Last year, the pool correctly predicted the deaths of Kim Jong-il (13 lists), Elizabeth Taylor (13 lists), Amy Winehouse (10 lists), Steve Jobs (6 lists), Christopher Hitchens (5 lists) and Gerry Rafferty (4 lists). It was wrong in the cases of Michael Douglas (37 lists), Aretha Franklin (32 lists), Lindsay Lohan (17 lists) and a whole bunch more. So then, who will “mark” this year?

Bill Jankow: 3 lists
Bob Barker: 3 lists
Ethan Zohn: 3 lists
Fidel Castro: 3 lists
Gary Carter: 3 lists
Michael Lohan: 3 lists
Prince Philip: 3 lists
Queen Elizabeth II: 3 lists
Roger Ebert: 3 lists

Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi: 4 lists
Courtney Love: 4 lists
Dick Clark: 4 lists
Gary Busey: 4 lists
George Michael: 4 lists
Hugo Chávez: 4 lists
Joe Paterno: 4 lists
Margaret Thatcher: 4 lists
Pete Doherty: 4 lists
Whitney Houston: 4 lists

Billy Graham: 5 lists
Kirk Douglas: 5 lists

Dick Cheney: 6 lists
Michael Douglas: 6 lists

Nancy Reagan: 7 lists
Penny Marshall: 7 lists
Robin Gibb: 7 lists

Lindsay Lohan: 9 lists
Muhammad Ali: 9 lists

Charlie Sheen: 10 lists

Aretha Franklin: 11 lists
Zsa Zsa Gabor: 11 lists

Etta James: 16 lists

Rick Paulas really, literally, could not have done this without the assistance of Excel spreadsheet wizard m. berru.

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First in a series of two essays today on Louis C.K. Next: Super-Stud in Divorceland.

Let me start with a couple of stipulations:

(1) Identifying bubbles in real-time is notoriously difficult, and;

(2) I really, truly love Louis C.K. I’ve tried (and failed) on multiple occasions to see him live; I’ve watched all of his specials, including some of his weird, almost unrecognizable early appearances in Boston clubs; I’ve even, despite knowing full-well that one should never, ever do this, recounted his routines, through snorts of my own laughter, to my politely smiling friends.

Nonetheless: I’m ready to declare that we are, right now, in the midst of a Louis C.K. bubble.

I’m not glad to be saying this. And it's our fault, not his. He is, I believe, among the best working artists we’ve got going right now, and his work-ethic—his capacity for churning out top-quality material at a rate that would make Joyce Carol Oates blush—is somewhere between inspiring and terrifying. The best bits of his stand-up (about the world’s saddest hand-job, or about the unappreciated miracle of flight) will make you laugh until your throat-cords burn; his show is a weird and occasionally wonderful alternative to the insipid, frenetic current crop of network sitcoms. I’m profoundly grateful that his comedy is in the world.

However: we have now, I believe, arrived at that moment in the party—some time between drinks three and four, say?—when the pleasurable wave of drunkenness gives way to the first intimations of nausea. He’s reached that full boil of fame at which his ticket-sales crash web servers; magazines scrabble to outdo each other with rapturous profiles and assessments; his personal and professional quirks (did you know he doesn’t let his kids watch TV? did you know he edits his show himself, ON A MACBOOK?!) have acquired an aura of divine relics. Last week he put his latest stand-up special on his website, and within a couple of days more than a couple hundred thousand people had downloaded it, at five dollars a piece... at which point, of the million-plus dollars, he gave at least a quarter of it to charity. There is the upcoming appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Liking him has come to feel not just like a marker of good taste but, somehow, an indicator of virtue. Which is to say: a note of desperation, of something less to do with rational evaluation than with a fear of being left out of something transcendent, has crept into our culture’s assessment of him. He is the stock market, and we who hang on his every word and Tivo his every late-night appearance are collectively writing Dow 36,000.

Cultural bubbles, like economic ones, arise with chart-able regularity. A year ago it was Jonathan Franzen and Freedom; a few years before that it was Radiohead; before that, Ricky Gervais. I remember a moment, in the fall of 2004, when I woke up to an op-ed in the paper by Larry David and realized that he could, just then, announce that he was running for president and (among the segment of the population that wakes up and reads op-eds, anyway) he could have himself a voting majority by dinner-time.

We’ve tended, understandably enough, to hear and read a lot these past few years about the ugly impulses that underly the creation of bubbles—the greed, the recklessness, the willful ignorance. But cultural bubbles, with their lack of potential for exploding the global economy, allow us to see another, less unpalatable set of impulses beneath bubbles’ creations. There’s a sadness, an almost sweet hopefulness, in the fervor with which we inflate certain figures and objects to places of undue worship. No one, after all, wants to live in an era of mediocrity. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to believe that there is right now, brewing away on someone’s Macbook, a work of art that will live on long after the polar ice caps have melted to the size of postage stamps? Wouldn’t it make you feel a little more hopeful about the world if a certain book, stacked in the front of the Barnes and Noble with a special embossed medal on its jacket, were not just good, not just something to read on subway trips after your iPhone battery has died, but something truly amazing? Something to rejigger your notions of what people are capable of? To make you write the creator a letter of abject-est admiration, not even caring if you get a response?

Here’s the tricky thing about bubbles, though, and the thing that assures their ongoing creation: there’s always a chance, however slim, that the show that everyone’s watching, the asset that everyone’s insisting you stock up on, really is the thing that will endure. There’s no law, after all, that ours must be an era devoid of genuine, time-capsule-worthy greatness. While Homer recited the Odyssey, there must, somewhere in the crowd, have been a moron whispering to his friends that this was all just middlebrow claptrap. And for all I know Louis C.K.’s comedy—or Seinfeld, or The Simpsons, or Kid A, or Freedom—really will still be consumed a hundred years from now, taught to bored undergraduates who can’t wait to get back to their Virtual Sex-Pods.

