Jay-Z, warming up a crowd for President Obama in Ohio today, rewrote the lyrics to his much-analyzed song 99 Problems to declare that he’s got “99 problems, but Mitt ain’t one”:

I have to say that, if with the distraction of Mitt Romney off the table, we could end stop and frisk after the election and thereby get Jay-Z down to 98 problems, that would be an America I’d be pretty happy to live in.

My favorite bit of Louis C.K.’s stint hosting Saturday Night Live was, I think not very surprisingly, the sketch where he recreated his FX show as if it were Abraham Lincoln living through awkward sex, stand-up comedy, and race relations in contemporary New York:

But I thought there were two particularly astute things about it, both of which are reasonable critiques of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, about which much more to come later in the week. The opening of the sketch gets at something Lincoln only deals with glancingly: Lincoln’s distance from the people he was freeing–the halting confession “I just don’t have any black friends.”
–and the question of what would happen both to freemen themselves and to the national economy after the passage of the 13th Amendment. “You’re all emancipated. It’s good, right?” Lincoln asks a freeman at a coffee bar in the first scene, trolling for complements. Now of course, slavery was absolutely terrible, but the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of the sharecropping system and other elements of economic apartheid continue to resonate today. Emancipation and the amendment were the beginning of a process that’s still ongoing to help people who were tools of the American economy become full participants in its labors and rewards, and it’s sly to work that in there.

In keeping with the sketch’s resonance for contemporary politics, C.K.’s summary of Lincoln’s dealings with slaveowners could apply to almost any political debate in which reason has fled the stage. “They’re like ‘Oh, but I like owning people,’” Lincoln/Louis explains in a monologue. “Oh, yeah , no, no, I get it. I totally get that. You gotta act like you’re kind of cool with it. ‘If I could own a couple of dudes, I’d love to own a couple of dudes.’…You have to act like this is a 50-50 issue. ‘You know, I just kinda think that owning a person is not cool, you stupid dick.’” I understand the need to compromise in the legislative process, to massage egoes and to make people feel respected. But it’s worth considering what we can do before things get to that point to knock some ideas out of the range of positions that deserve a fair hearing and emotional credence.

When the New Orleans Hornets’ Anthony Davis, this year’s number one overall draft pick, went down with a concussion in the team’s second game of the season last week, he was forced to exit the game and then stayed in New Orleans for further evaluation instead of traveling to the team’s next game in his hometown of Chicago.

The NBA has been proactive in dealing with concussions, and its policy mandates that players pass a series of tests to make sure they aren’t still dealing with the effects before they return to the court. So even as heightened awareness about concussions in football and other sports has made leagues and athletes more aware about the dangers of playing through head injuries, Hornets coach Monty Williams blasted the policy before the team played in Chicago:

“When you’re dealing with the brain, I guess what’s happening in football has impacted everybody,” Williams said before the game. “He got touched up a little bit last night. That happens a lot in basketball. It’s just that now they treat everybody like they have white gloves and pink drawers and it’s getting old. It’s just the way the league is now.”

“It’s a man’s game,” Williams said. “They’re treating these guys like they’re 5 years old. He desperately wanted to come, but he couldn’t make it.”

The idea that protecting players from potentially damaging head injuries is handling them with “white gloves and pink drawers,” that players are too sissy to return to this “man’s game” if they aren’t immediately back on the court, is exactly why concussion protocols like the NBA’s are necessary. Davis may have wanted to get right back on the court, and Williams may have wanted to get him right back on the court. But that doesn’t mean the best decision for Davis’ health and future was getting him right back on the court.

Williams seemed to realize that later in his rant, when he moderated his stance:

“I’m not saying I don’t like (the policy),” Williams said. “We’ve got to protect the players, but I think the players should have more say-so in how they feel. I’m sure I had four or five concussions when I played, and it didn’t bother me. The NBA is doing what’s necessary to protect the players, but this is not the NFL. You don’t get hit in the head that much. I understand it. But as a coach, I’m a baby about it. I want my guys ready to play. That’s basically the bottom line; I’m just a baby.”

