The Hollywood Reporter profiles Bill Simmons, the popular sportswriter, podcaster, and TV personality who founded Grantland. Simmons was fired from ESPN last year after making disparaging comments about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. The Reporter takes evident delight in detailing the hurt feelings and corporate machinations that led to Simmons’s departure, and in narrating his comeback—the Beverly Hills dinners and meetings with high-rolling network and tech executives who were desperate to hire him. He’s landed at HBO with a new weekly TV show, Any Given Wednesday, and has started a new sports and pop culture site, The Ringer. Simmons has a large and loyal fanbase, and he seems to know why his fans tune in, describing Any Given Wednesday as “conversations about sports, culture and technology . . . and then me being a snarky asshole.”
Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit and losing litigant in a discrimination suit against another former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, will publish a memoir about her experiences in Silicon Valley. Titled Reset, the book is an exposé of “the toxic culture that pervades the tech industry.”
In a story about just how much money the Broadway smash “Hamilton” is making—probably a billion dollars by the time all the checks are cashed—the Times notes that some writers are cashing in, too. Ron Chernow, a “Hamilton” consultant and author of the 2004 biography that inspired the show, has a 1 percent royalty agreement that nets him about $900,000 a year and his book has now spent thirty-three weeks on the best-seller list.
Following three months of surveys by an Australian market research firm called GfK Bluemoon, Pantone 488C, or “opaque couché,” has been named the ugliest color in the world. It can best be described as a cross between taupe and solid waste. Some say it conjures death and sludge—the Australian government plans to use it on cigarette packaging—while others think it is chic. “At the Pantone Color Institute, we consider all colors equally,” the company said in a statement to Cosmopolitan. “We don’t consider PANTONE 448 to be the ‘fugliest color in the world,’ as our color word association studies show PANTONE 448 is a color associated with deep, rich earth tones, the kind of shade that is used in elegant leathers and suedes for fashion accessories, outerwear, and footwear, and most especially in the home—a beautifully patina-ed antique armoire or an earthy brown tufted leather sofa.”
At Fusion, Terrell Jermaine Starr writes a dispatch from a gloomy Bernie Sanders rally on Tuesday night, one day after Hillary Clinton was announced as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate. Still, as the Wall Street Journal reports, some Sanders supporters are coming around: The hashtag #GirlIGuessImWithHer started appearing on Twitter this week, as people found a fresh way to use GIFs showing ambivalence, reluctance, and distaste.
This bloody face belongs to the actress Samara Weaving after a makeup test, not a supporter of Trump after a rally—a distinction made clear in a Tweet by the actor Bruce Campbell, who stars in the comedy horror showAsh vs. Evil Dead, after conservative bloggers used the image to stir up trouble. This meme, however, is oh so real: When a Canada goose began brawling with an American bald eagle in British Columbia, a vacationer captured the action on camera. “There was a whole bunch of noise to begin with,” Lisa Bell told CTV Vancouver Island. “The eagle was sitting on the goose…The goose basically was playing dead.”