Walt is on vacation, today’s edition comes from Palmer Haasch, my former Business Insider colleague who now works in comics at WEBTOON.

Mr. Beast

Beast Industries is hosting a ritzy breakfast in New York City to court brand and ad executives, hosted by none other than the Beast himself (Jimmy Donaldson) and Jeffrey Housenbold, the CEO of Beast Industries. Notably, this is TV upfronts week, where TV companies and streamers pitch advertisers on spending commitments for the upcoming season. Beast Industries’ efforts are indicative of a larger shift. Creators have long been siphoning viewers from Hollywood, and these days, advertisers are working to match that transition: U.S. ad spending on creator-driven programming is expected to hit $44 billion in 2026, up from $37 billion in 2025.

Lucia Moses, Business Insider

BTS Diplomacy

An estimated 50,000 fans filled the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square, on five hours’ notice to catch a glimpse of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum with the seven members of K-pop group BTS. Sheinbaum invited the group to visit the National Palace while in town for their ongoing “Arirang” world tour, which saw over one million fans vying for tickets to three shows in Mexico and led to the president issuing a plea to the South Korean government for more concert dates. This is not the first time the group has been treated like diplomats (or at least, diplomat-pop stars); in 2021, then-South Korean president Moon Jae-in’s administration appointed BTS as a “Special Presidential Envoy” to attend and speak at the 76th U.N. General Assembly. Meanwhile, back on the pop star side, BTS is digging out some of their deep cuts at each concert, and the early tour stops have been treated to a devastating (for fans with later tickets) number of classic BTS bangers.

Kate Linthicum, The Los Angeles Times

Prelude

Korean entertainment company HYBE and American record label Geffen Records are looking to replicate the magic of their global girl group KATSEYE (boba tea, gnarly, etc.). Today (May 12), the companies are announcing the final member of their next K-pop influenced idol project, referred to as “Prelude: The Final Piece.” Over 14,000 applicants submitted auditions to compete for the last spot in the group, and a select cohort of trainees did so on a reality competition series that aired on the Japanese streaming platform Abema. These kinds of “survival shows” are relatively commonplace in the world of K-pop: groups like KATSEYE and TWICE were formed via reality programs where members competed for a spot in the group. Now, two Japanese trainees are competing to join the “Prelude” lineup, which already features three locked members who were part of the KATSEYE training and selection process.

Lee Jung-joo, The Korea Herald

Blackpink

Two members of the K-pop girl group Blackpink have now notched solo top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Jennie just earned her first top 10 hit with Tame Impala’s “Dracula,” which hit No. 10 on this week’s chart after Jennie added a now-viral verse to the track in February. Group member Rosé earned her top 10 hit with “APT.” featuring Bruno Mars, which hit No. 3 on the chart in February 2025. Blackpink’s Hot 100 peak was No. 13 with the 2020 single “Ice Cream.” However, Jennie and Rosé’s chart placements make Blackpink the fourth all-women band with at least two members that have reached the top 10 — the others are Destiny’s Child, Fifth Harmony and the Go-Go’s.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Nebraska

16 passengers from the cruise ship associated with the high-profile hantavirus outbreak are, at least temporarily, finding safe harbor in Omaha, Nebraska. Of those, one passenger who tested “mildly” positive for hantavirus is being treated at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s biocontainment unit. The others are isolating in UNMC’s National Quarantine Unit, where they’ll each occupy one of the center’s 20 single-occupancy rooms equipped with negative air pressure systems. As a born-and-raised Nebraskan who spent a good chunk of her childhood obsessed with infectious diseases (everyone loved this, trust me), allow me to answer the “why Nebraska?” question: Nebraska’s quarantine unit is the only federally funded site of its kind in the U.S., and the Nebraska Biocontainment is a Level 1 Special Pathogen Treatment Center that treated Ebola patients in 2014 as well as some of the earliest COVID-19 patients in 2020, per Nebraska Medicine.

Sonia A. Rao, Jacey Fortin, and Jin Yu Young, The New York Times

Sports Manga

MLB Players, Inc., OneTeam Partners, manga publisher Viz Media and manga artist Acky Bright are teaming up to launch a sci-fi manga series featuring the likenesses of at least 10 currently active MLB players, including Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr. of the New York Yankees, Juan Soto of the New York Mets and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The manga, “GalaXic Baseball League” debuting on the Viz Manga app on July 2, will take those players into a spacefaring future where baseball is a “high-stakes interplanetary competition.” It’s neither here nor there, but the live-service video game Honkai Star Rail also coincidentally has an ongoing bit where its protagonist refers to themself as a “Galactic Baseballer” (because they whack enemies with a baseball bat).

Bravo Microdrama

Peacock is getting into the microdrama game, announcing that it plans to launch two unscripted Bravo microdramas that will stream in the Peacock app. As Business Insider reported last year, microdrama apps like DramaBox and ReelShort have challenged streamers like Peacock in terms of mobile engagement. They’ve also attracted consumer dollars: per the intelligence firm Appfigures, ReelShort drew approximately $1.2 billion and DramaBox drew $276 million in gross consumer spending in 2025. Peacock’s microdramas feature tie-ins to other Bravo programming like “Southern Charm” and “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” certainly hoping to pull those fandoms into a vertically oriented, 60 to 90 second viewing experience.

Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch

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Walt is on vacation, today’s edition comes from Olivia Walch. She is the author of Sleep Groove: Why Your Body’s Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It, the coauthor of Political Geometry: Rethinking Redistricting in the US with Math, Law, and Everything In Between and the founder of Arcascope.

Happy Monday, everyone! It’s great to be back for another guest newsletter. In the past, I’ve done NUMLOCKs on themes related to books I helped edit (gerrymandering) or wrote (sleep). For this one I decided to flip the script and tell you all a little bit about the fine literature I’ve been reading these days.

Moo, Baa, La La La!

Among children’s books with a barn animal sound in the title, “moo” (the sound a cow makes) makes up about 40% of them, with “quack” (the sound a duck makes) coming in at a respectable 19%. These two beat out the other candidates on the farm in a search which also contained filters for “baa” (sheep), “oink” (pig), “cluck” (chick– no, not a duck, a chicken), “cock-a-doodle” (again, not a duck, buddy–), “gobble” (sigh), “honk” (OK this one, I grant you, does look like a duck), “neigh” (horse), and “bray” (grumpy horse).

___ Eggs and Ham

Red is the most common color in children’s literature, making up 16.8% of all children’s books that have a color in the title. Black (14.3%), blue (12.6%), white (10.4%), and green (9.7%) are next in line, followed by—true shocker here—gold, brown, and rainbow at about 5% each. That’s right. Yellow, the color of the sun, loses to rainbow. Orange at 1.8% I can get; it’s a hard word to pronounce. But yellow?

