This post covers Episodes 1-3 of the second season of The Wire. For next week, we’ll discuss episodes 4-6.

If the first season of The Wire began with a focus on hands, the second season takes as its most important image paper. Even though the show introduced all of its main characters in the previous season, it has to reorient us to their new positions, and images of paper, both as slang for money and in its literal form, are a critical part of situating old players and introducing new ones.

We begin with the cops, and the bills that change hands between the man running the party on the Capitol Gains and McNulty, miserably assigned to the harbor patrol but not seasick enough to miss the opportunity for a reasonable bribe when he sees it. Kima’s consigned to paperwork, sighing “Fuck me, I still cannot type.” Daniels is stuck shuffling evidence in paper bags in the basement dungeon. Prez is staring at new printouts of photos tacked to a new bulletin board in a new detail office, this time a lonely building out by the water supplied by his father-in-law, Southeastern District Commander Stan Valchek.

Paper is the means of communication amongst criminals, too. Bodie notes down mileage and hands the tally to Stringer, who’s filing other pieces of paper in his pockets. We meet Blind Butchie in his capacity as bank, his most notable characteristic his ability to hear the count correctly. Omar and Dante first meet Kimmy and Tosha when they beat the men to a chance to rob a drug crew—Dante and Omar ambush the women and forge their partnership with them as they sort the bills from the heist into neat piles. In prison, D’Angelo’s transitioned from running the Pit crew to keeping the library neat, but he doesn’t have a sense of which currency is most valuable. “What do you like better? Ultimate Spider-Man or Regular Spider-Man,” a young prisoner asks D while he’s at work. “What’s the difference?” D’Angelo asks him, only to get a “Man, I gotta teach you everything” in response. And on the docks, Frank Sobotka lets stacks speak for him as he desperately tries to prevent defections to local 47, and Johnny Fifty and Ziggy Sobotka exchange slips of paper.

Paper means so many things here. To only be able to push paper is a sign of shame and restriction, in Daniels’ case, an unfair punishment from the department he has tried so hard to serve, in Kima’s case, an act of resentful loyalty to Cheryl, surrounded by a pile of paper of her own in the form of baby books. It can make you, as in a sergeant’s exam, or take your life away, as in the separation agreement McNulty’s wife sends him so it can speak the words she cannot bring herself to utter. To be able to make or share it is a source of pride, though one that can be badly misplaced, as when Ziggy, fatally unable to read any situation correctly, even from the beginning, declares “You know what, Dolores? I made money today” after he and Nicky steal a truck from the docks and sell the contents, prompting her contemptuous “Yeah? What ship came in?” It contains secret knowledge that cannot be spoken immediately out loud, like the note in Stringer’s pocket, the note from Johnny, which Ziggy can speak as soon as he’s far enough away from Johnny that Johnny can’t be traced to the information within it. And it’s a symbol of the value that can lurk in the mundane, as when McNulty sees the news report of the women found in the shipping container in the papers he and Bunk are using to protect the interrogation room table from their crab lunch.

That randomness, the chance that lead Jimmy to this new information, is particularly important. Watching this season again, I was struck by the extent to which Stan Valchek’s selfishness and his petty rivalry with the stevedores over who gets prominent placement for their donated church window end up doing some good. In The Wire: The Musical, the chorus sings “There are complex problems / Inherent in the bureaucratic institutions of the state / But there’s no one to blame / It’s a vast array of personal interests that conflict in a way that undermines the overall system.” But part of the point of The Wire is that goodness is as random as badness. If Stan, in a fit of pique, hadn’t demanded Daniels be put in charge of the detail, Burrell might well have let Daniels walk out the door and on to a legal career. Inertia, for better and for worse, is a more powerful force than meritocracy. Taking the effort to keep Daniels in house lets Burrell preserve the larger inertia that is sweeping him towards a commissionership.

And Valchek may not have convinced Prez that it’s better to adhere towards the vision he laid out for a younger man: “I think you’re going to take the Sergeant’s exam next month…you’re going to make sergeant. Then you’re going to come out here to the Southeast where, because of your father-in-law, you’re going to be assigned a daytime shift in a quiet sector. Then you’ll take the Lieutenant’s exam, where you’ll also score high…If you’ll just shut up and listen to me, you might actually have a career in this department.” But giving the detail some heft is an easier way to keep Prez from fighting that vision, and keep him from doing anything that might keep him from progressing towards those high scores on those tests, and the badges and stripes that go with those particularly powerful pieces of paper.

Gabby Douglas was the topic du jour for Olympic commentators throughout last week, but over the weekend, she became a centerpiece in another manufactured controversy at Fox News, America’s top outlet for manufactured controversies. Douglas’ pink leotard, Fox host Alisyn Camerota lamented, was emblematic of an Olympic “trend” (one that, Fox wants you to believe, is part of a liberal-left conspiracy to rid the world of red, white, and blue) of athletes wearing colors that don’t appear on the American flag.

