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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Given that Beyonce Knowles-Carter both had two musical partners in Destiny’s Child—Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams—before she went out on her own as a solo act, and a younger sister, Solange Knowles, who is also a musician, it’s fascinating to hear Rowland sing about the difficulties of living in Knowles-Carter’s orbit in “Dirty Laundry.” What makes the song particularly interesting though is the way it chronicles the ups and downs of Rowland’s relationship with Knowles-Carter as it tracks with what Rowland says was an abusive relationship with an unnamed man, during which Knowles-Carter’s fame and success were both causes for resentment, a lifeline for Rowland, and something her ex-boyfriend invoked as part of his efforts to isolate her and dominate her affections. “He hittin the window like it was me, until it shattered / He pulled me out, he said, “Don’t nobody love you but me / Not your mama, not your daddy and especially not Bey” / He turned me against my sister,” Rowland sings on the track, in which she also describes feeling some relief that Knowles-Carter’s fame eclipsed hers, and describes a call from Knowles-Carter that encouraged her to leave the man who was abusing her:

Given Knowles-Carter’s obsessive curation of her own image, “Dirty Laundry” may be the most genuinely revealing look at her behavior and artistic circle in years. It certainly tells us more about Knowles-Carter than Beyonce: Life Is But A Dream, the documentary she co-directed and for which she provided much of the archival footage, that aired on HBO earlier this spring. Knowing that Knowles-Carter remains personally close to at least one member of Destiny’s Child cuts through the tabloid rumors about feuds and reunions. And knowing that Rowland survived an abusive relationship lends context to her efforts to establish herself as an artist independent of both the musical legacy of Destiny’s Child and Knowles-Carter’s considerable shadow.

In an age of hyper-produced pop stars, and given the myth that trauma creates great art, it’s easy to forget how artistic confidence and personal stability can be related. Knowles-Carter fired her father Matthew as her manager, and appears to have had a falling-out with him, but she’s also in a long-term, stable relationship with a partner, Jay-Z, who appears supportive of her career and her family. Solange Knowles, who’s found professional success by hopping genres so she isn’t in competition with her sister, finding a musical style that matches her vocal capabilities and her strengths as a small-club performer, married and had her first child at 17, moved to Idaho with her husband, and divorced shortly thereafter. Rowland, who for a time split her efforts pursuing a career in acting while continuing to make music, also appears to have had personal difficulties that weren’t widely known until now. Or, as she puts it on “Dirty Laundry,” “I swear y’all don’t know the half of this industry.”

The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s annual survey of how women are represented in the 100 top-grossing movies from the previous year is out, and much has been made of the study’s finding that the percentage of female characters has declined to a five-year low, from 29.9 percent in 2007 to 28.4 percent in 2012. But it’s not just notable that the number of female characters with speaking parts has fallen to a low—after all, there were better years in between 2007 and 2012. The survey says a lot about what kinds of women successful movies include, and what those movies think women are for. My colleague Adam Peck put together a graphic representation of some of the most revealing statistics in the study:

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Chris Kluwe, the National Football League punter who has been an outspoken advocate for LGBT equality both inside and outside sports, announced Thursday that he will sign a one-year contract with the Oakland Raiders. Kluwe played the previous eight seasons for the Minnesota Vikings before being cut earlier this month after the Vikings selected a punter in the 5th round of April’s NFL Draft.

Kluwe, incidentally, is moving from one state that just passed marriage equality (Minnesota) to one where same-sex marriage is still illegal (California), and he told fellow LGBT ally Brendon Ayanbadejo that he will remain an advocate for LGBT rights when he joins the Raiders, Ayanbadejo wrote on FOXSports.com:

Kluwe is known for his mind and mouth, as well as his leg. He is a vocal advocate of equality in sports (and life), and says he will continue to speak for what he believes.

“I’m still going to be myself socially and continue to tweet and interact with my fans,” Kluwe said.

Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were both released by their teams this spring, immediately fueling speculation around the sports world that their advocacy had been a factor in the teams’ decisions. Even Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) weighed in when Kluwe was cut, saying, “Yeah, I don’t feel good about it,” an implication that Kluwe’s outspokenness played a role in his release. Others raised similar questions when the Baltimore Ravens released Ayanbadejo.

Though Ayanbadejo remains unsigned, Kluwe’s new contract should put those concerns to rest. The reality is that the release of both players looked more like business decisions — Kluwe was due $1.45 million in 2013, nearly $1 million more than the Vikings will pay his rookie replacement. Ayanbadejo, meanwhile, was an aging 36-year-old linebacker who primarily played special teams, and considering that the Ravens handed out a record contract to quarterback Joe Flacco, his $940,000 salary at an easy-to-replace position made him expendable (he was hardly the only prominent Raven to fall victim to cost-cutting this offseason).

