Quoted

Fork

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Quoted

Oprah

“If Oprah can leave and the world still spins, I honestly think it will survive me.”

Snap

B.S. Free at ESPN

This morning, New York Times media reporter, Richard Sandomir, broke the news that Bill Simmons is out at ESPN. While the news is shocking, I am not sure its all together surprising. I am optimistic and hopeful he will find an outlet for his unique voice somewhere else in media. I believe this will be a true test of the new medium and marketplace. I will be sad to see him go from Grantland, which I believe has been groundbreaking in many ways. I do wonder if he set himself up for this when he started Grantland in 2011. He went from a voice to a purveyor and as such I think his responsibilities to himself and what would become his staff changed. Only time will tell, but I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Quoted

Safe

“If a city isn’t safe enough to host a baseball game in front of a crowd, it shouldn’t host a baseball game at all.”

Quoted

Sweatpant

“We want our clothes relaxed, yet refined. We want things to be comfortable, without appearing sloppy. We want both crisp and casual in equal measure. And that brings us to the sweatpant.”

Locally Notable

The End Started in North Carolina

Like many other Millenials / GenYers, when I think about the downfall of the music industry, I think of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and BitTorrent. And certainly those peer-to-peer file sharing innovations played a major role. But dig deeper and there’s a case to be made that the downfall began in our own backyard. In fact, Stephen Witt, in a longform piece for The New Yorker, makes that very case. I especially enjoyed this characterization of early-nineties life in Shelby, North Carolina:

Glover and Dockery soon became friends. They lived in the same town, Shelby, and Glover started giving Dockery a ride to work. They liked the same music. They made the same money. Most important, they were both fascinated by computers, an unusual interest for two working-class Carolinians in the early nineties—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC.

In all seriousness, I had no idea that a small chunk of the ridiculous amounts of money I was spending on music in the nineties was coming back to the North Carolina economy. Had I known that there was a literal hit factory in Kings Mountain, NC, I might have tried to spend my summers working there.

Quoted

Allure

“I came down and it changed my life. I figured that must be what North Carolina was like every day.”

Quoted

Superman

“I hope we get a Superman movie by a director that actually likes the character again someday.”