I’ve just returned from Málaga and the European Communication and Research Association’s Television Studies section’s annual conference. A mouthful to type, if you get my drift.

The current controversies swirling around Hollywood in particular are a reminder, if any were needed, of just how damaging the use of sex through and as power can be, by intimidating those exposed to its horrors. Even if we exclude the notorious era of the studios’ “casting couches,” sexual scandals have abounded across the history of the industry. They are virtually all about men harassing women, as are the stories emerging today.

I’m enjoying watching the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup on television in Australia, where I spend seven weeks a year mentoring junior faculty and giving guest lectures when professors want to escape Perth, elude the responsibility of entertaining the great unwashed, or save their souls from preparing one more PowerlessPointless slideshow because today we are all 1970s art historians who just lurv Malevich.

A decade ago, Bernie Sanders and I arrived on the same plane from New York to a public event in the mid-west. We were allocated shared transport from the airport, so I spent maybe forty minutes with him. The event we were headed to was about media reform. Other speakers included Jesse Jackson, Amy Goodman, Billy Bragg (whom noone had heard of), and Phil Donahue. My friend Bob McChesney was our presiding guru.

As I write, I’m on the road in Colombia from Barranquilla (see this impressive citizen journalist seeking to enter Shakira’s home there) to Cartagena de Indias, which Francis Drake briefly captured from the Spanish in 1586.