I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s delightfully weird and very, very female show about a dance school in California. But in Willa Paskin’s long and fantastic interview with Sherman-Palladino, she points out something I’ve found utterly baffling about the entertainment industry:

I always find it funny that people take the wrong message from any success. Like “Bridesmaids” comes out and people go, “Oh, women are funny, they shit in the street. Let’s make sure now everybody shits in the street!” Not like, “OK, but it’s a well-constructed script with very good characters and the core of it is actually about female relationships,” nothing about that. They take the one shitting in the street thing and then for months you’re going to have every actress that you love shitting in the street. Until they realize, “Oh, it doesn’t work that way, I guess, so now women aren’t funny.” No, no, no! It’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s just that all of them don’t have to shit in the street!

I feel the same way with these sitcoms. It felt like dirty girl sitcoms, that’s the way to go, and NBC especially made these giant deals with like Whitney Cummings, and Chelsea Handler, and Sarah Silverman and all these women whose stand-up acts are so filthy they will never translate to television because they can’t! Sarah Silverman cannot do her act on TV, it’s not allowed! I’m not saying that her sitcom won’t be great — or I don’t know if they picked her up or not — but it’s like this trend of like “OK, so that’s how every woman is going to be now.”

I don’t even know that this is a trait that’s specific to women. It’s been fascinating to watch actors like Brandon Routh and James Marsters, who began their careers as pretty faces, score successes by treating their looks as if they’re less important than their acting chops, even by turning their extreme good looks into a joke by playing porn stars and maniacally excited dance show hosts. And I can even see why casting directors would value a surface thing like handsomeness, which is very, very broadly applicable, over a talent for self-parody or silliness, which are narrower skills. But it’s funny to see how an industry can both seize on a single, wildly aberrant scene in a movie instead of its overall themes and tones, or ignore that there’s an intimate connection between a comedian’s filthiness and her impact. Maybe it’s all a matter of wishful thinking, hoping for the thing that’s easiest to replicate, or the possibility of replicating something at all.

Lizzie Armitstead is one of the U.K.’s Olympic darlings. On Saturday, she won a silver in the 140 kilometer bicycle road race — the first medal for the host country.

But while Armitstead was thrilled with her win, she also took advantage of the limelight to bring attention to something that was annoying her — Olympic sexism, and a lack of leadership on the issue from those who head up athletic associations.

Asked about her meeting with Pat McQuaid, president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), Armitstead brought up sexism, saying, “It was the kind of moment where you kind of want to say ‘Let’s sit down and have a conversation after this’”:

“It’s something that can get overwhelming and very frustrating, the sexism that I experience in my career,” she continued. “But it’s something that as an elite athlete that you just get used. At the moment there’s not much I can do to change it but after my (athletic) career I hope to.”

Asked to elaborate on the sexism, she said it was “obviously just a big issue in women’s sport.”

“The obvious things like salary, media coverage, just general things that you have to sort of cope with in your career. Like I say if you focus too much on that, you get very disheartened and I try to focus on the positives.”

Armistead said plenty could be done to improve the problem “but certainly I think we could get more help from the top — which is the UCI. Just certain things like forcing perhaps pro teams to have an equivalent women’s team et cetera, but I don’t want to focus too much on the negatives really.”

She raises a great question here about where it becomes McQuaid’s responsibility to step in. No one could have expected UCI’s president to to police the playground where Armitstead was teased as a kid, but it’s not unreasonable to think that a President of a major athletic league could influence, say, salary scales for athletes. Or give Armitstead a professional stage to perform on.

Armitstead could have given McQuaid a piece of her mind. It would have shown a different kind of leadership, and might have been gratifying for her. But ultimately that single action won’t change ingrained sexism in an institution. She says she doesn’t have time for anything bigger, like organizing female cyclists or filing a lawsuit. As she rightly points out, “the problem is we are elite athletes training every day trying our best every day. So it’s very difficult to try to come together when I’ve been at home five weeks this year, to try to tackle that massive issue.” That’s why it’s up to leadership to listen to its athletes and come up with solutions. It’s just that they too often don’t.

If Armitstead wants to fight sexism after her athletic career, she will be in good company: There are a record number of women athletes in the Olympics this year, many of whom are also experiencing sexism. And Olympians, when they are not in training, do have a stage on which to spread their message. It could be a long time, though, before 23-year-old Armitstead is done with cycling and ready to tackle sexism. Even then, she may not feel empowered to step up. When a reporter asked her point-blank if she’d seek legal action, Armitstead said, “it’s something I’m not qualified to even think about. I’m just a cyclist.”

The biggest argument people who support the cable business model—or think it’s inevitable and immutable—make is that a lot of channels would go out of business if consumers had to select them individually from a menu rather than getting them as part of a bundle that subsidizes their production. I tend to be all right with that scenario, not because I want to see people lose their jobs, but because I’d like to be able to direct more of the money I spend on the bundle on the specific channels that are most important to me, and to see companies like HBO unmoored from the most restrictive terms of their engagement with the bundle. Now, a new study from Lazard Capital Markets and Clear Voice research provides some sense of the networks that inspire the most loyalty in consumers—and would be most likely to survive the end of the bundle era—and which inspire the least. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

The index found that 38 percent to 43 percent of consumers would cancel or switch their pay TV service if they lost top broadcast networks. More than a third would cancel if they lost ESPN, the top cable channel in terms of viewer loyalty. And 29 percent would cancel if they lost the second-ranked cable network, Discovery. Despite recent ratings challenges, Viacom reached an average cancel rate of 15 percent, led by its Comedy Central (20 percent) and Nickelodeon (19 percent).

