What we read while being snookered by Fox News…
- Bill Murray. Need we say more?
- YES! In fact, GQ’s entire comedy issue is worth checking out, from a writer’s account of the last days of Conan’s Tonight Show to an interview with Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, and Tracy Morgan, and another with some of the funniest directors of the last 30 years.
- Our friends at Dead Homer Society took a nuanced look at “Homer’s Enemy,” a memorable eighth-season episode of The Simpsons that The A.V. Club considers “the beginning of the end” and Sam Downing views as just another dark episode in line with several predecessors in the series.
- Keith Law on Malcom Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw.
- The NY Times has a new snazzy format for its “Room for Debate” feature. Their recent features on college tenure and Teach for America were both thought provoking.
- Forget the signing of Darko Milicic, the trade for Michael Beasley and the trade of Al Jefferson; the surest sign of Timberwolves’ GM David Kahn’s insanity is that he discerned from this interview that Chris Webber was the one acting as “kind of a schmuck.” On the subject of basketball, we haven’t written a Double Bonus in a while, but we did enjoy this Luke Winn piece on one of the Tournament’s best games and Dana O’Neil’s survey of college coaches.
- Meanwhile, the world of sports journalism was aflutter when Mitch Albom, writer of hack novels and magniloquent prose, won the prestigious Red Smith Award. Writers from the ever-ornery Jason Whitlock and the guys at Deadspin, to even the more reserved likes of Dave Kindred, Charles Pierce, and Joe Posnanski have expressed outrage at this hypocrisy.
