It's Thursday, March the 21st, 2024.

Welcome to the Daily Article podcast.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Ryan Denison.

The NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments kick off today,

so if your office seems a bit more sparsely populated

or email responses come slower than usual, now you know why.

And the lengths to which some will go in order to watch the tournament's opening days of chaos

speak volumes to the place it has within our culture psyche.

I reported 37% of Americans are willing to call in sick

or skip work to watch March Madness. One in five have canceled dates or birthday parties

in order to catch the games. Those not willing to skip work will watch an average of six hours

of tournament play while on the clock,

and that's the estimate before working from home became more common. And for men not willing

to fake an injury or illness, March Madness is the most popular time of the year to get a

vasectomy and have a legitimate reason not to leave the

couch. One of the primary reasons for the tournament's popularity, especially its opening days,

is the fact that it truly feels like anything can happen in most of these games.

As I wrote last year, upsets are common and unless they happen to your school,

we get to embrace the seeming randomness of each game's outcome without being personally

invested in the results. We can root for the underdogs without any sense of disappointment

when they lose. There aren't many other areas of our lives where we can emotionally invest in

something without any real risk if it doesn't go our way. So in 2024, considering the ways in which

...