Numlock News: July 14, 2025 • Solar Trouble, Interplanetary Traveler, Superman

Jul 14, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Thanks to everyone who came out last week to the first of the shows in Garbage Day’s three-show residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. I’m working on them and the crew has great stuff planned for the next show this Tuesday. More details at the bottom of the newsletter, you should come, the first one sold out!

Superman

Amid strong ticket sales, Superman starring David Corenswet — and launching James Gunn’s new series of DC universe movies — made $122 million domestically, the third-largest opening of the year. Add another $95 million in international markets, and a $217 million opening weekend is not too shabby for the Man of Steel. Moviegoers under the age of 25 accounted for 28 percent of the opening weekend crowd, which is a younger-than-typical skew. It’s all the more impressive because Superman didn’t really rely on any massive stars to score the opening, with the highest salary on the movie reportedly going to Nicolas Hoult, who played an outstanding Lex Luthor.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Mars

A 25-kilogram (54-pound) rock known as NWA 16788 is estimated to sell at auction for $2 million to $4 million this coming Wednesday at Sotheby’s. The sample is believed to be the largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth. A massive asteroid had crashed onto the surface of the red planet and ejected this chunk of rock 225 million kilometers away to Earth, where it was found in Niger in the Sahara Desert in November 2023. It is 15 inches by 11 inches by six inches, and single-handedly represents seven percent of all the Martian material currently on Earth. Out of 77,000 officially recognized meteorites ever found on Earth, only 400 are believed to be from Mars.

Dave Collins and Joseph B. Frederick, The Associated Press

Santini

There’s a fascinating minor controversy going on with Tour de France sponsor Santini. It pays millions of dollars to sponsor the Tour, only to have the competing athletes go out of their way to avoid wearing Santini jerseys on the actual road. While riders in the race get to wear their own (specialty-crafted) gear in the race, Santini’s sponsorship entitles it to make the four special jerseys worn by leaders over the course of the competition. The company makes not just the iconic yellow jersey of the lead rider but also the white jersey for the best young rider, the green jersey for the best sprinter and the polka dot jersey for the best climber. It turns out that wearing a random piece of equipment that is way less aerodynamic than your own space-age gear is kind of an annoying impediment, particularly when you’re about to do a time trial and are trying to be the most aerodynamic you possibly can. In the Tour, losing 15 seconds on an ill-fitting skinsuit over a 40-kilometer stage might mean you lose the race. As a result, some riders (with help from teammates) appear to be deliberately avoiding winning superlatives at inopportune times.

Eben Novy-Williams, Club Sportico

Solar

Solar panels function optimally at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and an increase in the temperature actually reduces the efficacy of those photovoltaic cells. One solution to this is pairing solar farms with actual farms. With the right crop combination, water vapor coming off the plants would cool the solar panels while the crops and workers get a little more shade. A study found that planting cilantro, tomatoes and peppers under solar arrays reduced the panel’s surface temperature by roughly 18 degrees. In places like Tucson (which saw 112 days of triple-digit temperatures last year), this can really take the edge off.

Tina Deines, Inside Climate News

Comics

Total sales of comics and graphic novels in the United States and Canada last year accounted for $1.94 billion, up 4 percent from 2023. Interestingly, after a 7 percent drop in sales seen in 2023, we do appear to be settling in at a comfortable new normal for the comics and graphic novel business, an industry that saw a massive infusion of new readers during the pandemic. Sales in 2024 were up 73 percent from 2019, indicating that the new fans of comics from the pandemic years were enough to nearly double the size of the business. The industry has remained relatively stable, given that sales were $1.91 billion in 2021. The growth is, for the most part, in the graphic novel business in particular.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

EVs

China has lots and lots of electric vehicle companies, but a ruthless pricing war is sending some producers looking for smaller markets where the competition isn’t as fierce. Over 30 Chinese EV brands were actively expanding abroad last year, and many of them were doing so before actually turning a profit in China. The consolidation in the Chinese auto industry has been relentless: there were 487 electric vehicle makers in 2018, a figure that was whittled down to 130 through M&A and competition. According to forecasts, that number will reduce further to about 15 brands by 2030, given the way that things are going now. It’s been a great deal for consumers. However, it has hit the point where the top economic planning agency in China had to tell BYD and others at the top of the business that they can not sell cars below cost.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Carnac

A large ancient rock formation in Carnac, France is now believed to be one of (if not the oldest) megalithic complexes in Europe, with archaeologists dating a section of the foundation pits to 6,300 years old. The rock formation contains thousands of huge stones in parallel lines at different sites, classic megalith stuff. For years, the site has beguiled investigators, given a conspicuous lack of stuff like charcoal that might be used to establish a chronology. However, a new study published in Antiquity used radiocarbon dating on 49 sites at the Le Plasker section to put a range of 4600 to 4300 BC, which would be about a millennium older than Stonehenge.

