I was a vocal defender of the idea behind Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games exhibit when the dates for it were announced last spring, and I continue to think that an excellent, comprehensive exhibit of video game art is a good idea. But despite some intelligent framing and good curation ideas, The Art of Video Games feels too defensive to be that show.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Art of Video Games is how much space it feels compelled to devote to testimonials insisting that video games are, in fact, art and worthy of an exhibit of this magnitude. Judging by the massive crowds at the show, that might have been a necessary case to make to donors and curators, but audiences didn’t need to be convinced. One of the joys of attending the show was seeing how excited visitors were to it to see the popular art that’s been important in their lives treated as if it’s worthy of professional assessment and attention. And curating the show more confidently without stopping to justify it would have both eliminated waste space and given little ground to those who doubt the need for The Art of Video Games at all.

Waste space is a problem: the exhibit feels alternately stuffed and and under-full. It’s a three-room show, which doesn’t seem like very much space for an exhibit that’s meant to be comprehensive. The first has concept art, packaging for old games, video interviews with game creators, and a multi-media explanation of the evolution of graphics. But the show’s almost entirely uncaptioned, so it’s hard to tell why these artifacts and not others made it into the show, or what stages of game development they’re meant to represent. The second room has consoles set up that let visitors play classic games on large-scale screens. But once again, they’re captioned with basic summaries of the game rather than any framing that would provide clear context for their inclusion or the advances they represent, and it means that the middle of the exhibit is slowed down by lines of people waiting for their shot at a controller.

The final room is the most interesting, but it still illustrates the show’s weaknesses. The display takes viewers through key games for each major console, with walkthroughs of gameplay to illustrate what console improvements let designers do with everything from character design, to cut scenes, to incentives. It’s a fascinating way to present information, but it also means that viewers are fighting for space at the relatively small screens where the walkthroughs are projected. The audio for each walkthrough’s piped through a single phone at each screen, which means that, even though the narration is captioned on the screen, people end up close to the screen, blocking them. There’s basically no way for any attendee to access all the information in the exhibit.

It’s too bad, because—though I’ll leave it to experts like Harold Goldberg to critique what the voting system that got games into the exhibit included and what it ended up leaving out—there’s a lot of terrific information in the show, whether you’re a long-time gamer or an interested novice. I hadn’t known, for example, that Metal Gear Solid can be played all the way through without killing an enemy. And while it’s not very interesting to hear generic defenses of video games as art, listening to creator Jenova Chen talk about the games he’s designed, like Flow and Flower, which absorb viewers in the natural world, provides a fascinating look at how gaming might answer the demands of a new generation of gamers and a the creative aspirations of a new generation of game designers and developers. It would also have been fascinating—and a good defense of the idea that games are a minor commercial product rather than art—to see games in the context of other media. I really enjoyed seeing the similarities between how Rez, Hackers, and The Matrix visualized the internet in its early days.

But fan enthusiasm and justifying an exhibit don’t a coherent narrative make. There are stories to be told about the development of video games in the past, and where they’re going in the future. And there are stories to be told about the artists, who appear here only in testimonials, rather than accompanied by relevant biographical representation (the show is careful to represent both female gamers and game producers, but it doesn’t discuss institutional sexism in the industry much, or how it affects its output). We’re getting terrific fiction out of the role that video games play in our lives and our economy, like Ready Player One and Reamde. Maybe, if we can finally get a Bioshock, Halo, or Mass Effect movie adaptation off the ground, we’ll have movies to match. And The Art of Video Games won’t be the only museum exhibit we’ll get about this art, this industry. Hopefully, this will lay a foundation for a show that has confidence in itself, and a story to tell about these gorgeous alternate universes.

Deadline reports the latest Rentrak data about DVD rentals:

Consumers spent $5.65B renting DVDs and Blu-ray discs in 2011, Rentrak says this morning citing data from its Home Video Essentials tracking service. That’s down 3.4% from 2010. But consumer defections from disc rentals appear to be accelerating. In the last three months of the year, rentals were -21.3% from the same period in 2010, as business at kiosks — including Redbox, which charges $1.20 a night — grew by 28%.

I’m not sure if this data includes Netflix rentals, but in any case, the same trend is roughly true for that company as well: now that subscriptions to Netflix DVD and streaming services are separate, subscriptions to the DVD-by-mail service are down. And we don’t have data yet about whether the end of Netflix’s streaming deal with Starz, which means that a bunch of content that was previously available streaming is now only available by mail, is driving consumers back to the DVD service.

