Kanye West's new album Yeezus leaked just a day before his girlfriend Kim Kardashian gave birth to their daughter, making for a seeming coincidence that gives credibility to West's claims of divinity. But there's speculation that Kanye himself unleashed the song set online, speculation that's kind of fun to believe. For a man on record as giving "no fucks" about the commercial viability of his latest release, with a history of fastidious control over every part of his artistic output, it's conceivable he wanted these 10 tracks to be in the world before his child was. That's if, like me, you buy the idea that Yeezus is an exorcism of sorts before a new, possibly more peaceful phase of life.

West's extraordinary rap career has seen the Chicagoan go from subversive but smiling upstart to ever-more-impressive, ever-more-discontented musical powerhouse. Earlier this year, Global Grind published "13 Photos of Kanye West Actually Smiling"--most of which were of his earlier years in the business. "You look at Jay or Diddy, and I'd say like, 90 percent of the time, you think they're having a good time," The New York Times' Jon Caraminca said to West during the rapper's only prerelease interview for his sixth solo record, out today. "With you, I would say, I don't know, 50-50 maybe? Or 30-70?"

West's reply: "Maybe 90 percent of the time it looks like I'm not having a good time."

Yeezus, a terse scowl of an album, at first seems like a straightforward, albeit musically insane, new manifestation of West's famous surliness. Swapping out the lushness of his earlier songs for abrasive minimalism, the first few listens dazzle for sounding new, stark, and pissed off. But the important things haven't changed: As with past albums, West ditches the overdone tropes of recent hip hop (some of which he helped helped popularize) while raiding both the past (in this case, '90s industrial, Chicago house) and underground present (trap, drill) to suggest a way forward for the genre.

But after a few days of listening, the most surprising thing to me about Yeezus is no longer how it sounds, but what it actually might be: a twistedly touching kiss-off to a vast, seemingly unhappy part of West's life. As he faces fatherhood and the prospect of a longterm relationship, he appears to be looking at his hedonistic past in a darker light than ever, resulting in an album of super-sexual angst vindicated by a single, sweet verse at the end.

The record opens with its four best songs, turning the dial up on West's strengths so they sound distorted, scary, and pretty damn catchy. There's a dance-floor electronic blast that short-circuits during the requisite call-and-response bridge ("On Site"), a militant statement of purpose punched up as a Wizard of Oz witches' guard march ("Black Skinheads"), ego trip turned horror-film incantation ("I Am a God"), and an incendiary political sermon framed by frigid beats ("New Slaves"). All the lyrics build convincingly on West's big, important theme: that he's a living, breathing god, and yet America's so screwed-up and racist that even he can't get his due.

The emphasis here is on West as too huge for this world--commanding a harem of "300 bitches," demanding breakfast pastries at a rate the garçon can't keep up with, etc. "New Slaves" immolates itself 75 percent of the way through with a swelling, celebratory sample from Hungarian rock band Omega as West and Frank Ocean cry, "let's get too high, get too high again." Then, a fade out--which, one Kanye-obsessed friend of mine claimed to me, is his first fade-out since 2004's "Through the Wire." (Any fact-checking fans care to verify?)

Next comes reality, in the form of a hangover. "Hold My Liquor" drifts in, with Chief Keef's and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon's drowsily autotuned voices riffing on sloppy substance use. There's a screech, and West returns to detail (hilariously) the damage he's caused: "Damn I'm back from my coma / Waking up on your sofa / When I park my Range Rover / Slightly scratch your Corolla / Okay, I smashed your Corolla." Turns out, he's addressing an ex-lover he'd been trying to get with, after her aunt badmouthed him as "a loner."

For the rest of the album, West fixates almost exclusively on women. The sex talk he delivers ranks among the dirtiest and most extreme of his career, but no one would mistake the surrounding music and words for sexy. West wants to retell a nightmare, not spin a fantasy. "I'm In It," the most explicit track, is like a slowed down, somehow more frightening version of Nine Inch Nails' infamous S&M anthem "Happiness in Slavery," featuring Angent Sasco's reggae wailing about street violence and Vernon ethereally repeating "star... fucker..." The title references both to carnal acts and ensuing ensnarement, with West rapping about being so scared of the "kids and the wife life" that he goes "to sleep with a night light."

That theme of seemingly carefree, partner-swapping sex taking a soul-grinding toll dominates the rest of the album. It's classic bachelor commitment-phobia elevated to distinctly Kanye levels. "Blood on the Leaves" preposterously dices up the hallowed lynching lament "Strange Fruit" for a bass-heavy opus about a guy gone broke from paternity suits. Over laser-gun noises and spacey synths, "Guilt Trip" documents the feelings of regret and resentment that linger after a long-dead tryst. And on the menacing, club-ready clang of "Send It Up," West leaves the downsides of lust to guests King Louie and Beenie Man, the latter of whom closes the song with an existential view on one-night stands: "Memories don't live like people do / They always 'member you."

The sex talk he delivers ranks among the dirtiest and most extreme of his career, but no one would mistake the surrounding music and words for sexy.

But there's the payoff for sitting through this (fascinating, well-made, occasionally danceable) house of horrors. "Bound 2," one of his most blissful songs ever, finishes the album with the oldies-sampling style that West has perfected over the course of his career. The Ponderosa Twins Plus One croon "bouuund / to fall in lovvvve" as, in the first verse, West gets up to his played-out, promiscuous ways: showing up to the club on a week night, hitting on girls from a 21st birthday party. Self-awareness starts to creep in: "I know I got a bad reputation / Walking 'round, always mad reputation / Leave a pretty girl sad reputation."

Then, Charlie Wilson's voice cuts in--soulful enough to sound like classic Motown, though it's from 2013--for a booming revelation: "I know you're tired of loving, loving / with nobody to love, nobody."

In another context, a moment like that could seem like throwaway, throwback schmaltz. But after everything that's come before, it's an important admission of the difference between sex and love. And suddenly, West's changes his tune: "Close your eyes and let the word paint a thousand pictures / One good girl is worth a thousand bitches."

Uh, kinda changes his tune. He still takes time to describe having sex on a sink with his new squeeze. But then he describes being surprised at having their relationship make it to the holidays. But then he describes asking this girl he loves if she'll have group sex with him. But... then he asks her to forget he asked that, to forget "all these long-ass verses" that came before, so that the two of them can "make it to the church steps." (While dating Kardashian, West reportedly did once ask for a threesome and was politely declined.) Yes, Kanye wants someone to forget something he did, so that he can settle down. The final thought on the album: What would Jeromey Rome, lothario of '90s sitcom Martin, think?

Of course, one closing song does not a reversal of philosophy make. West has always struggled to reconcile a desire for stability and love with his hound-dog instincts, and with 2008's 808s and Heartbreaks devoted an entire album to the fallout from the end of a long-term relationship. Plus, the pure crudeness of much of Yeezus shows he's nowhere near leaving behind the misogynistic attitudes that have pervaded popular music for decades.

But still, it's heartening to be reminded that West's excesses often have a purpose. It's interesting to see him become increasingly conflicted about sexual conquest. And it's nothing less than startling to realize that his most dark, twisted album yet may all be in service of a fairytale ending.

In an episode of Mad Men last month, a prostitute named Aimee has sex with a teenaged Don Draper (née Dick Whitman) after nursing him through a nasty chest cold. Actually, let me rephrase: Aimee doesn't just have sex with young Dick Whitman--she rapes him.

Throughout most of the episode, Aimee serves as a surrogate mother for Dick; she lets him recuperate in her bed and offers him rest, comforting words, spoonfuls of warm broth. However, in their penultimate scene together, Aimee's maternal kindness turns oddly predatory. She approaches her bed where Dick is lying weakly, fever newly broken, and asks, "Don't you want to know what all the fuss is about? "No," Dick replies forcefully, averting his eyes and hugging the blankets tightly against his chest as she reaches under the covers to touch him. "Stop it," he says, clearly uncomfortable, even afraid. But Aimee doesn't stop.

To me, this interaction was an unambiguous depiction of rape--and not simply statutory rape. Dick is in a physically weakened state and repeatedly makes it clear that he does not want Aimee to touch him sexually, much less "take his cherry." As a child of the '80s, I was raised on a healthy diet of "No Means No." Rape isn't just something that happens at gunpoint with a strange man in a dark alley; rape, essentially speaking, is being subjected to sex without consent. And Dick clearly did not consent.

Of course, I recognize that even my simple definition of rape as sex without consent gets murky when applied to concrete scenarios. Take the recent controversy over the infamous "gray rape" scene between Adam and Natalia on Girls. After that episode aired back in March, feminist publications erupted with substantive discussions about consent, rape culture, and sexual violence. Writers from major publications ranging from Slate to Salon to Ms. Magazine chimed in, speculating whether or not what transpired between Adam and Natalia should be seen as rape.

I didn't expect the Mad Men episode to generate as much interest--after all, the scene, despite more clearly depicting a lack of consent, is far less explicit than the one in Girls. But I did anticipate general acknowledgement from writers and critics that Dick had been, if not raped, at least violated or mistreated by Aimee.

That didn't happen. To my surprise and dismay, I found that the vast majority of responses (including The Atlantic's) glossed over the encounter, benignly describing Dick as "losing his virginity" or having his virginity "taken" by Aimee. Even more disturbing were those that portrayed the exchange as something positive, even empowering. According to one participant in a roundtable discussion at The Wall Street Journal, Aimee "guides [Dick] through his first sexual experience." A recap at The Daily Mail, despite recounting Dick's protestations, underplays the interaction as a mere "tryst."

I had to really dig to find Matthew Guerruckey's analysis at Drunk Monkeys, the only article I came across to give any serious attention to the abusive dynamics between Aimee and Dick. There was far more online chatter (even indignation) about Betty Francis making a rape joke in an earlier episode, and most writers seemed more disturbed about Grandma Ida stealing Don's watch than Aimee stealing sex without consent.

The most unsettling account I read was Paul MacInnes' recap for The Guardian, which somehow concludes that Dick not only consents to Aimee's advances, but actively desires them: "Aimee knew what young Dick really wanted and was prepared to do what was necessary to give it to him."

Let's pause for a moment and imagine a parallel scene between, say, a slightly older Sally Draper and an adult man. He tries to seduce her. "No," she says, when he begins to touch her, "Stop it." He ignores her; she lapses into silence; he has sex with her. Now let's picture the feminist outcry if a writer for a mainstream publication were to describe this as not only consensual, but as Sally getting what she "really wanted."

There is clearly a double standard at work here. Even though our cultural understanding of rape has gained nuance and depth over the last 50 years, thanks in large part to feminist activism, our narratives about sexual assault remain thoroughly mired in gender myths. Of course, it is true that most victims of rape are women, and most perpetrators men. But if the most recent data is any indication, sexual violence against men at the hands of women is far more prevalent than feminist and mainstream narratives often indicate.

According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a nationally representative study on sexual victimization developed by the CDC, 4.8 percent of men in the United States have been "made to penetrate" someone against their will at some point in their lifetimes. That's nearly 5.5 million men. And for about 80 percent of those men, their abusers were female.

If you find this "made to penetrate" thing a little confusing, you're not alone. I wasn't really aware that this type of sexual violence existed until a few months ago, when I came across the stories of men who had experienced it. Over at The Good Men Project, James Landrith and Levi Greenacres write about having sexual intercourse with women without their consent, recounting not only the assaults, but also the ensuing psychological aftermath. Landrith describes his "trauma response" as a sudden lapse into reckless behavior and "ridiculous promiscuity," as well as having long-term difficulty trusting women or even sharing confined spaces with them.

Both of these accounts arguably fall under the umbrella of date rape, or acquaintance rape, as the rapist was at least somewhat familiar to the victim. Most acts of sexual violence are, in fact, committed by acquaintances or partners (current or former), including 90 percent of "made to penetrate" assaults. For Landrith and Greenacres, alcohol was also involved--again, not uncommon in cases of acquaintance rape--which made it much easier for them to be overpowered. In addition, Landrith's assailant happened to be pregnant (talk about diverging from the archetypal rape scenario), and she used her vulnerable physical state to coerce Landrith into not fighting back.

To me, one of the more startling findings of the NIPSVS is this: In the 12 months prior to taking the survey 1.26 million men (1.1 percent) had been "made to penetrate," and that number is almost identical to the 1.27 million women (also 1.1 percent) estimated to have been raped during the same time period. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, this paints a significantly different portrait of sexual violence in the U.S. than what I'm used to seeing.

I can't help but think that we should be questioning these readings of power and sexuality, rather than reinforcing them.

The CDC, however, does not ascribe to my basic definition of rape as being made to have sex against one's will. They have placed "made to penetrate" in its own category, limiting the label of rape to being penetrated unwillingly. Using this definition, they cite the total number of male rape victims as closer to 1 in 71 men, or 1.4 percent. I will certainly admit that being penetrated has the potential to be more physically injurious than being forced to penetrate, but I'm not sure that justifies the exclusive definition, as it doesn't reflect how our cultural understandings of rape have evolved. The litmus test for rape is now widely accepted to be consent, not physical trauma.

Although it is certainly a step forward that organizations like the CDC are beginning to collect data about male victims of sexual violence, I am still somewhat troubled by the underlying implications of their terminology.

The CDC's definition of rape (which is also the one now used by the FBI to compile statistics) as limited to being penetrated rests on the assumption that only feminine bodies are raped, and, conversely, only masculine bodies commit rape. This says, essentially, that in order to be raped, a person must be forced into the feminine position of being penetrated, and in order to commit a rape, a person must have either a penis or a penis proxy. To me, this seems to rely upon a gendered understanding of sexual violence, in which victimhood is linked to femininity and sexual aggression retains a thoroughly masculine profile. I can't help but think that we should be questioning these readings of power and sexuality, rather than reinforcing them.

Putting aside the definition of rape specifically, the NIPSVS does explicitly highlight being "made to penetrate" as a form of sexual violence--and an apparently prevalent one at that. Why, then, when we see this kind of victimization portrayed on screen, is it read as harmless fun, or even romanticized as a rite of passage?

The sugarcoating of the Mad Men encounter, as well as the survivor accounts on The Good Men Project, highlight how troubling gender myths influence our awareness of sexual violence and often render male victims invisible. In our culture, male sexuality is overwhelmingly depicted as powerful, dominant, invulnerable, and sexually insatiable. Our more cartoonish notions of gender, found everywhere from deodorant commercials to bromantic comedies, perpetuate the idea that men are little more than walking boners, always up for sex. And, even though science has demonstrated otherwise, the misconception that an erection implies consent--that a man, in fact, can't penetrate unwillingly--is still commonplace.

Feminists have done important work interrogating problematic myths of female sexuality that are often used to blame rape survivors for their own victimization. But, as these responses to the Mad Men scene demonstrate, parallel myths that obfuscate male victims remain entrenched. The underlying problem here is that we too easily lapse into gender scripts instead of seeing people as complex human beings. Neither sex has a complete monopoly on agency, consent, vulnerability--or even power.

Everyone knows zombies matter. When large numbers of the living start dressing the part, they are announcing a true cultural phenomenon.

But though it may appear to be a fad, there is bite to the modern zombie obsession. The undead have real civilizational significance, on three levels.

No. 1: Pondering the zombie apocalypse is civilization's collective emotional preparation--our shared therapy--for facing bad things to come.

Secondly, thinking about zombies is also, ironically, society's only working pathway to real-world, worst-case strategic analysis.

Lastly, zombies are America's clearest window into our dark side, and at the same time, a key to national rebirth.

These truths are revealed in every zombie literary artifact, no matter how modest or small. Mostly they are elaborated via the tiny bands of post-apocalyptic humans who spend entire movies brain-splattering the undead in order to survive. Some of the best renderings, like AMC's The Walking Dead, are a revelation, a wrenching homily on American ethos.

But only Max Brooks's World War Z elevates zombies to high literature. Yes, high: like Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Graves's I Claudius, or Orwell's 1984. It is a history with the full sweep of a grand narrative directly addressing every one of life's big questions.

World War Z fulfills its literary promise on all three civilizational levels. As collective therapy, it shows how we will find a way to keep hoping, and to celebrate just being alive. As worst-case strategic analysis, it reveals the human future that is coming but we still cannot yet bear to face. As a window into the soul, it offers America two paths: one into darkness and extinction, the other into greatness beyond anything we have yet achieved. Brad Pitt and Hollywood's movie of the novel may not matter in the end, and it may not sing like the book. But it should still try, because zombies do matter.

Collective Therapy
How did we humans manage to get this far? We have been on the rocks several times. Anthropologists call these events bottlenecks. The worst of these came 150,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. There, the last remnants of humanity, a few ragged bands of us, fought off extinction by climate change. We survived, so scientists tell, by learning to eat shellfish.

New thinking tells us that consciousness itself is an evolutionary adaptation, and it is easy to see how being self-aware helped us survive.

But consciousness also can limit what we see. It allows us, even encourages us, to live in denial of the biggest new threats. For ruling establishments especially, the pressure to keep people oblivious can be all the more acute because admitting to big danger directly threatens legitimacy. Regimes only want "threats" that keep the money coming and the people in check.

Hence, at the beginning of World War Z, the big plague is on its way but the U.S. administration is in full, on-message denial. As the thinly veiled Karl Rove tells it:

What, you would rather we told people the truth? That it wasn't a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to private property? Can you imagine all those wet-pants senators who would have brought the government to a standstill ... can you imagine the damage it would have done to that administration's political capital?