Amtrak Supreme

Among children’s books with a vehicle in the name, trains are #1, making up 11.8% of titles, with bus (10.6%), car (10.1%), truck (7.9%), and boat (6.2%) trailing after. Incredibly, that dominant performance holds even when you explicitly exclude Thomas the Tank Engine, probably because he’s a Tank Engine, and I didn’t filter for “Tank Engine” in the original search, having forgotten it was a vehicle type. Not every category is so robust to the loss of a single brand: Exclude Magic School Bus, and “bus” drops to 9.4% while “car” vrooms ahead.

Apex Predator

Bears beat dogs, cats, and the combined forces of team rabbit/bunny to be the number one animal in the title of children’s books. Without the alliance of rabbit and bunny, the fourth place role would be filled by dragons. About one in every 321 children’s books has “dragon” in the title, crushing others in the Fantasy Creatures category, including mermaid (1 in 1,411), minotaur (1 in 14,769) and jackalope (1 in 74,900). In other news, I believe I have identified a gap in the market. Please look out for The Yellow Minotaur, my soon-to-be-bestseller in the children’s category, hitting bookstores this fall.

Count With Me

Nearly 1 in 50 children’s books has “one,” “1,” or “first” in the title, which is twice as often as two appears and nearly three times as often as three. But the trend’s far from smooth: 100 appears more often than 11, and 101 appears more often than everything between 14 and 99 except 20 and 50. More proof that publishers are steering authors of children’s books towards titles like the snappy, college-inspired “Dogs 101” instead of the age-appropriate and factually accurate “My 14th Book About Dogs”.

Smooth Starts and Effortless Ends

Nearly 1 in 3 children’s books—a full 30.5%—have an alliterative title. What works, works. Don’t fix it if it’s fine.

All analyses were carried out using the Open Library API (https://openlibrary.org/), a Project of the Internet Archive.

Contraclockwise

Better living through math + circadian rhythms

By Olivia Walch

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.

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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 ·

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By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Kylie Mohr over at High Country News, who wrote Why mycorrhizal fungi networks need more protection. This is what I wrote about it:

There are large, widespread networks of interconnected microbes that are tied together thanks to network-forming mycorrhizal fungi that facilitate their spread and connection. The western part of the United States is pretty rich in these kinds of subterranean ecosystems — it’s home to about five percent of all of the world’s ectomycorrhizal fungi hotspots — which can form symbiotic relationships with trees and shrubs across forests. A new atlas produced by the delightfully named Society for the Protection of Underground Networks estimates that 90 percent of mycorrhizal biodiversity hotspots are not within protected areas, leaving them vulnerable to destruction. With mycorrhizal fungi storing 13 billion tons of carbon, this destruction could have serio…

Read more

I am going on my annual vacation for the next week and a half, so per tradition your morning newsletter will come from a brilliant crew of some of my favorite writers who will be filling in for me in my absence. Thanks as always for reading! Enjoy the guest stars, I certainly will.

Protein Powder

In disastrous news for the himbos, beefcakes, swoles, brawny and hunks, there is a looming shortage of the whey protein concentrate that constitutes the central ingredient in protein powders, as demand for high-protein foods has outpaced the dairy industry’s ability to supply what was once a byproduct. Whey protein concentrates with 80 percent protein powder are seeing spot prices hit $11 per pound, and the protein isolate that comes in at 90 percent protein by weight is well into the $12 or more territory. As producers try to grow their supply of why protein, there’s incidentally an increase in the supply of butterfat, which is another byproduct that is actually in a massive surplus right now. Not helping the situation is everyone from Doritos to Pop Tarts dusting their wares with protein now in order to appeal to the macronutrient-conscious consumer, which is seemingly everyone; reports from one small town indicate a local community organizer has resorted to eating five instead of four dozen eggs every morning to help him get large.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Franklin

Researchers have identified the remains of four members of the doomed Franklin expedition, where the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror attempted to find the Northwest Passage in 1845 and were trapped in the ice. In 1848, the remaining crew of 105 men attempted to walk to the Canadian mainland across the ice, all dying in the process. The new studies — one published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and the other in Polar Record — identified three skeletal remains found on King William Island and one further south by comparing extracted DNA to the DNA of living relatives. So far, the remains of 23 expedition members have been found; with these four identified, the total number positively identified is now six.

Tom Metcalfe, Scientific American

Big

After the recent success of the Godzilla and King Kong updated franchises, it was only a matter of time before producers got wise to the trends and realized that now is the moment to greenlight any kaiju-related content they’ve got on the back burner. Based on the classic 1963 book series that sold 135 million copies across 20 languages and extending the IP past a 2000 animated series, a 2019 animated series and three games, 9 Story Media Group announced that it will produce a new television series of Clifford the Big Red Dog in collaboration with PBS Kids. It’ll consist of 26 new episodes each with an 11-minute story that dive even deeper into the Clifford mythos and lore of the iconic monstrosity for an intended audience aged three to five.

Stephanie Prange, Media Play News

Stuck

The Curiosity rover on Mars ran into a small problem on April 25 when it drilled into a 28.6 pound, 1.5 foot wide, 6 inch thick rock that NASA named Atacama. When the rover attempted to pull out its drill arm, the rock came up with it, having gotten stuck. This is a humiliating moment for any home renovation project, but when the drill in question is on a different planet, it becomes a real problem. The controllers attempted to shake the rock off, tried vibrating the drill, and then on May 1, they succeeded in shaking the rock loose when they tilted and rotated the drill while spinning the bit.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

Museums

A new study from the Government Accountability Office found that based on a survey of 300 museums and 17 site visits, 85 percent of U.S. museums have a backlog of building maintenance or repairs and 77 percent have at least one structural issue that puts the collection at risk. One conclusion of the research was that most of the 16,700 museums in the United States are actually rather small, with limited budget and staff and often serving local or regional historical interests, many of which are often historic homes themselves, making it even more difficult to repair. I have a solution, hear me out: we do 16,700 Met Galas, doing 46 Met Galas a day, all the way down to the Eastern Oakland Nail Clipper Museum or the Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi Historic Childhood House, all of them get a Met Gala.

Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper

Solar

You know that an energy source is really valuable once people start trying to steal it, something that Chile’s solar boom is now having to deal with. A panel weighs 30 kilograms and cost around $60 to $70 apiece, and have become the targets of criminal organizations given the now 11,190 megawatts of solar capacity installed across the sun-drenched country. In 85.7 percent of cases, the thieves go for the copper wire, with the photovoltaic panels pilfered in 54.8 percent of cases.

