Nathan Heller, who is one of my favorite writers, has a fascinating profile of former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan, who jumped over to Fairchild Fashion Media to run Women’s Wear Daily, and now is rolling out a men’s magazine with a novel conceit—it doesn’t want to treat its readers like idiots:

Fourteen years later, though, Kaplan finally finds himself at the helm of a stylish New York magazine. M, which launches this month under the Fairchild umbrella, is Kaplan’s latest, proudest project: the fullest realization of his ambitions for bound print. M is nominally the reboot of a long-retired Fairchild men’s magazine called M: The Civilized Man, but the new version is a ground-up reinvention. M will appear quarterly and—unusually for a luxury-market print magazine—its editorial infrastructure is being cobbled together on the cheap: Kaplan produced the first issue by borrowing staff from other Fairchild properties, like Women’s Wear Daily, and bringing in a couple of trusted ringers from the old days, like Windolf, to help wrangle and edit stories….

“I thought there might be a place for a men’s magazine that had a different kind of voice—a much wittier, more sophisticated, grown-up voice, and that was much more a lateral conversation than trying to whack you over the head with Mila Kunis,” he explains. “I’ve got two sons who are in their early twenties, and they are culturally demanding. They have a tremendous sense of humor. They are digitally fluent and literate at the same time. They are impatient to the point of being dismissive of two-thirds of the culture that’s being foisted on them.” This new-style guy also tends to dress deliberately, with a knowing sense of fashion, and in that nexus, Kaplan saw his opportunity.

There’s no question that the best men’s magazines publish good, substantive features that treat their readers like men, rather than salivating man-boys. But it’s also true that they tend to slip. The woman who makes GQ’s Man of the Year list poses naked. The same magazine insists that guys deserve better television and then devotes its fall TV preview to cataloguing the hotness of female stars, sometimes with dumb ethnic stereotypes. The question for M is not whether Kaplan and everyone else working on the project have good intentions. It’s whether they can stick to them if they end up feeling like they need to compromise to compete.

Over the last two television seasons, both Fox and NBC have both tried to make science fiction and fantasy shows work, focusing heavily on the visuals rather than the conceptual and emotional architecture underneath them. Both Terra Nova and Revolution look good. Fox spent money to make sure its dinosaurs didn’t look like an embarrassment. In its pilot, Revolution’s abandoned shells of airplanes and overgrown Major League baseball stadiums have a handsome air of decay. But watching both those shows and the finale of SyFy’s Lost Girl in recent days, it’s striking the extent to which shows seem to be able to pull off either the look or the ideas, but rarely both.

For much of its first two seasons, Lost Girl managed to be a relatively low-effects show for a story set amongst the fae. The episodes relied on physical props, on people acting as if they’d been controlled, on wild eyes and good makeup and what looked like surprisingly enjoyable sex for basic cable. But in the second half of the second season, as succubus Bo and her human and fae comrades went to war against a powerful antagonist called the Garuda, the show’s effects faltered. Suddenly, it looked a lot more like Charmed, the WB show about three sisters who also happened to be witches, which started airing in 1998. The Garuda’s lair, like those of the demons the sisters faced down on Charmed, looked more like a basement hideaway than an evil citadel. His wings of fire were transparently terrible animation rather than a compelling deception. But even though the fight scenes looked disappointing, everything that surrounded them worked. The show had ideas it wanted to explore—Bo’s confrontation with the Garuda was a way for her to finally accept leadership within her community, and a tool for her to confront issues in some of her relationships with both humans and fae—and the actors involved had the chops to pull it off.

