For Longreads, here’s Jamie Mottram of the USA Today Sports Media Group, who like his colleague Dan Shanoff gave Tom Scocca’s Deadspin piece on the Baltimore Orioles exalted status, as well as Charlie Pierce on Robert Griffin III.

David Roth of The Classical has an eclectic non-sports list, which he explains in terms of stylistic points and the pure enjoyment of reading them:

“Of those, only the latter two live entirely on the web. They’re not about similar things, or written for similar publications or audiences, or really even written in ways that outwardly have much in common. But there’s an energy and vitality to all of them, a sense that the people writing respect their obligation to tell the stories they’ve chosen, but also that they’re intensely into those stories. There are some good jokes and striking sentences and a great deal of elegant (or infuriating) and illusion-free (or opinionated) thought in all of them, but there is not show-offery or grandiosity or stuffiness. They’re stories told and arguments made by people who seem impassioned and informed, and told in the voices—different-sounding, as they should be—of people alive in and engaged with the world and the ideas loose in it, and conversant with both in the fast, open way of the web. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good writing.”