But I think that we don’t entirely do our favorite artists, or works of art, a favor when we rush to declare them the Greatest X of The New Millennium, or the Man/Woman/Show That is Redefining X, or the Perfect X for These Troubled Times. Because cultural bubbles, like economic ones, leave us sheepish, and angry, and feeling obscurely (or not so obscurely) duped. I wouldn’t, I don’t think, feel quite so queasy about Ricky Gervais—I wouldn’t greet his embarrassingly self-aggrandizing tweets, or his unfunnily nasty Golden Globes appearances, with quite such unhappiness—if I hadn’t, however many years ago, convinced myself that The Office was not merely an excellent show but a kind of comedic paragon. I wouldn’t have felt quite such searing disappointment during the last season of The Wire—and good God, did I hate watching those episodes in which McNulty developed his absurd plan to impersonate a serial killer—if I hadn’t insisted quite so often or so loudly in the years before that The Wire was the greatest work of art to have appeared in my lifetime.

And so, in the hopes that it isn’t too late for Louis—that we might not be so far along in the bubble cycle that we will have to be vaguely nauseated when, years from now, he appears again on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" to hold forth on the indignities of aging—let’s resolve be freer with our deflationary thoughts. Let’s love him less so we can love him longer.

Here goes my small contribution: the much-celebrated, hour-long episode set in Afghanistan actually kind of sucked. Especially the ending. That scene in which the duckling escapes from Louie’s hands and melts the Afghan soldiers hearts was on the level of those excruciating "Modern Family"-endings when all the characters put their arms around each other and jump in a swimming pool.

There. I feel more sensible already.

Ben Dolnick lives in New York. His new novel, You Know Who You Are, may or may not be taught to bored undergraduates who can’t wait to get back to their Virtual Sex-Pods.

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“The so-called 'tasteful' Playboy pics will be... a classic tribute inspired by original Tom Kelly nude pictorials of Marilyn Monroe.... According to sources, Playboy began taking Lindsay Lohan photos last week, while she was juggling other duties like ordering cupcakes to the morgue.”
—The Hollywood Gossip, 11/8/11, 10/25/11.

He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check. She didn’t like it when he touched her, the way his fingers hovered, but she didn’t know how to tell him to stop without making him angrier, he was in such a mood and it was just the two of them alone in the house, not even a make-up girl. The magazine had pitched it as an “intimate encounter” between photographer and model, like Marilyn and Bert, and he had seemed so okay when she’d met him with her people at Bastide and anyway how was she going to say no once they made her the offer. Now he was different, though, a different person, and he walked away and she couldn’t see him because of the lights but a few seconds later he told her that he was ready to shoot. He said to stop, to hold it, and he took a frame, the shutter clicked, and then he took another and then he stopped for a minute and she inhaled as the shutter clicked again, she hadn’t known there was going to be another right then, why. He raised his voice from behind the camera and said listen I told you to hold it, just for one second, I’ve heard you were difficult but this is a simple piece of direction, okay, now you have the pose fine so all you have to do is just hold it and stop breathing, and so she did, she stopped

like at the morgue the other morning when she’d seen the girl with the same scar as her. The first few days they’d just had her sweeping and washing windows and filing things in the office and it had been fine, she had signed autographs and a Mean Girls DVD for some secretary’s kid but then she had been dumb and accidentally tweeted from the bathroom. She had just wanted to thank her followers for their support in this tough time and tell them how much she loved them and it had been retweeted five thousand times and there was a story that night on TMZ about her getting special treatment and then she came back the next day, they’d sent her into the autopsy rooms with everybody else. So many rooms, so many bodies. They didn’t have to touch the bodies, her lawyer had made sure before she’d signed the papers, but they had to clean the tables after they had been used for the bodies. There were fluids that remained, dead cells, strands of hair; the woman doing the introduction used the word “ephemera.” There were all those things and sometimes, on other tables in the rooms near the empty ones they scrubbed with their paper towels and bleach, there were bodies, ones that had been examined and ones that were waiting to be seen before going away, boys and girls and men and women, all shapes and sizes, all of them so still

and he took a few more frames and said he got it and she inhaled and they were moving to the next setup. He told her to arch her back and stick her ass up in the air, to spread her knees some more, and she started to do it by reflex but then sunk back into the sheet and stopped, asked him what shot this was exactly. It was rhetorical, there was no shot with an arched back, that wasn’t Marilyn with Tom Kelley in 1949, that was Hustler, that was Penthouse, that was trashy girls with tramp stamps on YouTube, that was not what she had done the prep for, read the books and watched the movies and learned the positions and the expressions, how to find her light. She had done all that and now he was saying that the contract didn’t say anything about every shot having to be an exact copy, he wasn’t fucking Gus Van Sant; he was saying that Hef had a lot of nice ideas about what was classy and they were going to do those shots too but that this was 2011 and he was going to take a close-up of her ass and could she please stick it up in the air and for the love of God stop breathing so hard, which was not something even Tom Kelley would have had the nerve to ask Marilyn to do when he came to her at her lowest point and asked her to show all the private parts of herself to the world and him for fifty bucks. It was ridiculous but in the end what was she going to do, she needed the money more than she needed to feel good about herself and so she stuck her ass up in the air and buried her head in the sheet and stopped breathing and in the darkness she saw

the bodies on the tables, all of them so still, like at the wax museum downtown where she had gone to visit Marilyn the day she’d signed the papers, all these bodies frozen forever but especially the one, this girl with blonde hair she’d seen just before lunch the other day, the girl with her scar. Most of the time the bodies were covered in sheets or wrapped in bags but sometimes the sheets slipped and sometimes the nurses forgot to zip the bags and sometimes the PO’s wanted to mess with you and set up a scare for you before they sent you in the room. There was one of them who called her “Star” in the line-up and she knew he was fucking with her when he called her it but it still made some part of her feel good anyway and that was even worse, she knew, and if she could afford more therapy she would talk about it then. He had sent her into the room on the third floor before lunch and Lindsay had turned away from the stain she was scrubbing because the bleach was making her dizzy and as she turned she saw the scar on the inside of the girl’s right thigh, a little raised circle the size of a pencil eraser, almost invisible but she saw it

and when the posing was over and John offered her his pack of Parliaments and asked her, after all the yelling and the swearing and the telling her that she wasn’t allowed to breathe, asked what she was doing for Halloween, if she wanted to you know hang out. She took one out of the pack and lit it like Dietrich in high key, her eyes burning through him, and said she didn’t really go out anymore, that it wasn’t her thing, that she was a different person now. She exhaled and he smiled and said, oh sure, got you. A changed woman, he said, a miracle. He was such an asshole and when she was younger she might have told him, but instead she just smoked and looked out at the surf from the back of the house and then left, changed. She had been Marilyn for him and the camera and now she wasn’t, now she was just herself again, whatever that was. She had told him she was a different person and he had nodded like they all did and smiled that smile, looking at her but not seeing anything. It didn’t matter what he or anyone saw, though, she was different, she had changed, you had to keep changing because otherwise you were

