The Daily Caller, in its efforts to discredit some of President Obama’s celebrity surrogates, has decided that the most effective way to push back against people like Sarah Jessica Parker is to imply they’re ugly and synonymous with their roles. In an item entitled “Sarah Jessica Parker sticks her nose into 2012 campaign,” Neil Munro apparently thinks it’s clever to play off a fact that some people don’t like Parker’s looks, calling her “the celebrity horse that Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign is betting on.” And he goes on to suggest that Parker is defined by the fact that “she played a single New York columnist who meets and sleeps with various men while living in the city. The role made her famous, and also won her a top place in New York City’s social circuit.” The Daily Caller might take a moment surfing over to IMDb for a reminder that Parker was a well-established actress long before she signed on for Sex and the City. And apparently this comes as news to folks, but Sarah Jessica Parker is not, in fact, the same person as Carrie Bradshaw.

The whole thing is an ugly, substanceless slam disguised as a piece of reporting about the fact that, shockingly, some conservatives don’t like the ad that Parker cut in support of the Obama campaign. Parker, by the text of this reasoning, is apparently incapable of supporting the Obama administration effectively because she is wealthy and is an actress. But the subtext is clear: Sarah Jessica Parker is ugly. And she was in that slutty television show, too. This kind of slagging of a successful woman is the last refuge of people with no legitimate arguments who are terrified they’re losing. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of shining a mirror in someone’s eyes so you can run away while they’re distracted.

I generally find the idea that people who work in Hollywood are flaky or somehow less entitled to their political opinions than the rest of the country bizarre. It’s not as if someone who makes a lot of money as an industrialist or an energy titan is uniquely more connected to middle class Americans than someone who works in Hollywood. If hedge funders get some sort of credit for interacting with white collar workers in their office or working on issues that end up affecting the rest of the American economy, there’s no reason actors and directors shouldn’t get equivalent credit for their contact with their crews or for working on projects that explore fantasies of American life. There are smart and thoughtful people and dumb and shallow people working and succeeding in every industry in America.

And beyond the basic intelligence of people who work in Hollywood, it’s not as if entertainment is a job detached from politics, or as if one’s employment is the sole determinant of what political issues one is invested in. Sarah Jessica Parker has a long record of involvement with UNICEF and has done work on behalf of anti-hunger programs in New York. Latina actresses like Eva Longoria and Rosario Dawson have backed the administration as parts of their efforts on voting access and women’s issues. Conservatives love treating Hollywood celebrities like they’re valuable and substantive when they voice conservative opinions, whether it’s Jon Lovitz critizing Obama or the prospect that Obama might lose Hollywood support during the SOPA fight. But when they back liberal politicians or causes they’re inherently dumb, vapid, substanceless. And apparently if they’re women, you can single out their noses as a reason to tell them to stay out of processes they don’t belong in.

This weekend brought two pieces of bad news for traditional television networks. First, Business Insider reports that, from a survey of 28,000 international viewers, the number of people who self-report to Nielsen that they’re watching television one or more times per month fell from 90 percent to 83 percent in 2011. And now TV industry analyst Tony Wible is suggesting that while streaming services might have initially helped boost television ratings by helping viewers catch up or discover new shows, that boost is fading. 84 percent are watching television programming on their computers at the same rate.

That’s a big drop, to be certain, and it’s always worth keeping an eye out for whether this is a multi-year, recession-independent trend, or simply a result of a weak crop of fall television. And the question is whether the rise of watching television on devices means, despite its flaws, the industry’s backstop plan is working?

A lot of you believe, I think not incorrectly, that the network and bundled cable system is on some sort of collision course with consumer preferences. I don’t think television is going to go away entirely, of course. The rise of Sunday night event television has made watching shows at the same time as everyone else exciting again, and to a certain extent mandatory if you want to avoid spoilers. Cable in particular has invested in cinematography such that it’s fun to watch shows on bigger screens rather than smaller ones. Just because must-see shows are must-see for niches rather than enormous mass audiences doesn’t mean that the people who are tuning in are less passionate—in fact, maybe the reverse—but that in an era when there are more quality options, the giant mass audience is probably over.

The question, as always, is what is the new equilibrium? It’s one thing to know that a show is profitable at a certain ad rate and a certain Nielsen rating. It’s a much more complicated equation to figure out which combination of Hulu streaming, iTunes purchases, time-shifted viewing, and viewing in the time slot makes a show profitable, and beyond that, to figure out which combinations of shows based on those metrics, plus monetization of networks’ back catalogues, makes a network work. And if available revenues are simply going to shrink even as networks have the same number of programming hours to fill, what shrinks? Do shows start looking worse, whether it’s lower-quality cameras or cheaper sets? Does the trend of bringing big movie actors to TV stall as networks become unwilling to assume their contracts? Will networks cut down production orders to save money and shrink the length of the TV season? If it’s going to be impossible to scare up the $2 million per episode it costs to produce a comedy or the $3 million it costs to produce a network drama and still turn a profit, shows are going to look different.