And Deadline has more details:

As you might expect, the Big Four broadcasters, ESPN, Discovery Channel, History, USA Network, and TNT have the most dedicated followings. (At the bottom of the list: OWN, Fox Soccer Channel, CNBC, Oxygen, and CMT.) The problem for Disney is that its channels aren’t popular enough to continue to justify the nearly $8.4B a year they currently generate from program fees — about 26% of pay TV’s total programming outlays. Crockett figures Disney’s take could drop 65.2% to $2.9B a year. Other potential losers include Time Warner (not including HBO) which could see yearly payments fall 28.6% to $2.5B, and News Corp (not including its regional sports networks) which could slide 23.2% to $2.8B. But CBS (not including Showtime) could be a big winner in an a la carte world with payments +454.2% to $1.5B. It’s followed by A&E (+168.6% to $1.9B)m Scripps (+164.3% to $1.4B), Discovery (+153.1% to $3.1B), AMC Networks (+87.1% to $782M), NBCUniversal (+66.0% to $4.2B), and Viacom (+1.4% to $3.3B).

I don’t see the end of the bundle coming immediately, but if studies like this continue to suggest incentives for a new model, we could see the beginning of carriage negotiations that could win the networks more freedom. I actually think that might be how we get something like stand-alone HBO GO, as part of a negotiation where cable companies become willing to give the premium networks like HBO and Showtime more freedom to distribute their content in order to preserve at least some of their cable subscription revenue.

It’s not exactly news that ABC, which is part of the same corporate family as Disney, wants to get in on the massive success of The Avengers (and give the franchise a cross-promotional boost in between major movie events) and develop a television series based in the Marvel universe but not overly dependent on the ongoing set of superheroes who are getting major motion pictures. But apparently discussions are heating up again. And given ABC’s brand is closely associated with serialized storytelling and female characters, this is a great opportunity to get a superheroine in the mix. ABC’s already tried and failed to develop an AKA Jessica Jones show, so assuming that character is out, and excluding characters whose rights are held outside of Marvel or who have already appeared in the movies, here are five Marvel women who might be perfect for television:

1. She-Hulk: I know. Broken record. But the story of Jennifer Walters, attorney and Avenger, is begging to be turned into a smart procedural. The show could have a case of the week—Jennifer sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel on behalf of Spider-Man and files wrongful death suits against a corporation whose carelessness creates new superheroes at the cost of human lives—as well as to longer, Damages-like investigations across the course of entire seasons. And while Hulk effects are expensive, the show could keep Jennifer in human mode most of the time to save money in a first season, and have her spend more time as She-Hulk if the series progresses and is successful.

2. Sif: The Marvel movies have Thor, a god with ties to Earth. So why not bring Sif, his fellow female brawler, who’s occasionally gotten herself stuck outside of Asgard, to the human realms and see what happens? It would be a fascinating thought experiment in what it would be like for ordinary people to deal with Strong Female Characters who step off the screen, expecting equality. As much as I’d love to see a Wonder Woman movie or show again, it seems we’re ages away from that. So why not experiment with another goddess? Jaimie Alexander didn’t have nearly enough to do in Thor, so Marvel should let her shine on the small screen, and out from the shadow of Thor’s hammer.

3. Ms. Marvel: Air Force pilot. C.I.A. operative. Feminist magazine editor. And now, in the comics, she’s taken on the mantel of Captain Marvel. A TV series would have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in picking a setting to tell a story about Carol Danvers. If Marvel is going to do a Secret Invasion storyline, which would feature the Skrulls who showed up in The Avengers shapeshifting and disguising themselves as humans, a TV series could also be a great way to introduce Ms. Marvel, who played a major role in beating back the Skrulls in that comics storyline, to the franchise.

4. Dazzler: Want to do something soapy and fun? Originally invented as a way to do cross promotions for Casablanca Records, Dazzler is a performer when she isn’t a reluctant superheroine, and she could be a way to tell a story about struggling to make it in the entertainment industry, even with a little something extra on offer. And a Dazzler show could also be a way to do an anti-hero story. All the super-powered people we’ve seen in the current era of movie superhero storytelling have taken up the call. Dazzler is more than unusually reluctant, and could be a way to explore what happens when significant power comes unmoored from a sense of responsibility.

5. Spitfire: If ABC wants to hop on the Downton Abbey bandwagon, the network could revisit Spitfire, a World War II-era British superheroine from a noble family. The story’s got vampires, Nazi sympathizers, the Blitz, and efforts to hunt down war criminals. Captain America could swing by in an occasional flashback. And ABC could co-market lipstick and forties styles.

When I was a girl, I once write a very serious entry in my journal explaining how I was finally starting to feel like a grown-up. The cause of my sense that I’d passed a milestone? I finally understood the jokes in a Doonesbury strip. Garry Trudeau’s sweeping chronicle of American life, perhaps more than any other cultural artifact, ties the generation of my family together. A print of Mike Doonesbury walking across Yale’s snow-covered Old Campus was one of the first big presents I could afford to give my father. The clipping Ellie’s little sister’s birth, announced as “It’s a baby woman!” is tucked into family photo albums along our own momentos. And now, Alex Doonesbury is grown up, married to Toggle, an Iraq war veteran, and as of this weekend, officially Doonesbury‘s new main character.

Daily cartoon strips may not get as much credit as they ought to for shaping the cultural zeitgeist, but throughout her life, and mine, Alex Doonesbury’s been one of the best female characters, of any age, in any medium. She’s a child of divorced parents with a complicated relationship with her mother that made her mature and self-protective rather than the victim of cliche trauma, and loving, collaborative tie to her stepmother, a Vietnamese refugee adopted by American Jews. In addition to both of these women, Alex has a father who spars with her on politics, works with her on business projects, and treats her like a mature person with worthy ideas. She’s been a full member of the cast almost from her birth because she was that important in Mike’s life, and she became so in ours. Alex is a computer genius without falling into sexy hacker tropes, and her skills brought her closer to her parents and all the way to MIT, a point of pride so fierce that MIT students rigged the voting to win her as a fictional fellow student. And her love story with Toggle, a disabled veteran with less education and a decidedly different family background from Alex’s own, has been part of Doonesbury’s transition into a more expansive portrait of American life.

