This post discusses episodes nineteen and twenty of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I like a great deal about Veronica Mars is how well, even in the midst of its mannered noir storytelling, it captures what it means to be a teenager, and specifically what it means to be variable as a teenager, without being light or inconsequential. And this pair of episodes, whether through Weevil’s break-in at the Kane house, Veronica’s burgeoning relationship with Logan, or the sexual harassment of Carmen gets at something frightening about being in high school. It’s possible for teenagers to be genuinely different people than who they were when they did things that were criminal, but they have the resources to take actions with truly lingering consequences.

When Weevil breaks into the Kanes’ house, he initially tells Veronica a lie that’s based in teenage changeableness, saying he wanted to retrieve a diamond ring. “I was trying to get it back,” he tells Veronica. “It was my mothers and she was saving it for me for an engagement ring. Once upon a time, I was dumb enough to think I wanted Lilly to have it.” What he’s really after is a spy pen that holds secret messages, a toy Lilly got out of a cereal box and bragged to Veronica–before Veronica knew about Weevil–that she’d use to communicate with her conquests. Whatever message too or from Weevil that was in that pen may have been written in a moment of passion and total sincerity. But he’s changed enough, and circumstances have changed enough, for him to need it back. Being the bad boy Lilly used to make her parents angry is no longer such an innocent occupation.

In the next episode, Veronica gets caught up in helping Carmen, a girl whose boyfriend is blackmailing her into staying with him with a tape of her suggestively sucking a popsicle in a hot tub that turns out to have been made under the influence of GHB. The boy is revoltingly self-regarding and self-justifying. When Carmen sticks to her guns and breaks up with him, he distributes it, believing that no one will want Carmen once they’ve seen the video, telling Veronica “She forced me to. She left me.” It’s utterly pathetic, nasty behavior that ignores the fact that both he and Carmen are headed off to college, a world where people won’t know to track down a video of Carmen in a sexually compromising situation, and where even those who do might understand that she was drugged, that the video doesn’t represent her whole personality, or even that sexual voraciousness (if Carmen had made it consentingly) is hardly the whole of her personality, or a crime. The boy, hopefully, will have to live not just with being taped to a flagpole and an unfortunate tattoo, but with the moral knowledge of what he’s done. Carmen, by contrast, may suffer the short-term consequences of the video, but in refusing to retaliate, even though Veronica cooks up the material that would allow her to do it, reveals herself to be the more grown-up person. She knows what she’ll be able to handle after high school.
Read more

Attack Of The Show veteran-turned-star-of The Newsroom Oliva Munn’s reaction to her (female) critics—probably best embodied by a 2010 interview in which she said said such a phantom critic “needs to fucking turn her fucking computer off, take the sandwich out of her mouth and go for a goddamn fucking walk… Just walk it off, bitch.”—has always struck me as probably psychologically necessary for Munn herself, and a bit off the mark as to how one might reasonably interpret the choices Munn made earlier in her acting career. In a new interview with Flare, she puts some of her frustration with Hollywood sexism as exemplified by women in a bit more context:

She’d lined up a job at Fox Sports, as a sideline reporter for women’s college basketball, but soon landed Attack of the Show!, a variety program beloved by geeks and gamers. She quickly ingratiated herself to her (largely male) audience—leaping into a giant pie in a French maid uniform in one infamous skit, a move she now regrets—and developed a cult following for her quick wit and willingness to play silly. The Daily Show producers noticed her hustle and, in 2010, tapped her to be their “senior Asian correspondent.” The show, already under blogosphere fire for Stewart’s dearth of female players, was skewered for the hire. Sites such as Jezebel accused Munn of being better known for deep-throating hot dogs on Attack and posing for Maxim than for her comedy chops. “There’s apparently no way that I can embrace my sexuality, be on the cover of a men’s magazine, and also be thoughtful and smart, and know what the Pythagorean theorem is,” Munn says. She posed for a second Maxim cover shortly after she was hired. “If you don’t like that I’m being sexual, or letting myself be objectified, then you better not own a push-up bra and wear it outside of the house,” she says.

