December 28, 2013

It Was A Great Year For Sportswriting; Here's Some Of The Best Of It 

There's definitely something gratuitous and undisciplined in a lot of the long stories that run today, and in the general fetish for them, but this is just part of the price paid for the ready access we all enjoy to an astonishing depth and variety of quality work. Anyway, the list below isn't any kind of best of, but it is a list of stories I loved and that you should read if you haven't, or even read again if you already have. You could easily make a list twice as long and just as good without doubling up on anything or anyone, and so could I, and that's the best sign of how good things are right now. Saying otherwise is just a sure way of showing how little you're paying attention.

50 Best Songs You Might Have Missed in 2013

22 Of The Most Heart Melting Love Songs of 2013

Love and Math

Mathematics directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars. Math is a way to describe reality and figure out how the world works, a universal language that has become the gold standard of truth. In our world, increasingly driven by science and technology, mathematics is becoming, ever more, the source of power, wealth, and progress. Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. While our perception of the physical world can always be distorted, our perception of mathematical truths can’t be. They are objective, persistent, necessary truths. A mathematical formula or theorem means the same thing to anyone anywhere – no matter what gender, religion, or skin color; it will mean the same thing to anyone a thousand years from now. And what’s also amazing is that we own all of them. No one can patent a mathematical formula, it’s ours to share. There is nothing in this world that is so deep and exquisite and yet so readily available to all. That such a reservoir of knowledge really exists is nearly unbelievable. It’s too precious to be given away to the “initiated few.” It belongs to all of us.

No Exit

Excellent interactive GQ piece about firefighters caught in a wildfire.

December 27, 2013

Grantland's 2013 Year In Review

I love year end reviews and top ten lists. It's a moment where everyone finally stops and digests what just happened.

10 Movie That Take Place At Christmas For No Reason

For as many movies as are clearly “Christmas Movies,” there are quite a few others that take place during the holiday season and yet are not dubbed with the colorful moniker. Do they need to be set at Christmas? In a lot of cases, no; they really are just using the holiday as a setting or are adhering to the release date. For some reason, movies released at Christmastime are often set then as well, as though people who go to the movies in December can’t fathom a story taking place in May. At any rate, here are ten movies that take place at Christmas that maybe don’t need to. Here, they’re in chronological order.

The Seven Imperatives To Keeping Meetings On Track

There’s nothing more annoying than a meeting that goes on and on and on. As a manager, it’s your job to make sure people don’t go off on tangents or give endless speeches. But how can you keep people focused without being a taskmaster or squashing creativity?

What the Experts Say

The good news is that meeting management isn’t rocket science; you probably already know what you should be doing. The bad news is that keeping your meeting on track takes discipline, and few people make the effort to get it right. “The fact is people haven’t thought about how to run a good meeting, or they’ve never been trained, or they’re simply too busy,” says Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, senior fellow at Brookings Institute, and author of Extreme Productivity. “Organizations are moving faster and faster these days and few managers have time to think through their meetings in advance,” says Roger Schwarz, an organizational psychologist and author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams. But rushing now is only going to cost you more time later. So whether you’re getting ready for a weekly team meeting or convening a larger group to discuss your division’s strategy, it’s important to put in the effort. Here’s how to make your next meeting your most productive one yet.

The Best Of The Art of Manliness

Great site about things like how to end a conversation, accept a compliment, and how to walk like a ninja.

The Year of the Crush: How the Radically Unfair Candy Crush Saga Took Over Our Lives

Gambling is the most existential of vices, because it depends upon an interface with the universe as a thing that simply happens. In this way, chance is just a synonym for the universe itself, for its happening. Unapologetic games of chance, like Candy Crush, offer ways to prove to ourselves that luck really is on our side, that the odds are actually in our favor, that our desires are momentarily aligned with the universe. Of course, we have to go back to the table again and again because life just keeps happening. And, truth be told, most days we don’t feel so lucky.

What Candy Crush does better than just about any other game is model an essential fact of life: its radical contingency. Young people feel this in cities, in nights out, where all the colliding elements give an overwhelming sense of possibility. At any moment, something could happen and set your life on a new course. But the stakes of this contingency become even clearer as you age. The world becomes a thing not only imagined but experienced. Your brain, evolved to anticipate contingencies, if-thens ad nauseam, actually sees the unexpected and often tangled consequences of a given moment and their accumulation over a lifetime. You watch as people around you struggle to control chance, maybe impose a little of their own design on the universe, if they’re lucky. You see the less lucky thrash and flail or die in senseless accidents. You feel their contingency wink out.

