Men have found a new way to make themselves the central figures in women’s fight for equality while congratulating themselves on their intellectual progressiveness. And, boy is it the worst. Policy makers and would-be opinion shapers eager to appeal to feminists and family values-ists alike have been imploring the…
O.J. Mayo received an at-least-two-year ban from the NBA today, for repeat violations of the league’s anti-drug program. This is not exactly important news for the NBA, because O.J. Mayo is busted and terrible and probably was on a plane to China when the decision was made anyway. However, it’s an occasion to remember…
Any Given Wednesday, Bill Simmons’ new weekly sports talk show, debuted this evening on HBO. It was ... exactly what you’d expect. It opened with a segment on the NBA Finals and LeBron’s greatness (featuring a Teen Wolf comparison less than two minutes in) before Charles Barkley joined the show to lay down his takes…
Sports media giant/tall Nilla wafer Bill Simmons is the subject of a short, soft profile in The New York Times today, running under the headline “Bill Simmons Prepares To Stand Up To Sports Incorporated.” It begins by describing Simmons as “cool and edgy,” moves into a comparison to Bill Maher, and then labels Simmons…
A year after learning on Twitter that ESPN fired him, Bill Simmons is clearly still bitter. “They’ve now gotten rid of everybody who is a little off the beaten path,” he says in a Hollywood Reporter cover story. “Ask yourself this: ‘Who would work there that you respect right now?’”
The Ringer—Bill Simmons’s self-described “content media site”—launched this morning, and immediately felt familiar. It looked like all the other digital media sites built on Medium, splashed with The Ringer’s inimitable and garish electric green color scheme, and was mostly seeded with the stories The Ringer has been…
A year after his rude ouster from ESPN, you’re about to get a whole shitload of Bill Simmons back in your life, both at The Ringer (set to formally debut next month, although they’re already pumping out vital “Is Tom Hiddleston A Superstar?” takes on Facebook) and with his new HBO show, Any Given Wednesday, which also…
Four Days in October is an ESPN 30 for 30 series film that first aired in 2010. It aired again yesterday, in slightly edited format, and dopey Red Sox fans teamed up with dopey conservatives to form a coalition of derp in protesting what they believed to be a conspiracy against recently fired analyst Curt Schilling.
Hot sports-media beefing action today, as ESPN used the occasion of tonight’s game between the Thunder and the hosting Boston Celtics to note, on SportsCenter and in an article by Chris Forsberg, that the Boston Celtics probably would like to have 27-year-old four-time scoring champ, five-time All-NBA first-teamer,…
The Ringer, Bill Simmons’s new venture, released its first newsletter today. The introduction featured an explanation for how the staff decided upon “The Ringer,” as well as a list of all the curve-related names.
Bill Simmons’s new website will be called The Ringer, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported today. It’ll also bring in a bunch of people from Grantland.
ESPN killed Grantland today. There were hints that this would happen, starting with the departure of Grantland founder Bill Simmons in May. This summer, news broke that ESPN would be making enormous budget cuts over the next two years. Last month, Grantland suffered a crippling blow when four top editors—Sean…
On the third episode of Bill Simmons’s podcast, Simmons had former Grantland movie critic Wesley Morris on. They talked about movies in a particularly Simmonsy way (there was an extended De Niro vs. Pacino passage), and, more intriguingly, got onto the topic of Simmons’s rise and fall at Grantland. The host had sharp…
Last month, The Atlantic published an 18,000-word article by Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” It was the second epic piece in what appears to be a series in which Coates examines the toll of white supremacy as American policy on black life in the United States. The article…
When you fire up the first episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast—a free-flowing conversation once hosted by ESPN, and now the staging area of Simmons’s return to public life—this is what you hear:
Two months ago, ESPN unexpectedly, unceremoniously dumped Bill Simmons, one of the network’s biggest and best-known personalities. When they did, Simmons was forced to abandon Grantland, the sports and pop culture website he created and edited; more specifically, he was forced to abandon dozens of writers, editors,…
ESPN has just announced that Chris Connelly will take over as the editor-in-chief of Grantland, on an interim basis.
Since being fired by ESPN, Bill Simmons has sent multiple goodbye emails to members of the Grantland staff. Here is a portion of one of them:
