I like this idea from Colin Trevorrow, the director of Aubrey Plaza’s new movie Safety Not Guaranteed, about why the actress plays the kind of sweet-and-sour slacker she does both in that movie and on Parks and Recreation:

There’s a reason Aubrey Plaza keeps getting cast as interns — as eyerolling Pawnee Parks Department lackey April Ludgate on NBC’s Parks and Recreation and as the defeatist, toilet-scrubbing Seattle Magazine intern in the upcoming Safety Not Guaranteed, and in real life as well, in NBC’s famed page program. According to Safety director Colin Trevorrow, the 27-year-old actress is an everygirl, a face for the masses of underpaid, overeducated young workers of the world.

“Aubrey represents a whole generation of young women who are very disaffected,” Trevorrow said. “Not just women, a whole generation. And disaffected for a reason. They don’t see anything out there for them, and this is not a world for them, and they have every reason to want to go back to a time when everything was a little bit easier and there were more opportunities and they weren’t treated like shit as an intern somewhere.”

I know some folks have been disconcerted by April’s slow evolution on Parks and Recreation from someone who essentially hated everything, to someone who loved Andy, and is now exploring the possibility that she might like some thing or some idea enough to work for it enthusiastically. But I think that it would be a violation of the show’s core ethic if April stayed static and didn’t find an opportunity to succeed and enjoy it. If Ron Swanson can be shaken from his libertarianism by the sheer force of Leslie Knope’s enthusiasm, and if Leslie can win an election against stiff odds, April would inevitably be affected. There’s a really interesting story to be told about someone who is terrified of disappointment facing even a small opportunity. I hope now that April’s come up with an idea for Andy to move forward, she comes up with something she’s willing to try herself.

I was fascinated to read Deborah Weisgall’s essay on Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s, in part because she says that when she went back to the novel as an adult, “I did not recognize the story I was reading”:

What happens is fierce: Jo burns off half of Meg’s bangs when she tries to frizz her hair with a curling iron, just before a party—a party organized, like the one that opens Pride and Prejudice, to introduce eligible girls and boys. But Austen’s Bennett sisters accept as a given that looks and fortune get husbands; such a crass assessment of their marketability outrages the Marches. Next, because Jo has not invited her to the theater, Amy burns Jo’s manuscript, stories that Jo had been working on for years. Jo, in retaliation, lets Amy skate on the river without warning her that the ice is thin. Amy falls through, and Jo barely manages to rescue her. Then Jo cuts off and sells her own glorious hair—the only beautiful part of her—to buy her mother a present. Beth is pathologically shy and hardly leaves the house for fear of having to talk to people. When Laurie’s tutor declares his love for Meg, everyone is thrilled but Jo, who is bereft at the imminent dissolution of her family. She understands the heartbreak inherent in marriage and in the separation, the growing apart—and possibly the growing objectivity—that marks the end of childhood.

That pain and ferocity are part of why I liked the novels in the first place: I sobbed at the movie theater when Beth (Claire Danes) died, but Little Women was one of the first novels I read where a girl was allowed to be outraged, to be genuinely uncomfortable in her own station and her own skin. Jo March is not just the heroine of literary little girls everywhere, but of ones whose clothes don’t seem to do for them what other girls’ do, whose attempts to iron their hair result in cinders and who make do at parties, who are simmeringly angry, and often uncomfortable in their own skin and the conventions they live in. When her sister Amy, a pretty, socially successful little girl, burns Jo’s manuscript after Jo has been invited to a play and Amy excluded from the invitation, the act is such a violation because Amy is invading the territory where Jo is queen. Jo goes on to write other works, but the book Amy destroys is lost to Jo, and to us, forever. Jo’s temper is presented as dangerous, but it’s also a vital life force, the thing that propels her out of her small town outside of Boston to work in New York, where she’s exposed to new people and new ideas, and ultimately to the man who will become her husband.

And yes, it’s a novel about compromise, but also about growth. The March girls begin the novel with their castles in the air, their dreams for their future, but grow up to be women who understand that, as Megan Draper’s mother put it to her in the finale of this season of Mad Men: “The world could not support that many ballerinas.” It’s not that they’re crushed—their dreams evolve. Jo March, who spent her girlhood escaping into worlds of her own invention through her fiction, becomes a woman who constructs an alternate reality in the real world, through her school for boys and girls at Plumfield. Amy, who despite her ruin of Jo’s work had artistic ambitions of her own, ultimately becomes a patron rather than a full-time artist herself, though she continues to sculpt. Meg, who wanted nothing more to be a wife, ends up a mother to two remarkable children, and in the novel’s sequel, Little Men, is widowed early, becoming the accidentally independent woman Jo always planned to be. Little Women is a fierce novel because that’s what required to stand up to the uncertainty of life and to adapt rather than be crushed by it.

