Since it opened in previews at the end of November, the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has drawn unprecedented attention from the news media, online websites, theater community and public. Though much of this attention has been driven by a concern for the production's safety, its intensity and prominence call to mind a moral panic, motivated less by the production's well-being than by upholding the arts in their present form. Spurred by the immediacy and rising role of new media, a less authoritative old media and a Broadway community unnerved by challenges to its longstanding aesthetic and social order, the attention shows no sign of dying soon.

The spotlight has been unrelenting since the production was conceived nearly nine years ago. As its creative team -- Julie Taymor, Bono, The Edge and Glen Berger -- lost and reestablished funders, worked up a $65m budget, and both intrigued and annoyed a Broadway community dismayed by the effect of an expensive musical about a comic-book hero on the complacent Broadway order, the production garnered unrelenting scrutiny. Attention spiked when early accidents raised the question of whether or not the creative team was taking too many risks and endangering the cast, and Broadway websites, in the best of times energetic trackers of theatrical shows, pummeled the production. When the show's first preview was halted multiple times due to technical malfunction, websites received hundreds of thousands of online hits, late-night television crafted parodies, and media reviewers tackled the show, violating the tacit agreement not to do so until previews -- performances held before critics are invited to visit -- were over. By the time last week's incident unfolded - in which dancer/aerialist Christopher Tierney fell when his harness malfunctioned -- the perfect storm for a moral panic had been set. Within hours the Broadway community weighed in on the morality of pushing performance thrills at the risk of safety. Calls were made to close the show, sue the creative team and put Julie Taymor in jail. Not only did Spider-Man surface as a trending topic on Twitter and a breaking international news item, but it became the target of a potential legislative hearing on safety standards.

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Last week, a number of religious freedom activists, bloggers and organizations were alerted by Sgt. Justin Griffith, a soldier at Fort Bragg, N.C., to a mandatory U.S. Army survey called the "Soldier Fitness Tracker." One of the areas included in this survey, which measures a soldier's fitness in a number of areas, is "spiritual" fitness. According to his survey results, Sgt. Griffith is unfit to serve.

A little background: I've been working with Sgt. Griffith for the past few months on an event he's organizing in response to the Billy Graham Evangelical Association's "Rock The Fort" event, which was held on the parade field at Fort Bragg in September. Although a number of organizations objected to a military installation officially sponsoring this Billy Graham event, which was clearly designed to make converts of soldiers at the post, the event went on as planned. In defense of the event, the post commander issued a statement saying that any other group that wanted to hold a similar event would be given the same approval and support that "Rock The Fort" had been given. I immediately called Mikey Weinstein, my boss at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and said that we needed to take Fort Bragg up on its offer and tell them we want to hold a comparable event for non-theists. Just as we were discussing the feasibility of putting on an event on the same scale as the Billy Graham event, we got an email from Sgt. Griffith, who had had exactly the same idea. And, thus, a beautiful partnership was born. From my very first phone conversation with Sgt. Griffith a few days later, I knew we had a soldier with the brains, guts, and determination to pull this off. Other organizations quickly got on board -- the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Americans United, the Military Association of Athiests and Freethinkers, American Atheists, and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation -- as did a bunch of great entertainers and speakers, including the illustrious Ed Brayton, who has agreed to emcee the event. The event, tentatively scheduled to take place in April, is called Rock Beyond Belief.

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Happy New Year, HuffPosters! As we're sweeping up the confetti, let's raise a final glass to 2010. Amidst the disasters, the acrimony and the "recovery, what recovery?" economy, there was still much to celebrate. It was another exciting year at HuffPost as we continued to grow and evolve. There were new sections (hello Travel, Religion, Health, Education, Divorce, Food, College, Arts), and new ways to experience HuffPost on the go (hello, iPad app). And there's more to come next year: more sections, more original video and more HuffPost reporters covering everything from politics to business to popular culture -- with an emphasis on storytelling and putting flesh and blood on the data. Personally, I watched my youngest daughter join her sister in college and crisscrossed the country on a book tour (with many detours to visit the daughters in college!). On the road, I marveled at the resilience and ingenuity I encountered as people throughout America take it upon themselves to reconnect to those in need and rebuild their communities. Here's to a wonderful 2011, full of love, compassion, creativity and surprises!

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There can be little doubt that, here in America, 2010 will be remembered as a tough year coming on the heels of a tough decade. Be it unprecedented rancor, record-setting obstructionism, the waxing crescent moon of our economy, or the continuously embarrassing fecklessness of much of the media, this year gave us a great deal to cringe about. Sure, we benefited as a nation from many of the hard-fought legislative achievements of the most productive Congress in fifty years, but each of those gains -- substantial though they may be -- carries the heavy asterisk of what could have been. This is the year that brought us the nightmarish stultification of the conservative movement and the nearly parodic collapse of the exhausted liberal will; it introduced us to Christine O'Donnell, Eric Massa, Tony Hayward, Sharron Angle, Terry Jones, bedbugs, death panels, Miami LeBron, and Four Loko. As demoralizing as so much of it was, however -- I'm looking at you, Four Loko -- my biggest regret of 2010 is reserved for an event that never happened.

2010 ought to have commemorated the hundredth anniversary of an American political movement which sought to make our country a kinder and better land, a movement which was conceived on August 31st, 1910 in the southwest corner of Osawatomie, Kansas, and which died, stillborn, during the presidential election of 1912. That August evening was supposed to have marked the culmination of a two-day festival memorializing America's most famous radical, John Brown, with the dedication of a park in his name; in the course of an hour-and-a-half-long address, however, the illustrious keynote speaker hardly even mentioned the notorious honoree. Two years removed from the presidency and two years shy of announcing that he would run again, Teddy Roosevelt spoke to 30,000 Kansans from atop a kitchen table that night, delivering what would come to be known as the "New Nationalism Speech." It was a speech about justice, about the principles we as a nation hold dear; it was a clarion call that -- for a moment -- reminded us of America's promise of a fair shake for all, and of how far we had already fallen from that foundational ideal.

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