Homeland, Showtime’s freshman drama about bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody, the former prisoner of war she suspects of being a terrorist and falls in love with anyway, starts its second season on Sunday at 10 PM. I caught up with the show’s creators, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who collected Emmys for best drama writing and for best drama last weekend, at the Television Critics Association press tour in August to talk drone strikes, Carrie as assault survivor, Brody’s political future, and putting Islam on screen. This interview touches on the basic setup of the show’s second season, and has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking one question that had been percolating in my mind since last season: were we meant to think that Carrie was sexually assaulted after she was pulled out of the prison in the first episode?

Alex: We didn’t explicitly want you to think that, but it was always a subject of our discussions: what exactly happened to her? And the possibility certainly was there. What made you think that?

I thought the transition in the pilot between that and the scene where she’s washing her genitals after that, there’s that sense of carried-over shame that was really interesting.

Alex: We talked about that. At one point we were going to show some of that period where she was being held, and we chose not to. It just felt at some point like it was beside the point at that time.

How much time has passed between the first season and the second.

Alex: Six months. Ish?

That’s a quick turnaround for Brody as a Congressman.

Howard: It’s sort of like, dog ears, six months in TV time. Some stories are better explained. The idea would be that he was appointed to that seat…Which is what happened last year [with former Congressman Anthony Weiner].

I also wanted to ask about the vice presidential storyline, where Brody learns that Walden is considering him for a spot on the ticket, because while it’s nice to have him close to the Vice President, it’s hard for me to believe he would pass even an initial vet.

Alex: Well, I mean, Sarah Palin passed a big vetting process. Look, the guy’s a national figure. He’s generally acknowledged to be a hero. He’ been demonstrated to be incredibly good when he gets up to speak.

Howard: And in the context of what we posit geopolitically, he’s especially valuable to Walden in terms of casting an image of strength and service.  

Alex: But we also want to make it clear that he’s not the only choice out there. There are other, he’s being vetted among a number of vice presidential choices.

Howard: And he’s still a long shot.
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“If we start talking about it we’ll be here all day, making diagrams with straws,” Joe (Bruce Willis) tells Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his younger self, over diner coffee in Rian Johnson’s elegant but ultimately incomplete futuristic thriller Looper. To its credit, Looper spends more time on the uses and moral implications of its time travel technology, which has been outlawed, and is used primarily by a criminal syndicate that sends its victims back in time to be assassinated by young men who must eventually kill their future selves as part of the bargain, than in attempting to make it comprehensible. But the movie ends up split between two equally rich concepts, failing to adequately connect them, and doing full justice to neither.

The movie begins with Joe, a young looper, explaining his work in 2040s Kansas, where he kills people at the edge of a sugar cane field, burns their bodies in an industrial facility, and stops at a diner where he practices French with his favorite waitress, Beatrix. He spends more time on the mechanics and mindset of his job, a profession populated mostly by young men who aren’t very good at thinking ahead, but very much enjoy the lucrative rewards of their work, paid in bars of silver strapped to the bodies of their victims, which allow them to frequent flashy clubs and stay addicted to stimulant eye drops that turn the world pleasantly upside down. Joe’s boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels, vastly more enjoyable here than he is pontificating in The Newsroom), grumbles at Joe that “The movies that you’re dressing like are just copying other movies. Fucking 21st century effect. Do something new,” and suggests that he abandon his plans to visit Paris because “You should go to China…I’m from the future. You should go to China.”

As an aside, Joe mentions a mutation that’s given about ten percent of the population mild powers of telekenisis, a revelation that once lead people to believe that superheroes were about to emerge, but “Now it’s just a bunch of assholes who think they’re going to blow your mind by floating quarters. It’s like this whole town: big heads, small potatoes.” What’s initially an aside, a bit of local color in a glimmering megacity that Johnson builds with the same hardboiled spine and detailed flesh that he brought to Brick, his first feature, also a collaboration with Gordon-Levitt, becomes the point on which the movie bifurcates.

Joe’s routine is interrupted when his friend Seth (Paul Dano) shows up at his apartment having failed to kill his future self, or close his loop. He’s terrified, and with good cause: Abe’s private squad of hitman show up at Joe’s apartment to do the job he couldn’t. Joe eventually gives Seth up in order to keep his secret stash of silver, a not particularly subtle allusion. But before Seth dies, he passes along a warning from his future self to Joe: “He told me there’s a new holy terror bossman in the future and he’s closing all the loops.” It proves prescient. Joe’s loop shows up, but unlike Seth’s, who slips because of Seth’s negligence, he’s prepared, which makes since, because Future Joe is prepared, determined to escape and kill the bossman, known as the Rainmaker, so he can avoid being spent back and live out his life with his wife in China.
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This post contains spoilers for the September 27 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After a strong start to its fifth season last week that laid out major themes, including Leslie’s anxieties about her new role and her separation from Ben, how Ron will handle the Parks Department without Leslie there to balance out his antipathy for government and, as Leslie put it, “feelings and emotions,” and Andy and April’s next steps towards adulthood, this week’s episode of Parks and Recreation left me feeling concerned. Leslie’s election to city council, Andy’s decision to pursue police work, and Ben and April testing the waters in Washington should give us a sense of a slightly larger Pawnee, letting us finally spend time with Councilman Hauser, seeing who Dave’s colleagues in the police department are, finding out where Pawnee’s trouble spots are other than Ramset Park. But “Soda Tax” mined old Parks territory to little effect.

