What we read while making our own pact with the devil:
- We may have been a little hasty in calling the Conan/Leno situation a “travesty” (twice!). It actually seems to be doing wonders for Conan’s career. Team Conan is swelling. His ratings are soaring. And his bank account is growing. It hasn’t even been a travesty for comedy fans, as hosts throughout late night have been mining the situation for comedy gold. Conan has been looking for other options. Letterman, who has some experience with all this, has handled it with traditional wit. Jimmy Kimmel, though, was the only one to confront Jay Leno directly.
- Seems like everyone has had something to say about Katie Roiphe’s provocative piece about, well, the apparent lack of provocation in the sex scenes of contemporary American male authors from last week’s New York Times Book Review. Matt Steinglass complements Roiphe’s line of thinking with his own piece (the title says most of it) while Sonya Chung of our go-to literary blog, The Millions, wonders why Roiphe left James Salter out of her discussion. And The Awl does our work for us by taking Roiphe to task for her poor interpretation of David Foster Wallace. Some people just don’t understand DFW like we do.
- Critical of Norv Turner’s clock management at the end of the Jets-Chargers game, Joe Posnanski wonders why NFL head coaches consistently make such simple time management mistakes. Speaking of the Jets-Chargers game, here is more evidence of Rex Ryan’s awesomeness.
- In a time when weekly sports magazines that simply detail basic game plots and predictions have become less and less necessary, we have to wonder why it was up to GQ to dig deep into the ongoing Marvin Harrison investigation. Turns out the foil to all those diva receivers for so many years may be the worst of them all, Rae Carruth included.
- A traveler’s perspective on Haiti.
- We apologize for being the “Dudes who link to every article by us” while acknowledging that this is creepily accurate.