Antonia Mufarech, Bloomberg

Teach A Man To Fish? Please Don’t.

A new analysis of thousands of recreations fishing surveys finds that people who fish recreationally catch two billion to six billion fish each year, and while many practice catch-and-release, the estimate is that recreational anglers keep between 230,000 and 670,000 metric tons of fish in the United States. To be clear, that’s well above previous estimated, coming in at 20 percent of the total recorded annual consumption of fresh fish. We also know that some fisheries are under stress; a 2019 analysis of 200 lakes in northern Wisconsin found that 40 percent of walleye recreational fisheries were overfished.

Matthew Robertson, The Conversation

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Stephen Follows who is out with a new video all about the casting of Bond. Casting James Bond is a particularly hard task, even for Amazon, and Stephen breaks down why. We also talked rankings, scoring, and who the next Bond might be.

This project is one of the videos from his new YouTube channel, which I recommend checking out. You can read about the video over at his newsletter too, if that’s more your thing.

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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 ·

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Gibraltar

In a somewhat fitting metaphor of Anglo-Continental relations, the British overseas territory of Gibraltar has just been dumping raw sewage from its 40,000 people and businesses directly into the sea at Europa Point because the territory has never had a wastewater treatment plant. While it’s supposed to be protected for wildlife and the European court of justice ruled that the UK was in breach of wastewater law in 2017, Brexit means there has not been sufficient political will to budget a fix. That may change, as a planning application for a wastewater plant was submitted in March, which would cap a 15 million pound investment in the sewer infrastructure.

Rachel Salvidge, The Guardian

Alcatraz

Biologist have revealed that the coyote that swam all the way to Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay pulled off an even more impressive swim than previously thought. Rather than completing a one-mile swim to the island from San Francisco, the coyote actually managed the swim from Angel Island, which is two miles away, based on DNA evidence of its scat. The coyote was believed to have left its home base in search of a mate or new territory; the park service was initially worried about its origin because Alcatraz is now a seabird nesting habitat and a coyote could cause a lot of chaos for the birds.

Janie Har, The Associated Press

Jackson

The movie about Michael Jackson had the exact effect that its backers intended, and streams of Jackson’s catalog are up substantially in the week following the premiere. His solo catalog registered 137.5 million streams in the week of April 24, up 146 percent week over week and demolishing the 53.7 million steams notched the week of Halloween in 2019, which was the high before the movie’s promotional tour got into swing. Streams of The Jackson 5 are up 135 percent week over week to 10.1 million, while streams for The Jacksons are up 57 percent to 4.3 million. The bump is so big that four decades after its release, Thriller came in at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 with 45,000 equivalent album units.

Trevor Anderson, Billboard

A

Last year at Harvard, 66 percent of grades were an A, and 84 percent of grades were either an A or A-. This has set off concerns about grade inflation and some of the bad incentives that might emerge from such a system; for instance, if an A is the expectation, students may feel pressured to avoid courses that have a reputation for challenging them or are outside their comfort zone. The A situation at Harvard has at times reached farcical levels; the Sophia Freund Prize goes to the graduating senior with the highest GPA, and in the past, the prize went to one student or occasionally two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. Some professors want to cap the percentage of flat A’s at 33 percent, while allowing as many A- as needed.

Joshua Greene, The Atlantic

Walk It Back

In the MLB season through Tuesday, 9.5 percent of all plate appearances have resulted in a walk, a sharp rise that is being chalked up to the introduction of robo-umps. The MLB walk rate surged above 10 percent in the 1940s and 1950s before falling back down, and with the exception of a brief bump in the steroid era — listen, you’d rather just walk Barry Bonds at a certain point — has stayed around 8.5 percent since. At the current rate, 2026 would be the season with the second-highest walk rate in 70 years. It’s not all bad; scoring has increased to nine runs per game, up from 8.6 runs in the same stretch of 2025.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

Fertilizer

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz means that many products relying on oil and gas production from the Middle East have had serious supply chain snarls, and one important such product is fertilizer. The price of urea hit nearly $700 per ton in April, up from $455 before the war, and farmers are unprepared for the price hike; the American Farm Bureau Federation found 70 percent of farmers nationwide are unable to afford the fertilizer they need, and one in three farmers in the Midwest didn’t prebook fertilizer for 2026 and are now in trouble. Help isn’t coming anytime soon, for that matter: even in the most optimistic scenario, the Agricultural Risk Policy Center projects that prices will remain high heading into 2027 as it’ll take time to repair damaged production infrastructure. The Center projected urea fertilizer will cost 13 percent more than its pre-crisis price heading into at least 2028, even if the Strait does open imminently.

Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval, Wisconsin Public Radio

Standards

China’s dominance in the electric vehicle business means that worldwide standards will likely be determined by Chinese companies given they’re the ones making the most cars. That phenomenon is already being seen in batteries, as the world moves towards the lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry favored by BYD and CATL over the nickel-based battery chemistry favored by American automakers. The winning charging plug design seems likely to come out of Asia, too; China and Japan are jointly developing the next generation plug, the ChaoJi, which can handle about four times the power of NACS, the Tesla-designed North American charging standard.

Indranil Ghosh, Rest of World

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Lotteries

Societies have long had to deal with the basic phenomenon that lots and lots of people like to gamble a little bit. The long-running issue was that when lotteries were illegal, they were by definition only ran by criminals and were therefore benefiting crime syndicates; states addressed this by making a lottery a function of the government, where it can be tightly regulated and the proceeds directed towards public goods. Now, illegal lotteries are back, and they’re taking market share away from official games. Brazil recently blocked more than 25,000 betting sites, and Costa Rica has seen an illicit lottery game pop up that pays 90 times the original bet on a winning number, beating the 70 times from the official lotto. To compete with the illicit game, the Costa Rican lottery hiked payouts to 209 billion colones (US$406 million), up from 70 percent of revenue to 75 percent of revenue, shedding profit percentage from 30.93 percent in 2019 to 23.27 percent in 2024.

Maya Averbuch and Michael D McDonald, Bloomberg

Pub’s Closed

The British Beer and Pub Association announced that 161 pubs closed in the first quarter of 2026, a significant increase in the rate of closures given that only 336 British pubs closed in the entirety of 2025. Across the country, Wales is the only region that reported an increase in the number of pubs, while Scotland was responsible for a disproportionate 41 closures in Q1.

