I dig Grantland a lot...

which i'm sure there's a market for... just not for me

there's a pretty cutting edge piece on their front page right now about how nicki minaj's "starships" is newsflash not a good song

also i think i've picked up a lot of purposeful non-investment in the tone of their music writing, which again is prob not "important" but kinda gets at me

long thread but important

bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

also here's his sports version of "adele_plump_female_musicians_sex.php"

http://deadspin.com/5878436/tennis-players-bill-simmons-would-do-another-classic-from-the-secret-sports-guy-vault

also also worst thread title ban NYCNative

Charles P. Pierce's articles are good (because he's a good writer who hopefully is getting paid wheelbarrows of cash by ESPN to slum)
Jonah Keri's 'The 30' weekly baseball round-up is also good

you could set the rest of the blog on fire, the wonder and amazement they have at the audacity of covering omg reality tv is fucking horrible

oh also barnwell on football is solid

Simmons idolizing Malcolm Gladwell probably tells the uninitiated everything they need to know.

pretty much agree with the general consensus on this thread that the pop culture stuff is mostly bad, but the sports writing has occasional gems. i really liked colson whitehead on the poker tournament, and i enjoy the wrestling pieces though admittedly i know nothing at all about wrestling.

pretty much off topic except that it's sports writing, but i read this recently and it is pretty much the best piece of non-fiction i've ever read about poker:
http://www.amazon.com/Positively-Fifth-Street-Murderers-Cheetahs/dp/0374236488

i highly recommend

yeah that's considered a classic. i think i have it at my parents house somewhere

also it sorta seems like aside from tv recaps they're aiming for "you're a 45 year old trying to retain coolness, here's all the stuff you missed today that other people have been flogging for the last six hours"

Somehow this description of it made me realize I am OK with being in Grantland's target demo. And realizing that me passive-aggressively saying I'm OK with that means I've been there for years already.

I guess I didn't really know this was Jonah Keri's outlet now.

Grantland is brimming with NBA playoff excitement. You may have already noticed.

?????

this is the only thing i've seen on grantland worth reading

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7789978/a-racetrack-killing-history-organized-crime-hot-springs-arkansas

Grantland is great for me because it allows me to a) catch up with cable shows that I can't be bothered downloading but get bought up in polite conversation amongst hipster circles in my part of the world and b) sometimes read some non-retarded writing about North American sport.

all of their articles are too long

this is one of the best non-specialist pieces abt stan lee i've ever read:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7906504/the-surprisingly-complicated-legacy-marvel-comics-legend-stan-lee

the Greg Oden piece is really good and IMO exactly the sort of thing this site *should* be doing

I like this site, even though I find Simmons really annoying, unless he is talking about any team in the NBA except the Celtics.

Charles Pierce is excellent.

imo the site has like a 40/60 hit/miss ratio which really isn't all that bad. i do think they've assembled a pretty good stable of writers. the pop culture stuff seems to be kinda bland but it's not offensive which is probably half the battle.

They are at least trying to be relatively intelligent. Most of ESPN content, on all of its platforms, is written/produced by morons, for morons, so to see at least an attempt at being smart is somewhat refreshing.

it's certainly better than it was! the character pieces are definitely good, especially the Amarillo Slim one

i really wish this wasn't the kind of thing molly lambert wrote for grantland:

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/59116/tabloids

What is an example of something she has written that isn't a complete waste of time.

i like her stuff from thisrecording.com:

http://thisrecording.com/today/tag/molly-lambert

would much rather read about sweet celeb gossip than some stupid bullshit about telephone poles

http://ll-media.tmz.com/2012/01/26/0126-leo-erin-heatherton-zip-line-launch-ex-1.jpg

i find the celeb gossip stuff really boring and i don't even get that she's doing anything interesting w/ it? idk, celeb gossip is maybe a cultural blind spot for me and maybe there are grantland readers that are like, "thank god molly lambert is finally breaking down gossip in a compelling + vital way, this was much more important than when she was writing critical theory about gender identity." seems like a waste to me.

mordy totally otm grantland wastes the great molly lambert :(

i like gossip a lot but i don't get that feature

all the hyperlinks in her thisrecording pieces drive me up the wall, because im incapable of preventing myself from hovering each one and evaluating if its worth opening in a new tab. i hate it!!!

haha. i still read grantland, i like that there's a writer powerful and popular enough that a mega corporation would give him an entire website and staff just to keep him happy. as far as simmons toys go it's no 30 for 30 but i do appreciate that it does have some interest in longform stuff, that it's clearly guided by someone who's interested in some idea of 'good writing' as opposed to standard seo stuff. nobody w/ any familiarity w/ simmons can be surprised by the gap between it's sports coverage vs it's pop culture coverage - model for sports coverage is the national and golden age si, model for pop coverage is vulture. he's a guy who's seen almost famous a million times (and will let you know) but has little to no interest in actually reading lester bangs. feel like stuff like the lambert tabloid thing is simmons pandering to some idea of what he imagines his wife wants to read or providing cover for his sorta odd interest in stuff like reality tv, celeb gossip, etc.