Parks and Recreation is always at its best when it explores issues specific to the surreal version of Pawnee it’s set in, rather than getting too close to real-world political issues. It’s one thing for Leslie to accidentally marry a couple of penguins and set off an equal rights crisis. But watching Leslie follow spontaneously in Mayor Bloomberg’s footsteps doesn’t have much pop. Sure, the sodas in question are freakishly large: “Roughly the size of a two-year-old child, if the child were liquified,” as Paunchburger lobbyist Ms. Pinewood, puts it. But the issue doesn’t seem to come from any particular passion of Leslie’s.

And in another diversion from the usual brilliant eccentricity of the show, Leslie’s constituents seemed dumb rather than particular to Pawnee. The woman who told Leslie, “My husband started drinking those giant sodas and he gained 100 pounds in three months. Consequently, we haven’t had sex in ten years,” was typical and reasonably funny fare for the show, but the guy who thinks “we should tax all bad things, like racism, and women’s vaginas” is less clever. And having someone declare that it’s not the federal government’s business whether he pays taxes feels suspiciously like the show editorializing on people who want the government’s hands off their Medicare. It’s all a bit common for Parks and Recreation.

It’s also a problem that the show recycles the threat for a company to take jobs out of town. Last season, when Bobby Newport threatened to outsource Sweetums, his suggestion was genuinely unnerving, both because it was such a nasty thing for such a dumb, sweet man to suggest, and because the prospect of it coming true seemed real. Here, the threat is recycled, but it doesn’t carry any real weight. It would be interesting if Leslie blows off the warning and it comes back to bite her. But in this episode, it seems like the show going to the same well twice in less than a season’s-worth of episodes, to significantly diminished effect.

It’s also returning to the same well of Leslie seeking out Ron for reassurance and Anne for policy ideas. If the legislative fight had been stronger, I might not have cared so much, but how many times do we have to hear Ron tell Leslie things we know, like “you were insubordinate, a pain in my ass, and worst of all, bubbly.” Sure, it’s a difference to know that he tried to have her fired, but not enough of a rift to make the conversation feel like a standout.

What did feel new, and the major thing in the episode that worked (though I did like Andy’s training and Chris’s revelation, which could produce some awesome therapy sequences), was the scene where Ben confronted April about her slacking in Washington. Most of April’s apathy has been harmless, or supported by Ron, or jollied-through by Leslie. But this time, Ben “asked you to come here because I thought you’d enjoy it and I think you’re smart,” and she’s both disappointing those expectations and making it harder for him to do something he definitely cares about even if it’s something she’s not sure she likes yet. It was an interaction that produced an actual shift in their dynamic, and let April feel some actual shame. Now, maybe her take with the interns isn’t the actual desired end result here, though her promise that “If you don’t do it, I swear to God, I’m going to murder you in your sleep. I know where you live. 14th Street, right?” shows a better sense of DC than Hollywood normally demonstrates. And it represents forward progress, rather than backsliding, whether to what a person or a show has been, in favor of striding boldly towards its future.

There’s an idea floating around the internet today that the National Football League owners “lost” their labor dispute with the NFL Referees Association after the two sides reached a deal last night. The Big Lead’s Jason Lisk said as much in a post today, and others have made similar arguments.

That might be an easy belief to hold, given negotiations got serious as a result of the public relations nightmare that was this week’s Monday Night Football game, when a blown call cost the Green Bay Packers a game. From where I’m sitting, though, that view couldn’t be more wrong.

When the lockout began, the owners had three major asks: they wanted to eliminate the pension benefits current officials receive, add full-time officials, and add a back-up pool of officials. More details will come out, but the deal they reached last night added a group of full-time officials and a back-up pool of officials and grandfathered in pension changes that will eliminate the current defined-benefit retirement program for all officials by 2016. The owners got basically everything they wanted, and somehow they lost?

I’m not seeing it.

If anything, this deal is more evidence of the power corporate interests hold in labor disputes. Laden with cash and able to wait, the NFL spent the offseason moving the NFLRA’s thin red line closer to what the owners wanted, to the point where the reasonable compromise was one that gave the league everything it wanted, if on a slightly slower timeline. That ensured that when fans firmly took a side, the league would still get its way. That power is shared by corporations in lower-profile battles, where companies are locking out workers to pay them less and eliminate pensions and benefits just because they can.

There’s only one loser in this, and it’s the American worker. Another pension is gone, and because the real refs are back on the football field, we’ll all forget about the nonsense and go back to watching the game as if none of this never happened. For a measly $60 million, the owners could have shored up the pensions of employees who make a $9 billion league work. Instead, they ruined three weeks of football to save less than a penny on the dollar, and their reward was to get everything they asked for. And this will keep happening, in sports leagues and factories and workshops across America.

