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Russell Brand Schools Morning Joe Panel. So Why Are We Surprised When He Does Smart Things?


Image courtesy Josie’s Juice.

Russell Brand’s late-night news show on FX, Brand X never quite came together and has been cancelled by the network. But his appearance on Morning Joe this week to promote his new stand-up tour illustrated why, while Brand may not have been adept at hosting a full half-hour or hour of news and interviews, he’s strikingly gifted as a guest, correspondent, or columnist:

That the Morning Joe segment was both a disaster and an opportunity was due to host Mika Brzezinski, who utterly lost control of the program, and Brand’s fellow guests, who created the conditions for Brand to launch a scathing critique of cable news. When Brand was asked what unified the world-historical figures who inspired his tour, Brand gave a terrific answer that should have lead to some follow-up questions: “They’re all people who died for a cause, they’re all people whose icons are used to designate meaning perhaps not in the manner in which they intended.” Brzezinski’s response? “I kind of like that, that sounded dead serious.” The other panelists mocked his accept. When one of them tried to ask Brand a “serious question”–actually a bit of fluff about which medium Brand prefers, which Brand answered with insight and introspection–Brzezinski told him he could “Try. It’s never going to work,” as if being a comedian disqualifies one from introspection. They referred to him in the third person, declared his clothes distracting, and in general behaved like children rather than news professionals.

And finally, Brand had enough. “Is this what you all do for a living? Let me help you. I’m here to promote a tour called Messiah Complex,” he told them exasperated, before shuffling up a stack of paper and posing a series of entirely reasonable questions about the roles of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden in our national security environment before continuing his lecture. “You forget about what’s important and allow the agenda to be decided by superficial information.” Turning to Brzezinski, Brand asked, “What do you think that gesture means, the way you’re touching that bottle. You need to lose that ring because it don’t mean nothing to you.”
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‘Twenty Feet From Stardom,’ ‘Lean In,’ And The Role Of Ambition In Women’s Professional Success

“You gotta have that narcissism, that ego,” Bruce Springsteen says of what it takes to be a lead singer early in Twenty Feet From Stardom, the excellent new documentary about backup singers from director Morgan Neville that opened on Friday. “It’s a pretty long walk.” Ambition and bravado are important and difficult-to-quantify factors in professional success. And that Twenty Feet From Stardom identifies it, along with record company chicanery, the musical training many backup singers received in African-American churches, and underpayment of black singers as factors in directing some artists into backup roles makes the movie a valuable contribution not just to our understanding of contemporary pop music, but to the debate about ambition and work-life balance sparked by books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In or Arianna Huffington’s Third Metric conference.

Twenty Feet From Stardom makes clear that there are talented backup singers who were, without question, robbed of their shots at solo stardom. Record producer Phil Spector, who had Darlene Love on contract, took her vocal performances on songs like “He’s A Rebel,” and “He’s Sure The Boy I Love” and marketed them as the product of a girl group called The Crystals, who got credit when “He’s A Rebel” hit number one on the pop charts. “It’s pretty debilitating to sit at home and hear the song you sang and someone else lipsynching it,” says Susaye Greene, who was a member of The Supremes in the seventies. Spector’s power meant that he could be vindictive. When Love eventually signed a contract elsewhere, Spector bought it from her new label, and effectively sidelined her career. Love ended up working as a housekeeper, before revitalizing her career in the 1980s.

Another factor the movie identifies as routing women into backup singing is the institution that trained their voices in the first place: African-American church choirs. “You come up learning the part your voice actually sits in,” Love explains in the movie. And Dr. Mable John, who was the first woman signed to Motown by Berry Gordy, and who worked in pop before 1973 before leaving to make Christian music, suggests that “We, in the mustic industry, as African-American people, need to know our worth. As women, we need to know our worth.”
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‘Anchorman: The Legend Continues’ Will Be About The Perfect Subject: The Rise of Cable News

I’m trying very, very hard not to get too excited for Anchorman: The Legend Continues because of the considerable risk of disappointment I’m running, but the first full-length trailer for the movie is absolutely not helping my efforts to contain my enthusiasm:

Ferrell, for all that he’s a big, loud goof in a lot of his comedy, is an actor with a great deal of interest moments when American culture is shifting in some significant way, particularly when he’s collaborating with Adam McKay, as he did on the original Anchorman, the underrated Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. If Anchorman was about the arrival of women not just in the workforce but in occupations that men believed to be specifically reserved for them as a result of their maleness, it looks like Anchorman: The Legend Continues has an equally good idea. It’s going to explore what happens when someone like Burgundy, whose ego was healthy enough when he worked in local news, goes national, and what happens when broadcast news, which in Anchorman was padded out with panda pregnancy watches and cat fashion shows, goes from hour-long slots to round-the-clock coverage. That’s an incredibly rich area for critique, and I can’t wait to see what happens when the news team has to fill that much programming, how Ron will react when he meets a rival anchor with better hair in the form of James Marsden, and whether it’s possible for him to destroy race relations in America in a single dinner.

