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.