In walking her down the aisle to Toggle at her June wedding, Mike ceded pride of place in her heart to a new man, and informally deeded the strip to a new generation of characters. The joyful rehearsal dinner at Walden College the night before the ceremony brought the strip’s core characters together again in the place where we first met them. “Is Alex’s tribe what you expected?” liberal radio host Mark asked Toggle, seeing it all for the first time, as might be the case for newer Doonesbury readers. But part of what was striking was both the characters who had left, which characters were at the margins—J.J. and Zeke snuck in as bartenders, while Kim is the radiant mother of the bride—and the new people sitting at the table. Ray Hightower, B.D.’s Gulf and Iraq War buddy, not one of the original characters, is at the main table now, representing a critically important tie from one generation to the next, linking B.D. to Toggle, and to the rest of the core cast. Reverend Sloan is regretting that he and Joanie never got together. Mike stands on the left side of the single large panel, preparing to give a toast in the single-frame panel, and the other characters’ conversations cut him off. On the right is his daughter, telling the guests “Everyone shut up! Go ahead, Daddy.” The composition emphasizes the extent to which this transition, if not Doonesbury as a whole, is about a father and a daughter. And in an emotionally wise piece of writing, Doonesbury skips over Mike’s toast, leaving that moment free for all the fathers and daughters reading to fill in with their own words, and Mike’s tribute to Alex a loving mystery.

The next day, as Mike prepares to lead his daughter down the aisle, he flashed back for a moment, seeing her not radiant in the wedding dress that brought him up short, but as a little girl with a fistful of wildflowers. “You okay?” Alex asked him. “You seem a little out of it.” “I’m fine,” her father told her. “You go play.”

Those days are gone, and so is Doonesbury‘s old order. It’s true that this has been an ongoing transition, and that Doonesbury has, unlike other strips that keep its characters preserved in amber, always allowed its characters to age and die, and achieved some of its finest artistic, emotional, and political moments in those departures. But there’s still something moving about seeing Mike formally announce that it’s Alex’s time, that she’s ready—and then to take it back as she, breaking the fourth wall, demands a cuter nose and that the aging hippies give pride of place to the kids they raised, who grew up to be programmers, and novelists, and world-class slackers. It’s bittersweet, and the transition won’t be a clean, complete break. But in between its talking cigarettes and dying AIDS patients, Red Rascals and journalists-turned-bloggers, Doonesbury has always been as weird, and biting, and tender—and now, as generous and far-sighted—as the best of life itself.

Nina Shen Rastogi has a fantastic piece in Slate about race and Hollywood casting, specifically about what casting notices communicate about what producers and directors are looking for, and how agents, managers, and even actors’ assumptions about what roles are open to which people limit pools of people trying out for certain parts. I think that last part is particularly important, because while the predominance of older white men in the creator ranks certainly creates a bias towards better roles for men who look like them, in the absence of specific encouragement, it seems people tend to default to rather conservative assumptions about the opportunities available to them, and to their clients:

We discussed a breakdown for the upcoming ABC series Nashville, which described a male role as being “Caucasian or mixed ethnicity.” I said that, to me, that seemed like a way of opening the door for an actor who was ethnic but not too ethnic. Kadish suggested the phrase “mixed ethnicity” was meant as a kind of euphemism for “exotic”—but one that didn’t carry the same connotation of sensuality or physical attractiveness. But “we don’t know what anyone means by ‘mixed,’ ” she admitted…

Marsh stressed that talent agents’ experiences and expectations shape the casting process as much as the breakdown does. He showed me a notice for the part of an emergency room nurse with one line on the FX series Sons of Anarchy. Some 1,800 performers had been submitted across a wide range of races and ages. And yet, even though the breakdown didn’t say anything about the character’s gender, most of the actors submitted were female—reflecting the popular belief that nursing is a woman’s profession.

A couple of actors I spoke to singled out another breakdown code word they frequently find themselves having to negotiate these days: “all-American.” “I think everyone understands what they’re trying to get at when they say that,” said Alfredo Narciso, a Brazilian-Filipino actor who primarily goes out for Latino roles. “They’re looking for that Midwestern type, blond-haired, blue-eyed, somebody who looks like they were born and bred in Iowa. And the funny thing about that is I was born in Wisconsin—born and bred. But I would never be considered for that. I would never be called in for that. Even if I was submitted for it, even if I was pushed for it.”

It’s amazing how meaningless these phrases are, and I can’t even imagine trying to read the entrails and figure out what it would be worth pursuing or not. It would be nice if agents were bolder about putting their clients up for parts, rather than discouraging them from pursuing parts ostensibly open to people of all races and ethnicities, or siloing them based on race or gender. But folks who are writing notices and the people asking them to find actors seem to need some lessons in both using plain language, and in honestly assessing their own intentions and openness to whoever is truly best for the part.

Word came down over the weekend that Iwan Rheon, who played Simon on the wildly inventive dark British superhero series Misfits, has joined the cast of Game of Thrones. And some folks are speculating that he may play Ramsay Bolton, the illegitimate son of Roose Bolton, the lord sworn to Robb Stark who entered the show last season suggesting it might be a good idea to flay some of the enemy host, loosening their skins as a way to loosen their tongues. I hope that’s the case. Rheon is a fantastically chilly actor, and I think he’d bring something special to a role that I think is one of the most important in the Game of Thrones universe. Folks who haven’t read the books and are averse to spoilerdom might not want to read further.

Ramsay plays a pivotal role in the plot of Game of Thrones going forward. It’s he who takes Winterfell from Theon Greyjoy at the end of the second season. But instead of restoring the Northern alliance from the threat of conquest by the faction of the Greyjoys who want to carve out an addition to their kingdom on the fertile mainland, his possession of the castle turns out to be a dagger in the hopes of Northern consolidation. His family betrays the Starks and Ramsay, at the end of A Dance With Dragons, appears to have lured Stannis Baratheon into what may be a fatal trap, a battle in the midst of a blizzard.

