I spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over the holiday, and saw two terrific exhibits: the reopened Islamic art wing, about which much more to come, and “After the Gold Rush,” a contemporary photography show. Two pieces in the latter exhibit struck me in particular.

First, Philip-Lorca diCorcia took his 1991 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used it to tweak conservatives who were hysterical over NEA funding for a traveling show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. He parceled out the money in small sums to male prostitutes and drug addicts, paying them posing fees and producing a series of tender, lovely portraits. In my favorite, a young man named Todd M. Brooks, appears washed in blue through a cheap motel window, framed in red window trim, and against a patterned blue bedspread. It’s not Picasso, and diCorcia’s approach isn’t a perfect solution to the problem of artists exploiting vulnerable subjects. But it’s a creative political stunt, with better results than usually come from those sorts of origins.

In the second, Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ll admit to having felt like this season of The Walking Dead has spent a lot of time with the characters, human and formerly human, stewing in the same juices: the endless hunt for Sophia, the secrets of Hershel’s farm, the insecurities of Dale, Glen, Darryl and Andrea, the question of whether Rick or Shane is better suited to lead and to love Lori. Fortunately, the stunning final scene of this episode tied all of those threads neatly together. After massacring the walkers in the barn, who they’ve convinced themselves aren’t human, one more emerges: Sophia, changed and ravening. And Rick finds a bridge between Shane’s harsh moral view of the apocalypse and Hershel’s idealism, shaped by isolation from the outside world, and shoots the girl in an act of self-protection and mercy.

I thought the scene did a wonderful job of giving everyone a human moment that addressed, if not resolved, their arc. Glenn steps up to protect Maggie, and she protects her father, grieving with him, but doesn’t try to stop her lover. Darryl, after rejecting Carol’s profession of affection with a brutal, “Leave me be. Stupid bitch,” earlier in the episode, holds her as she sees what’s become of her daughter, and as she witnesses her death. Carl, who told his mother, “I’m not leaving until we find Sophia…I was thinking, she’s going to like it here, this place. It could be a home,” who tried on a man’s cursing to go with a man’s hat earlier in the episode, is reduced to childhood by his friend’s transformation and execution, sobbing in Lori’s arms. Andrea steps up to the front lines with Shane, unaware that Shane’s emotions and his move to start the massacre are deeply engaged with Lori, who is off to the side here. T-Dog is, for once, unconflicted and part of the firing line. And Dale is late to the slaughter, protected from his own dehumanization by fate if not design.

So is the conclusion that Rick is right? Do the reasons you do things matter as much as the fact that you do them? Does Hershel’s determination to see the humanity in the walkers redeem the risks he’s taken, his denial of outside reality? Does the murder Rick commits out of a profound sympathy for the little girl his community’s lost mean something different than the brutal executions carried out by the other members of that community? And does Lori’s declaration to Shane that “Even if it’s yours, it’s not gonna be yours. And it’s never gonna be yours. And there’s nothing you can do to change that,” actually make it so? The Walking Dead is very good at posing moral questions, though I’m not sure it’s as good at knowing what its own answers to them are. Even if the show doesn’t reveal them to us all at once, I’d like a sense that they have a coherent and decisive worldview.

Maybe I should be less cynical, and we do love ourselves some “Party in the USA” here at ThinkProgress headquarters, but I’m not particularly moved by the sight of Miley Cyrus recycling a year-old anodyne girl power anthem and cutting it with a lot of footage from Occupy movements in a statement of radical chic solidarity:

I do think there’s some real value to Cyrus’ core audience seeing images of police brutality. But having a real context for that brutality would lift this video beyond generic teenaged stick-it-to-the-manism in a way that would be useful and specific. There are a lot of signs that show up in the footage: “Wall Street or War Street,” “Trust me—I’m a Banker,” “I Am the 99 percent,” “Separation of Corporation and State,” and “Don’t Destroy the American Dream.” Those slogans sound dandy, but they don’t actually explain why the people in the video or protesting, or why the police have been sanctioned to bring such violence to bear against them. Cyrus’ note accompanying the video, “This is Dedicated to the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in” is equally meaningless, a non-endorsement endorsement that can’t possibly rattle the cage at Hollywood Records.

