In case you didn’t know already, Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones’ movie critic and I, do a semi-regular podcast, A Movie And An Argument. Our latest, and most depressing edition, discussing the Oscars, Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea, and human rights violations in movie-making, is up now!

And on that note, have a great weekend!

In Foreign Policy, Joshua E. Keating asked an interesting, and I think important, question: does Hollywood have a foreign policy? Based on the movies of the last half-century, he argues that Hollywood’s deeply skeptical of the rest of the world and very ready to acknowledge security threats to the United States, but deeply skeptical of the United States’ response to everything from the rise of Communism to terrorism:

But it’s fair to say that the kind of prestige films that get nominated for Oscars tend to come from one side of the political spectrum. From Vietnam-era dramas like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to the growing number of Iraq movies like Green Zone and 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, the most celebrated movies have tended to take a critical look at America’s wars, often questioning the motives of senior officials and examining the psychological effects on the men who fight them. From Jack Nicholson’s sneering colonel in A Few Good Men to the cynical incompetence of the officers in Three Kings, the military tends not to get too positive a portrayal when the movie is about an actual war, rather than an alien invasion. (World War II movies are a possible exception, but even films like Saving Private Ryan are more about how the war affected individuals than military achievement.)

Not that the civilians fare much better. Whether they’re colluding with the communists (The Manchurian Candidate), whacking their own people (The Parallax View), concocting a war to cover up a president’s improprieties (Wag the Dog) or standing idly and incompetently by in the midst of a genocide (The Killing Fields), Hollywood has taken a dim view of U.S. policymakers and diplomats. (Steven Soderbergh’s virus thriller Contagion, entirely ignored by the Academy, is a notable exception.) They get off easy compared to global corporations, invariably the villains in films like Syriana and The Constant Gardener.

This skepticism has carried over into the depictions of terrorism in post-9/11 films. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for instance, certainly can’t be accused of sympathy for jihadists, but took a tone of ambivalence about the ethics of counterterrorism that led critics like the New Republic’s Leon Weiseltier to accuse it of “the sin of equivalence” between the Israeli spies and the Palestinian terrorists they were hunting. Questions of accuracy and the torture debate aside, Zero Dark Thirty probably belongs in the same category: a movie with no hesitation about the evil of terrorism that also asks what a society loses by bending its own moral code to prevent it.

It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s vision of foreign policy is entirely conflict-oriented. Movies are all over wars, or the lead-up to wars. There are plenty of portrayals of soldiers on the way to a battlefield, at said battlefield, or recovering from the effects of their time in a war zone, though the latter normally focus more on soldiers’ personal reactions than any of the institutions set up to support them or the failure of those institutions. If we’re not talking about wars, movies are often exploring the lead-ups to them, particularly in the form of espionage. Argo was the rare movie that portrayed diplomats as well as members of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s very little conversation about trade, or cultural exchange—The Sapphires, about Australian singers who perform in USO tours during Vietnam, is a rare exception—banking, immigration (except in documentaries), technology, or trans-state actors like the United Nations. The fact that Game of Thrones takes on so many of these soft-power issues, at least in the novels, is one of the reasons it’s so unusual. This focus on the military and on security issues makes a certain amount of sense: war is among the highest stakes that any set of characters can face, and ticking time bomb scenarios or climactic battles make for strong three-act structures. But focusing on those issues alone means that Hollywood is leaving lots of kinds of stories on the table, and picking ones that are more likely to present other countries as dangerous, inhospitable places.

And that’s a bias that runs contrary to Hollywood’s own interests. Beyond what it shows on its screens, the biggest factor driving Hollywood’s actual foreign policy as an industry is trade barriers, whether it’s China’s limits on the number of movies produced by other countries that can air legally on Chinese screens in a given year, or the need to accomodate content restrictions in countries with state-run ratings and censorship systems. Keating mentions China’s leverage to get movies cut to meet its standards before they air in the United States, but it’s an issue worth exploring further, especially on issues like Middle Eastern funders’ comfort with higher levels of violence than sexuality. Hollywood’s foreign policy might have initially been driven by the preferences and contradictions of American audiences’ feelings about our country’s foreign entanglements. But other audiences’ preferences, and the preferences of their governments, will matter more and more as the international audiences account for more and more of box office receipts.