Terra Nova and Revolution both look a lot better than Lost Girl, a Canadian import that fits well into SyFy’s lineup, a place where the core audience is used to doing a little extra work to suspend disbelief. But even if the visuals on Revolution make it easy to believe that the population of the United States has dramatically shrunk, and that Wrigley Field is overgrown, the show’s ideas and acting interfere with its emotional credibility. If Revolution was interested in exploring what life was like after the clock turned dramatically back on technological development, we could enjoy the sight of the lost world, we could explore the things things they’ve built to replace lost conveniences, the infrastructure that once held society together. Instead, there are pesky questions hanging around the premise. If Ben Matheson knows why the electricity went out, why has he kept silent for fifteen years? Why does electricity work in Grace’s attic if it doesn’t wear anywhere else? Why aren’t people building steam engines? I understand that the show intends to answer these questions, but it’s hard to imagine that the answers will be good enough to justify the irritations of the inconsistencies, or that Tracy Spiridakos, the show’s CW-style lead actress, can provide enough emotional weight to give us consequences beyond the setup.

I’d love science fiction and fantasy shows that both look great and have great setups. But Battlestar Galacticas are few and far between. And apparently they aren’t frequent enough, or big enough hits to convince networks that their shows need to have concepts, visuals, and people who can actually act. Revolution‘s off to a good start, ratings-wise: 11.7 million people tuned in to its pilot, boosted by a lead-in from The Voice. But genre fans shouldn’t let networks buy them off with things that look good but don’t have anything underneath the hood. And if we have to pick one or the other, I’ll take solid worldbuilding and actors who can carry that world on their shoulders over pretty, flimsy pictures.

There are a lot of things deeply wrong with the vision of the world Mitt Romney laid out for a group of fundraisers in May in remarks recorded on video released by Mother Jones. There’s the idea that the very poor are sponging off the labor of the very rich. The misplaced idea that people who receive any form of government assistance inevitably vote for Democrats. But one of the things that stuck with me, as it always does, is that everyone receiving government assistance, whether in the form of tax credits, Supplemental Security Income, or help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program likes it, that help from the government is something people develop a taste for and want to continue consuming. It’s a narrative that doesn’t allow for the idea that needing help actually becomes a substantial spur to success for a lot of people. I’m sure these five people—and many others—might be able to enlighten Romney about the impact of getting help from the federal government on their lives, and what they do and don’t think they’re entitled to.

1. Natalie Hawkins, mother to Olympic gold medal gymnast Gabby Douglas: Hawkins is on long-term disability, something that doesn’t seem to have prevented her from helping raise an Olympic gymnast. Shockingly, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t enjoy having had to declare bankruptcy, or the fact that her daughter’s endorsement earnings after her Olympic all-around gold medal will probably be the thing that can lift her out of it.

2. Tobey Maguire: The actor told Barbara Walters in 2002 that “Me and my Mom would go into a grocery store and get groceries and pay for them with food stamps, and I would run out of the store embarrassed.” That doesn’t really sound to me like someone who believes “that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

3. Oprah Winfrey: Winfrey’s mother, Vernita Lee, sometimes relied on welfare to supplement her income during Winfrey’s childhood—in fact, she gave up Winfrey’s half sister, Patricia Lee, for adoption because she was afraid the burden of raising another child would make it impossible for her to get off the welfare rolls. The experience doesn’t appear to have bred in Winfrey a love of government assistance. During the debate over welfare reform, Winfrey declared she wanted to “destroy the welfare mentality,” and gave $6 million for a program run through the Jane Addams Hull House Association to help Chicago families move off the welfare rolls.

4. Cecil Fielder: While Fielder worked his way up to the big leagues, his family couldn’t make ends meet on minor-league paychecks. His wife Stacey got the family food stamps to cover the gaps. Fielder finally made it in the bigs, and his son followed him to a Major League career. Taking some public assistance doesn’t appear to have given the family a multi-generational taste for the culture of dependency.

5. Whoopi Goldberg: Before she was an actress, she sometimes relied on public assistance—People reported that she worked however she could while trying to make it as an actress, including a stint as a morgue beautician. That doesn’t sound like someone who would have preferred to be supported by the government to winning an EGOT.

The bridge is yours.

-Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart will debate on October 6.

-Manchester is the piracy capitol of the United Kingdom.

-I honestly don’t care if Cee Lo Green leaves The Voice as long as it means he has more time to focus on his NBC sitcom.

-An amazing conversation with Breaking Bad‘s location scout.