It’s understandable that Williams wanted Davis on the court: he’s arguably the team’s best player. And it’s understandable why Davis would want to get back on the court: the Hornets don’t have another game in his hometown this year. But the more we learn about concussions and how they effect athletes in all sports — from football to stock car racing to gymnastics to basketball — the more evident it is that medical professionals should be the ones with the most “say-so” in when a player like Anthony Davis gets to return to the game, whether players and coaches like it or not.

The bridge is yours.

-I would totally watch Michelle Obama’s talk show.

-Get your Lord of the Rings marathon tickets while they’re hot!

-Science fictional presidents of the 21st century!

-We are apparently getting six new Ridley Scott movies.

-Pretty excited that Steven Soderbergh is apparently now obsessed with the politics of drugs, Jude Law, and Channing Tatum:

Well, this is super-charming. Sony Computer Entertainment has gone up in French markets with an ad that compares the PS Vita, which has touch screens on both sides, to a headless woman with two sets of breasts:

I don’t know what’s worst about this. The photoshop of horrors that’s distorted the model’s arm? The depersonalization of the woman involved here? The idea that it’s cool to get to grope breasts without having to deal with an actual human with her own particular needs and responses? The idea that boobs=sales? I can’t even just be irritated on behalf of women. Remember, fellows: this industry, and many, many others, thinks you’re stupid, drooling, sexually deprived easy marks.

You don’t get to be super without some trouble along one the way. One of the most common tropes in superhero origin stories is the trauma that sets a person on the road to greatness, whether it’s the destruction of Krypton, the murder of the Waynes in a back alley, or Tony Stark’s unpleasant acquisition of some shrapnel in his chest in Afghanistan. Usually, that trauma leads to a period of reflection and the emergence of resolve and maturity, and a generalized kind of certainty. But watching the CW’s Arrow, I’ve been struck by its very different take on this narrative. Oliver Queen certainly suffered enormously when his father committed suicide so Oliver would be able to survive the wreck of their yacht, and he emerged different from his years of training on a remote island. But rather than imbue him with a sense of certainty that carries over to us, the show is spending a lot of time suggesting that Oliver’s view of his own antics is unreliable, and in doing so, capturing a deeper sense of the trauma that turns someone into a greater version of themselves, and the unreliability that can accompany that transformation.

One of my first reactions to the Arrow pilot was that it was a nastier portrayal of superheroism than we’ve typically seen in this revival. The Avengers have bruising fights, but the only people they kill are invading alien armies, or in self-defense. Christopher Nolan’s Batman faces off against grostesquely sadistic opponents, like the Joker, but in his day-to-day patrolling routine, he normally sticks to punching people–in the most recent movie, the person who turned out to be his primary antagonist died in a car crash rather than directly at his hands. Oliver Queen, by contrast, kills people–a lot of them.

Given that Arrow is the kind of show that will dispassionately survey the fletchery protruding from an assassin’s shattered goggles, I’ve been glad to see the show reckon with the deaths that Oliver is racking up. “Oliver, you’re not a soldier. You’re a criminal. And a murderer,” Diggle tells him when Oliver makes his initial pitch to his bodyguard to join him in a crusade against the corrupt elements of their city. And in this most recent episode, Arrow used its flashbacks to explicitly address how learning to kill changes a person. As Oliver weakens on the island, his body affected by the trauma of his near-drowning, his father’s suicide, his own recent poisoning, his mentor refuses to let him eat if he won’t dispatch of his own dinner. “Please. I’m starving. I never killed anything before,” Oliver begs him before giving in and snapping a bird’s neck. It’s no small thing to graduate from never having caused a death or having any acquaintance by the violent process by which people are parted from life prematurely to killing on a regular basis. This process may be the means by which Oliver survived to return home, but it’s not clear that it was good for him.

