Matthew Jent is a writer from the Midwest now living in Southern California. His fiction and memoirs have appeared at The Fanzine and The Longbox Project and reviews and criticism have appeared in Publishers Weekly and The Beat. He <a href="http://matthewjent.blogspot.com">blogs</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/matthewjent">tweets</a> as best he can.
By Matthew Jent
Post-9/11 TV: How Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, and The Wire Dealt with Catastrophe
Couples TV: The Shows We Watch Together, The Shows We Watch Alone
Bill Cosby: Loving the Art, Hating the Artist
From Interstellar to World War Z: How Much Does Scientific Accuracy Matter?
Has Facebook Become the Barometer for What's Real in Our Lives?
Survivor: 14 Years of Problematic Depictions of Women
Why Almost Everything You Know About Star Wars Is Now Wrong
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"disqusTitle": "Post-9/11 TV: How Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, and The Wire Dealt with Catastrophe",
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"content": "\u003cp>On September 11, 2001, a hole was torn in the fiction of eternal American promise, in the belief that, as a society, we’ve committed no sins. We’ve had 14 years to think about the reasons why it happened, to think about what happened after, and to ask ourselves hard questions without neat answers. The most challenging and best realized television shows of that first decade after 9/11 struggled to talk about what we couldn’t yet grasp. The story told by three of those series—\u003cem>Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Wire—\u003c/em>can be seen as a triptych response to a catastrophic event like 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reboot of \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica \u003c/em>first aired as a miniseries on SyFy (at the time just called plain ol’ Sci-Fi) in 2003, and it debuted as a regular series in October 2004.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Standard operating procedure: \u003cstrong>spoilers\u003c/strong> exist herein for beloved shows that are 10+ years old, and they will be referenced casually. If you haven't watched \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood \u003c/em>or \u003cem>The Wire,\u003c/em> and you want to remain as pure as a South Dakota snowfall, look away now. Al Swearengen raises his glass to you. Everything after that is spoiler-laden.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-14731\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg\" alt=\""What's the matter? Taken by a vision?"\" width=\"700\" height=\"486\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg 700w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al-400x277.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> is mostly set on a spaceship, which is what kept my dad from watching it right away. It opens with an attack on human colonial settlements, though it takes some time to parse what they’re colonies \u003cem>of\u003c/em>. Evil robots—built by the colonists, treated like slaves—have risen up and massacred their former masters. Cities are bombed, battlestars are destroyed, and the human survivors are faced with a life of perpetual war against an enemy that hates everything they are and everything they have done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em>’s executive producer \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rondmoore\">Ronald D. Moore\u003c/a> spoke at the \u003ca href=\"http://herocomplex.latimes.com/tag/hero-complex-film-festival/\">Hero Complex Film Festival\u003c/a> in Los Angeles about \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/pgQLzYxmFRI\">watching the original series pilot\u003c/a> in the months after 9/11 and re-imagining it for a 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century audience:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just realized, immediately, that if you did that show in that moment in time, the audience could not help but bring their experience with them. And if you did a show, you had an opportunity and a responsibility to talk about what we were going through as a culture and what was going on in the world… and to ask hard questions and not really deliver neat answers every week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I always thought there was a kind of egotism to the idea that a show of television could [say] ‘Well, here’s how Al-Qaeda could be dealt with, and here’s the answer to Iraq, and here’s the answer to terrorism.’ It was important to me that the show just asked you questions and challenged your assumptions, and if you came out of the end of that experience with your beliefs confirmed, fine. And if you came out the other side with your beliefs challenged, that was great too. I just wanted you to think for 45 minutes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>9/11 was so awful, so unexpected, yet understandable in retrospect. The only equitable response was to raise the questions of why it happened, how it happened, and what we do now. \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica,\u003c/em> from 2003 until 2009, explored the immediate aftermath of trauma, grief, and who we choose to be and who we turn to when we fall down. It looks like it’s about robots, war, and revenge, but ultimately it’s about the cost of inhumanity, war, and revenge. It posits, over and over again, that there’s no finish line to war. The mission is never accomplished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You fight and you run, and then you keep fighting, you keep running.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only way out is to forgive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqG5NOvAG8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s another full season after this moment with Gaius Baltar, the series’ traitor to end all traitors, but \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> essentially ends with forgiveness. But the ending everyone is cranky about is the one where the colonists, the robots, and the folks who are somewhere in between, settle on Earth. They scatter, throw away their old tools and rules, and get to work building a new community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright wp-image-14734 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev-400x223.jpg\" alt=\""You could've just said 'Amen.'"\" width=\"400\" height=\"223\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev-400x223.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> aired on HBO from 2004 to 2006 over the course of three brief seasons. It started after \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> and finished before it, but you can see it as a spiritual sequel. \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> is about going further than the map allows, having brought with you everything you know you are and don’t know you are, and recreating society. The good things, the bad things, the things you tried to leave behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://amzn.com/1596912391\">\u003cem>Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, show creator David Milch says he originally pitched a series about cops in Ancient Rome working under the mad emperor Nero, “intstrument(s) of order, in a world that could invoke no ordering principle besides, ‘Do what an insane person tells you to.’” HBO turned that pitch down because \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_%28TV_series%29\">they’d already greenlit another series set in that period\u003c/a>. But Milch, best known for his work on \u003cem>Hill Street Blues\u003c/em> and \u003cem>NYPD Blue\u003c/em>, wasn’t ready to return to the modern day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The human heart yearns to be lifted up,” he wrote. “What lifts us up with less excess weight and baggage better than anything else is a story about our brothers and sisters. But it’s disingenuous not to recognize that certain moments in history make it hard to acknowledge all our familial connections. It was for something like that reason, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, I didn’t want to do a story with a contemporary setting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like \u003cem>BSG,\u003c/em> \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> looks like a genre show—a Western—but it functions as a parable for rebuilding after a great trauma. Deadwood’s inhabitants are survivors of a catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the first century of America and the Civil War, but there are also catastrophes of the heart. The gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok has been driven from civilization for gambling debts, vagrancy, and a propensity for violence. Seth Bullock has walked away from his responsibilities as a lawman to make money, but quickly finds himself enforcing the law in a town \u003cem>with no laws\u003c/em>. Alma Garret married into money, lost her husband, gained his money, and stayed to build up a new land instead of returning to the old one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have all fled their old lives, often their old families, and vowed to start anew. But they quickly find the best versions of themselves by establishing new familial connections. They are often family fighting against one another, but they always come back together. They forgive trespasses, they commit themselves to kindness and selflessness and what is best for the larger society.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/W8Pp2S1a4eo\">Eulogizing Wild Bill in season one\u003c/a>, Reverend Smith paraphrases St. Paul and Corinthians: “For the body is not one member, but many. He tells us, the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee. Nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary. He says that there should be no schism in the body but that the members should have the same care, one to another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We remain connected, even when we say we are separate. Even if we’ve left a larger world, we bring our inner worlds with us. When outsiders come to a new world, there is going to be natural tension and aggression and even violence. But like has happened before, they will eventually be subsumed into the order.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft wp-image-14735 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire-400x242.jpg\" alt='\"The pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick.\"' width=\"400\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire-400x242.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire.jpg 700w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How does that body grow? When a community has come together, whether from the ashes of catastrophe or not, is it doomed to fall apart again? Does it rot from the inside out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, and again it looked like a genre show. It came wrapped up as a police procedural, but in reality it brings us closer to the catastrophe again. This is the community grown rotten, or maybe just so large that the hand no longer realizes it is the same organism as the eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The general assessment of \u003cem>The Wire \u003c/em>is that it’s about American institutions and how they fail individuals. Over the course of its first season, \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> reveals itself to be more than a cop show. It’s about rules. It’s about the changing landscape of law enforcement and the social contract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if it’s not overt for the first four seasons, by the time the fifth and final season arrived—airing in 2008, before the election of Barack Obama—it was clear this was a show that was pessimistic about organizations, those who lead them, and the compromises those leaders make. One of the major storylines of season five has Detectives McNulty and Freamon, formerly proud spires of doing what’s right, no matter the cost, inventing a serial killer and feeding information on said killer to the press in order to gain funding to continue \u003cem>actual\u003c/em> police work, including the continuing case against Marlo Stanfield and his drug dealing operation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, I can’t say with certainty that \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War\">the rationale for the 2004 invasion of Iraq\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War\">the subsequent nearly 9-year Iraq War\u003c/a> was based on information the leaders of the United States of America knew to be false. It’s true that no weapons of mass destruction were found, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript/\">in spite of Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first episode of season five begins with the epitaph, \u003cem>The bigger the lie the more they believe\u003c/em>. It’s easy to see this entire season as exploring the question of, is it ever okay to lie for the greater good? If so, who gets to decide what the greater good really is?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After watching five seasons of \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>, it can be hard to remember that Baltimore is a real American city in the 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century. Detroit has never had a comparable fictional examination, \u003ca href=\"http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html\">but it also continues to be a real American city in decline\u003c/a>, perhaps on the edge of catastrophe. \u003ca href=\"http://www.thenation.com/article/155801/city-ruins\">\u003cem>The Nation\u003c/em> called Camden, New Jersey, the “City of Ruins.”\u003c/a> David Simon, the creator and executive producer of \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire\">wrote in the Guardian in 2013\u003c/a> that there are “two Americas,” and that capitalism “has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eye has said to the hand, \u003cem>I have no need of thee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the landscape of post-9/11 television, \u003cem>The Wire \u003c/em>is the story of the pre-apocalypse, the story before we go back to the beginning, where our sins—subjugated robots, a war fought for slavery, unchecked capitalism—return to haunt us.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>On September 11, 2001, a hole was torn in the fiction of eternal American promise, in the belief that, as a society, we’ve committed no sins. We’ve had 14 years to think about the reasons why it happened, to think about what happened after, and to ask ourselves hard questions without neat answers. The most challenging and best realized television shows of that first decade after 9/11 struggled to talk about what we couldn’t yet grasp. The story told by three of those series—\u003cem>Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Wire—\u003c/em>can be seen as a triptych response to a catastrophic event like 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reboot of \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica \u003c/em>first aired as a miniseries on SyFy (at the time just called plain ol’ Sci-Fi) in 2003, and it debuted as a regular series in October 2004.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Standard operating procedure: \u003cstrong>spoilers\u003c/strong> exist herein for beloved shows that are 10+ years old, and they will be referenced casually. If you haven't watched \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood \u003c/em>or \u003cem>The Wire,\u003c/em> and you want to remain as pure as a South Dakota snowfall, look away now. Al Swearengen raises his glass to you. Everything after that is spoiler-laden.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-14731\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg\" alt=\""What's the matter? Taken by a vision?"\" width=\"700\" height=\"486\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al.jpg 700w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/01_al-400x277.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> is mostly set on a spaceship, which is what kept my dad from watching it right away. It opens with an attack on human colonial settlements, though it takes some time to parse what they’re colonies \u003cem>of\u003c/em>. Evil robots—built by the colonists, treated like slaves—have risen up and massacred their former masters. Cities are bombed, battlestars are destroyed, and the human survivors are faced with a life of perpetual war against an enemy that hates everything they are and everything they have done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em>’s executive producer \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rondmoore\">Ronald D. Moore\u003c/a> spoke at the \u003ca href=\"http://herocomplex.latimes.com/tag/hero-complex-film-festival/\">Hero Complex Film Festival\u003c/a> in Los Angeles about \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/pgQLzYxmFRI\">watching the original series pilot\u003c/a> in the months after 9/11 and re-imagining it for a 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century audience:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just realized, immediately, that if you did that show in that moment in time, the audience could not help but bring their experience with them. And if you did a show, you had an opportunity and a responsibility to talk about what we were going through as a culture and what was going on in the world… and to ask hard questions and not really deliver neat answers every week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I always thought there was a kind of egotism to the idea that a show of television could [say] ‘Well, here’s how Al-Qaeda could be dealt with, and here’s the answer to Iraq, and here’s the answer to terrorism.’ It was important to me that the show just asked you questions and challenged your assumptions, and if you came out of the end of that experience with your beliefs confirmed, fine. And if you came out the other side with your beliefs challenged, that was great too. I just wanted you to think for 45 minutes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>9/11 was so awful, so unexpected, yet understandable in retrospect. The only equitable response was to raise the questions of why it happened, how it happened, and what we do now. \u003cem>Battlestar Galactica,\u003c/em> from 2003 until 2009, explored the immediate aftermath of trauma, grief, and who we choose to be and who we turn to when we fall down. It looks like it’s about robots, war, and revenge, but ultimately it’s about the cost of inhumanity, war, and revenge. It posits, over and over again, that there’s no finish line to war. The mission is never accomplished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You fight and you run, and then you keep fighting, you keep running.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only way out is to forgive.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AKqG5NOvAG8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/AKqG5NOvAG8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>There’s another full season after this moment with Gaius Baltar, the series’ traitor to end all traitors, but \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> essentially ends with forgiveness. But the ending everyone is cranky about is the one where the colonists, the robots, and the folks who are somewhere in between, settle on Earth. They scatter, throw away their old tools and rules, and get to work building a new community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright wp-image-14734 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev-400x223.jpg\" alt=\""You could've just said 'Amen.'"\" width=\"400\" height=\"223\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev-400x223.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_Deadwood_Rev.