Monday Medley

What we read while preemptively forgetting old acquaintances…

• David Wain reviews Les Misérables, and Michael Schulman ranks the cast’s singing. Why has the story stayed relevant for 150 years?

• The greatest comedy writing staff you’ve never heard about. And David Letterman talks about Jay Leno.

• The FISA wiretapping laws were renewed again, with little opposition and bipartisan support. Jacob Appelbaum talks about the surveillance state in America. Spiegel Online examines the woes of an American drone operator.

• Speaking of the civil liberties violations, New York City Mayor Bloomberg credited the stop-and-frisk program for the city’s lowest murder rate in history.

• The LA Times looks at the perception of gays in sports, including an unfortunate take from Torii Hunter.

• Does a new showrunner for The Walking Dead mean something for the rest of TV?

• An old SI profile of John Wooden. One of Wooden’s greatest players, Bill Walton, was the focus of Richard Deitsch’s SI media column after he returned to announcing.

• A list of the top 100 lists of all time.

Monday Medley

What we read while our goals were mysteriously disallowed…

• BP’s first smart move in the wake of its massive oil spill may have been lessening Tony Hayward’s role in the spill response. He had become one walking gaffe since the disaster–he probably doesn’t have a role in Damon Lidelof’s (fake) movie about the spill.

• As if we needed another reason to hate the World Cup, it is apparently distracting Billy Beane, who has become such a soccer fan that he almost missed Dallas Braden’s perfect game last month. Joe Posnanski is called it “the day Moneyball died,” which John S predicted last summer. That’s not the only way the World Cup is invading Major League Baseball, as seen at Sun Life Stadium on Saturday. Of course, we’d probably watch more of the matches if they looked like this live.

• Philadelphia Magazine (hey, we embarked beyond NYC!) tries to answer the question that has been bugging a lot of people who saw this or read this (what is a douche juice anyway?): Why is Buzz Bissinger so mad all the time? (We do find his absolute trashing of LeBron, with whom he just wrote a book, pretty fascinating. And in the interest of equal time, Deadspin‘s series with Tim Donaghy analyzing the officiating of the NBA Finals was compelling, as well.)

• Our pals at Dead Homer Society are busy reviewing the ninth season of The Simpsons, which is when, in their words, “the show started becoming more Zombie than Simpsons.” Here’s their take on “The Cartridge Family”–an episode every Simpsons fan we know has recently watched for its brilliant opening send-up of soccer. “Oh, I’ll kill myself if Portugal doesn’t win…”.

• Our favorite retrospectives on two fallen sports figures: Posnanski on John Wooden and Sam Mellinger’s premature eulogy for Manute Bol. That both work(ed) at the Kansas City Star may or may not be coincidental.

• We at NPI aren’t fans of this “fail” meme (we like grammar, remember?), but here are the 50 biggest hip-hop “fails” of all-time.

• Michael Ian Black defends selling out on Twitter. Amanda Rykoff attacks #ff (Follow Friday for the uninitiated).

• Psh…we’re pretty sure we can lose Monopoly in fewer than 21 seconds.