I visited Toy Fair in New York City hunting for ideas for our summer series about kids' culture. One of the big takeaways was the increasing popularity of construction games such as Legos. Sales shot up nearly 20 percent last year. Now, it seems, every major toy manufacturer is scrambling to add new games geared toward kids building things.

Concurrently, I happened to visit the National Building Museum, where an impressive exhibition, PLAY WORK BUILD, showcases the museum's vast collection of block sets and building toys. It also takes blocks into the future – with the David Rockwell-designed Imagination Playground, an azure-blue block fantasy for the under-5 crowd.

That prompted this story on blocks, which starts with a small business selling wooden blocks made in the U.S. (specifically the Unblock, designed and created by the Azmani family in Wisconsin) to the gigantic Legos, Hasbros and Mattels of the world, selling high-concept blocks that often seem like nothing so much as vehicles for cross-promotional licensing.

That prompts the question — what makes a block a block? I asked Karen Hewitt, a toy designer who's written about the history of blocks.

"That it's three dimensional," she offered. "That it's nonrepresentational, it doesn't have anything until a child gives it a name or function. And usually, blocks are modular. They relate to each other in some forms in ratio of size, or shape. They're predictable, so they keep their shape, no matter the material. And blocks basically rely on balance for building."

What would Maria Montessori or Friedrich Froebel think of Minecraft? They were pioneers of early education who made block play central to their philosophies. Minecraft is the hugely popular virtual game that invites its 10 million players to manipulate a world made of blocks.

"Montessori was quite a brilliant woman. I think she'd be very interested in what's going on today," Hewitt observes dryly. She was polite about Minecraft ("It just doesn't have that sensory feeling for me") but copped to a real fascination with new games that synthesize real blocks and with ones on screens. For example, the inevitable Lego-Minecraft tie-in, or a math-based game, Building Blocks, that uses actual and virtual blocks.

But Hewitt believes the lesson of blocks is even more fundamental and powerful than exploring ideas of geometry, spatial relations, patterning and numbers. When kids play with blocks, they're beginning to build.

"The ability to construct has to do with our whole culture — where do we live, how do we make our homes," she says. "It's really the beginning of thinking about survival.

Kids have loved blocks for so long and so loyally, it's a bit of a surprise Hollywood has not attempted to cash in. Blocks: The Movie. Sounds like a blockbuster.

World War A (in which Isaac Newton is bonked on the head and still bravely figures out gravity)

World War B (spun off from a VH1 reality show)

World War C (in which two dudes hit each other with cellos for 2.5 hours)

World War D (part of The Great Report Card Skirmish Of 1998)

World War-E (in which a tiny robot rolls around and watches Hello Dolly and then smashes the doubloons out of everything in sight)

World War F (the [bleep]ing best war ever)

World War G (gorilla versus giraffes versus gerbils versus guinea pigs) (brutal)

World War H (sometimes, the war is silent)

World War I (often confused with World War I)

World War J (alternate title: World War Erving)

World War K (cereal warfare)

World War L (ends in Canarsie)

World War M (about the one thousandth world war)

World War N (directly follows World War N-1, followed by World War N+1)

World War O (Oprah's war)

World War P (when you lie on your side, it's just a war between people sticking their tongues out at each other)

World War Q (Almost always followed by World War U)

World War R (pirate war)

World War S (emphasizing that there are always many, many world wars)

World War T (the war between the shirts)

World War U (where we learn to party and chase monsters)

World War V (inside every warrior, there's a space lizard)

World War W (whatever)

World War X (the sexiest World War)

World War Y (the war for men only)

This week, Vice magazine unveiled a fashion spread featuring images based on famous female writers who killed themselves. To call it merely tasteless would be to understate how calculated it was, as well as how revolting it was — it literally created an image based on a real writer who really hanged herself with a pair of stockings, and then it told you where to buy the stockings.

And because it was awful, a lot of people wrote about how awful it was, and Vice eventually took it down from the online magazine while (of course) leaving it in the print edition, and they apologized, sort of, in that "sorry if you're mad about the fashion model we posed with a gun to her mouth" way that's so very common and dispiriting.

If I had to guess, I'd guess whoever thought of it will get a promotion.

Yesterday, my Twitter feed filled up with people who were horrified by the spread, but also with some folks arguing that it was the duty of all of us to ignore it and stop talking about it. The magazine, this thinking went, was obviously only doing it to make people angry, to attract the attention that comes with horror, to get eyeballs that showed up expecting to be disgusted and were not disappointed.

If I had to guess, I'd guess it's probably true. The magazine's semi-apology claiming that this all stems from their attempt to be editorial isn't remotely persuasive; nobody puts a gun in a model's mouth and doesn't know that's going to be a storm. You only do it if you want the storm. They wanted the storm, they got it, they probably counted the clicks and are perfectly happy.

This particular line of thought, the settle-down line, holds that when you know something is bait, when you know it's there to make you angry, you simply ignore it. You see a fashion spread, for instance, where women killing themselves is used as fashion and commerce and smarmy provocation, and you know that if you say anything, they win. So you say nothing. You stay quiet.

