It's Monday and time for a few of our favorite things.

Sarah Abdurrahman: Last week, Stephen Colbert had a two-part interview with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are.  Who knew the children’s book author was so hilarious?  I highly recommend watching the interview.  Part one is below, and you can watch part two here.

Bob Garfield: I feel like lifecasting 1Q84 as i work my way through it.

Katya Rogers: My staff pick is this Ryan Lizza article from last week’s New Yorker.  You know how everyone has a theory about why President Obama hasn’t managed to achieve much of what he set out to do at the beginning of his presidency? Well, this article is a dissection of his first three years almost in the president’s own words. Lizza obtained years worth of memos complete with Obama’s handwritten comments. You really, properly get a sense of the minutiae a president has to reckon on to get stuff done – or not done. This one was on a memo titled “Information on Medical Malpractice Reform Options.” It says “Obviously we shouldn’t do anything that weighs down the overall effort—but if this helps the AMA stay on board, we should explore it.”

PJ Vogt: I just got caught up on the second season of Louie, and wow, is it good. I know that this show got (deservedly) praised a lot, so if you already saw it, great job. But if not, you ought to. It kind of scratches a similar itch to Seinfeld, I guess, in that it’s about a comedian in New York and there’s interspersed bits of very good stand-up material in the episodes. But it’s also so weirder, and truer, and much less sit-comy. Here’s a pretty good scene where Louie has to ask the comedian Dane Cook for help getting tickets to a concert, after having kind-of sort-of accused Cook of stealing his jokes in the past.

Jamie York: A Separation is an Iranian film that slowly, subtly, dramatizes the law of unintended consequences when a couple decides to split.  It didn’t have a false note or stray bit of dialogue and it built the kind of suspense that usually requires a hostage to be taken or a dirty bomb to be disarmed. 

And I’m sure whole books have been written about how to build a song so that it contains just  the right mix of tension and release.  Save yourself some time and just listen to this instead.  I’ve heard this song hundreds of times but when it came up in a mix last night I was floored yet again.