Americans only watch TV for football and politics
And more Super Bowl Sunday recommendations.
Happy Sunday and welcome back to my weekly recommendations email, a bonus feature for paid subscribers.
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With that, let’s dive in!
Donald Trump will make history today by becoming the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. But he isn’t the first president to leave an imprint on the sport. Read the story of how Theodore Roosevelt saved football.
Also in honor of Super Bowl Sunday: here’s a look at the 100 most-watched television broadcasts of 2024. It turns out that football and (to a much lesser degree) politics are the only things that mass numbers of Americans turn on the TV for anymore. See the footnote for the list of political events that make the list.1
This also holds up if you look at the most-watched broadcasts of the last four years:
One of the strangest subplots of the second Trump administration has been the story of acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll. According to the Wall Street Journal, someone else was originally supposed to be the bureau’s temporary leader when Trump took office, but White House officials accidentally put Driscoll’s name on the website; instead of fixing the mistake, they just gave the job to Driscoll. Read more from the Journal and the New York Times about how that turned out to be a fateful choice, as Driscoll — who goes by “The Drizz” to his friends — has made the FBI into an unlikely redoubt of anti-Trump resistance.