Sports

Why Students And Taxpayers Are Subsidizing College Sports — And How We Might Fix It

(Credit: AP)

America’s colleges and universities used more than $2 billion in student fees — an average of more than $500 per student — to subsidize rapidly growing university athletic budgets, as Ohio University professor Richard Vedder wrote at BloombergView today. Those fees can top $1,000 a year at some schools, and as Vedder writes, reliance on them ends up making college more expensive for students and often places the burden on the poorest students. And most of the time, students don’t even know they’re paying the fees.

In addition to student fees, athletic programs are relying more on money from general university budgets, so taxpayers are also spending millions of dollars a year to cover shortfalls as athletic budgets continue to grow faster than academic budgets. But as Vedder noted, and as this chart from a study by the Delta Cost Project shows, that isn’t happening at the biggest, richest athletic programs, with a few notable exceptions. Rather, it becomes a problem in the bottom half of the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) and gets worse in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) and at non-football Division I schools:

That may make it seem like we’re dealing with two separate problems when we talk about college sports, then: one at the biggest schools, where amateurism and paying college players is the biggest issue, and another at the smaller schools, where rising budgets and increased student subsidies are the biggest problems. But those problems might actually be linked, because as Sports On Earth’s Patrick Hruby has reported, amateurism and tax-exempt statuses of athletic departments have increased costs and inflated budgets at the biggest schools. Small schools don’t have to keep up dollar-for-dollar, but the inflation still trickles down because they operate in the same market when it comes to recruiting, facilities, and coaches. Unlike the large schools, though, they don’t have TV networks and revenue streams to cover the growing costs.

Defenders of the NCAA status quo aren’t wrong when they assert that smaller schools probably can’t afford to operate in a system that compensates players. But is that really a bad thing? Ending the amateurism ruse would separate the athletic departments that can afford to participate in such a system (and despite their claims, most of the biggest schools can) from those that can’t compete in a system that includes schools like Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio State. That reality would let smaller schools exchange the big-budget recruiting trips, the expensive cross-country game travel, and the shiny new facilities of the current system for a model that treats intercollegiate sports like the extracurricular activities NCAA defenders say they are. Because while the big business of college sports is thriving at the top and would continue to do so even if athletes are compensated, treating sports as a business clearly doesn’t make sense in the middle or at the bottom of Division I. Right now, though, there’s more incentive to ask for subsidies than to accept a scaled-back athletic program.

Schools argue that they use sports to attract students, and thus subsidizing sports is a smart use of their resources. But that doesn’t really work. Data show that national championships boost enrollment, but most of these small schools aren’t competing for national titles, and Vedder notes that 72 percent of students in a recent poll said sports had an “extremely unimportant” or “unimportant” role in their school choice. So if Florida Gulf Coast is relying on a lightning-in-a-bottle Sweet 16 run every March to survive as a school, or if Appalachian State needs a once-in-a-lifetime upset to attract students, that’s an indication not that they need sports but that they’re running a misguided operation. And fleecing unwitting students and taxpayers to prop up a bad business model doesn’t make any sense at all.

‘Man Of Steel’ And How Superheroes’ Girlfriends Burned Me Out On Love Stories

RogerEbert.com editor and New York television critic Matt Zoller Seitz is one of my favorite people to read, so it’s no surprise that, though it seems he and I took rather extraordinarily different things away from the Man of Steel screenings we attended, his review of the movie still made me think. Suggesting that Amy Adams and Henry Cavill lacked chemistry, which I’m not quite sure I agree with, Matt notes the way the movie plays down romance. “Considering that every previous “Superman” movie put the courtship dance between men and women at the heart of its action — particularly “Superman: the Movie”, “Superman II” and “Superman Returns” — the fact that “Man of Steel” has a No Girls Allowed sensibility seems like a deliberate creative choice, a way to reassure young male viewers accustomed to the glib swagger of “Iron Man” and the dire self-pity of Nolan’s Batman that this hero is very much in the same wheelhouse,” he argued.