Does this mean consciousness actually works against our ability to prepare for the Big One? No, because there is a safety valve that elites cannot control. It is called literature.

Literature is humankind's vehicle for collectively preparing and readying ourselves for the threat of annihilation. The genre that you could call apocalyptic lit has been with us for a long time. It really took off when civilization began to collapse in the sixth century after Justinian's plague (brought on by climate change).

People turned to literature to frame their response, to seek solace, to organize chaos into meaning. Medical science? Modern management? None of those solutions even existed. But literature did, and offered something more important: a reason to keep going. A reason to live. The Western world survived literally because a single city survived: Constantinople. But the people behind those great walls still had to keep believing.

The zombie virus makes us fight the war *they* want, and critical time is lost while we struggle to make the necessary recognition. Only the prospect of extinction opens our eyes.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers all lived through these times, and they tapped into the climate of fear and dread. But theit "apocalypses" actually had a different practical utility. As Johannes Fried writes, "such rhetoric is neither hysterical nor the result of panic but rather is a discourse of action, one that urges specific kinds of action ... in response to belief in the imminent end."

Apocalyptic lit helps us conquer fear. And when we are no longer afraid, we can do. So zombie tales tell us what we have to do in the next bottleneck, no matter what form it takes or how bad it is. It is not the message here that counts but the taking onboard of the message--repeatedly--that actually preps us emotionally and intellectually.

World War Z captures the big threat: people give up hope. From those on the ships of Radio Free Earth, keeping the last world network alive, we see how that happens:

When the last broadcast came from Buenos Aires, when that famous Latin singer played that Spanish lullaby, it was too much for one of our operators. He wasn't from Buenos Aires, he wasn't even from South America. He was just an eighteen-year old Russian sailor who blew his brains out all over his instruments. He was the first, and since the end of the war, the rest of the IR operators have followed suit. Not one of them is alive today. The last was my Belgian friend, "You carry those voices with you," he told me one morning.

Here Brooks is like a great Greek or Latin Rhetor whose goal is to teach us how not to fear.

Worst-Case Prep
But World War Z offers something that antique apocalyptic lit did not: real strategic analysis. The heart of the novel is a virtual primer on net assessment: identifying the actual reality in the midst of hopes and fears. How do you assess something unthinkable? The real race in the story is not about defeating zombies, it is the race to adapt--to see reality as it really is.

At its most passionate, World War Z indicts the atrophy into which U.S. strategic thinking has fallen. Not having won a war since 1945, staggering from one failed enterprise after another, the fabled American war machine has nevertheless continued boasting through the decades. Brooks takes on the mindset responsible for this tortuous state of denial.

Deliciously, he does so through the vehicle of zombies, in a way George Romero never attempted once in the 40 years of his Living Dead franchise.

So when the U.S. military tries to stop the undead onslaught at the end of the "great panic," it chooses to fight the war it likes, and make the enemy fight the way we like. The result is the extravagant debacle called the "Battle of Yonkers," where the American Way of War is crushed in open battle:

Perfect name, "Shock and Awe"! But What if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't! That's what happened that day outside New York City, that's the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. Yonkers was supposed to be the day we restored confidence to the American people, instead we practically told them to kiss their ass goodbye.

After 9/11, our state fought the war it desired, and has since refused to face how and what it has lost. Brooks shows us how this leads to the near-extinction of humanity. His moral: Just because we choose a war, fight it the way we want, lose it, and then move on like nothing happened, does not mean that such strategic narcissism will not, someday, have terrible consequences.

The zombie virus makes us fight the war they want, and critical time is lost while we struggle to make the necessary recognition. Only the prospect of extinction opens our eyes.

What better way to get our attention? Nothing clears the mind better than fighting on Sun Tzu's "death ground." And we have been there, at Pinnacle Point, during the Black Death, and in World War II. We don't need zombies to tell us this, but zombies are there to remind us when nothing else can.

Destiny's Choice
For we "exceptional" Americans, Brooks offers a final literary service, like Tolstoy to his Russia: The gift of prospective national renewal. World War Z shows us nothing less than how a corrupted nation can find itself again and redeem humanity.

Like Tolstoy, the main purpose of World War Z is the celebration and reinforcement of collective meaning and belief. Tolstoy was building a narrative of Russian identity that would transcend the venality and ruling impoverishments of his time. He hoped it would show the way to something true and beautiful for all Russians.

Max Brooks does this for us in World War Z, offering a believable path to reclaiming ourselves. For Americans this path has always been about sacrifice and the rediscovery of civic virtue. At novel's end, those remaining Americans, whose way of life is now back to something like 1920, are yet better Americans for their privation and sacrifice.

But most important, the Americans in World War Z have cast off their former narcissism, today's it's-all-about-me mentality. The faux elective wars and their remorseless cheerleading too are over.

But how do we get there? Here Brooks reminds us that there is no escaping American altruism. Yes, nations have interests, and we can boast endlessly about being the world's last best hope. But in the end we have to really come through. America saves the world. Period. If America does not--if someday it cannot--then there will be no salvation. Truth is seldom so stark as to offer only one path:

The lies of the past were gone now and the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through their doors, clawing at their throats ... The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species ...

At the decisive moment there is a United Nations conference in Honolulu, aboard the hulk of the old carrier U.S.S. Saratoga. The president of the United States rises to offer humanity its mission, and its necessary future:

The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They'd robbed us of our confidence as the planet's dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction ... Was this the legacy we would leave to our children? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendents rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this reason alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war's greatest monument.

When the final vote is taken, and when "for us, our countries, our children the choice had been made: attack"--we see clearly not only the narrative Americans yearn for, but also the nation we need to be.

/p>

Major League Baseball is reportedly on the verge of the largest drug bust in sports history. Some 20 players, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, allegedly purchased performance‐enhancing drugs (PEDs) from BioGenesis, an "anti‐aging" clinic in Miami. The office of baseball's commissioner, Bud Selig, is considering suspending these players for up to 100 games.

Presupposed by this punishment and baseball's ban is the principle that using PEDs is wrong. As a philosophy professor, I can't help but ask: What makes these drugs so bad? Why is it wrong to use them? In spite of all the focus on the use of PEDs in sports, this simple question of ethics is harder to answer than it might seem. Below are six popular yet flawed reasons for rejecting PEDs--and a less-familiar seventh reason that explains what's really wrong with them.

Reason No. 1: Using PEDs is cheating.
A natural first suggestion is that using PEDs is wrong because it's cheating. In an article for Salon titled "A-Rod Isn't a Cheater," the philosopher Alva Noe questions whether it's cheating when "a whole generation of the best and most promising athletes has been doing it."

Of course, it is still cheating. Baseball banned steroids in 1991, so anyone who used them after that was breaking the rules--including A-Rod. Moreover, it is simply false that all good athletes use PEDs. Even at the height of baseball's steroids era, there were those who chose to play clean. Consider former Major Leaguer Doug Glanville, a personal friend who first inspired me to think about these issues. Although Doug had a successful career, playing in the Big Leagues for nine years and managing over 200 hits one season as the Phillies' center fielder, there is no doubt that he would have had more hits, a longer career, and a bigger paycheck if he had followed the lead of many of his peers and used PEDs. But as he documents in his book The Game From Where I Stand (and as his slim frame and modest power numbers would seem to confirm), Doug played drug-free. He was certainly not alone.

But as Plato would have recognized, the real problem with the cheating argument is that it's shallow. In the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considers the question of whether an action is wrong because the gods disapprove of it, or whether the gods disapprove of an action because it is wrong. For example, is murder wrong because the gods disapprove of it? Or do the gods disapprove of murder because it is wrong? Most philosophers embrace the latter claim. After all, the gods aren't acting arbitrarily in disapproving of murder rather than, say, knitting. They must have a reason for disapproving of murder.

We should all agree that athletes who use outlawed PEDs are cheating. They are breaking the rules and giving themselves an unfair advantage. But Euthyphro shows that there is a deeper question: Why should PEDs be banned in the first place? Is there really a reason to prefer a sport that bans PEDs to one that allows them? Or is our preference merely arbitrary, like our preference for a game that encourages stretching and singing in the seventh inning rather than the sixth?

Reason No. 2: PEDs are unsafe.
If you told your mom you wanted to try PEDs, her first concern would probably be for your health. Relatively little is known about the long-term effects of drugs such as steroids because, as the Mayo Clinic notes, it's unethical to design studies to test for those effects. But it's unlikely that PEDs are as benign as calcium supplements.

It's not immediately clear, however, why this should count against their use. When it comes to sports, a certain amount of danger is part of the game. Boxers, soccer players, and football players suffer concussions, runners and basketball players blow out their knees, and tennis players injure their ankles and elbows. The first marathoner, Pheidippides, collapsed dead from the effort, and many since have suffered the same fate. We could rewrite the rules to significantly reduce these harms--marathons could be shortened, and the NFL could adopt the playground rules of "two-hand touch"--but we don't. We accept that sports can harm one's health. If PEDs were much more harmful than sports themselves, the argument could be made that they should be banned because they're especially unsafe. But there is little evidence to suggest that the side effects of PEDs are that bad. They're almost certainly no worse than repeated head traumas, and when used in moderation, certain PEDs may be no more dangerous than running marathons. Moreover, as medical research advances and PEDs evolve, the side effects of PEDs are likely to diminish.

Reason No. 3: PEDs reflect an obsession with perfection.
Some philosophers hold that an action is good or bad not because of its effects, but because of the reasons associated with it. If I shoot someone for sadistic pleasure, I've done something wrong; but if I shoot someone to prevent him or her from assassinating the president, I've acted heroically. So perhaps the problem with PEDs is that they are used for the wrong reasons.

Consider Lance Armstrong, who explained to Oprah Winfrey that his use of drugs stemmed from his "ruthless desire to win--to win at all costs." Or consider A-Rod, who used PEDs in the early 2000s "to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time."

There is clearly something disturbing about an obsession with perfection that drives us towards using illegal substances. But we don't always find it objectionable when people go to extraordinary means to reach the top. Cyclists who sleep in a hyperbaric chamber to boost their red blood cells are not invited to acknowledge their sins on Oprah's couch. Ballplayers who immerse themselves in their crafts for 90 hours a week are not tried in the court of public opinion for neglecting their families. We recognize that being the best requires a ruthless desire to win, and often admire that desire. Our disapproval of PEDs is surely more than a disapproval of the hyper-competitive spirit that motivates their use.

Reason No. 4: PEDs create inequalities.
Some have wanted to outlaw PEDs because they create new inequalities among athletes. They're expensive, and not everyone can afford them. This problem is particularly acute in international competitions such as the Olympics, where poorer countries struggle to provide their athletes with cutting-edge technologies and facilities. But even aspiring Major League players can't necessarily afford PEDs when the average contract for a first-year minor leaguer is only $850 per month.

Inequalities can't be the main problem with PEDs, however, since we could just as easily eliminate them by subsidizing PEDs as by banning them. Baseball clubs could hand them out with uniforms and lockers at the start of each season, and the International Olympic Committee could find pharmaceutical companies willing to sponsor athletes. Moreover, from the perspective of equality, a ban on PEDs may be counterproductive since only the wealthiest and best-connected athletes will have access to the most cutting‐edge methods for evading detection.

Reason No. 5: PED users don't deserve credit for their accomplishments.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant emphasized the importance of agency for morality and responsibility. A snowstorm can have bad or good effects--it can bring about traffic fatalities or a cuddly night by the fire--but it doesn't deserve credit or blame for what it does since it isn't an agent. By contrast, you can take credit for your athletic accomplishments, but only insofar as they are caused by you and not your PEDs. If you're only able to qualify for the Tour or hit 50 home runs because you have the latest and greatest drugs, then it's questionable whether you're really responsible for your achievements. It's not you who deserves praise for your athletic prowess, but your pharmacist.

Yet our achievements are never solely our own. Racers do not design and build their own bicycles, batters with poor eyesight do not fashion their own corrective lenses, and no athlete is responsible for the education of his or her coach. Individual achievement is always set against a backdrop of community assistance. So why not add your pharmacist to the long list of people who make it possible for you to succeed? If this seems strange, recall that Metta World Peace (then known as Ron Artest) publicly thanked his psychiatrist when he and the Lakers won the NBA finals in 2010.

Racers do not design and build their own bicycles, batters with poor eyesight do not fashion their own corrective lenses. Individual achievement is always set against a backdrop of community assistance. So why not add your pharmacist to the long list of people who make it possible for you to succeed?

Reason No. 6: PEDs make success too easy.
Even if PEDs don't sap all responsibility from your achievements, you might worry that they make success too easy. As Nietzsche observed in his famous discussion of the will to power, much of the value in an activity consists in overcoming obstacles. There is nothing good in and of itself about hitting a home run; rather, what's good about hitting a home run is that it's usually the culmination of a long process of hard work that involves years of honing one's talents, thousands of swings in the batting cage, endless hours in the weight room, and a careful diet.

Yet this worry betrays a misunderstanding of PEDs. They're not magic pills that instantly transform you into Babe Ruth. Athletes who take steroids still need to spend years training. PEDs accelerate the rewards of hard work; they don't substitute for it.

Reason No. 7: PEDs generate a vicious arms race.
This is what I believe is the real problem with PEDs in sports.

Traditionally, an arms race occurs between nations when they compete to amass superior weaponry. During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race. Each nation built up its own stockpile of nuclear weapons to counter the threat from the other. As political scientists have noted, a traditional arms race is vicious since both nations would surely be better off never amassing arms in the first place. But once started, an arms race quickly runs out of control and everyone suffers.

Sports are competitive enterprises. Not just anyone can play for the Yankees or the Red Sox; you need to be better than almost everyone else. As a result, sports encourage an arms race--not of literal weaponry, but of equipment, training methods, and anything else that provides a competitive advantage. Sometimes this arms race is virtuous, as when it encourages everyone to practice more and train harder.

Other times, however, it is like a traditional arms race in that everyone winds up worse off than if the arms race had never begun. In the Beijing Olympics, swimmers who adopted a polyurethane body suit that was designed with the help of NASA won a disproportionate number of medals and shattered world records. Swimmers who did not have the suit were left in their wakes. An arms race was on. Swimming became as much about swimwear technology as about an effective stroke. Collectively, swimmers recognized that the arms race was vicious. The suits cost over $500 each, could be worn only a limited number of times, and took over 30 minutes to put on. While they made everyone faster, that hardly seemed relevant. If the point were to traverse the pool as quickly as possible, boats would be used. Swimming races are supposed to showcase swimming, not NASA's engineering. Everyone was clearly better off without the suits, yet so long as they were permitted each swimmer needed one to compete effectively. Recognizing the absurdity, the sport's governing body, FINA, wisely banned the suits in 2009.

When a sport is partly about the technology being used, a technology arms race is not necessarily a bad thing. The America's Cup is of interest as much for the engineering of the yachts as for the skill of the sailors. The same is true of Formula One auto racing and, to a lesser extent, the Tour de France cycling race. The technology arms races in these sports are arguably virtuous. But when, as in swimming, the arms race leads to the pursuit of a new technology that does not contribute to the sport and leaves everyone worse off, the arms race is vicious.

The legalization of PEDs in baseball would likewise generate a vicious arms race. The game would become a competition to find the best drugs. Even players who wanted to compete drug free would be coerced into taking PEDs to keep up with their peers. And there is no stable stopping point. If two players are competing for a starting spot on the Yankees, neither player can rest content with yesterday's pharmaceutical technology. Each one needs to get the latest and greatest PEDs or risk losing his job to the other. And so they're off to the races, with the finish line set only by the ingenuity of bioengineers.

Increasing the number of home runs is not in itself a good thing. If it were, Bud Selig would order the outfield walls moved in. Moreover, PEDs carry health risks, particularly when there is pressure to adopt the newest and strongest drugs even before they have been properly tested. As I wrote above, a concern about safety is ordinarily not a sufficient reason to ban something from a sport. But in the context of an arms race--in which the only benefit the "arms" provide is relative to one's competitors--it is. Imagine if the bodysuits used by swimmers not only made everyone faster, but also occasionally caused dangerous overheating. Even if the dangers were no greater than those that accompany running a marathon, the need to ban the suits would be even more obvious than it already was.

It's important to see that using PEDs is not always wrong. Few would object to using steroids to stimulate muscle mass in patients with cancer or AIDS, and even Major League Baseball allows players with legitimate Adderall prescriptions for attention disorders to play under the influence of the stimulant. But when the only point of using PEDs is to obtain a competitive advantage over the rest of the field, we have entered the realm of an arms race where their use threatens to do more harm than good.

In an arms race, there are only two stable scenarios: perpetual escalation, and disarmament--a league where all PEDs are pursued, or a league where none are. The best way to avoid this escalation is to ban the arms outright and enforce penalties on cheaters. Change everyone's incentives, and the arms race will never begin. In a real, international arms race, this is notoriously difficult to do, since internationally sanctioned bodies are weak and few states have the power or will to impose penalties unilaterally. But in baseball's arms race, Major League Baseball has long had the power to punish players who cheat. Fortunately, it now looks like it also has the will.

