When I woke up to the news this morning that Chinua Achebe had died earlier today in Boston, I was struck all over again by how strange and frustrating it is that his novel Things Fall Apart remains probably the only novel by an African writer that most people will ever read in their first thirteen years of education. It’s not that Things Fall Apart is a bad novel—it’s a very good one—or that it’s in some way crowding other African writers out of the American education system (which would only be true if there was some sort of quota, and I’m sure no one would admit to that). It’s that Achebe’s most famous novel is a reminder of what we lose out when the literature we read is limited to a narrow set of perspectives.

The thing that fiction does that’s powerful, and that can also make it dangerous, is that it gives us a perspective to sympathize with that, if we’re not careful, and in conjunction with the framing of the history we’re taught, can come to dominate our thinking on events. Scarlett O’Hara is a tremendous character—and I think there’s a compelling argument that Gone With The Wind makes the case that a capitalist free labor system produces both better economic results and more appealing humans than the slaveholding South—but she’d be an absolutely terrible lens through which to view the complexities of the Civil War. Sulking over socials does not principaled opposition to the Confederacy make.

When it comes to Africa, stories like King Solomon’s Mines or Zulu, the classic movie about the battle of Rorke’s Drift, taken on their own, may not seem terribly consequential. But what’s important about Africa in King Solomon’s Mines is that it’s strange, and provides Alan Quartermain a space in which to have an adventure. In Zulu, the point of the story is that more British men received the Victoria Cross for their service in that fight, in which the British were dramatically outnumbered by Zulu warriors. Africa matters in that it’s a staging ground for European men to prove their greatness, or because it’s a place where clashes of civilization occur. But before those white men arrive to test themselves, or before guns are pitted against spears, Africa doesn’t get much attention in literature or in history classes, at least in ordinary middle and high schools. Literature ends up collaborating with accepted versions of history, not challenging it or complicating it.
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Over the past couple of days, a kerfuffle’s been unfolding in the Chicago Public Schools after the administration announced that Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir Persepolis would be removed from seventh-grade classrooms, due to concerns about the language and content, apparently in particular, the book’s portrayal of torture during the Iranian Revolution. It’s not clear to me that a specific parent complaint prompted the book’s being pulled from the curriculum, but it’s still a disappointing decision, given how wonderfully attuned Persepolis is to the inner lives of children and teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And as the decision’s become a political football between the school administration and the Chicago Teacher’s Union, it’s also become a test case in how to handle changes to curriculum poorly, in a way that shows a lack of respect both for students and for strong material itself.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public School system wrote in a letter to principals in her system that: “We have determined Persepolis may be appropriate for junior and senior students and those in Advance Placement classes. Due to the powerful images of torture in the book, I have asked our Office of Teaching & Learning to develop professional development guidelines, so that teachers can be trained to present this strong, but important content. We are also considering whether the book should be included, after appropriate teacher training, in the curriculum of eighth through tenth grades. Once this curricular determination has been made, we will notify you.” It’s unclear why the school system couldn’t have made this determination over the summer, rather than in the middle of the year, so that the decision would be consistent over a year of students in the system.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world to determine that a work can be more fully absorbed by students who are both older, and who have been better-prepared for certain material by other parts of the curriculum, whether it’s history, geography, or other literature. But that determination should be made based on those concerns, and announced in a way that is reflective of a concern about the overall efficacy of curriculum design. Pulling the book from the rotation mid-year can’t help but look like the decision is in response to a parent complaint, rather than a genuine reassessment of how best to present a work that the school system continues to think is important and is committed to presenting in a way that will be to the book’s best advantage as well as to its students’. This seems like it would have been particularly important given that, as the Chicago Teacher’s Union points out, many elementary schools in the system don’t have libraries, so removing Persepolis from the classroom is effectively removing student access to the book, at least in a school setting.

