If you've had an eye on pop culture recently, chances are you've seen Admiral General Aladeen, the subject of Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming movie The Dictator.

You might have seen him on this weekend's Saturday Night Live, trading quips with Seth Meyers (and prisoner Martin Scorsese!).

Perhaps you came across his recent interviews with Larry King, Matt Lauer and the New York Times.

Or maybe you caught his act on the red carpet at this year's Oscars, dumping fake cremains on an unimpressed-looking Ryan Seacrest.

One person you probably haven't seen during all of this is Sacha Baron Cohen. As with his previous blitzes for Brüno and Borat, the actor has made an aggressive point of doing publicity in character as much as possible.

That doesn't mean that Baron Cohen hasn't ever been interviewed as himself, but as evidenced by reports of resistance by a handful of media outlets like the BBC, he clearly prefers not to. And when he does, as he did on Fresh Air in 2009, that very fact might be the headline.

While that sort of thing certainly demonstrates the commitment with which Baron Cohen throws himself into his comedy — although did anyone who watched Borat ever think to themselves, "It's funny, but I wish he'd COMMIT more"? — it also imposes a subtle tyranny on anyone who tries to engage with him, either directly or simply watching at home. That might be a meta-riff on The Dictator, except for the fact that Baron Cohen's been doing it for years.

There's a fierce selfishness in play. It forces everybody who interviews him to become absorbed in whatever bit he's working on. When Lauer sits down with Aladeen on NBC, he essentially cedes control over Today to Baron Cohen for the duration. An interview with the actor qua actor would still be promotion for the movie, of course, but there's something off-putting about inviting someone into your house and then letting him call all of the shots. Lauer, like just about everyone who wants to get a segment on a potentially popular movie, is volunteering to be batted around by Baron Cohen, when an actual interview would be closer to the other way around.

Just compare Jon Stewart's sit-down with Baron Cohen back in 2004, before he started disappearing into his characters, with his interview with Borat two years later. In the first one, Stewart is talking comedy with a colleague, and the two have a happy give-and-take that reveals a little bit about how Baron Cohen works.

In the second video, Stewart doesn't have much to do and is entirely at Baron Cohen's mercy. It's awkward — Stewart, after all, constantly reminds us that he's a terrible actor — and not nearly as much fun, despite being a more dedicated comedy segment than the earlier interview.

The worst instance of this was this year's Oscars. Most people with a substantial role in a nominated movie would have attended in the spirit of supporting their film. But instead of celebrating Martin Scorsese's lovely Hugo like a normal actor, Baron Cohen opted to tromp around in character. And not even as the arch station inspector he played in the film, but as Aladeen. Rather than drawing attention to the work that was being honored that night, he apparently preferred to say, in a funny accent, "ME ME ME ME ME!"

(Scorsese, on the other hand, showed up to help Baron Cohen promote The Dictator on this weekend's Saturday Night Live. He did throw in a small plug for Hugo, but that was more than Baron Cohen did on the red carpet.)

What might be most irksome, however, is that for anyone actually interested in what Baron Cohen does, there's a way that appearing in public almost exclusively as his characters reveals his comic creations as less than meets the eye. Interviews with comedians often do an excellent job of shining lights on the roles they play and can reveal additional dimensions to their work that might not have seemed apparent at first.

Even when Robin Williams free-associates on Jay Leno's couch for six minutes or Steve Carell goes to The Daily Show and plays off the weirdness of being a former correspondent (either by pretending that Jon Stewart's still his boss or veering hard in the other direction and dramatically insisting on how far above his old show he really is), you can still get a sense of the processes that drive their comedy.

Baron Cohen would rather avoid all of that. Interested in finding out why, specifically, he thought it would be funny and/or fruitful to lampoon a quasi-Qaddafi strongman? Whether he thought that the events of the Arab Spring made it more relevant, or gave him second thoughts about the timing? Why he developed it as a scripted comedy instead of the semi-documentary approach of Borat and Bruno? How he compares these movies with non-proprietary projects like Hugo or Sweeney Todd? Well, tough. You're not going to learn, or at least you will have to work exceptionally hard for it.

Instead, you can dislike Borat, Bruno and Aladeen and not know a thing about Baron Cohen — and certainly not discover something that might make you think that there's more to them than you originally thought. He seems to be determined to convince us that there isn't anything more to them.

And by refusing to appear out of character except on frustratingly rare (and, as per the above, genuinely enlightening) occasions, he's not only right: He makes a convincing case that there isn't anything more to Baron Cohen, either.

There are three types of people currently reading this blog post about Lana Del Rey: those who reflexively rolled their eyes upon reading the very words "Lana Del Rey" just now, those who have no idea why the words "Lana Del Rey" would provoke autonomic eye-rolling and those who scoff at the thought that people can be divided into only three types.

