The TED lecture series has expanded to a TEDxTeen program, and one of the first participants is Rookie Magazine founder and style icon Tavi Gevinson, who raises some important points about the much-maligned archetype of the so-called “strong female character”:

“I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted and we get these two-dimensional superwomen,” Gevinson suggests. “They’re not strong characters who happen to be female. They’re completely flat.”

I’d actually go further. The evaluation of whether a female character is strong shouldn’t be about whether or not the character herself demonstrates physical or emotional resilience, but about whether the execution of the character, whether she is personally weak or strong, decisive or lost, is precise and unique. The “strong,” if we’re going to keep using the term, should be an indicator of quality, rather than of type. A personality can be strong and distinct without being positive. And there should be a lot more room for women to be compelling without being nice, to exist with a network of support rather than needing to do everything for themselves, and for stories about them to make them worthy of our investment because of those things. Going from one very narrow lane to the next isn’t an improvement. I want female characters to be able to drive all over the highway.

Was the National Football League and a committee it established to protect players from brain injuries instrumental in killing a padded helmet cover that may have reduced the likelihood of concussions for players who wore it? And did it do so because the product possibly threatened Riddell, the helmet manufacturer that had a business relationship with the league? That’s the implication of a Bloomberg story published Monday on the ProCap, a pad that fit over players’ helmets and, according to its inventor, was able to reduce the force of blows to the head and thus the occurrence of concussions.

Industrial designer Bert Straus, the ProCap’s inventor, put his product in front of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee in 1995 after multiple players who had suffered previous concussions adopted it for use in NFL play. The committee, however, rejected his proposal and ultimately ruled that the ProCap was actually more dangerous for players. That and the committee’s recommendations against other helmets, according to Straus and others, was a result of the NFL’s relationship with Riddell, whose helmets didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the league even though, according to one study, they were more dangerous than those made by other manufacturers.

The research behind the ProCap isn’t clear. While one small-sample research project showed that it reduced the occurrence of concussions, the other supporting study was paid for by Straus’ business, and other products, like special mouth guards and helmet products, that have claimed to substantially reduce concussions have been questioned. As Paul Anderson, an expert on the lawsuit former players filed against the NFL last year, told me Monday, such products are often marketed in a way that fosters a false sense of confidence among users even though there is very little research to support claims that they make players less likely to suffer concussions (and, in many instances, research proving they don’t).

The MTBI committee ultimately came to the conclusion that the ProCap could be more dangerous for the head and neck, and Anderson suggested that the committee at least based this decision on science. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an inherent conflict of interest on the committee that could have prevented it from banning products, ProCap or otherwise, that could have offered players more options for protection on the field.

Why does that matter? The conflict between the NFL’s business interests and the MTBI committee’s stated goal of protecting players is a major piece of the lawsuit from more than 4,000 former players that claims the NFL withheld and covered up information linking football to concussions and long-term brain injuries. The MTBI committee has a long history of seeming to do just that, with its own director and its own body of research downplaying the dangers of concussions, the need for “hard and fast protocol” for treatment, and the connection between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy all the way until 2010, when it was disbanded.

Whether the ProCap itself could have reduced concussions doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the appearance of conflict that may have prevented the NFL and the MTBI committee from thoroughly considering alternative products and, more importantly, research that ran contra to the NFL’s financial interests. Even if the committee got the science right in this instance, its ability to question alternative products without examining Riddell’s helmets—one of which finished 14th of 15 helmets in one concussion impact test—with the same scrutiny seems to call into question the idea that it was operating with the singular goal of protecting the players.

That doesn’t mean the players are destined to win the lawsuit; in fact, this specific instance likely won’t have much effect on the overall lawsuit at all. If there is a smoking gun that proves the players’ claim, it will almost certainly be found in the discovery stage. That is still a ways off, given that a federal judge will decide on the NFL’s motion to dismiss next month, and it may turn out that the MTBI committee and the NFL have all the research they need to back up their actions (or lack thereof). But the narrative is building that the NFL’s lack of action on concussions was not, as former player Steve Wallace told Bloomberg, “about players’ safety, it was about the dollar bills.” That’s a characterization the NFL can ill-afford, but it’s also a characterization that with every bit of new evidence seems more and more accurate.