If that’s a “loss,” I’d hate to see what it looks like when they win.

The latest numbers from Folio about who makes what in the world of magazine editing reaffirm what we already know: women make less money than men in comparable positions. Male editors-in-chief or editorial directors of magazines make $100,800 to women’s $85,100. For executive editors, men pull down $84,200 to women’s $65,700. And for senior editors, men make $63,600 to the $58,200 women take home in salary. What those numbers don’t tell us is how to start rectifying those pay gaps, which, as Folio editor Bill Mickey told The Atlantic Wire, start to seem inevitable: “We don’t have any further insight into that number, except that the gap has historically been about the same and I believe aligns with national trends across other industries.” We’ve collected data on gender and pay and gender and bylines for a long time. But if we want things to change, we need to start cross-referencing these numbers to see who’s doing worse, who’s doing better, and why.

Folio’s numbers, for example, break out pay not just by gender, but by whether the editors at business-to-business publications, consumer magazines, and trade publications, where they are geographically, by size of publication, and by years in the business. Looking at the numbers by gender alone are discouraging—they make it look like everyone is doing badly. But if we started cross-referencing those numbers, we might be able to see if some kinds of publications do better than others. Are women able to get a leg up in business-to-business magazines? Are the numbers skewed by bigger-than-normal pay gaps in New York, the center of the magazine industry? Are the numbers closer to parity in entry-level positions, indicating that time is doing the work to change a culture of pay inequality that magazines previously haven’t done?

These are the same kinds of questions that it would be useful to apply in film and television as well, where there is much less comprehensive salary data in any case. Knowing if women do better in dramas or comedies, in shows or films produced by different studios or airing on different networks or distributed by different companies would help us figure out who’s doing exceptionally poorly, and who’s made strides.
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I don’t think that people do anything just because celebrities tell them to do so. We may have positive associations with famous people, but those ties tend to be relatively weak. But I do think that they can do something more limited: tip us over on decisions we were already considering making. If you were already going to buy vodka but don’t have a brand loyalty, spotting Aaron Paul in a Ciroc ad might be activating. And when celebrities with very particular personas and specific followings directly ask their fans to do something they might have done anyway, it might be more effective than if they try to reach a broad audience on a shallow level through something like an advertising campaign. It’s an approach that’s evident in at least three viral campaigns to turn out the vote this year, each of which rely on what makes the three different actors starring in them so compelling.

First, there’s Steve Carell’s spot for National Voter Registration Day, which turns turns his fundamental decency into a tool of shame—he probably will not actually box your ears, but the sense that he’d be gravely disappointed in you is somehow so much worse:

Then, there’s Sarah Silverman’s Let My People Vote project, which is the follow-up to her Great Schlep video from 2008 in which asked young Jews to encourage their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama, is vintage Silverman: naughty, baby-voiced, scatological, and with the conclusion that we should get our grandparents gun licenses to make sure they’re covered on photo ID on election day. It’s also brutal about the impact of voter identification on likely Obama voters in only the way Silverman’s faux-naif could pull off:

Today sees the release of Samuel L. Jackson’s Wake The F**k Up campaign, which for him has the advantage of both encouraging voter turnout and enthusiasm, and boosting Jackson’s audio-book rendition of the “children’s” book on which the campaign is a riff. It’s filthy, aggressive, and strangely adorable—nothing warms my heart more than feisty little girls who are into politics:

I don’t think any of these campaigns are going to swing the election. Eminem couldn’t, after all, get us a Kerry administration. But they may prove good models for celebrities who want to have a deeper, more targeted impact, a reminder to play to your strengths and to pay attention to who your real, true, core audiences is.

The bridge is yours.

-I will never stop loving stories about groundbreaking historical women, particularly not when they are awesome jockies.

-The rise of hater humor.

-I’m getting more and more excited for NBC’s Infamous.

-Stephen King’s Misery is getting adapted for the stage.

-Jean Grae goes into a video game:

Watching this year’s crop of fall pilots, I was struck by something: it’s an awfully good time to be a kid on television. If you’re a child or a teenager, you get to be the voice of reason on a show full of insane adults! Confidant to a terrorist who you know as your dad! The clandestine prize in a battle between your father and your uncle about what counts as heroism and successful masculinity! Or a whole new archetype of teenage nerd. Even the adorable moppets cast for sitcoms these days have some edge, from Joey King in the tragically-cancelled Bent, to Shania on The New Normal. One note: these roles remain overwhelmingly white—when you slot characters of color in peripherally, we don’t get much chance to meet their families. Interestingly, a lot of these great, smart, intriguing characters are girls. In honor of the the rise of great kids on television, and with hope for more, here are six of my favorites:

1. Dana Brody, Homeland: Dana started out Homeland‘s run as one of the sulkiest teenagers anywhere on television, but her father-daughter bond with her former prisoner of war father has turned into one of the most touching depictions of parent-child closeness on television. Dana is her father’s confidant on issues like his conversion to Islam and his troubles returning home, and he, in turn, is her champion when Dana and her mother Jessica, turned rigid and controlling by Brody’s years in exile, come into conflict. And at the end of the last year, that love helped prevent a devastating terrorist attack. This year, Dana gets to flirt with boys, stand-up for her father yet again, and continue to be one of the most crankily real teenagers on TV. I dread to think what would happen if she ever learns the truth about her dad.