And as as Cyd Zeigler argued at OutSports when the Vikings cut Kluwe, immediate speculation without evidence that advocacy played a role in their releases can be counterproductive to the cause they are pushing, Ayanbadejo, Kluwe, and other players have fought to make the NFL a more open and inclusive place both for advocates of LGBT rights and for gay players. But painting football as a place where those voices still aren’t welcome, where speaking out carries the penalty of losing one’s job, only encourages allies to remain quiet and gay players to stay in the closet. And it ignores the progress the league as made. Despite hiccups along the way, the NFL has indeed become a more open place: not only are Kluwe and Ayanbadejo speaking out, but so are both NFL Players Association president Dominque Foxworth and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and the league has strengthened its efforts to rid the game of discrimination and homophobia.

If evidence existed that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo’s advocacy played a role in either situation, it should be publicized, shamed, and subject to the league’s non-discrimination policy. It’s far more likely, though, that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were cut because football, as Zeigler explained, “is a numbers game.” Making legitimate business decisions doesn’t make a football team discriminatory, and treating legitimate business decisions as discriminatory only ensures that football will remain in the shadows of tolerance for far longer than it should.

This post discusses plot points from Star Trek Into Darkness in some detail.

Starships and Klingons and tribbles, oh my! I’d expected that Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to his 2009 alternate-timeline reboot of the venerable franchise, with returning writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, could have been any one of a number of things: a confident coming-of-age for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), a return to the tradition of space exploration that defined the original show and movies, with some unintended consequences thrown in to accomodate the tastes of modern action audiences, and even continuation of the sci-fi screwball romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). What I didn’t anticipate is that as a blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness would be impressively generic, but that in a summer when drone strikes and extrajudicial killings appear to have been on many screenwriters and directors minds’, it would do one of the clearest (if not deep) jobs of outlining the debates over the American drone program for a mass audience.

When we meet up with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise again, they’re on a planet inhabited by a primitive species that’s about to be destroyed by a volcano. Spock, in a potential violation of the mission directive to explore the world, uses cold fusion to stop the explosion, but not without endangering his own life in a way that prompts Kirk to come to his rescue by means that blow the Prime Directive not to speed up that species’ technological development quite literally out of the water, or without hurting Uhura, now firmly established as Spock’s girlfriend. Their actions, and Kirk’s filing of a fudged report of them while Spock tells the truth, get Kirk demoted to First Officer under Christopher Pike, who returns to command of the Enterprise, and Spock reassigned to the U.S.S. Bradbury. But their split it short-lived after a man identified as Starfleet officer John Harrison induces a fellow member of Starfleet to bomb what appears to be an archive, an attack that turns out to be a trap to lure Starfleet’s top commanders to a single for a strategy session. When Harrison attacks that session from the air, killing Pike and other high-ranking Starfleet commanders, Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) gives Kirk back his ship and permission to go after Harrison, who turns out to be rather more than he seems.

The details of what how they do so are remarkably noisy and remarkably forgettable. But the nature of Marcus’s commission to Kirk and company provokes the movie’s strongest throughline and most clearly-developed ideas. The question in Star Trek Into Darkness is whether or not Kirk should follow strategic detail of Marcus’s orders to, using new and advanced torpedoes, “park on the edge of Klingon space, you fire, you take him out, and you haul ass,” or comply with Starfleet rules and make sure that Harrison receives a fair trial back on earth. That Star Trek Into Darkness presents that choice at all, outlining the debate in very similar terms to the arguments about the use of drone strikes to carry out extrajudicial killings of accused terrorists outside of the United States, differentiates it from the other pop culture explorations the subject, which has become a strikingly common feature of movies and television this year, including Iron Man 3 and Fox procedural Bones.
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The bridge is yours.

-Teal Sherer is Kickstarting a second season of the very funny My Gimpy Life.

-This is your brain on television.

-The American Civil Liberties Union wants Modern Family‘s Mitch and Cam to get married.

-Shakira’s heading out ofThe Voice.

-If you have $10,500, you can have a Night’s Watch Watch.

