I consider myself a Simmons fan, but I could only make it thru about 2 paragraphs of his new column on Grantland. I've been a fan of previous incarnations of the idea: Simmons and Gladwell exchange emails about anything and everything, but this time around, the level of handjobbery was too high for my liking. This time around, it was 2 guys trying way too hard to seem cool and relevant. Painful.

Unless someone points out something interesting from the rest of the column, I'm not going back.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8016432/gladwell-vs-simmons-iv

I think I really dislike Malcolm Gladwell.

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Fire Phil Emery

I knew that from your past comments I jus never understood why. Your main point of contention with him, iirc, is that he selectively picks stats to help advance his narrative. Which give him something in common with you, I, and everyone else that had ever used a stat in an argument. You can't really say he's a bad writer, so what else?

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

That's not really my problem with him per se, though he does that. My bigger problem is that he's way too cute with his analysis. A lot of times he just doesn't really understand what the hell he is talking about because he's all over the place. That's a huge problem with his sports stuff specifically.

Richard Posner absolutely eviscerated Gladwell in what's become a pretty famous book review of Blink (full text: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner012405). It's actually a bit ironic, since Posner has some of the same problems as Gladwell in general, but maybe it takes one to know one.

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Fire Phil Emery

Also related is this piece which is awesome (not directly about Gladwell, though he makes a rather significant cameo): http://mgoblog.com/content/sports-economists-always-wrong-about-everything

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Fire Phil Emery

I'll check that out. It wouldn't be of much use reading the Blink review since I never read Blink but Outliers is a really good book.

I don't think you have to give much credence to Gladwell's conclusions to like him. If he makes you think about something in a way you otherwise wouldn't have he did his job. I think he's good at doing that.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

One last thing about Gladwell: google "Igon value" for the fallout from a semi-recent spat between Gladwell and Steven Pinker (a spat that, for quite a while, focused on Gladwell's transparently silly claim that draft position has no predictive value whatsoever for QB play). There's some evidence that Gladwell doesn't actually know what his subjects are talking about at least some of the time.

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Fire Phil Emery

The Lebron stuff wasn't too bad. If he had been born 10 years earlier and did not have to play in the social media age, how much different would his career be?

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I thought that part was good as well but I can't believe they went down the "What if LeBron was born 10 years earlier argument without mentioning Jordan. He obviously wasn't gonna win a title til after '98 and then he woulda saw Shaq and Kobe when he was in his prime. I get that it was focused on the non-basketball part but considering that I'm not sure how much differently it woulda played out.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

They did bring up how they though Jordan would of went nuts i had all the media attention Lebron has. Can you imagine the instant tweets after he lost 200k in a golf game?

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I would rather pour molten lead in my eyes than read an email exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I actually thought that was the best part. Although I'm not sure I agree with their steadfast conclusion that he would've definitely handled this era poorly. I think there's a chance it woulda just driven him to be more successful on the court. And growing up in the time and place I did I learned to stop doubting on-court Jordan a long time ago.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

I don't mind Simmons as much. He has his blind spots and can be frustrating but I'm still pro-Simmons if forced to choose.

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Fire Phil Emery

it's actually a good read but i agree with IB about how "cutesy" gladwell is, although Simmons is guilty of this an awful lot too. Some of the exchange does scream "look how funny we are!" so it's not exactly subtle writing...but it's an interesting exchange.

I have a little Gladwell story. A couple years ago he was the keynote speaker at the big annual conference in my field. They asked him because he started his career doing things like reading the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology or Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and basically write about the findings in laymen's terms. The problem I always had with what he did is exactly what IB said, he doesn't necessarily understand what he was writing about and thus would slightly miss the point or think it supports his point but might not. Well at this conference he was supposed to give a talk about a topic that was relevant to psychology. Well, he get's up and says that he was going to talk about that but instead is going to talk about something completely different. He then told a story about entrepreneurs where he was trying to make the metaphor that they are just like people who do research in the social scientists. The analogy fails and the room is rather annoyed, they paid him a lot of money to come and give one talk and he gave another. Needless to say, that was the last time a nonpsychologist gave the keynote speech. I think Gladwell realized his original talk was not going to go over well (he tried to give it to another group previously, and apparently it did not go over real well) so he changed it up.

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Simmons is okay every now and then. The Book of Basketball is really good except for the assertions that sundry mediocre Celtics are better than non-Celtics who were actually good and of course the creepy Bernstein-times-a-million rants about how he loves big strapping black men who were bred to play basketball. He's deep into self-parody by now, though, and reading his extended dialogues with Malcolm Gladwell must be like watching characters from The West Wing give each other handjobs. See? I even made a pop culture reference out of it. Meta!

