GQ had the ridiculous notion of sending Drew Magary to Los Angeles to profile Justin Bieber.

Justin Bieber is a very small human being. He’s 18, but he could easily pass for someone six years younger. His rep says he’s five feet nine, but he looks about four feet four, maybe one hundred pounds. I shake his hand, and it feels like there should be more hand there. I suddenly realize that I can’t box this guy. I’m ten inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier. I ought to sit with him and read him Babar. But soon it doesn’t matter, because Bieber says he forgot his boxing equipment.

“I didn’t want to get my ass kicked,” he says.

“But I was told your dad was an MMA fighter,” I say.

“Yeah, he was.”

“So you could beat my ass.”

“No, not really.”

And just like that, game over. No beatdown for either of us. No catharsis. There goes my last chance at making a man out of Bieber. I’m out of options. I’m stuck here with an 18-year-old, and we can’t drink, we can’t smoke weed, and we can’t leave the premises. We’re gonna have to talk.

We head into his studio, where Aldred greets Bieber and pumps him up for the evening by ripping the sleeves off of his T-shirt while he’s still wearing it. OUTTA MY WAY, SLEEVES. This is clearly not the first time they’ve performed this ritual. It’s Bieber’s patented entrance move, his talcum powder tossed in the air. Being Justin Bieber means having an endless number of T-shirts to destroy.

You. Are. Welcome.

Aaron Sorkin gave the commencement speech to Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2012. Sorkin giving life advice to fellow members of the Cuse? Obviously, this was going to get posted as soon as it was available on Youtube.

Sorkin has a knack for giving great advice and not sounding like a pretentious resident of Douchbagistan in the process. Still, my favorite part of the entire thing is his acknowledgement of failing a class his first year of college.

As someone who was friends with many drama students at Syracuse, that historical sidenote had an air of urban legend surrounding it — much like Michael Jordan getting cut from his basketball team in high school.

Full transcript of his speech can be found here. [Thanks, Ben!]

I’ve pretty much avoided everything on the Prometheus front since the first two trailers and the Peter Weyland Ted Talk. I’m already sold, but Ridley Scott and company seem desperate to oversell this movie and reveal every bit of footage before the movie hits theaters in June. Ugh, it’s the worst. Hence the avoidance.

However, a new viral hit today that isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. But, Noomi Rapace’s character, who is central to the film’s plot (and if I were guessing is probably going to be revealed as Ripley’s great-grandmother or something) begs Weyland Industries to help her and the entire video call is being monitored by the Yutani Company. Alien nerds will be keenly aware by now that in the first Alien movie, Ripley is sent aboard a ship courtesy of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

I’m totally fascinated by this world that Ridley Scott is building. Is it weird that I’m more fascinated by the story behind Weyland-Yutani than I am about the face huggers?

It’s something of a minor television miracle that not only has ABC’s sitcom Happy Endings survived for two seasons, but that it’s thrived thanks to a hands-off approach by the network. It’s easily one of the five best sitcoms on television today.

Rather than improve ratings by noticeably changing course (as Parks and Recreation had done after its first season), the cast and crew leaned into the weirdness of their comedy. Coupe and Wayans, who play married couple Jane and Brad turned their characters’ initial overachieving-bobo quirks into a full-blown orgy of neuroses—the second season finds Brad wearing a shirtdress because “Daddy likes a deep tuck,” and Jane stalking a kid she thinks might be her egg-donor baby (in fact the parents didn’t use her egg because they thought she seemed just the kind of crazy who would stalk her egg-donor baby). Wilson gave her singleton an ability to rebound that verges on masochism. And Pally’s gay character, Max, so brilliantly overhauls TV’s go-to flamboyant stereotype that in one episode he slovenly hibernates for the winter, like a bear. “It’s like we’re all kind of sharing a brain, and we’re just like, ‘Yeah, this is the direction [the show] needs to go in,’ and we all pushed it into that direction,” says Coupe. “We’ll come up with stuff together and be like, ‘Let’s do this.’ And sometimes there will be a director who’ll say, ‘Please give us a normal take,’ and we’ll be like, ‘No, we want to do it our way.’ And what’s funny is they’ll cave in.”

Scratch that, someone this show has become one of the three consistently funny shows on television. It looks like a Friends clone, but it has more in common with Arrested Development or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s a bit surprising the show hasn’t been embraced by the Internet denizens like many others.

Related: Maske, over at Uproxx, feels me on this show. Go check out his massive collection of Happy Endings multipanes.