But even more importantly, he’s an example of two themes that are critical to George R.R. Martin’s novels: the dangers of unchecked appetite, and the transmission of sin from generation to generation. While Joffrey Baratheon is one of the most hateful and frightening characters in the early novels and seasons of Game of Thrones, Ramsay Bolton easily eclipses him in A Dance With Dragons. Joffrey may order Sansa beaten, but he asks for her face to be preserved: he continues to see her as human, even if he wants to violently control her. Ramsay, on the other hand, is in the business of turning women into non-persons. He hunts them like game, rapes them, flays them and murders them, the order depending on his mood and the quality of chase they give him. And if they are particularly feisty, Ramsay names his female dogs after his victims. Ramsay doesn’t just want to control women, he wants to obliterate what makes them people, turning them into chunks of meat or animal. He represents appetite unchecked by social norms or conventions. When he does marry, Ramsay has no concern for rumor, locking one wife in a tower to starve to death and subjecting the other to particularly brutal marital rapes. Ramsay’s utter lack of shame or need for approval is one of the most monstrous things Martin presents us with, and this is in a world that includes zombies created by nature and man, dragons of legend, and the routine cruelties of feudal tyrants.

And while Ramsay is an unprecedentedly terrible monster, his monstrousness is not sui generis. As I wrote for my essay in Beyond the Wall:

In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.” While he undoubtedly means that his line has been polluted by having to divert it through an illegitimate son who is half-peasant, Robett Glover provides an alternative explanation in A Dance with Dragons: “The evil is in his blood. He is a bastard born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.” While it may be decidedly anti-modern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

Ramsay Bolton isn’t the only child who is the unintended consequences of his parents’ sins. Joffrey Baratheon inherits his father’s entitlement and taste for clumsy sexual violence, Robb Stark his father’s emotional sense of duty, the Sand Snakes their father Oberon’s impatience and strategic wrath. Ramsay’s just the worst example of how violent indifference can flower into murderous sadism, at a cost to nations.

Before NCAA president Mark Emmert handed down the sanctions last week, I was not as fiercely opposed to the idea of punishment as others, including Dave Zirin and Pat Forde, two writers I admire and respect. Though I agreed with both that NCAA sanctions were a generally bad idea, I viewed it as inevitable that the NCAA would do something because, as I’ve written before, to do otherwise would have seemed, to most, like a dereliction of its duties.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the NCAA’s decision to punish Penn State, though, it is undoubtedly worth a look at the implications of that punishment and how it was determined, delivered, and carried out, and whether the punishment of Penn State should be aimed at simply punishing the institution or at generating large-scale reforms at both Penn State and within college sports as a whole.

If you think the point of punishing is simply to be punitive, you undoubtedly support the NCAA’s decision, and any questioning of that decision is likely to look like a blustering defense of Penn State. That’s fine, I guess, but it seems to me that the focus on punishing Penn State has lost sight of the fact that punishment isn’t enough. Punishment should not come for the sake of punishment, it should not come to make us feel like we’re doing right, and it shouldn’t come because not punishing would cause a public relations nightmare. Punishment needs to be rehabilitative, and it needs to be aimed at preventing similar situations in the future.

The NCAA’s method of punishment, however, is too often astounding in its ability to be punitive and equally astounding in its inability to be effectively punitive. That is, it focuses too much on the punishment and not enough on rehabilitation and prevention to ensure that similar actions aren’t repeated imminently thereafter.

Take past NCAA sanctions as examples. In the 1980s, the NCAA gave Southern Methodist University’s football program the “death penalty” and leveled the University of Kentucky’s basketball program over impermissable benefits provided to players and recruits. Less than a decade ago, it hammered Baylor University’s basketball program for its role in a massive cover-up of the murder of a former player. In the last decade, the NCAA has placed sanctions on both Florida State University and the University of Georgia due to academic fraud that took place in their athletic departments.

And yet, little has changed. Multiple big-time programs — most notably the University of Alabama and University of Southern California — have been hit over impermissable benefits received by players since the SMU and Kentucky scandals (Kentucky, incidentally, repeated similar violations in its football program a little more than a decade later). The NCAA is currently investigating the University of North Carolina in what may turn out to be the biggest academic fraud case in the history of college athletics. And Penn State spent more than a decade covering up major crimes, undeterred by the Baylor sanctions.

I don’t trust that the NCAA’s treatment of this scandal is any different. This scandal happened at Penn State, and as such, the focus has remained on that institution. But this scandal could have happened and could still happen in hundreds of other programs, and because of that, focusing on Penn State’s culture isn’t enough. If we want to prevent a similar scandal from happening elsewhere in the future, it’s worth examining the similar “sports first” culture that persists throughout top-tier college sports and how the NCAA, the punisher in this instance, helped create, foster, and incentivize that culture.

If the point of the punishment is simply to be punitive, the NCAA’s actions will almost certainly accomplish that goal. But if the point is to generate the type of culture change that is desperately needed not just at Penn State but throughout the NCAA, I’m afraid the organization’s unwillingness to acknowledge its own place in that culture will cause it to fall far short of that aim.

The trailer for Skyfall, Sam Mendes’ James Bond movie, which arrives in theaters in January, sure looks pretty even if it doesn’t give even a hint of what the movie will actually be about, beyond some British flag-draped coffins and a trip to China:

At this point, Bond movies rise and fall for me on the quality of their villains. Casino Royale worked so well because it abandoned Cold War jockeying, something that had translated poorly as the movies tried to substitute China for Russia in Tomorrow Never Dies, for non-state actors like terrorists and their financiers, warlords, and freelance bombmakers. Rather than giant explosions and stupid doomsday devices, we had bruises and blood, crude methods of torture, conversations across tables between bitter enemies. Bond killed face-to-face. He, and we, felt the deaths he caused. After decades of Bond movies distancing us from the conflicts that birthed him, Casino Royale made them immediate and consequential again. Quantum of Solace wasted that momentum with a retreat to the generic, motivationless cabals that dominated the post-Berlin Wall period.

