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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has been ordered to pay more than $30,000 in legal fees to Leslie Klinger, an author and Sherlock Holmes expert who successfully challenged the estate's copyright. Calling the estate's grip on the Sherlock Holmes story "a form of extortion," a U.S. appeals court said Klinger "performed a public service" and deserved to be repaid. In December, a court ruled that the character of Sherlock Holmes, as well as Holmes stories written before 1923, are in the public domain. That ruling was upheld in June.

"Dubstep," "mojito" and "frenemy" are among more than 5,000 new words added to The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary. "Selfie," "mixtape" and "schmutz" also made the cut.

Christian Wiman has two new poems in Commonweal magazine. One of them, "Memories Mercies," begins:

"Memory's mercies

mostly aren't

but there were

I swear

days

veined with grace"

Amelia Togba-Addy lives in Atlanta, but Ebola is always on her mind.

Like many Liberian Americans, she has family and friends in West Africa, where Ebola has killed nearly 900 people. In Liberia alone, the World Health Organization has reported almost 500 cases and more than 250 deaths so far.

So when Togba-Addy's aunt called early one morning last week, she panicked.

Goats and Soda

An Ebola Quarantine In Freetown: People Come And Go As They Wish

Back in 2008, doctors in Cambodia made a worrisome discovery. They were having a hard time curing some people of malaria.

Even the most powerful drug wasn't clearing out the parasite from patients' blood as quickly as it should. Malaria had evolved resistance to the last medicine we have against it, a drug called artemisinin.

When Nimco Ali was 7, she thought her family was going on vacation. They flew from their hometown in Manchester, England, to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.

Ali doesn't remember the exact location. But she clearly remembers what happened there.

The young girl found herself in a dingy room, with a woman dressed in all black, standing over her. She didn't know what was going on at the time. But she fell asleep. And when Ali woke up, she was confused.

The woman had mutilated her genitals.

Ali is British to the core: She was raised in Britain and went to British schools. But her family is from Somalia — where 98 percent of girls and women have a part of their genitals cut, mutilated or completely removed.

“ It's not something that defines you. It's something that happened to you.

Now, you already know where this book is headed — if you haven't figured that out yet, take another gander at the title — and that sense of predestination isn't the only thing about this book that reminded me of a finely honed sitcom. The book isn't a pure comedy, exactly, but Bertino's plot points still land like punch lines, delivered with a brief setup before being shouldered aside to make way for the next one. Most characters are dressed with an eccentricity or two, thrust onto stage to speak a few quips and herded off to wait until they're called again. Bertino's Philadelphia brims with such quirk and coincidence, it begs for a studio audience — both for better and for worse.

Let's get worse out of the way first. This sprightly tone, while entertaining, doesn't serve the story quite as well when Bertino ventures into rougher waters. In darker moments, scenes of domestic abuse or hints at drug addiction, the book seems not to have wiped its smirk off in time. With one notable exception — a devastating exchange between Madeleine and her dad — pain comes packaged a bit too neatly to be convincing, like a backlot set designed for a tragedy.

Still, these missteps aren't enough to slow the novel down. Bertino has a knack for turning phrases, and she uses it to make otherwise mundane observations into jabs in the gut — whether they concern two skinny teens whose "collarbones vault in upsetting directions," or a "dumb scratch of moon" that lingers over Sarina's long walk home. And while the story may feel as if it's told in punch lines, more often than not, those punch lines hit their mark. The book is consistently funny, no matter which character takes a turn at center stage.

Most important, 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas also shares this in common with the best of TV sitcoms: Despite the contrivances, its characters are worth rooting for. Lorca, Sarina, especially Madeleine — even Bertino's version of Philadelphia — are all imbued with such wit, flaw and charm, they deserve whatever love they're offered. Just don't count on the city to return your affections.

Read an excerpt of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas

Like it or not, television has the power to shape our perceptions of the world. So what do sitcoms, dramas and reality TV say about poor people?

In life and on TV, "poor" is relative. Take breakfast. For Honey Boo Boo's family, it's microwaved sausage and pancake sandwiches. For children in The Wire's Baltimore ghetto, it's a juice box and a bag of chips before school. On Good Times, set in the Chicago projects back in the 1970s, it was a healthier choice: oatmeal. "If you're poor, it goes a long way. And it's pretty cheap," laughs Bern Nadette Stanis, who played Thelma Evans on Good Times.