“Some folks have noticed that the American athletes’ uniforms don’t carry the stars and stripes look as much as they have in past years,” Camerota complained, without any evidence of who “some folks” might be. “The famous flag-styled outfits worn in year’s past replaced with yellow shirts, gray track suits, pink leotards.” Radio host/Tea Partier David Webb later chimed in with a sad tome about how America has “lost over time that jingoistic feeling” because “a soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show their exceptionalism”:

Camerota and Webb apparently haven’t watched much of the Olympics, or else they would have noticed the multitude of Americans donning red, white, and blue uniforms. But even if they have, Fox has apparently decided to use the Olympics to advance the false notion — one it began cultivating shortly after 9/11 — that anyone who doesn’t constantly wrap him or herself in the flag isn’t sufficiently patriotic. A politician who doesn’t wear a lapel pin isn’t American enough; an athlete who wears pink doesn’t appreciate her country the way she should (even if her father serves in the military, hasn’t seen her in two years, then shows up to surprise her with a giant American flag at the Olympic trials).

Aside from the fact that athletes eschewing the colors of their home countries isn’t a particularly radical development, the Fox version of patriotism isn’t patriotism at all. Rather, it is a hollow display of jingoism that, despite Webb’s concerns, we don’t need any more of. True patriotism doesn’t come from the color of an athlete’s clothes, it is determined by how they act and compete on a world stage while representing their country. It comes in many forms, from celebrating on the medal stage as the national anthem plays to crying because it doesn’t, and it even comes in the form of protests that aim to make one’s country — and the world — a better, more equitable place or feats, like Douglas’, that highlight the overwhelming socio-economic barriers facing many of our greatest athletes.

That might be anathema to conservatives like Webb and media outlets like Fox, who have spent the last decade trying to convince America that true patriotism comes from putting on a “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirt and pointing an accusatory finger at anyone who doesn’t do the same, but it’s true.

“I’m proud to be an American!” Webb declared during the segment. So am I, and so too, I presume, is Gabby Douglas. She just doesn’t need to wrap herself inside the flag to prove it.

The first trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden was making even before President Obama ordered the operation that killed him, that’s stoked controversy about the briefings Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal received about the operation, tells us little but implies much:

There’s the implication of stressful interrogations in the repeated questioning of an unpictured detainee, but no word yet on where Zero Dark Thirty will come down on torture. There’s the sense of secret history being unredacted in the black lines fading away from the title text they’ve crossed out, but also of a new one being created as a black pen eats through other lettering, through the eyes of people in photographs who have been disappeared from the world, all on its relentless way to triangulating a target. It looks like Chris Pratt and Jennifer Ehle are in the field and Kyle Chandler and Jessica Chastain are in a command center. And beyond that, it’s going to be an even longer wait until November now that we’ve seen this.

The bridge is yours. And you guys, I am happy to be back on the East Coast so I have more time to hang out with you guys in comments and email!

-Syfy is adapting John Christopher’s The Lotus Caves.

-Olympians’ TV cameos.

-Latino audiences are turning in to top English language programming at half the rates they might have been expected to.

-Whatl Michael Phelps do in retirement?

-A supercut of Louie’s awkwardness with women:

Watching the American women win the all-around team gold in gymnastics in London last week, and watching Gabby Douglas win the individual all-around gold after that, I was struck by the fact that all the women on the team were born just before or after the publication of Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, Joan Ryan’s book about gymnastics and figure skating that made it almost impossible for me to feel decent about watching those sports precisely at the moment that American participation in them peaked during my childhood. I wrote about this a bit for Slate:

Ryan chronicled the accident at the 1988 World Sports Fair in Tokyo in which Julissa Gomez was left a quadraplegic after attempting a Yurchenko vault. Gomez, who eventually died from complications of her injuries and treatment, was not proficient enough to perform the vault, but her coaches insisted on it as a way to boost her potential point total. Ryan devoted another chapter to the death from anorexia in 1994 of gymnast Christy Henrich, who shared a coach with Gomez. If they (and a young Romanian gymnast murdered by her coach in 1993) were the extreme outliers, the larger numbers who developed obsessive compulsive disorder or cutting were no more encouraging. For a nascent young feminist who also thrilled to Olympic skating and gymnastics, Little Girls In Pretty Boxes was to those sports what the debate over chronic traumatic encephalopathy is to football today, a challenge to the idea that they were redeemable.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think there’s something to that comparison. It’s not an exact one, of course. Anorexia nervosa was not a competitive event in gymnastics in the same way hitting other people and making them fall down is part of football. The problems in gymnastics that were literally killing young women in performance and in the prime of their competitive years were more easily separated from the performance of gymnastics than hits are from football.

But there are similarities. There was a prevailing belief in gymnastics that lighter bodies resulted in higher heights during some elements, and more delicate performances, much in the same way that the NFL has developed a preference for significantly larger players, making hits harder and more dramatic. Safer helmets may not be a cure-all for hits that cause concussions, and may encourage players to hit harder in the belief they’re more protected, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make football safer, or that doing so will kill the game. Gymnastics has adopted more stable vaulting tables and different points systems, and the sight of young girls doing astonishing things with bodies that now seem more oriented towards strength than fragility is no less thrilling for it.