the girl who drank half a bottle of tequila and danced on the table and did three lines in the bathroom of the Roxy and went back to her bungalow with a guy who put out a lit cigarette on the inside of her thigh because when he fucked her she said she couldn’t feel anything, otherwise you were in the front seat of a car and your nose was bleeding and the road was spinning and the lights were pointing up into the night but not pointing to any stars, otherwise you were a little girl in a ponytail and a t-shirt pretending to fight with her own identical twin for fourteen takes because they couldn’t get the camera right, or the light, otherwise you were Marilyn cast in wax and wrapped in a white dress and stuck in a dark room on Hollywood Boulevard with your hands between your knees as a vent blew cold air up your skirt forever,

otherwise you were laid out on a table showing your scars to the world, frozen in a pose you couldn’t control until the day when everyone had forgotten your name. Lindsay couldn’t let it be that way, it wasn’t right, it couldn’t be. She picked the sheet up off the ground and lifted it above the girl, as high as she could reach. It caught the air like a sail, hanging in slow motion, and then settled over her, the folds outlining her form.

Justin Wolfe is a writer and student living in Bloomington, Indiana. His most recent blog is firmuhment; before that, he wrote songs about buildings and food.

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Depp isn’t the first actor who’s had to apologize for comparing photography to sexual assault. Just last year, Kristen Stewart told Elle UK that seeing photos taken of her by the paparazzi felt like "looking at someone being raped." It's an extreme reaction to the medium, and one that Susan Sontag addressed in her seminal On Photography, in which she argued that, while images can be violated, the people on whom those images are based cannot. "One can't possess reality, one can possess images," she wrote. But in Hollywood, a world where image is everything, how do you tell where reality ends and image begins?

The answer is clearly not provided on the big screen. On the contrary. Interestingly, Depp uses the term "stupid" at least a couple other times in the interview. One of them comes when he's describing his opposition to a staged cockfight in the upcoming film, The Rum Diary. Though the cockfighting scene reportedly looks real, the roosters were protected from killing each other with pieces of invisible monofilament (in accordance with American Humane Association regulations), a precaution he appeared to think detracted from the viscerality of Hunter S. Thompson's original scene. "I think it was stupid," he told Tosches. Extrapolating from that comment, Depp use of the term "stupid" suggests his aversion to false representation. Given his stated pleasure at being photographed by fans in his everyday life, it’s the falseness of the photo shoot and the poses associated with it that seem to bother Depp.

In this, Depp brings to mind Diane Arbus' "freaks," who remain some of the most extreme examples of the falsely represented. In On Photography, Sontag refers to the technique used by Arbus, famed documenter of New York’s marginalized (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists etc.): "Instead of trying to coax her subjects into natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward, that is, to pose. Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew. Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves." In a similar way to Arbus’ subjects—whose real selves are undermined by the images the photographer wishes to present of them—Depp subverts his own persona and projects that of the various fashion photographers who shoot him for magazines. In this way Depp maintains the Hollywood illusion of himself as poster boy for celebrity eccentricity.

The photographer’s power lies not only in determining how his or her subject poses, but also in how the image is ultimately produced (cropping, editing, Photoshopping, etc.); as Sontag put it, “in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.” Small wonder that Julia Roberts could tell American Photo in 2004 that she feels “stupid,” “goofy,” and “nervous"—like Depp—when being photographed and, in the same breath, say that when she handles a camera (as in the film Closer, in which she played a professional photographer), it “instantly makes you the coolest person in the room.”

Other celebs try to wrest control back from the cameraman. When I interviewed Shirley MacLaine a few years ago on the set of the TV movie Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, during our photo shoot, she chose the position in which she sat and dictated the light and filters the professional photographer was expected to use. Using a different tack, Lady Gaga caused a stir in March when she issued a release form demanding that concert photographers sign over to her the rights to all their photos taken at her shows.

Slightly harder to control are the rabid paparazzi photographers that have proliferated in Hollywood over the past decade. Popular targets have taken to disguising themselves, holding up signs (see Scarlett Johansson’s famous “I’m being harassed by the person taking this picture” sign), running from location to location, and sometimes even attacking the photographers who are following them (cf. Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson). But besides the immense danger the celebrities (and passersby, on foot and in vehicles) face in being mobbed, these off-duty stars also appear to be fighting what Sontag refers to as the democratization of their experiences.

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,” she wrote. In short, part of what these stars may be objecting to is their day-to-day experiences being nullified by the paps that are falling all over themselves to snap them for our viewing pleasure.

“Why would I want anything that's private to become entertainment for other people?” the infamously camera-shy Kristen Stewart seemed to ask for all celebrities in that 2010 interview with Elle UK. At the height of her Twilight fame, she was so used to her experiences being captured by journalists and photographers both that during the interview she hesitated before removing an iPod from her car’s glove compartment to show the journalist her music. “You want to be excited about something, normal people can be excited about their lives, and I am too, but it's such a different thing,” she explained of her hesitation. “It comes out as entertainment for other people and that makes me want to throw up.”

Explaining her moodiness around paparazzi, Stewart contended that the public is not often privy to what happens before the pictures are taken. “What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction,” she told Elle. “All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash. It's so... The photos are so… I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped.”

In her book, Sontag anticipated this type of comparison, stressing that photography requires distance while attacking someone sexually requires proximity. “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment,” she wrote. Though the use of “push and shove” does conjure images of photographers clamoring to snap Stewart, the sexual aspect of the action is missing.

In the same interview, Stewart did, however, seem to be in tune with Sontag. “Your little persona is made up of all the places that people have seen you and what has been said about you, and usually the places that I am are so overwhelming in the moment and fleeting for me—like one second where I've said something stupid, that's me, forever." The words conjure up Sontag’s suggestion that “the force” of a photo is such that it allows viewers (including Twilight fans) to scrutinize “instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.” So, one image of Stewart grimacing at a crowd of paps, or a moment in which she says the word “rape,” reverberates across the universe and single-handedly becomes her undoing.

