The unromantic comedy isn’t precisely new territory for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in one of the most resonant examples of the genre, Marc Webb’s 2009 hit (500) Days of Summer in which Tom (Gordon-Levitt) pursued Summer (Zooey Deschanel), falling in love with her in defiance of her repeatedly stated lack of seriousness about him. When they inevitably broke up, Tom was devastated and blindsided, especially when it turned out that Summer was capable of being serious about someone, just not about him. But the movie ended with him meeting another woman and sensing the prospect of a new relationship. The triumph in the film, and the indicator of Tom’s growth, wasn’t that he got together with Summer, but that he got over her.

Don Jon, which explores what happens when Jon (Gordon-Levitt), a porn junkie pickup artist with some serious road rage, meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who appears to be the girl of his dreams, but in a parallel to his own addiction, aspires to live out one of the romantic comedies she loves. It’s evident almost from their first meeting how terrible Jon and Barbara are for each other. Jon’s the kind of guy, as he tells us, hilariously and profanely in voiceovers, who believes things like “In real life, if you want to get head, you have give head. I know there are guys who like to eat pussy, but the thing about that is, they’re f—–g crazy.” Barbara, by contrast, measures her power over Jon by seeing how much she can get him to change his life and behavior for her, asking him “You take one class for me, just one little class?” when they make out at her doorway, and luring him to a ridiculously girly princess party for one of her relatives. Part of her behavior-modification program includes insisting that Jon give up porn and taking him to rom-coms with her instead, including a truly brilliant parody starring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway under assumed names. As Barbara puts it “Movies and porno are different, Jon. They give awards for movies,” a distinction that’s both wrong in fact and ignores the extent to which romantic comedies have shaped Barbara’s worldview, and not for the better. The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do.

Then there’s I Give It A Year, which came out in the UK in February and also aired at SXSW, and which stars Rose Byrne and Nate Spall as Nat and Josh, a couple who marry after a whirlwind courtship, rushing into matrimonial misery because they’re up against a different kind of narrative convention, that of time. “We’re at the age where we both wanted to find the one,” Nat tells their couples counselor at the beginning of the movie when they seek help not because, as their therapist asks “Does he have tremendously niche desires?” but because, as it turned out, they were so entranced by the idea of having found “the one” that they made a lifetime commitment without knowing each other very well. “Trying to decide if I think that’s endearing or if I want to bludgeon you to death with a shovel,” Nat says of Josh’s mannerisms, while he’s driven berserk by her tendency to sing out loud while dramatically misinterpreting lyrics to songs like “Sweet Dreams,” which she thinks features a protagonist who “traveled the world in generic jeans.” These small incompatibilities might have been surmountable had Nat and Josh not respectively met and reconnected with people who do truly know them and like them as they are. By the time film enters a state of actual parody, when Nat tells Josh “You’ve made me the happiest woman in the world,” when they agree to divorce, and Josh tells her, in utter joy, “I will never have to see you again. Ever,” it’s a catharsis to see their well-intentioned efforts to save their doomed marriage binned for good.

Neither Don Jon nor I Give It A Year are anti-love, precisely. The former, in fact, has a strikingly romantic ending, and if the latter fails to reach the same emotional heights, it’s because I Give It A Year knows it’s more successful at satire than sincerity. But while most romantic comedies focus on the work that couples do in the relationship they’ll end up in, putting their bad dates, agonizing breakups, and most hurtful failures in the past, unromantic comedies take a step back in time to focus on the fallacies, self-delusions, and errors that precede successful, long-term relationships. And despite their hyper-reality and critiques of conventional romantic comedies, both Don Jon and I Give It A Year share what’s essentially a very sweet lesson. The pursuit of romcom-perfect, milestone-hitting relationships can be exhausting and personally destructive. And that’s too bad, when the real thing can feel so natural and so gratifying, even if it comes in a form you didn’t expect.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.

There are a lot of figures from tech companies, many of which are made more valuable by cultural content, on the list. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied for 20th on the list. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes in at 27th. Apple CEO Tim Cook is 35. Robin Li, who founded and runs Baidu, China’s largest search engine ranks 64th.

But in comparison to all of those tech titans, there are just two people involved in the production of entertainment or cultural content. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes it at 27th on the list. Joseph Blattner, who runs the International Federation of Association Football, is the 69th most powerful person according to the list, on the grounds that he “runs the world’s most popular sport–and unofficial religion.”

It’s notable both that neither of them are artists—they’re both on the business and distribution side of content. The people who have power, apparently, are not the ones who come up with the ideas, images, and sounds that reach wide audiences, but those who come up with the paradigm-shifting means of distributing them, whether it’s the broadcast deals for FIFA matches, or the Kindle. And while content is an important part of Amazon’s business, the company’s come a long way from being a book retailer. Instead of just eliminating local bookstores, it’s now going after big box stores.

Similarly, it’s telling that the only head of a an organization that’s primarily a content creation enterprise is Blattner, and that he’s involved with sports, rather than with movies, music, or television production. Obviously FIFA games reach an enormous number of people, and anyone who’s thought about the cable package in the United States knows how critically important sports, particularly football, are to maintaining the viability of cable as a subscription service. But that it’s sports and Kindle sales in the mix rather than a television network head or a movie director says a lot about what it takes to get on the Forbes list in the first place. Numbers, it seem, matter more than ideas.

Holland argued that releasing all of the episodes of a show at once frees Netflix’s programming both from the traditional structure of a television episode that’s designed to get audiences to return the next week—and from some of the way the conversation around television functions, something that writers have mourned, but that it’s unclear yet if fans miss. “Part of the conversation early on is thinking about it as a 13-hour movie,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t need recaps. We don’t need cliff-hangers at the end. You can write differently knowing that in all likelihood the next episode is going to be viewed right away.” When I spoke to Kevin Spacey about why he and David Fincher decided that Netflix was the right home for House of Cards, he cited that structural freedom—particularly from the constraints of shooting a more conventional pilot—as one of the reasons they chose Netflix as a partner.

Sarandos gave a specific example in genre fiction, particularly the show that Netflix is developing with the Wachowskis. “Sense8,” he said, “is a genre that we were looking for, adult contemporary sci-fi, and done in a way that’s very difficult to do for television, both because of budget constraints and because sci-fi storytelling tends to be very complex. Because of our ‘watch them all at once’ mentality, we were able to allow them to create a dense and complicated world.” I imagine that’s a lesson Netflix has learned from the example of Game of Thrones, which relies on an immensely complex web of characters, plot lines, and concepts that aren’t always revisited from week to week, leaving viewers reliant on their friends or online concordances to keep everything straight. Binge-watching lets viewers be reminded of characters and genre concepts regularly, rather than trying to hold onto them over an entire week until the next installment.

I’m happy to hear Sarandos talking about the creatively liberating aspects of his business model, as well as to say things like: “I want it to be the exact number of episodes you need to tell the story perfectly. It’s very difficult to sustain a show beyond three years. Characters start to fall apart, and your writers turn over. Some of the other conventions that I’m happy to dismiss: How long does the episode have to be? And how many episodes does the season have to be?” But I do think the company has to be wary of some of the creative downsides of binge-watching for its writers as well.

One of the things that makes television unique, and that poses a useful challenge to writers is precisely that the medium, as conventionally aired, requires that the staff of a show create content that can hold up under a week’s consideration, and that convinces viewers to come back. Shows that are designed for binge-watching may fall under the latter constraint, because unless you’re a television critic or someone with a very inactive social life, there are a limited number of people who can watch thirteen episodes of a drama in one sitting.