I feel like such a scold about all of this, but Cyrus’s core fan group is exactly at the age where they’re about to start having adult experiences with debt and income inequality. If they’re applying for college, they may be taking on loans that they can never discharge in bankruptcy. If they’re getting their first credit cards, it might be good for them to know a thing or two about interest rates. A specific endorsement of the goals of the 99 Percent Movement might be uncomfortable for Cyrus, who was born into the 1 percent and has solidified her position there by making herself seem like a consumption priority for young girls. But if Cyrus is genuinely in invested not merely in the idea that free speech is good, but in the belief that widening income inequality is deeply damaging, there are more creative and meaningful things she can do than dust off her back catalogue and slap an Occupy sticker on it.

Editor’s Note: Apologies for the delay on this, due to travel and illness. And hopefully this open thread will tide you over until next weekend’s episode.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner is facing the military justice system again in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” as Will and Alicia defend Sgt. Regina Elkins, a young, female drone operator who is charged with 12 counts of murder when drones kill civilians in Afghanistan. Elkins’s parents are paying for civilian representation, and Capt. Hicks, who we first met in “Double Jeopardy,” comes to Lockhart/Gardner because he thinks they “would do the least damage.” Interestingly, though, it’s Kalinda who convinces Will to take the case: he’s reluctant, unsure of his own competence in the military court system, but when Kalinda tells him that the State’s Attorney’s investigation into him is winding down and that he should “do something nice for someone,” Will takes her at her word, and he and Alicia are back in military court. The judge is the same one Will clashed with during his last experience, so he does what he did when the British judge didn’t like him: He has Alicia talk in his place. Even though Will loves Alicia partially because she can hold her own in a courtroom, he persists in believing that she will come across to others as meek and kind to a fault. This play never really works, and despite Alicia’s compelling argument that Elkins’s accuser was sexist and that she was prosecuted as a scapegoat, Elkins is found guilty. I liked that, because the courtroom scenes have no tension if Will and Alicia always win, but I wish the show had taken this opportunity to delve into the questions it raised about civilian collateral in drone strikes and about the illegal use of drugs like Adrafinil by soldiers who must stay alert for long shifts.

It turns out that Kalinda had Will doing something nice under false pretenses, anyway, because her information was wrong. The investigation into Will isn’t winding down — it’s heating up. Peter assigns his old rival Wendy Scott-Carr as special prosecutor, and Scott-Carr decides to forget about Lemond Bishop and drugs, and instead go straight for Will and judicial corruption. (While we have no reason to think that Will is actually bribing judges, it is interesting that judges from outside his own system, like the British judge and the military judge, tend to hate him practically on sight.) Scott-Carr says it’s her own decision to make Will the focus of the investigation, but everyone, including Diane, assumes Peter is coming after Will because of Alicia. Diane knows the allegations against Will are unfounded, but her patience has run out, and she talks to him like a school principal scolding a wayward 10-year-old: “Stop it. Alicia. Peter Florrick is coming after you because you are sleeping with his wife. Don’t lie to me. It’s wrong. You are her boss. He is the State’s Attorney. Even if it weren’t wrong, it’s not smart. Stop sleeping with his wife. Do you understand me?” By the end of their confrontation, I’m ready to let Diane take over running the whole world, and Will looks appropriately chastened — though he never actually agrees to stop sleeping with Alicia.
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The bridge is yours.

-I really want to see how M will interact with the new Q.

-Rod Dreher on church architecture and Gaudi.

-Martin Scorcese on 3D.

-Critics, citizen curators, and gatekeepers.

