(Credit: AP)

In addition to student fees, athletic programs are relying more on money from general university budgets, so taxpayers are also spending millions of dollars a year to cover shortfalls as athletic budgets continue to grow faster than academic budgets. But as Vedder noted, and as this chart from a study by the Delta Cost Project shows, that isn’t happening at the biggest, richest athletic programs, with a few notable exceptions. Rather, it becomes a problem in the bottom half of the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) and gets worse in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) and at non-football Division I schools:

That may make it seem like we’re dealing with two separate problems when we talk about college sports, then: one at the biggest schools, where amateurism and paying college players is the biggest issue, and another at the smaller schools, where rising budgets and increased student subsidies are the biggest problems. But those problems might actually be linked, because as Sports On Earth’s Patrick Hruby has reported, amateurism and tax-exempt statuses of athletic departments have increased costs and inflated budgets at the biggest schools. Small schools don’t have to keep up dollar-for-dollar, but the inflation still trickles down because they operate in the same market when it comes to recruiting, facilities, and coaches. Unlike the large schools, though, they don’t have TV networks and revenue streams to cover the growing costs.

Defenders of the NCAA status quo aren’t wrong when they assert that smaller schools probably can’t afford to operate in a system that compensates players. But is that really a bad thing? Ending the amateurism ruse would separate the athletic departments that can afford to participate in such a system (and despite their claims, most of the biggest schools can) from those that can’t compete in a system that includes schools like Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio State. That reality would let smaller schools exchange the big-budget recruiting trips, the expensive cross-country game travel, and the shiny new facilities of the current system for a model that treats intercollegiate sports like the extracurricular activities NCAA defenders say they are. Because while the big business of college sports is thriving at the top and would continue to do so even if athletes are compensated, treating sports as a business clearly doesn’t make sense in the middle or at the bottom of Division I. Right now, though, there’s more incentive to ask for subsidies than to accept a scaled-back athletic program.

Schools argue that they use sports to attract students, and thus subsidizing sports is a smart use of their resources. But that doesn’t really work. Data show that national championships boost enrollment, but most of these small schools aren’t competing for national titles, and Vedder notes that 72 percent of students in a recent poll said sports had an “extremely unimportant” or “unimportant” role in their school choice. So if Florida Gulf Coast is relying on a lightning-in-a-bottle Sweet 16 run every March to survive as a school, or if Appalachian State needs a once-in-a-lifetime upset to attract students, that’s an indication not that they need sports but that they’re running a misguided operation. And fleecing unwitting students and taxpayers to prop up a bad business model doesn’t make any sense at all.

-How rock explains income inequality. I wonder if this economist factors in the fracturing of the genre?

-Sounds like Dan Harmon’s ego is in all-too-healthy shape.

-The case for banning steroids in baseball.

-The first reality stars: astronaut’s wives:

It’s absolutely true that Man Of Steel is much less concerned with the budding relationship between Superman and Lois Lane than in Clark Kent’s self-actualization and Lois’ insatiable curiosity, though there is a smooch, and a discussion of whether superheroes do it better. But reading Matt’s review, I realized that I was fine with that. In fact, unlike Matt, for which it was a decided and unwelcome abandonment of tradition, I was so relieved to see any break in the portrayal of superheroes’ love interests that it probably upped my overall assessment of the movie. I’m so burned out on the way superhero movies treat romance that I’d actually be relieved by one that leaves out the prospect of a climactic kiss altogether.

What is it that women do in superhero movies, after all? If they’re Pepper Potts, you act as a dutiful assistant, waiting to be noticed, then run Stark Industries faithfully while your boyfriend runs off to save New York, get ignored as Tony Stark navigates PTSD, then remembered when someone else expresses romantic or sexual interest in you, get kidnapped, get superpowers, and get divested of said superpowers. If you’re Jane Foster, you pursue obscure astronomical research, fall for the hunky guy who crash-lands out of the sky, get saved a lot, and get shipped off on fellowships to be removed from possible danger, since apparently Thor couldn’t just call her up and say “please get out of town for a while and when this is all over you and I can hit up a resort.” If they’re Peggy Carter, they’re feisty and then dead of old age. If you’re Black Widow, things are a little bit better: you get cocktail dresses that can apparently stand up to delivering an ass-kicking, you get to hang tough through an interrogation with a very cranky god, and you, unfortunately, get to beat the hell out of your brainwashed maybe-love interest before rewiring his brain correctly. If you’re Rachel Dawes, you get to be Batman’s moral compass, and in the process, get drugged and then burned to death. If you’re Catwoman, you get to rob and lecture Batman before he delivers unto you your actual purpose, and then runs off to Paris with you. If you’re Talia al Guhl, you get to honey trap Batman, while having a much more interesting backstory with Bane that gets filled in by two minutes of dialogue. In other words, over and over again, you get to participate in a man’s self-actualization.