The last group, there is no hope for. Those people are just the worst.

The other two are on a collision course, ready to smack head-on into one another tomorrow night. For that is when Miss Del Rey (neé Miss Grant, about which let me say more in a sec) makes her American television debut – two weeks ahead of the release of her first album Born To Die – by performing on the Daniel Radcliffe-hosted Saturday Night Live and what has been largely the province of online music and pop-culture tastemakers gets unleashed upon the populace at large.

To appreciate the weight of this, there are two things that you must understand about Del Rey. First, she is almost universally loathed by most of the major music blogs. And second, the first fact is almost entirely unimportant.

What's the problem with Del Rey? I'm going to tell you, but before I do, I must warn you that what I have to say is so shocking, it will rattle you to your very core and almost certainly send you to join the chorus of Internet naysayers eagerly panting their dismay. If you are not sitting down now, you almost certainly will be when I reach the end of the next sentence:

Her name is not really Lana Del Rey.

Okay, there's a little bit more to it than that. For a rundown on the matter, I humbly direct you to this marvelous Awl piece, which discusses how the erstwhile Lizzy Grant committed the inexcusable crime of coming from a privileged upbringing. It's worth mentioning that writer Adam Rosen falls squarely on the side of finding the whole uproar embarrassing for those doing the roaring. It's also worth mentioning that the very first, apparently-not-remotely-ironic reader comment immediately following the piece reads thusly: "Thanks for this. I got as far as 'boarding-school pedigree.' At that point, I knew all I will ever need to know about her."

Rosen's pointed call for music fans to respond to bands and singers based on "the simple matter of whether or not someone sucks" might not get much traction in cyberspace. Luckily for Del Rey, the blogstorm that has swirled around her for the past year will become almost entirely irrelevant once Harry Potter introduces her tomorrow night on SNL.

As it happens, blogs don't really affect popular success, at least not as far as the mainstream is concerned. The average pop-radio listener – whether it's straight-up Top 40 or niche formats like adult alternative, where Del Rey's dusky songs are likely to end up as a sort of stopgap Neko Case proxy – doesn't know anything about the blogs. (A more cynical wag would say that the average pop-radio listener doesn't know anything about anything, but we refrain from such incendiary remarks.) Nor does he or she care. Such folks have a pesky habit of liking the music they like, with little or no regard to the narrative attached to it unless there's a tabloid component. The hate-on for Del Rey doesn't remotely qualify.

Let's step back three and a half years, when pop hopeful Katy Perry hooked up with the Warped Tour, the annual breeding ground for skate punk, emo and sunstroke. (Seriously, people, stay hydrated out there.) The pairing was ridiculous both on the face of it and in practice; she stuck out like a sore, fake thumb playing shows that were cravenly designed to earn her cred from the in crowd. And having failed at that, she licked her wounds, shrugged and went on to become one of the world's biggest pop stars.

From a mainstream perspective, credibility is overrated. Perhaps Del Rey can seek solace in the tale of Vampire Weekend, the fresh-faced preppie Ivy Leaguers with a penchant for once-removed (i.e., Western-filtered) African music who faced an awfully similar backlash as 2007 gave way to 2008 and they prepared to release their debut. It happened so far in advance of the record's release, in fact, that there was enough time for a backlash against the backlash to develop. And then, once their album came out and they themselves played SNL, they were met with a chorus of, "Yeah, they're all right."

It'd be hard to pin that exclusively on the show, but it's certainly true that the reach of one episode of SNL far exceeds that of the people who've spent the better part of a year howling for Del Rey's head on a platter for acting out to the exact letter one of the core tenets of punk rock, which was the ability to demolish your own past and recreate yourself in whatever image suited you. (Apparently, you now have to submit your proposal to a board for approval first.) Once SNL looses Del Rey on to a public that knows nothing of her past – both her biographical background and her online notoriety – all of that righteous fury fueling the blogsplosion will be reduced to shouting in a wind tunnel.

Whether Del Rey makes more than the slightest blip on the pop-culture radar is up in the air, of course. She'll rise or fall on her own merits and the usual cocktail of vagaries that dictate whether any pop artist is successful or not. And the blogs will almost certainly continue to provide their own takes on her music and career as long as she's pursuing both. But tomorrow night is when she ceases to be an issue of purely academic concern and becomes merely one more new singer vying for your eardrums, just like everybody else you haven't heard of yet.

(Written in the full knowledge that Lana Del Rey is neither Neko Case nor punk rock, not that this will help.)

