Numlock News: December 18, 2025 • Kestrals, Plutonium, Oscars

By Walt Hickey

We don’t really do gift guides around here, but it is a week until Christmas so down below I’ve linked a few unlocked Sunday interviews with people who made a book or game that could be delivered in less than a week that may very well be something you’re looking for! It’s been a great year with some excellent conversations.

Oscars

ABC has lost the right to broadcast the Academy Awards to YouTube, which swooped in and made a deal to broadcast the Oscars for five years from 2029 to 2033. It’s a big poach for YouTube, which has seen significant success in live entertainment, and a step back for ABC, which has broadcast the ceremony since 1976. The Oscars ceremony generates $150 million per year in revenue for the Academy, and it’s not yet clear what YouTube will pay. But the writing was on the wall that ABC wanted to meddle with the ceremony and reduce its obligations to continue ahead. YouTube parent Alphabet will also aid in digitizing the 52 million items in the Academy Collection. In some ways, this is a perfect fit: the Academy essentially produces a single in-depth four-hour video once per year, which means that they’ll fit in perfectly with your standard film YouTube video essayist. Stash the Governors Awards and the Hersholt Humanitarian ceremonies on a Patreon, and they’ll fit right in. Mark my words, in five years, they’ll just start releasing all their new stuff on Nebula anyway.

Scott Feinberg and Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Good a time as any to plug the Numlock Award Season Supplment, our long-running pop-up newsletter for Oscar season.

Holiday

We’re coming up on some time off, with the Christmas and New Year’s Day holidays considered to be federal holidays in many countries. That said, it’s not all of the countries. In fact, those days are not ones that most people have off worldwide. There are 5.5 billion people who live in a country where December 25 is a public holiday, and 4.3 billion people who live in a country where January 1 is. There are a number of other holidays where lots of the world (3 billion or more) get off, including Good Friday, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha and the Prophet’s Birthday. There are also a few countries large enough that their regional celebrations make a noticeable dent, such as October 2 in India or the Lunar New Year in many East Asian countries. However, one day beats all of them. That would be May 1, which is Labor Day for 5.8 billion people. It is by far the biggest day off around the world, even if Canada and the U.S. celebrate it in September, and the U.K. just forgoes it entirely. After all, if they celebrated Labor Day, they would regrettably not have enough days to celebrate the monarchy.

Amanda Shendruk, Not-Ship

Kia Boys

Kia and Hyundai have agreed to retrofit millions of cars with new zinc-reinforced ignition cylinder protections after videos describing how to steal cars without push-button ignitions or anti-theft devices went viral and led to a rash of car thefts. Hyundai will offer the hardware update to 4 million vehicles, and Kia will offer it to 3.1 million cars. The automakers also agreed to equip all new cars with the engine immobilizer anti-theft tech. The cost of installing ignition cylinder protections on all the eligible vehicles could exceed $500 million.

David Shepardson, Reuters

Tourism

Japan and China are in a diplomatic tiff, and that could spell problems for Japan’s bustling tourism industry. Last month, 562,000 Chinese travelers visited Japan, up three percent compared to last year, but that is the slowest growth rate seen in four years. Chinese arrivals in Japan were up 40.7 percent during the first 10 months of the year, and in the first 11 months of the year accounted for 22 percent of the 39 million foreign arrivals. On November 14, China issued a travel advisory for citizens telling them to avoid Japan, which coincided with Japan’s prime minister suggesting that Japan could deploy military forces in the event of a conflict with Taiwan. Chinese visitors were responsible for a fifth of the US$51.9 billion Japan made from tourism, and the estimated losses of the travel restrictions range from an estimated US$3.2 billion (500 billion yen) on the low end to $7.7 billion (1.2 trillion yen) on the high end.