I try not to get overly invested in any of the many, many shows the broadcast networks are frantically trying to pitch to advertisers, television critics, and ultimately to audience during upfronts week every year, because so many of them will turn out to be dreck, to be abused by the networks that currently claim to love them by means of scheduling shenanigans, or to simply fail to connect with mass audiences. But every year, hope flares up again about one or two of the trailers I’m seeing, and this year, I’m excited about Super Fun Night, Wilson’s comedy for ABC, which looks like it could be one of the more entertaining and honest portrayals of nerdy girls out there, because it seems like it will use their awkwardness not to make fun of them, but to reveal some of the weirdness of social convention:

If the characters act weird while trying to get into a club, it’s partially because standing in a line for hours to go to a place where there is music and alcohol, and where a strange set of rules governs who gets in and who doesn’t, is actually a strange, not incredibly fun experience. If Rebel Wilson underwear with light-up hearts on it to impress a guy she’s supposed to meet, maybe it’s because the rules governing what counts as sexy female attire are actually sort of strange. And maybe if you spend some weekend nights in with your friends or roommates, it’s because nights in are fun not only for freakish losers, but for actual humans.

Female-created comedies in recent years have tended to go in one of two directions, aiming squarely for raunch like Whitney or 2 Broke Girls, or making their characters odd in some way. The Mindy Project‘s Mindy Lahiri is hilariously self-absorbed about everything except her hypercompetence as an OB/GYN, while New Girl‘s Jessica Day is squeamish about sex and whimsical in ways that can be socially inappropriate. I’m sort of curious to see what happens when women from the second character try to become the sort of people who can capably participate in the first. I just hope that Super Fun Night gives its female characters compelling reasons to stay in, as well as to start going out.

National Review roving correspondent Kevin Williamson is in the process of congratulating himself for, in response to having been repeatedly interrupted by a phone-using patron at the theater last night, grabbing her phone, hurling it away from her, and getting himself slapped and ejected:

The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome.”

Let’s leave aside the facts that making grand statement’s like Williamson’s is almost certainly more disruptive both to fellow patrons and to the actors on stage than the use of a cell phone in the audience, and that sending someone else’s phone across the theater at great speed is a much more efficient way to make a martyr of said terribly rude person than to strike a blow for civility. Williamson is right on two points: the use of cell phones in live performances in particular is inexcusably rude, and theaters need to do much more to protect both audiences and performers from interruption.

Theaters tend towards politeness for the most part, asking people to turn off their phones, cameras, tablets, etc., rather than telling people directly that device use will get them automatically ejected and even banned, or, less coercively, using what’s been found to be a psychologically effective tactic of telling audiences what percentage of their peers turn off their phones. But theaters are private establishments that are allowed to set their own rules, and have plenty of good grounds to do so, including the safety of performers who could be distracted by a bright cell phone screen in the audience, and the pleasure of the vast majority of patrons who come to shows hoping to be uninterrupted. And it would be nice to see them be far more proactive to set clear ground rules, to have ushers monitor the house from the back and proactively warn and then eject patrons who use their phones, and even to consider bans on people who don’t comply with stated rules. Such a policy might risk losing some business, but a theatergoer who’s spending all night on the phone should be judged a less valuable customer than one who pays attention.

Or theaters could take a different approach and circumvent the problem of phones in the seats altogether. I attend critics’ screenings of films all the time where the people running the screenings require people attending the film to check their cell phones in paper bags, mostly as an anti-piracy measure. It seems to work just fine, and people seem to submit without much hassle. Theaters for staged plays have two advantages on movie theaters: they already have coat checks, for the most part, and they’re dealing with far fewer performances, so handling the volume of checked phones, whether patrons have to put them in lockers or hand them over directly, shouldn’t be impossible. If the slight inconvenience protects well-intentioned patrons from both cell phone use and the squabbles over it, it’s well worth it.

Brave‘s Merida is one of the few Disney princesses—along with Mulan—who gets to be physically active, and really the only one with a physique to match her love of riding horses, shooting things, and her ability to stand up to a bear. But Disney, as it’s done to other women in the official Disney Princess pantheon, decided that to mark her inclusion, Merida needed a new dress that was off-the-shoulder, and a belt instead of a quiver for her arrows. Unlike the other Disney Princesses, it also decided that she needed to get a lot skinnier for the occasion.

The website Disney debuted as a portal for Merida merchandise seems to be sticking with the original design for Merida, kinky red hair, forest-green dress, and bow ready to fire, a move that some advocates are claiming as a victory. But the products themselves seem to be a mix of Merida ready for action—at least holding on to her bow, as in this nightshirt—and Merida in party-wear, as on this mug. Change.org petitions may feel good, but it’s hard to get a big corporation like Disney to junk an entire product line on a moment’s notice.