Two of sports’ most outspoken advocates for marriage equality filed a brief with the Supreme Court Thursday, asking it to reaffirm a lower court’s decision that overturned California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage by ballot referendum in 2008.

“When we advance the idea that some people should be treated differently because of who they are, demeaned in public as lesser beings, not worthy of the same rights and benefits as others despite their actions as good citizens and neighbors, then we deny them equal protection under the laws,” Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo wrote in the brief. “America has walked this path before, and courageous people and the Court brought us to the right result. We urge the Court to repeat those actions here.”

Kluwe and Ayanbadejo, who have both argued for LGBT equality in both sports and America as a whole, also argued in the brief that their roles as prominent athletes matters in setting an example for all Americans, and that the Supreme Court should relish the similar role it has:

These athletes understand that, because of their public stature, the consequences flow naturally from their actions even if they cannot see the consequences. Consequences of being a role model and leader. Consequences for young children and adults who mimic our behavior when they interact with other children and adults. Those consequences flow because children and adults want to “Be Like [insert athlete name here].” Athletes are learning that they can no longer say “I am not a role model”— that they are forced to be a role model and privileged to be a role model, and that their words and actions, no matter how innocently intended, are magnified for both good and bad. If a professional basketball or football player says something is “gay,” young boys on the playground will copy and magnify the statement. If a hockey player says homosexuals are not welcome in the locker room, a young girl will shun a teammate who she thinks may be gay—where that teammate was until then a bright, happy, smart, and promising kid. After, she will be afraid of being who she is, and will takes steps, even dire steps, to avoid it.

But if a Pro Bowler treats a teammate as being an equal who is worthy of his friendship and respect because that other person is a good friend who places the team before himself, then high schoolers in Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, and Minnesota will not—cannot—miss that example. If that Pro Bowler speaks out publicly and kindly, kids will hear it and feel it. Kids who are already dealing with everything youth throws at them will know they can treat others as friends and equals, and those others will know they are equal and that, without question, it is better to be themselves than to be hurt. They will follow the credo, “Live on, and be yourself.”

The argument that sports matter as a driver in social change is not novel, but it is a new feature in the debate for marriage equality. Sports have led civil rights fights in the past, but when it comes to equality for LGBT Americans, sports have largely been absent from the fight.

That is beginning to change, thanks in large part to athletes like Kluwe and Ayanbadejo. There still isn’t an out man in American professional sports, but three of the four major leagues have added sexual orientation to their non-discrimination clauses in labor negotiations, and as this week demonstrated, the prospect of violating those agreements is not taken lightly by players’ unions or leagues. Teams across leagues have participated in the “It Gets Better” campaign and leagues have set up organizations to push for equality. And players’ attitudes are slowly beginning to change, even if they are sometimes forced to. When San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver said he wouldn’t welcome a gay teammate the week before the Super Bowl, he was swiftly rebuked by his teammates and former players, and he attempted to make up for it by volunteering at an LGBT charity. Two years after Kobe Bryant called an NBA official a “fucking fag,” he has taken to rebuking Twitter users who use similar slurs.

Those attitude changes matter because sports, as leisurely and casual as we sometimes view them, often act as a powerful driver of social change. American professional sports integrated at least a decade before the Civil Rights Movement took off, and even after the movement began, athletes marched with civil rights leaders and exposed racial injustices on podiums at the Olympics. Athletes like Muhammad Ali fought both racial inequality and the plagues of war; athletes like Billie Jean King were central in the fight for equal rights for women. The sports world, if not Kluwe and Ayanbadejo themselves, may be late to the fight for LGBT equality. But that doesn’t mean they can’t, and won’t, still have a similar impact.

The bridge is yours.

-Only six of the Writers’ Guild of America 101 greatest screenplays are by women.

-Quvenzhané Wallis is not the only person people seem to think it’s okay to nickname rather than learning to pronounce their names.

-I want to see Snowpiercer immediately.

-Louis C.K. will be back on our televisions on April 13.

-China’s using cracking down on pornography as an excuse to censor websites.