To work backwards from all of this, the problem, of course, is that there are far too few roles available for women that are simultaneously sexual and intellectual. Munn got one of those rare roles last summer in a supporting turn in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike. In that film about male strippers, she played Joanna, a woman who was casually dating, or at least sleeping with, the main character, the titular Tampa stripper with dreams of designing furniture, played by Channing Tatum. They had easy, uncomplicated sex after Mike’s shows, and hung out with Mike’s coworkers on Tampa’s beaches. And it turned out, in a reversal that worked to create emotional surprise in the movie in two different ways, that Joanna was a graduate student who met Mike through her field research on strippers and sex workers. She wasn’t just a woman who was capable of having sex the way Mike and his male friends seemed to—though of course Mike’s own relationships to sex and intimacy were more complicated than they appeared—she was someone who, by virtue of her academic position, had built distance into her relationship with Mike and his fellow strippers, who had placed herself in a position to analyze and even to judge them in a way they couldn’t quite reciprocate with her.
Read more

The National Republican Congressional Committee this morning posted what was supposed to be a clever riff on HBO’s hit fantasy series Game of Thrones: an interactive map called “Game of Dems.” The feature was supposed to highlight the various alliances and supporters behind Democrats like Elise Gomez Reyes. It’s a cute idea, with just one problem in its execution. The map the NRCC produced looks a lot more like the maps of Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings franchise, down to the fonts and brushwork illustrating mountains, than it does any extant map of Westeros or Essos, the continents where George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is set. Given that there’s a very comprehensive set of Game of Thrones maps extant and available for purchase, this oversight doesn’t just make the NRCC looks dumb: it makes them look lazy or cheap, distracting from the actual message they were trying to get across, which is not a bad one.

This seems like it’s a silly thing to harp over, but it gets at an important point. Conservatives vacillate back and forth between bashing popular culture for its amorality or immorality, or lack of positive portrayals of conservative characters and conservative values, and badly wanting to exploit pop culture tropes and develop their own benches of celebrity spokesmen. But it’s only possible to do the latter if you make a deep study of popular culture, so that you have a sense of what’s relevant to mass–and particularly youth–audiences, and so you can riff off culture and imitate its cadences.

Witness the debut today of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public Twitter feed. The picture her staff selected for her profile is the same one made famous by a Tumblr called Texts from Hillary, which imagined her in hilarious correspondence with celebrities like Meryl Streep and other political figures like Mitt Romney. Her first tweet from the account was a shout-out to the followers of that Tumblr, letting them know that “I’ll take it from here.” Her biography on the site, in addition to her other accomplishments, lists her as a ” hair icon, pantsuit aficionado,” both riffs on traits that she’s been criticized for in the past, and that she’s successfully made light of, most notably referring to her supporters as “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Where the Republicans tried to bash Democrats and came across as clueless about the very franchise they were trying to exploit, Clinton’s twitter feed makes her look Aware Of All Internet Traditions. Whether fine-grained internet jokes on that level are necessary for a political campaign, they’re a way of creating clever buzz and positive micro-news cycles for people who can employ them deftly. But screwing up pop or internet culture references damages both the message you were trying to get across with them, and your own cool quotient. If you want to sit at the table with the kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and debating Game of Thrones rather than flipping it over and calling us dorks, you might want to know at least the basics before you try to act like an expert.

The bridge is yours.

-We’ve lost Iain M. Banks.

-Every scene Peggy and Joan have been in together on Mad Men.

-We’re getting an Archie movie!

-Diversity in speculative fiction.

This post discusses plot points from the June 9 episode of Game of Thrones. During this week, I’ll publish a series of posts on a number of aspects of the third season, but in this piece, I’ll focus on the third season finale.