2. Shania, The New Normal: I remain unenamored of Ryan Murphy’s portrait of a gay couple having a baby with a surrogate. But I cannot resist Shania (Bebe Wood), the first daughter of surrogate Goldie. As Shania, Wood is a rare thing on television, a child with opinions and interests that are decidedly her own. She calls her grandmother a bigot. She gets obsessed with Grey Gardens as a way of communicating how alone she feels in California. She kisses boys in the cloakroom. And unlike her mother, she pulls the lever for Obama in her school mock election. More than almost another other child on television, Shania feels like an actual person rather than a moppet. I would watch a spinoff in which she and Joey King’s character from Bent are bitter enemies, or who solve crime together, for ten seasons.

3. Walter Junior, Breaking Bad: I was initially annoyed by Walter Junior, AKA Flynn, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the sensitive son Albuquerque’s resident super-villain has never really appreciated. Walter Junior began the series loving a father who is somewhat disgusted by him, whether Walt’s resentful of Walter Junior’s efforts to built a website to raise money for his care, or Walt encouraging Walter Junior to drink until it makes his son ill. Since then, Walt’s courted his son with cars, but something interesting has happened: Walter Junior’s seized on the idea that his Uncle Hank is a hero instead of his father. Walt may have convinced himself that he’s a meth-cooking ubermensch, but the New Walt can’t even convince his own son to admire him. He has to buy him instead. Poor Flynn. If Hank busts Walt and Carrie busts Nicholas Brody, he and Dana should sneak some beers out of the house and try to figure out what went wrong.

4. Alex Dunphy, Modern Family: Alex Dunphy’s a new kind of girl on television: a nerd who’s relatively confidently superior to the popular kids, embodied by her gorgeous but academically-struggling older sister, Haley. As a result, she’s put social studies low on her list of academic challenges, but like a popular kid learning to enjoy hitting the books, Alex is starting to realize that her older sister’s approach to life has some assets, too. Rumor is, she’ll have her first boyfriend this season on Modern Family. Hopefully the show finds our favorite girl geek a fellow as iconic as Haley’s on-again-off-again sweetie, musician Dylan.

5. Simon, The L.A. Complex: Simon, more so than some of the other precocious creations on this list, feels like an actual child, a kid who gets super-excited about bubble machines, runs away from home when he’s angry at his big sister, and isn’t sure if he wants to be a child actor, or to grow up to be a scientist. But he’s sweet, winning, and tough, willing to act through a scary scene on a crime show that frightens Beth, his caretaker, warm enough to make friends with the grown-ups at the long-term occupancy hotel where they’re staying. I’m sorry Simon’s leaving the show, but it’s nice to see a kid have actual relationships with adults who recognize that he has something to offer on his own terms.

6. Arya and Sansa Stark, Game of Thrones: Given that their older brothers are off being King In the North and fighting with the Night’s Watch, I’m not counting the Stark boys as children. But even if I factored them, I’d have to give the edge to Arya and Sansa Stark, two sides of the tomboy-girly-girl coin played to perfection by the actresses who embody them. Both Sansa and Arya have found different kinds of power in their gender. As a hostage in King’s Landing, Sansa’s burgeoning sexuality makes her vulnerable to the sadism of King Joffrey, but sympathetic to men and women alike whose sympathy may be her greatest asset. And on the road, Arya has disguised herself as a boy to survive among warlords and brigands, her skills with a pointy sword and willingness to make unusual allies keeping her alive. Taken together, Arya and Sansa are a reminder that neither masculinity nor femininity is superior: it’s all what the situation calls for.

My pals at the Mary Sue posted Ms. Magazine’s inaugural 1972 cover next to the one the magazine is running for its fortieth anniversary this month. And as much as the comics-lovin’ gal in me is excited to see Wonder Woman back in her role as cover woman, I couldn’t help noticing some of the differences between the covers, which in subtle ways have a lot to say about where feminism was forty years ago and where it is now. Take the 1972 cover:

The billboard calls for “Peace & Justice In ’72,” rather than making specific feminist demands. She’s in a landscape where the war in Vietnam and the blasted landscape it’s produced are in danger of intruding on the American main street, and Wonder Woman rushes to catch a war plane before it crashes, perhaps into that schoolbus. In this reading, feminism is part of a much larger left movement, but the implication is also that it has a larger role to play. The cover lines may be about paid housework and body hair, but Wonder Woman, as the personification of feminism, is solving not just any problems she might have as a super-powered lady, but the problems of everyone else. This was a time when people still talked about misogyny as a root cause of war, something that seems awfully distant from our mainstream political discourse now.

