Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons On Obama: ‘There’s a Serenity About Him That Disarms Just About Everyone’
By Tom Johnson | November 18, 2015 | 11:25 PM EST

Almost two years ago, in an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, President Obama drew one of the worst sports-related analogies ever when he likened ISIS to a JV team. Last month, Obama sat for an interview with an actual sportswriter, Bill Simmons, who pretty much pitched batting practice, thereby minimizing the chance of presidential gaffes, sporting or otherwise. The Q&A appears in the new issue of GQ.

Simmons, the former ESPN and Grantland personality who’s developing a show for HBO, set the highly deferential tone in his introduction, declaring that Obama “carries himself like Roger Federer, a merciless competitor who keeps coming and coming, only there’s a serenity about him that disarms just about everyone…He casually compared himself to Aaron Rodgers, and he wasn’t bragging. Obama identified with Rodgers’s ability to keep his focus downfield despite all the chaos happening in front of him. That’s Obama’s enduring quality, and (to borrow another sports term) this has been his ‘career year.’”

Lena Dunham Doesn’t Care 'What Conservative White Men Think'
By Matt Philbin | January 14, 2015 | 2:59 PM EST

Lena Dunham is blissfully untroubled by self-awareness. It’s a quality that might be endearing in someone less repulsive. But in a recent interview with Grantland’s Bill Simmons it comes off as the obnoxiousness of a spoiled brat.

Take, for instance, when the 28-year-old, who’s currently flogging her memoir (even Obama had the decency to wait until his early 30s), and much of who’s work in “Girls” is at least somewhat autobiographical said, “I never want to become someone where like what’s happening to me becomes the entirety of the reality of the world.”

Grantland: Fox News Essentially a ‘Conservative Daily Show’ That ‘Won’t Admit It’s a Joke’
By Tom Johnson | August 23, 2014 | 7:10 AM EDT

The ESPN-affiliated, Bill Simmons-run website Grantland, which specializes in sports and popular culture, claimed on Friday that Fox News Channel is a major source of what Simmons calls “unintentional comedy” (or maybe "subconscious comedy" would be more accurate).

In a feature about the history and influence of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, Grantland staff writer Brian Phillips opined that “the structure of Fox News is so deeply and basically comic that it’s impossible not to read it into the tradition of news satire” and that “like ‘Weekend Update,’ Fox succeeded by taking the elements of a normal news broadcast and exaggerating them to ludicrous proportions.”