But hopefully, as Disney considers the reaction to the Merida art that circulated, and as they consider how to make even more money out of the Brave universe, Disney could consider that dresses and princess crowns aren’t the only things that you could sell to little girls through their parents. Get into the archery sets game. Get into weaving kits, even. If “princess” is a title you can give Native American advocates, Chinese warriors, and Scottish tomboys, then the things princesses can do don’t have to be limited to going to parties.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will lay out a proposal Thursday for a $195 million basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university that spent $20 million in 2004 to make its current home, Allstate Arena, “a state-of-the-art facility.” The plan, according to reports from CBS Chicago, will require $125 million from taxpayers, with $70 million coming from a tax on hotel rooms and an additional $55 million coming from a common arena scheme known as tax-incremented financing (TIF).

Emanuel hasn’t talked openly about the plan, but an alderman on the city’s board told CBS that the plan, which includes hotels attached to the city’s convention center at McCormick Place, was about fostering economic growth. “Sometimes you have to make an investment in city resources to be able to generate tax dollars,” Ald. Pat Dowell said. But local arena expert Marc Ganis told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that it was “lunacy” to expect the plan to help the economy:

‘‘It’s lunacy,’’ he said straight off. ‘‘Sheer folly. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.’’ [...]

As someone who has worked on projects like these for decades, I can tell you there is absolutely no way for this to make any sense in any way. It is not in the realm of possibility.’’

DePaul has long wanted to abandon the Allstate Center, located about 17 miles away in Rosemont, for a facility closer to its Lincoln Park campus. The new arena, situated next to the McCormick Place convention center on Lake Shore Drive, would still be about seven miles from DePaul. The arena plan also includes proposals for new hotel, restaurant, and retail space around the convention center and arena. But why an arena, and one that DePaul will use just 18 times a year, needs to be a part of the redevelopment of that part of the city is unclear, especially since any plans to fill arena dates with concerts and other events would have to compete with the United Center, an arena just a few miles a way that is twice the size.

No matter what aldermen like Dowell say, the arena certainly isn’t included for economic benefits: studies have shown that arenas don’t actually have any. Instead, publicly-financed arenas and stadiums are far more likely to leave taxpayers saddled with debt they didn’t expect and without any of the economic benefits politicians and arena supporters promised.

TIF plans like Chicago wants to use rarely work out. A TIF plan creates a district around the new arena in which a portion of sales tax revenues will go toward paying off future arena debts. But actual revenues spurred by arena traffic almost always fall short of projections, as they have in Louisville, where the TIF district has failed to live up to its promise and left the city scrambling to make up the revenue gap. Louisville’s arena bonds are now at junk status, propped up only by the city’s willingness to pay them off with other sources of funding.

Chicago, though, need not look to Louisville to see why the arena isn’t a good idea. Chicago often uses TIF districts to promote redevelopment, and their failure has typically resulted in the city “raiding property-tax revenues that would otherwise be used for school funding,” as Field of Schemes’ Neil deMause noted today. That’s bad news for a city that is dealing with a $1 billion school funding gap, which it is trying to solve by closing dozens of schools across the city. So not only is the new arena plan likely to fall short of projections in a way that hurts the city’s general finances, it may hit it in a way that only exacerbates the school-funding problem Emanuel is desperately trying to solve.

As Washington Post tech blogger Tim Lee reported this morning, the federal government has moved to shut down—or at least restrict—the online currency Bitcoin. The Department of Homeland Security and US District Court for the District ordered a seizure of the funds in Dwolla account owned by the currency exchange Mt. Gox, and Dwolla has stopped processing payments into and out of the account, making it impossible to buy and sell Bitcoins. As Lee explained:

For years, Bitcoin supporters have touted the currency’s potential to resist government surveillance and censorship. They point to the example of Wikileaks, the whistleblower Web site whose access to funds dried up after the federal government applied informal pressure to intermediaries such as PayPal to cut off payments. The Bitcoin network is fully decentralized, so there is no one with the ability to monitor the network and block illicit transactions. If Wikileaks had funded itself through the Bitcoin network, the government wouldn’t have had such an easy time freezing its funds.

That’s a feature for people concerned with press freedom, but it looks more like a bug for government officials charged with enforcing the nation’s drug, gambling, counter-terrorism, and money laundering laws. The government relies heavily on financial institutions to help them monitor their customers’ financial activities and flag or block potentially illegal transactions. The lack of intermediaries makes Bitcoin an attractive technology for those who want to evade government scrutiny. It was only a matter of time before authorities started to give the technology some unwelcome attention.

I was struck by this not because, as Lee says, the news is surprising, but because by coincidence, Amazon’s just launched Amazon Coins, a currency that’s specific to the Kindle Fire. The Coins are currently selling at 100 for $1, though buying Coins in bulk will get you a discount. And once you’ve purchased them, you can use them to buy apps and items in Kindle Fire games, though not books, or any other products in the wider Amazon ecosystem. As ABC News explains, they’re essentially a scheme by Amazon to get users to give them money up front, and then download apps because they might as well, having already paid up, rather than paying only when users are moved to purchase a specific app.
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The bridge is yours.

