The National Hockey League is less than a week away from becoming the third major American sports league to lockout its players in the last 13 months, after owners in the National Football League and National Basketball Association forced their players off the job last year. Players and owners have until Saturday to reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement; otherwise, owners are committed to locking out players for the second time since 2004.

Contra 2004, though, there doesn’t seem to be much of a legitimate reason to lockout the players this time around. Back then, the league was in dire straits financially, and ownership had a semi-legitimate reason to jeopardize the entire season (even if I disagreed with them). That’s not the case this time around, as The Atlantic’s Armin Rosen outlined this week:

The NHL is in the middle of what should be its golden age. Twenty-one of the league’s teams played their home games at 95% capacity or higher last season; 16 of them sold out every home game. The league just signed the largest national television deal in its history, and last year marked the first time that every game of the two-month long Stanley Cup playoffs was available to American TV viewers. This year’s Winter Classic–if it happens–will draw over 100,000 fans to Michigan Stadium for a game between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, teams with a combined franchise value of over $850 million. While the league is saddled with several struggling and probably non-viable franchises (the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes and reeling New York Islanders come to mind), there are hockey-mad markets on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border that could easily accommodate an NHL franchise. The NHL is a profitable league with a global profile, a stable of marketable stars, and actual growth potential. The pre-lockout mania of exploding salaries, unstable profits, and agonizing hockey is behind it.

It would be easy to think the NHL owners would have the incentive not to go through the pain of a lockout again. The 2004 lockout led to the league playing for years with no major network television deal in the United States, and league attendance and popularity fell off a cliff, at least until it was rescued by young stars like Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin.

The league is as healthy as it’s been in decades. Yes, salaries are up, but so are franchise values, and the league’s first national TV deal since the lockout added even more money to the league’s and owners coffers. But that doesn’t matter to the owners who are ready for another labor war. After all, the owners won the last lockout, extracting huge concessions from players who were desperate to get back on the ice, and there’s no reason to believe the owners won’t win again.

The looming NHL lockout is emblematic of corporate America’s view of collective bargaining and labor rights. American corporations are reporting record profits, but with plenty of labor sitting on the sidelines thanks to high unemployment, they are willing to shutdown production to extract what they want out of unionized workers to gain pennies on the dollar. Take Caterpillar, the heavy machinery giant that raked in record profits and paid its chief executive $17 million last year, but insisted on locking out its workers to freeze their pensions and wages. Compare that to the NHL or NFL, the league that locked out officials over pension and salary increases despite its $9 billion revenue haul and incredible economic health.

These fights aren’t just getting more common in sports, where labor fights are prominent and dominate the news. They’re happening across America, where lockouts now make up a record share of work stoppages. One thing, though, is clear: sports leagues and corporations aren’t locking out players and workers because they need to, they’re doing it because they can.

When teenage Chicago rapper JoJo was shot to death last week, his murder set off two separate online convulsions. The first was an alarming string of celebratory tweets from other Chicago teens who were glad of the killing. The second was a less-local burst of essays from hiphop writers on the relationship (or lack thereof) between the “drill” music that bubbles up from Chicago streets and the violence that fills them. Potholes In My Blog honcho Andrew Martin voiced the sickened, sorrowful feeling the response to JoJo’s murder inspired, and asked rap bloggers to reconsider how they talk about the drill scene. Lloyd Miller at Mostly Junk Food took the opposite approach, asking “Would any of the many other non-rapping young men and women in Chicago be in any more danger if they were to pick up a mic?”

This conversation misses a lot, but I share the sense of unease that sparked it. From Tipper Gore to Bill Bennett to suburban PTA meetings, nearly everyone who’s ever called for curbing the cultural output of the American ghetto has ended up looking out of touch or authoritarian. Yet while real-life violence never dinted my affection for emcees like Ice Cube, Big L, or Freddie Gibbs, reading about Chicago’s insanely violent summer has dredged up an internal conflict I’ve somehow dodged through a dozen years of hiphop fandom. It’s worth considering what our responsibility as listeners is; if you like drill, and you introduce a friend to a Chief Keef track, is it incumbent on you to mention the context in which the music’s produced? But surely it’s foolishness to get uncritically caught up thinking that the horrifying new normal in Chicago is in fact novel.

The murder rate in NWA-era Los Angeles was similarly jaw-dropping; 738 Angelinos were killed the year “Straight Outta Compton” came out, and over the next six years the population-adjusted murder rate would jump from about 21 killings per 100,000 people to over 30 in 1992-93. When Big L was killed in Harlem in 1999, the Giuliani administration’s authoritarianism had already lowered New York’s murder rate from its absurd early-90s highs, but he was one of 664 New Yorkers murdered that year. Freddie Gibbs is from Gary, IN (the one thing he has in common with my father), and Gary’s a perennial candidate for Murder Capital of America. Since the early ‘90s, “the Guts” has registered a much higher per-capita murder rate than New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, or Houston. (These statistics all come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, a system that’s vulnerable to stat juking by local PDs, to be sure, but murders are tough to hide. I’m no criminologist, but while murder rates have dropped precipitously, hundreds are still killed each year in our most violent cities.)

Current-ness biases us. It’s easy to mistake things that are happening right now for much worse or much better than similar things that happened years ago. Like Poot said in season 4 of The Wire, “Man every year everybody’s like, ‘yeah these kids out here, they’re a new breed! I ain’t never seen nothing like this before! This the end of the world now!’”