As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, many of my colleagues who write about policy have been looking back on their past prognostications to see who was right, who was wrong, and who believed what information on what basis. It’s an interesting exercise, considering how many reputations were made and broken on those assessments, but I’m interested in looking backwards for something different. During the decade of America’s involvement in Iraq, Hollywood’s responded with a huge array of movies, television shows, and miniseries that offer a fascinating, and in many ways disturbing window into our desire to support and honor the people who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite the profusion of these movies, and of soldiers as heroes even in movies that aren’t specifically about these wars, pop culture tells us as much about our attitudes to Iraq in what movies and television largely leave out: the reasons we sent soldiers to Iraq in the first place and kept them there for so long; the rising number of female veterans who are homeless, even as the Obama administration welcomed servicewomen officially into combat; and what medical recovery from combat injury really looks like. Too often, Hollywood products reflect a public desire to support the troops without recognizing what kind of support would actually be useful. And too often, sympathy for veterans substitutes for grappling with the reasons that we asked them to do things that have left them physically or psychologically injured.

As was the case in the Vietnam War, something I’ve written about at some length before, many of the movies about our involvement in Iraq are set not there, but back in the United States after soldiers return home. It’s a setting that allows audiences to mediate their experiences with veterans, and to consider encountering them as people, rather than as symbolic and inert yellow ribbons. And telling coming-home stories allow movies to engage with small parts of the military support experience. Sometimes it’s the families who stay behind, and in some cases are left behind forever when a soldier dies, as is the case in the John Cusack-starring drama Grace Is Gone, or In The Valley Of Elah, which featured Tommy Lee Jones as a father searching for his veteran son, who is eventually found murdered. Other movies deal with at least some of the bureaucracy of the military and the toll of the war in Iraq, as is the case with The Messenger, which follows Casualty Notification Officers as they deliver the news that soldiers have been killed overseas to their families at home.

Not all movies focus on families: others move closer, foregrounding the experiences of soldiers themselves when they try to reckon with reintegration into civilian life, or the impossibility of doing so. Two of the best moves in this class, Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, intriguingly, are both made by women, who convincingly convey an alienation from mainstream American culture that’s very different from that experienced by Vietnam veterans a generation ago. Where Vietnam veterans had to deal with a certain amount of disdain for those who had served in the war, Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker confront different societal challenges: the former is about a soldier, played by Ryan Phillipe, who believes he’s home safe with the war only to find that his contract has been reupped without his consent under the military’s anti-attrition policies, and faces disbelief from his friends when he goes on the lam to attempt to have the decision appealed so he can stay home. Ultimately, he’s unwilling to flee to Canada and forfeit his life in America to avoid another term of duty. An anti-war movement that might have supported him is a long way away: the idea of honoring service is so deeply entrenched that the people around this young man can’t necessarily acknowledge that he might have given enough, that the best way to recognize his devotion to duty would be to let him return to civilian life. In The Hurt Locker, the main character, a bomb defuser, voluntarily decides to return to his dangerous work in Iraq after finding himself overwhelmed and disengaged by the prosperity he encounters on his return to the United States.

And soldiers have become stock figures in all sorts of genre movies, even those that don’t purport to deal directly with war or the soldiering experience as their primary subject—and soldiering roles have become a key way for actors to attempt to rebrand themselves as serious mainstream players. Zac Efron, as part of his attempts to present himself as something other than a teen idol, played a Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks weepie The Lucky One. Professional wrestler John Cena played a Marine who was discharged for overzealousness in the fight against terrorism in Iraq, and who has trouble adapting to civilian life until his skills become necessary in tracking down a violent band of criminals who have kidnapped his girlfriend in The Marine. The remake of The A-Team, which put a jokey spin on the Iraqi insurgency, was part of Bradley Cooper’s move up from goofy supporting player to star, and an attempt to make South African actor Sharlto Copley a mainstream American movie actor after the success of District 9. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was a silly stop for both Channing Tatum, who between this and Stop-Loss has benefitted perhaps more than any other single actor from the fad for soldier characters, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it did demonstrate that they were both credible participants in action franchises.
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The bridge is yours.