-Gorgeous bicycle animation:

Remember Emma Sullivan, the Kansas school student student who tweeted, jokingly, that she’d been mean to Gov. Sam Brownback, noting “#heblowsalot”? The one who apparently so freaked out the Governor’s office that they reported her to her high school principal Regina George-style? Apparently, she’s vexed with Brownback because he eliminated Kansas’ public funding for the arts, forcing the state to sacrifice funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and shutting down the state’s arts agency. Apparently, Brownback doesn’t want to risk interfering with the delicate mechanics of the marketplace of ideas, unless the marketplace assigns an uncomfortably high value to the idea that he’s a less than awesome governor.

I, along with what seems like every other television critic in America, have been greatly enjoying seeing Happy Endings hit its stride this fall (especially paired with Revenge, it makes for a nice comedy-drama macaron). But I’m finding myself wishing that the show would take a bit more advantage of making Brad (Damon Wayans, Jr.) and Jane (Eliza Coupe) an interracial couple to actually talk a bit about race. I’d be really curious to hear them talk about how they want to raise their kids and what it will mean for them to be biracial instead of having their visit to suburbia be about breakfast-themed Halloween costumes and the perils of that particular holiday. And the show seems inclined to give them wacky marriage strains and fixes like weirdly peppy sorority sisters and improv obsessions, rather than finding a defining approach to more naturally occurring material. The show tends to bring up race more in the interacts between Brad and his friends — in the last episode, Dave kept posing at blackness and kept getting shot down by Brad. But while the episode did a nice job of shooting down Dave’s dorkiness, the show didn’t really have Brad say anything about what Dave’s attempts at bonding meant to him, or why they didn’t work, or why they were inauthentic. It felt like an incomplete moment, particularly since these guys are supposed to be close.

I think it’s in part because my new throwback obsession is Living Single, which I’m devouring off my DVR. And one of the things I like best about it is the way it draws its jokes and dramas from real differences of opinion and conflicts about race. The scenarios aren’t patently absurd, so the presentation has to be sharp. (It also, like many other shows of another era, assumes a much broader base of general knowledge than shows today appear to.) I loved, for example, the episode where Max’s mother, the always extremely welcome CCH Pounder comes to visit. When Max’s friends say they look alike, Max’s mother, who straightens her hair, replies that it will be true once Max, who wears her hair braided, grows up–and starts paying better attention to her hair. It’s not some invented, bizarre mother-daughter cruelty. It’s instantly recognizable, and lands particularly hard because of the force of Pounder’s delivery.

It’s no mistake that one of Happy Endings‘ best episodes is the one where Max (in this case, white and gay) discovers that Brad is blowing him off to spend time with an alternate group of friends composed entirely of black men. Both Brad’s need for a racially specific environment and Max’s anxiety about not fitting in with Brad’s black friends are realistic and draw their humor and pathos from things real people are likely to feel. Unlike, say, using couples improv to boost a fraudulent tour business. It’s similar to the way the show scored a hit with a fractured take on another common experience — Penny buying her dream condo, only to believe it’s haunted by the ghost of spinsterhood yet to come. I think Happy Endings is often very good, but I’d like to see the show trust itself a bit more to riff on what’s real rather than coming up with goofy substitute conflicts.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of Homeland.

Homeland‘s had an incredible introductory streak, so I suppose it’s inevitable that the show would produce an episode that’s less than stellar. And I’m still trying to decide if this episode, which in one fell swoop made the plot more convoluted and saccharine, signals a derailment of the show or if it’s a mild aberration, necessary to the film’s larger themes.

