FEELING THE BERN

It's almost absurd how perfectly election cycles seem to work out for Saturday Night Live. When Sarah Palin burst onto the scene in 2008, Tina Fey was there to capture the comedic moment. SNL struck gold again last weekend when Larry David assumed the role of Bernie Sanders in the show's cold opening sketch about the recent Democratic Presidential Debate. The comparisons between the comedy mind behind Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld and the socialist Vermont senator had been made by many for months prior: they're both loud, highly opinionated, knowingly stubborn New Yorkers with the same hairstyle. The sketch's hilarious tone was set early as David's Sanders followed up his opening greeting with, "And now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna dial it right up to a ten!" We can only hope David's appearance as Sanders won't be a one-time-only stunt casting (but if it is, maybe SNL should look into bringing on James Adomian).

SLAYING IT

Singer-songwriter Natalie Prass has had quite the 2015 (including a notable Sasquatch! set) thanks to the bittersweet beauty of her self-titled debut LP. And while there's a light quality to her tender timbres, darkness is never distant. So though her undertaking Slayer's thrash metal classic "Raining Blood" for The A.V. Club's A.V. Undercover video series may seem like a sonic stretch, the results are unsurprisingly sweet. Plus, it's almost always great to hear actual enunciation of screeched metal lyrics.

THE ART OF EFFORT

Taylor Swift seems omnipresent these days, but it's sometimes hard to determine what she's like beyond her superstar outer shell. As one of the premiere pop culture writers alive, Chuck Klosterman always taps into a intellectual pop psychology in an attempt to find the truth about an artist, athlete, or cultural phenomenon. So the two meeting for a GQ cover feature is pretty much an automatic must-read. In the piece, Klosterman takes a deep dive into the perception that Swift calculates everything about her persona, and how that now may have become a sort of inescapable möbius strip.

Also, as a result of their conversation, this paparazzi photo exists. And now that I've seen that pic, I cannot fathom a world in which it does not exist.

QUOTH THE MEME, "COWBELL MOAR"

In addition to breaking down the Canadian election with Mike Meyers and a moose getting a colonoscopy on Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver also examined how politicians' speeches routinely attribute quotes to people who never actually said the words in question. The trend has only gotten worse with social media, as candidates can just make up quote memes that suit their side and attribute the phrasings to the founding fathers. To get in on this propagation of lies, Last Week Tonight created definitelyrealquotes.com, which generates dumb quotes and slaps them on to photos of famous people with meme-like efficiency. While the generator is limited, it can still turn out a few gems...