Songs aren't argumentative essays, they're everything from narratives to character studies to imagist poems. He's said as much that he wanted to fuse some of the smoothness and romance of r&b with the swagger and ethical ambiguity that's intrinsic to hip-hop. A self-justifying adulterer character would be pretty good…

I mean, if you're talking about non-representative demographics in media, it's not exactly out of left field to imply or to state outright that there are a ton of Jewish (religiously or just culturally) people at all levels in entertainment, way out of proportion to the general population. There are a number of…

It's not unnecessary. It gives an enormous amount of insight into what the power structures are, how the characters relate, who has which chip on their shoulder.

But his characters could easily be cast color-blind in a way that, say, Woody Allen's characters couldn't.

I think the diversity argument can often come from the wrong place, too. Different shows have different tones that require different writers. Sometimes a show profits from having everyone being of similar background; sometimes a show benefits from having a very diverse writer's room. As I've said previously, the "room…

But a wealthy black person has a very different experience in America from that of a wealthy white person. Some writers write more specifically than others. Joss Whedon tends to paint with a larger brush on a canvas that's less rooted in the current real world, so he has leeway to cast colorblind. Lena Dunham is…

Ehhhhhh, not really. Game of Thrones gets away with not having direct experience with those things because no one in the audience has ever lived in a mythic kingdom either.

I mean, to say that most of our major entertainment institutions in this country - the hit parade, song publishers, broadway & touring companies, the film & television industry, the comedy club circuits - haven't been disproportionately Jewish for the past 110 years is to ignore not only demographics but something…

It's exactly the same type of microaggression. The fat one happens to be accompanied by many, many other macro and micro aggressions.

You still have a bunch of people who feel they have the right to loudly judge your body and ask you to change it. I've had clients send me checks that say "Make sure to spend some of this on food, you skinny thing!" And I'm sorry, that's bullshit.

If you can dance to slow funk/soul, half-time death metal, or a slow hips-heavy blues, you can dance to dubstep. Not that hard.

Dubstep is supposed to be the lovechild of Two-step and Dub music, which were large parts of the British electronica & dance music scenes. It's characterized by a majorly processed synthesized bass - usually a sine wave, modified by a lot of oscillators until it's very thick with a characteristic "wobble" sound, which…

Or, people could focus on designing games with great gameplay, since in the end treating a game as an interactive story leaves you with two joined segments:

There's actually a wealth of literature on the differences between the prequels and the original three, and what makes the original superior as filmmaking.

Except when it comes to that Muslim Community Center in Downtown Manhattan.

Yeah, I can't help but wonder if headlines for Daniel Pearl might have been "journalist works longer hours for less pay in new media landscape, lives middling but happy existence", and if Matthew Shepard might not have been "Gay person lives life somewhere."

This is one of the reasons that specific projects themed towards diversity, or explicit quotas (industry-wide or internally imposed) are important. It is a lot harder to cast non-white actors, models, writers, etc, because the lack of jobs and visibility means fewer qualified candidates. Unless the opportunities for…

Theatre guys rape. They just don't get publicity.

Yo, you're not allowed to hate on gays. Not when you've got a haircut like that, you're not.

"What's a Nubian?"