The title of the third season finale of Game of Thrones is “Mhysa,” the Ghiscari word for mother, and the title that’s given to Dany by the freed slaves of Yunkai at the end of the episode. But it’s a fitting title for an episode that’s substantially concerned with what it means to be family, whether you’re born into it, chose to affirm it, or build it from the ashes of your shattered life. And it’s also an hour of television that’s a powerful reminder that what happens in family, and who counts as family, always emotionally powerful questions, matters rather more in a system of governance based on hereditary monarchy, and one that begins to explore the emotional and governance risks of building a family that’s the size of an entire nation.

The nightmare of a family you’re born into, especially when that nightmarish family has become entwined with the state, is never more clear than in the small council meeting where Tyrion learns of Robb Stark’s death. “Write back to Lord Frey,” Joffrey says, thinking not of the implications for his nation, but of his personal vendettas. “Thank him for his service. And command him to send me Robb Stark’s head. I’m going to serve it to Sansa at my wedding feast.” Tyrion, who’s extended his protection to Sansa Stark at their wedding in the matter of their bedding, with help from his father, tries to intervene again, and provokes another nasty confrontation. “Everyone is mine to torment,” Joffrey declares. “You’d do well to remember that, you little monster.” “Monsters are dangerous,” Tyrion shoots back at him. “And just now, kings seem to be dying like flies.” And Tywin, once again, backs up his son, telling his grandon, “Any man who must say ‘I am the king is no true king,’” then sending him to bed without supper.

But the decision that follows, about the moment when Tywin decided he would accept Tyrion as a Lannister, and make him part of the family, is so painful it’s almost not worth scoring the points with Joffrey. “A good man does everything in his power to better his family’s position, regardless of his own selfish desires,” Tywin order Tyrion to get Sansa pregnant–he doesn’t care about the young woman’s trauma, just securing the Lannisters’ interests. And he finds himself musing to Tyrion about what those ties mean to him. “The day that you were born. I wanted to carry you into the sea and let the waves wash you away. Instead I let you live. And I brought you up as my son. Because you’re a Lannister,” Tywin tells him. Blood means overcoming even disgust.
Read more

Jeremy Scahill, a reporter for The Nation, has done extensive reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the companies like the former Blackwater, who have profited off those conflicts. And Dirty Wars, the Rick Rowley-directed documentary that premiered at Sundance and opens in wide release today, is an extension of Scahill’s reporting on the Joint Special Operations Command’s night raids program and on drone strikes in Yemen. But it’s also a story about what it takes to do war reporting in our current conflicts, whether that means venturing beyond the areas most protected by U.S. troops or combing through the public record for information hidden in plain sight. I talked to Scahill about his experience stepping in front of the camera, how he protects his sources, and what kinds of reporting he thinks count most in a war characterized by extreme secrecy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The movie is bifurcated between two different stories: the story of the raids program, and the story of your reporting to uncover it. How did you figure out the balance between those two stories?

I actually didn’t want to be in the movie at all as myself. The original idea, Rick Rowley, the director and I, have worked together for more than ten years. I spent several years going in and out of Iraq with his wife. For years we had talked about doing something together. I was sort of just finishing up the multi-year Blackwater project and was looking to do something else, and had started to explore the idea of doing some more in-depth reporting in the war of Afghanistan. Rick had spent a lot of time embedded in Afghanistan. So we decided to take a trip together to Afghanistan to see if we wanted to a series on night raids or a movie. Rick and I rolled very cheap, we stayed in the same hotel room. We ended up doing that for the entire project because we became like siblings… We started investigating these night raids. And when we realize that the force that was doing the raids was actually [the Joint Special Operations Command] and started to discover who they were, and discovered the head of JSOC William McRaven, this epically powerful figure, had almost no public record on him, we realized we were going to do a film with a much bigger scope.

