A day after the debate over the safety of football made it all the way to the White House, Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard delivered a dire prediction about the future of the NFL to CBSSports.com:

“Thirty years from now,” he said, “I don’t think it will be in existence. I could be wrong. It’s just my opinion, but I think with the direction things are going — where they [NFL rules makers] want to lighten up, and they’re throwing flags and everything else — there’s going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it.

“Guys are getting fined, and they’re talking about, ‘Let’s take away the strike zone’ and ‘Take the pads off’ or ‘Take the helmets off.’ It’s going to be a thing where fans aren’t going to want to watch it anymore.”

Last week, after researchers published a study further linking chronic traumatic encephalopathy to football, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates called it a death knell for football, though unlike Pollard, he predicted that death would come from the supply side:

There’s something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players–and maybe athletes at large–to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don’t know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)

After that, I don’t know how pro football can stand for long.

The irony about these two views — whether football’s death will be brought about by supply- or demand-side problems — is that if more research proves stronger links between CTE and the sport, football will likely have to choose the method of its death. The game can probably be made safe enough, by eliminating much of the padding and tackling, to keep kids playing at the youth levels. And as long as football remains a big business for colleges and the NFL, they’ll make an effort to protect players while presenting a product people will watch. The question, I think, is whether enough people will watch a game that actually protects the players.

Americans love the inherent violence of football. We love that it offers a chance to see two men larger, faster, and stronger than we’ll ever be crashing together in a moment of bone-crushing, brain-mushing gladiatorial glory. We love that “football at its finest” is a safety crushing a running back, that football’s “truest nature” is a defensive end leveling a running back so majestically that the poor sap’s helmet ends up 10 yards down the field. We hate that the NFL is trying to take that away from us, which is why every time a flag flies for a helmet-to-helmet hit, we yell that the league is “taking football out of football.”

It is becoming more and more evident that we can’t make football safer without radically changing the game itself. But the flip-side to that is that what Americans love most about football is exactly what makes it dangerous. So the NFL and the NCAA have a choice: stay dangerous, and risk kids no longer playing. Get safer, and risk creating a product that no one wants to watch. I side more with Pollard’s view than with Coates’, but either way, death seems almost certain, even if the method and the timeframe are anything but.

According to a news analysis by the Smart Politics project of the the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, during former Gov. Sarah Palin’s tenure as a contributor to Fox News—which ended last week with the decision not to renew her contract—Palin was paid $15.85 per word she spoke on the network. Given that Palin and her family are now primarily working as entertainers, rather than as public servants, commercial fishermen, or even spokeswomen for teen pregnancy prevention, it seems worth taking a look at how well that’s working out for the Palins—and the people who’ve employed them.

-$1 million: Sarah Palin’s annual salary as a Fox News analyst.

-189,221: Words Palin spoke on Fox during her three-year contract.

-$1.25 million: Palin’s advance for her memoir Going Rogue.

-469,000: copies of Going Rogue sold in its first week on the market. The memoir would go on to sell 2,670,000 copies in 2009.

-797,955: Copies of America By Heart, Palin’s second book, sold in 2010.

-$100,000: Palin’s speakers’ fee, as negotiated by the Washington Speakers Bureau, as of 2010.

-$200,000: The reported low estimate for Palin’s per-episode fee for Sarah Palin’s Alaska, her TLC show, which ran for a single season. One of the reasons the show ultimately wasn’t renewed? Palin’s salary demands for a second year.

-3.2 million: The average number of viewers who tuned in to Sarah Palin’s Alaska. She earned additional fees for the weeks she survived elimination.

-$15,000-$30,000: Bristol Palin’s range of speaker’s fees, as of 2010.

-$125,000: Bristol Palin’s base salary for her appearance on Dancing With The Stars.

-$354,348: Alaska tax subsidies for Bristol Palin’s reality show, Life’s A Tripp.

-726,000: Number of viewers who tuned in to Life’s A Tripp. Unsurprisingly, Lifetime cancelled the show after two airings.

-5.24 million: The number of viewers who tuned in to the first episode of Stars Earn Stripes, a 2012 NBC reality show in which Todd Palin and other celebrities competed to earn money for charities of their choice. That number fell to 2.88 million by the finale, and the show has yet to be renewed.