It’s absolutely true that Man Of Steel is much less concerned with the budding relationship between Superman and Lois Lane than in Clark Kent’s self-actualization and Lois’ insatiable curiosity, though there is a smooch, and a discussion of whether superheroes do it better. But reading Matt’s review, I realized that I was fine with that. In fact, unlike Matt, for which it was a decided and unwelcome abandonment of tradition, I was so relieved to see any break in the portrayal of superheroes’ love interests that it probably upped my overall assessment of the movie. I’m so burned out on the way superhero movies treat romance that I’d actually be relieved by one that leaves out the prospect of a climactic kiss altogether.

What is it that women do in superhero movies, after all? If they’re Pepper Potts, you act as a dutiful assistant, waiting to be noticed, then run Stark Industries faithfully while your boyfriend runs off to save New York, get ignored as Tony Stark navigates PTSD, then remembered when someone else expresses romantic or sexual interest in you, get kidnapped, get superpowers, and get divested of said superpowers. If you’re Jane Foster, you pursue obscure astronomical research, fall for the hunky guy who crash-lands out of the sky, get saved a lot, and get shipped off on fellowships to be removed from possible danger, since apparently Thor couldn’t just call her up and say “please get out of town for a while and when this is all over you and I can hit up a resort.” If they’re Peggy Carter, they’re feisty and then dead of old age. If you’re Black Widow, things are a little bit better: you get cocktail dresses that can apparently stand up to delivering an ass-kicking, you get to hang tough through an interrogation with a very cranky god, and you, unfortunately, get to beat the hell out of your brainwashed maybe-love interest before rewiring his brain correctly. If you’re Rachel Dawes, you get to be Batman’s moral compass, and in the process, get drugged and then burned to death. If you’re Catwoman, you get to rob and lecture Batman before he delivers unto you your actual purpose, and then runs off to Paris with you. If you’re Talia al Guhl, you get to honey trap Batman, while having a much more interesting backstory with Bane that gets filled in by two minutes of dialogue. In other words, over and over again, you get to participate in a man’s self-actualization.

Don’t any of these guys have male friends who are non-employees, unlike Happy and Alfred, with whom they could shoot the breeze or work through a few more of their issues? What about women friends or coworkers who aren’t there simply to be love interests? That might be a way for the Marvel universe, at least, to make use of the dramatically under-utilized Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill? If superheroes are supposed to be possessed of tremendous will, couldn’t they take care of some of the self-actualization their own selves? I am exhausted by watching talented actresses get cast as the little women to very big men, not just because it’s sexist, but because over and over again, the narrative arc of these origin stories is exactly the same, whether the origin is of the superhero’s powers, or of his relationship with the love interest who helps him manage them.
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Sports

PHOTOS: Brazilians Flood Streets To Protest World Cup Spending, Government Corruption

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured into the streets of at least 25 cities across the country Monday, blanketing the streets of major cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and climbing to the roof of the Brazilian National Congress in Brasilia, the nation’s capital. The protests, sparked last week by a smaller demonstration against fare hikes on public buses, are taking place around the Confederations Cup, the soccer tournament that began Saturday as a tune-up for Brazil’s 2014 hosting of the World Cup.

The World Cup has become a symbol of corruption and overspending in the country. Brazil, originally slated to spend less than $1 billion in private funding on soccer stadiums, has already spent more than $3 billion, most of which has come from public funds. Meanwhile, schools and hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, infrastructure is crumbling, and income inequality is rising as Brazil’s minimum wage remains low. The money spent on the World Cup, the protesters say, would be better spent on efforts to help ordinary Brazilians.

Though there were small pockets of violence during demonstrations in some cities, the vast majority of the protests remained peaceful, according to local news reports. Here are pictures from Monday’s protests:

An estimated 100,000 protested in Rio de Janeiro. (Credit: AP)

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The First Trailer For ‘Frozen’ And The Problem With Kids’ Entertainment

So, Disney’s new movie Frozen has a girl as a main character, a girl named Anna voiced by Kristen Bell. And it’s got another significant character, Anna’s sister, the Snow Queen, who has apparently cast a spell on the country they both live in, to keep it permanently winter. That’s not a lot to go on, but it’s an interesting update to Disney’s tradition of female protagonists, making those kinds of characters active rather than passive, a queen with her own agenda rather than a princess or princess figure who gets pushed into action as a response to external events, and setting up the story as an interaction between two women, rather than a woman and a man.