Part of the challenge, of course, is that the big, genuine rivalries in our geopolitics these days (as opposed to our entanglements) are economic rather than military. It didn’t matter if Bond movies demonized the Soviet Union because it wasn’t like the economics of the movie business required Bond to do substantial overseas gross there. Today, as movies jockey for access to the rapidly expanding Chinese movie market, which allows in only a limited number of American movies, studios are willing to bow to Chinese preferences and requirements, ranging from having characters speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese or moving shooting away from dissident-heavy locations. The economic incentives are for integration and collaboration on-screen in service of integration and collaboration in the real world, rather than exploration of tensions and challenges present on a broad scale.

More closely-kept conflicts would solve that problem and preserve a sense of Bond’s capabilities as realistically impressive rather than utterly cartoonish. And if the last decade of our geopolitics have taught us anything, it’s that big things have small beginnings, and the shadowy cabals behind them are lethally specific, rather than blandly anonymous.

I thought last night’s episode of The Newsroom was an improvement in its portrayal of the actual process of reporting and the kind of mistakes writers can make in both sourcing and tone when they’re in the heat of a broadcast, if not in Ladies Knowing How to Do Things, or Having a Modern Understanding of The Internet. But there was one thing I thought was disconcerting about the episode: the divide between the way the show talked about Will McAvoy’s father’s drinking and abusive behavior, and the way The Newsroom has consistently portrayed Charlie Skinner.

I’ve been bothered for a while by the way The Newsroom treats Charlie. He’s ostensibly on the side of the angels, and we do see him protecting News Night’s editorial independence. But the show also treats his heavy daytime drinking as if it’s an amusing character quirk, rather than a problem, something that leads him to get so angry at his colleagues at lunch that he’s spitting in their faces as he rants. And we often see him in full-throttle holler mode, going after his employees with an indignation that seems less passionate than abusive, and after executives in a way that seems less strategic than unhinged (speaking of which, where is Leona with the scheming?). Sloan’s screw-up tonight was obviously significant, if motivated by concerns about both the truth and the safety of Japanese people who live near Fukishima. But Charlie’s response, calling her “girl” rather than treating her as if she’s a professional who make a serious error, was bullying rather than a demonstration of commitment to high standards of journalism.

And it came in an episode where we learn that Will’s father was a physically abusive alcoholic. It was an interesting kernel of a revelation, meant to tie together Will’s response to the sorority girl questioner from the pilot and Will’s treatment of a black, gay aide to Rick Santorum, a callback to Chris Matthews’ on-air showdown with Robert Traynham. But instead of showing this and letting the revelation really sink in, The Newsroom chose to tell us in a therapy session Will finally attends after flubbing a show sign-off because he isn’t sleeping. It’s interesting to know that Will has a protective instinct, but given that he’s never demonstrated it to anyone other than MacKenzie before last night, there was something awfully tidy about suddenly making Will Sloan’s Kindly Brother in the story where we had this revelation. And just as The Newsroom’s told us that MacKenzie is a brilliant producer and thinks that means it never has to show her booking a guest or editing a story, the show seemed content to tell us that things had been bad and use that admission to drive plot rather than to make plot clear and to develop characters further.

A show with a stronger sense of drama might let us build to this conclusion and do work to set up Will’s journalistic relationship with Sloan rather than shoehorning it in when necessary to tell a story. A more searching one might even have questioned both Will’s instincts to bully and to protect as insufficient, given that saving women, especially by encouraging them to lie about their intelligence, is not the same as supporting them. And a more consistent one would recognize that certain behaviors are damaging whether exhibited by off-screen abusive fathers or shouty, grandfatherly news executives.

Television executives can get skittish about the strangest things, as I wrote earlier this summer about the Maxi pads, sex on kitchen tables, and the Lord’s name taken in vain that freaked out NBC suits during the Must See TV era. And one of the most striking differences between cable and network shows this last week has been the way people making programming for mediums talk about the role of standards and practices in their work.

“I think the only note we’ve gotten so far that makes it more of a network show than a cable show came from Standards this morning,” said Josh Berman, creator of NBC’s Mob Doctor, which stars Jordana Spiro as a young female surgeon who works for the Chicago mob when she isn’t pulling rotations. “We got a note that said ‘When you show the character’s urine, make sure it’s not too yellow, because too yellow violate network standards.’ So other than that, we don’t really differentiate between [making a show for cable and making a show for network.]” It turns out Standards okayed paler yellow urine in the scene. But it’s revealing that standards and practices at NBC thought something this minor was worth its creators time and attention. A show may not lose its artistic integrity through these tiny cuts, but it speaks to a profoundly conservative approach to standards. It’s hard to defend a large vision or a new approach when you’re freaked out by the color of a liquid standing in for urine in a test tube that’s momentarily on screen.

By contrast, Louis C.K. said that his interactions with Darlene Tipton, the vice president for standards and practices at FX and Fox Cable Networks, had been oriented towards a larger goal. “She said that her goal is to keep my show free and that she has a better sense of where the lines are,” he told the reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour. “Her department knows where the phone calls come from and…what fuses you’re more likely to break and where they are. So she keeps me within there. Because if I step too far over and I piss a group off really terribly, then I’m going to get curtailed beyond, you know, lower than I am now, if that makes any sense…So I always look to me, it’s a service to me, the standards.”

And that’s how standards and practices should work: serving the audience by serving the creative interests of creators, writers, and actors. It’s on the audience and critics to provide incentives, in the form of viewership, acclaim, and awards, for content that’s more diverse, or less harmfully sexist, or crude and dumb about gay people, or religious people, or any other kind of people. But standards and practices should treat creatives as their main clients, rather than interest groups. And they should want to preserve as wide an aperture as possible for their clients to do their jobs in, rather than narrowing it, a urine-filled test-tube millimeter at a time.

This post contains spoilers through episode three of the fifth season of Breaking Bad.