TO THE NAKED EYE, IT MAY APPEAR THAT: In Man of Steel, Amy Adams plays a "tougher and cooler," "more modern" version of Lois Lane, critics say. This past weekend's record-setting No. 1 movie transforms Superman's iconic reporter girlfriend into a bolder, braver heroine who shoots bad guys, asks if her uncooperative sources are done "dick-measuring," and gets writer's block when she's not wearing a flak jacket.

BUT ACCORDING TO SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT REALLY HARD ABOUT THIS: While Adams's Lois Lane is probably the most 2013-friendly vision of Lois, the character she plays has been reinvented and retooled a few times before to reflect what the "modern" woman looked and acted like at different points in the 20th century. The same goes for some other females in Superman, most notably Lois's romantic rival and Daily Planet colleague Lana Lang.

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• Will the '70s Be as Unkind to Don Draper as They Were to Real-Life Mad Men?
• The Anthropological Reason It Feels Weird to Dance to Brubeck's 'Take Five'
• Sorry, Syracuse: Why the 'Hot Hand' in Basketball (Maybe) Isn't a Real Thing

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In its original 1930s comic-book incarnation, Superman "synthesized two opposing strands of thought regarding female autonomy," J.P. Williams, of Wayne State University's Speech Communication and Journalism department, wrote in a 1990 Journal of Popular Culture article about female rivalry in Superman. "While the comic book's female protagonist, reporter Lois Lane, represented a positive image for that portion of the audience which expected to see strong, independent women portrayed in popular culture, the outcome of these stories frequently reinforced the idea that female autonomy was temporary and illusory."

In other words, despite the progressive portrayal of Lois Lane as a single woman with an outside-the-home career, Superman's adventures often derailed her work pursuits. Often, the Man of Steel even disapproved of how aggressive Lois could be. As females rapidly entered into the work force during World War II, Lois remained "never quite as self-sufficient as she believed," Williams writes, reinforcing the notion that "women who were surviving during the 1940s without the help of men would have to fall back onto traditional relationships when the war ended."

Mort Weisinger then took over as the editor of Superman in the early 1950s, and Lana Lang made her debut shortly after. Lana had appeared as a supporting character--Clark's childhood next-door neighbor—in Superboy, a series about Clark Kent as a young boy discovering his powers (and starting in 2001, she was teenage Clark's love interest on the WB's Smallville, played by Kristin Kreuk). The adult Lana arrived in Metropolis in 1952 and asked Clark to help her find a job; with help from Lois Lane, she became a TV reporter. The two women then spent much of the rest of the 1950s and 1960s competing over who would become Superman's wife. Williams points out that Superman, meanwhile, regarded both women as "annoyances, whose feuding kept him from work."

Lana and Lois spent much of the 1950s and 1960s competing over who would become Superman's wife. Superman, meanwhile, regarded both women as "annoyances, whose feuding kept him from work."

By contrast, Lois's desire to succeed in journalism took a backseat to her desire to marry Superman (and stop Lana from doing so first). Williams points out that in 1959's "The Girl Atlas," the story begins with Lois chasing the "story of the century," in which a scientist has invented a formula that will give humans superpowers—but then Lana appears on the third page of the comic and mentions to Lois that if she (Lana) bathes in the formula, "Superman would know my life could never be in danger from his enemies—and we could get married!" And from that point on, the "story of the century" plotline falls away and the story becomes about Lois and Lana's competition over Superman.

These portrayals of Lois and Lana, Williams points out, are identifiable products of their era:

This characterization of Lois as flighty, impulsive and frivolous was in tune with the attitudes of post-war America, the era of what Betty Friedan has called 'the feminine mystique.' Women, according to the feminine mystique, attained personal fulfillment only through marriage, motherhood, and homemaking. ... On the surface, Lois Lane because just such a woman. In her feud with Lana over who Superman loved (and in her obsession with Superman's secret identity), Lois seemed intent on proving that she could be just as silly and frivolous as the feminine mystique required.

Lana, Williams notes, was depicted as far more "feminine" than Lois. Comic-book creators drew her into the foreground of the comic strip far more often than they did Lois. They also depicted her as using gender-coded nicknames (calling Lois "darling," and, um, "scheming hussy") and more extravagantly "girly" gestures, like tending to her hair. As Williams explains, the two were foils in their representations of femaleness:

Together, Lois and Lana presented two extremes of female behavior: Lois represented women as impulsive, curious, emotional; Lana represented women as calculating, manipulative and cunning.

Although Clark did, as Williams writes, sometimes turn to Lana when "Lois became too demanding," he didn't settle on either woman until the late 1970s, after Lana and Lois's relationship had undergone some transformations. (Spoiler alert: He picked Lois.) Lana was written out of the series for several years; convinced that Lois had won Superman's heart, Lana left Metropolis to become a foreign correspondent. When she returned, "she [was] much the same as before: more traditionally feminine than Lois, with the same heightened concern for her appearance and the same obsession with marrying Superman." But according to Williams, Lana's ways weren't as charming in the age of women's lib:

While in the 1950s such behavior is depicted as one possible means of obtaining Superman's affection, the 1970s comic books portray Lana as being inferior to Lois. With the less cartoonish art of Curt Swan replacing Schaffenberger's rendition of Lois and Lana, Lana's exaggeratedly feminine appearance and gestures seem especially anachronistic. In addition, Lana's style of speaking has remained essentially the same as in the 1950s. In 1978, such speech is presented as an affectation which the other characters are sometimes tempted to ridicule.

But even once Lois had gotten the guy, she abruptly discovered she couldn't exactly have it all. In the 1970s, Williams writes, she faced having to juggle both a career and a private life with Superman—so Lois was again representative of a national conversation about the role of women (one that continues today). According to Williams,

Feminist theory during this time increasingly stressed the need to examine how a patriarchal order affects women's daily lives. The slogan "the personal is the political" summarized the viewpoint seeing a connection between political structures and personal relationships in describing an inequality "so deep as to be invisible." ... In Superman, certainly the changes on the surface simply masked the continuing imbalance in Clark and Lois's relationship, with Lois having to make the majority of concessions.

And thus, Williams writes, for decades afterward, Lois continued to be part of a tradition in which "heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment."

AND... ANYTHING ELSE? Yup. Lois Lane's gone through a few other incarnations besides the ones mentioned in Williams's article, both in onscreen adaptations (as has been well-documented this week) and in other comic-book installments. But with a Man of Steel sequel already in the works, perhaps Lana Lang could be the next of Superman's female counterparts to get a 2010s reinvention. After all, she did make a tiny (but credited!) appearance in Man of Steel--as a little girl in a school-bus seat in one of Clark Kent's flashbacks.

AND THUS, WE CAN CONCLUDE THAT: Amy Adams's Lois Lane isn't the first Lois to reflect "modern" American attitudes about women's roles. But while Adams's effort to deliver an up-to-date, self-actualized Lois does have its critics, she may be the first Lois designed to fit some of the ideals of an America experiencing the "rise of women."

Every week for the sixth season of AMC's acclaimed series Mad Men, our roundtable of Eleanor Barkhorn (Sexes editor, TheAtlantic.com), Ashley Fetters (editorial fellow for TheAtlantic.com's Entertainment and Sexes channels), and Amy Sullivan (National Journal correspondent) will discuss the latest happenings at Sterling Cooper & Partners.

Sullivan: All together, now: OH MY GOD! THEY KILLED KENNY!

Okay, so Kenny just ended up injured and determined to leave the Chevy account—and possibly advertising entirely. But I wouldn't put it past Matthew Weiner to have orchestrated that entire sequence just so we'd all have a reflexive South Park response. Kenny himself got to react with an epic rant: "I hate Detroit. I hate cars. I hate guns. I don't even want to look at a steak anymore ... Did I tell you that on the way to the hospital, they tried to stop for lunch?"

That should have been my clue that this was going to be a terrific--and funny--episode, perhaps my favorite of the season. Call me old-fashioned, but I like episodes that move, that use storytelling. This has been a frustratingly uneven season, in part because Weiner chose as his season-long theme the idea that people don't really change, history repeats itself, nothing new ever happens. That's either incredibly bold or idiotic for a dramatic television series.

It also conflicts, at least on the surface, with the actual events of 1968 that have played out during season six. That violent year was so jarring precisely because so many things seemed to be happening to which Americans did not know how to react. Multiple high-profile assassinations, urban riots, the fairy-tale widowed first lady marrying a Greek shipping tycoon--none of these had precedents or prompted familiar responses.

Don mentioned the last development in a surprisingly flirty phone conversation with Betty, which puts this episode in late October 1968. That means Sally has been refusing to return to her father's apartment for several months now. "She says she's not going again," says Betty, who is uncharacteristically restrained in not pushing Don to find an explanation for Sally's abrupt change in behavior. Don looks destroyed—equal parts anxious that Sally will tell Betty or Megan and devastated that he's lost Sally, possibly forever. The episode opens with him curled up in a near-fetal position on Sally's bed, and he's back to self-medicating with alcohol.

Do we have a running count of how many times Megan has said "I don't know what's going on with you/us" this season? Megan, honey, this is the deal with Don Draper. You'll never know what's going on with him but you can guarantee it's not good. At the office, on the other hand, Don is back on his game—assuming his game is torturing Ted and pushing away Peggy. It was bad enough that Peggy left him for Ted, but now Don has to watch her laugh at Ted's jokes, see Ted putting his hands on Peggy, hear Peggy constantly telling him what a good man Ted is. Running into them at the movie theater together—that's their thing! He and Peggy see movies in the middle of the day when they're stuck!—pushes Don over the edge.

Our Don is nothing if not predictably petty, so we know almost before he does that he's going to blow up his truce with Ted, which lasted all of two months. Don tells himself—and anyone who will listen—that he's doing it for the good of the firm. And it's true that both Ted and Peggy have let their feelings impair both their creative and their business judgment. But Don's actions will have the long-term effect of making this shaky partnership unworkable. He lies directly to his partners, assuring Cutler there will be "no more surprises." He humiliates Ted in the St. Joseph's meeting. And by giving Frank Gleason credit for Peggy's commercial idea, he ensures that if the TV spot does win any awards, they won't go to her. If Don had looked at her face by the end of that meeting, he would have seen what became clear in the last scene, that Don has lost both Sally and Peggy forever.

But as sad as that final image was of Don curled up on his couch, desperately alone, this episode had some wonderfully funny scenes and exchanges. Among my favorites was the telephone call between Don and Harry (note Megan's expression of disgust as she hands the phone to Don—she hasn't forgotten good ol' Harry):

Harry: "I have good news for once."

Don: "You found the fun hooker who takes travelers checks?"

Harry: "Why did I tell you that."

We even saw a few of the characters-we-love-to-hate showing signs of personal growth. When Pete uncovers the deception of Bob Benson—or Bic Bittman, as I'll think of him—he reacts very differently than the Peter Campbell of Season One. Remember that when Pete discovered Don's secret and ratted him out to Bert Cooper, he gained ... absolutely nothing. By keeping his mouth shut for Bob, Pete has secured the very best kind of ally: one who owes him.

I can't help thinking, though, that this could potentially turn out very badly for Pete, particularly if someone else learns the truth about Bob and realizes that Pete knew already. And the last time a partner agreed to keep a colleague's secret was when Don told Lane he'd need to leave the firm because of that missing check. I don't think Bob's going to end up offing himself, but I also don't think this plotline will have a happy ending.

For the moment, though, Betty and Sally seem to have reached a detente. In fact, it's just possible that giving Sally a cigarette is the nicest thing Betty has ever done for her. What say you, ladies? Is Sally on track to become a mean girl like her mother? Or is there still hope for our girl in knee socks?

Fetters: Totally agree on Sally and Betty smoking in the car. It was like once there was a cigarette between Sally's fingers, she and Betty could finally communicate in the between-exhales language of adults. They looked like a couple of smoking-in-the-girls'-room queen bees together, so this certainly could be the pivot point that sets Sally on the path to grown-up bitchery a la Betty Draper. And those catty girls at boarding school could speed up that process even further.

Don's early phone conversation with Betty was really striking to me, too, Amy—but to me, it seemed like Don was pretty OK with Sally's distancing herself from him. When Betty says Sally's not coming up for the weekend, he even says to her, "Tell her if she does come, I'll be working the whole weekend." He offers to pay the entire tuition if Sally decides to go to boarding school, and even offers to pay to get her in.

Defense mechanism? Maybe. But at surface level, at least, it almost looks to me like Don's the one who's mad at Sally. Which is pretty inexcusable on all levels, given just how badly he screwed up and how innocently she just happened to catch him in the act of screwing up. Last week we declared that moment a new low for Don Draper, but I think this might be a step lower: He's now cutting his daughter out of his life out of spite (or, best case scenario, shame) because she may or may not have ruined the illicit affair he was having with his friend's wife. And cutting her off with an offer of money, the way we've seen him do before with his mistresses (Midge comes to mind, and his old secretary Allison).

There were so many callbacks to earlier episodes and seasons.

This conversation, it's worth adding, is what ensues right after Don's channel-surfing encounter with Megan's soap opera. Don lands on a TV station on which Megan is wearing a blonde wig and declaring in a ridiculous French accent, "I am talking to joo! Don't you dare eegnore me!"—and Don promptly flips the channel, almost defiantly. It's like a multi-layered reminder that in all possible ways, Don Draper is awful. Like the worst, sleaziest Inception nightmare ever.

Even with Don's early awfulness, though, I agree with you, Amy, that a lot of this episode was surprisingly funny. The SC&P higher-ups sharing their client-wooing horror stories was darkly comical; even Don's little prank on Peggy and Ted had me laughing in disbelief. The St. Joseph's pitch rehearsal looked like something from The Office; Bob Benson speaking Spanish on the phone came out of nowhere and was bizarre and great. (Any working theories on that, by the way? My thought is that it's related to Manolo. We know Manolo isn't into women, we know Bob isn't either, we know they know each other in some way that's likely not really related to Manolo nursing Bob's dad back to health, because—as some commenters pointed out a while back—Bob's also said before that his dad is dead.) Ted and Peggy had a few funny moments, even if it is getting more than a little out of hand (especially for an office setting). I have to keep reminding myself that Ted's married. I, like Peggy, am decently charmed by Ted, against my better conscience—but Don's right when he says Ted's judgment is impaired.

The last line of the episode, of course, is Peggy's declaration to Don that "You're a monster," after his nasty little stunt in the pitch meeting with St. Joseph's. To my ears, "monster" seemed like an odd choice of words; obviously, as we've seen in the last 11 weeks, my mind usually goes right to "sleazy" or "bastard" or "creep." But "monster" has an element of real, innate malice to it. Peggy's called him something more evil—uncontrollably evil—than I've ever thought to call him. Is that what's going on here? What do you think, Eleanor? Has Don Draper become a monster?

Barkhorn: The monster line got me, too. I saw it as a rare example of someone being unfair to Don. Yes, his behavior has been monstrous this season, but in ways that Peggy knows nothing about: neglecting his own wife, sleeping with his ex-wife, sleeping with his (only) friend's wife, freezing out his daughter after she catches him in the act, and on and on.

In contrast, I thought his behavior toward Peggy, though not perfect, was quite compassionate. Yes, it was cruel of him to deprive her of credit for the aspirin ad. (Though I have to wonder just how good of an idea it is, relying as it does on two ethnic cliches—the soup-wielding Jewish neighbor and the photo-snapping "Japanese"—and inspired as it is by a nightmare-inducing horror film.) But it's quite possible there was no other way to convince the client to use the idea at all.

More importantly, Don was right to call Ted and Peggy out for their increasingly obvious flirtation. Whenever the episode showed the two of them laughing and glowing at each other, I was embarrassed for both of them, and worried for Peggy. It's bad enough that many veteran SC&P-ers assume she's gotten to her current position by sleeping with Don. It could be disastrous for her professional reputation if Ted continued to favor her so obviously. We could already see the resentment building in this episode, when Ginsberg made the crack about how he wanted to see if Ted would respond any ideas besides Peggy's. Those sorts of jokes would only get more frequent if somebody hadn't poured water on the fire.

I also think Don was right to tell Peggy that Ted's "not that virtuous ... he's just in love with you." Despite Peggy and Ted's recent closeness, Don has known and observed him much longer. And as I've mentioned before, the Ted we've seen in past seasons is hardly virtuous: He's petty, weasely, eager to steal Don's clients and employees. Ted's hardly been a moral exemplar this season, either. We've witnessed his insecurities and competitiveness at closer range, and we've also gotten a glimpse at his home life. Remember that sweet scene last episode where Ted returned home to put his kids to bed? His behavior toward Peggy indicates that his renewed domestic devotion was short-lived. Don sees Ted more clearly than Peggy does—and we the audience arguably see him more clearly still. Peggy's judgment is impaired by the thrill of being admired by her boss. Again, the delivery was imperfect, but ultimately it's good for Don to point that out to her.

As for the episode as a whole, I agree with Amy that this was one of the better episodes of the season: funny, surprising, well-paced. I was also struck by how much it rewarded longtime viewers of the series. There were so many callbacks to earlier episodes and seasons. As we've already discussed, there was Pete's deja vu moment with Bob Benson, echoing his discovery of Don's true identity back in Season One. I also couldn't help but take Kenny's accident as sad karmic retribution for that time he drove the John Deere tractor out into the Sterling Cooper offices, which resulted in a PPL executive losing his foot. Peggy's Rosemary's Baby-inspired aspirin ad reminded me of the time SCDP tried, and failed, to model a diet soda spot on Bye Bye Birdie in Season Three. (The Rosemary's Baby pitch also reminds us that Peggy has a child of her own—something that arguably haunts her more than we've realized.)

