Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place. Still, I cannot help but feel exasperation at her defensive crouch when she’s questioned about Bush, or Hart, or her responsibility for the toxic work environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” I cannot help but roll my eyes at the self-pitying strain that runs through “Relatable,” her scrupulously unilluminating 2018 Netflix stand-up special, in which she professes, or performs, frustration at the indignities of the celebrity stratosphere. […] As in her interview with Hart, her segment on Bush, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah, the Dakota Johnson moment inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own post-aughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous, the odd Dolly Parton excepted, are in solidarity mostly with themselves. […] For DeGeneres, who built her career on playing versions of “Ellen,” by appearing, as a queer woman in a patriarchal society, not only “normal” but ordinary, this evolution couldn’t help but hold symbolic resonance. Because “progress” is not an achievement but an action, and to let up the fight is already to lose it. From “Don’t Say Gay”-style legislation in the U.S. and the prevalence of transphobia in U.K. media to the deadly threat to queers in Russia and its occupied territories, LGBTQ people are engaged in a tug of war on a tectonic scale, struggling ceaselessly just to keep our footing. It does not seem so outrageous to me, in this context, to expect the most prominent LGBTQ American to pull in the same direction, or at least to accept that the price of holding the vanishing center is becoming a little less beloved. It’s not as if DeGeneres has been driven into hiding. She simply forfeited her position as the queer celebrity everyone — me, my mother, George W. Bush — could agree on, because in a time and place of such terrifying revanchism, it is not enough to be agreeable. For those of us frightened by the change she once represented being so swiftly rolled back, DeGeneres’ fumbling attempt to keep her distance turns out to be the one choice we couldn’t forgive, and will not forget. When we lost Ellen, she lost us.

Arnold wasn’t just a football-headed fourth grader. He was an urban planning pioneer. --- The stories of a group of fourth graders coming of age in the big city at times mimicked the neoliberal objectives of Clinton-era policy: The bullies that Arnold and his friends faced might as well have been the state and private capital, which linked arms in the name of urban renewal while actually threatening the sanctity of working-class life. And although Hey Arnold! did not present itself as a manifesto for a generation that would grow up to cast doubt on the normalcy of capitalist logic, the cartoon did provide a cultural experience that remains salient, 25-plus years on—and one that fans tell me, surprisingly for a cartoon, broached these subjects more blatantly than many are willing to do today. […] Geographers have since explored the long-term deleterious effects of these 1990s schemes. In 2019, for instance, Samuel Stein published Capital City, where he explored how the $217 billion industry that is global real estate follows the movements of a “creative class,” whose members move to poorer neighborhoods after being priced out of more expensive places already overrun by high rent costs. Only then do urban planners see these neighborhoods as “livable”—as Stein puts it, “a euphemism for White people with disposable income”—before tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones that ultimately price out the creative class that made neighborhoods attractive to capital in the first place. […] It’s not so much that Hey Arnold! radicalized millennials in their youth, it seems, but that it infused their inchoate political and social consciousnesses with ways to respond to their material realities later on. A lot of the rhetoric of liberal capitalism—that it is driven by natural turns in the market—was flipped on its head in Hey Arnold. In the show, capitalism was nothing more than the destroyer of fun. It threatened not only the displacement of the city’s working class, but also the places in which young viewers played. And as millennials are now feeling many of the neoliberal structural changes of the 1990s, including being unable to buy homes or even rent in cities, it’s no surprise that the majority of young Americans now look unfavorably upon capitalism—just as their favorite cartoon characters did two decades ago.

Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony. --- Branded toys routinely make more money than the films and cartoons on which they are based—sometimes a lot more—so it’s logical in a way that yes, children’s television shows and movies are basically long, elaborate toy commercials. If they are to provide something, anything, more interesting or positive for children than a siren call to the toy store, any other potential motives—humor, pleasure, an observation on human nature or a philosophical or moral lesson—are incidental to the prime directive of selling toys, lunchboxes, T-shirts, and all the other branded merchandise known in the trade as “CP,” or consumer products. […] In effect, it’s no longer possible to produce mass-market children’s entertainment outside the parameters of “selling out.” […] All the bronies I have met share this effortless camaraderie; some are shyer than others, but basically they are twenty-somethings with the simple, unaffected friendliness of 5-year-olds. […] There’s a temptation to reckon the attempts of artists like Lauren Faust to create entertaining and meaningful shows within the straitjacket of corporate commerce as entirely futile, hopeless. A mug’s game. But then I remember the Grand Galloping Gala in full swing. In time the techno music was blasting and a throng of kids massed together in the center of the dancefloor, dressed in cosplay pony ears and swishing tails and all sorts of homemade cartoon finery, pogoing, and suddenly it became clear that they were all chanting together. Evan, I said. Are you hearing what they’re chanting. He’s all, What is it? It was this: “Friendship! Friendship! Friendship!”

Slow television is the uninterrupted broadcast of an ordinary event from start to finish. Early efforts included burning Yule logs on TV around Christmas and driver’s views of complete British rail journeys (not to mention Andy Warhol and the pitch drop experiment), but Norwegian public television has revived the format in recent years. The first broadcast was of a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo, which was watched at some point by ~20% of Norway’s population.

