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No one can send up sexism with a punchline quite like Amy Schumer.

"A lot of the women's magazines are supposed to like, be confidence building, but they really just scare...you so you buy the products in them," she says in one stand-up routine. "Like, they all will put Jessica Alba or someone like that on cover. And she's super sexualized no matter what magazine. And you're like, 'Good Housekeeping? Why is this even here?'"

But Inside Amy Schumer gives the New York native a chance to turn those sharp stand-up routines into a larger swipe at society's casual sexism.

In one moment from the show, she tries to play a shoot-em-up video game as a female character, only to see that character stopped from going into battle and sexually assaulted, then pelted with questions like "Do you wish to report it?" Then: "Are you sure?" And "Did you know (the assailant) has a family?"

It's a simultaneous slap at the boys' club of gamer culture and the military's terrible response to sexual assaults. In another sketch, she's a beautiful-but-awful tennis star. But the TV announcers aren't really interested in her athletic ability.

"I think the most incredible part about (her) game is how she manages to stay so thin, but still have such large breasts," says one match announcer, as the soundtrack to a cheesy soft porn movie plays in the background. Wonder if Anna Kournikova's ears were burning?

Schumer sells all this cutting-edge comedy with a knowing attitude. She's a smart aleck who talks about sex with the kind of explicit glee usually reserved for guys.

One great example involves a bit about her encounter with a reporter from TMZ. "He asked me, like a slut question, because I'm the 'it' girl for that," she said, laughing. "He asked me about a product called Instead. It is a product for women, you buy it and you..."

Wait a minute. Maybe I shouldn't say too much more about that on a family-friendly website.

Anyways, the calculation at Comedy Central seems obvious: Use sex jokes to get the mostly young, mostly male audience to pay attention, then school them with some eye-opening comedy about sexism and stereotypes.

But for me, that combination also inspires a little guilt. It grabs my attention, I laugh and then I feel a little ashamed for how well the sex talk reeled me in.

There are times when Schumer misses the mark. In one moment from the first episode of this season, she finds out an old sex partner has herpes, she pleads for help from God and he arrives ... in the form of superstar character actor Paul Giamatti.

"Let me be honest with you," Giamatti-as-God says. "You did get herpes. You already have it. For me to undo your herpes, I have to create balance in the universe...I'd have to kill off an entire village in Uzbekistan."

"Yeah ... whatever you think is best," she says, blankly. "Do it." Later, she offers to have sex with God if he'll undo her herpes and he refuses because he's gay.

It's wry and very weird. But Schumer's also working a stereotype: the ditzy slut. And that comes dangerously close to the biggest risk in modern comedy: A comic tries satirizing a stereotype, but just encourages it.

Schumer walks that line brilliantly, but there are others who haven't. Like Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who discovered just how difficult that kind of humor is during the Academy Awards last year when he sang a big production number called "We Saw Your Boobs."

It was delivered with an "ain't we naughty" kind of attitude. But you waited for MacFarlane to at least nod toward a larger point about the movies' double standard for topless actresses. And he never did. So a serious issue was passed off as harmless fun.

Schumer is too smart to make that mistake. Instead, there's a delicious tension between her attention-getting sex jokes and the social commentary she drops once we're paying attention.

I can't wait to see how guilty she makes me feel next time.

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

In a book out Tuesday, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens proposes six amendments to the U.S. Constitution, including measures aimed at preventing gerrymandering (that is, redrawing district lines for political advantage), abolishing the death penalty and allowing limits on the amount of money that political candidates and their supporters can spend on campaigns. Other amendments would promote stricter gun control and abolish states' sovereign immunity. The 94-year-old Stevens writes in the preface to his book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, that of his proposals, "the first four would nullify judge-made rules, the fifth would expedite the demise of the death penalty, and the sixth would confine the coverage of the Second Amendment to the area intended by its authors." He added that he is confident "ultimately each will be adopted."

For the grumpy prescriptivists of the world, there is now an extension for Google Chrome that replaces the word "literally" with the word "figuratively" on the webpages you visit. (Though you're fighting a losing battle, dear purists — the word's more colloquial, emphatic sense — as in, "I'm literally going to kill the next person who comments on my use of the word 'literally' " — was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.)

On Monday evening, state Rep. Thomas Carmody shelved a bill to make the Holy Bible the state book of Louisiana, saying the issue had become a distraction. Carmody initially tried to designate a particular copy of the Bible from the Louisiana State Museum as the state book, but the bill's language was eventually changed to refer to the King James Bible, and then just to "the Holy Bible." Critics, including the Louisiana ACLU, called the bill discriminatory and complained that it blurred the line between church and state.

The novelist Salman Rushdie remembers Gabriel Garca Mrquez, who died last week at age 87: "The trouble with the term 'magic realism,' el realismo mgico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, 'magic,' without paying attention to the other half, 'realism.' But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn't matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It's because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works."

Claudia Rankine has won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, an annual award given "to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition." Rankine's poems are an interesting melding of essay and poetry — one of her prose-poems, "Don't Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]," begins: "There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where's the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn't seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren't Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking."

At first, Hari Kondabolu's comedy was mostly about catharsis: "I was doing some work in detention centers and meeting families who had family members who were going to be deported," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It was really powerful work ... but it was incredibly hard and performing at night was a relief. It was cathartic. It was just a way to get things out."

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"The conduct of the captain and some crew members is wholly unfathomable from the viewpoint of common sense, and it was like an act of murder that cannot and should not be tolerated."

Yonhap News says that was the word Monday from South Korean President Park Geun-hye as she spoke with senior aides about last week's ferry disaster, which is feared to have killed about 300 people — most of them high school students who were on a trip to a popular resort island.

CNN has a slightly different version of the president's words, though they convey the same message:

" 'The actions of the captain and some of the crew are absolutely unacceptable, unforgivable actions that are akin to murder,' Park said Monday in comments released by her office. She said she and other South Koreans were filled with 'rage and horror.' "