yeah that feels about right

grantland is a blackhole

at the beginning of grantland she wrote more sustained celeb gossip type pieces, like a "normal" version of her stuff for thisrecording. i remember liking the one about jennifer aniston. i just don't get the almost-copying-pages-of-us-weekly-verbatim new-style lambert columns. they're unreadable!

yah they're pretty useless

she doesnt tweet v much anymore either

:(

i miss you, molly!

maybe she's working on a book? i hope so!

i would even read a whole book about goddamn mad men that she's so obsessed with.

i would read that book

they have both a good baseball writer (Jonah Keri) and a good football one (Bill Barnwell), plus every once in a while there's a neat podcast (like the Obama one), it's not exactly a great website but I kinda dig it now

okay they got Norm MacDonald writing for them now, I'm officially a fan

We were trying to come up with New Year’s resolutions. Adam, sober now for over a year but nonetheless still somewhat interesting, said, “Hey, do New Year’s resolutions always have to be good for you?” The thought had never occurred to me. It’d be a helluva lot easier to stick with a New Year's resolution if your resolution was to become a big fat guy, right?

The physical Grantland books themselves are beautiful.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/66990/jenna-maroney-an-appreciation

the Grantland 64 song best of the millenium thus far bracket is.....kinda depressing? maybe of sociological interest?

Tenative conclusions: white guys from 35-45 are overinvested in thinking Jay and Kanye are still in their prime.....

8 remaining songs look to be:

Rolling, Maybe, Paris, Empire, Paper, Ignition, Yeah!, Hey Ya!

kanye is still in his prime

i voted paper but brightside seems to be winning atm

The sports blogger Tom Hitchner wrote recently about the tendency of sports commentators to find random, dumb, uninfluential opinions to dispute, even when those opinions are held by almost no one, simply to represent themselves as the wiser and cooler party. Too often, writers at Grantland played into this tendency, engaging in verbal eye-rolling about the idiocy of those who might disagree with them rather than just making their case.

I think this is OTM about a broader trend but I wouldn't pin it on Grantland. I feel like Freddie is very sharp on how online discourse works but I always have to filter out his various tedious bugbears about popular culture.

@BenLindbergh
Haven't told my parents about Grantland, because 1)I like that someone still thinks it exists and 2)I'm testing how irregularly they read me

NYC event

http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/nov_23_grantland_appreciation_night.php

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-second-coming-mtv-news/

not sure if we have a beefs thread for this but the breathless praise for grantland at the start of this piece just reminds me how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

wes morris was actually good, rembert was fun. i would actually occasionally read it whereas now the only non-sports stuff i'll even look at on the ringer is serrano or concepcion in funny blogpost about some hbo show mode, every other non-sports writer i react to the sight of their byline the way i did to steve hyden's on grantland. the sports writing isn't as good at the ringer either though it's fine enough, i still check in. i think in a weird way the ringer misses a jonathan abrams than a lowe or barnwell; like they're still doing something like the analysis lowe and barnwell brought but the really solid features abrams could turn out they don't really even seem to attempt. even if #longform doesn't generate the clicks and was responsible for the worst moment grantland had, it's still the kind of brand building thing that can give a patina of 'quality' that can make ppl think they're smart to love/read a sight even if they really go there to find out what character on game of thrones j.r. smith is. it is kinda funny that the sports writers i really enjoyed at grantland stayed at espn and the ones i kinda loathed ended up at si.

I very much miss the Grantland versions of Rembert, Brian Phillips, Emily Yoshida and Molly Lambert.

<3 katie bakes but it seems like a struggle

how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

yeah sorry folks but the fact that ppl read this stuff makes me think they live in an alternative dimension where there are 48 hours in a day or something

got what a shitty hypocritical post. sorry

not sure if we have a beefs thread for this but the breathless praise for grantland at the start of this piece just reminds me how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

― k3vin k.,

I read Morris and Mark Harris all the time.

Rembert Browne's recaps of Designated Survivor almost make me want to start watching the show

the recent simmons-jalen podcast has some fun inside stuff on the early grantland days and how jalen got started

the simmons/jalen relationship is super heartwarming btw, very clear they are close buds and care about each other. basically everyone who’s worked with bill says he’s a great guy it seems

i loved that pod. jalen is a good personality. i listen to jalen and Jacoby on occasion. hilarious that jalen basically stalked bill as a fanboy.

Former Grantland and SI.com writer Jonah Keri sentenced to 21 months for domestic abuse.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/disgraced-montreal-sports-writer-jonah-keri-sentenced-to-21-months-for-domestic-abuse-charges-1.5831494