Don’t any of these guys have male friends who are non-employees, unlike Happy and Alfred, with whom they could shoot the breeze or work through a few more of their issues? What about women friends or coworkers who aren’t there simply to be love interests? That might be a way for the Marvel universe, at least, to make use of the dramatically under-utilized Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill? If superheroes are supposed to be possessed of tremendous will, couldn’t they take care of some of the self-actualization their own selves? I am exhausted by watching talented actresses get cast as the little women to very big men, not just because it’s sexist, but because over and over again, the narrative arc of these origin stories is exactly the same, whether the origin is of the superhero’s powers, or of his relationship with the love interest who helps him manage them.

If we’re going to be clobbered with two or three superhero movies a year into infinity, as seems to be the case, we are desperately in need of new narrative frameworks for stories about these characters. Just as it’s gotten exhausting and poisonous for superheroes and their antagonists to destroy enormous swaths of cities without facing any apparent moral or legal consequences for the mass death and property damage they’re causing, it’s exhausting to see their interactions with women be essentially the same time after time, without any growth or sense of what a settled relationship between a superhero and a human with her own interests might look like. It was what made Tony and Pepper’s argument over the hideous giant rabbit he got her for Christmas in Iron Man 3 simultaneously so appealing and sad: it was an actual conversation about their relationship, and one that revealed that Tony knows precisely nothing about the live-in girlfriend who is running his company.

Maybe it’s time to start treating superheroes as a category of characters, and mashing them up with genres, rather than treating the presence of a superpowered person in a movie as a factor that automatically causes certain comic book conventions to lock into place. A genuine superhero romantic comedy, unlike the poisonously uncharming tripe that was My Super Ex-Girlfriend that gets at how superpowers might affect the manifestation of supercharged emotions would be a way to recharge the flailing romcom trope. A procedural involving superheroics and actual law, like an adaptation of Powers, which I fear is dead at FX, or my personal dream project, a She-Hulk movie or television show, that treats superpowers as something that need to be constrained and kept under control, rather than unleashed in the service of gleeful destruction, would get at new psychological dimensions of superherodom, as well as of key questions in crime procedurals, like the treatment of police brutality and evidence obtained without warrants. Screwball could put superheroes in a position where they aren’t immediately admired, and need to win over someone, often a competent woman, with something other than a super suit.

And really, though most unrealistically given Hollywood’s predilections, what we need is superheroines. There’s nothing like giving a woman a lot of power to make people newly attentive to the importance of gender equality. Just as no one expected Bill Clinton to keep house for his wife while she was Secretary of State, it’s hard to imagine a superheroine movie where She-Hulk or Wonder Woman’s boyfriend’s main function is to look cute, where his work as a scientist or a high-powered corporate executive is less important than his squeeze’s ability to save cities, and where he’s left hanging out at home, misunderstood and ignored while she’s off being a badass. And sure, some of that is because of sexism: Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and the God of Thunder would never get judged for prioritizing their own superpowered careers over being good partners in the same way a paired-up superheroine would, and they’d never get penalized for playing the field in the way She-Hulk gets criticized by her fellow Avengers for partying in the “Single Green Female” arc. But maybe seeing that you can stage some bone-crunching fights and pay actual attention to the domestic lives of super-people all in the same film would be a reminder that while their majority audiences might be men, you can still sell them on the idea that it’s aspirational to have all kinds of fully-developed relationships with women.

The World Cup has become a symbol of corruption and overspending in the country. Brazil, originally slated to spend less than $1 billion in private funding on soccer stadiums, has already spent more than $3 billion, most of which has come from public funds. Meanwhile, schools and hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, infrastructure is crumbling, and income inequality is rising as Brazil’s minimum wage remains low. The money spent on the World Cup, the protesters say, would be better spent on efforts to help ordinary Brazilians.

Though there were small pockets of violence during demonstrations in some cities, the vast majority of the protests remained peaceful, according to local news reports. Here are pictures from Monday’s protests:

An estimated 100,000 protested in Rio de Janeiro. (Credit: AP)

An estimated 30,000 Brazilians flood the streets of São Paulo. (Credit: AFP)

Brazilians protest for spending on hospitals and schools instead of the World Cup. (Credit: @AnonNewsDE)

Protesters amass in front of Brazil's National Congress in Brasilia. Sign reads: "Cup for whom?" (Credit: AP)

A Brazilian police officer pepper sprays a protester in Rio de Janeiro. (Credit: AP)

Brazilian protesters in the streets of São Paulo. (Credit: Globo News)

Protesters dance on the top of the Brazilian National Congress in Brasilia. (Credit: Globo News)

But would you be able to tell any of this from the first trailer?