Good Times debuted in 1974, in the midst of a recession. Many people were struggling. For a time, it was one of the highest rated shows on TV, but Good Times also drew criticism for giving the impression that being poor isn't so bad, as long as there's love. But Stanis says, judging from personal experience, that's true. "I too was raised in the projects in Brooklyn, in Brownsville. I lived in a two bedroom apartment with my mom and dad and five children. So there were seven of us. But we also were rich in education and in love," says Stanis.

Good Times also tackled some of the bad times facing poor communities, like drug addiction and gangs. Norman Lear, who co-produced the show, says that above all, they wanted to make people laugh — but they also wanted story lines that resonated. Before the 1970s, he adds, TV pretty much ignored poor people. "The biggest subjects in television comedy were 'The roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner,' or 'Mom dented the car and how do the kids and mom keep dad from finding out,'" says Lear. "There were no political problems. There was no poverty. That was the total message wall to wall, floor to ceiling," Lear says.

There's a lot of debate about the subject of entertainment TV's depiction of poverty. Do audiences empathize with the poor people they see or look down on them?

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Chris McDaniel, who lost his bid to unseat Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran in the GOP primary, is taking his case to the state party.

McDaniel announced at a news conference Monday that he has found enough evidence of improper or questionable votes that the party should void the results of the June 24 runoff.

"They asked us to put up or shut up, and here we are with the evidence," McDaniel, a state senator who was supported by Tea Party-aligned groups, said.

Turnout increased between the June 3 primary, in which McDaniel out-polled Cochran, and the runoff, when Cochran prevailed with 51 percent of the vote.

McDaniel has been arguing for weeks that Cochran's victory was due to votes from Democrats. Turnout shot up for the runoff in heavily African American precincts in areas such as Hinds County.

McDaniel's attorney Mitch Tyner said his campaign had found 3,500 instances of crossover votes, in which voters who had participated in the Democratic primary voted in the GOP runoff. Such crossover voting is a misdemeanor under Mississippi law.

Tyner also claimed to have found 9,500 "irregular votes" and 2,275 absentee ballots that were "improperly cast."

"Given the number of additional votes Cochran received in the runoff — more than a similar increase seen by McDaniel — the campaign clearly plans to argue that many of those votes were from Democrats and should be considered invalid," The Washington Post reports.

McDaniel has been complaining for weeks that the runoff was a "sham." The Cochran campaign intends to keep its focus on the fall.

"Like other Mississippians, we have watched with interest as the McDaniel campaign has made repeated and baseless allegations of fraud and misconduct against not only members of the Cochran campaign staff, but also circuit clerks and volunteer poll workers around the state," Mike Garriga, an attorney for the Cochran campaign, said in a statement. "The filing of this challenge marks the point where this matter moves from an arena of press conferences and rhetoric into a setting where nothing matters but admissible evidence and rule of law."

Actually, it's not clear what will happen next. McDaniel wants the state Republican Party to hold a public hearing within eight days, but ahead of his press conference Mississippi GOP Chair Joe Nosef said it's not clear how the party will respond, other than talking with lawyers.

"The statute provides very limited guidance on how the party has to handle it," Nosef said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry got some good news last week. In a FOX News poll, Perry moved from an also-ran in the contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination to a tie for first place with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

This is undoubtedly a reaction to Perry's decision 10 days ago to send 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the border in response to the deluge of Central American children that have been showing up there.

Nothing motivates the base of the GOP like the issue of illegal immigration. Even if the immigrants are children fleeing violence and chaos in Central America, this is no longer George W. Bush's Republican Party — not nationally, and not in Texas either.

In the 1990s, the GOP in Texas watched their colleagues in California self-destruct and lose control of the state in part because of their tone on immigration at a time of Hispanic population growth. The Bush family decided Texas Republicans would go a different route, campaign aggressively in the barrio, earnestly speak bad Spanish and just generally show they cared about Hispanic voters in Texas.

It worked. George W. Bush racked up as much as 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas.

It was hard to be a Texas Republican politician during this period and not absorb some of that political lesson. It sure wasn't Pete Wilson — the former California GOP governor and one-time presidential prospect — serving back-to-back terms in the White House, now was it?