But they’re off the hook from the former in ways that I think can be significant. One of the comments I heard frequently from friends who were binge-watching House of Cards is that the rate at which they consumed the episodes made it easier to gloss over problems they had with individual hours of the show. If events like Zoe Barnes’ (Kate Mara) decision to sleep with Rep. Frank Underwood (Spacey), even though sex seemed totally unnecessary to their professional transactions, Frank’s murder of a colleague who was running for governor, or the revelation that, as a college undergraduate, Frank had a sexual and emotional relationship with another man were left hanging from week to week, they’d at minimum demand more context even if they didn’t rise to the level of posing grave plausibility problems to the show. But in a binge-watch, it’s easy to rush past these events and their implications when there’s another episode, and as a result, more plot around the corner. Binge-watching can be the enemy of coherence, plausibility, and even of contemplation, if characters are always supposed to be on to the next thing, rather than grappling with the implications of what they’ve experienced, and what we’ve seen.

I can understand why Netflix would want to liberate itself from the creative constraints that have most deformed broadcast television. But in the process, I hope the company doesn’t forget that constraints can prompt writers and actors to rise to the challenge in ways that are creatively rewarding.

I’ve talked about villain design before as an advantage that movies based on DC Comics, at least in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise, have had over Marvel, with the exception of Loki, so far. For the most part, it’s been a matter of ideas and motivations rather than action choreography. Ra’s al Guhl’s totalitarianism, the Joker’s anarchism, and Bane’s vision of class warfare all posed very specific challenges to Bruce Wayne’s vision of a Gotham capable of saving itself. But Iron Man’s villains have tended to be relatively poorly developed, the Red Skull, while a villain of particular vintage, never told us anything about Captain America’s basic decency we didn’t know, and Loki emerged as a good villain mainly because he challenged the logistical capacities of his opponents rather than their values.

Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness had a different problem in common, though: it wasn’t clear what would take their villains down. In Iron Man 3, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a former nerd enhanced by the chemical treatment known as Extremis, which allows injured people to regrow their limbs, seems pretty much invincible, as do his minions. They can be shot, blown up in enormous explosions, punched extremely hard, attacked by unmanned Iron Man suits, and keep on going. In the movie’s climactic action sequence, Killian survives even devastating blows from Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)—only to finally be put down by a killer punch from Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who he’d dosed with Extremis at the risk of killing her. Had Killian’s strength been sapped by his previous regenerations, which had happened in close succession? Can someone with Extremis powers only be taken out by someone else with the same enhancements? I have no idea, and the movie doesn’t seem to either, unless there’s a snippet of conversation I missed somewhere along the way. But it’s relatively clear that Killian succumbs to Pepper’s punchings mostly because the action sequence needed to end at some point, and because it was a chance to see Pepper, mostly relegated to being good at business and remarkably successful at tolerating Tony as a romantic partner, do something awesome. That lack of clarity left the third act without much of an arc. It was a chance for Iron Man 3 to show off Tony’s programming abilities, but not for us to understand why he won, and should have won, and why Killian lost.

Similarly, Star Trek Into Darkness makes a great deal of Khan’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) genetically engineered strength. The man can take out the crew of a starship, survive what for anyone else would be a suicide bombing that takes out an enormous amount of San Francisco by crashed ship, shake off a Vulcan nerve pinch, and is invulnerable to a phaser set to stun when he’s shot with it repeatedly by Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana)—though apparently not that same weapon when it’s wielded by engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). But for some reason, when it becomes clear that Khan needs to be taken alive so his blood can be used to revive Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), who previously wasn’t able to do much in the way of damage to Khan, is suddenly able to knock the man out with a solid uppercut. Once again, the fight sequence ends not because Spock and Uhura figured out Khan’s weakness, or worked together to defeat him, but because the needs of the movie required it to end, and to end that particular way.

I point this out not to be an action choreography snob—though I will cop to being that—but because this kind of sloppiness speaks to a larger problem with action moviemaking. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness are convinced that what audiences want is spectacle, whether it’s the timely arrival of a whole array of Iron Man suits zipping in to an oil rig right on time or characters leaping between one—well, what were those flying things hovering over San Francisco, at great speed and apparently pilotless in the midst of an emergency that should have grounded air traffic, anyway?—speedy platform thingy and another, whilst kicking each other in the face. But spectacle should serve character and story, or it risks turning the lightweight, greasy taste of a summer blockbuster into something more like cardboard.

-Nashville undergoes changes as it prepares for season two.

-Jennifer Westfeldt joins season three of Girls.

-I’ll believe this when I see it, but Steven Spielberg is producing a Halo series for X-Box.

-General Zod has some thoughts for us:

But last week, a good girlfriend suggested I give Lean In a try, and I finished it just as Anne Applebaum published a joint review of Sandberg’s book and Hanna Rosin’s The End Of Men in the New York Review of Books, situating Sandberg’s volume squarely in the tradition of business advice books. Applebaum seems disappointed, as she puts it, that “this is not a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi. It belongs in the business section,” and maybe given some of the hype around Lean In, that’s fair. I’m more than willing to grant that the book has many of the flaws that have been ascribed to it, including a failure to extensively discuss the role of paid help in Sandberg’s work-life balance, the fact that the book is not particularly applicable to working-class women, and its cursory treatment of women in the Third World. But if you are a woman preparing to begin a white-collar job, or to level up from one to the next, Lean In is worth reading precisely as a business book, and not because it has definitive answers for every situation, but as a useful guide for thinking through situations where there is no clear or easy answer—particularly those where women face social obstacles particular to their gender.

Applebaum’s critique of Lean In as business advice—separate from her criticisms of Sandberg’s argument that women in business leadership will create a more supportive environment for the women coming up behind them—has three central tenets. First, that Sandberg’s advice appears contradictory, suggesting that women speak more at some times and less at others, or arguing for women to project confidence they don’t feel in some situations, while being emotionally honest in others. Second, she argues that Sandberg doesn’t provide enough specific detail about her childcare arrangements for other women to model. And finally, Applebaum suggests that Sandberg hasn’t given enough room to discuss factors like luck and her ability to get along with difficult men, like former Treasury Secretary and longtime Sandberg mentor Larry Summers. Those last two criticisms aren’t unreasonable, and it would be fascinating to read Sandberg’s advice for dealing with Summers, but it’s hard to see how knowing precisely how many nannies Sandberg hires would help those of us who don’t have her financial resources. And I think Sandberg would have no disagreement with Applebaum’s argument that:

In practice, a successful woman—like a successful man—must learn, early on, how much emotion to show and how much to conceal, depending on the circumstances. She must learn how much to speak and how much to keep silent, for that depends on the circumstances too. Above all, she must understand herself well enough to know which challenges are worth accepting and which—given her personal situation, her husband, her finances, her interests, her age—must be sensibly refused.

What makes Lean In valuable, particularly for women at the earlier stages of those careers, is that it provides a series of prompts for those of us who are still figuring out what we want and what we can handle, and advice for asking for getting it in a world that often punishes women for behaving like men. Lean In is significantly anecdotal, but those anecdotes serve less as hard and fast rules, and more as thought experiments. In one example, Sandberg relates the advice she gave to Priti Choksi when she was trying to recruit the younger woman to join Facebook:

I explained that although it was counterintuitive, right before having a child can actually be a great time to take a new job. If she found her new role challenging and rewarding, she’d be more excited to return to it after giving birth. If she stayed put, she might decide that her job was not worth the sacrifice. Priti accepted our offer. By the time she started at Facebook, she was already expecting. Eight months later, she had her baby, took four months off, and came back to a job she loved. She later told me that if I had not raised the topic, she would have turned us down.

That’s an idea that may have occurred to women who have already had the experience of having a child and returning to the workforce, as Sandberg did. (In what appears to be a misreading of Sandberg’s definition of leaning in, Applebaum says that Sandberg leaned out for taking a real maternity leave when she had her second child, when Sandberg explains that embracing maternity leave made it easier for her to come back to the job.) But it’s a way of framing that particular question that puts aside concerns about whether a woman might look less than committed for taking maternity leave early in a new job, and emphasizes what will make a woman feel energized, encouraged, and engaged instead.