“I am angry nearly every day of my life,” Mrs. March tells Jo in the novel, explaining to her daughter that she’s tried to control and transmute her anger rather than to give in to it. Being a woman, it turns out, is a lot like being Bruce Banner.

It’s sort of hard to believe that folks could have behaved even more poorly in the events surrounding the coverup of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s alleged sexual abuse and assault of children he met through his Second Mile charity. But as his trial is underway, it appears my beliefs have been confounded: Pennsylvania’s attorney general is now suggesting that former Penn State vice president Gary Schultz kept a file on Sandusky, and that in emails between him and former Penn State president Graham Spanier suggest that university officials thought it would be more “humane” not to report Sandusky than to report him. The full report from a local CBS station is here:

There’s a debate to be had about whether it makes sense for universities to build enormous sports edifices in their midst and to become reliant on the revenue they provide. But if they’re going to make that decision, I think we can all agree that for those institutions to survive, university administrators need to distinguish between athletic programs and the people who run them. And while I want to see the full text of the emails, the idea that not reporting Sandusky would have been the “humane” thing seems grotesque in a way that would be almost impossible to justify even in context, and reflects a profound failure of judgement.

The idea that Sandusky deserved consideration more than the victims’ families deserved justice or that the community deserved a chance to have him go through a fair trial is humane only in a system that values the powerful over the powerless, or the few among the many. Even if your values are so distorted as to put concern for Sandusky before other considerations, wouldn’t the humane thing to do to be to separate him from his capacity to do harm to others, and if he’s mentally ill, to get him treated? Someone who concludes that not reporting Sandusky is the humane things to do seems to lack the moral credentials to effectively administer a large organization, particularly one tasked with preparing young people to become solid citizens. And making the decision not to report Sandusky reveals a bizarre lack of business sense: silence is not the same thing as containing rot.

The bridge is yours.

-Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the most-studied pop culture franchise.

-Another classic Topless Robot Q&A on Prometheus.

-Pretty sure the male critics this movie’s director is saying fueled the Girls backlash actually love Girls.

-I feel like people should stop prematurely announcing they’ve quit things, like acting, or “the rap game.”

-New Pet Shop Boys is always cause for celebration:

This year’s Netroots Nation had its familiar lineup of panels, with brilliant progressive minds talking about organizing tactics and every issue under the sun. There was one panel, however, that was the first of its kind. At “How Sports Shapes Our Politics and Why It Matters,” the panel’s participants—The Nation’s Dave Zirin, Change.org’s Eden James, professor Diane Williams, and Dr. Eddie Moore—discussed how sports affect larger progressive fights for equality for women, minorities, and the LGBT community, and how professional and amateur athletes have both led and followed fights on those issues and others.

The entire panel is worth watching, even if (especially if) you aren’t a sports fan. Some progressives have seemingly lost a sense of how politics-infused our professional sports are, and about how progressive our sports can be, a point Zirin drove home early in his speech.

“The powers that be in our society have created an athletic-industrial complex that’s set up to make you think that if there are any politics in it at all, it’s politics much more comfortable with Glenn Beck than the people in this room,” Zirin said. “Militarism, patriotism, sexism, all the rest of it, and not the politics of liberation. That has somehow been completely disconnected from sports.”

Sports, indeed, have long been an agent of progressive social change. From Civil Rights to women’s liberation to labor fights and opposition to war, the progressive movement has often found a home—and leadership—in sports.

“You cannot tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement without talking about Jackie Robinson,” Zirin said. “You cannot tell the story of the 1960s without talking about Tommie Smith and John Carlos on that medal stand with their fists in the air. You cannot tell the story of women’s liberation without telling the story of Billie Jean King. It is so much a part of our history and fighting for freedom, and it’s an absolute sin that it’s not a history that we claim.”

For whatever reason, progressives have largely chosen to ignore the opportunities sports give us to talk about and examine our differences and the issues those differences create. Even worse, the left far too often dismisses legitimate issues in sports as unimportant disputes between “millionaires and billionaires.”