It’s also easy in cases like these to appear that you’re showing a lack of respect for what students can handle. The portrayals of torture in Persepolis aren’t exceptionally graphic. They are, like everything else in the book, in black and white, in fairly simple outlines. Gashes from a beating don’t suppurate—they stand out in sharp relief. The way the pain of them is communicated is through the main character’s reaction. The experience of reading Persepolis as a child or teenager is the experience of seeing the impact of torture on someone very like yourself, who likes punk music, and gets angry at God, and alternately adores and fights with her parents. It’s a book that trusts teenagers to handle the idea of torture and the concept of war because its author had to handle those things not just in practice, but in reality, when her relatives were tortured and her friends’ older siblings were sent off to die in war with keys to paradise around their necks. Believing that children shouldn’t experience those things for real shouldn’t be the same thing as believing that they can’t being trusted to experience the sadness, fear, and anger that will help them navigate the world as moral adults. A school system that’s afraid of its ability to handle introducing students to these kind of emotions or ideas is one that doesn’t seem to trust its teachers or itself very much.

For the last three years Vida, a non-profit dedicated to women in literature and associated literary arts like poetry, has published a census that tracks the number of women writing for significant literary publications like the Boston Review, Harper’s, and the New Republic, the number of women writing reviews, and the number of women whose work is reviewed by those publications. The purpose of those numbers is simple: to expose how significant the byline gap between male and female reviewers is, and to make clear the differing levels of attention that literary work by men and women receive by the publications where a good review can make a significant difference in an author’s reputation or sales. But the hope is more ambitious: that by forcing editors to see the results of their commissions and subject selections in the aggregate, they’ll change their practices.

But when the third set of results was published yesterday, the news was discouraging. In 2012, the Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement all published reviews by fewer women than they had in 2009. Of the publications that published more women in 2012 than in 2009, Granta, The New York Review Of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, published fewer women in 2012 than they had in 2011. Gains were followed by reversals, proof that gains were ephemeral rather than systemic, more likely the result of a random fluctuation than a renewed commitment to bring a diversity of ideas in the door by diversifying the authors who would offer them up.

The numbers invite some discouraging potential conclusions. Is listing numbers of women authors published and reviewed—or the number of women writing and directing and producing episodes of television and movies—a pointless enterprise because the people who run literary magazines and studios and television networks are unshameable? “Three years is enough time to create change, even if it’s a little change. I’m tired of conversations. What else is there to say? Editors don’t give enough of a damn to change the status quo,” wrote the fiction writer Roxanne Gay. “There’s nothing to really say at this point. The gender (and racial) inequity exists. It is stark. Counting is useful for reminding us.” When editors like the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who wrote the Forward’s Elissa Strauss “You are right. It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that,” do they not actually mean it? Or do they not know where to look for women to commission? Because if the latter, I’m sure the Collected Wisdom Of The Internet could drum up some suggestions.

My guess would be that the problem is less malign, but more insidious. I’d be willing to bet that every editor of every publication on this list is, in theory at least, committed to the principals of gender equity. But I’d also be comfortable laying money on the idea that they’re equally convinced that their subconscious biases, reliance on familiar authors, and processes to sort submissions and identify new contributors are sound and don’t in any way work to produce byline inequality. They’re probably uncomfortable with the idea of quotas and target numbers, in part because they want to have faith in their own processes. In other words, they can acknowledge a problem without thinking that it’s their problem. And making that connection is what’s important.

I don’t think Vida should stop its count any more than I think Martha Lautzen should stop measuring how many women are making film and television. And I certainly plan to keep writing about those numbers, if only so any time someone is upset about one person or another getting or not getting an opportunity they can say they didn’t know there was a larger context at work here. But for those numbers to break through to the people who have the power to change them, we apparently need something more than those figures. It may not take a Ladies Home Journal-style sit-in, but maybe we could at least start with some specific asks for editors. Do we want parity by a set date? A goal of a certain percentage change per year? I’m open to all suggestions. Because three years of stagnation is a sign that we need different tactics.