But would you be able to tell any of this from the first trailer?

I recognize there’s more to come, but I’d be curious if parents in the audience are as irritated as I am by the idea that the best way to sell children on a movie is with the most disposable parts of it, the relatively non-narrative, slapstick comedic relief provided by the less-intelligent sidekick characters?

By contrast, the initial trailer for The Little Mermaid in 1989 lead with Ariel’s voice, and with the plot–the fact that you’d heard her singing meant that when the movie got to a key plot point, the fine print of her deal with Ursula, we were invested in getting her voice back because we’d heard how fine it was. And Disney wasn’t afraid to lead with the music, which won an Academy Award, a Grammy, and the soundtrack as a whole went triple platinum.

Ditto with Beauty and the Beast:

Both of these trailers have problems of their own–Ariel and Belle have qualities other than being beautiful and young, something both previews emphasize the first time we see them on screen. But they both trust that parents and children might be interested in a single film, and that children can handle and be drawn in by actual narrative and characterization. If a “family film” is to be something other than ninety minutes of animation parents can use to narcotize their children, it would be nice if those movies were sold with some respect for children, and some expectation that they have something to offer that parents and children can talk about together.

‘Veronica Mars’ Television Club: Everybody Hurts

This post discusses the final two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

The last two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars center on the two central mysteries that have threaded their way throughout the year: who raped Veronica at that party? And who killed Lilly Kane? But though those questions have very different answers, they center on a similar problem. How do you be a decent person when up against social pressure, fear of losing your class status, addiction, or even rotten parenting?

There are a few good people in Neptune. Weevil may not be able to resist baiting Logan, when he chases after Veronica, who’s become convinced that Logan was responsible for her getting roofied at that fateful party, even if he didn’t actually dose her himself. “When they run away like that, it’s kind of a hint they’re not interested,” Weevil taunts the more privileged boy. “I”m just looking out for Veronica. So if you think you’re going to lay a hand on her the way you did Lilly…” And when Logan falls back on class to try to assert his dominance in the conversation, Weevil has an answer for that, too. “What’s worse?” he asks Logan. “Thinking Lilly had feelings for me, or that she was using me for sex?” Weevil may be stuck in an ugly and unproductive war of words with Logan, with whom he’s feuded since the first episode, but it’s remarkable to see how consistent Weevil’s support for Veronica has been. He’s one of the only boys her age who appears to want remarkably little from her, who doesn’t ask for anything in return, whether he’s trashing Logan’s car back at the beginning of the show, or only wanting to know “You okay?” when he picks her up from the Ecchols’ house after she discovers the camera in the guest house.

He’s not the only person who is decent out of proportion to public perception. As Veronica uncovers the story of what happened to her at the party, an unexpected voice of conscience shows up in the form of Beaver. “She’s actually kind of hot, when she’s quiet,” the odious Dick declares of Veronica, who is passed out in bed after a GHB-laced drink. “She’s not willing, Dick,” Beaver tells his friend, who is encouraging him to have sex for the first time with a woman who can’t possibly consent. “She’s unconscious.” That he knows the difference, that he, like Weevil, asks “Veronica, you okay?” marks Beaver as one of the boys in Neptune who appears to have picked up a rudimentary moral education, even if he leaves her there passed out in bed and ends up vomiting outside, rather than ensuring her safety.
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Sports

With Players’ Support, Workers Reach Labor Agreement With Major League Baseball’s Uniform Manufacturer

Workers and management at a Pennsylvania garment factory that makes Major League Baseball’s official game uniforms have reached a labor agreement that will preserve health benefits and provide pay raises, a positive end to what nearly turned into a full-fledged labor dispute. The workers at the VF Majestic factory voted overwhelmingly to approve the agreement, a release from the Service Employees International Union said.

The labor agreement between workers and management ended at the beginning of June, but the union held out hope it could reach a deal that maintained workers’ health benefits without a strike. The new agreement maintains the “current level of health insurance benefits without significant increases in worker premiums,” according to the release. VF Majestic had sought to double the amount workers paid in health care premiums, but under the agreement, workers will instead shift onto the union health plan. That will avoid cost increases for both workers and Majestic. The agreement also grants the workers “reasonable cost-of-living” pay increases for workers whose average wage is less than $11 an hour, according to SEIU.

