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.