Tomorrow, I go on the road for both the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour and the Sundance Film Festival. Posting will continue generally apace, with some interruptions allowable for travel days. And guest bloggers will back me up while I’m holed up in movie theaters at Sundance, after which I’ll be back in action on the 23rd.

I’m excited about both TCA and Sundance this year. I think 2013 could be a huge breakout year for women in cable drama, so I’ll be looking forward to FX and Showtime’s presentations in particular. And Sundance has an impressive competition lineup this year, from a depressive Kristen Bell in The Lifeguard to Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant in Fruitvale. I’ll look forward to reporting back. And if there’s anything you’re particularly excited about in upcoming film and television, or questions you have, let me know, and I’ll keep an eye out in Los Angeles and Park City.

The announcement today that, at the end of its contract with The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan is taking his Daily Dish blog independent, and plans to support it with a metered subscription costing $19.99, has been treated, with some justification, like a major development. It’s rare to see a blogger who’s been fortunate enough to make it into the mainstream publishing apparatus decide to leave it and return to the independence and risk of the early days of the blogosphere. And Sullivan’s decision will be an important test case for what price readers assign to his site, and how many of them place a specific monetary value on the Dish at all. But it’s important to recognize that, while it’s a big deal for this particular blog, the choice to take the Dish independent and what happens afterwards shouldn’t be overinterpreted.

“People form an emotional relationship with the site and have a sense of belonging and take pride in being able to support something they enjoy,” Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova told the Guardian last week of the reason she relies on subscriptions rather than advertising to support her site. “It’s the same reason people have been donating to public libraries for centuries.” But that emotional connection that allows some sites to survive, that allows Louis C.K. to make an enormous amount of money from independently distributing a special and selling tickets for his tour, or that allows certain projects to be funded almost immediately on Kickstarter is also a reason that many publications won’t be able to get by solely on the passion of their audience. Or, as Time’s James Poniewozik put it on Twitter, “Less interested in whether ppl willing to pay for @sullydish blog than how many total blogs they’d be willing to pay $20/year each.”

It’s great for Sullivan and company, whose support this blog has benefitted a great deal from over the years, to go independent, and I heartily hope they succeed. But I hope their business model becomes sustainable not because I think we need it as a sole light forward in a dark publishing landscape. Rather, I think we need a lot of models, so new entrants into the market have lots of paths to sustainability. Some products that have been prestige for the entire run of their existence, like The New Yorker, will be able to flourish in their walled gardens without ever venturing out into a more open marketplace. Others, that have both passionate and casual readers, and perform the services both of delivering basic news information and offering up longer, more proprietary analysis, like the New York Times and the Dish will do well with metered models. Projects like ThinkProgress and Pro Publica, which want a certain amount of independence from corporate interests and protections from the vicissitudes of the advertising marketplace, will successfully justify their necessity to a variety of non-profit funders. Rather than aiming to be among the most privileged and valued of products and individuals from the start—a position that guarantees financial support, but that doesn’t clarify the nature of the product they’re distributing—publications and content distributors would do better to know the fundamental nature of their business, and to choose a revenue support model based on that.

The success or failure of the Daily Dish’s meter model will tell us something about what kind of support a site with that sort of brand, longevity, and audience can expect to muster, just as the Times’ paywall has given us similar data for large, long-established newspapers, and Talking Points Memo did for the reported news site that grew out of Josh Marshall’s blog and discussion community. But it shouldn’t have to be a litmus test for the future of online journalism. Instead, this should be a reminder that we’re at the beginning of a long period of developing new business models out of the decline of one old one.

Last July, the NCAA leveled Penn State University’s football program with sanctions for its involvement with and cover-up of the Jerry Sandusky rape scandal. The sanctions vacated 14 years of wins, banned the school from participating in bowl games for four years, and levied $60 million in fines. With the exception of the so-called “death penalty” it leveled on Southern Methodist University in 1986, it was the most far-reaching punishment the NCAA had ever issued.

This morning, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) announced at a press conference that his state was bringing an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA to challenge those sanctions. Flanked by area business owners, state politicians, and Penn State students, Corbett called the NCAA’s actions “overreaching and unlawful,” and accused the organization of overstepping its legal bounds in punishing Penn State.

