“TLC announces series with Toddlers & Tiaras‘ Alana, A/K/A ‘Honey Boo Boo.’ Called ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,’” NPR’s Linda Holmes announced mournfully on Twitter this morning. “We don’t deserve electricity.” Whenever news of some media move that exploits children in a way that creates a permanent record breaks, I end up feeling like a Church Lady. But it really does seem like we need some sort of media code of ethics when it comes to the presentation of children.

It’s abundantly clear that there are some parents and media outlets who simply can’t be trusted to act in their children’s interests when it comes to media exposure. Whatever the Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms parents say about their children wanting to compete or enjoying being in front of the camera, it’s an unnerving abdication of parental discretion and judgement to kids who can’t possibly understand how far they’re being broadcast, what the reaction to them is, or how permanent the record of their behavior is going to be. Similarly, the boy from the Time Magazine cover on attachment parenting, shown nursing at what a lot of folks would consider an advanced age, may grow up so he’s not immediately recognizable, but his name is out there, Googleable in relation to that picture for forever. His mother may have thought posing for the portrait was an act of pride, but parents’ jobs are to think through the crueler assumptions will make about them and their children. And for every parent willing to expose themselves and their children, there’s someone willing to make money by broadcasting them doing so or publishing images of them.

I’m not saying we should legislate against that kind of behavior. People are free to do more damaging things. But it would be nice to have a code of ethics around the depiction of children—Holmes laid out some potential guidelines last fall, and I added a few more. The presence of such a code might not stop some shows. But networks and parents would have to decide how comfortable they felt to be in violation of it. And such a concept might help The Learning Channel think a little harder about whether it wants to extend a fig leaf of respectability to parents who want to make a buck or win public recognition off their kids.

This is kind of cool: Crusader Kings II, which previously let players take on the role of a Christian feudal lord, is expanding the game so players can be Muslim rulers, and if they choose to do so, they’ll get to operate under a different set of laws that govern everything from property to marriages. It’ll be interesting to see what that turns out to mean: is there a banking system that doesn’t involve interest? A rule of law that permits multiple marriages? Characters with protected status under Muslim law?

There’s something appropriate about the fact that this game is rolling out at a time of hard-right panic about a theoretical resurgence of sharia law, a paranoid fear that Muslim religious law will supplant a secular Western, by which they mean Christian-derived, legal system. But it’s not as if medieval European countries were exactly models of rational, just governance. Putting old-school Muslim law and Muslim governance up against feudal scenarios, even in a game, is a useful reminder that both societies have evolved, that whatever al Qaeda would have wanted, we’re not actually enmeshed in a holy war at the direction of the pope anymore. There are useful conversations to be had about the status of women, about the treatment of people of other religions, of the harshness of punishments in majority-Muslim countries or in countries with legal systems derived from Islamic jurisprudence. But pretending we’e actually at risk of going back to the dark ages is silly fear-mongering, and doesn’t actually make those conversations productive.

What would help? Having more people who know more good information about Islam, and who don’t view Muslims simply Other. I’m not saying an extension pack on a video game will change the world. But it’s nice to see someone treating Muslim characters as identities people would want to put on, not merely as enemies to be eliminated. Curiosity makes for better storytelling than mindless mistrust.

I was reading through Annalee Newitz’s piece in last month’s Smithsonian about Neal Stephenson’s efforts to create a more optimistic science fiction in the wake after reading Emily Nussbaum’s piece on Community and Doctor Who in the New Yorker, and the combination struck me. The thing that I’m most interested in seeing in my science fiction right now is not solely new technology, and not solely explorations of what relationships might look like in the future: I’m interested in explorations of what our relationships to our new technology are going to be like.

One of the things Emily praised about Doctor Who in its latest incarnation was its exploration of how a specific technology—time travel—affects characters’ relationships to each other, and enhances fears of abandonment, missed chances, and the need for profound patience with the people you love. Stephenson, Annalee writes, has a more concrete set of motivations:

“We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no holocaust,” Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace” engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re “trying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with existing systems, versus trying to create new things.”Stephenson’s greatest hope is that young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, “If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.”