I recognize there’s more to come, but I’d be curious if parents in the audience are as irritated as I am by the idea that the best way to sell children on a movie is with the most disposable parts of it, the relatively non-narrative, slapstick comedic relief provided by the less-intelligent sidekick characters?

By contrast, the initial trailer for The Little Mermaid in 1989 lead with Ariel’s voice, and with the plot–the fact that you’d heard her singing meant that when the movie got to a key plot point, the fine print of her deal with Ursula, we were invested in getting her voice back because we’d heard how fine it was. And Disney wasn’t afraid to lead with the music, which won an Academy Award, a Grammy, and the soundtrack as a whole went triple platinum.

Ditto with Beauty and the Beast:

Both of these trailers have problems of their own–Ariel and Belle have qualities other than being beautiful and young, something both previews emphasize the first time we see them on screen. But they both trust that parents and children might be interested in a single film, and that children can handle and be drawn in by actual narrative and characterization. If a “family film” is to be something other than ninety minutes of animation parents can use to narcotize their children, it would be nice if those movies were sold with some respect for children, and some expectation that they have something to offer that parents and children can talk about together.

This post discusses the final two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

The last two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars center on the two central mysteries that have threaded their way throughout the year: who raped Veronica at that party? And who killed Lilly Kane? But though those questions have very different answers, they center on a similar problem. How do you be a decent person when up against social pressure, fear of losing your class status, addiction, or even rotten parenting?

There are a few good people in Neptune. Weevil may not be able to resist baiting Logan, when he chases after Veronica, who’s become convinced that Logan was responsible for her getting roofied at that fateful party, even if he didn’t actually dose her himself. “When they run away like that, it’s kind of a hint they’re not interested,” Weevil taunts the more privileged boy. “I”m just looking out for Veronica. So if you think you’re going to lay a hand on her the way you did Lilly…” And when Logan falls back on class to try to assert his dominance in the conversation, Weevil has an answer for that, too. “What’s worse?” he asks Logan. “Thinking Lilly had feelings for me, or that she was using me for sex?” Weevil may be stuck in an ugly and unproductive war of words with Logan, with whom he’s feuded since the first episode, but it’s remarkable to see how consistent Weevil’s support for Veronica has been. He’s one of the only boys her age who appears to want remarkably little from her, who doesn’t ask for anything in return, whether he’s trashing Logan’s car back at the beginning of the show, or only wanting to know “You okay?” when he picks her up from the Ecchols’ house after she discovers the camera in the guest house.

He’s not the only person who is decent out of proportion to public perception. As Veronica uncovers the story of what happened to her at the party, an unexpected voice of conscience shows up in the form of Beaver. “She’s actually kind of hot, when she’s quiet,” the odious Dick declares of Veronica, who is passed out in bed after a GHB-laced drink. “She’s not willing, Dick,” Beaver tells his friend, who is encouraging him to have sex for the first time with a woman who can’t possibly consent. “She’s unconscious.” That he knows the difference, that he, like Weevil, asks “Veronica, you okay?” marks Beaver as one of the boys in Neptune who appears to have picked up a rudimentary moral education, even if he leaves her there passed out in bed and ends up vomiting outside, rather than ensuring her safety.

But so many other people in Scranton appear to have been so deeply failed by everyone who should have taught them how to behave. The implications of those failures are clear in Veronica’s agonized confrontation with Duncan. “Carrie said she walked into the guest bedroom and you were naked and on top of me. You were the one who raped me,” Veronica tells him. “You were there too, you know,” Duncan tells her, complicating the narrative Veronica thinks she’s assembled of that terrible evening. “I thought we had some unspoken rule, like we were never going to talk about it, but now I raped you?” It turns out that he was also drugged and believed what happened between them to be consensual, but that Duncan left because he panicked: “You’re my sister! And I knew it!” The Kanes have been more concerned with making sure that Veronica doesn’t stake a claim to the Kane estate than with finding out whether or not their suspicions about her parentage are true, so they can find out the truth for Duncan, as well as for themselves. And when Jake tells Duncan that “You did it, son. You had a fit. You killed your sister,” it turns out they’ve been more concerned with protecting Duncan’s reputation than–if they really believed he killed Lilly–in helping him face the consequences of his actions, deal properly with his grief, and make amends in his community. Their desire to protect him has ended up causing him great injury.

If the Kanes have almost drowned their son in privilege, Aaron Ecchols turns out to be a monster who wants to use his son to put on displays of decency when it suits him. He cooks crab cakes without having any idea that Logan is allergic, forgets his son’s birthday, and, oh yes, turns out to be having an affair with said son’s girlfriend, Lilly Kane, and willing to use violence against her when it suits him. We’ve seen a lot of kinds of privilege this season on Veronica Mars, but it’s hard to think of something more disconnected and vain than Aaron’s belief that it’s fine for him to literally lock Veronica in a refrigerator and set it on fire because “I’m not going to let a 17-year-old piece of ass ruin my life.”

