In June, I wrote about five cities that were seeking taxpayer money to build new sports stadiums for professional franchises in their areas. Those projects are at different stages of development: Atlanta and St. Louis are still negotiating, Washington D.C.’s plan still isn’t off the ground, Santa Clara has begun digging, and Minneapolis’ stadium has already turned into a financial catastrophe.

Taxpayers in at least five more cities are facing the prospect of paying for new sports stadiums or updates to existing facilities for football, hockey, basketball, and soccer franchises, some of which don’t yet exist. Since the wheels of taxpayer-financed stadium boondoggles never stop spinning, here’s a look at five cities that are asking — or thinking about asking — taxpayers to help finance stadiums:

Miami: The Miami Dolphins want taxpayers to foot the bill for $199 million of a proposed $400 million renovation to Sun Life Stadium, a facelift owners say the stadium needs if the city wants to host future Super Bowls. A Senate committee unanimously approved legislation that would provide the Dolphins with $90 million in state funds. The rest would be paid for by an increase in Miami’s hotel tax. The Dolphins, however, agreed to put the issue before voters over the weekend, heeding the calls of lawmakers who didn’t like the bill. Miami’s taxpayers are already on the hook for Marlins Park, the $634-million baseball stadium that just opened last year.

Charlotte: Charlotte’s city council advanced a plan last week that would give the NFL’s Carolina Panthers $144 million to upgrade its stadium. The plan, if it is approved by North Carolina’s state assembly, would raise the city’s food-and-beverage sales tax by one cent. Lawmakers expressed fears that the Panthers could move to another city that has stadium plans, though no such city exists, and they voted on the proposal behind closed doors. The deal does require the Panthers to stay in town over the life of the 15-year agreement, but taxpayers will finance more than half of the proposed renovations.

Orlando: Major League Soccer wants to expand into Florida, and state lawmakers are trying to help it do so. State Sen. David Simmons (R) proposed legislation that would add MLS franchises to the list of those eligible for a monthly subsidy from the state, which could help build a new stadium for the Orlando City Soccer Club, a minor league team that hopes to move up to MLS. In October, the Orlando Sentinel reported that a new stadium could cost between $90 million and $95 million, though no financing plan has been proposed. “Certainly, we’d look for it to be a public-private partnership,” Orlando City President Phil Rawlins said, meaning taxpayer money would be involved.

Detroit: The National Hockey League’s Detroit Red Wings are seeking funds for a new arena, the state legislature passed a bill in December that could grant the team nearly $13 million in annual tax subsidies to help accomplish that goal. The franchise could qualify for other state tax subsidies if it applied for them, according to the Detroit News. Those same subsidies, available through the Michigan Strategic Fund, were used to give the Detroit Tigers $55 million in subsidies for a new stadium in the 1990s (the Tigers and Red Wings are owned by the same family). Financing plans have yet to be finalized, but the Red Wings hope to start construction by the end of the year.

Virginia Beach: Lawmakers in Virginia got their hopes up when the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings reportedly showed interest in a cross-continent move to Virginia Beach. The Kings ultimately chose Seattle instead, but that hasn’t stopped Virginia Beach from preparing for its next run at a team. In January, a Virginia state House subcommittee approved legislation that would allow Virginia Beach to issue bonds to finance an arena, and those bonds would be paid off by sales tax revenues. The bill has a long way to go and its financial impact is unknown, but it’s clear that plans to finance an arena didn’t necessarily end with the Kings’ move to Seattle.

As we have detailed, stadium deals that rely on public funds rarely live up to their economic promise. Still, cities continually pursue these plans, even if they almost always leave taxpayers deeper in debt and facing budget cuts to vital public programs.

This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

If the first half of the Walking Dead’s third season was about defining morality as care for your group, the midseason premiere took a step back to ask “what makes you part of the group?” In both the prison and Woodbury, the consequences of war shook the foundations of group structure, revealing seemingly unbreakable bonds to be fragile and calling into question the leadership structures everyone had been taking for granted.