Rashaad Jorden, Skift

Kestrals

A new study dives even deeper into the benefits of keeping a few raptors around the compound, if only for security reasons. Specifically, a 2018 study found that cherry farmers who installed nest boxes for kestrals (a bird species that hunts cherry-consuming birds like robins or grackles) got a major return on their investment, averting the loss of $357 worth of cherries for every $1 they spent installing the boxes. A new study advanced that research further, and found that orchards with occupied nest boxes also have less damaged cherries and less bird poop around, which is good because some pathogens in bird poop can give people food poisoning. There are other benefits to keeping birds of prey around orchards; owl nest boxes have been installed by the thousands to rein in rodents, which means a decrease in the use of rodenticides.

Benji Jones, Vox

Titan

Research published in Nature argues that the initial interpretation of data from NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn’s moon Titan got it wrong. The thrust of that analysis was that the moon was frozen, but had an ocean of water underneath an ice shell that was tens of kilometers thick. That conclusion was derived from a radio science experiment, measuring gravitational changes that indicated an exaggerated tide beneath the icy shell. Now, new analysis suggests that Titan may have had a liquid ocean, but it is now frozen. The energy balance is simply off if there is indeed an ocean. Titan dissipates four terawatts of energy into its surroundings. In the case of an ocean, the frictional heat generated by its flexing would keep the oceans warm and liquid, eventually making its orbit more of a circle.

Hannah Richter, Science

Oklo

Oklo, one of the companies aiming to generate nuclear power from smaller modular reactors, is angling to get its hands on some of the plutonium that the federal government is making available to reactor companies (20 metric tons!). Low-enriched uranium is used in the traditional light water reactors and only transforms about five percent of its material into fissionable isotopes, in no small part because those 94 commercial reactors use water as a coolant. Oklo wants to make “fast reactors” — far from a new idea; it was developed in the 20th century — using liquid sodium metal as a coolant, which allows reactors to operate at much higher temperatures. Plutonium could also work in that kind of fast reactor, and the U.S. has lots of it leftover from the Cold War that was just going to be buried in the desert anyway. That plutonium could produce enough fuel to generate 2.5 gigawatts of electricity, good to power 2.5 million American households.

Alexander C. Kaufman, Sherwood News

Here’s a bunch of people I interviewed this year with books and games that might make a great gift:

Games & Fiction
Person Do Thing, a party game from Uri Bram [interview]
Romeo vs. Juliet: A Kill Shakespeare Adventure by Anthony Del Col [interview]

Science & History
Sleep Groove: Why Your Body’s Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It by Olivia Walch [interview]
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte [interview]
Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change by Olga Khazan [interview]
Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking by Alice Vernon [interview]
99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life by Adam Chandler [interview]

Pop Culture
The Year of the Ring by Susana Polo [interview]
Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves by Chris Dalla Riva [interview]
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine by Alissa Wilkinson [interview]
Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion by Chris DeVille [interview]
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times by Ross Benes [interview]

What a list! To get a cool interview in your inbox every Sunday, consider becoming a paid subscriber:

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

My book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, is available wherever books are sold.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock News: December 17, 2025 • Icebreakers, Crash Clock, Paperbacks

By Walt Hickey

MJ

Michael Jordan sold his Chicago-area mansion to a real estate investor last year for $9.5 million. This was a bit of a flop; it had been on the market for over 12 years and was initially put up for sale in 2012 for $29 million, which would be $41 million in 2025. That said, the fate of the property has not evidently improved; the initial notion was to make the property a timeshare, selling off $1 million equity stakes for one week of access to the home of Jordan. This did not work for a couple of reasons, the first being that a week of access to the Chicago suburbs was evidently not that enticing, the second being that the city changed the zoning code to specifically prohibit timesharing “Champions Point.” The new strategy? Renting it out month-to-month for $150,000 a pop.