Similarly, Sandberg suggests a different way to look at the cost of child care. Rather than considering nannying or preschool costs as a dilemma, something that wipes out a woman’s earnings, or that’s discretionary spending to allow a woman to continue doing something that she likes, Sandberg once again reframes the question, acknowledging that “Child care is a huge expense, and it’s frustrating to work hard just to break even. But professional women need to measure the cost of child care against their future salary rather than their current salary…Wisely, Anna and other women have started to think of paying for child care as a way of investing in their families’ future.” Again, I don’t blame any working woman who’s already made these calculations and reached this conclusion for not finding Sandberg’s advice helpful. But for young women, like the one who Sandberg describes quizzing her on work-life balance issues even though she wasn’t pregnant—it turns out she didn’t even have a boyfriend—these kinds of examples are a useful early intervention.

And beyond the question of balancing work and family, an issue that only comes into play for many women once they’ve already put significant work into their careers, Sandberg’s case studies are useful advice for women who are already on board to lean in, but understand that they can be penalized for that desire. Sandberg’s clear that she understands it’s on some level unproductive to continue asking women to play by rules that reward men and punish women for the same behavior, but she suggests that it’s better to give women tools that will allow them to succeed now, rather than to wait for a perfect world. One was she suggests that women should handle the pressure on women to be concerned with a group as a whole rather than with their own success and performance is to negotiate with those values in mind.

“I have advised many women to preface negotiations by explaining that they know that women often get paid less than men so they are going to negotiate rather than accept the original offer,” Sandberg advises. “By doing so, women position themselves as connected to a group and not just out for themselves; in effect, they are negotiating for all women. And as silly as it sounds, pronouns matter. Whenever possible, women should substitute ‘we’ for ‘I.’”

She also suggests that women take advantage of that expectation that they’ll be concerned with others rather than with themselves. Sandberg gives this example:

In 2004, four female executives at Merrill Lynch started having lunch together once a month. They shared their accomplishments and frustrations. They brainstormed about business. After the lunches, they would all go back to their offices and tout one another’s achievements. They couldn’t brag about themselves, but they could easily do it for their colleagues. Their careers flourished and each rose up the ranks to reach managing director and executive officer levels. 17 The queen bee was banished, and the hive became stronger.

In journalism, that’s the guiding principal behind sites like LadyJournos or the newly-launched Journos Of Color, outlets that spotlight the work of female and non-white writers in part so they don’t have to promote themselves on their own. Sandberg may not have definitive proof that women executives make the workplace better for all women simply by their presence. But among the other advice Lean In gives to women, the argument it makes is that if women lean in, we don’t have to do it alone, or in competition with other women as a class. Given all the expectations and double standards women face in a business environment, that’s a welcome challenge to stereotype—and a suggestion that women have strength, resources, and flexibility we may not be taking advantage of.

The company that resurrected Tupac Shakur in the form of a hologram for a memorable 2011 concert, Digital Domain Media Group, actually planned to create a similar digital replica of Presley before it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. And bringing the dead back to reclaim their former glory, with all the profits going to the corporations that own their images, isn’t the only way that this sort of technology could be valuable–and very disconcerting.

If the prospect of someone owning your likeness, your expressions, your voice, and the ability to manipulate those images and audio to make you do or say anything, is odd enough when you aren’t around to see it, or to verify whether or not your image is doing or saying something you’d actually do or say, it’s even more unsettling to consider what it would be like for someone to be able to do those things when you were still alive. That scenario’s precisely what’s at issue in a new movie making its debut at Cannes, The Congress, which combines live-action and animation to follow a fictionalized version of Robin Wright as, on advice from her agent, who believes she’s wasted her career, she allows herself to be digitized and manipulated, in part so she can afford to spend time with her son, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Even without the trippy animation, the trailer gets at how disconcerting it must be to see someone, apparently yourself, do things that you haven’t done–and that you’d never do:

I was particularly struck by this line, when DeGeneres asks “What are we aspiring to? ‘Honey, do these jeans make my butt look invisible?’” It’s a crack that gets at the two options for women in mass-market fashion. If you’re heavier than a size ten, companies like Abercrombie and Fitch, and plenty of actual individuals would like you to disappear so they’re spared the sight of you wearing their clothes in a way inconsistent with their brand, or so they’re spared the sight of you at all. And if you do fit in the acceptable range of sizes, it means you’re within striking distance of shrinking into a different kind of invisibility.

You’d think a mass-market clothing retailer would be proud of its ability to make any consumers look attractive, rather than being very clear that it has no idea what to do with consumers who wear anything larger than a size ten. And you might also think that a retailer that wants to be an aspirational brand might consider whether it’s positioning itself out of the reach of its potential customers it wants to capture.

But what does happen is this: she tells Kirk to look away when she changes, and because he’s Jim Kirk, and apparently desperately needs to try to convince everyone that he’s heterosexual at every possible moment, he looks anyway. Instead of him getting slapped, the camera decides to collaborate in Kirk’s absolute need to see his colleague in her kit, and shoots her from an angle that suggests it’s hovering slightly below her genitals, giving the audience a nice long look at Marcus in her black silk underwear and nothing else, because while apparently we’ll leave poverty in the present, Victoria’s Secret is forever.

All of this is a long way of getting to what Star Trek Into Darkness writer Damon Lindelof told MTV reporter Josh Horowitz when the latter asked why Carol Marcus had to get undressed:

Why is Alice Eve in her underwear, gratuitously and unnecessarily, without any real effort made as to why in God’s name she would undress in that circumstance? Well there’s a very good answer for that. But I’m not telling you what it is. Because… uh… MYSTERY?

It’s this kind of thing that always makes me want to curl up under my desk with the dragon’s egg and Ron Swanson bobblehead on it and rock back and forth for a while.

Because if you’re one of the many wonderful people who consumes or works in genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and wishes that those genres could escape their second-class status because of the work they do to explore big issues and to create great characters, Lindelof is not helping. First, he’s reaffirming every stereotype in the world about geeks who are more likely to see a grown woman get undressed on screen than in the flesh, and who get all cranky and entitled about their need to said fictional characters take off their clothes, story, character, agency, and reciprocity be hanged.

And in a way, I resent Lindelof’s “Because… uh… MYSTERY?” even more than his refusal to seriously engage the question of why he and his fellow writers made that choice, because it shows such a rank contempt for the very things that make science fiction and fantasy so powerful: the ability to build new worlds and new rules. Lindelof and Star Trek Into Darkness director J.J. Abrams have long been known as people who prioritize mystery and grandeur over coherent systems or rules of the universes in which they work, and it’s made them very, very successful. But it’s also what makes their ascension in genres where the rules of the universes in which stories operate are a lot of what make those universes interesting, and how characters navigate those restrictions a major engine of character development so irritating. I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no or few stories have gone before. But if you think that working science fiction and fantasy relieves you of your obligations to coherent plotting and character behavior, or if it’s an engine to deliver free naked ladies, then you can stay in your mom’s basement, and off my bandwagon.

-NBC has closed the inevitable loop and ordered a scripted show about a reality series.

-I’d be curious to see what folks think of James Fallows’ take on Kevin Spacey.

-Crime spree in Cannes.

-Tim Goodman, preaching on the practice of burning of unaired TV shows.