Though the camera doesn’t “rape,” it does “violate” its subjects, but according to Sontag, it’s only a figurative violation “by having knowledge of them they can never have.” Stewart herself cannot be possessed but as the subject of a photograph, an object that can be physically held, she is “symbolically possessed.”

This so-called symbolic possession becomes all the more realistic when you consider the way photography works, which Sontag explained as “never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject.” Because of this, images can “usurp reality” since it is essentially “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real.” Sontag concluded by stating that the photograph being an extension of the subject captured, the image becomes a kind of means of acquiring the subject.

The statement gives a literal bent to Sean Penn’s comment in Playboy in November 1991 in which he described himself and Madonna as “public property.” It also makes Keira Knightley’s 2007 Crocodile Dundee-style, quasi-spiritual fear of being photographed appear slightly less ridiculous. "I'm not comfortable having to be myself or being photographed as myself,” she said. “Australian Aborigines say that with every photo that is taken, a piece of your soul goes with it. And there are some days when I kind of believe that."

But Sontag's book rebuts the idea that photography has the power to capture a piece of one’s real soul. “It is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images,” she wrote. What’s confusing to celebrities (and much of the rest of the world) is that our era confounds reality with photographs. “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism,” Sontag claimed, adding that the “true modern primitivism” is not to consider the image real, but to consider reality an image that can only be realized through photographs.

Unfortunately, the only way to combat this primitive behavior, Sontag argues, is to see the photograph for what it really is, not a real instance of power, but merely a weak expression of it—as it is a weak expression of the real Depp and the real Stewart, and as such is no real replacement for the stars themselves or their bodies. “The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist,” Sontag explained. “It will be knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape.”

Soraya Roberts is an entertainment writer and editor. She writes about films on her blog, Incinerater. She is also on Twitter, much to her dismay.

Photo of Stewart by Joe Seer, via Shutterstock.

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And nowhere do you get such a good approximation of what it feels like to be Kanye than that brew of sex, sentimentality and synapse-exploding amazingness that makes up the video for "All of the Lights."

So how does the video simulate Kanye World? To start off, there are the Gaspar Noe-inspired titles and general war-on-epileptic strobe light vibe which is pretty much guaranteed to blow minds. There's Rihanna looking so insanely hot that the only reference point I can think of is the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then maybe count in there the obligatory Michael Jackson references (Kanye on a cop car and Kid Cudi in red leather). Everything is as awesome and ridiculous and overwrought as something directed by a dude whose first name is Hype should be. And awesome, ridiculous and overwrought are just other names for the Kanye West persona. But there's also this adorably serious-looking little kid wandering around, and that's the part I find troubling.

Let me insert here that I view celebrity Kanye West differently than I do Kanye West the artist (Kanye West the real-life person is of course, at this time, unknowable to us). At his best, Kanye the musician writes songs that are self-aware and self-deprecating, traits you don't associate with Kanye the celebrity. Take “All of the Lights” as a song—a huge backing track behind a sordid story about a deadbeat dad and abusive husband. The lyrics work to undercut the epic-ness of the music, an action-movie soundtrack for an indie flick. But the video is all Kanye the celebrity. Everything huge! The BIGGEST hip-hop star, the HOTTEST female pop singer, the CRAZIEST visuals and, uh, KID CUDI. And if last year taught us anything, all caps is how Kanye the celebrity interprets the world.

This would be fine on its own—making people feel like superheroes for three to five minutes at a time is one of the greatest things that pop music does. But the addition of sappiness to the mix in the form of that little girl is toxic here. Cheap emotion against such an expensive backdrop makes the emotions throw shadows that are as huge as everything else on display. So Kanye isn't just better than you at being amazing, he's better than you at feeling things too. It's an unpleasant reminder that one of the great things that pop also does is evoke the mindset of a teenager. That can be beautiful, but in this case it comes off as one of the ugly parts of being young and stupid enough to believe that you somehow feel everything more strongly than anyone else in the world ever has. That your experience is more meaningful than everyone else's. Self-satisfaction along with self-pity—an unlikely sounding but common enough combination. Which, by the way, is also a good capsule description of the mindset of the classic ugly American.

By my completely scientific and comprehensive analysis, one of the most common stereotypes of Americans that abounds in the world relates to that mode of self-congratulatory complacency (and it's a criticism Americans make about other Americans, too). We defund Planned Parenthood because we're against killing potential babies, but we can't bother to do anything about actual ones. We're all for democracy in Egypt even though two months ago we didn't care that we were propping up the dictatorship. Wikileaks is the best thing ever, but what do you mean we're supposed to do something with that information? We are, without a doubt, a force for good even though it looks suspiciously like we're not doing very much.

This is obviously not true for all (or even, most) people. The events in Wisconsin the past couple weeks have shown that people are willing to take action beyond writing an angry blog comment. (And in fact, being convinced that out there somewhere exists a group of faceless, apathetic assholes who are ruining things for everyone with their hypocrisy while you don't do very much yourself is a pretty good sign that you're infected.) But trying to do more than care—to actually risk looking like an idiot (or worse) and take actions that will affect people other than yourself—is an impulse that has to be cultivated and tended to and guarded against all kinds of types of laziness and apathy.

As Kanye West the celebrity could tell you, it's really easy to see the disconnect between how much you care and how much the world cares that you care as proof that your greatness is being unfairly rejected. Realizing that you are not amazing sitting by yourself and feeling very strongly about things, that you in fact have to work with other people to accomplish something in order to be considered a worthwhile human being is one of those things that adults are supposed to do. That it's really hard to do all that looks like a worse excuse every next year. A music video might not trick anyone into thinking otherwise, but we should still be suspicious of anything that tries to make us to feel things without trying very hard at it. The cynicism at work there is all kinds of ugly. Which is probably all just a very long way of saying that Hype Williams should have kept that adorable kid the fuck out of the video.

Sunny lives in Austin where he works in a lab. He writes stuff here.

