Tag Archives: Grantland

I Love You, Kill Screen, But…

This is what I get quarterly from Kill Screen for $40 a year; just shy of 100 pages:

This is what I get from the Grantland Quarterly for $48 a year; about 340 pages including a pull-out style section:

To be fair, Kill Screen is full color and has a lot more content that either isn’t available on the website or is delayed there after the print publication. (Grantland is done in 2-color groups and has mostly content that was published on the website about six months earlier, but it’s hardcover.)

I love both publications and think that they are both full of a lot of very, very good writing, but there’s a value comparison here that’s not in Kill Screen‘s favor, especially considering that Kill Screen has ads and Grantland Quarterly doesn’t.

“Dick’s Degrees of Separation”

From Mark Titus‘s weekly power rankings on Grantland:

I’ve decided to implement a halftime break for each column, and this week I’m using the break to start a new game. It’s called “Dick’s Degrees of Separation,” and it’s inspired by the tangents Dick Vitale rattles off whenever he calls a game. Dickie V. has a habit of letting his train of thought get away from him, resulting in rants on a variety of topics that have little to do with his original subject. It’s like he’s playing six degrees of separation in his mind and wants to find a way to connect Kentucky’s ball screen defense to the cheeseburger he ate in Salt Lake City in 1979 while watching the Magic vs. Bird national championship game. To celebrate how entertaining Dickie V. can be, I’ve picked out my favorite Vitale tangent of this past week. I’m going to provide the end point of the tangent, as well as three potential pathways that arrive at the conclusion. From there, it’s your job to determine which tangent is real and which ones I made up. Good luck.

I am so looking forward to next week’s answer and you should be too.

I plan on writing more on this once I receive my printed Quarterly, but some of the best writing on the Internet (or indeed anywhere) is currently happening on Grantland. If you don’t have it in your RSS reader of choice you should change that.