The first year or so that we were shooting, 2010-211, I was sort of this tour guide through this archipelago of war sites…And we had done a multi-hour rough cut, I don’t remember if it was two and a half hours or three and a half hours. Rick remembers it as four hours. We had this cut of the film, say, January 2012. Are we going to break it into a two-part movie, are we going to cut it into a series? So we asked our friend David Riker to basically come and consult on the film for two weeks, and we ended up working with him for an entire year. David started interviewing me. And he started to suggest that “Instead of giving facts and figures as you’re driving into this village, why don’t you share with me what you’re going through your head?” I really fiercely resisted that. But I realized that David was right, that if you let people into your head, or don’t pretend to being an all-knowing voice of God, you establish a rapport with journalist. That was hard for me to agree to do that. What we ended up going back then and looking at all this footage of me being a journalist. It was hard for me. I don’t write articles in the first person. That’s not my normal way of being. I like telling other people’s stories.
Read more

You’ve got your life in pretty good shape if the biggest wrinkle in a given week, as was the case for Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington on Thursday, is that you’ve got the clear the furniture out of your newly-redecorated apartment to convene a group of women to discuss what Huffington calls the “Third Metric,” a definition of success that goes “beyond money and power.” A wide-ranging series of panels and interviews, the conversations suggested an interesting tack. Given that many of the women leading and participating in conversations about work-life balance, including Huffington and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg are women who already have quite a lot, we might all be better off shifting the conversation from the mechanisms of how women strive to have it all — we’re not all going to be able to afford the same nannies and personal assistants, and we won’t all be soothed by the same morning meditations or supported by sharing a facialist with Candace Bergen — to the question of what actually constitutes “it all,” and who has access to different visions of it.

Over and over again, the panelists talked at least as much about what they’d decided they could do without, let go, and leave behind, as what they incorporated or added to their lives. For Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), it was housework. “I found myself divorced with three young children as the elected prosecutor in Kansas City,” she explained. “My oldest child was only six. Not only was I handling 8,000 to 10,000 felonies a year, I also had these three children, and I also had to appear absolutely invincible day in and day in….I didn’t give a shit if there were dust bunnies under the bed…All the things I’d been taught as a young girl about everything being straight and neat, I said screw that.”

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, said she’d learned a valuable lesson when she was working for then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and he asked her one day what she was worried about. “I said, in just this moment of honesty, the Halloween Parade starts in 20 minutes and it’s 25 minutes away. And he said, ‘Then what are you doing here? Go,’” Jarrett explained, saying that because the parade was a particular priority for her daughter, it gained significance for Jarrett. “If I had not been there when my little darling came out with her little costume looking for me, I would not have forgiven myself. I did not make a lot of open houses, but the Halloween Parade was important to her.”

And actress Ali Wentworth and director Tanya Wexler offered contrasting explanations for their decisions about work and family. Wentworth said she had been offered a second lead role in a show that was picked up by a network this fall, and the network had said they could concentrate her filming in Los Angeles for 13 weeks to make it easier for her to accommodate her family in New York. “And I was very excited and I called George [Stephanopoulos] and said it’s 13 weeks, we can totally do it. He said, ‘You’ll cry all the time. I know you’re all pumped up.’ And [I realized] I’m going to be at LAX crying because my daughters are crying because I’m not there for the ballet recital…I think you redefine what having it all at any point in your life is.” And Wexler, who most recently directed the period romantic comedy Hysteria, said that for her, continuing to work and letting her wife be the primary caregiver for their four children had been the right choice. “I love my children, but it is a pain in the ass a lot of the time, because it’s a maintenance job. It’s a lot of work for ultimately your child to become their own person and their accomplishments,” she explained. “And going out and making stuff is awesome. I love being busy. I was talking with my assistant, who is one of the two people I mentor, and I was saying, I love making stuff. And my brain is on 24 hours day. I can’t unplug because I don’t want to.”
Read more

A couple of you sent met Joss Whedon’s big interview with The Daily Beast, in particular this paragraph, in which Whedon, who made his name with a supernaturally powerful female character, and has dedicated this phase of his career to a genre where women are too often limited to playing girlfriends, victims, or support staff, talks about the consistent marginalization of superheroines:

Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, “You see? It can’t be done.” It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, “Yeah, of course they were.” I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