I get somewhere between four and six e-mails every day from NPR's news managers, each one an update on the network's coverage plans for the day — and each one bearing this stern all-caps warning:

*THIS NOTE IS STRICTLY FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY: INFORMATION IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION, BROADCAST OR SHARING WITH THIRD PARTIES*

Like most news organizations, we keep our so-called "story budgets" close to the vest, not least out of competitiveness.

Not so at Britain's Guardian newspaper, though — at least not at the moment. As London-based national news editor Dan Roberts tells NPR's Audie Cornish, the 190-year-old outlet has taken to making its story list public, and inviting readers to help shape coverage.

"We've been experimenting for a while in trying to get readers to help us report things," Roberts says in an interview airing on Weekend Edition Sunday. (The audio will appear above after broadcast.)

"We realized that the only way to really take that to a bigger scale was to tell them what we're already doing — 'cause there's no point in just kind of giving them a blank sheet of paper and saying, 'What would you do?' You have to kind of engage them in the process."

It's a kind of crowdsourcing, to hear Roberts describe it:

"We did an investigation into the exploitation of interns, and rather than the normal process of doing the investigation and then opening the piece up for comments on the website and then seeing people's experiences, we flipped it and we said, 'Right, in advance we're going to tell people we want to investigate this. Can you give us examples of perhaps how you've been exploited as an unpaid intern?'

"And suggestions poured in. And then we did the reporting, we checked them out."

It made for a better story, Roberts argues. "We had some brilliant examples that really opened people's minds to just how bad the problem was."

But it also helped build an advance audience — one whose appetite for the story had been whetted.

"So it ended up being the best-read story of the week," Roberts says.

The experiment has also helped change the way the Guardian sets its broader news agenda, Roberts suggests. Editors and reporters sometimes think old news isn't still news, for instance — but their audiences don't always see it that way.

How much health-care reform coverage is enough? The news, after the jump ...

From a pop culture perspective, Hugh Grant's testimony yesterday about ethics in journalism is a fascinating step for a guy who's already had a pretty interesting trajectory.

We traced the Grant history back in 2009, but here's a refresher: For mainstream American audiences, he popped up in 1994's Four Weddings And A Funeral, playing the adorable, flopsy-haired Charles, who had a halting manner but a giant heart of gold and could barely bring himself to speak to pretty women he didn't know. After that very good performance, he did good guys in dull movies like Nine Months, with Julianne Moore, which may be one of the bigger wastes of acting talent you'll ever see.

Of course, in the summer of 1995, a couple of weeks before the release of Nine Months, he was arrested in public with a prostitute, which made the publicity for the film a tiny bit awkward and led to the very famous Jay Leno interview that opened with the question, "What the hell were you thinking?"

After that, things slowed down until about the time he made the Julia Roberts romcom Notting Hill, which is conventional but has considerable charm — and in which he's still doing the sweet, stammering dreamboat.

But the really important moment came in 2001, when he quite fabulously played the unapologetic cad in Bridget Jones's Diary who lost the girl to Colin Firth. It became clear at that point that at least a dash of the guy you hate yourself for liking was very flattering to him. After that, it's been mostly jerks or partial jerks — in the witty About A Boy, in the silly Two Weeks Notice with Sandra Bullock, and in Music And Lyrics with Drew Barrymore. For a guy who started out being cast over and over as a sentimental bumbler, he turned out to be a really great lovable jackass.

[Note: This does not always work. See the Sarah Jessica Parker stinker Did You Hear About The Morgans? Or, actually, do not see it.]

Now, as All Things Considered reports, he's become the primary celebrity activist in Britain's phone hacking scandal. He testified yesterday about a break-in at his apartment, about a story he doesn't believe could have been sourced other than through listening to his voicemail, and when confronted with the theory that it's fair game to investigate a celebrity trading on his good name, he made the rather blunt and observant comment, "I wasn't aware I traded on my good name. I mean, I've never had a good name, and it's made absolutely no difference at all."

A surprising spokesperson, after the jump.

The encomiums for Family Circus creator Bil Keane continue to pour in. The best of them, like this one from the AV Club's Sean O'Neal, find a respectful way to acknowledge the strip's evolution from its early status as a relatively hip (and sometimes downright saucy) gag strip, to its more familiar status as ... precisely none of those things.

Like Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, Keane's strip specializes in capturing discrete snapshots of that particular phase of kid-hood when magical thinking (the invisible gremlins of Ida Know and Not Me, for example) bleeds harmlessly into regular thinking. (Consider: When 3-year-old Jeffy sees the spirits of his departed grandparents floating over the kitchen table, the reader thinks, "D'awww. This one's going on the fridge!" If the teenage kid in Zits were to see the same thing, the reader's mind would teem with concerns about early-onset schizophrenia.)