-Charlie Kaufman and Dan Harmon got Kickstarter funding for their new movie.

Campaign finance and advertising have been a heated subject of discussion down the stretch of this fall’s presidential election, particularly the role of Super PACS in both the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney and down ballot races. But though it’s unlikely to change the game entirely, the Obama campaign is going back to a kind of advertising it pioneered in 2008: billboards within Electronic Arts campaigns. Obama was the first candidate to advertise in video games in that race, which is all well and good. But while it’s easier to report on who’s spending what, and on what kinds of advertising, the larger question with this, and with the rest of the campaign advertising we’re awash in, is whether it makes a difference.

Commercial brands seem to believe that in-game advertising is valuable. Unilever signed a deal this spring to place its products inside the Sims. It’s a kind of advertising that makes sense because it can be smoothly integrated into the environment where it appears. Tricia Duryee put it, “It’s much harder to work a bottle of shampoo into a game that’s set in the forest or at a poker table. But when a game is about sleeping, eating microwave dinners or taking showers, that sort of product placement becomes much easier.” It’s not disruptive to have products be branded in-game as they are in real life. And if advertisers are looking for product recognition and familiarity, placement is an easy way to achieve it.

That said, the overall impact of in-game advertising appears to be a bit of a mixed bag, for both game companies and advertisers themselves. EA may have more than 300 million users, about whom they have a fair amount of data. But straight-up display advertising doesn’t seem to have become a core business for it and other video game companies the way it is for, say, television networks. If players want to escape into a world, the best way to sell your product or your person may be to bow to the rules of that world, rather than placing advertising that takes players out of the universe they’ve entered.

The Obama campaign’s decision to spend money on advertising in EA games may be about generating impressions and reminding folks to step away from the console on or before November 6 (the 2008 ads reminded players that early voting had started, among other messages). But it’s also a way of letting a constituency know that they’re on the campaign’s mind. It’s become all too easy for advertisers, political and otherwise, to gin up stories about spots that they have no intention of actually running, or no funds to actually air. But to get attention to your advertising in a sector of the media that isn’t dedicating a lot of space to campaign coverage is a clever trick. And that coverage, more so than the ads themselves, may be worth the money.

It’s a bad sign when a show has to contort itself to make its premise work. Such is the case with The Mob Doctor, the drama that premiered on Fox last night about a young Chicago resident who finds herself doing medical work for the mafia to save her brother, who’s run afoul of them. Given a chance to leave Chicago and her debt at the end of the pilot, Dr. Grace Devlin (Jordana Spiro) insisted, against all the evidence, that she couldn’t leave town. But while I may have been frustrated by the contrivances that will keep the show going, it was hugely refreshing to see The Mob Doctor‘s utter lack of ambiguity on an issue where more coherent television shows so often demonstrate moral cowardice and contortions of logic: abortion.

As Grace struggled to decide whether to kill a patient on the order of the mafia don to whom she was indebted, the B plot of the pilot concerned Grace’s boyfriend’s patient, a 14-year-old girl Grace has known since she was a small child. Admitted after collapsing, Suzy turned out to be pregnant, despite the fact that her hymen was intact. While the way she came to be that way was a typical medical procedural gambit, both Grace and Suzy were adamant about the right decision going forward. “My dad is going to kill Johnny. And I have a swimming scholarship to Saint Catherine’s. If I’m knocked up, I lose it,” Suzy told Grace. And Grace, in discussing what to do with her boyfriend, who was reluctant to perform an abortion on Suzy in violation of the state’s parental consent laws, which would have required Suzy’s father to sign off on the procedure, was clear about the cruelty the law was enforcing. “That scholarship is her one shot at making something of her life,” Grace said. “It gives her options and you’re standing in her way.”