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Randy Quaid: 4 lists
Stephen Hawking: 4 lists
Larry King: 4 lists
Mel Gibson: 4 lists
Jimmy Carter: 4 lists
Gerry Rafferty: 4 lists
Peter Tork: 4 lists
Keith Richards: 4 lists
Ronnie Biggs: 4 lists
George H. W. Bush: 4 lists
Ariel Sharon: 4 lists
Margaret Thatcher: 4 lists
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 4 lists

Roger Ebert: 5 lists
Nancy Reagan: 5 lists
Courtney Love: 5 lists
Christopher Hitchens: 5 lists

Steve Jobs: 6 lists
Bob Barker: 6 lists
Kirk Douglas: 6 lists

Dick Clark: 7 lists
Betty White: 7 lists
Michael J. Fox: 7 lists

Muhammad Ali: 8 lists
Penny Marshall: 8 lists
Fidel Castro: 8 lists

Charlie Sheen: 9 lists
Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi: 9 lists

Dick Cheney: 10 lists
Amy Winehouse: 10 lists

Zsa Zsa Gabor: 12 lists

Elizabeth Taylor: 13 lists
Kim Jong-il: 13 lists

Lindsay Lohan: 17 lists

Aretha Franklin: 32 lists

Michael Douglas: 37 lists

Rick Paulas is done trying to defend the reasons why gets his friends and family to wager on which celebrities will die the following year.

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Goodbye Blanche Lincoln and goodbye Arlen Specter. Hello Rand Paul, Jerry Brown (again!) and Harry “that was close” Reid. Even with the close saves in the Democratic Party, the GOP grabbed 60 new seats in the House. While the Dems maintain a cold, death-like grip on the Senate, the party was even more devastated by the GOP tsunami than anticipated. And among the winners, no one star shines so brightly as Sarah Palin, whose luster has been exponentially fuelled by each of her endorsed candidate’s wins.

She’s no Bill Clinton, in terms of charisma, but her influence on the outcome of the election is without question, and her leadership on the right is unchallenged. Her opportunistic “SarahPAC” commercial—a hollow caricature of patriotism—released just a day after the Democratic bloodbath intentionally associated Palin with the GOP coup d’etat.

But let’s not forget that Palin actually doesn’t hold political office. And that the Tea Party that continues to support her isn’t a mainstream political party (yet). And that only 15 of Palin’s 34 endorsed House candidates actually won their seats. Sure, Rand Paul secured Kentucky and Michael Grimm toppled New York Democrat Michael McMahon, but consider Palin’s charlatan tag team: Sharron Angle and Christine “dabble into witchcraft” O’Donnell. These candidates were a circus show that Palin supported all the way—and they were highly visible losses.

But the Tea Party, and Palin for that matter, are an idea and a brand and not directly connected to reality. And as in Hollywood, ideas and brands can be, at least in the beginning, far more powerful than substantive. Celebrity, that magical and nebulous quality that makes us fascinated with some people more than others, enables people like Palin to transcend their lack of talent. Let’s not forget that O’Donnell—despite being a totally unqualified candidate—was covered more than any other politician during the campaign season. Our interest hinges on them as people, or on our perceptions of them, rather than on what they’ve actually contributed to the world at large. This is the same phenomenon that occurs when Lindsay Lohan’s face is plastered across every tabloid, even though she hasn’t starred in a good film since Mean Girls (or probably, more accurately, The Parent Trap). The same phenomenon occurs when, despite the fact that Angelina Jolie has won an Oscar, we are still far more interested in her kids eating Cheetos. Oh the banality!

And the same goes for Palin, the political Paris Hilton. Like Paris, Palin is pretty, spouts truly ridiculous utterances and seems rather devoid of critical thinking. Also like Paris, she works incredibly hard to maintain and exploit her celebrity. Palin has used our collective interest in her persona to establish a brand that may take her straight to the head of the GOP ticket. (Which, to be clear, terrifies much of the GOP as much as it horrifies the Democrats). Like Paris, Palin’s genius is not in her substance but in her ability to assign value and influence to her vapidity.

But celebrities in the political realm, like their counterparts in Hollywood, must eventually be backed up with substance. As in Hollywood, celebrity-driven politicians reach the limit of their careers far more rapidly than those with talent. Some, like Christine O’Donnell, become a punch line before voting on Election Day even begins. Others, like Palin, are more strategic and thus are able to extend their influence for a longer time. If Palin is the Paris Hilton of politics, consider O’Donnell the Tara Reid—earnestly trying but ultimately screwing up at every turn.

It is those with talent who reap the ultimate rewards. Jolie, Obama and Clinton may have cults of personality but they are backed up by Oscars and political offices. Celebrity matters but it is insufficient on its own. In Hollywood and politics, the A-list possesses both talent and our attention, but it is the former that sustains their careers in the long term.

The alarming irony is that most of us started paying attention to Palin because we thought her similar to Hilton, Reid (Tara, not Harry) and Lohan: a fascinating yet fleeting train wreck. Yet despite Palin’s perpetual derailments she has managed to keep chugging along, sustaining our interest and threatening to snag the GOP presidential ticket in 2012. But we must hold out hope that given her ratio of talent to celebrity, it’s only a matter of time before we get bored—and when boredom at last sets in, Palin will disappear.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the author of the brand new Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity. It's "a breakthrough inquest into the rattletrap culture of fame," says Graydon Carter! So seriously, check it out.

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After I’ve had my little joke, I’ll let everyone know what I actually plan to do is legalize all drugs, nationalize the brothels and mandate a life-sentence for any captain of industry who is complicit in polluting the planet. Yeah, I’m a one-term kind of guy. But it’s not my time. Not yet.

This year brings us the usual Fall harvest of liars, cheats and whores, plus an over-hyped bumper crop of creationist kooks, gay-bashers, progressive paranoiacs, fear-mongers and reality-stars-in-training. But what we seem to be missing is that rarified strain of political beast: the candidate that was famous before he or she ran for office.

So today, instead of piling on the anti-auto-eroticist, the wrestling promoter and the facial-hair fiasco, I thought I would rock and regale you with bedtime stories of the heroes and villains of yesteryear, the bright lights who have all done their part to make America the whoopee cushion of global politics.

Actors are egomaniacs, so I guess it isn’t surprising that so many of them have had the calling to serve: Clint Eastwood became mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the dude from the "Love Boat" became a US congressman.