Keane proudly — and in later interviews, defiantly — trafficked in the wholesome, and his fellow cartoonists respected him for it. At first glance, the sensibilities of Bil Keane and Lynda Barry, for example, might seem diametrically opposed, but Barry has spoken often of what The Family Circus represents to her, most recently on her blog in the wake of Keane's death:

I was a kid growing up in a troubled household. We didn't have books in the house but we did have the daily paper and I remember picking out Family Circus before I could really read.

There was something about the life on the other side of that circle that looked pretty good. For kids like me there was a map and a compass hidden in Family Circus. The parents in that comic strip really loved their children. Their home was stable. It put that image in my head and I kept it.

My own household wasn't particularly troubled, so The Family Circus didn't carry anything like that emotional weight. But it was a much-anticipated fixture of Sunday mornings. Especially the "dotted-line comics."

These were strips bursting with color and detail, which told a story — actually several mini-stories — in a single, vast, mural-like panel. To accomplish this, Keane pulled back — way back: we readers suddenly found ourselves looking down upon the family's pristine suburban development like a benevolent god.

A dotted black line followed a character's (usually Billy's or Jeffy's) carefree peregrinations through the privet-lined, strangely carless, possibly post-Raptured streets of his neighborhood. Here, Billy dallies on a jungle gym. There, by the babbling brook, he catches polywogs. And all the while, that dotted black line follows him, jumping over tree stumps and skirting around barking dogs.

It's impossible to read these strips, which depict a small child blithely wandering on his own through verdant backyards and quiet cul-de-sacs, without feeling a pang of nostalgia for a time before stranger-danger and Amber Alerts. But that's exactly what Keane was selling, of course. Because his dotted line always, always circled back to end where it began: On the doorstep of the family home.

The Sunday dotted-line strips required a level of planning — and evinced a clean, meticulous draftsmanship — the daily strips never needed to. As I grew older, I began to appreciate the way Keane cheated the perspective so as to fill the entire panel with detail — even those places and objects farthest away from the reader's eye.

To a suburban kid, these strips provided a new and quite literal perspective on my world, which so closely resembled the four-color, zipatoned Levittown Keane depicted.

Reading them in the car on the way home from church, those strips were like tiny, epiphanic visions. It was the easiest thing in the world to see myself as Jeffy; the realization that all the adventures that filled my days could fit below the fold of the Sunday funnies was jarring. Those strips took me out of the everyday and let me see what my life looked like, at a remove.

And it looked ... small.

As a man of devout faith, Keane likely suspected that his strip could provide comfort and hope to kids like Lynda Barry. Could he have imagined that his dotted-line strips might also have the power to send bored, broody, indoorsy kids like me down so many existentialist rabbit-holes?

Ida Know.

ABC News and Yahoo! announced today that they are teaming up in a "strategic online news alliance" they hope will reach 100 million U.S. users a month. And they're not starting small: George Stephanopoulos will interview President Obama at 2:35 this afternoon for a webcast on ABCNews.com and Yahoo.com. The partnership will make ABC News, according to the press release, "the premier news provider on Yahoo! News." The press release says that Yahoo! will have editorial control over its sites and ABC News will have editorial control over its sites (ABCNews.com and GoodMorningAmerica.com).

This partnership, in part because of its sheer size and reach, will be inevitably compared to the teaming up of AOL and the Huffington Post, despite the fact that that was structured as an acquisition of the latter by the former and this is being called a "strategic alliance," a more diplomacy-inspired term. Moreover, that was two existing online properties, and this is a primarily online-driven outlet teaming up with a primarily television-driven one.

But television news and online news have teamed up before, most notably at MSNBC.com, a joint project between Microsoft and NBC. (Microsoft is no longer involved in MSNBC, the cable channel, which is a separate company from the web site.) The cross-branding of NBC content and MSNBC.com content is pervasive and sometimes perplexing — all of MSNBC.com's entertainment content, for instance, is now branded as part of the site for NBC's Today.

More than selling the partnership itself, the two companies are focused on the new online content produced especially for this purpose that will be available through Yahoo's "global technology platform." In addition to the Newsmakers series that will debut with the Stephanopoulos-Obama interview, there will be an online series with Christine Amanpour and one with Bill Weir, Nightline's co-anchor, focusing on technology and innovation.

How much interest the new content generates may well drive initial reactions to the agreement. Ordinary site users likely won't care about the behind-the-scenes changes to how things are financed and branded, and there isn't an obvious celebrity angle, the way there was when Arianna Huffington essentially took over managing content at AOL. Yahoo! has certainly had its share of negative press, and as recently as last week was being casually referred to as "beleaguered." Some fresh content (like, for instance, a live interview with a newsmaker) is likely welcome. For ABC, there's the promise of Yahoo!'s enormously well-trafficked news portal, which will now send people plenty of ABC News content.

