The bridge is yours.

-A great examination of dystopian fashion.

-How TV networks fall apart.

-Some early pictures from the set of Django Unchained.

-Judge condescendingly declares that documentary filmmaking can’t be a for-profit activity, gets a lesson.

-Having better cameras doesn’t mean everything has to look the same, does it?

For those of you looking for a place to vote with your dollars in favor of more diverse depictions of New York in general and Brooklyn in particular, I’d humbly submit that you should be getting really, really excited for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, which was one of my two favorite movies at Sundance this year. It’s a glorious movie, often joyful, sometimes shattering, about the black church, about white gentrifiers who freak out when African-American kids write their initials in her cement, about air pollution and asthma and the high cost of inhalers, about falling in love for the first time when you’re a young teenager. I would be willing to lay money that the horror with which Lee’s Sundance pronouncement that Hollywood doesn’t care much for or about black people was greeted is part of the reason it’s taken so long for Red Hook Summer to find distribution. I’m also willing to bet that the movie will be criticized for its frank politics and for its attention to Lee’s personal areas of interest—Deadline, for some reason, has decided that it’s “controversial,” which says more about Deadline than Lee or Red Hook Summer. If you’re in New York, mark your calendars for August 10 for the movie’s release date. The rest of us will have to wait a little bit longer.

I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I will be spending my White House Correspondents Association Dinner watching punk rock documentaries and drinking wine. But the whole thing is a hilarious spectacle, particularly the rush by news organizations to secure high-profile guests at their tables. And these are the funniest, most revealing guests each of the outlets have scored this year—that we know of so far.

ABC: Christa Miller and Bill Lawrence of Cougar Town. The network keeps the show in limbo forever, but hey, it’ll throw the folks involved some rubber chicken!

AFP: Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters. Oddly appropriate for a newsgathering organization.

Atlantic Media: Sex and the City‘s Darren Starr. Did Carrie ever score a byline in The Atlantic? Her fights with big would fit her in just fine among some of the magazine’s other female regulars.

Bloomberg: Zooey Deschanel. Clear win for odd couple of the evening

CBS: Homeland star Claire Danes. Blatant, but brilliant, Obama-pandering.

Fox: Lindsay Lohan. Not that Fox engages in tabloid journalism or anything.

Huffington Post: True Blood stars and parents-to-be Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, who will also edit HuffPo’s Vampire Parenting section.

The New Yorker: Portlandia stars and New Yorker profile subjects Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, who presumably will enquire after the welfare of their rubber chicken.

Newsweek/The Daily Beast: Reese Witherspoon, who will totally play Tina Brown in the inevitable biopic.

People: Peeta, we mean, Josh Hutcherson, who will be a mystery to the core WHCA dinner demographic.

POLITICO: MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt who should make for the evening’s most awkward table pairing.

USA Today: Kelli Garner of Pan Am. Well, maybe not anymore. But I guess they could have bet on the Playboy Club?

And though I’m generally loath to yield them pride of place, the Washington Times totally schools the Washington Post. The latter scored Pierce Brosnan. The former, The Artist scene-stealer Uggie.

The New York Times reports that, in the first year that National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts in Media grants were open to gaming and web-based projects, those projects ended up winning funding ahead of established PBS programs:

Among the PBS programs receiving significantly less funding are “Live from Lincoln Center,” which was granted $100,000 last year and nothing this year. The Metropolitan Opera received $50,000 to support its national “Great Performances at the Met” telecasts, $100,000 less than last year. WNET received $50,000 to support other “”Great Performances” productions and the same amount for “American Masters,” compared to $400,000 for each last year.

“The PBS NewsHour” will receive $50,000, half that of 2011, for arts segments; independent documentary series “Independent Lens” will get $50,000, down from $170,000, and documentary series “POV” will receive $100,000, down from $250,000.