There are times when this approach has some appeal to me. When I see on Twitter that someone with an egg avatar and two followers has gotten a writer I know to spend ages arguing back and forth about nothing, there is part of me that thinks, "Why bother? The world is full of awfulness; you will never beat back all of it." We all ignore things all day long; if we didn't, we'd never get anything done.

But Vice asks for credibility. It's trying to position itself as a force in a kind of gonzo journalism for bros. They have a series on HBO. They don't have an egg avatar. They get — and want — attention for the things they do that are serious. This isn't scouring the Internet for obscure horrible people doing horrible things in tiny corners and exhausting yourself howling at the moon over it. This is seeing a powerful media brand selling degrading images of violence in an issue they're claiming is all about women in fiction.

It's insidious and frustrating, the idea that the more blatant an effort to offend for attention, the more the offended are to blame if they react. It imposes a sort of duty of measured inertness, as if you owe it to the greater good not to challenge something if the people who dumped it out into the world don't really believe in it but only want a reaction. It rewards anything you believe to be craven exploitation by suggesting that the more you believe it's just craven exploitation, the more you owe it to the world to sit silently, roll your eyes, and be quiet. It makes craven exploitation bulletproof.

It's insidious and frustrating, but (or maybe because) it's true. It's true, I suspect, that Vice probably got what they wanted from this when Jezebel wrote about it. It's true that we may all be following the intended script, including me. It's not that I don't get it; we all get it. And I can't speak for anybody else, but as a writer, I feel sort of bullied either way when things like this happen — bullied into responding as I know I'm expected to, or bullied into sitting quietly while somebody flicks me on the ear. Neither feels good; in fact, both feel awful.

But both feel awful because both are responses to something that feels awful already, which is seeing real and serious issues (I've seen it with race and sexuality and faith; in this case, it's the gross ways in which degradation, violence and fashion are mixed) exploited for attention. And that's still bad, even if it works.

When this happens, when I believe or half-believe that something is only there to make me angry, it feels less like simple click bait and more like taunting. What are you going to do about it? Go ahead. Get mad. You're only going to make it seem important.

Well, so be it. Perhaps there isn't a good way to call out quests for attention without rewarding them in the short term. But in the long term, this spread still happened, and Vice will always be the magazine that published it. And I will always be a writer who predictably wrote about how gross it was. I suppose we'll both have to live with it.

NPR has obtained [or invented, whatever] an excerpt of the draft script for Zack Snyder's much-rumored sequel to the hugely successful Man Of Steel. The script, which was found in a booth at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on La Cienega, suggests that the distinctive tone set by Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy and adopted by Snyder's Man Of Steel will continue to inform the expanding cinematic universe of DC Comics characters.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE MOVIE

Screenplay by David S. Goyer

Produced by Christopher Nolan

Directed by Zack Snyder

INT. HALL OF JUSTICE - DAY.

A large central table occupies most of the room, surrounded by large red chairs adorned with the insignia of various heroes.

SUPERMAN enters.

SUPERMAN (grimly): .... I wanted to save them. I wanted to save all of them.

I had to try. Because that is what I do. It's ... it's who I am.

BATMAN, WONDER WOMAN enter. BATMAN glares at SUPERMAN. WONDER WOMAN looks on.

BATMAN (grimly): I ... am the soul of Gotham.

SUPERMAN (grimly): I ... made coffee. We're out of regular. There was only hazelnut.

WONDER WOMAN (grimly): I ... am a Warrior for Peace. Also, hazelnut ... is gross.

SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN fight. WONDER WOMAN punches SUPERMAN through skylight.

CUT TO:

INT. CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM - DAY.

Chaos. Throngs of injured children lay strewn around the waiting room on stretchers, daybeds. A harried ADMITTING NURSE speaks to a bandaged mother cradling her wailing baby.

ADMITTING NURSE (grimly): I'm sorry, there's no more room. We're three to a bed already.

Just from that brawl in Metropolis. So many innocent, injured, tiny children.

We can't –

SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN crash through the ceiling, which crumbles. Screams. Blood. Silence. Standing unhurt atop the rubble, SUPERMAN punches WONDER WOMAN, sending her flying out of frame.

CUT TO:

INT. SAINT SEBASTIAN'S HOME FOR DIABETIC PUPPIES – DAY.

Hundreds of adorable puppies romp and play and submit themselves bravely to insulin shots caringly administered by teams of smiling attendants.

CLOSE ON the TINIEST AND MOST ADORABLE PUPPY, who tilts his head inquisitively, at a distant noise.

TINIEST AND MOST ADORABLE PUPPY (grimly):

.... Wurf?

SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN crash through the rear wall, which causes the ceiling to crumble. Screams. Blood. Silence. Standing unhurt atop the rubble, WONDER WOMAN punches SUPERMAN, sending him flying out of frame.

CUT TO:

INT. HALL OF JUSTICE – DAY.

BATMAN has been joined by THE FLASH, AQUAMAN, GREEN LANTERN, and GREEN ARROW. The five men sit at the central table and stare at one another grimly, as the burden of their powers weighs heavily upon them.

