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Have you ever heard a cheerleading squad do one of those call-and-response bits where they say, "Seniors yell it!", and then the seniors yell, "Fight! Fight", and then they say, "Juniors yell it!", and so forth? Top Chef brand extensions are kind of like that: All-Stars yell it! Dessert chefs yell it! Veterans yell it! Healthy chefs yell it! Former contestants yell it!

Top Chef has become the Real World/Road Rules of food, where if you play your cards right (and/or act like an utter buffoon), your initial appearance can lead to not only other Top Chef stuff, but other food things on other food networks — like, for example, Food Network.

And now, they've introduced another incarnation, Top Chef Duels. This one will take past contestants and set them against each other in full, hour-long battles made up of several challenges. The premiere, which airs on Bravo Wednesday night, pits molecular gastronomists Marcel Vigneron and Richard Blais against each other. Marcel was originally on Top Chef in 2006 and Richard in 2008, so they've been at this for a while. They've both done All-Stars, they've both done other stuff — they both even had their own shows briefly.

The show does its best to drag out the "Marcel is a little brat" angle that they were working eight years ago, but it's pretty stale at this point. (By the way, I once was at an event where Marcel served liquid nitrogen-frozen popcorn balls. They tasted like ... frozen popcorn, although they did cause me to exhale dragon smoke, which I guess was the point?) They try to scrape the bowl, as it were, for the last few teaspoons of hostility between the two, the better to create the kind of sniping of which many of us have grown tired.

The problem, as is the case with many similar projects, is that at one point, Richard mentions that Marcel texted him the night before, calling him "Grandpa." So, you know. They're texting each other the night before the competition, meaning they've pretty fully transformed themselves from actual prickly competitors (which many people on Old Original Top Chef pretty clearly are) to old hands at giving this particular production what it needs.

Thus, the attempt at personal drama is a flop from the start, leaving us with the actual cooking. At first, it's pretty flat: it's hard in a world of Chopped and especially Cutthroat Kitchen to make up cooking challenges that seem fresh. But late in Top Chef Duels, they do find some interesting angles with blindfolds and so on that serve as good reminders that these folks are, in fact, pretty inventive and good at what they do. (There is also a moment when Gail Simmons seems either spiritually or actually tipsy, and all Top Chef incarnations are better when the judges are — again, either in fact or in effect — boozing.)

So is this really necessary? No. No, it is not. But if you want to see a guy make fruit out of livers, this is the brand extension for you.

A few months back, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, brought a bill to the floor that basically offered tax incentives to businesses and individuals. Those incentives are called tax extenders.

They include big stuff and small stuff — tax breaks for wind farms, tax breaks for schoolteachers who buy their own supplies. Tax breaks for rum producers in Puerto Rico, people who make movies, race track owners, even some breaks for people who bike to work. In other words, something for every lawmaker to take home.

This should have been a slam dunk. And at first, it was. Ninety-six senators gathered in the chamber shortly after Wyden's speech, and all voted in favor of moving the bill forward. But two days later, this bill, with 96 out of 100 supporters, was stopped cold. To anyone watching, it might have looked like some special kind of insanity.

But Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow with the tax policy center at the Urban Institute, says look closer.

"This is all fairly well planned," he says. "This isn't World War I, where we kind of accidentally stumbled into a catastrophe."

He says he does understand how frustrating it is for Americans to watch this process: "It's either frustrating or amusing. If you actually watch this on C-Span and you don't get the joke, it has to be very frustrating."

That leads to things like a rally outside the Capitol on a recent afternoon of Republicans who were upset with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for not bringing House bills to a vote.

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Like it or not, television has the power to shape our perceptions of the world. So what do sitcoms, dramas and reality TV say about poor people?

In life and on TV, "poor" is relative. Take breakfast. For Honey Boo Boo's family, it's microwaved sausage and pancake sandwiches. For children in The Wire's Baltimore ghetto, it's a juice box and a bag of chips before school. On Good Times, set in the Chicago projects back in the 1970s, it was a healthier choice: oatmeal. "If you're poor, it goes a long way. And it's pretty cheap," laughs Bern Nadette Stanis, who played Thelma Evans on Good Times.

Good Times debuted in 1974, in the midst of a recession. Many people were struggling. For a time, it was one of the highest rated shows on TV, but Good Times also drew criticism for giving the impression that being poor isn't so bad, as long as there's love. But Stanis says, judging from personal experience, that's true. "I too was raised in the projects in Brooklyn, in Brownsville. I lived in a two bedroom apartment with my mom and dad and five children. So there were seven of us. But we also were rich in education and in love," says Stanis.

Good Times also tackled some of the bad times facing poor communities, like drug addiction and gangs. Norman Lear, who co-produced the show, says that above all, they wanted to make people laugh — but they also wanted story lines that resonated. Before the 1970s, he adds, TV pretty much ignored poor people. "The biggest subjects in television comedy were 'The roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner,' or 'Mom dented the car and how do the kids and mom keep dad from finding out,'" says Lear. "There were no political problems. There was no poverty. That was the total message wall to wall, floor to ceiling," Lear says.

There's a lot of debate about the subject of entertainment TV's depiction of poverty. Do audiences empathize with the poor people they see or look down on them?

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For All Things Considered's series on Men in America, we asked the guys out there: What are the movies that make you cry? While reading through the 5,000+ responses, we started to notice a recurring theme — or should we say, a recurring man: Tom Hanks.

Hanks was mentioned far more than any other actor and for a wider array of performances — from Captain Phillips to Philadelphia, among many others.

So what makes him the master emotional manipulator in Hollywood?

We actually put that question to Hanks' agent in Hollywood, but haven't heard back. So instead, let's take a look at some of his most-cited performances.

Editor's Note: We're talking about the emotional climax of a lot of movies here. Suffice it to say, you've been warned about a boatload of spoilers.

Forrest Gump

This movie can be an emotional roller coaster at times, but there are a few scenes that were mentioned over and over again. The first arrives when Forrest meets the son he didn't know he had.

"But...is he smart or is he..." asked Forrest Gump of little Forrest. #menpr

— Richard Yeh (@ryeh) July 31, 2014