-I am terrified by the number of people who might not recognize the extent to which this is a parody:

Politico reported yesterday that Alpha House, the Garry Trudeau-created pilot about a group of Congressmen living together in a townhouse in Washington, DC that’s based on a 2007 New York Times story about real-life legislators who are roommates when they’re in the District of Columbia, has become one of the first shows to be picked up by Amazon as part of its attempts to expand into original content development. It doesn’t shock me that Amazon pulled the trigger on Alpha House, which, if nothing else, let the company lock down John Goodman for a show, a move that follows the playbook laid out by Netflix in its splashy signing of Kevin Spacey to star in its remake of the British series House of Cards. But Alpha House was far from the strongest of Amazon’s adult-oriented pilots (it’s also testing shows aimed at children). And even if Amazon isn’t doing a traditional development process like its competitors in broadcast television, it would be wise for the service to consider taking a page from the networks’ playbooks and consider revamping the show a little bit before its full launch. Here are five suggestions for how to make Alpha House shine.

1. Make The House Bipartisan: One of the dullest decisions in the original pilot of Alpha House was to make all members of the house Republicans, and to make them all risible. Goodman’s Gil Joh Biggs, a do-nothing incumbent from a rural district who teaches Louis Laffer (Matt Malloy), an obviously closeted social conservative, to shoot in the basement, and signs them both up for a trip to Afghanistan when they attract Tea Party challengers and need to look tough. Clark Johnson plays Robert Bettencourt, an African-American Congressman who’s mostly in in for the donations from defense contractors—in one scene, he gives Gil John his notes from a filibuster speech so they can both go on the record saying nice things about the same giant corporations. And Mark Consuelos plays andy Guzman, a recently-divorced freshman who’s schtupping the founder of a Super PAC. All in all, it’s nothing we’ve seen before. But if Alpha House can sharpen the characterizations and give us a fresh take on what bipartisanship actually looks like, it could be refreshing and funny.

2. Lose The Lazy Do-Nothing Politicians Cliches: Alpha House‘s pilot makes a mistake common to many Washington shows: assuming none of its characters have actual passions or interests in policy, and that they’re good at manipulating the system, but not at doing anything of substance. But the show should take a lesson from Parks and Recreation, which has only gotten better as its main character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) has become more competent, and as her success has posed an increasing challenge to the worldview of her libertarian supervisor Ron Swanson. Apathy doesn’t go anywhere. But genuine interest and accomplishments that threaten the priorities of other members of the house would be constant plot fodder.

3. Beef Up The Staff And Spouses: Right now, Alpha Dogs staffers and spouses fall into two categories: the beleaguered chief of staff and wife who try to get Gil John to do anything to stay in office, or enablers, like Bettencourt’s chief of staff or Guzman’s sexy bundler. Giving these characters more personality shading would make it clearer why the main cast loves the house as much as they do, and would create tensions within it. I already can’t wait to see what the preparations look like when Gil John’s wife shows up for visits.

4. Give The House Neighbors: The only story than the original Times reporting on the Congressional frathouse was the news, broken several years later, that Rahm Emanuel, while he was serving as President Obama’s chief of staff, lived in an illegal rental unit in Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and her husband, political strategist Stan Greenberg’s basement. Stories about families of whatever variety are always better when you’ve got great neighbors, whether its the Flanders on The Simpsons, or sad FBI agent Stan Beeman’s total unawareness that his raquetball-and-motel-drinking buddy Phil Jennings is a Soviet spy on The Americans. This could also be a way for the show to get some ideological balance if Amazon plans to air the original pilot as is.

5. Explain Why The Characters Love Not Just The House, But Washington: Pop culture loves to bash Washington, DC as a third-rate swamp of corruption. But there’s a lot to love about the nation’s capital, and it would be nice to see Alpha House play on the tension for men who not only have left their families behind to pursue politics, but in some cases, are leaving rural districts behind for a more cosmopolitan area with a lot of amenities. This could also be a nice way to flesh out the members’ personalities beyond their stereotyped beginnings. Maybe have Gil John, in addition to shooting mattresses in the basement, be super-into his local Fresh Farm market, or have Bettencourt be irritated that since the beginning of the Obama administration, he can no longer sneak off to Ben’s Chili Bowl.

One of the stars of “Game of Thrones” is refusing to appear in any more nude scenes, according to a cast member.

“One of the girls in the show who got her [dress] off the most in the first couple of seasons now doesn’t at all,” Oona Chaplin, who plays the noblewoman Talisa Maegyr on the show, told reporters in London over the weekend.

“She said, ‘I want to be known for my acting not for my breasts.’ ”

Chaplin refused to say which actress it is.

I absolutely support any actress who doesn’t want to do nudity, particularly given the disparate pressure on women to take their clothes off on-screen, and how often that nudity is used as fan service rather than for narrative emphasis or to grow characters. But I do think it’s depressing that we’re at a point where actresses feel that they’re faced with a choice: getting nude, even when said nudity might provide an important character moment or punctuate a scene in a moving way, or be taken seriously. Game of Thrones, in its first several seasons, particularly through its use of sexposition—sex scenes that appeared in the show to make more visually, er, stimulating, scenes where characters explained backstory or politics—helped make that feel more like a choice.

But it’s done a great deal in this third season to make nudity equal-opportunity across genders, and more importantly, to demonstrate that you can be naked and do serious acting. Seeing Brienne of Tarth lunge, nude, out of a bath to confront her antagonist and former prisoner, Jaime Lannister, wasn’t about presenting her body for our consumption as a sex object, but to demonstrate that she wasn’t afraid to be naked in front of a man who had sexually shamed her for loving a king who would never want her. Seeing Robb Stark and his wife Talisa naked together after a bout of marital sex was a display of their intimacy and comfort with each other, as well as the fact that they were still in the early stage of their relationship, when their nudity was still novel to each other. And seeing Jon Snow stripped of his furs was also to see him stripped of the vows he swore as a member of the celibate Night’s Watch: wildling Ygritte’s seduction of him rendered him emotionally and physically naked.

Getting naked is a serious business, something that happens consensually between adults, non-consensually a way of victimizing someone and making them feel powerless, non-sexually as a way of demonstrating comfort, or necessarily to provide care to someone who is vulnerable. Nudity can be funny without making the person who is nude risible, and sensual without making the person who is naked an object. That we still have trouble with those ideas suggests we have a lot to learn as viewers, and that our popular culture has to be more precise in the way it teaches us to absorb the nudity it puts on screen.

The death—or diffusion—of the television water cooler has been much ballyhooed. But NPR’s Elizabeth Blair did a great segment on how word of mouth still helps build television, where the conversations about episodes have migrated, be it Twitter or the AMC’s post-episode chat show The Talking Dead, and was kind enough to have me on to talk about Scandal and how the labor law episode of The Good Wife got people who I hadn’t seen discussing the show dissecting it on social media for the first time:

She mentions something else that’s worth remembering, which is that some shows like NCIS, which get huge ratings, don’t really show up on social media at all. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a word of mouth discussion of the show, it’s just taking place in arenas where it isn’t necessarily visible and quantifiable. It’s fascinating how we assumed the existence of the water cooler for so long without being able to see it on a more than experiential level, and as soon as something more tangible came along, it became easy to reduce the physical water cooler conversation to the ephemeral thing it always was. But the simultaneous success of a show like Scandal, which made itself essential viewing in the time slot in part by making the ability to participate in the real-time social media conversation about it, and the longevity of something like NCIS provides a useful rule of thumb for talking about the television business right now. The old ways are far from dead, and the shiny new ones are far from triumphant, so it’s not a matter of choosing between them—instead, we have to keep an eye on both.

