I interviewed Donald Glover for the A.V. Club. →

Also, here is a picture with him and my wife, because it makes her happy when she looks at it and she will probably see this post on her phone while she’s on the bus ride home! Hi, Kat!

Anyway: This time out, we talk about his IAMDONALD tour, the fact that he hits on Rashida Jones in his songs kinda a lot, and the six years he spent working hard to become an overnight success.

(My previous interview with Glover ran on MTV Hive earlier this month, if you’re interested.)

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." →

Several months ago, when I was just beginning to work on this story for the Texas Observer about soldiers who’ve refused their deployment, I encountered the pro-military, hard-right blog This Ain’t Hell, But You Can See It From Here. They had been highly critical of Travis Bishop and Victor Agosto, the subjects of the Observer article, and I requested an interview with one of the site’s main bloggers. After a little back-and-forth regarding the slant of the article (he didn’t want to be portrayed as a cranky guy telling people to get off his lawn; I assured him that it wasn’t my intention, and hope that the article succeeds in that), he agreed. I disagreed with most of his opinions, but he seemed like a straightforward guy, and I respected that.

Today, This Ain’t Hell… has a new main page post about Bradley Manning that is really impressive. If you’ve been following the case from a pro-Wikileaks, pro-Manning perspective, it’s not new ideas to you. But the fact that a blog like This Ain’t Hell… is making them now is just staggering. It speaks well of their integrity, that they’d look at the arguments of lefty bloggers who they tend to disagree with on everything, consider them, and change their opinions, but even more than that, it speaks to the wrongness of Manning’s detention. It reminds me of the quote up there, reportedly from LBJ, during the Vietnam War. Walter Cronkite had given an editorial report on CBS calling for a diplomatic resolution to the war; after watching it, LBJ said those words to his aides, the story goes. And, you know — if the Army has lost This Ain’t Hell… in regards to Bradley Manning, then they’ve lost both sides of the argument. Hopefully it ends better than Vietnam.

(also, yes, skip most of the comments, as per usual.)

"Who the hell even thought of doing this? This is so stupid" →

I got mainpaged on AOL.com over the weekend for my NFL hip-hop tributes piece on Asylum. That means I got COMMENTS. Lots and lots of comments from people who think that I am very stupid.

That’s happened just about every time I’ve had a story run on the AOL.com welcome screen, in fact — the Internet is full of angry, annoying people, but the ones who decide to comment on stories that appear on the AOL.com welcome screen are the very worst. Makes YouTube seem like a rational discussion board. They tend to break into a few different categories — the “how is this news” comment, which is often followed up by a request that the energy I spent finding a story about, I dunno, a pizzeria that makes pizzas shaped like the bat-signal or something instead be devoted to proving Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that George Bush blew up the World Trade Center; the “dan solomon is retarded and probably black” posts which just fill the comments section with casual and/or overt homophobia/racism/misogyny/etc, depending on the subject matter (or sometimes independent of the subject matter!); the one that finds a grammatical or typographical error and then insists that I should have no job and that the person posting the comment should have my job instead; people who are mad that I ignored some pet issue/cause/whatever tangentially related to the subject of the post; etc, etc, etc.

On this post — which got people really worked up over NFL hip-hop tribute songs! — I got most of these. Surprisingly, no one gave me a “This is news HOW??” comment, I think because even people who flock to the AOL comments section expecting hard-hitting news are used to half-assed sports analysis and accept it. But here are some other highlights:

See, because “rap music” is an oxymoron!

• Wow I actually listened to all of these. What music I didn’t hear any!
• None of them. They all sound like crap. When are we going to get some real songs to represent our teams. This is nothing but garbage.
• Good God!!! WYF’s with the rap crap? Im so over it.
• Who the hell even thought of doing this? This is so stupid, they are bad, really bad songs. if you can call it music

Because it wouldn’t be football talk on the Internet without some quick homophobia:

• I have one for the Jets, it goes like this: we are the jets…. we suck suck suck
• I have one for you jeff you sucks dicks.