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> aired on HBO from 2004 to 2006 over the course of three brief seasons. It started after \u003cem>BSG\u003c/em> and finished before it, but you can see it as a spiritual sequel. \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> is about going further than the map allows, having brought with you everything you know you are and don’t know you are, and recreating society. The good things, the bad things, the things you tried to leave behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://amzn.com/1596912391\">\u003cem>Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, show creator David Milch says he originally pitched a series about cops in Ancient Rome working under the mad emperor Nero, “intstrument(s) of order, in a world that could invoke no ordering principle besides, ‘Do what an insane person tells you to.’” HBO turned that pitch down because \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_%28TV_series%29\">they’d already greenlit another series set in that period\u003c/a>. But Milch, best known for his work on \u003cem>Hill Street Blues\u003c/em> and \u003cem>NYPD Blue\u003c/em>, wasn’t ready to return to the modern day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The human heart yearns to be lifted up,” he wrote. “What lifts us up with less excess weight and baggage better than anything else is a story about our brothers and sisters. But it’s disingenuous not to recognize that certain moments in history make it hard to acknowledge all our familial connections. It was for something like that reason, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, I didn’t want to do a story with a contemporary setting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like \u003cem>BSG,\u003c/em> \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> looks like a genre show—a Western—but it functions as a parable for rebuilding after a great trauma. Deadwood’s inhabitants are survivors of a catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the first century of America and the Civil War, but there are also catastrophes of the heart. The gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok has been driven from civilization for gambling debts, vagrancy, and a propensity for violence. Seth Bullock has walked away from his responsibilities as a lawman to make money, but quickly finds himself enforcing the law in a town \u003cem>with no laws\u003c/em>. Alma Garret married into money, lost her husband, gained his money, and stayed to build up a new land instead of returning to the old one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have all fled their old lives, often their old families, and vowed to start anew. But they quickly find the best versions of themselves by establishing new familial connections. They are often family fighting against one another, but they always come back together. They forgive trespasses, they commit themselves to kindness and selflessness and what is best for the larger society.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/W8Pp2S1a4eo\">Eulogizing Wild Bill in season one\u003c/a>, Reverend Smith paraphrases St. Paul and Corinthians: “For the body is not one member, but many. He tells us, the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee. Nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary. He says that there should be no schism in the body but that the members should have the same care, one to another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We remain connected, even when we say we are separate. Even if we’ve left a larger world, we bring our inner worlds with us. When outsiders come to a new world, there is going to be natural tension and aggression and even violence. But like has happened before, they will eventually be subsumed into the order.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft wp-image-14735 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire-400x242.jpg\" alt='\"The pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick.\"' width=\"400\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire-400x242.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_thewire.jpg 700w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How does that body grow? When a community has come together, whether from the ashes of catastrophe or not, is it doomed to fall apart again? Does it rot from the inside out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, and again it looked like a genre show. It came wrapped up as a police procedural, but in reality it brings us closer to the catastrophe again. This is the community grown rotten, or maybe just so large that the hand no longer realizes it is the same organism as the eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The general assessment of \u003cem>The Wire \u003c/em>is that it’s about American institutions and how they fail individuals. Over the course of its first season, \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> reveals itself to be more than a cop show. It’s about rules. It’s about the changing landscape of law enforcement and the social contract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if it’s not overt for the first four seasons, by the time the fifth and final season arrived—airing in 2008, before the election of Barack Obama—it was clear this was a show that was pessimistic about organizations, those who lead them, and the compromises those leaders make. One of the major storylines of season five has Detectives McNulty and Freamon, formerly proud spires of doing what’s right, no matter the cost, inventing a serial killer and feeding information on said killer to the press in order to gain funding to continue \u003cem>actual\u003c/em> police work, including the continuing case against Marlo Stanfield and his drug dealing operation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, I can’t say with certainty that \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War\">the rationale for the 2004 invasion of Iraq\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War\">the subsequent nearly 9-year Iraq War\u003c/a> was based on information the leaders of the United States of America knew to be false. It’s true that no weapons of mass destruction were found, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript/\">in spite of Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first episode of season five begins with the epitaph, \u003cem>The bigger the lie the more they believe\u003c/em>. It’s easy to see this entire season as exploring the question of, is it ever okay to lie for the greater good? If so, who gets to decide what the greater good really is?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After watching five seasons of \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>, it can be hard to remember that Baltimore is a real American city in the 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century. Detroit has never had a comparable fictional examination, \u003ca href=\"http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html\">but it also continues to be a real American city in decline\u003c/a>, perhaps on the edge of catastrophe. \u003ca href=\"http://www.thenation.com/article/155801/city-ruins\">\u003cem>The Nation\u003c/em> called Camden, New Jersey, the “City of Ruins.”\u003c/a> David Simon, the creator and executive producer of \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire\">wrote in the Guardian in 2013\u003c/a> that there are “two Americas,” and that capitalism “has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eye has said to the hand, \u003cem>I have no need of thee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the landscape of post-9/11 television, \u003cem>The Wire \u003c/em>is the story of the pre-apocalypse, the story before we go back to the beginning, where our sins—subjugated robots, a war fought for slavery, unchecked capitalism—return to haunt us.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Couples TV: The Shows We Watch Together, The Shows We Watch Alone",
"title": "Couples TV: The Shows We Watch Together, The Shows We Watch Alone",
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"content": "\u003cp>When I met my wife, Kate, we both lived in Baltimore. She was born and raised there, and I’d moved down the coast from Vermont a few months before. I was running toward a job and away from a breakup. We met, we drank whiskey, she spilled some into her shoe, a couple months later she moved in, and about three years after that we got married in the desert of New Mexico.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, television hadn’t really played a role in our courtship. When I moved to Baltimore, I got cable for the first time in years, but she mainly watched documentaries on Netflix. I tried to introduce her to \u003cem>the Wire\u003c/em>, it being Baltimore and all, but she was bored with the crime and the inaccuracies about her home town. “What’s a lake trout?” she asked me. “Why is everyone drinking Bud Light?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then we realized we could gravitate around a shared love for \u003cem>Star Trek: The Next Generation\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Data was her first love. I remembered being 8 and so excited about \u003cem>TNG\u003c/em> that I would literally run circles around the couch, and my mom would warn me that, if I couldn’t sit down, I wouldn’t be able to watch it at all. So I sat down in a chair with a pillow across my lap, tapping invisible buttons, just like Data at the helm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While I finished \u003cem>the Wire \u003c/em>alone and tried to explain that \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> was more than swearing and cowboy hats, my wife was watching \u003cem>Say Yes to the Dress\u003c/em> (the Atlanta one, which she said was the funny one, not the New York one, which she said was the boring one), but it couldn’t hold my attention. I’m definitely not too stuffy for that kind of show, but there’s a film of unreality to a lot of reality programming, to the point where I have a hard time investing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then? She introduced me to Stacy and Clinton.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvQ7ihpobR4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d heard of \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em> before, but the title had always turned me off. I thought it would be mean, that it would make fun of the people who appeared on it, that they would be taking folks who dressed quirkily or out of step with fashion, and cram them into one-look-fits-all outfits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that is \u003cem>not\u003c/em> the point of view of \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2014/10/08/what-makeover-shows-like-girlfriend-intervention-should-learn-from-what-not-to-wear/\">I’ve written about my admiration for Stacy & Clinton & Ted & Carmindy before\u003c/a>, but to put it succinctly, it’s a show where fashion/life gurus help people find their truest selves. They encourage their contributors (they call them \u003cem>contributors!\u003c/em>) to look at why they wear clothes that don’t fit, why they try to avoid being seen, and why they duck away from opportunities for happiness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it wasn’t really that \u003cem>I’d\u003c/em> found \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>. It’s that my wife had found something about me — that I was attracted to positivity, that I valued kindness over snark. I didn’t know much about fashion or style, or at least I didn’t philosophize about it, before watching \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>, but watching and talking about Stacy & Clinton led us to what is probably the television love of our lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-14632\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"4558c8cd-97bb-d8c3-79c5-8cab6c5aae43_Mad Men_Stairs_Jon_Jes.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-400x266.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-1440x960.jpg 1440w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kate didn’t introduce me to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2015/02/17/mad-men-lets-wildly-speculate-about-the-first-photos-from-the-final-season/\">\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, but watching it with her and talking about it with her led me to appreciate it as more than a sophisticated soap. I think I can be a little clothes-blind when I watch television, and I’m prone to miss out on subtleties or symbols in fashion design. Even when she said something simple like, “If two characters are aligned philosophically, they’ll show them in similar colors or patterns. They’re part of the same color scheme because they’re aligned.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright wp-image-14633 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete-400x267.jpg\" alt=\"RogerDonPete\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete-400x267.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete.jpg 560w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Mad Men’s\u003c/em> season six premiere, Don and Pete were on the same page — looking outward — while Roger stood apart by looking inward. This sort of thing is worthy of its own article, but writing about it here feels like I’m trying to complete a high school Spanish assignment, or like I’m writing with my left hand. I \u003cem>get it\u003c/em>, and I \u003cem>can\u003c/em> \u003cem>do it, \u003c/em>but it doesn’t come entirely naturally. Watching \u003cem>Mad Men \u003c/em>with Kate, and talking about it after, is like having an external hard drive where I store my thoughts and revelations about the show; I agree with almost everything she discovers about the show, and I’m not a dumb guy, but boy I’d never figure that stuff out on my own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Mad Men \u003c/em>is our true love, but there’s another place where we feel the most comfortable. Where we go to be together in silence, often over dinner, after hard days or long days or (sometimes) just for fun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNkvxqGmscY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Math? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rock music? Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Opera? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Poetry? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vice-Presidents? Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novels? Both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alex Trebek’s dad-style bad jokes? \u003cem>EVERYONE\u003c/em>, don't front.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We still try out new shows (\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2015/01/14/all-hail-the-cw-how-the-youth-geared-network-became-one-of-the-best-on-tv/\">\u003cem>Jane the Virgin\u003c/em>\u003c/a> is on deck), and it’s a kind of game in and of itself figuring out which shows we’ll enjoy together and which we’ll enjoy separately. I’m watching \u003cem>Twin Peaks\u003c/em> — I’ve seen the first season twice, but never the second — and Kate watches some episodes over my shoulder for the outfits and gender dynamics, but even when she's not there, I look at the show differently knowing how she might react to it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's a common but complicated thing — trying to understand someone else's inner life. It's what we'll do our entire lives with the people we love most and the people we see every day. I think my wife's spirit animal is \u003ca href=\"http://www.lookhuman.com/render/product/6006/6006909442702003/394triblk-w800h800z1-41741-brains-and-beauty-dana-scully.jpg\">Dana Scully\u003c/a>, and I can't watch \u003cem>The X-Files\u003c/em> without wondering if this is an episode Kate would love, or be indifferent to, and why or why not either way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than the television we watch — together or alone — that unending desire to know someone, to see them or hear them even when they're not around — that's the journey of the heart, right? In marriage or in friendship or in whatever other form intimacy takes.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "There's TV you watch alone, there's TV your partner watches alone, and there are the things that overlap. What does that say about your relationship?",
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"description": "There's TV you watch alone, there's TV your partner watches alone, and there are the things that overlap. What does that say about your relationship?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When I met my wife, Kate, we both lived in Baltimore. She was born and raised there, and I’d moved down the coast from Vermont a few months before. I was running toward a job and away from a breakup. We met, we drank whiskey, she spilled some into her shoe, a couple months later she moved in, and about three years after that we got married in the desert of New Mexico.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, television hadn’t really played a role in our courtship. When I moved to Baltimore, I got cable for the first time in years, but she mainly watched documentaries on Netflix. I tried to introduce her to \u003cem>the Wire\u003c/em>, it being Baltimore and all, but she was bored with the crime and the inaccuracies about her home town. “What’s a lake trout?” she asked me. “Why is everyone drinking Bud Light?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then we realized we could gravitate around a shared love for \u003cem>Star Trek: The Next Generation\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Data was her first love. I remembered being 8 and so excited about \u003cem>TNG\u003c/em> that I would literally run circles around the couch, and my mom would warn me that, if I couldn’t sit down, I wouldn’t be able to watch it at all. So I sat down in a chair with a pillow across my lap, tapping invisible buttons, just like Data at the helm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While I finished \u003cem>the Wire \u003c/em>alone and tried to explain that \u003cem>Deadwood\u003c/em> was more than swearing and cowboy hats, my wife was watching \u003cem>Say Yes to the Dress\u003c/em> (the Atlanta one, which she said was the funny one, not the New York one, which she said was the boring one), but it couldn’t hold my attention. I’m definitely not too stuffy for that kind of show, but there’s a film of unreality to a lot of reality programming, to the point where I have a hard time investing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then? She introduced me to Stacy and Clinton.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/rvQ7ihpobR4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/rvQ7ihpobR4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>I’d heard of \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em> before, but the title had always turned me off. I thought it would be mean, that it would make fun of the people who appeared on it, that they would be taking folks who dressed quirkily or out of step with fashion, and cram them into one-look-fits-all outfits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that is \u003cem>not\u003c/em> the point of view of \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2014/10/08/what-makeover-shows-like-girlfriend-intervention-should-learn-from-what-not-to-wear/\">I’ve written about my admiration for Stacy & Clinton & Ted & Carmindy before\u003c/a>, but to put it succinctly, it’s a show where fashion/life gurus help people find their truest selves. They encourage their contributors (they call them \u003cem>contributors!\u003c/em>) to look at why they wear clothes that don’t fit, why they try to avoid being seen, and why they duck away from opportunities for happiness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it wasn’t really that \u003cem>I’d\u003c/em> found \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>. It’s that my wife had found something about me — that I was attracted to positivity, that I valued kindness over snark. I didn’t know much about fashion or style, or at least I didn’t philosophize about it, before watching \u003cem>What Not to Wear\u003c/em>, but watching and talking about Stacy & Clinton led us to what is probably the television love of our lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-14632\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"4558c8cd-97bb-d8c3-79c5-8cab6c5aae43_Mad Men_Stairs_Jon_Jes.