First, there’s Brody’s backstory, which is about as straightforward as it can possibly get: it turns out that in his captivity, Abu Nazir had Brody teach his son English, and when the boy was killed by a drone attack, Brody dedicated himself to revenge, specifically on Vice President William Walden. There’s nothing precisely wrong with that storyline, and as usual, it’s well-executed: Brody’s face when he sees a bath for the first time after months of filth and captivity is a sight to see. But I’ve gotten used to seeing Homeland subvert our expectations, and so the cheesiness of Brody teaching Isa to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or bonding with him over soccer, of seeing the boy comfort the post-traumatic man by treating him like a son would treat his father felt like a letdown if only because it was so emotionally predictable. I want to resist the urge to demand that I be surprised all the time, because on principal, I do think fictional should operate by consistent internal logic rather than aiming to operate like Rube Goldberg devices in contravention of the logic we’re all governed by. I don’t want the show to get increasingly baroque. But I do want Homeland to continue its commitment to subtlety and emotional richness that doesn’t grow out of entirely predictable places. This story of drone strikes is entirely too emotionally and politically simple, it doesn’t make the case for using drone strikes. The show’s portraying Abu Nazir as a decent man and only asserting that he’s a villain. It would be nice for that work to go in two directions.

In addition to that saccharine interlude, the show’s writing also felt a little flat. I actually think it’s been to Homeland‘s credit that, in a season full of shows like Boss and Hell on Wheels that aim for rhetorical heights, the show’s stuck to plain language. The writing hasn’t overshadowed the emotions. But here, the writing felt a little flat. We’re stuck with an FBI stooge who says things like “Justice? What does that mean?” or “It’s his word against mine.” His snark at Carrie, “You people have rubber hoses, don’t you?” isn’t a bad slap at the CIA’s record on interrogation, but he’s got such wooden lines otherwise that the line doesn’t land very hard. Carrie isn’t elevating matters either with lines like “If your men made a mistake, you need to come clean.” I hate seeing this show feel like a cliche. Fortunately, there’s Tom Walker in the woods, joking grimy that he’s hunting “office supplies” before blowing away a hunter who has the misfortune to recognize him. Homeland is more fun when it pulls us into sympathy with someone whose head we don’t necessarily want to be in at all, much less feel in concert with.
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I love this 1936 Thanksgiving proclamation by Connecticut Gov. Wilbur Cross, and (religion aside if it’s not your bag) this of all years seems like a good time to trot it out:

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of

Public Thanksgiving

for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth—for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives—and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land;—that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.

It’s a real loss that the language of our public declarations rarely scales such heights any more. Big problems demand big thinking, and big inspiration.

In any case, I am exceedingly grateful for all of you, for your comments, and conversations, and participation in this project. It’s a joy talking to you. And I hope those of you who are marking Thanksgiving have a wonderful, restful day.

I’ll be mostly off for the rest of the week, doing holiday and holiday-adjacent things with my family and friends. I hope you all are getting some time to rest up and recharge, and I’ll see you around for occasional posts (including a belated Boardwalk Empire open thread).

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 20 episode of The Walking Dead.

Last night on The Walking Dead, the prospect of new life, whether in the form of a pregnancy, a revitalized sex drive, or the dream of a cure for “Mom. Sean. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher. Lacy. Duncan,” got everyone in trouble.

First, there’s the question of the walkers in the barn, fed by chickens and kept safe. Dale, providing at least half-successfully wily, lets Hershel know he knows what’s up without implicating Glen, only to find himself in a moral debate with their host. Hershel’s upset by the walker’s death at the well, suggesting it was coarsening. “You killed a person,” he tells Dale. “We don’t shoot sick people…My wife and stepson are in that barn. They’re people.” But he has the benefit of isolation, something that still doesn’t quite strike me as plausible. And Maggie has their beliefs on that score challenged when she’s attacked by a walker in the pharmacy and saved only by Glen’s brutal and brutally efficient intervention. But the budding affection between them is too much for her. “You’re smart, you’re a leader, but your friends don’t see it,” Maggie tells Glen. “They don’t want to see it. You’re just their errand boy. Walker in the well? Send Glen down. You’re walker bait.” Rick and his people may be right about what it takes to survive, but Hershel may be right that it’s cost them something along the way.

