Amid the fog of scandal and shame at some of our biggest institutions, the role academics play in the big business of college athletics has come under more scrutiny. With players taking made up courses in made up schools, and with schools fudging grades to keep players eligible, the NCAA has taken steps in recent years to bolster academic standards. But it continues to ignore the most important fact that is staring top-level college sports in the face: many of the athletes are in school because the model we have created makes going to college the most logical step toward becoming a professional athlete. Many “student-athletes” are students simply because they are athletes, and the education they truly care about is the one that occurs on the field, not the one that happens off of it.

Whenever athletes make that clear, the NCAA and its proponents stir it up as a major controversy. But former professor David Pargman, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, thinks we should cater to athletes who want to become professionals by making an athletics major available to college players. That’s not a new idea, but few have gotten as specific as Pargman, who argues that if theater and music students who face similarly long odds of a professional career have their own majors, perhaps athletes should too:

Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?

Acquisition of athletic skills is what significant numbers of NCAA Division I student athletes want to pursue. And this is undeniably why they’ve gone to their campus of choice. Their confessions about their primary interest are readily proclaimed and by no means denied or repressed. These athletes are as honest in recognizing and divulging their aspiration as is the student who declares a goal of performing some day at the Metropolitan Opera or on the Broadway stage. Student athletes wish to be professional entertainers. This is their heart’s desire.

In Pargman’s view, an athletics major would consist of the standard two years of general studies that most undergraduates take as freshmen and sophomores. After that, it would get more specific to their field, as they would take classes like anatomy and physiology, exercise science, contract and business law, and public speaking. Physical education, physical therapy, and kinesiology majors are still common at our colleges and universities, and while those are available options for college athletes, Pargman’s proposal improves on them by requiring skills like public speaking, business courses, and contract law that are especially important for soon-to-be professionals. By mixing in sport-specific labs (or by giving credit for on-field practice and game time), such programs would also acknowledge that the actual playing of the sports is in itself a part of the student’s job training experience. Many athletes already major in physical education or kinesiology, but giving them the option to fine-tune their coursework would make for an even stronger academic experience while theoretically increasing their interest level and therefore the value of the education they ultimately receive.

Critics of an athletics major would be quick to point out how few of our college athletes go on to professional careers. But Pargman compares his hypothetical athletics major to concentrations in theater, music, and art. Few of our theater majors end up on Broadway, few of our art majors have paintings in the Met, and hardly any music majors end up in the Boston Pops. But they still take courses specific to their craft, and proponents of such programs (myself included) are quick to defend their social and academic value. Given that sports and physical education have social and academic value as well, why should they be treated as less worthy of academic study than theater, art, and music — or religion, philosophy, anthropology, or any other social science majors that often have little practicality for a student’s long-term career prospects?

As for the athletes who “go pro in something other than sports,” the athletics major doesn’t have to be a waste. As Pargman argues, students who fall short of professional athletics will simply deal with their college choice the same way other students who chose specific majors do: by applying the skills they have learned in another career path of their choosing. For those who don’t make it, many of the course Pargman proposed would have practical application in fields like education, behavioral sciences, or communications. Such majors could even have further concentrations (like many broad arts and sciences majors do) to push athletes closer to their interests, making it easy for an athletics major to transition his or her skills to physical education, coaching, contractual law, or business and marketing should they not fulfill their goal of becoming a professional athlete.

College education, in the end, is an experiment for all students, and degree programs aren’t necessarily job training programs. The NCAA has focused its academic reforms on increasing standards for incoming athletes and increasing oversight on athletes once they get on campus, but none of that addresses the purpose or function of academics in big-time college sports, or how to make the academic side work in tandem with the athletic side. Letting athletes pursue their interests the way we let other incoming students (particularly those focused on a craft) pursue theirs could address the tension that currently exists between the student and the athlete. Pargman’s proposal may not be perfect, but given the obvious failures of the NCAA’s recent attempts to make academics a serious part of the college athletic experience, it is at least worth considering.

