The MMA media took the UFC bait
Of course the UFC did an in-house interview with Conor McGregor ahead of the current season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” and of course the MMA media, which is always hungry to aggregate any Conor McGregor content it can, jumped on the chum the UFC threw in the water.
There are some smart people in the UFC. They know what will make headlines, and McGregor saying he plans on fighting three or four times is red meat for the click-mongers.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single question in that interview asking McGregor about drug testing. Once again, the UFC is controlling what it wants the narrative to be when it comes to McGregor.
UFC rarely loses.
A good profile
“The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe”
How “Tokyo Joe” climbed the ranks of the Chicago mob, and how things went wrong for him when his bosses assumed he was about to turn on him. They had him shot in the head. The story doesn’t end there.
An essay
From Harry Crews on climbing, or not, climbing the tower. “There are people throughout the world resisting with all their might and will climbing the tower, because once the tower is climbed there is no turning back.”
Classic magazine cover
Also, the story “M” is one of the best magazine stories ever written and should be required reading.
A classic sports profile
Pete Dexter writes about professional wrestler Mad Dog Vachon from 1984
“That is not the worst. The worst are the old people. A seventy-five-year-old man cut my brother’s throat ear to ear while he was leaving the ring. An old woman attacked me with an umbrella and cut my head open. You try to be polite, but these people make you rude.”
A philosophical debate
“They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?”
This is well written, and presents a philosophical question about mass shootings. Would revealing the aftermath of the violence help, hinder or produce no result in the question of gun control?
Good art
A podcast
If you’re a fan of print and magazines, then this podcast, which is in its second season, is for you.
This is the episode I started with, which is a great episode with the man who helped reinvigorate Esquire magazine, David Granger.
A Dave Chappelle debate - not about his comedy
There are many reasons to criticize what Dave Chappelle has become as far as his comedy. This story isn’t about that. It’s about how he is buying property in his hometown of Yellow Springs, OH. The debate is not a simple one, it brings in race, celebrity, the wants and needs of a town that has seen better days, and more. A well-written, thought-provoking and complicated story.
“What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town”
Good twitter
A short story
Richard Ford’s “Winterkill” is worth a read.
Classic ad
A novel to read
“William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.”
A movie to watch
The 70s were a dark time in film - The Conversation
My MMA writing
UFC event quota fillers, and the trap of ‘don’t judge a card before the event’
Conor McGregor’s USADA delay looks like UFC smoke and mirrors
MMA doesn’t have media, it has UFC disinformation distributors