Marvin Miller, the labor leader who built the Major League Baseball Players Association into sports’ most powerful union, died today. He was 95.

You won’t find Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t among the game’s most important figures. The Babe Ruth of labor negotiations, Miller took over a weak union in 1966 and immediately turned it into a force that would be modeled in other sports thereafter.

Miller led the union through a total of five work stoppages and, as adviser to the MLBPA, worked alongside it during three more. His victories were numerous. He led baseball players into the first collectively bargained contract in professional sports history in 1968; in 1972, he led the first major players’ strike in the history of American professional sports. Later that year, he led former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s unsuccessful challenge of the reserve clause, the rule that gave owners sole control over player contracts and movement. In 1975, baseball’s independent arbitrator — who existed because of a union victory — invalidated the reserve clause in response to another Miller-led challenge, paving the way for free agency that gave players labor rights they had never had before.

Free agency ensured that baseball’s players wouldn’t be excluded from the new-found prosperity that came from television contracts. When Miller took over the union in 1966, the average salary was just $14,000. By 1976, it had grown to $52,000 and the next year, star players like Reggie Jackson received multimillion-dollar contracts. The rise in salaries bolstered the players’ once-meager pension plan, making it the real retirement program they had long sought. By the time he retired in 1982, the average salary was up to $245,000; on the day of his death, it exceeded $2.3 million.

Critics of professional sports often point to the astronomical salaries players now receive. Those are, in part, Miller’s doing, but that is a point to praise, not to criticize. Miller recognized that the labor of the athletes he represented had substantial value, and a $6,000 minimum salary that hadn’t moved in nearly two decades wasn’t close to meeting it. It was Miller who convinced players to think like union workers (he came from the steelworkers union) who had extracted better salaries and benefits from corporate owners in other industries; it was Miller who got players to hold firm during fights for their rights. It was Miller who, when players were angry at Flood for disrupting the status quo, eventually coalesced them behind the idea that they weren’t just lucky to play a boy’s game for a living, but that they had worth and rights and that neither was being honored by baseball’s employment structure.

His victories resonated both inside and outside baseball, which today is home not just to the strongest union in sports but perhaps the strongest union in America. The 1981 strike he led and the 1994 World Series-cancelling strike that followed still stand as models of solidarity and determination; rather than break the union, the ’94 strike seemingly broke owners, who finally realized they would have to negotiate in good faith. After labor disputes ground baseball to a halt eight times between 1972 and 1995, the sport hasn’t had a work stoppage since. Miller is gone, but the union that has made baseball prosperous for both owners and players today is built on the foundations he put in place.

“All players – past, present and future – owe a debt of gratitude to Marvin, and his influence transcends baseball,” MLBPA director Michael Weiner said in a statement. “Marvin, without question, is largely responsible for ushering in the modern era of sports, which has resulted in tremendous benefits to players, owners and fans of all sports.”

Miller’s victories spurred labor movements in the other major American sports, leaving a legacy that today makes sports one of the labor movement’s strongest fronts. It isn’t implausible to think that without him, sports today would be union-free games where the labor didn’t share in the prosperity gained by the corporate class. Even if baseball owners never get over themselves and put Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, his legacy will stand among the giants of sports. Marvin Miller didn’t just change baseball. He made all of our sports better games.

At Gawker this morning, Max Read did a thorough job of explaining why Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who appears to have shown considerable disappointment in real life that he’s not attractive to some of his very young colleagues, is perhaps not the person best fit to decry Daniel Craig’s chiseled physique and to praise retro, older sex symbols like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as Cohen did his column yesterday. But reading through Cohen’s lament that ladies of roughly my age seem to dig Craig more than we do grizzled syndicated columnists, I think that Cohen, without intending to, is expressing an anxiety that’s worth examining. James Bond’s being treated like a Bond girl. The ascendance of young adult literature means that pop culture has more and more gorgeous young men who are offered up like a dessert tray for heroines’ pleasures. And as images of what makes a man attractive and successful as determined by female desires and standards proliferate in our culture, it makes sense that the guys watching at home would start to worry if they measure up, and to think about what would happen to them if they started facing ideals as rigid as those imposed on women.