WNET, however, did receive $75,000 towards production of a new series, “The Electric Animation Festival,” and its companion Web site, and PBS received $50,000 to support the creation of mobile apps for its arts initiative. A number of other individual documentary films and smaller programs also received funds, as in years past, as did NPR, and numerous public radio productions.

Opening up the grants to more kinds of media projects makes a great deal of strategic sense for the NEA: it lets the organization meet arts consumers where they’re at, makes the organization look forward-thinking in supporting projects that might not garner support or be treated like priorities within their industries but still have important potential, and frankly, it also gives the NEA bases of support in industries that might previously have been indifferent to the organization, or the cause of public funding for the arts. But it does raise a fundamentally tricky question for the NEA in the future. How much of the organization’s work should focus on keeping alive high culture that has wealthy patrons but trouble attracting a new generation of mass-market attendees? And how much should it focus on driving the culture of the future? Obviously these priorities aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are competing for resources, and I do wonder how the mix is going to shake out.

I’ve been watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a cute little web series that imagines Jane Austen’s best heroine as a graduate student living at home with her parents to save money and avoid taking out further loans:

It’s clearly being shot on a low budget, so the show is unfortunately a bit limited. But I’m struck by the way it’s managed to gracefully make the old text more diverse and more modern. Lizzie’s best friend Charlotte Lucas has become Charlotte Lu, who edits Lizzie’s videos and occasionally stars (quite funnily) as Lizzie’s father. And Mr. Bingley has been turned into Bing Lee, a successful Asian doctor who’s recently bought a nice house in the neighborhood, and has been targeted with laser-like precision by Lizzie’s mother, who is desperate to find prospects for her single daughters in the suburbs. It’s smart, if a little punny, and nod to the demographics of suburbia (I think Suburbia does this okay, too, though it could use some Asian teenagers as well as its gay Asian principal).

The one thing that strikes me as a little off, though, is the way modern Lizzie ribs Lydia about being a slut. Lydia’s character is unpleasant, but the relish the novel takes in packing her off to a miserable marriage is pretty nasty, and a reminder that, no matter how enduring Lizzie Bennet is, Jane Austen was a woman of her time. One of the things that I liked so much about David Liss’s The Thirteenth Enchantment was its compassionate, but not entirely unrealistic, look at the prospects for a woman like Lydia who would have been considered “ruined.” It may be easy to get romantic about Mr. Darcy’s reform. But I have zero nostalgia for the era’s overall sexual politics.

I wrote about the news that a Jackie Robinson biopic was in the works last year, and expressed some concern that the movie had found its Branch Rickey—initially Robert Redford, now, apparently, Harrison Ford—before its Jackie Robinson, who rightfully should be at the center of the movie. But I am glad to hear that the movie is starting production, and that it’s supposed to reach theaters on April 12, 2013.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.

ESPN has an interesting, if somewhat general, piece about whether the NFL could use more female scouts to avoid groupthink in the draft, and to help teams avoid players who might end up making a team atmosphere toxic, rather than helping a squad cohere:

Women, on the other hand, are much less likely to have blinders when it comes to big moves. They also do a better job placing choices in context. In football terms, female scouts might have seen that Vince Young, for all his awesome talent, was not a good fit with the team, coaching staff or scheme in Tennessee.

Another place where the NFL could really use a woman’s touch is with the impossible task of predicting how a newly minted 21-year-old millionaire will behave once he hits the league. Most teams use personal interviews to gauge a potential player’s intangibles — work ethic, leadership, motivation, teamwork — but the results would likely be more reliable if women were leading this process. Shrira says studies show that women are intuitively better at discerning and exploring a candidate’s character. Adds Spencer, “This is the unique dimension women would add to the draft: getting to the absolute heart and soul of a player.”