After all that’s happened between Aaron and Logan this season, the belts, the beatings, the idiot posing at the front gate, the death of Logan’s mother, it’s hard to believe that anything could be sadder. But then, we get to the way the show illustrates all the little ways in which the father failed the son, and the son fails other people as a result. Logan’s not incapable of being decent, but his sense of what’s the right thing to do, and whether or not he can be the person to do it, is often misguided. “What can I do? What can I do to make it better?” Logan wants to know when Veronica tells him she was raped and that she believes that he obtained the GHB that drugged her, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s not in a position at that moment to act on her behalf. There’s something awfully stunted about the idea that Logan gave the drugs to Duncan because he wanted to pep his friend up, and Veronica quickly shoots that idea down. “Fun, like sex with unconscious people fun?” she wants to know. When he ultimately confesses that “I just wanted Duncan to have some fun. He barely even smiled since Lilly died. I’m the one that’s responsible for what happened to you. And I can’t take that I hurt you like that,” it’s an admission that’s more about him and his feelings than Veronica, but at least he understands that he did something wrong on at least one level.

Even then, though, Logan isn’t operating in an environment that allows him to do the right thing on a consistent basis. When Aaron throws him a belated surprise birthday party that’s meant to make up for years of neglect, but that ends up outing Veronica and Logan as a couple to people, like Dick, who has been a consistent tormenter of Veronica’s, and who Dick isn’t sure he even wants to be friends with anymore, Logan does the stand-up thing. “Please tell me this is some new reality show called ‘My Skank,’” Dick wants to know. “Bye, Dick. Get out of my house,” Logan tells him. “If you have a problem with Veronica, you have a problem with me. Actually, if you have a problem with Veronica, you’re pretty much dead to me.” But when Veronica discovers that she’s being taped, courtesy Aaron’s screwed-up proclivities, rather than Logan’s, she flees the house. Privilege, if you’re a teenager, doesn’t mean you can escape your parents’ influence entirely, and Logan is more ensnared by Aaron’s twisted morality than he knows.

That’s true for Veronica, too, though she’s lucky enough to have one decent parent. Keith’s willing to trust her and to test her with the Kane’s offer to pay him the reward as long a she gives up any claim to their fortune, but there’s such joy and relief in his voice when he tells her “You didn’t sign away a thing. Veronica, I am, without a doubt, your father.” Given the material harm Veronica’s mother is willing to do their family, stealing not just Veronica’s college fund, but Keith’s reward check, Veronica is particularly fortunate to have a father who performs the actual functions of an adult in a child’s life, including protecting her, loving her, and requiring her to be responsible for her actions.

Given how well Veronica Mars deals with the living people in its frame, there’s an interesting ambiguity to Veronica’s reverie, in which she dreams a permanent reunion with Lilly. “This is how it’s supposed to be,” Veronica tells her dead friend. “And this is how it’s going to be from now on.” But Lilly knows herself better, it seems, than Veronica does, and tries to prepare her living friend for their inevitable separation. “You know how things are going to be from now on, don’t you?” her shade asks “Don’t forget about me, Veronica.” “I could never,” Veronica promises, but what will she remember? The beautiful, wild girl from the memorial video that brought Veronica and Logan together? The secretive, intriguing ingenue from the car wash, who created an air of complicity with Veronica, but concealed so much from her? The spoiled young woman who was willing to hurt her boyfriend by sleeping not just with a poor Mexican-American, but with Logan’s own father? In the world of Veronica Mars, the living can be held responsible, but the dead belong to those who remember them, as the keepers of their memories want to remember them.

The labor agreement between workers and management ended at the beginning of June, but the union held out hope it could reach a deal that maintained workers’ health benefits without a strike. The new agreement maintains the “current level of health insurance benefits without significant increases in worker premiums,” according to the release. VF Majestic had sought to double the amount workers paid in health care premiums, but under the agreement, workers will instead shift onto the union health plan. That will avoid cost increases for both workers and Majestic. The agreement also grants the workers “reasonable cost-of-living” pay increases for workers whose average wage is less than $11 an hour, according to SEIU.

The players who wear the uniforms made in the factory were supportive of the workers, as the Major League Baseball Players Association came out in support of their efforts to maintain benefits in May. MLBPA Executive Director Michael Weiner told the workers to “stick together so that you can achieve…a fair contract with good wages, good health care and respect on the job.” Of the players’ role in the process, Weiner said, “We take seriously our role as a union.”

