Inspired by Teju Cole, who has begun writing microfictions that make famous literary characters the target of drone strikes, and Bones‘ recent episode in which a terrorist hacked a drone and aimed it at an Afghan girls’ school, I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about the depictions of remote killing devices in our culture, popular and otherwise. And when I saw the trailer for Iron Man 3, I was struck by an idea: is Tony Stark so compelling to us because he and his Iron Man suits are a fantasy of the way that drone warfare is actually supposed to work?

It’s an idea that’s heightened by the idea, clearly suggested by the trailer, that Tony has gone from dissing Congressional committees to working directly for a President of the United States who’s been elected almost solely on a platform of aggressive action in defense of American security. The question of how superheroes would be regulated or controlled has been an open one around the edges of many of the movies in The Avengers franchise. Joss Whedon’s movie suggested that there was some sort of intergovernmental council in charge of making decisions about superhero deployment, but it was also clear that Nick Fury had the ability, if not the authority, to shrug off their decisions. Iron Man 3 looks like it will tackle Stark’s work for the president much more directly.

And what is it that Tony Stark does for the President? His primary job is to hunt down a terrorist called the Mandarin, and to prevent him from causing more damage to American interests. In pursuit of that goal, Tony swoops in to save people who have been blown out of jets by the Mandarin. As we’ve seen since the first movie, he also appears out of the sky, suddenly and without much warning, much like a drone, to kill people. Except, and this is where the fantasy comes in, he’s got targeting technology that means he can shoot just villains, rather than their victims, even if they’re being held hostage. With Iron Man technology, you don’t have to worry about obliterating a wedding party or killing American teenagers. The person piloting the technology, Tony Stark himself, is both directly in the war zones where he kills people on behalf of the government, so he can make decisions based on information he’s seeing in person, rather than from behind computer monitors, a remove that hasn’t prevented real-life drone pilots from getting burned out or diagnosed with PTSD. But unlike, say, the SEAL team that we sent in to kill Osama bin Laden, and no matter how many times we see Tony pull off his face mask and look dazed, as Iron Man he’s not really at physical risk: both the franchise and our dream of his capabilities demand it.
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“Are you aware that I exist?” is one of the last—and most uncomfortable—lines uttered in A Place At The Table, which arrived in movie theaters, iTunes, and Amazon on March 1. Spoken by Barbie Izquierdo, one of the advocates trained by Witnesses to Hunger, a group that organizes low-income women to tell their own stories to policymakers, it’s a reminder of how invisible food insecurity is in American life and American policy-making, a state of affairs that A Place At The Table tries to correct. Watch an exclusive clip of the movie here:

The movie does what good documentaries are supposed to do. It attaches faces to the statistics, giving humanity to the 50 million Americans living with food insecurity. A Place At The Table features testimony from a mother in a northern city who relies on food stamps, still can’t help make ends meet, and wonders if hunger was the cause of her son’s developmental delays; a family in Colorado that includes an elementary school-aged child who can’t concentrate in school because she is hungry and fantasizing about food; and a child in a Mississippi family suffering from obesity and related health problems while her family struggles to purchase food.

But A Place at the Table isn’t just trying to score sympathy points. It’s full of experts, like Center for American Progress fellow Joel Berg, who tease out the issues that have left its subjects short of food. Some of these policy decisions are simply bad math, like the gap between benefits levels and what families actually need to meet their food needs, or insufficient investments in school meals. And others are larger cultural decisions, like agribusiness subsidies that incentivize the production of unhealthy crops, and Reagan-era budget cuts that increased reliance on overstretched charities, a response that resembles individual citizens showing up to a blazing fire with buckets of water. .

These issues, and Barbie’s question, are particularly salient at this moment, when the sequester is literally taking food from people’s mouths: 600,000 people will be cut from the Women Infants and Children (WIC) food program in FY 2013. And a pending reauthorization could take at least another $4.5 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

The team behind A Place At The Table has goals beyond simply getting the film in theaters. They’re holding screenings for stakeholders on food security issues. And the filmmakers have also partnered with the nation’s major food organizations, including Bread for the World, Feeding America, the Food Research and Action Center, and Share Our Strength. When individuals seek more information about the film online, they are provided with an avenue to “take action” which adds them to the email list of the food organizations, offers a hotline number that will help them to connect to their member of Congress, and provides information about locations where they can volunteer in their community. Rather than those individual citizens showing up with buckets, A Place At The Table is trying to turn its audience into a fire brigade.

Joy Moses is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Poverty and Prosperity program at American Progress.