Flash-forward forty years:

Wonder Woman’s striding through the streets of Washington, the capitol in the background. Unlike the cover forty years ago, when the women on the street were dwarfed by the Amazon striding above them, Wonder Woman appears to be following a group of multi-racial young feminists carrying signs about the War on Women and voting in 2012. The movement’s survived into the next generation, and its constituency is broader than it was back then. But its theater of operations has gotten smaller: institutional feminism is part of the patchwork of the left, but nobody’s claiming that feminism will get us out of Afghanistan. Part of it, I think, is that in those forty years, feminists have had to spend a lot of time consolidating and defending our early gains, instead of pursuing new goals. It’s hard to to move into new arenas when we’re still trying to hold on, for example, the right to choose.

Word comes from the New York Times that, a year after Iran won its first Academy Award for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Iran will boycott the Academy Awards in protest of “Innocence of Muslims,” a crude film about the prophet Muhammad that may not even exist as a feature film:

The boycott appears straightforward: Mohammad Hosseini, Iran’s culture minister, on Tuesday confirmed that his country would not submit a film for consideration at next year’s Oscars in protest of “Innocence of Muslims,” the anti-Islam YouTube video that has sparked deadly riots. He specifically cited the “failure” of Oscar organizers to take an official position on the incendiary “film.”

But Iran’s move left Hollywood scratching its head. Iran, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film earlier this year, was seriously going to boycott moviedom’s biggest prize because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hadn’t denounced a crude YouTube video made by a former gas station owner? (The academy had no comment.)

It’s hard to know what Iran thinks it will accomplish with this move. Is it to shame an industry that, by all accounts, is deeply embarrassed by the incident? It’s not as if Paramount, which built the old JAG set Innocence of Muslims was shot on, needs Iran’s boycot to think more carefully about where its sets end up and what that means for their brand. It’s not as if the actors involved in the movie, one of whom has already sued over the deceptive use of her image and work, aren’t horrified by how their performances were dubbed and distorted to produce a crude project that didn’t resemble what they’d signed on for. It’s not as if the highest authorities in the United States haven’t condemned the man who made it for his provocations, while still defending his right to free speech. And if Iran thinks it’s going to challenge the American focus on free speech, muzzling itself and its own filmmakers seems like a poor way of making that argument, one that perhaps overestimates Iran’s influence on the Academy and American consumers.

But this actually strikes me as a move that’s aimed more internally than externally. Farhadi and the members of his crew who accompanied him to the Academy Awards, wore neckties, which were banned as a symbol of Western decadence after the Iranian Revolution, to the ceremony. He used his acceptance speech to draw a rather careful distinction between the Iranian people and their government, saying that he knew Iranians would celebrate his win “because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country Iran is spoken here through her glorious culture. A rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country. A people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.” Iran may not have been particularly eager to have another director take the stage again, perhaps emboldened by Farhadi’s reception.
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There are conflicting reports about whether a deal to end the National Football League’s lockout of its professional referees is in place. ESPN reported that a deal was “at hand” an hour after reporting that the two sides weren’t close, while NFL.com has reported that the officials union and league have reached minor agreements but are still stuck on the biggest point of contention: the referees’ pension benefits.

Regardless, I wanted to address one thing that keeps coming up when the lockout is discussed: whether the NFL players, who are also unionized, could end the lockout by showing solidarity through a walkout or other means. The short answer to that will disappoint many of you, because it is almost undoubtedly, “No.”

The NFL Players Association stood with the officials from the start, promising to consider all options and refusing to take a strike or walkout off the table. After the egregious mistake at the end of the Monday Night Football game this week, Green Bay Packers offensive lineman TJ Lang said players debated walking off the field or taking a knee on every play this week to show how disgruntled they are with the replacement officials.

The reality is, though, even in the absence of a deal, none of that is likely to happen. The “take a knee on every play” strategy would certainly cause a public relations nightmare for the league, but it would be nearly impossible to organize league-wide. Plus, with paying fans in the seats and at home, there’s a better-than-solid chance that it would backfire, making the players villains when they are currently on the right side of this debacle.

The other option, a general walkout by the entire NFLPA, is even less likely. The collective bargaining agreement players and owners reached last year contains a no strike clause that prevents players from walking off the job unless they feel their jobs or their union is at stake. Walking out, then, would require making the legal argument that use of scab officials is negligent and creates an overly hazardous work environment, which would allow the players to void the entire CBA. That would almost certainly lead to protracted and costly legal battle that I suspect the union doesn’t want. And while it would certainly show solidarity, it too would turn at least some fans against the players and officials at a time when the NFLRA has all the leverage in this fight.

Outside the players, others are taking action too. The president of the New Jersey state senate introduced legislation yesterday that would ban professional sporting events played in the state from using replacement labor, a noble cause but one that isn’t likely to go anywhere (the NFL quickly dismissed it as a stunt).

It’s good that people are taking notice (even if it’s often for the wrong reasons), and it’s good that players like Lang are discussing ways to throw their muscle around to help the officials. But the players have long argued that there isn’t much they can do — that this is a mess created by the league and, as such, will have to be solved by the league — and I tend to agree with them. It would be great, as someone who is sympathetic to the NFLRA’s cause, to see the players walk off the field in solidarity Thursday in Baltimore and Sunday across the country. The reality, though, is that there just isn’t much the players can do.

