The Ringer

Michael MacCambridge—author of 1997’s The Franchise, a classic in media reporting—deep-dives what to make of Sports Illustrated following Meredith’s acquisition of Time Inc, and how (and even whether) the once-essential magazine can continue to survive in a continuously evolving media landscape

Whether ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski is dropping #wojbombs, or Adam Schefter is piling NFL scoop after scoop into his Twitter timeline, there are certain reporters who seem to always be the first to know who signed where and for how much money. That is, until Sports Spectrum, a burgeoning Christian website, began to beat the ESPNs and other mainstream outlets at a game they’ve long since perfected. How? By allowing athletes to express their faith and religious beliefs.

Bryan Curtis profiles Jamele Hill, the ESPN Sportscenter host under fire on Twitter, and from the White House, for calling President Donald Trump a white supremacist.

During poker’s boom in the early-aughts, Phil Ivey was the sport’s first genuine superstar, an intimidating manipulator with an utterly brilliant mind who helped catapult poker (and his own bank account) to dizzying heights. “I like it when I lose so much money I can barely breathe,” he once told a table during the filming of NBC’s Poker After Dark. But then Ivey disappeared, hamstrung by the lingering accusation and subsequent lawsuits that he had cheated casinos out of millions playing baccarat, which begs the question—does poker still need Phil Ivey?

How a new generation of indie filmmakers is finding its voice through Amazon and Netflix — and why this might be a scary development for the future of cinema.

It’s impossible to escape Dick Vitale, the original ESPN personality and longtime mensch of college basketball, but at age 77, and after watching countless friends retire from the broadcast booth, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis tries to answer the question of what continues to push Vitale?

How a decades-old standby dish in Nashville found its way into stardom.

How the video game Zelda: Majora’s Mask — the “black sheep” member of the game franchise notable for its apocalyptic storyline as a stark departure from the beloved princess-saving series — became a cult object that spawned a fan-made, horror-based, sinister “creepypasta” storyline called Ben Drowned which has terrifying connections to the story of Katelyn Davis, the 12-year-old girl who committed suicide, live online in December, 2016.

In our post-Bourdain era of Yelp, Instagramability and celebrity chefs, it seems like everyone wants to be a food writer, but how did food writing become the new rock criticism? And is the genre suffering from too many cooks in the kitchen?

Twenty months after Tamir Rice was killed in Cleveland, his mother is still grappling with how to grieve in private following her son’s public death.