-The takeover of action movies by indie directors continues.

-Rembert Brown ranks the best musical performances he saw at SXSW.

-New secrets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

-I’m getting very, very excited to see Short Term 12.

-Here, have a TV show from Christopher Guest:

The Washington Post’s announcement yesterday that the paper will erect a paywall that charges readers who access more than 20 pieces of content per month was probably inevitable. As much as papers and other publications have tried to monetize online viewers, the infrastructure of those publications were built on the revenues from a model that could extract more money from readers: you’re always going to be able to get more money from audiences when, without paying it, they can’t access the information or data they want at all.

But even as publications that were built on subscriber fees collectively move in the direction of paywalls, the ways they design those paywalls say a great deal about what those publications perceive as their strengths and weaknesses. The Post, the paper explained, “will exempt large parts of its audience from having to pay the fees. Its home-delivery subscribers will have free access to all of The Post’s digital products, and students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces. Access to The Post’s home page, section front pages and classified ads will not be limited.”

Government employees and military personnel are some of the Post’s bread and butter—other national papers don’t cover issues like federal compensation or government openings and closings the same way the Post does, so the Post’s competitors on those issues are trade publications like my former employer, Government Executive. If the Post was confident that its coverage in those areas was vital to its readers, and that it would beat its competitors, it might make sense for them to keep government employees outside of the paywall rather than giving them a passthrough, because those readers would be a reliable source of revenue. But giving them a loophole suggests that the Post needs their eyes but doesn’t trust this core consumer audience to pay for the content—it’s a sign of weakness where the publication should be strong.

It also remains to be seen, I think, how the Post will handle its online-first properties, like Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog. While paywalls are an attempt to recreate the subscription model for the internet age, things like Wonkblog or Max Fisher’s blog lived online first, and trying to move them into a new business model might split up their readership. Paywalling them would be a retreat from the Post’s ventures into digital development, a sign that the company is continuing to have trouble running a mixed strategy. The New York Times’ move to a paywall demonstrated that, even if the paper has had to continue buyouts and reduced ambitions, its core readership remains relatively strong and committed. The Post’s paywall comes with lower expectations in the form of its loopholes than the Times’ has. But even with that curve, I’ll be curious to see what the paper’s final grade turns out to be.

An incredibly easy way to test whether someone is in a defensive crouch is whether or not they’re claiming that all publicity is good publicity. And the producers of the Academy Awards are doing precisely that after a widely-maligned ceremony hosted by comedian Seth MacFarlane.

“People have complained for years and years that the Oscars were becoming irrelevant,” Neil Meron told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think what we did this year is to really make them part of the cultural conversation, and I think that’s the important part that people will take away.”

It’s awfully depressing that the ambitions for a production with a purported billion-person audience that’s meant to celebrate an industry that creates internationally compelling images and stories is to be “part of the cultural conversation.” Hosting awards shows is a difficult thing, requiring the hosts to be funny, potentially to be musical depending on the show, to frame guest presenters artfully, to act in sketches, to switch tones effectively between humor and honor. That’s not an easy mix of skills to find in a single person, and I understand why there are so many failures to design effective ceremonies, and why people like Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg end up hosting so frequently.

But in a good awards ceremony, the content itself ought to be the news, and the host’s primary job should be to showcase the content. And if you have good content, particularly that which represents conflicting viewpoints and styles, which was the case at this year’s Academy Awards, that content should propel you into the news cycle. The contrasts between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and between Django Unchained and Lincoln alone should have been enough to generate a compelling drive towards the end of the evening. And if Meron and company weren’t interested in making the event into a competition, then why not stick with their theme, which was music in the movies? It could have been a way of narrowing the host’s tasks, and the kind of guests that the producers needed to recruit. But then, if you’re going to screw up the sound mixing on Adele’s performance, maybe that wasn’t a good idea either. At minimum, I’d hope the ceremony could have the same technical competence as the movies it’s celebrating.