Studio Hive

[Channel 6] The Rare Literal: Chilly Today, Chili Tomorrow

The Rare Literal is our weekly-ish cultural newsletter at Channel 6; at the start of the 2021 football season I laid out something of a chili polemic that people seemed to like, despite the fact that it's a recipe on the internet.

Speaking of Texas, I should warn some of you right now that this bowl contains meat AND beans AND tomatoes AND peppers, and that a third core belief is you should do whatever you like with your own chili and not trouble your spirit to stir when any purists of any sort insist that whatever concoction you call chili is Not Real Chili. There’s no such thing as Real Chili. All recipes are made up. All words are made up. If this sounds like your impulse set, take a few cleansing breaths, and perhaps a short walk. My mother’s family is from Hungary, and I’ve gotten out of more than one internet fight by saying You Can’t Tell Me How To Make Goulash, even though I learned to make chili from my dad.

Texans, I see you’re still waving your hands in the back row there. You would like me to know that Real Chili comes from Texas, not Mexico. I would argue that Texas is also made up, in a manner of speaking. Do you maybe just need a nap? You sure about that?

(Free with email signup to read the rest at Channel 6; clips available by request.)

[Channel 6] YOU KNOW NOTHING OF MADNESS

In 2020, playcallers’ signals were more easily overheard than ever, which might have been hilarious had it not been for everything else. With practice time curtailed by pandemic circumstances, player conditioning levels weren’t anywhere near where they ought to be, and entire units fell into and out of rhythm. Again, in another timeline, maybe this is fun to watch. Heading into 2021, we have less of a good idea what to expect on these fields since America’s emergence from World War II, a statement that feels deeply insane but also patently obvious? High-running frustration levels are to be expected under these circumstances, for every team not actively microdosing their own head coach with medical-grade psychotropics – which, to be clear, I am not endorsing in this space, for the ironclad reason that nobody has paid me yet to do so.

But with all that in the rearview, whether it belongs there or not – sing along if you know the words – it’s the players who have the valid complaint here, when attempting to account for What Exactly It Is We’ve Lost.

(Subscription required to read the rest at Channel 6; clips available by request.)

[Unir] Ground Game: Georgia

In the immediate aftermath of the November 2020 elections, and the ensuing Georgia Senate runoff, I joined the founders of Unir to showcase a side of the races that was and remains absent from most mainstream media coverage. The result was Ground Game: Georgia, a podcast miniseries I co-hosted and executive produced alongside Marcus Patrick Ellsworth, chronicling voter registration efforts, issue-based campaigning, and political organizing told entirely from the perspective of the grassroots level. All nine episodes are available here. 

[Banner Society] Lost and Found

Sometimes we’d see him in the backyard, training his eyes on the starry sky, not moving, not blinking. Downloading mission parameters, we’d say. Searching for signal. Before our first year living together was up, we’d come to a perfectly reasonable conclusion: Champ was a stranded cosmonaut, trapped in the body of a small dog after a botched science experiment and abandoned in Alabama. He kept trying to tell us, he just didn’t have the apparatus to relay his message. You’d be skittish, too.

(Read the rest at Banner Society.)

[The Golfer's Journal] Bard of the Dewsweepers

Published in The Golfer's Journal, issue No. 7.

It was the armadillo that finally did it. It was bigger than you’d imagine an armadillo to be, at least if you grew up in Appalachia, where armadillos were uncommon sights, and had only ever glimpsed them from a speeding car window, flattened on the sides of various Florida interstates. It was uglier than you’d think too, and hairier, inexplicably whiskered and patchily sprouting these awful little bristles, and it was also dead and taxidermied (poorly) and perching on our kitchen counter.

It makes reasonable sense, looking back, that my mother was upset.

(Read the rest.)

[Medium/Off Beat] Cake Weather

Even among friends it’s not the kind of thing you can just lob into conversation and expect it to be left alone where it lands. Well, it’s the recipe that’s haunted, really, if you want to get specific. No, it’s just the maker of the cake that’s afflicted, not the cake itself, if you want to assuage those glancing nervously at the buffet table. Eat it. It’s fine. I didn’t bleed in it, not literally.

(Read the rest at Medium's digital zine, Off Beat.)

[ESPN] Lane Kiffin, Gone Fishin'

It's a tangible shift, seeing a coach famed for youth and immaturity emphasize the generation gap between himself and his players. And it's a shift Kiffin wants you to notice. After flameout-filled stops as head coach of the Oakland Raiders, Tennessee Volunteers and USC Trojans, followed by a stint in football's finishing school calling plays for Alabama, he'd very much like for you to think he is, at 42, at last an adult. So would his bosses in Boca Raton, Florida, in the FBS backwater of Conference USA.