There was the return (and vindication!) of Glen Bishop, who's evolved from creepy neighbor to protective brother figure. (Amy, you expressed concern that Don's awfulness might make Sally suspicious of men in general—hopefully Glen's kindness toward her will help prevent that from happening.) And of course there was Roger's conversation-stopping reference to Lucky Strike's Lee Garner, Jr., whom we haven't seen since Season Four: "Lee Garner Jr. made me hold his balls."

There were also some more somber callbacks to earlier this season, which show just how far Don has fallen. That breakfast scene at the beginning of the episode—eggs on the stove, orange juice in the glass—immediately made me think of Don's pitch for Fleischmann's margarine. In his "rap session" with Ted, he envisioned a hearty, homemade breakfast on the farm. For a moment this week, it looked like a similarly wholesome scene was developing at the Draper apartment—that is, until Megan burned the eggs and Don spiked his OJ. It was also rather startling to see Don's about-face on Sunkist, and by extension on loyalty. It was only a few episodes ago that he was lecturing Pete on why not to go after Heinz ketchup: "sometimes you gotta dance with the one that brung ya." It was a pretty cynical statement coming from a serial cheater (and not one he was especially devoted to, of course; he ended up going after the ketchup account). Now his professional ethics are more in line with his personal ones: He'll happily ditch Ocean Spray to pursue Sunkist.

And now there's just one episode to go in this uneven, unloved season. Where will the finale leave us? Will the messy merger of SCDP and CGC survive? What about the Drapers' marriage—or the Rosens'? Or the Pete-Bob alliance? Will Peggy and Ted finally cool off? And, of course, the eternal question: Will anyone die?

Last week's best pop-culture writing

Stevens: Maybe the Heat were inspired by that incredible, triple-overtime game between the Blackhawks and Bruins. Maybe Miami finally recovered from their bruising series against the Pacers. Maybe they were inspired by the military-style camouflage that LeBron wore to the game—a departure from his usual suit and tie. Whatever the reason, the stars finally came out for Miami in their 109-93 Game 4 win over the Spurs.

Until last night, this Finals had been about the role player-turned-quirky hero. Thursday, though, wasn't for guys like Mike Miller, Gary Neal, or Tiago Splitter. Game 4 was for the big guns. Like, for instance, the heretofore frigid Dwyane Wade, who got hot for the first time in the series to lead the 33-5 second-half run that won it for Miami.

But this game—like any in which he plays—was defined by the presence of LeBron James. The big story before tipoff—in addition to his olive-drab outfit—was James's anger at his own poor play in Game 3 and repeated insistence that Game 4 was on his shoulders. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

Therein lies what's so striking and ultimately frustrating about James. No matter how hard he tries to act deadly serious about his sport, we all know he isn't. It's done for the cameras, from a sense of obligation to fans. Deep down, LeBron knows it's just a game. Worse, we know he knows it. Sure, the guy wants to win. The players like Michael Jordan and Bill Russell to whom he's inevitably compared didn't just want to win, though. They had to win. They were desperate for it. They needed victory like a vampire needs new blood.

Can you imagine Michael Jordan having to announce that a game was on his shoulders? Like there was ever any doubt. Can you imagine Bill Russell waiting until Game 4 of the NBA Finals to finally get mad? The guy was mad in preseason.

We want our heroes to suffer for their greatness—to feel agony after defeat, not head for the clubs of South Beach. We want them to care more about the game than we do. James tries. He acts like it, because he knows he's supposed to. But it's nevertheless obvious that he just plain doesn't live and die with every bucket. Even more galling, he's so insanely talented that he can win without having to. That why LeBron will always respected, but never be beloved.

Boys, what's your take? It's down to a three-game series. Will James muster enough of whatever it takes to win his second title, or can Duncan, Parker, Ginobili, and company somehow overcome? Let me hear it.

–Hampton

Hruby: Hampton, no mas. I'm begging you. Begging you and the entire sports media-industrial complex. Particularly ESPN. Please stop. Please stop turning individual games, the entire playoff series, and the whole of the National Basketball Association into a never-ending see-saw referendum on LeBron James and his psyche. Does he want it enough? Is he aggressive enough? Is he shooting too much? Too little? He should help his teammates. He should assert himself. Why can't he be more like Michael Jordan? Where is my "Space Jam II?" WAHHHHHHHHH!

Here's the thing: The NBA Finals—and, by extension, professional basketball—is not a summertime superhero movie. It is not a bunch of throwaway supporting characters and scripted plot points revolving around one hero's narrative journey. No matter how well or poorly James plays, no matter passive he looks or angry he sounds, there are always nine other guys on the floor. Plus more on the bench. Plus coaches, scouts, and front-office people. And every single one of those people is the hero of their own story. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that James is not the cosmos, and the Finals are about a lot more than his choice of suit color. There's plenty else to analyze, appreciate, and discuss—and we should keep that in mind, because all of those non-LeBron things will end up deciding the series.

James is not the cosmos, and the Finals are about a lot more than his choice of suit color. All those non-LeBron things will end up deciding the series.

Take Game 4. James was great: 33 points, 11 rebounds and four assists. Still, the Heat won because previously-MIA SuperFriends Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were great, too, combining for 52 points after averaging just under a collective 27 points during the first three games of the Finals. Miami also evened the series because San Antonio was unable to punish the Heat's small-ball lineup of undersized shooters—Tim Duncan was typically solid, but fellow big man and block sponge Tiago Splitter looked decidedly unready for prime time—and got: (a) one good half out of injured star Tony Parker, hamstrung by a sore hamstring; (b) zilch out of moldering former star Manu Ginobili, whose -22 plus/minus rating was not, in fact, a misprint.

So, what happens going forward? For the Spurs to win, they need Parker's sore leg to make like Wade's sore knee. They need to free sharpshooters Danny Green and Gary Neal for open looks. They need to counter Miami's new lineup, as well as the Heat's defensive strategy of funneling the ball to Splitter before blitzing him. More than anything, they need the once-swashbuckling Ginobili to enter a Wayback Machine and have an impact the way Bosh finally did. As for Miami? The Heat need to play well collectively, and not simply rely on James. In Game 4, I think they found the formula—play smaller and faster, gamble more, create and capitalize on turnovers, force San Antonio's role players to consistently shine—and so long as whatever treatment Wade is receiving on his knee continues to work, I think they'll stick with it. Miami in six.

Jake, what's your take?

Simpson: My take is simple: Don't sleep on the Spurs. Despite what we see from pundits and the Twitterverse alike, there are two teams in this series. The outcome is not simply in the hands of LeBron, dependent on his ability to flick his On/Off switch to On. Not when San Antonio has the best basketball strategist in the world in its corner.

In fact, Gregg Popovich may well be the key to the final three games of this series. With Wade in peak form, Miami presents a matchup nightmare for any defense, and Pop will have to counter with a defensive adjustment that minimizes the Heat's athletic advantage. Pop also has to coax a Vintage 2003 effort out of Duncan, who has been good but not dominant in this series. With Parker playing on a balky hammy, 15 points and 11 rebounds a game from the big fella (his per-game averages in the Finals so far) is not going to cut it.

The Heat have been inconsistent for three weeks. You know that stat about the Heat not losing consecutive games since January? Miami hasn't won consecutive games since May 22.

But I think San Antonio will find a way to bounce back in Game 5. For one thing, the Heat have been stupefyingly inconsistent for the last three weeks. You know that stat about the Heat not losing consecutive games since January? Well, Miami hasn't won consecutive games since May 22. Every win against both Indiana and San Antonio has been followed by a loss, a one-step-forward-one-step-back pattern that has created the schizophrenic reactions from the media and the public.

The Spurs will have a frenzied home crowd for Sunday's Game 5, and I think they'll take the game and swing the narrative of the series once again. Expect a big game from Duncan, who even at 37 has outplayed the younger and higher-paid Bosh. And then, Miami will take their talents back to the South Beach and win Games 6 and 7. At least I hope that's what happens. A series this compelling deserves to go the distance.

Early in Man of Steel, we watch as a school bus carrying a teenage Clark Kent and his classmates veers out of control and plunges off a bridge into a river. As the bus sinks below the surface, its trapped and terrified occupants frantically seize what appear to be their last gasps of air. Lucky for them young Clark is aboard! He lifts the bus back up from the depths and saves the day.

But word gets around that something out of the ordinary has taken place—the parent of one of the rescued kids declares it "an act of Providence"—leading Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) to lecture his adoptive son on the need to be more discreet with his superpowers. "What was I supposed to do, let them die?" Clark asks. His dad replies, "Maybe."

Wait—what? Maybe Clark should have let a busload of kids drown rather than risk revealing his powers? Forgive me, but I thought this had been meant as a rhetorical question.

Welcome to the Dark Knight-ification of Superman. Yes, the film is directed by Zack Snyder, but it is heavy (in all senses of the word) with the imprint of co-writer and co-producer Christopher Nolan, who's followed his decade with the caped crusader by taking on the task of rebooting DC Comics' other superstar superhero. The tone is somber, the palette is grayish, and you can scarcely swing a cape without it getting snagged on some moral dilemma.

Man of Steel is an audacious undertaking, a stylistic and thematic mash-up of Avatar, The Matrix, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Independence Day, The Thing, Thor, and (especially) Bryan Singer's X-Men films. What is open to question—and I confess to finding myself uncharacteristically ambivalent on the subject—is whether the resulting heavyweight summer blockbuster is very much fun.

The story begins on Krypton, a planet of floating robotic valets and winged mounts that would make a Nazgul sick with envy. There's just one catch: Due to the government's poor management of natural resources (it has taken the "drill, baby, drill" mantra to improbable extremes) the planet is about to explode. Krypton's military leader, General Zod (Michael Shannon) responds to this news by fomenting rebellion; its top scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) opts for putting his infant son, Kal-El, in a tiny spaceship and blasting him to Earth. (In a neat inversion, what makes this savior-to-be special is that Krypton grows most of its children artificially and Kal-El, by contrast, was the product of the planet's first "natural" birth in centuries—i.e., his is a uniquely non-immaculate conception.)

From there, we flash forward to Earth about 30 years later, where a handsome drifter (Henry Cavill), equal parts pectoral muscle and facial hair, is making his way across Canada, hopscotching from truckstops to military installations. And no, before you ask, this isn't Wolverine, whose reboot doesn't arrive until next month. Rather he's Kal-El, a.k.a. Clark Kent (no one's thought to call him the S-word yet), and he's looking for answers about his origins that he can't find in the copious flashbacks to his childhood in Kansas. Eventually, he finds them in an old Kryptonian spaceship that can project a hologram of his dead father. But intrepid reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) also finds him, and he pleads with her to let him stay un-found.

The question of whether or not Clark should reveal himself to humankind is soon rendered moot, however, by the arrival of another spaceship, bearing his dad's old nemesis General Zod. The general, who evidently watched The Dark Knight during his long journey to Earth, immediately takes a page out of the Joker's book and demands that Kal-El surrender himself or he'll start killing Earthlings.

Inevitably, Zod and his followers announce their Evil Plan for the Human Race, and it falls to the newly christened Superman to foil it. This entails a great deal of fighting: punches are thrown, and cars too; flight and heat vision get their requisite workouts; and Zod's starship levels half the skyscrapers in—Manhattan? Metropolis? Either way, it's played by a combination of Chicago and Vancouver.

As the man of steel, Cavill (best known from Showtime's The Tudors) displays a magnetic presence and topographic physique in the star-making role that had narrowly eluded him in the past. (He was the runner-up to play Bond in Casino Royale but was deemed too young; Twilight author Stephenie Meyer called him "my perfect Edward," but by the time the novel was optioned he was deemed too old.) As Lois Lane, Adams shows so much pluck that it's a wonder she isn't conscripted for duty on a poultry farm. And the rest of the cast (which also features Ayelet Zurer and Diane Lane as Clark's biological and adoptive mothers, respectively, and Laurence Fishburne as Perry White) fulfill their obligations with aplomb. I do wish, though, that Shannon (as Zod) had been asked to dial back his patented brand of wide-eyed crazy at least intermittently.

The grim tones favored by Nolan (and Snyder) may be a natural fit for the nocturnal exploits of Batman, but when it comes to a flying man in blue and red spandex, a little jocularity can go a long way.

There's plenty to like in Snyder's hectic, rowdy film, from the cast to the fluid action sequences to the expansive reimagining of the Superman mythos. But by the time we reach the bludgeoning excesses of the last half-hour—which are more than a tad reminiscent of the finale of The Avengers—it's hard to shake the sense that this was an opportunity at least partially missed. The grim tones favored by Nolan (and Snyder) may be a natural fit for the nocturnal exploits of Batman, but when it comes to a flying man in blue and red spandex, a little jocularity can go a long way. And while there are a few light moments sprinkled throughout the proceedings—a nice exchange with Lois about the meaning of the "S" on Superman's uniform; a witty (if preposterous) closing gag at the Daily Planet that recalls Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 observation that it's Clark Kent who is the assumed identity, the "costume"—such whimsies are few and far between.

Man of Steel is, by pretty much any measure, a better film than Bryan Singer's 2006 reboot, Superman Returns: better cast, better action, better script. But Singer attempted, with uneven success, to offer a different vernacular for the superhero movie, an innocent alternative to the solemnity of Nolan's Batman and his own X-Men. For all its strengths, Man of Steel—and, in particular, the extended fisticuffs of its final third—left me nostalgic for the idea of a superhero who never has to throw a punch.

This is a post in a series from Atlantic writers on Arrested Development's fourth season.

The Atlantic's sexes editor, Eleanor Barkhorn, has been making her way through the new, Netflix-released season of Arrested Development for the past few weeks. Entertainment editor Spencer Kornhaber finished the season a few days after it hit the Internet. Below, the edited transcript of a story brainstorming session that turned into a discussion of the show's identity politics.

Eleanor: Has anyone done a good piece on the gayness of Arrested Development?

Spencer: Not that I've seen. Did you just watch the second GOB eppy, the one where he sleeps with Tony Wonder?

Spencer: And what would you say about that theme?

Eleanor: That's the thing. It's kind of hard to work out who the joke is on. I mean, there are all the levels of deception. Tobias is gay but doesn't know it. Tony Wonder isn't gay but wants people to think he is. GOB isn't gay but wants Tony Wonder to think he is (but doesn't want anyone else to think he is). And along the way they find what they really want is friendship, which is one of the more poignant conclusions of the show: No one really has friends.

And then there's Lucille's comic homophobia.

Spencer: Yep. I thought about including something like "the gays" in my piece, where I list some of institutions/groups that are in the show that are kind of satirized but mostly exist as marks for the Bluths' cons.

Eleanor: But, then, beyond "the gays" as an institution, there is actual engagement with homosexual desire

Spencer: True, it doesn't quite work the same way, especially with the whole Tobias thing.

Eleanor: Right. The closeted dude is a classic comic character, but usually the jokes are on the character trying to hide his sexuality. This a character who is so clueless, he says things all the time that out him, even though he's not even aware he's in the closet in the first place.

Spencer: It's an extension of Tobias's cardinal flaw, denial, which goes along with believing he can be an actor. All the Bluths have their own specific kind of narcissism: Michael's is pride, Lindsay's is vanity, GOB's is a kind of sociopathic blend of insecurity and self-absorption, Lucille's is malice I guess, George Sr.'s is greed. Though I think I stole that idea from Dan Zak.

Eleanor: What about the sex scene between Tony and GOB where each guy thinks he's having sex with himself? Obviously the point there is narcissism—they're both turned on by someone who looks exactly like them. But the scene is also willfully blind to how sex works—since they're both supposed to think they're having sex with Anne wearing mask.

Spencer: It's kind of a genius, if nonsensical, thing for the show to have happen. I mean you can obviously choose to see it all as problematic—the implication that homosexuality is an extension of male friendship, the idea that sexual orientation is not really innate at all, Tony Wonder's building a career on the premise that being gay makes it easier to get ahead in society. But that's not the point. It's not supposed to be commenting on reality or homosexuality but on the characters' self-involvement.

Eleanor: Which is kind of fascinating and definitely unusual. The headline could be "Arrested Development Is Obsessed With Homosexuality but Has Nothing to Say About It," or something. "The Least-Gay Gay Show."

Spencer: Ha, that's fun. Yeah, I could see that. But that's the case with everything the show's obsessed with.

Eleanor: Totes.

Spencer: I'd be interested to hear what you thought of its Christian stuff.

"The cynicism seems more dominant this season, and (unsurprisingly) I feel that the most when it's directed at a group I'm a part of."

Spencer: Well I think with all these things, they're shown as available for abuse by terrible people and delusional people. Ditto the eastern religion stuff with Lindsay, liberal activism, etc.

Eleanor: Yeah that's true, that's true.

Spencer: At least in this season, I just felt bad for the Christians for everything GOB does. I'm not a Christian, but I remember gasping at GOB's Jesus stuff. Like, this is so bad. But that's obviously the point. This guy is saying literally the most sacrilegious things possible at a Christian wedding where he's the groom. It's the height of this family's narcissism being destructive... but maybe it's disparaging to have the Christians just sit there and take it?