Daniel Libit, Sportico

Icebreakers

Russia is trying to keep the gas exports going, but is boxed in on multiple sides. To the west, Ukraine has begun to directly assault commercial tankers angling to get oil out through the Black Sea. To the north, Russian ships are being constrained by another entity: ice. For the first time, Russia has deployed all eight of its nuclear-powered icebreakers at once to keep shipping lanes open in the Gulf of Ob or the Yenisei Gulf. This is all in an effort to keep the flow of oil, gas and minerals going out of the Arctic Gate oil terminal, the Yamal LNG plant and Norilsk Nickel. Russia has three more icebreakers under construction due in 2026, 2028 and 2030 as well as a massive Leader-class icebreaker being built to keep the Northern Sea Route open year-round starting in 2030.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Chips

There are lots of data centers in the United States, and many large companies want to get AI data centers up and running quickly. However, while small sections of small data centers can probably support AI racks, an entirely new site is often required. It’s physically hard to support the AI racks, which are considerably heavier than conventional server racks due to the density of electronics within the chips. Thirty years ago, a server rack averaged 400 to 600 pounds. Today, it’s closer to 1,250 to 2,500 pounds for a rack. The projected milestone weight of an AI rack is 5,000 pounds. Not only are the chips denser, but water-cooling features and the copper plate busway weigh 37 pounds per linear foot. Add those together, and you’re talking floor-busting levels of mass.

Elissa Welle, The Verge

Paperbacks

At the end of this year, the book distributor ReaderLink is ending distribution of mass market paperbacks, essentially ending the format as ebooks replace them in the overall book business. The mass-market paperback was at one point a bonanza for the industry, which allowed hit books to be printed cheaply and efficiently and distributed not just in book stores but also in newsstands and supermarkets. This format significantly broadens the audience, with retailers like Walmart constituting the core distributor these days. Sales jumped from $656.5 million in 1975 to $811 million in 1979 at the peak, outselling hardcover books with 387 million mass-market paperbacks to just 82 million hardcovers. Ebooks became an even leaner production process and a more efficient mass distribution service, slowly devouring the mass market paperback’s share. Unit sales of mass market paperbacks fell from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, an 84 percent decline. Sales this year through October were just 15 million.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Reptiles

Warming temperatures could spell disaster for reptiles, as the temperature of an embryo has a direct effect on the sex of the eventual animal. With green sea turtles, if the temperature is above 29 degrees Celsius during the mid-incubation window, the hatchlings will be about 50-50 male and female. As it gets hotter, the broods skew female. Once you hit 33 degrees Celsius, you’re looking at an overwhelmingly female brood. The opposite is seen among crocodiles; hotter temperatures in the incubation window mean more males, and scientists fear single-sex generations of gators by 2100. It’s not all bad; “Reptile Sexpocalypse” is at least a pretty sick band name.

Elizabeth Preston, Scientific American

Scams

Meta calculated that about 19 percent of the company’s $18 billion advertising business in China came from ads for scams, illegal gambling and pornography, according to internal documents. China’s government doesn’t intervene when scam ads don’t target Chinese citizens and are instead targeted abroad, so it was up to Meta to root out the bad actors. An anti-fraud team ratcheted up enforcement and, in 2024, cut the questionable ads from 19 percent to merely nine percent of the total ad revenue from China. However, company brass reportedly intervened because, hey, that’s perfectly good money you’re enforcing. The team was disbanded, and the questionable ads climbed back to 16 percent of Meta’s China revenue by the middle of this year.

Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham, Reuters

CRASH Clock

Over the past seven years, the 4,000 satellites in Earth’s orbit have increased to almost 14,000 in number. In order to avoid collision with one another, the satellites must constantly maneuver. For SpaceX, from December 2024 to May 2025, that means 144,404 collision avoidance maneuvers over the period. A new study looks at what might happen if they could not maneuver for a period of time, perhaps from solar interference or a communications bug. As of 2018, if all satellites suddenly lost their ability to maneuver, there would be a collision within 121 days. Today, that figure is down to 2.8 days without a collision.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·

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Numlock News: December 16, 2025 • Coup, Hyperion, Glacier

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.