I’ve been glad to hear about Whedon’s plans to add Scarlet Witch to the team in The Avengers 2, making her the first woman with superpowers in Marvel’s franchise. And I’d love to see him make a movie that’s more broadly gender-conscious in the way The Avengers was in small moments, like when Bruce Banner, having become the Hulk, move to backhand Black Widow, or when Loki tried to rile her up with anatomical insults. What will it mean to the male Avengers, including the rather old-fashioned Captain America, to have a teammate who isn’t just a competent but human fighter, but as powerful as they are, and powerful in ways that defy their relatively scientific understanding of their powers much in the way Thor’s existence does? What will it mean for Black Widow and Maria Hill to be working with another woman, and one who is significantly more physically powerful than they are? Will they be friends, or rivals? How will Scarlet Witch’s presence change the dynamics between the heroes themselves and S.H.I.E.L.D.? Making a feminist super-hero movie, as Whedon well understands, isn’t just about throwing a woman in there and pretending that her powers and expected gender roles interact in the same way they do for men, whether it’s in their own heads, or the way other people react to them.

NPR’s Code Switch, their relatively new site devoted to race, has been a steady source of fascinating stories since its inception, but I was particularly stuck by this finding from a survey of 1,081 African-Americans by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. According to the results, the respondents said the aspect of their communities that they were most dissatisfied with was the entertainment offerings available to them:

The thing folks rated worse than their local schools or police departments or health care — lower than anything else they were asked to rate — was the quality of local entertainment venues like movie theaters and nightclubs. While neighborhoods with a paucity of food options are often described as “food deserts,” respondents gave their grocery stores relatively high grades.

We wondered whether the harsh ratings given to entertainment venues might be a symptom of “popcorn deserts” in black neighborhoods, but we found no significant differences in these ratings when broken out by the racial makeup of the respondent’s area. This was one of the few areas where the pollsters didn’t see a split depending on the respondent’s financial self-assessment. Whether they said they were in strong or shaky financial shape, respondents were most likely to offer up C, D or F grades to their entertainment venues.

Hollywood’s proved remarkably impervious to the idea that African-American audiences might represent an underserved audience they could plausibly make more money by programming to, treating Will Smith (let’s see what happens to him after the box-office crash of After Earth, shall we?), the success of Tyler Perry, and Oprah Winfrey all as if they’re unreplicatable flukes. But if I were John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, this is a finding that would send me scrambling to answer two sets of questions. For his members, I’d think Fithian might want to find out whether movie theaters in predominantly African-American neighborhoods are in a state of decay? Do they get releases more slowly? Do they need to run shuttles from public transportation? And for the studios, with whom the theater owners have a complex but deeply intertwined relationship, if Fithian is thinking strategically, I’d hope he’d be asking for how they can improve the content they have to offer his members who operate theaters in communities that are significantly African-American, or have large numbers of African-American moviegoers.

This is an industry that’s proved its willing to chase higher and higher profit margins by investing enormous amounts of money in superhero franchises. You’d think it might consider doing the same by investing in offerings for non-white movie-goers, at a much lower cost, rather than assuming that they can continue to take such audiences for granted.

I’m in New York at meetings today and tomorrow. Posting will go on but it might be slightly slower than usual. Be excellent to each other in my absence.

This season of Mad Men hasn’t done much for me this season, something Sean T. Collins and I discussed at length in an episode of Bloggingheads earlier this week. But one scene has lingered with me, bright among the haze of marijuana smoke and misery: the sight of Don Draper taking a seat by himself at a table for two at Bobby’s summer camp, and watching his ex-wife, Betty, with her new husband, Henry Francis. The day before, Don ran into a newly-slim Betty at a gas station where they’d both stopped for directions, and the two of them had staged a sexual reunion in one of the cabins. Where previously, that might have been an act of self-loathing on Betty’s part, the way she sought out an anonymous stranger for sexual affirmation when she and Don were still married, and an expression of Don’s overpowering charisma, the polarity between them was reversed. Don sought out Betty, who in previous seasons had called him on the phone as if she missed him. And where Don had always meandered home from his sexual liaisons to a resentful Betty, this time Don was disposable, a fling, someone to indulge and discard. Like an inverse vampire, Betty was fresh, rejuvenated, and flirtatious at breakfast in the morning sun with Henry, while Don, stuck against the wall and in the shadows, seemed drained. The sexual power that had once been exclusive to Don in their relationship was now Betty’s, too. And without that advantage, Don was at a loss, experiencing, for the second time in the season after Sylvia broke it off with him, what it meant to be cast off as he’d disappointed so many women before.