The bridge is yours.

-Thomas Edison will be the star of an NBC show. I hope Tesla gets to be a Big Bad!

-Darren Aronofsky sure likes his snakes.

-Playing cooperative video games, even violent ones, apparently makes players more cooperative.

-Stop torturing us with promises of Ghostbuster 3!

Nikki Finke, the secretive and mercurial editor of Deadline Hollywood, usually sticks to reporting the news about casting, box office, or personnel movies in the entertainment industry. But ever so often, as she did while liveblogging the Emmys this weekend, she ventures into criticism. The results are…mixed. Her latest opinion? Beautiful women (and men) can’t possibly be funny. She wrote:

Listen-up, Hollywood: Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy. (As Bowen demonstrated with her acceptance speech that repeated the phrase ‘nipple covers’ 3 dozen times. To zero laughter.) Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups. Bowen isn’t a comedienne just like Brooke Shields wasn’t and a zillion more. Because it’s all about emotional pain and humiliation and rising above both by making people laugh with you instead of at you. So stop casting beautiful actresses when you should be giving ugly women a chance. (Tina Fey always points out she looked like a troglodyte when she was younger.) This also applies to handsome men, by the way. Now argue amongst yourselves.

Which, though Finke styles herself a Hollywood feminist, actually sounds a lot like Adam Carolla’s declaration earlier this year that women are, on the aggregate, not as funny as men, and those rare few who he judges to be actually amusing are some kind of Aberration From Nature. They’re both totalizing statements that make the people in question sound parochial. And they’re both based on the idea that there is one essential way to be funny.

This is the problem about almost all of our conversations about comedy: they keep devolving into always and never statements. Rape is inherently funny. Rape is never funny. Men are funnier than women because they’re more willing to go for the gut, because they’re more willing to be gross, because they’re less sensitive, because it’s always funnier to be insensitive, because dominance is funny, because the differences between people are inherent and it’s inherently funny to point them out, because the most important thing humor can do is puncture political correctness. It goes on and on. But these discussions always blow up when someone tries to divine a hierarchy of comedy, a platonic form of it, something that suggests that some kinds of humor are better than others and ends up implying that there’s little or no value to be found beyond a narrow bit of spectrum.

And I also think that these conversations go wrong in part because they come from some places of real anxiety, be they realistic or not. Men like Carolla, who have some of the more marginal jobs available to comedians, start feeling pressure from the success of women. Chris Rock feels that recording at shows and distribution platforms like YouTube have made it nigh-impossible for stand-ups to work out their material in front of crowds in the recognition that it’s flawed and may improve. And…well, I’m not going to even try to speculate about what Nikki Finke’s motivations are, though as Glamour accurately points out, there are basically no women working in television comedy who are not, by any standards, quite pretty. But a point at which people feel that they have something to lose can be a bad basis for important conversations, or for welcoming innovation and innovators rather than pushing them out. And while I don’t have the answers for Chris Rock, I mostly feel bad for anyone who’s shutting themselves off from kinds of funny and different kinds of purveyors of it.

Man, I love me some Madonna, but her endorsement of President Obama in Washington, DC is half an illustration of why celebrities can make powerful spokesmen and half an illustration of why they are at risk of going terrifyingly off-message:

There’s the narrative she gives of of American evolution on race, which, if presented with some poetic license, fit nicely together with the on-message idea that “we are still a work in progress.” There’s her reminder of Obama’s personal evolution on gay rights, a well-tailored shout-out to the target audience they care.

And then, there’s the cheery reminder that it’s awesome that Obama is black…and Muslim. Which she means in a completely enthusiastic, affirming way. And to a certain extent, I’m with FX late-night host W. Kamau Bell: if the United States was in a place where we could elect a Muslim person president, no matter their race, it would be a sign of our improved national mental health. But Madonna’s apparently in enough of a bubble to not be aware that President Obama is not Muslim, and the accusation that he is secretly Muslim has been one of the most pernicious lies told about him in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness. It’s a striking reminder of how isolated the most famous people in the world are from the news cycle and from the rest of us, and of how their celebrity can ricochet off in directions they don’t intend, like light off a mirror that can blind and confound as easily as it can illuminate.

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy.*

I’m not sure I buy all the complicated mechanics that brought Opie to this particular death, but sure as Jimmy Darmody, who walked to his murder in the last episode of Boardwalk Empire last year knowing full well his life had ended in Europe, Opie’s been gone since his father’s killing, since his brokenness ruined his marriage to sweet porn star Lyla, maybe even since Tig Traeger shot Opie’s first wife Donna with a bullet that was meant for Opie, a piece of metal that’s been chasing him ever since. “I don’t know if I love anything,” Opie told Lyla last week, giving her the money to care for his children while he went back to prison with the Sons. “It just ain’t fun anymore,” he told Jax in the prison yard. “Chasing cash we don’t need and spending every dime trying to stay alive.” “American dream,” Jax replied, not quite agreeing with him.

