Novelist Teju Cole is Twitter’s foremost literary entrepreneur. His “Small Fates” project, which compresses a person’s life and death down to 140 characters, is a fascinating exercise in probing Twitter’s limits as an art form.

But I’m profoundly ambivalent about his newest project, a series of Tweeted musings on the American drone program. On the one hand, his entry on Tuesday — essentially seven fictionalized Small Fates of people killed by drone strikes — brilliantly humanizes some of the more problematic parts of America’s targeted killing campaign. One of Cole’s victims was killed in a “signature strikes,” wherein missiles are launched not because of concrete intelligence indicating the target is a part of a terrorist organization, but because the person or group of people ” bear[s] the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban” targets. This tactic raises serious legal and ethical questions, the answer to which determines whether real people live or die. Cole’s work skillfully draws the public’s attention onto the all-too-often invisible foreign victims of our counterterrorism policies.

On the other, not all of Cole’s drone writing is so revealing. About a year ago, Cole wrote a series lumping together drones with Downton Abbey and Virgin Atlantic’s name for its first class section to show that “height” was “the commanding metaphor” of our time. At the time, it struck me as fruitless postmodern metaphor-play. I still think that now, but I’d add that, unlike his recent entry, it’s didactic and unhelpful. Virgin Atlantic’s semantic choices, while maybe obnoxious, don’t shed light on why the targeted killing program continues or what to do about it. The question “those people down there, are they really people?” that Cole suggests links the things he lists isn’t one whose answer explains the American targeted killing program. America’s use of drones in the war on terrorism is an incredibly difficult policy question, one that isn’t amenable to simple moralizing. Drawing attention to the moral stakes is one thing; reducing disagreement to a world-historical dispute over “for whose sake this world exists” is quite another.

The promises and pitfalls of Cole’s writing on drones aren’t created by his his chosen medium, as a lazy analysis might suggest, but reflective of the broader limitations of literary approaches to argument about politics and philosophy. Non-fiction has the luxury of being able to be boring: it can reflect every nuance, every subtle detail of an argument, however much rote recitation of facts that might require. Even narrative journalism, with all its literary trappings, still has a basic obligation to string together an argument based on the facts.

Fiction, by contrast, is about a universe that isn’t real. It isn’t about making an argument with facts that exist in our world; it’s about creating a new one. That world may be very similar to ours, but it isn’t the same thing. Fiction isn’t a direct argument, with clear premises and conclusions; it’s a means of pointing us in a certain direction. This can be brilliantly illuminating: think 1984 on the nature of totalitarianism. But the insights that book, brilliant as they are, could very well have wrong. Winston Smith’s world isn’t necessarily ours. We know from firsthand accounts of life in totalitarian nations that the book’s account of the psychology of repression is chillingly accurate. But other world-pictures, like Ayn Rand novels, miss the mark, yet remain stubbornly influential on the real-world outlooks of a shockingly large number of people. The seductive appeal of a worldview grounded in fiction can lead to mistaken judgments about the real world it obliquely argues about.

Cole’s blend of cultural criticism and life-like fiction in his drone writing blurs the line between non-fiction and fiction, as does the pseudo-journalistic portrayal of the hunt for bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Both are ways to use the tools of literature, word and screen, to heighten our awareness of our real past, present, and future. That’s a laudable goal. But art can mislead as much as guide, a point that Plato first recognized when writing about art and poetry in The Republic:

There is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again…the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action — in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

The irony, of course, is that The Republic itself is a fictional dialogue.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) has banned an 11-year-old girl from participating in its youth football league, and her family says it’s because the organization told them that “football is for boys.”

Caroline Pla, according to news reports, has played football in the Archdiocese league for six years and in the CYO league for two years before officials made her aware of the rule that prevents girls from participating in the league. Neither her coaches nor her teammates were aware of the rule, and by all accounts, Pla is a standout player: she was voted to the league’s all-star team following the 2012 season. The Archdiocese bent its rule to allow her to finish this season but has not changed it to allow her to continue playing, citing safety concerns, ABC News reports:

“CYO football is a full-contact sport designated for boys,” archdiocese spokesman Ken Gavin wrote in a statement to ABC News. “There has been some perceived ambiguity in the policy regarding this point. It is currently being reviewed and will be addressed moving forward to provide complete clarity.”

That isn’t exactly a strong reason to ban Pla, who has started a Change.org petition asking for reinstatement, from playing the game. There are more than 1,500 girls playing high school football across the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the number has increased more than 17.5 percent from four years ago. Multiple women have earned chances to play football at the college level, including Katie Hnida, who became the first woman to score a point in an NCAA Division I game when she kicked an extra point for the University of New Mexico in 2003. And Sam Gordon, the 9-year-old football sensation, captured America’s attention earlier this year and ultimately ended up on a Wheaties box.