Networks and viewers are locked in an impossible situation here. It’s hard to settle into a new equilibrium with incremental changes to the business model. The experiments networks are doing, whether with streaming services like Hulu or subscriber verification are an important way of gathering data, but they leave users with enormous uncertainty about where to find content—I essentially stopped watching 2 Broke Girls once CBS pulled it from Hulu, information that I’m sure is useful to CBS but remains frustrating to me—and that makes it hard for consumers to establish consistent new viewing behaviors. We’re stuck, at least for a while.

The usual caveats apply, but I was interested to read through this study out of Indiana University which tracked children’s television viewing habits over a year and found that both white and African-American girls and African-American boys’ saw their self esteem take a television-related hit, while white boys felt better about themselves.

The study’s based on a couple of central ideas, all of which I found to be useful clarifications of ideas I use to explain the impact of media on people of all ages. First, there’s a homogenizing effect of television, which establishes common expectations for which jobs, bodies, and standards of living: “common features of the television landscape pervade all forms of program- ming. Cultivation theory offers an explanation for how white collar jobs, the thin ideal, power, and wealth may come to be perceived as commonplace and easily achievable.” In other words, the fact that television characters have what seem like the same three or four occupations creates a kind of closure. There’s a tricky balance to be achieved here: “research demonstrates that upward comparisons can actually be beneficial to people when they are led to believe that attainment of the depicted achievements is possible.” But if it’s actually harder than portrayed to achieve any of the conditions portrayed on television in real life, that could produce poor self-esteem if someone thinks the failure is theirs, not the media’s. And boys, more than girls, are the beneficiaries of positive messages about what to aspire to. Finally, “Milkie (1999) argues that viewers struggle to avoid self-evaluations with media messages because the mass media alter societal ideas about what is normative. If children believe that others (e.g., peers, family) use such mes- sages to evaluate them, White girls and Black children cannot simply ignore mass media messages as a comparative referent.”
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The bridge is yours.

-Kim Zolciak is coming for your television, America, and she is seemingly unstoppable.

-The pocket princesses are pretty awesome.

-Ladies apparently need other ladies to explain sports to us, instead of those intimidating men with their awful ties and stenorian voices.

-I am very excited by the possibility of a Carter Beats the Devil movie, less so by the prospect of Tom Cruise starring in it.

-More fodder for your Emma Watson crush:

The invaluable Saul Tannenbaum passes along a tale of editing malfeasance, in which Barnes & Noble’s formatter, converting War and Peace for the Nook from a Kindle edition “changed every instance of ‘kindle’ or ‘kindled’ into ‘Nook’ and ‘Nookd’”:

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

The unwitting hilarity of a publisher doing a “find and replace” and accidentally changing the text of a canonical work of Western thought is alarming. Many versions of e-books are from similar outfits, that distribute public domain works formatted for Kindle or Nook at the lowest possible prices. The great democratizing factor of the ebook formats – that anyone can easily distribute – can also mean that readers can never be quite sure that they are viewing the texts as the author intended.

It is nice for books to be cheap, available in a format that’s transportable, and portable from device to device. It’s not nice for them to be produced so cheaply that the text is altered in a way that ruins the integrity of the art the reading experience. There are some parts of producing any kind of art that can be made less expensive with technology. And my understanding is that many publishers now do less editing than they used to before books reach the market. But incidents like this should be a reminder that there’s a hard floor it’s not worth crashing through to make products cheaper.

I’ve been interested in the reaction to a trailer for Hitman: Absolution, which I tend to think is sexist, but not because it sexualizes violence against women:

I don’t think depictions of violence being done to women are inherently misogynistic, and as part of the reason why, it might be useful to break down violence into two categories. There is violence that is committed against women as a way of diminishing and repressing them, whether it’s a man beating his female partner, or a female character being raped as a way to illustrate her weakness. These sorts of portrayals can be a way of communicating the ugliness of the people committing it, as is the case with Game of Thrones.

Then, there’s violence involving women. Women can be instigators of violence, particularly as action heroines: there aren’t rules of gentlemanliness or feminism that require male characters not to fight back against female antagonists. Fights between men and women can be excitingly choreographed, communicating information about character and innovation with balanced styles. The contrast in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon between Jen Yu’s franticness and Master Li Mu Bai is a perfect confrontation between both their ways of fighting and of living.

