What do you say about a man who conquered cancer, won seven world championships, used his profile as one of the world’s greatest athletes to raise and donate millions of dollars to cancer research, and had the most crippling fall from grace perhaps any American athlete has ever had? What do you say about a man who is an outstanding narcissist in an industry full of narcissists, but cared enough about the awful disease that nearly took his life that he devoted the rest of his to making other lives better?

Is he a fraud, a self-serving cheat, a professional scam? Is he a tragic hero, a flawed champion, an inspiration to millions of people who might follow him out of the depths? Is he both?

We may never get a bigger admission that Lance Armstrong cheated his way to his seven Tour de France titles than we got today, when he stepped down from Livestrong, the cancer foundation he started, and lost his contract with Nike, a company that stood by beleaguered superstars like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant and even Lance Armstrong. That even Nike, the company with the biggest financial stake in maintaining Armstrong’s innocence, has given up the cause makes it seem that this is real, and that believing in Armstrong took the same level of naivete it took to believe in Barry Bonds.

According to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, Armstrong was part of “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” Armstrong is not just a cheater. He may be the biggest dope in the history of sports.

But what about all the people Armstrong helped? According to its web site, Livestrong has raised more than $470 million since it started in 1997. It has donated to 550 separate cancer research organizations, and 81 cents of every dollar it gets goes toward services for survivors. A third of its fundraising comes from individuals, another fifth comes from merchandise, the ubiquitous yellow bracelets and Livestrong branded gear. That money has undoubtedly helped millions of people fight cancer and deal with its effects.

Would any of that have been possible without Armstrong, without his success, however tainted it was? And is that a bigger, somehow a more moral, question than how many lives Armstrong affected in cycling?

After all, while Armstrong was raising money to fight cancer, USADA says he not only used performance-enhancing drugs but distributed them as well, and that the scheme he was a part of “was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs.” Improper usage of EPO, the drug Armstrong allegedly used extensively, has been linked to heart disease, stroke, embolisms, and immunodeficiency disorders. While he was helping people fight one disease, Armstrong was putting himself and his teammates at risk of others.

So is Lance Armstrong a fraud, a cheat, and a villain, the worst example of how the quest to win at all costs can distort our priorities? Or is Lance Armstrong is a friend, an inspiration, and a hero, the best example of how success can be used to change the world around us. Can’t he be both?

This post discusses some extremely basic plot points for American Horror Story: Asylum.

Of all the genres I wish I appreciated more, the one I have the most regret about is horror. An early encounter with an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein gave me childhood nightmares and a life-long aversion to being deeply frightened by my entertainment. I mustered up the courage to see my first horror movie, Drag Me To Hell, several years ago for a long piece on the recession in movies, but nothing’s pulled me back since. I’m aware that in staying away from horror, I’m cutting myself off from a tradition that’s rich with explorations of our darkest social anxieties and pathologies, from violence against women to immigration. But it’s been very difficult for me to justify subjecting myself to images that upset me so deeply to get to the substantive ideas expressed by them.

Somewhat to my surprise, this season of FX’s anthology series, American Horror Story, is prompting me to try again. The second mini-series from creator Ryan Murphy, this time set at an insane asylum in 1964 New England overseen by the Catholic church, with its central mystery the identity of a killer of women who skins his victims, is at the very outer limits of my tolerance for violence. But its exploration of sexual taboos and repressed desires is more deeply felt and certainly as frightening as Bloody Face, as the killer’s been dubbed by a morbidly obsessed public, and much more interesting than the buckets of blood and organs sloshing around in the space between those themes.

At first glance, it looks like American Horror Story is pitting the mostly-innocent and not necessarily insane inmates of Briarcliff Asylum against its proprietors, most notably the severe Sister Jude (Jessica Lange). There’s Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), incarcerated as a nymphomaniac, her head shaved for punishment, mostly on the grounds that she has a high sex drive. “Men like sex and no one calls them whores. I hate that word. It’s so ugly,” she tells Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), who appears to have a more serious set of problems than some of his patients. “I like sex. It’s my crime.” Kit Walker (Evan Peters, one of the few returning members of the original American Horror Story cast) is a young man, newly and secretly married to his African-American wife, when he experiences what appears to be an alien abduction, she is brutally murdered, and he is arrested on suspicion of being Bloody Face. “Did her dark meat slide off the bone easier than any of the other victims?” Sister Jude asks him nastily at his intake session.