A lot of the piece is based in general business psychology, rather than in the track records of the very few women (like Linda Bogdan, pictured here) who have gotten a say in NFL. But that research and the evidence of other successful businesses do make a compelling case that any organization might want to consider diversity not simply for its public image, but for its bottom line. Different perspectives can bring not just different ways of making decisions, but different costs and potential problems to light. Myra Kraft famously convinced the Patriots to release Christian Peter after the team drafted the man even though he had a horrible record of violence against women. A scouting corps that included more women might be more likely to weigh past records of such allegations more seriously, not just because abusing women is bad, but because players who get in trouble outside of the stadium lose playing time and mental focus.

There’s no question that it won’t be easy to get more women in the scouting and executive ranks. It’s not like there are no women who are substantially interested in football, but it is a specialization beyond general business acumen. And if, as the article points out, women tend to get powerful positions in NFL teams only if they’re related to the owner, even if they perform well, that’ll likely be a hurdle to convincing other teams that they got their on their own abilities, no matter how sterling those abilities are. Allegations of nepotism tend to stick, even if they’re utterly unfounded. I’m not sure what the way in will turn out to be. But, rooting interests aside, I’d applaud whatever team decided to seek new insight and get some women in the mix. Neither men nor women are collectively perfect decision-makers. But new eyes and new perspectives are rarely a bad idea, and it would be interesting to see how female scouts challenge the existing consensus about what’s valuable in the NFL, and in other sports.

I think MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is right to say, in the wake of the controversy over the initial R rating given to the documentary Bully (it was lowered to PG-13 after cuts), that the association’s ratings system, which carries great power, should be more transparent to the public. There’s a perception, fair or not, that the ratings weight certain content—like sexual content between gay couples—more heavily in moving towards an R rating, and that the system fails to acknowledge how context mitigates content. That last perception was at issue in Bully: the R rating depended on incidences of profanity deemed inappropriate for teenagers, despite the fact that those profanities were uttered by teenagers and directed at teenagers. More data about how the ratings panels make their decisions would help outside observers determine whether these perceptions of inconsistency and failure to contextualize were true, or to debunk them.

Discussing whether transparency might be a good idea is not the same thing as committing to it, of course. Releasing the exact counts of words that trigger ratings might be one place to start. And while making it clear who’s in the ratings panels might open up the possibility of bribery, it would also let outsiders look for patterns in raters’ behavior the same way political analysts score the leanings of judges. Any other thoughts on what data it would help to have in the open? It’d be nice to have this be the kind of thing that doesn’t just float into conversation and disappear.

The bridge is yours.

-You should be allowed to review The Avengers without being attacked for not showing fealty to it.

-Beyonce really is the world’s most beautiful woman.

-io9 is more confident than I am about SyFy bringing the sci-fi back.

-Yes, Denis Leary. Emma Stone is awesome.

-Shia LeBoeuf and Tom Hardy would like to see you some corn whiskey:

I tend to agree with Amanda Marcotte that torture’s become a dangerous cliche in popular culture, though I think we come at it from rather different directions:

More importantly, torture scenes violate the audience’s trust that the characters onscreen, no matter how outlandish their surroundings, will behave like human beings. On TV, torture almost always works. The victim usually knows the information, and gives it up immediately. In rarer cases, they know nothing but are able to stop to torture by stating this fact. Either way, they respond positively to torture, and somehow the tormentor magically knows when their victim is speaking the truth.

I agree that it’s a problem that torture is shown as being effective in popular culture. But I think that should actually be a second-level objection to torture: the point that’s important to win, and the line it’s important to draw, is that torture is wrong. What actually scares me about torture and violence against prisoners and interrogators in pop culture is that there are settings in which it’s presented as at least somewhat justified. Almost all cop shows involve an officer of the law snapping and doing violence to a suspect at some point. But those actions are generally presented as failures of control, as was the case with Elliot Stabler’s beatings of suspects on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or of desperation, as was the case with the beatings of Bubbles on The Wire. When that’s not the case, torture can be an opportunity for a victim to prove their fortitude—specifically, their manhood. In the Casino Royale remake, Le Chiffre’s torture of bond provides an opportunity for him to prove his imperviousness to pain, and to make a joke that emasculates Le Chiffre.