As you well know, early leading the pack of bad actors turned politicians is President Ronald Reagan, previously famous for co-starring with Bonzo the Chimp. But you have got to hand it to incomprehensible strongman Arnold Schwarzenegger for proving once and for all that you can never underestimate the stupidity of the American public. What qualifications did he have? He was Reagan’s hand-picked something or other in charge of physical education, and even then you knew he was a pig, a juiced-up, stoned, ass-grabbing ape.

Oddly, Arnold’s alien-hunts-humans-in-the-jungle opus Predator launched the political campaigns of two other thespians. Pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura became a credit to grapplers everywhere when he became the Governor of Minnesota, running on the remains of Ross Perot’s Reform Party and, and among other libertarian follies, advocating the legalization of prostitution. (It should be noted here that Minnesotans are not without a sense of humor — in 2008, after a contentious Gore v. Bush recount and court battle, former "Saturday Night Live" funnyman Al Franken became anointed as their new bleeding heart US Senator.)

The lesser-known Sonny Landham, who played Billy in Predator, spent 31 months in a federal pen for making threatening calls to his ex-wife, a conviction that was eventually overturned on appeal. He ran for Governor of Kentucky in the Republican Party in 2003, railing against the Kentucky Family Court, convinced that it was run for the benefit of lawyers rather than families or children, and demanding mandatory sentences for men or women who bring false charges against their spouses. His political ambition was monkey-wrenched when it was revealed that he had a brief career as a porn star in the 1970s (who could forget Hot Shots?).

And then there was tough guy Tom Laughlin, famous for playing Billy Jack, the Native American kung-fu master who battled bikers on the big screen in drive-in classics like Born Losers, but who was ultimately best captured in the Mad Magazine satire (“Billy Jock”) where everyone fell asleep waiting for him to get angry enough to fight. He ran for President as both a Democrat (1992) and a Republican (2004), never making much of a showing in the one or two primaries for which he qualified.

Comedian Pat Paulsen, formerly a star on the "Smother Brothers Comedy Hour," ran for President six times beginning in 1968, mostly based on lame jokes and double-talk.
"I've upped my standards,” he declared: “Now, up yours." In 1996 he finished second in the New Hampshire primary. He collected 921 votes — bested only by the winner, Bill Clinton, who pulled in 76,754. Paulsen died in 1997, but according to his website, he ran again in 2008. His son, Monty, has announced he’ll be seeking the Oval Office in 2012.

Comedian and actor Al Lewis, best known for playing batty old vampire Grandpa on the Munsters, and by far the most charming of this lot, ran a great campaign for governor of New York at the age of 88. He had a long history of political protests, beginnging at age 17 in 1927 (!!!), working against the convictions of Sacco and Venzetti, the Italian immigrants framed for murder. Later he joined anti-war rallies, and marched for Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers. Though he described himself as an anarchist, he was the Green Party’s candidate in 1998 (against the wishes of some upstate party members who said he was “too Jewish”), espousing a pro-marijuana agenda and insisting that he be listed on the ballot as “Grandpa Al Lewis,” arguing that this was how his future constituents knew him. His request was handed back to him by the Board of Elections. Despite this scoffing setback, his total of 52,533 votes topped the number needed to secure a place on the ballot (50,000), besting left-wing wonk Ralph Nader’s previous effort for the Greens, and hence guaranteeing the Party an automatic ballot line for the next four years.

Jerry Springer is the oddball of this group, and probably the only true visionary, moving in the opposite direction, from politics to in-your-face fame: He was the mayor of Cleveland, the thirty-third biggest city in the United States, and rose to become the standard bearer for sleazoid television. And why not? Sex and politics go together like soup and a sandwich. When Bill and Hillary first came to office there was a feeling of Hey, finally a first couple that actually still had sex. Not with each other, but at least they were both interested in women. (OK, that was a cheap shot — everyone knows Hillary is way too uptight to be gay.)

But no matter what strange bedfellows it makes, politics is ultimately a cocksucking business, so it is no surprise when professionals get in the ring. To wit, porn star Mary Carey, the fetching ingenue and star of Filthy Whore and Lesbian Big Boob Bangaroo II, who ran in the 2003 California gubernatorial rat race, which started with a recall, and eventually delivered the Terminator to high office. Unfortunately, past the It-Gets-Weirder-Every-Day news flashes she enjoyed at first, no one gave a good goddam, even in a state known for its loosey-goosy value system and flagging moral inventory. Still, she placed tenth in a field of 135, right behind child-star-turned-satire candidate Gary Coleman, who collected 14,242 votes, not a bad showing for a D-list reality show wannabe who wasn’t tall enough to ride Space Mountain (rest his soul), and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who scored 17,458 votes—representing a less-than-rousing one-half of one percent of all ballots cast.

To see porno-turned-politics on a truly professional level, we need to travel all the way to Italy and the insatiable Cicciolina, who won a seat in the Italian Parliament in 1987, and would continue to make hardcore porn films while in office. In 1990, during the build-up to the first Gulf War, she selflessly offered to “make love with Saddam Hussein to achieve peace in the Middle East."

Incidentally, Mary Carey ran for Governor again in 2006, announcing her candidacy soon after acquiring brand new teeth and super-deluxe breast implants. She dropped out early to take care of her mother, who had attempted suicide by jumping off a building, but she still harbors political ambitions and hopes to be President one day. Which is, as stated ever–so-coyly by Wikipedia, “contingent upon her reaching the age of 35, the minimum age requirement for United States presidents.” She’ll turn that trick in 2015.

Thanks to a slew of late-inning snoozers, Norman Mailer’s literary legacy is still swinging in the balance, but in 1969 he was in top form, and probably the smartest man ever to run for mayor of New York, on a double-bill with Jimmy Breslin, who was running for President of the City Council. It was an odd pairing, considering Mailers’s hyper-intellectual proclivity for scrawling two-page paragraphs of spectacular, pyrotechnic but ultimately confusing prose, and Breslin, an old school, round-heeled city beat journalist, probably the best newspaperman in the history of New York City and therefore the world, who could find a story just walking down the street, and whose style was model of brevity and quickness, all lightning jabs before the knock-out punch. On a good day Breslin could make Hemingway’s most-pugilistic efforts seem like a Yes concert.