And then there’s Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a journalist relegated to the recipe column who comes to Briarcliff, ostensibly to write up Sister Jude’s famous bread bakery, but is using the assignment as cover to try to get a coop on the Bloody Face story. After an accident at the asylum, Sister Jude has her put in a cell, first telling Lana it’s so she can recover, but later blackmailing Sarah’s lover, Wendy (Clea Duvall), a young school teacher who fears having her sexual orientation exposed and being fired, into having Lana committed. “You have no legal standing,” Sister Jude tells Wendy. “I have a moral standing,” Wendy protests, seeing defeat already but determined to have her say. “Moral. That’s an interesting word,” Sister Jude tells her. The heartbreak of that decision, which Wendy immediately recognizes as an error, is the truest emotional beat in a new season with a fair number of them, mostly because it relies on real social conditions rather than lights in the sky or people made up as freaks to achieve a profound sense of fear and despair.
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The National Hockey League made its most serious offer to settle the league’s labor dispute with its players union yesterday in an attempt to end current lockout in time to preserve a full 82-game season.

The NHL has already canceled the first two weeks of its season, which was supposed to begin last weekend. If an agreement is reached before October 26, though, the league could still fit in a full 82-game schedule by adding just one game every five weeks, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday. Bettman’s offer deals primarily with the major economic issues dividing the two sides, including how revenue should be split and whether players will see reductions in salaries:

“Hockey-Related Revenue”: The NHL’s offer would split so-called “hockey-related revenue” evenly between owners and players, a significant reduction from the 57-43 split players received under the previous collective bargaining agreement. Hockey-related revenue is the portion of each team and the league collectively makes that is then split between owners and player salaries. Hockey-related revenue is calculated through a complex formula that allows owners to set aside some revenues and deduct costs from others. For example, owners can deduct the costs of operating concessions and parking before calculating revenue; they also only contribute a certain about of revenue from luxury suites to the hockey-related revenue pool. So the 50-50 split isn’t actually 50-50 at all, and it’s not completely accurate for owners to claim they need a larger split to pay costs, since they are allowed to deduct a portion of costs before hockey-related revenue is even calculated. Rather, the 50-50 split would be an even split of a certain portion of revenues, while owners keep other revenues to themselves. Prior to this offer, the NHL sought to make the hockey-related revenue formula even more generous for owners, but it abandoned that proposal.

Salary “rollbacks”: After the 2004-2005 lockout, players took a 24-percent immediate salary reduction (or rollback), and owners began this year’s negotiations asking for another 24-percent reduction. They abandoned that request in this offer, essentially agreeing to honor the contracts they already negotiated and signed (not exactly a major concession). The switch to a 50-50 split would necessitate a roughly 12 percent reduction in salaries upfront, but in this offer, owners pledged to “protect” players by making up salaries over time. It is unclear how exactly that would work.

Escrow: The NHL’s offer could also change the way its escrow account works. In short, because the league bases hockey-related revenue off of the past year’s revenue, it has no way to accurately project revenues that will be divided between owners and players. So players pay a portion of each paycheck into an escrow account, and if league revenue falls short of projections, the NHL takes money out to make the agreed-upon hockey-related revenue split work. If revenue exceeds projections, the escrow money is split among players to make the hockey-related revenue balance. An increase in escrow contributions could work as another form of rollback if league revenues fall short, something the players are already concerned about.

The owners’ offer came a day after Deadspin broke the story that the league was using GOP strategist Frank Luntz’s firm to figure out how to market the lockout to fans and the media. The 50-50 HRR split, which certainly sounds reasonable on its face, was explicitly mentioned as a strategy in the documents Deadspin obtained, and it is one that has had success before: National Basketball Association owners used that terminology during their lockout in 2011. It seems clear that the strategy was to make laughable offers all summer to make what the owners really wanted look generous by comparison.

