Now you can get your Grantland blog posts from August in book form, to be delivered in November, for $19.95, with "a cover that looks and feels like you're holding a football." Only 81 shopping days until Christmas!

We are going to have to talk a bit about aesthetics and their relationship to fiction and reality here, and I will try to make that as painless as possible. Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (opens tomorrow, if you live in a major city, looks like) is a very suspenseful, intentionally frightening (thriller-style) look at a wildman who defuses bombs during the early-middle stages of the Iraq war. It is about, Bigelow said the other night at MoMA, an "inexorable tide of potential violence." (She meant, I think, reality; real violence.) It is also gorgeous, and successfully shot in a manner that is intentionally documentary-like yet artful and immersive (manipulatively [...]

“For a few weeks in March and April, a strange fad took hold in the headquarters of Condé Nast Publications at 4 Times Square,” wrote Warren St. John in The New York Times during the spring of 2003. “After sharing elevator rides with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Condé Nast employees sat down at their desks and typed accounts of their vertical journeys with the fashion icon,” he continued…. Then the seas changed for the magazine world. McKinsey consultants and magazine closures followed and this year the company lost its position as this city’s top privately held fashion magazine publisher in terms of market share [...]

Have you listened to Kid Rock lately? Probably you have. Although he has been culturally irrelevant for the last half-decade, his songs are always playing whenever you turn on the radio. Slowly, he has turned himself into the turn-of-the-millennium answer to the Monkees or, maybe even the late Rolling Stones: quintessentially shallow, timeless pop music that does nothing new and enforces old clichés, forever recapitulating them until, at the end, we can finally come around to enjoying it.