-Read these science fiction novels if you want to understand the economy.

-David Edelstein on “spoiler” creep.

-We are getting more Peanuts comics, and they will be on Vine.

-So on board with the revival of butterscotch.

-Have an actual, full-length “>Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. trailer:

When Fox announced that it would be airing The Mindy Project, a sitcom by The Office star and writer Mindy Kaling, based in part on Kaling’s own mother’s work as an OB/GYN, I had high hopes. Like many freshman comedies, particularly its timeslot partner New Girl, The Mindy Project had a first season that involved throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what stuck and what didn’t. Last night’s finale of The Mindy Project, though, contained a near-perfect sequence that united the series’ two core elements, the practice of medicine, and the pursuit of romantic comedy perfect, and provided a terrific template for how the show can follow New Girl‘s lead and level up dramatically in its second season.

Pulled out of a party to celebrate Mindy and Casey’s moving to Haiti for a year that had become an utter disaster after Danny’s ex-wife had praised his androgyny in a photograph, Mindy had tried to get Casey to break up with her by demanding that he propose, and Casey, unaware that he was playing relationship poker, called her bet and asked her to marry him on the advice of “the Notorious G.O.D.” and she freaked out, Mindy, Danny, and Jeremy ran off to deliver triplets. Their display of extreme competence, set, in a flashback to the premiere, to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” not only gave Mindy a professional win and the ensemble a nice character moment, with Jeremy bragging that the triplet that he was responsible for “had the highest Apgar score.” But the willingness of Mindy’s patients to embrace the chaos of triplets also gave her a critical insight in what she needs to have a grand romantic comedy moment, and it isn’t a checklist of compatibility, or a meet cute in an elevator: it was courage. She rushed to Casey’s apartment, delivered a demented speech on the gap between her aspirations to be in a serious relationship and her actual ability to handle her dream scenario, revealed her chopped-off hair, and reunited with her pastor boyfriend.

This is The Mindy Project‘s sweet spot, the interaction between Mindy’s role as an expert in the mechanics of what it takes to have safe sex or deliver a health baby, or what makes an individual moment cinema-worthy, and her total lack of understanding about how two people get to a point where they want to have a baby in the first place. The finest episodes of the show’s first season were the ones where Mindy’s work helped her realize important things about her approach to dating and relationships—and ultimately made a sly argument that even if Mindy has to run out of dates and parties to deliver children, her commitment to her career is actually one of the things that’s helping her make incremental progress towards a healthier personal life.
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It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.
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Over the past couple of days, Media Matters for America has been rolling out an analysis of who gets booked on cable news shows, and comparing it to data from a similar month in 2008. The findings are discouraging. In May 2008, 57 percent of all guests on evening cable news were white men. In April 2013, that number’s risen to 58 percent.

The network-by-network numbers are revealing. At CNN, 55 percent of guests in May 2008 were white men, but in April 2013, 62 percent of the network’s booked guests were white men. On Fox, the percentage of white male guests rose from 56 percent in May 2008 to 60 percent in April 2013, and that rise might have been sharper if Sean Hannity hadn’t booked 22 non-white guests in a single evening to discuss Dr. Ben Carson’s remarks comparing homosexuality and sexual disorders like bestiality and pedophilia and the ensuing controversy over whether he should speak at commencement for the Johns Hopkins school of medicine. MSNBC is the only network where the percentage of guests who were white men declined, from 61 percent in May 2008 to 54 percent in April 2013:

Even on the MSNBC evening news, that increase in diversity is largely driven by two shows, Politics Nation, anchored by Al Sharpton, where 51 percent of the April 2013 guests were non-white or women, and All In, Chris Hayes’ show, which continues his tradition of booking white men in numbers close to their actual representation in the United States, and had a guest roster that was 41 percent white and male. Chris Matthews’ show Hardball had a guest roster that was 66 percent white and male in April 2013—81 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 79 percent of them, across all races, were male. And 57 percent of Rachel Maddow’s guests in April 2013 were white men—89 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 63 percent of them, across races, were men.

Hayes has made clear that the key to his success in diversifying his guest roster is relatively simple: a desire to do so, and a willingness to ask for recommendations for guests. If All In does well as it settles in to its slot, MSNBC might consider whether a long-term way to distinguish itself from a flailing CNN and a Fox News retrenching in the wake of the November elections, is to offer up viewers not just hosts with different opinions, but very different participants in the people they’re in conversation with.