Further, there is Bettman’s clear pitch that this is the only way to save the 82-game season, a claim likely designed to win over restless fans who already hold him largely accountable for one lockout (and the full cancellation of the 2004-2005 season) and don’t want to see another. But that claim ignores that Bettman could have saved the season this summer when players offered to play through the lockout while owners and the union negotiated a new bargaining agreement. Instead, Bettman and the owners locked the players out.

The 50-50 deal on hockey-related revenue is where owners wanted to end up all along. The offer, Bettman said Tuesday, “was done in the spirit of getting a deal done.” But this is probably the point where serious negotiations to end the lockout will begin, not where they will end. If Bettman was interested in preserving the 82-game season, the owners should have started making offers in the spirit of getting a deal done a long time ago.

The bridge is yours.

-Is fandom unhealthy?

-Dish is having legal trouble in its fight with AMC.

-Questlove will be teaching at NYU.

-This sounds like a shockingly great movie.

-Charlie Jane Anders is more optimistic than I am about the prospects for Revolution, but also right about how it can get better.

Cable companies scored a victory yesterday at the FCC:

Federal regulators are letting cable companies scramble all their TV signals, closing a loophole that lets many households watch basic cable channels for free. The Federal Communications Commission voted Friday to lift a ban on encryption of basic cable signals, saying it will reduce the number of visits by cable technicians to disconnect service and reduce cable theft. Neither the FCC nor the National Cable & Telecommunications Association knows how many households are taking advantage of the unencrypted signals. NCTA spokesman Brian Dietz says most of the theft is by cable modem customers who also connect their line to a TV set.

Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of the decision, I think there’s an extent to which this is an interesting test. People who would like to see the cable and media companies, which to an extent are distinct entities, innovate in the service offerings they make available to consumers tend to fall in one of two camps. First, there are those who say that piracy, whether of content or of the cable services that let them access content, are a sign that current offerings aren’t sufficient to meet the specific needs of potential consumers, and that content and cable companies could innovate their way to more business. Second, there are those who say that piracy is committed by people who would never purchase these goods and service in the first place, and who thus shouldn’t be subject to excessive regulation, which is of course a different argument than saying regulations would damage the underlying structure of the internet, etc. This second argument is a decent one against spending money and energy on regulation, but it’s ultimately an argument against innovation. If pirates are people for whom the only acceptable price point is zero dollars, no matter how much content and cable companies innovate, they’ll never be able to capture those consumers, and so it makes no sense to adjust or endanger business models to try to accommodate their needs.

What happens after cable companies start scrambling their signals will be an interesting test of these propositions. If cable subscriptions stay level, they maybe it’s true that the folks who are stealing cable service were never potential consumers. If one company cracks down and another company’s subscription base rises, maybe it’s a sign that consumers are willing to pay, but will be unwilling to sign up with companies that seem sour about enforcement. Or if all companies crack down and all subscriptions go up, then perhaps there’s some indication that there are customers out there available to be culled if the environment gives them few options other than to buy service legally. These will all be shaky correlations, of course. But it’s important to actually start testing the question of whether people who aren’t paying for media they consume now are potential customers or not if we want to push cable and content companies towards new business models.

I’m charmed by MTV’s Underemployed, a quirky little drama that debuted last night with an extremely smart premise. It follows a group of soon-to-be college graduates with high ambitions: as Glover (Sarah Habel) says the night before school ends, “We have to get together and celebrate our complete world domination!” But because of the vagaries of the economy, the rise of unpaid internships, and some of their own realistically bad decisions, find themselves adrift after they leave school. It’s a charming, even sexy show at times, but it’s also an example of a slightly strange trend: a show that’s absolutely about the recession, but that has a hard time naming social conditions for what they are.

