I dig Grantland a lot...

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

thought it was pretty funny how they just c+p'ed p4k's best of the decade list

kanye is still in his prime

― Treeship, Monday, August 26, 2013 12:05 PM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah in the same way that Kobe is.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/85512/mileytaughtme-the-lessons-were-learning-from-mileygate

No ILX discussion of FiveThirtyEight/Nate Silver going to ESPN for a Grantland style multi-author site?
First piece is hosted on Grantland.
http://www.grantland.com/fivethirtyeight/story/_/id/9802433/nate-silver-us-government-shutdown

Kinda curious where this is headed - ESPN doing politics? Bring together all the stat nerds from around the sports spectrum (even though they don't work nearly as well in other sports as in baseball)?

re: Grantland itself, now that you can safely ignore Bill Simmons content and Klosterman/Carles write rarely if ever, it's gotten to be pretty awesome, missteps like the song poll aside (and that was clearly Simmons exerting himself, right?).

it was discussed somewhere, i'm not sure where. he was on the bs report shortly after it was announced and it sounded like he has pretty ambitious plans w/ grantland the definite model. sounds like the times was not a happy fit and w/ the stuff coming out about krugman lately i'd say it's safe to say there's a culture of cluelessness there. there was some spec that he was moving more towards tv and he confirmed he'll do things for abc news re: politics and for olbermann re: sports but from the podcast it sounded like that was a very minor thing, that it definitely wasn't why he left. i think those pop culture polls are more a vestige of vulture being a template for the site than any push by simmons (doubt he'd heard half the songs on that poll tbh).

American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

didn't really say anything particularly interesting tho

yeah there's a couple of posts back in july, but they don't say much interesting either (for some reason morbs thinks he's only going to be writing about baseball now, which uh isn't the case). some stuff here - http://deadspin.com/espns-nate-silver-is-here-to-answer-your-questions-951328525

http://deadspin.com/can-jason-whitlock-save-espns-black-grantland-from-hi-1586606960

posted this in the race thread but figure it'd be just as relevant here

sort of what i suspected was going on

thought revive might be for this pos:

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-if-i-play-this-rb-singers-music-will-he-help-me-have-sex-chart/

http://grantland.com/features/its-not-crazy-its-sports-the-subterranean-stadium/

i watched these errol morris docs on tv last night, they were all pretty good but this one was the best.

writing a feature at an adult awards festival is so passé but since it's molly lambert doing it i'm willing to make an exception:
http://grantland.com/features/porntopia/

http://www.businessinsider.com/espn-has-suspended-bill-simmons-former-website-grantland-2015-10

sucks for their good writers

Yep. The Grantland writers on non-sports stuff will need to find other outlets. Some of the sports writers may still survive on ESPN.com

FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated will survive

@joe_sheehan
We get the sports media we deserve.

The Dissolve, Grantland ...

oh cool I can shelve the proposal I was going to send!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5VCY28_Xo