Hyperion

Meta is constructing a massive data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, called Hyperion. It’s a massive facility, and Meta got a massive break on the Louisiana sales taxes as an incentive to set up there. The state of Louisiana has a sales tax of 9.56 percent, and if you were going to build out a $50 billion 1-megawatt data center, you would probably spend about $35 billion on GPUs to put inside it. That transaction would ordinarily involve sales tax, which in Louisiana’s case would come to about $3.3 billion. That is, had the state not waived all state, local, sales and use taxes on data center equipment. That is enough money to build 33 new high schools, pay the salary of every public school teacher in the state for a year or pay for seven years of the Louisiana State Police budget. After a construction period where jobs will peak at 962, the number of direct, local jobs produced by the Hyperion data center will be just 326.

Jon Keegan, Sherwood News

Contagious

One interesting argument in geopolitics is the concept of a coup contagion, where a successful coup in a region may inspire or provoke copycat coups in neighboring areas. There is, therefore, concern about a coup cluster in Africa; since 2020, there have been 11 successful military takeovers and 5 attempted but failed coups. New research indicates that while plotters do tend to pay attention to their contemporaries seizing power abroad, that doesn’t mean that it’s off to the races seizing the local radio towers and airports. That is because it is not just the coup plotters taking notes; the existing regime and its allies will also be keeping tabs on neighboring countries to see where things go well or badly.

Salah Ben Hammou and Jonathan Powell, The Conversation

Flat Lighting

Film analysts, essayists and viewers have complained that movies are getting flatter or muddier, as the strategies that filmmakers employ to produce movies these days reward a softer or flatter shoot that can be adjusted in postproduction. This can actually be measured; contrast measures the gap between the bright part and the dark part of a shot, key fill ratio compares how evenly lit the bright parts and dark parts are and shadow hardness measures how crisp various boundaries are. An analysis of a database of 1,024,493 shots of human faces from 3,655 live action films finds some overall trends: declining contrast since 2008, a slight decrease in the key fill ratio since the 2010s and a sharp drop in shadow hardness. But what’s particularly neat is how much genre affects these elements. Movies about sports tend to be very high contrast, while horror, mystery and sci-fi tend to be lower. Key fill rations are low in family films, comedies and musicals, while they are uniformly high in the heavy stuff like mystery, horror, western, history, war and thriller.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

I want to shout out a great newsletter called Semafor Media, written by a friend of mine, Maxwell Tani, and Semafor’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. It dives into the fascinating political, cultural and financial forces shaping global news organizations. I’m personally a huge fan; each issue is full of really thoughtful analysis and the occasional colossal scoop. In my experience, it’s basically where the news gets its news — check it out and subscribe for free here.

Glacier Melt

At least 4,000 glaciers have melted in the past two decades. There remain 211,000 glaciers that still exist, but a new study modeling climate finds that about 1,000 glaciers are lost annually. That may rise to 3,000 glaciers lost annually moving forward. Current climate trajectory puts the world on pace for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial temperatures, hot enough for 79 percent of glaciers to disappear by 2100. Limiting that to two degrees would rein in the damage to 63 percent of glaciers. Hitting four degrees of warming would mean 91 percent of glaciers are gone by the end of the century.

Alec Luhn, New Scientist

Ammonia

If you want to grow plants — and let’s take it as a given that a large portion of the world spends most of their day-to-day specifically concerned with such matters — you need nitrogen. If you want nitrogen, these days you need ammonia. If you need ammonia, you generally need natural gas or coal, which is used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. Incidentally, it’s also used to produce carbon dioxide. As a result, in order to grow plants these days, you need to emit a lot of carbon, so much so that the production of fertilizer is responsible for 1.8 percent of global carbon emissions. It’s possible to make ammonia without using carbon fuels — “green ammonia,” man, we really gotta work on branding — and swapping it in could reduce the carbon footprint of the Corn Belt by 33 percent. The price of ammonia fertilizer has ranged from $500 to $1,600 per ton over the past five years. In 2024, long-term contracts for green ammonia from the Gulf coast came in at $600 to $800 per ton, sometimes cheaper, sometimes not.

