In American sports, as in American life, winning changes your character without changing your character. It can’t alter who you are, but it can upgrade all of your adjectives. A flamboyant showman hits the shot that a selfish ballhog misses. A relentlessly competitive leader is a bully plus a touchdown drive. Some of this is the nature of sports, which is a business of what works; some of it is human nature, which always wants to see success as a vindication of inner qualities.1 The real link between character and accomplishment is often dim and hard to articulate, but we find little parables everywhere. To inspire, all you have to do is score.

A sports figure comes out as transgender, and the general public is riveted by her story, which is met with everything from bigotry to curiosity to empathy. All at once, the subject seems to be everywhere from op-ed pages to dinner-table conversations. Transgender stories – this time fictional – start to gain a toehold in popular culture. The highest-rated sitcom on network TV takes some tentative steps toward exploring the fluidity of gender identity by having a gay cross-dressing performer as a recurring character. A popular medical drama wins an Emmy nomination for a two-part episode about a doctor who undergoes gender-reassignment surgery.

The year is 1976.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers know what’s up. People who worked in the restaurant industry wouldn’t ask us this question — what will motivate servers to do a good job? Because, inside the restaurant, we know that while the customers think their tips allow them to control the server, in fact the control is illusory. The story of the server being motivated by the customer’s power to tip, is instead a fiction created to make the customer feel important.

This is something where there is often substantial confusion in discussions of copyright piracy, where they are treated as lost sales. But they are not lost sales. They are never-were-going-to-be sales. To be sure, the hypothetical perfect digital rights enforcement mechanism for that media would prevent them from getting the content without paying ... but it wouldn't generate any additional income to the creators of the original work. They would just move on to some other media.

So as far the royalties-paying operation is concerned, they are phantasms. They just don't matter, no matter how much noise they may make on some discussion forum. In this particular case, they do not offer any potential benefit to the creators of anime, and so whatever reasons they may offer as to why they bootleg instead of using legit content are of no particular relevance to the market.

It would be fun to report that the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, which were announced February 2, were the result of brilliant maneuvering or diabolically clever stratagems, of masterstrokes and counterthrusts carefully planned in studio war rooms. But despite often justifiable skepticism about the process, Oscar nominations—one of which, of course, went to Bridges—can’t be bought. Not exactly, anyway.

By 2001 this paradox was collapsing on Jay-Z: How does a burgeoning mogul and darling of the mainstream—one who would turn 32 years old that year—maintain a persona dependent on poverty and youthful transgression? Or, to put it more simply: how do you grow up when all anyone wants you to do is keep talking about when you were a kid?

“As we planned it over the last 18 months, my No. 1 goal was to figure out how to capture the spirit and creativity of 30 for 30 and transfer it to a website. We wanted original voices, and we found a bunch of them already. We’re going to take chances, come up with a few premises and ideas that you haven’t seen before, and be consistently entertaining day after day. You will never know what to expect when you come to the site – in a good way. That’s our ultimate goal.”