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Ryan Broderick and the crew at internet culture newsletter Garbage Day are putting on three live shows this summer, and Numlock is a part of them. If you’re in NYC and looking for something fun, learn more about it here and get tickets to the second and third shows. It’s going to be very, very fun.

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.

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: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

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

Numlock Sunday: Rachel Adams-Heard on what $45 billion will do to ICE

Jul 13

Numlock News: July 11, 2025 • Pterosaur, Tether, Birkin

Jul 11, 2025

Tether

The El Salvador-based cryptocurrency company Tether Holdings has said it owns about $8 billion worth of gold in a Swiss vault, coming in at around 80 metric tons of gold. This would make Tether Holdings one of the largest gold holders in the world, outside of banks and countries. Simply put, I am begging companies — especially those in the crypto business — to stop simply using Neal Stephenson books as a playbook. This is like the third time this has happened, and I swear to god if one more company tells me about a sunken gold shipment off the coast of the Philippines or a sequestered math-based pseudo-monastic environment, I am going to scream.

Mining.com

Birkin

The Birkin Bag — the specific one, the first one that set the template for all Birkin Bags to come — sold for US$10.1 million, instantaneously becoming the most successful bag ever sold at auction. The leather bag was the result of Jane Birkin asking for a slightly larger bag on an airplane in the vicinity of the guy who then ran Hermès in 1985. The 8,582,500-euro total includes commission and fees, and Sotheby’s did not publish a pre-auction estimate. This number crushed the previous record of US$513,000 set for such a container.

Ian Youngs, BBC

Netherlands

An incredible trove of 25 items has been tracked down by a detective specializing in historical documents, finding a cache of records from the Dutch East India Company and early modern European trading companies. Among these documents is a book detailing secret government meetings from 1592 to 1604, as well as ship logs from Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter. The items were discovered in the attic of an incapacitated person, and are believed to have found their way there by way of a thief who borrowed money from the attic’s owner.

Sarvy Geranpayeth, The Art Newspaper

Singapore Sling

There were 90 reported incidents of maritime crime in the Singapore Straits, which handles around 30 percent of global trade. This is an increase of 50 percent compared to the same period of 2024. That year, the maritime corrdior only recorded 57 incidents, or about 63 percent of all globally reported cases of piracy. Boardings are incredibly successful, with 95 percent of them succeeding last year.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Teens

A new study from the Pew Research Center found that in 2024, 46 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 reported they used the internet almost constantly. Another 47 percent said that they use the internet at least several times per day. All told, 51 percent of teens aged 15 to 17 use the internet almost constantly, and 95 percent reported having access with a telephone.

Pew Research Center

Pterosaur

A new study published in Science Bulletin tells of a pterosaur that fell out of the sky in what is now northeastern China about 120 million years ago. The unique sediment situation managed to preserve not just the bones but also the stomach of the bird. The fossil was found with a stomach full of plants, which would indicate that pterosaurs were occasionally herbivores. In the past, pterosaurs were found to consume animals.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

I’m In This Photo, And I Don’t Like It

A new study published in Waste Management argues that the food leftover in short-term rentals adds up. The aggregate value of food wasted by U.S. vacation rentals totals about $2 billion per year. This breaks out to $12 per night of short-term lodging, and comes out to 5.1 percent of the nightly rental fee. All told, the annual estimate is $2.3 billion spent on unconsumed food by the time a short-term renter’s vacation ends.

Emily Caldwell, The Ohio State University

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.

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.

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

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

Numlock News: July 10, 2025 • Bioluminescent, Koalas, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository

Jul 10, 2025

Waste

Eight groups from the American nuclear industry have signed a letter indicating that it is perhaps time to address all the nuclear waste that’s currently held at nuclear power plants around the country. They imply that it is to move forward with the plan to inter the waste deep underground at the designated Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. In general, nuclear waste isn’t a huge problem — all the spent fuel from the entire history of America’s commercial nuclear program would fit on a football field. However, with a possible reactor buildout on the horizon (fission notoriously doesn’t spew carbon into the atmosphere), there is an argument to properly settle on a spot to retire spent fuel. It’s not like there’s a lack of money — $50 billion has accrued in the federal Nuclear Waste Fund over the years to explicitly solve this problem — but there is a lack of will to be the guy that points at a spot on a map in a swing state and say “that’s where all the nuclear waste should go.”