THE FLASH (grimly): I ... cannot run from the past.

AQUAMAN (grimly): I ... am an outsider in a world that mocks that which sets me apart.

GREEN LANTERN (grimly): I know what it is to be afraid of being afraid.

GREEN ARROW (grimly): I ... what?

GREEN LANTERN (grimly): I said, "I know what it is to be afraid of being afraid."

TROUBLALERT (V.O.) (grimly): Justice League Alert. Mass casualties reported downtown.

GREEN ARROW (grimly): What does "afraid of being afraid" mean?

TROUBLALERT (V.O.) (grimly): Hundreds ... correction: Thousands missing and presumed dead.

Path of destruction heading towards eldercare facilities.

GREEN LANTERN (grimly): I dunno. I just felt the need to explicitly state my organizing principle.

GREEN ARROW (grimly): No, yeah, I get that. We all feel that. I just didn't understand yours.

GREEN LANTERN (grimly): ... No one ... understands.

CUT TO:

INT. SUNRISE MANOR HOME FOR WISE OLD FOLKS WHO REMAIN SPRY AND STILL HAVE MUCH WISDOM TO IMPART AND HAVE YEARS OF FULL RICH HEALTHY LIFE TO GO GO GO! – DAY

A bright, sun-dappled dayroom where hale and hearty elderly folks smile and laugh and play pattycake with visiting grandchildren. A KINDLY OLD MAN WHO IS, LIKE, A RETIRED NEUROSURGEON PROBABLY? looks out the bay window, concerned.

KINDLY OLD MAN WHO IS, LIKE, A RETIRED NEUROSURGEON PROBABLY? (grimly): What's that? That speck in the sky?

[EXCERPT ENDS]

Once upon a time, it was MySpace. (Huh. Turns out you can still link to it.) Then Facebook happened. And Twitter. And beyond those two dominant social-media platforms, there are a host of other, newer options for staying in touch and letting the digital universe get a look at your life. And for certain kinds of sharing, some of those other options make more sense to tech-savvy teens than the Big Two do.

On today's All Things Considered, NPR's Sami Yenigun talks to a roomful of teenagers to see who uses which for what these days. (The answer, like most involving tech or teens, is subject to change like the weather.)

Some takeaways:

Facebook is for finding old friends, and maybe for arranging parties. (Unless they're the kind of parties you don't want the police knowing about. "Oftentimes, parties that are all over social media get busted by the cops really easily," one 17-year-old tells Sami.)

Twitter is more for personal expression. "People be in their feelings on Twitter — they vent," says Jamal Royster, 18.

Visual communication? It's a different mode of connection. And as with text-based platforms, use cases vary among the teens Sami talked to.

Vine is where you publish (and watch) short video clips — seven seconds or so. People make all kinds of clever short films with the app. Check out Waka Flocka Elmo, a recent viral hit recommended by 17-year-old Jesse Aniebonam.

Instagram, a relative veteran in the pics-and-flicks category, is the go-to app when it comes to documenting your days and nights. "I Instagram everything," says Grace Plihal, 18. "It's kind of my way of showing myself to the world, I guess."

(Interesting, that, given how much control Instagram gives users over the look and feel of what they post. "Showing myself" is a telling way to put it.)

But the observation that struck me most, when Sami told me about the shape of his story, was this one, from 13-year-old Caroline Lamb. There are times when you want to take a back seat to the story you're telling, she suggests — and those are the times for Tumblr.

Here's how she puts it in her own words:

Oh, one last entry: Snapchat is for selfies you don't want to show up later — like when a college admissions counselor goes Googling for you. Users send snapshots back and forth using a proprietary app.

What makes 'em different from the photos in the MMS messages you can send using most phones' built-in text-messaging programs? Well, you can set Snapchat images to self-destruct: They disappear at most 10 seconds after the recipient views them.

So, Snapchat? It's a near certainty that you don't want to know what the teenagers in your life are doing with it.

Look, Miss Utah USA, Marissa Powell, gave a pretty unimpressive answer to a question about income inequality at the Miss USA pageant. Let's all agree on that.

But what, exactly, did the circumstances call for?

She was asked — by NeNe Leakes, who first became famous on The Real Housewives Of Atlanta before warring with Star Jones on The Celebrity Apprentice and is therefore exactly the person to whom we would entrust interrogations on major policy issues — the following question: "A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?"

Not to put too fine a point on it, what kind of a simultaneously (1) dumb and (2) impossible to answer question is that? First of all, it's three questions rolled into one — what does it say that in 40 percent of homes, women are the primary earners, or what does it say that women earn less than men, or what does it say that we allow these two facts to coexist?

Second of all, "What does this say about society?" Really? Not "What kinds of help do families need to make ends meet?" or something with at least some policy meat on the bones, but "What does this say about society?" Asked by NeNe Leakes? While you're standing next to Giuliana Rancic, whose other job involves making people walk their fingernails down a tiny, hand-sized red carpet? What would have been a good answer to this question that could have been delivered in the time frame she had?