My guess is that ultimately DVDs will become a luxury-item business. People will still want to buy fancy box sets with extra features that come all wrapped up in gorgeous packaging for their very favorite things. But most of us, they’ll become an inconvenience: the discs and the cases will take up space, and even a several day wait to get them will seem so irritatingly slow as to not be worth it for all but the most desirable content. And making both video and books impulse purchases that are instantly available may increase how much we use them. Netflix streaming’s grown to be a huge proportion of internet use, and while the numbers are self-reported, there’s some data to suggest that e-reader owners buy and read more books. It’ll just be interesting to see at which point television and music creating companies accept that they’re in the same position book publishers are, and offer dual formats rather than pushing DVDs over downloads. Ultraviolet is a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure getting cloud storage space with a disk is as attractive as getting cloud storage space with a download: the whole point of cloud storage is not having to deal with those pesky discs and format transfers.

The bridge is yours.

-This new James Brown biography looks pretty good.

-Modern Family‘s cast would like all the money, please.

-Could The Hunger Games get a Best Picture nomination?

-Gamers have bigger reward centers in their brains.

-One more day until Community day!

I’ve written in the past that perhaps the greatest sign of Hollywood’s racism is the deeply boring white actors it gives chance after chance when compared to the wildly talented black actors it refuses to aggressively promote and develop. But the industry is determined to keep giving these fellows chances. So not to get all Regina George about it, but here are five boring white dudes I wish Hollywood would stop trying to make happen. Because to some degree or another, it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying these men don’t deserve to find work, or that they’re bad people (with one exception). But if Hollywood has limited capital and advertising dollars to spend, it could be spending it more interesting places.

1. David Lyons: There is no penance too great to be done for The Cape, NBC’s epically awful attempt at a superhero story. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a show that looks and feels like old-timey comics, but it doesn’t work when a stump is standing in for your lead actor. But Lyons is getting another shot, in the J.J. Abrams show that people are still insisting is about “a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously cdased to exist.” I guess from one ludicrous premise to the next?

2. Alex Pettyfer: Need a generic-looking dude for your adaptation of a book that came out of James Frey’s Young Adult fiction factory? For your silly remake of Beauty and the Beast? Pettyfer is your dude, as long as you don’t mind him acting like a diva on-set (or the rumors that he stalks his ex-girlfriends). Bland handsomeness is a dime a dozen. If only Hollywood was willing to jettison the bland jerks, and recognize that they can get bland personalities to match, and at least get to neutral.

3. Jason O’Mara: To be fair, Terra Nova had problems other than its totally generic leading man, including expensive special effects paired with a total lack of careful thought about what to do with its promising concept. But O’Mara didn’t exactly bring anything special or original to the party. But never fear: of course he’s getting another shot, this time, in a new show from CBS about former Las Vegas Mayor Ralph Lamb.

4. Sam Worthington: Perhaps the most egregious example on this list, Worthington’s the face of two franchises—Avatar and the Titans movies, despite an utter lack of a personality or much in the way of a range of facial expressions. Neither franchise is particularly dependent on Worthington’s performance, but man I’d like a more interesting actor to get at least a bit of the credit for carrying them.

5. Zac Efron: Yeah, I know, there’s the teen and tween factor. But strip Efron of his trademark swoop of hair and the opportunity to sing overblown songs on the Disney channel, and it’s not particularly clear what his appeal is or his talents are. Sure, there’s a viable romantic comedy market out there, but people like Channing Tatum, who have actual personalities, might have an up on Efron there. We ladies? Not stupid.

My decision in the Morning New’s Tournament of Books is finally live, so I can reveal that I picked Teju Cole’s Open City over Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and I can finally discuss both books without tipping my hand about what—or how—I’d be judging.

There’s a fascinating discussion in comments about the key event in the book. Julius, a somewhat depressed psychiatrist who is the main character in the novel, spends much of the book reconnecting with Moji, a girl he knew when they were both growing up in Nigeria. But towards the end of the novel, Moji reveals her real motivations for getting to know Julius as an adult: Julius sexually assaulted her when they were young teenagers, and she’s wanted to see if he remembers his actions and feels regret or remorse. Commenter Neighbors73 raises an objection that others brought up as well: “I guess I’m the only one who is still struggling with the idea of a 14 year old boy forgetting he’s a rapist?”

I can understand why some readers might find this jarring. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t. The power of that conversation between Moji and Julius lies in its dissonance, the fact that an event that was shattering for one person was forgettable for someone else. And this is the kind of thing that can happen when we don’t treat boys and girls equally about what consent means. It’s just as important to teach boys that no genuinely means no as it is to teach girls to say no in the first place. Putting sole responsibility on women is a sick joke when men can override their lack of consent.