Katie Watkins, Offrange

Collection

The largest card grading and authentication business is buying up the third-largest operation in the field, with Professional Sports Authenticator’s parent company buying Beckett, a longtime rival. Sports memorabilia in general and trading cards in particular are a hot commodity these days. Companies that serve as arbiters of value and appraise the condition of various collectibles have been in high demand. Beckett is a distant third in the game: there were 650,000 items graded in the past week, with PSA accounting for over 75 percent of them, rival grader CGC accounting for 18 percent, and Beckett coming in at just three percent.

Dan Hajducky, ESPN

Cursed Stone That Does 2d6 Psychic Damage

A new survey found that 44 percent of adults in the United States use their smartphones to browse the internet within 10 minutes of waking up, either always or often. I concede I do this. Nothing gets me going quite like staring at a slab of silicon and shouting, “What fresh hell is this?” A similar percentage, 43 percent, said that they use their phone to browse the internet within 10minutes of going to bed, and now that’s just sensible, because how else am I supposed to do such crucial things as discerning the opinions of Californian insomniacs if not plunging my retinas into an ocean of light immediately before trying to sleep? Needless to say, 32 percent of respondents said that their phone was “mostly negative” for their sleep habits, and just 13 percent said “mostly positive.”

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

We just had Jamie on for a Sunday edition, it was a great conversation, do check it out if you haven’t yet!

Numlock Sunday: Jamie Ballard talks American belief in cryptozoology, aliens, and ghosts

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock News: December 15, 2025 • Star Wars, Ella McCay, Shaboozey

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Zootopia, Too

Zootopia 2 passed the $1 billion global box office milestone after just 17 days in theaters, the shortest amount of time for any PG-rated or Hollywood animated film ever. The film has now made $259.6 million domestic and $877.8 million globally for a $1.08 billion global cume. Disney’s other movie at the box office this weekend was Ella McCay from James L. Brooks, which opened to $1.9 million. That is a brutal number and among the worst-ever for any movie that released in over 2,500 theaters. But if you invent The Simpsons, the company that owns The Simpsons will clearly give you a freebie whenever you want (as long as it means they get to keep owning The Simpsons).

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Art

The painting by Tom Jung that became the poster for Star Wars sold for $3.875 million, a new record for Star Wars memorabilia and beating the $3.654 million price of Darth Vader’s lightsaber. The work, Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) Half-Sheet Original Artwork for a Key Poster by Tom Jung, belonged to the family of the film’s producer, Gary Kurtz, and was painted on a 21-inch by 34-inch board in airbrush and acrylic, featuring the whole cast.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Mercury

In 2013, two wolves from the Alexander Archipelago in Alaska made a swim to Pleasant Island, which is 50 square kilometers. The wolves thrived and grew to a population of 13, but wiped out all the deer on the island in doing so. What happens to the wolves next attracted the interest of biologists, who anticipated the animals would probably make the arduous swim back to the mainland. Instead, the wolves adapted and started hunting sea otters, which came to represent 60 percent to 70 percent of their diet. There is an issue, though, one of the wolves died in 2020, and a postmortem analysis found that the wolf had the single highest level of mercury ever recorded in a wolf. Yes, the wolves of Pleasant Island are mad as hatters. They had mercury concentrations 278 times the level found in wolves in the Alaskan interior, which coincided with adding sea otters — aggregators of heavy metals in shellfish — to their menu.