I think what I’m curious about is a fusion of the two. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312 is about precisely that dilemma: what happens when humans who are interconnected to their personal computing devices to the point of having them embedded in their bodies, discover that computing’s evolved to a higher level such that they aren’t sure they trust something they’re intimately connected to? What happens when they date someone or get involved in professional relationships where someone wants them to detach? These aren’t exactly new questions—Orson Scott Card posed a lot of them with his character Jane, a sentient expression of the internet, in Speaker for the Dead—but Robinson feels like he’s riffing off Siri, the Apple personal assistant that doesn’t work as well as we’re told it will, but that we’re supposed to want to like quite a bit.

And these aren’t the only technologies that pose those kinds of questions. Watching Star Trek a couple of years ago, I was struck watching Bones repeatedly stab Kirk with injections. I have a nut allergy, and my Epi-Pens are a source of both great comfort and anxiety to me. I’m glad they exist, but I’m terrified of actually having to jab myself with one, and I was both uncomfortable and fascinated to see Bones doing that repeatedly as if it was no big thing. I’d be curious to hear from long-time Trekkies in the audiences whether there are episodes of the show or movies I might have missed that address what it’s like to have medical technology that good. Do people take more risks? Do doctors overmedicate patients? Does it lead them into error? I feel like we have a lot of science fiction, whether it’s John Scalzi’s work or The Forever War that discusses how medical technology changes decision-making by soldiers. But from a doctor’s perspective, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a tool that powerful at your disposal, and I’d love to see a futuristic medical show that explores some of those questions. I’d totally watch a show about a futuristic Atul Gwande (or, who am I kidding, Shonda Rhimes 2032 show Space Mistresses).

Good gadget design or carefully thought-out rules are a first step towards good science fiction. But just putting those tools or those rules into action without meditating on them aren’t the only way to tell stories with them.

The bridge is yours.

-Super, super excited for the debut of This Was Television, a historical TV blog.

-The first primetime schedule, from 1946. I would totally watch the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports and Serving Through Science.

-Nitsuh Abebe has a playlist to get you through to the end of the week.

-Bad dating advice from superheroines.

-All the spells from Harry Potter in one place:

As a kickoff to summer, I decided to finish up The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, HBO’s adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of a Botswanan female detective named Precious Ramotswe starring Jill Scott. It’s a totally charming show, and both its tone and content are incredibly different from anything else on television, which makes me particularly sorry that it never got the second season. Precious is neither an anti-hero nor your standard cop with a dark secret—she’s a profoundly nice woman with a streak of steel she acquired during an abusive marriage—and most of the people around her, from her rigid secretary to the hairdresser who refers her clients are also pleasant and kind. The bad people she encounters aren’t great villains. Instead, they’re often petty, weak, or angry, and taking it out on the people around them. And perhaps most importantly, her cases are similarly low-key.

The obsession with murder on American crime shows makes sense for a lot of reasons. Murder and rape, the other pop culture standby, are the crimes we take most seriously: they grab an audience’s attention and lend a sense of urgency to an episode. Murders provide opportunities to whip out the kind of high-tech wizardry that works so well as television transitions, whether it’s a medical examiner explaining something routine to Law & Order detectives, or the geniuses playing with awesome-looking toys on Bones. It also provides an excuse for harsh and theoretically exciting interrogations. And has become almost universally true in both prestige and network drama, there’s a consensus that we reach a truer understanding of humanity by venturing through the darkness rather than by heading towards the light. We’re more interested in divining the motivations of the most depraved people among us than exploring saints or simply good people who maintain from day to day.

