Washington Post - "America’s purest underdog is our men’s soccer team"
By Will Leitch
Monday, June 23, 2025
MLB is Growing Again
Bloomberg - "Major League Baseball Is Growing Again. Why Isn’t Its TV Money?"
"Major League Baseball’s TV conundrum
Major League Baseball is off to its best start in years. Viewership is up across all its major national TV packages, led by ESPN, where ratings are up 22%. TBS and Fox have scored 16% and 10% lifts, respectively, the league said this week. Game attendance hit a seven-year high in 2024 and is inching up again this year. (The viewership on Japanese TV network NHK is also up about 22%.)
And yet, the league is scrambling to find a buyer for a major TV package that includes 30 regular season games, the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card playoff round and up to 10 spring training games. ESPN said in February that it would end its broadcast deal with MLB after the 2025 season, pulling out of the relationship three years ahead of schedule. The sports network had been paying the league $550 million a year and wanted to pay less than half that price.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred initially responded by saying ESPN was a shrinking platform, only to later concede “we liked the deal we had” and that he wishes he didn’t have to sell these rights at this moment. NBC and Apple are in talks to buy some or all the games, though neither is willing to match the $550 million price tag. Fox has expressed an interest in more baseball as well. Other potential buyers, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon and Netflix, are all sitting on the sidelines."
The Great American Fried Chicken Sandwich
The Atlantic - "The Golden Age of the Fried-Chicken Sandwich"
"American eaters have become accustomed to, and expectant of, the opportunity to customize everything. This is why ordering from Starbucks feels like taking the MCAT, and another reason fried chicken is so appealing—it’s a relatively bland meat that takes well to being dressed a gazillion different ways. Case in point: Wingstop’s crispy chicken sandwich is available with a choice of 14 sauces, plus four dips. When it first came out in 2022, the chain sold more than a million sandwiches in six days.
This, really, is the key to fried chicken: It is an ideal blank slate for a novelty-obsessed food culture. Although fried chicken can be an absolute party, texturally speaking, it doesn’t have much to offer, flavorally speaking, at least not without additions. This isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength. “Americans are ornament-, garnish-, kick-it-up-a-notch-oriented,” Freedman told me. (We have become less spice-averse in the past generation or so.) Fried chicken works with all manner of trend and cuisine. Right now you can find a Bolivian fried-chicken sandwich, marinated in South American beer and served with serrano-habanero-chili vinegar, in New York City; a Cambodian one with pickled papaya and long beans in Chicago; and a Thai-inspired one served with your choice of Southeast Asian–style sauces in Glendale, Arizona.
The fried-chicken sandwich is one of the great American inventions—a holy mash-up of tradition and newness, convenience and indulgence, crunchy and soft. It is the perfect food for this culinary moment. But wherever we trend next, it will be there, too, because the fried-chicken sandwich can be whatever we want it to be."
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