And when we don’t teach boys what consent genuinely means, and why obtaining it is critical, this is where we get these horrendous differences in memory. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that someone would forget a one-time sexual encounter in a lifetime of them if that’s the way their lack of knowledge and empathy lead them to read an assault. And I find it all too plausible that a 14-year-old could rewrite what for a woman was a lifechanging sexual assault into a routine, and barely-remembered hookup at a party. Julius didn’t forget assaulting Moji because he’s a sociopath who can easily put a rape out of his mind—he forgot assaulting Moji because he doesn’t understood himself to have assaulted her in the first place. This doesn’t absolve him of moral responsibility, then or now. In fact, it shows him to be more globally detached and inconsiderate than we’d previously seen. It’s a revelation that forces us, and Julius, to revisit everything we’ve come to understand about him.

This post contains spoilers through the May 27 episode of Justified.

I was joking on Twitter last night that sometimes, the best endgame I can possibly see for Justified would be that Wynn Duffy and Raylan Givens lay down their arms and their Bluetooth headsets, forgive their old enmities, and open up a bar in a convenient holler somewhere. Perhaps with barbeque catered Ellstin Limehouse, if he lives through this season, though given that the title of the finale is “Slaughterhouse,” and an awful lot of people want his money, is not something I would particularly count on. But I think there’s something to that: Raylan and Wynn are both cantankerous, both wily, and in their own way, both quite competent. You’ve got to wonder if at some point they might recognize that they have more in common than not and make common cause.

This, however, seems unlikely to be that day, mostly because right now, Wynn and Raylan share a similar objective but very different plans for what they’d do if they achieved it. At the moment, Wynn seems closer to having a handle on Quarles than Raylan does. No matter how slippery a man is, shackles and the determination of a riled-up Boyd Crowder can be an excellent deterrent. One would guess that would be a fragile alliance. Wynn may have a deal with Sammy Tonen to turn him over—though that’s a risky proposition when, as Tonen puts it, “To kill Bobby Quarles? Yeah, I plan on sending more.”—but Boyd’s sense of self, which has taken repeated knocks this season as he attempts to set himself up as Harlan’s most impressive kingpin, has been injured.

Our other dirtbag alliance du jour is between Dickie Bennett and Limehouse’s henchman, tied together by an aggrieved sense that they could run things a lot better themselves. “Man won’t let us change with the times. I think you might have had experience dealing with someone like that yourself,” the man from Noble’s Holler tells Dickie, after warning him that Mr. Limehouse doesn’t take kindly to disparagement. I suspect this union is little more than plot mechanics, but it would be interesting to see the Bennetts and Limehouse’s operation in fuller juxtaposition. Harlan’s history is so rich.

Beyond the criminals, our lawmen aren’t in the best of shape. Raylan’s a mess, whether from offending bartender Lindsay or throwing down with Quarles, prompting a fatherly lecture from Art on what may be the real problem at hand. “The prospect of first-time fatherhood can make a man feel unmoored,” Art advises, trying to calm his best man, and his twitchiest. “To be clear, I just don’t need you to be any more reckless than normal. Whatever your failings are likely to be as a father, I’m pretty sure your child will be better off if you stay above ground long enough to make his acquaintance.” Rachel, on the other hand, is doing better, though she has to make a knee-punctuated point with a handsy criminal, and even that little bit of work made me immensely glad that she’s back.

There are a lot of television shows where I find myself wishing they were more clearly focused on one of the multitudes they contain because the main storyline is unsatisfying. It speaks well of Justified that I love the core of it, but could easily watch any one of a number of shows set in its universe in addition to it. Whether it’s Rachel or Noble’s Holler, I’d love to watch a show about Harlan through an African-American perspective, to see it in conversation with the white men in white hats.

Yesterday, I wrote about what I think is one of the central cruxes of making streaming video profitable: whether we’re willing to give content distributors more data about us and permission to distribute more of it to advertisers in order to make streaming more profitable and potentially cheaper for us. Turns out the Federal Trade Commission is considering exactly the same challenge in its report laying our recommendations to businesses and policymakers about protecting consumer privacy while satisfying consumer desires in an age when technology is undergoing rapid change. A key section:

Many commenters expressed support for the general principle that companies should limit the information they collect from consumers. Despite the broad support for the concept, however, many companies argued for a flexible approach based on concerns that allowing companies to collect data only for existing business needs would harm innovation and deny consumers new products and services. One commenter cited Netflix’s video recommendation feature as an example of how secondary uses of data can create consumer benefits. The commenter noted that Netflix originally collected information about subscribers’ movie preferences in order to send the specific videos requested, but later used this information as the foundation for generating personalized recommendations to its subscribers.