The players who wear the uniforms made in the factory were supportive of the workers, as the Major League Baseball Players Association came out in support of their efforts to maintain benefits in May. MLBPA Executive Director Michael Weiner told the workers to “stick together so that you can achieve…a fair contract with good wages, good health care and respect on the job.” Of the players’ role in the process, Weiner said, “We take seriously our role as a union.”

“The members of the PA Joint Board, Workers United SEIU greatly appreciate the support they received from the Major League Baseball Players Association and look forward to working with VF to keep the MLB equipped with uniforms that are made in America,” David Melman, manager of Pennsylvania Joint Board of Workers United, said in the statement.

Labor law limits what unions like the MLBPA can do to assist other unions involved in disputes or negotiations, but it has in the past spoken out on behalf of workers. It publicly opposed the push for an anti-union “right-to-work” law in Michigan last fall, telling ThinkProgress at the time that it “all union members — either auto workers, teachers, firefighters, or the American League champion Detroit Tigers — oppose legislation designed to weaken unions.”

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How Hollywood’s Disinterest In Women Could Waste A Generation Of Outrageously Talented Actresses

Last week, NPR’s Linda Holmes did the math on movies that were screening in the Washington, DC-area on Friday, and calculated that of the 617 movie showings on the calendar, 90 percent of them were for movies about men, and only one of the movies in theaters was directed by a woman. And this is in a major metropolitan area.

“I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot,” Holmes wrote. “There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one. There are not any.”

This is terrifying not just because of what it says about how limited the choices for consumers are, particularly in the dude-heavy summer blockbuster season, or about failures of the movie market that don’t seem to happen in, for example, book publishing. Holmes’ piece scared me not just because of what it says about how Hollywood studios and Hollywood filmmakers think about women, or because of what these numbers suggest about how the rise of the international film market is making female characters less valuable, though those things are depressing too. Actually, I think the idea of women literally fading from our movie screens like Hermione Granger from the photos in her parents house after she casts a spell on them to erase herself from their lives scares me most because it means we could waste an outrageously talented generation of young female actors on the rise.
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Sports

‘We Don’t Need The World Cup’: Brazil Erupts In Protests Against Cost Of 2014 Tournament

Brazilian protester holds sign reading, "Health And Education, Not The Cup" (Credit: BBC)

The official slogan of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup is “Juntos num só ritmo,” or “All in one rhythm.” It is a “unifying message which represents the unique flavour” Brazil will bring to the competition, a FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke said, and “an invitation to all Brazilians to join together and celebrate the immense sense of pride in our country’s position on the global stage,” according to Brazil’s sporting minister.

Brazil unveiled the slogan in 2012. It lasted just more than a year before the Brazilian people replaced it on the world stage, unofficially, with a new one: Nos não precisamos da Copa do Mundo. More than 2,000 protesters took that message — “We don’t need the World Cup” — to the streets Saturday outside Brasilia’s Mané Garrincha stadium, where the Confederations Cup, a pre-World Cup tournament, was set to begin. The protests were part of larger movement that began last week across the country, and others followed during Sunday matches in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. They are expected to continue Monday and throughout the Confederations Cup.

Not all of the protests are tied directly to the World Cup: Brazilians rallied throughout last week against fare hikes on public buses, and in Fortaleza, bus drivers called a strike in a fight for higher wages. Activists under the name “Change Brazil” are trying to bring the issues to light around World Cup festivities, producing videos outlining their causes, while other unnamed groups have circulated fliers asking foreign tourists to avoid attending the World Cup next year. The unifying message of the protests is clear: a country with faltering infrastructure, low wages, crowded hospitals, and a crippled education system should be spending money not on soccer stadiums but on efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Brazilians.

At each protest, police showered protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Hundreds have been arrested and dozens injured. The police have, at times, acted “arbitrarily and violently,” according to the Brazilian defense minister.

Mané Garrincha is the symbol of Brazil’s World Cup excess. Opened in 1974, it was deemed inadequate, unsafe, and in need of major renovations for the World Cup. Brazil’s World Cup bid said the country would spend less than $1 billion, mostly from private financing, to renovate seven stadiums and build five more. But Mané Garrincha’s renovations cost $750 million alone, while the total cost of the 12 stadiums is expected to exceed $3 billion, almost all of which has come from the public. Mané Garrincha is the most expensive stadium construction project in Brazilian history.