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-400x266.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes-1440x960.jpg 1440w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/02_mad_men_stairs_jon_jes.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kate didn’t introduce me to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2015/02/17/mad-men-lets-wildly-speculate-about-the-first-photos-from-the-final-season/\">\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, but watching it with her and talking about it with her led me to appreciate it as more than a sophisticated soap. I think I can be a little clothes-blind when I watch television, and I’m prone to miss out on subtleties or symbols in fashion design. Even when she said something simple like, “If two characters are aligned philosophically, they’ll show them in similar colors or patterns. They’re part of the same color scheme because they’re aligned.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright wp-image-14633 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete-400x267.jpg\" alt=\"RogerDonPete\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete-400x267.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2015/01/03_MM_RogerDonPete.jpg 560w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Mad Men’s\u003c/em> season six premiere, Don and Pete were on the same page — looking outward — while Roger stood apart by looking inward. This sort of thing is worthy of its own article, but writing about it here feels like I’m trying to complete a high school Spanish assignment, or like I’m writing with my left hand. I \u003cem>get it\u003c/em>, and I \u003cem>can\u003c/em> \u003cem>do it, \u003c/em>but it doesn’t come entirely naturally. Watching \u003cem>Mad Men \u003c/em>with Kate, and talking about it after, is like having an external hard drive where I store my thoughts and revelations about the show; I agree with almost everything she discovers about the show, and I’m not a dumb guy, but boy I’d never figure that stuff out on my own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Mad Men \u003c/em>is our true love, but there’s another place where we feel the most comfortable. Where we go to be together in silence, often over dinner, after hard days or long days or (sometimes) just for fun.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/eNkvxqGmscY'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/eNkvxqGmscY'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Math? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rock music? Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Opera? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Poetry? Her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vice-Presidents? Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novels? Both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alex Trebek’s dad-style bad jokes? \u003cem>EVERYONE\u003c/em>, don't front.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We still try out new shows (\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2015/01/14/all-hail-the-cw-how-the-youth-geared-network-became-one-of-the-best-on-tv/\">\u003cem>Jane the Virgin\u003c/em>\u003c/a> is on deck), and it’s a kind of game in and of itself figuring out which shows we’ll enjoy together and which we’ll enjoy separately. I’m watching \u003cem>Twin Peaks\u003c/em> — I’ve seen the first season twice, but never the second — and Kate watches some episodes over my shoulder for the outfits and gender dynamics, but even when she's not there, I look at the show differently knowing how she might react to it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's a common but complicated thing — trying to understand someone else's inner life. It's what we'll do our entire lives with the people we love most and the people we see every day. I think my wife's spirit animal is \u003ca href=\"http://www.lookhuman.com/render/product/6006/6006909442702003/394triblk-w800h800z1-41741-brains-and-beauty-dana-scully.jpg\">Dana Scully\u003c/a>, and I can't watch \u003cem>The X-Files\u003c/em> without wondering if this is an episode Kate would love, or be indifferent to, and why or why not either way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than the television we watch — together or alone — that unending desire to know someone, to see them or hear them even when they're not around — that's the journey of the heart, right? In marriage or in friendship or in whatever other form intimacy takes.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Bill Cosby: Loving the Art, Hating the Artist",
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"content": "\u003cp>William Cosby, Jr., was born in 1937 in Philadelphia. He came to national prominence in the 1960s as a stand-up comedian and television star, and, in the 1970s, he created the animated \u003cem>Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids\u003c/em>, and finished a graduate program and a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the 1980s, \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> made him America’s dad and it’s one of a handful of sitcoms that not only define the era, but can stand the test of time. \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> is still really good, gang.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtJpafsDAr8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what do you do when the artist who made \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> stands accused of more than 20 instances of sexual assault, incidents that go back as early as the 1960s, when Cosby was a renowned stand-up and winning three Emmys in a row for \u003cem>I Spy\u003c/em>, the first network series to feature an African-American lead? More than 20 allegations that, \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bill-cosbys-legacy-recast-accusers-speak-in-detail-about-sexual-assault-allegations/2014/11/22/d7074938-718e-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">according to the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> this November\u003c/a>, “are strung together by perceptible patterns that appear and reappear with remarkable consistency: mostly young, white women without family nearby; drugs offered as palliatives; resistance and pursuit; accusers worrying that no one would believe them; lifelong trauma”?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sit down, Huxtables. We have to talk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The allegations against Bill Cosby are not new. They are consistent and have been public knowledge since the early 2000s. All of these women have come forward with specific details regarding their encounters with Cosby, and all of them have used their real names. It’s true that \u003cem>innocent until proven guilty \u003c/em>is a bedrock of our justice system (and, as an avid \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://serialpodcast.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Serial\u003c/a> \u003c/em>listener who binged on the \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murders_at_Robin_Hood_Hills\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Paradise Lost\u003c/a>\u003c/em> trilogy over Thanksgiving, I feel especially leery of passing judgment just because something “feels right”), but it’s also true that our culture tends to disregard, ridicule, and disbelieve allegations of rape and sexual assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’ll never know what really happened \u003c/em>became a common refrain earlier this year when allegations against Woody Allen returned to public conversation. \u003ca href=\"http://www.salon.com/2014/02/02/compartmentalizing_woody_allen_what_america_chooses_not_to_see/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Roxanne Gay wrote about the culture of compartmentalization\u003c/a> that occurs in cases like this—when an artist and their art are scrutinized after accusations of monstrous crimes—and said, “I know I would rather stand where I stand and eventually be proven wrong than support Woody Allen and eventually be proven wrong.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I can’t see a Woody Allen movie without thinking about \u003ca href=\"http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow/?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the letter Dylan Farrow wrote in February\u003c/a> about the abuse and trauma her father inflicted on her. But I never liked \u003cem>Annie Hall\u003c/em> to begin with, so it wasn’t a beloved piece of art that had to be thrown on the fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I love \u003cem>the Cosby Show.\u003c/em> I loved it as a kid, when I was roughly the same age as Rudy. I love it as a grown-up when the marriage of Cliff and Clair Huxtable is an aspirational example of two fully-formed, independent professionals who love each other and work together as partners and parents. The Huxtables are a fictional family, sure, but since when does \u003cem>fictional\u003c/em> mean we can’t aspire to it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpEj00g9CyE\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s why the idea of Bill Cosby as a rapist is hard to deal with. The Huxtables—Cliff and Clair especially—were willfully and explicitly role models, to African-American families and to every American family. Cliff’s relationship with his wife is the gravitational center of \u003cem>the Cosby Show\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A society’s—or a television fan’s—discomfort and disappointment when \u003cem>Bill Cosby the artist\u003c/em> lets them down is nowhere near equal to the decades-long trauma and pain experienced by any of the women who were assaulted, violated, and bullied into silence by \u003cem>Bill Cosby the man\u003c/em>. But it’s the legacy of that artist that protects the man. No one wants to live in a world where Bill Cosby does this. Where he gets away with it for almost 50 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These accusations have been public knowledge for nearly a decade, but we’ve continued to give Cliff Huxtable preference over actual women who were betrayed and assaulted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have a dear friend who grew up on the East Coast, and therefore loves Bruce Springsteen (\u003cem>spoiler alert—this is not a story revealing Bruce Springsteen as a monster\u003c/em>). She remembers being 13 and going to a Springsteen concert, in the front row, and wearing her most-scandalous-at-thirteen outfit, hoping the Boss would notice her. Now, as an adult, she thinks about how \u003cem>terrible\u003c/em> it would have been if Springsteen had noticed her. How terrible it would have been if he had even done a double-take in her general direction. He was a rock star, an idol, an icon—he was an artist she loved and admired. And if he’d noticed her thirteen-year-old self, with even the smallest ounce of inappropriate leering? All of that would have been broken.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Artists are people. Sometimes they’re good people and they make bad art. Sometimes they’re terrible people and they make one of the seminal television shows of the 20\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> century. It doesn’t make them above reproach, and it doesn’t mean we can turn away from the people they hurt and the lives they ruin. When faced with fantastically selfish and criminal behavior, it’s important and necessary that we be willing to look the devil in the eye and say, \u003cem>I see you\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cosby hasn’t said much in public about the accusations levied against him. As reported in the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em>, Cosby’s attorney called the allegations ridiculous and Cosby himself said, “I know people are tired of me not saying anything, but a guy doesn’t have to answer to innuendos. People should fact-check. People shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.” In 2006, Cosby reached an “undisclosed settlement” with Andrea Constand, who accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 2004.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late November, \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/lifestyle/bill-cosby-timeline/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> published a Bill Cosby Timeline\u003c/a> tracking his career and the allegations against him. It is, I am sad to say, already a bit outdated. \u003ca href=\"http://www.avclub.com/article/bill-cosby-hit-another-lawsuit-things-keep-being-a-212848\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The AV Club has an updated roundup of allegations and lawsuits\u003c/a>, as of December 10th.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Settlements aren’t an admission of guilt. They can be the best option for someone who thinks the odds are against them in a court of law or the court of public opinion, regardless of the truth. In that court of public opinion, not many people who know Cosby are coming to his defense. The \u003cem>Post\u003c/em> quotes two allies who do their best. Weldon Latham, an attorney and friend of Cosby, says, “What you’re hearing is clearly not the entire truth, and how much of it is true, you have no idea.” Virginia Ali, the owner of a restaurant where Cosby sometimes eats, said, “I’ve always found him a very kind, generous person.” That’s the most anyone seems able to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love \u003cem>the Cosby\u003c/em> \u003cem>Show\u003c/em>. I probably always will. Ultimately, I think the show will endure. \u003ca href=\"http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-nbc-drops-bill-cosby-comedy-project-in-wake-of-allegations-20141119-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">But I’m glad TV Land has pulled the reruns from its schedule for the time being\u003c/a>. Bill Cosby \u003cem>does\u003c/em> need to address his accusers. It doesn’t matter if he did dozens of times, once, or not at all. This is not innuendo. These are serious accusations and, if true, serious crimes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking squarely at these accusations might make our relationship with Bill Cosby and his art more complicated, but it doesn’t destroy it. And I really can’t put it in any better than \u003ca href=\"http://www.hulu.com/watch/717607\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Che on \u003cem>SNL\u003c/em>’s Weekend Update\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I may never forgive Bill Cosby, but hopefully someday I can forgive Dr. Huxtable.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>William Cosby, Jr., was born in 1937 in Philadelphia. He came to national prominence in the 1960s as a stand-up comedian and television star, and, in the 1970s, he created the animated \u003cem>Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids\u003c/em>, and finished a graduate program and a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the 1980s, \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> made him America’s dad and it’s one of a handful of sitcoms that not only define the era, but can stand the test of time. \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> is still really good, gang.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/JtJpafsDAr8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/JtJpafsDAr8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>So what do you do when the artist who made \u003cem>The Cosby Show\u003c/em> stands accused of more than 20 instances of sexual assault, incidents that go back as early as the 1960s, when Cosby was a renowned stand-up and winning three Emmys in a row for \u003cem>I Spy\u003c/em>, the first network series to feature an African-American lead? More than 20 allegations that, \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bill-cosbys-legacy-recast-accusers-speak-in-detail-about-sexual-assault-allegations/2014/11/22/d7074938-718e-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">according to the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> this November\u003c/a>, “are strung together by perceptible patterns that appear and reappear with remarkable consistency: mostly young, white women without family nearby; drugs offered as palliatives; resistance and pursuit; accusers worrying that no one would believe them; lifelong trauma”?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sit down, Huxtables. We have to talk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The allegations against Bill Cosby are not new. They are consistent and have been public knowledge since the early 2000s. All of these women have come forward with specific details regarding their encounters with Cosby, and all of them have used their real names. It’s true that \u003cem>innocent until proven guilty \u003c/em>is a bedrock of our justice system (and, as an avid \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://serialpodcast.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Serial\u003c/a> \u003c/em>listener who binged on the \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murders_at_Robin_Hood_Hills\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Paradise Lost\u003c/a>\u003c/em> trilogy over Thanksgiving, I feel especially leery of passing judgment just because something “feels right”), but it’s also true that our culture tends to disregard, ridicule, and disbelieve allegations of rape and sexual assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’ll never know what really happened \u003c/em>became a common refrain earlier this year when allegations against Woody Allen returned to public conversation. \u003ca href=\"http://www.salon.com/2014/02/02/compartmentalizing_woody_allen_what_america_chooses_not_to_see/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Roxanne Gay wrote about the culture of compartmentalization\u003c/a> that occurs in cases like this—when an artist and their art are scrutinized after accusations of monstrous crimes—and said, “I know I would rather stand where I stand and eventually be proven wrong than support Woody Allen and eventually be proven wrong.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I can’t see a Woody Allen movie without thinking about \u003ca href=\"http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow/?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the letter Dylan Farrow wrote in February\u003c/a> about the abuse and trauma her father inflicted on her. But I never liked \u003cem>Annie Hall\u003c/em> to begin with, so it wasn’t a beloved piece of art that had to be thrown on the fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I love \u003cem>the Cosby Show.\u003c/em> I loved it as a kid, when I was roughly the same age as Rudy. I love it as a grown-up when the marriage of Cliff and Clair Huxtable is an aspirational example of two fully-formed, independent professionals who love each other and work together as partners and parents. The Huxtables are a fictional family, sure, but since when does \u003cem>fictional\u003c/em> mean we can’t aspire to it?\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/NpEj00g9CyE'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/NpEj00g9CyE'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>That’s why the idea of Bill Cosby as a rapist is hard to deal with. The Huxtables—Cliff and Clair especially—were willfully and explicitly role models, to African-American families and to every American family. Cliff’s relationship with his wife is the gravitational center of \u003cem>the Cosby Show\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A society’s—or a television fan’s—discomfort and disappointment when \u003cem>Bill Cosby the artist\u003c/em> lets them down is nowhere near equal to the decades-long trauma and pain experienced by any of the women who were assaulted, violated, and bullied into silence by \u003cem>Bill Cosby the man\u003c/em>. But it’s the legacy of that artist that protects the man. No one wants to live in a world where Bill Cosby does this. Where he gets away with it for almost 50 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These accusations have been public knowledge for nearly a decade, but we’ve continued to give Cliff Huxtable preference over actual women who were betrayed and assaulted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have a dear friend who grew up on the East Coast, and therefore loves Bruce Springsteen (\u003cem>spoiler alert—this is not a story revealing Bruce Springsteen as a monster\u003c/em>). She remembers being 13 and going to a Springsteen concert, in the front row, and wearing her most-scandalous-at-thirteen outfit, hoping the Boss would notice her. Now, as an adult, she thinks about how \u003cem>terrible\u003c/em> it would have been if Springsteen had noticed her. How terrible it would have been if he had even done a double-take in her general direction. He was a rock star, an idol, an icon—he was an artist she loved and admired. And if he’d noticed her thirteen-year-old self, with even the smallest ounce of inappropriate leering? All of that would have been broken.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Artists are people. Sometimes they’re good people and they make bad art. Sometimes they’re terrible people and they make one of the seminal television shows of the 20\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> century. It doesn’t make them above reproach, and it doesn’t mean we can turn away from the people they hurt and the lives they ruin. When faced with fantastically selfish and criminal behavior, it’s important and necessary that we be willing to look the devil in the eye and say, \u003cem>I see you\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cosby hasn’t said much in public about the accusations levied against him. As reported in the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em>, Cosby’s attorney called the allegations ridiculous and Cosby himself said, “I know people are tired of me not saying anything, but a guy doesn’t have to answer to innuendos. People should fact-check. People shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.” In 2006, Cosby reached an “undisclosed settlement” with Andrea Constand, who accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 2004.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late November, \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/lifestyle/bill-cosby-timeline/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> published a Bill Cosby Timeline\u003c/a> tracking his career and the allegations against him. It is, I am sad to say, already a bit outdated. \u003ca href=\"http://www.avclub.com/article/bill-cosby-hit-another-lawsuit-things-keep-being-a-212848\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The AV Club has an updated roundup of allegations and lawsuits\u003c/a>, as of December 10th.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Settlements aren’t an admission of guilt. They can be the best option for someone who thinks the odds are against them in a court of law or the court of public opinion, regardless of the truth. In that court of public opinion, not many people who know Cosby are coming to his defense. The \u003cem>Post\u003c/em> quotes two allies who do their best. Weldon Latham, an attorney and friend of Cosby, says, “What you’re hearing is clearly not the entire truth, and how much of it is true, you have no idea.” Virginia Ali, the owner of a restaurant where Cosby sometimes eats, said, “I’ve always found him a very kind, generous person.” That’s the most anyone seems able to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love \u003cem>the Cosby\u003c/em> \u003cem>Show\u003c/em>. I probably always will. Ultimately, I think the show will endure. \u003ca href=\"http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-nbc-drops-bill-cosby-comedy-project-in-wake-of-allegations-20141119-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">But I’m glad TV Land has pulled the reruns from its schedule for the time being\u003c/a>. Bill Cosby \u003cem>does\u003c/em> need to address his accusers. It doesn’t matter if he did dozens of times, once, or not at all. This is not innuendo. These are serious accusations and, if true, serious crimes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking squarely at these accusations might make our relationship with Bill Cosby and his art more complicated, but it doesn’t destroy it. And I really can’t put it in any better than \u003ca href=\"http://www.hulu.com/watch/717607\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Che on \u003cem>SNL\u003c/em>’s Weekend Update\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I may never forgive Bill Cosby, but hopefully someday I can forgive Dr. Huxtable.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "From Interstellar to World War Z: How Much Does Scientific Accuracy Matter?",
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"content": "\u003cp>Maybe it started with \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Released in 1975, \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> was Stephen Spielberg’s breakout feature, and it’s widely regarded as creating the summer blockbuster model. It made a lot of money, it’s excellently structured, and it’s an efficient machine of repeatable dialogue (\"We’re gonna need a bigger boat.\" \"That’s some bad hat, Harry.\" \"Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.\" \"\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/_oFl_2p_LHU?t=29s\">Smile, you son of a -- EXPLOSION\u003c/a>.\").\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the most enduring legacy of \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> is the Spielbergian trope of marrying family drama -- most often the husband/father who wants to protect or reunite with his kids -- with sci-fi adventure. \"I have to save the world\" is a hard thing to grasp. But \"I made a promise to my daughter\"? That’s a feeling you can understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the initial conversation about \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>\u003c/a> has focused on: Is it good science, or bad science? Real-life conversations don’t sound like they do in most movies, real-life humans don’t \u003cem>look\u003c/em> like they do in most movies, so why is there a “___________ is bad science” headline whenever a movie like \u003cem>Interstellar \u003c/em>comes out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/Rt2LHkSwdPQ?t=1m15s\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Before we go any further, be warned there are spoilers below. Casual spoilers for \u003cem>Interstellar, Contagion, World War Z, \u003c/em>and for \u003cem>Back to the Future\u003c/em>. I respect your time. It can be hard to get to the movies, but sometimes you have to just say a thing in order to talk about a thing.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Interstellar’s \u003c/em>director is Christopher Nolan, best known for \u003ca href=\"http://amzn.com/B009JBZH54\">the Dark Knight trilogy\u003c/a>. He also wrote and directed \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception\">\u003cem>Inception\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2010, which is about the decidedly non-scientific idea of stepping into someone else’s dream. But discussing “\u003ca href=\"http://www.wired.com/2014/11/metaphysics-of-interstellar/\">The Metaphysics of \u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>\u003c/a>” with \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://wired.com\">Wired\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, Nolan said “\u003cem>Inception\u003c/em> had a lot of science in it: A rigid set of rules, mathematical and geometrical in their nature, define that script. That took a very long time to work out. They’re not real science, but they have that quality. You always have to cheat in cinematic narrative, but you try to do it as little as possible and in a way that doesn’t violate the pact with the audience. In \u003cem>Inception,\u003c/em> the geometry’s pretty solid.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is to say, \u003cem>Inception\u003c/em> establishes the laws of its fake science, and it abides by them. A rigid set of rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are two recent science fiction movies that have similar premises that explore science (and relationships) in different ways: \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em>\u003c/a> (released in 2011, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns) and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_%28film%29\">\u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em>\u003c/a> (released in 2013, directed by Marc Forster, written by … well, written by a whole lot of people, frankly, and based on the book by Max Brooks).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contagion’s\u003c/em> trailer begins with relationships, and then it starts to look like an action-thriller. And I call it science fiction because, in the simplest sense, it is. Not to go all term paper on you, but Webster’s says sci-fi is a story “\u003ca href=\"http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science+fiction\">about how people and societies are affected by imaginary scientific developments in the future\u003c/a>.” \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> is a day-after-tomorrow kind of future, but a 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century global pandemic remains (thankfully) science fiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/4sYSyuuLk5g\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>World War Z’s \u003c/em>trailer plays out similarly, with a family in their SUV playing 20 questions (and Brad Pitt is there playing himself? Because what other dad has hair like that), but it quickly turns into…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/HcwTxRuq-uk\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>…yup, an action-thriller. Both \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> and \u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em> are movies about global pandemics and a virus spread through basic human contact. \u003cem>WWZ’s\u003c/em> virus is anthropomorphized as actual zombies coming to get you, but the social unrest that ensues is similar. Governments go into lockdown and teams of scientists race to find a cure or a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the science of the movies are very different. \u003cem>WWZ’s \u003c/em>zombie virus transforms victims in twelve seconds exactly, and late in the film our heroes discover that an injectable vaccine-of-sorts will trick the zombies into thinking you’re already infected, making them ignore you. The question of how the zombies -- or more specifically, the virus that has taken over the human bodies -- can tell if someone has been infected or not is unclear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/vt2HfDqiuWM\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a lot of sniffing. A little minor jaw snapping. There is not a lot of expository dialogue, except for the incredibly unhelpful, “He just walked right past him!” Over at \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/\">Vulture\u003c/a>, biophysicist and post-doctoral fellow Scott Forth \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/biophysicist-assesses-world-war-z.html\">offers a quick fact-checking of the science of \u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> saying, “It’s completely unclear how they are able to sense an individual that is infected with some sort of illness. Smell? We see the zombie sniffing intensely at Brad Pitt, but the human olfactory system isn’t terribly sensitive. Maybe the zombies have rapidly developed super-smell abilities? Any other form of sensing the presence of infected prey, unless they just kind of know it preternaturally or something, would require methods we're not currently aware of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The science of \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> got a warmer reception because it was closer to actual science. Yes, there is a scene where a researcher tries out a potential vaccine on herself, but the context is very different, and the film itself is concerned with how actual viruses travel the globe, how they are found and researched by the scientific community, and how the scientific process is the best (and maybe only) hope for stopping a future pandemic. \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/oct/22/contagion-film-truth-viral-pandemic\">Screenwriter Burns worked with Dr. Ian Lipkin\u003c/a>, a professor of epidemiology, neurology, and pathology, to consider how that process could contribute to plot, as opposed to how an action/adventure plot might work a little science into it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/GibtO8lMTnU\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> isn’t very action-based at all, but boy, it is absolutely terrifying. Every hand that lingers on a metal surface transferring possible germs, every cough and sneeze, is scarier than any of the snorting zombies chasing Brad Pitt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How each movie treats relationships is different too. In \u003cem>WWZ\u003c/em>, the only relationship that really matters is between Brad Pitt and his family -- he, too, promises to return to them -- and solving the worldwide zombie war is simply the thing he has to do before getting back to his wife and kids. There are plenty of other characters in the movie, including a young soldier who plays the role of surrogate daughter for the movie’s middle act (\u003ca href=\"http://i.imgur.com/wN9Obkx.png\">also \u003cem>Doctor Who’s\u003c/em> Peter Capaldi, playing a W.H.O. Doctor … !\u003c/a>), but they barely have names, much less motivations beyond \u003cem>don’t become a zombie. \u003c/em>The stakes are high in \u003cem>Contagion, \u003c/em>but, with fully realized characters like these, it would be just as interesting to watch what happens to them one year (or one decade) before or after the virus spreads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_14139\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar.jpeg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-14139\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-400x266.jpeg\" alt=\"Photo: Paramount Pictures\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-400x266.jpeg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-800x533.jpeg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-1440x960.jpeg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Paramount Pictures\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em> comes from a similar place. Theoretical physicist \u003ca href=\"http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/\">Kip Thorne\u003c/a> has been interviewed and mentioned nearly as much as Christopher Nolan and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan when it comes to the movie, and with good reason. As Dr. Lipkin helped shape \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em>, so did Dr. Thorne help shape \u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>, if not moreso. Thorne worked with Jonathan Nolan on the screenplay for several years before Christopher came on to direct, and he was on set to discuss the science with actors Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same \u003cem>Wired\u003c/em> article mentioned above, Christopher Nolan related that his brother “says that through working with Kip, he finally grasped relativity for a couple of weeks, and then the writers’ strike happened and he had to stop writing, and it was gone. I know exactly what he means. It’s like a little window opening up. That’s why the relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me. It wasn’t really about an intellectual understanding. It was a feeling of grasping something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A feeling of grasping something\u003c/em>. That’s what it is. Good science -- operating within the realm of what we understand, consistent logic and rules -- engaging relationships, good storytelling. More than convey truth or an accurate understanding of physics, good science allows the audience to feel like they’ve grasped something, even if it slips away after. \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> isn’t great because sharks are terrifying. \u003cem>Jaws \u003c/em>is great because sometimes you’re out in the ocean before you realize, \u003cem>We’re gonna need a bigger boat.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cooper tries to tell himself to stay both early and late in \u003cem>Interstellar’s\u003c/em> story, and it’s consistent with how the movie presents time travel. \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/waojxR20oRk?t=41s\">When Marty McFly starts to fade away in \u003cem>Back to the Future\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, it’s not good science -- not even in a time travel movie. But the moment when George dances with Lorraine and Marty springs back to existence? That’s \u003cem>a feeling of grasping something\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grasping a feeling is hard to quantify or explain with science. But when it’s done right, you know it. That’s why they call it movie magic.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "We take a look at how accurate the science in Interstellar, Contagion, and World War Z is, and how much it matters.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Maybe it started with \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Released in 1975, \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> was Stephen Spielberg’s breakout feature, and it’s widely regarded as creating the summer blockbuster model. It made a lot of money, it’s excellently structured, and it’s an efficient machine of repeatable dialogue (\"We’re gonna need a bigger boat.\" \"That’s some bad hat, Harry.\" \"Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.\" \"\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/_oFl_2p_LHU?t=29s\">Smile, you son of a -- EXPLOSION\u003c/a>.\").\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the most enduring legacy of \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> is the Spielbergian trope of marrying family drama -- most often the husband/father who wants to protect or reunite with his kids -- with sci-fi adventure. \"I have to save the world\" is a hard thing to grasp. But \"I made a promise to my daughter\"? That’s a feeling you can understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the initial conversation about \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>\u003c/a> has focused on: Is it good science, or bad science? Real-life conversations don’t sound like they do in most movies, real-life humans don’t \u003cem>look\u003c/em> like they do in most movies, so why is there a “___________ is bad science” headline whenever a movie like \u003cem>Interstellar \u003c/em>comes out?\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Rt2LHkSwdPQ'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/Rt2LHkSwdPQ'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Before we go any further, be warned there are spoilers below. Casual spoilers for \u003cem>Interstellar, Contagion, World War Z, \u003c/em>and for \u003cem>Back to the Future\u003c/em>. I respect your time. It can be hard to get to the movies, but sometimes you have to just say a thing in order to talk about a thing.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Interstellar’s \u003c/em>director is Christopher Nolan, best known for \u003ca href=\"http://amzn.com/B009JBZH54\">the Dark Knight trilogy\u003c/a>. He also wrote and directed \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception\">\u003cem>Inception\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2010, which is about the decidedly non-scientific idea of stepping into someone else’s dream. But discussing “\u003ca href=\"http://www.wired.com/2014/11/metaphysics-of-interstellar/\">The Metaphysics of \u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>\u003c/a>” with \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://wired.com\">Wired\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, Nolan said “\u003cem>Inception\u003c/em> had a lot of science in it: A rigid set of rules, mathematical and geometrical in their nature, define that script. That took a very long time to work out. They’re not real science, but they have that quality. You always have to cheat in cinematic narrative, but you try to do it as little as possible and in a way that doesn’t violate the pact with the audience. In \u003cem>Inception,\u003c/em> the geometry’s pretty solid.