Culture
U.S.-Canada 4 Nations Face-Off final draws 9.3 million viewers, most-watched NHL-sanctioned game in decades

Take two proud hockey countries in a best-on-best final, add a massive dose of geopolitics into the equation, and then conclude the matchup with a historic overtime goal by the game’s best player. It’s a recipe for a historic viewership number — and that’s what we saw with Canada’s 3-2 overtime win over the United States on Thursday at the 4 Nations Face-Off in Boston.
The game drew an astonishing 9.3 million viewers on ESPN, per Nielsen. To put this in perspective: That tops Game 7 of the NHL Finals between Boston and St. Louis in 2019 which drew 8.9 million viewers on NBC — the most-watched NHL game since the league returned to broadcast TV in 1995.
In Canada, Sportsnet said the game averaged 5.7 million viewers and peaked at 7.3 million when Connor McDavid scored the OT winner. Add in 1.18 million viewers on TVA, as per Adam Seaborn of Better Collective, and the game averaged nearly seven million viewers. Canada’s population is 40 million.
So adding the two countries up: The game drew more than 16 million viewers in North America.
The earlier round game between the United States and Canada — a 3-1 win over Canada on a rock ’em sock ’em Saturday night in Montreal — averaged 4.4 million viewers on ABC and peaked with 5.2 million viewers in the 10:45 quarter-hour. That had been the most-watched non-Stanley Cup Final hockey telecast in the U.S. since a Blue Jackets-Bruins playoff game on NBC in 2019 that averaged 4.5 million. The NHL said the combined North American audience for last Saturday’s game was 10.1 million viewers.
The tournament clearly showed the desire of hockey fans who have been dreaming of best-on-best for years. Next stop for best-on-best: The Olympic Games next year in Cortina-Milan.
Required reading
(Photo: Vitor Munho / Getty Images)

Culture
Test Your Memory of These Classic Books for Young Readers

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s tests your memory of books you may have read during your school days — specifically, the plots of much-loved novels for young readers. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books.
Culture
Test Yourself on These Cartoons and Comics Adapted for the Screen

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights cartoons and comic strips that were later adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions.
Culture
I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.
“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
The Pond at Dusk
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward–radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last, and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
Listen to A.O. Scott read the poem.
THE POND AT DUSK by Jane Kenyon
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