The episode picks up right where the midseason finale left off, with Darryl and Merle set to fight for their lives and Woodbury’s amusement. The Governor’s decision to pit the brothers against each other gives Merle an opportunity to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a Woodbury man. Reassuring whispers to Darryl aside, it’s not clear whether he would have committed fratricide in a bid to rejoin the Governor’s team had it not been for Rick, Maggie, and Glenn’s assault weapon-equipped intervention.

But it turns out the Prison Expeditionary Force’s efforts were for naught. A rescued Merle proves as poisonous as he was in Season One — his racism reemerges, asking Darryl if he had “gone native” when he sees Michonne with the group, and he sets about spilling everyone’s Woodbury secrets (Andrea is there!) in the fashion most likely to set off a civil war. Rick, rightly recognizing the threat to be too grave, kicks Merle to the curb, but loses Darryl in the process. That Darryl won’t abandon the brother who almost killed him for the group that saved his life shows just how circumstantial the group bonds are. Blood trumps from the moment, though it seems from the preview that Darryl and Merle won’t be having an easy time of it alone in the walker-infested wilderness.
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In Mother Jones today, Kate Sheppard has the news that Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, shuttered after he was murdered at his church in 2009, will be reopening under the leadership of Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller when he was alive. In Burkhart’s conversation with Sheppard, she says that she decided to reopen the clinic in part because no one else would do it, and because she wants to reframe the debate about abortion care. “I think abortion is about motherhood,” she said. “Abortion is about motherhood because by and large women coming in to have abortions are concerned about the kind of life and the future for their children. Women are thinking in a very responsible manner when choosing that.”

These are important points, and ones made at greater length in one of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, After Tiller. By first-time directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, After Tiller spends time not just with the four remaining doctors in the United States who are willing to perform late-term abortions—Burkhart’s clinic will not—but with many of their patients. It’s a set of perspectives that rarely enters the national debate about the legality of abortion procedures. The testimony of women and men who badly wanted children who have grown too sick to survive, and of doctors who help them when almost no one else will, may not convince the people who protest outside the four doctors’ clinics, and for whom the questions involved have simple and obvious answers.

But for anyone else watching the film, it will be clear, as Dr. Susan Robinson says, that no one ever wants an abortion, particularly not the kind that she and her colleagues provide. And the doctors in After Tiller are providing their services not out of some sort of attraction to the procedure that’s become their calling card, but out of a conviction that women shouldn’t be abandoned in their decision-making processes. After Tiller is a powerful reminder that abortion in America is less about desire than about need, and a matter not of carelessness, but the result of dreadful deliberations.

Many of the patients who agreed to have their consultations with the doctors filmed in After Tiller are facing the prospect of aborting children they planned to have, but whose pregnancies have gone terribly awry along the way. “It just didn’t seem fair to her,” say the parents of one child who would live in agonizing pain if she were born. Another describes a dreadful dilemma, saying “It’s guilt because we’re doing what we’re doing and guilt because if we brought him into this world he wouldn’t have any quality of life.” Monica, a patient whose child was diagnosed at 25 weeks with a debilitating illness that would cause his certain death if he were born, ultimately chooses to have an abortion rather than delay an inevitable decision to end her child’s life—better now, she ultimately decides, than to make him suffer before turning off his respirator so she can have had the experience of his brief, agonizing life. “It is hurtful because it was a planned pregnancy, and I did want this,” another patient explains.

Much of the focus of the consultations and on the planning for these families’ abortions is focused on giving them dignity and helping them process their emotions, both before and after their procedures. “The only time they get to say hello to their baby is when they have to say goodbye to it, too,” Dr. Robinson explains. As she runs through a checklist to help a couple prepare for their abortion and the burial arrangements for their child, I started to cry in the theater when the shot showed that “blanket requested” was one of the options on the list. There’s an incredible cruelty to the genetic lottery that forces parents to convert receiving blankets to burial shrouds, and an incredible courage to those parents who have their only time with a child after that child has died. Dr. Shelley Sella counsels two couples with ill children together, telling them “Both of you have babies who are really sick, and both of you have babies who would suffer a lot,” and giving them an opportunity to see that their experience is neither solitary nor shameful.
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The bridge is yours.

-Parenting lessons from Downton Abbey.

