S(Tuesday) Scraps 109

1. HOOPS: Bill Simmons, who I generally love, gets rightfully reamed by college basketball player Wayne Washington when Simmons refers to his dreads as “stinky.”

2. AUTHORS: Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, American Wife) gets interviewed by The Rumpus about her new book, Sisterland.

3. NEW MEXICO: The New Yorker‘s Rachel Syme, writes eloquently about the hometown she shares with Walter White.

4. CELEB: I really dig this advice from Olivie Wilde in Glamour, or rather, this advice from her ghostwriter. Regardless, I’m into it.

5. MOMS: My favorite, Roxane Gay, interviews her mother for The Hairpin about how she feels about her mothering decisions, 30 years later. Should we all be so lucky as to have these conversations.

6. SPORTS: What does it say about you as a parent when you push your daughter down the path of soccer, dance, or chess? Apparently a lot?

Related Post: Sunday 108: George Saunders, OITNB, Ill-Doctrine, etc.

Related Post: Sunday 107: Amanda Palmer = awesome, millennials worry, email mapping!

S(M)onday Scraps 103

1. HISTORY: Imagine you’re 23 and you’re heading off to WWII as a nurse. What do you pack? Slate‘s new history blog has got you covered with a real recommended packing list. Don’t forget your homemade Kotex!

2. ELLEN: Ellen solves all problems. In this clip, she takes on Abercrombie and their whole “only skinny kids are cool” baloney.

3. ART: Like me, you probably assumed pin-up artistry was historically a male artform. Not so! Three of the most respected pin-up artists were women, who knew?

4. SPORTS: Remember Allyson Felix, the Olympic sprinter? What happens after you win gold and you’ve accomplished all your goals at 26? Grantland finds out.

5. EVEREST: Apparently, Mount Everest is overrun by inexperienced, poorly equipped climbers. National Geographic explores what it’s like to wait in line to hike the summit.

6. MAKE-UP: In this short Thought Catalog piece, Chelsea Fagan explains some of the complex rationales that inform female make-up habits. It’s not as simple, “I want to look hot.”

Related Post: Sunday 102 – Depression cartoons, GeoGuessr, war photos, etc.

Related Post: Sunday 101 – Lean In letters, Colbert’s homphobia song, American Girl evolution

Sunday Scraps 100

1. GAYS: In the 2010 census, one county in the US reported 0 gay people. None. Zilch. Nada. Explore Franklin County with CNN and find out if the census is true. Hint: Doubtful.

2. SCOTUS: A little late to the game on this one, but Courtney Milan’s concise play-by-play of the Prop 8 Supreme Court case is the first time I actually think I know what’s going on. Sample truncated piece of dialogue: COOPER: But these people were injured. They didn’t want gay people to marry, and now look! Gays. Lesbians. Able to marry at will. It’s very injurious. They’re injured just thinking about it.

3. FEMINISM: I dare you not to cry at this amazing obituary of feminist revolutionary Shulasmith Firestone. Written by the incomparable Susan Faludi, it’s just… a lot. Sniff.

4. POLITICS: To my surprise, I came out of Jonathan Van Meter’s NYT profile of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin feeling pretty sympathetic for Weiner. Maybe sympathetic’s not the word…

5. FOOTBALL: From Grantland, what would happen if an NFL player died on the field? 8 years ago, Al Lucas died during an Arena football game. Is that where we’re headed?

6. LOOKS: Why does it matter that the President called Kamala Harris good-looking? Amanda Hess at Slate knows why, and I couldn’t agree with her more.

Related Post: Sunday 99: Megan Mullally and Ron Swanson, Tavi Gevinson, Rolling Rock history and more

Related Post: Sunday 98: Chinese marriage market, George Saunders, Lena in Playboy and more

Sunday Scraps 92

1. CHICAGO: Love this story from Chicago Magazine about the millionaire founder of Land’s End’s financial and emotional commitment to personally reinvigorating the neighborhood he grew up in.

2. TINA: Blurgh! It’s over. At least the dearly departed 30 Rock  has left us with some serious vocabulary, as catalogued by Slate.

3. TINA #2: More on 30 Rock, because it’s just that important, Wesley Morris for Grantland specifically focuses on the show’s portrayal of race.

