Notes on Pop Culture: Periodical Beach Reading, The Newsroom & Political Animals

I spent the past week on a Cape Cod family vacation where I swam, biked (rode a bike for the first time in many, many years), enjoyed sunsets, fresh seafood and got thoroughly and embarrassingly crushed on a farm-themed mini-golf course. (My 10-year-old handily kicked my behind.)

But when we weren't scanning the seas for seals, the favorite snack of sharks  -- we were a few miles away from that Cape beach where a shark chased a kayaker -- I was gorging on the heaps of reading material I brought along (an academic book and Lord of the Rings, both for a research project I'm working on, along with a bunch of periodicals). Here's what kept me entertained:

New Yorker: For a Boston area resident, I was rather sickeningly Gotham-centric this past week. I got substantial sunscreen and sand all over the July 9/16 issue of The New Yorker and enjoyed the long review of Douglas Brinkley's new Walter Cronkite biography by Louis Menand which included a fascinating debate over whether a Cronkite comment, coupled with the anchor's pessimistic view about American success in Vietnam, prompted LBJ not to run for a second term.
An article that sparked a beach-side conversation was by James Surowiecki about businesses that aren't hiring new employees because, the article asserts, employers are being too picky despite ample options:
"When companies complain that they can't find people with the right 'skills,' they often just mean that they can't find people with the right experience . . . Thanks in part to the sheer number of applications, screening of applicants is automated, with computers evaluating resumes according to pre-set criteria. Fail to meet one of those standards, and your application gets tossed, even if a good H.R. director might have spotted your potential."
How depressing.
Speaking of depressing . . . I was also riveted by "The Hunger Diaries," excerpts from American writer Mavis Gallant's journals written in 1952 when Gallant was literally starving for her art while living in Spain.

New York Magazine: The July 9 cover story, "Does Money Make You Mean?" ignited another lively debate with its provocative accompanying art. Citing various work by researchers who are delving into whether money causes people to be less humane and whether people who seek money share those same traits or whether the entire "less humane" question is bogus baloney, writer Lisa Miller worded her central query this way: "How does living in an environment defined by individual achievement -- measured by money, privilege and status -- alter a person's mental machinery to the point where he beings to see the people around him only as aids or obstacles to his own ambitions?"
New York Times: In between the pages of the Old Gray Lady, I greatly related to a Sunday Styles section meditation, "Friends of a Certain Age," about the challenge of making and keeping friends as we get older:
"In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children's play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends -- the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis -- those are in shorter supply.
As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends."
In the same section, I found a scary story by Lee Siegel who accidentally sent Linked In friend invitations to all 974 contacts in his address book including deceased people, "lawyers, landscapers, accountants, literary agents, babysitters, window-installers, art dealers, ex-girlfriends, the ex-boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend . . . obstetricians, dentists, ophthalmologists, gastroenterologists, urologists, psychologists, pediatricians, billing offices for all of the preceding . . . my ex-wife [and] two litigious former landlords."

The Newsroom: As for TV, I saw the latest two episodes of Aaron Sorkin's new HBO drama The Newsroom which, I've decided, has officially hooked me with its cutting dissection of contemporary cable TV news. Yes, it can be preachy, annoyingly preachy and smugly sanctimonious as well. The second episode irritated me with its relentless focus on two of the female staffers falling to pieces over their love lives. But by the fourth episode -- "I'll Try to Fix You," which I reviewed here -- that got me.

Political Animals: I also caught the first installment of USA's mini-series (the network is calling it a "limited series event") Political Animals where Sigourney Weaver plays Elaine Barrish, otherwise known as Hillary Clinton had Clinton dumped Bill right after she lost her 2008 presidential bid. It also features a tough reporter, who wrote nasty pieces about Barrish's ex, shadowing Secretary of State Barrish around for a week for a story. The show felt crisp, the relationship between the reporter and Barrish is promising and the political manipulations entertaining (better than the boring, real life presidential race we've got goin' on right now). Looking forward to seeing more of this "limited" event.

Image credits: Amazon and New York Magazine.