There isn’t an alternative available to Pla, who didn’t abandon a female football league to play with the boys. She’s simply playing on the only field, in the only league, available to her, and there is no evidence that she does not belong. But she isn’t alone: across sports, there are cultural and systemic barriers to female participation, and those are barriers we as a country have been tearing down in the four decades since Title IX became law. We’ve made progress, but as participation rates and funding levels (not to mention senseless rules like the one enforced by the Archdiocese) show, there is still progress to be made.

The Archdiocese’s concerns for her safety and well-being are legitimate, but they should not arise simply because Pla is a girl. It is becoming increasingly evident that football and the head injuries that can accompany it can pose serious risks to the futures of the young men and women who play it, and those injuries don’t discriminate based on gender. If the Archdiocese is truly concerned about safety, those concerns ought to cover all of its players, not just the ones who happen to be female.

There’s finally a video for one of my favorite songs of last year, from Ab-Soul’s brilliant album Control System. “ILLuminate” is a standout from that record, a showcase for the Black Hippy alum’s addictive blend of introspective cultural commentary and blunts-and-brags swagger. The video, directed by Fredo Tovar and Scott Fleishman, provides appropriate imagery — a vaguely post-apocalyptic wasteland and a group of young people keeping the darkness away with their own creativity:

The timing for the video is pretty solid, too, coming three months after Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (and eight months after Control System). “ILLuminate” features Lamar on the final verse, and the two men’s complementary styles here provide a winsome invitation and representative introduction to the creative output of the Black Hippy set beyond Lamar. (Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q were absent from GKMC, while Jay Rock made the absolute most of his feature on “Money Trees.”)

Ta-Nehisi Coates has started digesting the Kendrick Lamar record, and the major qualities he’s praised about it – its sincere vulnerability and the way it speaks for the unheroic and the common – should lead him and others to check out Control System as well. Ab-Soul’s version of vulnerability is certainly different from Lamar’s. Coates had a great line about Lamar being “obsessed with speaking as a civilian” in an art form “obsessed with soldiers,” and that’s a good way to understand the surface differences between Ab-Soul’s vulnerability and Kendrick’s. Soul flirts with speaking as a civilian but clings to soldierly posturing far more than his labelmate. As an example: When Kendrick pondered gang unification on good kid, it was as a threat to his own life. When Ab-Soul ponders it on Control System, it’s part of a fantasy about being able to fight off the U.S. military. “Terrorist Threats” is another great track from this record, but neither it nor “ILLuminate” are good examples of Ab-Soul’s vulnerability. That song’s insecurities about fleeting popularity and industry pressures to duplicate 2 Chainz are, in a sense, the performative version of vulnerability that TNC notes is common to rap.

The best example of the deeper, truer vulnerability in Control System doesn’t have a video yet, but it should. “Double Standards” features Anna Wise, who’s having a great run of guest vocals on excellent rap records. (She sang on multiple good kid, m.A.A.d city cuts last year, and on two tracks from Oneirology by Cunninlynguists, one of the best records of 2011:)

“Double Standards” is a lot like Kendrick’s “The Art Of Peer Pressure” in its reflective take on group dynamics and individual behavior. The simplicity of the hook strays close to the preachiness that makes that Macklemore “Same Love” joint almost unlistenable for me, even as I appreciate its value. But Soul saves it in the verses, with economical depictions of the wildly different norms about promiscuity and fidelity that prevail for men and women. Those norms are present in some of the best examples of the flawed or performative version of hiphop vulnerability Coates sees Kendrick breaking away from on good kid. Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” Ghostface’s “Back Like That,” and MF DOOM//Madlib’s “Fancy Clown” all traffic in the crippled, one-sided understanding of fidelity that Ab-Soul rips apart on “Double Standards.”

In the final verse, he points out that we inherit these attitudes, that they are trained into us at a developing age. This isn’t the first-person storytelling of good kid, but it’s predicated on the same genuine openness and reflectiveness on experiences that are common, daily, and unheroic. It’s a different formula of the same drug, and hopefully everyone who appreciates Kendrick’s output will make time to explore Ab-Soul’s.