What was interesting to me about the torture in this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, which Amanda focuses on, is the extent to which those scenes were about neither of those things. Joffrey and Harrenhal’s interrogators are torturing people not out of fits of temper, and not because they think there’s information for them to get out of the people they’re targeting. Joffrey doesn’t have questions that he wants to ask Ros and Daisy. The Harrenhal interrogators ask the same set of questions to every person they talk to, no matter where that person comes from or their likelihood of knowing any relevant information. These people are torturing their victims because they enjoy doing so. These scenes are all about giving us information about the torturers, to draw a line between the characters who behave like human beings and those who exist and act beyond the laws that govern the rest of us.

Following up on yesterday’s conversation about the odd tendency of some hipsters to cling to racism as proof that they are edgy, fearless truthtellers, reader BC sends along Lester Bangs’ “The White Noise Supremacists,” (NB: the link leads to a PDF download) published in the Village Voice in 1979. It’s quite the piece of writing, in which Bangs tries to square up honestly to his own past as someone who used racist language and sentiments to project what he saw as a certain kind of coolness, and to examine the persistence of racism in some of the music scenes that he loves. Bangs isn’t perfect here, or elsewhere, but his assertion of empathy as a radical value that transcends accusations of corniness is important to the debates that we’ve been having over the past few weeks.

It’s also an amazing illustration of how, even if there’s less tolerance for outright assertions of white power in scenes that like to style themselves cutting edge, certain kinds of behavior still get mined for the theoretical currency they convey. Bangs writes, and I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting at length from a very long piece:

You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized. Which is why it has to be monitored, made taboo and restrained, by society and the individual….

I figured all this was in the Lenny Bruce spirit of let’s-defuse-them-epithets-byslinging-’em-out in Detroit I thought absolutely nothing of going to parties with people like David Ruffin and Bobby Womack where I’d get drunk, maul the women, and improvise blues songs along the lines of “Sho’ wish ah wuz a nigger / Then mah dick’d be bigger,” and of course they all laughed. It took years before I realized what an asshole I’d been, not to mention how lucky I was to get out of there with my white hide intact.

I’m sure a lot of those guys were very happy to see this white kid drunk on his ass making a complete fool if not a human TV set out of himself, but to this day I wonder how many of them hated my guts right then. Because Lenny Bruce was wrong—maybe in a better world than this such parlor games would amount to cleansing jet offtakes, and between friends, where a certain bond of mutual trust has been firmly established, good natured racial tradeoffs can be part of the vocabulary of understood affections. But beyond that trouble begins—when you fail to realize that no matter how harmless your intentions are, there is no reason to think that any shit that comes out of your mouth is going to be understood or happily received. Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect. This seems almost too simple and obvious to say, but maybe it’s good to have some-thing simple and obvious stated once in a while, especially in this citadel of journalistic overthink. If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture- flak hailing on you wherever you go. Ivan Julian told me that whenever he hears the word “nigger,” no matter who says it, black or white, he wants to kill. Once when I was drunk I told Hell that the only reason hippies ever existed in the first place was because of niggers, and when I mentioned it to Ivan while doing this article I said, “You probably don’t even remember-” “Oh yeah, I remember,” he cut me off…

Things like the Creem articles and partydown exhibitionism represented a reaction against the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussyfooting around questions of racial and sexual identity, questions we were quite prepared to drive over with bulldozers. We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecar they Coked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mind-lessness which seemed to represent, as Mark Jacobson pointed out in his Voice piece on Legs McNeil, a new kind of cool…

I can go just so far with affectations of kneejerk cretinism before I puke. I remember the guy in the American Nazi Party being asked, “What about the six million?” in PBS’s California Reich, and answering “Well, the way I heard it it was only really four-and-a-half million, but I wish it was six,” and I imagine you’d find that pretty hilarious too [the you is Miriam Linna of the Cramps]. I probably would have at one time. If that makes me a wimp now, good, that means you and anybody else who wants to get their random vicarious kicks off White Power can stay the fuck away from me.

