I dig Grantland a lot...

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

aw this sucks, I really liked a lot of their non-sports writers (I'm sure their sports writers were good too, I'm just not that into sports). Also enjoyed some of the podcasts.

FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated will survive

the unkindest cut of sll

Jalen Rose's NBA stories were the unsung MVPs of Grantland.

http://observer.com/2015/11/why-we-should-mourn-and-cheer-grantlands-demise/

I didn't read their film coverage enough to weigh in on this:

Grantland was the epicenter of this cult of the upper-middlebrow. In a well-crafted (if somewhat overwrought) eulogy of Grantland for The New Republic, Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov highlight the site’s Paul Thomas Anderson Week, a multimedia, cross-site event that brought a tremendous amount of firepower to examining the filmmaker in every way imaginable. The event produced a lot of incisive commentary, and with its combination of various media and diversity of lenses, demonstrated the huge potential of web-native publishing. But it’s worth noting that Grantland on PT Anderson was an impossibly perfect combination of subject and venue. Mr. Anderson, an incredibly gifted filmmaker, occupies the upper-middlebrow perfectly, making movies that are labeled “indie” but which are treated like an event by our press, the kind of movie you usually take in at a specialty cinema but which aren’t impossible to find at the multiplex. Again, this isn’t a critical judgment of Anderson’s work, which is fantastic, but a recognition of a certain sweet spot in our culture industries that signify good taste without inviting accusations of pretension. It’s hard to imagine Grantland devoting a week to Lars von Trier, let alone Wong Kar-Wai

that's not wrong but lol at evoking two of the safest canonical "highbrow" directors i can think of

Anderson’s work, which is fantastic

no

(and I liked the last two)

lol i've seen several things name checking that pt anderson week, none acknowledging the reason it happened was simmons specifically is a big pt anderson fan.

What a weird complaint.

"It’s testament to a phenomenon that’s far broader than Grantland, and for which the site bears little blame: the rise of the sports snob, the guy who just can’t believe that someone could think something so dumb."

I think this dude hasn't hung around a lot of sports fans because this is not a remotely new phenomenon particularly with baseball.

zach lowe, on his most recent couple podcasts kept referring to grantland as "a website that still exists" right up until Friday's entry.

fairly certain he's going to land somewhere, his being one of the strongest hoops minds out producing work right now, i just hope it comes soon

completely disagree with the passage on bill barnwell. barnwell vs received wisdom is where he is valuable. freddie casually switches from talking generally to talking specifically about other football journalism in particular but he is ignoring the high volume churn of tv pregame guys, commentators, talking heads, internet commenters - those are the collective loudest volume opinion on football and they're dense with dumb epigrams and misguided cliches that could do with being dismantled. and he's being generous to the main body of football journalism anyhow; he's misunderstanding his own (apparently limited) experience for universal experience. anyway, it's when barnwell is putting original ideas forward rather than rebutting wrong ones that he stumbles the most.

I'm think I'm mostly going to miss Shea Serrano. Like Mike Tanier when he got booted from Sports On Earth, I can't see him landing much of anywhere that he can do what he does best - hip hop, R&B, bad movies and sports, all at the same time - unless maybe he winds up at Deadspin. I could still pretend I'm boggled why Tanier didn't end up at Deadspin except for the fact they already have Magary doing their weekly NFL thing, and Serrano going to Deadspin also seems redundant somehow but maybe not. SBNation, I hope, but then what happens to all the rapper quad charts?

Rembert Browne and Brian Phillips are also really important to me but the idea that they don't end up doing great things somewhere else just seems absurd. Phillips in particular seems like he could anywhere, I just worry that nobody else will ever let him do this:
http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/