Today, Amazon announced the debut of its 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire. Available for $199, the Kindle Fire is being positioned as a device that will deliver Amazon's e-books, MP3s, magazines, web browsing, and streaming video for less than half the price of full-featured tablets like the Apple iPad. The Fire is available for preorder starting today, and will ship November 15.

The company also revamped the existing Kindle line which, until today, cost $189 for the basic model if you got it without "special offers" — Amazon's nice way of saying "ads," which come in the form of screens that show up when you're not reading.

The Kindle Touch, a touchscreen version of the existing e-reader, will go for $99 in WiFi only or $149 with 3G — $139 and $189 respectively if you don't want ads. A smaller, lighter Kindle without the touchscreen will come in at $79 with ads or $109 without — the cheapest e-reader Amazon has ever offered. (Both Engadget and Gizmodo live-blogged the announcement, and will be helpful if you're looking for more specifics.)

As fast as Amazon could release the Fire, however, the questions started to arise.

A supercharged Kindle or an underpowered iPad? For the Fire to catch on, Amazon probably needs it to be compared in terms of functionality to the existing Kindle, and not to the far more expensive iPad. The Fire can't stand toe-to-toe with the iPad for functionality, cool design, or size, but Amazon hopes to compensate with the much lower price. By selling the Fire for $199 (when rumors had suggested more like $250), they have a chance to position it as a tablet for people who haven't felt like an iPad was essential enough to spend more than $500 to acquire.

In fact, NPR's Laura Sydell told me she's been speaking to analysts today who believe the price point can bring people into the tablet market who would never enter it at current Apple prices. One pointed out to her that a person could by a Kindle Fire for herself and an inexpensive Kindle for her kid and still get out of the deal for $300 — $200 less than an iPad.

What the Fire probably compares to most directly is Barnes & Noble's Nook Color, which also runs on Android and is rumored to be about to see its second-generation launch. Those comparisons, however, won't be complete until we know more about the Nook Color 2. But Sydell says the Kindle Fire may be making Barnes & Noble more nervous than Apple.

Content, size, display and more, after the jump.

Netflix has figured out that people are very upset about its decision to split streaming video and DVD delivery — a decision that got it in huge hot water earlier this year. Customers who had previously gotten both streaming and DVDs for a single price would now have to pay separately. If you only use one or the other, you could pay less, but if you still wanted both, you'd pay more.

The Netflix response? Separate the businesses even more. In a new blog post, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings explains that for some reason, he has concluded that separating the businesses completely is going to help people understand what's going on. Thus, Netflix will not send DVDs at all anymore but will only provide streaming, while the company's DVD business will happen under the new "Qwikster" brand.

Hastings seems to be operating under the premise that customers don't really understand what's going on; that they are angry because they think that a single business has increased its price when in fact it has merely split into two businesses that charge separately. Presumably, the idea is that making the split more definitive will make people slap their foreheads and say, "Oh, now I see. Netflix actually lowered its prices, as long as I don't buy Qwikster! And new Qwikster is cheaper than old Netflix! I'm coming out ahead, sort of, if I don't want all the services I used to get!"

The only problems with this approach are that its underlying assumptions are almost certainly wrong, and that it ignores major inefficiencies that will be introduced for customers who do, indeed, want to continue to use both streaming and DVDs. Now, if you want both, you have to go to two different sites with two different queues, you have to pay two different charges to two different entities, and in general, you have to have two different memberships. That's not psychologically better for consumers. That's buying two things which are both less helpful than the single thing you could get before.

It's like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that consumers will notice the lower 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe.

And it has to be said: It doesn't help that the word "Qwikster" sounds inherently faddish and goofy, like the very last word of its kind they could make out of the correct phonetic elements that wasn't already trademarked.

The inconveniences, in other words, are real and tangible and instantly noticeable, but the advantages are cosmetic. They're trying to train people to think of these as two different things, streaming and DVD renting, and that's fine. But when you do it at the expense of convenience and ... well, expense, then you can't expect it's going to solve your customer loyalty problems.

Netfllix is not without competition in streaming video. Amazon is in the game, Hulu Plus is in the game, Apple is in the game, and more entrants are certain to come down the pike. More and more customers have stream-to-TV devices like the Roku that allow them to pick a new service essentially whenever they want with almost no fuss. They are at a very, very delicate point. It's certainly a bold move to abandon the image that lies at the very heart of their brand — the red Netflix envelope will cease to exist, replaced by a red Qwikster envelope — but at first glance, it seems wildly unlikely to satisfy customers who are still well aware of what a price increase looks like.

Something interesting happened to Jacob Boehm and his family, but it isn't what the media's suggesting.