I think about this kind of stuff a lot. I've studied it. I've had about 20 years longer than Miss Utah USA to think about it. I have no idea what I would have said if someone had asked me such a moronic question on live television.

This isn't the kind of question that actually tests what you know; it's basically a test of your ability to generate cow patties on command. Have you ever seen the part of Miss Congeniality where they all say "world peace" and receive polite applause? The entire reason it's funny when Sandra Bullock says, "That would be harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan," is that she's not supposed to say anything substantive based on her experience. She's supposed to say "world peace."

These dumb questions aren't intended to actually see whether you're smart or not. Miss Utah USA might be smart and she might not be, but the last thing I'd use to guess at whether she's smart is whether she can answer this kind of question "correctly." Because "correctly" here just means smoothly, expertly, without hesitation or stammering. Had she said, "What it says is that we live in the greatest country in the world, and every day I get up and thank my lucky stars that I live in the United States of America," she would not be in the news, despite having given just as irrelevant a non-answer. Had she said, "What it says is that family is the most important thing in the world, and we need to figure out how to help all families be happy families because it's the most important thing in the world," she would not be in the news.

And none of this has to do with whether beautiful women or pageant contestants can be smart or are smart. Some are! Some are not! Welcome to the broad sweep of humanity.

She's not in the news for being dumb; she's in the news for being bad at spontaneous but convincing balderdash manufacturing, and because it's fun to watch a carefully orchestrated spectacle crash on the rocks. She's not a dumb person; she's bad at public speaking. And if she were good at it, nobody would have ever heard of her.

Last Thursday, the NFL announced a policy change in which only clear plastic bags would be allowed into stadiums — one per person. Nothing they can't see through. The league says that the change is meant to ensure safety while speeding up security checks and preventing gate backups, which sounds good enough at the outset.

In the handful of days since, this has largely been framed as an issue affecting women, who won't be allowed to bring purses into the stadium anymore. Others have noted in online discussions that it might make it easier for stadiums to spot contraband food and booze, thus protecting one of the major revenue streams inside the facility.

And, of course, quite predictably, the NFL announced it would be selling official team-branded clear tote bags of exactly the kind and size that will pass under the policy. Handy! (Do they come in pink?)

No camera bags, no seat cushions, fanny packs ... you get the idea.

It's interesting that the league has chosen this moment to crack down considerably on fans. As we've discussed in this space before, it's harder and harder for normal humans to even afford to attend NFL games. (If you care about this and still haven't watched the documentary America's Parking Lot, it's available on demand and I do highly recommend it.) It doesn't necessarily seem like creating echoes of airport security is likely to make people particularly enthusiastic, even fans who understand that everyone wants games to be safe.

We have a curious drive to make ourselves completely secure in large crowds, despite the fact that it's awfully difficult to do. Within a secure perimeter (like a stadium), searches and checks of various kinds might make people feel safer, but something like an NFL game already presents tremendous opportunities for mischief if anyone was so inclined. And there are some situations like diaper bags that would indeed seem to present challenges.

But on the question of purses specifically, it seems rather quaint to suggest that women have substantially different needs to privately transport flotsam and jetsam into a football game (or in any other public space they'll be in for a limited time) than men do. Women have raised the issue of feminine-specific products they might wish to carry with them, but the fact that small, hand-sized clutch bags are OK seems like it might take care of that part, given that football games last a few hours, not a week. And even if not, it might be socially advantageous to get past the idea that there is something untoward about a woman between 15 and 50 being seen with a product used perhaps 20 percent of the time by most women between 15 and 50. (Pardon me, you can come back now if you fainted right there.)

What many of us carry in our bags on a day-to-day basis — a wallet, a brush, a tiny hairspray, some crumpled receipts, somebody's business card, half a roll of Life Savers, some gum, an umbrella, an extra pair of shoes, a shopping list, a paperback book (this is just my bag, understand) — we could certainly either leave at home or carry in a plastic bag. I'm not sure the need for women to retain a large and mysterious purse is about need as much as it is about not wanting anybody to see that there's half a wrapped-up granola bar in one of the pockets and some earbuds we can't figure out how to untangle in another one.

However you feel about security checks and safety and the ability of clear plastic bags to make you safer, we're probably all equally entitled to drag stuff we don't need all over the place because we don't want to throw it out before we leave home. USA! USA!

(h/t Metafilter)

Count plenty of grown-ups among the millions of fans of Adventure Time, a kids' show on Cartoon Network. Some are surely Emmy voters. (It's won three.) Others are very possibly stoners. Still others are intellectuals. Lev Grossman falls in the last category. He wrote two best-selling novels, The Magicians and The Magician King, and he's Time's senior book critic.

Grossman's critique of Adventure Time? "It's soooo smart! It's sooo intelligent!"

Hang on. He's just getting started.

"I am a little bit obsessed with it," Grossman continues. "It's rich and complicated the way Balzac's work is, which is a funny thing to say about a cartoon."

