The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

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1. io9 is reporting (and the AP has confirmed) the sad news that legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury — whose prolific output included Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and one of our all-time favorite short stories, “Dandelion Wine” — died this morning in Los Angeles at the age of 91. “His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theater, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him,” his grandson, Danny Karapetian, told the site. “He was the biggest kid I know.”

2. Rumor is that the next Marvel hero who’ll be getting the big screen treatment is Black Panther — a character many consider to be the first major black superhero — and the script by screenwriter Mark Bailey, who has a background in documentaries, is supposedly fantastic. [via Inside Movies]

3. If you haven’t seen The Book of Mormon yet, it might be worth trying to score tickets for today’s free fan appreciation performance; apparently, it will be Tony Award nominee Josh Gad’s final show. [via Playbill]

4. “I tend to write romantically and idealistically, and I look for opportunities to do that, that on the face of it seem counterintuitive. For instance, when I did The West Wing, by and large in pop culture, our leaders in government are usually portrayed either as Machiavellian or dolts… And I think nowadays the news is held in at least as much contempt as our leaders in government are.” — ArtsBeat has an interesting interview with Aaron Sorkin about his new HBO show The Newsroom.

5. The good news: ABC might be picking up Super Fun Night, the comedy pilot from Bridesmaids star Rebel Wilson that CBS decided to pass on. The bad news: It sounds like Jenny Slate won’t be involved with the revised, single-camera version of the show. [via Vulture]

Bonus Buzz: The “It’s Apparent I’m A Parent” Face In Family Sitcom Opening Credits