Monday Medley

What we read while Sunday came afterwards…

• Think newspaper design is dead? Check out these fantastic presentations of the NCAA Tournament bracket, ranging from a terrific takeoff on Facebook to a traditional yearbook-themed design. Other highlights from what is always one of the best weeks in college basketball journalism: Princeton alum Sean Gregory’s retrospective on the Tigers’ memorable upset of UCLA in 1996 (chock full of inside info), Joe Posnanski’s breakdown of Texas’ terrible timeout, a New York Times profile of Gus Johnson, Matt Norlander’s story on Morehead State coach Donnie Tyndall and his family, and Tim Layden’s look at that little title game played last season.

• If you somehow missed Jalen Rose’s comments about Duke from the Fab Five documentary, here is the response from Grant Hill, as well as one from Michael Wilbon and another from Jason Whitlock.

• We might have found ourselves a new favorite punter.

• One of our favorite comedians is taking a dramatic turn on Broadway, and one of his costars calls out Hollywood in this interview with Vulture.

• On a sober note, the New York Times’ Peter Wynn Kirby addresses Japan’s nuclear problems through the lens of the nation’s cinematic obsession with nuclear-themed horror films.

• A former Oxford University Press editor offers advice to book authors seeking to be published.

• Richard Posner and Gary Becker on the value of a college degree.

• An oral history of The Strokes, up to their newest album, Angles.

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Unabated to the QB, Week 3: This Side of Michael Vick

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want her girlhood—she wants to repeat the honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

I’m pretty sure, now that I think about it, that it was the first time I had ever seen Michael Vick play, in that comeback in Morgantown. Up until 1999, Virginia Tech had been, at least to me, a banal Top 25 team, in that class with Clemson and Auburn and Georgia Tech — teams that were always ranked, that always played some good games, always played January bowl games, but never mattered in the title race. Vick, of course, changed that at Virginia Tech, and by the time I laid eyes on him, the Hokies were already No. 3 in the polls.

It was that run down the sidelines during the final drive that arrested my attention. It was so sudden and so graceful — so easy for Vick to transform the dynamic of that final minute from “Virginia Tech still needs a bunch of yards in a short amount of time” to “Oh, they’re in field-goal range now. They’re going to win.”

It was Will Hunting easy for Michael Vick to turn upfield on that play, and what seems so innocuous to us now wasn’t then. Quarterbacks didn’t do that. They weren’t that fast and elusive and graceful.*

*And if they were, they were doing it at a lower level of college football. This is my Steve McNair acknowledgment.

Monday Medley

What we read while not writing anything….

• The New York Times Magazine’s profile on David Mitchell is one of our favorite features on one of one of us’s favorite authors. Our favorite part from Wyatt Mason’s look at Mitchell: “When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, ‘your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there’s this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing.'”

• Speaking of books, The Millions has a whole new page devoted to its exhaustive catalog of reviews. And Pierre gets a shout-out on the back pages of the NYT‘s Book Review.

• Monday Medley regular Jason Segel talks to GQ about How I Met Your Mother, muppets, and various other things.

• Last week we linked to Philadelphia Magazine‘s profile of Buzz Bissinger, which asked why the former Pulitzer Prize winner was so angry. This week, we link to Bissinger’s own indirect response from The New Republic, in which he explains why he loves Twitter: “I am an angry man, which is one of the reasons I have resumed therapy and take four different pharmaceuticals. I wake up angry, stay angry during the day except to my dog and children, and go to bed angry at night. Most of my anger amounted to a running dialogue of abuse and self-abuse while working alone at home. But with Twitter, I now had an outlet.”

• Michael Cera as the “ultimate Canadian superhero.”

• Michael Wilbon gives commencement address, quotes Mike Tyson.

• Arizona passed a controversial immigration law a few months ago, which can only mean one thing: Protest songs! One from Chuck D and one from Conor Oberst.

• Elena Kagan’s email inbox from her time serving the Clinton administration has been made accessible in user-friendly Gmail-like fashion. You can learn things like Kagan’s lack of vacation plans. Transparency is cool and all, but this may be a little excessive.

• Artificial Intelligence is also cool and all, and this latest advancement is by no means excessive.

Happy Time for Pardon the Interruption

Now, I didn’t get ESPN until right before Pardon the Interruption debuted eight years ago Thursday, so I don’t really know what ESPN’s afternoon programming looked like. I imagine there were a lot of SportsCenter reruns, maybe some extra NFL Lives just in case we weren’t sure how OTAs were going in mid-June, and possibly some Up Close with Gary Miller.

Eight years later, those SportsCenters aren’t reruns but rather the same show aired again live, those NFL Lives air at night, and Up Close with Gary Miller has been upstaged by the YES Network’s CenterStage with Michael Kay. ESPN’s afternoons, meanwhile, have been revolutionized by the show we affectionately call PTI.

It’s funny when you think about how something so derivative itself could spark a revolution. It would be like Rob Thomas becoming the new voice of a generation. PTI simply preyed on the well-known idea that people enjoy sports and sports debate. All Pardon the Interruption essentially did was take the idea of sports talk radio and put it on television.