And so in the 2012 GOP presidential race, when Perry was criticized by competitor Michele Bachmann for allowing the children of undocumented immigrants who grew up in Texas to get in-state tuition rates at the state's public universities, Perry responded at a Florida debate like the good Texas Republican he was: "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they have been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart," he said.

In 2001, when Perry signed the Texas DREAM Act, it was supported and passed into law by state politicians in both parties: educate the ambitious Texas children, simple as that.

But by 2012, those sentiments were a sign among Tea Party Republicans that you were "squishy" on illegal immigration — someone who was too focused on amnesty and not enough on closing the nation's borders to law breakers.

Democrats like to gleefully point to Perry's "Oops" debacle during the GOP presidential debate in Michigan as the moment the nomination slipped from his grasp. But that was just the final nail in the coffin. Perry had doomed his campaign two months earlier in Florida by turning his back on his political base's most passionate issue.

Up until that moment, the Texas governor had enjoyed a reputation as a politically astute politician. Which he'd been — he was just behind on his party's immigration politics. But now he's learned his lesson and his deployment of National Guard troops to the border proves it.

If the governor's move has been a hit with Republicans nationwide, it's been a much tougher sell along the border. Neither the Texas National Guard nor the Texas Department of Public Safety requested the deployment. County sheriffs along the border complain they were never consulted and urged Perry to send them the money to hire more deputies — which they say would do more to stem the flow than the $12 million per month the state will pay to deploy troops who can't make arrests.

And the business community in the Rio Grande Valley isn't thrilled either because they believe sending troops makes their region seem dangerous and out of control, which they insist is nowhere near the truth and will drive away potential business.

In fact, the vast majority of children from Central America are under the mistaken impression that, because their home countries have become violent, dangerous places, they will be welcomed in America. Most are just walking or wading across the river and searching for border guards to turn themselves in.

But in his speech announcing the troop deployment Gov. Perry said less about the children and focused instead on what he described as an unprecedented wave of criminals and drug cartels that were invading Texas.

The Texas National Guard's officers have admitted there's some confusion about exactly what they'll do along the border. In 1997, an American high school student guarding his family's goats on the American side of the border with an old rifle was killed by Marines who'd been deployed to guard the border. The boy was Hispanic and the unfortunate Marine squad who stalked and then shot the 17-year-old was just doing what they'd been trained to do — which, of course, was not law enforcement.

That horrible mistake ended that Marine deployment, and the incident was indelibly etched in the Texas military psyche.

But no matter what the National Guard troops end up doing along the border, a jump by Perry in the FOX News presidential poll from almost last into a tie for first is a big step forward for the Texas governor's political hopes.

Although a guardsman has yet to step foot on the Rio Grande, for Perry's as-yet-unannounced presidential ambitions, the deployment may have already accomplished its mission.

Playing a woman discovering sexuality in the '50s makes actress Allison Janney think of — of all people — her mother. Janney's mother and father got married in their early 20s, and she doesn't believe her mother had sex with anyone else.

"I remember my mother talking to me about the birds and the bees," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Of course, I had already known [about them], probably years before she came to me. But remembering the way she talked to me about it — it's just everything about her reminds me of Margaret Scully."

Margaret Scully is the character Janney plays in Showtime's Masters of Sex, based on the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, and the research they conducted into human sexuality starting in the late 1950s. Scully is married to Barton Scully (played by Beau Bridges), the provost at the hospital at Washington University, where he supervises Masters' research. Barton is closeted and the two are stuck in a sexless marriage. When Barton betrays Margaret by hiring prostitutes, Margaret finds herself in the throes of passion with another man.

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Anthony Matthews is something of a master of the customer complaint. He's sent detailed, humorous letters to car companies, hotels and airlines — with successful results. He posts his carefully composed missives and the companies' responses at his website, Dear Customer Relations, which is also his characteristic opening line.

The letter that started it all was written on a typewriter 25 years ago.

Hear The Full Rover Complaint

In about one-third of U.S. households, the sound of a phone or doorbell ringing may trigger a desire to duck.

That's because roughly 77 million adults with a credit file have at least one debt in the collection process, according to a study released by the Urban Institute, a research group. A credit file includes all of the raw data that a credit bureau can use to rank a borrower's creditworthiness.

Some of those debts can be quite small — perhaps just a $25 overdue water bill. But some are substantial, and all can hurt a family's long-term economic prospects, the study found.