In addition, commenters raised concerns about who decides what a “specific business purpose” is. For example, one purpose for collecting data is to sell it to third parties in order to monetize a service and provide it to consumers for free. Would collecting data for this purpose be a specific business purpose? If not, is the only alternative to charge consumers for the service, and would this result be better for consumers?

The FTC lays out a very basic principal from these challenges, the idea that “Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumer
data for practices that are consistent with the context of the transaction or the company’s relationship with the consumer, or are required or specifically authorized by law.” But we’re a long way from defining “consistent with the context of the transaction.” And consent and will are not necessarily among the things companies can grok about us from the data they’re gathering.

Given some of the sillier elements that crept into the later movies in the Matrix trilogy; given the semi-disaster that was their adaptation of beloved cartoon Speed Racer; given the lurid way the media portrayed Lana Wachowski’s gender transition in the press; given the way the Wachowskis were treated for trying to make a hard-R love story that would have depicted a gay American soldier and an Iraqi man (I’d be curious how the trade press would have treated someone else trying to get a similar project into production); given that The Matrix itself is thirteen years old, it’s easy to forget how amazing it was to see that movie for the first time, how visionary the Wachowskis seemed all the way back in 1999. And maybe The Matrix will never register to a generation the same way it did to mine, those of us who grew up without the Internet and then had it open up before us. But if anything, we’re still living in the world they laid out for us, and grappling with the questions they posed before us. There may be less black leather and fewer mechanical nasties, but we still haven’t figured out how closely we can be tied to our technology and still stay healthy, and hackers still have cachet and the power to poke hard at our government and businesses.

All of which is a long way of saying that whatever has happened to them creatively and personally in the years since The Matrix was released, I want the Wachowskis to have a hit again, and I’m willing to give them a lot of credit and leeway as they try. I’m glad they got a shot at adapting Cloud Atlas. And I’m pretty excited to hear that they’ve signed up Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to star in their next original movie, a science fiction project about which little is known called Jupiter Ascending. They did a nice job of working with Keanu Reeves’ blankness in the Matrix trilogy, and while I think Tatum’s proved that he’s more than a slab of beef, this might be an opportunity for him to convince those who are unmoved by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints or 21 Jump Street.

The news of Jupiter Ascending also makes me feel like, despite my grumbling about the SyFy network yesterday, we might be entering a nice little moment for original sci-fi. Prometheus looks downright incredible, visually gorgeous and scary, and a reminder of the risks of our drive for exploration. I hadn’t even realized that Guy Pearce’s latest, Lockout, was a science fiction thriller until I saw a trailer for it in front of The Hunger Games this weekend. But I’m always down for a nasty, industrial view of space, where instead of the final frontier, it’s a place of exile and danger, in this case, for criminals and a few innocents. The Wachowskis found transcendence in metal, and wire, and castoff clothes once. I have such hopes for them taking us somewhere new, and frightening, and beautiful again.

Yesterday, Forbes’ Roger Friedman asked if Fox would pull Neighborhood Watch, an action comedy about overzealous neighborhood watchmen whose vigilance turns out to be justified when they have to battle an alien invasion. Today, in light of the ongoing investigation into the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Fox has pulled a teaser trailer and poster for the movie from theaters.

The trailer shows the neighborhood watch volunteers, including Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Jonah Hill as feared (if somewhat over the top) figures in the suburban streets they patrol, dragging a white child into a police department for pelting them with eggs:

A Fox spokesman told the Hollywood Reporter that, “We are very sensitve to the Trayvon Martin case, but our film is a broad alien invasion comedy and bears absolutely no relation to the tragic events in Florida.” That’s probably true. But it’s worth interrogating why we find images of over-the-top approaches to law enforcement funny or compelling, whether it’s the main characters in 21 Jump Street busting out their guns to keep the peace in a sun-filled, peaceful public park, or Elliot Stabler beating up a suspect on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It’s not just laughable when this sense of puffed-up bravado is played out in the real world. It’s downright dangerous.

“Bending is the coolest thing in the world!” Avatar Korra, a rebellious teenager who’s just arrived in Republic City, the metropolis founded by her predecessor Avatar Aang, declares towards the middle of the premiere episode of The Legend of Korra. Fans of the first show in this series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, about a little boy who can manipulate earth, air, water, and fire in a process called “bending,” might be inclined to agree with her. The concept around which the series was based—that there are people who can manipulate each element, but one person in each generation who can manipulate all four, and gets special responsibilities along with his special powers—set the stage for stories that combined spectacular animated action sequences with intelligent meditations on the proper use of power and our relationship with the natural world. In Avatar: The Legend of Korra, which skips forward two generations to follow Korra, a young Avatar who is training with Aang’s airbending son Tenzin, flips our assumptions upside down, and gives us something very exciting in its place.