The young adult novelist Malinda Lo has, in a post about her efforts with colleague Cindy Pon to spend a year focused on diversity in young adult fiction, in two very concise paragraphs summed up the challenge felt by white creators who have the desire to include characters of color in their work, but are deeply concerned about committing cultural appropriation, falling into stereotype, or performing ugly mimicry that’s actually worse than keeping their stories lily-white:

I really appreciate writers who write outside their racial experience or sexual orientation. For one thing, there are many more white writers being published these days than writers of color, and if white writers can contribute to increasing the representation of people of color in the book market, I’m all for it. Second, I believe part of a writer’s job is to write about people who are different from her. I think it’s important that we do that. That we seek to tell stories that challenge us as writers on many levels — whether in characters or in plot or in style. Otherwise, we don’t grow as writers; we become mired in stories we’ve retold so many times they wear a groove in the stairs of our imaginations. I think that in order to truly fly, writers must do things that can cause us to crash and burn.

But I understand why writers are hesitant to write about characters who don’t share their race or sexual orientation. Cultural appropriation is real, and many of the guest posts about white/straight writers doing their research and attempting to get to the heart of their characters are, I think, sincere efforts to avoid cultural appropriation. I applaud that awareness, because I’ve read books that have been insanely popular, but have turned me off completely because they felt so much like cultural appropriation.

This is an issue that’s come up in debates about the monochromatic nature of the main cast in Girls. And it’s a good explanation for why so many people default to the idea that colorblindness in character writing—essentially, creating characters who are entirely unshaped and whose actions are undetermined by their racial or ethnic background—is progressive. As Marla Daniels put it on The Wire, you cannot lose if you do not play, and when it comes to race, a lot of white creators seem to agree with her: having a non-white character lets a show or movie look like its covering its bases, but refusing to actually create character details that are drawn from or rooted in that character’s race or ethnicity means that a writer or director doesn’t risk getting those details wrong. Race-blindness is more risk management strategy than a means of actually making television, movies, and books more diverse.

The thing about diversity is that it’s really not about numerical quotas—it’s about getting different kinds of experience, and different kinds of details on screen and on the page. And getting those details and experiences right is largely a matter of doing research about matters large and small, something that goes for white characters as well. If you’d make a character read Jewish by having him or her use the occasional Yiddishism and talk about the high holidays—the negotiation over Josh Girard’s TGS contract in 30 Rock, in which Jack offers him Sukkot off, is a great example of doing this—you can write detail that ties a Latino character to a country of their family’s origin in conversations about food, geography, religious practice, or any number of other characteristics. If you want to give an African-American character slang, or preferences, or style that aren’t generically and stereotypically black, think about region, which influences music, food, fashion, and experiences of racism—Boston has expressions of bigotry that are different from, say, those in Georgia.

In other words, treat characters of color like you’d treat white ones: as people who pop off the screen or the page in direct relation to the amount of work and detail that’s gone into building them as believable and complete human beings. If a creator is worried that adding details and nuances that are drawn from a character’s race and ethnicity will swamp that character, making them only legible as black, Latino or Asian, that means you’re not doing enough to develop that character, to think about how they in particular might react to experiences that might be common to someone of their heritage, and what specifically they’d take away from being the subject of a racially motivated traffic stop, an assumption that they’re undocumented, or an incident where someone treats them as if they’re either a genius or sexually inadequate. Running generic scenarios with a specific character in mind, even if those thought experiments don’t make it into a final product, can be a way of testing your own thinking about that character’s identity and uniqueness, and developing a set of consistent behaviors that will guide their reactions to all kinds of events, racially-motivated or no.

This is work I think writers don’t always realize they’re doing with white characters, because the details are familiar and easily available to them. But just because you don’t have to reach for the details of a bar mitzvah, a Lutheran wedding, or tailgating at Ole Miss doesn’t mean those nuances aren’t signifying racial identities, experiences, and allegiances. And just because you don’t know much about Mexican Catholicism, regional Chinese cooking, or the origins and contemporary reception of Kwanza, for example, doesn’t mean those details aren’t out there to be found. You may not be able to lose if you don’t touch race with a ten-foot pole. But your work, and the consumers of it, definitely can.

