Brow Beat

The Starship Enterprise

Paramount

Today in Slate, Matthew Yglesias explains what makes Star Trek great. He also ranks the movies and TV series, and picks his favorite episodes, villains, and crew members.

Now it’s your turn. Is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan still the best Trek movie, all these years later? Does The Next Generation really tower over the other TV series? Is The Original Series actually worse than Voyager?

Make your selections in the poll below. Voting closes at noon on Friday.

Children are the No. 1 danger to your groin.

Still from America's Funniest Home Videos' "30 Groin Hits in 30 Seconds"

You better wear protection, because the whole world is out to hit you in the balls. That’s the message of America’s Funniest Home Videos, now in its 23^rd season. This morning, Slate learned via press release that the archives of American’s Funniest Home Videos are now online, and this had us wondering: How many different objects has the show featured hitting us in the crotch?

After a thorough analysis of all 166 videos tagged “groin”—from “No Pain, No Groin” to “Groin Fishin’” to “Ball to the Crotch”—we present our findings in the form of the following comprehensive list of groin hazards, including everything from pool balls to barbells to geese. While "Man Getting Hit by Football" remains a classic of the genre, it turns out that the football doesn’t rank as high as Hans Moleman might have you believe.

Tom Baker

BBC

Summer is right around the corner, and it’s the perfect time to catch up with a few of those shows everyone is always saying you should watch. But there are so many! How can you decide which to try? Pilot episodes have so much introductory work to do; they’re usually subpar compared with the great stuff to come. And the very best episodes of a series often demand too much knowledge of what came before.

You need to find the gateway episode, one you can watch without any background knowledge and which will give you a real sense of the show—and whether you’ll like it. In this new weekly Brow Beat series, we’ll be directing you to the best gateway episodes for great series you should watch this summer.

For many Doctor Who connoisseurs, the BBC’s 2005 rebooting of the classic British sci-fi serieshas been a mixed blessing. While the revival of the program is an answer to many very nerdy prayers, the considerable success of the revamped series on both sides of the Atlantic has arguably pushed the classic original series even further into the shadows. Previously regarded as a monumental and ground-breaking touchstone in TV sci-fi, direct comparison with the new, glitzy Doctor Who has underlined the classic’s dated, low-budget aesthetic and self-conscious, post-war British fustiness.

This is a shame.

Singer Matt Berninger of The National

Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

Though they may have chosen the wrong time to reveal it—hitting the web as it does just hours after the new album from Daft Punk—you can now stream the new album from The National. Head over to the band’s landing page in iTunes to hear Trouble Will Find Me in full.

And it’s a surprise: It’s a party album! No, just kidding. It’s sad and sullen and gorgeous.

Daft Punk performs in Australia in 2007

Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images

After more than 8 years, and weeks of leaks and pseudo-leaks of the LP’s first single, you can finally listen to a proper new album from Daft Punk. It’s streaming in full over on the band’s iTunes landing page, which means fans can finally stop poring over those and 15-second samples and 10-hour loops of 15-second samples, and listen to all 74 minutes of the real thing.

Last week, an installment of the occasional Tonight Show segment “Pumpcast News” went viral on YouTube. In the bit, a fake newscaster appears on a video screen installed above a gas pump, then starts speaking directly to a gas station customer. In this particular installment, the customer is surprisingly game to sing for free gas, and busts out a more than passable “Livin’ on a Prayer,” honed, he says, by many nights of karaoke. His wife stays in the car, seemingly embarrassed. But then she’s coaxed out as well, and launches into a very tuneful rendition of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” with the husband harmonizing.

Michael J. Fox as Mike Henry on The Michael J. Fox Show

NBC

There is, obviously, a huge amount of interest in Michael J. Fox’s return to weekly TV after more than a decade away. In case you need a reminder, Fox, whose breakout role was Alex P. Keaton on NBC’s 1980s sitcom Family Ties, stepped away from his starring role on Spin City in 1998 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Fox decided he wanted to spend more time with his family. He made a few appearances on shows like Boston Legal and The Good Wife, but only recently did he decide to resume his acting career full-time. The result is The Michael J. Fox Show.The actor plays Mike Henry, who, after years of staying home with his family while dealing with the effects of Parkinson’s disease, decides to return to his old job on TV.

Y.N.RichKids

Still from "My Bike"

Last August, snack-sized rappers Y.N.Rich Kids found Internet fame with “Hot Cheetos & Takis,” racking up millions of YouTube views and causing millions of adults to Google “What are Takis?” The song, which featured seven rappers trading verses in tribute to their favorite munchables, was written as part of Minneapolis after-school program Beats and Rhymes, but its fame spread far beyond the Twin Cities school system, even meriting a review in Rolling Stone—it earned 4 stars (out of 5).

That song came out too late to be a bona fide song of the summer, but the kids’ new songs arrive just in time. The standout is tribute song “My Bike,” an ode to a subject as universal as any spicy, salty, junk food. And again, they’re also paying tribute to their idols: Whereas before they were turning Kanye and Young Chris into “snacks on snacks on snacks,” here refrains of “swerve” (from songs like “Mercy”) and “pop that” (from, most famously, French Montana) are just references to cycling and wheelies. Later, they turn from jacking hip-hop hits to riffing on the “The Wheels on the Bus.”

Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station

Photo by © 2013 - The Weinstein Company.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2009, police responded to reports of an altercation on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train in Oakland. Not long after, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who had been celebrating New Years Eve in San Francisco, was shot dead by police officer Johannes Mehserle while being detained along with his friends on the subway platform of the Fruitvale station. Amid Bay Area protests of police brutality and racial profiling, the event and the ensuing trial received national attention. The name Oscar Grant has joined Rodney King and Amadou Diallo as a byword for the tense relationship between law enforcement and minorities.

Shot on location in Oakland, Fruitvale Station, the feature debut of director Ryan Coogler, takes place on the last day of Grant’s life. It received rapturous reviews—and the Grand Jury Prize—at Sundance, and is set to premiere in the heart of Oscar season. The trailer, just released, strikes an appropriately ominous tone from the beginning, and is bookended by the chaotic events of that night. In between we are introduced to the key players in the story, including Octavia Spencer as his mother Wanda and Melonie Diaz as his girlfriend Sophina.