When I saw the trailer for this new incarnation of the show, I wondered whether the decision to include steam-punky technology, including airships, crime-fighting equipment, and cars, would pull the series away from its core. Instead, it’s turned out to be a brilliant decision. Aang’s model city, a place he intended “to be the center of peace and balance in this world,” may have advanced technology. But it also has many deeply poor people, something that comes to a shock to Korra who tells a vagrant she shares a meal with that “I thought everyone in the city was living it up.” Triad gangs made up of benders extort protection money from shopkeepers.

And a political movement believes that bending, the very device that made Avatar: The Last Airbender so cool, is responsible for the city’s problems. “Are you tired of living under the tyranny of Benders? Then join the Equalists,” a political speaker tells a crowd, setting off Korra’s initial outburst. “For too long, the bending elite of this city have forced the non-benders of this city to live as lower-class citizens…Together, we will tear down the bending establishment.” Korra’s not wrong that bending’s a cool concept. But the speaker appears to be right about individual benders: he embarrasses Korra by revealing that her first instinct is to shut him down, rather than to work with him. Similarly, Republic City law enforcement may be coming down on Korra pretty hard, but she did act like a vigilante in trying to round up the Triad gang, and caused an enormous amount of damage. Without regulation, bending isn’t exactly producing peace and prosperity in Republic City.

Hopefully, we’ll see more of those themes, particularly bending’s relationship to economic inequality, in future. We’ve heard “with great power comes great responsibility” a million times, but almost always in the context of an individual struggle for self-control. Tackling the role of special powers and special advantages in society on a larger scale is something entirely different, and very interesting.

The bridge is yours.

-My decision in the Tournament of Books is up!

-One of the best things I’ve read on the season premiere of Mad Men.

-Which real world villains would you like to see Iron Man take on?

-Brazil’s arts agency benefits from a tie between bread and roses.

I was quite charmed by NBC’s Bent, the sitcom about a stressed-out lawyer, Alex, (Amanda Peet) and her cutie of a contractor, Pete (David Walton), it’s inexplicably burning off to embarrassingly low ratings. Anything that stars Joey King and Jeffrey Tambor deserves at least some strong effort at promotion. And one thing stood out to me while watching the pilot and the second episode (NBC is showing them two at a time, a sad demonstration of the network’s eagerness to get rid of what should have been a solid fall season premiere). Pete’s character is a perfect example of a growing category of characters on television: the charming gambling addict.

It’s not as if gambling addicts are entirely new to television screens. Seeley Booth, the dapper FBI agent portrayed by David Boreanaz on Bones, has a serious gambling problem that the show has played to both dramatic and comedic effect. On How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson includes problem gambling among his other compulsive proclivities—he’s well-known enough in Atlantic City to have a regular gang of Asian gaming buddies. It was inevitable that Luck, HBO’s recently-canceled show about the world of horseracing, would have a gambler somewhere in the mix, as it did with Jerry, who can pick winners but inevitably lets his winnings slip through his fingers. Switched at Birth even has a teenage gambler.

Gambling addiction is a perfect fit for television in a number of ways. Gambling addicts don’t have to be kept out of bars, a common default social setting for shows with younger characters, particularly on multi-camera sitcoms. Other than stress, problem gambling doesn’t take an inherent physical toll or come with nasty side effects, so you don’t have to worry about compromising on Hollywood’s standards of attractiveness. And it’s a convenient, but not omnipresent dramatic device that can be deployed when you want to introduce risk or temptation into a character’s storyline.

But gambling addiction is also the perfect television flaw for a recession fueled in part by easy access to credit and a collective gamble that the economy would only continue to grow. These characters are the collective manifestation of a sense that we could beat the system, a sense that we now know is false and is prompting some serious reassessments. They’re charming and handsome (and interestingly, universally male)—in other words, they’re people we want to identify with, rather than condemn or push away, a balance that lets us assign them responsibility but also encourages us to stick with them through the process of managing their addictions. We can’t run away from the problems we’ve created for ourselves, and neither can they. And they make the point that all kinds of people can fall prey to the lure of easy wealth, whether they’re corporate honchos with unidentified functions like Barney, otherwise-upstanding FBI agents like Booth, or regular guys like Pete. It’s nice, but unrealistic, to believe that we all could have seen around corners and avoided trouble when trouble was presented in such a tempting package. Gambling addict characters don’t help us grapple with the larger financial system that benefitted from this collective delusion. But they can help us understand temptation, and the perpetual struggle not to fall for easy promises.