“The members of the PA Joint Board, Workers United SEIU greatly appreciate the support they received from the Major League Baseball Players Association and look forward to working with VF to keep the MLB equipped with uniforms that are made in America,” David Melman, manager of Pennsylvania Joint Board of Workers United, said in the statement.

Labor law limits what unions like the MLBPA can do to assist other unions involved in disputes or negotiations, but it has in the past spoken out on behalf of workers. It publicly opposed the push for an anti-union “right-to-work” law in Michigan last fall, telling ThinkProgress at the time that it “all union members — either auto workers, teachers, firefighters, or the American League champion Detroit Tigers — oppose legislation designed to weaken unions.”

Last week, NPR’s Linda Holmes did the math on movies that were screening in the Washington, DC-area on Friday, and calculated that of the 617 movie showings on the calendar, 90 percent of them were for movies about men, and only one of the movies in theaters was directed by a woman. And this is in a major metropolitan area.

“I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot,” Holmes wrote. “There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one. There are not any.”

This is terrifying not just because of what it says about how limited the choices for consumers are, particularly in the dude-heavy summer blockbuster season, or about failures of the movie market that don’t seem to happen in, for example, book publishing. Holmes’ piece scared me not just because of what it says about how Hollywood studios and Hollywood filmmakers think about women, or because of what these numbers suggest about how the rise of the international film market is making female characters less valuable, though those things are depressing too. Actually, I think the idea of women literally fading from our movie screens like Hermione Granger from the photos in her parents house after she casts a spell on them to erase herself from their lives scares me most because it means we could waste an outrageously talented generation of young female actors on the rise.

What about Brie Larson, who played an open-hearted popular girl in 21 Jump Street, is a hilariously sullen teenager who turns out to be surprisingly perceptive in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s forthcoming directorial debut Don Jon, and whose turn as a social worker in Short Term 12 is supposed to be so good that it’s rivaling Pacific Rim and Elysium as my most-anticipated movie of the summer? What about The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook star Jennifer Lawrence, who can shoot a bow, nail a dance competition, and has eyes that can alternately hide anything and reveal everything, even and especially emotions characters don’t want to see? What about Chloe Grace Moretz, who can be enchanting and kind, as she was in Hugo, or a literal or metaphorical monster, as she was in Let Me In and the Kick-Ass franchise? Or Abagail Breslin, who was so winningly un-self-conscious in Little Miss Sunshine, who ran away with Definitely, Maybe, snaffling it from Ryan Reynolds every time she was on screen, and who gets to be Valentine Wiggin, one of the better characters in young adult literature, next? How about Quvenzhané Wallis, Oscar-nominated for her performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild–what might she do in a more conventional Hollywood project like the remake of Annie, in which she’s meant to star?

Is the purpose of these girls and women to grow up to be kissable objects in stories about the self-actualization of men? Why, exactly, are we supposed to care more about self-fashioned superhero Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) than the adventures of Hit-Girl (Moretz), raised to be a superhero by her father, after she becomes an orphan? Is Breslin fated to become the girl whose beauty is revealed once her glasses are removed and she’s subjected to a convenient makeover, rather than someone spiky and interesting enough to rock out on stage with her grandfather or to become an internationally influential blogger at twelve? As Lawrence moves beyond her early twenties, will we see her spending more time being the means by which damaged men heal themselves, as she was in Silver Linings Playbook, rather than as a superheroine who embraces radicalism, or the instrument of national liberation she plays in the Hunger Games franchise? Are we supposed to be satisfied if Wallis grows up to be a reasonably age-appropriate love interest for Jaden Smith? After dumping an eligible but dull boyfriend in The Help, is it progress for Emma Stone to get chucked off a bridge to further the necessary traumatization of Spider-Man?

None of this means I’ll stop praising a movie like Man of Steel for letting female characters keep their clothes on and giving them actual work to do. Movies about actual men shouldn’t be afraid to have actual women as characters, rather than pliant objects lingering in the wings, waiting to be noticed and bedded. But woman cannot go to the movies on Lois Lane alone, even if she boosts the number of female ticket-buyers who will turn out for a superhero flick. It would be an awful shame for a generation of tremendous young actresses to come of age, only to be slotted into a series of positions and functions that makes them the on-screen equivalent of fifties housewives, serving up support for male characters like a martini before Chicken Kiev.

-Amazing pictures of the Second Avenue Subway construction.

-Paul Feig’s cultural influences.

-Hipster DC Superheroines.

-Natalie Portman might fight some people.

-I am totally in favor of Blumesday.