That Cohen, whether he recognizes it or not, is not alone in his anxiety doesn’t exactly make his critique of James Bond in comparison to older, less athletic, but still super-rich and super-white guys thoughtful or incisive. Desirable masculinity, as Cohen outlines it, is a pretty great deal for men, or at least, men of a certain financial position and class upbringing. A world in which men can take the things they learned when they were young about how to “handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin,” or about how to be the kind of man who “knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning,” buy some style along the way, and have beautiful women fall into their laps is one that doesn’t force those men to suffer much in the way of anxiety or upkeep. There’s no female gaze or female judgement here—nor any concern for female pleasure, the question of what those male bodies might be good for. Men present the standards for manhood, and women effortlessly—gratefully, really—accept them.

Cohen dismisses the current crop of sculpted hunks that Daniel Craig represents as “some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer,” but the standards for what makes a man sexy that he’s describing are no more natural or objective. And I’m curious if he’d identify the beauty of the women he cites in his column, like Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor, as effortless and natural, rather than the product of beauty standards and the punishing regimes and restrictive clothes that helped women accomplish them. One of the earliest contradictions I understood as a young teenage girl reading fashion magazines was that I was supposed to look “natural” and “effortless,” but that it took an enormous amount of work and money to recreate the looks that I was told embodied those standards. I learned that my own lip color and texture was less natural than a glossy pink, that the blush of my unadorned cheek looked less vital than a layer of foundation, powder, and blush. I’m glad I had that education so I could see the distance and the contradiction, enjoy wearing bright red lipstick for its artificiality and sense of performance, not because I believed that my own hue was an error or imperfection. But it’s not an easy education to acquire, or to shake off in favor of truly discerning what I want to look like and feel, and I don’t envy someone like Cohen coming to his own version of it later in life, or reckoning with the work he’d have to do to meet the standards laid out for him. I feel a lot more concern, however, for teenage boys who are turning to steroids or working out more than is actually healthy to meet those standards

In a way, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point in our culture, but one that still involves men and women (when those are the parties to the conversation) talking past each other. What’s interesting to me about Daniel Craig’s body is less how it looks than in what he does with it as James Bond. The contrast between the force he’s able to exercise (as James Poulos put it on Twitter, “Soooo to be clear, CraigBond’s muscles are things you have to have if you are a blunt instrument. Get the causal arrows right.”) and the tenderness and sensuality Craig in particular shows women is what’s attractive about him. Watching him curl up under a running shower with Vesper or bowl her, laughing, over a hospital bed, the delicacy of the way he unbuttons Eve Moneypenny’s blouse, or the rough hurry with which he pushes his unnamed paramour up against a wall in their lean-to on the beach—these all speak to an attentiveness to and experience with women’s bodies that’s far more relevant to the question at hand than Bond’s ability to deal with a formally trained waiter, though in Casino Royale, he seems to navigate fancy restaurants just fine. While neither Edward Cullen nor Christian Grey does it for me, I can understand why those archetypes are so attractive to some of the women who consume them, and not just because they’re described as very handsome: these are men who are bringing considerable physical power or substantial sexual experience to bear in service of their partners’ pleasure*.

The question of how we want our bodies to look, and how we want other people to react to them, has long stood in for how we want them to feel, how we want them to be touched, and treated. This isn’t to say that looks don’t matter, but they’re intertwined with a set of issues we’re much less capable of having productive public conversations about. I’m glad, to a certain extent, that more men are coming to an understanding of how culture contributes to this nasty bit of sleight-of-hand for women, particularly after what’s felt like a particularly intense decade of Beauty And The Slob pairings. But this is a case when turnabout isn’t fair play for people on either end of the equation.

*More thoughts on this tomorrow.