For the uninitiated, Adventure Time is set in a surreally pastel post-apocalyptic kingdom crawling with mutated candy creatures, bizarre princesses — think Slime Princess and Lumpy Space Princess — and our two heroes. They're Finn and Jake, a gangly human boy and his moon-eyed yellow dog.

The show's creator, Pendleton Ward, modeled Jake partly after Bill Murray's sardonic camp counselor in the 1979 movie Meatballs, a cooler-than-cool older-brother figure who can laugh at his charges without being mean and whose teachable moments are anything but cloying.

"Jake sees his own death in one episode," says Ward. "And Finn has to deal with that. Jake's a hip guy. He can watch his own death, and he's comfortable with it, and that's a weird thing, especially for Finn, who's superyoung, and it's really hard on him."

In the episode, called "New Frontier," Jake experiences a vision during which he's taken to an afterlife of stars and darkness by a little bananalike creature (voiced by Weird Al Yankovic).

"When I die, I'm gonna be all around you," Jake reassures Finn. "In your nose. And your dreams. And socks! I'll be a part of you in your earth mind. It's gonna be great!"

"That episode was really tough to tackle, writing it for a children's television show," Ward remembers. "It was hard for us to really not make it so sad and scary that you feel really sad and scared watching it."

Adventure Time insists on emotional honesty — even in its bad guys, usually depicted as cardboard villains in kids' cartoons.

Grossman offers the shrill, socially maladapted Earl of Lemongrab as an example. An unlikable character, his story is movingly explored and raises questions nearly every kid has wondered about: Why do I seem weird to other people? Why do I seem weird to myself?

Or take the buffoonish, bandy-legged and morally compromised Ice King. "[He's] psychologically plausible," Grossman observes. "He's an old lecherous man who has a magical crown. It's made him into this strange, awful individual who goes around capturing princesses."

The king's crown wiped his mind and warped his body. He'll die if he takes it off.

"Which is this rather moving tension, and he doesn't remember who he used to be, but other people do," Grossman says. "It's very affecting. My dad has been going through having Alzheimer's, and he's forgotten so much about who he used to be. And I look at him and think this cartoon is about my father dying."

In spite of the critical admiration, the warm feelings of fans and the prestigious awards, Adventure Time nearly never aired. "It actually felt like a great risk," says Rob Sorcher, the Cartoon Network's chief content officer. "It's not slick. It doesn't feel manufactured for kids, so who's it for?"

Um, perhaps partly for the kind of grown-up who might watch Yo Gabba Gabba with a little chemical assist?

"For me, it doesn't come from that place," says Ward. "For me, it comes from my childhood, wandering in my mind. You can't really go anywhere when you're a kid. I don't have a car, I don't have anything. I just have my backyard and my brain. And that's where I'm coming from when I'm writing it." He pauses. "I can't speak for all the writers on the show."

Ward and his mother used to watch cartoons together when he was a kid, but he claims today he's not writing specifically for a co-viewing audience of parents and kids. Still, author Grossman says Adventure Time works for him and his 8-year-old daughter, Lily, equally.

"It's really important for us to have something we can enjoy together and talk about together. It gives us in some ways a common language for talking about more important issues," he says.

Adventure Time's world used to be our world. Then it was destroyed by a war. It's strewn with detritus such as old computers, VHS tapes and video games from the 1980s.

"It takes my childhood, the shattered pieces of it, and builds it into something new, which is now part of Lily's childhood," he says, almost in wonder.

We taped this week's podcast while still giddy from the effects of the very fine Tony Awards broadcast, so we begin by sharing some thoughts about that killer opening number, some of the other musical happenings, our feelings on Pippin, Phantom and other theater pieces, and whether we are suffering from, as Glen puts it, "Doogie Fatigue."

And then we open up a discussion about what we term the "he said/she said" song, which encompasses breakup songs, never-ever songs, songs of longing, and perhaps a little bit of tormented whispering. It also brings you to a mind-meld between Trey and Stephen that might just make you cheer. There is a lot of music here, and it's all great (and, because of Stephen, sometimes very depressing). We'll come up with a Spotify playlist once you've had a chance to contribute your suggestions as well.

And as always, we close with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a little project he'll explain, with which he needs your help. I am happy about this, obviously. Trey is happy about this, this, and this. And Glen is happy about this.

Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Glen, Trey, producer Jess, and esteemed producer emeritus and music director, Mike Katzif.

I live in the D.C. metro area, which is a very good place to find films. If you don't live in New York or Los Angeles, it's about the best you can do. I'm within 10 miles of a multiplicity of multiplexes, not to mention four theaters I would consider "art house" theaters or at least mixes of wider-appeal fare and smaller stuff.

According to Fandango and some back-of-the-envelope math, excluding documentaries and animation, there are 617 movie showings today — that's just today, Friday — within 10 miles of my house.

Of those 617 showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men. The movies making up those 561 showings: Man Of Steel (143), This Is The End (77), The Internship (52), The Purge (49), After Earth (29), Now You See Me (56), Fast & Furious 6 (44), The Hangover Part III (16), Star Trek Into Darkness (34), The Great Gatsby (16), Iron Man 3 (18), Mud (9), The Company You Keep (4), Kings Of Summer (9), and 42 (5).

