BOMP! ALERT: I think it says something powerful about Jennifer Garner's appeal that I am genuinely happy for her that her Roxane got such a good review from Ben Brantley.

AS OUR BLOG'S 36-HOUR OBSESSION WITH BRIAN WILLIAMS CONTINUES: Bill Carter reports:

Mr. Michaels noted one small adjustment made for Mr. Williams’s sake. A planned sketch about edited-out parts of the Harry Potter films featuring the recently outed Dumbledore will not star Mr. Williams as Dumbledore. And the show will surround Mr. Williams with high-quality support, including two big-name surprise guests, one from politics and the other from music.

I'll go with Al Gore and Paul McCartney, both veterans of SNL cameos, and especially given that yesterday was the deadline for filing for the New Hampshire primary ballot. Anyone else want to wager a guess?

e.t.a. Wrong on both accounts. You can view the primary cameo here, though the title spoils the surprise.

TILDA: Last night, at long last, I saw Michael Clayton. Tilda Swinton does such an excellent job in this film that I was inspired to think about the other notable roles she has played.

I first became aware of her in 1993 in Sally Potter’s Orlando in which she played the title role, a person who lives four centuries of experiences through the eyes of both genders. Born as a man during the reign of Elizabeth I, Orlando becomes a woman midway through the film.

In 1997 Swinton played an attorney in Female Perversions. Interestingly, in both that film and in Michael Clayton, the role is that of a fiercely ambitious warrior on the verge of a key promotion. Also, in both of these movies, she portrays her character in a manner that makes us keenly aware of her gender.

Perhaps her breakthrough role was in The Deep End in 2001, when Swinton starred as a mother of three who lives in a beautiful house on Lake Tahoe. She gets in way over her head (no pun intended) when she believes her son is in danger. As in Michael Clayton, significant aspects of the plot in The Deep End revolve around keeping secrets and failing to communicate in an honest and forthright manner.

Swinton had a small role as Nicholas Cage’s impatient producer in Spike Jonze's film Adaptation in 2002. She also had a small role in Broken Flowers in 2005, where she played one of Bill Murray’s ex-lovers (she’s the one who has a front yard full of motorcycles and a menacing partner).

Finally, in a role that echoed aspects of her character in Michael Clayton, Swinton played the (evil) White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was released late in 2005. All told, she has been in over 50 films, but the vast majority of them are not well known.

Here, there and everywhere - The Daily Nightly - msnbc.com

THIS IS THE BUSINESS WE HAVE CHOSEN: NBC News anchor Brian Williams has blogged about his bad-ass week, moderating Tuesday night's Democratic debate in Philadelphia, then driving back to 30 Rock by 1am for the SNL writers' meeting, pulling an all-nighter to prep for his hosting the show this weekend while also hosting the Nightly News and guesting on Conan later that day.

Here's a line we never heard from Walter Cronkite: "It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled an all-nighter, but the SNL gang hasn’t forgotten the rule we all learned in college for how to do it: consume mass quantities of snacks. To that end, dinner consisted of Tostitos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups."

THE MAGAZINE'S LAST 16 COVERS HAVE FEATURED BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, BASEBALL, BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, BASKETBALL, AND BASEBALL: And so Slate's Josh Levin asks, What's wrong with Sports Illustrated?

Sports Illustrated has plenty of competitors besides ESPN and the New York Times. The increase in sports television coverage, and partly the popularity of SI itself, created a huge demand for comprehensive, sophisticated sports journalism. Traditional beat reporters, Web writers, enterprising bloggers, brainy statisticians, and YouTube videographers are now producing plenty of smart, funny, indiscreet, insidery material every day. Sports Illustrated used to distinguish itself by writing better, and securing better access to its subjects, than anyone who wrote faster. Now, with a few exceptions—Ian Thomsen's recent story on the Celtics' maneuverings to corral Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett, Tom Verducci on how the Red Sox saved Jonathan Papelbon's shoulder—the magazine's reported pieces don't offer original details. They just come out three days later than everybody else's.

Levin offers a handful of interesting possibilities: (1) use its influence to push bolder opinion journalism; (2) beef up the investigative reporting and (3) open up the archives and put more materials from the magazine's glorious past online.