In case you missed this story: Boehm is a 22-year-old Stanford student who spent the summer performing with his school choir in Japan. After the group finished touring, he traveled by himself, and along the way, he made regular social media updates about his trip. On August 13, he let everyone know he was in Malaysia, and then no one heard from him for a week.

His parents were worried by his sudden silence, so they emailed a dozen of his friends to ask if they could use social media to track him down. Soon, thousands of people took to Twitter, Reddit, and other sites to launch a "find Jacob" campaign. Facebook employees posted ads about him in both English and Malay. The U.S Embassy got involved. And less than 24 hours after Boehm became a cause, rangers found him in Taman Negara National Park.

Turns out, he was just hiking around. The park doesn't get cell phone or internet reception, and apparently, the kid forgot to mention this to anyone before he entered.

What happened next, after the jump.

Updated again, 4:30 p.m.: HBO has announced that the first two Paradise Lost documentaries will be available on the network's mobile app, HBO GO, beginning Tuesday, August 23rd, and HBO On Demand beginning Wednesday, August 24th. They will then air on HBO — the first one on Monday, August 29th and the second one on Tuesday, August 30th.

Updated, 1:00 p.m.: The parties have announced that under a plea agreement, the "West Memphis Three" are being released from custody today.

This morning in Jonesboro, Ark., Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, known as the "West Memphis Three," are being released today after spending 18 years in prison for the 1993 murders of three young boys. Echols had been sentenced to death.

Under the arrangement worked out with prosecutors, the existing convictions were set aside in return for the agreement of all three to be charged again, to plead guilty, and to be sentenced to the time they had already served. In other words, they were not exonerated; they were convicted again, but under the new convictions, they serve no additional time in prison and get to go home. Among other things, according to prosecutor Scott Ellington, it protects the state from being sued for wrongful imprisonment in the event they were retried and acquitted. They remain, in the eyes of the law, guilty, despite the fact that they maintain that, in fact, they are innocent. (This particular kind of guilty plea is called an Alford plea after the case where it was established; lots of information about Alford pleas is linked from here.)

The documentary filmmaker at work, after the jump.

Last night, Christine O'Donnell, who was a much-discussed Senate candidate in Delaware last year and author of a new book, walked out on her interview with CNN's Piers Morgan after he asked her to talk about gay marriage, which she said was rude, because she was there to discuss — in her words — one of "the issues that I choose to talk about in the book." Ultimately, their disagreement came down to her assertion that as a host, it's rude to ask her things other than the things she wants to be asked about. When Morgan disagreed and asked why she was being "so weird" about what she wanted to be asked, she said, "I'm being pulled away," added that she "turned down another interview for this," and left.

Walking out of an interview is certainly not new; it reportedly happened just recently with Sarah Ferguson, who didn't like it when the Australian 60 Minutes showed her some now-familiar footage of her offering access to her former husband, Prince Andrew, in exchange for cash. Julian Assange walked out of an interview with CNN in June after the interviewer asked about allegations he was facing. And it doesn't have to be over anything particularly earth-shaking: Russell Crowe bailed on a radio interview because the interviewer didn't like his accent in Robin Hood. And Paris Hilton walked out on ABC News after being asked whether she worried about her "moment having passed."

Why some walk out and some don't, after the jump.

"In Superman, some of the loftiest aspirations of our species came hurtling down from imagination's bright heaven to collide with the lowest form of entertainment, and from their union something powerful and resonant was born, albeit in its underwear."

That line, from the first chapter of comic-book writer Grant Morrison's Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, is Morrison all over.

He's never been one to shy from the gleefully grandiose: As you start that sentence above, for example, you can practically hear alarums and excursions. But note how he allows his Underoos kicker to deflate what's gone before; it's a tip of the cowl to the glorious goofiness bound up in the whole notion of spandex-clad mesomorphs who fight for what's right.

Over the years, the guy's chronicled the comic book adventures of everything from lantern-jawed lawmen to universe-conquering caterpillars, with the odd (the wonderfully odd, let it be noted) sentient, transvestite city street thrown in for good measure.

Supergods is less a history of the superhero genre than it is a meditation on the Superhero, Writ Cosmic. Superheroes as they exist on the comics page can disappoint — Morrison's true subject is the Superhero that exists in our collective cultural psyche. The book is a love letter to this curious breed of technicolor spectacle that, Morrison maintains, reflects our idealized dream-self.