I always spending time in the novelist Teju Cole’s head, and I was struck by his most recent piece in the New Yorker, a meditation on how President Obama, whose billing of himself as a serious reader has been a way of selling him as a serious, empathetic man, has also become an active user of drone strikes to kill terrorists and suspected terrorists. He argues that enjoying the way literature makes you empathize with someone else, even someone very different from you, doesn’t necessarily mean that said empathy extends once we look up from a book, much less once we’re entrusted with immense power:

Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture in 1993, said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” This sense of literature’s fortifying and essential quality has been evoked by countless other writers and readers. When Marilynne Robinson described fiction as “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification” she was stating something almost everyone would agree with. We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa. We persist in this belief regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes…

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

I also think it’s worth noting that empathy, while a worthwhile value, is actually a fairly neutral tool when it comes to literature. Convincing your reader (or viewer) to suspend disbelief and to enjoy spending time seeing the world through your characters’ eyes is a basic task of fiction. But it can be employed to any number of ends. Which is why so many people fall for Atlas Shrugged, or end up with bad ideas about what sex should look like from Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.

Laura Murphy, whose son is a senior in high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, doesn’t think he—or anyone else—should be reading Beloved in their English classes, and she’s on a quest to get it bumped from the curriculum. Per Raw Story:

“I’m not some crazy book burner,” Murphy, a mother of four, insisted to the Post. “I have great respect and admiration for our Fairfax County educators. The school system is second to none. But I disagree with the administration at a policy level.”

In spite of the awards and accolades won by Beloved and its author, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Murphy feels that the book’s theme of the brutality of slavery and scenes depicting gang rape, infant murder and violence are too intense for high school seniors. She said her son had nightmares when he had to read the book for his senior English course.

“It’s not about the author or the awards,” said Murphy. “It’s about the content.” On Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board voted not to hear Murphy’s challenge to the book. She now plans to take her fight to the Virginia Board of Education.

The thing about sending your children to public school is that you’re consenting to give up a certain amount of control over what they’re exposed to, because one of the major points of public schools is to make sure students have a pre-established set of skills and cultural references in common. And that often means teaching children things that their parents don’t know, or giving them access to literature and history that their parents might not have at home, or frankly, might not want them to read or learn about. It also, on an emotional level, means letting your children come into contact with ideas and art that will expand their sense of the world.

An associated risk of that is that they might be upset by some of the things they learn about the world. Racism is frightening. So is sexual assault. But both of those things have happened in the United States, and for many people, continue to be major factors that affect their day-to-day life. And I think high school seniors, especially those who will be going off to colleges where they have much more sexual autonomy, and will be dealing with larger and more diverse peer groups, not only are old enough to understand the reality of those facts and to be confronted with the emotional impacts they have, but really ought to be confronted by them. I’m not a parent yet, but my understanding is that parenting is a balance between protecting children from things they genuinely don’t have the capacity to process—Wu-Tang may be for the children, but I’m not sure Toni Morrison is—and helping them process the difficult things they have the moral and emotional ability to confront, even if that involves hard work on your, and their parts.

If Murphy’s son is having nightmares about slavery and gang rape, that actually seems to suggest that he’s pretty attuned to the emotional horror of racial and sexual violence. Maybe, instead of trying to protect him from those feelings, she could find some way for him to channel them into productive anti-racist or anti-sexist work. That would be much better college prep (and resume-building) for him than trying to save him, and other seniors, from being upset. I doubt Murphy is going to have much luck with the Virginia Board of Education. And she’ll have much less with whatever institution of higher learning he heads off to.

Having finally seen and fallen in love with The Godfather, I decided I should go back to Mario Puzo’s original novel of the same name, the pulp classic that became a masterpiece. I’d been told that there’s a lot more in the book about Hollywood, which there is, and which remains a relevant critique of that city’s sexual culture today. But I was mostly curious as to whether Puzo had more to say about the women who hover outside of the doors who are shut in their faces by the Corleone men.