A logical reason that Sofia (a very strong Michelle Ang), a gifted writer, would be working in a donut shop where customers yell things at her like “What do you mean you’re out of maple bacon bars, you little bitch? Having maple bacon bars is your job!” rather than interning at a magazine is the economy and the contraction of the publishing industry. But Underemployed sets up Sofia in a beautifully twee apartment (the characters all seem possessed of great real estate) and treats her unemployment as a symptom of a larger confusion about what she actually wants to be doing with her life, her writing an extension of inner confusion. It does better with a plot about Sofia’s sexuality: her friends tease her about having survived college a virgin, but when she’s asked out on a date by an attractive African-American lawyer who is the boss of one of her college friends, the show doesn’t have to state out loud why she didn’t have sex with a man somewhere along the way. The expression of joyful surprise on Sofia’s face when she has her first orgasm feels wonderfully sweet and revelatory, especially in a television environment that seems to believe that there’s a direct relationship between raunch and insight.

Then, there’s Glover, whose sex life and job struggles are also intimately related. After she asks her boss if, after a year of unpaid internships, she can finally be paid, Glover’s handsome boss asks her to lunch, and they end up sleeping together. But when it turns out that the boss has a girlfriend and no intention of doing right by Glover, who ends up blackmailing him into a reasonable salary and a parking space. It might have been nice for her to mention, as interns are arguing in courtrooms over the country, that even if he hadn’t slept with her, unpaid internships that involve substantial work rather than educational experiences may well be illegal. And it would have been even better if Underemployed hadn’t set him up to be a potential love interest in the future, doing the right thing personally and dumping his girlfriend after he was forced to do the right thing professionally and pay Glover.
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This post discusses plot details of the October 16 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

There were a lot of things that happened in this episode of Sons of Anarchy, from Jax getting surprisingly easy revenge for Opie’s murder, beating the prison guard to death with a snow globe, to Tara trying to get Otto to recant his testimony, to Roosevelt’s wife’s death, to Carla’s suicide. But really, this hour of television ended up focusing on two themes for me: the extent to which the Sons are building a very bad fate for themselves they’ve evaded through luck, and the degree to which the show itself is avoiding giving Gemma responsible for her behavior.

Part of what’s fascinating about watching Pope groom Jax is the way he moves to separate him from the rest of SAMCRO. “My crew wants out of the drug game,” Jax tells him when Pope offers him a deal that would pay an extra $100,000 per run to haul in extra cocaine. “What do you want?” Pope asks him. And he gives Jax a personal incentive, promising him that “I’ll kick back 2 percent of my profits on the 30 keys to you, gentleman’s agreement. Just between us.” Given Jax’s perpetual waffling about whether to get out of the club before he took his seat at the head of the table, this is a particularly potent inducement, an offer of money that he could exempt from the normal split with the rest of the club and sock away as a nest egg that might enable him to leave with Tara and their sons without the shame of living off his wife. Later, Pope reminds him of how vulnerable Jax is. “Independent security contractors,” he advises him. “First one to kill my killer gets $5 million. Fear protects me. Greed ensures it…You don’t need money, Jaxon. Just the ability to see the inevitable.”

And so much of Sons of Anarchy is about the things that men make inevitable. No fate is so terrible as the ones the Sons are building for themselves, piece by bloody piece. “Must have been retaliation,” Clay says when he learns that Sheriff Roosevelt’s wife has died of the wounds she sustained in the invasion of her home, using the cycle of violence that the MCs have accepted as normal as a cover for his own actions. But of course, it’s been the Nomads, master-minded by Clay, who have been staging the attacks all along. “Idiots! You weren’t supposed to kill her!” The idea that he could create an acceptable level of violence in Charming that would undermine Jax and create tension with the Niners without creating extraordinary blowback that could imperil the whole club was a foolish dream. He’s made a liar of Jax, who tells Roosevelt “That was some outlaw shit, man,” after Roosevelt runs Bobby off the road to force the club to talk to him, but swears they are not involved in any way in the attacks. And Roosevelt is even righter than he knows when he promises Jax: “You reap what you sow. I’m going to crush your club.”
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