"In addition to creating difficulties today, delinquent debt can lower credit scores and result in serious future consequences. Credit scores are used to determine eligibility for jobs, access to rental housing and mortgages, insurance premiums, and access to (and the price of) credit in general," the study concluded.

The typical adult in trouble with bill collectors has a median debt of $1,350 in the collection process.

We aren't talking about home loans here. This report looks at nonmortgage debt, such as credit-card balances, stacked-up medical bills or past-due utility bills. These are debts that are more than 180 days past due and have been placed in collections. The study didn't count personal debts, such as loans from family members, or pawnshop loans.

Nevada, a state hit hard by foreclosures, has the worst problem with overdue bills. There, just under half of the residents with credit files have debt in collections, according to the study. The Urban Institute based its report on a random sampling of 7 million people with 2013 credit bureau data from TransUnion, a major consumer credit reporting agency.

While Nevada is a standout, problems with debt are concentrated mostly in the South, the study found. Of the 12 states besides Nevada with high levels of debt in collection, 11 are Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia. The 12th state is New Mexico.

The states with the fewest troubled debtors are Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

About 22 million Americans have no credit file, which typically means they are too poor to have any credit at all. In other words, the study underreports the financial troubles of the truly poor and is more a reflection of the stresses on middle-class families in the U.S.

The report talks about the problems with "snowballing" debt. A lot of these overdue bills start out as relatively minor problems, such as past-due gym memberships or cellphone contracts. But once those old bills get turned over to the collection industry, troubles mount for the debtors, whose credit scores worsen.

Here's an odd twist to the debt story in the post-recession era: Most people are actually cleaning up their credit-card debt. The American Bankers Association said earlier this month that as a share of Americans' income, credit-card debt has slipped to the lowest level in more than a decade.

Today, about 2.44 percent of credit-card accounts are overdue by 30 days or more, compared with the 15-year average of 3.82 percent, according to the ABA Consumer Credit Delinquency Bulletin.

In other words, most people these days are more focused on paying off their bills. "More and more consumers are using their credit cards as a payment vehicle, paying off or paying down their balances each month," the ABA's chief economist, James Chessen, said in a statement.

Here's another peculiar point: The recession really hasn't done much to change the percentage of Americans dealing with debt collection. A decade ago, a study done by Federal Reserve economists concluded that just more than one-third of individuals with credit records had a debt in the collection process.

For the people who have fallen behind on nonmortgage debts, being in the hole hurts because it undermines their long-term prospects.

"High levels of delinquent debt and its associated consequences, such as limited access to traditional credit, can harm both families and the communities in which they live," the Urban Institute study concludes.

The House voted Monday to allow airlines to advertise lower prices for their routes.

The Transparent Airfares Act, which was approved with minimal debate, would overturn a 2012 rule that requires airlines to post the full price of tickets, including taxes and fees.

Shoppers are smart enough to figure out the price of an airline ticket without federal regulation, said Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio, a bill co-sponsor.

"Talk about the nanny state," he said. "Give me a break. What do they think, Americans are idiots?"

Consumer groups oppose the legislation. Prior to implementation of the rule, airlines would often "hide" the cost of taxes and fees in small print in advertising or down at the bottom of Web pages.

That gave the impression you could fly for a lot less than the actual total cost.

"Before the full-fare rule went into effect, it wasn't uncommon to find an attractive ticket price — say, $299 for a transatlantic flight — but once taxes, fuel surcharges and other fees were added, the total fare came to $899," notes travel writer Christopher Elliott in The Washington Post. "That price was revealed only at the end of the booking process, frustrating passengers."

Despite quick action, it's not clear that the bill — which is supported by the airline industry and transportation unions — will have much life in the Senate.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has introduced what he calls the Real Transparency in Airfares Act, which would double maximum penalties to $55,000 per day for airlines and major ticket sellers that don't post the full fare.

About 100 miles north of Flagstaff, Ariz., a long dirt road ends at a precipice. Thirty-five-thousand feet below, the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers meet at the floor of the Grand Canyon.

Developer R. Lamar Whitmer took one look at this stunning view and saw opportunity. He envisions a gondola ride, two hotels, a restaurant, a cultural center, an amphitheater and an elevated walkway along the river's edge.

Whitmer believes the project would keep Navajos from moving off the reservation to find jobs.

Code Switch

The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before

Obama Onsen is a small resort destination in Nagasaki, Japan. In Japanese, the word Obama means "little beach," or "little island." In the last several years though, the name has become synonymous with an American president, and the people of Obama have readily embraced their faraway namesake.