Kanye West’s debuted a new song, “New Slaves,” for a mass audience on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and as an art project last Friday, projecting a video for the song on buildings in London, Chicago, New York, and Sydney. Among those locations was the Prada store Fifth Avenue:

It’s a fitting choice of venue, given that “New Slaves” is a complex discussion of unpaid, bonded labor, and American consumer culture. At Salon, Natasha Lennard has a great discussion of the facts behind a central section of West’s lyrics in which he raps about the rise of private prison companies that pay prisoners far below minimum wage that’s in part become successful because of the demand for incarceration created by the War on Drugs:

Yeah they confuse us with bullshit
Like the New World Order
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See that’s that private-owned prison
Get your piece today

But where the track gets both more psychologically perceptive and less comfortable is in West’s look at the way African-Americans are treated in the luxury consumer market, and what it means to join a class dominated by people who do things like put black men in prison for profit. At the beginning of the song, West teases out an important dichotomy that explains how racism changes, but doesn’t dissipate, as African-Americans acquire wealth and the social capital that often accompanies it:

You see its broke nigga racism
That’s that “don’t touch anything in the store”
And there’s rich nigga racism
That’s that “come in and buy more”
What you want a Bentley, fur coat and diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things
Used to only be niggas
Now everybody play me
Spending everything on that Alexander Wang

Having money makes you valuable, but that’s a very different thing from being considered respectable, or even an individual. But while the insight is unique, Kanye’s lyrical solution to it is…not so much. Instead of targeting, say, Corrections Corporation of America founders Tom Beasley, T. Don Hutto and Doctor Robert Crants, or the private prison company’s current board chairman, John Ferguson, or its president and CEO Damon Hininger for their corporate decision-making, or Drug Enforcement Administrator Michele Leonhart for her policy-making, “New Slaves” ends with a cheap, nasty fantasy of sexual revenge. “They prolly all in the Hamptons / Braggin’ ’bout they maid,” West reflects of the DEA and CCA. “Fuck you and your Hampton house / I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse / Came on her Hampton blouse / And in her Hampton mouth.”

Even if you think it’s important to prioritize the analysis of racism in “New Slaves” over the song’s dip into misogyny, it’s hard to deny how useless it is to turn away from the real structural targets of West’s critique to a dream of shaming powerful men by sexually dominating their wives, or how much that fantasy plays into the demonization of black male sexuality. Even if the lyrical supply chain West is constructing here between slave-picked cotton and his own consumption of Alexander McQueen clothes is striking, particularly when offered on this scale, the idea of seducing and sexually dominating your rival’s partner is one of the oldest, stalest threats in the book. And for a song that starts with memories of West’s mother generation and the historical experiences of black women, there’s something oddly amnesiac about fantasizing about exerting control over your enemies through sexual control of their wives.

One of the reasons Yahoo bought Tumblr is simple: it was available. Facebook bought photo-editing-and-sharing app Instagram last year, a move that made sense given Facebook’s focus on social distribution of information, particularly of images. The bulletin-board service Pinterest pulled in a $200 million round of funding in February, but it’s not clear that the company would be open to a sale, or even if it were, that Yahoo would have been interested in the business model, given the uncertain path from getting revenue out of Pinterest. Various estimates seem to be putting Twitter’s value between $9 and $10 billion, and the company seems more likely to opt for an initial public offering than to sell out to another social media or internet company. Facebook’s IPO is a year old. Of the large social media companies examined by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, that left Tumblr as the property available to Yahoo if it wanted to buy another popular service.

But even if there had been another appealing property on the block—and speculation continues to swirl about whether another company will buy Hulu—Tumblr would still have been appealing for two reasons, one a hard figure, one a perception. The first is that 13 percent of internet users aged 18-29 told Pew that they use Tumblr, a figure that suggests that an enormous number of Tumblr users could be coming online in coming years. The second is the perception that Tumblr is a female-driven service. That isn’t quite accurate. That same Pew study found that 6 percent of both male and female internet users report that they’re on Tumblr, though the sample Pew used is slightly weighted towards women, surveying 956 women out of 1,802 total respondents. But whatever the actual numbers, the perception is that Tumblr has a female-heavy user base (as well as a strong LGBTQ one).

So when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.

Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.

-Anything that means more America Ferrera on television is good news to me.

-Apple hits 50 billion app downloads.

-Get ready for a content boom in Hollywood.

-Pairing up the Game of Thrones characters with OK Cupid.

-It cannot be Anchorman 2-o’clock soon enough:

In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.

Disputes like this one highlight the extent to which making PBS reliant on private charity calls into question the meaning of “public” television. A state of affairs in which television content is determined by the government is obviously undesirable and subjects programming to a partisan agenda in a way that would serve members of both parties ill by turns, and the public poorly at all times, given how timid the content choices would likely be. But a “public” television regime that’s established to give extremely wealthy people another way to buy programming power other than by purchasing affiliate stations is “public” only in a business sense, rather than serving a broadly-defined public interest.

PBS president Paula Kerger offered a potential definition of that public interest at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, when she explained that:

As governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson proposed that we establish state funded libraries so that people could freely access new ideas and information. Until then, books were mostly sheltered in private collections and shared only among the wealthy or the privileged. This access to ideas was at the heart of our founders’ vision of democracy, a country founded by the people and for the people, where every citizen had the opportunity to be informed and have a voice in the future of our country. Nearly 200 years later, our public broadcasting system continues to carry out the spirit of our founders’ vision, using our nation’s airwaves to educate, engage, and inspire all Americans. The value of our mission was certainly called into question over the last few months, and once again the American people spoke out to highlight the importance of our work.

Open access to information is an important issue, and it’s critical to remember that simply archiving that information isn’t enough: we need means to distribute that information to people who would like to use it, or don’t necessarily even know it’s out there to be accessed at all. Low-cost, low-reliability solutions like Wikipedia have been able to rely on small donors. The challenge for a higher-cost, higher-quality operation like PBS is finding a sustainable funding mechanism or mix of mechanisms that are all truly committed to that mission.

In a series of interviews — including one on camera Friday — for an ESPN The Magazine and espnW.com story set to hit newsstands later this month, Griner said her silence during college was because Mulkey and her staff were concerned about the program’s image.

“It was more of a unwritten law [to not discuss your sexuality] … it was just kind of, like, one of those things, you know, just don’t do it,” Griner said Friday. “They kind of tried to make it, like, ‘Why put your business out on the street like that?’”

But Griner reiterated on Friday that her sexuality was an open secret at Baylor.

“I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,” Griner said. “I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.”

It’s unfortunate that Baylor basically told Griner that her sexual orientation was no big deal—as long as, by their definition, she didn’t make it that way. And her experience raises interesting questions about what it means for a person to be out of the closet, particularly if their lives are bifurcated between their personal social experiences and a national role.

Baylor’s question, as Griner phrased it, “Why put your business out on the street like that?” speaks to the difference beween so-called tolerance and actual acceptance of LGBTQ people. In the absence of confirmation that someone is gay, they’re assumed to be straight, in part because that’s an assumption that makes people who have little experience with gay people more comfortable. Heterosexuality isn’t “business” that makes anti-gay people uncomfortable to encounter. It’s a neutral default. And because of that assumed neutrality, heterosexuality isn’t something that it’s possible to be “out” about. It’s presumed to be visible even if a theoretically heterosexual person isn’t actually dating someone in a way that publicly confirms their sexual orientation. Heterosexuality can only be disproved. Homosexuality or bisexuality, by contrast, aren’t necessarily visible to a casual observer who chooses not to see the possibility that a figure like Griner could be gay. But that LGBTQ people have to confirm their sexual orientations, at this point, says as much about outsiders who assume they must be straight as it does about LGBTQ people themselves.