Then, there’s the matter of Lori’s abortion. Maggie’s right that there’s something horrible about Lori making Glen take risks for her, particularly for something she’s not even sure will work. And I appreciate that the show suggested it would be entirely reasonable for Lori to not want to bring a child into a zombie-ridden world. “I got a deep well to draw on. I still remember joy. But I think Carl’s is already running dry,” she explains. I understand that keeping her pregnant makes the show more complicated and provides a lot of dramatic tension, or as Glen puts it, “You’re pregnant. You need vitamins. Medicine. A nice pillow.” And it’s interesting that the show presented her decision to vomit up the morning-after pills as less rational than trying to go through with an abortion. But it’s still a fairly typical television approach to abortion on television: get absolutely up to the edge of the prospect, then back aggressively away from it.

And then, as Lori decides to have Rick’s child, Shane and Andrea, hyped up by stress, have sex in a car and return to Hershel’s farm changed. What will it mean for Lori, who’s been unable to do the right thing and relinquish her hold over Shane, to see his affections shifted. What will it mean for Dale to have Andrea revitalized, not reliant on him for her ties to life and to the group? In a world dominated by death, the life force, and the hope it engenders, can be awfully dangerous.

In yesterday’s post about biopics, I wrote that “we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating.” Today, Hollywood gives me exactly what I want! (I really should make demands more often.) Apparently, a biopic’s under way about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who, though he wouldn’t carry a gun, at great personal risk worked as a medic during the Battle of Okinawa and saved the lives of 75 men who were wounded. He also won the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The story poses really interesting challenges: I can’t wait to see someone dramatize a major action sequence where the main character can’t, or won’t participate, which I assume has to be a really difficult stance to maintain in the midst of a battle people later named the Typhoon of Steel.* And given how far we are from the last American draft, I wonder if audiences who have never had to face the prospect of being forced to go to a war they’d rather not fight personally will have trouble relating to Doss’ character. But even if this was fiction, it would be a pretty creative take on action and war movies. And the fact that it’s true just makes it astonishing.

*Side note: how has George R.R. Martin not stolen that title?

I’m running around New York today, so no links, except a wish that someone would make me a Breaking Bad-Breaking Dawn supercut. Walter White would never let his daughter marry one of the undead.

Because I have a tendency to make foolish decisions while in New York, I let a group of my friends talk me into seeing Breaking Dawn. As will surprise no one, even aesthetic and feminist objections aside, it’s not a good movie: the shots are endless and empty without meaningful dialogue to fill them, the action sequences are incomprehensible and lack even the slightest tension, and for all the vampire wealth we’re supposed to be lavished with, the sets often look ugly and cheap. There are bits and pieces that suggest the missed opportunities had someone had the fortitude to do some real surgery on the novel: a series of very funny wedding toasts, some nonsense with lingere, a nicely nervous loss-of-virginity prep. And it tip-toes up to something very interesting and scary about pregnancy before walking away.

In the movie, as in the book, Bella finds herself unexpectedly and terrifyingly pregnant with a rapidly-growing fetus that does her great harm — starving her, kicking her bruised, breaking her ribs and ultimately her spine. I don’t agree with everything in this essay, but I agree it’s a good, scary metaphorization of the huge things one’s body goes through when one gets pregnant. And in the movie, it’s horrifying. Bella becomes a living corpse, and not one that sparkles in the sunlight. She’s terrifyingly emaciated. She’s bruised. Her hair is dirty. When her labor begins and her baby breaks her spine, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve seen on screen all year, and I’m not being facetious — it’s a body doing something it’s not meant to, and it’s sickening. The c-section via Edward’s teeth is shot such that it’s a deeply uncomfortable riff on oral sex. It all could have been more lurid, but it’s the one part of the movie where writer Melissa Rosenberg (no relation) and director Bill Condon really seemed to commit.