Soshi Nakamura works in the town's tourism office. He says that the town felt an affinity for Obama immediately, and that everyone was really excited when he was elected in 2008. Six years later, they're still excited. Outside of the town's tourism office, visitors are greeted by a life-sized statue of the president, wearing a black suit and big grin.

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Traditional Chinese medicine holds that the scales of a pangolin, a small ant-eating mammal, are "cool" and "salty." Eating those scales, the TCM thinking goes, may help expel wind, reduce swelling and boost lactation. But pangolin scales also seem to induce something far less beneficial: rapacity.

A recent report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, warns that the pangolin is "literally being eaten out of existence." Demand not just for scales but also for pangolin meat in East and Southeast Asia has produced a thriving illegal pangolin market.

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It sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss, but artist Sam Van Aken is developing a tree that blooms in pink, fuchsia, purple and red in the spring — and that is capable of bearing 40 different kinds of fruit.

No, it's not genetic engineering. Van Aken, an associate professor in Syracuse University's art department, used an age-old technique called grafting to attach branches from 40 different kinds of stone fruit onto a single tree. It's called the "Tree of 40 Fruit." Weekend Edition's Arun Rath spoke to Van Aken about the project, and what inspired it.

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If the Television Critics Association press tour of 2014, wrapping up Tuesday and Wednesday with presentations from PBS, has had a catchphrase, it's "audience measurement."

Critics heard an extended presentation from Nielsen on the very first day of tour about the company's plans to begin measuring viewership on mobile devices and, more generally, about its scramble to keep up – catch up, really – with the way television works now. Many days later, a panel of research analysts from broadcast as well as premium and basic cable outlets made what was in part a pitch to reporters to stop relying on overnight ratings, given the fact that it's not unusual for shows to increase their audiences 40 or 50 percent (or more) once DVR viewing from even the next three days is included. FX, in fact, has committed to not releasing overnight ratings for its shows at all, arguing that they're simply too misleading to be taken seriously. It will make its ratings announcements a few days later.

The easy read on the FX decision, of course, is that they don't want bad overnight ratings to be reported, and it's not that that isn't any part of it – they certainly aren't doing this so that you don't report in haste on their out-of-the-gate smashes. And networks have complained for a long time that this show or that one is misreported as a disaster because nobody waits for the reliable numbers; this is not a new phenomenon.

But it does require a bit of a shift in perspective when you realize that time-shifting has evolved to the point where watching a new episode of a show is only sort of something that happens at a particular time, such that you can meaningfully describe it in terms of what happened at that time. (That being true, while again not a new phenomenon, is a newer phenomenon than the chatter about it being true.) If you're only talking about measuring shows relative to each other, it might seem unimportant provided that all shows grow by roughly the same percentage. If everybody gains the same advantage from DVR viewing, the relative numbers are still right.

Everybody doesn't, though. And while it is an insistent battle cry of fans of low-rated shows that whatever they love is secretly hugely popular but not being measured properly, what emerged from the data was that it's more a matter of there being kinds of shows that are vastly more time-shifted than others. Reality shows are time-shifted relatively little, presumably because people want to know what happened before they get spoiled. Comedies are time-shifted more, and then dramas are time-shifted the most, meaning that if you take a reality show and a drama that are neck and neck in overnight ratings, the odds are that a few days later, a lot more people will have watched the drama.

Of course, the looming question is: assuming those numbers are in fact wonky in exactly the same way everybody is telling us they are, what difference does it make?

Readers are curious about ratings for two reasons, in my experience. The first is that they want to know whether shows are going to be canceled or not. The second is that they're curious about cultural stuff: whether a weird thing is a hit, whether a terrible thing tanks, and, fundamentally, what other people are interested in. (Some are also interested in the ins and outs of industry successes and failures in terms of producers' and executives' fates, but not many.)

That's where you find the nut of the problem, really. It's not only a measurement problem. It's also a contextual problem. Even in a hypothetical world of perfect information in which everybody could instantly know what how many people are watching what show, on what platform, at what time, with what fast-forwarding capability, what numbers are meaningful?

