by Jaime Wolf

Jaime Wolf recently spent some time with Agnès Troublé for T Magazine

. (Perhaps you know her best as Agnès B.) They went to Brooklyn to photograph graffiti! The legendary designer’s first film, Je m’appelle Hmmm…, is currently playing in festivals and opens in France this spring.

– Frank dies.

– Peter Russo comes back to life like one of the characters in “Les Revenants,” walking out of the Potomac River and ending up at his old bachelor pad having no idea that he is dead. He is very hungry. Frank murders him again.

– Wait no Frank doesn’t die. OR DOES HE.

– Slugline collapses and Zoe is forced to post all her stories as first-person narratives on Thought Catalog. By episode 3 she’s written out of the show. (Frank murders her.)

– Claire sleeps with Remy. Frank sleeps with Remy. Zoe sleeps with Remy. Zoe’s mean editor who’s not so mean anymore sleeps with Remy.

– Frank murders Remy.

– Kate Mara, the actress who plays Zoe, has a sister named Rooney Mara, best known as the girl with the dragon tattoo in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She makes a surprise appearance as Zoe’s sister (meta!) who is trying to investigate Zoe’s death. Her storyline is cut short in episode 6 because Frank murders her.

– Frank becomes the President after the President dies in a mysterious accident (murder).

– Claire finds out that Frank is literally murdering every character on the show. Claire murders Frank. Frank murders Claire in response.

– The season ends on a cliffhanger as Frank turns to the camera, pulls out a gun, and fires it at the camera. Everyone who watches this finale will die like in that movie The Ring.

“Everything I do, I mean sincerely, but there is a little joke within this one. In every critique of Twin Shadow, there is a dropping of Morrissey’s name, which I always thought was funny because I have never really been a huge fan of Morrissey or the Smiths. [Laughs] So it’s a nod to people calling me ‘the Dominican Morrissey’. I think part of it is just that the trend in underground music the last 20 years has been to sing in a high, sort of whiny voice — coming from that MGMT, John Lennon place. I have a gloomy, low-ish voice, so I think people attach that to Morrissey.”
 — Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jr. talks about his decision to cover Smiths classic “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Once upon a time I would have thought, “What a risky choice, to take a shot at something so significant to so many people, most of whom will be angry at what they consider to be sacrilege,” but I eventually realized that it’s just a song, you put it out there and people like it or they don’t and then everyone goes on with their lives, particularly now that the outrage cycle moves so quickly. So maybe you’ll have opinions about this cover. Good for you! There are any number of platforms on which you can share them. The wonder of the way we live now is our ability to let so many people know just how we feel about things. It truly is a golden age.

by Michael Bertin

Congratulations field hockey, you’re the most progressive sport in the whole Olympic program.

That needs some clarification: It’s not the sports themselves under scrutiny here, but the sports’ governing bodies. The above graphic describes the gender makeup of the executive committees — the people in charge — of every sport in the Olympic program (London 2012 and Sochi 2014). That’s summer sports on top, winter on bottom; men on the right, women to the left.

For example, starting at the bottom — we are in the midst of the Sochi winter games, after all — the World Curling Federation has seven men and one woman on its executive committee (you can mouseover each horizontal bar for specifics).

Among all 33 bodies, field hockey’s executive committee comes closest to equality by percentage, topping out at 37.5% female. Holy heck, that’s pathetic. And even that fact comes with an asterisk. The last official document from the International Olympic Committee itself was a 2009 report in which the composition of the FIH executive board was listed as 17 men and six women. Currently, the official FIH website lists just the 16 members indicated by the above chart. That’s odd, because bureaucracies tend not to shrink.

Reverting to the IOC numbers would give the “most equal” title to skating, with four women holding one-third of the power. As an arbitrary threshold — 2:1 men to women — it should be an easily achievable minimum. But it’s almost the opposite, with only two governing bodies getting to that ratio. Oof. Collectively, it’s embarrassing. That chart is bluer than Karl Rove’s worst nightmare.

It’s even worse when you consider there is a credible argument to be made that women generate a disproportionate amount of horsepower in the economic engine that is the Olympics.

The single highest-rated night of programming from the 2012 London Olympics was Tuesday, July 31st, when NBC posted a 21.8 rating. That was the night they aired the womens’ team all-around finals in gymnastics. The second highest rated telecast from London happened two nights later, when the women’s individual all-around finals took place. Even if it wasn’t the most-watched night of the Olympics, it was still the largest audience to watch Thursday night TV on any network since the finale of “Friends” in 2004. Women also ruled online; NBC’s most-streamed event was the women’s soccer final.

Similarly, it’s a safe bet that the highest rated night of NBC’s coverage from Sochi will be one of the two nights of the ladies’ figure skating singles final. It was the highest-rated telecast in Vancouver, and Torino, and Salt Lake City. The women’s competition in Lillehammer is still the sixth highest rated TV program ever, with a 48.5. But it’s not every year you get hired goons whacking an ice princess on the knee.

Heck, the IOC added a new made-up figure skating event this year — the team competition — probably just to create more TV programming.