As has been widely reported, Vice is in North Korea with Dennis Rodman now on what has been billed as some sort of pseudo-diplomatic mission, but which has instead turned into a parade of gross declarations of friendship for the horrifically oppressive regime on Rodman’s part, and disgusting tweets about getting hammered with Kim Jong Un from Vice staffer Jason Mojica. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just one of Vice’s usual video stunts. It’s an episode that the company is shooting for its HBO news magazine series. And that they’re doing something like this isn’t particularly surprising.

This summer at the Television Critics Association press tour, I asked Vice’s Shane Smith about the way they were branding the show, which included things like introducing segments by offering up as analysis of the Kashmir conflict “India and Pakistan fucking hate each other,” and about what level of information they expected their audience to have. His answer didn’t reveal a keen awareness of the difference between starting broad and getting more detailed, and the problems with presenting news about the world beyond the United States in a reductive tone that smacks more of cultural tourism than insight.

“They do fucking hate each other, and they’ve hated each other for quite some time,” he told me. “So, you know, we get into why, which is because of partition and Kashmir. But also it goes to a very complex point of its water now. Water is a huge issue in Pakistan. They’re saying that ‘India’s taking our water.’ Water is maybe the main issue in India right now. Now, that’s a very complex point to get to, but you have to start sort of broad and say, ‘They hate each other. This is why they hate each other.’”

I’m absolutely a believer in trying to bring new audiences in to international news, and into news at all. But to have any sort of integrity, your priority in that mission has to be the story itself. Speaking the same language as your target audience may be an important skill set to bring to the mission. But the point is less that you want to meet them where they’re at than to convince them to come along to where you are. And if using that language and those values—including the idea that it’s transgressive and cool to get drunk with and fed by a dictator who is starving his own people to death—take over what you’re trying to communicate about water rights in Pakistan or the horrendous repressiveness of the North Korean regime, you probably need to slow your role and reconsider what you’re doing. If this was some sort of Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret-style fiction, I could see it as a Girls-level satire of the grotesque privilege and oblivious of First World tourists in the Third World. But Vice and Rodman are actually doing these things. And I’m curious how HBO is going to try to convince audiences that this is really a fresh, edgy take on news reporting, if only for the despair factor.

Given that efforts are continuing to pin blame for gun violence on violent media culture, the content industries are responding proactively with a new and voluntary campaign to help parents understand the tools that already exist to help them keep their children from consuming media they find disturbing:

In the news release on Wednesday, representatives for the industries said they would “make a positive contribution to the national conversation on violent behavior by launching a national educational campaign through communications channels including television public service announcements, educational and informational websites, in-theater advertising, and other media.”

The industry representatives include the lobbying groups for filmmakers, theater owners, broadcasters, and cable operators. They said the public service ads would appear on television and on the Web in the months to come. The ads will remind parents about the existing television and film ratings systems and the parental controls that are built into most television sets. Ads about the film ratings system will also be shown in movie theaters.

As someone who was very effectively kept away from violent movies, television, and video games as a child—though not from an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein, which gave me nightmares for months—I’m genuinely curious as to what options the parents in the audience wish they had to regulate their children’s media useage that aren’t available to them now. I totally understand that it can be jarring to have advertising for violent or sexual content come on during or in front of programming that itself is rated for general audiences. And I imagine trying to prevent content creep both at school as children get older and have more autonomy over how they spend their time, and as kids visit other people’s houses where video games are more widely available or certain channels are unblocked, must be a constant source of frustration.

The first problem is one that could be fixed by voluntary self-regulation on the part of movie theaters and television broadcasters, in coordination with movie studios and video game manufacturers. The second is harder, and involves lots of conversations with your children about what hard, scary things mean, and what makes you uncomfortable, and what makes them uncomfortable. And the latter probably involves some limits-testing and kids encountering things that upset them, and that they decide they’re not ready for. That’s a risk I think some parents don’t particularly want to take, but it seems to me to be a fairly necessary part of children and young adults developing their own internal set of limits, which are likely to be more effective than simply asking them to abide by parentally-determined ones.

But beyond those ongoing efforts and voluntary regulation by the industry, and excluding the idea of bans on certain kinds of content on the grounds that censorship is neither desirable nor implementable, what are the resources you wish you had? Better channel-blocking and web-monitoring software? Guides to talking about certain kinds of images, like gun violence or sexual assault? Or are you all set?