The lawsuit may be futile. Penn State, after all, agreed to the sanctions, though Corbett reasoned that it did so only to evade the “death penalty.” Corbett’s motivations, meanwhile, seem far from pure. He has an election coming up in 2014, and he’s about to become the subject of another investigation, as incoming Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) has promised to probe his role as attorney general in the investigation and cover-up of Sandusky’s crimes. And there are plenty of other questions to be asked. Neither Penn State nor the current attorney general are party in the suit, which only contributes to the feeling that the lawsuit is more exhibition than substance. It is also unclear how expensive the case will be for taxpayers at a time when the state is already facing a multibillion-dollar budget gap.

Despite the facts against the case and the murky questions that remain, though, it is hard to argue that the NCAA and president Mark Emmert didn’t leave the door open to such a suit when they punished Penn State. And as such, it’s hard to imagine that the organization and Emmert are getting anything else than what they asked for.

The NCAA’s punishment of Penn State was sloppy. It reeked of desperation, a public relations ploy to comfort everyone into thinking that it had done something — anything — to address the Penn State problem. The NCAA never conducted its own investigation, instead relying on the Freeh Report commissioned by the university. There was no hearing before the Committee on Infractions, no notice of allegations, no charges against the school, all typical components of an NCAA case. In announcing the sanctions, which he seemed to reach unilaterally, Emmert never specified which NCAA rule Penn State had broken.

That is the heart of Corbett and Pennsylvania’s suit. “The NCAA has punished Penn State without citing a single concrete NCAA rule that Penn State has broken, for conduct that in no way compromised the NCAA’s mission of fair competition, and with a complete disregard for the NCAA’s own enforcement procedures,” the complaint states. In doing so, the complaint asserts that the NCAA, acting as a trade association, violated antitrust law in a way that will have a “devastating, long-lasting, and irreparable effect on the Commonwealth, its citizens, and its economy.”

That the NCAA violated antitrust law, that its members essentially conspired to decimate Penn State football, is “going to be very hard to prove,” ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack said this afternoon.

Regardless of whether Pennsylvania wins the suit, though, the NCAA’s sloppy punishment has indirectly turned this into an even bigger mess than it already was, and it could get even worse. The lawsuit could jeopardize the investigation Kane, who takes office this month, has promised to lead, giving Corbett an easy out to avoid commenting on a pending issue and perhaps preventing the public from learning exactly how far into the state government the vines of the Sandusky scandal stretched. Corbett isn’t a hero here, and I’m still not sold that this lawsuit should have been filed. But it is now entirely and unfortunately possible that the NCAA’s punishment may inadvertently cause more problems in the clean up of Penn State than it ever hoped to fix.

When the Motion Picture Association of America on December 20 came out in support of President Obama’s efforts on gun control in the wake of the Newtown, the organization simultaneously aligned itself with the productive side of a national conversation and set up a strategic trap that the National Rifle Association walked into the very next day. In a shocking and incoherent press conference that attempted to shift the conversation away from regulation of gun and ammunition purchasing and ownership, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed pop culture that was, in some cases, decades old, for America’s mass gun killings.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Combat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” he said. “I mean we have blood-soaked films out there, like ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Natural Born Killers.’ They’re aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”

The absence of any evidence that Adam Lanza, the alleged Sandy Hook shooter, had consumed any of the cultural artifacts LaPierre brought up would have been enough to render LaPierre’s assertions ludicrous and diversionary. And that’s without taking into account in the question of what impact media consumption does and doesn’t have on the general public’s actions and social attitudes, rather than on people who are mentally ill or who might be predisposed to violence, a subject nicely and soberly summed-up by the media scholar Jason Mittell. But there’s a difference between suggesting that it makes more sense to regulate mass culture than to regulate our access to the weapons that make it possible to translate violent plans into mass killings, and talking about what it would take to shift our mass culture away from violence as a major subject and as a primary way of demonstrating competence and heroism. But the people who try to hide behind the former argument are almost uniformly uninterested in the policies and shifts in the market it would take to accomplish the latter without regulation or abridgment of freedom of speech.