Over at Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera talked to analyst Geoffrey Zatkin about the market conditions for video games that have only female protagonists, as opposed to male protagonists, or the choice to play as a male or female main character. There are a lot of insights in there worth considering, but this one stood out to me:

We know from our previous article that marketing spend is one of the few, if not the only, things that can overcome negative reviews. Television commercials, ads in magazines, and even shelf space in stores are all for sale, and the more you have to spend the better your game will sell.

Games with only female heroes are given half the marketing budget as games with male heroes. That’s an enormous handicap that cripples their ability to sell well. “Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said.

So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do publishers send female-lead games out to die without proper support? “I think it might be, and I think in some cases, though this is a guess, that these games may be considered more niche, and you advertise niche games less,” Zatkin said.

It’s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?

And this is exactly a point. I don’t want to hear that video games starring women don’t sell as those starring men unless you can show me a persistent failure of video games starring women that have received the same quality and investment in their advertising campaigns and rollouts. Don’t tell me that African-American actors can’t conquer international box office until you make the same efforts to build more Will Smiths as you do to build Taylor Kitsches and Daniel Craigs. Our assumptions about what works and what doesn’t, what will sell, and what won’t, are not natural laws. They’re decisions we’ve made.

The bridge is yours.

-Girls on skateboards in Afghanistan.

-More details on the new Star Trek villain, maybe.

-I am totally buying Sarah Silverman’s babysitting app.

-I am not sure how I feel about Lenny Kravitz playing Marvin Gaye.

-I really hope this Rupert Murdoch miniseries makes it stateside.

-We may be losing Cousin Matthew from Downton Abbey.

Deadline, in the course of writing up Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicles the efforts of the team that finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, notes a juxtaposition the movie makes between the Obama administration’s stance on torture

There were charges that in the heat of the Presidential campaign the Obama administration was givng unprecendented cooperation since obviously a positive film about the capture of Bin Laden couldn’t hurt his re-election chances. The filmmakers always denied that and in fact in the finished product unveiled today Obama is only seen or heard one time in newsreel footage talking about how the U.S. would never tolerate inhumane means of torture in order to elicit information even as the film’s early scenes vividly shows such uses as waterboarding and other horrific acts to get the info they desire. Not exactly a pretty picture.Other than that there is no mention of President Obama and his efforts to make this happen except occasion references to the intense interest of the President as to how this operation was going to be enacted. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is never seen or mentioned.

I can’t tell from this description if the movie’s conclusion is that torture works, or if it’s presented as a tactic that failed and is replaced by others that produce higher-quality information. This was a debate that began immediately after President Obama announced bin Laden’s death, and however it shakes out, Zero Dark Thirty will reignite this enormously difficult conversation, which has lapsed somewhat in fact of bin Laden’s death. Either way, this—and advertising for the movie that suggests that our invasion of Iraq was part of the hunt for bin Laden—suggests that Zero Dark Thirty‘s politics are going to be much more complicated than an Obama reelection vehicle would have been. Anyone who knows Bigelow’s work at all would have known how ludicrous thinking she’d produce that kind of movie is: she’s far too cagey a filmmaker for that. And it suggests that the Obama administration’s assistance to the filmmakers is something more complicated than a collaboration with a friendly filmmaker, and certainly more of a gamble.

Stoner comedies are a venerable staple of cinema, and have been for a long time, but marijuana enthusiasts have tended to hover around the edge of television, particularly on the networks, where they’re more a fodder for jokes than serious contenders for main characters. But as marijuana legalization has become a political reality at the ballot box, pot may move to the center stage on television, too. Entourage producers Rob Weiss, Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson, whose tenure on the HBO sitcom gave them some sense of how to make lighting up a bong, or the possession of marijuana, or a dearth of marijuana, funny, just sold a show to Fox , The Happy Tree, about a burned-out lawyer who becomes a spokesman for a marijuana legalization movement. Whether the show ends up making it to the air or not, and if it does, being any good or not, it raises an interesting question: why haven’t we cracked how to make political procedurals?