That’s not to say that making football watchable will be easy, particularly since I’m not sure we’re at a critical mass of viewers who feel deeply uncomfortable continuing to consume a sport that destroys men’s brains and lives. And changing it is unlikely to happen quickly, particularly given that football players are conditioned to and rewarded when they hit extremely hard long before they reach the National Football League, with its hit-oriented highlight rules and bounty scandals. But if a generation of gymnasts could grow up and compete healthier in a world that Joan Ryan helped change, maybe a generation of young men can come up playing a different kind of football, shaped by the world of devastating reporting on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

This post contains spoilers through the April 5 episode of Breaking Bad.

I wrote earlier this season about the haunted greatness of Skyler White, the character who sees Walter White with a terrible clarity, and who is hated by some fans of the show for it. There are other things going on in this episode of Breaking Bad, of course, but none so important as Skyler’s confrontation with her husband, and the show’s meditation on the ways that a tyrannical man can shatter the illusion of a woman as an equal partner in a marriage.

It’s fitting for an episode about Walt as a purveyor of emotional domestic abuse that so much of this hour of television focuses on food and the rituals around it. A year ago, Walt’s request for “Chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Life is good, Skyler,” might have been the ordinary ritual of a man asking his wife to indulge him on his birthday. Now, it’s an order that Skyler both fulfill Walt’s request, and that she fall emotionally in line with him, that she celebrate his birthday not just in deed but in her heart. For the rest of the episode, food and meals will be Skyler’s way of testing her new boundaries with Walt. When she serves him his birthday breakfast but neglects to rearrange the bacon into a “51,” Walter Junior reminds her “Mom, you forgot. Dad’s bacon? Mom’s got to.” And Walt, the menacingly mild paterfamilias tells her, “Well it is sort of a tradition,” putting it on her to respond. “What’s this, Holly,” he tells their daughter as Skyler complies. “Watch what she does with bacon. What is she doing?” Their baby and her care and safety are a powerful weapon Walt holds over his wife, especially since she’s told him “A new environment might be good for them,” but shied away from telling Walt exactly why she wants their children gone.

At their subsequent family meal, Skyler resists Walt’s wishes for a party, and opts instead for a small family gathering and a simple meal, though she does serve “Chocolate cake, as requested,” the setting for her terrible act of resistance against her husband: a suicide attempt that inspires Marie to volunteer to take Holly and Walter Junior for a few days. She’s been experimenting with self-harm earlier in the episode, twisting dental floss around her finger so tightly that it looks in danger of killing flesh. And when Skyler walks into that pool, it’s not clear that it’s entirely a feint. Knowing what she knows about Walt, how deeply she has come to revile him and the things she has followed him into, hearing him wax eloquent about her may have been too sickening to endure. Walt gets credit for being both a survivor and a grateful husband when he tells Hank and Marie “And Skyler, honey, remember that first week of chemotherapy, that night on the bathroom floor, what you said to me? I was so sick. It was rough going at first. But Skyler, she was right there, of course, putting wet washcloths on my forehead, and she sang to me, and this would go on day after day. I was lying there on the floor of the bathroom because it felt nice and cool. And I was asking her, if this could all be over.” But to Skyler, this recitation of her wifely perfection is a scourge, scoring her guilt deeper into her skin.

Whatever her intentions, Skyler’s response to Walt’s interrogation of her after he pulls her out of the pool is a beautifully written, tragic illustration of the resourcefulness and limitations of women in abusive relationships, even if her circumstances are horribly unique:
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The amazing men and women of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration landed the Curiosity rover on Mars last night. But the piece of writing that perhaps best encapsulates the wild joy at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and the meaning of their accomplishment, was published almost 20 years before, on January 1, 1993. I hope everyone will forgive me quoting Kim Stanley Robinson’s introduction to Red Mars, the first of his masterful trilogy about the colonization of the Red Planet, at length here, because it’s the most powerful meditation on the meaning of Mars that I know, and it’s so strikingly applicable here (and make it worth it by going out and buying the book if my repeated proselytization for it hasn’t convinced you already). Robinson wrote:

Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis—they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah—stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

In Robinson’s vision, we sent the first colonizing mission to Mars in 2026. President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposes cutting NASA’s planetary science budget from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion and ending the U.S. partnership with the E.U. to send probes to Mars on two planned missions in 2016 and 2018—this year, the Jet Propulsion Lab’s open house was marked by a bake sale to call attention to the proposed cuts. What the scientists at JPL did last night was a critical part of our future in space not simply because they did something extremely difficult that will advance our understanding of the planet that’s fascinated so many of us so deeply and for so long, but because they helped keep the dream alive at all, reminding of what it’s like to watch the future arrive, and how cheap it is to purchase in comparison to what we spend to maintain conflicts and policies that mire us in the past.