This news came down last week, but street artist Shepard Fairey is teaming up with two movie studios to produce a new film adaptation of 1984. Normally, I’d complain about Hollywood dipping back into the same well time and again. But I’m actually fairly excited for this. We still need mass art that grapples with what it means to torture people and to be tortured in the wake of the Bush administration’s distortion of our language and morals and our still-incomplete efforts to eradicate the sins of torture root and branch from our national psyche.

Now, I understand that 1984 isn’t completely or only about the power of torture. It’s about how propaganda shapes thought, how language changes over time, how difficult it is to break away from consensus, how cultural artifacts survive through oral tradition. If Fairey’s involved, this could be an opportunity for some incredibly sweet movie graphic design, and successful proof that you can conjure an uncomfortably foreign world without spending an enormous amount of money.

But what’s always stuck with me most about the book is Room 101, the cruel genius of a regime that figures out what its enemies fear most and forces them to confront it. Winston Smith, the cage, the rats—this, like waterboarding, is the stuff of nightmares even if you’ve never experienced it, the kind of thing you would give anything not to experience. The Hunger Games deals with torture, too. In Mockingjay, the third book in the series which will now inevitably be adapted into a movie, Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a political symbol of a rebel movement, has to deal with the consequences after the Capitol takes her partner in the arena, Peeta Mellark, captive and tortures and brainwashes him. While we don’t see these tortures directly, we do learn about them as Katniss learns about them, and feel her pain as she absorbs the full emotional impact of what could have been done to her.

It’s a good thing we’ll get two big-screen adaptations that take on the full and persistent impact of torture. We need to feel a visceral disgust for the tactics our government employed on our behalf, rather than to see them as proof of some sort of ludicrous manly resolve. But it’s one thing to see torture as repellant, and another to accept that our government did it, and we need to accept responsibility for that and move forcefully to make sure it never happens again. That’s a harder thing to accomplish in a narrative, particularly one displaced from our own place and time. It would require a character we’ve come to know and love to commit torture, and for him or her to make amends in a sustained way. Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison may not exactly be up to the task, especially now that she doesn’t have access to the CIA’s resources. But I wonder if she’s paved the way for a character who could take us on that journey, on television where it could happen over more time and with greater depth and clarity than in a two-hour movie.

The latest exhibit in the desperate squareness of right-wing cultural production is The Conservative Teen, a magazine clearly designed more for parents who want to hold back the tide on their children’s inevitably progressing adolescence than for children themselves. Everything about it is wrong, from the weird interstitial definitions of terms like “cameo” and “eugenics,” which ought to be familiar to reasonably well-educated kids in the target demographic, to the fact that it’s being distributed in an awkward PDF reader rather than being made available as an app or in shareable pages that are well-integrated with social media.

And then there’s the content itself, in, say, this wildly outdated piece about Glee:

Conservatives have to wonder what’s “quirky and sweet” about a show in which half the teenagers are sexually confused and the other half are sleeping around, or how ridiculing conservative principles and figures equals a “nonpartisan funfest.”…In between the songs and the jokes, “Glee’s” audience is treated to homosexuality, underage drinking, hookups and teen pregnancy. The production numbers themselves are often smutty (smutty: obscene, indecent), as when the character of “Rachel” wore a belly-showing, bra-bearing shirt and an extremely short skirt, channeling Britney Spears’ infamous Catholic school-girl outfit when she performed the hit “Baby One More Time” in a Spears tribute episode.

Rachel Berry’s midriff is coming for your children, and if you can’t convince them to resist it, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Jennifer Lawrence is tiny—even before Lenny Kravitz, playing stylist Cinna to her post-apocalyptic teen reality contestant Katniss Everdeen, cinches her into a corset to put her on display before the decadent residents of the Capitol—so why did critics and fans alike start discussing whether she looks famished-enough to play the lead role in The Hunger Games? Rue and Thresh, the Tributes from District 11 who face off against Katniss in the 74th Hunger Games, are clearly described as dark-skinned in Suzanne Collins novels, on which the movie is based, so why did fans react to the casting of black actors in those roles with racist outbursts and claims the casting “ruined the movie”? Along with making an enormous amount of money, The Hunger Games seems to have brought out the worst in a whole bunch of people.

Julian Sanchez has a great post on why, even beyond the reading comprehension issues involved, it’s so disturbing that readers would assume all the characters depicted in the franchise are white:

The book doesn’t dwell on this, though, and a reader skimming along at a fast clip could be forgiven for missing the two quick references. The deeper stupidity here is the assumption that the default race of any character is Caucasian when it’s not stated explicitly, and that casting a person of color in this case would represent some kind of deviation from the book’s implicit characterization. This would be wrongheaded for an adaptation of a book set in the present, but at least quasi-understandable: The social realities of people of color in contemporary America are different in a variety of ways, enough so that we do generally expect authors to make at least passing reference to a major character’s minority status.