Jax is a prince by blood, and Opie’s membership in SAMCRO has been sealed by spilling it, over and over again. Where Jimmy represented an underlooked historical phenomenon, the men who failed to successfully reintegrate into society after the First World War, Opie is terrible lesson about a particular kind of membership in a downwardly mobile white underclass. Jax’s pride may shame him about the prospect of living off his wife, but Opie never had a wife he could live off of. His association with criminality has meant that Opie has always been at risk of running up the kind of debts and obligations that he can’t pay off through honest labor and still provide a stable environment for his family. And perhaps most importantly, the Sons have always given him his most powerful sense of identity and social standing, even as the men who gave him that status were an inevitably fatal cancer on his family. Opie has always returned to the Sons, and why wouldn’t he? Even family that eats away at your soul is better than the prospect of becoming a hollow man.

And in the end, Opie’s love for Jax, and his inability to part from the remaining source of his identity, turns into a kind of suicidal impulse. When he finds a way to join the Sons in prison, “staying close,” as Gemma puts it, he does so with an act of violence. When Jax starts a scrap, loyal Opie follows him into it. And when Jax, cornered by Pope’s ultimatum, his seemingly limitless power over the imprisoned Sons, Opie does the inevitable: he fights, and in fighting goes to his death. “Keep it interesting, shithead,” the warden doing Pope’s bidding tells him. He means to shame him, to turn Opie into an animal fighting for his life in the dark. But in Kurt Sutter’s Hamlet, Opie is Horatio following through on his offer to his prince to quaff the poison. “Now cracks a noble heart,” indeed.
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I’m here at the office a bit late, and was Googling around, and stumbled onto Johnny Mathis’s recording of Kol Nidre, which he recorded in 1958, and a glorious reminder of both the emotion behind what’s technically a contract and the complex history of black and Jewish collaborations in music:

And as someone who writes about art, it’s always nice to be reminded that the Awe in Days of Awe can come in many forms.

By now, there’s no need to rehash the blown call that ended week three of the National Football League season and left everyone — fans, players, coaches, politicians, and media types — fuming at the replacement officials brought in thanks to the owners lockout of the league’s professional referees. Everyone has seen it, the league has denied the Green Bay Packers’ appeal to overturn the call, and what’s done is done — except the lockout, which everyone is starting to realize is jeopardizing the quality of the game.

The call was bad. It cost the Packers a much-needed win, and the outcome may play a big role in determining whether Seattle or Green Bay goes to the playoffs later this winter. But here’s the thing: it was nowhere near the biggest, most dangerous blunder the refs have made this season.

Golden Tate, the Seattle wide receiver who caught the game-winning touchdown pass without actually catching the game-winning touchdown pass (after blatantly interfering with a Green Bay defender, no less), was the perpetrator of an illegal block that knocked Dallas Cowboys linebacker Sean Lee out of the team’s previous game. The hit, clearly against NFL rules, didn’t draw a flag. And this week, there were more like it: Oakland Raiders wide receiver Darius Heyward-Bey left on a stretcher after taking a helmet-to-helmet hit that didn’t earn Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Mundy a penalty.

Those are the hits that concerned NFL players when the season began without a settlement between the league and the NFL Referees Association. Those are the hits that led DeMaurice Smith, the NFLPA’s executive director, to tell me that the labor dispute “flies in the face” of the NFL’s efforts to make the game safer for players. Those are the hits that a competent officiating crew could prevent, or at least penalize, by keeping control of the game and policing it the way it is meant to be policed. And those are the hits that haven’t drawn the outrage drawn by last night’s call.

It’s a shame that the Packers lost a game because of a blown call. But it would have been a bigger shame had Heyward-Bey’s career ended because of the cavalier nature in which the scab officials, and the league itself, has treated head-crunching hits since the season began. And it’s an even bigger shame that those hits aren’t becoming a bigger concern with fans and the media.

It’s hard to know definitively that the exact hits wouldn’t take place with the real referees on the field. Some undoubtedly would. What is inarguable is that the replacement refs, through their own incompetence, have lost the respect of the players, and as a result, they have lost control of the games. Players are pre-ordained to push the limits of the acceptable, and by not flagging them for blatantly illegal and incredibly dangerous hits, the replacements are enabling them. That makes the field a more dangerous place for everyone involved.

Let’s face it: the NFL doesn’t care about player safety, and neither do fans. Hits like those on Darius Heyward-Bey and Sean Lee are what keep football fans coming back for more, and only blown calls that directly affect the outcomes of nationally-televised games are enough to turn the replacement refs from a laughingstock into a point of outrage. And because fans don’t care, because the media doesn’t care, the league will never care enough, at least until someone like Heyward-Bey is leaving the field on a stretcher without his thumb in the air.

The NFL and its replacement referees deserve all the scorn they are getting for demeaning the product and making a mockery of the sport. But the real scorn should come from the fact that the league replaced unionized workers with scabs and is jeopardizing the safety of its players to save pennies on the dollar. This is America, though, where we apparently don’t care about our fellow workers or the modern day gladiators who are ruining their lives one hit at a time, as long as the right team wins the football game.

Via Poynter:

For the first time in its 103-year-history, Condé Nast has named a black editor to head one of its magazines.