David Poltrack, the Chief Research Officer at CBS, made this pitch in talking about different kinds of numbers and whether Live +3 ratings (which include live viewing and the next three days on DVR, but do not count VOD, do not count apps, do not count Hulu and so forth): "I would like to make the point that your responsibility as reporters is, for most of you, is to report television as the social, cultural phenomenon that it is as well as the economic phenomenon it is. So Live+3 ratings are an economic phenomenon, but they don't reflect the cultural phenomenon of the medium, since they are only a limited part of the audience. If you're reporting on the economics of the business, Live+3 ratings are relevant. If you're reporting on cultural phenomenon called television, Live+3 ratings are far less relevant."

In other words, he says, what numbers are meaningful depends on what you're using them for. If you're talking about what makes money and what might get canceled, maybe you only care about those Live +3 ratings (which are already much more inclusive than what they call "live plus same day" or "Live +SD," which is basically just everybody who time-shifts until later on that same evening). But if you're actually trying to figure out what the viewership of something is, and what its cultural penetration is, and how many people like it, that number isn't so helpful. It seems self-evident, but also unsatisfying. What is the cultural relevance of audience size, past "huge hit" stories?

Furthermore, there we were, listening to four network research folks talk about ratings when ratings do not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean the same thing at every network. Kim Lemon, the Executive Vice President of Program Planning and Scheduling and Research for Showtime, made the point himself that Showtime doesn't really care in the same way about ratings, since it's not ad-supported, and it certainly doesn't have the same issues with online versus on-television viewing. As long as you have to be a Showtime subscriber to do it, they don't care whether you watch on your TV or on your phone or on a plane. All enthusiasm, for them, is of equal monetary value, essentially. It just has to make you subscribe. (Incidentally, their numbers are even more slanted toward time-shifted viewing — in part, probably, because their top stuff airs on the crammed-full Sunday night schedule.)

At CBS, on the other hand, it's very squishy to get information about how much it matters to them if you watch a show online. You're a viewer from a cultural standpoint, but you're not worth money the same way you are if you're eyeballing ads and watching live. (You will watch ads online too, but different ones.)

The bottom line is this: it's not as simple as "measurement." It has to with the placing of data in context, which is a lot harder than figuring out how to count up video views. I spoke to a showrunner who talked about the frustration of having a show that's good, that everybody thinks is good, that is never mentioned without the parenthetical that it is ratings-challenged or little-watched. And very often, those perceptions come from initial overnight ratings.

But what if they didn't? What if the ratings were perfectly accurate and complete, and your show was little-watched or ratings-challenged? When movies are discussed in terms of their quality, there is no expectation that you always mention their low box office, except perhaps in the case of high-budget intended blockbusters.

Creative and economic success have been uncoupled in critical discussions of film (and music and books) to a greater degree than in television. That's in part because shows are ongoing business concerns with futures to consider, but it's also in part because television's populist reputation and history has created an environment in which, if you are not being widely seen, there is a perception that you are failing in whatever your project is. Which, from an economic standpoint, if you are on a broadcast network in particular, you are. But which, from a creative standpoint, you are not, necessarily. (Consider the fact that in film, people who analyze box office and people who act as critics are mostly different people; in television, they're often the same hybrid critic/reporters, only some of whom have a strong background in ratings and scheduling and such.) It's not that people don't separate good from popular, but there's always that "struggling"/"cult" caveat, more than in other fields.

Nina Tassler of CBS talked in her executive session about what the network's job is, and this is what she said: "We are still broadcasters. We're still looking [at] No. 1, are we entertaining the greatest number of people, and are we making the most amount of money doing that? Those are the two boxes we have to check." She still talked about trying to make great content, she still talked about how great some of their shows (like The Good Wife) are. But she was straightforward about it: the most people, the most money. So if your show is not making the most money by appealing to the most people, your show is not succeeding as a business concern. But I think writing about television is perhaps more likely than writing about other creative fields to surround projects with a stench of general failure (or irrelevance) based on instant popularity or the lack thereof, which doesn't follow logically.

All these folks phrased their objections to the way ratings are being reported as issues of accuracy: overnight ratings are terribly incomplete, they argued. The subtext, of course, feels completely self-interested: overnight ratings make things look like they're being watched by fewer people than they are. But the actual lesson felt a little more nuanced: it's not just what the numbers are, but what the numbers communicate, that's gotten progressively foggier. The economic value proposition has very much come unglued from sheer viewer counts on Showtime; it's even shaky on FX, where there is ad support to consider but also the degree to which your viewers consider your network an essential part of their cable package. Consider what's happened when networks face off with cable companies over carriage deals — the network needs you to not just like their shows, but love their shows.