Thirty-one are showings of movies about balanced pairings or ensembles of men and women: Before Midnight (26), Shadow Dancer (4), and Wish You Were Here (1).

Twenty-five are showings of movies about women or girls: The East (8), Fill The Void (4), Frances Ha (9), and What Maisie Knew (4).

Of the seven movies about women or balanced groups, only one — the Israeli film Fill The Void — is directed by a woman, Rama Burshtein. That's also the only one that isn't about a well-off white American. (Well, Celine in Before Midnight is well-off, white and French, but she's been living in the U.S.)

There are nearly six times as many showings of Man Of Steel alone as there are of all the films about women put together.

If I were limited to multiplexes, as people are in many parts of the country, the numbers would be worse. In many places, the number would be zero. Frances Ha is by far the most widely available of the four women-centered movies, and it's at 213 theaters this weekend in the entire country. The East is at 115. What Maisie Knew is at 51. Fill The Void looks like it's in about 20 locations, judging by its site.

The Internship is at 3,399.*

[*Note: I originally had understood these to be screen counts; they're actually theater counts. Not a huge difference with non-blockbusters less likely to play on multiple screens at the same place, and if anything, makes the possible disparity with something like The Internship greater, but it's different nonetheless. This doesn't affect the numbers for my own local theaters, though — those are just individual showtimes counted by hand.]

I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon — you can't. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.

There are not any.

By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that's at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (at 891 theaters) so I hope you like it. Because it's pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

Somebody asked me this morning what "the women" are going to do about this. I don't know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by "we," I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says "win some, lose some" and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every "surprise success" about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.

Nobody remembers, it seems, how many people said Bridesmaids would fail. And it didn't! But it didn't matter.

My answer is that I have no idea what the women are going to do about it. It helps when critics, including men, care about the way women artists are treated and make it their problem to share, as Sam Adams did yesterday in a terrific piece about Sofia Coppola. It helps when people go out of their way to see any kind of film that's about people other than themselves. It helps when we acknowledge that what we have right now is a Hollywood entertainment business that has pretty much entirely devoted itself to telling men's stories — and to the degree that's for business reasons, it's because they've gotten the impression we've devoted ourselves to listening to men's stories.

But for crying out loud, let's at least notice. When it's 90 percent here, it's much worse elsewhere.

Well, here it is: the trailer for the next Hobbit movie in the series of three Hobbit movies that will be made out of a single medium-length book.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug doesn't come out until December, but you can already delve into the dragons and mountains and birds (oh my).

So what do you think? Are you excited? Could you have gotten this done in two movies? Or one?

Parents steer their kids to media for all kinds of things: as a distraction so they can make dinner, to teach letters and numbers, and for pure entertainment. There are also times when parents rely on books, TV, museums and other media when they aren't quite sure how to approach a difficult topic by themselves.

Linda Ellerbee is the queen of hard subjects. Domestic abuse, Sept. 11, alcoholism and living with HIV are among the many tough issues she's covered in the 22 years since she's hosted NickNews on Nickelodeon. The show is written for 9- to 13-year-olds, and Ellerbee says her one rule of thumb is don't dumb it down.

"Our viewers are smart people," she says. "They are merely younger, less experienced and shorter." They also possess a more limited vocabulary, but Ellerbee she still uses words they might not know, like "intervention" or "hijacking."

"If I'm going to use a word that I think a 10-year-old might not understand," she says, "I either explain what the word means or use it in such a way that it's absolutely clear what the word means. I don't change the word."

NickNews is also known for letting kids do the talking: Children who've experienced all kinds of difficulties go on air to explain what their lives are like and how they're coping. Ellerbee says it's an effective way to explain a hard subject to young people. But, she cautions, don't do it too soon.

"That's why we haven't gone to Newtown yet to do a show with those kids or, you know, about what happened," she says. "It's about timing. You need to sort of let some things settle."

For the producers of Glee, meanwhile, the right time was four months after Newtown. Last April, the Fox series did an episode in which the high school goes on lockdown when a student's gun goes off. Some Newtown, Conn., residents urged people in the community to boycott the show.

Psychologist Jennifer Powell-Lunder says the dangers of that Glee episode vary depending of who's watching it. "It is not a good show for kids who've been through such a trauma to be viewing," she says. "And it's very simple: Because it's too close to home, it retraumatizes them."

For teenagers who haven't experienced a similar tragedy, Powell-Lunder says, the episode was well done. "Really, the way the adolescent brain works is such that bad things happen to other people," she says. "So what I think it did is strike empathy and understanding amongst that age group and amongst all of us about the fear and the terror of the unknown."

The Right Book For Rough Subjects

In the late 1980s psychologist Jerome Singer warned, "Television is like having a stranger in the house." Most parents wouldn't want their children learning about the dangers of the world from a stranger, and that includes TV, he said when he was at Yale. At the same time, some parents need help starting the conversation. For young children, the right book can help, especially since reading together naturally lends itself to conversation.