“I think it’s really exciting, will be a little strange and fun to wear color at Wimbledon.I’m looking forward to it.” — Maria Sharapova, on the announcement that All England Club would be suspending its traditional “all white” garment rules at Wimbledon for the London Olympics.

How important is sound editing to a movie? Quite a bit, actually. More important than most people are willing to consider. In this one-minute clip above, editor Kogonada, illustrates the importance of sound through the films of director Darren Aronofsky beginning with Pi and ending with Black Swan.

Kogonada was also responsible for: Breaking Bad POV’s, Wes Anderson – From Above, Quentin Tarantino – From Below. Oddly, three awesome pop culture viral videos that I never posted for one reason or another. [via theawesomer]

Anchorman: The Legend Continues reunites the Channel 4 News Team as played by Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and David Koechner. The sequel takes place at the dawn of racial integration in the newsroom and the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle.

You know something has reached the pop culture canon when there’s a teaser poster for a movie still being written that only needs the character’s feet to get people excited.

[via firstshowing]

Gizmodo’s Mat Honan details how Yahoo! bought Flickr, let it wither on the vine and ultimately lost the Internet long game.

Because Flickr wasn’t as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn’t given the resources that were dedicated to other products. That meant it had to spend its resources on integration, rather than innovation. Which made it harder to attract new users, which meant it couldn’t make as much money, which meant (full circle) it didn’t get more resources. And so it goes.

As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social-the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.

This is a great case study for business, technology and web start-ups. [via @timoreilly]

Kenya’s Sammy Wanjiru won the country its first Olympic medal when he won gold at the 2008 Beijing marathon. That made Wanjiru rich and famous and promised a decade of earnings potential as an elite marathon runner. He was just 21-years-old. He followed up his win at the Olympics with wins at the London and Chicago marathons in 2009. Wanjiru would be dead by 24.

But, in the end, Sammy’s death may show nothing as much as the shockingly cavalier way Kenya treats its abundant athletic resources. Sammy is buried in a dairy farm he purchased near his home where a single sheep grazes by the red marble tomb embossed with a photo of him smiling in a shiny brown suit. There’s no statue to him, no race named in his honor. On the contrary, Kenya has moved on from his passing in spectacular fashion.

Four Kenyans ran 2:04 or better last year, and at the end of this month, Athletics Kenya will pick a three-man Olympic marathon team from a field of six that includes Patrick Makau, who shattered the world record in Berlin with 2:03:38, and Geoffrey Mutai, the New York City Marathon winner whose personal best is 2:03:02. The stark reality is that Sammy might not even have made Kenya’s 2012 Olympic marathon squad.

“I was the head of the delegation in Beijing,” says David Okeyo, the secretary general of Athletics Kenya, “and I was one of the happiest people in the world when Wanjiru won that marathon. What happened with him is very sad.” Asked what he thinks about the charges and counter-charges, he says, “One day the truth will come out. I am sure of it.”

But it already has. It wasn’t the fall that killed Sammy Wanjiru. In Kenya, it’s always the rise.

His death is a tragic and mysterious story, one that ESPN has tried to piece together.

Gawker has a rundown of ABC’s new shows premiering in the fall. The only one that remotely grabbed my attention was ‘Last Resort.’

Here’s what they say about the show: “Synopsis: A nuclear sub is given is orders to fire upon Pakistan and, because those orders are shady in origin, the captain of the sub decides not to fire. Some nefarious part of the US government then orders an attack on our heroes who end up taking control of a small island nation and declaring themselves a new country. It is Crimson Tide meets the Rock.”

‘Last Resort’ comes courtesy of Shawn Ryan (The Shield, Terriors, and other great shows) and stars Andre Braugher. The show will air on Thursday at 8 p.m.

This video will save your eight hours of your life, if you haven’t already wasted them like I have. [via theaggregate]

NBC has a new show coming out this fall from producer J.J. Abrams and director John Favreau about what happens 15 years after the entire world loses electricity. The premise for the show is cool, but doesn’t it just feel like this show is going to get cancelled after about five episodes? Maybe it’s that the trailer reveals the electricity hasn’t really gone out, or maybe it’s the solidly bland cast or maybe it’s NBC’s poor track record when it comes to science fiction.

Like CBS’s long-cancelled Jericho, this feels like a show that needs to be on a premium cable channel or at the very least FX. (Also, combing through the upfront trailers seems harder and harder to find shows that look promising)

“Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that he’s being diluted to 10%?” — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to his attorney on cutting out co-founder Eduardo Saverin from the company.

Business Insider got their hands on a letter written by a 20-year-old Zuckerberg and while it might make him appear less sympathetic, it’s clear that even at a young age he was not to be trifled with.

