Race has always hovered around the edges of the storytelling in Mad Men, though the racial politics of the sixties have usually served to illustrate characters’ personalities, rather than driving the storytelling. When Pete Campbell notes the emergence of a distinct black market, it’s an illustration of his sharpness as an advertising executive, and his inability to push the insight forward through conversations with the office building’s elevator operator serves as a reminder of his social deficits. Paul Kinsey’s decision to go on a Civil Rights organizing trip with his girlfriend is more about demonstrating his desire to simultaneously ingratiate himself and prove he’s on the cutting edge than about him actually having particularly evolved racial attitudes. Lane Pryce’s dalliance with an African-American Playboy Bunny was an act of fairly childish rebellion against his father, as much as his wife. And Peggy’s willingness to take Dawn, her replacement as Don’s secretary, home for the night, only then to worry that the more junior woman might steal from her, is an illustration of the struggle between her desire to be kind and her self-interest.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s been actively resistant to the idea that he has to tell stories about the Civil Rights movement on the show in the past, even though he’s obviously made a choice to depict a segment of Madison Avenue that’s whiter and more male than the industry was overall. So Sunday’s episode of the show, in which we both learn more about Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee, and see racial and gender strife come to the firm not through a racial incident but through the kind of petty office politics that have driven so much of the show’s drama for the past five years, feels both like a response to long-running criticism of the show and a rebuke to the critics, Weiner showing us that his show would get to a key subject in what he determined to be good time, and in his own way.

What Weiner decided to do was make Dawn’s race a factor in a conflict that was simultaneously larger and smaller. While Dawn wasn’t willing to skip out on work to help Scarlett (who must be named for Miss O’Hara, in a great nod to pop culture’s influence even on these pop cultural characters), she did agree to punch her fellow secretary’s time card. When Joan found out, she fired Scarlett for effectively stealing wages from the company, setting up a confrontation between her and Harry, who resents that Joan is a partner, while Harry’s work on television hasn’t earned him the same thing—”It’s a shame my accomplishments happen in broad daylight,” he spits at her in public, ignoring that what earned the partners that title was sacrifice and investment, not personal accomplishment—and bringing up the question of Dawn’s race as one factor, along with her lower level of complicity in Scarlett’s offense, in the decision about whether to fire her.
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The recent decision by college football’s biggest schools to institute an end-of-season playoff to determine its champion will no doubt generate millions of dollars in additional revenue for the sport and its participating schools, and it has added fuel to a growing debate about whether the people who make it all possible — the thousands of players at colleges and universities across the country — should get a piece of the pie.

For a brief moment, the NCAA thought they should. Last year, the organization that oversees college sports initially gave conferences and schools the right to give a $2,000-a-year stipend but delayed the proposal shortly thereafter due to concerns about its implementation. Recently, college football’s most prominent coaches, including the University of Texas’ Mack Brown and all 14 coaches in the Southeastern Conference, have revived the idea, backing the idea that if a playoff is going to help make bowl executives, coaches, athletics directors, and even the NCAA president rich, the players ought to get a cut too.

To traditionalists who value “amateurism,” the idea of paying college football players is absurd. To author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch, though, it is a matter of human rights.

“My concern is not ensuring that the athletes get paid, but ensuring that they get their rights,” Branch told me in an interview. The fight to reform the NCAA and make it more equitable for athletes, he says, isn’t just about compensation, but about giving the players bargaining rights and making them consenting participants in the system. “If you are a grad student at the University of Texas,” Branch added, “you can bargain for how much you get paid as a teaching assistant.” If you’re a college athlete, no such rights exist.

The stipend, as proposed, is a complicated issue, Branch said, since it doesn’t appear to change that. “They’re still within the framework of the old system,” Branch said. “The coaches and athletics directors decide (how much they get paid). This is like a tip a waiter gets. You can’t get market values, and you can’t object to it without being called unethical.”

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On Monday, I asked what the impact would be if the Supreme Court a) takes a case accusing SyFy of stealing an idea for a television show and b) rules that the network had implicitly created a contract between itself and the people pitching a show. Copyright lawyer Michael Salerno explains that it’ll likely lead to more specific contracts, rather than easier entry into the business for people who aren’t established but have original ideas:

The Court can’t allow for ideas to be copyrightable or a numebr of writers will just submit any number of rather generic scripts and then sue the pants off of networks that develop similar shows. Can you imagine a writer being able to have a copyright in an idea like “six friends live in New York and have their love lives intertwine”? There goes just about every 30-minute sitcom ever. If the writers win on a contract basis (which is MUCH more likely), studios will just create more specific contracts that state any screenplay submitted is either a) a work for hire whose copyright resides in the studio, or b) that the network reserves the right to develop a series based on the idea within the script without remuneration for the writers. Tough terms, to be sure, but that is what will likely happen.

And Rhys Boyd-Farrell suggests that among the things that could get included in such contracts is a requirement that disputes be settled by arbitrartion rather that the courts, something that’s been a significant trend in employment and contract law in any case.

Zack Stentz suggests that it could also bring about changes that, in addition to helping avoid idea-stealing claims, would be total catnip for nerdy television critics like yours truly:

I think if this brings about any changes, it will be to force the studios and networks to more carefully document their development process. I don’t know what the facts are in this case, but simultaneous creation does happen all the time. When we meet with producers or studios and they pitch us ideas, we’re always really careful to say “that sounds great, but unfortunately we’re already working on an idea like that and we don’t want to step on it.” If NBCU already had a paranormal investigator idea in the works, they should have documented it somewhere and told these people when they came to pitch them.

I may be a little burned out by origin stories for characters, but I do like a good origin story for a piece of art.