This is the second in a series of posts, corresponding with horse racing’s Triple Crown, examining safety issues facing the sport. Part one appears here.

When nine horses leave the gates at Pimlico in the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown Saturday afternoon, they will mark the end of a sporting era. For the last time, the Preakness Stakes will be run under medical and drug testing rules that are set solely by the state of Maryland, thanks to an agreement among eight mid-Atlantic and northeastern states that will set uniform medication and drug testing standards beginning in 2014.

The compact, agreed to by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Massachusetts, is the result of push to bring some uniformity to horse racing’s medication and drug rules that has lasted for nearly a decade, years in which the sport has faced questions about both performance-enhancing drugs and therapeutic medications used to treat horses both in the days leading up to races and on race days themselves.

Horse racing banned the use of anabolic steroids in 2008, when Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown tested positive for Winstrol, a performance enhancing drug, and runner-up Eight Belles collapsed shortly after the finish line and was euthanized on the track. But other drugs, mostly therapeutic in nature and used to treat routine injuries, are still wildly prevalent, raising questions in an American industry that is dealing with higher rates of catastrophic breakdowns and fatalities among its horses than its foreign counterparts — and a general lack of data and research into how to improve it.

“Racing fatality rates in the U.S. are two- to three-times higher than other major racing countries that don’t allow phenylbutazone and other drugs,” Dr. Rick M. Arthur, the equine medical director at the University of California-Davis and the California Horse Racing Board, said at The Jockey Club’s annual meeting last year. “My international colleagues have no doubt our medication policies, especially in phenylbutazone, are the cause of this disparity. I’m not convinced it is that simple, but there is no question medication regulation is the most glaring difference between U.S. and other major racing countries.”

The eight-state compact is not the first major step toward addressing and improving the medication of horses in the United States — in a business regulated on a state-by-state basis, states have made their own adjustments to which drugs can be used and when they can be administered. But the compact is the biggest step in streamlining the process and standardizing medical practices and drug testing across state lines. With the help of scientists and experts across the industry, the eight states identified 24 drugs that are “appropriate for therapeutic use in racehorses to treat illness or injury” and set standards for when they can be administered and how much of the drugs can be present in a horse’s body on race day. It also identified other drugs that cannot be present in a horse on race day under any circumstances.

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Because this is apparently a week that involves a lot of me lowering my head slowly and deliberately to my desk a la Peggy Olson, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to trot out some very old talking points in her commencement address to the 2013 graduating class at Bowie State University:

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.
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“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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The bridge is yours.

-I have no idea how it possible to commit adultery with Netflix, but apparently we are all at risk!

-Writing dramas about the military.

-On being a Kanye West fan at a Kanye West concert.

-The CW is the latest network to try to make a Wonder Woman show.

-Emily Blunt might be the Baker’s Wife in Into The Woods.

I wanted to thank Kerensa Cardenas of Women In Hollywood for flagging this interview with Lucy Liu in, of all places, Net-A-Porter magazine, which is wonderful in part for Liu’s real talk on race in Hollywood. She brings up two separate issues that I think are equally important to acknowledge in the conversation about how to make Hollywood a place that represents the world more accurately, and that, as a result, tells more kinds of stories.

First, Liu points out from her own experience that there are cultural barriers that discourage people from certain backgrounds from going into the entertainment industry in the first place:

Growing up in the bustling New York borough of Queens, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she admits to being frustrated by her parents’ initial lack of support. They were highly educated, forced to do menial jobs in their new country. Her parents struggled, she explains, and they didn’t want the same for her. “After their struggle, they just really wanted to see me struggle in a different way, in a more obvious way, maybe something they could understand – she’s at college struggling, but then she will be a banker or a doctor. They understood that.”

It’s easy to talk about getting people access to similar opportunities once they decide they want to go into entertainment, but it’s worth acknowledging that people from different backgrounds, or different economic circumstances, may need different kinds of support if they’re going to make movies in the first place. If you have student loan debt, for example, you may not be able to take free internships. And creating stable opportunities for people at the early stages of work in entertainment may make it easier for people in different family situations to give it a go.

