I wish I could say that I’m shocked that two female candidates for Senate got asked in a debate whether they’d read Fifty Shades of Grey, but sometimes, everything is weird and terrible and this kind of nonsense does come to pass:

I’m willing to give the moderators a pass for asking about culture in general, both because the questions were meant to warm up the debaters, and because I think that asking substantive questions about culture is an interesting way to get at what public figures value and the extent to which they’re inclined to pander. But asking a yes or no question about whether Kirsten Gillibrand and Wendy Long have read a book that, as of August, had sold more than 40 million copies, doesn’t actually reveal any meaningful information about their tastes that distinguishes them from other women.

The reason people think reading Fifty Shade of Grey indicates anything at all is because people think it’s weird for women to publicly admit to being interested in sex, much less in books that involve women figuring out what they like sexually. Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t actually a particularly good book if you want to have a discussion of sexual self-knowledge, given that it’s a big proponent of the idea that all women have magically effective vaginal orgasms, that if you haven’t had sex before that it will automatically be terrific as long as your partner is a charismatic and kinky industrial tycoon, and that its knowledge of BDSM and power dynamics in sex appears to have been gleaned from a vigorous read of Wikipedia. But it’s still treated as if it’s some sort of scandalous text—people literally write articles about how to avoid being caught reading Fifty Shades of Grey in public. Asking Gillibrand and Long whether they’d read the book isn’t a way to learn more about them, or to start a discussion about sexuality, or to see if they’re in synch with female readers, or to warm them up: it’s in part to catch them out on something that shouldn’t be a titter-worthy issue in the first place.

Disney is introducing Sofia, who is supposed to be its first Latina princess, in a television special, Sofia the First: Once Upon a Princess, that will air November 18 on the Disney Channel. The problem—or depending on how you see it, upside of the character—though, is that the only indication that we have that Sofia is Hispanic is that Disney is telling us that she is:

Now, certainly it’s possible to be Latina or Hispanic and be light-skinned and have fair hair as people like half-Cuban Cameron Diaz are a constant reminder. And I can see an argument that it’s good for Disney to remind viewers that Latino is a label that encompasses people of many different origins and who look many different ways.

And so it strikes me as less of a problem that Sofia looks the way she looks and more that Disney was dull enough to set another princess story in the European fairy tale tradition. When Disney’s put stories about women who aren’t white on the big screen, it’s often done so in ways that draw drama and detail from their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that expand the definition of princess to cover all kinds of brave, enterprising young women. Aladdin was one of the first Disney movies to juxtapose the horrors of arranged marriages with the appeal of a love match, rather than pretending that its characters were simply free to marry who they chose. In Mulan, the titular character has to cope with the intersection of gender expectations and Confucian values to carve out a place for herself and her aspirations in ancient China. Pocahontas got to save a man, rather than the other way around, in a break from Disney’s generally traditional past, and to do so as an advocate for cross-cultural understanding. And in The Princess and the Frog, Tiana is an entrepreneur driven by her love of New Orleans cuisine.

Sofia, by contrast, gets absorbed into a blended royal family, goes to school where she’s taught by the tree good fairies from Sleeping Beauty and gets an amulet that puts her in communion with Disney princesses past. The whole project looks less like an original story and much more like an opportunity for marketing. Disney may have denied some little girls an opportunity to see a princess who looks like them on screen. But it’s also punted on giving viewers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds an innovative, engaging story about a young woman’s adventures.

Shockingly, a tactic used by movie studios and movie theaters to juice profits without much, if any, thought to how it impacts the viewer experience or the content of films, is not proving to be a long-term success:

Despite the optimistic title, the writing is on the wall for studios, which have become increasingly reliant on those ruby tinted spectacles for profits.”3D attendance has been declining on a per-film basis since the release of ‘Avatar,’ and we expect the growth in 3D film releases to flatten out,” the study’s authors write. Part of the culprit is that studios are not increasing the number of films they release in 3D like they once were, and theater chains in the United States are not doing as much to expand their network of 3D compatible theaters after a building frenzy. “Recent 3D releases have underperformed, screen build-out has slowed and ticket premiums are unlikely to increase,” the study’s authors write.

As someone who is a 3D skeptic, in part because I have to wear the glasses over my glasses, which is both physically uncomfortable and means the effects don’t work as well for me as for other people, there are only three uses of 3D I’ve found that justify the use of the technology, which even for non-glasses wearers has some detriments like turning down the brightness of color:

1. To explore the built or natural physical environment of a fictional world: There’s a reason Avatar is the highest-grossing movie, 3D or otherwise, to ever be made. James Cameron designed a fiendishly creative world, made it gorgeous, and used 3D to make his fictions real. If he was shooting on a real planet with familiar flora and fauna, Cameron could have counted on our minds to pop out the plants and animals we’d seen before and make them feel visceral and alive. Instead, he let us play. I’d argue that one of the reasons Thor wasn’t as entertaining as I wish it had been is that we got glimpses of Asgard, but instead of tooling around and through the city, courtesy some bodacious 3D, we instead got a lot of throne room scenes and a lot of distant cityspaces. Hopefully when we return, we’ll get some more Asgardian architecture to feast our eyes on.