Of course they, and the novel, back away from the horror. Bella gives birth to an angel who entrances her best friend, rather than to a monstrosity. She survives her horrific birth and is transformed into a being more beautiful than she ever was as a human. It’s an inverse of Rosemary’s Baby, promising that no matter what you endure, everything will be fine, no need to worry about your health, or any anxieties you might have about motherhood. I still think that a real aversion to having children, or even an antipathy to them in general, is one of the few views that remains fairly taboo in popular culture, where motherhood rules over almost any other alternate priority. Breaking Dawn may make a bunch of its vampires straw pro-choices, treating them as if they’re dumb and insensitive for valuing a sister-in-law they love over a child they don’t know. But it’s not really willing to have an honest debate about what motherhood means after you give birth.

I’m not usually exceptionally fond of either contrarianism or remakes, but I’m going to buck a trend here and say I’m kind of excited about a darkish reboot of The Munsters. We’re certainly seeing a bit of a trend towards the horrifying on television this fall: if American Horror Story can sell people on Connie Britton eating brains, I guess anything is possible. And Grimm is doing something I appreciate, increasingly partnering up straight-man-to-the-point-of-invisibility Nick with a Big Bad Wolf. But both Ryan Murphy’s wannabe-transgressive drama and NBC’s semi-bland procedural essentially use monsters in the same way, to test the extent to which there’s a bit of a wild thing inside all of us normals before reasserting our essential humanity. Instead, I’d like to see a show about what it’s like to be a monster in America, something as proudly but a little less triumphalist than The Addams Family. What does it mean to grow up really, profoundly different, without the promise of a big-city gay community or the rise of hipster glasses as a fashion trend to power you through? What does it mean to find your community — and your family — and what would you do to protect it from outsiders? America’s pretty quick to kill or assimilate the things it sees as monsters. We’re less good at making art that at the things we can’t eliminate easily or decisively.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 20 episode of Homeland.

“Call him a terrorist. What happened here won’t matter very much.” -The FBI’s liaison to the CIA on the Tom Walker detail

“I’m going to be alone my whole life, aren’t I?” -Carrie

Tonight brought another twist in the mystery of what happened to Brody in Afghanistan and who he is now. But I think I’ve decided that I don’t much care about the final destination of this show as long as it keeps taking us to these fascinating, heartbreaking places. Whether Brody is guilty, innocent, or merely beyond our comprehension, Homeland is, I think, a story about how our country breaks our hearts.

On a policy level first, the botched apprehension of Tom Walker pulled together three central themes of the show. First, Carrie turned out to be wrong about the extent to which she could wrangle Walker’s traumatized wife, who made a grand, stupid gesture to try to absolve herself for the sin of moving on. But she was right to order caution in the raid, and disaster resulted when the FBI ignored her, leaving two men dead at prayers and the Muslim community up in arms. Second, that tragedy continued the show’s dedication to finding beauty in prayer: the agents’ sights picked out the iconic arches in a mosque that from the outside was so non-descript, it looked like a warehouse. And finally, it was an example of a government agency being so callous about Islam that it would be nice to believe it wasn’t true, though of course it mirrors an ugly reality.

Then, there’s the human heartbreak of the work-service to country can be salvation and damnation both. Saul, mounting a last-ditch effort to make Mina stay, compares himself to Walker, saying their fatal flaws are that they both love their wives. But of course he has it wrong, admitting, too late, that “I always come when they call me.” And even in his own home, there’s someone he loves more than his wife. Twice Carrie’s come to his home in tense moments with Mina, and twice Saul’s admitted her. He can take time to chastise Carrie and to comfort her, but not to save his marriage.

Then, there’s Jess, who is in an agony of guilt, and Brody trying to absolve her and himself. What pulls them together is an invitation to a party thrown by a power-broker from their church with political plans for the Brodys. It turns out that playing perfect saves them. Their children watch for the arrival of a hired car like it’s something far more powerful than a prosaic sedan, and when the parents return home, drunk and excited by having lived up to the imaginations of powerful people who see the promise of America in them, their children are sober, placid, and watching uniquely American dreck. It may not last, but a single night of Ice Age, popcorn, and accord feels like heaven.