-Jon Snow’s eighties training montage:

Brazilian protester holds sign reading, "Health And Education, Not The Cup" (Credit: BBC)

Brazil unveiled the slogan in 2012. It lasted just more than a year before the Brazilian people replaced it on the world stage, unofficially, with a new one: Nos não precisamos da Copa do Mundo. More than 2,000 protesters took that message — “We don’t need the World Cup” — to the streets Saturday outside Brasilia’s Mané Garrincha stadium, where the Confederations Cup, a pre-World Cup tournament, was set to begin. The protests were part of larger movement that began last week across the country, and others followed during Sunday matches in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. They are expected to continue Monday and throughout the Confederations Cup.

Not all of the protests are tied directly to the World Cup: Brazilians rallied throughout last week against fare hikes on public buses, and in Fortaleza, bus drivers called a strike in a fight for higher wages. Activists under the name “Change Brazil” are trying to bring the issues to light around World Cup festivities, producing videos outlining their causes, while other unnamed groups have circulated fliers asking foreign tourists to avoid attending the World Cup next year. The unifying message of the protests is clear: a country with faltering infrastructure, low wages, crowded hospitals, and a crippled education system should be spending money not on soccer stadiums but on efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Brazilians.

At each protest, police showered protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Hundreds have been arrested and dozens injured. The police have, at times, acted “arbitrarily and violently,” according to the Brazilian defense minister.

Mané Garrincha is the symbol of Brazil’s World Cup excess. Opened in 1974, it was deemed inadequate, unsafe, and in need of major renovations for the World Cup. Brazil’s World Cup bid said the country would spend less than $1 billion, mostly from private financing, to renovate seven stadiums and build five more. But Mané Garrincha’s renovations cost $750 million alone, while the total cost of the 12 stadiums is expected to exceed $3 billion, almost all of which has come from the public. Mané Garrincha is the most expensive stadium construction project in Brazilian history.

Meanwhile, the public works projects that were supposed to accompany the World Cup have stalled, with many delayed or canceled, and protesters and activists say politicians and World Cup promoters are ignoring the country’s deeper problems. More than 80 percent of Brazil’s schools are inadequate, according to government watchdogs, and its students rank below average in all three areas of educational attainment monitored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In some cities, 70 percent of the water supply goes untreated, and Brazil’s public hospitals are overcrowded. And while Brazil’s minimum wage raises annually, it stands now at roughly $315 a month (the average monthly rent in Brazilian cities tops $400 a month).

If the sparkling soccer and the magnificent stadiums tell the story of the Brazil soccer promoters want to showcase, the protesters are telling the story Brazil and the world are trying so desperately to ignore. Despite claims of a coming economic bonanza, the World Cup cannot and will not solve the problems facing millions of Brazilians: crumbling schools, low wages, poor health programs, and increasing inequality. And so the tournament will fail to live up to the ambitious motto it set for itself, because the Brazil that wants the World Cup and the Brazil that knows it doesn’t need it can’t possibly exist all in one rhythm.

Image courtesy Tumblr.

It’s also raised questions about whether the celebrity photographers who captured images of the events should have intervened to help Lawson. The debate over whether photographers and other journalists should be willing to take action after they’ve photographed people in danger, or whether they should take action rather than photograph people in danger, is hardly limited to paparazzi, or to situations where violence is imminent or occurring. Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the galvanizing image of a small, starving girl being stalked by a vulture in Sudan during the terrible famine there, was sharply criticized for not making sure that the girl reached a feeding center, though he did reportedly chase away the vulture watching her. In other words, this sort of reaction isn’t just limited to celebrity gossip or to the much-reviled paparazzi. Perhaps because photography is so visceral, it’s hard for some audiences to see images of an obviously news-worthy event like the Sudan famine, shot by a hard news photographer, and understand why someone would capture images rather than try to save a starving child, even if photographing that child will do important, long-term good in terms of mobilizing public action and changing public opinion.

But while it’s easy to think that the paparazzi should step in, even if we don’t like to acknowledge that they might be bound by journalistic ethics not to intervene, however loose, it’s harder to tell if, in Lawson’s case, they actually could have done any good. The photograph of Saatchi’s hand on Lawson’s throat is frightening. It captures her choked expression, her face filling the frame. But that doesn’t mean the person who took it was actually close to her, just that they had access to good telephoto lenses. By the time they put down a camera, got into the restaurant (where they might not have been allowed in any case), and attempted to intervene on Lawson’s behalf, Saatchi could have taken his hands off her, or already done whatever harm he intended to do. In the interim, there were people in the restaurant with Saatchi and Lawson, some of whom have already talked to the press about how upsetting it was to witness the incident, and who might have been in better proximity to intervene on Lawson’s behalf if they thought she was in real danger. It’s fun to talk about the evils of the paparazzi. But when domestic violence, if that is indeed what this proves to be, takes place in public, bystanders, not just photographers, have obligations as decent human beings, too.