Just go read the whole thing and then come back so we can talk about it.

President Obama appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, which was broadcasting from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last night to explain his call to halt a pending hike in student loan interest rates—with the help of The Roots and the host himself:

I can’t decide what I like most about this: the suggestion that Congress should get bipartisan “like Kim and Kanye”? The description of Obama as “the POTUS with the Mostest”? Jimmy Fallon shouting out golden-era Jackson 5 by telling the audience “Stop—the loan you save may be your own”? Obama’s total nerd-dad version of the mic drop, the most delightfully decisive move in hip-hop? Actually, I think it may have been the revelation that the Obamas didn’t pay off their student loans until 2004:

The idea that student loans can follow you throughout your life is not an exaggeration. That they can chase you all the way to the U.S. Senate (or the White House), and could stick around for longer if you don’t get a job out of school ought to be frightening, and to inspire compassion, no matter what side of the aisle you sit on.

One of the salutary effects of reading entertainment industry trade publications is that every time I get depressed about our abilities to have serious conversations about major issues in American entertainment, I get a very specific reminder of the fact that things are much, much worse elsewhere. Today’s reminder comes from India, where the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has shut down the broadcast of a movie called The Dirty Picture. While the title might suggest otherwise, this isn’t like the Scary Movie franchise (though such a thing would be pretty entertaining to watch). Instead, it’s a biopic about Indian actress Silk Smitha. And specifically, it’s about the fact that Smitha was typecast into what, by Indian standards, counts as soft-core pornography even though she garnered critical acclaim for more straightforward work. And the televised broadcast of the movie’s been shut down precisely for its exploration of themes like typecasting and the way women can get trapped in their looks:

While The Dirty Picture does not show any graphic nudity, the film had run into controversies even before its theatrical release for its bold portrayal of a struggling starlet making it big as a sex symbol. Last week, a lawyer from the central Indian town of Nagpur filed a court order seeking a ban on the film’s telecast since it “contained obscene shots.” But the High Court cleared SET to go ahead with the screening after the I&B Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification stated that the film had been re-edited with over 50 cuts.

“Whatever is shown on TV – whether it is a film, a serial or a commercial – has to be as per the program code of the Cable Television Network Regulation Act. As per the code, films that have U/A rating can be shown on TV… Some films have adult themes and the treatment and public perception is such that even after making many cuts the film retains its mature theme,” CBFC CEO Pankaja Thakur told a newspaper defending the government’s directive to reschedule the film after 11 p.m.. But Thakur also added that the incident will force the CBFC “to look at the whole process of cutting an adult film to make it suitable to be watched by children.”

I should note that The Dirty Picture did get theatrical play, and its director, Milan Luthria, has pointed out that it’s ridiculous that an extremely edited version of the movie, which would have aired at night and with significant notices of its rating, can live in theaters but is barred from broadcast. It’s a reminder that what counts as brave and what counts as difficult discussions aren’t the same everywhere. We take for granted a lot of what we can depict and what we can discuss.

Going into this season of Game of Thrones, I wrote a bit about how one of the challenges the characters face is how to govern by realpolitik in a world where various deities are beginning to intervene more aggressively in human affairs than they have in centuries. So the religion nerd in my heart is gladdened by this video in which George R.R. Martin and company discuss the religions at play in the series, and provide valuable context for some of the events we’re seeing:

One of the things I think the series has done nicely this year is show us the role of women religious in the wider world of Westeros, whether they’re treating the wounded on the battlefield or delivering Ned Stark’s bones to Catelyn as a gesture of respect and care. But I think there are times when a sense of religious awe’s been lost as the show has moved away from point of view perspectives on the events. Melisandre’s monstrous birth this week was one of the few moments the series has that’s conveyed a real sense of wonder and terror. And I’m excited to see more of that as the show progresses.