Gennaro Tomma, bioGraphic

NASCAR

NASCAR has been locked in a lawsuit with Michael Jordan over the power imbalance between the individual racing teams (one of which is owned by Jordan) and the larger racing company. Teams invest millions into the sport, but they don’t actually own any stake in the NASCAR business, which has been controlled by a single powerful family. Teams hold charters that guarantee them spots on the races; however, the deal is generally pretty mediocre for the actual teams. This discrepancy led to a suit lodged by 23XI and Front Row Motorsports against the system. With Jordan’s deep pockets and somewhat notorious competitive spirit, the plaintiffs ultimately prevailed in the antitrust suit, resulting in a settlement that grants the teams a larger share of the NASCAR revenue. The organization needed a shot in the arm; from 2005 to 2024, average viewership for NASCAR races fell from 8.5 million to 2.45 million. Perhaps dealing with Michael Jordan can help get more eyeballs on the ovals.

Adam Minter, Bloomberg

Fire

Volunteer fire departments are feeling the squeeze from private equity firms rolling up the niche software and suppliers that a fire department relies on, jacking up the prices for the services. Volunteer fire departments account for 85 percent of the 30,000 fire departments in the United States. About 20,000 of those fire departments use some of the services from ESO — one of three software suppliers (alongside ImageTrend and First Due) that serve fire departments and make the specialty software for inventory, hydrant management and so on. When ESO acquired Emergency Reporting — which served 7,500 departments — ESO moved to shut down Emergency Reporting, pushing those customers to its other platform. For the Norfolk, Connecticut, volunteer fire department, that would increase the costs from $795 per year to over $5,000 per year.

Mike Baker, The New York Times

Bar Song

TouchTunes (which operates jukeboxes for bars) reported that for the second year in a row, the most-played song on jukeboxes was “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey, which just feels on the nose. About 38 percent of all plays on the platform are rock songs, but 23 percent are country. And country music is well-represented at the top of the charts, with the three most-played artists being Morgan Wallen, Chris Stapleton and Toby Keith. If you’ll excuse me, I’m moving to Nashville to write songs like “A Good Song (To Play On A Juke Box)” and “Bar Music For A Bar” in the hopes that I can notch that No. 1 hit through sheer nominative determinism, just like Shaboozey did.

Kevin Rutherford, Billboard

DB

Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s railway, has been disappointing travelers with some of the least punctual trains in all of Europe. October data indicate that only 51.5 percent of trains arrived less than six minutes late. This threat to the famous Teutonic reputation of efficiency comes from the infamous Teutonic reputation of frugality, as the system has been underfunded, and maintenance has been deferred. The government has announced a 100 billion euro investment in rail infrastructure, and installed a new CEO from the Austrian Federal Railways.

Esme Nicholson, NPR

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock Sunday: Brendan Borrell on Power Soak

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Brendan Borrell, who has written many things that have appeared in Numlock over the years in his time contributing to Hakai Magazine. Borrell is out with a delightful new book that dives into a fascinating era in the history of rock and roll called Power Soak: Invention, Obsession, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Sound.

The book dives into the troubled and genre-bending history of the band Boston, the web of vexing studio contracts that diverted their creative energies into the courtroom, the third album that seemingly could never come, and the technological breakthrough that turned the tide of chief songwriter Tom Scholz’s fortunes. It’s a great read!

The book can be found wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Brendan, thank you so much for coming back on.

Thanks for having me.

Readers of Numlock might know you from your bylines over at Hakai. We are big fans of your work in general. You are out with a really cool new book. It is called Power Soak. It is a music history book that looks specifically at the band Boston.I devoured it, I think I read it in a single sitting because it was just such a really fascinating cultural, creative, legal, business story all wrapped up in one. How would you describe your interest in this story and how you came around to it?

Well, you described it pretty well. That is what drew me to the story. I’m always looking to get into these complex new worlds that have a propulsive narrative. In this case, I knew nothing about Boston. Obviously, I was vaguely familiar with the song “More Than a Feeling.” Then a friend of mine said, “Hey, they were in this huge legal battle back in the ’80s.” I started digging into it, and I realized nobody had really done the long-form version of it. And it just really resonated with me.

The music industry in the ’80s is famous for having rather large personalities. It was crazy to read a story where Irving Azov and David Geffen were present, but not even the biggest personalities in it.

