These are a few of our favorite things:

These are a few of our favorite things:

How a single LP sums up the music of earth.

A few of our favorite things this week.

A few of our favorite things this week.

It’s been over a decade since reality television exploded. Cheaply-produced programs showcasing people acting nuttily while being urged on by reality show producers and powered by alcohol beam at all hours of the day.  

The magic’s in the editing. Nothing’s real. Blah, blah, blah. We get it. And, perhaps from a combination of demand and low costs, it doesn’t look like this trend will stop any time soon.

At least, I hope not.

Walt Frazier was a first-round draft pick to the New York Knicks in 1967, and 20 years later, the seven-time NBA All-Star was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame. As an athlete, he made stealing the ball an art form, and as a sports broadcaster he has turned game commentary into poetry, coining phrases like "dishing and swishing," "bounding and astounding," and "posting and toasting."

Frazier was given the nickname "Clyde" after being photographed in an ensemble similar to Warren Beatty's in the film "Bonnie and Clyde," and his flashy sense of style off the court was credited with bringing glamour to Madison Square Garden. A gifted broadcaster, successful entrepreneur and basketball legend, Walt "Clyde" Frazier has managed to maintain an image of himself shaped decades ago, without being trapped by it. 

Watch Brooke's interview with Frazier about his basketball career, evolution as a broadcaster and relationship with the media — as well as some of his surprising passions like yoga, gardening and of course, fashion.

A few of our favorite things.

On this week's show, we are asking our listeners to share their experiences with new Copyright Alert System (CAS), also known as "Six Strikes." We wanted to know what this system looks like in practice - whether people are getting these alerts accidentally, what they look like, etc. This week, we're getting the first glimpse.

A few of our favorite things.

Since 2006, Aasif Mandvi has been making Daily Show audiences laugh with titles like "Senior Muslim Correspondent" or "Senior Asian Correspondent," often satirizing Muslim, Middle Eastern and South Asian issues in the news.

But Mandvi is so much more than a "Senior Brown Correspondent." He's an accomplished theater actor, having starred in productions such as a Broadway revival of "OKLAHOMA!" and most recently the critically acclaimed play "Disgraced.” He won an Obie award for his one man show "Sakina's Restaurant," which he later turned into the feature film "Today's Special."

Watch Brooke's conversation with Aasif about comedy, Broadway, making "fake news” and the challenges of being the "brown guy."

The Copyright Alert System (CAS), known colloquially as "Six Strikes" is being launched today. This program will enact punitive measures against people sharing copyrighted material, up to and including temporarily slowing down their internet and blocking certain cites.

We want to track this program - see how well it's working, whether it's throwing false positives, and what these measures look like. We need your help to do that.

This week, the story that leads the news cycle (and, not coincidentally, leads our show) is the looming sequester. With Congress seemingly at an impasse, Republicans are demanding significant cuts in government spending, while Democrats are demanding an increase in tax revenues. Being that I play video games and find partisan congressional hackery so boring I could die, I naturally focused in on the one gaming story that has anything to do with the sequester.

Earlier this week U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor posted a note on his website citing specific examples of government waste. Among them: "The National Science Foundation spent $1.2 million paying seniors to play 'World of Warcraft' to study the impact it had on their brain." The claim was quickly picked up by other Republicans as a talking point, with House Speaker John Boehner writing "no one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines."

World of Warcraft? What is this study? How can I get on board? 

This week's OTM will dedicate the top of the show to cybersecurity after the President took a moment in the State of the Union to address the topic.

A few of our favorite things. We do this every week.

Our favorite things for the first week of February.

In her book “The Future of Nostalgia,” Svetlana Boym reminds readers that nostalgia was originally a medical condition. The word was coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in the late 17^th century. He used it to describe a debilitating disease that plagued its victims with depression, obsessive thoughts of returning home, and hallucinations of scenes from their homeland and the voices of distant loved ones. Populations especially at risk of contracting nostalgia included displaced workers, students from foreign lands, and of particular concern, soldiers fighting abroad. Boym explains that “[i]t was unclear at first what was to be done with the afflicted soldiers who loved their motherland so much that they never wanted to leave it, or for that matter to die for it.”

Today, of course, nostalgia is no longer a battlefield illness. Instead, curiously, nostalgia manifests itself among many Americans as a longing for wartime.

During the Arab Spring, NPR's Andy Carvin used social media to report on uprisings happening a world away. Although Carvin's based in DC, his twitter stream became a reliable one-stop shop for news about events on the ground from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya to Bahrain. 

Tonight, Carvin sits down with Brooke to talk about how he does what he does and what it might mean for the future of journalism. 

You can follow along on the livestream below, and tweet Andy questions using the hashtag #OTMlive. We'll be live-tweeting the event as well. 

Also, be sure to check out Andy's new book, Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution.

For a moment in time, these were our favorite things.