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is to say, \u003cem>Inception\u003c/em> establishes the laws of its fake science, and it abides by them. A rigid set of rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are two recent science fiction movies that have similar premises that explore science (and relationships) in different ways: \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_%28film%29\">\u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em>\u003c/a> (released in 2011, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns) and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_%28film%29\">\u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em>\u003c/a> (released in 2013, directed by Marc Forster, written by … well, written by a whole lot of people, frankly, and based on the book by Max Brooks).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contagion’s\u003c/em> trailer begins with relationships, and then it starts to look like an action-thriller. And I call it science fiction because, in the simplest sense, it is. Not to go all term paper on you, but Webster’s says sci-fi is a story “\u003ca href=\"http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science+fiction\">about how people and societies are affected by imaginary scientific developments in the future\u003c/a>.” \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> is a day-after-tomorrow kind of future, but a 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century global pandemic remains (thankfully) science fiction.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/4sYSyuuLk5g'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/4sYSyuuLk5g'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>World War Z’s \u003c/em>trailer plays out similarly, with a family in their SUV playing 20 questions (and Brad Pitt is there playing himself? Because what other dad has hair like that), but it quickly turns into…\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/HcwTxRuq-uk'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/HcwTxRuq-uk'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>…yup, an action-thriller. Both \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> and \u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em> are movies about global pandemics and a virus spread through basic human contact. \u003cem>WWZ’s\u003c/em> virus is anthropomorphized as actual zombies coming to get you, but the social unrest that ensues is similar. Governments go into lockdown and teams of scientists race to find a cure or a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the science of the movies are very different. \u003cem>WWZ’s \u003c/em>zombie virus transforms victims in twelve seconds exactly, and late in the film our heroes discover that an injectable vaccine-of-sorts will trick the zombies into thinking you’re already infected, making them ignore you. The question of how the zombies -- or more specifically, the virus that has taken over the human bodies -- can tell if someone has been infected or not is unclear.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/vt2HfDqiuWM'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/vt2HfDqiuWM'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>There’s a lot of sniffing. A little minor jaw snapping. There is not a lot of expository dialogue, except for the incredibly unhelpful, “He just walked right past him!” Over at \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/\">Vulture\u003c/a>, biophysicist and post-doctoral fellow Scott Forth \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/biophysicist-assesses-world-war-z.html\">offers a quick fact-checking of the science of \u003cem>World War Z\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> saying, “It’s completely unclear how they are able to sense an individual that is infected with some sort of illness. Smell? We see the zombie sniffing intensely at Brad Pitt, but the human olfactory system isn’t terribly sensitive. Maybe the zombies have rapidly developed super-smell abilities? Any other form of sensing the presence of infected prey, unless they just kind of know it preternaturally or something, would require methods we're not currently aware of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The science of \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> got a warmer reception because it was closer to actual science. Yes, there is a scene where a researcher tries out a potential vaccine on herself, but the context is very different, and the film itself is concerned with how actual viruses travel the globe, how they are found and researched by the scientific community, and how the scientific process is the best (and maybe only) hope for stopping a future pandemic. \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/oct/22/contagion-film-truth-viral-pandemic\">Screenwriter Burns worked with Dr. Ian Lipkin\u003c/a>, a professor of epidemiology, neurology, and pathology, to consider how that process could contribute to plot, as opposed to how an action/adventure plot might work a little science into it.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/GibtO8lMTnU'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/GibtO8lMTnU'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em> isn’t very action-based at all, but boy, it is absolutely terrifying. Every hand that lingers on a metal surface transferring possible germs, every cough and sneeze, is scarier than any of the snorting zombies chasing Brad Pitt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How each movie treats relationships is different too. In \u003cem>WWZ\u003c/em>, the only relationship that really matters is between Brad Pitt and his family -- he, too, promises to return to them -- and solving the worldwide zombie war is simply the thing he has to do before getting back to his wife and kids. There are plenty of other characters in the movie, including a young soldier who plays the role of surrogate daughter for the movie’s middle act (\u003ca href=\"http://i.imgur.com/wN9Obkx.png\">also \u003cem>Doctor Who’s\u003c/em> Peter Capaldi, playing a W.H.O. Doctor … !\u003c/a>), but they barely have names, much less motivations beyond \u003cem>don’t become a zombie. \u003c/em>The stakes are high in \u003cem>Contagion, \u003c/em>but, with fully realized characters like these, it would be just as interesting to watch what happens to them one year (or one decade) before or after the virus spreads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_14139\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar.jpeg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-14139\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-400x266.jpeg\" alt=\"Photo: Paramount Pictures\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-400x266.jpeg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-800x533.jpeg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/11/02_interstellar-1440x960.jpeg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Paramount Pictures\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em> comes from a similar place. Theoretical physicist \u003ca href=\"http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/\">Kip Thorne\u003c/a> has been interviewed and mentioned nearly as much as Christopher Nolan and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan when it comes to the movie, and with good reason. As Dr. Lipkin helped shape \u003cem>Contagion\u003c/em>, so did Dr. Thorne help shape \u003cem>Interstellar\u003c/em>, if not moreso. Thorne worked with Jonathan Nolan on the screenplay for several years before Christopher came on to direct, and he was on set to discuss the science with actors Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same \u003cem>Wired\u003c/em> article mentioned above, Christopher Nolan related that his brother “says that through working with Kip, he finally grasped relativity for a couple of weeks, and then the writers’ strike happened and he had to stop writing, and it was gone. I know exactly what he means. It’s like a little window opening up. That’s why the relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me. It wasn’t really about an intellectual understanding. It was a feeling of grasping something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A feeling of grasping something\u003c/em>. That’s what it is. Good science -- operating within the realm of what we understand, consistent logic and rules -- engaging relationships, good storytelling. More than convey truth or an accurate understanding of physics, good science allows the audience to feel like they’ve grasped something, even if it slips away after. \u003cem>Jaws\u003c/em> isn’t great because sharks are terrifying. \u003cem>Jaws \u003c/em>is great because sometimes you’re out in the ocean before you realize, \u003cem>We’re gonna need a bigger boat.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cooper tries to tell himself to stay both early and late in \u003cem>Interstellar’s\u003c/em> story, and it’s consistent with how the movie presents time travel. \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/waojxR20oRk?t=41s\">When Marty McFly starts to fade away in \u003cem>Back to the Future\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, it’s not good science -- not even in a time travel movie. But the moment when George dances with Lorraine and Marty springs back to existence? That’s \u003cem>a feeling of grasping something\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grasping a feeling is hard to quantify or explain with science. But when it’s done right, you know it. That’s why they call it movie magic.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>I remember the address book that lived in a drawer in the table where my parents’ landline telephone sat. I wasn’t a very social or sociable kid, but when I made a new friend and was given their phone number, I had special permission to add it to the book. Steve G., Joe S., Jay A., wherever you are now, you earned a special place in that red, faux-leather address book that still exists on Weaver Road in Ohio. That was the official demarcation point separating “my friend” from “kid I talk to in class.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today? Friendship is not official until it’s Facebook Official. It’s the modern day address book, a catalog of our friends and acquaintances. And unlike the old pen-and-paper address book, you can look at a Facebook profile and see your web of social connections. 82 friends in common, 23 friends in common, friends-of-friends you might not have met yet, but who are \u003cem>people you may know\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we’ve all got some randoms on our friends list, too. The lone trees in the wilderness with no web of connections, \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>, holdovers from other lives or social groups. Past girlfriends or lost connections who sought you out (or who you sought out) to scratch some existential itch. Because if you’re not friends on Facebook, how do you know they’re real?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are names I type into the search bar from time to time. School friends or dimly recalled vacation acquaintances, folks I met once or simply haven’t heard from since they moved away when we were both in the fourth grade. Are they real? Are they misremembered ghosts? Will it make them more real if I can find their online avatars, send a request, and see it confirmed? Does your in-person connection with another human soul still count if there’s no virtual proof?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check the notifications on my smartphone for the words “\u003cem>The first thing on your calendar today…\u003c/em>” It’s another sign that it’s 2014 and we live in the future. A sizeable portion of our working minds have been outsourced to external hard drives. It’s such a ubiquitous idea that anyone who spent any time at all watching the \u003ca href=\"http://www.fxx.com/thesimpsons\">Every Simpsons Ever marathon on FXX\u003c/a> recently has seen the Windows Phone commercial for Cortana, a potential Siri replacement that promises to help an affably-voiced man remember his wife’s anniversary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/w0pjD4qpIpg\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This idea is not even presented as a joke in the Windows Phone commercial -- it \u003cem>assumes\u003c/em> I’m not going to remember my anniversary, and the presence of Cortana, the female-voiced virtual assistant with a vaguely Latina-sounding name (“Cortana” is actually \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_%28gastropod%29\">the name of an extinct land snail from Brazil\u003c/a>) is meant to be reassuring and necessary to my 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while I bristle at Cortana’s insinuations that I’ll need her reminders to get through my daily life, the truth is that I \u003cem>do\u003c/em> use my phone and my calendar and my social networks for things like this all the time. The only people I wish happy birthdays to are the ones who plug their birthdays into Facebook. If I’m throwing a party, the invitations live there too. Facebook has become more than just an address book or a calendar -- it’s an approximation and representation of my real life, to the point that things really do seem more real if they’re mirrored online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 11\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> grade, an exchange student from Japan came to my high school. He didn’t live with me and my family, but he joined my Dungeons & Dragons group and became a fixture in our small, nerdy circle. On his last day in the United States, Yusuke and I took turns playing \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger\">Chrono Trigger\u003c/a> \u003c/em>on the Super Nintendo, and he explained that the character designs were created by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Toriyama\">Akira Toriyama\u003c/a>, an artist I’d never heard of who was well-known to my nerd-equivalents in Japan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then for a good ten years, after Yusuke went back to Japan, my friend and I lost touch. We didn’t speak, write, or have any evidence we’d ever met aside from memory and a few photographs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then one day, and a simple Facebook search later, there he was again. He lived outside of Tokyo, he was married and had two sons, he was eating a cheeseburger in his profile picture. I sent a friend request, he accepted it, and there was proof. \u003cem>Matthew became friends with Yusuke.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A nearby message stated we had \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>. Was that true?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are people I know in real life, people I share dozens of actual friend\u003cem>s \u003c/em>with, that I haven’t friend requested virtually. I see them in life, but not enough that I have much curiosity about their Buzzfeed quiz results or vacation pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some folks are opting out of virtual social networks altogether, either as political statements or as lifestyle choices. It makes it hard to remember their birthdays, and it also means I miss out on casually absorbing their life events. One of my Facebook-less friends got very sick last year, and she passed away in July. I found out the old fashioned way -- well, the new-old fashioned way -- via email from a real-life-mutual-friend. I flew to Chicago to attend Anne’s memorial service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anne’s sister Renee, who I hadn’t seen in ten years or more, remembered me by sight. She remembered the wedding we’d all attended -- Renee was a singer in the wedding band -- and she remembered the pig that had roasted nearby. At lunch after the wake, I read from an email exchange between Anne and myself from a few months before. I hugged Renee and her mother, and I sat around a real table with Anne’s real friends, and we told stories in real time, face to face and voice to voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few days later, back in California, I looked Renee up on Facebook. I sent her a friend request, which she accepted. Her profile picture was an image of her little sister Anne, smiling at the camera, facing toward the camera and away from a sunset reflection on a lake. The social network said Renee and I had \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I knew that wasn’t true.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I remember the address book that lived in a drawer in the table where my parents’ landline telephone sat. I wasn’t a very social or sociable kid, but when I made a new friend and was given their phone number, I had special permission to add it to the book. Steve G., Joe S., Jay A., wherever you are now, you earned a special place in that red, faux-leather address book that still exists on Weaver Road in Ohio. That was the official demarcation point separating “my friend” from “kid I talk to in class.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today? Friendship is not official until it’s Facebook Official. It’s the modern day address book, a catalog of our friends and acquaintances. And unlike the old pen-and-paper address book, you can look at a Facebook profile and see your web of social connections. 82 friends in common, 23 friends in common, friends-of-friends you might not have met yet, but who are \u003cem>people you may know\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we’ve all got some randoms on our friends list, too. The lone trees in the wilderness with no web of connections, \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>, holdovers from other lives or social groups. Past girlfriends or lost connections who sought you out (or who you sought out) to scratch some existential itch. Because if you’re not friends on Facebook, how do you know they’re real?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are names I type into the search bar from time to time. School friends or dimly recalled vacation acquaintances, folks I met once or simply haven’t heard from since they moved away when we were both in the fourth grade. Are they real? Are they misremembered ghosts? Will it make them more real if I can find their online avatars, send a request, and see it confirmed? Does your in-person connection with another human soul still count if there’s no virtual proof?