Yeah, absolutely. Walter Yednikoff was the big man back in those days. Man, that guy was volatile.

Where did they come to this thing; it seems like there were a couple of contracts that broke rather badly for them.

The founder of Boston is a guy named Tom Scholz. He was this MIT-trained engineer who spent about six years working on demo tapes that would ultimately become Boston’s first album. He was just sending them out blindly and was desperate to get some buy-in from one of the major labels. Eventually, he ends up with this manager who had been key in making the Eagles a hit, along with Fleetwood Mac. Tom signed this contract with him, which turned out to be a really, really terrible deal. He didn’t discover this until years later.

Tom’s manager only had to pay Tom for every three out of four albums sold. He could discount that further by another 10%. If the record company that he sold the record to escalated his royalties, the manager did not have to pass that on to Tom. There were just all kinds of crazy little details in this contract that made it terrible.

Then there’s the recording industry contract. The manager is the in-between, but then the recording industry contract said that Tom basically had to deliver an album every six months, which, for some musicians, might be acceptable. But Tom was an absolute perfectionist. There was no way he was going to pull that off. Year by year, the pressure escalates. And that’s what sets up the story.

Walter Yetnikoff standing with promising unknown musical talent

There’s always a transition in the story where people who had been closely working together in a band and tightly working together at a label, whether it was a label president or the hit band. Again, Boston truly was big back then. There’s a moment where all that starts to disintegrate, and it disintegrates, it seems, very, very quickly.

Absolutely. I would say that Boston had about two fantastic years. The first album came out in 1976. It was the biggest debut album of all time in history. For CBS Records, which was the biggest label in the country, it was their most profitable group. I mean, so they were enormous. They have a full year of touring, going from 1977 into 78. It was after their next album was released in 78 that everything fell apart. The band essentially (for the public) vanished for about eight years.

There are a couple of interesting things going on, one of which is that there are some internal band problems. At one point, I believe, there’s a $50,000 ad in the back of Rolling Stone for a singer who sounds like their singer.

That’s one of my favorite little details that I pulled up. That is an exclusive from this book. I’d seen a hint of it somewhere. It had been very briefly published, but there were no names attached. I found I had a copy of a deposition where Tom Scholz talks about it. He names the guy, and I tracked this guy down and learned his entire story. Tom Scholz is a very geeky guy. He’s not great at relating to people. His actual words were, “I needed to find somebody with the ‘identical vocal sound’ as my lead singer, who was basically departing the band at that point. He had this view of the members of the band as though they were just replaceable cogs in the machine. And I think that was pretty hurtful to them.

Once CBS starts bringing down the full faith and power of the Columbia Broadcasting System, it seems that the legal situation disintegrates very quickly.

Absolutely, yeah. Just to give you a little background, there are about two or three pages about this conflict in a couple of other books. Tom and CBS were at odds with each other the whole time. It turns out, when I dug into the record, that Tom actually had a pretty close relationship with Walter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS, who’s this volatile character I mentioned. He’s just the complete opposite of Tom. He’s just this blowhard lawyer snorting coke. He basically wanders into the office at, like, 10 or 11 a.m. and has a screwdriver to start his day.

But he and Tom actually had this really good relationship with each other for a while. Walter Yetnikoff recommended his personal attorney to help sort things out with his manager. He’d call Tom up and just chit-chat on the phone, which was pretty unusual for somebody at such a high level to be talking to the artist. That was pretty fascinating. But once things went bad, they went really bad.

I really like this story, and we won’t talk about every twist because people really should buy Power Soak. It’s a very good one. But there’s one that is, frankly, directly in the title, which you alluded to. There was a record that came out in 1976, there was a record that came out in 1978 and there was not another record until 1986. While all this legal machination’s going on, while their revenues have been frozen by CBS, while their royalties have been impounded because they don’t get the third record, Schultz does an end run and pulls off something really interesting that actually recapitalizes it. Do you want to talk a little bit about the Power Soak and the Rockman?

