While I was home this weekend, I did one of my regular dives into the bookshelves of my youth and surfaced with Madeline L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. Vicky Austin seems very young to me now, and the book short-shrifts teenage sexual desire, I think. But it’s still remarkable how much L’Engle expects of her target readers: the book is full of complex discussions of science, theology, and morality, hinges significantly on challenging poetry, and is full of references to different poetic forms. Some of these are details that young readers could gloss over, of course—it’s not actually significantly important to the novel that readers fully understand the kinds of poems Vicky considers when she sits down to right. But the book feels richer if you do.

I think it’s striking to me, because some of the megaseries aimed at young people of recent years have asked quite a bit less. The Harry Potter universe contains all kinds of delightful in-jokes and references for people in the know, but it hinges on rather simple understandings of good, evil, and familial love, both sealed by blood and by choice. There’s a sense in which it operates like most animated movies do today, keeping audiences engaged and entertained on different levels. I think one of the reasons the Twilight books, apart from the thing that vexed me about them, didn’t feel very interesting is that while Bella’s supposed to be super-smart, she’s not actually reading anything particularly sophisticated, or performing at a particularly high level in her school. The books would have been better if they’d surrounded Bella with more complex ideas and had her engage with more complex literature, because she would have seemed more plausibly special and sophisticated.

In a way, A Ring of Endless Light is kind of the book I wish Twilight had been. Vicky thinks she’s less pretty than her sister, but she still ends up with three men competing for her affections. She’s got dolphin-triggered ESP, which is a lot more useful than super-tasty-smelling blood. She’s got an attachment to her family that isn’t easily discarded in favor of something more glamorous, and gives back as much to everyone in her life at least as much as she receives. In other words, she’s a worthy object of that competition in her own right, grappling with the world instead of being desperate to escape it, or transcend it.

I didn’t watch the show, since I was out at dinner with friends, but I am completely thrilled that Claire Danes won an Emmy for her performance as Temple Grandin. The role is in some ways a conventional biopic: character overcomes struggles, emerges triumphant. But it’s a strikingly original movie about a strikingly original woman. Visually, the movie works hard to show us the world through Grandin’s eyes, and to make clear how differently she sees and experiences things, and that we’re not merely being asked to sympathize with a loner, or someone who is misunderstood—we’re being asked to surrender the way we see and feel the universe around us. That’s a significant demand for a piece of art. And for all of Grandin’s triumphs, the movie is absent the kind of personal developmental signposts that we’ve been trained to look for. There is not a love story here, and the triumph involves something most of us will not experience directly, the improvement of industrial agriculture. Temple Grandin is without question one of the movies I’ve enjoyed most this year, and I’m glad to see Danes’ excellent work it in recognized on a night when Emmy voters made so many other deeply conventional choices.

I wrote about an aspect of Sookie Stackhouse that I think Charlaine Harris handles particularly well, the fact that the character is self-educated, a rarity in popular fiction.

Why doesn’t the notion that vampires are really kind of horrifying and scary stick? We’re in a period where vampires are cuddlier than ever; I was at drinks with someone this week who literally started banging on the table in vexation over the cuetification of bloodsuckers in Twilight. We’ve got chaste hunks in that series, decidedly unchaste vampire hunks in True Blood. We had redeemable individual vamps in Buffy and Angel. And yet what I think is notable is that during the time all of these interpretations have become so popular, we’ve had plenty of depictions of vampires that make them seem creepy as all hell. The Blade movies, anyone, where the vampires looked good and behaved badly? 30 Days of Night and Daybreakers, which erred on the zombie-vamp hybrid interpretation side of things? And we’ve got the remake Let Me In and the film adaptation of The Passage coming up, both of which are popular interpretations of the vampire myth that stay on the ugly-and-terrifying side of the debate, too—The Passage in particular presents vampires as zombie-like entities that operate in some ways like a hive mind.

And yet I feel those individual works will be successful, compelling, and still totally unsuccessful in ending our romantic fascination with vampires. I understand the popularity of the idea of some entity that is glamorous, and exceedingly dangerous, but makes an exception for a character that’s an avatar of us. And I get the death wish thing, too. But I also wonder if we like to believe that dangerousness can be beautiful because we like the idea that death, if it has to come for us in a violent and unexpected way, might come in a glamorous and sexual package so at least we feel good on the way out. I think it’s possible that vampirism is less an expression of suicidal ideation, and more of a compromise with our fears about things that go bump in the night. We love beautiful vampires, because the ugly ones are a bit too true to life.

Reading this profile of Katy Perry, I had a moment of regret that her faith doesn’t actually play a more prominent role in her public presentation and music. One of the things I find vexing about coverage of evangelical Christianity is that it consistently expresses shock that individual observant Christians can also be thoughtful and witty about sex and sexual presentation in ways that don’t involve extreme moralism about sexual expression and sexual contact outside of marriage. It’s a silly, and not exceptionally thoughtful stereotype to assume that evangelical Christians are inherently, and necessarily, prudes.