The audio from your favorite events isn't real. It's much better than real. --- Just to walk through the logic: based on the sound of arrows in a fictional Kevin Costner movie, Baxter created the sonic experience of sitting between the archer and the target, something no live spectator could do. […] "That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event," Baxter recalls. "And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats." The real sound, of course, would have included engine noises and a helicopter whirring overhead. The fake sound seemed normal, just oars sliding into water. In a sense, the real sound was as much of a human creation as the fake sound, and probably a lot less pleasant to listen to.

Eleanor recognizes that only in The Bad Place would people be forced to treat others as disposable…so they must be in The Bad Place. And when she makes decisions on the assumption that she isn’t in an ideal world, this throws a wrench in Michael’s plan. He has to reboot that world because Eleanor’s behavior has become incompatible with it. Eventually (in “Team Cockroach” S2E4) Michael joins them, realizing that he needs their help if he himself is to escape the ultimately punitive and carceral regime of which he is a part. That’s what the show spends the rest of season 2 doing: season 2 is about mostly white women and people of color (and one white male accomplice who literally is a mostly(?) reformed demon…plus Janet, who I’ll get to later) collectively practicing philosophy on the assumption that the world they live in is not in fact equal but designed to harm and oppress them. [...] Beginning from the assumption that everyone’s on more or less an equal playing field and thus entitled to equal weight in the conversation (and that people generally want to do the right thing, which Mills calls the assumption of “strict compliance”), this is the same “both sides” liberalism that Mills critiques as ideal theory. Despite what Schur tells us the show’s message is, season 2 shows us a very different message, one about the importance of beginning from the assumption that you—especially if you are a white woman, person of color, or non-human person—are in The Bad Place. And you’re there not because of anything you did, but because White Men engineered it that way for their benefit.

But it seems that Making A Murderer is teaching white people around the country—from reporters for mainstream media, to Facebook friends, to co-workers—to see. The crime series focuses on the invisibility that comes with being white, poor and lower class—a position that, in many ways, parallels the invisibility that comes with being a person of color. It allows white people in denial of the injustices of the judicial system and police enforcement to become aware of (and informed about) what people of color have known all of their lives.

Aziz Ansari's Tom Haverford nicknames foods on ‘Parks and Recreation.’ Tofu is… NATURE SPONGES

If reading this litany has been exhausting, it’s testament to just how well “Game of Thrones” has done at leavening this grimness with humor, tenderness and moments of real human connection. But it also ought to suggest how odd it is to accuse the showrunners of adding a sexual assault to somehow up the stakes when, dragons aside, intimate violence is already at the core of so many of the series’ storylines. There’s no requirement that anyone like any of these storylines or that anyone who feels exhausted from spending his or her days in a world marked by sexual violence retreat to a worse one for pleasure. But that’s not the same thing as proof that “Game of Thrones” is generally careless in its depiction of sexual assault or that rape doesn’t serve a purpose on the show. Sansa Stark isn’t ruined, as a character or as a person, because she was raped. She lives, and her story continues, even if you’re not tuning in to watch

A profile of Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings.

Now, tasked with little more than delivering a modest number of age-appropriate eyeballs, O’Brien seems both stunted and settled, lavishly rewarded for doing what he loves most for a company that seems to value the end product the least. It’s been well established by now that Conan O’Brien can’t stop. But it seems he’s only transcendent when someone is trying to make him.

Now I am older than Keats was when he died and I live in a room whose walls somebody else painted this very soothing shade of taupe and I’m still the same age as Lena Dunham but I’m not jealous of her anymore. I am making a living doing a different thing that I love and I feel as lucky as she has probably at some point felt, and I catch myself whenever I start buying into a worldview that mandates I see anyone a little bit like me as my competition. So good luck to her. May she make the space expand.

‘Woman-beating rage-broccoli Chris Brown lip-synced his single “Turn Up the Music” (without being threatened by Sir Elton John) and danced roughly as well as a third-rate Chicago footwork dancer. He ended his performance by back-flipping off the stage, though sadly not off the earth.’

‘news coverage that treats politics as an insiders’ game invites the public to become “cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement.”’

“The people complaining about the loss of these "non-mainstream" categories aren't really asking for a fair distribution of categories; they're asking for patronage. They're asking for the Recording Academy to act as a booster club and preservation society — to recognize and support these traditions as a special interest. Never mind that this is a kind of support new and fragile musical traditions don't get. Never mind that people in each of these genres are more than capable of recognizing their own achievements, and probably more effectively than the Academy does.”

Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk tells the story of his band’s jingle for Budweiser in the early 90s, and how he feels about bands and advertising then and since. A good companion to Matt LeMay’s ‘Art vs Content’ post from late 2010 (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content).

An empathetic profile.

It’s not terribly shocking that a reality show about an ignorant millionaire trying to fix a school’s lunch program with his own special menu was a costly, exploitative, and ruinous failure, but the disastrous state of school lunch programs nationwide *is* shocking.

"The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned." This is a very interesting look at the frequency with which this show (that I have never seen) addresses copyright issues without actually addressing copyright issues. And it's dead-on about the potential for a television show or other media of this popularity to effect social change in the realm of copyright perception.