2. To provide a sense of actual scale: Martin Scorcese’s Hugo may be the best 3D movie I’ve ever seen, in part because it used the tactic for both the first reason on this list and the second. We meet the train station where the movie’s young protagonist lives out his days as secret keeper of the clocks through a big, meandering 3D introduction that whips us through the cogs and pistons of the timepieces. And 3D, by situating us in the frame, helps us see how small and vulnerable Hugo is, and the magnitude of the work he’s doing in order to stay free and fed. The shots of him hanging over the station floor in the giant clock there have a marvelous sense of scale, and as a result, of stakes.

3. To make your audience physically uncomfortable: I tend to believe that if the story and basic images you’re putting on screen don’t transport viewers, you’ve got problems already. But there are times in which I can see a movie wanting to give viewers an overwhelming sense of speed, or a fall, or a reversal of perspective or direction, in which case 3D could be a way to make the situation feel overwhelming.

I’m sure there are more good filmmaking scenarios that would justify 3D. But much of the time it feels like we’re paying a couple of extra bucks mainly for the privilege of wearing plastic glasses for two hours, rather than having a different movie-going experience. If you want to convince audiences that your movie is literally worth more because it’s in 3D, then you need to show that to them on the screen, rather than expect them to believe it.

I literally could not care less whether Jack Reacher turns into a new action franchise for Tom Cruise (though if it got him out of the way of Jeremy Renner in the Mission Impossible movies I would not cry salty tears). But I am very glad to see that David Oyelowo, who was awesome on Spooks, and underrated as a corporate corner-cutter in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is getting slipped into yet another movie so American audiences will get used to seeing him around:

We talk a lot about black men who should be giant stars in various tranches of Hollywood: Idris Elba, who should be a middle-aged superhero somewhere, Romany Malco, who would be a regular romantic comedy leading man if anyone had any sense, Michael B. Jordan, who is a ridiculously multi-threat talent. I think Oyelowo should play a larger part in that conversation: he’s a handsome, talented 36-year-old who is older than Jordan, who at 25 is still on the upswing towards leading man-dom, and younger than Malco and Elba, who are both in their forties. He’s right in the sweet spot, and if he keeps showing up in proximity to big stars, maybe some of the recognition will start to rub off. It would be lovely if someone in Hollywood had plans to do something with those opportunities, build them towards something, rather than permanently siloing him as a white hero’s enabler or obstacle.

The bridge is yours.

-65.6 million people watched the second presidential debate.

-How to sell a TV show.

-Details on Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s alien movie.

-Mad Men is going to Hawaii!

This morning, Newsweek editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced a change to the magazine that seemed both seismic and inevitable: the December 31 issue of the print edition will be Newsweek’s last, and the publication will continue as a tablet and web publication. “Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context,” they wrote. “Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

That language, and the task at hand, sounds strikingly similar to the way David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, talked about his vision when he and the editors who worked for him re-conceived the magazine when Bradley moved it from Boston to Washington, cutting fiction and devoting more space in the magazine to long-form reporting on policy. In 1999, Newsweek actually discussed the question of how The Atlantic could adapt itself to the internet age:

Every magazine has its ideal reader, and for the “thought-leader” category The Atlantic belongs to, that reader is the lay intellectual. Reflective lawyers, like federal Judge Richard A. Posner, are ideal readers. So are military intellectuals such as Col. Harry Summers, author of “On Strategy.” But the number of such people is small–no more than a million Americans, by the estimate of John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, The Atlantic’s chief rival. And with a number of magazines carving up this constituency–not only The Atlantic and Harper’s, but also publications like The New Republic, Commentary and The National Interest–the commercial prospects for any one of them don’t seem bright.