Tim Bray wades into the app versus browser debate and offers compelling reasons for both. Ultimately, it’s not so much “the how” as to the “what and why” of the matter that is important.

One of the biggest problems I have with my tab attic is the discrepancy between the tabs I open at home versus the tabs I open at work versus the tabs I open on other computers. I’ll find a great tab at work, open it on Chrome and then not be able to do anything with it until the next morning. To get around this conundrum, I’ve relied on Google’s bookmarking feature — basically, at the end of the day, I’ll bookmark all my open tabs in case I want to do something with them at home.

What I’ve wanted for sometime now is the ability to sync tabs across different browsers. In other words, the tabs I open at work can easily by opened at home. It seemed like something of a pipe dream, but today, Google announced that the latest version of Chrome will now feature tab syncing — so long as you’re signed into your Google account on Chrome.

This is a monumental feature for people suffering from multiple tab attics.

Looks like actress Mindy Kaling managed to jump the sinking ship of NBC’s The Office at just the right time. And yes, we realize, that The Office has been a slowly sinking ship for a few years now. We watched an episode last week (first one in a few years) and couldn’t help but marvel how the show had no semblance to reality.

Anyway, Kaling’s new sitcom on Fox looks promising. Anytime you can throw in a Michael Fassbender penis joke is okay with us. Have you seen Shame? It shouldn’t be titled “Michael Fassbender’s Penis”.

The good folks over at Reddit have begun compiling the most intellectually stimulating websites.

Videos and Lectures

• KhanAcademy.org
• TED.com
• UnplugTheTV.com

Learn New Things

• FuckingHomepage.com
• IfEveryoneKnew.com

Testing Knowledge

• FreeRice.com
• LizardPoint.com
• MathRun.net

Teach Yourself Something

• OpenCulture.com
• NoExcuseList.com

Youtube Channels

• SciShow
• CrashCourse
• MinutePhysics
• TEDEducation

EDIT:

Subreddits

• r/DepthHub
• r/explainlikeimfive
• r/RedditGuides
• r/TrueReddit

The thread has some great links to free university courses and more. Go learn some shit (and then come back and share)!

James Winters created this ridiculously adorable tribute to recently deceased Beastie Boy, Adam “MCA” Yauch. Winters cajoled his wife, kids and his nephew for the video — one that would probably be a viral hit regardless, but is that much more touching given the recent passing of Yauch. [via blogtown]

Here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost deleted before the film was released in theaters, courtesy of Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman. Jacob and Susman were the film’s associate technical director and supervising technical director, respectively.

As the MythBusters crew remind us, “It’s probably a little over-dramatized from what actually happened, but is a good reminder to back up your important files!” [via doobybrain]

Bleeding Cool‘s Patrick Willems and Matt Torpey recently moved to NYC and did the only sensible thing any new New Yorker should do. He took a Ghostbusters tour of the city. It dawns on me, while watching them visit every location from the film in one afternoon, how perfect Ghostbusters is as a NYC film. It’s not too often a supernatural comedy bests a Scorcese or Woody Allen film for best NYC movie ever.

The fifth season of HBO’s True Blood starts in less than a month. Last season ended with Bill and Eric delivering the true death to Nan Flanagan, big bad Russell Edgington breaking out of his cement prison, Tara supposedly dying (unfortunately, she’ll be back), etc. New season starts June 5, but it’s on a short leash for me. I’ve mostly lost interest in the show, but will keep watching until I lose all interest or the show wraps it up for good. [via flavorwire]

After a week away in San Francisco covering the Citrix Synergy show for TechTarget, there’s nothing more depressing than getting to the office and seeing a very moldy coffee cup. Anyway, here are some links that caught my eye while I was away, but didn’t have time to write them up.

1. TechCrunch takes a closer look at Chorus, the content management system created by Vox Media that powers The Verge and SB Nation blogs. Sadly, there’s no indication that Vox Media plans to make Chorus available for other publications — which means news organizations are stuck with WordPress for the time being.

2. I really dig the spate of “What I Read” features, that asks famous people how they consumer media. The Atlantic does it best and New York Times tech reporter Jenna Wortham is a good place to start.

3. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights advocates for the banning of college football.

In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

That’s because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today’s times.

4. Love, love, love this: “A Map Of Your City’s Invisible Neighborhoods, According To Foursquare”

5. Andrew Sullivan first made the case for gay marriage back in 1989, which means he can put on a pair of his “I told you so” pants with his latest Newsweek essay after Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage last week. It also gives him a unique perspective on the matter, being a gay, Catholic conservative, after all.