Eleanor: Yes, the non-response was odd. The Christians on the show are in general weirdly gullible and passive. Like, when Ann and GOB get engaged, no one asks any questions... the parents don't point out that it's strange for their daughter to marry a guy she hasn't been dating, not to mention a guy who's the uncle of her ex-boyfriend. Of course that wouldn't happen in real life. But that's not all that different from how the show treats other groups—the gay guys on the Queen Mary and the various activists, both liberal and conservative, that Lindsay encounters are also very willing to be manipulated by the Bluths.

In general, I've found myself more unhappy with the little moments—not the over-the-top wedding scene, but the cheap, one-liner shots at Christians. Probably because they're so close to the kinds of things that pop up in less absurdist shows. The exchange between Tony Wonder and GOB in the most recent episode I watched, where they were talking about how he's a Christian celebrity magician, that felt like a more real thing: let's all laugh at Christians and their weird celebrities. Or, as I said before, the Veals' reaction to the Ann engagement.

Spencer: I could see being annoyed as a Christian at the way he gets engaged to Ann.

Eleanor: YES

Spencer: Like, that's a joke on the stereotype of evangelicals marrying young, etc.

Eleanor: And all the family members-coming out of the woodwork: haha huge families and their credulousness.

Spencer: Yeah, that's definitely spot-the-stereotype humor.

And also, of course Ann will sleep with him the minute she turns 18? And then get married? So lol hypocrisy?

Eleanor: Right, and then the later reveal that she had sex with Tony Wonder. (re that... I was confused that five years had passed.)

Spencer: Yeah that whole plotline is hazy to me still. But ok, yes, AD obviously relies on gross stereotypes for some of its humor.

Eleanor: Right

Spencer: And that includes homosexuality. A la the dudes on the boat in the very first episode. But I'm almost never actually offended because this is such a cartoon world.

Eleanor: Yes. They're just eye-roll moments.

Spencer: Though it's funny to see these horrible characters be blithely racist or homophobic or whatever.

Eleanor: But then the joke is on the racist or homophobe. Like when George doesn't tip black guys, it's like, George is an idiot... not black people don't need tips. Same with Lucille when she scapegoats "the homosexuals" for her problems.

Spencer: Yeah of course. One of my favorite eventual reveals in this season is in the final episode. There was this one element that had had me worrying this whole time that the show was racist, but it turns out, nope, just the characters are. You haven't finished yet, right?

Eleanor: No.

Spencer: OK well go home and watch then. There's a whole horde of other things to talk about.

Eleanor: So, in the end, how are we supposed to react to the show's outlandish homophobia, racism, and religion-bashing? Is it really ok for this all to be about the Bluths' narcissism?

Spencer: Well, I love this show, so I'm inclined to say yes, it's ok. The things that bother me are few and far between. And the idea of that the Bluths' wrongheaded, sick views on the world extend from selfishness is actually a really great, useful satirical point. It's not just equating racism, etc. with bad people (which Ta-Nehisi has pointed out many times is a racist fallacy in itself). It's equating racism, etc. with self-interest and a lack of empathy. Which feels right on.

Eleanor: I hear that. I've always been a bit more skeptical of the show than you've been—it's felt too much like one of those dark, mean-spirited, everyone-is-bad comedies like Seinfeld, which I really don't like. For the first three seasons, I could get over the moments of mean-spiritedness because, yes, the show is hilarious and generally does a decent job of sending up the institutions it's skewering. The Christian "inner beauty" pageant in Season Three was funny, and made a point that I could take to heart: that Christians (and other do-gooder types) can be so eager to show the world they're good that they'll crown a girl who's pretending to be paralyzed as queen of the pageant.

But the cynicism seems more dominant this season, and (unsurprisingly) I feel that the most when it's directed at a group I'm a part of. I keep watching... but with more and more ambivalence.

Hollywood's had a long love affair with sci-fi and fantasy, but the romance has never been stronger than it is today. A quick glance into bookstores, television lineups, and upcoming films shows that the futuristic and fantastical is everywhere in American pop culture. In fact, of Hollywood's top earners since 1980, a mere eight have not featured wizardry, space or time travel, or apocalyptic destruction caused by aliens/zombies/Robert Downey Jr.'s acerbic wit. Now, with Man of Steel, it appears we will at last have an effective reboot of the most important superhero story of them all.

These tales of mystical worlds and improbable technological power appeal universally, right? Maybe not. Bollywood, not Hollywood, is the largest movie industry in the world. But only a handful its top hits of the last four decades have dealt with science fiction themes, and even fewer are fantasy or horror. American films in those genres make much of their profits abroad, but they tend to underperform in front of Indian audiences.

This isn't to say that there aren't folk tales with magic and mythology in India. There are. That makes their absence in Bollywood and their overabundance in Hollywood all the more remarkable. Whereas Bollywood takes quotidian family dramas and imbues them with spectacular tales of love and wealth found-lost-regained amidst the pageantry of choreographed dance pieces, Hollywood goes to the supernatural and futurism. It's a sign that longing for mystery is universal, but the taste for science fiction and fantasy is cultural.

Cultural differences are fascinating because even as we learn about others, we learn about ourselves. As an anthropologist, I want to flip this conversation: Why are we so into science fiction and fantasy? Nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber had a useful theory about this: The answer may be that we in the West are "disenchanted." The world in which we live feels explainable, predictable, and boring. Weber posited that because of modern science, a rise in secularism, an impersonal market economy, and government administered through bureaucracies rather than bonds of loyalty, Western societies perceived the world as knowably rational and systematic, leading to a widespread loss of a sense of wonder and magic. Because reality is composed of processes that can be identified with a powerful-enough microscope or calculated with a fast-enough computer, so Weber's notion of disenchantment goes, there is no place for mystery. But this state of disenchantment is a difficult one because people seem to like wonder.

And so we turn to science fiction and fantasy in an attempt to re-enchant the world. Children and childhood retain mystery, and so one tactic has been to take fairytales and rewrite them for adults and here we get the swords and sorcery of modern fantasy. Another strategy was to reinsert the speculative unknown into the very heart of scientific processes. But just because we have mined myth for magic—and, remember, even what we define as myth would have been called religion two millennia early (and the very fact that we think those two terms equivalent is also cultural)—does not mean that this fills the same need for wonder elsewhere.

India has developed many of the same features as America: a capitalist economy, an enormous bureaucratic government, and cutting-edge scientific expertise. But its intellectual history is different. Weber's argument is much more nuanced and substantive than the cursory description I have given here, but, in sum, disenchantment is rooted in the intellectual tradition of the 18th-century European Enlightenment with its struggles over the place of religion versus rationality. The aftermath of that contest in the West was to relegate the supernatural mysterious to a lower position than material-based reason. The key point is that this is a particular moment in cultural history, not some necessary and universal stage of human societal "development." Similarly, for that reason, I'd guess Japan's vibrant tradition of the supernatural in its anime, and China's recent taste for American FX spectacles, results from those countries' specific cultural contexts rather than from disenchantment. (And some of the ways the West looks to the non-West for re-enchantment are another, Orientalist can of worms best left for a different day.)

Anyone looking to debunk cultural explanations for the American/Indian sci-fi gap might point out that Hollywood has had the big-budget, dragons-and-droids market flooded for years. Perhaps Bollywood, for commercial reasons, doesn't want to jump in. Average production costs for American superhero blockbusters hover around $200 million these days, and audiences have come to expect the computer-generated spectacle that kind of money buys. But... Star Wars was made for $11 million in 1977 (less than $40 million now) and 25 percent of Iron Man 3's $200 million budget was Robert Downey Jr.'s salary. Surely there's enough technical expertise and financial muscle in India to digitize a realistic Mars landing when the country's space program is on track to launch a real spacecraft (unmanned) to the red planet this upcoming November.

What about the fact that American blockbusters make tons of money worldwide? For films like Avatar and The Hobbit, foreign sales equal or exceed domestic U.S. sales. But India, the world's ninth-largest economy and second-most populous country, does not even rank in the top 12 foreign markets for the genre. The list of those markets reads like the attendees of a G-8 summit (plus some key trading partners): the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Russia, Australia, and China. Avatar (2009) set the high-water mark for India, where South Asian audiences purchased $24 million worth of tickets—about 10 percent of foreign ticket sales worldwide. But for most science fiction, countries with smaller GDPs than India (Australia, Mexico, South Korea) are higher consumers. Of Avengers' (2012) $888 million worldwide, $12 million came from India; Iron Man 3 is on track with similar numbers; and, to their credit, Indian audiences contributed a paltry $2.8 million to Transformers 3's $434 million. Fantasy fares much worse. The Hobbit (2012) made $714 million worldwide; it took home $1.8 million in India. That is barely more than Croatia's $1.4 million.

Indian audiences contributed a paltry $2.8 million to the $434-million worldwide gross of 'Transformers 3.' And fantasy fares much worse: In 2012, 'The Hobbit' made $714 million worldwide; it took home $1.8 million in India.

The simplest conclusion to draw from this is that Bollywood doesn't produce science fiction and fantasy because Indian audiences aren't as keen on it. Local cultural production doesn't just result from economic wherewithal; desires and needs also matter. And desires and needs are cultural. This sometimes feels hard to accept because desires and needs feel so natural. Often we think that the way we live is normal and not cultural; this is what anthropologists call "tacit ethnocentrism," when we are not trying to be prejudiced, but we have unquestioned assumptions that somehow we are the normal human baseline and others somehow deviate from that.

Hollywood continues to make science fiction and fantasy movies because disenchantment creates a demand for these stories, but disenchantment predates Hollywood. We were journeying ten thousand leagues under the sea or scarcely surviving a war of the worlds before the film industry began. If the uptick of Hunger Games-inspired archery lessons and the CDC's humorous-but-practical Zombie Preparedness Guide are any indication, this is not going away any time soon. Re-enchantment delivers something more important than escapism or entertainment. Through its promise of a world of mystery and wonder, it offers the hope that we haven't seen all that there is.

These days, it seems amateurism is in the ascendant. We are told to ignore the experts and instead put our trust in the "wisdom of crowds"—by definition, an agglomeration of amateurs. We read amateur writers' blog posts; we watch the theatrics of reality television's amateur stars .

It's the age of the amateur, but not when it comes to golf.

The U.S. Open Championship, which begins today in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, is called such because it is "open" to both professionals and amateurs (as it has been since its inception in 1895). But today, a victory by a non-professional would be beyond unexpected—even beyond imaginable.

Sure, the most historic Open win ever was scored by teenage amateur Francis Ouimet over British professionals Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at The Country Club in Brookline, but that was in 1913. And, of course, all-time great Bobby Jones, an amateur who never turned pro, was a four-time U.S. Open champion (and finished second, including two playoff losses, four times), but his final victory was 83 years ago. The last amateur to take home the U.S. Open trophy was Johnny Goodman in 1933, and recent years have not been kind to amateur aspirants to the Open title. Not even Tiger Woods (who is seeking a record-tying fourth U.S. Open title this week) was a competitive force in his amateur days, finishing tied for 82nd in 1996 and withdrawing due to injury after shooting an opening-round 74 the year before. Last year, 17-year-old Beau Hossler excited the gallery by grabbing the lead in the tournament midway through the second round, but he started the last day in eighth place en route to finishing tied for 29th.

But the return of the Open to the venerable Merion Golf Club on Philadelphia's Main Line this year stirs up memories of the last time an amateur made a serious run at the championship. At Merion in 1971, Jim Simons, a 21-year-old Wake Forest University golfer, shot a 65 in the third round to finish the day leading a formidable field that included Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino. "Simons, An Amateur, Leads U.S. Open by 2 Strokes," the newspaper headline read on the Sunday morning of the last round.

As Robert Sommers wrote in his compelling, readable history The U.S. Open: Golf's Ultimate Challenge, "Unless a player is exposed day after day to the grinding competitiveness of professional golf at its highest levels, he can't win; the nerves will surely fail." But Simons's run was far from over. Although he confessed that he was too nervous to get a good night's sleep before the final round, Simons survived a bogey on the second hole and remained the leader after the first nine holes that last day, ahead of Nicklaus by one stroke and Trevino by two. Then he ran into trouble on the back nine—although when he reached the final hole, he was just one shot behind Trevino, who held the lead. A birdie would have tied him for first place (and earned him a ticket into the next day's playoff, which ultimately became a showdown between Trevino and Nicklaus), but a drive into the rough resulted in a double bogey and a tie for fifth place.

It was a remarkable effort by an amateur golfer, but it wasn't as exceptional at the time as it appears in retrospect. Just four years before, former NCAA champion Marty Fleckman had held the lead after the third round in the 1967 Open at Baltusrol in New Jersey, before collapsing with a final-round score of 80. And in 1960, 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, then still an amateur, had held a one-stroke lead after 12 holes in the final round before three putts on both the 13th and 14th holes cost him his chance at the title, which was ultimately won by Arnold Palmer. Nicklaus did hold on to finish second only two shots behind Palmer. His playing partner, golf legend Ben Hogan, famously said afterwards, "I played 36 holes today with a kid who should have won this thing by 10 strokes."

Ben Hogan, playing partner of then-amateur Jack Nicklaus, famously said afterwards, "I played 36 holes today with a kid who should have won this thing by 10 strokes."

Nicklaus, of course, would more than live up to Hogan's observation once he turned professional in 1962 (and won the first of his four U.S. Open titles that year). Simons and Fleckman never enjoyed great success as professionals. Yet all three amateurs proved able to stay in contention for the Open championship into the final round (and for Simons and Nicklaus up until the last few holes).

As the Open returns to Merion, it is now 42 years and counting since any amateur has been able to equal Simons's run at the title. And if none of the amateurs in this year's U.S. Open field can pull it off (and the odds against them are overwhelming), all the more reason to remember—and honor—what Jim Simons accomplished.

For three days over this past Memorial Day weekend, MAD encouraged the public to decide what design objects were museum-worthy. "They gave away the power of 'credentialing'—possibly their most valuable power," explains lead curator Anne Quito, who wrote the proposal that led to the exhibit, which was put on in part to encourage the design community to rethink the needs of the museum.

Quito, an MFA student at The School of Visual Arts' design criticism department, was inspired by a 2000 retrospective on Tibor Kalman, called "Tiborocity," at the New Museum. "Near the entrance," she recalls, "there was a shelf where you could take anything that was there. I took home some dental floss that day. It reinforced Tibor and Maira Kalman's love for ephemera. I never forgot that."

Adding the "leave one" requisite took the exhibition concept to another level. Placing a gold sticker noting "From the MAD MUSUEM COLLECTION" and logging all the objects in a ledger book made MAD's acquisition of each object official. Quito and her classmates Caterina Francisca and Sandra Nuut served as co-curators. "We hoped to engage as many 'critics' and 'curators' as possible," Quito says, "and challenge the traditional curatorial cycle/hierarchies. The fact that we were given prime lobby space (rather than a studio on the 6th floor) was critical. The fact that it was free and open to the public reinforced the democratic spirit behind the concept."

All the donated exhibits were placed neatly on a shelf. It was important that the installation looked like it belonged to MAD and fit in with the museum's interior design. Desiron lent a beautiful white and chrome shelf unit that looked like it was custom-made for the MAD lobby. The exhibits, on the other hand, were a disparate array of items that together appeared like a 21st-century general store. Donated from invitees (including me) and the public, some were thought-out, and others were whatever was in the visitor's pocket. "With the objects that [museumgoers] took home as tokens," Quito says, "I wanted the idea of the exhibit and its critical questions to live on past its run, just as it did for me in the Tiborocity show."

The exhibit was also staged as a kind of performance: "The three of us who manned the exhibit for the three-day run wore all black, white museum gloves, and tried to act with the decorum of someone who might work for such institution."

The curators hoped serious artists, designers, and crafts people, "who have been waiting to be collected by a museum," would bring their artwork to MAD. But they also were excited by more random possibilities. "I really wished someone would have taken off their bra and left it there," Quito says.

No bras were recorded in the log, but there are a few delightfully curious transactions among the 150 people who participated and who were asked to fill out a donation card with title, date, artist's name (if known) and personal notes. Murray Moss, a well known design entrepreneur, left a vintage red star pin with a photo of the baby Lenin. Someone left a Chilean satirical newspaper with Barbie on the first page and took the donkey mask. A young boy left a pencil from the MET gift shop in exchange for a paper sculpture by a visiting artist at the MAD Museum. Another visitor swapped a Library card from Maryland for a urine test kit. Then there was a faulty iPod with "Superior Music" exchanged for a broken "10:15:37 cat o'clock" (a broken watch). One visitor wrote in the log: "Entry: I TOOK: 'a look' I LEFT: 'happy.'"

Quito concluded that there were three kinds of participants: (1) artists who wanted the "MAD cred," rarely took anything, and were satisfied enough to see the gold sticker on their piece on the shelf; (2) takers, who wanted to get stuff and would leave a throwaway card in return; (3) purgers, those visitors taking the curatorial role seriously by bringing a somehow-valuable object to replace a "crappy" one on the shelf.

"What people left, together with the labels they included with it, spoke volumes," Quito says. "There were many 'Duchampian' moments. A sanitary pad becomes 'design' or 'art' when given a label."

Tens of thousands of more-or-less similar typefaces are currently available, yet designers continue to create new ones and revive old ones every day. The recently released Monotype Metro Nova, however, stands out as a notable resurrection of what was arguably a lost masterpiece by William Addison Dwiggins (a.k.a WAD or Dwig [1880-1956]).