Yeah. So Tom, when he was working for those six years recording in his basement, he was inventing all types of gadgets. He was coming up with new techniques. He would layer track upon track in a way that people had never done before, just the complexity of it all. He’s using analog tape. I mean, he would modify his tape machines. I don’t know if you remember the days when you would use a tape machine and you’d hit record, and there would be like a second before it actually recorded. That made it very difficult to do super-precise things. So he would, like, modify the the $5,000 tape recorder he had so he could record instantly and come in and out of the track.

He also made gear, like the Power Soak, which, at the time this was classic rock. You want that big, distorted sound that was basically pioneered in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It comes from turning up the amplifier and getting this resonance in the tube amps. But the problem is, if you’re actually practicing in your basement, then you need to have that all the way up. If you turn it down, you lose that distortion.

A Power Soak

Tom, what he did was put a giant resistor in a box, and he called it the Power Soak. Basically, the amplifier was maxed out, but the sound that came out of the speaker was much lower. Believe it or not, it did not exist until he created this thing. He patents it in ’79. He had a prototype for a while, but decided to put it on the market in 1980 or so at a pretty small scale. And this is just when the conflict’s heating up.

By then, he had all these other ideas for gadgets. He goes on to found this company called Scholz’s Research and Development that produces an even fancier version of the Power Soak, which basically simulates the distortion sound in a Walkman-sized box. That was called the Rockman. And this stuff takes off. All these other musicians pick it up. Def Leppard’s album, Hysteria, every track on that album that I heard used the Rockman. The Cars, who were another Boston band, were using it. There are all these incredible guitar players who even vouched for it. So, yeah, it was pretty incredible. Even though some people think, “Oh, yeah, Boston’s a one-hit wonder more than a feeling, maybe a few other songs,” they had this enormous impact through the ‘80s. They were the sound of 80s rock.

It’s just such a great story. There are a lot of very fun twists in this. The legal machinations are very fascinating to follow. The moment that this thing goes from being not just a legal fight, but a very clearly personal battle between some very large personalities. It’s all really, really good stuff. I highly recommend it. Obviously, this is a story about creative power, technology, and corporate greed intersecting. This is not the last time that this happened in the music industry, right? This does feel like a very pertinent story. Even towards the end, you allude to some of the work that Taylor Swift did in reclaiming her masters. Why is this story still relevant today in your view?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Scholz’s battle really created a moment when a number of artists started trying to use these same methods to break their contracts. Scholz’s lawyer, this guy Don Engel.

He was fascinating.

He was fascinating. He’s a big character, and he discovered this loophole in California law that basically said you can only have a contract for seven years. The way the record industry was doing things, it would say, “Hey, you need to give us this many albums.” If you’re too late on an album, we’ll just extend your contract for another year and another year. Scholz had eight albums that were due. Anyways, once Scholz started to break himself free, other artists saw an opening. Don Engel just became a huge name in the 90s and 2000s. He was known as Busta Contract.

Prince, part of the reason he changed his name was to get out of his contract. The funny thing about Prince is that he wanted to release his albums faster than the record company wanted to release them because he was so prolific. And then Taylor Swift ended up buying back her masters. There are just so many stories like this because these contracts the deck is stacked against the artists. The record companies will say it’s because we invest so much in developing, most of our artists don’t actually ever make back the money and so on and so forth. But it definitely can be pretty hurtful for the person’s career. In Tom’s case, it was just egregious. I mean, he was getting a fraction of what everybody around him was getting.

Yeah. So, again, the book is called Power Soak. Where can folks find it? Where can folks find you?

Yeah, Power Soak about Tom Scholz and his long fight against CBS Records. It’s available on a bunch of online bookstores: Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble. And I am at brendanborrell.com or find me on Twitter.

Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for coming on.

Alright, thanks for having me.

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Edited by Crystal Wang

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