As someone who has read Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles more times than I care to admit, and who harbors a streak of deep and abiding corniness, will confess to being happy at the news that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expecting their first child together. But it’s not just the Royals-watcher in me that’s curious to see how Kate Middleton’s pregnancy plays out. Here are three things I’m thinking of as the media frenzy commences:

1. How will her pregnancy affect the ongoing debate over British press laws? When Princess Diana was pregnant, Queen Elizabeth made a special appeal to the press to consider how they treated the Princess of Wales, given how badly she was suffering from morning sickness, an affliction that also appears to plague her daughter-in law. This time, Kate Middleton’s pregnancy comes in the middle of an event that could put even more pressure on British publications: the release of the Leveson Report into the phone hacking scandal that proposed a much more rigorous regulation scheme for the British press. How British tabloids pursue the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge could end up affecting public sentiment about the Leveson recommendations.

2. It’s crazy-retro to have your job be getting pregnant, but at least that recognizes that pregnancy is work: Usually, we’re uncomfortable discussing the extent to which being pregnant is hard work until it comes to giving birth: then, we call the process labor. Some informal rituals have sprung up to acknowledge the physical work that goes into carrying a child, like the idea of so-called push presents for a partner who’s given birth (the all-time best of those? The biker boots Tim Burton gave Helen Bonham Carter after the birth of their fourth child.). We’re comfortable with the idea that surrogates should be compensated (and we don’t treat them like insane throwbacks, in part because surrogacy isn’t usually a full-time job). But all of these conversations still shy away from the nine-plus months of work that happens before a woman goes into labor, and for state support for women whose pregnancies aren’t as high-profile affairs as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s. The United States is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member country that doesn’t mandate paid parental leave schemes for new parents. It may be insanely old-fashioned for a woman to have as her career goals having two children. But at least when she does, everyone recognizes that she should get totally comprehensive, affordable health care coverage.

3. Boys are no longer the prize: I wrote about this earlier today, but for the first time, a Royal pregnancy doesn’t have to produce a boy to be successful. If Kate has a girl, she gets to be Queen, period, without any worry that she’ll be leapfrogged by a younger brother. That’s awesome, and shockingly overdue.

The rotting zombies on The Walking Dead, foul as they are, have nothing on the show’s decayed human souls. The third season of The Walking Dead has been about what violence and scarcity do to our society’s moral codes — how our sphere of ethical concern narrows to a pinhead as conditions become dire. Last night’s midseason finale hammered the point home, using the battle between Rick’s band of survivors and the Governor’s to examine the hows and whys of moral decline after the apocalypse.

As The Walking Dead becomes less of a turgid zombie soap, and more about the conflict between bands of humans in a dangerous, anarchic world, its central question has become less “how do we survive?” and more “who do we want to survive?” Each major turning point in the midseason finale — Rick’s choice to spare Michonne, Darryl’s decision to turn back for his brother Merle, Carl’s intervention on behalf of a new group of survivors, and the Governor’s big speech casting Merle out of respectable Woodbury society — are all about defining who matters morally and what the answer to that question means for the people asking it.

The Governor’s answer to this question is the simplest and most inhuman: kill everyone who isn’t one of His People. “We’ll have to take them out, let the biters move back in,” he says of the prison group, comparing them to the National Guardsmen he massacred in cold blood at the beginning of the season. While Rick is more compassionate, treating people outside his group as objects of suspicion rather than targets to slaughter, his worldview also centers on a stark us-and-them distinction. “If this goes south, we’re cutting her loose,” he says of Michonne, who has yet to earn ingroup status despite putting herself on the line to rescue Glenn and Maggie from the Governor’s clutches.

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

The moral drama in the struggle between the two groups of survivors, then, isn’t over the appropriateness of groupism in the shadow of the End. Instead, it’s about how we rebuild our moral code from the ashes. The difference between the Governor and Rick rests mostly in how they make decisions, and not the decisions they make.