I think one of the reasons Perry’s presentation has been so commercially successful is that she gets at the fact that trying to come across as a bombshell is an inherently slightly silly enterprise. Unlike Dita Von Teese, who is an actual, honest-to-God pinup, Katy Perry is playing one, pretending just as much as the Vanity Fair Vanities Girls are. As annoying and as disrespectful to gay people as “I Kissed A Girl” is, the sentiment “just wanna try you on” in one of the lyrics speaks to some genuine, and I think not necessarily condemnable, sexual curiosity. There’s no reason that being an evangelical Christian, which Perry seems to be, precludes you from that kind of curiosity or play, and though I think most thinking, reasonable people both inside that faith and outside it understand that, I think it’s easy to forget. I’d like to see Perry drawing out the contradictions she lives in more, because they’re interesting, and useful to talk about, and I think it would be useful for people, whether they come from any faith or none at all, to recognize that the beliefs of people who adhere to any one set of practices come in a spectrum, and one that’s consistently expanding and contracting.

So, I was rewatching Star Trek over the weekend, and it struck me for the first time what an incredibly sarcastic movie it is. In an era dominated by snark, a style of commentary that involves the same kinds of take-downs as sarcasm, but with much less emotional investment, it’s actually a bit odd to see a movie so full of biting sarcasm, drawn from a well of deep engagement. From the angry “live long and prosper,” the young Spock bites off at the Vulcan Science Academy admissions panel that’s just dismissed his human heritage, to the “enlighten me,” Kirk spits at Spock during his academy trial the movie’s full of angry, funny people. I think it’s a characterization tool that works remarkably well for the group of ambitious, insecure characters the movie throws together.

It’s possible that sarcasm is just a less successful means of emotional distance and disguise than snark is, but it’s also more interesting to watch on screen. Making fun of things for the sake of making fun of things is fun in conversation, particularly if said conversation revolves around light one-upsmanship, or say, writing on the internet. But sarcasm’s far more engaging to watch on screen, because it’s an underused way of signaling character emotion and rawness. Not everything has to be tears, or anger, or passionate declaration. Misdirection, failed or successful, and caginess are just as effective, and often more revealing.

I’ve written in the past about how frustrating I find the fact that The Social Network purports to tell us something revealing and important about Facebook’s founders, despite the fact that it’s based on fictionalized source material. Unsurprisingly, the founders turn out to find that frustrating as well. The actual events that they’re arguing over including in the movie—including a “mostly made up” scene involving bare breasts and strippers—aren’t that germane to understanding Facebook’s nature and development, but the fact that they’re arguing over them is.

The internal logic the Facebook founders guide their personal lives and their business by is fascinating, and contradictory. To some extent, there’s a free-market element to this all. Facebook users are given the tools to humiliate themselves, but there’s certainly no requirement that they do so. At the same time, even discretion isn’t enough to ensure that your privacy will be protected, given the company’s internal controls, or lack thereof. The founders seem to largely operate on principals of self-protection; they abide by their own internal rules. But they also seem to dislike it when other people force them to live by the second part of the functional rules that govern their product: there’s only so far you can lock up information. The debate might be different if the movie was based on credible source material, instead of a book so speculative that it gives Zuckerberg & Co. an excuse to cast doubt on true events as well as falsified or misemphasized ones. But it’s still an intriguing one. If you build a big chunk of the world, you tend to get stuck living in it.

Or must Vegas residencies be good financially for artists, but less than awesome quality of life-wise? If you’re going to be rich and famous and on tour, one of the benefits has to be the variety. And if one place is going to be your home base, anywhere near the strip on Vegas has to be awfully unpleasant. (That may just be my bias speaking, I didn’t particularly like Vegas when I went there for the first and only time last June, although seeing a Cirque show was rather fun and Mario Batali and Tom Colicchio sure run them a pair of fine dining establishments). And most importantly, perhaps, you’re committing to years with a shifting audience that only wants the most familiar of you, rather than stuff you liked but that didn’t take off, or new material you’re working on; if they’ve come there, and paid as much as Vegas shows cost, they want only your greatest hits. I can’t imagine Madonna ever taking one, or really any other artist who is still recording and promoting new material.

I feel like The Next Three Days would be a much more interesting movie if a) Elizabeth Banks’ character was guilty of the murder for which she’d been incarcerated or b) she was breaking Russell Crowe’s innocent character out of jail:

This just feels like a variation on a damsel in distress story, otherwise. And not a very interesting one at that, particularly since Crowe’s character doesn’t appear to feel a lot of concern or doubt about his wife’s innocence.