It's not just that we don't know what the real audience size is (though we don't). It's also that it wouldn't entirely be clear yet, to anybody, what it would mean if we did.

The first time I took one of the online Myers-Briggs inventories and it spit out that I was an introvert, one of my friends questioned the results. Specifically, he said, "Are you sure you weren't holding the test upside-down?"

I wasn't, though. Crowds challenge me, as do bustling parties, as do chaotically noisy environments, as do spaces I can't get out of quickly. So I'd pretty much made up my mind that I'd never set foot at San Diego Comic-Con, which scores pretty high on the Writhing Humanity scale. Let me put it this way: Have you ever been right outside a stadium when a truly huge sporting event or a concert let out? Where you're just getting shoved along, you can't really go anywhere except as part of a river of humans, and you suddenly realize that if you were viewed from above as part of this gathering, you'd suddenly realize the insignificance of your existence?

Much of the San Diego Convention Center, inside and out, is like that nonstop for about four days.

But this year, we had an opportunity to take Pop Culture Happy Hour to Comic-Con for a panel discussion (thanks to Stephen Thompson's mother, Maggie, a comics luminary) (Maggie does the "In Memoriam" segment at the Eisner Awards, if you want to evaluate that luminariosity for yourself). It was right at the end of my two-plus weeks at press tour, so I was on the west coast anyway. Why not? (We'll be posting the audio of the panel as our weekly show this Friday.)

I would love to tell you here that it was not as bad as I feared, that the esprit de corps overwhelmed any anxieties, swept away any discomfort, and made me forget about my sense that if there were a fire, we'd be screwed. I would love to have come home feeling that I'd battled my own bustle-avoidant tendencies as successfully as my buddy Glen Weldon did last year when he wrote a series of Comic-Con diaries that I encourage you to read.

But, perhaps exhausted from press tour, perhaps simply unsuited to it, I freely admit that I was a toe-dipper. Not inclined to endure long lines either for high-profile panels or for the chance to buy stuff, I spent about 15 minutes on the show floor, clinging to the perimeter, before taking my bulging eyeballs right out of there. I did not dive. I waded.

And the first thing I learned — confirmed for myself, really — is that Comic-Con is much, much less weird than a lot of people who don't attend it make it out to be. I encountered so many contemptuous tweets about it in absentia, so many assumptions that this was, at best, some kind of Weirdo Dude Ranch where, for once, freaks have the opportunity to be among their own. And I'm not saying there's none of that, particularly if among freaks and weirdos you count those who would wryly attach that label to themselves. It is, quite clearly, a haven.

But I dare you to watch the documentary America's Parking Lot and conclude that the extreme football fan tailgaters profiled therein — who tend to be tagged as extreme in their enthusiasms but not socially derided — are less weird than the people of Comic-Con.

Let me get this out of the way first: People take a lot of pictures of the costumes, because they're cool. But most of the folks I saw there taking in panels and shopping on the show floor were not in costume at all. It's not the Star Wars cantina. It's more like you're walking through a crowd of people and most of them look like the people you'd see at the mall, and then suddenly one of them is Wonder Woman. As our own Petra Mayer talked about in her really excellent radio piece this weekend, cosplay is an extremely creative DIY hobby, not much different from anything else you might make yourself just to show people that you made it, just to make it, just to do something interesting. And again, why is it any weirder from putting on face paint at a football game while wearing a player's jersey?

I did go to a couple of panels while I was there, and here's how I picked them: I went into the first room that was open. Why? Because most of the things I was extremely familiar with fell into the category of "too much waiting in line," so I was stuck with the unfamiliar. So why not gamble?

I first wound up in a panel of women who do fan art and fan fiction surrounding the current TV incarnation of Teen Wolf. And you know what they were like? They were a lot like every other panel of geeky young writers I've ever seen. They spoke intelligently and thoughtfully about writing and creativity and what they like and don't like to make art about. They talked about the responsibility they feel when they write about mental illness and thoughtfully chewed over the idea of creating transgender characters to add to what's sort of a preexisting universe. They rolled their eyes at a video that was circulating in which Teen Wolf actors were placed on the spot and asked to read fan fiction aloud for yuks, shrugging it off as a cheap effort to make actors uncomfortable on camera and get them to dump on their own fans.