“You’re looking at it wrong,” Jesse tells Walt, disgruntled over the costs of standing up a replacement to Gus’s meth operation, towards the end of this episode of Breaking Bad. “We maybe cleared less money, but we got a bigger piece of the pie. It’s like you said. We’re owners not employees.” I’ve talked a great deal this season about how chilling it is to see Walt twist the truth such that he’s a victim and his targets are cast in need of forgiveness, as he’s done with Skyler, and as he does again tonight. But there’s something even more unnerving at play. Walt doesn’t want to have to think about people other than himself, but he doesn’t like considering his own actions too closely either. He’s becoming what Michael Chabon in Summerland referred to as a Hollow Man, a person who gets so caught up in an infernal task and the sense of accomplishment it provides him, that he loses moral perspective and humanity, becoming a thinned-out facsimile of a person.

This was a largely expository episode of Breaking Bad, but even as it explains how Walt, Jesse, and Mike are setting about reestablishing their meth business, it sets up a battle between Mike and Walt that Mike wins. The hour begins with Mike laying down his terms for Markowski, one of his men who is incarcerated (it was very funny to see him pose as a paralegal). “The deal is the deal,” Mike tells him, encouraging the younger man to stay strong in prison. “You will be made whole.” Mike tells Walt, prior to their hunt for a new location to cook, that he needs absolute authority over their business affairs. It’s a canny play, one that lets him fulfill his promise to Markowski, and provides us with a terrific scene that lays out the operation of the new business and puts Jesse in a position to decide, once again, between Mike and Jesse. “Transportation is worth 20 percent? $275,000 worth of risk? What did Gus pay his mules?” Walt grouses about distribution costs, then complains of Mike’s men “What are they doing to further our interests? So we’re paying them why?” When Jesse offers to put up the money to forestall a fight, and because he appears to agree, at least to a certain extent, with Mike’s assessment that you pay “Because it’s what you do,” Walt steps up. But he’s forestalled the gunfight, not won it. “Listen, Walter. Just because you shot Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James,” Mike warns the man who’s tried to come after him before, without success.

With Skyler, Walt’s offering too little—and maybe even the opposite of “a little” in the form of Scarface and pizza—far too late, given that shaming your wife for an affair to distract from the fact that you manufacture and sell an exceedingly corrosive drug definitely counts as beyond any reasonable hour. When Skyler melts down after Marie lectures her, first about her occasional smoking, then about planning a celebration of the life of a man who’s making hers miserable, Marie tries to use Skyler’s distress to leverage some form of truth out of Walt. He, of course, sees it as an opportunity to make even more people see him as noble and put-upon. “It wasn’t ongoing or anything. Skyler and I have been trying to put things back together,” he tells Marie. “Then the accident happened and she got—I’m begging you, please. Keep this to yourself. I don’t want Hank to think less of her, or me.” Walter White may not ultimately prove to be a successful crime lord, but he’d make one hell of a terrific political campaign manager leaking things to the press to cause maximum damage.
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Some days, it feels like we’re in an arms race of stupid, as is the case when Dane Cook decides that the timing is right to pull this joke in response to the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado:

So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into the movie. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but the movie is pretty much a piece of crap. Yea, spoiler alert. I know that if none of that would have happened, pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, was probably like ‘ugh fucking shoot me.

There is, in fact, a point to be made about the extent to which images of gun violence are integrated into our culture, and the degree to which we’ve become callous about the prospect of shootings. But I’m not sure that this routine really conveys the horror of that disconnect between our everyday conversation and our reaction when the things we joke about become real. There’s a strain of comedy that relies on the people who stories are told about believing in things no one would ever believe, or reacting in ways actual humans would never react, whether it’s a disgruntled moviegoer wanting someone to end it all for them, or Daniel Tosh’s joke involving his sister thinking it’s hilarious that a prank he played on her left her unable to defend herself from a rapist. Jokes like that tend to reveal more about how the people telling them see the world than about the actual foibles and hypocrisies of their targets.

That the NCAA relied heavily on the report produced by former FBI director Louis Freeh and his team to level the Penn State football program earlier this week is hardly a shock or a secret — the report, as NCAA president Mark Emmert said, was “vastly more involved and thorough than any investigation we’ve ever conducted.”

But the Freeh Report, commissioned by Penn State’s Board of Trustees, was never meant to investigate whether the football program violated NCAA rules, according to a source from Freeh’s team reached by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Freeh Report, the source said, was an investigation into “how Penn State operated, not how they worked within the NCAA’s system,” and it “was not meant to be used as the sole piece, or the large piece, of the NCAA’s decision-making.” Instead, the source said, the report “was meant to be a mechanism to help Penn State move forward. To be used otherwise creates an obstacle to the institution changing.”

Looking through the Freeh Report, it’s hard to dispute that point. The report is a legal investigation meant to lead to changes that prevent another such institutional failure, and it includes specific recommended changes to Penn State’s administrative and academic culture to achieve that goal. In no way does it examine Penn State’s role within NCAA bylaws or whether it might have broken NCAA rules.

Given that, it seems a thorough investigation into whether, and how, Penn State violated NCAA rules should have been in order, especially before the program was hit with massive fines, bowl bans, and scholarship reductions. Some sort of investigation was begun — Emmert delivered questions to Penn State in November, and the university was reportedly set to deliver its formal response around the time Emmert handed down the sanctions — but it was abruptly aborted, a fact that always seemed odd, especially when Emmert struggled to name specific bylaws Penn State had violated. The reasoning the NCAA uses to justify going forth with the sanctions before it conducted an investigation is shoddy, at best, as Emmert said the Freeh Report provided all the information he and the organization’s Executive Committee needed to know.

The fact is, there are multiple investigations going on at Penn State. To produce the Freeh Report, investigators combed through millions of emails and conducted a thorough investigation. The Department of Education is now carrying out its own investigation into whether Penn State violated federal law by not reporting crimes committed on campus, and deep investigations will continue to take place involving the federal charges facing two former Penn State officials. And the NCAA has even reserved the right to conduct a more complete investigation and bring more punishments to the table for individuals once the legal process is completed.