The International Skating Union council

It’s not only women athletes drawing viewers and it’s not only women being drawn to watch, but you don’t have to look too far beyond the commercials to infer that Y chromosomes aren’t being as pandered to by sponsors during the Olympics as they are during most sporting events. One commercial break over the opening weekend went: Cover Girl, Ameritrade, Disney, AT&T; and there was an ad for Secret — the exclusively female deodorant — in the previous break. That doesn’t sound overwhelmingly feminine, but the AT&T; commercial was basically emotional porn for being a mom. As well, GE and some paper towel made similar “Mom is Awesome” spots they are running throughout the games. More obviously, though, it’s not the beer-truck-truck-beer that usually dominates sports on TV. This isn’t new; the Times wrote about it back in Beijing.

And that is why NBC paid ridiculous money for the rights to the Olympics: $2B for the 2010 and 2012 games. The U.S. isn’t the only place that watches the Olympics; we just pay the most for the privilege. That $2B represents 51% of the total take for the IOC for that cycle. The next two biggest spenders combined — Europe and Japan — paid just over half of what NBC did.

So women are the biggest TV draws of the games, and they bring in casual female viewers who otherwise mightn’t watch primetime TV, much less sports. At least partially because of that, the most lucrative market fills the IOC’s TV coffers more than half-full by itself. Nice job, ladies.

But why are you so powerless off the ice or field or water or whatever then? Twelve of the 33 bodies have one or fewer women — that’d be zero for the mathematically challenged among you — on their executive committee.

Forget equality — getting to 50–50. There are only a couple of sports where the governing body is close to equity — here, mirroring the participating rates among genders at the games. Those are canoeing and boxing. The latter is partially because of a technicality. Women’s boxing just appeared on the Olympic program for the first time in London. The 36 female pugilists were dwarfed in volume by the 250 men. But, percentage-wise, the 12.6% of 2012 female boxing competitors lets the AIBA’s 10% female board look relatively equitable as a function of participation.

It’s probably a bad day in sports when the people running boxing can be held up as an example for others to follow.

Most everyone else is pretty lousy. And not to pile on any one federation, but FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation) is a particularly egregious offender. Because of synchronized swimming, there are actually more women than men under swimming’s purview at the Olympics (676 to 624, or 52% women). Yet, FINA has but one woman among 23 executive committee members. Mathematically, tennis and handball are slightly worse, but that’s because they have no female members at all (both are 50–50 in terms of athletes).

FINA’s “Bureau” at Barcelona in 2013. Photo by Giorgio Scala/Deepbluemedia.

Part of the problem is that these are independent organizations. They aren’t necessarily beholden to the IOC, or to anybody but themselves for that matter. For something like FIFA, soccer’s governing body (and it just added the first female member in 2012), the Olympics isn’t even the sport’s marquee event. It has much more important business, specifically running its own quadrennial graft-a-thon in the World Cup. Another part of the problem is that these are global organizations and there are plenty of parts of the world that still have Cro-Magnon views on gender roles.

That still leaves plenty to be explained. What the number of women on any given governing body ought to be is a separate argument. But if women are such an important part of the draw of the games (and hence its financial success), then it seems axiomatic that the numbers ought to be higher than what they currently are. The IOC could theoretically put pressure on these sports to put more women into positions of power. The games are expensive to stage and the IOC has already made moves to curb the number of competitors and limit costs. Baseball in 2008 was about 200 competitors for 3 medals. It’s one of the reasons it (and softball) got the kibosh after Beijing. Rowing has seen its events trimmed. Track and field has already been told its numbers will be capped for 2016.

It’d be two birds should the IOC threaten to remove competitor spots in sports if governing bodies don’t modernize their thinking (and numbers) with regard to women. It would be a laudable first step, and one that might actually be a catalyst for progress.

Of course the IOC might want to look inward first. With only four women among its 14 executive committee members, even it doesn’t reach that 2:1 threshold. And yet, apparently it could be worse.

Michael Bertin is a writer rarely in New York.

This here is Pickles, whom noted animal blog the Daily Mail says is three feet long and weights 21 pounds. “Everyone’s obviously first reaction is like wow that cat is huge,” said Pickles’ new owner. You can find many more pictures of this large cat over here.

“Goat No. 11765 spent the last few days of her life foraging on a hillside near Shandon, a pretty town on the central coast of California. On the morning of May 2, 2012, she was placed in a truck and moved to a pen for goats in poor health. A few hours later, a Department of Agriculture inspector watched her struggle in the afternoon heat and, before the accompanying veterinarian could put her down, the goat died.”
 — I am not going to pretend that this in an upbeat piece that will make you feel better about life, but so few of them are anyway that you may as well go with something I can promise is at least worth your time.

“Hoard that Valentine’s Day candy now, because chocolate prices are poised to head higher.”
 — But what if you want to eat your feelings instead of hoard them? What if you didn’t get any Valentine’s Day candy at all because no one loves you? What if chowing down on that chocolate is the only thing that — for a few fleeting seconds of your day — helps you forget just how horrible things are? You just can’t win.

Florence Agnes Henderson, America’s Other Mom, has a birthday today. You should give her a call. (Above, perhaps her most underrated performance.)

“Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, a wealthy backer of Hillary Rodham Clinton, misstated the type of factory that was visited by Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the ambassador to Ukraine. It is a metallurgical mill, not a meteorological mill.”

“A Saturday storm will dump 4 to 6 inches of snow over New York City, according to the National Weather Service. The precipitation will clear up by Sunday afternoon, but is expected to cause delays at airports.” Even the jokes aren’t funny anymore.

UPDATE: This forecast is actually from the beginning of the winter. My mistake! Tomorrow’s prediction is only 1–3 inches, which is like we’re living on a tropical island or something. PHEW.

Photo by jgny, via Flickr