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

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/chuck-klosterman-corners-guy-at-party-wearing-dio,33615/

the purest manifestation of heavy metal music, “or, at least, our collective idea of what heavy metal music means.”

Let’s acknowledge a few of the biases inherent in the creation of this bracket. There is no metal. There is only a smattering of country. Rock music is consistently relegated to the lowest seeds. Pretty much anything played on an acoustic stringed instrument is apparently verboten. Bands you might like — Spoon, the National, the Hold Steady, Queens of the Stone Age, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Drive-By Truckers, Bon Iver, Mastodon, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Muse — are nowhere to be found. This is a list where "great song" is synonymous with "rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once." That doesn’t mean the bracket is terrible, necessarily —

just that if you happen to be among the troglodytes for whom "rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once" does not constitute quality listening, sorry, you are left out.

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

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

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

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2013/0827/grant_r_BracketFinalFour.jpg

So this is the bracket. Jesus fucking christ.

Also, lol at "SORRY NEERRRRRDS this is for rap and pop bangers ONLY!" yet I see "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Idioteque." Nothing says "pop banger" like Jay Bennett falling face-first on a fuzz pedal and recording the results.

This is bullshit. I quit. Me, Rem, Katie, Barnwell, Cho, and hopefully Chris Ryan. We all quit. We're all going to start Dipset Grantland. "Sports, Drugs, and Entertainment" will double as our mission statement. We'll interview athletes about Dipset. We'll interview Dipset about athletes. Every pop culture reference we make in any article will be about Dipset. Every post will be printed on a purple background and rendered mostly unreadable. We'll expense fur coats, we'll do a deep dive into Cam's second "What Means the World to You" verse and how it changed Penny and Tim Hardaway's lives. This video of Kanye and Cam'ron rapping about sizzurp will be locked permanently atop the new Hollywood Prospectus blog. It'll all be great. And in retrospect, we'll all be better off. Good-bye, Grantland. It's better this way.

Long live the Dipset millennium.

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

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

The Rise of Tough Mudder and Social-Physical Challenges

As Clear As Mud
CrossFit, Tough Mudders, and the rise of social-physical challenges

By Carles

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

I don't know how it'll play on the telecast, but watching Jeff Ross roast live was like seeing Eric Clapton stroll into a Guitar Center and start playing "Layla."

What bothers me most about this--



--aside from basically everything, is the way they farmed it out to Pappademas. Simmons is buddies with Ross, so if he or Cousin Sal wrote this column, it would be a shameless conflict of interest. So instead they hand some young guy a ticket to the Franco roast and tell him to come up with 1500 words on how there were a ton of gay jokes, but that's ok and not problematic at all, because the people saying them have been on the B.S. Report, and also make sure to mention that JEFF ROSS IS A VIRTUOSO.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

"Layla" seems more like a showcase for the piano rather than guitar.

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

Well now this is some through-the-looking-glass shit, isn't it.

Wasn't Molly Lambert the one who was said to have gotten a job there for being pretty, because it sure as shit wasn't her writing?

Hey, remember when Simmons wrote the worst thing ever published on the internet? Well, now you can read Molly Lambert do it again!

You're a masochist. You know the pop culture section of Grantland is horrifying yet you can't resist glancing.

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

And she went to Brown!

I know I shouldn't have but I clicked.

I don't even know what that was. It read like a coked-up male virgin's first IMDB message board post.

The next time I have sex I am going to refer to it as the "artistic process."

September Song (or, Twenty Years Of Schooling & They Put You On The Day Shift)

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Here comes September to cut into the sweaty, humid, unemployed, depressed cake that was August before it weeps any more pink frosting onto the dirty kitchen floor!

I grew up fetishizing cold weather, because it was not a thing we really have in Los Angeles. Years of exposure to books set in prep schools or written by Johns Updike and Cheever cultivated in me the strong Jewish/Catholic lust for east coast WASPs and their culture. I especially fetishized fall, with its scarves and coats and coziness.

Fall is when school starts, it's when the new TV season traditionally begins, and summer popcorn movies are replaced by Oscar-bait movies. Magazines get thick again (or they used to) and all of the new products are suddenly "pumpkin" or "plum."

September for me has always meant my birthday, which talk about your buildup to a non life-changing event. Nothing changes on your birthday. Nothing especially changes on New Year's. So why do we expect so much from our Septembers?

Well for one, September is when kids go back to school, which implies the return of structure to where there was none. Even if you went to camp or worked all summer break, August was about the antsiness building up for something new to happen.

We spend the bulk of our youths, a ridiculously long amount of our lives, on a strict calendar whose organizing principle is school starting in the early fall. It is not hard to imagine that vestigially we still feel like we are going back to school every September.

Until I lived on the east coast during college, I had no idea that scarves served an actual function (keeping your neck warm). I also knew nothing about the secret undertow of autumn's nostalgia, which is DREAD. The trade-off for the beautiful natural spectacle of New England autumn is that it becomes New England winter.

In California the fall crispness is just a prelude to more of the same during winter, but in most other places it acts as foreshadowing that within a couple of months it'll be too cold to keep your eyes open outside. Fall nostalgia has a morbid undercurrent. The leaves are beautiful but they are dying. Back to school's second self is Halloween.

It's like we subconsciously internalize the seasonal change. Studies have shown that external stimulants like sounds and smells have a huge impact on influencing human behavior. Is that why everyone freaks the fuck out at the end of summer even though they are no longer going back to school? Something about seeing all those pencils and backpacks just triggers the deep desire we all have to hit the reset button on our lives.

Most of the people I know are freelancers in one sense or another, and their career paths involve amorphous to-do lists and shitty day jobs or erratic work. Because I have nothing else to compare it to, it is hard for me to feel like being in your twenties right now is any different than being in your twenties at any point during the last century.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both. And so the flip side of anticipation is dread.

You can anticipate good things happening with the seasonal change, but because you absolutely cannot predict in advance them there is also endless dread of worst case scenarios, even though the chance of every situation playing out nightmarishly is low.

You might not have a decent job or an apartment or whatever right now, but that doesn't make you the kind of person who is incapable of having those things. It just makes you someone who doesn't happen to have all of them right now, which is most people at most points in most of their lives. It's not a comment on your true self.

The thing about external factors beyond your control (like the horrible economy and its many attendant trickle-down woes) is that they do change unexpectedly and in a way that is impossible to always predict accurately, much like the weather.

In the meantime all you can do is stay as positive as possible, keep putting in work, and maybe eat some pumpkin bread in a scarf and coat by a duck pond around dusk.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

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