In 2011 I joined the editorial staff of Negative Dunkalectics, a basketball blog with an often tongue-in-cheek look at the cultural and aesthetic world of the NBA. Though it started as something of a joke, Negative Dunks became fairly heralded in the world of Internet basketball writing, stepping into the shadow left by publications like Free Darko and Hardwood Paroxysm when larger media outlets had purchased them or poached their writers.

In any event, one of my Negative Dunks pieces, “On Windows Closing,” was among the site’s most popular entries. It was featured on longform essay aggregators like TheBroswer, Zite, and SportsFeat alongside pieces from Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker, and it received a good deal attention via social media. It is a more personal piece of writing than any of the others featured here, but it does fit into my personal and professional goals to use the Internet to push the boundaries of existing forms of writing in the fields of mass media and culture. This essay is about grief, sports fandom, my father, and the 2011-2012 Boston Celtics. It is available here.