Monday Medley

What we read while Aaron Craft took a “charge”… 

• Last Wednesday marked the ten-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. A dying veteran wrote a letter to President Bush. How our perceptions of the war’s opponents (including Republicans) has changed…

• The sabermetricians who run New York City.

• The Tonight Show will move back to New York when Jimmy Fallon replaces Jay Leno next year. But who will replace Fallon at Late Night?

• 20 things you didn’t know about Bob Dylan’s debut album.

• How Barrett Brown of Anonymous became a government target. In other tech law news: the awful Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

• Will Leitch makes the case for the Yankees winning the AL East in 2013.

• How old is Paul Rudd?

Monday Medley

What we read while the Indians were mathematically eliminated…

• We couldn’t let Opening Day go by without a link to Joe Posnanski, could we? Here he breaks down the 32 best players in baseball. And a uniform roundup from Paul Lukas!

• The best longish piece about baseball we read this week, though, comes from Andy McCullough at the Star-Ledger, providing an inside glimpse at one of New York’s most misunderstood stars, Jose Reyes. It’s almost as good as Charles Pierce’s magazine piece on Red Sox prospect Ryan Westmoreland from a few weeks back, which includes about as good a paragraph of sports journalism as we’ve ever read (we’re not telling you which one, except to say it’s pretty early on). For short, conversational pieces, The Awl has Yakkin’ about Baseball, which will hopefully be as consistently hilarious as Yakkin’ about Football was.

• Chipotle in Chelsea is a little bit different than the other Chipotles.

• A documentary about legendary comedian Bill Hicks is getting released this week.

• A lot of fuss over Matthew Weiner’s contract talks with AMC came basically to nothing as Mad Men was renewed with pretty much all of Weiner’s demands met.

• What’s it like to have lunch with Roger Waters?

• Oh, some band you may have heard of played its last show ever on Saturday. It apparently went well.

• John Wray is using Twitter to explore a character cut out of his most recent novel. We’re all for Twiterature experiments.

The Conan Travesty, Part 2

Hell yeah! Stick it to The Man!

Conan announced this afternoon that he would not accept NBC’s choice to move him back to 12:05 a.m.