One section of the novel follows a fictionalized version of Mary Frances Gerety, the ad writer who worked on the DeBeers account, and who is responsible for the ad slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” It’s obvious that Sullivan has done an enormous amount of research into Gerety’s life, but rather than creating vibrant scenes that bring us into Gerety’s work, we’re treated to passages that read more like school reports. Early in the novel, Sullivan writes that “Frances had just finished writing the newest De Beers copy, a honeymoon series with pictures of pretty places newlyweds might go— the rocky coast of Maine! Arizona! Paris! And something generic for people without much money, which she labeled By the river. In a way, that one was the most important of them all, since they were trying to appeal to the average Joe.” Frances is someone who tells us rather than shows us how excited she is to live alone, that she dresses like a man and drinks brown liquor like one because that’s what it takes to get ahead in the advertising agencies of the 1950s and 60s, and wonders aloud about getting old alone. But she’s so burdened with the responsibility to convey historical information about DeBeers, as well as to deliver the basics of a counterpoint to Mad Men that might have made a more interesting section if Sullivan was willing to write more naturalistically about her.

The other stories in The Engagements follow a series of couples from up and down the class spectrum, from James, a Cambridge EMT who’s become obsessed with upgrading his wife’s wedding ring even as a hole develops in their ceiling, to Kate, who’s guarding the rings for her cousin’s extremely expensive wedding to his fiancee. All of these couples have been affected by Frances’ work in ways that include, but aren’t limited to these feelings about their jewelry.

James has been obsessed with the diamond he can give his wife Sheila since they became engaged during the Vietnam war, in part so if James was drafted, they’d at least have had the experience of being married. “No matter how piss poor his delivery, he knew the diamond would communicate something that words couldn’t. A woman wanted a diamond,” he reflects. “It meant you were serious, committed for life. He proposed on the seawall at Wollaston Beach, and Sheila cried out in surprise as he got down on one knee, as if the whole thing hadn’t been her idea.” Later, buying her a larger diamond becomes a way to compensate for what he feels are his failings to her as a provider and as a father to their children. “Her friends, who she had felt so superior to back then, had seen their average-looking husbands grow into men with money and power, the sort of guys who took them to the Bahamas for an anniversary, or out to dinner in town every Friday night. And what did Sheila have?” James tortures himself. “The formerly handsome teenager who had failed to live up to his potential.”

Delphine, a Parisian woman whose story is set three decades after James’, becomes deceived by a different kind of sparkle, when, several years into a happy marriage with her husband Henri, with whom she co-owns a rare instruments store, she leaves him for P.J., a talented American musician who buys a Stradivarius violin from her husband. Delphine’s close relationship with her father, and his conviction that she is extraordinarily special has left her with a longing for something spectacular. “It was absurd that she had not had a boyfriend to speak of since university, and that boyfriend was now married with two children, and living in a vineyard in Bordeaux, while she still managed to get her heart broken every year or so; a hopeless romantic with a taste for unkind men,” she reflects. “It was absurd that she was thirty-three and yet still unsure about what to do with her life. It was absurd that her father, the best and strongest man who had ever lived, was now dead and buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, where cats and American tourists regularly walked over his grave.” When P.J. comes along, bringing both his brilliant musical performance and a strong sexual connection, Delphine is entranced, and decides to abandon her more settled, but satisfying, existence with Henri. But after she moves to New York for PJ., she discovers that she’s bought herself a chunk of glass, rather than a real diamond. “His focus had been on his music for so long that other parts of him were dead from disuse, or had simply never developed,” Delphine comes to understand. “He wasn’t particularly bright or cultured, and he wasn’t sensitive.”

And bookending the vignettes about couples are Evelyn and Kate. Evelyn, who’s been lucky to fall in true and enduring love twice, is shocked by the arrival of more casual attitudes towards marriage in her own life, in the form of her son Teddy’s request to his wife for a divorce. When she gets the news, Evelyn “could feel her heart crack like a thin sheet of ice.” When Teddy comes to visit Evelyn and her husband with his new girlfriend Nicole, one of the ways Evelyn’s horror at the situation manifests is in concern over the state of her diamond engagement ring. “She was probably imagining that one day it would be hers,” Evelyn thinks when Nicole complements the piece. “The thought made Evelyn want to run outside right now and toss the ring into the pond, just to make sure that this woman would never wear it, even for a second. Evelyn thought briefly of giving it to Julie anyway, divorce or not, though no doubt she would refuse it, even if Evelyn tried to persuade her to keep it for the girls.”