Alexander C. Kaufman, Field Notes

The Price of Vibes

If a restaurant wants to play music, it actually has to pay an annual fee to a Performing Rights Organization (or PRO) to prevent being sued by the musicians. The big two PROs are ASCAP and BMI, which represent 90 percent of musical compositions, and SESAC represents the other major player. It’s hardly the most glamorous part of the music industry, but it drives a lot of revenue. ASCAP is the only one that publicly shares collections data, and revenue has risen from $935 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2024. That said, the restaurants on the other side of that transaction are smarting, especially as new PROs emerge and more bills have to be paid. The National Restaurant Association says the average member pays $4,500 per year to license music. A large hotel that hosts occasional live music would probably pay $5,000 to $20,000 per year to a single PRO, and would spend to the order of $80,000 a year if the hotel is paying all of them.

Ashley Carman and Aruni Soni, Bloomberg

Dr. Phil

Phil McGraw, the television figure best known as “Dr. Phil” in some circles and “somehow only the third-worst cultural force Oprah Winfrey unleashed upon the population” in others, is in a legal kerfuffle over his television network as it undergoes financial problems. His Merit Street Media is in bankruptcy court and is suing its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting. The network reaches 65 million homes, but boy howdy is it not resonating in them. Merit TV averaged 27,000 viewers during primetime in 2024, ranking 130th among broadcast and cable networks. This audience number means that Numlock News might actually be punching down on Dr. Phil here. As of the second quarter of 2025, the audience is down to 17,000 primetime viewers.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Streaming Wars of Attrition

In 2021, Netflix programs accounted for 80 percent of all the programs that made Nielsen’s weekly list of the top 10 original shows on streaming at some point in the year. The streamer is followed by Disney+ (8 percent), Hulu (5 percent) and Prime Video (5 percent). By 2023, Netflix’s share had slipped to 69 percent of those shows, then 62 percent in 2024. So far this year, Netflix is responsible for only 52 percent to make Nielsen’s list, which compares the performance of streamers as best as can be. The rise of multiple other streamers has been devouring a market that Netflix once dominated, with robust competition from Prime Video (13 percent), Hulu (10 percent), Paramount+ (9 percent), Apple TV+ ( 7 percent) and yes, even Peacock (4 percent).

Entertainment Strategy Guy

Koalas

A new study tracking the fine-scale movements of koalas has found that they only spend about 10 minutes per day on the ground (heading down 2 to 3 times in a night) or about 1 percent of their lives. However, 66 percent of recorded koala deaths happen when they’re out of the trees and on the ground. This is a problem because extensive land clearance means that the tree-dwelling animal is forced to spend more time on the ground to move between sources of food. It forces these koalas to be vulnerable to dog attacks and vehicle strikes.

Society for Experimental Biology

Robots

There is a poorly-kept secret of the marble sculpture business: sophisticated robots emerging on the Italian scene have made it considerably cheaper and less time-intensive to produce stunning marble sculptures and reproductions of iconic works. A Robotor robot can sculpt stone based on a 3D model 24 hours a day and can prepare a piece of rock for human hands to bring in for the finish. The basic software costs $5,000 per year, encoding toolpath carving instructions that might be executed by a $200,000 sculpting robot that is actually a reassembled version of the standard $70,000 basic robot you might find on an assembly line. That’s steep up front, but pays out in short time. A machine-assisted reproduction of Amore e Psiche by Antonio Canova with manual finishing would take just 77 days and cost 64,000 euros in labor. This is in comparison to a solo manual process, which would take 132 days and cost 90,000 euros in labor.

Matthew Hart, Bloomberg

Haute Couture

At the Paris Haute Couture Week, the event where pioneering or experimental fashion gets revealed to the world, one particular dress produced by biodesigner Chris Bellamy in cooperation with researchers from the University of Amsterdam caught attention. The garment was created from 125 million living Pyrocystis lunula algae, and was bioluminescent, a first-of-its-kind “living look.” The dress is made from a gel material that contains the bioluminescent blooms, emitting light when it’s moved.