4. ART: Photographer Paul Schneggenberger captures couples sleeping over a 6 hour period and creates sort of wierd, mostly awesome portraits of sleep.

5. GUNS: Illinois has super harsh gun laws and yet Chicago has a serious gun problem. What gives? NYT has a map showing where Chicago guns come from.

6. MARRIAGE EQUALITY: My new favorite NBA player, Kenneth Faried, introduces his two moms (who seem quite reluctant to be on camera) to lend his voice to the fight for marriage equality.

Related Post: Sunday 91 – McDonald’s and books, sci-fi gender swapping, celeb high school photos

Related Post: Sunday 90 – Lindsay Lohan, Frida, Tina + Amy Forever

The Best Things I Read on the Internet: Sports Edition

I like sports a lot. I like pretending to invest in my fantasy football team and then forgetting to set my line-up and accidentally starting three players on bye week and two who are nursing busted knees or ankles. I like following Chicago sports so I can nod along with the sandwich guy about Charles Tillman’s wife, and damn, I hope she has that baby before Sunday!

I like sports because they raise so many other issues, about entitlement and academics, about fitness, health, beauty, gender, safety, parenting, money, community and values. I also really like when people write well about sports, like these folks:

• “The Hard Life of an NFL Long Shot” – The New York Times (Charles Siebert): Following his 21-year-old nephew through the the ups and downs of a maybe, someday, hopeful NFL-er, Siebert captures some of the frenzy we see on the surface of the NFL, and some of the loneliness and struggle of the almost-made-its.
• “The Favorite” – Grantland (Brian Phillips): Serena Williams is my favorite, and Brian Phillips’ too. He explores why (and other stuff, like race and privilege and pressure) in this excellent profile.
• “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer” – New York Times (John Branch): In this epic three part series, Branch examines the life and career of one of the NHL’s most notorious brawlers, and his death by accidental overdose at age 28.
• “The Woman Who Would Save Football” – Grantland (Jane Leavy): Dr. Ann McKee is a Packers fan. She is also the woman to whom brains are sent when athletes die.
• “A Basketball Fairytale in Middle America” – New York Times Magazine (Sam Anderson): Kevin Durant is the Oklahoma City Thunder, and in exchange, Oklahma City has devoted itself to Kevin Durant. This is a fabulous profile of a player (the youngest scoring champion in league history) and a city who levied a sales tax to build him a home.
• “Venus and Serena Against the World” – New York Times (John Jeremiah Sullivan): I know this is my second piece about the Williamses, but I just really like them, ok? Also, it’s really good.

Why You Should Be Reading Grantland

If you’re not an ESPN-watching dude, or you don’t have very many ESPN-watching dude friends, you might be missing out. The first person to send me something from Grantland, an online magazine on sports and pop culture, was one of those dudes, and I doubt I would have stumbled upon it without his help.

Grantland was founded by ESPN’s Bill Simmons, what Ad Age calls a “one-man content generating apparatus,” in June 2011. I was late to the game and only added it to my reader a month ago, but in that time, I’ve starred oh so many things.

Ostensibly for long form sports and culture, I really find it’s at its strongest at the nexus of those two. Anything in the “sports and” category is where they really hit their stride: Sports and medicine (like this piece on CTE in NFL players), sports and gender (like this on the Kournikova era), Sports and race (like this one on Serena Williams), but every now and then, there’s the randomest of gems (like this diva-off).

My reader and Twitter feeds, not to mention my typical self-guided daily tour through the interwebz, is basically a who’s who of 3rd wave feminism. Jezebel, Mother Jones, Peggy Orenstein, the XX Factor, Anita Sarkeesian, Clarisee Thorn, this is my digital bread and butter. The Grantland staff isn’t exactly the equivalent of reading Drudge every morning in terms of spicing up my web consumption, but it’s a different crowd and I think I like it.

Related Post: Final thoughts on the Olympics

Related Post: I will not be joining your gym

Sunday Scraps 74

1. WRITING: Junot Diaz has a new book. The Atlantic wonders if Diaz, whose characters are consistently horrible to women, can write a sexist character without writing a sexist book.

2. SPORTS: With the Olympics being all about Missy, Gabby, Serena and the Fab 5, Grantland wonders if we’re past what he dubs “the Kournikova era”, when being hot matters more than being good.

