The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

Sarah Abdurrahman:  In a previous edition of OTM’s staff picks, I recommended the series “Downton Abbey.” Though I thoroughly enjoyed the show (yes BOTH seasons, despite all the criticism of the second) I can’t really recommend it again. But I CAN recommend this hilarious video from “Saturday Night Live” that depicts an advertisement for “Downton Abbey”—if it aired on Spike TV. The funniest thing is that it’s actually a pretty accurate description of the show:

Brooke Gladstone:  “Footnote”: The other great film, the one that didn’t win. I loved the winner, Iran’s “A Separation.”  So did everyone else (pretty much.) But not very many people have seen Israel’s Oscar entry, “Footnote,” another family-focused tale that’s also about something bigger. “Footnote” is equally tragic and comic and ventures more deeply into the absurd.  It’s about the rivalry between a father and a son, both scholars in the Talmud department of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  It’s occasionally laugh out loud funny even when it’s most genuinely sad, a pretty tough trick to pull off.  Some crucial aspects of the tale  are based on a true story. (Also won best screenplay at Cannes.)

Chris Neary: My staff pick is this kick-ass explainer of what’s at stake in the Supreme Court health care arguments this week:

http://www.propublica.org/special/mapping-the-supreme-courts-health-care-arguments

PJ Vogt: I feel morally ambivalent about recommending a flash-based game as my staff pick, but, if you want to flush your week down the drain, here’s the link. You’ve been warned.

Jamie York: This begins as a kind of off-the-cuff essay on the occasion of the closing of the Bronx Zoo Monkey House and winds up being an elegant provocation.  It raises so many interesting questions that it doesn't even try to answer; the changing role of 'wild' animals and zoos, how watching and being watched affects the psyche of all us animals and, perhaps most interesting to me,  the creeping impact of solastalgia.

And I'm a big fan of Amadou et Mariam the great Malian musical couple. I'm less of a fan of the frequent tendency to pair American or British pop acts and African artists, the results are often wildly uneven.  But this song works, I'll keep my fingers crossed for the album: