Ben McLemore is a 6-foot-5 inch phenom, a 20-year-old redshirt freshman who leads one of college basketball’s best teams in scoring, has the Kansas Jayhawks on the verge of another deep run into the NCAA Tournament, and could be the first overall pick in June’s National Basketball Association Draft. McLemore is a contender for the national Freshman of the Year award and is a finalist for national Player of the Year awards too.

He is also a product of the extreme poverty that grips millions of families across this country, a child whose mother worked multiple jobs in a vain attempt to make ends meet, a kid who often went days without food and found it “hard to play basketball when nothing is inside of you.” McLemore’s family often had to choose between food and electricity, as USA Today’s Eric Prisbell detailed in a profile of the Kansas star last week:

McLemore says the only meals he sometimes had were the free ones at school. His mother, he recalled, sometimes made the difficult decision to sell food stamps in order to pay bills.

“Sometimes we would not have food so we could keep our lights on and have hot water,” he says. “She had to sacrifice for that.”

When the family did not have hot water, McLemore remembers one nightly routine: Fill the bathtub with cold water. Heat up bowls of water in the microwave, then run them to the bathtub to make the tub water lukewarm for baths. The warmth never lasted, he says.

McLemore is months from being able to fully leave that past behind, a from-the-gutters-to-greatness success story that is so often repeated in sports. But the fact that McLemore’s family had to sell food stamps to afford light and heat, that they had to shuttle microwaved water to the tub for a warm bath, that they went days without food and slept huddled in the living room to avoid the bitter cold, is more a story of America’s failure than it is of McLemore’s success.

Our social safety net keeps millions of people out of poverty each year. It includes programs that help low-income families afford food, that helps poor children get breakfast and lunch at school. It also includes programs that help low-income families heat their homes, that help working mothers like McLemore’s afford child care, that help poor children get a better education. It includes programs that all Americans have heard of, like food stamps and welfare, and many, like WIC and LIHEAP, that go mostly unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t use them. Together, the programs form one of the stingiest social safety nets in the industrial world, and yet, it is these programs that have repeatedly faced the budget axe as American politicians keep cutting spending.

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In a long interview with Vulture, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl creator Issa Rae talks about everything from her big-television show I Hate LA Dudes (which sounds like it didn’t get an ABC pickup since they’re shopping it to cable) to her love for Tina Fey. But I was struck by how she talked about White Jay, the love interest for the character she plays on Awkward Black Girl, and who, as it turns out, was the product of a similar process that produces characters of color on majority-white network television show. She explained:

It’s really kind of superficial. The first season, we were growing in popularity, but my producer at the time was saying in order to reach a bigger audience, and to reach white people specifically, you have to put a white person in the show. I was like, “Oh my God, that makes so much sense.” So we chose this character Jay. He was only supposed to be a one-off character. But once we premiered his episode, the audience went crazy in the [YouTube] comments section. I don’t want to bang anyone over the head with the same interracial tropes you’ve seen in the past. It just seemed like a fun story line. His name was initially “Jay,” and the commenters named him White Jay. So we stuck with that.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the assumption that colorblindness—which in pop culture, frequently functions as casting an actor of color and then refusing to think about how that character’s race might have affected their life experiences, perspectives, or even cultural touchstones and tastes—is progressive, arguing both that erasure of racial experience and perspective is a sin in and of itself, and that it often flattens characters, denying them detail and depth. The flip side of colorblindness, of course, is obnoxious and counterproductive, casting a character of color to provide nothing other than a familiar and reductive dose of blackness, or Asianness, or Latinoness, as if diversity is the equivalent of Tarragon.

What Rae is describing is the intention that can help guide cultural products through a default to colorblindness on one hand, and reductive stereotyping on the other. The assumption that you need to add characters of color to a majority-white show, or a white character to a show that’s mostly about characters of color is an irritating underestimation of audiences, a reflection of the fact that in a lot of directions, pop culture is bad at teaching people to be interested in characters who aren’t like them. But if a showrunner gets handed that directive, it would be awfully nice if their instinct was to create something distinct, rather than to respond to a demand driven by lowest-common-denominator concerns with either a stereotype or a cardboard cutout. That alone isn’t enough to make a character work—you’ve got to actually do your homework for that—but it’s a reaction that really ought to be natural.

The bridge is yours.

-How 3D printers will change the future.

-What the Skywalker family would be like if Anakin hadn’t fallen to the dark side.

-Leigh Bardugo continues to basically be the best.

-O’Brien is leaving Downton Abbey? Hell no!

-Sophmoric sex humor + brass=new Big Boi video:

On Friday, the Washington Post announced a change that may sound procedural, but has enormous implications: after 42 years, the paper will no longer employ an ombudsman to examine the operations and stances of the paper from an independent perspective (Disclosure: the last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, was a colleague and editor when I started out at National Journal, and remains a friend). Instead, publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote in a note to readers:

We will appoint a reader representative shortly to address our readers’ concerns and questions. Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee. The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.