Tabby Wilson, BBC News

Archives

The colossal data center buildout crucial to tech titans’ investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure has sent prices for solid state drives and other storage spiraling upwards, and it’s having unintended effects across other sectors that rely on consistent access to affordable memory and storage. The Internet Archive, which operates web archiving stalwart Wayback Machine, is feeling the pinch, as their preferred 28 to 30 terabyte drives are either completely unavailable or very expensive. The projects gather 100 terabytes of new material every day, and have 210 petabytes of material archived, so the cost of storage is a real concern. The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other projects, has to maintain its data center, and has had to get clever about how it handles hardware.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Similes

A new analysis of 200,000 similes — phrases like “it’s as hot as the sun” or “I’m as ravenous as one of the cocaine hippos” — drawn from popular fiction finds that for a few adjectives, there are some pretty clear and obvious go-tos. For instance, “as dry as ____” is written with either “bone,” “desert” or “dust” in 43 percent of all usage. When someone is strong, they’re an ox; when something is empty, it’s as empty as a drum; things are as delicate as lace and as small as an ant.

Russell Samora, The Pudding

Stomach

For the first time since the eventful 2020, the number of metabolic and bariatric surgery procedures in the United States has dipped below 200,000, as GLP-1 medications either avert or delay the need for such procedures. From 2023 to 2024, there was more than a 20 percent decline in bariatric surgeries following several steady years of growth. Even within the bariatric surgeries that are happening, the once dominant sleeve gastrectomy had dropped from 64 percent to 58 percent of procedures.

Roger Kissin, American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery

Crannog

Archaeologists examined an artificial stone-built island in Loch Bhorgastail on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, and found a large timber platform hidden underneath the stones. There are hundreds of such small artificial islands called crannogs all across Scotland, and were mainly built between the Iron Age and the post-medieval period. Some of them, like this 5,000 year old structure, may date to the Neolithic, which was between 3800 and 3300 BC. This one featured a circular wooden platform 23 meters across topped with brushwood; 2,000 years after it was first constructed, another layer of brushwood and stone was added, and then another was added 1,000 years later.

University of Southampton

Steam Machine

Valve, a company famous for its ability to ship promised products in a timely fashion, is coming out with a long-awaited console called the Steam Machine. They are unfortunately trying to launch this tech product into a market where semiconductors are hard to come by, so it has been entirely unclear when this thing is going to hit shelves. Avid Valve watchers have resorted to analyzing the shipping data for containers that Valve is getting from China to ports in Los Angeles and Tacoma. Here’s the rub: Valve has had seven shipments since April 23rd with an average weight of 12,600 kilograms each. This is interesting: for the past few years, as Valve released its handheld console, the boxes it gets from China held up to 42 packages with a total gross weight of 14,500 kilograms. This would imply these seven new shipments hold a different product than what Valve has been getting typically. Perhaps the Steam Machine is on American soil? Or, dare I say, Half Life: 3?

Sean Hollister, The Verge

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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 ·

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Samsung

Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung who died in October 2020, left behind a 26 trillion won fortune that included shares, property, and art collections. South Korea assesses a 50 percent inheritance tax rate, and maintaining control of the company was of paramount importance to the family. This was pretty closely watched: Samsung is the largest chaebol in the country, a massive employer and a critical part of the nation’s economy, so a succession crisis or a loss of control could have consequential reverberations for the politics and economy of the entire nation. The tax bill was paid in six installments over the past five years, coming in at 12 trillion won (US$8 billion), the largest settlement in South Korea’s history.

Osmund Chia, BBC News

Whatnot

Sales via livestream apps are picking up in the United States, fueled largely by Whatnot, which has become the second-most downloaded shopping app in Apple’s App Store, beating out Amazon and eBay. Livestream sales account for about five percent of the ecommerce market in the United States, well under the 60 percent seen in China. Whatnot sellers are now creating over five million listings a day, and last year, the app facilitated $8 billion in sales. Buyers are also spending a ton of time on the app: 46 minutes on Whatnot for the average user in the first quarter of 2026. By comparison, the average YouTube user spent 83 minutes on that app, and those videos aren’t just people pushing stuff to buy.

Alicia Tang, Bloomberg

Wrigley View

The Chicago Cubs have been locked in litigation against a nearby restaurant called Wrigley View Rooftop, which sells access to stands on its roof with a pretty solid view of the field where the Cubs play. It’s a pretty interesting legal fight; the Cubs sued in 2024 alleging unjust enrichment and that the restaurant misappropriated the team’s property rights, while Wrigley View Rooftop alleges that the Cubs don’t own the building and the restaurant has a legal right to conduct business on its rooftop as it sees fit. And even if the Cubs do have an established property right in the form of a live Cubs game product, Wrigley View Rooftop alleges that the team failed to protect that right by putting Wrigley Field in the middle of a city infamous for very tall skyscrapers. Before 2024, the venue and the Cubs had a deal — 17 percent of revenue from out of stadium rooftop seats and 11 percent of billboard revenue to the Cubs — but when the deal ended the team told the venue it could not renew. Naturally, a 1938 ruling of Pittsburgh Athletic Co. v. KQV Broadcasting Co. has come into play here, because this of course is not the first time something like this has happened in baseball in America.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Cone Collection

The forestry industry employs a group of professionals often called “pinecone cowboys” who scale tall trees in order harvest pinecones from the top, which are the cones likeliest to have pollinated by other trees. Those seeds are then used to replant forests, sustain tree farms and recover after fires. The profession first emerged in 1933 with a division of the Civilian Conservation Corps that collected enough cones to plant over three billion trees by 1942 , which was ultimately important during the postwar housing boom. Today, as a result of repeated budget cuts and reductions in personnel, the U.S. is well behind the 120 million annual seedling goal proscribed in the REPLANT Act; the Forest Service produces only 30 million to 50 million seedlings a year, and given that it takes about 220 seedlings to reforest a burned acre of forest, the agency is only meeting six percent of its post-wildfire planting needs annually.

Dillon Osleger, High Country News

Star Wars

Nielsen released data on how people are actually watching Star Wars these days and found that 44.2 percent of view time is from the live-action movies. This is a somewhat surprising result, given just how much of Star Wars there is in animation (16.8 percent of view time) and live action series (38.9 percent). Over the course of 2025, people watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars content. A year ago on May the Fourth, the newly-released Andor led in terms of most-streamed. It was followed by Star Wars: A New Hope and then, to my shock, the third-most watched Star Wars thing was none other than Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. For those unfamiliar, Star Wars was the side project of toy impresario George Lucas, you know, the THX-1138 and Red Tails guy.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Sea Levels

A new study published in Nature Sustainability argues that at this point, southern Louisiana will face three to seven meters of sea level rise as a result of warming global temperatures, which will result in the loss of three quarters of its remaining wetlands and push the shoreline as much as 100 kilometers inland. This is not all forecast; since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles to coastal erosion and at current rates, will lose another 3,000 square miles over the next 50 years. At that point, New Orleans, which is home to 360,000 people, might only be able to exist with a seawall, substantially upgraded levees and at some point may not be viable.