From a business perspective, the results are clear. Palin might be a good deal when it comes to book publishing, particularly if bulk sales to conservative book clubs and the like continue to bolster her overall figures. But it’s probably worth keeping an eye on her declining sales figures to peg her advances to. And when it comes to television, be it news analysis, dancing competitions, or getting stuck on the way up Mount McKinley, the Palins aren’t any more than utility players. Hollywood’s notorious for helping to facilitate upward failure. But even the Palins seem to be coming to the end of their chances to prove themselves big draws instead of utility players.

The bridge is yours.

-Waking Mars sounds like the next video game I’ll want to play after I finally finish Portal at my incredibly pokey pace.

-How to make lockpicks from bra underwires.

-Because it’s cold and everyone needs something cute, Shetland ponies in sweaters.

-Why the user interface in Hackers holds up.

-Well, this makes my heart get all gushy because I am sentimental:

While noting that Chinese corporations don’t have to try to buy an American movie studio, the Hollywood Reporter examines the reasons that they might want to, considering the investments the manufacturer TCL has made in naming rights and product placement in the last month. Clarence Tsui writes:

But China’s expansion into Hollywood is, in many respects, the opposite of Japan’s. Sony and Matsushita ran Columbia and MCA according to their own business ethos and, in the case of Sony, hoped to generate content for its own products. What China needs from Hollywood is more than a return on investment; it needs expertise. By partnering with Hollywood, the Chinese film sector — which saw box office jump from $144.2 million in 2002 to $2.69 billion last year, with the number of screens going from 1,400 to about 12,000 in the same period — can continue its rapid expansion while avoiding growing pains. “We want to be a global film exhibitor, and to develop this infrastructure on our own would take a long time,” Wang told THR in June. “Through the [AMC deal], we can achieve this very quickly.”…

As Chinese conglomerates acknowledge their inexperience in running multinational corporations, the takeover of a Hollywood studio instantly would grant China enormous cachet — and even more power — on the global film scene. The purchase of Hollywood assets is “an enhancement of a company’s brand,” says Yang. “If Wanda can properly handle the adjustments in AMC’s corporate management and ensure a smooth transition, it will improve Wanda’s bargaining power abroad.”

It’s an important question for reasons of content as well as finance. Even though Chinese companies don’t own American movie studios, the New York Times explained in a story earlier this month that American movie makers, in order to gain access to the lucrative Chinese audience that, thus far, has shown a preference for American imports over domestic Chinese projects, is collaborating with Chinese government advisors to get their movies past the country’s censorship board:

Paramount Pictures just learned the hard way that some things won’t pass muster — like American fighter pilots in dogfights with MIGs. The studio months ago submitted a new 3-D version of “Top Gun” to Chinese censors. The ensuing silence was finally recognized as rejection….One production currently facing scrutiny is Disney and Marvel’s “Iron Man 3,” parts of which were filmed in Beijing in the last month. It proceeded under the watchful eye of Chinese bureaucrats, who were invited to the set and asked to advise on creative decisions, according to people briefed on the production who asked for anonymity to avoid conflict with government or company officials. Marvel and Disney had no comment….

Hollywood as a whole is shifting toward China-friendly fantasies that will fit comfortably within a revised quota system, which allows more international films to be distributed in China, where 3-D and large-format Imax pictures are particularly favored. At the same time, it is avoiding subject matter and situations that are likely to cause conflict with the roughly three dozen members of a censorship board run by China’s powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or S.A.R.F.T.

I have no objection to Hollywood thinking creatively about the fact that its audience is international, rather than simply domestic. That fact alone should drive the casting of more actors of Asian—and hopefully some day African—origin, and more consideration about what sources of drama, other than the establishment of American badassery, will resonate abroad. But it’s one thing for Hollywood to consider the needs of international consumers directly, and another for studios to have to seek the approval of government organizations that don’t necessarily represents the cultural demands and politics of consumers.

