The 2026 World Series opened Friday night with a matchup that felt like a dream for purists and a nightmare for television executives: the Milwaukee Brewers against the Tampa Bay Rays. Two small-market franchises, neither of whom had ever won a championship, meeting on baseball’s grandest stage. For fans in Milwaukee and St. Petersburg, this was a moment decades in the making—a celebration of grit, scouting, and homegrown talent. But for national media outlets, the story was often framed through the lens of ratings. Would anyone outside those two metro areas care? Would casual viewers tune into a series without…

Jared Kushner is no stranger to controversy, but the legal battle now brewing with Vanity Fair and its parent company, Condé Nast, is a different kind of fight altogether. Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a former senior White House adviser, has formally put the magazine on notice over allegations contained in an excerpt from investigative journalist Matthew Cole’s forthcoming book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East. The book’s title alone suggests a dramatic story, but the excerpt goes much further, claiming that Kushner had access to foreign accounts holding…