News Reporter: Act Four: Squeezing in sports on a critic's schedule

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Washington Spirit teammates celebrate after scoring a goal against the Western New York Flash during the first half of the 2016 NWSL Championship at BBVA Compass Stadium last year in Houston. (Scott Halleran/Getty Images)

Every week, I answer a question from the Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the April 10 chat here and submit questions for the April 17 chat here. A note on the latter: We decided this week that I’ll take a couple of off-topic questions per chat. So if you want to talk to me about things that are not strictly my beat, but that I do know something about, among them cooking, travel and being a person who has survived into my 30s with a lot of intact friendships, ask away. This newsletter will remain strictly culture-oriented, though. And this week, a reader has a sports question:

Lifetime announced the 2017 broadcast schedule for the [National] Women’s Soccer League. Will you be watching? Do you follow women’s soccer? I was very glad they got better pay. They persisted and it worked.

I think the biggest loss for me as a full-time critic is that I have much less time and energy to follow sports than I used to. When I was growing up in a family that didn’t really watch television, we listened to Red Sox games on the radio when we weren’t attending them. Before I was a professional critic, I watched NFL games much more frequently (and football is still by far the sport I follow most regularly). But now, it’s very difficult for me to find time to sit down and watch something that won’t, in some way, contribute to a column I’m writing. Watching anything on television is simply never going to be relaxing to me as practicing yoga or cooking or hanging out with my friends. And since sports are least likely to spur a future story idea, and still don’t relax me as much as these other things, they’ve generally gotten the short end of the stick.

That said, I’m glad to see Lifetime pick up the league’s broadcast rights. Another chatter mentioned this a while ago, but it’s exciting to see Lifetime, a network that has long been derided, make a bunch of moves to suggest that programming for women can be a huge range of things. And more broadcast revenue that can be turned into bigger salaries for players is always something I’m happy to see, especially when those players are as dramatically underpaid as women’s soccer players have been in the past.