Fox’s sports bet: When News Corp. first launched Fox Sports 1 in 2013, it was meant to be a “fun” alternative to ESPN. But after two years of terrible ratings, the network switched gears and began hiring loudmouthed veterans who seemed more in line with Fox News pundits. But Ben Mathis-Lilley studied the spiritual relaunch of the network and found that unlike its divisive sibling, Fox Sports 1 has stoked cultural tensions in sports by amplifying voices on both extremes of the political spectrum.
A path forward: The GOP health care debacle on Friday gave Democrats an “unprecedented gift,” Jamelle Bouie writes. Bouie considers several ways the Democrats could take advantage of last week’s events for political gain.
A growing consensus: On Monday, the chief judge for the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that anti-gay employment discrimination is almost certainly already illegal under Title VII. This is an important step that could encourage more judges to consider sexual orientation discrimination to be the same as traditional sex discrimination under the law, Mark Joseph Stern writes.
Kinda-sorta-Doomsday vault: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, tucked away in a cluster of frozen islands north of mainland Norway, contains hundreds of thousands of seeds and crop samples. It sounds like an optimistic post-apocalyptic safeguard, but in reality, Jacob Brogan writes, it’s a practical reminder that there’s no single refuge that’ll save us from the global environmental and political crises already playing out before us.
For fun: A Vermont dairy farm baited Nintendo into a cow-milking contest.
Open to taking any spare crop samples you might have,
Molly