(It’s worth noting, too, that Poot is one of the very few members of the original terrace crew from season 1 who makes it out of the life. He’s as much lucky as anything else, and ultimately his escape involves some pride-swallowing; in season five, he’s working at a Foot Locker. But while all this may have some relevance, The Wire isn’t a good enough stopping place here.)

Three obvious possibilities for why I’m reacting differently to drill than I do to the above-referenced trio of hardcore rhymers: I see thoughtfulness and artistic merit in L’s, Cube’s, and Gibbs’ output that is lacking from the drill rappers I’ve heard; I’m getting old; or the people dying in the home of the drill scene this summer are so likely to be children that there really is a meaningful difference.

Either way, it’s important that we be honest about why this conversation is happening now, and what it really is. We’re not talking about this because there have been over 150 murders in Chicago this summer. We’re not talking about this because nearly a third of those killed have been minors. We’re not talking about it because the conversation about violent culture and actual violence recurs, cicada-like, at fixed intervals.

People are positing or refuting links between Chicago’s drill scene and its bloody summer because the kid who got killed last week left behind an online footprint that provides the raw materials for a conversation about rap and violence. And it’s much, much easier to get lost in arguments about these kids’ lifestyles than it is to grapple with the systemic failure that’s producing such a staggering volume of young, dead brown bodies.

The critical conversation around drill music and real-life murders is a way to avoid talking about how Chicago came to be a place that produces both of those things. Drill isn’t causing killings, the dead-end trap of urban poverty is. Today’s landscape was produced by some combination of failures in education, public infrastructure, social policy, and economic opportunity. (For smart sociology on how the evaporation of blue-collar jobs from urban centers and disparities in social capital helped constrain the ambitions of East Harlem natives, read “In Search Of Respect: Selling Crack In El Barrio” by Phillippe Bourgois.) If we don’t find ways to remedy those failures, likely with policies that will look more like revolution than reform, we’ll continue to see generation after generation of American youth stay stuck and get dead. It won’t be because of the music they listen to. It’ll be because we haven’t done enough to expand the pathways by which social and economic capital flow between the burbs and the block.

If you paid much attention to food news last week, which, uh, maybe you didn’t, you probably caught multiple reports on a Stanford study indicating that organic food doesn’t carry more nutritional value than conventionally-produced foods. This is one among a slew of recent studies and reports slamming the organic label, which is not as rosy as some people think it is. Sadly, many of these studies aren’t examining the deeper problems within industrial organic¹ and how the label is handled, leaving people with some erroneous impressions about what’s at stake here.

If food politics seems a little outside of the usual purview here, consider it guest poster’s prerogative, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Food is becoming a looming social issue, thanks to increasing food prices worldwide. More and more people are living in a state of food insecurity, and climate change is putting additional pressures on the food system. It’s part of the cultural, and pop cultural, zeitgeist, and it’s only going to get bigger from here. Awareness of food politics equates not just to a greater understanding of and connection to the food system, but having the tools to work on fixing the system.

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Ayn Rand’s pomposity has a certain immunity to irony. The unbearable pretentiousness of awful philosophy masquerading as “serious” novels has been a literary punchline for roughly the past 70 years since the Fountainhead, and yet we still have a Vice Presidential candidate who touted Rand’s work as the best “moral case for capitalism” (Adam Smith and John Locke notwithstanding). Rand’s appeal, both in its high school infatuation and more troubling lifelong believer varieties, appears to be enduring. So it’s probably not going to be worth much for me to point out that the new trailer for the new Atlas Shrugged film suggests, among other things, that the government’s first move when “society is collapsing” is seizing America’s supply of patents:

It’s all very Book of Revelations as written by Jamie Dimon. But what makes this mess truly execrable — yes, even more so than the prospect of salvation by corporate boardroom — is the refusal to dial down the aforementioned self-seriousness. The idea that a select number of one percenters could save the world by discovering limitless clean energy and going on strike is intrinsically silly, much like the scene in Independence Day where Will Smith threads an alien spacecraft he’s never flown before through a needle after Jeff Goldblum destroys advanced alien software with a computer virus. But Independence Day has the good sense to cast two talented comedic actors in the lead roles and let them riff. Sure, basically everything that happens in the movie is hilariously implausible, but it doesn’t really matter because the film is winking at the audience the entire time.

Atlas Shrugged can’t do that, because its plot serves principally as the delivery mechanism for a crude political message. Government has to be absurdly anti-capitalistic in a crisis because Rand’s argument itself paints a very simplistic picture of government’s ills. Any ironic pokes at the strangeness of the proceedings would serve to undermine the movie’s central goal. It’s not, then, that seriously drawn far-fetched plots can’t serve as effective allegory — no one who’s familiar with the history of science fiction could say that with a straight face. Rather, the problem with Atlas Shrugged: Part II is that the message corrupts the medium.

A similar effect is on display with National Review‘s cover art for its Romney/Ryan endorsement, which (unintentionally?) aped a bit of Soviet kitsch art that I happen to have at home as part of a propaganda collection:

National Review is, whatever its other merits and faults, a movement conservative outlet. The core defining element of contemporary movement conservatism is elevation of the movement’s goals (which are now basically the Republican Party’s goals as well) to the level of a prime directive. It’s kind of hard when you’re attempting to lionize an establishment political party to get the kind of distance, ironic or otherwise, that’s needed to produce more sophisticated art. Hence why the cover ended up looking like rote Soviet realism — in neither case could the artist do anything but self-seriously laud its subjects given the purpose of the art.