Case in point: The picture book When Leonard Lost His Spots: A Trans Parent Tail by Monique Costa addresses an issue you rarely find in children's literature — transgender. With playful rhymes and Disney-like illustrations, a tiger cub tells how he feels about his father becoming a female:

"I didn't know how to react.
Or even what to say.
I pretended not to notice him.
I wish he'd go away."

The cub feels shame, anger and fear. That openness is something publishers Cheril Clarke and Monica Bey-Clarke were drawn to. Their company, My Family!, focuses on children's books about nontraditional families. "It doesn't shy away from the fact that [the] cub is struggling inside," Clarke says. "It's a very honest story from a child's point of view."

But if a book for small children is too depressing, some adults just won't buy it. When Sue Glader was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went looking for books to read to her nieces and nephews. "I saw a lot of things that were really very sad and very scary or supertechnical for a young child," she says. So when she was going through chemotherapy, she wrote the book Nowhere Hair:

"A sparrow might have borrowed it to warm her fancy nest.
Perhaps she stuffed a pillow to help grandma get some rest.
The day I asked her where it went
She had a simple answer
'I'm bald because of medicine
I take to cure my cancer."

Glader's advice for talking to kids about hard subjects is be "silly ... in the right places."

Sculpting And Touching Tragedy

As hard as it might be to talk to a child about cancer, it's still a relatively concrete and present subject. Talking about difficult issues in the news is a different challenge. When it's the so-called "crime of crimes," many adults would rather not think about it at all, let alone talk about it with kids.

Artist and activist Naomi Natale is trying to get young people, as well as grown-ups, to understand genocide with a project called One Million Bones.

Pre-K through 12th-grade students at several hundred schools around the country have been sculpting human bones out of clay for a mass grave to be displayed on the National Mall to honor the victims of genocide.

At Georgetown Day Middle School in Washington, D.C., 12-year-old Cole Wright-Schaner made a spine. "It was kind of disturbing to make it, thinking of all the people that have died in the African countries," he says. "It really opened my eyes to genocide and what's going on in the world. We live in such a safe country."

Natale says the simple, physical process of making a bone is what makes genocide personal. "If you can think about the bone that's in your hand, and that you're using your hands to craft another bone, you know — representative of our lives and evidence we existed," she says.

And young people can comprehend a difficult subject better by seeing it or touching it. At the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, they get to do both.

Joanne Martin founded the museum with her late husband, Elmer Martin. They assembled an exhibition on slavery that is both extraordinary and grim: The museum has actual slave chains and shackles that visitors can hold. The weight alone drives home the brutality of slavery.

There's also a replica of a slave ship. Narrow, creaky steps take visitors down below. It's dark and there are life-sized statues of men, women and children with chains and shackles around their legs and their necks.

On a recent trip to the museum, fifth-grade teacher Damien Samuels said his students from KIPP Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., were "significantly affected" by the slave ship. He says teaching the complete story of slavery is challenging. It's easy to find stories about escaping slavery and abolitionists but most media skirt the really difficult parts.

"Even the textbooks shy away from certain images," Samuels says. "I think this museum does a very good job at showing the graphic details. So I think this is a very, very good opportunity for [the students] to really, really appreciate what their ancestors have been through."

The Great Blacks in Wax Museum also includes many stories that celebrate African-Americans' achievements over the decades, from civil rights to space exploration to the White House. Leaving young people with a sense of hope is important whenever media tackle hard subjects, says Nickelodeon's Linda Ellerbee.

"Wherever bad things happen, you always find good people trying to make it better," she says. "And there are more good people than there are bad people."

Well, this is news.

MTV, VH1, and CMT sent out a press release this morning announcing that on July 4^th, which they're calling "Music Independence Day" (!) (!!), they will "dedicate their channels exclusively to music."

ALL DAY LONG. If by "all day long," you mean "from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern and Pacific." (Hey, what's a day, right? 12 hours, 24 hours, these are semantics.)

You might think that MTV, VH1, and CMT would not need a special declaration to devote a 12-hour block to music, but you would be wrong. IT'S MUSIC INDEPENDENCE DAY, WOOOOO! The way for artists to get in on it, it turns out, is to sign up on the Artist Platform. You might think the Artist Platform would be where a band is raised above a screaming crowd to fight Labelzilla, but in fact, the Artist Platform is an MTV/VH1/CMT portal for artists to have their own pages, sell stuff to fans, and even get a chunk of the ad revenue. And some early returns suggest that it's doing at least some good for some bands.

So all you have to do to get in on this whole 12-continuous-whole-entire-hours-of-music extravaganza is sign your band up with MTV's effort to become the new online social home of bands and artists. (At the time Artist Platform was announced in August 2012, they explicitly stated it was meant to replace the success MySpace had for a long time in providing social support for musicians.) In return, people will be able to communicate with your band online (where else can they do that, after all?) or leave you a "tip."

They'll spend those 12 hours introducing folks to the bands from Artist Portal who are lucky enough to make the cut, as well as serving up plenty of existing superstars, both through their own music and through other artists they love.