What filed into the room next was a jam-packed panel called "IS IT STEAMPUNK?" Now this, costume-wise, is the old-timey, goggle-wearing droid you are looking for. (Yes, I am mixing my everything. Shhhhh.) Roughly defined, steampunk is Victorian-era-ish science fiction (think goggles and gears, as far as the aesthetic), and I had the biggest blown mind of my entire Comic-Con experience when I learned that at least to these steampunk people, the greatest steampunk movie is understood to be ... wait for it ...

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I was not prepared for this!

The "Is It Steampunk?" panel included Andrew Fogel of The League Of S.T.E.A.M.; Claire Hummel, who worked on Bioshock Infinite; Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, who write the adventures of the "steampunk robot" Boilerplate; and Thomas Willeford, who makes steampunk stuff and arrived dressed as Steampunk Iron Man. They basically tried to define what exactly steampunk is — and distinguished it from other faux genres and subgenres including "clockpunk" and "dreampunk" — and then voted on various examples from pop culture as to whether they are steampunk.

Steampunk Iron Man. You win, sir. #SDCC pic.twitter.com/qC2E2G92PR

— Patrick Day (@patrickkevinday) July 25, 2014

Congress begins a five-week summer recess Saturday after a somewhat tumultuous exit.

The Republican-led House stuck around an extra day trying to overcome conservative opposition to an emergency spending bill dealing with the surge of under-age immigrants from Central America. While that chamber finally eked out a bill last night, it's likely going nowhere. The Senate had already left town after Republicans there blocked a similar funding effort.

Out on the House floor on Friday, Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern offered his sympathies to those who try to follow Congress' antics.

"In case any, Americans are still watching, they can be forgiven for being a little confused about what happened this week," McGovern said.

What happened was a Republican bill providing far less money for border control and refugee processing than what President Obama requested got yanked from the House floor on Thursday right before it was to be voted on.

Instead, House Speaker John Boehner hastily issued a statement saying there were steps Obama could take to secure the border that would not require Congressional action. Speaking at the White House on Friday, Obama sounded baffled.

"Just a few days earlier, they voted to sue me for acting on my own," Obama said. "And then when they couldn't pass a bill yesterday, they put out a statement suggesting I should act on my own."

And the reason they couldn't get that bill passed, Obama said, was House GOP leaders could not get their own troops in line. "So that's not a disagreement between me and the House Republicans, that's a disagreement between the House Republicans and the House Republicans."

University of Maryland congressional expert Frances Lee says this is not the first time this has happened. "This is actually sort of a pattern in recent years," Lee says.

Boehner's ongoing problem, she says, is that with an already slim majority, he keeps trying to push through partisan bills that are not conservative enough to win over his entire caucus.

"The 20 to 30 thereabout members who consistently hold out against the leadership are enough, when Democrats refuse to participate, to keep the leadership from being able to act," she says.

Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said it's no wonder he and his fellow party members refuse to vote for the GOP's bills.

"I will tell the American people, Mr. Speaker, none of the leaders of the Republican Party have reached across to say, 'How can we do this in a bipartisan way?'" Hoyer said on the House floor.

As a result, little gets done in this Congress. Oklahoma House Republican Tom Cole says next fall's midterm elections are causing a risk aversion that's on full view in the Democratic-led Senate.

"You've got Sen. Reid with his majority at risk, he's trying to keep his side from casting any tough votes at all," Cole says. "So you know, we don't have a broken Congress, we have a broken Senate, in my view."

But Charlie Dent, a moderate House Republican from Pennsylvania, says there's plenty of blame to go around.

"The Republican conference can't stand up and complain every day about the Senate doing nothing and then on the other hand use as an excuse not to govern that we're afraid the Senate will do something," Dent says.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, for his part, puts the blame for inaction squarely on the GOP.

"Republicans are spending their time talking about impeachment and suing the president," Reid says. "This is a degree higher than absurdity, and I don't know what that is. I don't have a word for it."

Some Republicans actually seem proud of how little Congress has done this session.

"When we don't act, we act. That is an act," said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. "It's a decision, as sure as if we'd passed a law."

And yet that inaction is what Obama says forces him to use his executive powers, including with the border crisis.

"I'm gonna have to act alone, because we don't have have enough resources. We've already been very clear, we've run out of money," he said.

And apparently patience, as well.