Though the world of sports has, for the most part, trailed the rest of American culture in the fight for LGBT equality, that fight has come front and center in recent weeks. NFL players Chris Kluwe and Brendan Ayanbadejo filed a brief in the Supreme Court fighting for marriage equality. Professional soccer player Robbie Rogers came out as gay in a blog post that also announced his retirement from the sport. And NFL teams have been embroiled in controversy over whether they asked future draft picks about their sexuality and if they “liked girls.”

There still isn’t an openly gay male athlete in American professional sports, but there is a growing sense that that could change soon. With that in mind, I talked to Travon Free, a former college basketball player at Cal State-Long Beach who came out as bisexual after his career ended, about what challenges face athletes who stay in the closet and about the challenges the first openly gay athlete will face. Here is a loosely edited transcript of our conversation:

You came out in a blog post on your website in 2011. What went into that decision, when you decided you were going to be public about it?

Around that time, summer of 2010, there were a lot of kids killing themselves, and it was really sad. Some friends and family knew, so I wasn’t going out of my way to hide it, and so after seeing that and just, like, being heartbroken by all those stories, I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like I was doing a disservice to myself and all those people who might look toward me as a some type of silver lining or a role model; if it was just one person who saw there was one person like me in a space where that was typically frowned upon or accepted.

Did you ever think about coming out while you were still playing basketball?

Oh yeah, I did. I thought about it a couple times. It’s funny. You go through a couple moments where you gauge the temperature of your peers to see how they might handle it, and for the most part, I don’t think it would have been a problem. My team didn’t seem very homophobic. It was funny because I used to tell people, my teammates loved to do really gay things, just do really silly shit. I think it’s kind of like that on sports teams in general: guys love to play around by pretending or doing things that are typically deemed gay, because the joke is, ‘I’m not really gay, I’m just doing this because it’s funny.’ Just hearing the occasional serious conversation or pseudo-serious conversation where guys would say, ‘I don’t really care’ or ‘it’s not a big deal,’ or they’d say they didn’t have an opinion, and I think you know what that means. The closer I got to graduating, the more comfortable I became with it, to where I stopped going out of my way to hide it. It was like, if someone found out, I wouldn’t care.

I think my coach would have not tolerated any type of animosity toward me if I did it. I think [former Long Beach coach Larry Reynolds] was pretty good about stuff like that. He wouldn’t have allowed it to be an environment where there would have been any hostility toward me for doing it.

How did you gauge it with teammates?

The couple times I can remember it came up organically. There was one road trip I remember. We were somewhere and there was a billboard, I don’t remember if it was a pro-family billboard or an equality-type thing. I just remember we passed it and it started a conversation. I would always listen closely to those kinds of things. I didn’t hear a lot of negativity toward it at all, it was really just guys talking about it. I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘No way would I play with a gay teammate,’ or ‘I don’t like gay people.’ At the time I remember thinking, ‘Well that’s a little comforting.’ If I did decide to do it, I don’t think my teammates would turn against me.

Afterward I got a lot of support from them. Old teammates would contact me and say, ‘I heard about it and you’re still one of my best friends, it doesn’t change anything.’ There was only one teammate who I found out about in retrospect who tried to make it a thing that people should be concerned about. I don’t know what his intention was. I didn’t find out about that until after I graduated. I found that out from another teammate. And the thing is, he was telling people stuff that wasn’t true. So that was the only guy who I guess had a problem with it.
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The (snowy) bridge is yours.

-Sam Raimi seems kind of delightful.

-Princess Leia will be back for the new Star Wars movies.

-Play Nicolas Cage Roulette!

-Really excited that Blue Caprice is going to make it to theaters.

-Carly Rae Jepsen Meets Nine Inch Nails:

This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified. Read at your own caution if you aren’t caught up.

As I’ve watched Justified over the past several weeks, I’ve been struck by a sense of how crowded the show has become. It sometimes seems as if everyone is descending on Harlan County, which is simultaneously sprouting new layers of law enforcement, a Native American community, and teenage miscreants. But last night it struck me why I haven’t loved this season of the show, even as I’ve loved the evolution of Boyd and Ava’s relationship this year. Much of what makes Justified special is its attention to its setting, and everything the show’s been adding lately has made Harlan more obscure and less specific.