On the face of it, this structure seems like a problem for two reasons. A reader representative is not the same thing as a person who represents the best interests of the Post, and who tries to discern what those interests might be for readers, reporters, editors, and the business side in concert. Reader concerns are only one part of that constellation—though of course they’re an important one—and readers’ concerns may not grow out of an understanding of what it takes to report a news story. Readers’ interests may run counter to journalistic ethics or to quality journalism, as is the case with readers Pexton wrote about in a recent column, who want coverage of homosexuality to give equal weight to discredited ideas about gay people. And readers aren’t the only or most informed critics of most papers: a good ombudsman weighed criticism from media analysts and ethics groups as well as reader concerns. Replacing the ombudsman with a reader representative feels diminishing, a step down to an emphasis on the local reaction to the paper rather than a continued emphasis on the Post’s national reputation.

And even on that scale, this is a worrisome development. How can someone who is employed by the Washington Post itself be expected to truly represent reader concerns against the priorities of the people who sign his or her paycheck? Even if the job is being scaled down to focus on reader concerns, readers should feel more confident if their advocate is financially independent of the paper. And reporters who are criticized by readers should worry about whether they will get a fair hearing against those criticisms given that the person weighing them needs to please their employer as well, and is representing readers, who in turn represent dollars, to the publisher. It’s also notable that Weymouth, rather than Post editor Marty Baron, made the announcement of this change in policy, which seems more about customer service than journalistic integrity. This is a tangled set of incentives rather than one set up to produce firewalls and genuine independence, much less trust from the readers this new position is meant to represent.

In a feature on the decision at NPR, Edward Schumacher-Matos argued that, while it’s not surprising that news organizations, like individuals, might dislike hearing criticism, the best ones embrace ombudsmen as a way of enhancing their own credibility, and as a way of protecting themselves from backlash against free speech. He explained:

Curiously, while the American news media cowers and pulls back, unable to believe in itself, the increasingly free press in so many other parts of the word are adding ombudsmen and improving standards. Even in some places without a long tradition of free press, there is a growing recognition of the link between good public information, on the one hand, and economic development and democracy, on the other, as shown in studies by the World Bank and others.

I am on the board of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen and have watched with delight as the number of ombudsmen has taken off in countries such as India, Bangladesh and South Africa. According to Stephen Pritchard, the president of ONO, Colombia now has 14 ombudsmen working just in television — each with a weekly half-hour show—and Mexican television has five. When Lord Justice Leveson issued his report last November on the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain, he cited having an independent ombudsman as a “best practice” to respond to public complaints.

In other words, the Post’s choice to ditch the ombudsman position doesn’t just make the Post look journalistically anxious. It makes the paper look parochial. And if the Post wants to restore its reputation as a nationally and internationally important news organization, it would do well to look past its own organizational anxieties to international norms for excellence.

This post discusses plot points from the March 3 episode of The Walking Dead.

In both style and substance, The Walking Dead returned to its roots this Sunday, bringing back both the haunting aesthetic and a critical, seemingly forgotten character from the show’s premiere. The result was the most effective episode since the midseason break, a psychological horror show that tells us the worst thing about the apocalypse is being alone.

Only three of the regular characters (Rick, Carl, and Michonne) appeared tonight, as the show abandoned its standard whole-cast format to spotlight their mission to acquire the guns from Rick’s police station to sustain their war effort against the Governor. The more focused plotting facilitated the sort of nuanced character work that had been missing in the past few episodes: Michonne gets to display some welcome droll humor and Carl gets to step out of the “kid badass” archetype to remind us (through a sentimental quest for a photo of his family) that he is, in fact, still a kid.

But this was Morgan’s (Lennie James) episode, returning for the first time since Rick parted ways with Morgan and his son Duane in the first episode. As Rick himself notices, it’s hard not to see Morgan as Rick’s double, but while Rick suggests he and Morgan been through the same travails (“Things went bad for me, things went bad for you”), he’s wrong. While Rick found a community, Morgan and his son trod a solitary path. And that made all the difference: people need each other, often in more ways than we know.

Morgan lost Duane to an attack by his zombified wife (who, back in the first episode, Morgan couldn’t bring himself to shoot). Alone, Morgan spun further and further away from reality, and by the time we see him again he’s surrounded by an unnecessarily enormous weapons stockpile and walls defaced with disturbing, incomprehensible graffiti (“sometimes interrupt with the start;” “we PULL upon detention”). It wasn’t just seeing his wife devour his son that drove him over the edge; we know from real people that solitary living is the death of sanity. Terry Anderson, a journalist kidnapped and held in solitary confinement in 1985, described the experience as the destruction of thought, happiness, and human experience:

The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.