Oliver Milman, The Guardian

Tenet

New research published in the journal Futures found that, based on survey data, Americans care significantly more about future generations than is generally believed. The survey asked how many future generations society should keep in mind when making collective decisions, and how far into the future do people still deserve “moral concern.” With a generation defined at 25 years, the average respondent said that society should consider 17 generations ahead when making decisions. Whether or not that’s an exact figure is, granted, a bit abstract, but what makes it interesting is that the average respondent assumed the average American would say 13 generations, indicating that people are at least somewhat more future-conscious than we assume them to be.

Kyle Fiore Law and Stylianos Syropoulos, The Conversation

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

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Welcome back!

Devil Works Hard

The Devil Wears Prada 2 has made $77 million domestically and then another $156.6 million abroad, good for a $233.6 million opening. The movie is in the fantasy genre and takes place in a magical world in which magazines are still lucrative. Besides Prada, the box office was mostly composed of the other three hits from this year — Michael, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Project Hail Mary — holding the next top places. A politically inscrutable animated version of Animal Farm from Angel Studios opened to a disappointing $3.3 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Snooker

Today, a champion will be crowned for world snooker at the Crucible Theater in the United Kingdom after a tournament that has seen 32 players narrow to just two. The sport — which resembles billiards, up to a point and was developed by British army officers in India in the 1870s — is indeed English, though the center of gravity has shifted decisively to Asia. Fewer than 20,000 people play snooker regularly in England, and television viewership of the World Championship is a quarter of what it was three decades ago; the sport has 350 million fans in East Asia, and China alone fielded 11 of the final 32 players at Sheffield this year. China is home to 300,000 snooker clubs, while the UK is down to around 700.

Andrew Dickson, Bloomberg

Magnetotelluric

After 20 years, the Magnetotelluric Array project has released its final map and model in Reviews of Geophysics; the results from this analysis of data from 1,800 temporary stations across the United States has spawned imitators around the world. One discovery of the research is a fragment of Pangaea underneath the Appalachian Mountains created 200 million years ago known as the Piedmont Resistor. The project was operated on the cheap — just $20 million, started as a side project of the U.S. Array and then eventually brought to the finish line by USGS. It will have implications for the preparation against solar storms as the Resistor amplifies threats to power grids, as well as, I must assume, future “Bioshock” games as a lost underground American continent called the Resistor is just too good to pass up on as a setting.

Paul Voosen, Science

Timmy

A humpback whale first spotted in March in the Baltic Sea has been rescued from certain death. Efforts to save the 26,000 pound whale, named Timmy, were elaborate, and after four failed attempts to coax Timmy into a water-filled barge, the fifth attempt finally worked. Humpback whales generally don’t go into the Baltic Sea, and when they do, they are often stranded and die due to their dismay upon realizing that there’s a Denmark in the way of their exit, and they can’t figure out how to exit through a busy shipping lane.

Jenny Gross, The New York Times

The Spice Must Flow

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz has upended the global trade for saffron, a very expensive and important culinary spice. Iran produces over 90 percent of the world’s saffron in the fields of Khorasan, and traders in Kashmir have relied on Iranian imports to supplement supply, though now much of that spice is snarled in ports in the Persian Gulf. It coincides with a year in which Kashmir’s own crop has hit rock bottom, with poor weather conditions resulting in an autumn yield that is only 20 percent of its normal output. Kashmir is responsible for under 1 percent of global supply by volume, but it’s got the highest concentrations of crocin, the iconic saffron pigment; its crop tends to come in at 8.72 percent crocin concentration and thus command top prices, compared to the 6.82 percent concentration in the Iranian supply.

Kamran Yousuf, Foreign Policy

WNBA

The estimated valuation of the average WNBA team is now $427 million, up 59 percent year over year and up 345 percent compared to 2024, thanks to surging popularity, more valuable television deals that begin in 2026, a fresh CBA that guarantees labor peace for the foreseeable future and an on-court product that is commanding more interest than ever. All told, the 13 WNBA teams that played in 2025 are worth a collective $5.55 billion. The league also has the best value-to-revenue multiple in sports at 13.6x, narrowly beating the NBA’s 13.5x.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Agri-drone

The global market for agricultural drones is expected to reach $4.62 billion this year and rise to $9.65 billion by 2032. The drones solve an agricultural labor crunch and are used to spray pesticides and herbicides. The biggest player in the field globally is China’s DJI, which has an 85 percent market share in the U.S. and Europe; Chinese companies in general command 95 percent of this market. That said, recent bans in the United States are forcing buyers to look for new sources, and the Turkish manufacturer Baibars Mechatronics Aviation is aiming to capitalize, looking to triple sales to $100 million by 2029. It’s seen sales in Europe rise 60 percent year over year, and while its agricultural, firefighting, and logistics drones run about 25 percent more expensive than the comparable Chinese product, Turkey’s membership in NATO and stronger ties to Europe and the United States may give Baibars Mechatronics Aviation an edge.

Sinan Tavsan, Nikkei Asia

Correction: The film is Animal Farm, not Animal House.

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

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows who is out with a new video all about the casting of Bond. Casting James Bond is a particularly hard task, even for Amazon, and Stephen breaks down why. We also talked rankings, scoring, and who the next Bond might be.

Stephen and I are pals, we were both obsessed with data and the movies at around the same time, and his newsletter is one of my favorite reads. This project is one of the videos from his new YouTube channel, which I recommend checking out. You can read about the video over at his newsletter too, if that’s more your thing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, how’s it going, man? It’s good to see you.

Thanks. Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

It is always, always good to catch up. You are one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite collaborators. Let’s talk a little bit about James Bond. You were out recently with a fascinating video all about who the next James Bond will be. I really just love how you framed this question and how you attacked it. So do you want to talk about why this is a very strange moment in the history of Bond and why this pick is pretty, pretty important?

I think that the interesting thing is that I’m not coming from the point of view of who should Bond, be in a subjective sense. I’m not sitting there telling you who I think. In fact, I won’t tell you who, but some of the people that come up in the process I did are not the people I would want to watch as a consumer.

But what I can do is have a look at the problem that Amazon faces and think about if I were against my own, against my wishes, strapped to the chair and told to figure this out, how would I go about it? And what is in the smoking rooms that Amazon has, I’m sure in the back rooms, where the three people that matter are making the decision, how are they doing this?