3. DRUGS: Artist Bryan Lewis Sanders takes most drugs known to mankind and then draws self-portraits (Cultso).

4. ADVERTISING: Man, sometimes Google knows what’s up. Instead of doing the “dumb dad” routine in their latest Chrome campaign, they actually do a pretty cool portrait of a father-daughter relationship.

5. LIT: Literary archaeology is the coolest. For only the second time ever, a photo of Emily Dickinson has been found!

6. TRANS: DC launches its first ever transgender respect campaign with billboards featuring real members of the trans community and the (obvious) directive to treat everyone with respect and dignity.

Related Post: Sunday 73 – Joy of Sex illustration history, Philip Roth vs. Wikipedia, my new fave NFL player

Related Post: Sunday 72 – Zoe Smith vs. haters, Valerie Jarrett, Katherine Boo on Katrina

Sunday Scraps 71

1. GLOBAL SEXUALITY: New York Times report on the global domination of Cosmo and how cover to cover, mag to mag, the content shifts to accommodate cultural norms from Kazakhstan to Singapore.

2. HELEN: More Cosmo: Letters of Note has a spectacular letter from legendary Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown to the editor of Turkish Cosmo berating her for the offshoot’s content.

3. OLYMPICS: What happens to the Olympic facilities after the Games have come and gone? Sociological Images has a gallery.

4. FOOTBALL: When NFL players commit suicide, Ann McKee is the doctor they send their brains too. Grantland profiles McKee as she investigates what football does to the brain while also trying to save the sport she loves.

5. ADVICE: Four advice columnists, including Dear Sugar and Dear Prudence, gather for a roundtable to discuss advice-doling strategies and the most common dilemmas (#1 = How do I get over an ex?).

6. AMERICA: America Ferrera, who I’ve missed dearly since saying goodbye to Ugly Betty, is back with a web series called Christine. Worth a look.

Related Post: Sunday 70 – Louie CK, boys in dresses, US ladies at the Olympics, teen books

Related Post: Sunday 69 – Divers, books and bikinis, gun violence, big grocery stores

Sunday Scraps 50

1. LAW: The New Yorker has a fascinating piece on the true story behind the Lawrence vs. Texas case. Who was Lawrence, and who was the other guy, and what was actually going on? Hint: It’s not what you think.

2. TELEVISION: In the midst of 8 gazillion March Madness style tournements, Grantland is running one pitting characters from The Wire against one another. My money’s on Obama’s #1 seed.

3. POLITICS: Alternet has helpfully curated a list of the 11 dumbest things Republicans have said about women (recently).

4. DATING: xkcd tackles pick-up culture and hits the nail on the head. Gentlemen, we know what you’re up to.

5. LANGUAGE: From Buzzfeed, a chart tracking the usage of the word “slut” in recent years.

6. WORLD: Does four years with an American president feel like a long time? The Economist compares the average tenure of our leaders to the rest of the world.

Related Post: Last Sunday, we had a Lena Dunham interview, 1938 dating advice and 6 houses in Chicago.

Related Post: Two Sundays ago, Zilla marches, feminist pornographers, and Jonathan Lethem on copyright.

Sunday Scraps 47

1. HOLLYWOOD: Grantland‘s Mark Harris explores the complexities of black actresses exclusively getting Oscar nominations for playing maids.

2. CALVIN: From BookRiot, 16 things that Calvin and Hobbes say better than anyone else. Includes “You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.”

3. DIET: In an extreme example of the conflation of skinny with healthy, a teenage girl endangers her health with an all-nugget diet. Don’t worry though, she was still thin! Ragen Chastain at iVillage explains where we went wrong.

4. LEGO: More on Legos, I know, enough already! Except I can’t help myself… Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency is just too damn articulate to pass up! In a tw0-parter, she explains the history of Legos and gender.

5. BOOKS: I love the stuff that science can figure out these days. The latest in the list of SUPER IMPORTANT DISCOVERIES is pinpointing exactly what old books smell like.

6. ART: Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano has taken a digital scalpel to famous works of art to see what impact traditional photoshopping would have on Venus de Milo. What happens when you apply modern beauty standards to the knockouts of the Renaissance?

Related Post: Pro-lifeers + Planned Parenthood, Disney medley, inside a whale…. Sunday 46!

Related Post: The Lovings of Virginia, Peggy Orenstein, and Tim Gunn…. Sunday 45!