Because here’s the thing that we all know: just because you employ a ton of women (40%, they say!) on your staff doesn’t negate the possibility that the content of your show, and its public image—as in, who actually writes and says the words, who, in a word, are presented as the show’s “authors”—is male-skewed. No matter how porous the boundaries between the creative and production staffs, no matter how integral they are to the-day-to-day work of putting on the show, that’s got to be obvious to you. If your male writers are, as The Daily Show’s are, dominating your women writers at a rough 15:1 ratio, if it is men that you take onstage with you at the Emmys, then let’s be honest about what that means.

As of this writing, Carmon’s post has generated almost 1,000 comments and nearly 90,000 page views. It’s a prime example of the feminist blogosphere’s tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as “outrage world”—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate‘s own XX Factor and Salon‘s Broadsheet. They’re ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business. But they promote the exact opposite of progressive thought and rational discourse, and the comment wars they elicit almost inevitably devolve into didactic one-upsmanship and faux-feminist cliché. The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what’s “empowering” and “anti-feminist” inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits. Paradoxically, in the midst of all the deeply felt concern about women’s sexual and professional freedom to look and be however they want, it’s considered de rigueur to criticize anyone, like Munn, who dares to seem to want to sexually attract men.

The post causing all the controversy is here. The Daily Show responds here. If you’re interested in learning more about feminism, I’d recommend avoiding the blogs and starting with any of the numerous articles at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I guess you get your hipster pass the day you sign up for a gypsy punk rock marching band:

Perennial Top Five of the Moment pick My Dear Disco played till it rained:

Even if you don’t find Starship Troopers as prescient as I do, the years have been kind to it, if only because it’s now removed from the context of whatever expectations people might have had for it at the time. It seems absurd now to write it off as some silly piece of escapism, as its detractors complained, and the amount of detail Verhoeven and Neumeier invest in their cinematic universe keeps cultists like myself coming back to it.

Another phobia is talking on the phone. This one is more complex, and to be honest, a bit more debilitating in a world that hasn’t quite transitioned to text based communication in all things. Actually, like bee stings, where one can acquire an allergy by being stung in the right sequence, talking on the phone has now gotten quite a bit worse for me. The problem is that, in this modern world, phone conversations are rare if you want them to be, and so I can’t really rely on the kind of habituation that has allowed me to come to terms with, among other things, heights.

As an example, we recently switched phone plans, which prompted my wife to check our monthly minutes usage. I had used 4 or 5 minutes that month. Yeah, I know. Statistics don’t lie.

[Aside: I'd like to meet the genius who invented the concept of "minutes", I'm imagining a kind of philosopher king out there in the business world. A wizard with power point who goes home to read Kant and Heidegger. The kind of person who has a deep infatuation with Ulysses that he can't share at the office.]

It’s not that I have a problem communicating, or at least, not really. I’m comfortable with email, texts, IM, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and all that. I’ve even developed some facility with in-person conversations. [The trick, if there is one, is to just start asking questions. Any random question will do to start.] There’s something horribly intermediate and incomplete about talking on the phone, as if the narrow range of the performance, the intimacy of producing and hearing sounds, the various different fronts that one has to maintain against the incursion of awkwardness (some technological, teleological, metaphysical, physical, psychological) are all working against you, plucking the strings of insecurity.

Then there’s the fact that somehow, over the phone, because it is intimate but not difficult, it reminds you of the web of social obligations you are no longer meeting. The genius of Facebook is in the illusion the software is able to create about one’s own commitments and obligations to the social web of friends and acquaintances. You are presented with the illusion of having friends without the hard work of being friends.

This is also why the new iPhone video chat is sort of a joke, a tool sculpted for absentee parents who want to see their kids and almost no one else. In almost all other situations the goal is to decrease the amount of real intimacy that social situations require, to turn social interactions into casual wall posts or text messages, not to up the ante with goddamn cameras. Other people have said it better. I have a somewhat harder time imagining the calculus for those who do use it to talk to their kids. I mean, if you have a high flying job that takes you away from home, how is having a piece of magic glass really going to stand in for the physicality of being there. If given the choice, wouldn’t you ditch the phone and stay home?

[Aside: I also think the prop work for the island's heart was a tad careless, but I find people's hatred of the plug sequence sort of odd considering the relatively bizarre and groan inducing prop work we've encountered in earlier and better seasons.]

The writers did a nice job playing with our perceptions of the island as a kind of allegorical or literal purgatory. We find out in the end that the island was, in the confines of the Lost universe, the real and messy world of the ambiguous characters and weird situations, politics and drama and mystery. The “normal” flash sideways world was the dream, the limbo, a staging area for both characters and fans to move on. The best part, I think, is that we’re still free to speculate on the nature of the island, what happened after, and what came before.

Apple fans. Even when we get it right, we sound like portly teenage boys, lecturing the maids until they compliment our yachts correctly.

And if people of the future happen upon this desolate and unremarkable wasteland, what then? Well, some of them get sick and die. We have  to trust that humanity’s ability to formulate causal models from that kind of data remains intact, and so the rest will relearn the forgotten lessons of the past. In other words, the best way to communicate with the future by doing nothing special and trusting that they will figure it out.

UPDATE: Ana called me out for not reading the linked article (just the pull quote). This is one of those cases where a piece of news is making multiple circuits around the web, and I had assumed (wrongly) that the links led to an article I had read awhile ago, and not the current (and quite interesting) interview.

I also have to revise my own plan somewhat. A Rosetta stone like monument is clearly the best bet for the short term, assuming some language survives. Though computational linguistics is making progress decoding languages with no Rosetta stone analogue, the ability for future generations to interpret signs increases dramatically if one of the available languages is known.

The case where no language survives in its current form is more complex. Here’s were my plan makes a bit more sense. You have to weigh the probability of discovery against the probable protocols future humans (or others) might employ should the site be discovered. I was imagining an ideal scenario where the site could avoid detection for a million years.

But what if it is discovered? I think the best result is to have some kind of subtle but lasting monument, and let the experience of exploring a radioactive hot zone (and the inevitable bad result) lead future explorers to the correct conclusion about the meaning of the monument. Basically, if people find the repository, we want to make sure they explore it, and by exploring it, learn the nature of the danger. This avoids the terrible case where people settle the area without any knowledge of the danger lurking underneath.

I now own a pair of overalls. And a pitchfork.