The story of Drew Thompson was supposed to be a story about the arrival of the serious hard drug trade in Harlan. But instead, it’s ended up being about people in Harlan responding to, and in Boyd’s case, manipulating, Theo Tonin, the Detroit crime boss who was pulled into the show last season by the presence of Robert Quarles. The problem with the Tonin storyline though is that it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Harlan or the people who live there. Theo, at least so far, comes across as a fairly generic mercurial gangster who indulges his son and has a henchman who wanted his fatherly approval. He doesn’t represent Detroit in nearly the same way Boyd or Yorkie-owning, Dixie Mafia-running Wynn Duffy tell us about Harlan by letting us see a very particular vision of crime in Harlan.

And the time spent on Thompson this season has ended up taking away from any number of other, more local, and more interesting subplots. I was terribly disappointed to see the initial plot by Harlan’s elite to hire Boyd to blow a hole in a slurry pond so they could claim EPA clean-up funds to address the resulting disaster turn into a cheap assassination plot. That’s a fascinatingly diabolical idea rooted in real dangers—coal slurry threatened the Tuscaloosa water supply in 2011—and it would have provided both fascinating commentary on a long-running American industry and a throughline to Boyd’s experiences as a coal miner, first as a teenager with Raylan, and in season two.

The slurry plot could have made physically manifest the ways in which coal mining has had a morally poisonous influence on Harlan. Coal has helped economically stratify the county, something that became very clear when Boyd and Ava went house-hunting in Clover Hill, the neighborhood where Ava’s mother worked as a cleaning lady when Ava was a child—”They locked up their jewelry whenever she came over,” Ava says, a little sadly. “Are you sure I can’t show you something a little further down the hill? There are some lovely starter homes down there. Beautiful views. Quaint,” their realtor told them, trying to shoo the couple out of the neighborhood that might by polluted by the implications of their all-cash purchase and unpolished diction. “You and your fiancee might want to think about the commute..I ask because the banks are getting very stringent with applications.” It’s not that no show or movie has ever focused on poor or unwanted people moving into a rich—or white—neighborhood before. But Harlan’s class dynamics are specific, and, just as Boyd and Ava have discussed, the role of Crowders in Harlan is specific, persisting as they suspect from one generation into the next, requiring radical action, or at least a Dairy Queen franchise, to change.
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Chris Sprouse, the comics artist who’s drawn everything from Batman for DC Comics to the Dark Horse adaptation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, has announced that he will withdraw from illustrating Orson Scott Card’s Superman story for DC, on the grounds that the furor around Card’s grotesquely anti-gay advocacy made it impossible for the story to stand on its own:

“It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I’ve decided to step back as the artist on this story,” Sprouse said in a statement released Tuesday. “The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with. My relationship with DC Comics remains as strong as ever and I look forward to my next project with them.”

Due to the creative change, the Card story will not appear in the first collected issue out May 29. Instead, it will feature a story by writer Jeff Parker and artist Chris Samnee, as well as a tale by Jeff Lemire and one by writer Justin Jordan and artist Riley Rossmo.

DC is also looking for a replacement illustrator for Card’s story.

“We fully support, understand and respect Chris’s decision to step back from his Adventures of Superman assignment,” the company said in a statement. “Chris is a hugely talented artist, and we’re excited to work with him on his next DC Comics project. In the meantime, we will re-solicit the story at a later date when a new artist is hired.”

This strikes me as one of the best possible outcomes we could have hoped for in this case. I know a lot of people would have liked to see Card summarily dismissed, but that seems like a decision that could have made him a martyr for people who don’t actually understand how First Amendment rights function, and might have limited the incident to a one-off, requiring more organizing the next time a comics company hired Card to write a title. What Sprouse’s decision does is illustrate something more useful: a shift in the market that suggests Card isn’t a good choice to work with because his active work to ban equal marriage rights and to recriminalize homosexuality make it impossible for his work to stand alone as fiction. I think it’s very, very risky to support political litmus tests for whether people are allowed to work or not—though I have no problem with political litmus tests for whether or not you want to give someone your money, or how you want to offset giving your money to someone who would use it for ill. But if someone’s political advocacy is making it more difficult for them to do the job they’re up for, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable not to hire them or work for them. We want the norms around Card to change, not to be fighting him title by title and watching the companies that employ him fail to learn the same lesson each time.

Whether DC still intends to stay in the Card business after this remains an open question. If I were them, I might not formally cancel his contract, but now that he’s no longer being used to launch the title, I might just…not rebid the art on it for a long time that could gradually turn in to forever. If they “fully suport, understand, and respect Chris’s decision,” not to be associated with a story that was going to attract nothing but disapprobation and boycotts, I wouldn’t be surprised if DC finds a way to follow in his footsteps, however quietly and slowly.