And Liu mentions the obvious truth that Hollywood puts actors into lanes, and that one of the ways the industry determines what those lanes will be is to use race or ethnicity:

Liu is proud of her achievements, but admits she gets annoyed when people can’t – or won’t – think of her outside of that “action” box: “I wish people wouldn’t just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add race to it, and it became, ‘Well, she’s too Asian’, or, ‘She’s too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It’s a very strange place to be. You’re not Asian enough and then you’re not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.” Liu’s wary of playing the racism card, but admits that she had to “push a lot just to get in the room”. “I can’t say that there is no racism – there’s definitely something there that’s not easy, which makes [an acting career] much more difficult.”

It’s notable that either Net-A-Porter or Liu referred to this relatively basic observation, one which is factually grounded in Liu’s filmography, as “playing the race card.” It’s a long-standing canard that Hollywood is a liberal place because so many celebrities are affiliated with Democratic candidates and broadly progressive causes, but one of the clearest boundary markers of the limits of that liberalism is the idea that talking about race or racial inequality might be seen as selfish complaining or invite retaliation. It was striking last summer at the Television Critics Association, for example, to see Lance Reddick carefully but clearly acknowledge that being African-American has obviously shaped the parts available to him, even as many actors are quick to suggest that the industry that employs them is color-blind, all empirical evidence to the contrary. For all that Hollywood likes making products about the crippling effects of racial inequality, when those events are historical or based in a different industry or set of institutions, it’s telling that people who work in entertainment still have to worry that talking about race will get them labeled difficult, demanding, or in some way ungrateful.

For the second half of its 2012-2013 the Shakepseare Theater company in Washington, DC is currently putting on performances of Coriolanus, Wallenstein, and The Winter’s Tale. The first two plays are being performed in a pair the company is calling the Hero/Traitor Repertory, but it’s also fascinating to read the two Shakespeare works currently in production, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale, together. Though the former is a tragedy set in ancient Rome about a war hero who becomes the enemy of his city when he refuses to temper his manner to secure elected office, and the latter is a comedy of mistaken identities set in Sicily and Bohemia, both plays have tremendous roles for older women, Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother in the play that bears his name, and Paulina, advisor to the royal family of Sicily, in The Winter’s Tale. And to a certain extent, both plays are about what happens when women are barred from formal roles in public life, or when their voices are ignored.

In Coriolanus, Volumnia is the model of a Roman mother, a woman who has raised a great war hero. But while Marcius (the name her son bears before he is given the title Coriolanus in recognition of his war service) can do what Volumnia cannot, represent his country on the battlefield and win honor and political power by doing so, Coriolanus lacks his mother’s deft political perception and ability to compromise when necessary. To a certain extent, this is Volumnia’s fault in raising him. She’s the kind of woman who tells her daughter-in-law “If my son were my husband, I / should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he / won honour than in the embracements of his bed where / he would show most love,” and insists that if Marcius were killed in battle “Then his good report should have been my son.” Marcius’ success is a proxy for Volumnia’s own ambitions. When he wins his greatest victory yet and is poised to become a consul, she reflects, “I have lived / To see inherited my very wishes / And the buildings of my fancy.”

But she may actually be more fit to make the compromises necessary to hold that office than her son is. “Pray, be counsell’d,” Volumnia begs her son when he’s furious at having to go through the rituals to make him consul, including hearing himself praised for his accomplishment, and seeking the approval of Rome’s ordinary citizens, who he has nothing but contempt for. “I have a heart as little apt as yours, / But yet a brain that leads my use of anger / To better vantage…You are too absolute; / Though therein you can never be too noble.” The implacable nature that leads Coriolanus to storm entire cities by himself, and to fight his bitter enemy in single combat makes him an incredibly terrible politician. Volumnia may never have been able to kill in battle the way her son does, but it’s a shame she isn’t allowed to stand for office in his place. Coriolanus may be repulsed by the prospect of compromise, but Volumnia understands a politician’s job all too well: “I would dissemble with my nature where / My fortunes and my friends at stake required / I should do so in honour.”
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