Sometimes, it can seem like pop culture is converging on real life: romantic comedies highlight a vein of unproductive thinking, a movie about an aging parent highlights the path forward through a dilemma, an origin story makes certain bits of psychology make sense, even if they lead a character to different and more dramatic ends than our own. So it was with me and high school reunion movies this year. In addition to shooting guns and kissing girls, Channing Tatum starred with his wife, Jenna Dewan-Tatum in the reunion drama Ten Years. The folks behind the American Pie franchise decided that Jim, Michelle, and company had let their reunion slide a couple of years, and held their ten-year reunion thirteen years after Paul was ushered into manhood by Stifler’s mom. Ben and Kate broke with Thanksgiving’s traditional dominance of sitcoms—though there was a turkey-stealing cold open—and sent its characters back to their high school days. Even when I was in high school, I suppose I was looking forward to who I’d be a decade or more after graduation—after we got back from senior prom, my friends and I somehow ended up watching Grosse Pointe Blank*. But even for someone who was born looking forward to adulthood, being reminded that I actually was going to go back to be a grown-up with people who knew me when I was 17, and seeing how awkwardly it all played out on screen proved to be a little much as the actual day approached.

But I survived! And as someone who is in recovery from the social deficiency elements of my geekiness, if not my affection for cultural ephemera that, when I was in high school, carried less social capital than Dawson’s Creek, the experience left me with some insights. Because so many of you were so helpful in preparing me to go to a suburban hotel and drink not very good bourbon with people I haven’t talked to in ten years, I thought I’d pay them forward for those of you in the audience who are contemplating returning to your hometowns in the year to come, but are as nervous about it as I was**.

1. You Weren’t As Bad As You Thought You Were: Most of my memories of high school are of it as a place I was eager to get out of, mostly so I could start over in place where (almost) nobody knew how awkward I was. It turns out, though, that I’m a pretty unreliable narrator of my own life, as I suspect many of us are as well. And it turns out we’re more generous in our memories of each other than we are in our memories of ourselves. Walking through the door of that hotel, I remembered things I hadn’t thought of in years: marathoning Wild Things and the Usual Suspects on weekend afternoons with a friend I’d lost touch with while we were in college, dancing at prom with another, passing notes—these things we Olds had before cell phones—so thick it was hard to fold them up small enough to palm or slip through locker slots. Going to my reunion let me have back good things that I’d forgotten, including my sense of who I was in high school.

2. No Power In The ‘Verse Can Make You 17 Again: As the evening wore on, one of the guys in my class and I confided to each other that there was something supremely strange about revisiting a part of our lives that none of the people we’re close to now know much about. But the thing about going back is that it didn’t transform us: he didn’t get his long-surrendered hair back or lose his awesome wife, and I didn’t suddenly revert to my high school pixie cut and standard wardrobe of a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt. Our high school selves aren’t people who are lurking in the shadows, waiting to take over our bodies with all the force of demonic possession. The past, in this case, is pretty much past. And we can revisit it in safety.

3. The Things That Made You Geeky Then Are Your Superpowers Now: Okay, this may be more literally true for me than most people. But while not everyone is going to turn their high school obsession with the Star Wars Expanded Universe into a paying job, the number of former geeks in my graduating class elevated by their passions, and the number of formerly popular people who ended up pursuing geeky professions is impressive. They’re working as camera techs on great television shows, actually making music full-time, doing amazing biology research, even working as literal rocket scientists. This isn’t really a Revenge of the Nerds scenario: it’s that after graduation, no matter where we were in high school, we came to a common consensus that sincere enthusiasm is an asset. It’s not about who’s cool and who’s not anymore: it’s about who’s interesting.

Now, none of this will help you confront your high school mean girl or bully, or consummate some unfinished business with a high school crush, or kill it on the dance floor, because I didn’t do any of those things, and I don’t really think they’re essential checkmarks on the reunion list. But the easiest way to trip yourself up in anticipating your reunion—and I certainly did this to myself—is to think that it’s some sort of climactic rebellion, an emotional Battle of the Trident. But the truth is the war is history, and reunion’s just a tournament: done right, everyone survives to go home.

*We also may have gone to IHOP for late-night pancakes. My sense of adventure in high school was calibrated to the same frequency as Liz Lemon’s.

**Which is to say really, embarrassingly terrified, given there was no chance that, unlike in American Reunion there was no chance I’d end up in front of my high school friends in fetishwear a la Michelle and Jim.

This post discusses plot points from the November 18 and 25 episodes of Homeland.

During last night’s episode of Homeland, as Peter/John removed his silenced revolver from his coat, preparing to dispatch with Brody should he no longer prove necessary, I grabbed my boyfriend’s wrist so hard he told me it actually hurt. It was an interesting moment for me and my relationship to this sometimes-miraculous, sometimes-confounding show. The moment was tense and well-constructed, but the prospect of Brody’s death was viscerally upsetting to me not because of the plotting and counterplotting taking place around him, but because of the simpler questions Homeland has obscured this season. What does it mean to be alienated from your country, your family, and the values you once devoted to yourself to protecting? What does it mean to understand the motivations of a terrorist?