6. Here’s the 100th SNL Digital Short. Natalie Portman reminds you how hard she is.

[via uproxx]

7. This should make Lady Oyster happy: Apple is ditching Google’s mapping technology for the maps app come iOS 6. Hopefully, they can make a few more improvements as the maps app is her least favorite thing about the iPad.

8. Storytelling advice from Joss Whedon, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Scott Simon, Damon Lindelof and a machine.

9. An insider reveals why Anonymous might be the most powerful organization on Earth.

punch in the face where Anonymous began to realize how incredibly powerful they are. There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth. The entire world right now is run by information. Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that’s what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s? It’s the geeks and computer hackers of the world.

10.You could do worse than taking a few seconds to catch up with Nivan Mullick and the little boy who created Caine’s Arcade.

Above: Artist Hannah Friederichs has drawn Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in the fashion of the late, great Maurice Sendak. Also, the movie continues to own the box office like nothing else in history.

I’m in San Francisco this week as part of my work for TechTarget. I’ll be covering the Citrix Synergy show, which is probably more interesting to me than it is to all of you. Seriously, I’ve tried telling family and friends about virtualization and cloud technologies and generally I can see their eyelids slowly gloss over.

I’ll have some free time and will be here through the weekend if any readers want to meet up for a beer, get in touch. I’ll also be on Twitter. Anyway, posting will be limited — as in probably non-existent.

Gawker has rounded up the best “quotes, drawings, videos, illustrated envelopes” that have begun making the rounds since news of Maurice Sendak’s death hit this morning.

Update: The gang over at Flavorwire also have a nice tribute to the late author.

Meth auteur Walter White (Bryan Cranston in character) endorses Maxwell Ulin in an election for Student Body President at the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in L.A. Rumor has it, there’s another video of Gus Fring endorsing the other candidate, Summer Kennedy. All of the videos have been made private by the school (Watch a mirror here.), which means it’s not some crazy viral promotion for the upcoming fifth season of Breaking Bad. Given how Walter White ended things with Gus Fring at the end of season four, is it safe to say Ulin has this election locked up? [via hypervocal]

I’ve been on an Old Crow Medicine Show kick lately and I was googling around and discovered they covered one of John Prine’s best known songs for a tribute album. That excites me to no end. Not only that John Prine has a tribute album, but that also OCMS was able to take part. Even more exciting, was the discovery that the two played the song together during a 2010 Bonnaroo performance.

Of course, this probably means I’m going to end up on a sick John Prine kick for the next few days. Such is life.

Director Jay Roach pits Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis against one another in a congressional race for biggest buffoon. Great idea for a comedy, but it makes me wish this was a Christopher Guest mockumentary, ya know?

With that said, however, the cast seems interesting with Jason Sudeikis, Dylan McDermott, Brian Cox, John Lithgow, and Dan Aykroyd in the mix and Jay Roach has proven he can be a capable comedy director. I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed his recent political drama for HBO, Game Change.

In theaters August 10, 2012.

Fuck. This hits hard. Maurice Sendak, who obviously wrote where the Wild Things Are, had a huge affect on my childhood. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that book spoke to me as a little kid in ways that no other book ever did.

Sendak died after complications from a recent stroke. He was 83.

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said.

I love the expression “shtetl Blake” and the notion that he never did learn to draw feet. Sigh. Watch an excerpt from the documentary Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak here.

Epipheo interviews Daniel H. Wilson, author of ‘Robopocalypse‘, to teach you how to survive the eventual robot uprising.

Science! It’s refreshing to know that in the real world we might actually have a chance against the robots.

What’s better than Zack Galifianakis making awkward banter with celebrities? Zack Galifianakis making awkward banter with Jon Stewart, Tina Fey and Sir Richard Branson for 30 minutes as part of the Comedy Central Between Two Ferns Special, which aired ahead of Sunday’s Comedy Awards.

Unfortunately, the special isn’t embedable, but go forth and enjoy the next 30 minutes of your morning with a cup of coffee while you awkwardly try and avoid your boss.

Piñata Anatomy by Carmichael Collective. I can’t decide of the Twizzler muscles or the orange fruit slice stomach is more appealing at the moment. [via laughingsquid]

The Beastie Boys perform “The New Style” in an unreleased clip from the third season of Chappelle’s Show — you know, the one where Chappelle was in Africa and Charlie Murphy did most of the hosting? Yeah, that one. Anyway, according to Prefix Mag, the clip was thrown up on YouTube by stand-up comedian/Chappelle’s Show co-creator Neal Brennan. [via @toddcadley]

Yeah, yeah, Marvel’s The Avengers smashed the opening box office weekend record. So what’s next? According to Deadline, Marvel is looking at bring The Hulk back to the big screen by 2015. No surprise there. Plenty of reviews suggested Mark Ruffalo’s The Hulk was the best thing about The Avengers.

