Monday Medley

What we read while assigning baseball allegiances to past assassins…

• It’s been an interesting stretch for magazine features, starting with Luke Dittrich’s Esquire piece — the title is too long to quote here — on the Joplin tornado. Also at Esquire, Tom Junod tackles Jon Stewart (in kind of the same way he tackled Roger Ailes, i.e. obliquely and not quite as effectively as you might like). Over at GQ, Michael Paterniti goes all second-person in a tale of survival surrounding the Japanese earthquake — which the Nieman Storyboard thought was worthy of some dissection.

• Excerpts from Roger Ebert’s upcoming memoir. One alludes to the feature Chris Jones penned on Ebert some months back. Jones was pretty happy with that one, if he may say so himself.

• Our weekly David Foster Wallace bullet: DFW (very politely) threatens an editor via fax. Also, just what is Jonathan Franzen trying to accuse DFW of here? Speaking of Franzen, here’s a reason to get very excited for a new season of television programming.

• In other TV news, Hulu picked its five favorite magazine articles about television, including this great oral history of The Dana Carvey Show.

• One thing Grantland does that we do like is the director’s cut series on old magazine profiles. Gay Talese’s on Joe DiMaggio is one of the best you’ll ever read.

• If we were to begin a series of old, esoteric interviews, this one from the Paris Review of Jorge Luis Borges would be a good starting point. Learn, among other things, what Borges’ favorite fabricated English word is. Unfortunately, while discussing the origin of character names, he does not bring up our resident sports revolutionary.

• Forget baseball; Stephen Marche on what hockey means to Canada.

• PTI, which Tim celebrated two years ago, reached its tenth anniversary.

• The ten most tweeted moments ever offer an interesting (and possibly depressing) look at what humans are engaged by.

Monday Medley

What we read while wondering what the original Holy Saturday was like…

• As fans of Ron Swanson and baseball, we very much approve of this attempt to bridge the two.

• For anyone who doesn’t understand Passover, this extended version of the Four Questions pretty much explains it all.

• Tom Scocca v. Chris Jones! Writer feud!

• Jones also talks about Jon Krakauer’s takedown of Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortensen and its ramifications for non-fiction writers.

• Noam Chomsky asks if the world is too big to fail.

• A brief history of Humblebrag may qualify as its own best example.

• The WNBA’s next slogan: Take a gamble!

• For all our soccer aficionados, the Cosmos!

• Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, among others, talked about the art of comedy on HBO’s Talking Funny.

Monday Medley

What we read while Colin Firth managed to give a stutter-less acceptance speech…

• Natalie Portman won the Best Actress award last night, so it’s worth asking: Is Natalie Portman a good actress? Slate ran two stories that seem to say “no.” Slate also dished on The King’s Speech and stuttering.

• We know one Egyptian who will be retroactively upset The Social Network didn’t win Best Picture.

• Suze Rotolo, of this famous album cover, died last week, meaning pop music lost perhaps it’s greatest muse (it’s either her or Pattie Boyd, right?).

• Have you ever wanted to hear Louis C.K. repeatedly ask a former Secretary of Defense if he is an alien lizard? If so, then boy do we have a link for you…

• On his “other” other blog, Chris Jones riffs on the rules to the press box and the locker room for sports reporters. The latter drew some commentary from former hockey player Justin Bourne.

• Frank Lloyd Wright had a 10-point manifesto for his apprentices. It doesn’t necessarily conform with the philosophical tenets of the book he, in part, inspired.

• Man, when was the last time we had a batch of DFW links? Well, here’s an old Laura Miller interview with him, as well as a thoughtful look at the underappreciated Oblivion, and a look at the recently opened archives in Austin. And hey, this makes Infinite Jest slightly less confusing. Slightly.

• The multi-talented Donald Glover as a rapper.

• What your favorite classic rock band says about you…

• Charlie Sheen…er, uh, well, we don’t really know what to say….

Monday Medley

What we read while wondering if the winners of the Lingerie Bowl play the winners of the Puppy Bowl…

• Michael Weinreb explores the American bacchanalia that is the Super Bowl…

• Michael Kruse starts examining the constitutionality of Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd’s sting operations, but doesn’t dive deeply enough into the crux of the issue for our tastes.

• Over in the movie world, Stephen Tobolowsky explained how Groundhog Day changed his life, while Tara Reid apparently announced plans for a nonexistent sequel to The Big Lebowski. The Writers Guild Awards happened (on two coasts!) and Kristen Schaal hosted the east coast version.

• Speaking of comedy, Dana Carvey was back hosting SNL. Also, old people don’t understand why David Brent is funny.

• Our favorite part of FOX’s NFL broadcasts–referee majordomo Mike Pereira–did an online chat with the Wall Street Journal, hinting at possible changes to the league’s challenge system.

• Chris Jones goes after Jason Whitlock! And Phil Simms goes after Desmond Howard!

• The Onion strikes again, this time on puppies. Man, we love the Puppy Bowl.

• Tyler Cowen enters the fray on the Chinese mother discussion. He also has a controversial new book out.

• We stumbled upon two websites that attempt to explain the endings of two notoriously impenetrable TV classics.

• Michael Lewis went to Ireland to figure out why the country’s going bankrupt.