The violence in this trailer seems to fall in the second category: the women who are fighting against the main character strike first, and with lethal force. I don’t think he’s obliged to just disarm them—it’s not sexist for him to respond in kind. And I don’t actually think that the stupid sexy-nun characters his attackers are wearing makes his violence against them sexual. Instead, it diminishes them as combatants. The shoes are unstable, the PVC totally inappropriate for heat or rain and it doesn’t protect their bodies, the corsets limit mobility. Their victim, by contrast, is wounded when they attack him, but he’s dressed in a sensible suit. He looks like a serious person, and he makes short work of them, doing one the courtesy of closing her eyes after he kills her. This scene isn’t sexist because the target gets sexual satisfaction out of murdering women. It’s sexist because it creates a setup where we aren’t supposed to take the women in question seriously, and expect to see them killed. The costuming reduces them to meat before a man ever gets his hands on them.

This post contains spoilers through the second season of Game of Thrones.

“The King won’t give you any honors, the histories won’t mention you, but we will not forget,” Varys, the Master of Whispers, tells Tyrion Lannister halfway through the finale of the second season of Game of Thrones. Tyrion knows he’s been scarred, he’s been stripped of his role as Hand of the King, he’s worried he’ll lose his lover, and worst of all, he’s been insulted by a suddenly-resurgent Grand Maester Pycelle, who’s transfigured Tyrion’s kind gesture to Daisy earlier in the season into a profound insult, flipping a coin at him “For your trouble.” Varys has introduced another possible misery to Tyrion, and articulated what’s powerful about Game of Thrones for those of us watching from aeons away: this is the secret history of Westeros, the filth and blood that will be smoothed away into the official record, expunging dwarves, and bastards, and little girls along the way.

In an episode that ends with the rise of the unbelievable, it’s fitting that two pivotal characters spend their appearances in the episode fretting over belief in the same God, and their ability to follow Him. Stannis Baratheon is devastated by his defeat on the Blackwater, a calamity that has him feeling retrospective guilt. “I murdered my brother,” he confesses to Melisandre, author of his will in that matter, refusing to share the blame that eats at him. And at the first sign of Melisandre’s failed prophecy, he questions her to the point of asphyxiation, attempting to choke an alternate truth out of her. “You promise these things, but you don’t know,” he despairs. “None of us know.” But Melisandre, despite letting slip that she sees only glimpses of the future, seizes the opportunity to turn Stannis into a true believer, helping him look into the flames. It’s the first time his grimace has relaxed—even when impregnating Melisandre (no other word really seems to capture the grimness of it), he’s been locked in his own misery. Now, she’s given him not just a promise for the future, but a sense of wonder.

Arya wants to believe more badly than Stannis does, but finds she’s unable to, at least not yet. She has an unexpected chance to say goodbye to Jaqen after she finds him waiting on the road after her escape from Harrenhal, though he won’t quite explain to her how he know she would be there. And he has a future to offer her. “To be a dancing master is a special thing. But to be a faceless man, that is something else entirely,” Jaqen promises her. “The girl has many names on her lips…Names to offer up to the Red God. She could offer them one by one.” It’s a tantalizing future for a girl with so much blood to spill, but Arya has other obligations, telling him “I want to. But I can’t. I need to find my brother and mother. And my sister. I need to find her, too.” But Jaqen is playing a longer game than Melisandre is, giving her a coin, but warning Arya “It is not meant for the buying of horses.” “Then what good is it?” asks the girl who has lived because she is so much more than she seems, but has yet to recognize that quality in others.

There’s something heartbreaking about Arya’s insistence that she has to find her family, even Sansa, who she believes betrayed them, when Sansa, offered the opportunity to escape by Petyr Baelish, tells him “King’s Landing is my home now.” It’s not necessarily that I believe that she’s given up on her family, but living in what counts for luxury in Westeros, Sansa has so many fewer resources than her little sister, and the one asset she had is about to become a tool to wound her, to render her unable to use it again to her own advantage. “We’re all liars here, and every one of us is better than you,” Baelish tells her, after warning her of what her immediate future holds after Joffrey puts her aside in favor of the vastly more politically convenient Margeary Tyrell, a woman who knows enough of womanly wiles and men’s appetites to tell the boy king that “those tales [of his courage] have taken root deep inside of me.” “‘He’ll still enjoy beating you, and now that you’re a woman, he’ll be able to enjoy you in other ways as well,” Petyr warns her. “Joffrey’s not the sort of boy who gives away his toys.”
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