I just wanted to take a moment to say goodbye to my colleague Matt Yglesias and to wish him well in his new gig at Slate. I met many of you for the first time when I was hanging out at his blog earlier this year, but without him, I probably never would have started blogging in the first place. He was one of the first people to ask me to take a whirl at his place back when he was at The Atlantic, and encouraged me in the early days when I was plugging away on Blogger. And in honor of everything he’s done for me, I’ll renew his call for an investigation of the Lyte Funky Ones:

Just because he’s leaving ThinkProgress doesn’t mean that the cause will die.

Normally, profiles of women in Hollywood have at least one anecdote about what they eat (remarks about clothes and jewelry are the substitute for women in Washington) to suggest that said actresses are normal people and to obscure the fact that it takes an enormous amount of self-denial and expensive training to actually meet the industry’s standards for body size. But Vanity Fair is breaking all the rules! Instead of using Mindy Kaling’s order at a restaurant to show she’s a normal person taking advantage of someone else’s expense account by ordering goodies, they’re using it to raise their eyebrows at her lack of fealty to an absurd dieting regimen:

“I’m ready, actually,” she replied enthusiastically, ordering fruit salad, followed by day-boat sea scallops in creamy corn grits with bacon-braised greens, a poached egg on top, and toasted rye on the side. She devoured the second course happily and requested jam to go with the toast.

“Not too careful with the calories, Mindy?” I ventured.

“Are you kidding? I love reading about diets. But I can’t implement them. That’s my problem.”…

“I just want to let you know about the dessert,” our waiter said tactfully.

She chose the profiteroles with chocolate sauce and melted ice cream.

The jam! The humanity! It would be really delightful if someone would actually find a different way to do a celebrity profile. But even if you’re doing a puff piece, this is an even more direct and pathetic reinforcement of stupid norms than usual, skipping the bit where they pretend it would be great if people didn’t have to starve themselves.

Back in June, I put Hilary Mantel’s masterful novel about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall, on my Introductory Guide to Women-Centered Culture For Guys syllabus. Now, HBO’s making a miniseries out of it.

This is great news for a couple of reasons. First, if it’s done right, the adaptation will be a great look at — in addition to the birth of the Church of England — European trade, the consolidation of church properties that led to the founding of Cardinal College at Oxford, and the allegations that Thomas More actively promoted the torture of Protestants during the lead-up to England’s split with the Catholic Church. Wolf Hall is a phenomenal novel about personal investment in politics. Watching Thomas Cromwell escape his father’s vicious abuse through the kindness of Amsterdam’s cloth merchants and the mercenary armies of the continent; Cardinal Wolsey fret over the future of the college he wanted to make a jewel; or the cold home More builds to prop up the edifice of his righteousness, the show builds a complicated definition of the means and costs of being a genuinely world-historical figure.

And for all that it’s big, it’s a strikingly personal novel. We see what it means to be sold off for your chastity, the cost of being an object of obsessive pursuit in a way that makes a mockery of Twilight. It’s a shame that Natalie Dormer already played Anne Boelyn in The Tudors so she can’t take on a more nuanced version of the role here. Cromwell’s relationship with his late wife, and later, with her sister, who is married to another man, are infinitely tender. The loss of his daughter, the disappointment of his son, sting like whips. And it’s a marvelous novel of friendship, whether it’s Cromwell and Wolsey or Cromwell and Imperial diplomat Eustace Chapuys. I don’t really know how a miniseries will capture the Cabinet of Wonders-like effect of the novel, which is one of the most effective evocations of a historic worldview I’ve ever read. But I’m glad it’s not getting reduced to a movie, and that some serious writerly fire-power will be behind it. HBO’s movie team has been wildly on their game lately, so I can’t wait to see what they do with this.