Dwiggins was a significant American designer who, among other things, coined the term "graphic design" in 1922 to explain all his graphic trades: calligrapher, book and book jacket designer, typographer, type designer, advertising designer, and illustrator. In the early 1920s, he designed Metro, the first modern sans-serif typeface done for the leading American type supplier's most famous type machine, Linotype. There were other popular sans serifs—"gothics"—but not from Linotype. Metro was so named because it was intended for newspaper use in large and small sizes. A stylish, art-deco typeface, it was linked to but distinct from Modernist European sans.

Metro might have been revived sooner, but the original drawings disappeared into the archives of the Printing Museum in North Andover, Massachusetts for 80 years, until filmmaker Doug Wilson stumbled upon them during research. Wilson, the director and producer of the critically acclaimed documentary Linotype: The Film-In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World (2012), persuaded the famous type company Monotype U.K. to turn Dwiggins's pencil sketches into a digital font to use for his film. Type designer Toshi Omagari was assigned to make the new Metro Nova, which Monotype will introduce on June 19, Dwiggins's birthday.

The decision to produce a new or revived face isn't made lightly, given the high cost of making, distributing, and promoting a font in today's competitive font marketplace. For Wilson, legacy was a major factor: "Metro will always have a special place in Linotype history," he explained in an email. "I chose to make it the 'signature' face of Linotype: The Film because I felt it was a great typeface that didn't get the respect it deserved in the digital age." But it was only when he pulled a drawing out of one of the many black boxes and saw a capital "A" that had a graceful, slanted apex did he realize this typeface "had much more life and character" than he realized.

It may seem arcane, but typeface nuances govern our reading habits. As Wilson researched through old type specimen books, he discovered that there were two Linotype releases: Metro and, soon after, Metro No. 2, which was more "modern" and "sterile" than Dwiggins's original glyphs. "I believe this [change] was from customer feedback, but I greatly preferred the original Metro," he says.

Wanting the "great old quirks and lively characters," Wilson contacted Dan Rhatigan, Monotype U.K. type director, "about having someone draw up just an all-caps version" that could be used exclusively for his film credits, since he wanted to use only typefaces that were originally designed for the Linotype to help the film's authenticity. Omagari designed an all-caps version in the bolder Metro Black, then he completed a lowercase to match. From there, the idea for a full typeface with additional weights began to materialize as Metro Nova.

But the effort raises the question of why another typeface is necessary. "It is just like new music," Wilson says. "You always think you don't need any new music until you hear that new song that grabs you and expresses your thoughts and ideas perfectly. Then, it is pure magic."

This, too, raises a question: If Metro is so great, why redesign it instead of just porting it to a new medium? The answer may fascinate typography nerds... but all others may want to skip ahead. Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype told me that "Metro was indeed special, but it was originally—at just four weights and three italics—a small family, and was drawn within the requirements of the Linotype typesetters at the time." The family included Metrolight, Metrolight Italic, Metroblack and Metroblack Italic, which shared the same character widths, and Metromedium, Metromedium Italic, and Metrothin, which also shared the same character widths. This is a technical limitation that, Haley explains, resulted in the "italic designs—which are normally slightly condensed and spaced tighter than their roman [or non-italic] counterparts—had to be drawn wider and spaced more open than they should. Also, bold designs were forced to be drawn to more condensed proportions than normal." The characters in the original Metro, therefore, started quite wide in the lightest weight and became progressively more condensed in heavier designs. "Metro Nova, however, is not encumbered by these design restrictions," Haley says. "The various family members were drawn within purely aesthetic considerations."

it was only when Wilson pulled a drawing out of one of the many black boxes and saw a capital "A" that had a graceful, slanted apex did he realize this typeface "had much more life and character" than he realized.

Metro was first released around the time when the iconic faces Johnston Underground, Gill Sans, and Futura (promoted as the typeface of the future) came out. "The sharp cuts and organic shapes of lowercase letters contributed to the calligraphic feel of the face that was even stronger than Gill, for example, and still seems to remain rare in sans serif," Omagai says about Metro's abundance of stylistic alternates and weights. More type-nerd info: "Each style contains nearly 900 glyphs, and roughly 150 are alternates. I am particularly proud that Metro Nova is the first typeface that has alternate Icelandic 'ð'. While it may not be important to many, I hope Icelandic designers will rejoice."

The Metro Nova family is also substantially larger than Dwiggins's original seven weights, from ultra-thin to extra-black, in regular proportions, and six weights of condensed designs. Each design has an italic complement for a total of 26 styles. The family is also available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts.

Once designed and in the world, consumers determine how a face is used—good or bad. Dwiggins's Metro was intended as a text face. Metro Nova was designed for largely for display—headlines and signs and the like. However, Omagai says, "I personally want to read a book entirely set in it."

It took 14 months for Omagai to complete all the characters, and the payoff is not in Metro Nova's commercial success than in its physical details. "The lowercase 'e' is what I adore the most," he says. "It is said that you get the 'e' right when it looks like it's smiling, and the one in Metro Nova is exceptionally joyful—it makes me smile too."

And to think, Bud Selig almost managed to pull off the impossible: being admired.

Major League Baseball's commissioner, in office since 1992, has never been particularly popular. Perhaps it's the way the former used-car salesman turned Milwaukee Brewers owner, who helped organize a putsch against his predecessor Fay Vincent, assumed the job in the first place. Or, more likely, how the devastating 1994's player's strike--which canceled the World Series for the first time in 90 years--occurred on his watch. Whatever the reason, the owlish-looking commissioner has always been rather unlovable.

So now that the commissioner has finally announced that he will retire at the conclusion of the 2014 season, you'd think Selig would kick back, anoint a successor, and coast to the finish line secure in the knowledge that he's left baseball in a better place than where he found it.

Instead, he's on the verge of suspending as many as 20 players for their role in a new steroid scandal, one revolving around a shady anti-aging clinic near Miami called BioGenesis. And even though none of these players failed a drug test, and even though BioGenesis' director appears to have little credibility, Selig and MLB's lawyers will not be deterred. When these suspensions occur--perhaps as early as this month--the result will be the biggest drug bust in sports history.

***

How did this all begin? Though the full BioGenesis story is detailed and complicated, the broad outlines of the story are these: A former employee of the clinic handed over documents to the Miami New Times stating that the clinic, along with its director Anthony Bosch, supplied baseball players with illegal drugs. In order to go after the players, Major League Baseball attempted to obtain the documents from the newspaper. The New Times, citing the need to protect its source, refused. And in the meantime BioGenesis closed down, its various employees scattering throughout south Florida.

Then, in March, Major League Baseball sued Bosch in Florida state court in an attempt to obtain his testimony, which MLB could then use as evidence that its players were using steroids. Bosch at first denied supplying any players illegal drugs (he claimed he was merely a "nutritionist") but then turned to Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees slugger and alleged BioGenesis client, for money to help him fight the lawsuit. Rodriguez refused. In turn, Bosch then cut a deal with MLB in which, in exchange for immunity from prosecution and indemnity from any future repercussions from his testimony, he would presumably give the league the information it wants: which players used steroids. And as soon as MLB is satisfied that it has obtained all the information from Bosch that it needs, the league can then proceed with the biggest mass suspension in the sport's history.

Bud Selig has decided to end his 21-year tenure by creating a completely avoidable legal scandal against his players in a vain attempt to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs.

***

Above all of this is Bud Selig,  a man who has essentially decided to end his 21-year tenure by creating a completely avoidable legal scandal against his players--or, in other words, his employees--in a vain attempt to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs.

Selig has chosen to do this despite the fact that a scandal of this magnitude would distract the country's baseball fans from action on the field, permanently scar the reputations of players who have never failed a drug test, lead to months (if not years) of expensive, complicated litigation, and still fail to fully rid baseball of drugs. In his zeal to punish his players, Selig is cooperating with a criminal whom the league was more than happy to sue just three months ago. And, Selig is doing all this despite the fact that MLB successfully implemented a testing and suspension regime that has greatly reduced drug use at no cost to the game's popularity or financial health. In fact, even with the drop in offense that has accompanied the new testing regime, baseball is as popular as ever.

It's a sad conclusion to the career of a man who tried so hard to shake a reputation for being the illegitimate commissioner who killed the 1994 World Series. There wasn't a whole lot that Selig, who has always lacked the lawyerly smoothness of a David Stern, could do to get people to love him. But by pursuing the Biogenesis suspensions with such prohibitionist zeal, the man who might have walked away as the most admired commissioner in major American sports has inflicted on himself a darker, tawdrier legacy than what might have been.

There are two obvious answers: money and fame. These alternatives broadly structure Jon Reiner's recent piece at The Atlantic, in which he argues that the Internet has led to a decrease in opportunities for the first and an increase in opportunities for the second.

What's changed now is the payoff. The monetary rewards for writing are smaller than in the pre-Internet age. Even if every writing program in the country had a Zell grant to float the post-grads, there's no way that number of writers could enter the profession and sustain the day-to-day of eating and staying dry. But the psychic rewards, the seduction of an audience discovering you right now, have never been greater.

There's some truth to that, and it may well account for the boom in enrollment in writing courses that Reiner discusses. But I think the formulation of money vs. glory omits a third, possibly more powerful motivation: conversation.

My Secret Garden is a famous—or perhaps infamous—collection of female sexual fantasies. Nancy Friday put advertisements in magazines and spoke to friends and acquaintances. Her book is mostly a faithful retelling of the rape fantasies, lesbian fantasies, masochistic fantasies, interracial fantasies, incest fantasies, bestiality fantasies, and other anonymous explicit sexual daydreams and desires communicated to her by her interviewees and interlocutors.

Obviously, Nancy Friday herself put the book together for both fame and fortune; it sold extremely well and became something of a feminist classic. The people who wrote to her, though—the ones who detailed their bestiality and rape and exhibitionist fantasies—received neither payment, nor (since they were anonymous) fame. All they got for their efforts, then, was a chance to communicate their thoughts to someone who said she cared about them, and a chance to participate in a scientific or sociological project. Participants throughout the book say that both of these motives—the chance to be heard, the chance to contribute—were important to them. But neither reduces easily to either money or fame.

Sorcery and Cecelia is a very different kind of book from My Secret Garden. Rather than feminist sociology, it's a romance mash-up—a romp that imagines the world of Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer with magic added. The book is constructed as a series of letters between two cousins... and authors Wrede and Stevermer each wrote one cousin's correspondence. The book, then, is a kind of game—and, indeed, in the afterword, the authors refer to it as a "letter game." They also make clear that the point of writing it, initially, was that it was a blast. That they were able to publish it eventually was a bonus—but the primary motivation was that they were enjoying themselves together.

In his essay, Reiner argues that "There have long been three kinds of writers: writers who write for readers (novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists, journalists, etc.); writers who write for other writers (students); and writers who write for themselves (diarists, shipwreck survivors)." The one group of writers conspicuously missing there is letter writers—who are both writers and readers, and who are writing not so much for someone else, as in order to get writing back. Not coincidentally, letter writing is a much closer analogy to what is happening in My Secret Garden and Sorcery and Cecelia—and it's also a much closer analogy to what happens with a lot of writing on the Internet.

Letter writers write not so much for someone else, as in order to *get writing back*. Not coincidentally, letter writing is a much closer analogy to what happens with a lot of writing on the Internet.

As My Secret Garden and Sorcery and Cecelia show, these aren't new ways of using writing. Letters have long bound people together, as, for that matter, have diaries, which have very often (and contra Reiner's supposition) been semi-public documents, intended to be shared with friends and family. Indeed, if you weighed up all the reasons for writing on a per page basis, I'd guess that most people, most of the time, over most of history, have written from a personal desire to maintain bonds of friendship or form communities, rather than for money or fame.

The Internet hasn't changed that. What it has changed is the relative visibility and mixture of the different motivations. Letters used to be private—not so much, as it turns out, because the writers wanted privacy as because there simply was not the mechanism to make them more public. Now there is, and as a result, we are all reading everybody else's letters all the time. This is great for everyone who is writing in order to form connections or communities. It's not so great for those of us writing for fame and fortune, since all those letter writers tend to glut the market. But the fact remains that, for what most people want to use writing for most of the time, the Internet has undoubtedly transformed the world for the better.

Last week at a signing for his new book, Eleven Rings, The Soul of Success, a fan asked legendary Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson for a prediction in this year's NBA finals. The NBA's "Zen Master" didn't miss a beat: "The San Antonio Spurs will beat the Miami Heat," he said.

Then he added, with typical self-deprecation, "At least, that's what I think." The Spurs beat the Heat 113-77 last night to take a 2-1 lead in the series—so if the momentum continues, he could be right. And who would bet against the NBA Finals prediction of a man who's won 11 Finals titles of his own?

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The Best Matchup of the 2013 NBA Finals Is Between Coaches, Not Players

Well, until recently, I might have. Like many basketball fans, particularly those of us on the cynical Eastern seaboard, I'd always had trouble understanding why some people regarded Phil Jackson as one of the greatest coaches—maybe the greatest—in pro basketball history. Red Auerbach, who took the Boston Celtics to nine championships, and Pat Riley, who won four with the LA Lakers and Miami Heat—those guys were coaches: tough, relentless, foul-mouthed (the TV cameras never did close-ups on them when they were angry, but you could still read their lips), old-school fundamentalist disciplinarians.

But Phil Jackson? He was a big cosmic muffin, an air-brained hippie spouting pop-Zen nonsense, who had an ego as big as those of the movie stars sitting courtside at Lakers games.

Or, that's what I thought until I actually read Jackson's book. What should have been evident just from his record was that he knew the game at least as well as any of his rivals, and even if his methods were, let's say, unorthodox, Eleven Rings makes clear that Jackson's unwavering commitment to basketball excellence—and its results—can't be denied.

No megastar basketball coach ever had stranger origins than Phil Jackson. He was born in Deer Lodge, Montana, which scarcely qualified as a town, and grew up in not-much-larger Williston, North Dakota. His parents were Assemblies of God preachers; his dad sermonized on Sunday mornings, and his mother, descended from a long line of Mennonites, took the pulpit in the evening. The Jackson household was so strict that Phil's brother once told a sportswriter that the young Jacksons excelled in sports because it was the only time they could have fun—so Jackson was an all-around athlete, playing football, pitching on the baseball team, and throwing discus in track and field. But basketball was his first love, and he led his team to two state titles. Jackson mentions that he didn't see his first movie until he was in high school—a particularly odd fact coming from the man who would one day coach Hollywood's team. Curiously, he never addresses in Eleven Rings whether the circumstances of his youth led him to Eastern philosophy and the nickname "Zen Master."

Jackson very nearly pursued baseball instead of basketball; several major league scouts worked their way up to North Dakota to watch him play. One of those scouts passed his notes on to a former college baseball coach, Bill Fitch, who was working for the Atlanta Braves. In the spring of 1962, Fitch took a job as head basketball coach at the University of North Dakota and dropped in to watch Jackson play some round ball during his junior year. He decided Phil was good enough to deserve a scholarship.

Jackson succeeded at UND, and the team earned third- and then fourth-place finishes in the NCAA's Division II tournament. He impressed a New York Knicks scout and was chosen as a second-round pick in the 1967 draft. Though never a star in New York, he was a superb defensive player who could do certain things—such as passing—very well. He came away with two championship rings (1970 and 1973). Jackson's ring total as a player and coach are easily an all-time NBA record, and he would have been fully justified in calling his book Thirteen Rings.

When it came to coaching, Jackson paid his dues—maybe more than should have been required. He worked for years in the Continental Basketball League and for National Superior Basketball of Puerto Rico. Though he constantly put out feelers for an NBA job, no one seemed interested. Exactly why isn't clear, but rumors flitted through NBA offices that Jackson partook of banned substances and was, well, a bit flakey. It's easy to see where at least one of those rumors got its start: Visitors to his offices were often greeted with the lilting sounds of the Grateful Dead, and Jackson liberally quotes from Jerry Garcia's lyrics in Eleven Rings.

Still, he got a job as an assistant with the Chicago Bulls in 1987 and within two years, at the age of 44, was named head coach. Over nine seasons, he coached the Bulls through six championships and often made sportswriters chuckle at press conferences by quoting Lao Tze and Sitting Bull, insisting that there was something spiritual about his "triangle offense" (a teamwork strategy perfected by Kansas State coach Tex Winter, which maintains spacing between players, each of whom can pass to any of his four teammates so that the team can react to any move by the defense).

Over the course of his NBA career, Jackson coached some of the biggest names in modern basketball history—and if you're a coach with superstars like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kobe Bryant on your roster, you should, of course, win championships. A few championships, perhaps. But Phil Jackson didn't win a few championships—he won 11. That's more than any NBA coach ever, and his win-loss percentage, .704, is also tops in the game.

Coaches who win more than one title generally have at least one superstars on their teams—and usually have a few. Auerbach had Bill Russell and Bob Cousy, and Riley had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson, and even casual basketball fans would recognize the names of another three or four players in those lineups.

And if there's one thing we ought to know about the modern NBA, it's how toxic team chemistry can become with a high number of superstars on the roster. Jackson's job was to keep all those star players from antagonizing one another and teach them to play as a team instead. Jordan couldn't stand Pippen (who could?), Kobe resented having to share the glory with Shaq—and even earning jewel-encrusted championship rings together couldn't create harmony between them.

A lot of us dismissed him. We should have known better.

