Here are five articles I enjoyed this week enough to recommend you read them, too…
- Thirty years ago, just before embarking on his career as a late night talk show host, Conan O’Brien created one of the best Simpsons episodes. “Monorail” was a loving tribute to his favorite movie, “The Music Man,” and Irwin Allen’s 1970s disaster movies (e.g. “The Towering Inferno”). Alan Siegel compiled this remembrance of O’Brien’s creative process, Phil Hartman playing con man Lyle Lanley, a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy, and Homer’s classic line, “Donuts — is there anything they can’t do?”
- If you’re looking for a topic guaranteed to start a heated discussion with your fellow football fans this weekend, my friend Nolan Dalla has chosen the 21 greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. For the record, I would have placed Bart Starr much higher.
- NY Times movie critic Manohla Dargis says she’s optimistic about women in the movie world for the first time ever.
- Jason Jones has a nice profile of Dean Blandino, the rules analyst for Fox’s NFL coverage, who was once a standup comedian.
- To kick off her new weekly column for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan explains how she would fix Twitter if she were its CEO.