Kate, by contrast, is horrified by the prospect of marriage. “The fall of her sophomore year at UVM, she took a class called ‘The History of Marriage,’ in which she learned that, historically speaking, marriage wasn’t about love at all. It was essentially a business transaction,” Kate remembers. After graduation, she goes to work for a human rights organization that works on issues including labor abuses in the diamond industry, and Kate becomes obsessed with the subject. “She found it harder than ever to let go after that meeting,” Sullivan writes. “She read everything she could on the topic. When she saw a woman wearing diamonds on the street or at the movies, she wanted to pull her aside and start reciting all the awful statistics.”

Like Frances, Kate is more a vehicle for information, though about how DeBeers gets its diamonds rather than how the company marketed them, than an actual person. But she also raises a larger issue about Sullivan’s writing, particularly with regard to feminism and activism. Kate cares desperately about an enormous number of issues, but she’s so affected by them that she’s almost paralyzed, and the purity of concern leads her to alienate, rather than to convince, her relatives who can’t possibly live up to her standards. Sullivan writes that:

The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from— their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/ or bearable. Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.

But despite all of these feelings, Kate does relatively little to actually live out her principals. She quits her job at the human rights organization and goes to live in the country where she and her partner Dan, who have decided not to get married, and to raise their daughter with organic food, gender-neutral toys, and progressive principals. But when her cousin Jeff’s wedding to his partner Toby arrives, Kate feels angry and hopeless about her inability to resist participating in the ceremony, and by the way her daughter is drawn to a princess-y flower girl dress, nail varnish, and make-up.

Commencement, Sullivan’s superior first novel, featured a similar activist character named April, whose commitment to a radical feminist filmmaker she goes to work for after graduation leads her to take an action that’s both tremendously self-destructive and terrible for feminist activism. At the behest of her employer, who has effectively colonized her entire life, April agrees to go under cover as a sex worker, and to fake her own kidnapping to demonstrate that the media will pay more attention to missing white women than women of color. It’s a choice that draws her friends into a panic, and ends up taking attention away from real crimes against women of color who do sex work in the neighborhood where April pretends to vanish.

Sullivan was a reporter and wrote extensively on feminism before she began writing fiction full-time, and I fully understand the need to exorcise both the frustrations with tactically compromised feminist actions, and how overwhelming it can be to live consciously in a world that seems determined to throw up obstacles to living conscientiously. But there’s something worrisome about the way her characters who want to make a difference in the world end up coming across as angrier, less socially functional, and frequently more alienating than anyone else in Sullivan’s novels. Is there no joy, no self-actualization available to characters who try to create domestic arrangements with greater integrity and equality than the ones they experienced as children, no victories available to the people in Sullivan’s novels who work for a better world?

These are important questions, because for all that The Engagements suggests that the work Frances does to promote diamond engagement rings, and the financial expectations for marriage and gender dynamics that go along with those jewels, have done an enormous amount of harm, Sullivan doesn’t have much to offer in the way of alternatives, except for a gay wedding that temporarily prompts Kate to shelve her bitterness and stand up for her family. In The Engagements, diamonds are forever, because that’s what Frances Gerety, a woman who clung fiercely to her own single independence, was paid to sell us. And there may be little we can do to escape the curse she gave us, that in an odd twist, is presented as a kind of feminist triumph for Frances, if not for the rest of us.

Given how infrequently Leonardo DiCaprio does comedy, I’ll be fascinated to see the full results of The Wolf of Wall Street, his new period movie about the finance industry, especially since DiCaprio will be going up against Matthew McConaughey, who is on quite a roll when it comes to a deep commitment to roles that might otherwise seem impossibly goofy:

Given the rich storytelling implications of our current financial crisis, sketched out brilliantly in movies like J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail–one of the best features to air on that network in several years–and somewhat less-well in the over-the-top Richard Gere morality tale Arbitrage, my initial reaction to the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street was to wonder why we were getting a period piece about the recklessness of the eighties, rather than a meditation on a new set of failings. But I wonder of the result of financial chicanery, not the details of that chicanery itself, is precisely the point of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Hollywood, driven by an “aspirational” aesthetic that affects everything from Bravo’s upscale reality television programming to the kind of decision about sets that makes it seem reasonable for four people in their late twenties and early thirties working in lower-wage white collar jobs to live in a giant loft on New Girl, has gotten very good at making us covet the wealth we see on screen, and even to equate wealth and taste with morality. So if you were to tell a story about callous people working in finance in a contemporary setting, and show them amidst the trappings of their wealth, be that getting to the Hamptons by helicopter, or a Damien Hirst dot painting in their living rooms, we might get distracted by what we’ve been taught to see as class from the way the movie wants us to see the character. But a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, that wants us to see both the moral rot in the tactics by which its main character is pursuing millions, as well as to see the tackiness of his broish enthusiasm for spending that money, needs to go back in time to a moment we can’t help but see as horribly un-chic, where what was once mistaken as taste or panache can only come across as horrifying.