And it’s that dynamic that upsets the long-established narrative of coming out particularly for public figures. If Griner was out to her friends, family, and potential partners at Baylor, is the fact that a national audience didn’t know or think that she might be gay on her, or on that audience? Coming out has been framed as a triumphal process, both for the person who finally gets to acknowledge their true identity in public after suffering under pressure to hide, and for people who benefit from the knowledge that there are happy gay people in, say, college sports. But conversely, there’s something frustrating about the idea that Griner, who was out to people who know her in real life already, has to inform a national audience who assumed she was straight by lazy default that, no, actually, she’s gay. It’s great that Griner’s willing to use her experience to educate a national audience about what it’s like for a talented gay woman to coexist with an institution that has openly homophobic statements of principals on its books. But that her experience still seems novel enough to merit news coverage says less about her courage, and more about the lack of imagination of viewers at home who hadn’t bothered to think about Baylor’s treatment of gay and potentially gay players until Griner stepped forward.

If last week’s Game of Thrones was a meditation on what makes for a good relationship between romantic and sexual partners, or between friends, this week’s episode narrows its focus to ask what makes a good friend. It’s a question that gets introduced in a conversation between Arya, who’s sulking that her attempt to run away has lead her into the custody of a man who’s on her kill list, but who she doesn’t quite have the courage to try to take out. “There’s no one worse than you, she tells the Hound as they ride towards a river so placid that it seems the war has never touched them. “You never knew my brother. He once killed a man for snoring,” the Hound tells Arya, before moving from the specific to the general. “There’s plenty worse than me. There’s men who like to beat little girls. Men who like to rape them. I saved your sister from some of them.”

“Second Sons” has many reminders that the men from that terrible day in King’s Landing aren’t alone, and the bloodlust that griped the crowd isn’t the only thing that can move men to downgrade consent. Mero, the commander of the Second Sons, the sellswords hired by the Yunkish slavers to keep Dany out of their city, immediately moves to try to make Dany feel powerless by sexualizing her. First, he tells Dany he’s sure that he had sex with her in Lys—and suggests that she’s a prostitute, not a leader of her own people. “Take your clothes off and come and sit on Mero’s lap and I may give you my Second Sons,” he tells her jovially, then asks to see her vagina as the measure of whether she’s worth switching sides to support. He sniffs at the genitals of Missendi, Dany’s translator, and warns both Dany and the younger woman that “The Second Sons share everything. Maybe after the battle, we’ll all share you. I’ll come looking for you when this is over.” Sex for someone like Mero isn’t just preferable when the woman doesn’t really have agency. It’s a way to deny women agency in the first place.

And Essos mercenaries aren’t the only people who downgrade the consent of the women they have sex with. “I’m a mistake,” Gendry reflects of his parentage on Dragonstone. “I’m only here because my father grabbed my mother instead of the next girl in the tavern.” And Robert Baratheon’s son in name if not by blood shows off his nasty streak again at Sansa Stark’s wedding to Tryion Lannister when Joffrey tells Sansa that his engagement to Margaery Tyrell hasn’t shifted his interest from Sansa, and makes clear that her marriage to Tyrion Lannister doesn’t bring her under protection meaningful enough to give Joffrey pause. “Congratulations, my Lady,” he tells her in a sickening tone. You’ve done it. You’ve married a Lannister. Soon you’ll have a Lannister baby. It’s a dream come true…It doens’t really matter which Lannister puts the baby into you. Maybe I’ll pay you a visit tonight after my uncle passes out. How’d you like that? You wouldn’t. That’s all right. Ser Meryn and Ser Boras will hold you down.”

But if Sansa’s life and sexuality remain under threat, at least she’s been lucky enough to marry a Lannister with some decency. First, her father-in-law Tywin Lannister betrays some of the only gentlness he’ll ever show anyone when he tells Joffrey, “I believe we can dispense with the bedding,” a tradition in which the bride and groom are stripped naked by guests of the opposite gender and put to bed together to consummate their marriage. Then, Tyrion, her husband (who objected to the bedding, but who needed Tywin’s help to stop it), tells her “I won’t share your bed. Not until you want me to.” Sansa asks him tentatively “And what if I never want you to?” Painful as that must be for Tyrion, and drunk as he is, he handles her sexual rejection with humor if not grace. “And so my watch begins,” Tyrion raises his glass to his bride, swearing the same vows as the men of the Night’s Watch he visited back when the peace still held.

In Yunkai, Dany turns out to be lucky enough to have encountered a sellsword company that, while lead by an outrageous misogynist, includes a leftenant who likes his women willing, and considers the pursuit of a beautiful woman a philosphical end. “The Gods gave men two gifts to entertain ourselves before we die,” Daario Naharis explains his worldview to the commander he’ll shortly kill. “The thrill of fucking a woman who wants to be fucked. And the thrill of killing a man who wants to kill you.” The first men he dispatches is Mero, offering up his service and himself in a rather bold move to Dany. Whether she takes him up on the second part of the package remains an open question.

Misogyny isn’t the only way a man can be cruel or kind, of course, though it’s often paired with other kinds of indecency. “Is your father cruel, like mine?” Gilly asks Samwell Tarly beyond the Wall, after Sam tells her that he’d rather she not name her baby boy after Sam’s own father. “Different manner of cruel,” Sam tells her, referring to her own father, Craster. But in truth, Craster and Randyll Tarly’s nastinesses have a similar foundation in hatred of women. Craster sees women as utterly subordinate to him, in every way, no matter their relationship to him, his daughters turning into his wives, and unavailable to other men, much less having choice and agency of their own. And what Randyll Tarly hated in his son was what he perceived as Sam’s womanishness, his preference for books and music over blood. Wanting to hardness femininity when it appears in women and destroy it when it appears in men are both ways of hating it.

And the treatment of women can be a proxy for the way you treat other people without power, a question Stannis Baratheon is contemplating on Dragonstone after Melisandre brings him Gendry, and he believes her means of sacrificing him means murder. “Forgive me, I’m not a learned man, but is there a difference beween kill and sacrifice?” Daavos Seaworth asks his King when Stannis visits him in prison. “You came to me now before this boy is put to the knife becuase you knew I’d counseled restraint. You came to hear me say it becuase you believe it yourself. You’re not a man who slaughters innocents for gain or glory.” Gendry ends up sexually and physically victimized, seduced by a woman who ties him up and drains his blood to cast curses on kings. But he survives the ritual, Stannis’ mercy a crooked compromise, but more than is afforded to many of the women in this war of many kings.

This is the second in a series of posts, corresponding with horse racing’s Triple Crown, examining safety issues facing the sport. Part one appears here.

When nine horses leave the gates at Pimlico in the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown Saturday afternoon, they will mark the end of a sporting era. For the last time, the Preakness Stakes will be run under medical and drug testing rules that are set solely by the state of Maryland, thanks to an agreement among eight mid-Atlantic and northeastern states that will set uniform medication and drug testing standards beginning in 2014.

The compact, agreed to by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Massachusetts, is the result of push to bring some uniformity to horse racing’s medication and drug rules that has lasted for nearly a decade, years in which the sport has faced questions about both performance-enhancing drugs and therapeutic medications used to treat horses both in the days leading up to races and on race days themselves.

Horse racing banned the use of anabolic steroids in 2008, when Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown tested positive for Winstrol, a performance enhancing drug, and runner-up Eight Belles collapsed shortly after the finish line and was euthanized on the track. But other drugs, mostly therapeutic in nature and used to treat routine injuries, are still wildly prevalent, raising questions in an American industry that is dealing with higher rates of catastrophic breakdowns and fatalities among its horses than its foreign counterparts — and a general lack of data and research into how to improve it.

“Racing fatality rates in the U.S. are two- to three-times higher than other major racing countries that don’t allow phenylbutazone and other drugs,” Dr. Rick M. Arthur, the equine medical director at the University of California-Davis and the California Horse Racing Board, said at The Jockey Club’s annual meeting last year. “My international colleagues have no doubt our medication policies, especially in phenylbutazone, are the cause of this disparity. I’m not convinced it is that simple, but there is no question medication regulation is the most glaring difference between U.S. and other major racing countries.”