Homeland has always been somewhat uneven when it tries to answer those questions, but that it tries to answer them at all has always made it a rather different animal from its counterparts and predecessors. In the first season, and in an inversion of how these things normally work, the show did better when Brody talked about what Abu Nazir meant to him than in the brief flashbacks that outlined his relationship with Issa. In this week’s episode, the discussion between Carrie, Peter, David, and Saul about whether the plot Brody had outlined to them made sense produced one of the most interesting moments the show’s had in some time: Carrie explaining that it made sense because of how it met Abu Nazir’s emotional needs and standards. It was mirrored by Abu Nazir’s explanation to Brody himself, that he could be hunted and killed like bin Laden, his legend reduced by the manner of his death, or he could bring his fight to American soil himself, carry out a plot on his own terms. Nazir’s explanation of his own motivations—apart from the actual plausibility of the mechanics of it—was one of the smarter attempts I’ve seen to imagine how bin Laden’s death has changed the world. Homeland‘s genuine interest in mysteries both large, like why Brody would turn on his country, and small, like how Nazir feels about his place in the world, is the thing that sets the show apart for me even when it delves into more prosaic territory.

And as niftily-constructed as Nazir and Roya’s plot against the vice president is, it’s prosaic. It’s a standard fantasy of hyper-competent terrorism that ignores how small-scale and ineffective plots against America have actually become, and how easily-thwarted those that actually make it to the execution stage have been. I understand that the demands of plot keep some of these fantasies alive on-screen. But those fears also animate policies in the real world: they’re kept alive by interests more powerful than American audiences’ addiction to artificially high stakes. And just as those fears crowd out rational conversations about everything from the Defense Department budget to airline security in the real world, the plot this season has crowded Homeland, too. Last year, the construction of a vest and Tom Walker’s possession of a sniper rifle were comparatively simple logistical concerns that served the contrast between the two men, how they’d responded to torture, and what waited for them on their return. This year, the complexity of the plot against America, and America’s plots against its potential attackers, has put layers in between Brody and his motivations, Roya in between Brody and Nazir, the munitions expert in between Brody and Walden, Quinn in between Carrie and Brody.

The scenes between Brody and Carrie are a constant reminder of how excellent Homeland is when it strips away that clutter and focuses on what draws the two of them together: their shared inability to truly and seamlessly integrate into the roles set out for them. Their difficulty makes them valuable, to a certain extent: Brody can play the hero tenably enough to be of use to Nazir, and Carrie is right often enough to be worth some of the trouble she causes David and her other colleagues at the CIA. But both of their masquerades have expiration dates. Carrie’s already hit one of hers. And Brody is very, very close to his. “I’m going to be in the cell next to you. Which, I have to admit, isn’t the future I imagined for us,” she told him during their sojourn to the motel. “If we saw this through togehter, if we finally stopped Nazir once and for all, that you’d be a real hero. And that fact would somehow make everything you did before not matter. That it would all just be about getting to there.” Quinn may hear “a stage five, delusional getting laid” in the sex he overhears between Carrie and Brody. But they’re clearer-eyed, if more wistful, than he imagines.
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The bridge is yours. And welcome back! I missed y’all.

-SEK, as always, is indispensable on Game of Thrones.

-Paul Greengrass is back directing MLK biopic Memphis.

-Hollywood’s trademark troubles.

-Now I need to read Vader’s Little Princess to see how much Darth Vader’s relationship with Leia has in common with me and my father.

-Planning Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope’s weddings.

It says a lot about the penetration of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes into public consciousness that the folks who cut the trailer for Dwayne Johnson’s new action movie, Snitch, use scenes where characters talk about sentencing guidelines twice in the first minute:

Were this a different movie, I’d take a look at the cliche cartel villains (though I do love me some Benjamin Bratt) and the chase sequences, and I’d probably write it off. But the decision to portray mandatory minimums as both cruel in and of themselves—which,in addition to being applied in racially disparate ways, they are—and to demonstrate the ways in which they can be used to push people in vulnerable circumstances into becoming confidential informants, is astute, and different. Both the New York Times and the New Yorker published blockbuster pieces on the use and misuse of confidential informants earlier this year. The former, by Ted Conover, followed the experiences of one such informant, Alex White, while the latter, by Sarah Stillman, took a more systematic approach. But they both make the point the drug war in particular is increasingly reliant on a system that puts people who have committed small crimes in great danger for very chancy results.

