Extracurricular Activities 2014

This week, SportsAlcohol.com hasn’t been publishing much new content because we’re all on a long-deserved vacation. Just kidding: we’re watching movies so that we can vote on the best of the year. But if you love that rich, hearty SportsAlcohol.com flavor, you may be interested to know that our various writers have also written other things. Yes, it’s true! So while you wait for us to return, feel free to peruse our other worthwhile writing projects.

Lit & Fiction

Maggie‘s first novel is coming out in 2015; if you want an early taste of her fiction writing, her prize-winning short story “The Bus” is now online. She also wrote an excellent piece for The Toast about reading other people’s mail.

Jesse also had a story on the Toast a while back, during the long and storied prehistory of SportsAlcohol.com. This year, he has an unintentional companion piece called “Here On Out” — a short story about rock and roll music, set in the future.

Sara‘s short fiction is not as readily available on the internets (though it can be found in print, which is this thing where people care enough about words to print them out on real paper). But you can read her appreciation of Jo Ann Beard, and you can also read her thoughts on writing.

Pop Culture

Some of Jesse’s favorite AV Club pieces this year include an essay about ScarJo, the universe, and everything, an essay about the tenth anniversaries of Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite, an essay about rock and roll in 2014 film, and the Best Film Scenes of 2014 piece he got to help put together. He also got to help cover the New York Film Festival for Brooklyn Magazine, which meant he also got to briefly pretend to be a photographer (see photo at the top of this post).

Some of Marisa‘s favorite 2014 pieces include a primer of her favorite unseen TV characters (a la Bob Sacamano from Seinfeld or Tino from My So-Called Life) for mental_floss, a twopart Q&A with the creator of Manhattan about how Los Alamos was basically a summer camp for geniuses, a totally well reasoned argument explaining why Mockingjay should not have been split into two films (and, by “well reasoned,” we mean “GIF-laden”), and reviews that beg people to watch Under the Skin but avoid Mulaney.

Etc.

For the armchair travelers out there, Marisa helped the Condé Nast Traveler nail down the most impressive cemeteries, observation decks, and ghost tours. If she didn’t want to be cremated, she’d want to be buried in the Merry Cemetery.

Jesse