1. Increase funding for public broadcasting: If you want to see more non-violent television on the airwaves, it makes more sense to treat it like an emerging product, like solar energy, that needs to be significantly subsidized until it can build the market that allows it to be self-sustaining. I imagine the NRA and other conservatives who spring to blame violent popular culture for American violence would never get behind massively expanding funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that, rather than trying to regulate Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones, is probably the quickest way to make non-violent popular culture more competitive in the overall marketplace. What about funding levels that would allow PBS to start an HBO-like movie channel, buying the rights to buzzy, relevant films like Margin Call and producing features like Too Big To Fail? How about funding that would support the purchase of more British shows like Downton Abbey, letting PBS take on BBC America, or a foreign language network that would broadcast subtitled shows from Israel, like Hatufim, or Scandinavian noir shows that have become part of the competitive advantage for services like Hulu or networks like Link TV? Or simply funding that would let PBS advertise more of its programming more heavily, building the kinds of audiences that networks can with in-company ad slots? This will never, ever happen. But that it won’t shows how unserious conservative media critics are about building credible, mass-market alternatives to successful, and violent, commercial programming.
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During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I had a chance to see Ai Weiwei: According to What?, an exhibit of the Chinese artist’s work that’s running at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, DC, until February 24. In recent years, Ai’s work as a critically important political provocateur has made him even more famous than his art. But the show’s a really stunning reminder of how indivisible his vision as an artist is from his vision for China as a more humane, democratic society.

While the show is framed, to a certain extent, by a huge collection of Ai’s photography from his time in the United States, including portraits of Allenn Ginsberg, images of AIDS patients during some of the worst years of the epidemic, snapshots of Bill Clinton in Harlem, and personal photographs that offer up a vision of New York that’s radically different, and much more Chinese, than the one that dominates popular culture, the best individual pieces in the show address China, not the United States. On a macro level, the theme of According to What? is the irreducible individuality of the parts that make up a whole. In a solid block girded by metal pipes, it’s impossible not to see the beauty of the individual pieces that have been fit together to compose it:

In a sea of ceramic crabs, which represent a feast to which Ai invited his followers, I was struck by the expression of one of them:

The pieces are a rebuke both to Party attempts to tamp down the individuality of its citizens, and to the tendency outside of China to see the nation as a monolith.

That same principal is at work in one of the largest pieces in the installation, and one that expresses a more recent theme in Ai’s work. An arrangement of rebar that Weiwei’s studio obtained from the remains of schools that collapsed—allegedly because of shoddy construction practices—during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed 68,000 people is overwhelming in the aggregate, but particularly beautiful when you get up close to the individual pieces of steel:

And he inverts that idea in an enormous snake, sewn together from matching backpacks representing the thousands of children who died in those schools. Individually, they represent their families’ private griefs. But together, their deaths anchor a collective and public outrage, an entity with coils and fangs—all that remains is the question of whether they’ll be used:

It’s a tremendous show, and a sharp rebuke not just to the Chinese government and to anyone who dismisses Ai as a simple political activist, but to the idea that art and politics somehow occupy separate spheres. Art doesn’t lose any of its dignity when it’s applied to protest. And politics is not somehow exempt from the powerful examination that comes from the outside perspectives of artists.

There’s a lot to chew over in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody slavery epic, and the second in a planned trilogy of revenge movies, the third of which will be about black World War II fighter pilots. There’s the movie’s worship of cool masculinity, even as, like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln it marginalizes the role black women played in the fight for their own liberation. There’s the reaction to a black man, first killing white people for money, and then to eradicate the forces that have consistently brutalized his family and denied him his humanity, something that’s been rightly demolished by other critics. But as I’ve thought about the movie in the weeks since I’ve seen it—and I needed that time to really consider Django Unchained—it strikes me that it’s as interesting a movie about whiteness, solidarity, and how best to achieve social progress, as it is on any of these other questions.

And it’s impossible to consider that element of the movie without thinking about it in context of Lincoln. Like long-term abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens’ decision, on the floor of the House, to moderate his stated views on the equality of black Americans to win support for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in Spielberg’s film, a crucial moment in Django Unchained comes when German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a newer advocate of equality, is offered an opportunity to avoid violence and advance the cause of equality with social moderation—except that in this case, he chooses purity, radicalism, violence, and ultimately his own death.