This struck me because, despite their wildly differing locales, main characters, and relationships to the American cop show tradition (in one marvelous sequence in Ladies’ Detective Agency, the stylist, who is driving Precious’s secretary Grace, says how pleased he is that they’re bickering because it means they’re living up to trope), the show that most reminds me of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is The Unusuals. A short-lived ABC cop show with a ludicrously good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, The Unusuals was distinctive among its network brethren in that that the detectives weren’t always solving murders. Yes, there was an episode where Goldberg and Perrineau’s characters took over an underground murder store as a sting operation and faced a quandary when one of their clients wanted to kill her abusive cop husband. But a lot of the time, the characters were rounding up a one-man band on a nuisance charge, solving a crime spree motivated by the medical bills of an old-school hood, or tracking down a reported zombie that turned out to be a man with Alzheimer’s who had escaped from a nursing home. These were absolutely smaller stories, but they could be beautifully written, revealing of a whole range of life beyond New Yorkers with their heads bashed in or their hearts shot out.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency worked that way by design. As detectives, Precious and Grace were guaranteed to get cases that either didn’t rise to the level of police attention or didn’t concern strict illegality. Watching Precious track down the records that prove a lawyer is committing insurance fraud to help fund an orphanage, or Grace investigate beauty contest candidates for their integrity (an assignment that tests her jealousy and sense of self) is charming and a much more wide-ranging perspective on Botswana than it would be if she was simply another tough cop. I’ve written that we might have an anti-hero glut on television. If we turn away from the old stand-bys, it might be nice to spend time with people who are pleasant rather than saints—and with scenarios that explore our more frequently unleashed petty impulses rather than our mostly-contained dark ones.

Over at Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein responds to the exclusion of movies by female directors from the main competition at Cannes with a call for more transparency about the process by which films make the cut. I’m of two minds about this.

I think there are certain kinds of transparency that are valuable. When the National Magazine Awards came out this year and people were dismayed, I think the American Society of Magazine Editors did themselves a favor when they gave journalists some insights into the makeup of the pools that produced the nominations. Being transparent ended up dispelling the sense that a secret cabal of dude editors had systematically shut women out of the running and refocused the conversation on thornier questions like the differences between magazines aimed at men and women, or how to improve the pool of women who are writing magazine features on things that aren’t women’s issues. I’m all for exposing cabals if they exist, but they shouldn’t become a distraction from things that are much harder to address.

But there’s no question that some kinds of transparency can become a rabbit hole. If festivals or awards start explaining why they accept or reject every single movie or piece, they’re not likely to satisfy anyone. The Pulitzer’s one-line citations of nominees and eventual winners are a nice bit of economy, but explanations like that open the door to lengthy justifications of what got in and what didn’t, offered up to folks who want to champion a movie, or a show, or a piece that resonates with them. Ultimately, nominations and awards are always going to be products of their judging pools, rather than of popular votes, and opinions in those pools will always be subjective and brokered.

Better to know who the judges are than to try to get reasoning for their preferences out of them. It might even be interesting to see judges write statements about their preferences and the things that get them excited, and for competitions to try to put together balanced pools based on those as well. It’s not like putting Kathryn Bigelow on your jury will tilt it towards sympathy for carefully observed domestic stories about the inner lives of women. The basic facts and figures on who makes up judging pools is a good form of transparency that should be standard, along with the numbers on whose represented in initial submissions. But transparency is only the start: the decisions people make much earlier back in their careers are much murkier to fathom, and equally important.

One of the things that irritates me most is people — progressives in particular, because conservatives tend to be more vigilant on this score — who dismiss culture as if it’s unimportant, or as if people aren’t influenced by it. And my favorite counterargument of the moment comes from Paul Krugman, who went into economics because he wanted to be Hari Seldon when he grew up:

The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity…, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen…Not everyone, obviously, but social scientists in general … I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like. Never mind the gadgets, although they create the alternative worlds, but a lot of it is thinking about society.

Fiction is about defining the outer limits of possibility: you show a kid a world where economists can shape the fate of humanity, and he’ll embrace realistic possibilities for social science he might never have been attracted to in the first place. Show girls superheroines and master archers as well as princesses and maybe some activity will catch a spark. I sometimes write that a movie or television show feels surprising because I didn’t think it was something that could exist. What really ends excites me about those pieces of art is that they’re times when popular entertainment is matching what’s truly possible in the world, and occasionally exceeding it. It’s artistically and societally depressing when media rooted in imagination turns out images and societies that are vastly more crabbed than our world actually is.

By that I don’t mean that we can’t explore oppression, or myopic people. But when books, or music, or movies fall into replicating the same old character tropes, or means of interactions between people, or possibilities for science and technology without acknowledging that society’s moved on around them, there’s something sad about that, both as a failure of art, and of excitement for the future. Or, as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a marvelous line cited by Austin Allen in an essay on the power of literature, fiction “Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.”