Over in the world of computer animation and robotics, they have this awesome term for how the more human things seem, the more attractive they are, up until the point when something seems unsettlingly almost human but not quite, at which point, we become repulsed by the almost-human thing–the uncanny valley. The valley has a far side, where the thing looks exactly human and our revulsion is overcome and we like it just fine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the notion of the uncanny valley helps clarify a lot about how our broader popular culture works. Remember good old-fashioned vampires, like Count Orlock or the New England vampires? They were gross and terrible, especially when they were beloved family members come back from the dead to feed on you. They were like humans but recognizably no longer human. In other words, vampires resided in the uncanny valley, close enough to human without being so that it creeped us out.

But, as we’ve lived with the vampire and its traits have become codified and known, it’s become less creepy. Not only in the sense that vampires now sparkle in the sunlight, but in the sense that, even when you’re watching a scary movie–let’s be honest–once you recognize that it’s a vampire, it’s not quite as scary anymore. I think this is a clue that recognition is a part of the mechanism for moving something out of the uncanny valley.

I just finished Karin Tidbeck’s amazing collection of short stories, Jagannath. And one of the reasons I think her stories are so damn good is her skill at navigating the uncanny valley, of using it to her advantage. Her stories are full of things that are unsettlingly almost human–a baby/locomotive that talks in a train-whistle-y voice, a tiny blooming plant man, distant relatives who are born from pupae, and a baby made in a tin can from salt water, a carrot and menstrual blood–that never quite resolve into something recognizably human.

Her story, “Pyret” has this great moment where one of the characters is describing her encounter with two of the titular characters.

I peeked into the grocery store and saw someone standing behind the counter, and a customer on the other side. Just what you might expect. But the customer would put some groceries on the counter, and after the cashier rang them up, the customer put the wares back on the shelves again! Then they started all over again. I looked while they did it four times. They were still doing it when I left.

See how it works? It’s not clear in the story what these things are exactly, but here we are, viewing them doing something that seems to be normal human behavior–a cashier checking someone out.  She’s leading us toward recognizing them as something human and then she slips that little weirdness in there of them repeating their actions. Even out of context, it’s strange. In the story, it’s a moment that gives shudders, precisely because it’s just not behavior that adult human beings would engage in for fun (though this does raise the question of how often children do stuff that creeps us out and whether we can understand it as being creepy because it strikes us as almost but not quite human).

I think there are social justice implications here, too, which I hope we can discuss when we talk about Lovecraft, tomorrow. Don’t worry if you’ve never read any Lovecraft. Every story is about how there’s something unspeakable thing that is worshiped by people unlike Lovecraft and that is, in some way, corrupting the narrator and touching him with its slimy tentacles.

I’m really happy and honored to be here–thanks for asking me, Alyssa–and so I hope it’s fun and interesting for you guys, too.

It’s kinda hard to knock Glenn Beck’s hustle. Since leaving Fox News in June of 2011, Beck has kept himself busy with projects like starting a jeans label and relaunching The Blaze as a libertarian online network. His continued presence as a right-wing personality has shaped him into an odd species of self-help guru, urging his audience to live their best lives by embracing his personal blend of faith and politics. But now Beck has his sights set on a loftier prize: Building an American oasis for free-market values.

Last week Beck’s website announced his concept for Independence, USA, a shelter from the rest of the United States, which he believes is “going away from the values of freedom, responsibility and truth.” Beck’s vision for Independence would include a residential area where families could “bring their children to be inspired,” a marketplace dedicated to fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship, and a multi-denominational mission center modeled after the Alamo. The site also mentions that Independence was inspired by Walt Disney’s initial vision for Disneyland, a place where people could find “happiness, courage and hope.”

But because capitalism is the cornerstone of Independence, Beck’s brand of freedom surely won’t come for free. After all, if Beck’s dream becomes reality, his revenue-making production company would be the heart and soul of the new settlement:

There would also be an [sic] Media Center, where Glenn’s production company would film television, movies, documentaries, and more. Glenn hoped to include scripted television that would challenge viewers without resorting to a loss of human decency. He also said it would be a place where aspiring journalists would learn how to be great reporters.

An environment built primarily on capitalism—and Beck’s brand of news and entertainment—will have to turn a profit. And from the proposed theme park to the ranch where visitors can learn to “work the land,” Independence, USA is a vehicle for Glenn Beck to cultivate, build and benefit from his audience’s attention as well as their wallets. At its core, the concept of Independence—like the fantasy playland Walt Disney created nearly 60 years ago—sells nothing more than the make-believe world Beck has spent years building on Fox News, and later with his own media company.

In the event that Independence, USA becomes reality, it might be both interesting and instructive to watch how this young society–based on, among other things, a funhouse reflection of American ideals–handles its growing pains.