There’s something fitting about the fact that Tor, which publishes a lot of books in which people think about what the future might look like, has decided to remove digital rights management protection from their ebooks. From the company’s press release:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.

At first glance, Lesley Arfin, the Vice contributor and writer on HBO’s sitcom Girls, and John Derbyshire, the former National Review columnist, have little in common. They’re a woman and a man, a naughty provocateur and a writer on, among other things, China and mathematics, whose work resonates in New York and Washington respectively. But in the last month or so, they’ve served as illustrations of the ugly fact that racism retains a certain cultural capital even among bastions of people who like to consider themselves enlightened.

Derbyshire got himself in trouble first after he wrote an astonishingly racist column for Taki Magazine (about which more in a moment) about telling his children to avoid black people as if that was some sort of sensible safety guide. He presented the piece as if he was speaking difficult truths that others dare not speak, a common framing tactic of racists who like to believe that their biases are grounded in scientific evidence and want to use that delusion to attach legitimacy and a claim of the moral high ground to their bigotry. After several days of controversy, National Review, which had previously tended to turn a blind eye to or to edit down Derbyshire’s more appalling proclivities, fired him.

Lesley Arfin seems to have been less commonly-understood to be a racist until, in response to charges that the show for which she works, Girls, is strangely white for a story set in Brooklyn, she tweeted “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” She subsequently added and scrubbed an apology. And evidence has quickly emerged that the tweet was hardly an isolated, insensitive mistake. Arfin is apparently the kind of person who thinks it’s clever to compare President Obama’s skin color to shit, or to say in an interview that the word “nigger” is the one that makes her feel proud to be a writer. Elspeth Reeve, in an elegant piece at The Atlantic Wire, suggested that Arfin’s comments spring from a common well, that this is “where this vein of hipster racism starts. It tests the idea that anything wrapped with enough irony can be transformed into something else. The more uncool the raw materials are—trucker hats, ugly T-shirts, mustaches, smoking crack—the better the trick.”

That’s true to a certain extent. But while there’s no inherent cultural capital in trucker hats or mustaches, there is a strong, if narrow thread of thought that is interested in making sure that racism stays nominally acceptable, and not because it demonstrates the ability of those thinkers to turn something ridiculous into a trend. Much in the same way that John Derbyshire peppered spectacularly illogical racist advice to his children with links to anecdotal stories meant to gloss his nonsense with a scientific veneer, Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice (and Taki Magazine columnist, it’s worth noting), responded to the criticism of Arfin’s behavior by suggesting that the people who were uncomfortable with Girls’ whiteness were deluded race-mongers desperate to turn a buck. “You can’t continue a mythical Cold War forever and it’s likely the days of randomly tarring and feathering people for ‘racism,’ real or imagined, are coming to a close,” he wrote in a post defending Arfin. “Not because it’s morally wrong, but because people are no longer buying it. And when people aren’t buying something, you can’t make money.” These two strains of thinking are complimentary and mutually reinforcing: people who see racism are deluded and have impure motives, while people who seek to assert racial difference are acting out of a disinterested commitment to scientific truth in the face of terrible opposition.

But there’s nothing brave or bold about clinging to racist ideas, to your supposed right to wound other people by being nasty and childishness. It’s the reverse, a desperate clinging to modes of thought that protected your own privilege and save you the inconvenience of having to engage with people in a way that might require compromise and growth. The immature and fearful people who huddle around the campfire of racism aren’t keeping a flame of secret knowledge alive. They’re hiding from a world they’re unable to cope with.

The bridge is yours.

-An awesome list of ten web series starring women of color.

-A superhero who’s teaching kids to overcome Tourette Syndrome.

-Not going to lie. Pretty excited for the new Fast and Furious movie.

-Jon Lovitz is not wild about President Obama.

-Ted Nugent may not be a threat to President Obama, but he is a danger to bears.

-So, the new G.I. Joe movie is basically In Like Flint, with the fake president?