Given that seeking that approval is necessary to access that market in the first place, and that working with Chinese filmmakers and crews on co-productions has the effect of building up a film workforce and credentialing Chinese filmmakers with American audiences, I understand why studios would make the decision to press forward. But I’d rather see American filmmakers make movies that then get cut for Chinese audiences if they’re going to be cut at all, as was the case with Cloud Atlas. It’s not an ideal solution, but in a situation that offers no ideal options, I’d rather censorship be obvious than assimilated. A Chinese-owned studio would be more likely to integrate censorship requirements into creative decision-making from the start, making those changes more invisible to us.

Having finally seen and fallen in love with The Godfather, I decided I should go back to Mario Puzo’s original novel of the same name, the pulp classic that became a masterpiece. I’d been told that there’s a lot more in the book about Hollywood, which there is, and which remains a relevant critique of that city’s sexual culture today. But I was mostly curious as to whether Puzo had more to say about the women who hover outside of the doors who are shut in their faces by the Corleone men.

He does, but The Godfather remains an odd book when it comes to women, and is odd in a number of different ways. The size of Sonny Corleone’s penis comes up more often than his mother’s actual first name. Apollonia, Michael’s first, Italian wife is an utter blank, an expanse of “satiny skin” for Michael to consume, and to imprint with English and driving lessons. It remains utterly inexplicable to me why Kay Adams ultimately decides to take Michael Corleone back, much less to marry him, after he not only disappears on her without notice, but after he returns, as Mama Corleone puts it, for six months “He no call you up? He no see you?” Her decision to follow consigliere Tom Hagen in abandoning her own ethnic and class background to become a compliant Italian wife, quashing her concerns about Michael’s affairs and saying Masses for his souls every morning, is a compelling counter to the assimilation the Don hoped his son would achieve: Michael doesn’t just fail to break away from his Italianness, he brings Kay back with him. But there’s a fundamental gap in her story. And Connie Corleone never gets to be anything other than a shrew, until the moment at the end of the novel, as well as the film, when in her hysteria, she accuses Michael of murdering her husband Carlo, and gets dismissed as crazed by grief even though she’s absolutely correct.

The one woman who does make it out—or at least, who finds a way to live in the Corleone family orbit without being compromised by it—is Lucy Mancini, whose story is essentially a massive red herring, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Johnny Fatone’s Vocal Cord Surgery. Puzo does precisely no work to grow real thematic connective tissue between Lucy’s story and the rest of the novel, which is strange, because after Kay, she’s the woman on which the novel spends the most introspective time. And she’s also, frankly, a character with an arc I’m surprised Puzo dreamed up, given the treatment of the other women in the novel, and their position as profoundly mysterious creatures, particularly when it comes to sexual desire.

Lucy enters the novel as Connie’s maid of honor at her wedding, a position that’s given Lucy the opportunity to seduce Connie’s older brother, Sonny. He’s attractive to her in part because of what she’s been told about her body and its lack of desirability: “In her two college love affairs she had felt nothing and neither of them lasted more than a week. Quarreling, her second lover had mumbled something about her being ‘too big down there.’ Lucy had understood and for the rest of the school term had refused to go out on any dates.” Sonny, because he’s well-endowed, doesn’t treat Lucy like she’s sexually inadequate. And alone among the women in The Godfather, Lucy’s opened up to the possibility of an affair that’s solely about her own sexual fulfillment, without being treated like a slut, either by Sonny, or anyone else in the Corleone orbit. When Sonny dies, “her dreams were not the insipid dreams of a schoolgirl, her longings not the longings of a devoted wife. She was not rendered desolate by the loss of her ‘life’s companion,’ or miss him because of his stalwart character. She held no fond remembrances of sentimental gifts, of girlish hero worship, his smile, the amused glint of his eyes when she said something endearing or witty. No. She missed him for the more important reason that he had been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love.”
Read more

This post discusses plot points through the January 27 episode of Downton Abbey.

I was on the road when the January 20 episode of Downtown Abbey aired, so this week, I’ll consider both hours of television together. And while the show does have a tendency to skip around—in time, in location, in tone and quality—these two episodes, taken together, offer up a strong illustration of the difficulties of making yourself heard, whether it’s across the gender barrier, upwards across class lines, or through an arbitrarily-imposed bureaucracy. The consequences of those enforced silences, as we saw this weekend, are fatal.