Most of our crime movies operate by showing us the flaws in the law-enforcement system and using the victories and examples of noble exceptions to those flaws to reaffirm our faith in the police and in the courts to keep us safe, combat evil, and act with mercy. Snitch could be that rare crime film that works in a different direction, arguing that systems meant to produce consistency in inconsistent circumstances inject further instability into our government’s efforts to control the flow of narcotics. Even if it’s not willing to indict the war on drugs—and it’s true that there are cartels, and they can be brutally violent—or the law enforcement system as a whole, I’m glad to see movies like Snitch that are more closely rooted in the ambiguities and real impact of our criminal justice system even if they devolve into by-the-numbers shoot-’em-ups. There’s drama to be drawn from the experiences of people whose lives are ruined by an inflexible system, and by the bad deals that prosecutors offer up to them, and stories worth telling about those failures. The setups to our action movies matter, even if a lot of them end the same way.

I agree that Hollywood often does a rather sappy job when it tries to tell stories about people with disabilities, but unlike Ian Buckwalter, writing on The Sessions, which I reviewed in February (when it had a different title), I don’t actually think the answer is that our depictions of disability need to get more despairing:

There’s no rule that says the tougher film has to be the better one, but the problem with Intouchables and The Sessions is that they achieve their sunny dispositions by pulling punches. Any hint of difficulty is immediately tempered so as not to upset the lightly comedic tone of both films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in The Sessions when a power outage causes a failure in the iron lung that allows Mark to breathe. While it’s in character for the devoutly Catholic Mark to greet potential death with the same beatific acceptance he carries through much of the rest of his life, that doesn’t mean the film can’t recognize the dire nature of the circumstances. This should be a tense moment, but The Sessions refuses to acknowledge highs and lows, tension and release. It flatlines from start to finish, even if Mark doesn’t.

Audiard strikes a better balance in Rust and Bone, demonstrating that one can take a pat inspirational story and infuse it with the hardship required to make that inspiration feel earned. Following the loss of her legs, Stéphanie is nearly as defeated as the stroke victim of Amour. As a whale trainer, she makes her living on her feet, and her character’s despair is palpable. More importantly, Audiard makes it impossible to turn away from that despair, unlike the glossed-over expository conversations in Intouchables and Sessions about how their characters dealt with that loss.

The thing is, there’s a difference between a story about someone learning to cope with a newly-acquired disability, and a story about someone with a disability doing something else, like having sex or falling in love. In that first category of story, the goal of the movie is presumably to communicate to a majority able-bodied audience that their negative expectations for what their lives would be like if they suddenly lost, say, the ability to walk, aren’t accurate or complete, and that joy, love, and physical pleasure are still possible. As much as I dislike the idea that movies about people with disabilities need be tragic, I understand why these categories of films include that register of emotions, because they’re a way of hooking in audiences who fear the idea of grave accidents or infections that suddenly change their capacities.

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and em>The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

And I don’t see why a movie like that has to be dark, or despairing. In fact, way the arcs for a lot of the best sex stories work is that there’s a lot of anticipation, and then an anti-climax, rather than an enormous climb and an inspiring victory. The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends with relatively brief sex and a goofy sing-a-long: the emotional work’s done, the victory achieved. Rats Saw God, one of my favorite young adult novels, actually draws some wonderful drama from the main characters’ reactions to the first time they have sex: the fact that it isn’t a transformational experience leaves them feeling confused and somewhat alienated from each other. In The Sessions, the obstacles are Mark’s anxieties, premature ejaculation, his desire to give pleasure as well as to feel it. These are not the things of triumph-over-disability movies: they’re things that a lot of us experience, and Mark’s confinement to his iron lung is the particular thing that inflects his journey through them. But that doesn’t make these experiences and emotions unimportant—if anything, that Mark is concerned with giving pleasure even though it’s harder for him to, say, touch his partner, makes him a hero in comparison to less thoughtful people, whether they have physical limitations or none at all. Sex comedies shouldn’t have to automatically move into a tragic key because a person with a disability is involved in them. Rather, how persons with disabilities—not all of whom acquire those conditions dramatically or suddenly—navigate circumstances that they share with those of us who don’t have disabilities tells us about the universality of those experiences, rather than offering testaments to the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s something disquieting about the idea that the only uses of characters with disabilities should be to provide those testaments. As with, say, gay characters, telling stories about difference is only a first order accomplishment when it comes to diversity. By all means, tell stories about what it means to suddenly move into the ranks of people with disabilities, the legions of wheelchair users. But remember that people are born with disabilities too, and people who have disabilities do far more with their lives than accommodate themselves to the limitations and difficulties they face.