Morrison is a deeply passionate writer — when he enthuses, it is completely infectious; when he disdains, it is downright virulent. Supergods' most entertaining passages are those in which Morrison gets a good head of steam going — as, for example, when he sets his sights on the uber-violent, nihilistic, grim-n'-gritty tone that overtook superhero comics in the late 80s and early 90s. Comics of the time, he says, were like spotty teenage boys in their underwear (NOTE: it always comes back to the underwear) striking poses in their bedroom mirrors:

"The deep earnestness, the crass sensationalism, the aching desire to be taken seriously had become a ridiculous posture, and things would have to change ... Now it was time to get out there and meet girls."

Morrison was one of the writers who helped drag mainstream comics out of that dark time with bold, swing-for-the-fences Big Ideas that evoked Jungian archetypes, Lovecraftian horror and huge action-movie set pieces. And he made sure to place all of that high-concept dream-stuff squarely inside the pulp tradition that gave rise to comics in the first place.

Passages in which Morrison describes his shamanistic experiences with hallucinogens don't offer up the kind of insights to his creative process he seems to think they do, but they do round out his authorial self-portrait — and just might help explain what the hell was going on in his bumfuzzling 2002 series, The Filth.

Morrison has thought deeply about his subject, and communicates those thoughts with cheeky, and at times giddily bitchy, humor. Dry historical treatises on the rise of the superhero abound; Supergods offers an articulate intelligent and (more to the point) fun guide to a world where all of us are the best we can be — and look great in spandex.

... And when we say "community-based," we technically mean Community-based. As in the NBC sitcom. Starring, among others, Donald Glover.

Who, you may recall, was the subject of a social media campaign last year. Twitter users busted out the hashtag #donald4spiderman to encourage Hollywood to cast him as Peter Parker in the reboot of the Spider-Man film franchise. (We covered that campaign in this admittedly discursive post last year — scroll down, waaaaay down, past all that pontificating about what Twitter is "for.")

He lost out to a lanky, albeit endearingly sincere, Brit, but Glover's comic-book story didn't end there.

Let's back up: We've discussed the Ultimate line of Marvel comics before — a wholly separate, alternate universe launched in 2000 with the goal of updating familiar Marvel characters "for the 21st century." The two universes exist side-by-side.

In the mainstream Marvel Universe, Peter Parker is still the web-swingin'-est, listen-bud-he's-got-radioactive-blood-iest arachnid-themed hero going.

But last month, in the Ultimate universe, Peter Parker died.

Today, in the pages of Ultimate Comics Fallout #4, a new guy steps into the Spidey-suit. This kind of thing goes on rather a lot, in comics.

But the reason you've already heard about it — the reason USA Today covered it, and the New York Times interviewed author Brian Michael Bendis — is because, even in this offshoot fictive universe, Spider-Man is Marvel's flagship character.

And the guy taking over? Is a kid of mixed African-American/ Latino descent named Miles Morales.

Who, not for nothin', just so happens to look a lot like ... well, here's what Bendis said yesterday to the New York Times Arts Beat blog:

"I'm a huge 'Community' fan," Mr. Bendis said, "and I went: 'Why couldn't [Glover] be Peter Parker? He'd be a great Peter Parker.' Then I realized I was working on that project already. And I realized we were doing the right thing."

Mr. Bendis said he had also taken a lesson from a black friend who told him that Spider-Man was the only superhero that other children would let him play when he was growing up. "You couldn't see his skin color," Mr. Bendis said the friend told him. "He was any of us, when he was in costume."

After the jump: The two simple words that can change a multiverse.

Smart kids crave breaking news.

They are a natural audience — intelligent, curious, fascinated by the story, able to assimilate facts and associate ideas at cyberspeed. And they live with one foot in the online world.

But some parents worry that the news is too often presented in a violent, graphic or hypersexualized way. Or that it's just not age-appropriate.

"Once I started distilling news for my 7-year old," says Claudia Heitler, a former producer for NBC's Today Show, "I found it was a lot more work than I thought it would be. It sometimes took me hours between finding an appropriate story and finding the right way to tell it."

For example, she says, "could I say that North Korea was in 'time-out'?"

Heitler figured that other families might be in the same boat. So she launched Here There Everywhere - News for Kids.

Increasingly, Heitler says, there are more outside influences on young people as they grow older — video games and television and various marketing campaigns. "This seems to be the savviest generation of kids ever" she says. "All fine, but let's also take some time to tell them about what's going on in the world and make that accessible to them, let's make them savvy about that, too."

Recent HTE stories include: "Should Dogs Wear Seat Belts?" and "There's a New Country" about the Republic of South Sudan.

Here There Everywhere is not the only news-for-kids site. There are others, including DOGO News and Youngzine. Another site, GoGoNews, is designed to be read by people who are at least 7 years old, says founder Golnar Khosrowshahi. "Given the variance in literacy levels for the under 7 set, while the content is suitable, the most satisfaction would probably be gained when viewing it with the help of an adult." For the under-7 set, the site provides a way for kids to listen to the articles.