(Read the rest at ESPN.)

[MTV News] The Stakes

From April 2016 through June 2017, my team at MTV News delivered The Stakes, a weekly newsmagazine podcast. The show spanned election coverage, interviews with political and cultural leaders like Rep. John Lewis and Kerry James Marshall, and field reporting from central Florida to the southern border to Standing Rock, along with music, essays, and original poetry. I served as the show's executive producer and wrote multiple episodes, in addition to hosting the show's first season. All 66 episodes are available here, or on Stitcher and Apple Podcasts; the series finale, "Florence and Normandie," an exploration of South Los Angeles on the 25th anniversary of the L.A. Riots, was published as the entire politics team was being laid off, and as such may not appear in all feeds.

[MTV News] Casper Pride

In the high summer of 2017, I traveled as part of a four-person documentary crew to Casper, Wyoming, the hometown of Matthew Shepard, to witness the town's first Pride parade. Here's our story.

[MTV News] The People's Playhouse

I co-authored and served as an executive producer for MTV's live news coverage of Election Night 2016. The five-hour television special included live musical acts; spoken word and dance performances; and a series of interviews and panel discussions on police brutality, immigration, criminal justice reform, and other crucial issues, all staged on an interactive set with a free-roaming studio audience. You can view the entire broadcast on YouTube (scroll down for a timestamped segment guide). 

[EDSBS] An Altered State

I don’t have a Pat Summitt story. What I have is a landscape that was altered for me before I even drew breath on this earth.

(Read the rest at EDSBS.)

[Grantland] Blades of Glory: Welcome to the Lumberjack World Championships

The deal with Hayward is, you can’t get there from here. The nearest interstate highway is about an hour and a half west, over the state line from Wisconsin in Minnesota. Any way you try to approach it, you’re going to have some substantial stretches of time alone with your thoughts as you wind through thick woods and farmlands and a nighttime darkness so total you’re surprised to reach your destination without finding a hook hanging from the car door handle.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Here There Be Dragons: The Return of UAB Football

There’s a digital clock on the wall on the left going down the steps into the UAB football offices, done up like a miniature scoreboard, green and white with the team’s dragon-head insignia. It reads BLAZER FOOTBALL COUNTDOWN and has spaces for ticking off the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the next University of Alabama at Birmingham football game, and right now, it’s dark.

The Blazers don’t live here, not the way they once did. Not since December, when the university clumsily disbanded the team. UAB reinstated football in the summer, after most of the athletes and all but a few of the staff had situated themselves in new schools, and while the program shudders back to life, the hallways remain mostly empty. Administrative assistant and team den mother Shannon Ritch says she still isn’t used to the absence of sound that follows a slamming door in the building. Each bang used to herald a parade of players, hooting and hollering and tumbling all over one another like packs of puppies walking upright. Now, the absence is palpable.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Breaking the Waves

That Saturday morning, August 27, was move-in day on campus, and the football team was traditionally tasked with hauling luggage for their fellow students. “Obviously, I was wanting to go where all the girls’ dorms were,” said Ricard. “They needed help, and that’s what I was here for. I’m a strong guy.” He remembers limiting the number of suitcases he was trying to pick up at one time, in fear of having to tell his coaches he’d messed up his back trying to impress a bunch of freshmen.

“Then right after lunch, Scott Cowen, who was the president of Tulane at the time, he gets on this platform in the quad area, and he shouts on a bullhorn, ‘You need to evacuate campus and get out of New Orleans.’”

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Exclusive: Roger Federer Makes Deviled Eggs

In this, there is no conundrum: You must begin with the chicken. An Appenzeller Spitzhauben is best; silver birds, if you can obtain them, make the most picturesque backdrop for dining out of doors. We understand one another, this chicken and I. I can look into one of her eyes and know her father wished for her to become a surgeon, and into the other and see her conflicting dreams of becoming an astronaut. Instead, she busies herself in the poultry yard, patrolling for insects and pausing only to cock her head at the sky, observe a passing satellite, and wish, and wonder.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Snakes on the Plains: At the Rattlesnake Rodeo

The late morning is thick with humidity; this could pass for summer weather in a lot of places, but it’s springtime in the Deep South. I’m standing near a cluster of men leaning on their golf clubs, hushed to respectful silence. It’s the final weekend of the Masters, but we’re hundreds of miles from Augusta. On a stage erected nearby in the grass, the town’s mayor is standing at the end of a long line of area dignitaries. You can pick him out by his short-sleeved official event polo, embroidered with a diamondback snake on the breast where the alligator would go, with “MAYOR” below the snake in neon-green letters. He addresses the families assembled in the stands, the milling throng threading through the carnival booths, and the line of beauty pageant winners organized tallest to smallest. The threat of inclement weather has dampened the turnout some, but his enthusiasm is undimmed.