Bond is such a fascinating problem because it’s a one-shot deal, as in for the next 10, 15 years, you have one Bond. Changing them all the time wouldn’t be a good idea. No one would want that. You also need to have a certain set of requirements, which we can talk about in a minute. Some are really hard, but most of them have a level of softness to them. In the sense that you could choose to make anything you want, but then there’s this very established, very conservative audience who will not like changes. So how do you create something new, fresh, different and perhaps aligned with where you want to be as creatives, at the same time, delivering the exact same thing that people already expect without them telling you that it’s tired or cliched or old.

When you pick it apart and think about it analytically, it pulls on most elements of the industry, IP, casting, creativity, human beings, which is often factored in last. So I very much enjoy trying to think about, oh my God, how would I even begin?

I love the presentation of the problem because you had this really fascinating stat in the video that you alluded to just a moment ago, which is that the Bond audience is lowecase-c “conservative” in no small part because they are the oldest audience of any major franchise. But it presents a challenge in a way that you can’t just hire the first TikToker who might be able to play a superhero.

Yeah, and it’s a challenge in a number of ways because not only is there a larger body of work, meaning that there are over 25 films where people have seen a certain thing and so they will draw conclusions from that, but also because it’s happened over such a long period of time, people have drawn their own conclusions from their childhood and from their adulthood and things like that. And because the audience themselves are old, now, I wouldn’t for a second say that you or I are old, Walt, but these young kids today are willing to have new ideas that I do not count as old. As humans age, we tend to get more set in our ways. And also with movies and things like that, when it comes back to, we remember the childhood that we had and we maybe enjoyed the movies as a kid, we don’t wanna see anything deviate from that pattern.

Because they’re physically old, because the franchise is old and because the franchise has twice the body of work that Fast and the Furious has, you actually end up with a very calcified impression of who this should be and what it should be. And you don’t have as much room to play with. You can’t really reinvent it.

The analysis is super fun. Before we talk, I would encourage everyone to watch it. I don’t really think that we’re gonna spoil too much from it, honestly, in our conversation here.

Go for it, it’s about a process. Also, the videos are for fun, I don’t think you can spoil it.

Your approach is really exciting to watch happen in real time. I’ll let you describe what the various different boxes that had to be checked or criteria that had to be addressed were. But you basically take, here’s every single person on IMDb and then bit by bit, reduce it down to a shockingly manageable number.

Yeah, you could, as a casting director, meet everyone who was a viable candidate. And what I mean by that is you can already work out who you invite in the room. And if they don’t turn up to your room, they’ve already filtered themselves out. So, actually you can meet them. Now, does that help? I don’t know.

Let’s say that we were making a brand new film that was low budget and you needed an action star, it would have a lot more to do with who’s a good actor, who’s available, and you could probably have tens of thousands of people as candidates. Bond isn’t like that because some of the criteria is involving fame and notoriety.

I remember I did a study about 10 years ago on the actors’ profiles that were publicly available in the UK, people put on mostly Spotlight, but there were other sites as well, where people would say, look, this is my professional CV. And they put their playing age, how old they think that they can play. And it’s usually about 10 years, right? And obviously it’s exactly what you think. The youngest people skew slightly older. As soon as you get to your mid-twenties, they’re honest. And then from then onwards, everyone thinks they can play someone 10 years younger than themselves. You should look at the graphs, they’re really fun.

But what’s interesting is I found that if you wanted to pick a female role that was like 26 or something, half of all the working actresses thought they could play that role. So you end up with an insurmountable number of people.

With Bond, it’s not like that. The criteria that I created with Bond was that I tried to intuit what made sense. So first of all, the producers have said that the character is male. The previous producers have said that, and also the public in large numbers have said they really wanted to be male.

So without putting on a subjective judgment, I’ve said, okay, it’s male. So that halves the pool already. You’ve definitely got an age criteria. They have to be an adult, so you’re gonna put a low end on there. You’re also gonna put a high end because you don’t want them running around being very old because it might be hard for them to do the action stunts. They may not look convincing. Let’s say you’ve got a 15-year time horizon, which is what Daniel Craig looked at. I recently watched some of the old Roger Moore films, and he looks old in them, and he’s running around with younger women. It was weird then, and it was wrong then. It’s weirder and wronger now. And so that gives you a narrow time horizon.

Then finally, you definitely want someone who is a professional actor. They have to have been on set. You’re giving them the keys to one of the most valuable franchises in the world. I mean, Amazon paid a billion dollars for this, right? So you need someone who you can trust, who’s got the acting chops, who’s got the experience, and know they’re a professional actor. That cuts it down to about under 500 people straight away in the world that could do that.

There’s one more criteria, which is slightly more subjective, but I’ve taken their lead, which is that the character of Bond is British and is perhaps the definition of British suave. However, my personal opinion as a consumer is I don’t care where they’re from. Just convince me on screen, and I’m sold. However, there is a general consensus that they should probably be British or Irish, and so I included that in the criteria, which knocks out some of the Jacob Elordi people, or Glen Powell or someone like that.

But without that criteria, you’re under 500 people. Maybe 50 of them don’t want the job for various reasons. So could you, as a casting director, meet that many people? Yeah, probably. I mean, certainly you don’t have to, because you can watch their previous films and decide that they’re not a convincing actor or whatever it might be. Now you’re down to a very small number, and we haven’t even put any criteria about who they are. Are they attractive? Do they sell this? Do they sell that? This is just three or four criteria.

Yeah, again, I would encourage folks to watch the video, because it is a deeply, deeply fun approach that just like you take it very step-by-step. I think all of the assumptions that you make are done with the appropriate amount of generosity, done subjectively to the effect of “Listen, this is a product that they need to market.”

Again, I don’t think I agree with their decision that they couldn’t, say, take an Australian for the role, but then again Lazenby was Lazenby. End of the day, they’re called, and they get their list of who to call. But the video’s outstanding. Do you wanna talk a little bit about where you think some of this is gonna go? Maybe one of your favorite under-discussed Bonds?

We’ve got four criteria that I just mentioned there. So you’re looking for a man who’s British, British adjacent, in their 30s, who’s a working professional with some films behind them. That takes you down. Now you’re starting to do the artistic work of curation. Do you want someone attractive? Do you want them edgy? Do you want them to look unusual? Are they a character actor? Do we think of them as a convincing, charismatic person? Is Bond supposed to be like that?

If you look at the description of the character of Jack Reacher in the books, and then you look at Tom Cruise, they are not the same. If you look in Argo, at the end, there’s all these photos at the end of Argo, of the real person that person was portraying and the actor. And they are dead ringers, except for Ben Affleck.

And so you can see where power has changed. There’s physicality, there’s an intangible charisma and things like that. There’s also been quite hot button effort topics like race, for example. I mean, under half the population who was surveyed by the YouGov poll seem to be bothered whether Bond is white or not. Even the comments on my video show that there are people who do die on that hill. My personal opinion, that’s very disappointing and sad to see that in the world.

