Brow Beat

Mushroom and Herb Lasagna

Juliana Jimenez for Slate

Like many fine features of Italian culture, lasagna goes back to the ancient Romans, who were modifying something they got from the Greeks. Or maybe the dish was borrowed from medieval England. Either way, it has by now become thoroughly Americanized—witness Stouffer’s twenty frozen varieties, promoted with the leading question, “On the lookout for lasagna?” (Who isn’t?)

But the best lasagna isn’t something you happen upon by being extra watchful in the frozen-foods aisle, of course: it’s something you make yourself. If you’re skeptical of the effort required, consider that Stouffer’s is packed with tapioca dextrin, hydrolyzed beef protein, and caramel color flavor (sounds synesthetic), in addition to bargain-basement commodity meat and dairy products.

Your mouth and body will both be much better off if you do some advance grocery shopping, set aside a couple of weekend hours, uncork a bottle of wine, and put some water on to boil. Homemade lasagna isn’t easy, exactly—but it isn’t hard, either. It just takes time, some menial labor, and a starter kit’s worth of cookware (most of which, conveniently, you can wash while the lasagna’s in the oven).

Lasagna, like casserole, refers to both the cooking vessel and the type of food cooked in it (the Latin lasanum refers to a dish or bowl), but that doesn’t mean you can stick just anything in there.

Aaron Sorkin at the 2012 Syracuse University Commencement on Sunday

Photo by Nate Shron/Getty Images

Aaron Sorkin delivered the commencement address at Syracuse, his alma mater, this Sunday. Judging from the applause in the video below, it went quite well—which comes as no surprise, of course: Sorkin, with his love of rhetoric and anecdotes and aphorisms, not to mention his proudly worn idealistic streak, was born to give commencement addresses.

The first "first" likes First Knight.

Still from "First Commenter with Patton Oswalt."<

You’ve seen it before: A commenter planting a flag, marking his territory, pointing out that he (or she, though somehow I suspect it is usually the former) was the original commenter to reach a post or a thread. The comment is written with varying degrees of irony: Some type these five letters out of the purest pride, while others simply parody the tradition. Most, I suspect, fall somewhere in between.

But who was the first “first”? This is the question that Patton Oswalt’s Walluks Bashley explores in this new short from Funny or Die.

Emily Blunt is one of the latest victims of a dart to the thigh.

Still from the trailer for The Five-Year Engagement.

When Zach Galifianakis marches up to Will Ferrell while toting a crossbow at the end of the trailer for The Campaign, Ferrell’s character should know what’s coming: A dart directly in his thigh. Then again, perhaps Ferrell’s character didn’t see the trailer for The Five-Year Engagement, in which Emily Blunt Misses also gets shot in the thigh with a crossbow. Or the trailer for This Means War, another 2012 release, in which Chris Pine gets a dart in his neck.

These days if you star in a comedy, it’s your outrageous fortune to get stuck over and over again with darts and arrows.

Lena Dunham on Girls (HBO)

David Haglund: One of the essential storylines—the essential storyline?—of Girls is Hannah’s effort to become a writer. This episode begins with the price of those efforts, as Charlie forces Hannah to read the passages in her “journal” about him and Marnie. “It’s actually not a journal,” Hannah explains, “it’s a notebook—it’s notes for a book.” Those notes prompt a loud, relationship-ending fight between Charlie and Marnie, and then Hannah turns to her best friend and asks, “If you had read the essay and it wasn’t about you, do you think you would have liked it? Just as, like, a piece of writing.”

I wish that moment had worked better than it did. I also wish Dunham had pulled off more convincingly one of the other things Hannah does “for the story”: attempt to sleep with her boss. This episode, like “Hannah’s Diary,” was not directed by Dunham, but by her longtime cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes—who outdoes Richard Shephard’s efforts on “Hannah’s Diary,” but doesn’t quite equal Dunham’s work on the first three episodes.

The episode is called “Hard Being Easy,” and focuses on the Girls’ (sans Shoshanna, for obvious reasons) efforts to use sex to retake control of their lives. Jessa, unsurprisingly, does this most explicitly, having sex with an old boyfriend to show that she “cannot be smoted.” Hannah likewise tries to turn an awful office situation to her advantage—or at least into good memoir material. And Marnie puts on her “party dress” and gets Charlie into bed, only so she can break up with him, rather than the other way around.

That tangle of sex and power is then dramatized most memorably by the last scene, when Adam asks Hannah if she wants to watch him masturbate, “you know, for the story.” What did you guys think of the stories in this episode?

Still from "Lioness tries to eat baby at the zoo" on YouTube.

You may like to watch videos of cute-looking animals on YouTube, but be advised: Some of these animals would like to eat your children. That seemed to be the message of the new video “Lion tries to eat baby,” which went viral on YouTube this week. The video shows a lioness at the Oregon Zoo clawing at the glass and trying to get its jaws around a toddler’s head, all while only inches from the child’s face.

As the Huffington Post notes, this is not the first time such an event has been captured on video. Indeed, videos of lions clawing at children represent their own tiny YouTube subgenre. HuffPo wrote this one up  last year.

Transfixed by these clips, we decided to ask an expert who has worked with these ferocious beasts to explain what is actually going on. Are they really trying to eat these children, or are they only exhibiting playful behavior?

King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World,  in New York.

Publicity still © 1933 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.

Every once in a while we like to pay tribute to a landmark film by encapsulating it in three animated GIFs. For this installment we're honoring King Kong, the 1933 adventure film that became a monster hit.

In the comments, let us know which three GIFs you would have selected, and nominate the film we should take on next.