The Governor is, for all his pieties, a dictator. He alone makes every critical political decision, hiding critical information from his subjects to ensure that they always come to see his own righteousness. His labelling of Rick’s group as “terrorists” who “want to destroy us” depends on Woodbury’s residents not knowing that the attack was really a rescue mission, a worrying suggestion that War on Terrorism secrecy may be dulling our own moral sense. What seems right in Woodbury, in short, is whatever the Governor says is right.

Though Rick declared that “this is not a democracy” at the end of the second season, his decisionmaking has become more cooperative, depending on input and informed consent from all the group members. When Rick asks Darryl to escape with the group and leave Merle behind, he gives him reasons to so, appealing rather than ordering. When the Governor instructs his lover Andrea to stay away from the battle, he dismisses her questions with a curt “do as I ask.”

So though Rick is the clear leader of his group, their moral code is determined by mutual consent and deliberation rather than dictatorial fiat. Indeed, Carl’s suggestion that Rick give up his leadership post in the preview hints that the group’s moral democracy may bleed into an actual one. Under the Governor’s rule, that would be unthinkable.

I caught up with this third season Treme last week, and among other things that struck me about the show—particularly that television shows about music are always going to be viscerally satisfying in a way that even the most beautifully-shot shows about food can never be—that the show really clicked for me this season, and distinguished itself from David Simon’s other shows, through its female characters. I wrote about two of them, LaDonna and Janette, as part of a piece on television’s difficult women for the Daily Beast late last week:

I was initially frustrated by Janette Desautel’s reaction to the opportunity to open a large, well-backed restaurant back in New Orleans. Her disregard for human-resources briefings and her distaste for even the prospect of profit margins seemed petulant to me early in the season. But as the restaurant opened, her temper tantrums started to make sense as the reasonable-sounding restrictions began to make it harder for Janette to run her kitchen, manage her staff in a way that was effective, turn out dishes that became so in demand that it was impossible to fulfill all the orders and still keep quality high, or even hold a benefit for a fellow, if less-glamorous, New Orleans restaurateur.

The experiences of that woman, LaDonna Batiste-Williams, raise the question of what it even means to be strong when the world punishes you for being cool and composed. After surviving a brutal sexual assault and struggling to reopen her family bar in the aftermath of Katrina, LaDonna spent much of this season waiting for her assailant’s trial to begin and trying to push back against demands of protection money. Her rudeness to her husband’s upper-crust relatives or willingness to cuss out the man extorting her may not be badass, but they’re an assertion of dignity to people who are all too willing to peel it off her like a layer of skin. And while LaDonna may never get the baseball bat she keeps behind the bar out in time to chase off the man trying to intimidate her into withdrawing her rape charges, or to keep him from burning her bar, her failures don’t make her weak or flailing.

I also thought Treme did an excellent job this season with two of its much more subtle storylines this year, too: Annie (Lucia Micarelli), a young musician beginning her rise towards the big time, and Sofia (India Ennenga), the daughter of civil rights lawyer Toni Bernette. Annie’s trajectory is outwardly smooth: she signs with an agent who keeps his promises to her, she begins touring and her work is well-received, her album comes out towards the end of the season. What lends the story drama is how her success is received by the people around her. Her mother (Isabella Rosselini), devalues Annie’s success because she isn’t performing classical music, and makes little effort to learn more about the blues tradition Annie’s working in, even as her father makes some efforts. And even worse, her boyfriend Davis, a DJ, is pursuing his career in parallel to Annie’s, and is so distracted by his own dreams that he doesn’t even notice that Annie’s success is happening. Davis is more musically and politically ambitious than Annie is—while she aspires to record some of her old friend Harley’s songs, he’s trying to convince his aunt to fund a scathing opera about Katrina and New Orleans’ musical legacy. But when he finds success, it’s with the musical equivalent of a temper tantrum that goes viral, cussing out his aunt, and Annie, or so it seems, in the process. The two of them break up without a big, bruising fight: neither of them needs to speak out loud the obvious truth that Davis will always be jealous, and Annie’s simply grown beyond his parochialism. By the end of the season, Annie’s performing at Jazz Fest, and Davis watches her, invisible, from the crowd: he finally sees her and her successes, but her world is now too large for him to stand out in it.

Sofia’s story is somewhat more dramatic, but it’s still handled as if the human scale of it is important and worthy. In retaliation for her mother’s investigations into the New Orleans Police Department’s actions during the storm, Sofia becomes the regular subject of traffic stops, warnings from cops, even an arrest for being underage at a party where alcohol is being served. Sofia is doing her best to be a good kid, and to protect both her family and her mother’s work by not getting into trouble—Toni’s surprise when she finds out that Sofia has broken up with an older boyfriend she thought was a bad influence on her daughter is a lovely example of a mother coming face-to-face with her daughter’s maturity and being pleasantly surprised by what she finds there. But it’s New Orleans, and Sofia is a teenager. Some joy and some trouble are inevitable. And when Toni decides to send Sofia off to finish her senior year in Florida, it’s both the right thing and painfully unfair. When Sofia comes home for a visit and finds Terry Colson, an NOPD officer who becomes her mother’s new boyfriend, drinking juice in his boxers, the polarization between them is reversed. Their conversation may consist of Sofia telling Terry that Florida sucks. But from Sofia’s face, she’s unexpectedly pleased that her mother’s found love, or something like it, in the wake of her father’s suicide. Both of them are growing, and for the first time, capable of recognizing it in each other and being happy for each other, as if they are friends as well as mother and daughter.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Maureen Ryan talks to Howard Gordon about last night’s nutso Homeland episode.

-The Daily is dead.

-Whee Game of Thrones production videos:

Immediately after the suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who police say murdered his girlfriend at their home before driving to the Chiefs’ practice facility and shooting himself in front of the team’s coach and general manager, thoughts turned to the role concussions and brain injuries may have played in the tragedy.

But during halftime of last night’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, NBC’s Bob Costas brought up another angle: the role guns, and our nation’s lax gun laws, played in the tragedy. After a brief introduction, Costas quoted Kansas City-based columnist Jason Whitlock, who wrote yesterday that he believed both Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive today were it not for Belcher’s possession of a gun:

‘Our current gun culture,’ Whitlock wrote, ‘ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy. And more convenience store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows? But here,’ wrote Jason Whitlock, ‘is what I believe — if Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.’

Conservatives and gun advocates are, of course, angry at Costas’ insinuation, via Whitlock, that gun control could have prevented the murder of Kasandra Perkins. Fox & Friends blasted Costas this morning, with co-host Brian Kilmeade relying on the tried-and-true point that follows every outbreak of gun violence this country has. “I just don’t know if it’s appropriate enough on a Sunday night, less than 24 hours after this guy took his own life and killed his girlfriend and the mother of his baby, to make that stance,” Kilmeade said. “I don’t think we needed to hear that last night.”

When, then, is the appropriate time to talk about gun violence? According to gun advocates, it wasn’t after another black teenager was shot in a parking lot because he was listening to loud music. It wasn’t after another mass murder at one of our schools, shopping malls, or movie theaters. It wasn’t in a year when another 30,000 Americans lost their lives to firearms (11,000 in homicides), or in a country where 1,800 women like Kasandra Perkins are killed in gun disputes and another 5,000 are treated for assault-related gunshot wounds every year. It wasn’t during presidential debates. It wasn’t after Trayvon Martin was killed for wearing a hoodie, after Jared Lee Loughner shot a member of Congress in the head, after the Dark Knight Rises theater shooting, or after the latest murderous weekend in one of our nation’s biggest cities. So if those weren’t the right times, and this isn’t either, when? Which high-profile murder, suicide, or mass killing will be the one that gets us to talk?

Perhaps, if Jovan Belcher didn’t own a gun, he would have found another way to kill Kasandra Perkins and himself. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have. Having a gun in the home, after all, increases both the risk of homicide and suicide, and 60 percent of our nation’s homicides are committed with guns. Studies have shown that guns in the home increase chances of homicide two to three times, and gun death rates are seven times higher in states that have high household gun ownership (Missouri is 21st, and considered a high-ownership state), according to the Brady Campaign. For suicide, guns present a similar problem. “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk,” according to Harvard’s School of Public Health, and suicides committed with guns are most likely to be successful.

