Jon Bois: Narrative Documentary Style and Major Works

Jon Bois is an American sports and culture writer and video documentarian whose career has run through SB Nation, Vox Media, and now the Secret Base channel on YouTube. He is best known for a distinctive narrative documentary style that combines hand-drawn visuals, Apple TextEdit interstitials presented as in-world text, atmospheric electronic music, and a calm, observational voiceover. His major works include the 2017 science-fiction piece *17776* (sometimes called "What Football Will Look Like in the Future," widely regarded as an instant classic of online long-form storytelling) and its sequel *20020*; *The History of the Seattle Mariners*, an eight-part series running roughly seven hours total; *The Bob Emergency*, a two-part documentary on the decline of the name Bob in American sports; and the ongoing *Chart Party* series, in which obscure statistical anomalies become entry points for human-interest stories. He has also begun a multi-part series on the birth of the internet, opening with a piece on the early telegraph. For a creator who works primarily in sports, Bois's factual reliability is high — research quality is consistently strong and primary sources are typically verifiable. He is more opinionated when it comes to interpretation, transparently broadly progressive in outlook and open about that bias rather than concealing it. The combination of strong sourcing and overt point of view places his work closer to long-form magazine journalism than to neutral encyclopedia entries, and is part of why his style has been widely imitated but rarely matched.