When we got word that Anchorman 2 was finally happening, I wondered if the second movie would be as awesomely feminist as the first. Empire Magazine interviewed director Adam McKay, and while he says the script isn’t even close to done, the movie will tackle an entirely different kind of diversity:

So what will the sequel have in store for Ron and the team? Nothing good – at least, not if you’re a luxuriously-maned, change-averse ’70s sex dinosaur. “We know these guys never deal well with change,” says McKay, “and the good thing is that there’s a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We’re going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they’re not going to handle it well.”

So what does that sinister-sounding “regular timeline” mean for KVWN-TV? “It’s right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in ’78 or ’79,” McKay explains. “All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you’re talking about diversity and the Action News team, that’s always fun to deal with.”

That delights this progressive’s heart (it should be noted that McKay is a staunch progressive whose side project involves supporting liberal political songwriting). And it’s also a chance to riff off the utter genius of the news team rumble from the first movie, which remains an incredibly witty explication of weapons preference, if not the world’s best piece of fight choreography:

I really hope they can get Tim Robbins back as the leader of the public news team. But it would be nice if they didn’t have Ben Stiller pretend to be Latino.

Tom Hiddleston, who plays Asgardian god Loki in Thor and will be the main antagonist of The Avengers, pens a nice little reflection on the impact of superheroes on his own actorly ambitions, and the role superhero stories can play in exploring big questions:

Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good. The possibility of redemption is right around the corner, but we have to earn it.

The Hulk is the perfect metaphor for our fear of anger; its destructive consequences, its consuming fire. There’s not a soul on this earth who hasn’t wanted to “Hulk smash” something in their lives. And when the heat of rage cools, all that we are left with is shame and regret. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s humble alter ego, is as appalled by his anger as we are. That other superhero Bruce – Wayne – is the superhero-Hamlet: a brooding soul, misunderstood, alone, for ever condemned to avenge the unjust murder of his parents. Captain America is a poster boy for martial heroism in military combat: the natural leader, the war hero. Spider-Man is the eternal adolescent – Peter Parker’s arachnid counterpart is an embodiment of his best-kept secret – his independent thought and power.

I don’t know if arguments like this will convince doubters like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane to take superhero movies seriously. But it makes the point that these holdouts are a minority. All critics have biases, and perhaps it’s better that those biases be put on display by someone like Lane, who thinks that Battlestar Galactica is a waste of his infinitely precious time, or the New York Times reviewers who make their contempt for fantasy every time they write about Game of Thrones. I’m not saying that genre material should be turned over to reviewers who privilege science fiction or fantasy over other frameworks. But if you want to give culture that a lot of people take seriously a fair shake, it’s probably worth assigning it to a reviewer who is open-minded about it. Bad things can make a lot of money, or garner high ratings. But quality doesn’t automatically decline as profits and ratings increase. It’s a shame that some folks deny themselves great fun out of close-mindedness, and unfortunate when they try to dissuade others from that enjoyment as well.

My fellow critic Sean T. Collins has been championing the hell out of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” on Twitter, so I finally pulled it up yesterday and had a listen. It’s a really fun pop song with the same kind of emotional ambiguity as Miley Cyrus’s flawless “See You Again.” And the video contains a nice little surprise:

I think we can now safely say it’s a mini-trope to have a girl interested in a boy only to find out he’s gay, and to handle with it surprise and general good humor. That’s the basis for the introduction of Kevin Keller in Archie Comics, and it feels like a small sitcom staple. It’s a nice little illustration of the complexities of modern dating. And while it would be easy in these situations to portray gay men as competition for women, I think the best depictions tend not to do this. Here, the guy who turns out to be gay isn’t taking another fellow Carly Rae has a crush on away from her—he’s just into one of her bandmates, who is surprised, but not visibly grossed-out or hostile even though he’s pretty clearly not interested. And in the Archie world, Kevin’s coming out opens up a new possibility: instead of becoming another object of romantic competition between Betty and Veronica, he gets to become their friend.