That was a classic New York City story of blue-collar angst colliding with left-wing idealism, but their campaign, fueled by booze and anger, was fatally marred by infighting and the weight of Mailer’s humongous ego. In the end, their admirable “No More Bullshit” platform—unfortunately unprintable in the newspapers that covered the election—earned them no more than a sliver of the vote.

Better than these two, though, I’d have to rate Hunter Thompson’s campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, as the best-ever journalist-on-the-ballot bid. Demanding decriminalization of drugs and the re-naming of Aspen to “Fat City” to deter investors, Thompson shaved his head and began calling the crew-cut wearing Republican running against him “my long-haired opponent.” He lost by a narrow margin. One can only dream of the ripple effect “Sheriff Hunter Thompson” would have had on law enforcement everywhere.

Off the top of my head, I can think of almost as many politicians who play instruments with TV talk show bands as part of a “See, I Can Have Fun, Too” strategy as I can musical fops who pose as political provocateurs. Who can forget Bill Clinton’s ape-like Blues Brothers routine, performed for toothy talk show host Arsenio Hall, who shucked and jived along with the future prez as if he were the reincarnation of Big Jay McNeely?But at least Bill was a populist Southern Democrat, a white politician who was a friend to black Americans, and deserved some respect—if not for his thoroughly mediocre sax playing, then for his big-tent politics.

More recently we’ve had to endure bass-thumping Right-to-Lifer, former preacher Mike Huckabee, who is, honestly (just watch the tapes), a far more competent musician than the aforementioned 60s leftovers. But what I want to know is: What the fuck was he doing on Leno, sitting in like he was mutherhumping Duck Dunn? Huckabee hates women, hates gays, hates minorities, represents a group that has come down on the wrong side of every single shred of civil rights legislation since Lincoln freed the slaves, and yet there was Kevin Eubanks, guitar player and leader of the Tonight Show band, highly regarded in the African-American community as a purveyor of smooth-jazz and all that is urban and hip, gleefully playing along and high-fiving the fuck-faced Huckabee. In other words, Uncle Tomming it for Boss Leno and the NBC suits. Guilty by association is the rest of the band who shilled for this douchebag.

John Kerry also plays guitar and was once in a band, but nobody cared.

Generally speaking, beyond the blather, musicians don’t run for office, but there are a few exceptions. Sonny Bono (not to be confused with the other, sillier Bono, who has bigger world-saving ambitions), had a career as a US congressman from California which came to a sudden halt when he skied face-first into a tree, taking to the grave forever the answer to the musical question: How come a guy who used to wear tie-die and fringe and make hippy-dippy pop music—and presumably equally sticky love to Cher, the dyslexic daughter of an Armenian refugee and a Cherokee Indian—turned into a raging Republican?

Kinky Friedman’s run for George Bush’s old stomping ground, the Texas governor’s office, seemed to have legs, at least for a little while, running on the slogan “How Hard Could It Be?” But he came out fourth place in a crowd of six.

The most entertaining of them all was former Dead Kennedy’s frontman Jello Biafra, who ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, finishing a close fourth behind Sister Boom Boom, the drag queen nun. Part of his new-world utopia would have required businessmen to wear clown suits to work. Twenty-one years later, a jury found him liable for fraud and malice and ordered him to pay $200,000 in overdue royalties to his former bandmates. Inexplicably, donning a clown suit was not part of the settlement.

And then there were the animals. Mickey Mouse has always faired well, most recently receiving 400 write-in votes in Florida in the 2004 election, making him complicit in stealing the White House from Al Gore. Marvel Comics anti-hero Howard the Duck’s ’76 bid was a classic. But the star of this menagerie was clearly Pigasus, a cute pink porker whom the Yippies ran for president in 1968. His candidacy came to an abrupt end when he was arrested protesting the Democratic National convention in Chicago that year. (Seriously, they arrested a pig, you can look it up.) Admittedly, Pigasus was an unknown, but one can only ponder the tidal flood of voters a superstar like Arnold Ziffle could have oinked and snorted into the ballot box.

Mike Edison is the former publisher of High Times, the former editor-in-chief of Screw magazine, and a professional wrestler of no small repute. He is the author of 28 pornographic novels and the outrageous memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go — Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

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Yes, I am on Facebook. I am part of the 176% on twentysomethings who exist online, who have friends and post on each other's walls and have status updates and stuff. Now let's talk about something else.

The complacency this film assumes that I have grates on me, hard. It's like a suggestion of what I would find interesting, one that is all the more frustrating for the laziness with which it wasn't developed. The thought process behind the movie, the one all the way at the back-because I bear no ill will towards Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher (though guys, I thought you were awesome but you have seriously let me down here man) or even Mark Zuckerberg, whose legacy is so far up in the air that my computer-trained eyes can't even find where in the sky it was flung-is painfully, insultingly apparent: young people are on Facebook. No, young people like Facebook; young people go to see movies about things they like; QED, The Social Network. The sheer and blind underwhelmingness of this idea, its power to cajole some of the cultural power players with greater caché and artistic cred is evident in every frame of the film's immaculate and preposterous trailer. It is an alluringly simple pitch, almost seductively thoughtless. I cannot blame the people involved. They have careers to support. I try to refrain from placing blame, because I feel guilty about it afterwards.

But has the creation of our own heroes (and villains and villain-heroes) been taken out of our hands entirely? Do we no longer rise to the occasion? Is the premature canonization of someone whose nominal status as a prophet for the young springs almost entirely from the pens and minds of thinkers whose most immediate tie to that generation-no, to me, because this is more than abstract when you're one of those twentysomethings we hear so much about and happen to have something to say and the wherewithal to know that even if it doesn't link to Foursquare, sometimes it just doesn't matter-when their immediate tie is hereditary, is that all there is? I would hazard a "no," but emphatically: perhaps it is all that has been given to us, but we are better and more complex than that, and if we are only just finding the adamance and defiance that push our talent from sanctioned accomplishment into the realm of getting shit done, it is because only now have we found the thing that we can be against wholly and with every ounce of audacity, with all due respect: this notion of the future. Not so much that we will Facebook and tweet and whatnot (I appreciate a well constructed series of 140 characters as much as the next aspiring intellectual), but that we can be told what defines us. We reserve that right, even if we have not yet used it in full.

