Top 5 Internet Writers That You Don’t Read

McBane here.

The joy of doing top five lists, to me at least, is that our mission statement is inherently a positive one. This is important.

Our lives are nearing the point of hypercomplexity, if we’re not there already; this is quite understandably scary. Despite all our advancements, fear is still our most primal impulse and our surest defense mechanism; we remain, after all, only human. Confronted every day with a growing number of people and things and ideas we don’t understand or trust, our anxiety hums steadily along in the background, like an old-model refrigerator, until we get to a point where it seems uncomfortable if we don’t feel it.

Culturally, this has many diverse expressions. A common one is to go on the internet and hide behind ridiculous handles like “Raptor” and engage in a constipated form of reflexive self-analysis. These are the people who crave the need for self-expression and identity in an alienating world, yet are a) unwilling to communicate except through the form of self-deprecation and diminished expectations, b) unable to explore anything sincere or authentic, and c) undaunted in their worldview that at the end of the day pretty much everything sucks.

That kind of reductionism is useless for those of us who have evolved past irony. The world may be complex, and the internet may be a vast frontier, but the upshot of it is: the numbers say there’s a good chance that there are some pretty awesome things out there.

Maybe I can’t get to all the things worth checking out, but at least I can do five at a time. That, gentle reader, is my agenda for this and all subsequent posts.

Today, I offer praise to these five internet writers, who not only validate but in some cases personify this ethos.

5) Jay Pinkerton / Stuart Layt / Alex Levinton / approximately 30 others (33-way tie)

Perhaps one of the most consistently entertaining websites out there is cracked.com, and it is unusual in that so many contributors can produce so many good pieces. Pinkerton's article on the Larry Holmes Grill may actually physically hurt you if you try to read it out loud. Layt's article is a good example of the kind of thing we’ve always needed to know about but never thought to ask for (kind of like our blog). Levinton's article will send you screaming straight for the shower.

This is an excellent site across the board, and I can’t punish anyone because of it. Thus, the approximately 33-way tie for fifth place.

4) Mark Morford

I think pretty much anybody, from any part of the political spectrum (including perhaps Morford himself), would agree that he presents himself as a rabid liberal pretty-boy douchebag. (That fact that he works for SFGate.com is undoubtedly helpful to him in this presentation.) Thus, he is obviously rather polarizing; people tend to find his persona, hundred-mile-an-hour writing style and tabloid-sized headlines enjoyable and/or despicable. Personally, I claim indifference. What I do enjoy immensely about him, though, is that he is a fantastic source for rhetorical questions, the kind you can waste an evening at the bar drunkenly deliberating. Is $200K too much for firefighters to make in a year? How much Photoshopping is appropriate, and in some cases is the lack of it inappropriate? Should mothers be taking their eight-year-old daughters in for bikini waxes?

These seem like things that we, as Americans, need to work out.

3) Stephanie Zacharek

Zacharek is a reviewer of movies and music for Salon.com, as well as a sort of cultural essayist. While this overlap may not work for others, it seems to have been the perfect fit for her. In trying to be steady in her approach to all three, her unifying trends tend to be, simply, perspective and insight; her reviews are thoughtful, in the truest sense of the word.

Unusually for a critic, Zacharek is immensely enjoyable to read after you consume the culture in question, for she’s interested in themes, hidden insights, and undiscovered possibilities in the art. Not only is she a creative thinker, which is perhaps the best thing a critic can be, but her prose is accessible enough that she seems like she could be one of your smartest, coolest friends; the kind you look forward to going to a movie or concert with so you can talk about it when it’s over, very much like I don’t like to do with Raptor.

2) Amelie Gillette

Gillette is a columnist for the satirical news magazine The Onion, where she openly embraces the dark side of the force in order to punish the feeble-minded famous for their transgressions. Her Tolerability Index and The Hater are perhaps the two best parts of The Onion’s very impressive smart-slacker A.V. Club. Simultaneously bombastic and biting, her immense talent also serves as a warning to posers that while mean-spiritedness and outrage can be a great thing, you had better be sure you know what the fuck you’re doing.

Gillette has a remarkably probing social understanding, similar to an eagle that can see every blade of grass in the field, and she couples this with a tone that comes across like a sarcastic drill sergeant on her period. As a result, her column is wickedly, intelligently hilarious, even while making you feel terrible for liking it. It’s the literary equivalent of finding a better way to masturbate.

1) Kyle Whelliston

Do you know there’s roughly 330 teams eligible for March Madness? Do you know where they are? Do you know what all the gyms are like? Do you know what conference they’re in? Do you understand just how fundamental the differences are between the MAC and the MAAC? The SWAC and the WAC? Probably not. I’ll ask some more questions. Do you know how Massachusetts and Mississippi are different? I bet you think you do, but do you, really? What about Kansas and Kentucky? Tennessee and Texas?

It’s a big, complicated country we live in. But since Charles Kuralt died, no one really knows this, except for maybe Whelliston. He knows this all because of his love for mid-major college basketball. Every year, he criss-crosses the country, writing features and game stories, sleeping at truck stops and driving rental cars, because, well: he can’t waste a lot of time sleeping, he isn’t made of money, and Itta Bena doesn’t have an airport. Neither does Cookeville. Neither do a lot of places. Whelliston spends his career in the purgatories where the Gonzagas and Davidsons of the world are duking it out, hoping for their chance to get their shot at the big boys.

It speaks to Whelliston’s tremendous gifts as a writer (and perhaps as a man of the cloth, though he virtually never references this in his work) that all his stories are endlessly fascinating. Using humor, admiration, and sometimes even reverence for his material, he weaves a tapestry of America through the medium of basketball to the point where his best work may, for the secular, almost feel like a religious experience.

His talents have opened several opportunities for him; he does once-in-a-blue-moon articles for ESPN.com, as well as writing for several other publications. He has created a statistical website, basketballstate.com, that Moneyball-savvy head coaches would be wise to take advantage of in non-conference scheduling and scouting. But The Mid-Majority is where his heart is, and it’s the best thing you’ll find by the best writer you don't read on the internet.