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check the notifications on my smartphone for the words “\u003cem>The first thing on your calendar today…\u003c/em>” It’s another sign that it’s 2014 and we live in the future. A sizeable portion of our working minds have been outsourced to external hard drives. It’s such a ubiquitous idea that anyone who spent any time at all watching the \u003ca href=\"http://www.fxx.com/thesimpsons\">Every Simpsons Ever marathon on FXX\u003c/a> recently has seen the Windows Phone commercial for Cortana, a potential Siri replacement that promises to help an affably-voiced man remember his wife’s anniversary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/w0pjD4qpIpg'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/w0pjD4qpIpg'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>This idea is not even presented as a joke in the Windows Phone commercial -- it \u003cem>assumes\u003c/em> I’m not going to remember my anniversary, and the presence of Cortana, the female-voiced virtual assistant with a vaguely Latina-sounding name (“Cortana” is actually \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_%28gastropod%29\">the name of an extinct land snail from Brazil\u003c/a>) is meant to be reassuring and necessary to my 21\u003csup>st\u003c/sup> century life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while I bristle at Cortana’s insinuations that I’ll need her reminders to get through my daily life, the truth is that I \u003cem>do\u003c/em> use my phone and my calendar and my social networks for things like this all the time. The only people I wish happy birthdays to are the ones who plug their birthdays into Facebook. If I’m throwing a party, the invitations live there too. Facebook has become more than just an address book or a calendar -- it’s an approximation and representation of my real life, to the point that things really do seem more real if they’re mirrored online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 11\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> grade, an exchange student from Japan came to my high school. He didn’t live with me and my family, but he joined my Dungeons & Dragons group and became a fixture in our small, nerdy circle. On his last day in the United States, Yusuke and I took turns playing \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger\">Chrono Trigger\u003c/a> \u003c/em>on the Super Nintendo, and he explained that the character designs were created by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Toriyama\">Akira Toriyama\u003c/a>, an artist I’d never heard of who was well-known to my nerd-equivalents in Japan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then for a good ten years, after Yusuke went back to Japan, my friend and I lost touch. We didn’t speak, write, or have any evidence we’d ever met aside from memory and a few photographs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then one day, and a simple Facebook search later, there he was again. He lived outside of Tokyo, he was married and had two sons, he was eating a cheeseburger in his profile picture. I sent a friend request, he accepted it, and there was proof. \u003cem>Matthew became friends with Yusuke.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A nearby message stated we had \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>. Was that true?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are people I know in real life, people I share dozens of actual friend\u003cem>s \u003c/em>with, that I haven’t friend requested virtually. I see them in life, but not enough that I have much curiosity about their Buzzfeed quiz results or vacation pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some folks are opting out of virtual social networks altogether, either as political statements or as lifestyle choices. It makes it hard to remember their birthdays, and it also means I miss out on casually absorbing their life events. One of my Facebook-less friends got very sick last year, and she passed away in July. I found out the old fashioned way -- well, the new-old fashioned way -- via email from a real-life-mutual-friend. I flew to Chicago to attend Anne’s memorial service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anne’s sister Renee, who I hadn’t seen in ten years or more, remembered me by sight. She remembered the wedding we’d all attended -- Renee was a singer in the wedding band -- and she remembered the pig that had roasted nearby. At lunch after the wake, I read from an email exchange between Anne and myself from a few months before. I hugged Renee and her mother, and I sat around a real table with Anne’s real friends, and we told stories in real time, face to face and voice to voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few days later, back in California, I looked Renee up on Facebook. I sent her a friend request, which she accepted. Her profile picture was an image of her little sister Anne, smiling at the camera, facing toward the camera and away from a sunset reflection on a lake. The social network said Renee and I had \u003cem>no mutual friends\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"disqusTitle": "Survivor: 14 Years of Problematic Depictions of Women",
"title": "Survivor: 14 Years of Problematic Depictions of Women",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13635\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1.jpg\" alt=\"survivor-women\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1-360x202.jpg 360w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1-300x168.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venerable reality series \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.cbs.com/shows/survivor/\">Survivor\u003c/a> \u003c/em>returns this week for a 14th year and a 29th (!!!) season. Despite its longevity as top-rated show in a long-dominating genre, when I talk about my love of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> and \u003ca href=\"http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/November/131112/2D9670167-104040-d0525b.blocks_desktop_medium.jpg\">Jeff Probst\u003c/a>, the response I hear most often is, “Oh, is that show still on?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O4waun0Hqgg/TqjxNxjvEtI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/anja-pBN3GQ/s1600/eyeroll.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"768\" height=\"424\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: \u003ca href=\"http://realitydraft.blogspot.com/2011/10/top-5-gifs-of-staceys-redemption-island.html\">Reality Rivals\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yes, \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> is still on. And \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>is still great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The social game is fascinating, the challenges are fun, everyone is good looking, and Jeff Probst is one of the best counselors and hosts on reality TV. Seriously, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/kkDEUx4WNOY\">when he talked down Brandon Hantz after a rice-pouring meltdown\u003c/a> back in Caramoan, he diffused a tense situation that could have gotten yelly and violent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>is not a perfect show. Probst connects well with men (and bros), but he doesn’t do as well talking to, or understanding, women. \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> casts and edits women with strict and often unrealistic roles in mind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/09/13/survivor-philippines-jeff-probst-women/\">In a 2012 interview with \u003cem>Entertainment Weekly\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>Jeff Probst said, “There just aren’t as many colorful women characters in \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> history. For whatever reason, we’re loaded with interesting guys. Maybe that says something about our casting process, or maybe it says something about how men and women behave differently in conflict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watching any season of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> will reveal Probst man-crushing on \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/BostonRob\">Rob Mariano\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Colby_Donaldson\">Colby Donaldson\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Brad_Culpepper\">Brad Culpepper\u003c/a>, and other buff dudes. Probst’s (and the show’s) treatment of female contestants, on the other hand, is consistently condescending, when it’s not outright sexist. So to paraphrase Jeff Probst: “For whatever reason,” here are the female archetypes of \u003cem>Survivors \u003c/em>past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Black Widow\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13625\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 435px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-13625\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: CBS\" width=\"435\" height=\"265\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry.jpg 435w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry-360x219.jpg 360w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry-300x182.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 435px) 100vw, 435px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Parvati Shallow. Photo: CBS\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Jerri Manthey (Australian Outback, All-Stars, Heroes vs. Villains), Parvati Shallow (Cook Islands, Micronesia, Heroes vs. Villains)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the run-up to \u003cem>Survivor’s\u003c/em> second season, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jerrimanthey\">Jerri Manthey\u003c/a> was teased as the villain, a female manipulator on par with an evil \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_girl\">Bond girl\u003c/a>. Jerri had a kind-of-flirtation with \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/nxBkwIl_jOg\">Colby Donaldson, who is the natural-born son of Matthew McConaughey and Captain America\u003c/a>, until they came down on opposing sides of the social game. Colby became the golden boy and Jerri became the evil schemer, plotting to (gasp!) manipulate her fellow contestants and win the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/parvatishallow\">Parvati Shallow\u003c/a> played her first season as a self-described flirt, but when she came back for a “Fans vs. Favorites” season in Micronesia, her strategy was to make friendships and alliances, exploit them, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/NOwRtkMjznk?t=10s\">and play smart with people she could trust\u003c/a>. But she also came up with the name “\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Widow_Brigade\">Black Widow Brigade\u003c/a>” in Micronesia, for an all-female alliance that sent home a bunch of the boys and \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMmEdEMbXL8\">even convinced one of them to give his immunity to them\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Crazy One\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/ir4SUxQpJuA\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sue Hawk (Borneo, All-Stars), Abi-Maria Gomes (Philippines).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue Hawk delivered one of the most iconic \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> moments in season one, with a symbol-heavy, grammatically horrifying, speech about \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/ir4SUxQpJuA\">rats, snakes, and denying a dying woman a drink of water\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue came back for All-Stars, but she quit following an incident when Rich, her ally in season one, pressed his naked body up against hers during a challenge. Rich was voted out in the same episode for unrelated reasons. At the next challenge, Jeff Probst bought up the incident by saying, “Richard Hatch, sorta being inappropriate. Anybody have any comments?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue’s fellow contestants stared at the ground, saying nothing. Sue made it clear that it wasn’t “sorta inappropriate,” it was harassment, even if Richard Hatch thought it was funny. “I was violated, humiliated, de-humanized and totally spent, Jeff. It wasn’t sorta, Jeff… There’s no way I can continue with my emotions pushed into the ground that much.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/NAJvetEuoKM\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Probst, clearly caught off guard, fumbled with how to respond. “So, okay,” he said. “So, when you say you’re done with the game -- as in, you’re out of the game?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My mind left this game 24 hours ago,” Sue said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Sue’s fellow contestants -- Shii Ann Huang, who is on the opposite tribe -- at least recognizes that the incident took place, saying, “I’m so sorry, Sue. I didn’t see -- I’m so sorry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> treated this incident as best they could. Richard was already gone, and a boat was called in to allow Sue to leave the game. But the silence with which Sue’s statement was met is indicative of the response many women get when they report sexual harassment: silence and ostracism of the victim. To the show’s credit, they didn’t just edit this uncomfortable sequence out of existence. But overall, Sue’s depiction is that of a hotheaded Midwestern hick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More often, the Crazy One is simply shown to be foolish. In the Philippines, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/theabimaria\">Abi-Maria\u003c/a> is manipulated into turning against her ally \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/RC_Survivor\">RC\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/PeteYurkowski\">Pete\u003c/a>, the kind of dude who compares himself positively to \u003cem>Fight Club\u003c/em>'s Tyler Durden. The viewers are in on the joke the whole time -- Abi-Maria is getting fooled! -- whether we want to be or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Ice Queen\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13629\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/yuPLIa.gif\" alt=\"yuPLIa\" width=\"432\" height=\"242\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Candice Cody (Cook Islands, Heroes vs. Villains, Blood vs. Water), Kim Spradlin (One World)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Candice_Cody\">Candice\u003c/a> made good moves, but came across quiet onscreen. Until she returned in Blood vs. Water, that is, when she was edited as being a bossy ballbreaker, telling her husband what to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/SpradlinKim\">Kim\u003c/a> played a winner’s game in One World from the start, the kind that took Boston Rob four seasons to learn how to play. But she did so humbly, quietly, and intently. She won handily, and we’ll probably never see her on that island again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Lazy One (a.k.a. the Beach Beauty)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sarah Jones (Marquesas), Morgan McLeod (Cagayan)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Lazy Ones are almost always young, cute, and skinny. It doesn’t help their energy levels when they’ve been living on tiny cups of rice for several weeks, but when Maraamu tribe arrived on their beach, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Sarah_Jones\">Sarah Jones\u003c/a> opted to be carried in on the raft that her tribe mates were paddling. Every season reaches a point where the conversation turns to who “contributes” to the tribe and who sleeps the day away, followed by a cutaway shot to girls in bikinis lounging on a bed of bamboo. Unless the camp is near a lagoon, in which case there is\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/sEyiGHTsCaw?t=43s\"> a cutaway sequence to the women washing each other’s hair\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Adorable Tomboy\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13630\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/Le4ba.gif\" alt=\"Le4ba\" width=\"259\" height=\"252\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Colleen Haskell (Borneo), Kat Edorsson (One World, Blood vs. Water)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Awkward. Funny. Strange. \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Colleen_Haskell\">Colleen\u003c/a> played the game in season one and never returned, saying no when asked to play \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>again, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/WHAkz1wBiUU?t=10s\">but saying yes when asked to star in a Rob Schneider movie\u003c/a>. Hey, the heart wants what it wants, right? Meanwhile, Kat crawled around on all fours when her cousin came to visit as part of the One World “loved ones visit,” which was … um … better seen than described. This is the one archetype I can get behind. More \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> weirdos, please.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/LRNPpy5FuQw\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Ostracized African-American\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples:\u003c/em> Francesca Hogi (Redemption Island, Caramoan), Candace Smith (Tocantins)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, this is the most depressing one. Again, it’s practically a \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> perennial. Aside from \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Survivor:_Cook_Islands\">Cook Islands\u003c/a>, the (unfairly maligned, in my opinion) season where the tribes were divided by ethnicity, it’s very rare to see more than one African-American woman in a single season of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/DearFranny\">Francesca\u003c/a> has the … honor? of being the only contestant to be voted out \u003cem>first\u003c/em>, twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Tocantins, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Candace_Smith\">Candace\u003c/a> proved herself athletically, but clashed with tribe leader \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/the_real_coach\">Coach\u003c/a> over how to cook the rice and beans. Time and again, there’s “just something about” the African-American women of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> that makes them an early target for being voted out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, this isn’t true across the board. \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Vecepia_Towery\">Vecepia Towery-Robison\u003c/a> won her season, and \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Cirie_Fields\">Cirie Fields\u003c/a> is a three-time player generally regarded as both strategic \u003cem>and \u003c/em>very likeable. But, come on, \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> contestants. Maybe stop voting African-American women out at the first opportunity?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Mom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Tina Wesson (Australian Outback, All-Stars, Blood vs. Water), Dawn Meehan (South Pacific, Caramoan)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mom-figures on \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> have a pretty predictable arc. Either they go in the first few votes, usually due to “keeping the tribe strong,” or they make it deep in the game. Both \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Tina_Wesson\">Tina\u003c/a> in the Australian Outback, and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/meehand\">Dawn\u003c/a> in Caramoan, made it deep because they were able to dodge early expulsion, then made strong strategic alliances. Tina won her first season while Dawn lost to her ally Cochran, but both received similar criticisms: that they were carried to the end and made no moves of their own. It’s an inherently sexist criticism, almost always leveled against women or minorities who are sitting next to white men, who are deemed to have been “stronger players.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Sidekick/The Goat\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/LhMIG7wOe_E\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Amber Brkich (Australian Outback, All-Stars), Natalie White (Somoa)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only “The Goat” if they don’t become Sole Survivor, it’s become common for an opposite-sex pair to go to the end with the man presenting himself as the athlete/schemer/leader, and the woman made out to be -- either by her partner or by that season’s jury -- an unworthy coattails rider. That’s rarely the real story, since getting to the end in any configuration is a result of skill, luck, and good gameplay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>...and Sandra.