But apparently all of those Buddhist sayings, or koans—such as "The soul of success is surrendering to what is," words he repeats in Eleven Rings—really did mean something. What that "something" actually was is harder to discern; as Buddhist author Lafcadio Hearn once put it, "A Zen koan cannot be analyzed, only intuited." Eleven Rings makes a convincing case that Jackson believed in something, though, and even if he couldn't make his players like one another, he made his players believe. And that's what counted. (Not that they all bought into Jackson's ways, of course; Bryant, who was interviewed for Eleven Rings, calls his former coach's style of basketball "boring." But to my knowledge, he hasn't offered to return any of the rings.)

A lot of us dismissed him. We should have known better. A coach doesn't earn repeated successes in professional basketball without a steel-trap mind and a dogged dedication to the game. If his first tenure with the Bulls didn't make a convincing-enough case, his second incarnation with the Lakers, which produced five more championship victories, should have. He has 11 rings, and it shouldn't have taken a book by that title to convince me.

And to think, Bud Selig almost managed to pull off the impossible: being admired.

Major League Baseball's commissioner, in office since 1992, has never been particularly popular. Perhaps it's the way the former used-car salesman turned Milwaukee Brewers owner, who helped organize a putsch against his predecessor Fay Vincent, assumed the job in the first place. Or, more likely, how the devastating 1994's player's strike—which canceled the World Series for the first time in 90 years—occurred on his watch. Whatever the reason, the owlish-looking commissioner has always been rather unlovable.

So now that the commissioner has finally announced that he will retire at the conclusion of the 2014 season, you'd think Selig would kick back, anoint a successor, and coast to the finish line secure in the knowledge that he's left baseball in a better place than where he found it.

Instead, he's on the verge of suspending as many as 20 players for their role in a new steroid scandal, one revolving around a shady anti-aging clinic near Miami called BioGenesis. And even though none of these players failed a drug test, and even though BioGenesis' director appears to have little credibility, Selig and MLB's lawyers will not be deterred. When these suspensions occur—perhaps as early as this month—the result will be the biggest drug bust in sports history.

***

How did this all begin? Though the full BioGenesis story is detailed and complicated, the broad outlines of the story are these: A former employee of the clinic handed over documents to the Miami New Times stating that the clinic, along with its director Anthony Bosch, supplied baseball players with illegal drugs. In order to go after the players, Major League Baseball attempted to obtain the documents from the newspaper. The New Times, citing the need to protect its source, refused. And in the meantime BioGenesis closed down, its various employees scattering throughout south Florida.

Then, in March, Major League Baseball sued Bosch in Florida state court in an attempt to obtain his testimony, which MLB could then use as evidence that its players were using steroids. Bosch at first denied supplying any players illegal drugs (he claimed he was merely a "nutritionist") but then turned to Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees slugger and alleged BioGenesis client, for money to help him fight the lawsuit. Rodriguez refused. In turn, Bosch then cut a deal with MLB in which, in exchange for immunity from prosecution and indemnity from any future repercussions from his testimony, he would presumably give the league the information it wants: which players used steroids. And as soon as MLB is satisfied that it has obtained all the information from Bosch that it needs, the league can then proceed with the biggest mass suspension in the sport's history.

Bud Selig has decided to end his 21-year tenure by creating a completely avoidable legal scandal against his players in a vain attempt to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs.

***

Above all of this is Bud Selig,  a man who has essentially decided to end his 21-year tenure by creating a completely avoidable legal scandal against his players—or, in other words, his employees—in a vain attempt to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs.

Selig has chosen to do this despite the fact that a scandal of this magnitude would distract the country's baseball fans from action on the field, permanently scar the reputations of players who have never failed a drug test, lead to months (if not years) of expensive, complicated litigation, and still fail to fully rid baseball of drugs. In his zeal to punish his players, Selig is cooperating with a criminal whom the league was more than happy to sue just three months ago. And, Selig is doing all this despite the fact that MLB successfully implemented a testing and suspension regime that has greatly reduced drug use at no cost to the game's popularity or financial health. In fact, even with the drop in offense that has accompanied the new testing regime, baseball is as popular as ever.

It's a sad conclusion to the career of a man who tried so hard to shake a reputation for being the illegitimate commissioner who killed the 1994 World Series. There wasn't a whole lot that Selig, who has always lacked the lawyerly smoothness of a David Stern, could do to get people to love him. But by pursuing the Biogenesis suspensions with such prohibitionist zeal, the man who might have walked away as the most admired commissioner in major American sports has inflicted on himself a darker, tawdrier legacy than what might have been.

It's the capital-A Apocalypse, you see, so the party thins out rather quickly, with most of the guests falling into a giant flaming chasm that opens up in Franco's front yard. (Between this and the Red Wedding, it has not been a good June for social gatherings; plan your own schedule accordingly.)

That's pretty much the situation that gives rise to this particular situational comedy. Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Franco, Robinson, and McBride hole themselves up in the house, where they proceed to bicker over food, sleeping arrangements--to spoon or not to spoon?--and access to the sole pornographic magazine on the premises. (Misuse of this last resource prompts a Franco-McBride dispute over ejaculation that escalates almost as revoltingly/beatifically as the penis-drawing gag in the Rogen-and-Goldberg-penned Superbad.)

Much of the humor on offer is meta in the extreme. There are jokes about Franco's habit of holding onto his old movie props--the cast take turns filming themselves confessionally on the camera from 127 Hours--about making a sequel to Pineapple Express, and about who among those present would be most likely to force himself on Emma Watson. Early in the movie, Michael Cera is hilarious as a coked-out sex-fiend version of himself, and late in the movie Channing Tatum is more hilarious still as--no, I won't spoil it. I will note, however, that the film's ripoff of the demonic impregnation scene in Rosemary's Baby is considerably more horrifying than the original.

Much of the humor on offer is meta in the extreme, and the principal actors are within their comfort zones, as one would hope given that they're playing variations on themselves.

This Is the End is not, to put it mildly, a movie for everyone. It is crass, flimsily plotted, and self-referential to the point of narcissistic personality disorder. For those willing to tolerate such defects, however, it is also very, very funny.

Zack Snyder is not a realistic filmmaker. Anyone familiar with the Man of Steel director's films—2004's zombie-classic remake Dawn of the Dead, 2007's Spartan-war epic 300, 2009's graphic-novel adaptation Watchmen, and 2011's videogame-inspired female-warrior actioner Sucker Punch—knows that. Flesh-eating zombie hordes running amok in quiet suburbia. Insanely buff Greek he-men battling mutant giants and towering God-kings. Naked blue cosmic beings who exist out of time and space. Battle-hardened babydoll girls facing off against gargantuan samurai-statue creatures and undead Nazi soldiers.

In short, he likes his movies as far-fetched and fantastic as possible.

That's part of why Snyder is one of the most divisive filmmakers working today. Regarding 300, the AP's Christy Lemire opined, "Snyder's depiction of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae ... is so over-the-top, it's laughable—so self-serious, it's hard to take seriously." About Sucker Punch, Time Out's Nigel Floyd wrote, "Snyder pulverizes our senses with derivative digital images and obvious musical choices."

His critics should take a closer look, though. Snyder's disinterest in realism is exactly what makes his films work. Often maligned as prizing style over substance, Snyder in fact makes movies whose substance is found in style. That style: an expertly manicured blend of slow motion and fast-forwarded imagery coated in digitally enhanced, livelier-than-real-life colors and effects. The substance: commenting on the inherent ridiculousness of the very types of movies he's making.

Calling Snyder's films postmodern auto-critiques might seem like a stretch, since on the face of it, they—at least up until Sucker Punch—play their craziness relatively straight. Avant-garde, these movies aren't. Yet it's that dialed-to-11 embrace of blockbuster conventions that helps give them their meta quality. Speaking at 2010's Comic-Con to SFX Magazine, the director said as much himself: "I have an interest in and a love of movies that are self-aware ... I like movies that are constantly reminding you that they're movies, while immersing you deeper into the story ... I want to feel like in every shot of the movie there's irony ... And it's fun for me to play with the icons and the visual language of movies."

That self-awareness has been there from the start, apparent in the first sequence of Snyder's directorial debut, a redo of George A. Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead. In the scene, Sarah Polley's nurse awakens beside her husband to find a zombie at her bedroom door. Snyder's camerawork conveys the dramatic shift from normal domesticity to mayhem, affixing the lens to Polley's car hood as the heroine races through a suburb under undead siege. It's a blistering opening salvo (capped by a schizo news-footage credit sequence scored to Johnny Cash's apocalyptic dirge "When the Man Comes Around") that the rest of the film, which is about as good as horror remakes get, never quite lives up to. But that's beside the point. The scene introduces Snyder's intention to immerse via overt fantasy, to excite and enthrall by calling attention to the proceedings' artifice.

There are many things to dislike about Snyder's aggro-action follow-up, 300. Like, for example, its fetishization of bloodshed, its obvious politics, its homophobia, and its dogged attempts to literally reproduce the static panels of Frank Miller's celebrated graphic-novel source material. But those slams only work if one assumes Snyder is oblivious to them. More likely, he's embracing them ironically to underscore the outlandishness of action films. The genre, after all, roots itself in things like the homoerotic celebration of the male physique, the glorification of brutality, the portrayal of homosexuality as villainous and repugnant, and the codification of East-vs.-West, us-vs.-them dynamics. 300 gives its audience exactly what it wants, in a highly stylized package fit for high-definition drooling—replete with Snyder's signature "speed-ramping" cinematographic gimmick, in which the action's velocity fluctuates wildly within shots. The technique, upon repeated viewings, feels so in-your-face as to be a statement. It's as if every gloriously calibrated pan across battlefields and close-up of warriors' ludicrous 12-pack abs is meant as a wink, to let the audience know that Snyder's also giggling at the proceedings' macho-macho-man silliness.

His next foray was into animation with Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, a kid-friendly showcase for his trademark CG-ified slow-motion and hyper-real imagery—that also delivered surprisingly canny commentary on the vital power of storytelling. Snyder's subsequent two "live-action" efforts—a somewhat amusing term in this context, given his work's unrealness—further confirms that self-consciousness fuels his directorial approach. Alan Moore's famed graphic novel Watchmen offers a caustic appraisal of traditional superheroes, and Snyder's adaptation slyly doubles down on that. From the look-at-me latex-and-spandex outfits of the film's "heroes," to the Leonard Cohen-scored sex scene, to the ultra-viciousness of the characters' methods, the film's juxtaposition of corniness and cruelty comes off like a critique.

Sucker Punch, his first film based on his own original story, goes even farther. It mashes up exaggerated versions of genre tropes (a robot battle here, a Lord of the Rings warfare clash there) for a story about sex-kitten heroines navigating a cine-dream world. The garishness of everything is precisely the point. "Someone asked me, why did you dress the girls like that? And I said, I didn't dress them that way, you did," he told the Wall Street Journal about his hot-young-thing protagonists. "That's what pop culture demands, not me. And that's fun for me—I love that when confronted with the exact formula that they request, they get all freaked out by it, because they're like, 'Wait a minute—he's right. I do like this, and maybe that's my fault.'"

The garishness of everything is precisely the point. "Someone asked me, why did you dress the girls like that? And I said, I didn't dress them that way, you did," he told The Wall Street Journal.

Which is why Snyder seemed, at least initially, like such an unlikely fit for Man of Steel. There's no irony to Superman's symbolic embodiment of American values and might, and unlike his past three films, the story doesn't operate on a purely fantastical level. Rather, in its superimposition of the otherworldly on an otherwise believable reality, it's the closest project in his catalog to Dawn of the Dead. Still, Snyder's gift for visual storytelling remains his prime asset, and the half-century-plus history of Superman affords him a so-far unrealized opportunity to investigate hallowed pop-culture iconography on a grand summer-extravaganza scale. The film's largely positive early reviews suggest that Snyder may have pulled off his greatest trick yet: working on a big-budget superhero franchise film while simultaneously deconstructing the tropes of big-budget superhero franchise films. If he's successful, the result should be entertaining—and have something to say about entertainment.

I've been thinking for some time about this piece Emily Nussbaum wrote on Mad Men where she articulates the basic problems with the sixth season and, perhaps now, the entire series:

As the island was to "Lost," Don Draper is to "Mad Men." He was a great premise, a mystery we were dying to understand. But, the more the puzzle has been filled in, the more he's begun to feel suspiciously like a symbol, a thesis title rather than a character: "Appearance Versus Reality"; "American Masculinity as Performance"; "The Links Between Prostitution, Marriage, and the Ad Game." I'd hoped that the death of Don's California-stoner muse, Anna, two seasons ago—in one of the series' standout episodes, "The Suitcase"—would work as an exorcism, but instead Weiner doubled down, adding fresh flashbacks, to the point that even JT LeRoy might think that he was laying it on a bit thick. 

To recap: Don's real name is Dick Whitman. His prostitute mother died in childbirth; his dad, her john, beat him. His fundamentalist stepmother called him a "whore's child." Then his father got kicked in the head by a horse, and the stepmother moved in with her sister, herself a prostitute, living in a brothel. The stepmother, heavily pregnant with Don's half brother, prostituted herself to her brother-in-law, as the teen-age Don knelt outside her door. He watched them, through the keyhole, have sex. C'mon, now. This is no longer the backstory of a serial adulterer; it's the backstory of a serial killer.

We haven't even got to the part where Whitman goes to fight in Korea, accidentally blows up his superior officer, Don Draper, steals his identity, forms a secret relationship with his widow (she's motherly, yet also somewhat prostitute-like, since he pays for her upkeep), becomes a greaser, and seduces a model who is also concerned primarily with appearances. Eventually, he gets into advertising, and when his half brother, Adam, finds him, Don rejects him, and Adam hangs himself. It's not that none of this makes sense, or could make sense; it's just too much, overdetermined. None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it's a lazy way to impose meaning.

Reading Emily detail Draper's back-story, I had the feeling that I'd seen this improbable twisting and turning before—in comic books. We grant comic books that license because they are arched over decades, forged by different writers and editors. Some writers emphasize one aspect of backstory more than others, and whole events are often retconned into oblivion. Either way I don't think backstory is so much the problem, as the belief that backstory has more explanatory power than it actually does.

We are being told that Don is having an affair with Sylvia. Presumably this affair has some relation to the perversions he experienced as a child. That's a good start but it is insufficient. Why—specifically—Sylvia? Who is she? What, precisely, is she offering that Don simply can't get enough of? How does that particular character interact with whatever is going on in Don Draper's head?

This is not a new challenge. What made Don Draper's two affairs so powerful in the first season was the sense that both Rachel and Midge were doing something for him. Rachel and Don connected on mutual feeling of being a pariah. Midge was window into a world of nonconformity that has always intrigued Don—the representation of a path that an identity thief, running from a dysfunctional family might, himself, have taken.

And each of these characters were actual people. Rachel had a father and a sister and expectations emanating from each of those. She had her own thoughts on Judaism and Israel, ad ultimately, on what constituted cowardice and what didn't. Midge inhabited the falling world of the Beatnicks. And you had some real sense of that world—you got to see her friends, you got to go to Jazz clubs with them, and finally, you got to see her in love with someone else.

What other world does Sylvia represent, beyond OPP? Who is she independent of Don? What are the grounds on which they relate? Why did she agree to begin their affair again? Why does she like Don? Is it because he is the most interesting man alive?  Right now, all I am watching is the latest vagina Don Draper happened to trip over.

That is depressing. Mad Men's greatest strength was always the humanity it gave to women. You still see some of that in the interactions between Peggy and Joan. But this season has been mostly about making an argument, rather than telling a story. Whole arcs are initiated and then dropped. There are a flurry of characters, interesting in their own right, whose shine comes and goes. There's no focus beyond a kind of creeping amorality. (I think that's the argument.) Sally Draper's friend from the last episode wasn't so much a character as a demigod of chaos summoned up solely to fuck up Sally Draper even more. 

For those of us who once cared about Don, the big reveal lacked any emotional power. Here is a dude so low that he would bang his friend's wife while his own wife was upstairs, and go off on a drug binge while his house was robbed and his kids were held hostage. There's no sympathy left. He's a dirt bag. And I am fine watching dirt bags. But tell me something new about this particular dirt bag. Show me something about him that I did not know or suspect—something beyond, "Hey you know that dirt bag, really is just a dirtbag." There needs to be something more.

Craig Nova, author of All the Dead Yale Men, is a manic rewriter. He showed me a picture of what he calls his "slag heap"—a huge stack of manuscript pages, piled several feet high, that accumulated as he wrote his latest book. Nova does not merely tinker with word choice the way some editors do; instead, he writes again from scratch. Sometimes he'll approach a first draft in radical new ways, adopting new points of view—even trying again in different genres—to learn more about a character or scene. Directly contradicting the "first thought, best thought" code of spontaneity espoused by the Beats, Nova feels his work's not done until he explores each scene or section from every possible angle.

All the Dead Yale Men continues the Boston family saga that began with The Good Son (1982), which John Irving called "the richest and most expert novel in my recent reading by any writer now under 40." Nova's work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine; he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Craig Nova: All happy writers are the same, but each hardworking writer has a train wreck that is perfectly fitted to the task at hand. After all, as every novelist knows, writing a book is a collision between what one wants and what one gets.

My version of this started the moment I read a line by Robert Graves, who said that there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. Please see the photograph below.