HOGEBOOM! Word comes today that Survivor All Stars II is filming in Palau right now (home of the Tom & Ian vs. The Tribe That Never Won season), and many of your favorites from seasons 9-15 will allegedly be there -- manipulative Ami from season 9; Ian and Jenn from 10; doorman Judd of "I hope you all get bitten by a freakin' crocodile, scumbags" fame, fishmonger Lydia and Gary Hawkins Hogeboom! from Guatemala; Not-Smoking Shane, Cirie Fields and Simsbury's Terry Dietz, the dumbest immunity-idol-holder-ever from 12; and then I skipped seasons 13-14 but understand that saying "Ozzy" and "Yau-Man" will get some cheers here.

In re last night, because I've been watching this season, I just feel like I'm seeing a group of amateurs playing Survivor. Many of the competitors are advancing what they think is "strategy," but seems wholly untethered to the needs of other castaways or reality (and, Jean-Robert, I'm looking at you first.) Someone like Danni Boatwright, Rob C. or Boston Rob would eat these kids for lunch, and the real question is how wisely Gravedigger James will employ the gifts that fell into his lap. [Side question: would it violate the rules of the game to just steal another competitor's property?] I did love that expected moment of d'oh! at Council, however.

LEARNING FROM TINKER BELL, GIDGET, AND HOLLY GOLIGHTLY: We're devoting the next two classes to Susan Douglas's Where the Girls Are (1994), a history of baby-boomer culture and its portrayal of girls and women. A boomer herself, Douglas infuses her study with both self-deprecating humor and self-righteous indignation, but she's also an academic expert in communications history, anchoring her pop-culture analyses in their broader social and political context. As I said in my first post, it's a love-it-or-hate-it book, and therefore great to teach.

Douglas's central argument revolves around the ways in which post-WWII popular culture promoted both rebellion against and conformity to traditional gender roles: "the news media, TV shows, magazines, and films of the past four decades may have turned feminism into a dirty word, but they also made feminism inevitable." Douglas traces this ambiguity and contradiction through a wide range of pop-culture productions. Her earliest chapters examine the conflicting ideals of narcissism and masochism, presented in popular culture as essential elements of female identity. In Disney's Peter Pan (1953), Tinker Bell is a "scheming, overly possessive, vain ... no-good little bitch," while Wendy is "a kind-hearted, servile ... wimp who only wants to wait on boys." From melodramas like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), boomer girls learned that selfish young women who rejected parental authority would reap only misery and unhappiness, while self-sacrificing mothers who slaved for these ungrateful wretches would die saintly deaths (though at least Mahalia Jackson would sing at your funeral).

Yet by the early 1960s, pop-culture heroines were moving out of these traditional roles, becoming more assertive, and acknowledging the broader social changes going on around them, particularly the sexual revolution. In "pregnancy melodramas" like A Summer Place (1959) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), girls who got "knocked up" weren't automatically condemned as whores, and even wound up snagging Troy Donahue or Steve McQueen. The Shirelles' #1 hit "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (1960) wondered whether a boyfriend would stay faithful after "the first time," implicitly condemning the sexual double standard that encouraged male wild-oat-sowing but demanded female chastity. In Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), the character of Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) took this sexual liberation to a startling extreme, displaying a glamorous nonconformity and a brilliance for reinventing herself. Other 1960s heroines -- Sally Field's Gidget, Patty Duke's identical cousins -- lived far more conventional lives, but Douglas claims that they still captured the era's gender contradictions through the complicated quality of "perkiness," or assertiveness disguised as cuteness. Even the Beatles, Douglas argues, can be interpreted through the lens of gender ambiguity, because they "so perfectly fused the 'masculine' and 'feminine' strains of rock 'n' roll in their music, their appearance, and their style of performing."

While we'll follow Douglas's narrative into the late 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties next week, let's use today's discussion to talk about our own pop-culture educations in gender roles. When you were growing up, what did popular culture teach you about being a girl (or a boy)? In what ways was your gender identity shaped by the mass media?

Also next week: the counterculture, the counter-revolution, and the Hollywood revival of the '70s.