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/LNFFU9SWDM4\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sandra Diaz-Twine (Pearl Islands, Heroes vs. Villains)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Sandra_Diaz-Twine\">Sandra\u003c/a> has done what no other contestant on \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>has done: She’s played twice, and won both times. She played the game that was best \u003cem>for her\u003c/em>, going with the flow when she needed to, starting fights when she needed to, and letting others crash and burn when they just couldn’t help it. Sandra stands on her own because her gameplay, her edit, and everything about her is uniquely \u003cem>Sandra\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the thing is, she’s not the only fully-formed woman to ever play \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. It just means that, to again paraphrase Jeff Probst, “for whatever reason,” Sandra played a game that defied the easy edit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. It’s a rewarding and fun watch, even when the winner steamrolls their way to the end. This list is certainly not meant to represent the totality of every woman who has appeared on \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>, but rather out how the producers and editors of the show frame the way those women are represented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s worth pointing out that my favorite reviewers and critics who write about \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> are both women. \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/ChannonSarah\">Sarah Freeman\u003c/a> is part of a team that covers the show for \u003ca href=\"http://robhasawebsite.com/category/survivor/\">RobHasAWebsite\u003c/a>, run by two-time contestant Rob Cesternino, and she looks at the strategy behind each player, as revealed by their on-air edits and deleted scenes. \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/\">Linda Holmes\u003c/a> occasionally covers \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> for the NPR pop culture blog MonkeySee, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/10/231398615/the-tribe-has-broken-how-sexism-is-silently-killing-survivor\">including a post that specifically tackled the sexism inherent in \u003cem>Survivor’s \u003c/em>first Blood vs. Water season\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I like \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>,” she wrote in 2013, “but I cannot deny that having to sit through all this preening by bullies is beginning take a toll on my enjoyment, especially when I feel like the show and the host are on their side.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> has had a lot of imitators over the past 14 years, but very few are still standing today. \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> is a great game show, an interesting social experiment, and a living legend of reality television. Now all it has to do is live up to its own promise.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Tonight marks the premiere of the 29th season of Survivor. Will this be the year they do right by women?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13635\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1.jpg\" alt=\"survivor-women\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1-360x202.jpg 360w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/survivor-women1-300x168.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venerable reality series \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.cbs.com/shows/survivor/\">Survivor\u003c/a> \u003c/em>returns this week for a 14th year and a 29th (!!!) season. Despite its longevity as top-rated show in a long-dominating genre, when I talk about my love of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> and \u003ca href=\"http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/November/131112/2D9670167-104040-d0525b.blocks_desktop_medium.jpg\">Jeff Probst\u003c/a>, the response I hear most often is, “Oh, is that show still on?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O4waun0Hqgg/TqjxNxjvEtI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/anja-pBN3GQ/s1600/eyeroll.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"768\" height=\"424\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: \u003ca href=\"http://realitydraft.blogspot.com/2011/10/top-5-gifs-of-staceys-redemption-island.html\">Reality Rivals\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yes, \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> is still on. And \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>is still great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The social game is fascinating, the challenges are fun, everyone is good looking, and Jeff Probst is one of the best counselors and hosts on reality TV. Seriously, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/kkDEUx4WNOY\">when he talked down Brandon Hantz after a rice-pouring meltdown\u003c/a> back in Caramoan, he diffused a tense situation that could have gotten yelly and violent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>is not a perfect show. Probst connects well with men (and bros), but he doesn’t do as well talking to, or understanding, women. \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> casts and edits women with strict and often unrealistic roles in mind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/09/13/survivor-philippines-jeff-probst-women/\">In a 2012 interview with \u003cem>Entertainment Weekly\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>Jeff Probst said, “There just aren’t as many colorful women characters in \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> history. For whatever reason, we’re loaded with interesting guys. Maybe that says something about our casting process, or maybe it says something about how men and women behave differently in conflict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watching any season of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> will reveal Probst man-crushing on \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/BostonRob\">Rob Mariano\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Colby_Donaldson\">Colby Donaldson\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Brad_Culpepper\">Brad Culpepper\u003c/a>, and other buff dudes. Probst’s (and the show’s) treatment of female contestants, on the other hand, is consistently condescending, when it’s not outright sexist. So to paraphrase Jeff Probst: “For whatever reason,” here are the female archetypes of \u003cem>Survivors \u003c/em>past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Black Widow\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13625\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 435px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-13625\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: CBS\" width=\"435\" height=\"265\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry.jpg 435w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry-360x219.jpg 360w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/surv-parv-cry-300x182.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 435px) 100vw, 435px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Parvati Shallow. Photo: CBS\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Jerri Manthey (Australian Outback, All-Stars, Heroes vs. Villains), Parvati Shallow (Cook Islands, Micronesia, Heroes vs. Villains)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the run-up to \u003cem>Survivor’s\u003c/em> second season, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jerrimanthey\">Jerri Manthey\u003c/a> was teased as the villain, a female manipulator on par with an evil \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_girl\">Bond girl\u003c/a>. Jerri had a kind-of-flirtation with \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/nxBkwIl_jOg\">Colby Donaldson, who is the natural-born son of Matthew McConaughey and Captain America\u003c/a>, until they came down on opposing sides of the social game. Colby became the golden boy and Jerri became the evil schemer, plotting to (gasp!) manipulate her fellow contestants and win the game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/parvatishallow\">Parvati Shallow\u003c/a> played her first season as a self-described flirt, but when she came back for a “Fans vs. Favorites” season in Micronesia, her strategy was to make friendships and alliances, exploit them, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/NOwRtkMjznk?t=10s\">and play smart with people she could trust\u003c/a>. But she also came up with the name “\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Widow_Brigade\">Black Widow Brigade\u003c/a>” in Micronesia, for an all-female alliance that sent home a bunch of the boys and \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMmEdEMbXL8\">even convinced one of them to give his immunity to them\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Crazy One\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/ir4SUxQpJuA\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sue Hawk (Borneo, All-Stars), Abi-Maria Gomes (Philippines).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue Hawk delivered one of the most iconic \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> moments in season one, with a symbol-heavy, grammatically horrifying, speech about \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/ir4SUxQpJuA\">rats, snakes, and denying a dying woman a drink of water\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue came back for All-Stars, but she quit following an incident when Rich, her ally in season one, pressed his naked body up against hers during a challenge. Rich was voted out in the same episode for unrelated reasons. At the next challenge, Jeff Probst bought up the incident by saying, “Richard Hatch, sorta being inappropriate. Anybody have any comments?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue’s fellow contestants stared at the ground, saying nothing. Sue made it clear that it wasn’t “sorta inappropriate,” it was harassment, even if Richard Hatch thought it was funny. “I was violated, humiliated, de-humanized and totally spent, Jeff. It wasn’t sorta, Jeff… There’s no way I can continue with my emotions pushed into the ground that much.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/NAJvetEuoKM'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/NAJvetEuoKM'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Probst, clearly caught off guard, fumbled with how to respond. “So, okay,” he said. “So, when you say you’re done with the game -- as in, you’re out of the game?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My mind left this game 24 hours ago,” Sue said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Sue’s fellow contestants -- Shii Ann Huang, who is on the opposite tribe -- at least recognizes that the incident took place, saying, “I’m so sorry, Sue. I didn’t see -- I’m so sorry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> treated this incident as best they could. Richard was already gone, and a boat was called in to allow Sue to leave the game. But the silence with which Sue’s statement was met is indicative of the response many women get when they report sexual harassment: silence and ostracism of the victim. To the show’s credit, they didn’t just edit this uncomfortable sequence out of existence. But overall, Sue’s depiction is that of a hotheaded Midwestern hick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More often, the Crazy One is simply shown to be foolish. In the Philippines, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/theabimaria\">Abi-Maria\u003c/a> is manipulated into turning against her ally \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/RC_Survivor\">RC\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/PeteYurkowski\">Pete\u003c/a>, the kind of dude who compares himself positively to \u003cem>Fight Club\u003c/em>'s Tyler Durden. The viewers are in on the joke the whole time -- Abi-Maria is getting fooled! -- whether we want to be or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Ice Queen\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13629\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/yuPLIa.gif\" alt=\"yuPLIa\" width=\"432\" height=\"242\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Candice Cody (Cook Islands, Heroes vs. Villains, Blood vs. Water), Kim Spradlin (One World)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Candice_Cody\">Candice\u003c/a> made good moves, but came across quiet onscreen. Until she returned in Blood vs. Water, that is, when she was edited as being a bossy ballbreaker, telling her husband what to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/SpradlinKim\">Kim\u003c/a> played a winner’s game in One World from the start, the kind that took Boston Rob four seasons to learn how to play. But she did so humbly, quietly, and intently. She won handily, and we’ll probably never see her on that island again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Lazy One (a.k.a. the Beach Beauty)\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sarah Jones (Marquesas), Morgan McLeod (Cagayan)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Lazy Ones are almost always young, cute, and skinny. It doesn’t help their energy levels when they’ve been living on tiny cups of rice for several weeks, but when Maraamu tribe arrived on their beach, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Sarah_Jones\">Sarah Jones\u003c/a> opted to be carried in on the raft that her tribe mates were paddling. Every season reaches a point where the conversation turns to who “contributes” to the tribe and who sleeps the day away, followed by a cutaway shot to girls in bikinis lounging on a bed of bamboo. Unless the camp is near a lagoon, in which case there is\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/sEyiGHTsCaw?t=43s\"> a cutaway sequence to the women washing each other’s hair\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Adorable Tomboy\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13630\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/Le4ba.gif\" alt=\"Le4ba\" width=\"259\" height=\"252\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Colleen Haskell (Borneo), Kat Edorsson (One World, Blood vs. Water)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Awkward. Funny. Strange. \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Colleen_Haskell\">Colleen\u003c/a> played the game in season one and never returned, saying no when asked to play \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>again, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/WHAkz1wBiUU?t=10s\">but saying yes when asked to star in a Rob Schneider movie\u003c/a>. Hey, the heart wants what it wants, right? Meanwhile, Kat crawled around on all fours when her cousin came to visit as part of the One World “loved ones visit,” which was … um … better seen than described. This is the one archetype I can get behind. More \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> weirdos, please.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/LRNPpy5FuQw'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/LRNPpy5FuQw'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Ostracized African-American\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples:\u003c/em> Francesca Hogi (Redemption Island, Caramoan), Candace Smith (Tocantins)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, this is the most depressing one. Again, it’s practically a \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> perennial. Aside from \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Survivor:_Cook_Islands\">Cook Islands\u003c/a>, the (unfairly maligned, in my opinion) season where the tribes were divided by ethnicity, it’s very rare to see more than one African-American woman in a single season of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/DearFranny\">Francesca\u003c/a> has the … honor? of being the only contestant to be voted out \u003cem>first\u003c/em>, twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Tocantins, \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Candace_Smith\">Candace\u003c/a> proved herself athletically, but clashed with tribe leader \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/the_real_coach\">Coach\u003c/a> over how to cook the rice and beans. Time and again, there’s “just something about” the African-American women of \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> that makes them an early target for being voted out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, this isn’t true across the board. \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Vecepia_Towery\">Vecepia Towery-Robison\u003c/a> won her season, and \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Cirie_Fields\">Cirie Fields\u003c/a> is a three-time player generally regarded as both strategic \u003cem>and \u003c/em>very likeable. But, come on, \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> contestants. Maybe stop voting African-American women out at the first opportunity?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Mom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Tina Wesson (Australian Outback, All-Stars, Blood vs. Water), Dawn Meehan (South Pacific, Caramoan)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mom-figures on \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> have a pretty predictable arc. Either they go in the first few votes, usually due to “keeping the tribe strong,” or they make it deep in the game. Both \u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Tina_Wesson\">Tina\u003c/a> in the Australian Outback, and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/meehand\">Dawn\u003c/a> in Caramoan, made it deep because they were able to dodge early expulsion, then made strong strategic alliances. Tina won her first season while Dawn lost to her ally Cochran, but both received similar criticisms: that they were carried to the end and made no moves of their own. It’s an inherently sexist criticism, almost always leveled against women or minorities who are sitting next to white men, who are deemed to have been “stronger players.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>The Sidekick/The Goat\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/LhMIG7wOe_E\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Amber Brkich (Australian Outback, All-Stars), Natalie White (Somoa)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only “The Goat” if they don’t become Sole Survivor, it’s become common for an opposite-sex pair to go to the end with the man presenting himself as the athlete/schemer/leader, and the woman made out to be -- either by her partner or by that season’s jury -- an unworthy coattails rider. That’s rarely the real story, since getting to the end in any configuration is a result of skill, luck, and good gameplay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center\">\u003cstrong>...and Sandra.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/LNFFU9SWDM4\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Examples: \u003c/em>Sandra Diaz-Twine (Pearl Islands, Heroes vs. Villains)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Sandra_Diaz-Twine\">Sandra\u003c/a> has done what no other contestant on \u003cem>Survivor \u003c/em>has done: She’s played twice, and won both times. She played the game that was best \u003cem>for her\u003c/em>, going with the flow when she needed to, starting fights when she needed to, and letting others crash and burn when they just couldn’t help it. Sandra stands on her own because her gameplay, her edit, and everything about her is uniquely \u003cem>Sandra\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the thing is, she’s not the only fully-formed woman to ever play \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. It just means that, to again paraphrase Jeff Probst, “for whatever reason,” Sandra played a game that defied the easy edit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I love \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>. It’s a rewarding and fun watch, even when the winner steamrolls their way to the end. This list is certainly not meant to represent the totality of every woman who has appeared on \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>, but rather out how the producers and editors of the show frame the way those women are represented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s worth pointing out that my favorite reviewers and critics who write about \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> are both women. \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/ChannonSarah\">Sarah Freeman\u003c/a> is part of a team that covers the show for \u003ca href=\"http://robhasawebsite.com/category/survivor/\">RobHasAWebsite\u003c/a>, run by two-time contestant Rob Cesternino, and she looks at the strategy behind each player, as revealed by their on-air edits and deleted scenes. \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/\">Linda Holmes\u003c/a> occasionally covers \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> for the NPR pop culture blog MonkeySee, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/10/231398615/the-tribe-has-broken-how-sexism-is-silently-killing-survivor\">including a post that specifically tackled the sexism inherent in \u003cem>Survivor’s \u003c/em>first Blood vs. Water season\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I like \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em>,” she wrote in 2013, “but I cannot deny that having to sit through all this preening by bullies is beginning take a toll on my enjoyment, especially when I feel like the show and the host are on their side.