Where Stevens is a long-standing participant in the struggle for black liberation, Schultz is a newcomer to radical action against slavery, and a rather accidental one at that. Though he initially approaches Django, when the other man is imprisoned as a member of a slave-trading caravan, in a tone that makes the white men transporting uncomfortable enough to tell Schultz to “stop talking to him like that,” by which he means as if Django is a man possessed of agency and opinions, he treats Django as an equal only as in so far as he treats him like someone who can be of use to Schultz. Schultz clearly thinks slavery is wrong—he tells the other member of Django’s caravan that they should “Make your way to a more Enlightened area of the country. Oh, and if there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that way.” But at least at the beginning of the film, he appears to view the institution as a particular American backwardness rather than a moral abomination that requires urgent opposition, and Schultz is willing to hold Django’s freedom over him until he gets what he needs from the other man. “On the one hand, I despise slavery,” he explains to Django. “On the other hand, I need your help…In the mean time, I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work for me.”

Schultz’s radicalism comes from his increasing ability to place Django, the first slave he’s ever known personally, into the tropes that for him seem to define humanity. “Do most slaves believe in marriage?” he asks Django when he finds out his traveling companion is married. “Me and my wife do,” Django tells him. And when he discovers that Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) is named Broomhilda, Schultz is able to fit Django into a cultural framework that he understands, seeing him as the legendary hero Siegfried. “I’ve never given anyone his freedom before,” Schultz explains to Django when he decides to stick around and assist in Django’s quest to rescue his wife. “And now that I have, I feel vaguely responsible for you. And for a German to meet a real-life Siegfried, that’s a big deal.”

Where Schultz feels vaguely responsible to a specific slave, of course, Stevens feels very specifically responsible to black Americans both particular and general. As Stevens and Lincoln discuss in the kitchen during Mrs. Lincoln’s party, Stevens has a vision for the reintegration of the seceded states back into the Union that will reorder the nation’s economy to give the people who once were property in it a foothold they can lever into independence. At the end of Lincoln, the movie suggests that there’s a specific woman of color who motivates Stevens’ vision, the housekeeper he can’t bring to the White House, Lydia Smith (S. Epatha Merkerson). But in both cases, Stevens wants to reshape the world so he can live in it in a fashion more to his liking, with the woman he loves in particular, and in what he believes to be the true state of nature beyond his domestic affairs.

Schultz has the fire of a recent convert, but not the experience of America’s past and the things to gain from its reformed future that animate Stevens. And so when, after securing the freedom of Django and Broomhilda during a tense dinner with Broomhilda’s brutal owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Schultz has a chance to end the interaction in the kind of tense show of comity Stevens engages in for the greater good, Schultz takes the purer, but more dramatic path. After pointing out that Alexandre Dumas, an author Candie admires enough to collect, and to use as inspiration for naming one of his fighting slaves, D’Artagnan, after the hero of The Three Musketeers, was black, Schultz refuses to shake Candie’s hand. And then he shoots the other white man, explaining to Django, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.” That act of self-indulgent purity sets off an orgy of violence that endangers Django and Broomhilda’s ability to escape: it’s the act of a crusader who is more concerned with his own ability to get and stay right than with whether or not he achieves the freedom of the people he initially intended to help. I’m not sure whether Tarantino intended to make that point, or if Schultz’s indulgence is merely a way to set off a spasm of cool that gives Django the opportunity to free himself and to claim the mantle of a badass rather than having Schultz do that work and get that credit for him.

There’s no question that Hollywood could do more to let people of color be the heroes of their own stories, but I don’t think any of us would deny that it would be better if they didn’t end up in peril because white people made self-regarding decisions that placed them in great danger and difficulty. Stevens’ willingness to compromise may mean he gets credit that is not available to black characters in Lincoln. But he also doesn’t endanger the people he claims to represent and care about for the sake of his own pride.

In Tarantino’s world, it’s possible to have both, the shootout and the triumphant escape, to put Broomhilda through the tortures of slavery, while also preserving her radiant beauty as an inspiration to Django, to portray a weirdly sanitized vision of plantations full of well-clothed slaves working in immaculate fields, while still condemning the institution as an affront to human decency. But while Lincoln eschews Django Unchained‘s fondness for gouged eyes and gouts of blood in favor of a single, muddy battle scene and wars of words, it’s Spielberg who ultimately has the tougher vision of what it takes to achieve substantive social progress. Revenge may be more fun than reform. But it’s ultimately more self-indulgent.

It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.