How much do we really “need” sports?

For a year now, the national pastime has been baking bread, watching Netflix and muting/unmuting in Zoom. If you’re lucky, anyway. The major sports teams would tell you they’re a balm in “these unprecedented times,” but the numbers don’t really bear that out. On today’s show, we’ll talk about the interesting Jemele Hill piece in The Atlantic, “America Didn’t Need Sports After All.” Plus: When does a cyberattack become a war crime?

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• Some COVID death analysis on the TL
• “America Didn’t Need Sports After All” from The Atlantic
• “China Appears to Warn India: Push Too Hard and the Lights Could Go Out” from The New York Times
• “Biden works to unify Senate Democrats on $1.9 trillion relief bill” from The Washington Post
• “First vaccine to fully immunize against malaria builds on pandemic-driven RNA tech” from the Academic Times
• Social studies and civics education guidance from The Washington Post

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