And now, in the surest evidence yet that the print-media industry is in its death throes, Chuck Klosterman is taking over the "Ethicist" column at the NYT. Can't wait for columns acknowledging that rape and murder are wrong, but also wondering...what if they're not wrong?

His treatment of Billy Joel is a perfect example. In Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he oversees a rhetorical tennis match between the false binary that "Billy Joel Is Terrible" and "Billy Joel Is Secretly Great" by kicking around the man's career and eventually making the same evaluations everyone else already has: Billy Joel is a pretty good piano player who writes pretty good (and some great) pop songs about being in love, and usually once an album has a lyrically superior and commercially unviable song like "Vienna." The important points here are that:

1. That last sentence isn't long enough to count as an article or book chapter, and:
2. Writing that single sentence doesn't take you through the intellectual and emotional gravity well at the center of the universe, Chuck Klosterman.

Simmons goes through this same process with almost everything, sometimes spending a whole column on a strident criticism, then another walking it back too far, then reaching a synthesis as if it occasioned some degree of struggle. It's "Baby's First Hegelian Dialectic," only the logical building blocks are huge and can't really fit in his tiny hands. (Worse, like Klosterman, his analysis of sporting events now largely constitutes analyzing how he might come to analyze the sporting events later, and how he has to think about how he will reevaluate the hypothetical in light of outcomes that haven't even happened.)

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Heh. That Destructo post was a thing.

I still think 70% of Grantland's non-Pierce content is trash, but that's actually much better than I expected.

And 100% of its Pierce content. Not a fan at all.

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.

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.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bill-simmons-releases-2000page-book-exploring-how,28666/?ref=auto

In his 14-page introduction to Wit, Brilliance, Insight, Simmons, pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman poses the question of whether Simmons is brilliant because of his decision to embrace the entirety of television while writing for people who like to watch sports on television or, indeed, in spite of it.