For whatever reason, though, the only organization to have punished Penn State thus far did not conduct its own investigation and instead relied on a document we now know was used outside its stated purpose. That’s a step that, frankly, does absolutely nothing to dispel the notion that the NCAA has overstepped its legal bounds to hand down a punishment because it felt it had to do something and because, with football season just weeks away, doing nothing might have seemed like an abdication of its duties, even if that something ignored its own role in the creation and fostering of the culture it says it wants to change.

“You guys are going to be talking about us either way,” Bristol Palin said at a panel for Dancing With the Stars: All Stars at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday, explaining why she and her family have embraced reality television even though it brings additional scrutiny to her family. It was the second Palin-studded panel of the tour. Bristol’s father Todd is a participant in NBC’s military-themed reality show Stars Earn Stripes, and while he barely uttered a word during the panel introducing the show on Tuesday, his wife, gone strikingly Hollywood, was the most sought-after star at NBC’s poolside party. But it was Bristol’s appearance that illustrated the contradictions of the Palin’s hunger for the spotlight and their disinterest in dealing with, or embracing with relish, the consequences of continuing to put themselves in the public eye.

“Our family’s mantra is to live life vibrantly,” Sarah Palin told Vulture’s Joe Adalian in a brief interview he was able to snag before hotel security started blocking reporters from approaching the family. “And participating in a show like this, especially for Todd, is exactly that. It is living life vibrantly.” Her daughter was less able to put a politician’s gloss on an essentially mindless pursuit. “I just think that God provides opportunities like this and you can go out and do ‘em,” she said, suggesting that if she was going to be the subject of media reports, she might as well embrace the opportunities that come with living in the public eye.

But Bristol got less and less comfortable as she was asked whether her family, which has frequently been vocally upset about their press coverage, has contributed to its own problems by embracing a profession that often puts its subjects in revealing and embarrassing situations. Recently, Bristol’s Lifetime Show, Life’s a Tripp, featured a sequence in which many viewers believed Bristol’s young son Tripp used the epithet “faggot” to deride his aunt—Palin has said that he used profanity, but not an anti-gay slur. When she and fellow contestant Pamela Anderson were asked about their attitudes towards gay people, Palin got visibly upset. “I like gays. I’m not homphobic and I’m so sick of people saying that just becuase I’m for traditional marriage,” she said. That stand “doesn’t mean I’m afraid of anyone else…whatever. I’m going to dance, I’m going to go have fun.”
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Greek triple-jumper Voula Papachristou, after making a truly stupid attempt at joke about African athletes and West Nile virus, got herself booted for her country delegation. I think the San Francisco Chronicle is right that Olympic values have already been substantially degraded by the end of amateurism, and corporate sponsorship, and the geopolitical maneuvering that’s gone on around them. But Papachristou’s case is also an illustration of why it would be lovely to have serious consideration of Olympic values, and why it remains incredibly hard to do so.

The Olympics are supposed to be a moment of world peace and unity, but they’re also an occasion for rather intense nationalist competition. The athletes who represent their countries are faced with the pressure of both winning for them and representing them admirably, a burden that many of them, extremely young and sequestered from normal life for much of their training periods, may not have been particularly well-prepared to do. Ideally free speech and anti-racism would both be Olympic values, but Papachristou’s case illustrates the difficulties of reconciling them when they come into conflict. I’m excited to root for Team USA this summer, and to watch me some truly bonkers Olympics Opening Ceremonies performances. But all of these other questions are critically important not just for a couple of weeks every other year. We could stand to consider Olympic and national values a little more closely.

Since the shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, I’ve been thinking a lot about a seeming contradiction at the heart of what I write about. I don’t believe that video games and violent movies somehow program people to go out to commit terrible crimes, but I do think that mass culture contributes to our sense of what is normal, whether it’s something as depictions of hecklers almost every time we see a stand-up comedy set in movies or television or as significant as routinized uses of force by the police without moral condemnation and the setting of absurd standards for average bodies for both men and women.

One of the things that’s fascinating about the setting of those norms is that they can be accidental. My friends who are video game designers have discussed about the challenges of building characters who have bigger bodies without making them bigger in every way, such that they’d have to be abnormally tall in order to look heavier. Hero Complex talked to video game designer Chris Hecker about violence in video games, which he suggested is more a function of what designers feel confident doing than an inherent demand for violent gaming:

For me, the thing that’s different about games right now is that we tend to rely on violence as the main part of the meal, rather than as spice. This is mostly a historical artifact of our current point in time, because as game designers we know how to do interactive violence, but we don’t yet know how to do interactive versions of all the other emotions in the palette that the other more mature forms have available to them. I think this will change over time, as game designers learn how to use interactivity more effectively.

And then there’s a long meditation by Owen Gleibman in Entertainment Weekly about killers who are overly-identified with pop culture artifacts, and the way culture gets out of its creators hands as soon as fans start interpreting it:

What these commenters graphically illustrated, in their hyperbolic hate spew, is that it is now possible to “love” movies like the Dark Knight trilogy far too much, to love them in a way that is disconnected from the very humanity that the movies are making a plea for. Fanboy culture now risks turning into a kind of fundamentalism for fantasy geeks, with movies turned into an absolute: a reason for living that replaces living. That’s why it’s so threatening if even one critic doesn’t like the movie that you’ve been pining for, ruining its chances for a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100% fresh, the magical evaluation that would mean that everyone likes it, and that you could therefore join that club safe in the knowledge that you, too, will be liked by everyone.

People who are looking for frameworks to justify their dark visions will manufacture them out of whatever material is available to them, just as Jared Lee Loughner spun fantasies about the value of American currency from fragments of information. I tend to think we can more productively call artistic creators to account more for the things their work helps normalize, the quiet damage it contributes to, than the dramatic things people people claim were inspired by art that is very far distant from them.

Andy and Lana Wachowski have not stuck the landing on the emotional conclusion really, I think, since The Matrix, but they always produce a fantastic visual spectacle, and Cloud Atlas, which they directed in collaboration with Tom Twyker, looks like it’ll be no different:

One interesting piece of context for this very long trailer that the directors give in their commentary on it is that the actors, who are playing multiple parts in the movie, may be switching genders and races from storyline to storyline. I’ll be curious to see how the movie executes that, given the risk of handling blackface poorly. And I’d be fascinated to see what the movie (I haven’t read the book) ends up having to say about the commonality of human experience across race and gender, given that the time periods it spans, from 1850 into the distant future, are periods of radically changing conditions for women and people of color.