The eight-state compact is not the first major step toward addressing and improving the medication of horses in the United States — in a business regulated on a state-by-state basis, states have made their own adjustments to which drugs can be used and when they can be administered. But the compact is the biggest step in streamlining the process and standardizing medical practices and drug testing across state lines. With the help of scientists and experts across the industry, the eight states identified 24 drugs that are “appropriate for therapeutic use in racehorses to treat illness or injury” and set standards for when they can be administered and how much of the drugs can be present in a horse’s body on race day. It also identified other drugs that cannot be present in a horse on race day under any circumstances.

“It makes infinite sense,” Alan Foreman, the chairman of the Thoroughbread Horseman’s Association, said of the compact he helped develop, noting that the eight states to which it applies make up 60 percent of the national horse racing industry and are home to 18 racetracks within a 200 mile radius. The goal is to create uniformity in the regulation and testing of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which are common therapeutic medications, and corticosteroids, another form of anti-inflammatory often used to treat joint degradation and musculoskeletal pain. That will make it easier for horse owners and trainers to comply with rules as they cross state lines, and, according to Foreman, it will give American horse racing the “strictest drug testing system of any sport in the world.”

It could also make the sport safer for its primary participants — the horses.

“There’s never been a study that can link medication, especially therapeutic medication, to breakdowns,” Dr. Dionne Benton, the executive director of the Racing Medication Testing Consortium, which was instrumental in the development of the eight-state compact, said. “That’s not to say there isn’t a connection, but it’s never been shown. The goal of this program is to reduce the number of medications used in horses when they’re close to being raced.”

Where therapeutic drugs fit into horse safety, though, is in the evaluations of horses before they race. NSAIDs and corticosteroids are still important to treatment and maintenance of horses when used similarly to how human athletes utilize anti-inflammatories and pain medications. But when they are used too close to race day, and when horses have an excessive amount of the drugs in their system on race day, they can prevent veterinarians from fully evaluating the soundness of a horse that is about to take the track.

“Our goal is to allow the vet to treat the horse, then come back and see how the horse responds before sending it out to race,” Benton said. “We want the vet that’s evaluating the horses to have the best picture of the horses possible. We want to give them the tools to do the best job they possibly can.”

Such drugs can’t mask an injury like a fracture, she added. “But you can make a horse that’s a little sore look better. If the vet doesn’t see that, they can’t make an evaluation of how serious it is.” By decreasing the levels of drugs like phenylbutazone, a popular NSAID, in a horse’s body near race day, Benton said, “we’ve been able to improve the view the vet gets.”

The task force convened by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) after the state’s Aqueduct Park suffered an alarming increase of race-related fatalities came to a similar conclusion, saying that “the use of these medications too close to the race may have limited the ability of the (New York Racing Association) veterinarians to identify the presence of pre-existing conditions disposed to progressing to catastrophic injury.” The task force recommended better regulations of corticosteroids and other therapeutic drugs by reducing the amount allowed present in a horse on race day, which in practice increases the number of days before a race that such drugs can be administered. When Aqueduct’s 2013 spring meet ended in April, the number of catastrophic breakdowns was down more than 60 percent, Foreman, who participated on the task force, said.

“There were other reforms implemented – it wasn’t just the corticosteroids,” Foreman said. “But clearly those recommendations helped to cut down on the breakdowns. No question about it.”

Still, the eight-state compact will apply to less than a quarter of the 38 states in which horse racing takes place, leaving some of horse racing’s biggest epicenters uncovered by the new drug standards. The RMTC, though, has been pushing other states to join the compact, and Foreman is confident that some will before the standards first begin going into effect in January.

“We are now taking it beyond the region, and I am very confident that Kentucky, California, Illinois, Texas – I think the major racing states are going to embrace this program in the coming months so that they are in line with us in implementing it on January 1,” he said. “I am very confident you are going to see this program grow across the country and become the mechanism for a uniform medication program in the United States.”

A national uniform standard has been a goal for regulators and horsemen alike. The hard part is coming up with standards on which they all agree.

“Everyone wants national standards, but the hard part is deciding what those standards are,” Benton said. “In many ways they’re very similar, but in other cases, there are some significant differences. Everybody thinks their way, what they’re used to, is right. It’s going to take some compromises, and it’s not an easy process.”

Developing those standards, as the RMTC and other regulatory bodies continue to do, could provide a innumerable benefits to the sport. The standards will lead, Foreman said, not only to national medical and testing standards, but also to national cooperation on failed tests by horses owned or trained by the same horsemen in different states. And they could, in the end, result in a giant step forward for an business still trying to figure out how to best take care of its horses.

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.

The difference, then, might not be between the wildest dreams African-American and white prospective college students harbor in their hearts, but the risks and costs associated with pursuing them. The black-white wealth gap that has expanded dramatically over the last quarter century means both that there are fewer African-American families who can, as Serena and Venus Williams’ father, and as Bryce Harper’s parents did, did, devote the resources into turning their children into professional athletes—and who have the resources to get their children back on an academic path if those efforts fail. It may be easier to call for African-American students and their families to put aside unrealistic dreams in a commencement address than it would be to address the entire architecture of inequality that makes pursuing such dreams a riskier proposition for African-American families than white ones, just as pursuing a basic education once was. But building what Mrs. Obama called “an even better future for the next generation of graduates from this fine school and for all of the children in this country,” means building the right to dream big, and to fail and to find a new path, not just to walk the straight and narrow one.

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.

And whatever else torture is, Theon’s destruction is systematic. Theon’s first made to feel ignorant, begging “About what? I don’t know what you want!” when asked to tell an unspecified truth. His position is stripped from him. “I’ll make you a Lord of the Iron Islands for this,” he tells a man who poses as his rescuer before revealing himself to be the architect of Theon’s misery. “We’re not in the Iron Islands,” the man reminds him blandly. Theon, who once had a reputation for his sexual appetites, discovers that in war, being male doesn’t guarantee you either sexual happiness or sexual autonomy when one of his captors threatens him with rape in retaliation for an escape attempt. His expectations that anyone will be merciful are slowly dismantled. “Water. You want some water?” his main torturer asks Theon, then tells him “I wish I had some for you,” while pouring out the water on the floor. And bit by bit, his corporeal body is pared away, first a finger Theon begs the man to cut off after it’s been flayed, hoping amputation will relieve his pain, and then his genitalia, taken from him as a way of robbing Theon of the part of his identity that’s bound up in his sexual prowess. “No, mercy, please. Mercy, mercy,” Theon cries as his emasculation approaches. “This is mercy,” his torturer tells him. “I’m not killing you. Just making a few alterations.” It’s an efficient and nasty definition of what torture is, not an intelligence-gathering technique, not a tool that must only be used occasionally with great regret, but the process of turning someone into something else, and often something less. And Game of Thrones is making sure that its audience understands the full weight of that process.

Homeland, the War on Terror drama from Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, the creators of 24, that’s set closer to home in both time and proximity has made a similar point over its first two seasons. One of the main characters, suspected double agent Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), is tortured twice. First, after he is captured by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), Brody is forced to fight his fellow captive Tom Walker (Chris Chalk) until—he believes—he has killed the other man, and then he is required to bury Walker himself. He is held not just in solitary confinement, but in a windowless cell, for an extremely long period of time, until he is released into the custody of Nazir, who gives him food, introduces him into Islam, and most importantly, entrusts Brody with the care of his son Issa. After Brody returns to the United States and declines to carry out his suicide mission, he comes into the custody of the CIA, where an analyst stabs him in a hand. That treatment, in both cases, may not meet the Bush administration’s definition of torture as treatment that results in “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” but it is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

And in both cases, Brody’s experiences as a survivor of torture are critical to building sympathy for him and understanding of his motivations. Brody was a loyal soldier, rather than an inherently evil man—which is often the way terrorists are understood in the public imagination—before Abu Nazir used torture to shape him into a terrorist. And after he decided not to carry out an attack on the Vice President and much of the military leadership of the United States, hoping instead that he could satisfy Nazir and change American policy through his work as a member of Congress, the CIA pursued and tortured him anyway. Homeland eventually became a more baroque show as the second season wore on, and Brody was blackmailed into murdering the Vice President anyway. Without that twist, Homeland might have been a more focused show about the consequences of torture, acts that lead Brody to betray his home country, his family, and his oaths of service, and then, after he had tried to reestablish his loyalty, exiled him from it.