Meanwhile, the public works projects that were supposed to accompany the World Cup have stalled, with many delayed or canceled, and protesters and activists say politicians and World Cup promoters are ignoring the country’s deeper problems. More than 80 percent of Brazil’s schools are inadequate, according to government watchdogs, and its students rank below average in all three areas of educational attainment monitored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In some cities, 70 percent of the water supply goes untreated, and Brazil’s public hospitals are overcrowded. And while Brazil’s minimum wage raises annually, it stands now at roughly $315 a month (the average monthly rent in Brazilian cities tops $400 a month).

If the sparkling soccer and the magnificent stadiums tell the story of the Brazil soccer promoters want to showcase, the protesters are telling the story Brazil and the world are trying so desperately to ignore. Despite claims of a coming economic bonanza, the World Cup cannot and will not solve the problems facing millions of Brazilians: crumbling schools, low wages, poor health programs, and increasing inequality. And so the tournament will fail to live up to the ambitious motto it set for itself, because the Brazil that wants the World Cup and the Brazil that knows it doesn’t need it can’t possibly exist all in one rhythm.

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‘The Taste’s Nigella Lawson’s Husband Might Have Choked Her. Should Photographers Have Intervened?

Image courtesy Tumblr.

Frequent food television host and food writer Nigella Lawson found herself on the front page of British tabloids over the weekend when paparazzi photographs appeared to capture her husband, advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, with his hand on her throat at a London restaurant. This isn’t the first time that Saatchi has appeared to behave less than well to Lawson in public. There’s a 2012 photograph of him putting his hand over her mouth while they’re at an outside table at a restaurant, both with expressions on their faces that make it hard to tell if what’s passing between them is nasty, or a bit of private theater that might be misunderstood. But the image of Saatchi seeming to choke Lawson is much more decidedly disturbing image, and though Lawson hasn’t filed criminal charges yet, Scotland Yard is investigating the incident.

It’s also raised questions about whether the celebrity photographers who captured images of the events should have intervened to help Lawson. The debate over whether photographers and other journalists should be willing to take action after they’ve photographed people in danger, or whether they should take action rather than photograph people in danger, is hardly limited to paparazzi, or to situations where violence is imminent or occurring. Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the galvanizing image of a small, starving girl being stalked by a vulture in Sudan during the terrible famine there, was sharply criticized for not making sure that the girl reached a feeding center, though he did reportedly chase away the vulture watching her. In other words, this sort of reaction isn’t just limited to celebrity gossip or to the much-reviled paparazzi. Perhaps because photography is so visceral, it’s hard for some audiences to see images of an obviously news-worthy event like the Sudan famine, shot by a hard news photographer, and understand why someone would capture images rather than try to save a starving child, even if photographing that child will do important, long-term good in terms of mobilizing public action and changing public opinion.

But while it’s easy to think that the paparazzi should step in, even if we don’t like to acknowledge that they might be bound by journalistic ethics not to intervene, however loose, it’s harder to tell if, in Lawson’s case, they actually could have done any good. The photograph of Saatchi’s hand on Lawson’s throat is frightening. It captures her choked expression, her face filling the frame. But that doesn’t mean the person who took it was actually close to her, just that they had access to good telephoto lenses. By the time they put down a camera, got into the restaurant (where they might not have been allowed in any case), and attempted to intervene on Lawson’s behalf, Saatchi could have taken his hands off her, or already done whatever harm he intended to do. In the interim, there were people in the restaurant with Saatchi and Lawson, some of whom have already talked to the press about how upsetting it was to witness the incident, and who might have been in better proximity to intervene on Lawson’s behalf if they thought she was in real danger. It’s fun to talk about the evils of the paparazzi. But when domestic violence, if that is indeed what this proves to be, takes place in public, bystanders, not just photographers, have obligations as decent human beings, too.

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‘The Engagements’ Offers Up J. Courtney Sullivan’s Didactic Critique Of Marriage Rites

“This was what she disliked most about Gerald’s hobby; the contests made you think you needed something that, left to your own devices, you wouldn’t even want,” Evelyn, a woman devastated by the fact that her son, Teddy, has abandoned the family that Evelyn turned out to love more than he ever did, reflects of her retired husband’s passion for company-sponsored mail-in competitions. Her meditation while preparing lunch lays out the theme of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, a tart critique of how DeBeers’ creation of the engagement ring trend, affects a number of couples across a 75-year period. But the way it’s delivered also gets at the core problem of Sullivan’s third novel: she seems so terrified that her arguments might get lost, that she doesn’t trust her characters, or a clever plot that unfolds like a meeting between a moral horror movie and a romance, to carry them. Reading The Engagements feels a lot like a socially-conscious response to having to scroll through entire Instagram and Facebook feeds full of rings that have, in some places, supplanted pictures of actual women themselves.