He does, but The Godfather remains an odd book when it comes to women, and is odd in a number of different ways. The size of Sonny Corleone’s penis comes up more often than his mother’s actual first name. Apollonia, Michael’s first, Italian wife is an utter blank, an expanse of “satiny skin” for Michael to consume, and to imprint with English and driving lessons. It remains utterly inexplicable to me why Kay Adams ultimately decides to take Michael Corleone back, much less to marry him, after he not only disappears on her without notice, but after he returns, as Mama Corleone puts it, for six months “He no call you up? He no see you?” Her decision to follow consigliere Tom Hagen in abandoning her own ethnic and class background to become a compliant Italian wife, quashing her concerns about Michael’s affairs and saying Masses for his souls every morning, is a compelling counter to the assimilation the Don hoped his son would achieve: Michael doesn’t just fail to break away from his Italianness, he brings Kay back with him. But there’s a fundamental gap in her story. And Connie Corleone never gets to be anything other than a shrew, until the moment at the end of the novel, as well as the film, when in her hysteria, she accuses Michael of murdering her husband Carlo, and gets dismissed as crazed by grief even though she’s absolutely correct.

The one woman who does make it out—or at least, who finds a way to live in the Corleone family orbit without being compromised by it—is Lucy Mancini, whose story is essentially a massive red herring, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Johnny Fatone’s Vocal Cord Surgery. Puzo does precisely no work to grow real thematic connective tissue between Lucy’s story and the rest of the novel, which is strange, because after Kay, she’s the woman on which the novel spends the most introspective time. And she’s also, frankly, a character with an arc I’m surprised Puzo dreamed up, given the treatment of the other women in the novel, and their position as profoundly mysterious creatures, particularly when it comes to sexual desire.

Lucy enters the novel as Connie’s maid of honor at her wedding, a position that’s given Lucy the opportunity to seduce Connie’s older brother, Sonny. He’s attractive to her in part because of what she’s been told about her body and its lack of desirability: “In her two college love affairs she had felt nothing and neither of them lasted more than a week. Quarreling, her second lover had mumbled something about her being ‘too big down there.’ Lucy had understood and for the rest of the school term had refused to go out on any dates.” Sonny, because he’s well-endowed, doesn’t treat Lucy like she’s sexually inadequate. And alone among the women in The Godfather, Lucy’s opened up to the possibility of an affair that’s solely about her own sexual fulfillment, without being treated like a slut, either by Sonny, or anyone else in the Corleone orbit. When Sonny dies, “her dreams were not the insipid dreams of a schoolgirl, her longings not the longings of a devoted wife. She was not rendered desolate by the loss of her ‘life’s companion,’ or miss him because of his stalwart character. She held no fond remembrances of sentimental gifts, of girlish hero worship, his smile, the amused glint of his eyes when she said something endearing or witty. No. She missed him for the more important reason that he had been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love.”
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It’s incredibly sad to hear of the death of the writer Richard Ben Cramer from lung cancer. Many, many appreciations of What It Takes, his book about the contenders for their parties 1988 presidential nominations, will be written in the days to come. But what always struck me about the book is the relationship between objectivity and empathy in it.

Cramer believed that every candidate deserved a fair analysis, not a fair conclusion, and the book is richer for it. Details like George H.W. Bush’s penchant for writing thank-you notes or Michael Dukakis’ turkey tetrazzini are there not because they’re focus-grouped or blandly “colorful,” but for what they tell a reader about the candidate, from the strength of Bush’s network, to Dukakis’s tendency to get bogged down in details. The balance of the book stems from Cramer’s genuine curiosity about all the men he wrote about, and that curiosity has a way of opening up even settled minds. I’d always thought Bob Dole was simply mean until I read about his rehabilitation regime after his service in World War II and his work on the food stamps program. But in a fair analysis, not everyone is equal, and Cramer is honest about each man’s weaknesses and strengths, be they stylistic or risk-taking, like the idiot daring that lead Gary Hart to the deck of the Monkey Business.

We talk a lot these days about the win-the-morning mentality in political journalism. It’s a frustrating dynamic because it encourages an obsessive focus on perceived gaffes or individual debate performances, rather than fundamentals like the quality of President Obama’s reelection team’s ground campaign and sophisticated use of technology. But What It Takes is also a reminder that the most important campaign fundamental is the man at the head of it, and that he’s the product of thousands upon thousands of mornings.

It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.