What’s the quote from Samuel Goldwyn from MGM? If you want to send a message, use Western Union.

With respect, I think that the organization that developed the concept of Amazon Basics is going to make a specific decision here, whether I agree with it or not. So your point is taken.

I remember when 12 Years a Slave was released in Italy, Brad Pitt was the person on the poster. Now that is because the belief is, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but black faces don’t sell as many tickets in Italy. And certainly people have said similar things about China. I’m not here to say that’s true or not. I’m here to say that those are the kinds of decisions that we hopefully, as humans, don’t have to make in our lives, but Amazon as an organization needs to consider. Anyway, so there’s that stuff.

There’s also the right amount of famous. They don’t want someone who’s more powerful than Amazon or Bond, because they’ve got to negotiate with them. They’re anointing this person, and then they want to control them. It’s not like the Pope where they anoint him and he’s omnipotent. It’s the opposite. They want to appoint a Pope and then control him like a puppet Pope. And puppet Pope’s not a thing. So that’s really, really tricky.

So I went through all this criteria and I created a scoring system that looked at all these different things. And let’s be honest, at this point, we’re definitely in the “isn’t this fun??” category. A real casting director does so much more than this. I can only measure what I can see. A lot of them are proxies for things. At the end of the day, it would take you about 10 seconds if you were a professional to watch someone acting and be like, yes, or no, maybe less, right? What’s the Malcolm Gladwell book? Blink. Almost all these experts, they just know because of their experience and data can’t even begin to touch that.

However, it doesn’t mean we can’t rank people. The current leading favorite, according to the bookies, is Callum Turner. Callum Turner, at the point I was writing it, he was like one to two, meaning that the general public and the betting companies believe that the news has leaked, it is him. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but that was what the prediction markets reflect, that the news has leaked. Now, it hasn’t been announced and there was an opportunity last week before last at CinemaCon and they didn’t take that. So who knows?

But I found him, he ranked 333rd out of about 500 people for me. He did not rank highly, partly because I wasn’t measuring the fact that he looks incredible. I mean, you look at him and you’re like, “Yeah, okay, I can see that.” But also they’re not measuring his acting ability and things like that. I put a pretty heavy age multiplier on it because I think age is really important. I think that if you get someone young enough to be convincing now, but you can live with them for the next 15, 20 years, that’s the best financial decision Amazon can make. So I decided that as you get closer and closer to 40 and 50, when the film would come out, the next film, I wanted to punish that more heavily because I think that’s a short-term goal and I don’t think Amazon makes short-term plays.

So that indexed a lot of the younger people. The person that came up best for me on my data was a 31-year-old called Tom Glynn Carney, who I recognised sort of, but I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of the lineup necessarily.

I know this dude from House of the Dragon, right?

Yes, I haven’t seen that, so that’s why.

I was thinking he’s excellent in it, yeah.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m very good to hear. He came up very well and has got all of the bits on paper that I could measure and was very much the Broccoli-era Bond.

The producers of the original Bond, they sold it to Amazon. I know Amazon wants to do a whole different universe, the way that Disney changed Star Wars. They got rid of the extended universe and the old canon and created all these TV shows and adventure parks and stuff that weren’t there before. Maybe Amazon wants to do the same with a thousand TV series, spin-offs and adventure park. I don’t know. I think he’s good enough and experienced enough to be hired and be sold. I think he’s small enough and not famous enough that they can control him. I think it’d be great for him.

And Fionn Whitehead was very good. So was Joseph Quinn. was pretty impressed with Nabhaan Rizwan. He was fourth on my list, but he was the one I was most excited by. But there were others in there like Aaron Taylor Johnson, who would just be amazing, but a real tricky bet, very famous. It’s just what do you want your trouble to be? Do you want your trouble being selling this person in? Do you want your trouble being that they break the canon? Do you want their trouble to be that they’ve got more control than you want it to be? It depends what Amazon is in the mood for.

These are exciting problems and I look forward to how they prioritize the solution to them, I suppose.

And we don’t know the other half of this, right? Because let’s say that they have somebody in mind. All the data is great, they’ve watched all the person’s films and they’re like, they’re great. They walk in a room and they get the sense that they’re mad… I have met a lot of professional actors in my life and I can tell you, they over-index towards slightly mad. I don’t mind. As someone who’s neurodivergent, I do not mind being away from the mean, but I can tell you some actors are genuinely like, “Oh, I do not want to be in an elevator with you.” if they got that sense, they might be like, thanks for coming in. And then they turn to each other and say, “We are not putting that person behind the wheel”

“We’re not giving him a Walther PPK, I’ll tell you that much.”

There we go. That’s it. We’re not giving him our golden gun. We can’t ever measure that. We can’t ever know that. And as I said, I’m not gonna name any names, but I have worked with various people who I can see their public profile is slightly different to how they are in person. And if I was in charge of that and hiring them, I wouldn’t do that because of operational concerns, business continuity, however bland we want to put it.

So who knows?

I appreciate the attempt to try to dive into this Bond question just because it is such a fun one. And genuinely, is one of those once in a generation questions. You don’t get to do this speculation that often and we’re in that rare moment. So I would definitely encourage folks to check out the video.

Do you want to take a step back real quick and talk a little bit about where folks can find you and what irons in the fire you got right now? Because again, I really dig reading and watching you.

Well, I’ll give you a choose your own adventure. If you, there’s two options here. If you like your film stats done a bit dryly and a bit straightforward with a bit of pith and a bit of sass, but fundamentally just the facts, then go to stephenfollows.com. I publish two or three times a week. I study the film industry, both what’s on screen, but also behind the scenes. And I try to do a mix of content for data nerds, filmmakers, film fans. That might be everything from where films are made, how often Harvey Weinstein was thanked in the credits of the Oscars and the speeches of the Oscars, how long movies are, anything like this.

If you are just more wanting a bit of a journey, a bit of a mad cap journey through the film data world, then my new YouTube channel, The Film Data Scientist, is probably where to go. I promise you the math is just as rigorous, but it’s slightly more anarchic. And I make it with a good friend of mine called Ben, and we try and encourage each other to be as stupid as possible while keeping to the facts. And so yeah, subscribe there if you want to enjoy rather than think.

Amazing, all right. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, thanks for having me

Edited by Crystal Wang

Read more

Have a great weekend! Thanks for reading.