December 26, 2013

SNL Alec Baldwin - Cocoa Is For Closers

SNL You're A Rat Bastard Charlie Brown


Vulture Oral History of Parks and Rec Cones of Dunshire

In the Parks and Recreation episode “The Cones of Dunshire,” which aired November 21, 2013, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) finds himself unemployed for one week and he spends the time “cooking up something pretty big” — namely, the obsessively detailed board game that gives the episode its title. “Presenting ... the Cones of Dunshire, a brand-new gaming experience [for] eight to twelve players,” he excitedly tells his interest-feigning wife, Leslie (Amy Poehler), before rattling off ever-nerdier details about his invention, including its goal (“to accumulate cones: Four cones wins, but in order to get a cone you have to build a civilization ... which is where the Spirit Cards come in”), its hyper-specific character types (“two wizards, a maverick, the Arbiter, two warriors, a corporal, and a ledgerman,” the latter of which merely keeps score while wearing a hat that says Ledgerman), and its many quirks (“the thing about the Challenge Play is that it’s basically the game” — here, Ben opens his hand dramatically to reveal disc-shaped game pieces — “in reverse”). To build a prop worthy of Ben’s neurotic intensity, the Parks and Recreation producers turned to Mayfair Games, publishers of the meticulously crafted strategy game The Settlers of Catan. In our quest to add more micro oral histories to our theme week, Vulture spoke with Adam Scott, Parks and Recreation honchos, and the Mayfair Games brain trust to find out how the game was dreamed up, whether the cones are, in fact, a metaphor, and if we’ll ever see Ben’s creation in stores.

Vulture Oral History of Six Feet Under Finale

On August 21, 2005, the HBO drama Six Feet Under concluded with a seven-minute montage of flash-forwards revealing how each of the remaining main characters die. The episode, “Everyone’s Waiting,” was immediately hailed as the most satisfying TV ending ever, something the show’s creator, Alan Ball, still hears all the time. “People say they love it, that it was incredibly moving, that they watched it over and over,” he tells Vulture. “All those things.” As part of our micro oral history week, Ball and the scene’s other key players look back at the finale and discuss the Sia song, the process of aging the actors, and grappling with the meaning of life and death.

December 20, 2013

Paste 50 Best Songs of the Year

Foodspin: How To Make Bourbon Balls and be a Holiday Hero

Alamo Drafthouse 100 Movies List

Some nice surprises here.

17 Minutes of Rube Goldberg Machines from Japan

Top 12 Games of 2013

Winnie Cooper Teaches You To Sing Pi to 139 Places

Grand Piano Trailer

December 10, 2013

Sing Off
Street Corner Renaissance
What Makes You Beautiful

Community
Beyond the Darkest Timeline

 

 

Black Mirror

Through a Glass Darkly

We’re living in a golden age for golden ages: television, technology,journalism, television technology, television journalism, journalism technology, and on and on—we’ve all seen the TED talks. Paeans to our best-of-all-possible-worlds tend to not mention that the first golden age was presided over by a god who devoured his own children. But every utopia has its discontents, and every utopia deserves them. If you’re one of the discontents—if you get the nagging feeling that maybe buying a tablet computer isn’t a revolutionary act, that Twitter might not end political oppression, that humanity remains as stubbornly imperfectible as ever—British science-fiction series Black Mirror may be the show you’ve been waiting for.

 

The New Pippen

Andre Iguodala, one of the most versatile players in the NBA, could be the key to a championship for Golden State, but it took him years to find the right teammates — and some respect.

 

Enter the 36 Chambers of Teaching (What We Can Learn from the Wu-Tang Clan)

Are you ready to enter the 36 Chambers of teaching? Educator Jose Vilson breaks down why the Wu-Tang clan holds keys to greatness in the classroom. "If we can reach our students on their level," says Vilson "we have the opportunity to make our pedagogy relevant to some of our harder-to-reach students of all backgrounds." Vilson notes that "group member ODB would say, 'Wu-Tang is for the children.' But really, says Vilson, "Wu-Tang is also for the adults."

December 4, 2013

 

 

 

All Songs Considered: The Year in Music 2013

What defined music in 2013? All Songs Considered kicks off NPR Music's year-end coverage by humbly submitting the following themes for your consideration: The long-awaited return of legends. New favorites who arrived fully formed. The triumph of elaborate promotion. The sneak-attack album drop. On this special edition of the show, Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are joined by NPR Music's Stephen Thompson and Ann Powers for a roughly chronological tour through the musical high points of the year.

 

 

How To Buy A Good, Versatile, Suit For Any Occasion

Every man should have at least one good suit. However, different events often call for different attire, and keeping multiple suits around is a luxury few of us can (or want to) afford. Still, you'd be surprised how much versatility you can get out of one sharp-looking suit if you buy smart and get the right accessories. Suit up guys: here's what you need to know.

 

 

The Selfie Syndrome:

How Social Media is Making Us More Narcissistic