Anna and Bates’ story has fairly definitively stalled out for me at this point in Downton Abbey‘s run, but Bates’ stint in prison has been a nice little parallel to events at Downton itself. He’s a different kind of downstairs now, bound by a different set of social constraints. Inmates have different routes to influence than they did in the big house, where service to one of the principals of the household gave them direct access to air their opinions, if they were carefully stated. And the principals of the household had been raised from childhood to be used to having power, and to exercising it in certain ways, whether it’s to smooth the advancement of certain members of the household staff within the house, or to make interventions in their health and welfare outside the realm of service, as with the surgery for Mrs. Patmore’s contacts or Cora’s promise that Mrs. Hughes would be provided for even if cancer treatment failed to prove effective. But in prison, the guards and wardens are new to power and are primarily concerned with aggregating it. Where the Downtown residents’ acts of kindness to the people they have power over don’t constitute a wholly reliable social safety net or engine of upward mobility, they at least provide a reliable set of cues about incentives and rewards. In prison, something like the withholding of Bates’ letters is meant to enforce the arbitrary nature of his position, to encourage him to be utterly cowed lest he break an unwritten rule or violate a norm. It’s yet another one of Downton‘s reminder that however limited the opportunities are for people in service, falling out of that hierarchy can be even worse.

But it’s one thing to fall out of a hierarchy that provides you with a minimum of status, and another to reach the top of your privilege and find that some of the marginal gains aren’t worth the sacrifice that goes along with them. After Lady Edith found herself jilted at the altar and committed herself to a useful spinsterhood, I emailed a friend that I thought she might break out of society’s role for her, albeit in a more sedate way than Sybil had by eloping. Some of her initial changes are small. “Why don’t you have breakfast in bed?” Matthew asks her when she comes down to dine with him and Lord Grantham. “Because I’m not married,” Edith tells him shortly. It’s a position that provides her with some embarrassment, but it also puts her in the position of being the lone young woman in company with the men of her household, and in a position to voice frustrations about things like suffrage. “I don’t have the vote,” she tells Matthew, bitterly. “I’m not over 30 and I’m not a householder. It’s ridiculous.” His suggestion that she write to the Times may be flip, but it’s certainly more productive than Lord Grantham’s reminder that Edith really ought to talk to Cora about how she can help with the evening’s dinner. The Dowager Countess may tell Edith that “You’re a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining, and find something to do,” but I don’t know if she recognizes that dinners and local charitable patronage still might leave Edith empty.

And so there’s something tremendously exciting about seeing Edith take Matthew’s advice, and for once, get rewarded for making extra effort by the Times, if not by her family. “No lady writes to a newspaper,” Violet declares, before amending that statement to remind Edith that one who does is “A Churchill. The Churchills are different.” Cora tells Edith that “It’s good to have strong views, but noteriety is never helpful.” In other words, Edith is entitled to her feelings, but not the exercise of them, and should accept her gilded cage. And when the letter is published, under the title “Earl’s Daughter Speaks Out For Women’s Rights,” Edith may still be categorized by her relationship to her father, but for once, she’s using that power to get what she wants, instead of letting it define her sphere of influence. So what if “That’s what he’s buying, your name and your title,” as Lord Grantham puts it: Edith is getting something out of the bargain, too.

And as it turns out, “the problems faced by the modern woman rather than the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” aren’t an “even so.” They become urgent when Sybil goes into labor and Lord Grantham quashes the voices of women and Dr. Clarkson when it comes to their care, opting for class and gender solidarity instead. It’s awful to hear Lord Grantham say “I don’t want to hurt Sir Phillip’s feelings,” as if that were the most important issue at stake here, even when it seemed like Sybil’s delivery would go normally. And it’s worse to find out that Sir Phillip is essentially in agreement with Lord Grantham on the importance of his own expertise and status. His snapping at Dr. Clarkson, who has know Sybil her entire life, “Maybe she has thick ankles. Lots of women do,” is the Downton equivalent of advocating an aspirin between the knees as a contraceptive. It’s a refusal to see Sybil as a specific person, and to embrace the actual practice of medicine in favor of the performance of sagacity. And it kills her.
Read more