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.
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