In recent memory, we’ve had two effective shows that would meet that description, West Wing and Parks and Recreation. Both of those shows illustrate what makes it harder to do a political procedural than a crime show: the fight isn’t the same every week, and the episodes can’t hit the same satisfying rhythm of discover a body, fix on the wrong suspect, find the right suspect, trial, and verdict. On the national level, the dilemmas on West Wing ranged from bringing a recalcitrant Congress to heel, shutting down an advocate who could make trouble for the administration, deciding whether to go to war, or dealing with an assassination attempt. But the throughline was the power of the presidency and how it could be deployed. On Parks and Recreation, the episodes frequently revolve around event planning and execution, a flexible structure that’s carried the show through everything from sister city visits, to weddings, to reunions of Parks Department directors, to campaign stops.

It’s trickier to come up with that kind of structure for a story about a movement, because the tasks are different when you’re outside of government and seeking power rather than wielding it. That doesn’t mean that episodes can’t be organized around the kinds of events Leslie Knope takes on: movements need rallies, and meetings, and election days, which make for terrific climaxes. But rather than a straight episode-by-episode procedural with little continuity across the course of a season, it probably makes more sense to structure a story about a movement like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, setting up an elected official, a judge, a ballot initiative, or a commission as a Big Bad, and devoting much of the season to a meeting, a change of heart, a defeat, or a victory. Not all the episodes have to deal exclusively with whatever the drive towards victory is, but that fight will give a spine to each season of the show, without which it would be easy for a program like this to become a baggy, bleary collection of jokes about sparking up. It’s not that I don’t like those. But if you want momentum and stakes for something like The Happy Tree, you have to understand that marijuana isn’t just a matter of fancy Hollywood dealers and Harold and Kumar’s business hippies, and figure out how to make questions of enforcement, cultivation, taxation, and distribution interesting beyond Johnny Drama’s desperation for a dispensary hat.

There’s been a lot of furor in Hollywood over a Christian witness video made by Angus T. Jones, who for ten seasons has played the half man on Two and a Half Men, in which he calls out the show that’s been his paycheck, asking viewers:

Please stop filling your head with filth. Please. People say it’s just entertainment. The fact that it’s entertainment. Do some research on the effects of television and your brain and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to the television…It’s bad news. I don’t know if it means any more coming from me. But you might have heard it otherwise. But watch out…A lot of people don’t like to think how deceptive the enemy is. He’s been doing this a lot longer than any of us have been around…You cannot be a true, God-fearing person and be on a show like that.

The video itself is a rambling splice of several conversations, in which Jones discusses how he came to Seventh Day Adventism, what the series of study videos he’s endorsing in this clip means to him, and, in fairly generic terms, what he’s learned about the impact of entertainment on viewers:

I understand why this is an entertainment industry story—Jones is effectively pulling an inverse Charlie Sheen, whose meltdown-fueled insults to the show’s producers got him fired, and explaining why he’s too rectitudinous to continue working on Two and a Half Men, which maybe says something about a past expiration date for a show that was once one of CBS’s biggest hits. And certainly it’s fair for critics to ask whether Jones intends to stop cashing a paycheck and live up to his standards for being “a true, God-fearing person.”

But I’d actually like to hear in more detail what Jones thinks about the show where he effectively grew up. How did Two and a Half Men affect Jones’ views of women? What did the show’s perspective teach him about what it means to be a good man, and a successful man, if the two ideas are different? When he interacts with fans of the show, do they seem to be taking away different messages than the ones he thought he grew up conveying? How does he feel about Jake, the character he’s playing, specifically? I’d imagine Jones’ critique of the show might skew more towards the show’s deviations from Biblically-ordained gender roles, where mine might focus on the show’s dismissive attitudes about women. And I’m more likely to blame the work of Man rather than the Adversary for creating those images and disseminating those attitudes. But I don’t think Jones is wrong to take culture, or his role in producing it, seriously.