Suddenly, Women Pols on TV Shows is a Thing

In the recent documentary Miss Representation -- which criticized American culture and the media for its negative impact on women and girls -- child advocate Marian Wright Edelman lamented the scarcity of American women politicians saying that, "You can't be what you can't see." Given the latest uptick in the number of fictional female pols appearing on television, the vision of all those women politicians in their red, white and blue clothing ought to give Wright Edelman something to cheer about.

Female characters seeking or occupying elected office have been popping up on a number of shows across primetime from the new Shonda Rhimes drama Scandal and the dark HBO comedy Veep, to lighter comedies like Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Alongside the strong, brainy women, there are a fair number of female pols who are occasionally depicted as tone deaf, goofy or a bit off, but the other male pols with whom they share the screen aren't exactly Nobel Prize winning brain trusts either.

Take, for example, the soapy, D.C.-based Rhimes show Scandal. In addition to the main character -- a powerful, savvy, whip-smart D.C. scandal fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) who has a team of what she calls "gladiators in suits" who worship her -- there's a female vice president, Sally Langston (Kate Burton). And Vice President Langston is no slouch. She attempted to take quick political advantage of a situation when the president was caught doing something he shouldn't have. And while she didn't succeed in her maneuver, the viewers saw her as just as much a political player as her colleagues.

On the sardonic HBO comedy Veep, there's another female vice president who is also depicted as the "first" woman to hold that office. However while Julia Louis-Dreyfus' vice president Selina Meyer, a former senator, is intelligent and ruthless, she's very awkward, similar to the way in which Joe Biden can be awkward. She can be commanding when she wants to be, but isn't entirely convincing when she tries to smooth out political waves, largely of her own making. The latest plot twist -- the first female vice president was impregnated by her boyfriend and she's unmarried -- could've been ground-breaking, as I can't recall seeing a pregnant politician on a TV show. But having Meyer suffer a miscarriage, thus disposing of a potentially thorny plotline, left the vice president looking for a scapegoat to stave off the rumors of her pregnancy. Who took the fall? Meyer's quick-thinking chief of staff Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky) who claimed that she'd been the one who was pregnant, not the vice president.

Veep has also featured a powerful female senator, Barbara Hallowes (also played by Burton, the vice president from Scandal), who politically tussled with Louis-Dreyfus' Meyer on a few occasions. Burton's really good at the politician thing, perhaps even better than she was as Meredith Grey's mother Ellis on Grey's Anatomy.

One TV pol who shares some of Meyer's politician DNA but is painfully earnest (in contrast to the uber-cynical Vice President Meyer) is Parks and Recreation's Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) who spent the past season campaigning for a seat on the Pawnee City Council after taking a leave of absence from her post in the Parks and Recreation Department. Knope, a clever and big-hearted candidate, had to match wits with her moronic chief opponent's professional campaign consultant -- another knowledgeable woman -- who played very, very dirty. Knope held her own throughout the season as her campaign had little cash and a tiny volunteer staff, but Knope kicked some serious behind during the big debate, even bested her opponent after he threatened that his father would shut down the big Pawnee candy factory and throw a bunch of people out of work if Knope won. In the end, Knope squeezed out the victory.

Not so lucky was Modern Family's Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen) who also campaigned for a spot on the Town Council but had an utterly disastrous debate performance, mostly due to the idiocy of her husband Phil and a Valentine's Day surprise that went terribly awry. The refusal of Town Councilman Duane Bailey to erect a stop sign at a dangerous intersection -- after Dunphy had collected all the necessary signatures from concerned citizens and made an impassioned argument for the sign -- was the catalyst for Dunphy's first bid for elected office. Although Dunphy lost, at least, in the end, her opponent gave her the stop sign she wanted.

As disappointing as it is to learn that all of these programs won't be airing new installments until the fall (or later in the case of Veep), there's at least one new summer show that will make the case that women can flourish in the political realm (or at least stumble around as well as the men do). USA Network's Political Animals will be premiering next month featuring Signourney Weaver as the U.S. Secretary of State and the former wife of a U.S. president who had difficulty keeping his fly zipped. With the exception of the "former" wife part, does the premise ring any bells, right down to her denial that she'll ever run for president . . . again?

Image credits: Carol Kaelson/ABC, TVLine/NBC and Peter "Hopper" Stone/ABC.