On Scandal, torturers can also be torture victims. In the first season of the show, the hyper-competent, power-drill-wielding Huck, played with enormous sensitivity and menace by Guillermo Díaz in what is now one of the most underrated performances on television, was mostly the tool of last resort in fixer Olivia Pope’s (Kerry Washington) kit. This year, we saw him become the victim of torture twice. First, after he was framed for the attempted assassination of Presidential Fitzgerland Grant (Tony Goldwyn)—this being a soap opera, the real killer was a woman Huck met in the AA meetings he meets to handle his addiction to murder, instilled in him by his handlers at the CIA—Huck was beaten and waterboarded in an attempt to force him to confess. But unlike the ticking time bomb scenarios in 24, the terrible blow against the nation was in the past, rather than hovering menacingly in the future, and torturing Huck produced no useful information about the author of that act, because he had none to give.

Later, in a devastating episode, “Seven Fifty-Two,” we learned that this was not the first time Huck had been tortured. Huck has long had an obsession with watching placid-looking American families, and “Seven Fifty-Two” explained why: he was once a soldier with a lovely girlfriend, before he was recruited to join a secret torture-and-assassinations squad. During his time with that squad, and against regulations, Huck managed the trauma he was forced to inflict on other people by throwing himself into that relationship as a form of balance and penance. He married his girlfriend, cried with joy when she had their child, and kept his drill and his plastic sheeting safely at the office. But when Huck’s family was discovered by his boss, he was separated from them and thrown into a hole in the ground until he was so broken that he denied their existence. And when Huck repented, he was abandoned by the agency, yet another homeless, mentally ill veteran dumped onto Washington’s streets.

In the season finale of Scandal, Huck, his humanity somewhat restored to him, falters when he’s asked to torture a man to get information about the location of a card that holds data that proved the existence of a vote-rigging scheme that tilted the presidency to Grant. “I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t,” he tells his colleague Quinn (Katie Lowes). “But she needs the card. Liv needs the card.” Sensing his desperation, Quinn grabs the drill and plunges it into their captive’s thigh. The man eventually tells them the number of a safe deposit box where the card is held, but it turns out his suffering and Quinn’s moral compromise have been in vain: the card in the bank is a decoy. Later, Quinn, herself a victim of brainwashing and identity theft, talks ecstatically about her first experience torturing another human being. “Watching him beg and scream, it was such a rush,” she tells Huck. But instead of applauding her, Huck slams a door in Quinn’s face and retreats to the darkness. He’s passed the ability and willingness to torture her like a disease.

And even when torturers don’t themselves become the victims of tactics similar to those that they employ, the experience of torturing other people is presented as profoundly damaging in Zero Dark Thirty. Dan (Jason Clarke) begins the movie as a jovial torturer who calls his victim, Ammar (Reda Kateb) “dude” and “man” with a repulsive familiarity, and shows little concern for his colleague Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) mental health as he uses her presence to sexually humiliate Ammar and enlists her help in waterboarding him. But Dan’s work eventually burns him out and he leaves for Washington, DC, telling Maya “I’ve seen too many guys naked…I’ve got to do something normal for a while. You should come with me. You’re looking a little strung out yourself.” I wouldn’t say Dan exactly redeems himself by switching from stuffing men in tiny wooden boxes to buying corrupt rich boys yellow sports cars with CIA money, a transition that doesn’t precisely involve truth and reconciliation, but it does provide a key, and torture-free, break in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Maya never quite takes his advice, and after she identifies bin Laden’s body, she finds herself utterly alone.

Howard Gordon, the 24 creator who went on to make Homeland, which has a rather different perspective on the War on Terror, with his partner Alex Gansa, told the New York Times that Bauer “has evolved through the years, and this new and exciting event series format is perfect to tell the next chapter of his story and continue to reflect how the world is changing.” I imagine that Huck and Quinn, Maya and Dan, Carrie and Brody, and Theon Greyjoy and the Boy, all might have an idea or two about those changes, and where Jack Bauer fits within them.

-I have no idea how it possible to commit adultery with Netflix, but apparently we are all at risk!

-Writing dramas about the military.

-On being a Kanye West fan at a Kanye West concert.

-The CW is the latest network to try to make a Wonder Woman show.

-Emily Blunt might be the Baker’s Wife in Into The Woods.

I wanted to thank Kerensa Cardenas of Women In Hollywood for flagging this interview with Lucy Liu in, of all places, Net-A-Porter magazine, which is wonderful in part for Liu’s real talk on race in Hollywood. She brings up two separate issues that I think are equally important to acknowledge in the conversation about how to make Hollywood a place that represents the world more accurately, and that, as a result, tells more kinds of stories.

First, Liu points out from her own experience that there are cultural barriers that discourage people from certain backgrounds from going into the entertainment industry in the first place:

Growing up in the bustling New York borough of Queens, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she admits to being frustrated by her parents’ initial lack of support. They were highly educated, forced to do menial jobs in their new country. Her parents struggled, she explains, and they didn’t want the same for her. “After their struggle, they just really wanted to see me struggle in a different way, in a more obvious way, maybe something they could understand – she’s at college struggling, but then she will be a banker or a doctor. They understood that.”

It’s easy to talk about getting people access to similar opportunities once they decide they want to go into entertainment, but it’s worth acknowledging that people from different backgrounds, or different economic circumstances, may need different kinds of support if they’re going to make movies in the first place. If you have student loan debt, for example, you may not be able to take free internships. And creating stable opportunities for people at the early stages of work in entertainment may make it easier for people in different family situations to give it a go.

And Liu mentions the obvious truth that Hollywood puts actors into lanes, and that one of the ways the industry determines what those lanes will be is to use race or ethnicity:

Liu is proud of her achievements, but admits she gets annoyed when people can’t – or won’t – think of her outside of that “action” box: “I wish people wouldn’t just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add race to it, and it became, ‘Well, she’s too Asian’, or, ‘She’s too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It’s a very strange place to be. You’re not Asian enough and then you’re not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.” Liu’s wary of playing the racism card, but admits that she had to “push a lot just to get in the room”. “I can’t say that there is no racism – there’s definitely something there that’s not easy, which makes [an acting career] much more difficult.”

It’s notable that either Net-A-Porter or Liu referred to this relatively basic observation, one which is factually grounded in Liu’s filmography, as “playing the race card.” It’s a long-standing canard that Hollywood is a liberal place because so many celebrities are affiliated with Democratic candidates and broadly progressive causes, but one of the clearest boundary markers of the limits of that liberalism is the idea that talking about race or racial inequality might be seen as selfish complaining or invite retaliation. It was striking last summer at the Television Critics Association, for example, to see Lance Reddick carefully but clearly acknowledge that being African-American has obviously shaped the parts available to him, even as many actors are quick to suggest that the industry that employs them is color-blind, all empirical evidence to the contrary. For all that Hollywood likes making products about the crippling effects of racial inequality, when those events are historical or based in a different industry or set of institutions, it’s telling that people who work in entertainment still have to worry that talking about race will get them labeled difficult, demanding, or in some way ungrateful.