One section of the novel follows a fictionalized version of Mary Frances Gerety, the ad writer who worked on the DeBeers account, and who is responsible for the ad slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” It’s obvious that Sullivan has done an enormous amount of research into Gerety’s life, but rather than creating vibrant scenes that bring us into Gerety’s work, we’re treated to passages that read more like school reports. Early in the novel, Sullivan writes that “Frances had just finished writing the newest De Beers copy, a honeymoon series with pictures of pretty places newlyweds might go— the rocky coast of Maine! Arizona! Paris! And something generic for people without much money, which she labeled By the river. In a way, that one was the most important of them all, since they were trying to appeal to the average Joe.” Frances is someone who tells us rather than shows us how excited she is to live alone, that she dresses like a man and drinks brown liquor like one because that’s what it takes to get ahead in the advertising agencies of the 1950s and 60s, and wonders aloud about getting old alone. But she’s so burdened with the responsibility to convey historical information about DeBeers, as well as to deliver the basics of a counterpoint to Mad Men that might have made a more interesting section if Sullivan was willing to write more naturalistically about her.

The other stories in The Engagements follow a series of couples from up and down the class spectrum, from James, a Cambridge EMT who’s become obsessed with upgrading his wife’s wedding ring even as a hole develops in their ceiling, to Kate, who’s guarding the rings for her cousin’s extremely expensive wedding to his fiancee. All of these couples have been affected by Frances’ work in ways that include, but aren’t limited to these feelings about their jewelry.
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The First Trailer For Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’

Given how infrequently Leonardo DiCaprio does comedy, I’ll be fascinated to see the full results of The Wolf of Wall Street, his new period movie about the finance industry, especially since DiCaprio will be going up against Matthew McConaughey, who is on quite a roll when it comes to a deep commitment to roles that might otherwise seem impossibly goofy:

Given the rich storytelling implications of our current financial crisis, sketched out brilliantly in movies like J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail–one of the best features to air on that network in several years–and somewhat less-well in the over-the-top Richard Gere morality tale Arbitrage, my initial reaction to the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street was to wonder why we were getting a period piece about the recklessness of the eighties, rather than a meditation on a new set of failings. But I wonder of the result of financial chicanery, not the details of that chicanery itself, is precisely the point of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Hollywood, driven by an “aspirational” aesthetic that affects everything from Bravo’s upscale reality television programming to the kind of decision about sets that makes it seem reasonable for four people in their late twenties and early thirties working in lower-wage white collar jobs to live in a giant loft on New Girl, has gotten very good at making us covet the wealth we see on screen, and even to equate wealth and taste with morality. So if you were to tell a story about callous people working in finance in a contemporary setting, and show them amidst the trappings of their wealth, be that getting to the Hamptons by helicopter, or a Damien Hirst dot painting in their living rooms, we might get distracted by what we’ve been taught to see as class from the way the movie wants us to see the character. But a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, that wants us to see both the moral rot in the tactics by which its main character is pursuing millions, as well as to see the tackiness of his broish enthusiasm for spending that money, needs to go back in time to a moment we can’t help but see as horribly un-chic, where what was once mistaken as taste or panache can only come across as horrifying.

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‘Veep’ Creator Armando Iannucci On Dick Cheney, Being In Your Twenties In DC, And HBO Sitcoms

In the second season of Veep, Armando Iannucci’s caustic comedy about the woman who occupies the second-highest office in the land (though if you ask Kent, the President’s chief of staff, that should make her half as tall as the president), something happened. Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) got good at her job, or at least as good as a secretive President, a depressed staff, a daughter in college, and a sexually magnetic weasel of an ex-husband would let her be. And in tandem, Veep got wiser about the awkwardnesses of foreign travel, what it’s like to be climbing the Washington career ladder in your twenties, and how hard it is for people in public life to date.

I sat down with Iannucci to talk about why Selina did a Leslie Knope in her second season, what made Dick Cheney the most powerful vice president, and what makes HBO sitcoms different from their network counterparts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking something that had been sort of noticeable to me in the second season, which is that all of the characters seem somewhat more competent and I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that evolution of that decision.