-Rex Reed has clowned no one but himself in slamming Melissa McCarthy.

-A history of pasta, from an unlikely source.

-Meet Superman’s latest movie lady-nemesis.

-I am really, really excited about Monsters University:

It’s felt a bit like we’ve been living through one of Westeros’s infamous winters, at least when it comes to the dwindling supply of good television, so I’m looking forward to the return of Game of Thrones like a Brother of the Night’s Watch awaiting a raven of the appropriate coloring from the Citadel:

There’s not much here to see yet—Tyrion’s scar is probably the biggest change this lets us see. I understand why it would have been prohibitive to really get rid of Peter Dinklage’s nose to match up the damage Tyrion suffers during the Battle of the Blackwater in the books, but I do regret the preservation of his general handsomeness. Readers of the books may share my feelings about how that will affect our perception of events coming down the pike. For both readers and people who are only watching the show, what are you looking forward to and hoping for in season three? As a member of the former category, I have to admit I’m looking forward to seeing how the show starts to diverge from the novels, if only because I think that some of the story lines that are being changed and trimmed will give us clues about what’s going to happen in George R.R. Martin’s yet-to-be-completed novels, and which plotlines are just red herrings, and thus, for the purposes of television, dispensable.

On Friday, Showtime announced that it had picked up a new show called The Affair, which would tell the stories of a relationship that interrupts two marriages, splitting up the episodes to explore the perspectives of the men and women involved separately. It was a decision that, along with the forthcoming Masters of Sex, a historical drama bout the sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and Ray Donovan, which follows a Los Angeles fixer who is also dealing with the consequences of childhood sexual abuse in his family, that furthered a brand that underlies a great deal of Showtime’s work, and that makes the network unusual among its peers. Showtime increasingly as interested in exploring sex as it is violence.

This isn’t to say that all of Showtime’s programming is solely preoccupied with sex, but three of its foundational shows, The L Word, about affluent lesbians, Queer As Folk, an adaptation of the British drama, and Soul Food, an adaptation of the movie, were all substantially concerned with how adults approach sex, sometimes in the context of their families. It’s a theme that continues in the shows that are airing on it presently. Shameless is substantially about the sexual relationships of multiple generations of the Gallagher family. House of Lies examines both the sex lives of successful consultants and the sexual and gender identity of the main character’s son. Californication‘s focus is announced in its title. Dexter is a serial killer show that’s frequently explored the sexual components of violence. And Homeland started out as a show about national security and has morphed into an epic romance grounded in a striking sexual connection between its two main characters, a dogged CIA agent and the undercover terrorist she is pursuing.

I asked Showtime president David Nevins about that trend at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, and about how intentional the network’s focus on sex was.

“We have the ability to be adults, try to use the lack of restrictions that we have because we don’t sell to advertisers, use it to most interesting effect. And there are
taboo subjects that we can explore that other people don’t have — other programmers don’t have the same freedom and ability,” he said. “Masters of Sex feels like a show that only we could get away with, that only pay cable could get away with…Sex is one of the places where we can distinguish ourselves. But it’s really important to me also that we be interesting and provocative in a deeper way, not just salacious.”

That’s an ambitious goal to set, and one I’m particularly curious to measure The Affair, Masters of Sex, and Ray Donovan against. And it’s hard precisely because fewer people have worked at it. Mainstream movies and television have done an enormous amount of work to explore what makes for stylish violence, and what about the employment of violence we find alternately exciting and revolting. Some of the reason that’s happened is because of incentives set up in the television and movie ratings systems, which make it easier to make violent content reach a mass audience than to do the same with considerations of sex that are comparatively grown-up and intense. Some of it’s happened because there’s an alternative to mainstream entertainment that’s making sexual content that mainstream entertainment can’t and wouldn’t want to replicate.