University of Amsterdam

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.

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.

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

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

Numlock News: July 9, 2025 • Bayeux, Young Adult, Superman

Jul 09, 2025

Forest

Federal records revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request have found that the government of Singapore owns approximately 5 percent of all land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The city-state’s sovereign wealth fund, The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, is the sole owner of 540,000 acres of forestland in the Upper Peninsula, much of which is slated for active timber harvesting. In Gogebic County alone, Singapore owns one-sixth of all land. From 2021 to 2022, GIC spent $450 million to buy the land from other companies. For perspective, Singapore itself is only around 182,000 acres in size.

Simon D. Schuster, Bridge Michigan

Print

Sales of print books dipped slightly in the first half of the year, with total unit book sales coming in at 343.5 million books, down from 347.5 million books in the same half of 2024. The top-selling title of the year so far is Onyx Storm, which moved 2.03 million copies in two editions over the first six months of the year. It is followed by the nonfiction The Let Them Theory, which sold 1.76 million copies, then the new Hunger Games book Sunrise on the Reaping, which sold 1.69 million copies. Despite the success of Onyx Storm, sales in the romantasy category were actually slightly down. Religion books are still a winning category, as sales were up 16 percent over last year’s first half.

Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart, Publishers Weekly

Bayeux

France and Britain have cut a deal that will allow the Bayeux Tapestry to go on display at the British Museum next year. This will be the first time that the tapestry depicting the Battle of Hastings will be in Britain in nearly 1,000 years, as the country tried and failed to borrow the work in 1953 and 1966. The Medieval embroidery was created in the 1070s, consists of nine panels and was believed to have been made in Kent. However, it ended up in France and has been housed at the Bayeux Museum in Normandy since 1983. As you can imagine, it’s absolutely devastating to have a priceless and unrivaled artifact of your civilization’s cultural history stuck in the museum of another country, so our hearts truly go out to the British people who have had to endure this indignity for so very long. I’m told that Greece, Afghanistan, China, Ireland, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Rapa Nui, Italy, Pakistan, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Scotland, Iran, Iraq and Egypt also sent the British Museum their thoughts and prayers in this trying time.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

YA

A new analysis of 509 books that made the Young Adult New York Times Bestseller List from 2013 to 2023 found that the ages of the main characters of the books have been getting steadily older. This could potentially reflect the trend of many YA genre consumers being older than the traditional “young adult” audience of teenagers, with many readers well into their 20s or older. Of those 509 books, 316 revealed the age of the main character at some point. In 2014, the average age of a main character was 15.56 years old. By 2023, the average age of a main character in these books was 17.54 years of age, reflecting a persistent (if jumpy) trend over the preceding decade of characters getting older. Throughout the studied period, 90 percent of books had a character over the age of 15; if anything, though, that may just be a reflection of the reality that teenagers are less likely to read books featuring protagonists less mature than they are.

Ally Watkins, University of Mississippi, and Taylor & Francis Online

War, What Is It Good For

A new survey found that skepticism of U.S. foreign military intervention has surpassed approval ratings. A whopping 36 percent of respondents indicated that foreign military interventions worsen situations more often than not, 28 percent thought they neither improved nor worsened and only 17 percent thought they improve situations. The survey also asked about Americans’ retrospective analysis of the decision to intervene in multiple wars of the past century. The only ones to come in above water were the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Gulf War. The best way to figure out if a military intervention was vastly more condemned by Americans than approved is to simply ask, “How involved was Henry Kissinger in this event,” as both Vietnam and the Cambodian campaign come in robustly low when it comes to net approval.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Energy

A startling new report from the Department of Energy highlighted just how rowdy the future energy demand from AI data centers is poised to be. It found that parts of the mid-Atlantic and Great Plains regions could face 400 hours of power outages in 2030 under the combined worst-case scenario of large energy-demanding data centers growing unabated, fossil fuel plants closing quickly and new power systems coming online slowly. The PJM Interconnection — which serves Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia — is forecasting a 32 gigawatt increase in demand from 2024 to 2030, of which 30 gigawatts is from data centers.

Peter Behr, E&E News

Superman

Superman is projected to open with profits from $120 million to $130 million domestically and another $100 million internationally. The movie — which tells the story of an immigrant journalist who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still thinks that the American way is worth fighting for — had a budget of $225 million and is looking for a win at the box office.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

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.

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.

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

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

Loading more posts…