Monday Medley

What we read on our $200 million-per-day Indian vacation…

• The titular mission of one of NPI’s favorite former blogs has finally been accomplished, as ESPN has decided not to bring Joe Morgan back to Sunday Night Baseball (Jon Miller’s gone too, but we’ll miss him). Morgan himself claimed he wasn’t surprised by the move. Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs reprinted a 2005 story he wrote for SF Weekly on Morgan. And, of course, Joe Posnanski offered his thoughts on the farewell.

• Rachel Maddow had an extensive (and interesting) interview with Jon Stewart.

• Could you have solved this Wheel of Fortune puzzle with only one letter? Chris Jones of Esquire explained how Caitlin Burke actually did.

• Why are Publius, Rick Reilly, and Bill Simmons discussed in the same article? Find out!

• How Slate has failed to keep up with the Internet. Meanwhile, Charlotte Magazine takes an in-depth look at the state of the Queen City’s newspaper, the Charlotte Observer.

• The Onion basically sums up all the problems with democracy that John S tried to explain in his long post. Meanwhile, the evidence that democracy doesn’t work keeps on mounting…

• We would try to avoid linking to something as super-specific to our (read: Tim and Josh’s) tastes as an analysis of divisive Mets’ managerial candidate Wally Backman, but Ted Berg’s starts with a David Foster Wallace epigram! As a counterpoint, a study on what we all know: Managers don’t mean much of anything. And, another statistical analysis on the importance of managerial experience.

• Not quite Caden Cotard. Paul DePodesta, now assistant GM for the Mets, explains why his character will not bear his name in the Moneyball movie.

• Manny Pacquiao, Boxing’s Great Hope for Continued Relevance, was dominant again on Saturday night at Cowboys Stadium in beating Antonio Margarito. That reminded us of Andrew Corsello’s April profile of the Philippine for GQ.

Monday Medley

What we read while taking our talents to South Beach…

• LeBron James’ Decision generated all kinds of fallout last week, and not just among those burning jerseys and writing insane open letters in Comic Sans font. Joe Posnanski was mostly upset for not seeing it coming, and added some thoughts on Gilbert’s letter. Bill Simmons listed a torrent of angry emails about the decision, and in a podcast with Dan Le Batard, called it the cruelest thing any athlete had ever done to a franchise (meanwhile, Miami writer Le Batard was one of the only people to defend the decision). Will Leitch said it actually made being a sports fan feel stupid. Cleveland native Scott Raab took aim at ESPN. Brian Windhorst broke down how the new Big Three came together–a Big Three, by the way, that “breaks the linear equation” for certain Expected W-L formulas.

• Critically beloved The Daily Show allegedly has a problem with women, to which the women of the show responded. There may be something to the criticism, though, but only because women are not funny.

• Chris Jones’ investigation into Terry Kneiss’ incredible Price Is Right bid is terrific if inconclusive. At least it explains Drew Carey’s Buck-like lack of enthusiasm.

• We never thought we’d read another profile of former Memphis star Shawne Williams, especially not one that describes Larry Bird as a “basketball-legend-who-looks-like-an-old-lesbian.”

• Apparently, all rock stars are not that rich.

• “Irresistible”? Yes. “Teenage nonsense”? Never!

Monday Medley

What we read while reconnecting with our Buddhist roots…

• The Tea Party has been a hot topic of late, and not just at NPI. David Barstow of The New York Times wrote an in-depth piece on the group, as did Ben McGrath at The New Yorker. George Will is dubious of populism’s advantages to the Republican Party, and Kurt Andersen of New York thinks our democracy is too democratic. But populism and the Tea Party seem to be energizing the conservative movement, and motivating Sarah Palin to keep saying stupid things, and exploiting her retarded son for publicity.

• Speaking of fucking idiots who some people inexplicably trust as some kind of authority, Donald Trump doesn’t think global warming is real. Since, you know, it snowed a lot recently. Because that kind of logic is airtight. Political cartoonists have also harvested this hilariously ironic gold mine. A lot.

• Tim swears he wrote his ode to curling long before Dan Wetzel and Rick Reilly did their own. And that he hasn’t spent his entire weekend honing his strategy and touch curling online. (By the way, Reilly’s piece is notable for his characteristically condescending portrait of the typical American sports fan via an italicized interlocutor. Nobody disrespects the device of interlocutor as frequently and as frustratingly as Richard Reilly.)

• If you want serious Winter Olympic reporting, you have to turn to Deadspin, where Tommy Craggs rightfully took the International Luge Federation, Canadian Luge Association, and IOC to task for not doing what was necessary to prevent the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. But don’t worry, it’s not like even the experienced, former-medal-winning lugers think the track is still dangerous or anything.

• One grassroots movement to be happy about, though, was the apparently successful movement to prevent EMI from selling Abbey Road Studios.

• Chris Jones’s profile of Roger Ebert has rightfully been getting a lot of positive coverage. Here is Roger Ebert himself on the piece. If Jones’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because either A. it’s a really common name or B. you remember hearing how he won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing last year with his epic piece, “The Things That Carried Him.”

• NPI favorite Joe Posnanski writes a very compelling piece on why Frank Thomas is a no-questions-asked first ballot Hall of Famer. His reaction to Tiger Woods’ apology, meanwhile, was only compelling–not very.