The sequence, more so than any other image of Don looking drugged, or miserable, or at a loss this season, was powerful because it illustrated not just that Don is unhappy, but why he’s unhappy and unmoored. Much like Roger Sterling discovering that his smooth lines don’t work on a woman who’s drugged out of her mind, and for reasons that seem incomprehensible to him, has picked out a shorter, less impressive man for the evening, Don Draper is learning that, absent the forces that conferred extra sexual and economic power and freedom on him simply because he was born a certain gender, it’s a lot less fun to be Don Draper.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the show’s heavy reliance this season on the characters reacting to the welter of historical tragedies that marked 1968, “Ostensibly, Mad Men is a show about ‘the ’60s.’ But stories ‘about’ particular times almost never work. Stories about people work.” And the way to make stories about eras work is to explore what happens to very particular characters as they’re buffeted by world historical forces. That doesn’t mean that the characters have to stand in for their demographics–in fact, precisely the reverse. Details like Roger’s embrace of acid culture, or Joan’s decision to preserve the myth of Greg as her son’s father in part because of Greg’s service in Vietnam lends him a glint of heroism he never really deserved work because they’re human and particular, grounded in the characters we’ve come to know so well. But it does mean that the forces of history are more interesting when they’re writ large than when the characters are checking off boxes, reacting to political murders, racist assassinations, racially-demarcated riots, and protests against the war in Vietnam.
Read more

On Wednesday, I wrote about Jezebel writer Lindy West’s rather remarkable chronicle of the vicious sexual harassment she’s received since appearing on W. Kamau Bell’s Totally Biased to talk about rape jokes with Jim Norton, a comedian who disagrees with her about how they should be approached, but respectfully. I argued that West’s decision to make public the kinds of vitriol being slung her way was a good decision, not just because it mobilized support for her, but because it was good for business: Jezebel’s raking in traffic and ad dollars off of the incoherent rage-slinging of people who are angry at her.

But I also think the comments West posted reveal something interesting and important: the people who are threatening and harassing West have absolutely no idea what rape actually is. Over and over again, they’re variations on the same theme, that West doesn’t have to worry about being raped because she is sexually unappealing. It’s an idea that’s the inverse of an old theme, that rape happens because a woman’s good looks, or the way she dresses, are simply so provocative that she deprives a man of his reason. Rape is a form of sex, and something that only beautiful women can be victims of. And even then, they’re not victims because they were withholding or denying something that a man has a right to. By this reasoning, West should be grateful to be raped, or be seen as rape-able.

Needless to say, all of these ideas are profoundly wrongheaded, but powerfully persistent. But their persistence, and seeing them aggregated here, makes it clear why these conversations disintegrate so quickly. If we’re not operating on a common understanding of what rape is, it’s impossible to explain why, for example, Louis C.K.’s jokes about a rapist’s entitled mentality, or why it might be effective to rape rather than kill Hitler, are funnier than Daniel Tosh’s suggestion that it might be hilarious to see a woman get raped in the crowd at a comedy show. The first Louis C.K. joke mocks precisely the mentality West’s harassers exhibit, that rape is an exercise of sexual rights, and the latter an explication of rape’s power to degrade and inflict emotional suffering. The latter is an affirmation of the idea that rape is a means of putting women back in their proper relationship to men. But of course Louis C.K. reads as funnier to those of us who understand rape as a weapon, and Tosh’s to those who understand rape as a tool or a complement. We can’t get on the same page about what’s funny, and what’s hurtful, until we arrive at the same understanding of rape.

LGBT issues have played a prominent role in sports news over the last few months, with Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and Robbie Rogers all coming out. Their bravery has given everyone who covers and cares about progress on those issues in the sporting world a reason to celebrate. Lost in those stories, though, was one about Kerry Rhodes, a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals who was “outed” by a former manager who claims to also be Rhodes’ former lover.