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> has had a lot of imitators over the past 14 years, but very few are still standing today. \u003cem>Survivor\u003c/em> is a great game show, an interesting social experiment, and a living legend of reality television. Now all it has to do is live up to its own promise.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12826\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://blogs.kqed.org/pop/2014/07/10/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-star-wars-is-now-wrong/star-wars/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12826\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-12826\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: Lucasfilm\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars-400x225.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Lucasfilm\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Around the year AD 50, Christian leaders met to settle a disagreement over church dogma. The council said, “Okay, you know what? New converts to Christianity -- you don’t have to be circumcised if you don’t want to. You should still keep kosher, though.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Man, re-interpreting the word of God.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 2014, there is a man named Leland Chee. He is an employee of Lucasfilm, and therefore the Walt Disney Company. His official title is “Continuity database administrator,\" but Star Wars fans call him the \"Keeper of the Holocron.” (A \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocron\">holocron\u003c/a>, by the by, is a fictional holographic repository for Jedi knowledge; its real world counterpart is essentially a history book or database of the Star Wars universe, meant to maintain continuity.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Leland Chee is one of four members of the Lucasfilm Story Group, formed in 2013, shortly after the Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm. The Story Group’s job, according to a video and press release called “The Legendary Star Wars Universe Turns a New Page,” is to oversee the future of the Star Wars narrative across films, television, books, comics, games, and all ancillary releases. There will be no more contradictory stories, no more continuity mistakes, no more instances, as in \u003cem>Splinters of the Mind’s Eye\u003c/em>, the very first Star Wars spinoff novel released in 1978, of unresolved sexual tension between Luke and Leia. Every novel, comic book, or game previously released is now relegated to being called “Star Wars Legends.” The material remains in print, but the stories...they no longer count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We want the world to feel real,” Chee said in the Story Group’s video. “And it feels real if everything is in line.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, as Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin (and us) in \u003cem>A New Hope\u003c/em>, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Star Wars fandom started to turn against the folks who make Star Wars stories...well, probably as soon as (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader revealed himself as Luke’s dad. But the backlash kicked into high gear with the Special Editions, theatrical re-releases of the Original Trilogy in 1997, which featured new material, special effects upgrades, and tweaks to original scenes, the most infamous being the cantina shootout that introduces Han Solo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/fKxOEUhRMt0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the original release, a reptilian bounty hunter named Greedo threatens our man, Han. Han shoots him in cold blood. In the Special Edition, Greedo fires off a clumsy blaster shot that a CGIed Harrison Ford awkwardly dodges, before shooting back in retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anyone you’ve ever seen wearing a “Han Shot First” shirt is a Star Wars Gnostic, adhering to a version of the narrative deemed non-canonical by the Keepers of the Holocron.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine I called together the First Council of Nicaea. Constantine had converted to Christianity years before, legitimizing Christianity and helping it to spread throughout Rome. Nicaea is now regarded as the first Catholic Ecumenical Council, in which church patriarchs get together and decide which parts of Christian dogma are true, which parts they move around the board a little bit, and which parts get thrown out. At Nicaea, they announced that God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son were the same guy, and not two separate -- but both really important -- guys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like with Star Wars, we can all probably agree that this wasn’t the first time there were different interpretations of Christian dogma. But like “Han Shot First,” this was a line in the sand. This was Constantine saying, “Okay, you know what? There’s a lot of different opinions out there, but from now on, we’re the guys who decide what counts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And for a lot of people, they were. To others? Well, sometimes decrees and councils are a good opportunity to schism, or declare alternative popes, or write new gospels, or go on eBay and see if you can find those DVDs that came out a few years ago, the ones with the original theatrical cuts included as bonus features, because those are the versions of the movies you remember and like best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 451, after the Council of Chalcedon, church leaders declared that Christ was two beings in one person: a human and a divine. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox followers, among others, accepted this as dogma. Others -- the modern-day followers of Oriental Orthodoxy -- split off from these churches in a schism. They believe Christ is God, only and exclusively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12830\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 360px\">\u003ca href=\"http://blogs.kqed.org/pop/2014/07/10/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-star-wars-is-now-wrong/han-solo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12830\">\u003cimg class=\"wp-image-12830 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/han-solo-360x202.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: JD Hancock\" width=\"360\" height=\"202\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">First-shooter Han Solo vs. Special Edition Retaliating Han Solo. \u003cbr> Photo: \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/4579955422\">JD Hancock\u003c/a>, via Flickr\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Is that a quibble? I dunno. Have you ever paid attention to that Special Edition scene with Jabba and Han at the Millennium Falcon? The dialogue is basically the same as Han’s scene with Greedo. It makes the whole rhythm of the first act feel weird. Schism, I say!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A question posed to LucasBooks Senior Editor Jennifer Heddle via Twitter after the Story Group announcement asked if fan-favorite Expanded Universe characters like Darth Revan (a Sith Lord and the main character in the video game \u003cem>Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic\u003c/em>) had ceased to exist. “They’re still there!” she said. “But are they part of ‘official’ canon, for now? Probably not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 2005, after watching the prequel trilogy and feeling unfulfilled, I wrote script outlines for an alternative series of prequels that better fit what I thought the origins of Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker should have been. It was the first step into a larger world of making up my own Star Wars stories. There’s a “\u003ca href=\"http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page\">Wookieepedia\u003c/a>” that details official Star Wars and Star Wars Legends continuity, but there’s an equally impressive \u003ca href=\"http://swfanon.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Fanon_Wiki\">Star Wars fan fiction wiki\u003c/a> that tells scores of alternative sagas created by Star Wars fans. Their quality may vary, but they have readers -- even if only a few -- who are emotionally invested in the tales they tell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I play in a weekly Star Wars role-playing game with a long-running gaming group in a Google Hangout. We turn on our webcams, we roll virtual dice, and we pretend to be aliens and scoundrels and Jedis in training. I asked one of my fellow players, a teacher, writer and improviser named Alex Dodge, what he thought about decades of stories being wiped from continuity. He said, “Continuity should set a story up and give context and depth. It should never get in the way of a good story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can get in a lot of arguments -- on the internet, at a comic convention, at a bar -- about whether Han shot first, or if Anakin was conceived by the Force, or how many decks a Star Destroyer has, based on the \u003cem>Encyclopedia\u003c/em> or the West End Games \u003cem>Star Wars Sourcebook\u003c/em> or a screencap from the blu-ray. But ultimately, all of these stories are imaginary and all of these stories are real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We shouldn’t need a conclave or a Vatican II because we should each be free to worship in our own way,” Alex told me. “I’m a Star Wars Unitarian.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The new owners of Star Wars have decreed that all the books, comics, and video games are no longer \"in continuity.\" Who gets to decide which stories matter -- the corporation that owns them or the audience who experiences them?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12826\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://blogs.kqed.org/pop/2014/07/10/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-star-wars-is-now-wrong/star-wars/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12826\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-12826\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: Lucasfilm\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/star-wars-400x225.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Lucasfilm\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Around the year AD 50, Christian leaders met to settle a disagreement over church dogma. The council said, “Okay, you know what? New converts to Christianity -- you don’t have to be circumcised if you don’t want to. You should still keep kosher, though.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Man, re-interpreting the word of God.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 2014, there is a man named Leland Chee. He is an employee of Lucasfilm, and therefore the Walt Disney Company. His official title is “Continuity database administrator,\" but Star Wars fans call him the \"Keeper of the Holocron.” (A \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocron\">holocron\u003c/a>, by the by, is a fictional holographic repository for Jedi knowledge; its real world counterpart is essentially a history book or database of the Star Wars universe, meant to maintain continuity.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Leland Chee is one of four members of the Lucasfilm Story Group, formed in 2013, shortly after the Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm. The Story Group’s job, according to a video and press release called “The Legendary Star Wars Universe Turns a New Page,” is to oversee the future of the Star Wars narrative across films, television, books, comics, games, and all ancillary releases. There will be no more contradictory stories, no more continuity mistakes, no more instances, as in \u003cem>Splinters of the Mind’s Eye\u003c/em>, the very first Star Wars spinoff novel released in 1978, of unresolved sexual tension between Luke and Leia. Every novel, comic book, or game previously released is now relegated to being called “Star Wars Legends.” The material remains in print, but the stories...they no longer count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We want the world to feel real,” Chee said in the Story Group’s video. “And it feels real if everything is in line.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, as Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin (and us) in \u003cem>A New Hope\u003c/em>, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Star Wars fandom started to turn against the folks who make Star Wars stories...well, probably as soon as (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader revealed himself as Luke’s dad. But the backlash kicked into high gear with the Special Editions, theatrical re-releases of the Original Trilogy in 1997, which featured new material, special effects upgrades, and tweaks to original scenes, the most infamous being the cantina shootout that introduces Han Solo.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/fKxOEUhRMt0'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/fKxOEUhRMt0'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>In the original release, a reptilian bounty hunter named Greedo threatens our man, Han. Han shoots him in cold blood. In the Special Edition, Greedo fires off a clumsy blaster shot that a CGIed Harrison Ford awkwardly dodges, before shooting back in retaliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anyone you’ve ever seen wearing a “Han Shot First” shirt is a Star Wars Gnostic, adhering to a version of the narrative deemed non-canonical by the Keepers of the Holocron.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine I called together the First Council of Nicaea. Constantine had converted to Christianity years before, legitimizing Christianity and helping it to spread throughout Rome. Nicaea is now regarded as the first Catholic Ecumenical Council, in which church patriarchs get together and decide which parts of Christian dogma are true, which parts they move around the board a little bit, and which parts get thrown out. At Nicaea, they announced that God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son were the same guy, and not two separate -- but both really important -- guys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like with Star Wars, we can all probably agree that this wasn’t the first time there were different interpretations of Christian dogma. But like “Han Shot First,” this was a line in the sand. This was Constantine saying, “Okay, you know what? There’s a lot of different opinions out there, but from now on, we’re the guys who decide what counts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And for a lot of people, they were. To others? Well, sometimes decrees and councils are a good opportunity to schism, or declare alternative popes, or write new gospels, or go on eBay and see if you can find those DVDs that came out a few years ago, the ones with the original theatrical cuts included as bonus features, because those are the versions of the movies you remember and like best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 451, after the Council of Chalcedon, church leaders declared that Christ was two beings in one person: a human and a divine. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox followers, among others, accepted this as dogma. Others -- the modern-day followers of Oriental Orthodoxy -- split off from these churches in a schism. They believe Christ is God, only and exclusively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12830\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 360px\">\u003ca href=\"http://blogs.kqed.org/pop/2014/07/10/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-star-wars-is-now-wrong/han-solo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12830\">\u003cimg class=\"wp-image-12830 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/07/han-solo-360x202.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: JD Hancock\" width=\"360\" height=\"202\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">First-shooter Han Solo vs. Special Edition Retaliating Han Solo. \u003cbr> Photo: \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/4579955422\">JD Hancock\u003c/a>, via Flickr\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Is that a quibble? I dunno. Have you ever paid attention to that Special Edition scene with Jabba and Han at the Millennium Falcon? The dialogue is basically the same as Han’s scene with Greedo. It makes the whole rhythm of the first act feel weird. Schism, I say!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A question posed to LucasBooks Senior Editor Jennifer Heddle via Twitter after the Story Group announcement asked if fan-favorite Expanded Universe characters like Darth Revan (a Sith Lord and the main character in the video game \u003cem>Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic\u003c/em>) had ceased to exist. “They’re still there!” she said. “But are they part of ‘official’ canon, for now? Probably not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In AD 2005, after watching the prequel trilogy and feeling unfulfilled, I wrote script outlines for an alternative series of prequels that better fit what I thought the origins of Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker should have been. It was the first step into a larger world of making up my own Star Wars stories. There’s a “\u003ca href=\"http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page\">Wookieepedia\u003c/a>” that details official Star Wars and Star Wars Legends continuity, but there’s an equally impressive \u003ca href=\"http://swfanon.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Fanon_Wiki\">Star Wars fan fiction wiki\u003c/a> that tells scores of alternative sagas created by Star Wars fans. Their quality may vary, but they have readers -- even if only a few -- who are emotionally invested in the tales they tell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I play in a weekly Star Wars role-playing game with a long-running gaming group in a Google Hangout. We turn on our webcams, we roll virtual dice, and we pretend to be aliens and scoundrels and Jedis in training. I asked one of my fellow players, a teacher, writer and improviser named Alex Dodge, what he thought about decades of stories being wiped from continuity. He said, “Continuity should set a story up and give context and depth. It should never get in the way of a good story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can get in a lot of arguments -- on the internet, at a comic convention, at a bar -- about whether Han shot first, or if Anakin was conceived by the Force, or how many decks a Star Destroyer has, based on the \u003cem>Encyclopedia\u003c/em> or the West End Games \u003cem>Star Wars Sourcebook\u003c/em> or a screencap from the blu-ray. But ultimately, all of these stories are imaginary and all of these stories are real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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