And some of it is simply because the practice we’ve had at making entertainment intelligently or entertainingly violent isn’t matched by an equal set of established conventions around sex. It’s pretty easy to figure out what will make an audience either gasp in admiration at violent prowess—James Bond’s ability to take as good as he gets, and to dole out violence with precision is a good rule of thumb—or recoil in disgust from the damage done to a body. It’s much harder to figure out how to do a sex scene that will make a mass audience have the same unified reaction, and some of that’s because what we feel about sex isn’t close to standardized. In The New Republic, Sam Lipsyte, writing about how to write about sex, suggests that aspiring novelists “Trust in the modern gods who guide your hand: Sad and Funny. Like it or not, these are the twin poles for most of our tiny thoughts and doings. Sad and Funny are both the world and how we withstand it.” But poles aren’t the entirety of experience, and joy deserves some recognition in there as well.

I understand the many reasons that a network would choose to go with violence as its primal stakes and subject for exploration: it’s exciting, our reactions to a lot of it are easy to predict, and it is, in a lot of ways, easier to get on screen and easier to sell once it’s there. But even if violence isn’t an exhaustible subject, it’s far from the only one that matters, or the only stakes that any of us experience—for many of us, we’re deeply fortunate to avoid it. Going after sex and romance, and doing it with the same level of sophistication and style as many of the great cable dramas is a harder thing to do, and it’s why sex is an equal or close to equal subject maybe only in Deadwood and Mad Men.

“I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure,” Bikini Kill sang in 1995. Television still hasn’t even begun to tap that potential, but I do wish they’d start getting around to it. If Showtime is digging in on questions of what sex means to us, how we study it, and how we survive trauma around it, I’m excited to see what arguments those shows are going to make—and how viewers will react to them.

This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of Downton Abbey.

Last night’s super-sized Downton Abbey was a bit lumpy in places—the cricket match in particular felt like it might have been a richer subject several seasons down the line when we had a better sense of who actually lives not just upstairs and downstairs, but in the village. But the combination of two episodes that aired as individual hours in the UK let Downton ground Thomas’s story in a larger context of the ways in which sexual repression poorly serves men and women alike in 1920s England. As O’Brien conspires to lure Thomas to Jimmy’s room, Edith finds herself drawn to Gregson, and Matthew worries about his potential fertility, this episode was a reminder that, medically and socially, an inability to speak honestly about sex has terrible consequences.

Edith’s latest romantic adventures begin as professional ones. After Gregson writes her to inquire again after her availability as a columnist, she declares “I think I will go. It seems rude not to, in a way. And I haven’t been to London for ages.” Her family continues to be less than entirely supportive. As her grandmother puts it, “A woman’s place is in the home, but I see nothing wrong in her having some fun before she gets there. And another thing, Edith isn’t getting any younger. Maybe she isn’t cut out for domestic life.” But as it turns out, confining a woman to domestic life might also keep her from running across promising romantic prospects. When she and Gregson meet for lunch, Gregson admits to her “Am I allowed to say I’m pleased you’re not married?” “I’m a little less pleased,” Edith tells him. But she doesn’t leave the lunch and she takes the job—and she doesn’t quit it when Gregson remarks “You look very pretty today. I’m not sure how professional it is for me to point that out.”

It’s a relationship that brings out the best in both of them. Edith dares not just to write, but to take on subjects that no one would have expected her, like the lack of employment opportunities for soldiers returned home from the war, not all of whom are so lucky to amble into managing an estate, as Matthew has done. “I like the idea of a woman taking a position on man’s subject,” Gregson tells her. “I think we’re on to something new, here. The mature female voice in debates.” And it’s good for them personally—to a point. Edith comes out of her shell enough to enjoy a flirtation and to talk honestly about her experience being jilted. Gregson clearly enjoys her company as a colleague and as a woman. But when she inquires into his background, she discovered not just that he’s married, but how English law has inconvenienced him. Gregson is a decent man, but there’s something profoundly unfair about the law that shackles him to his wife because she’s too mentally ill to give consent to their divorce, and there appears to be no treatment that can make her well enough to set him free. Sir Anthony hurt Edith horribly because he couldn’t bear to tell her in a definitive way that he didn’t actually feel comfortable being with her. Gregson at least finds the courage to tell her the truth, but not after leading her down a disappointing path. What happens next may depend on how comfortable Edith feels defying convention. It’s one thing for her flighty cousin to convince herself a married member of the nobility is going to leave his wife for her, and another to go into a relationship like this one with your eyes open.
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