In my lazy time (it’s not spare time because I don’t feel like I ever have that), I watch too much TV. Dexter and Breaking Bad are my favorite shows. I started out the summer watching reruns of both so that everything was fresh in my head for the new seasons. Dexter is half-way through its last season now and Breaking Bad just ran the first episode of its last season. Dexter seems to receive a lot more criticism than Breaking Bad, and while I think Breaking Bad is a slightly better show, I love Dexter, not Walter. In general, the criticism of Dexter seems to be that the show and the character aren’t developing anymore, but to me, Dexter’s developing relationship with his sister Deborah is of paramount importance to the show’s finale. That’s something that has just started to work itself out in these last couple of seasons and will continue to develop until the very end. Unlike Walter, Dexter cares about his relationships, or at least he wants to care; that’s what makes him a lovable and sympathetic character. It’s hard for me to criticize a show that has successfully manipulated its audience into loving, liking, and/or sympathizing with a serial killer. We cheer for Walter, too, but he’s so manipulative and self-centered that we like him less and less each season. Still, we cheer for him because he’s television’s ultimate badass, and as the protagonist, he makes us feel like we can be him, too. Dexter is just as manipulative but not necessarily self-centered. It’s the latter characteristic that makes viewers have such different feelings toward these characters.

Orange is the New Black has become my show of the summer. I haven’t really watched a whole lot of shows with a female protagonist—probably in large part because there haven’t been that many, but also, I’m more attuned to and bothered by stereotypes of women on TV, so perhaps I subconsciously avoid them. This one, however, is different. I admire the way each show focuses on a character’s backstory, humanizing them obviously, but also playing against the criminal-in-prison stereotyped profile; they all come from different backgrounds. For nearly every character, there is a drastic juxtaposition between the person she was before prison and the person she’s become while in prison, and because the cinematography moves so fluidly back and forth from prison scene to past life, it augments those juxtapositions without feeling didactic.

The best book I’ve read this summer is the memoir Five Years of My Life by Murat Kurnaz. He spent five years in Guantanamo Bay as a completely innocent man. The United States government knew after two years of holding him that he did nothing wrong, but we wouldn’t release him, partly because Germany, where he was a legal resident, refused to take him back. Even when the US knew he was innocent, we continued to beat, torture, and interrogate him. Our government claimed that we captured him on the battlefields of Afghanistan when we actually kidnapped him in Pakistan while he was on a trip to study the Qur’an. While my respect for our government and military has waned over the past decade or so because of the use of water-boarding; the well-documented sexual and physical abuses at Abu Ghraib; the persistent use of drone strikes, one of which killed an American teenager; and because I could go on and on, this memoir is so shocking in its accounts of systemic abuses, that I feel as if I have no respect left. I can respect individuals who enter the military with altruistic motives, but I cannot respect the military as an institution.