A Southern California NPR affiliate, KPCC, has this month launched a bracket pitting NPR shows both national and local against one another. The Elite Eight in this tournament include "This American Life," "Fresh Air With Terry Gross" and "Radiolab," which surprisingly beat "Morning Edition" in the public vote. Local programming has gone the way of Harvard this year -- two shows focused on the Latino experience in particular, "Alt.Latino" and "Latino USA," fell in the first round. (So, too, did PRI's "The Tavis Smiley Show.")

"I was super concerned about this," said Mike Roe, a Web producer for KPCC. "I had this idea first and I didn't want to go with it. I was worried about the politics within it, within the whole public radio world." He decided to make all KPCC-produced shows No. 1 seeds, though as the brackets garnered national attention, they quickly fell.

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Basketball teams, yes. But also literary fiction, sexy animated characters, classic TV comedies and even cupcakes.

That's because March, trapped in the lull between the Oscars and summer blockbusters, between the end of "Girls" and the start of "Mad Men," has become the month when we collate, rank and quantify -- with brackets.

So later this month President Obama will fill out his NCAA tournament bracket on ESPN, and all the talk will be about bubble teams and buzzer beaters, Cinderellas and which 12-seed will upset a higher-ranked five. But for weeks now, in conference rooms and over cocktails, the media world battles over the newest and smartest pop culture brackets. It's true: I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by trying to pick a winner of a third-round best meme battle, between Michelle Obama's mom dancing and Taylor Swift singing with a goat.

This competition is serious. It is not friendly. And like the boom in oral histories of 10-year-old movies and TV shows that lasted from 2010-12, there's something about it that defies explanation.

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