The Double Bonus podcast is back to break down the most important questions of this year’s Tournament: What was this year’s worst commercial? Are all 15-2 upsets alike? How did the winner of the West Region not start with the letter “M”? And just how bad was Duke this year? Tim and John S also break down the Final Four, and make predictions for every possible iteration of this weekend. They also break the mold with their choice of theme music. Click here to have your mind completely blown!
The Double Bonus returns! With college basketball season officially underway–and Monday’s 24-hour marathon on ESPN being a reminder of how awesome college basketball is–John S and Tim return for their first ever in-person podcast! Together they break down their picks for each of the major conferences, discuss sleepers and POY candidates, and fondly reminisce about the good old days of the 2009 season. Click here to listen to the podcast that will change your life!
Tim and John S are back for another episode of The Double Bonus Podcast! Today they’re going over their suspiciously (and, for Tim, ominously) similar NCAA Tournament picks. The trendy upsets heading into this first weekend are Belmont over Wisconsin, Oakland over Texas, and Missouri over Cincinnati. Will Tim or John be on any of these bandwagons? Will they add a few of their own? And will anyone even hear Tim over his exceptionally poor audio quality? All those questions will be answered: Click here and listen to their full breakdown of this year’s bracket!
It’s episode two of the Double Bonus podcast! Listen as Tim and John S break down the weekend’s slate of games, and hear John S apologize for being so wrong. Click here for the podcast of a lifetime….
Welcome to NPI Comes Alive! It’s the podcast branch of the NPI network. Our first edition brings back The Double Bonus, with Tim and John S finally breaking down this college basketball season. Click here to listen.
As we at NPI have previously hinted, we have all emanated from that majestic and triumphant institution of higher learning, Duke University. In fact, it is fair to say that, without Duke, this blog would not exist. Other gifts to humanity that Duke has bestowed include basketball extraordinaire Jason Williams, former Heroes star Jack Coleman, novelist Reynolds Price, journalist Charlie Rose, and former NFL star Sonny Jurgensen. That’s not a bad list, and it’s by no means everybody.
Of course, Tim, Josh, and I would not say that Duke is perfect. For one, we’re not the kind of people that love institutions unconditionally. It’s pretty obvious that every university has its flaws. In fact, we probably wouldn’t object if you said that Duke has more flaws than your average elite institution.
But when someone who writes for a prominent magazine—like, I don’t know, let’s say The Atlantic—writes an unjustified hatchet-job that is illogical, mean-spirited, and not supported by any hard evidence…well, that really grinds our gears. See, hating Duke has been trendy for about two decades now (it probably started when Christian Laettner stepped on Aminu Timberlake). There are a lot of reasons for this that I won’t bother going into here, but suffice it to say that sometime around 2006, when three members of the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape,* members of the non-sports media realized they could churn out “polarizing” columns by regurgitating the same accusations of racism and elitism that had been levied against the basketball team for 15 years. Continue reading »
Recently, NPI has begun internal discussions about taking on additional staff. It’s not that John, Josh, Tim, and Pierre can’t handle the workload, but recently NPI’s revenues have gotten so excessive that we literally don’t know what to do with it all. We decided to put some of our more indigent friends and relatives on payroll, but it turns out that–according to the IRS–sometimes we have to publish them if they’re on payroll. Rather than risk tarnishing the overall quality of NPI, though, we subjected them all to a rigorous interview process. The only survivor was Jake, whose interview is included here:
An NPI Artist Rendering of Our Newest Contributor
What are your qualifications? In other words, who do you think you are?
A small bit of personal background: while this disclosure will almost certainly fuel the accusations of rampant nepotism at NPI, I attended college at the college of Duke, more accurately known as Duke University. In my free time I majored in English, delightedly consuming and artfully abusing what is indisputably the greatest language in the world. I am the defiant answer to Vampire Weekend’s insolent query: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”
Professionally, I’m a humorist whose style was once described simply as “abstract” by a very terse observer. I like to think I’m at least 19 times as funny as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I write for a much narrower audience. Like most journalists, I can’t be taken seriously, but unlike most journalists I consider this my top selling point. Continue reading »