The movie also comes at a period of significant change for the Wachowskis. While I don’t like overreading creators’ personal experiences into their work unless they suggest that I ought to, it’s hard to see it as total coincidence that they’re making a movie about the continuity of the human soul no matter the body it’s in during a time when Lana, who was born Larry, went from living as a man to living as a woman. The Wachowskis have always been totally uninterested in discussing their personal lives, even when it means that something like the Rolling Stone story about Lana’s transition, which was salacious in the extreme, was published without comment from them. Perhaps they’ll break character here, and end up doing a magazine story or a profile. But if they don’t, there’s something radical about Lana just showing up as she is, without explanation. It’s a wonderful thing when gay and transgender people come out and tell their stories and act as role models for others. But there is no universal obligation for gay and transgender people to translate their lives for those who don’t understand them, or to put their sex lives or gender ahead of the work that made them famous and important.

By Alli Thresher

When I first came across Joe Peacock’s “Booth Babes Need Not Apply” post on CNN’s Geek Out blog, I was intrigued. Here, I thought, based on the title alone, is a self-professed geeky guy delving into the problematic nature of a culture that promotes and uses models as marketing bait. “Excellent,” I thought to myself, “rad even – it will be cool to hear the perspective of a male consumer on this issue.” Boy was I disappointed. The title of Peacock’s post is horrendously misleading. He notes that he’s bothered by booth babes – but doesn’t really delve deeper than that. Instead, the readers are presented with a long, rambling, screed about “fake geek women” and how they’re ruining geek culture for everyone (everyone being dudes like Joe and his friends).

There are so many things problematic with Peacock’s piece–the fact that he rates women on a 1 to 10 scale, that he conflates professional booth staff with models and promoters and regular old cosplayers. That he talks about his own attraction to “real” geek girls but maligns anyone who might be at conventions doing the same thing:looking for a date. And then there’s the ranting and ranting and ranting against “fake geek girls.”

Let’s just get one thing out of the way here. Fake geek girls? They don’t really exist. Seriously. Leigh Alexander has some amazing things to say here. But I searched far and wide, but could not find anyone who’d ever met one of these supposedly toxic, nasty, creatures.

There are some decent points buried in Peacock’s post, but they’re barely touched on and mostly obscured by his complaints about all the nefarious fake women who are apparently ruining conventions for him. For example, he’s right that booth babes are a problem– but, counter to his complaints, they’re not a problem because they’re “fakes” or teases or whatever. Their use is problematic because it lends rise to attitudes like Peacock’s. When the most visible women in a male dominated space are, largely, promotional staff and models, it becomes really easy to write off most other women on the floor–as Peacock and his supporters, do.

As I wrote in another piece, when I’ve spoken to fellow gamers about their issues with booth babes, I’ve found, surprisingly, that male-identified gamers, their ostensible targets, are the ones most vocally opposed to the use of booth babes as an advertising gambit. I hear over and over “they don’t belong here, they don’t play games, I can’t talk to them.” When the women working the floor are written off, immediately, as not worth talking to, it lends to an attitude of models, promoters, and other female staff, developers included, being treated not as people but as, well, something less. It’s telling that Peacock called out both the Frag Dolls, a group of professional gamers, and Olivia Munn, former co-host of Attack of the Show, as “fakes” – I’d warrant that most geeks and gamers count all of these ladies as having more “cred” than the average geek dude, Joe Peacock included. And if Peacock hates the use of booth babes so much, he shouldn’t go after the models, go after the companies that hire them, or the content creators who build a market for hypersexualised, unreal, versions of women.
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ABC News President Ben Sherwood said, in the wake of errors in and disputes over his network’s coverage of the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, his network had no immediate plans to change standards and practices, but would look at how to make sure staff followed them in tense breaking news situations.

Sherwood faced sharp questioning from the Television Critics Association at a presentation in California on Thursday about Brian Ross’s initial report that a man who shared the name of the accused shooter was a member of a Tea Party group, and about reports that ABC News had mischaracterized the reaction of the suspect’s mother when she was called for comment about his involvement. In the former case, the James Holmes Ross identified as a Tea Party member was not the same James Holmes who will be tried for the murders of twelve people at an Aurora theater. And Holmes’ mother has suggested that her remarks to ABC News that “Yes, you’ve got the right person,” were meant to confirm that she was, in fact, his mother, not to indicate that she believed it likely that her son would have committed the crimes of which he is accused.

“What happened was we put something on the air that we did not know to be true, and the part of it we knew to be true was not germane to the story we were doing and the story we were covering,” Sherwood said of Ross’s initial report on Holmes’ political affiliations. “That was a violation of our standards.” But he declined to provide a narrative of how ABC came by the information and made the decision to air it, saying only that the report was Ross’s error rather than an indication of a systemic failure. That lack of a narrative made it difficult to determine which ABC standards or practices were violated, and which procedures Sherwood and his team would seek to improve.

In a press scrum after the main conference, Sherwood suggested that one change might be to give on-air reporters more information about the quality of data and reports.

“I’ve asked our team to look at ways in future breaking news situations that there’s even more clarity, as things are going around, as we’re pulling things off the web, as we’re pulling things down from social media,” he said. “Let’s make sure we’re even more clear with everybody who’s about to go on the air and involved in reporting, what is reportable, what is confirmed, what is only for background…It’s a blizzard of information, there’s all this stuff going around. We can be more clear in our internal communications so that we put only on the air what is confirmed.”

Sherwood said that Ross has personally apologized to the man he misidentified on-air, but said that he would not be suspended, sanctioned or formally reprimanded, though Sherwood said “I had a very serious and stern conversation with him, and I can assure you that Brian feels sick about this.”
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