How often does a thought-leader magazine spark a controversy outside its core readership? It does happen: Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated proclamation of “The End of History” first appeared in the National Interest in 1989. And in 1993 Foreign Affairs printed Samuel Huntington’s argument that cultural fault lines–based on differences of religion, language and tradition–would be the battlegrounds of the future. The Atlantic itself found broader readership for a 1993 article supporting two-parent families, perhaps less for its content than for its title: “Dan Quayle Was Right.” These are, however, rare events…

Still, every problem is an opportunity. Michael Kelly, The Atlantic’s new editor and formerly editor of The New Republic, argues that “It’s the smog aspect that makes [publishing] work for magazines like us. We have a culture of a ratcheted-up bombardment of everyone, a great wash of talk, blather, chatter… and it’s all sending the same message: ‘You have to pay attention to this right now. The zeitgeist is changing from what it was two minutes ago, and you don’t want to miss it’.” The Atlantic, he says, should be an “antidote” to media overheat, “the absurd topicality of everything.”

The Atlantic ended up embracing “the absurd topicality of everything” with not just its booming core website but news aggregator The Atlantic Wire. But it also revitalized the magazine’s buzz quotient by thinking somewhat more narrowly about what kinds of stories “lay intellectuals” would want to read. Where once that might have meant the same broad subject palatte that magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s still publish, The Atlantic doubled down on the kind of stories about the future of family and foreign policy, and the snappy cover lines, that Newsweek said served the publication well in 1993.

Newsweek has an advantage that The Atlantic didn’t have in 1999 when Bradley bought it: a strong web arm of the publication that boasts established internet-native writers (rather than traditional print journalists who are in the midst of transitioning to learning to write comfortably for the web) who do a mix of reporting and commentary. But it also has two deficits. First, it remains a very general interest magazine, which means it’s competing with everything, even when it can’t necessarily do, say, food coverage better than a specialist magazine like newcomer Lucky Peach, which caters to exactly the kind of wealthy, sophisticated readers the new, digital readers Newsweek would like to lock down. And even worse, unlike The Atlantic’s brand at the time of its reinvention, which may have been somewhat dry, but was definitely positive and respectable, Newsweek has degraded its own editorial reputation in a mad, and as it turns out final, rush to sell issues and generate traffic. “Final Newsweek cover: Why Barack Obama is the Worst Gay President to Ever Breastfeed Muslim Rage,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted this morning. Certainly, Newsweek has had covers in the past that look unattractive today: the July 30, 1945 cover with the tagline “The Jap: How Long Can He Take It?” is less than attractive. But the magazine has seemed exceptionally cheap lately, recycling sexually provocative stock images for shock value, in marked contrast to, say, its shattering cover photo for the feature on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, or fanning Islamophobia rather than substantively dissecting the attacks on American diplomatic facilities.
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Now that we’re in the midst of playoff baseball, there’s been a lot of discussion at ESPNw and Jezebel over the past couple of days about how Major League Baseball’s first season with a dress code for reporters went. And a lot of people, including some of the women to whom it applies, aren’t very happy about it. As Erin Gloria Ryan writes at Jezebel:

The League was cognizant of possible charges of sexism when they put the code together, which is why they included a woman on the panel behind the policy. But just because a vagina was present doesn’t mean that the end product didn’t turn out a little dickish. The new code addresses nearly exclusively wardrobe features found on women’s clothing, banning such non-gender neutral staples as short shorts, sheer fabrics, tank tops, one shoulder tops, and strapless tops and dresses. For women who work in warm weather environments covering a sport that plays right through triple digit temperatures, being barred from going sleeveless often means filling the undersides of sleeves with unladylike pit stains.

The best practical argument against the dress code is heat, and as someone who gets easily bedraggled while sitting in the stands at a baseball game, I sympathize with female sideline reporters who have to stand, doing their jobs, in full sun, for three hours. That’s an issue that seems like it could be in conjunction with both the league and news organizations: if Major League Baseball wants sideline reporters to dress a certain way, perhaps it could also require teams to provide them easy access to break rooms, water, shade in between takes, and it could set standards for how much time the organizations it credential games have to allow its reporters out of the sun or heat on days when the temperature ventures above a certain threshhold.

If MLB is really concerned about the presence of attractive women on the sidelines at games, teams could also just decline to credential sideline reporters of any gender, from any organization, confining interviews to the locker room and dugout, and commentary to the broadcast booth. There are exceptionally good sideline reporters, but there are also an enormous number of substanceless ones, and the league could easily shift patterns of coverage with new credentialing rules. The thought of listening to a few more minutes per game of Joe Buck talking about sports isn’t a prospect I find particularly attractive. But I wouldn’t complain if the networks had to think a bit more carefully and creatively about how to structure their coverage without cheesecake or fluff interviews as an option.

At the end of the day, though MLB should have saved itself a headache and been as clear and detailed about what kind of clothing is professional for men as well as for women. I don’t really think a one-sleeved top in sheer fabric is professional attire. But the fact that Craig Sager’s suits are considered less distracting and unprofessional than the suggestion of a woman’s breasts says a great deal more about us than it does about the people wearing the clothes.