Brow Beat

Both the poster and the trailer for the crime drama Rampart, out today, loudly herald its LAPD antihero as “the most corrupt cop you’ve ever seen on screen.” The marketing gimmick is effective, just like the heavy metal guitars the trailer employs to make even taking a dip in the swimming pool seem thrillingly sinister. But the marketers could also use some perspective.

The corruptness of Hollywood’s most corrupt cops cannot be underestimated. Woody Harrelson’s Officer Dave Brown is indeed a pretty bad and deeply troubled dude. He’s racist, ill-tempered, and a womanizer. But his corruption is a case of mild dyspepsia compared to the rabid rampages that are S.O.P. for many other movie cops.

Hollywood likes its cops over the top. Several actors have given their most scenery-chewing performances as police officers (usually as members of the LAPD, the local force for most moviemakers, and a department familiar with real-life scandal itself). They plant evidence, take out other cops that get in the way, and shoot at dead gangsters because “their souls are still dancing.”

Here are 10 cops more corrupt than Harrelson’s Dave Brown, along with an internal affairs-style report on the estimable misdeeds of each. Eat your heart out, Officer Brown.

Previously:
Fact-Checking The Rise of the Planet of the Apes: How Many Apes Live in San Francisco?
Fact-Checking Watch the Throne: Can You Really “Plank On a Million”?
Fact-Checking Herzog’s “Ecstatic Truth”: Are Those Alligators Really Radioactive Mutants?

You may notice something striking about this week’s American edition of Time magazine.

While readers in Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific—really, the rest of the Time-reading world—confront a serious profile about Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and his role in the euro crisis, Americans are in for a special treat: a cover story called “The Surprising Science of Animal Friendships*.” (The asterisk leads to a footnote at the bottom of the cover that says, “BFFs are not just for humans anymore.”) With not one but two adorable dogs against a hot-pink background, this week’s Time really signifies the editors’ staunch commitment to serious, hard-hitting journalism, even if it means risking unpopularity.

Sarcasm aside: This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, Time faced ridicule for giving the rest of the world a cover story on the Arab protests while feeding Americans a cartoon cover about “Why Anxiety Is Good For You” only two months ago.

Time’s conviction that Americans only want to read feel-good puff pieces appears to be far stronger than any desire on the publisher’s part to sell itself as an important U.S. news source.

Yesterday, I posted a new video by Slate contributor and Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer, detailing apparent linguistic anachronisms on Downton Abbey. Zimmer has now posted his explanation for each of the offending phrases—and he happens to address some of the questions raised by commenters on yesterday’s post.

Multiple commenters pointed out that “uppity” was in use by 1880, well before Downton Abbey takes place. However, Zimmer says that “uppity” did not come to England until well after it first appeared in the U.S.

On the American side, examples can be found back to 1880 (from the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris), but it did not make its way to the U.K. until much later: again, the Google Ngram Viewer identifies when it came into use in American and British English. (Uppish was an available British equivalent for "presumptuously arrogant.")

Zimmer’s post also links to a previous video he made, addressing apparent anachronisms in the first three seasons of Mad Men. While Zimmer doesn’t come out and say so, reading these posts side-by-side leads me to believe that the writers of Mad Men are more careful about such things than Julian Fellowes and crew. (Though, I admit, having Joan say “the medium is the message” in 1960 is probably the most egregious error on either show; Matthew Weiner himself owned up to that one.) Of course, Mad Men is set in a much more recent era, so perhaps Fellowes just faces a greater degree of difficulty.

What do you think? Watch the Mad Men video below. And, in case you missed it, the Downton Abbey video can be found here.

Welcome back to Slate’s caption contest. All we’re going to tell you about this photo is that it was taken itoday. Post your captions—20 words or fewer—in the comments section. (And watch that word count! We’ve been getting some great entries that are longer than 20 words and must therefore be disqualified).

Last Week's Contest

The winner:  Black-6

Here’s the problem. Once I loosen this, you’ll be able to blink again.

The runner up: themichaelrudd

Bachmann hopes the new look, complete with Ronald Reagan henna neck tattoo, will ignite early interest in a 2016 campaign.

The actual caption: 

Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota and former GOP presidential candidate, left, is prepped for an interview with Al Hunt, executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg via Getty Images News, right, in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

If you're as obsessive about Downton Abbey as the members of Slate's TV Club, you may have read (or even noticed yourself) that the language used on the show does not always seem to be entirely historically accurate. Over in the show's home country, the subject was actually covered in the newspaper—well, the Daily Mail, anyway, which ran a piece with the headline, "Get knotted! Downton Abbey talks its way into trouble with use of modern slang." The piece quotes an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who says that some of the colloquialisms on the show seem "quite wrong."

Now Ben Zimmer, a Slate contributor, has created a video for the website he executive produces, the Visual Thesaurus, detailing all the seeming linguistic anachronisms from Season 2 of the show, from "just saying" to "I couldn't care less." See them all below, and check out the Visual Thesaurus in the days ahead for explanations as to why these uses of language are probably historically inaccurate.

Note: The video goes all the way through episode 8, and so may contain spoilers for American viewers. Each anachronism receives its own title card, so you can choose to watch just the first few.

Previously: Did You See This? Lana Del Rey's "Hunger Games"

To the delight of the chattering classes, President Obama released a campaign playlist on Spotify today. The 28 songs chosen by the president (or, more realistically, someone on his staff) cover a wide swath of the popular music landscape—though one genre seems conspicuously abundant, while another is notably absent.

The only musicians who appear more than once on Obama’s virtual mixtape are country duo Sugarland and former Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker, who, in his post-Blowfish days, digressed briefly into R&B before going deep into country’s terrain. Sugarland’s and Rucker’s tracks are among seven country songs on the playlist (the others are by Dierks Bentley, Montgomery Gentry, and Zac Brown Band).

Rucker and Bentley were among the musicians invited to the White House in November for a country music concert at which Obama said that he’d “gained an appreciation for just how much country music means to so many Americans”—but as far as Slate can tell, that appreciation doesn’t run particularly deep, nor does it seem to exist much beyond the campaign season. (Of the six artists listed in the “Favorite Music” section of Obama’s Facebook page, not one is a country musician.) The Atlantic’s David A. Graham analyzed Obama’s choice to devote a quarter of his campaign playlist to country music bluntly: “The president knows he needs to firm up his support among white working-class voters.”

Which might explain Obama’s complete omission of hip hop from his campaign playlist. Although one of his favorite musicians (again, per Facebook) is the Fugees, and although Obama has spoken of enjoying the music of Jay-Z, Nas, and Lil Wayne, he apparently didn’t think any of these rappers’ work fit for the campaign trail. Perhaps he’ll listen to their songs using Spotify’s “private listening” mode.

It seems likely that the sting of Fox’s dog-whistle headline from last summer—“Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs”—hasn’t yet worn off. It’s equally likely that those “white working-class voters” Obama is trying to court don’t overlap much with the demographic that rush to download Kanye West’s latest. Still, what a sad statement about America’s cultural and racial divide that Obama thinks the only safe political move is to pretend that an influential, diverse, American-born genre of pop music simply doesn’t exist.