And, according to Slashfilm, director Edgar Wright hinted over the weekend that his long-in-gestation Antman movie might be moving forward. Which makes us wonder why the hell an Edgar Wright-directed, Joe Cornish (Attack the Block)-written Antman movie hasn’t already happened.

Regardless, it’s exciting to think about the post-Avengers Marvel movie universe and what could happen. Anything is possible.

Ben Folds Five are readying their reunion album, and the trio just posted a demo from one of those recording sessions to Ben Folds’ Facebook page. “Do It Anyway” proves that Ben Folds has been missing Darren Jesse and Robert Sledge creatively over the last decade. This song is easily the most interesting thing Folds has done musical since Reinhold Messner.

Mp3: Ben Folds Five – “Do It Anyway”

Ben Folds Five’s new LP still doesn’t have a release date but it should be out later this spring or early summer. [via stereogum]

Sacha Baron Choen, aka Admiral General Aladeen, congratulates Francois Hollande on defeating Sarkozy, whom he refers to as “a midget.” Not that it matters, The Dictator is more of a DSK guy. Obviously. I love how Cohen continues to try and blur the lines between real life and his movie in the name of promotion. [via buzzfeed]

Network World got the scoop and writes: “Entitled “1944,” the almost 9-minute full version was Apple’s in-house takeoff on “1984,” the iconic first Macintosh TV ad that caused a sensation during that year’s Super Bowl. Set as a World War II tale of good vs. IBM, it is a broadcast-quality production (said to have cost $50,000) that was designed to fire up Apple’s international sales force at a 1984 meeting in Hawaii. A copy of “1944″ was provided to me by one-time Apple employee Craig Elliott, now CEO of Pertino Networks, a cloud-computing startup located two blocks from Apple in Cupertino.”

Your guess is as good as mine? The full version of the spot runs nearly nine minutes long and features the hammer throwing girl from the 1984 spot.

Damn, everyone knew The Avengers was going to open strong, but $200 million strong? Bested the previous opening weekend record by $30 million? The strong anticipation, the overwhelmingly good reviews and the fact that the movie, while technically not a sequel, was kind of the sixth movie in a planned series. Kudos to Marvel for pulling off the impossible.

Now, the only two questions are: how much will this make at the box office overall? I’m guessing $450 million or so. The opening box office accounted for 40 percent or so of the total box office for nearly all of the recent movies that have opened strong out of the gates. That suggests, in part, that those movies don’t have strong legs and make most of their money in the first few weeks of opening.

However, if The Avengers performs more like The Dark Knight and this is only 30 percent of its take, it could end up doing extremely ridiculous numbers. Time will tell and there aren’t too many movies on the horizon that could dent its momentum; I suspect there are also plenty of people that have yet to see the movie (ahem) and will now want to do so.

As for the second question: does this mean Joss Whedon can finally make a show for Fox that won’t be unceremoniously be cancelled after one season? Probably not. It is Fox after all.

At just nine months, babies demonstrate biases in facial recognition — essentially, they can recognize faces and emotional expressions of people of the same race.

Now, that’s not to suggest this behavior make babies racist, per se, however, a recent study suggests that “biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed. It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate [the biases],” explains researcher Lisa Scott.

The learned mechanism is probably a survival technique of some sort and not ultimately behavior indicative of “racism.” But, it does suggest that people learn to identify and segregate people on the basis of race from a remarkably young age. [via theatlanticwire]

After discovering Disney’s legendary roller coaster Space Mountain was non-operational, Disney Blog’s John Frost didn’t hesitate for a second and hopped on the Peoplemover, where he got a lighted tour of the ride. [via devour]

Forgive me for not coming up with a more clever twist on the classic Jeopardy! question and answer format, but I was too distraught over the rumors that host Alex Trebek would be retiring once he reaches his 30th season of hosting.

Now, that’s a long time to do anything, and the man will get no beef from us, but we can’t imagine the trivia show without his presence. He’s more entwined to the fabric of that show than Bob Barker was to Price is Right. 

Of course, this is coming from the person who has made Jeopardy! appointment television since he was 10 and once lamented the shame when Trebek shaved his mustache.

Related: Trebek interviewed by Time | Trebek gets Autotuned