French glamor has, in recent years, largely been represented by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: the whirlwind courtship! The record! The Woody Allen movie cameo! The first baby born to a French president while in office! And so it’s interesting to turn back the clock a bit in The Conquest, Xavier Durringer’s fictional account of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s husband’s rise to power — and the woman he was married to before her. The Conquest can be ponderous when it comes to putting powerful men together in the gilded French halls of state. But as a movie about what it means to be a political wife, The Conquest can be absolutely searing — and applicable to any continent.

When the movie begins, Cécilia Sarkozy is encouraging her husband to embrace his new job as Interior Minister with vigor, telling him to “Create the news and comment on it. Be actor and director.” Much of the movie’s dialogue has this sort of momentous quality, something it shares with Starz’s Boss. I understand the desire to lend a grandeur to politics, but such language is at constant risk of being risible, and sometimes falls into that trap here. And it’s not necessary as Cécilia watches with mounting disappointment as her husband moves to become party head rather than embracing the work of the ministry, as he lambastes the businessmen she wants him to work with, spitting out that “Their generosity will be compensated.” We feel her growing discomfort as the couple becomes the object of intense media scrutiny — there are constant shots of people doing normal things, like eating breakfast, or going for a bike ride, only to have a cut or a wider shot reveal that they are performing for a cadre of photographers. “Our life has become a reality show,” Cécilia says, as they’re mobbed, walking on a beach. “We’re acting transparent, honey,” her husband replies, clearly feeding off the attention.

When she rebels, the only language Sarkozy has to woo her back is politics. “I’d like to share this with you,” he tells her. “We’ve wanted this for 20 years.” When he says “I can’t be alone,” it’s not because he can’t live without her, but because he can’t run for president without her. During a meeting with Jacques Chirac and his fellow Ministers, Sarkozy performs a double maneuver, showing his contempt for his colleagues by breaking up the meeting to text Cécilia, who has left him for her lover, playing a nasty game of brinksmanship by telling her “Either you come home [for the election] or I marry her,” a newspaper reporter he’s been seeing. Sarkozy’s political rivals and staff see the state of the Sarkozy marriage as a political condition. “If he can’t hold onto his wife, how can he hold on to France?” Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin crows triumphantly while working out on a rowing machine in a gorgeous historic French mansion. “She decides, he executes,” Sarkozy’s staff say of Cécilia, echoing language Chirac’s staff urged him to use to keep Sarkozy in line. The possessiveness is ugly. “You can’t pull away from me. Or me from you,” Sarkozy says, ignoring the fact that he’s already done that to her, when she says she’s leaving him. “We’re meant to be together.” He grabs her, hard. He throws things. When he touches her cheek after his victory, he touches her flesh less to caress and more to mold and subdue.

The positioning between powerful men is less interesting and emotionally rich, though it can be funny. “You looked great coming out of the water, like Ursula Andress in James Bond,” Sarkozy tells de Villepin while they’re on a working retreat, mocking him for playing the diva. “You know your classics,” de Villepin swipes back, putting down his less traditionally polished rival. And the movie doesn’t deal in a really substantive way with the riots in Paris suburbs that Sarkozy jumped on as a way to gain favor with conservatives. “We talk about ‘incivility’ instead of riots, ‘gangbangs’ instead of rape,” he tells Chirac, but the movie treats this move mostly as a matter of opportunism rather than getting into its racial component. But for its flaws, The Conquest looks gorgeous: lamps glow yellow on Jacques Chirac’s desk, and the yellow ribbons that divide an airport queue pop against the white stone floor, while the green glass of a moving walkway glimmers wetly, transforming a mundane space into something grand. And the grandeur of official French offices highlights the entitlement of these men. This is politics as performed by princes. But these days, princesses tend to have agendas and priorities of their own.