That perspective makes Arrow a more directly dark critique of the society in which Oliver operates than some of the superhero stories that have preceeded him. While the failure of Gotham’s institutions left a void for Batman to fill, there was an extent to which he answered the still-reasonable needs of Gotham’s citizens: they wanted someone to crack down on criminals, and in the absence of the police’s ability to do that, whether via corruption, lack of motivation, or literally being trapped underground, Batman does what they’d have done otherwise. In Arrow, by contrast, Oliver goes after institutions of his town, people who aren’t causing wide-spread violence or problems, but whom he deems dangerous. Where Batman is reactive, Oliver is proactive, a much trickier moral position for superheroes, especially ones who kill rather than simply immobilize and hand criminals over to the cops.

When Laurel asks Oliver “If what you’re doing isn’t wrong, why protect your face with a hood?” he gives the same answer Batman does–to protect the ones he loves, but it reads hollower for Oliver than it does for Bruce Wayne. What’s interesting about Arrow is that it questions how much Oliver needs to do what he’s doing, how much he likes it, and, as with his conversation with Diggle about his plans to gentrify a poor, black neighborhood, the extent to which he actually knows what he’s doing, not just about one-off decisions, but about the whole enterprise. Diggle joins up with him because the other options available to him, including bodyguarding privileged brats, are worse than undertaking even an ethically questionable fight to clean up the city. But Oliver’s journey suggests that his appeal is a testament to how sick Starling City really. Rather than answering a set of legitimate needs, his bent view of Starling City is marginally better than the alternative.

This post discusses plot points from the November 4 episode of Homeland.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”

“Mom says it’s like the wreck of the Hesparus in here,” Chris Brody tells Mike when he comes over to root through their garage for proof of Brody’s perfidy towards the end of this episode of Homeland. Mike explains that Jessica, who is using the reference to explain that the garage is a mess, is referring to a historical wreck that “some guy,” actually Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote a poem about it. It’s telling that all three of them miss the actual meaning of the poem, which is neither about actual wreckage, nor history, but a wrenching story about a father’s failure to protect his daughter. The wreckage that’s found from the trip is her body, the mast she was lashed to in a vain attempt to protect her in a hurricane, and ” her hair, like the brown sea-weed, / On the billows fall and rise.” It’s a poem with terrible resonance for Chris’s big sister Dana, who has gotten herself into terrible trouble. And it’s a perfect epigraph for an episode of television that’s significantly concerned with how people try and fail to protect each other, and their country.

The first person to fail is Carrie. After all the miracles she’s performed this season, I thought there was something sly about having her be defeated in what she is sure is a definitive investigation by a variety of mundane obstacles. Roya’s speech is obscured by a water fountain. Facial recognition software doesn’t work on her contact because he’s wearing sunglasses. Virgil loses him in the subway. Brody turns out not to know the guy. Later, at his meet with Roya, an irritating interloper checks his Blackberry near the two targets of Carrie’s surveillance, giving them a moment to go silence and become more careful in their speech. Carrie may have an enormous capacity to connect with sources and fantastic instincts about where information might lie. But separating the noise from the signal, in some cases quite literally, is the inevitable challenge of intelligence, and even Carrie can’t change that rule.

And even when she does everything right, warning Quinn that something might go wrong with their search of the tailor’s shop in Gettysburg, even Carrie has to fail sometimes. “Everybody missed something that day,” Saul told her of September 11, but she hasn’t learned from that terrible tragedy that sometimes it’s impossible to outrace events, especially when she believes her failure to do so is traceable to error rather than chance. “Did you know?” she confronts Brody. “I have got seven casualties in Gettysburg. Did you know that was going to happen?…Have you been lying to me?…Don’t touch me. Don’t you fucking dare.” The fact that he didn’t know, that he appears to be telling her the truth, seems to be more painful for Carrie than if she’d been betrayed. It means she was truly powerless, that she could not have saved the seven men shot in Gettysburg, that she cannot now extract further truth from Brody, that such disaster will likely strike her again.
Read more