“Good morning! It’s gonna be a great day! We’re supposed to have some sunshine coming out. I believe the rain’s over. We’ve got some great entertainment today, but right now, we’re gonna start the Rattlesnake Rodeo off with prayer.”

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Life’s Rich Pageant: Meet a Florida Man

“Everyone who hears that you’ve got your dick stuck in anything thinks you were trying to have sex with it. I have no idea how that’d be possible in this case. I have been in the depths of the compound bow, and it was not pleasurable. All right, so anyway, my dick. It’s been a while since I told this story. But basically, there are moments in life that kind of define you, they point you in a direction, they — you’re forged in the fires.”

What do we even mean when we say “Florida Man”? It’s an American phrase that identifies one of those indescribable French feelings, the kind there’s no word for in any other language. But it has evolved into something that transcends language. Give a state invasive fish and imported exotic birds and hordes of freed pet pythons, and in return it gifts us with the most specific sense of place imaginable, one with layers of humanity, history, and ecology fusing into something that can’t be defined except maybe by a laugh — rueful, but warm — and a certain tilt of the head, and a look of You Just Had To Be There, And Aren’t You Sorry You Weren’t.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] A God in Every Golden Cloister: Isn’t This What We Want Football to Be?

Knock me over with a feather. Or hit me between the eyes with a buckeye (the lowercase, poisonous tree nut kind, not the kind wearing a JONES jersey or an ELLIOTT crop top, please). The primary joy of college football lies in more than a hundred wells of local anthropology, one for every team, each with its own distinct terroir; a second delight so close it might as well be 1A is that while FBS ball is the highest level of college football, the pertinent term here is “college.” It’s all executed by kids, in their late teens and early twenties, with all the success of endeavor that you might remember from back when you first realized you could be really, really good at something, and all attendant absurdity of being that young interfering at every turn.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] Duck, Duck, Lose: Oregon Fells Florida State in the Rose Bowl

While it existed, Florida State’s 29-game victory streak was a marvel of talent, player development, and sweet fortune, and comprised two neatly composed halves: one of annihilations and one of swashbuckling escapes. That streak’s 59-20 ruination, dealt by the Oregon Ducks in Thursday’s playoff semifinal, was no less spectacular, though considerably more abrupt. It lent a finality to a Rose Bowl game that was reduced to serving as a palatial pit stop en route to the first playoff-produced national championship game at college football’s highest level.

The Seminoles’ dazing chain of wins is not undone, but it is over, mown under and buried deep in Pasadena in a sort of slowly unfolding slasher film, the kind where the hero keeps just out of reach of the blades for a while before pratfalling repeatedly into a series of ankle-deep holes, all set against the serene backdrop of the San Gabriels. The killer in pursuit, moving with supernatural speed, has lifeless, pool-black eyes, a pert sailor hat, and no pants.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] South Alabama Breaks Out of the Lab

It’s daunting work, maintaining a football program. It’s downright exhausting building one from scratch, and there are few who know that better than South Alabama Jaguars head coach Joey Jones. The Mobile native and Bear Bryant era Crimson Tide alum was a year into helping resurrect the D-III Birmingham-Southern program, which had been shuttered since 1939, when he returned home in 2008 to try an even trickier stunt: building a Division I football team from, pretty literally, nothing. As in “his first desk was a legal pad balanced on his knees outside a basketball gym” nothing.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Grantland] East Carolina’s Sunset Sail

Would you like to see a terrible magic trick? It’s a disappearing act of sorts: The East Carolina Pirates just beat ACC opponents in back-to-back weeks, played an SEC opponent close on the road before that, and are the toast of the Group of Five — and POOF! They’re gone. You won’t see them again before bowl season unless you know just where to look.

(Read the rest at Grantland.)

[Sports Illustrated] A random piece of masonry: Closing the book on the 2011 football season

It is the third full day of the 2011 offseason and the 2012 preseason. It’s really the second for me, having spent most of Tuesday trying with increasing reluctance to get out of New Orleans. By quick shoddy math, I’ve been on the road 27 days out of the last 41. I got to see a host of familiar faces this season and postseason, and meet so many of you for the first time. I get asked a lot: How did you get into this?If you know me from back home, it usually comes out Why did you get into this? I usually want to talk about Larry, but don’t. It explains things, but it takes a while. From now until August, though, we’ve got nothing but time. Time and recruiting and police blotters and calendar-cussing, and precious little else.

(Read the rest at Sports Illustrated.)