I think there’s two things, one is, you know, we’re getting to know them and therefore, it’s all about them, doing more with them. So I think any politician, when they go into a high office, there’s a period of adjustment. All the huge mistakes that presidents make usually are within the first six months, all the embarrassing stories, and they didn’t quite get this right, and why didn’t they do that, you know, that sort of goes on. But also I felt the first season was about coming to terms with the limitations of her job and also her staff. The second season would be more about what happens when you have power and influence, what does that do to you? Because that’s what you got into politics for. Okay what happens when you get what you’ve been asking for?
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Can FIFA ‘Suspend’ Russian And Qatari Anti-Gay Laws During Their World Cups?

Russia’s lower legislative body unanimously approved a bill that would effectively criminalize homosexuality within the country’s borders, and the legislation is almost guaranteed to earn approval in its upper house and from president Vladimir Putin as well. Along with Qatar’s own law criminalizing homosexuality, Russia’s means that in the next decade, three of the world’s largest sporting events will take place in countries where being gay is against the law.

Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup. Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup. Despite that, both FIFA and the International Olympic Committee have remained largely silent about the laws.

But according to GayStarNews, FIFA may be seeking to suspend Russia and Qatar’s anti-gay laws during the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. That news comes from Chris Basiurski, who chairs Britain’s Gay Footballers Supporter’s Network and spoke to FIFA president Sepp Blatter about the issue. In 2010, FIFA pushed some legal changes in South Africa and for the establishment of “World Cup courts” meant to deal with legal issues related to the tournament, and a similar effort that would include suspension of the anti-gay law could happen in Russia and Qatar.

“They would do something similar. When they are there everyone will be protected due to FIFA’s laws,’ Basiurski told GayStarNews. “This could mean any regulation FIFA brings in might end up breaking the law of the land.”

It’s unclear how that would work. There were, indeed, World Cup courts in South Africa, but it was South Africa’s government that opened them and they still acted with respect to South African law. They existed mainly to expedite an increased load of court cases during the month-long tournament. South Africa did turn some FIFA regulations into law, like a ban against the resale of match tickets. Suspending an existing law without proceeding through the legislative process, however, would be a much different policy.

Reached by email, FIFA didn’t respond directly to questions about whether it was seeking to suspend the law during the month-long event or about how such a suspension would work. FIFA remains “actively engaged in fighting against all kinds of discrimination within football and within society as a whole,” its statement said. “In addition to hosting events such as the FIFA Conference on Racism in Football and establishing every year an Anti-Discrimination Day, FIFA stresses continuously that we must take our efforts to a higher level and lead the fight against discrimination in football.”

Relying only a temporary suspension, if one is even possible, could mean FIFA misses its chance to cause actual change in both countries. FIFA has teams and federations in both Russia and Qatar, and LGBT people and LGBT fans won’t stop facing discrimination when the World Cups end. That’s a reality FIFA acknowledged, though its statement was vague about actual efforts to cause the change it says it wants to see.

“The staging of the FIFA World Cup in new territories can help improve social conditions and make a difference in societies,” the statement said. “There are other cultures and other religions, but in football we have no boundaries. FIFA believes there shall not be any discrimination against any human beings.”

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An Exclusive Excerpt From The Next Issue of Symbolia: “Laura” And Women’s Experiences At Guantanamo

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how the web, which initially became a vehicle for extremely short-form journalism and blogging, has become a refuge for long-form journalism through projects like Pro Publica, which partners with legacy publications on investigative journalism, and publishing platforms and apps like Atavis. One of my favorites is Symbolia, a digital magazine where authors do journalism through comics in themed issues. The publishers of Symbolia have been kind enough to let me publish an exclusive excerpt of “Heroines,” Symbolia’s latest issue, which features five first-person narratives from women around the world. In the story I’m reprinting here, we get to hear from Laura Sandow, a veteran of the U.S. Navy who served at GITMO, which morphed from a sleepy naval base to an infamous detention center during her time there. It’s fascinating not just to read Laura’s words about her attempts to process her role in the War on Terror, and how military culture has affected her emotional and mental health, but to see her experiences.

Laura’s story is a collaboration between Sarah Mirk, who interviewed her, Lucy Bellwood, who illustrated the interview, and of course, Laura herself. To read the rest of her story, and to meet other veterans, bellydancers, and survivors of human trafficking, you can download (and subscribe to) Symbolia on iPad, via PDF, and for Kindle. And for more information about Symbolia in general, visit www.symoboliamag.com.


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