I sat down with The New Republic’s Marc Tracy to talk about his article arguing that blogging is dying, and my response that blogging actually won, and it’s now serving interests other than those of people who wanted an easy way to publish independently. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion for me was the idea that blogging is changing in part because, to make it emotionally and logistically sustainable long-term, people have to embed themselves in larger organizations and to franchise, making blogs mini-publications with a united vision rather than a singular voice:

We also talked about Jason Collins’ public coming out, and how sports, which were a leader in civil rights when it came to race, have fallen behind the rest of society when it comes to sexual orientation.

The Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan used my argument that NBC’s Deception would be a better show if it had any racial consciousness whatsoever as an example in a piece he wrote recently complaining that pop culture criticism has gotten overly political. So we sat down so I could explain to him why for me, asking for better politics is a way of asking for better characterization and more carefully grounded conflicts:

It was an interesting conversation for me: I don’t possess nearly the confidence that Michael does to tell other folks that their distress at something they see reflected in mass culture is dumb or wrong. I may not find something personally distressing in the way another interlocutor does. But if someone’s finding themselves upset by something they’re seeing in media, or hitting a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment, that, for me, is generally a sign I should take a look at the writing or performance to see if execution’s gone soft, an expected sharpness has been blunted, or if intentions have gone badly awry. Incredibly stupid racism or sexism doesn’t normally make its way into mainstream pop culture (with some execptions) as a matter of intention. More often, there’s some kind of craft gone badly awry.

Last week, I went long on the future of popular culture about gay people and a pet peeve of mine: the treatment of homosexuality as primarly a source of problems instead of joy, whether it’s in the historical pop portrayal of gay people as deviant, miserable, and damned, or of homophobia as the primary dramatic story engine for gay characters. As is always the case on this subject, my writing was informed by conversations with friends and writers like Tyler Lewis, who writes better on the specific experiences of black gay men than anyone I know, and Slate critic June Thomas. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with June and tape our conversations for a new Bloggingheads episode:

It was a conversation that helped mentally crystallize for me the extent to which non-straight characters are written for the enjoyment of and in deference to the perspectives of straight people. Shows and movies that aren’t made specifically for gay people, like both iterations of Queer as Folk, are allowed to have one gay person or gay couple. We don’t get to see gay people in gay communities, to see gay men who are friends with lesbians (though that seems like it could change on The New Normal, where creator Ryan Murphy has announced plans to introduce a gay couple) because shows with gay characters are so often about gay characters’ relationships to a straight-dominated world, or more often, about straight people’s relationships to gay people, no matter whether or not straight people are the gay characters. Cultural signaling, like a man’s interest in fashion or a woman’s interest in sports, or is less about fleshing out the personalities and interests of the characters who possess them than in signaling to straight audiences about story developments: Kurt’s clothes on Glee mean there will be bullying, parental difficulty, a change of wardrobe, a revitalization of his confidence, and an eventual journey to the big city. Homophobia is something for gay characters to overcome, but also for straight characters to learn from, for straight viewers to use as a self-congratulatory benchmark, assuring themselves that they’d never behave so badly.

I’m being harsh here. I know that. The process of straight people learning and appreciating, rather than demonizing, gay people’s lives and challenges and gay cultures, such as they exist, is not an irrelevant process. But I’m tired of the constant need for accommodation. I’m tired of the idea that straight people are going to be most interested in stories about themselves than in stories about gay people even if the execution of say, an excellent love story about two men like Keep the Lights On is richer and deeper than so much romantic comedy claptrap. I’m tired, similarly, of the idea that stories about men are the default, that both men and women will turn into them, and that stories about women are somehow niche, that men won’t tune into them. In both of these areas, people who limit themselves to stories about themselves are both denying themselves great pleasure and beauty. And they’re defaulting to the privileged position of being able to expect that Hollywood will continue providing them stories about people whose lives are a heightened version of their own. At the end of the day, if people want to cut themselves off from stories that could move them, that’s their loss. It’s just frustrating to me when someone else’s lack of curiosity reaffirms Hollywood’s own, and limits what options are available to the rest of us.

Salon’s TV critic Willa Paskin is one of my favorite people to read, and one of the people I turn to whenever I need to make an idea sharper. We got together to discuss the new television season in a conversation that spiraled from how depressed we are by the new fall comedies, to what Homeland, Gone Girl, and We Need To Talk About Kevin have to do with each other:

There are two parts of the conversation that I think are going to be particularly important to my work going forward. First, is a conversation we had about the relationship of story structure to comedy and drama, which has really reshaped a lot of my thinking about how television works. Then, in the latter half of the conversation, Willa offers what I think is a brilliant riff on how our understanding of anti-heroes has gone off the rails that clarified what I want to I write about gender and difficult women on television. In any case, I was grateful to have had this conversation and I hope y’all enjoy it.

The kind folks at Bloggingheads were good enough to ask me to do a regular show over there, which means you’ll be getting a lot more culture alongside your politics. I’m lucky enough to have as my first guest the AV Club’s television editor and one of my absolute favorite writers on any facet of culture, Todd VanDerWerff:

There’s a lot in this conversation, including a discussion that I think is really important: which networks and services see themselves as in competition with each other. If HBO, Netflix and FX see themselves in competition with each other, it’ll have a dramatic impact on which movies and premium programming are available elsewhere. Networks like Showtime are in an interesting position here—if they’re not in direct competition with Netflix, there may be fewer pressures on them to invest in streaming products like Showtime Anytime, which it’s preparing to roll out more widely to customers of more cable providers, but it needs to not make the strategic mistake of restricting access to its content to the viewers who might need to sample it to get hooked and subscribe. This is really about the integration of two existing industries—movies and television. And the space for a more truly disruptive product, like Hulu, is wide open.

In any case, I hope you’ll swing by. And if you have requests for folks I should have on the show, holler. I’m excited to spend a lot more time talking to my critic friends, and not only at great length on Twitter.