I found this to be doubly true, if this is ontologically possible, when I combined it with a comment from F.R. Leavis, or I think this is who it was, in an essay called "Technique as Discovery." This essay made the point that if you changed the form of what you wrote from, say, drama to poetry, you would discover something about your subject you didn't know before.

It occurred to me that if this worked when you moved from one form to another, then the same thing should happen when you changed the basic elements of a novel.

Take point of view, for example. Let's say you are writing a scene in which a man and a woman are breaking up. They are doing this while they are having breakfast in their apartment. But the scene doesn't work. It is dull and flat.

So, applying the two notions mentioned above the solution would be to change point of view. That is, if it is told from the man's point of view, change it to the woman's, and if that doesn't work, tell it from the point of view of the neighborhood, who is listening through the wall in the apartment next door, and if that doesn't work have this neighbor tell the story of the break up, as he hears it, to his girlfriend. And if that doesn't work tell it from the point of view of a burglar who is in the apartment, and who hid in a closet in the kitchen when the man and woman who are breaking up came in and started arguing.

If the story is told from the man's point of view and doesn't work, change it to the woman's, and if that doesn't work, tell it from the point of view of the neighbor listening through the wall in the apartment next door.

It seems to me that each time you add a new point of view and tell the story again, you will discover something you didn't know before. And if this is true for point of view, it should hold true for structure, language, and all the other elements that go into a piece of fiction.

Of course, in the real world, in the day to day work, you discover a lot, and in fact it has happened to me that near the end of a book or what I thought was the end, I found some one, or something like the famous wooden leg in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," or the theft of that wooden leg, which would force me to go back to the beginning and work towards it or perhaps even begin with it.

I think the basic belief behind this way of writing a novel is that the entire business is one long discovery, and no one, or no novelist I know, sits down one morning, the complete book in mind, and types it straight off. At least, with the writers I know it is one long slog through the most trying parts of the imagination and memory.

I would like to add one warning here. Or make that two. You do come to the point of diminishing returns, and at that point it is time to stop. You have what you are going to have, and that's that. After a certain point, the novel will get worse the more you write.

The other warning has to do with mood. When I have worked and have the feeling that I have just produced something that makes me feel like saying, "All right Ford Madox Ford, take that. You're toast," this is a sure sign that I have written something so ghastly as to defy description. The best work seems to come when I am mildly depressed and have the smallest ambition. I will look at a sentence from the day before and think I can do something with it. Maybe. Just maybe. With a lot of luck.

It is all a mystery, and these ways of working are an attempt to come to terms with the frank chaos that the writer faces, at least in the beginning.

And yet I often think a book is waiting there, in the darkness, another Gatsby, and all it needs is to be written down. The question is, How to find it?

This pile of paper is one man's slag heap in this pursuit.

"Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is--" said Lazzaro, "it's revenge."

When Dresden was destroyed later on, incidentally, Lazzaro did not exult. He didn't have anything against the Germans, he said. Also, he said he liked to take his enemies one at a time. He was proud of never having hurt an innocent bystander."Nobody ever got it from Lazzaro," he said, "who didn't have it coming."

Poor old Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, got into the conversation now. He asked Lazzaro if he planned to feed the Blue Fairy Godmother clock springs and steak.

"Shit," said Lazzaro.

"He's a pretty big man," said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.

"Size don't mean a thing."

"You're going to shoot him?"

"I'm gonna have him shot," said Lazzaro. "He'll get home after the war. He'll be a big hero. The dames'll be climbing all over him. He'll settle down. A couple of years'll go by. And then one day there'll be a knock on his door. He'll answer the door, and there'll be a stranger out there. The stranger'll ask him if he's so-and-so. When he says he is, the stranger'll say, 'Paul Lazzaro sent me.' And he'll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger'll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life's gonna be like without a pecker. Then he'll shoot him once in the guts and walk away." So it goes.

Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said. 

Derby asked him who all was on the list, and Lazzaro said, "Just make fucking sure you don't get on it. Just don't cross me, that's all." There was a silence, and then he added, "And don't cross my friends." 

"You have friends'?" Derby wanted to know. 

"In the war?" said Lazzaro. "Yeah—I had a friend in the war. He's dead." So it goes. 

"That's too bad." 

Lazzaro's eyes were twinkling again. "Yeah. He was my buddy on the boxcar. His name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms." Now he pointed to Billy with his one mobile hand. "He died on account of this silly cocksucker here. So I promised him I'd have this silly cocksucker shot after the war." 

Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. "Just forget about it, kid," he said. "Enjoy life while you can. Nothing's gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have somebody else answer the door."

This is a pretty entertaining section, and the entire book is a string of bizarre and absurdist incidents. It has none of the complicated, nuanced characters I claim to enjoy in narrative. But I did enjoy this narrative. I think it is because, in fiction, if you like the person telling you the story—which is to say the voice, not the author—you generally will let them tell you a story.

Pride and Prejudice, for me, is all about voice. I don't find Mr. Darcy gripping at all, except when the Austen's narrator is describing him. It is as though she is letting me on a secret. Ditto for Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. The voice belongs to society insider, one who believes in all of its trappings but also loves to gossip about its hypocrisies. It is as if the voice is saying to you—"If you don't have anything good to say, come sit by me." Same with Moby Dick and the vagabond intellectual Ishmael. Same with The Great Gatsby and its everyman, Nick Carraway.

I've actually been struggling with this while studying E.L. Doctorow's work. Doctorow is my favorite author. The Waterworks, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, World's Fair, I love them all. (The Waterworks is especially underrated.) But I love the voices telling me the stories in each case. I'm now trying to get through The Book of Daniel, considered one of Doctorow's best novels. But I can't get with the voice and I'm not sure why.

At any rate, this is of major importance to me because I'm teaching a class next semester called "Voice and Meaning." It's all about how writers choose voices and why they matter. Like any class I teach, this is ultimately about making things. Theory is only important in so much as it helps.

We've been here before, of course, in both Seasons One and Two: The penultimate episode overturns the Game of Thrones playing board—Ned loses his head, the Lannisters turn the tide on the Blackwater—and the season finale picks up the remaining pieces.

As I've mentioned throughout our roundtables, I continue to be baffled by the show's start-stop pacing. The latter half of this season consisted of three consecutive episodes that significantly pared down the number of storylines and developments (often to agreeable effect), followed by the final two, in which major twists—including the major twist of the Red Wedding—competed for attention with a variety of subsidiary narratives. It's as if showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss miscounted their seasonal allotment and belatedly realized that they had to cram four episodes' worth of plot down into two.

That said, there was plenty to like tonight. Like the season overall, it offered glimpses of both the potential promise and the potential pitfalls of Benioff and Weiss making the story their own, rather than adhering slavishly to the blueprint provided by George R. R. Martin. Take, for example, the Tyrion-Sansa "sheep shift" scene, which is not in the books. I have my quibbles with the execution (does Sansa really need to be that stupid?) but the hint that maybe, just maybe, these two relatively decent characters could find a way to be happy as husband and wife gave another layer of resonance to the subsequent revelation that his dad had just engineered the brutal slaughter of her mother and brother. That's probably going to set back the clock a bit in the whole gradual-effort-to-win-her-heart scenario.

It's as if showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss miscounted their seasonal allotment and belatedly realized that they had to cram four episodes' worth of plot down into two.

Elsewhere tonight—and there were a lot of elsewheres tonight—I thought that Samwell Tarley and Bran Stark's intersecting storylines provided some of the best material either has had to date (which is not, alas, saying all that much), and it was nice to see Peter Vaughan's Maester Aemon again after a long absence. Liam Cunningham, who plays Davos Seaworth, continues to make the most of pretty much every onscreen opportunity he gets, even if his Dragonstone costars (Stephen Dillane's Stannis and Carice van Houten's Melisandre) remain decidedly uneven. And the culmination of Daenerys's soft conquest of Yunkai was both a bit underwhelming—certainly relative to her incendiary capture of Astapor—and featured substantially too much crowd surfing.

I give way to no one when it comes to appreciation of Rose Leslie's Ygritte, but her Angry Cupid act with Jon Snow felt a bit off to me. In the books, she puts an arrow in his leg during his direwolf-assisted escape from the wildlings, which took place last episode. Having her track him down to do the same at a later date (plus, um, where are all the other wildlings?) seemed an unnecessary indulgence, however striking she may be with a bow in her hand and tears in her eyes.

Charles Dance, meanwhile, was in exquisite Tywin-form taking his family back in Hand at King's Landing, and never more so than when he trained his cool, death-ray gaze on his putative ruler (and grandson twice-over) Joffrey: "The King is tired. Take him to his chambers"—where's this guy when it's bedtime at my house?

Which brings me to the interminably awaited (and widely guessed) revelation that Theon's torturer is, in fact, Ramsay Snow, the Bastard of Bolton, renowned flayer of skin and eater of pork sausages. His treatment represents perhaps the greatest departure that Benioff and Weiss have yet made in adapting Martin's novels, and I have a bone I've been waiting to pick for some time about how they went about it. (Those readers uninterested in questions about the transition from page to screen may want to skip the next few paragraphs.)

In the Martin novels, we meet Ramsay in book two. A renowned rapist and murderer, he usurped the identity of his dead manservant/accomplice "Reek" in order to escape execution. In this guise, he's brought as a prisoner to Winterfell, where he ingratiates himself with Theon after the latter takes the city. It's Ramsay/Reek who, after Bran and Rickon Stark escape, persuades Theon to kill two peasant boys, mutilate their bodies, and claim that they are the Stark heirs. (In the show, this falls to a minor Ironborn character, Dagmer Cleftjaw.)

Even setting aside the show's graphic (and to my mind unnecessary) depictions of Ramsay's torture of Theon—which take place "offscreen" in the books—there are plenty of narrative complaints that can be made regarding Ramsay's portrayal. Principally, his refabricating Theon as a broken creature called Reek (as we saw tonight) is vastly more interesting if you know that 1) he previously had a degenerate servant named Reek whom he sacrificed in his employ; and 2) when he initially met Theon he was pretending to be that servant. Of course, there are counterarguments, too (the Ramsay/Reek subterfuge is reasonably complicated, and Benioff and Weiss needed to cut where possible), and counterarguments to those counterarguments (if you had to cut something from Season Two, couldn't it have been from the Qarth subplot?).

But my dismay at the Ramsay adjustments is less narrative than philosophical. In the novels, Ramsay is both the figure who tempts Theon across a moral boundary from which he can never return (the killing of the peasant boys) and the one who subsequently punishes him for his transgressions. By cutting out the first half of this equation, Benioff and Weiss have reduced Ramsay to a garden-variety psychosexual sociopath—more accomplished than, say, Joffrey, but not appreciably different in kind. In Martin's vision, by contrast, he is a chillingly literal embodiment of the Devil: He seduces you to evil and then sentences you to Hell. This is not a small alteration.

Have I been waiting eight episodes to make that observation? Why, yes I have. How could you tell?

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: I'd say tonight's episode provided a fitting, if imperfect, end to the season. It had its ups and downs, its clever infidelities to Martin's text and its moments when it should have left well enough alone.

Overall, I found the season to be a substantial improvement over Season Two (which was still pretty damn good), even if it failed to rise to the near-perfection of Season One (which was immensely aided by its relative simplicity). To my mind, the fundamental question moving forward will be how well Benioff and Weiss can pare and adapt Martin's ever-more-sprawling (and unlikely to be completed) opus, and on this score I think Season Three offered both reasons to be optimistic, and reasons to be less optimistic.

Before asking what you guys thought, though, let me say thanks to you both for doing this—it's been an utter blast—and particular thanks for putting up with my occasionally idiosyncratic obsessions. Thanks, too, to our readers, for more of the same, for your many sharp comments and close analyses on subjects from Pod's penis to Talisa's fate, and most of all for not telling Spencer that everyone was going to die in Episode Nine.

So, what did you guys think?

Kornhaber: What do I think? I think I'm still recovering from the massive twist Benioff and Weiss just served up: having the capstone to their show's arguably best season, and the follow-up to their most shocking and eventful episode yet, be one in which the most exciting developments revolve around the opening of mail.

As you point out, Chris, this Thrones finale was in full Thrones finale form, hopscotching frantically across plotlines to tie a cliffhanger-y bow on each of them. In this case, though, that meant not much happened—games were not changed like they were when, say, Joffrey swapped Sansa for Margaery at the end of last season. Rather, they reached their long-foreseen conclusions with that series of homecomings you mention, and the not-even-shocking-to-newbie-me reveal of Torture Boy as a Bolton Man.

But as an epilogue to the Red Wedding, the show's writers, interestingly, used all these plotlines to slyly confront a widespread viewer reaction to the carnage that had just unfolded. Last week, the two of you may have been slightly underwhelmed, and I may have been more-than-slightly blown away, but a lot of newcomers felt pure outrage. A common sentiment on Twitter: What kind of sicko was George R. R. Martin to groom a group of likable, noble, on-the-side-of-right protagonists only to viciously butcher them at the end of Season Three?

"You disapprove?" Tywin asks his son, though he may well have been addressing Thrones fans who have sat happily through three seasons of murder and rape only to balk now at the loss of Young Wolf & co. "I'm all for cheating," Tyrion says, "but to slaughter them at a wedding..."

The show's great triumph is in how it's communicated, in Davos's words, "the world has got so far bent." At this point in the series, realpolitik seems like not only the practical philosophy, but often the more righteous one.

Again and again in "Mhysa," Benioff and Weiss riff on the theme of noble and ordinary deaths—the question of whether some lives matter more than others by dint of being highborn, lowborn, unborn, newly born, Ironborn, or born a half man. Characters as diverse as Walder Frey, Shae, and Gendry air angst about how the more-privileged think they're intrinsically more valuable. Ramsay Snow strips Theon of his lordship to remind him, and the audience, that even the seemingly anointed are "just meat." Tywin shares the tale of sparing his disappointing son an early death, while Baelon Grayjoy essentially sentences his to one. And at Dragonstone, Davos and Stannis again debate the fate of a man whose blood, according to Melisandre, matters a great deal more than most. "What is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" Stannis asks. Davos's reply: "Everything."

I'd like to say that I unequivocally side with Davos against Stannis, with Tyrion against Tywin, with Yara—who pledges to rescue Theon—against Balon. But Martin, Benioff, and Weiss's great triumph is in how thoroughly they've communicated, in Davos's words, "the world has got so far bent." By the end of Thrones' third season, we've seen the extent to which making choices based on love, or notions of honor, or ideas of fixed morality, can make one vulnerable—and as Robb sadly learned, vulnerability can have horrifying consequences. At least at this point in the series, realpolitik seems like not only the practical philosophy, but often the more righteous one too.

That could shift, though. Even if not a ton happened in this episode, the finale's many raven-delivered tidings of foreboding did impart a sense that change is coming. Thrones' storylines to the north of the Wall and to the south of Westeros have inched closer and closer to the mainland. Jaime's back at King's Landing, having been fundamentally altered in more ways than one. And Roose Bolton may be shaping up as an even more fascinating villain than Tywin. He's kind of like Tywin but creepier: even more strategically laconic, brimming not with scorn for his lessers but rather with clear-eyed opportunism. Plus, he—or at least his house—skins people, not deer. Here's hoping the next person this betrayer betrays is Walder Fray. Would that be the moral outcome? Who knows. Transfixing? Totally.

Ross, your thoughts?

Star Trek has a pretty good track record of forecasting the future. Cell phones, tablets, augmented-reality visors. But who would have thought that the franchise's darkest vision would be the next to come true?

But that model gets turned on its head in one of Star Trek's most popular series, Deep Space Nine. The show is set in the midst of a galactic war in which terrorism makes an appearance, alliances are broken, and many of the values that held Kirk's Federation together are threatened from within. As a part of the new, darker era, the show's producers created Section 31, an intelligence agency and special-operations outfit that's nominally controlled by the Federation but operates independently of it.

You might call Section 31 the Federation's id. Its mandate is to defend the Federation from any and all threats, at any price. Kidnapping, deception, manipulation—even genocide—are all acceptable instruments in Section 31's toolbox.

"The Federation claims to abhor Section 31's tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way," says Odo, one of the characters on Deep Space Nine. "It's a tidy little arrangement, wouldn't you say?"

There are caveats, but it's not a stretch to say now that we're living DS9, or some form of it. The revelation that the National Security Agency is scooping up every American's e-mails, photographs, videos, voice-over-IP calls, and more from telcos such as Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon but also from nine major tech companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, and possibly from credit-card companies as well—all in the name of protecting America—strikes many as a subversion of U.S. values and of the authority the public thought it was granting its government in the wake of 9/11.

There are caveats, but it's not a stretch to say now that we're living DS9, or some form of it.

Likely if Section 31 were disclosed to the broader Federation, the outfit would be shuttered immediately (or maybe not, considering how powerful its key members are). While there's no chance that NSA will be closed, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has vowed to introduce legislation paring back some of the laws that enabled NSA to create its electronic domestic surveillance program.

Another difference between DS9 and our world is that NSA is at least theoretically checked by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whereas Section 31 is entirely unaccountable to anyone—not Starfleet Intelligence, not Starfleet Command, not the Federation Council.

Still, the process by which the FISC oversees the NSA's surveillance requests is itself opaque. The public gets little more than annual reports on individual subpoenas submitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Of course, any post about Star Trek demands that we take the analogy to its furthest point. Who are the Klingons in this drama? Who's our Odo? Our Sisko?