The story, in fact, wasn’t really “lost.” Instead, it was “purposely underreported,” according to ESPN’s LZ Granderson, because Rhodes denied it immediately and discomfort about the prospect of outing Rhodes without his consent prevented other outlets from reporting it out. That may seem appropriate — who, after all, wants to out someone? — but in reality, it may be a form of soft bigotry that keeps sports reporters from pursuing stories we’d consider fair game and relevant news if the athletes in question were straight, Granderson argued:

The unintended byproduct of respecting a player’s privacy is rendering him invisible, and that invisibility allows prejudice to fester. In the case of gay athletes, the unspoken truth provides cover for our latent homophobia in the mainstream media. While we don’t mind chasing down and reporting every detail of presumed heterosexual athletes’ lives, we work particularly hard to avoid rumors of homosexuality. What weighs heaviest on me about this code is that it inadvertently endorses shame. It grants permission for bigotry. And it perpetuates the assumption that gay male professional athletes are a rarity. The media — more to the point, I — haven’t shown the courage to delve into whether or not that is true.

It’s time the charade ends. It’s time the media start covering gay athletes’ off-field lives with the same intensity and integrity with which we cover straight athletes. [...]

We need to move forward as the celebration over Jason Collins’ coming out ebbs. We need to reach the point where we are as comfortable with showing a male athlete’s male partner in the stands as we are with showing Katherine Webb, the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron. When reporting a profile, sports writers need to become willing to ask a male player if he has a girlfriend or boyfriend

Read more

As the school year draws to a close, The Daily Beast published a list of recommendations from famous authors about which books no student should fail to read before graduating from college. There are a lot of terrific texts in the roundup, but its very existence got me thinking. It’s a cliche that education is a life-long affair. And it strikes me that the year after you graduate from college—especially if you’re living independently rather than moving back home—is a time of even bigger adjustment than your first year in college and away from home. You’re no longer thrown together with people from your peer group, which makes dating and making new friends more complicated, if you’re financially independent for the first time, you’re learning a whole host of things about what your money will get you, and what your economic priorities are, and you’re living through your first year without structured breaks to help you recharge and catch up. There’s no one guide to doing that complicated first year right, but these are five books that are all about things I wish I’d thought through during that time.

1. Shopgirl, Steve Martin: Martin’s novella about Mirabelle Buttersfield, a young woman who “moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranged in the vast openness of LA,” is a lightening-quick read if you want to race through it, but it’s worth lingering over. An aspiring artist who ends up selling gloves at a luxury department store, Mirabelle begins the book believing that simply being in Los Angeles will propel her into the kind of life that she hopes for, and it seems to have arrived in the form of Ray Porter, a much older wealthy businessman who begins an affair with her. But as their relationship evolves and stagnates, Mirabelle comes to terms with how much work it takes to make real friends, to find a way into the field she actually wants to be in, and to demand that she be treated as worthy of investment and consideration. It’s a sobering story, but a hopeful one. And for people who are walking out into the unstructured wilderness of adult life, it’s an emotionally sensitive cautionary tale about the importance of caring for yourself, and what it takes to build a satisfying adult life.

2. Open City, Teju Cole: Julius, the main character in Cole’s novel, is older than a recent college graduate—he’s a psychiatric resident. But one thing the novel gets at is that as big as a city like New York—or really, any place you move after graduation—is, there will still be people you knew when you were younger there, and how you treated them has consequences. Especially if you had an unpleasant experience in college or high school, moving somewhere else can feel like a way to make a clean break. But there’s no such thing. If you actually want to move forward without baggage from your past, making amends will get you a lot further than trying to forget or ignore the harm or hurt you’ve done to other people.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Huge congratulations to Matt Zoller Seitz, who is the new editor of RogerEbert.com.

-Can Christians watch Game of Thrones?

-Ron Burgundy comes to the Newseum.

-Firefly is really dead, folks.