We can’t afford that. Progressives should talk about corporations getting rich off of college athletes (who disproportionately come from low-income minority backgrounds) who don’t share in the wealth and often don’t receive the education they are promised. We should talk about our sports leagues and college bowls not paying taxes. We should talk about teams and cities bilking taxpayers to finance sporting events and new stadiums. We should talk about the declining visibility of female athletes and the declining opportunity for female coaches. We should talk about the fact that our athletes often don’t get the health care they need, and the dire financial situations many enter after retiring. We should talk about the fact that there isn’t a single openly gay male athlete in American professional sports and that female athletes are too often told to stay in the closet.

These aren’t “sports issues.” They are progressive issues, and more importantly, they are human issues.

The good news is that sports have proven that they can be a positive agent of social change. And harnessing their potential to be that agent is crucial to the progressive movement. If we’re going to win off the field, we have to win on it too.

The Nielsen system, which measures television viewership, is far from responsive to the technology that’s created the modern viewing era, whether it’s the rise of DVR-assisted watching (still only 17 percent of television viewing) or streaming on platforms from Hulu to HBO GO. And it’s helped perpetuate a perception that watching shows in the time slot is the most valuable kind of viewership, even if time-shifting and streaming let viewers watch shows when they can be most engaged in absorbed in them. So it’s good to see, as the New York Times reports, advertisers and networks trying to do research that dispels that perception and develops new ways of rating and monetizing programming. Among the initial results:

Both pilot tests had a similar major finding: that the growing viewership of video online and on mobile devices is not diminishing the appetite for watching television. “Consumers have a desire to build more content into their lives,” said Joan FitzGerald, vice president for television sales and business development at comScore in Reston, Va.

For instance, consumers who watch online video “were greater users of TV” than those who did not, she added. The fact that the pilot test showed “there is not a lot of cannibalization” is significant, Ms. FitzGerald said. Likewise, Carol Edwards, senior vice president for cross-platform sales and marketing at Arbitron in Columbia, Md., said: “There isn’t cannibalization. Other platforms are complementary to television.”

“TV continues to play such a dominant role,” she added, “though there is content available on other platforms.” The tests are important, Ms. Edwards said, because “all the media companies are trying to monetize their content platforms and to be fully monetized, they need to be measured.” Among the findings of the Arbitron test that may be surprising was that of all the people who viewed content on all three screens, the largest demographic group was not the youngest. Adults ages 35 to 49 led, at 36.6 percent, followed by adults ages 50 and older, at 34.8 percent, and then by adults ages 18 to 34, at 28.6 percent

This kind of finding is critically important, and I look forward to the kinds of innovations these kinds of technologies eventually enable. I’d love to know if it’s possible, when someone DVRs a show, for the recording to be retrieved from a cloud rather on the recorder so the ads embedded in it could be continually updated, and made freshly relevant whenever someone chooses to play it. Similarly, I’d be curious to know if Hulu’s able to get higher ad rates on impressions its algorithm suggests are more directly relevant to users. Either way, anything that makes it easier to monetize shows in accordance with how they’re actually watched in terms of both time and intensity, and that makes it easier to support lower-rated shows on networks is good news for smart television.

This doesn’t surprise me at all, but apparently, the scene in Prometheus we discussed at length yesterday freaked out a lot of people before it scared the audience:

Even the monsters in Scott’s world were real — including the baby alien that Rapace’s Shaw rips out of her belly with help of a high-tech, robotic surgery machine — the kind every space ship without a doctor aboard should carry. The climatic scene in the middle of the film was shot over four days, a period that Rapace says she’ll always remember as the most stressful of the entire shoot.

The scene, according to Scott, is the one that tipped the film’s rating from a PG-13 to an R. The director said the only way to land the more family-friendly rating would have been to remove the scene entirely. “They didn’t even want the scene,” Scott said. “It wasn’t about just cutting it down, they didn’t want the scene.” And that was something neither Scott nor studio chief Tom Rothman wanted considering the importance of the sequence and the toll it took on the Rapace.

Given that both the themes and the plot of the movie are both totally dependent on that scene, I have a hard time imagining what the movie raters would have preferred as a substitute? Would they have wanted the snaky thing that killed members of the crew to come back for Shaw, even though it would have had no connection to her whatsoever? Could the movie have had a PG-13 rating if the alien had burst out of Shaw, and the medpod had healed the damage afterwards? It’s funny, how we have a tendency to treat damage done to women by other people as less threatening than women asserting their own autonomy over their bodies.