If this claim seems overblown, well, there may be some truth in that. There is no blame to be placed, because it is just a movie, after all. No lives will be unmade, no tectonics will shift, just because a shiny cultural product from the world's leading producer condescends to its audience; that is nothing new. Nothing is to be gained by seeking a foothold for attack when the geography doesn't permit engagement.

We cannot expect the professionals to be the revolutionaries. Pros (which actors and filmmakers often are) are too dedicated to the thoroughly excellent completion of the task at hand to partake in the extravagant sacrifice of talent that leads to new things. Here perhaps is part of Zuckerberg's appeal as a deeply fictionalized biographical subject, particularly by a group of seasoned professionalss, one that contains some truth: he seems insistently and alluringly amateur. Amateurs exude in full the inefficiency necessary for invention, while pros tend towards innovation's efficiency. In the context of people who know exactly where they are headed, the ambiguity and superfluousness that are a part of invention seem deliciously exotic.

Both Sorkin and Fincher are filmmakers whose past work has something of a top-down aesthetic, consisting of sensational pieces of mass entertainment in which their will is always present, and often subtle, elegant, and thoroughly convincing. They deal largely in ideas and moods of their own that find a place in created worlds, rather than finding worlds ripe for the recording. That's happened here again, but because this time it's about the now instead of the then, news instead of history, and the usually subtle superimposition mutates into a mesmerizing disconnect between speaker and subject, infusing the story with an epic, overwrought, even Grecian air that feels fascinatingly inappropriate for its subject. They're calling down from the peaks to all those kids at the bottom who haven't decided if the mountain's worth the climb, totally missing the point that this heroic narrative is rendered insufficient by the very thing they purport to understand. It's old-school marketing meets new-school possibilities: to quote Joey Lucas quoting a French revolutionary, they did their best to figure out where we were headed so that they could lead us there. In classic fashion, they've made the guy a hero, when the term doesn't ring true anymore.

It is perhaps not the responsibility of the young, or their culture, to consciously manifest the values that will lead us forward; that tends towards the canonical in a way that defeats the fundamental inventive impulse. But it is clear enough what we should be against, where we are coming from and what we should leave behind, if not where we are headed. I may see The Social Network. I am not sure if I want to, and depending on how much pocket change I have in October I may find myself in a theater, watching a film that I am sure will be better than I would wish. But still, the question I ask now, heedless of the film's quality and to spite the notion that it matters: is this the best we've got?

Matthew Wollin lives in New York. He has no other pertinent personality traits.

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This summer, as I watched Chris Brown stage tears during no less than a tribute to Michael Jackson at the BET Awards, and sat by the computer screen as Lindsay Lohan prepared to go to prison yet again, I thought that there must be some sense to all of this.

In the court of public opinion, Michael Jackson is widely judged to have been a curiously sexed child molester, yet the outpouring of love for him even during his trials and after death seems virtually unrivaled by that of any other public figure. If there is some criterion for surviving your crimes while in the public eye, young Brown and Lohan simply must not have met it.

By taking a closer look at the recent history of celebrity scandals and the public reaction to them, we can gain some insight into what behaviors Americans consider tolerable and from whom. Working with my friend and colleague, the graphic designer Matthew Goodrich, I set out to map this fertile terrain as clearly and definitively as possible.

The Process

Instances of public figures behaving badly are legion. (What would any celebrity be without the "Controversy" section of his or her Wikipedia page?) I settled on a diverse set of 30 of the biggest offenses and offenders, dating back to Jane Fonda in 1972. I then began to break down the dimensions of each scandal by observing whether the offender had been "forgiven," "unforgiven" or left "on the fence," while taking into account important factors like their level of celebrity status, the severity of the offense and whether or not the celebrity was convicted in an actual court of law.

Forgiveness, of course, is a relative term. In this case I looked to the free market and the press for definitive evidence. The questions used to determine the forgiveness metric were: "How has the public at large responded to the celebrity's work (movies, albums, endorsements, etc.) after the scandal?" And, "What is the tone of current media coverage?" In some places those diverged. (Notably: Roman Polanski, who completely meets the first criteria but not the second.) Those deemed "on the fence" often committed their offenses too recently, or have not yet produced enough work to be sufficiently judged.

For level of celebrity status, I considered achievements in the offender's field (Platinum albums, Grammys; blockbuster films, Academy Awards; Championship rings, world records; level of public office held, and so on) and general name recognition. Celebrities were ranked on a 4-point scale ranging from A-List to D-List. (It is important to note that celebrity status does not refer to present status, but status at the time of the offense. Often infamy increased a celebrity's status.)

Severity of offense is tricky to measure. But, as in every case, I sought some level of objective standard. For ranking each offense, the questions asked were: "What do our laws have to say about this?" And "How uncomfortable would the average person be if they knew someone who had committed this offense lived next door to them?" For those whose offense is a recognized federal crime, placement on the spectrum was influenced by the severity of punishment recommended by the United States government in the United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines of 2009.

Conclusions

The old saying goes, "To err is human; to forgive, divine." But even faced with moral crises as messy and mercurial as R. Kelly's laundry, people seem to reserve a unique capacity for forgiving the famous. Of the 30 celebrity offenders considered, 19 were "forgiven" or "on the fence" while only 11 remained "Unforgiven."

Though jurors on the court of public opinion are inconsistent (good ol' Tom Cruise can't get a break), examining the graphical representation of the data makes certain trends clear.

• Charges of violence (against people or animals) are more devastating than charges of sexual impropriety, for example.

• Certain offenses, though not actually criminal, are particularly lethal for the reputation (racism, hypocrisy).

• And women got off more frequently than men (2/3 forgiven, compared to 1/2). (That may have to do with the fact that no women were accused of dogfighting or hiring prostitutes.)

• The biggest factor determining whether an offender was re-embraced by the public, however, was celebrity status. The bigger they are, the softer they fall. The "Forgiven" column is dominated by A-Listers, suggesting that public figures can insure against almost any indiscretion by winning over a quorum of hearts and minds beforehand.

Perhaps the wise cultural arbiter Dave Chapelle put it best, in making the case for Michael Jackson: "He made Thriller! Thriller."

O. C. Ugwu is a writer with one and a half credits in statistics. He lives in Brooklyn.

Matthew Goodrich is an excellent graphic designer, who has better things to do. He also lives in Brooklyn.

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