Keija Minor is now editor-in-chief of Brides, the world’s largest weddings magazine. She succeeds Anne Fulenwider who left Brides earlier this month to become editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Minor had been executive editor of Brides since November 2011, and was acting editor-in-chief after Fulenwider left. Before Brides, Minor was editor-in-chief of Uptown Magazine, a luxury title targeting African Americans. She was also editor-in-chief of Gotham.

In addition to Brides, Condé Nast publishes GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Vogue among other titles. In its press release, Condé Nast praised Minor as being a gifted editor but it did not tout the fact that she is the first African American to helm one of its publications. Other news organizations did.

Minor’s promotion is exciting news, and not just because it represents a milestone for Condé Nast, or because if you want to get more women and people of color in an industry, it’s nice to be able to point to someone as proof they might be able to ascend to the same heights as white people and men. As a University of Nevada at Las Vegas study pointed out six years ago, African-American women are almost invisible in bridal magazines, from the advertisements to the covers. It’s a form of erasure that suggests that the bridal industry doesn’t see black women as potential customers, an assumption with a whole host of other implications about African-American women and marriage. Hopefully, Minor can play some role in correcting that imbalance, her role a reminder that African-American women don’t just have weddings, they can help shape the ideal of them.

I was talking to a friend last week about director Nick Cassavetes’ defense of his new movie Yellow, which is about a brother and sister who have a love affair, at the Toronto Film Festival. “I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids – who gives a damn?” he told The Wrap. “Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.” It’s not quite the attitude of the many, many other artists who have turned to incest recently to juice their television shows, seeking shock instead of Cassavetes’ plea for compassion. But it may be impossible for him to escape being lumped in with a larger trend: in Hollywood, incest is suddenly so wide-spread that it’s practically the new vampirism.

Over the last season of Dexter, the titular serial killer’s adoptive sister Debra Morgan (Jennifer Morgan) came to realize that she loved her brother—and not merely in a fraternal way. Her rush of romantic feeling for Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was rudely interrupted when, on her way to confess it to him, Deb found Dexter in the midst of killing his latest victim. In the season premiere of Dexter this Sunday, Dexter will try to manage Deb’s understanding of what she’s just seen. But I have to imagine that the possibility of being accepted and loved for who he really is, as opposed to for his ability to pretend to be a family man, as Dexter did with his wife Rita, could be powerfully appealing to Dexter. The breach of the incest taboo here may not be formally, because Dexter and Deb are not related by blood. But flirting with it is a way for Dexter, a show that’s made a serial killer its main character and hero, to contemplate leveling up to a new level of deviance.

Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones, by contrast, barreled right past playing with the idea of incest to show it happening. Last season on Boardwalk Empire, we learned that Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and his mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) had slept together, an incident that left lingering wounds in Jimmy’s psyche. This year, Gillian’s moved in on Jimmy’s son, claiming him as her own child rather than as her gradson. Her “I’m your mother now, remember?” has poison in its sickly sweetness, its reminder that Gillian has been constrained by the roles assigned to her by biology and societal expectation. Herself the victim of a boundary-crossing sexual assault that left her pregnant at 13, Gillian’s responded not by reinforcing rules and boundaries, but by becoming a predator herself.

Incest acts as a way to communicate Gillian’s monstrousness in Boardwalk Empire, and it begins that way in Game of Thrones, when Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pushes a child out of a tower with the intent of killing him when that child discovers him having sex with his sister Cersei (Lena Headey), who also happens to be queen of Westeros. But substantial plot mechanics of the show and the books on which they’re based depend on that incestuous relationship. And in the novels, which are ahead of the books at this point, our perspectives on both of those characters shift such that we understand their incestuous relationship is at least in part a product of the substantial damage that’s been done to Jamie and Cersei by their rigid father, and by Cersei’s abusive husband. The incest story is shocking, but it’s to a purpose other than to produce a series of ephemeral, horrified gasps.

The L.A. Complex did something similar in its two-part season finale this year. This season, Connor Lake (Jonathan Patrick Moore), a troubled television star, got involved with the Church of Scienetics, a thinly-veiled version of the Church of Scientology, on the advice of his long-lost sister, a member of the faith. As they bonded, Connor told his sister that he loved her and felt close to her. And she responded by planting a not-so-sisterly kiss on him. When Connor panicked, so did she, and so did the Church, which shipped her off to a remote facility. The point was less to titillate us with the prospect of an incestuous relationship but to provide an event shocking enough that it could trigger the darkest practices of Scienetics.

There’s no question that incest storylines can be powerful and meaningful, but when this many shows are turning towards incest to juice their storytelling, it feels more like they’re piling on a trend that moving on the strength of their own speed. An obsession with incest comes at times when a lot of television shows don’t seem to know how to gin up sexual chemistry between their characters who are legal, consenting adults who aren’t related to each other. If you’re dipping into a well of deviance not because you have something to say about the trope you’re adopting, but because it’s simply a means to heighten an already tense environment, it’s time to reevaluate your storytelling values. Shock, disgust, and titillation aren’t the only ways to produce dramatic tension or release.