By Walt Hickey

Bass

In the ever-starving maw of televised sports content, the major players (with their oceans of cash) can hammer down the most valuable leagues and contests, leaving mere scraps remaining for the smaller contenders. Among these scraps, a single jewel remains — a diamond in the rough that was just bagged by Roku, the Bassmaster professional bass fishing tournament. Five Bassmaster Elite Series events, the Elite Qualifiers series, the nine Bassmaster Elite Series events and the watery jewel in the riparian crown, the Bassmaster Classic, are now ensconced firmly in the bosom of the Roku Company. Fools will chase down billion-dollar NFL contracts. The maddened will barter over the fate of a thousand baseball games. The desperate will attempt to sign deals with increasingly esoteric college conferences. Only Roku possesses the categorical foresight to televise fishing to 145 million people, and only the Bassmaster team had the angler’s restraint to wait to sell their contest rights until every actual sports broadcasting company had completely exhausted their budgets on better stuff. Who knows, perhaps the contest is one filmed documentary series (probably called Cast to Outlast) away from becoming an F1-style sensation.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Guiengola

Aerial LIDAR mapping of an ancient ruined fortress in a forest in Mexico revealed that Guiengola wasn’t only a fortress, it was a thriving city of the Zapotecs — a sprawling municipality in pretty great condition, all things considered. According to the study published in Ancient Mesoamerica, the city was constructed in the 15th century, with residences, neighborhoods and temple pyramids. The location had been known as a fortress owing to its successful defense against an Aztec invasion. According to Spanish sources and oral histories, the city repelled a seven-month siege. The new findings show the 360-hectare city was worth defending in the first place, with 1,173 identified structures.

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Soccer

In the opening weekend of the Premier League season of association football, watching fans would be exposed to 11,000 gambling messages and advertisements conveyed using commercials, the radio, apparel and on-ground advertisements. That was a pretty shockingly high number for the researchers who tracked it and wanted to see how slowly that figure was rising. It turns out, not slowly at all: during the first round of games of the 2024-25 season, there were 29,000 gambling messages, with the West Ham-Alston Villa game featuring 30 gambling messages per broadcast minute of the game. Soon, gambling apps will accomplish their long-held goal of rendering all athletic contests into weighted random number generators upon which to produce lotteries. I mean, what else are you gonna watch, competitive bass fishing?

Tim Wigmore, The Telegraph

Rocks

A new plan from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry indicates a reversal of fortunes for the nuclear energy industry in Japan. The government plans for 20 percent of Japan’s grid supply to come from nuclear energy, up from 8.5 percent in 2023. Following the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster 14 years ago, after a tsunami damaged a generating plant, the government could not rip nuclear plants offline fast enough, and the number of commercial nuclear reactors in Japan fell from 54 to 14. Prior to the incident, 30 percent of the energy in the country came from coercing particularly special rocks to boil water. It was a pretty important source of energy for an island otherwise bereft of natural resources like rocks that can be burned to boil water or liquid carbon that can be burned to boil water

Shaimaa Khalil, BBC News

Do You Feel Lucky

Astronomers revised the probability that an asteroid named 2024 YR4 will collide with Earth on December 22, 2032, increasing it to 3.1 percent. The “good” news is that it’s 130 to 300 feet long, which is large enough to cause some serious problems for a city but not large enough to cause a hemispheric extinction, Given how full Earth is with oceans, the odds remain in our favor. That all said, this thing seems to have crossed a threshold where making jokes about the asteroid might, indeed, be considered in retrospective poor taste. I just want to say: if anyone eventually sees a video of a newsletter writer they like from a few weeks ago saying something like, “I swear to god if the Super Bowl ends up being the Philadelphia Eagles versus the Kansas City Chiefs, I’m rooting for the asteroid,” listen, it was a different time, and I tried to have that deleted.

Robin George Andrews, The New York Times

Luxury

Auction sales were down last year across the board by a factor of 26 percent, but some markets were down more than others. For instance, while sales of 20th/21st-century artists at the auction house Christie’s slipped a modest 15 percent, the sales slip in luxury goods was much worse, down 31 percent on the year. The worst was in the jewelry business, which saw sales slip 36 percent in the market as a whole. You could point to some real doorbusters in 2023 as the reason sales in 2024 looked bad — a $202 million collection of jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horton juiced the numbers in 2023 a bit — but it’s still a reflection of a market where the “money is no object” crowd seems a bit burned out on luxury goods, in general. The overall market for luxury goods is only projected to grow 1 percent to 3 percent through 2027.

Melanie Gerlis, The Art Newspaper

South Korea

Netflix has ridden a wave of South Korean television to great success the world over but is facing a significant challenge within the country itself. South Koreans watched 131 billion hours of premium VOD content across all platforms last year, up 18 percent year over year, creating $2 billion in revenue. Netflix had a 35 percent viewership share, the top of any platform. However, a local rival called Tving enjoyed rapid growth throughout 2024 and saw its share of the pie jump ten points to reach 34 percent of the viewership share in the country. All told, it’s a duopoly in South Korea, with the pair of streamers accounting for 80 percent of new subscriptions and 70 percent of viewership.

Naman Ramachandran, Variety

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