A domestic dispute in any home may leave a woman bloody and bruised, but in a home without a gun, it’s far less likely to leave her murdered. The presence of a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide for women by five times, according to one study, and two-thirds of women killed with guns each year die in domestic disputes. When a domestic dispute involves a firearm, it is 12 times more likely to end in homicide. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps his mother, who watched her son shoot the mother of his three-month-old daughter, could have helped calmed the fight. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps the coaches and executives who watched him put the final bullet through his own head, or the police officers who arrived seconds too late, could have saved his life.

We’ll never know if the lack of a legally-owned gun would have changed the situation and kept both Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher alive. Whitlock believes it would have, and I do too. What we do know is that Saturday morning, a gun made it easier for a man to kill his girlfriend, to take his own life, to leave his three-month-old daughter without her parents. And the Jovan Belcher story happens somewhere in this country every day. Somewhere, today, a man will shoot his girlfriend. A woman will shoot herself. A teenage boy will die at the hand of a firearm. A dispute that could have ended with a punch will instead end with a bullet. If that isn’t enough to make us talk about the role of guns in our society, I don’t know what is.

One of the things the controversy over an old blog post by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn last week raised for me was a common dynamic on the internet. First, someone will write something that’s patently offensive, people will discover it and have a justifiable—and predictable—reaction to that content, and defenders of the original writer will claim that the writing is satire, and the people who are offended are merely humorless and incapable of recognize what’s going on around them. In the case of Gunn’s original post, Gunn himself has acknowledged that his attempt at satire was ineffective, writing in an apology that “A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings.” And the conversation around the post has raised what I think is actually a really useful conversation about what satire is and what it takes for it to be effective.

On Tumblr, SciFiGirl47 offers what she calls the Subway Test, arguing that satire of misogynistic material isn’t actually effective if the language it uses would come across as genuinely threatening to someone who hasn’t been informed in advance that it’s satire. She asks readers to imagine themselves on a subway car, alone, with someone they don’t know:

What you do know is that you are alone with him. And it’s a long way to the next station. Your cell phone doesn’t work on this line. For all intents and purposes, you are trapped with this man. There is no where for you to go, you can’t get out and you can’t call for help, and you have to judge what is happening.

I want you to read James Gunn’s comments and imagine you are trapped in a subway car, alone and isolated with a man who is saying these things to you. I want you to imagine that he is looking at you, maybe looking you straight in the eye, not even glancing at your body, but he is staring you down, and he is saying those words. Do you feel ashamed? Afraid? Do you want to get away? Do you want to get your mace out? Then this piece of ‘satire’ has failed the subway test.

Over at her blog The Nerdy Bird, Jill Pantozzi argues that it isn’t enough for satire to be visible: it has to reveal something about its target.

Merriam-Webster has two definitions of the word:

1. a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2. wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

What human vice is Gunn holding up to ridicule or criticism here? What vice or folly is he using sarcasm or irony to deflect? The one answer I’ve heard to those questions is Gunn was attempting to ridicule the many comic fans online who write this type of gross list regularly but if that was his intent, he failed. The list is not satire, at best, it’s base humor.

Read more

This post discusses plot details from the December 2 episode of Homeland.

“I still prefer to figure the problem out, not obliterate it,” Saul told Dar Adul when the two men met over chicken and waffles at the beginning of this episode of Homeland. “You’re too sensitive for this line of work,” Adul told him. “Always have been.” There was once a time when this show was about that central difference of opinion about how to deal with terrorism, Carrie’s preference for building relationships with her sources pitted against David Estes’ way with a drone strike or a SWAT team. But increasingly, Homeland leaves conversations like these hanging in the air in favor of plastic ties and pacemakers. Remarks like David’s explanation that Quinn is “here to kill terrorists, Saul. Like all of us,” could stand on their own if the events around them questioned or affirmed his assumptions and the wisdom of that position. But last night’s episode of Homeland reaffirmed a worry I’ve had this season since it expanded beyond the core question of whether Brody will commit an act of terrorism: the show increasingly feels in love with plot mechanics rather than moral quandaries and character development.