The level of irony in calling it "Music Independence Day" when you're supposed to get to your fans through the gritty upstart known as Viacom is rather breathtaking, but hey – if you've been complaining that MTV isn't about music anymore, you're about to get your way for 12 continuous, delicious, synergy-creating hours.

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you'll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren't assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.

At Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., the 11th-grade honors English students are reading The Kite Runner. And students like Megan Bell are reading some heavy-duty books in their spare time. "I like a lot of like old-fashioned historical dramas," Bell says. "Like I just read Anna Karenina ... I plowed through it, and it was a really good book."

But most teens are not forging their way through Russian literature, says Walter Dean Myers, who is currently serving as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. A popular author of young-adult novels that are often set in the inner city, Myers wants his readers to see themselves in his books. But sometimes, he's surprised by his own fan mail.

"I'm glad they wrote," he says, "but it is not very heartening to see what they are reading as juniors and seniors." Asked what exactly is discouraging, Myers says that these juniors and seniors are reading books that he wrote with fifth- and sixth-graders in mind.

And a lot of the kids who like to read in their spare time are more likely to be reading the latest vampire novel than the classics, says Anita Silvey, author of 500 Great Books for Teens. Silvey teaches graduate students in a children's literature program, and at the beginning of the class, she asked her students — who grew up in the age of Harry Potter — about the books they like.

"Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' "

Those anecdotal observations are reflected in a study of kids' reading habits by Renaissance Learning. For the fifth year in a row, the educational company used its Accelerated Reader program to track what kids are reading in grades one through 12.

"Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning. Students participate in the Accelerated Reader program through their schools. When they read a book, they take a brief comprehension quiz, and the book is then recorded in the system. The books are assigned a grade level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity.

And Stickney says that after the late part of middle school, students generally don't continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.

Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.

Last year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were being assigned to high school students. "The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read," Stickney says, "has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level."

Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.

Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list.

Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, at a 10th-grade English class — regular, not honors — students say they don't read much outside of school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own. "I read The Odyssey, Tyler says. "I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read Hamlet. Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. "It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.

Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. "That's why we have great teachers that actually make us understand," he says. "It's a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it's a challenge."

But a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. "It gives us a new view on things."

Sandra Stotsky would be heartened to hear that. Professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they'll do in college. "You wouldn't find words like 'malevolent,' 'malicious' or 'incorrigible' in science or history materials," she says, stressing the importance of literature. Stotsky says in the '60s and '70s, schools began introducing more accessible books in order to motivate kids to read. That trend has continued, and the result is that kids get stuck at a low level of reading.

"Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more," she says. "You've got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You've got to do a lot more reading altogether."

"There's something wonderful about the language, the thinking, the intelligence of the classics," says Anita Silvey. She acknowledges that schools and parents may need to work a little harder to get kids to read the classics these days, but that doesn't mean kids shouldn't continue to read the popular contemporary novels they love. Both have value: "There's an emotional, psychological attraction to books for readers. And I think some of, particularly, these dark, dystopic novels that predict a future where in fact the teenager is going to have to find the answers, I think these are very compelling reads for these young people right now."

Reading leads to reading, says Silvey. It's when kids stop reading, or never get started in the first place, that there's no chance of ever getting them hooked on more complex books.

If you woke up this morning thinking, "I really need to hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer say the words 'noisily unwrapping her Twizzlers,'" have I got good news for you.

Margot Adler had a story on today's Morning Edition about Broadway audiences and whether they're getting ruder, given recent incidents involving the aforementioned Twizzlers, rude texting, talking and other interruptions. She went to the TKTS line (where you wait for discount Broadway tickets) and asked some of the folks what they thought.

Some offered the usual explanations — say, that we're all used to sitting in our living rooms watching alone, and we don't remember what it's like to use our polite-company manners anymore. One speculated that as theater has gotten more casual (less dressy, drinks allowed), people's behavior has lost its polite formality.

Jan Simpson, the writer of one blog about Broadway, actually calls herself "old-fashioned" for wanting people to sit quietly while watching a show, which I can tell you caused the writer of one blog about popular culture to clutch her metaphorical pearls in horror at the thought that there's something modern about being a disruptive buffoon. Adler acknowledges that in fact, "in Shakespeare's time, they threw food on the stage." Of course, in Shakespeare's time, they died of various things we've cured, so let's not embrace that too eagerly.

What emerges is partly a generational issue setting younger audiences who want to tweet about the show while it's happening (mon dieu!) against older, perhaps more experienced audiences who take a less consumer-oriented and more art-patron-oriented approach to attendance. But surely, a person of any age is capable of doing without Twitter for a couple of hours. I can do without Twitter for a couple of hours, for example, and I've been known to tweet about people clipping their nails on the Metro.

It's a good thing, indeed, to avoid taking theater and making it a cloistered place for elites only (not that ticket prices don't get you a good part of the way there). But it's also a good thing to avoid giving free passes out of Rudeness Jail for everyone who simply prefers not to iron anything except cargo shorts.

OK, OK, I don't really care if you wear cargo shorts. But the pockets should not be stuffed with things that beep, smoke, smell like garlic or tempt you to whisper.

Deal?