It makes no sense at all, however, in a dystopian sci-fi novel (implicitly) set two or three centuries in the future. First, we have no real idea what the racial dynamics of Panem are like, so there’s no particular reason to think Suzanne Collins would need to make note of it if Katniss were of (say) Korean or Chicana descent. Second, and maybe more to the point, non-Hispanic whites are already projected to constitute less than half of the U.S. population in 2050, long before the earliest possible date for the events of the book.

The weird bodysnarking of Lawrence, exemplified by Manohla Dargis, of all people (she wrote “A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.”) reveals both ignorance of the text and another kind of problematic default. Katniss is better-fed than her District 12 peers in part because of her ability to hunt, and she gorges herself during her time in the Capitol so she’ll have energy to burn in the arena. But more importantly, Dargis and the other folks who questioned whether Lawrence who was too thin to play Katniss forget how dramatically Hollywood actresses restrict their diets in order to look the way they do. Lawrence and company may not be starving, but their bodies aren’t exactly a naturally-occurring default, either.

It’s frightening to think we’re still stuck in a place where white is the default for characters and that choosing otherwise provokes such extreme anger, and that even an actress’s carefully maintained, tiny body isn’t starved enough to satisfy some people: she has to look like death, and still be a powerful huntress, too.

Well, it looks like somebody‘s campaign staff figured out that The Hunger Games was going to be a massive hit. Rick Santorum’s campaign dropped an ad over the weekend that borrows heavily from the worn Appalachian iconography that dominates the early scenes of that movie in its efforts to suggest that just two more years of an Obama presidency could produce a dystopian America:

And though the ad doesn’t mention abortion directly, focusing instead on a blown-out candle to represent the loss of freedom of religion, it repeats a quick but ominous image of a baby in a cradle bathed in red light twice. Santorum may, by this point, trust that his pro-life supporters have gotten the message and only feel like he needs to provide indirect reinforcement.

Given the tagline at the end, it looks like the Santorum campaign might run more of these ads like a web TV series. It would be a creative move for a campaign that doesn’t have a ton of money, and is never going to attract the kind of Hollywood support that let President Obama make a 17-minute long campaign documentary narrated by Tom Hanks.

But Santorum might want to think twice before embracing dystopian storytelling in his effort to position himself as the strongest challenger to the sitting president. After all, there’s already a great dystopian story about the logical consequences of his social policies and restrictions on women’s reproductive rights:

The Obama campaign doesn’t even have to worry about cutting new ads if Santorum’s the challenger. They can just take some of their ridiculous campaign war chest and buy time to air The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

In between Google and Facebook, it’s easy to feel like the constant target of a data mining operation that’s garnering an uncomfortable amount of information about our personal lives. But a recent post in Deadline suggests that advertisers feel like they aren’t actually getting very much information about the people who are consuming their content when those consumers view a show or a clip online instead of on a set-top television. Here are some of the most relevant breakdowns:

Conventional TV: A :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a traditional TV set is included in Nielsen’s C3 estimate for the applicable demographic.

Hulu: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on Hulu is reported by Hulu to the advertiser as an impression served, with no specific demographic information (Hulu will provide an estimate of the overall composition of site users)…

Mobile devices in home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee streaming to her iPad (in her home) isn’t captured at all.

Mobile devices away from home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a mobile device (outside her home) is reported by whatever service is delivering the video clip, with no specific demographic.

I’ve always enjoyed Hulu’s option to give feedback about whether an ad is relevant to me, both because it means I’m deluged with less totally irrelevant content, and because I’ve always assumed that I’m helping make the service a better option for both advertisers and content providers by giving them the ability to target me pretty directly. But apparently that’s not the case. And it raises an interesting question for those who want content to be available online for lower out-of-pocket costs than it is now. Would you be willing to give up some of your privacy and to be targeted much more directly by advertisers if it made content distribution on the web more profitable, and more viable?

The SyFy network’s announced that they won’t be moving forward with Blood and Chrome, a prequel to their critically acclaimed hit Battlestar Galactica, which would have flashed back to the first war between humans and their robot creations, the Cylons. For Battlestar Galactica fans who have missed the space opera, which drew parallels to everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to student protests in the 1960s, since it went off the air in 2009, and the show’s prequel Caprica, which finished its run in 2010, this may be bad news. But it’s a good decision by the network. Battlestar Galactica was terrific, but it’s time for SyFy to stop milking the same concept, and to find a new great science fiction show worthy of the network’s name.

