Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Charles P. ("Charlie") Pierce (December 28, 1953, Worcester, Massachusetts) is a American sportswriter, author, and game show panelist.
Biography
He graduated from St. John's High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and from Marquette University with a journalism major in 1975.
Pierce's first job was as a forest ranger for the state of Massachusetts, where among other duties he retrieved disposable diapers from trees so that raccoons would not choke on them. He wrote for Worcester Magazine in the 1970s, where he covered the Blizzard of 1978. In the 1980s and '90, he was a staff reporter for the Boston Phoenix and, later, a sports columnist for the Boston Herald.
Pierce is currently the lead political blogger for Esquire, a position he has held since September 2011. He also writes for ESPN's Grantland. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, GQ, and the e-zine Slate as well as the Media Matters blog Altercation, hosted by historian/pundit Eric Alterman.
Pierce also makes appearances on radio as a regular contributor to NPR programs Only A Game and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!. Recently Pierce has begun making weekly appearances on the Stephanie Miller Show. He also represented the Globe on several occasions on ESPN's Around the Horn. He also often co-hosts with Bob Ryan on NESN's Globe 10.0.
Publications
Pierce has written four books:
Sports Guy (2000)Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story (2001)Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything (2006)Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009)Quotes
"The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out of Olympia Snowe...And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories, where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this president wants to do."Pierce is noted for his 2003 Globe Magazine profile of Ted Kennedy in which he stated: "If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age". The passage was widely misinterpreted as laudatory of Kennedy; the full context makes clear that it was intended as irony. James Taranto, an online columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote, "Charles Pierce must really hate Ted Kennedy," and described the excerpt as a "paragraph of pure poison." In an e-mail interview with Dan Kennedy (not related to the senator) of the Boston Phoenix, Pierce confirmed that he considered his reference to Kopechne as being a harsh observation about Ted Kennedy. Pierce criticized several conservative commentators who had cited the passage as an example of liberal media bias and added, "My respect for Mr. Taranto grows by the hour." Nevertheless, the conservative Media Research Center made it its "Quote of the Year" in its, given to "the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2003."