All of this attention to newspups brings back memories of last century, when newspapers and magazines - battling against declining circulation — created kid-oriented sections, hoping to "young up" their audiences. Time magazine even launched a Time for Kids edition.

Now in the digital age, that quest for youth continues. There is a Time for Kids website. The New York Times also has a student-oriented blog called the Learning Network. The BBC created the Children's BBC for pre-teens. The Washington Post publishes a web version of its KidsPost section. And there are many others.

There are obstacles. All the sites must reckon with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which makes it illegal for a website to collect personal information or track the online activities of anyone younger than 13, without parental consent.

And what about bad news? The recent attacks in Norway, for instance. How do these news-for-newbies sites handle adult stories?

Here is the lede of the GoGo News story: "After a bomb was detonated in the Norwegian capital city of Oslo, further reports came in of a man in a police uniform killing more people at a summer camp on Utoya Island outside of the city."

Golnar Khosrowshahi explains that her site covered the Norway tragedies for several reasons. "The second attack occurred at a youth camp and there would be a greater likelihood that children would hear about it and have questions," she says. And "the unexpected nature of the event — given that it occurred in a normally peaceful northern European country — has made it front page news and topical discussion, more so than a roadside bomb in Iraq or a suicide bomb in India."

She adds: "There is no intent to undermine those incidents or assign a lesser value on lives lost — just an editorial decision of if and when it is appropriate to publish news that is appropriate for children to consume."

Here There Everywhere dealt with the situation differently: "This is the slippery slope where I agonize," Claudia Heitler says. "For all my advocacy for news and awareness, including some of the weightier topics, I am not writing about the Oslo attacks. I mourn for those people with all my heart, but I also believe in filtering and omitting for the sake of children."

She uses her son as the litmus test. "I have not brought it up with him," Heitler says. "Rightly or wrongly, I do not want to potentially instill fear in a young child that they could be the victim of calculated, horrific violence anywhere at anytime — especially if the children I am telling are not my own."

At this stage, she says, the site "is not meant to be comprehensive. It is meant to start conversations."

Tracy Grant, editor of KidsPost, agrees about the mission of kids-news sites. "Big news-bad news stories have to have either a connection to kids' worlds or historic significance," Grant says. "Part of this is the notion that we have an unwritten pact with parents. We don't want to needlessly put something on the breakfast table on a Tuesday morning that is going to engender an uncomfortable conversation. But we do want to help them have interesting conversations about the news."

Spend a moment watching the news these days and it's obvious; we love our damsel in distress tales. But even I didn't predict 15 million people would show for ABC News latest blockbuster story of a cute, young blonde woman subjected to a horrible crime: top anchor Diane Sawyer's exclusive interview with Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held for 18 years.

It was popular because it fell in doldrums of summer, when there's a lot of reality TV and reruns. And it sums up the zeitgest of the summer. Exhibit A: accused child killer Casey Anthony, whose acquittal inspired a flood of women-in-peril stories across every network and cable channel.

From the beginning, the Casey Anthony story has been a priority for ABC News, which paid her $200,000 for video and pictures years ago. When Anthony was acquitted, ABC News pulled out all the stops: they whisked the first juror willing to speak on camera to Disney World. Celebrity anchor Barbara Walters chatted up her attorney Jose Baez. And now the network has made another move which looks like ABC is trying to corner the market on women in peril stories. They've hired Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped at age 14 back in 2002 and found nine months later.

In her first appearance as a contributor on ABC Thursday morning, Smart talked about missing children in general, while also complimenting Dugard for speaking out. But her hiring raises an important question: Is this a signal ABC will cover more women-in-peril stories — crimes that really aren't that common?

For many years, critics have complained about the emphasis news outlets place on crimes which happen to young women — often pretty, often white and usually middle class. It even has a nickname: Missing White Woman Syndrome.

ABC is dipping deep into that well. According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine, the network's evening newscast spent almost 23 minutes covering the aftermath of Anthony's verdict last week, more than double what was on NBC and about four times what was on CBS.

When I talked to ABC spokeswoman Julie Townsend, she insisted the confluence of Smart's hire, the Dugard story and the Casey Anthony coverage was a coincidence. She said, in her words, "These are the kind of stories that are riveting; people want to hear about them from people who have experienced these issues firsthand."

In today's landscape of morning newscasts and true-crime network TV newsmagazines, such women-in-peril stories have turned crime news into melodramatic, real-life soap operas.

And just like on the best soaps, it doesn't matter if the woman at the heart of the tale is a heroine or a villain, as long as her story is so frightening and compelling people can't stop watching.

Eric Deggans is the TV and media critic for the St. Petersburg Times.