In recent years, one of SyFy’s most pronounced trends has been towards fantasy programming rather than science fiction. Alphas, its flawed-superheroes show, is wonderfully fun, but its characters’ abilities are of the X-Men-style, Children of the Atom mumbo-jumbo variety. The biological explanations are for the most part (Gary, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, is a notable exception) more hand-waving than serious exploration of the human body. Eureka, the network’s show about a town inhabited by the descendants of America’s greatest scientists and their cantankerous creations, is entering its final seasons. The artifacts that are stored in Warehouse 13 and hunted down by FBI agents gone steampunk are decidedly the stuff of literature and legend, rather than scientific discoveries that are key to American hegemony. Haven is about a town with supernatural troubles. Sanctuary is about a monster scientist. The network has no fewer than four shows about ghosts. And its latest mini-phenomenon, a syndication of the Canadian show Lost Girl, is delightful, but that doesn’t make it any less about a succubus making her way in the fairy community.

This seems like a real missed opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, and fantasy can set up moral dilemmas as well as science fiction: power is power, and decisions about how to use it can be fascinating whether it’s a new scientific discovery or a newly discovered supernatural ability. But, to go all Southland Tales on it, the future is going to be more futuristic than we imagined, and it’s getting here awfully fast. There are so many pressing questions that would also make for fabulous entertainment. What will it mean for space travel, something we once thought of as a scientific frontier and an escape hatch for humanity, to become a luxury tourism industry? What will it mean to be human as we’re increasingly integrated with our technology, perhaps to the point of having smart implants, like Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, or a bunch of the characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s forthcoming 2312? How will technology, medical advances, and the ability to augment ourselves exacerbate our class divides?

These questions are imminent, not theoretical. And they all lend themselves beautifully to television devices. You could do an office comedy about running a space tourism company, or a drama about corruption in the industry and an interstellar land grab. You can have chatty, snarky AIs as characters, or show humans growing overly invested in their technology—Apple clearly means for us to attach to Siri, and as she works better, I can see that happening. When there’s this much potential available, there’s something kind of unfortunate about turning away from the possible and the probable to the purely fantastical. Fiction doesn’t have an absolute responsibility to help us work out our problems, but it’s an incredible tool for helping us think through them. For a network with the motto “Imagine Greater,” that ought to be an exciting prospect.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

Alli Thresher, a video game designer at Harmonix, has a fantastic meditation up at XOJane on how booth babes change the dynamics at conventions. She argues that the presence of women who are hired purely to be attractive—even in cases where they’re knowledgeable about the products and franchises they’re selling—underrates women’s expertise and passion for gaming and sets up situations where women who are conventions for other purposes are at greater risk for sexual harassment because they’re assumed to be booth babes and therefore sexually available:

At last year’s PAX East I spoke to TWO women whose companies were using them as “booth babes” (literally advertising, “take photos with our booth babes”). One of them told me that she was actually the company’s office manager and she had been invited to the convention specifically to dress up and help the company subvert the policy.**

To PAX’s credit, they have been known to reprimand companies who do this sort of thing and have even, in some cases, escorted groups of babes and their product from the con. But still, how uncool to be asked, by your boss, to wear a tube top and miniskirt and pose for pictures with strangers? (The booth in question was run by a community outlet and not a development studio). I certainly don’t blame the women hired to work as booth babes for the bad behavior of a few select assholes I’ve encountered.*** I do, however, blame the culture and attitudes that promote their use.

As Lesley pointed out in her GDC diaries, when the bulk of the women one sees in a male dominated space are there as nothing more than human props or marketing tools, it’s easy to make the leap that all women staffing booths are there for the same purpose. For women like me, who are present to discuss the games we’ve worked on, this provides several challenges and also makes the convention floor an unwelcome space for us.

Thresher also makes what I think is a critically important point, and one that I’ve reiterated in other contexts: that treating men as if they’re dumb creatures who can’t process anything besides boobs and couldn’t possibly enjoy talking to an actual woman is awfully condescending. Thresher writes that for a number of male commentators, interactions with women who are presented to them strictly for visual consumption have been disappointing because they’re at conventions to talk about games and gaming. Seeing awesome cosplayers, or getting your picture taken with an attractive woman, may be part of the convention experience. But it’s a promotional device that doesn’t actually get to the core of why people come to conventions, which is to get more information about products that they love and to have conversations with other people who are as invested as they are in those products and experiences. The lowest common denominator, whether you’re setting up a stall at a convention, or marketing a movie like John Carter as if its core demographic still thinks girls have cooties, is not always actually the most profitable and engaged one.