Without people to tether him, Morgan snapped. The apocalypse remakes the whole world as a giant solitary cell, a hellscape that slowly but inexorably pushes one’s sanity to the breaking point.

Though recent research has proven that being held alone (quite literally) damages the human brain, the insight that people need each other is old. In his seminal Politics, Aristotle famously defines humans as “political animals,” capable of flourishing only in a community. Communities make people better: we define right and wrong for each other, while our moral faculties collapse when left alone. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals,” Aristotle argues, “but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.”

The difference between Rick and Morgan’s lives could be Aristotle’s exhibit A. While Morgan nearly killed Rick (twice!) for essentially no reason, Rick nursed him back to sanity. Morgan, who when introduced in season one appeared morally exemplary, had lost his ethical compass. “People like you, the good people? They always die,” he tells Rick. The survival of Rick’s group says otherwise, and goes a long way towards showing why, despite the dangers of war with other groups, the members of Rick’s little band need their little city after all.

While the dangers of holding people alone have been well-known since Aristotle’s time, the US prison system still routinely locks people away in solitary. Over 80,000 people are currently living in what’s euphemistically called “segregated housing,” including children and at least one person who’s been held alone for 42 years. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has advised against extraditing suspects to the US who will likely be held in solitary, on grounds that, as you might have guessed, it’s torture.

In a world without these kinds of legal structures, there’s also a more obvious need to have others around. At the beginning of Sunday’s episode, we see a man sprinting after Rick’s car desperately calling for help while they coldly drive by. At the end, they come across to his bloody backpack, and stop only to scavenge his supplies.

Sometimes, hell is the lack of other people.

It’s a sign of how anxious the right wing is about the possibility that Ashley Judd might run for Senate against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that the attacks on her have geared up before she’s even formally entered the race. There’s the American Crossroads ad trying to frame her as out of touch with a series of relatively anodyne and contextless quotations. And now, the Daily Caller, which has been trying to frame Judd’s feminist beliefs as fringe, has launched the stupidest salvo against her at all: arguing that Judd, because she has done nude scenes for her work as an actress, “has—literally—nothing left to show us.” In an exceptionally gross piece, Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s Entertainment Editor (Entertainment, in Caller parlance, apparently means surfing Mr. Skin and publishing clickbait trash gossip) writes:

We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.

It may come as a surprise to the Daily Caller, but actresses don’t generally take their clothes off on-screen as an expression of some sort of groovy seventies lifestyle, or as a way to have sex with people who are not their spouses or partners. Rather, getting asked to take off some or all of your clothes is, for a lot of actors, a frequent requirement of the job, and something that until recently, tended to be asked of women more frequently than men. When men do get fully naked on-screen, they’re often protected to a certain extent by the comedic framing of the scene, whether it’s Jason Segel stripping down in Forgetting Sarah Marshall for a scene in which his character expects to surprise his girlfriend and ends up getting dumped by her after he refuses to get dressed, or Will Ferrell going streaking in Old School. There’s a separation between actors and their bodies—no one considers men who get naked the sum of junk, the kind of person who, in real life, would pound a lot of beers at a frat party and take off, flapping in the breeze, down a suburban street. Ferrell can get down to his BVDs and still be happily married, raise money for cancer charities, and play the straight man in movies like Stranger Than Fiction. We know that Michael Fassbender is not actually the sex addict he portrayed in Shame in the same way that we know that he doesn’t actually have the capability to manipulate metal with his mind possessed by another one of his characters, X-Men‘s Magneto.

But with actresses, that division appears to be less certain. If a woman takes off her top in a movie, much less baring it all, Mr. Skin and his ilk will be there to catalogue it to make sure people who only want to see her as, in the parlance of that site, “breasts, butt, bush, underwear, sexy,” can skip the parts of her performance that would give her character humanity and context, and would remind us that she’s a woman playing a part. The movies Ashley Judd’s taken her clothes off in tend to have that kind of context, whether she’s playing a woman in love with a mentally ill man who claims to be a veteran in Bug or in Norma Jean and Marilyn, a biopic of Marilyn Monroe, a woman who, in real life, was devoured by audiences’ inability to see both her body and her mind simultaneously. If an actress goes nude for roles frequently, as, say, Lena Dunham has, she’s likely to be the subject of speculation about whether she’s some sort of exhibitionist, rather than whether her nudity enhances her roles, as if there’s no possible creative reason she could have for taking off her clothes or doing sex scenes. It’s a bizarre suspension of logic that applies to all other on-screen actions: no one thinks that Judd’s been married to a southern lawyer pulled into a racially-tinged trial, as she was in Time To Kill, or that she’s killed the ex-husband who framed her for murder as she did in Double Jeopardy, or gives her credit for knowing how Washington and politics work because she’s playing the First Lady in the forthcoming Olympus Has Fallen.
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