I am so stupid and the people who post the comments are smart and I should have written a totally different article the way they wanted it even though they’d have complained about that too (incidentally, none of the subsequent songs were included because the teams were long eliminated from the playoffs at press time, also because most of them aren’t hip-hop tributes, which is what the post was about):

• Where the HELL is Fly Eagles Fly, THE best, you dumbasses!
• How is the Saints song, “Black and Gold,” by Kgates not on here!!! They actually list and rap the players into the song, unlike almost all of those songs listed. Do some more research!!!
• are you kidding me? Where is Welcome to the Jungle for the Bengals????

And my very favorite, since A)I was writing about songs, not the teams themselves, and B) six hours later the Patriots were humiliated in the most-watched game in NFL playoffs history:

• The Patriots are one and done? What a joke—-and what a jerk. Watch a few football games before you try to pass yourself as knowledgeable. The jets? really? the jets? LMFAO.

Anyway. I used to try, occasionally, to respond to the comments on AOL stories, but I quickly learned that was an exercise in extreme futility. But it’d been a while since I’d seen the AOL welcome screen, and I’d forgotten just how absurd it gets. At least the comments don’t land directly in my inbox anymore.

Best of 2010: Three Rules for Achieving Greatness From Proven Champions →

— Asylum.com, April 28th

I dunno, I don’t like to brag on myself much (not explicitly, anyway — mostly just by creating top 10 lists of my own work like I’m doing now), but I feel pretty good about the fact that I am likely one of the only people who, after spending about twenty minutes talking with Eli Manning, would think — “This guy has so much in common with Seth Mazow.”

Seth Mazow is the two-time winner of Homeslice Pizza in Austin’s “Hands on an Eggplant Sub” contest, which earned him two years of free pizza. I interviewed him a few months before I wrote this story. I was sent to Miami during the Super Bowl this year to talk to Eli, but I didn’t have a story assigned — I was just supposed to come up with something good. When I realized that he and Seth had a few things in common, I pitched it to my editor as a story that would trace the different ways different people succeeded at difficult things, and she went for it. I added Joe Cada, the youngest-ever World Series of Poker Champion to the story, and put it together.

And, yeah, part of why this story means something to me is that it was the first time I felt like I was really validated in what I was doing — I got flown to Miami to talk to Eli Manning, you know? And then out to Vegas to do the same with Joe Cada, in like a three-week span. But I liked the conclusions, and I liked putting Seth in the same context as those dudes, because these small championships are still important, and I can’t think of a better way to make that point than to include him in a story on the same level as a Super Bowl MVP.

Stories 2010: Ann Wolfe Scares the Crap Out of Us →

— A.V. Club Austin, March 2nd

The final product here isn’t, like, exceptional, but the process of interviewing Ann Wolfe taught me a lot. She’s a remarkable woman, of course (eight-time world champion!), but one I had a really hard time establishing any sort of rapport with. The first half hour of the conversation was me asking questions about things she clearly didn’t have much interest in talking about, and both of us sort of sighing through the interview, while I’m hoping that I’ll get enough quotes to string together a piece worth reading.

But then at minute 31 of the interview, I asked the right question, and she totally transformed the way she was talking to me. We got on a subject that she was passionate about — being a woman who trains men to fight — and she started offering me these incredible monologues, stuff that should go in an Oscar highlight reel. I made the mistake of assuming that the things that had put her on the A.V. Club radar initially were the best things to talk about, but I learned from her that the only way a person will ever open up to you is if you get them talking about things they care about first. Then you can ask questions that they’re bored with, and maybe they’ll have something new to say about that, too. But a key to interviewing I learned from Ann Wolfe is that if the other person would walk away if it weren’t a conversation they were required to have, then it’s not a conversation in which you’ll get anything other than the most boring stories out of.

(Incidentally, I had some l’esprit de l’escalier about the headline, which I was never fond of to begin with. The day after it ran, my friend Tony asked if it ran under the title, “Who’s Afraid of Ann Wolfe”, and I really wished it had.)