Obviously I don’t think it’s good or realistic policy to ask doctors to violate parental consent laws. But there was something breathtaking in The Mob Doctor‘s presentation of the situation. Suzy is a smart young woman. She took precautions and ended up pregnant anyway. The show treats her as if she’s intelligent enough to know what’s best for her. And it framed her getting an abortion as important not simply as a one-time choice, but as a portal to other kinds of self-determination, to other choices and chances to make a better life for herself. The episode didn’t dwell on whether it would be viable for Suzy to carry the pregnancy to term because it self-evidently didn’t make sense for her health, her family situation, or her education. And the dilemma wasn’t resolved with a Convenient Television Miscarriage, the tool of showrunners who lack the courage to actually follow through on their intentions. It just argued that parental consent laws or the unavailability of doctors willing and able to perform abortions can be ruinous for young women, and that young women who find themselves in need of abortions are neither sluts nor idiots.

We live in a pop culture universe where if a married woman gets an abortion, as on Grey’s Anatomy, she must do so in a storyline that emphasizes the emotional turmoil of the decision; where teen motherhood can be a path to tabloid riches via MTV or gauzy, twee romanticizations of what it means to interrupt your adolescence with a pregnancy; where there’s got to be something in the water or a plague of irregular menses to explain why so many pregnancies spontaneously end so early in term; where seeking affordable birth control can get a young professional woman labeled a whore by a powerful media figure. It’s kind of remarkable that the two people who have given us relatively straightforward abortions in their television shows in recent years are Josh Berman, the gay man who created The Mob Doctor, and tough guy Kurt Sutter in his biker show Sons of Anarchy. In that context, if not any other, it would be nice if other people making television shows—this especially means you, Mindy Kaling—took The Mob Doctor as a model and rediscovered a little bit of their courage, and the reality of women’s lives.

io9 passes along an intriguing rumor that, in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Superman gets defeated, but by a fellow Kryptonian, Faora, rather than by Michael Shannon’s General Zod:

At first they’re not as powerful but later on as she applies her fight training and adapts them to her powers, she gives Superman one of the worst beatings a hero has faced on camera… She “Doomsdays” him… literally pulverizing him with precision and lethal strength with hitting pressure-points, nerves and even just outclasses Supes in bare knuckle and gives Supes a severe beat down…he’s total agony this entire time, bloody and broken and barely gets away. My buddy doesn’t know at all how Superman defeats these guys eventually but he did say that Superman in this film gets hurt a lot more easily than Routh’s pre-crisis Superman…the military can hurt him too but Faora pretty much nearly kills him in hand to hand.

This wouldn’t particularly surprise me, given Snyder’s interest in fighting women. Who knows what the actual execution would be like (I should here cop to my standard weakness for Sucker-Punch, and acknowledge that everyone thinks I’m insane). And I do really hope that Snyder’s version of Faora isn’t the one from Action Comics, who survived the destruction of Krypton because she was serving an off-world sentence for setting up a concentration camp where she was murdering men. Because I’m not sure the nerd community could survive the conversations about misandry and misogyny that would be the result.

But I am so, so eager to see genuinely super-powered women who aren’t providing assistants and who don’t have to be someone’s girlfriend. It’s not that Joss Whedon didn’t revitalize Black Widow in The Avengers, or that I didn’t appreciate the tremendous sexual chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield as Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man. I like romances. Watching The Thomas Crown Affair over the weekend, I realized how desperate I am for more love stories in which the participants and the obstacles to their union are both genuinely adult. Superhero movies, despite the criticism they get for playing to childish fantasies, are actually giving us some terrific portraits of women who get to be women, rather than girls, and their spiky romances with the men they love. But I would love to see a woman’s hyper-competence separated from her interest in the physical and mental health of the man she loved, to see a story where a woman like Selina Kyle save a man like Bruce Wayne’s armored ass because she can and she wants to, but for reasons other than that she’s fallen in love with him. I don’t want to cut down on the romances. I just want more, and more kinds of stories for women within this context. If the only way we can get to watch a woman grow into her power in a superhero movie right now is as a villain, I’ll take it. And hopefully Faora can knock out some of the pigeonholing of super-powered women while she’s at it. Not to mention that in between Faora and Selina Kyle, great female characters could be a dandy way for DC to put some real daylight in between their franchise and Marvel.