Trying to get someone to care about your fantasy football team is a lot like trying to get someone to sit through a slideshow of your family’s vacation pictures. Nobody’s interested in your trip to Washington D.C., dude. If I wanted to see a picture of the Lincoln Memorial, I’d have Alexa do a Google Image search, thank you.

Fantasy football is no different. Continue reading →

To use the expression “toxic masculinity” unironically is to open yourself up to criticism at the hands of people that don’t seem to think it actually exists. Brown University this year actually developed a course for their students focused on unlearning toxic masculinity, and the way the television news and social media treated that nugget of typical leftist propaganda, you’d think the Ivy League was slowly transforming into a literal circus. A clown college.

But there’s so much more to this conversation than what’s offered in some novelty course in Rhode Island. We’ve seen news stories about colleges teaching classes based on Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, too, but those cycled in and out of the national consciousness as quickly as criticism about this class likely will.

The difference is that I never thought about bringing Dumbledore or Jon Snow into my curriculum as a high school English teacher. The unlearning of toxic masculinity, on the other hand, does deserve a place in the classroom. Continue reading →

November is National Novel Writing Month, and believe it or not, it’s like this whole thing.

I’ve seen it around for years, and while I don’t know exactly when or how it started, every year when November rolls around I see the NaNoWriMo stuff pop up on Twitter and wonder whether I should be participating. I typically do not, but that’s only because it looks really hard. Adult life is hard enough as it is. Continue reading →

Back in January, I posted this to my Facebook page:

I didn’t post it for encouragement, and I wasn’t fishing for “likes.” Honestly, I already had all the motivation I needed to write the book all the way through.

What I wanted was accountability, and hoo boy, have people been holding me accountable. Continue reading →

I’m not a basketball writer anymore.

Actually, I never really felt like a basketball writer, even when I was writing professionally about basketball. I am racked with guilt over this, but a big part of me is glad is it’s over.

Let me explain. Continue reading →