There was a bit of moral debate in the scene between Carrie and Nazir while he held her in captivity, after she rejected his attempts to give her water. “Who is the terrorist?” Nazir wanted to know, querying Carrie on the drone strikes. But the scene couldn’t quite draw out a contrast or spark an actual debate between their world views there because Carrie isn’t even close to a forceful advocate for the use of drones. Instead, their conversation fell into a rather predictable track. Carrie reminded Nazir that his tactics can be similar to drone strikes, asking him to imagine “A young man enters a Shia village pushing a cart filled with candy and toys. He waits for all the children to gather round, then reaches back, and flips a switch.” Nazir tells her that he believes there’s a difference because”We fight with what we have…Generation after generation must suffer and die. we are prepared for death. Are you? With your pension plans and organic foods, your beach houses and sports clubs. Do you ahve the perserverence, the tenacity, the faith? Because we do.” Nazir “We carry God in our hearts, our souls. To die is to join him. It may take a century, two centuries, three centuries. But we will exterminate you.” Carrie points out that it’s that worldview that shapes her perception of him: “Like I said. You’re a terrorist.”

If the show had been able to make a connection between Nazir’s eliminationist worldview and the idea that it’s possible, or even desirable, to kill all terrorists and—as we’ve learned from reporting about the Obama administration’s drone strikes program—potential terrorists, represented by Estes and Quinn, it would have wandered into truly challenging territory. And the show might even have felt stronger to me if it made the point that, in the distorted world these characters inhabit, children are the only people still capable of taking moral responsibility. “Every morning I wake up and for a few brief seconds I’m free, I can just look at the sky, or listen to the birds again,” Finn, the only person in this show who experiences ongoing guilt, tells Dana when she agrees to see him while in hiding. “And then, wham. I remember the sound of that woman hitting the windshield. I remember that I’ve killed another human being and I can’t take it back…Remember that night? At the top of the Washington Monument? Can we start over?” Dana is sorrowful, but absolute, as she tells him no. “Whatever we felt, we broke it,” she reminds him of his dismissal of her. “We killed it, just the same way we killed that woman.”

Brody’s decision to help kill Vice President Walden may have been the big event in this episode, but it actually felt somewhat anti-climactic in this context, and I wouldn’t say hisaracter arc truly felt resolved. There are countless questions on the way to the moment when Brody tells Walden that he’s withdrawing from contention for the vice presidency because “It’s not for my family. It’s for me. Because I want to feel clean again. And because I pretty much disagree with everything you say and do…You still don’t get it, do you? I’m killing you.” Why didn’t he call Saul or someone else in the CIA when he knew Carrie was in danger? The only plausible explanation is that he knows about the mole, a plot line that hasn’t been mentioned since the first season of the show, but there’s no indication that Brody has any idea. How did Brody avoid the Vice President’s security? Isn’t that office monitored by video? Why doesn’t Brody just take a picture of the serial number and text it to Nazir? Or given that Carrie’s escaped, buy time with a number that’s a digit off? And really, what makes him decide to go through his collaboration with Nazir in the first place once Carrie was off and running? The only thing that really makes sense to me is that it’s a kind of demented, in-the-moment compromise, an opportunity to be a hero to Carrie and to fulfill his deep-seated desire to kill Walden, presumably triggered by Nazir requiring him to “Swear. On Issa’s immortal soul.”

And it’s in this environment that Estes pulls a power play on Saul, diverting him from the efforts to surround the power plant where Carrie says Nazir is holed up after her escape. “I’m on my way to catch a terrorist,” he asks them. “What could be more important than that?” No one says it out loud, but apparently, the means in which that terrorist is caught, and who takes the credit for it. Or as Adul puts it, “Little things I can count on mean more and more to me as I get older.” If only Homeland was still as good as it once was at parsing those little things that mean everything, that make all the moral difference in the world.