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"Okay now and then" is probably the best I thing can say about Simmons. He's fine on the NBA, I suppose (though The Classical is rendering him obsolete there), but he's been largely insufferable since he crawled up his own ass a few years ago. Most of his NFL stuff, for example, consists of bloated bad-faith arguments supported by nothing more than self-aggrandizing nonsense. "I may not know any X's and O's or pay attention to any numbers that matter, but I have total mastery of the NFL because I watch a lot of football! Sometimes at Jimmy Kimmel's house! Also, I've watched Bill Belichick coach for a decade, so I'm basically as smart as him!"

Gladwell is irretrievably awful, for all the reasons others have stated above.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Classical is Bethlehem Shoals, right? Not sure how much of him I can do, either. FreeDarko went so far up its own ass that it poked back out. Its last day, where its readers thanked them for gracing this earth with articles like "The Metaphysics of Greg Oden," was just too fucking much.

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Oh, absolutely. I guess I can better stomach pretension from actual smart guys than I can from paint-by-numbers middlebrow hacks like Simmons.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I think part of the problem is that in this era of writing, so much content has to be churned out that it's tough to stay likable. Plus, the better writers get 1.) imitators, who make you want to turn against the original, and 2.) sycophants, who sometimes encourage the worst excesses of the originals. The number of sports writing guys who I've read for 2+ years and still like as much as when I started is very small.

I remain tentatively pro-Simmons. Grantland is a bold effort, even if the execution is very often lacking, and even if the website often feels like a jobs program for Simmons's buddies. He'd be better if he wrote less, and if he dropped the mailbags, which bring out his bad side.

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Fire Phil Emery

Grantland, a/k/a A Heartbreaking Sports Page of Staggering Genius, probably does have the best sports content going, Booyah parentage notwithstanding. Deadspin gives you quality longform writing maybe once a week from what's otherwise a nonstop sewage pipe, and yet their singular dedication to exposing ESPN has made them the favored blog of the Score.

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As much as I dislike Simmons, I do wish he'd landed Tommy Craggs. I'm not quite as down on Deadspin as you and IB, but Craggs is a flower growing out of a pot of shit over there. He needs a place where he can stretch out consistently, not a place where he has to edit pieces about the ATM in DeShawn Stevenson's kitchen.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I really, really hated Daurelio. I don't actually type deadspin.com into my browser thingy, but I've noticed being sent over there more and more over the past couple of months and have enjoyed most of the links when I have gone. I simply rely on the hivemind to weed out the 90% of crap for me.

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Fire Phil Emery

Priceless!

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Tommy Craggs is okay. Katie Baker was good but Grantland stole her and she got better. Drew Magary is the guy I can't stand.

Hey, you fuckin' fucks. Everyone thinks they're a special fuckin' snowflake and they're fuckin' not, bunch of sloppy fuckin' assholes. ANGRY ABOUT THINGS. College escapades. The birth of my son and the poignant miracle of life. There, everything Magary's ever written.

Daulerio wasn't so bad in and of himself, though he was bad, so much as he was just the impresario of a terrible website.

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This email exchange wasn't anything special but I think the whole concept of we are going to talk back and forth over email and then print it for you the reader is pretentious anyways. I still dig alot of Simmons stuff and the Book of Basketball is a pretty great bathroom read but man Grantland is all over the place. I know they are spraying to all fields but some of it is legimtately interesting and some of the stuff on there is the worst crap on the intenet today. Who the fuck is Carles and why is he writing anything.

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Oh man, having to explain that to someone happening upon a Carles column without reading and "getting" Hipster Runoff must be like having to explain to your parents why for very good reasons you're playing air guitar to ABBA with your underwear on your head.

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I'll agree to disagree with you on this one, I think his mailbag is better than Simmons' version and when he was writing fun with Peter King at KSK it was hilarious. Plus, his evisceration of Greggggggggggggggggggggggggggg Easterbrook is always great.

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I went to Hipster Runoff cause in his bio at the bottom of the page says that's what he's known for or whatever and it just seemed like a snarky tumblr page. I guess you count me amongst the masses of the totally perplexed on that one.

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Magary's stuff at KSK was funny, especially the Rex Ryan posts and Peter King fisking. His mailbag at Deadspin is terrible. I don't even know how I'd compare it to Simmons' mailbags. "Dude-brah, how are you not the GM of the Timberwolves yet!?" vs. "How much money would it take for you to eat your own shit while watching your parents bone?"

The entire "mailbag" exercise should probably be suspended indefinitely.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.