Oilers

The Edmonton Oilers have managed to build what is considered the single largest 50/50 raffle in pro sports, with the contest selling C$472 million (US $350 million) in tickets since 2001, half of which has gone to prizes for residents in Alberta and the other half (after expenses) to funding the foundation. That “after expenses” bit is slightly germane here — the C$107 million paid to Win50, a company incidentally owned by the Edmonton ownership group, for organizing the raffle is a conspicuously large expense compared to other such events — but still, the numbers are massive compared to other contests across the NHL.

Justin Birnbaum and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

DAU

Meta reported that its figure for daily active users across their suite of social media products — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — dropped by 20 million this past quarter compared to the previous three months. The company chalked that up to Iran and Russia, though given the extent to which the company obfuscates information about what users are using which product and where, it’s up to the reader to decide how much they trust that statement.

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge

Pod Slop

Many companies are attempting to flood audio platforms with AI-generated files, and the podcast ecosystem has been a substantial target. Over the past nine days, the Podcast Index observed 10,871 new podcast feeds created. Of those, its analysis indicated that 4,243 of them, or 39 percent, may have been AI generated. One can only imagine the situation in newsletters; we here at Numlock appreciate your support for 100 percent AI-free words; all typos are either handcrafted or downright intentional, batch made by some guy in Queens, New York who got into this business for the numbers, not the grammar.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Eat Incredibly Fresh

Subway has pulled off a shocking realignment over the past decade, a move which most recently culminated in the net closure of 729 restaurants in 2025. At the end of last year, the sandwich artist collective finished with 18,773 units, down from over 27,000 stores in 2015. From 2016 to 2025, Subway closed a net total of 8,345 restaurants. For perspective, a restaurant chain with 8,345 locations would be one of the top five biggest chains in America.

Ben Coley, QSR Magazine

Our Mother Has Been Absent Ever Since We Founded Rome

A new study out of Italy’s Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of Lazio and Tuscany analyzed genetic material collected from 748 wolves found in Italy from 2020 to 2024, as well as DNA from 26 wolves collected between 1993 and 2003. The study found that 47 percent of those wolves were wolf-dog hybrids, some of which were the offspring of hybridization attempts from generations ago, but plenty of which were recent. Wolves play a complicated role in Italian society — alarmist argue that they seduce Italy’s many wooden puppet sons into a life of sin, while advocates argue that their milk aids leaders in augury — but the genetic degradation of their wild population could have long-term ramifications.

Gennaro Tomma, bioGraphic

Hot 100

A new analysis of songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 from 2021 to 2025 argues that the temperament of songs topping the charts have changed. According to the analysis, lyrical cynicism has increased from being seen in 59 percent of charting songs to 70 percent, anger is up from 26 percent to 36 percent, nostalgia is up from 23 percent to 33 percent, production is slower and songs are shorter. To which I say: we get it, country is now mainstream and charting, what else?

Gary Trust, Billboard

Tungsten Arm O’Doyle III

Munetaka Murakami of the Chicago White Sox is good at two things: striking out and hitting home runs, and he is good at very little in between. The rookie has already hit 12 home runs this season, tied with Aaron Judge, and is on pace for 63 homers through the first month of play. That said, he’s striking out like mad, with 46 strikeouts over the period and just 14 singles, with no double or triples. He is the first player since at least 1900 to hit 10 homers before hitting literally any other extra-base hit to begin his career. Fully 61 percent of base appearances end in a strikeout, a walk, or a home run; nobody in the history of baseball has been above 58.8 in a season.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

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The Devil

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is expecting a $75 million to $80 million opening weekend in North America, with some analysts expecting ticket sales to come in closer to $90 million to $100 million. With another $100 million internationally, that would be a solid global opening for a movie that cost $100 million to make, and would put it on pace to out-gross the original’s already pretty impressive theatrical run in just a few weeks. Clearly, the world is clamoring for one thing: cash-grabbing sequels to movies that scored Academy Award nominations for Meryl Streep. All your lingering questions will be answered in Doubt: Part Two. Mark you calendar for Silkwood: Half-Life and One True Thing Two: A Second True Thing. Audiences would line up around the block for a lega-sequel of Out of Africa that ignores all the problematic elements of the first film. Whoever wins, we lose in Kramer vs. Kramer: Requiem. The Iron Lady is about to get a visit from Nick Fury if you catch my drift. And speaking of drifting if you loved Julie & Julia, well you better buckle up for 2 Julie 2 Julia, Julie & Julia: Tokyo Drift, The Julie and the Julia, Jules 5, Julie & Julia 6, Julia 7, The Fate of the Julia, J9: The Julia Saga, Julie & Julia Presents: Jacques & Pépin, Julia X and of course Julia: Forever.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Toto

Japanese manufacturer Toto is best known as the producer of toilets and bathtubs, but decades in the ceramics business have teed it up perfectly for a moment in which ceramics have become critical components in semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Yes, welcome to another edition of the best business story of 2026, where the entire global supply chain for AI chips is dependent on a Japanese company that got into the manufacturing of a critical ingredient basically accidentally. Toto expects profits from its advanced ceramic division to jump 32 percent to 27 billion yen (US$169 million) in the fiscal year ending March, which means that the advanced ceramics business is now responsible for 55 percent of its operating profits, outstripping its toilets and tubs.

Rika Kimura, Nikkei Asia

Visionary

Since 1956, peace in Europe has been largely sustained by productive forms of great power competition that can let the people of the continent blow off their nationalistic steam in a productive or at least peaceful manner — like inter-league soccer, Formula 1 racing and of course the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Still, one international competition stands well above the rest: the Eurovision Song Contest, which since 1956 has attracted millions of fans while also simultaneously diverting the continent’s imagination away from developing innovations like “phosgene gas” and towards pursuits such as “inventing ABBA.” A new analysis of the 1,763 songs submitted across 51 countries from 1956 through 2024 found distinct evolutions in the themes and attributes of the submissions. The study found that the music has been getting steadily less nostalgic, more rebellious, less acoustic and more decisively in the genre of pop rather than rock.

Luis A. Nunes Amaral, Arthur Capozzi, and Dirk Helbing, Royal Society Open Science

Penguins

A new study published in The Anatomical Record purports to have found the muscle that causes penguins to waddle. The research looked at the m. flexor cruris medialis, which was known to be involved in bending the knee but has been otherwise debated for over 100 years. The study is based on an autopsy of one male (16 years old, 4.48 kg) and one female (36 years old, 3.16 kg) macaroni penguin donated from SeaWorld San Diego. Researchers found a part of the m. flexor cruris medialis that was actually attached to a different section of the tibiotarsus than previously thought, and while previous research suggested it was just part of the larger muscle, the new study finds it to be anatomically distinct, suggesting the name m. adductor tibialis.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Oligarchs

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has had one incidental positive impact for Kyiv: the state that once struggled mightily with corruption as a result of enormously wealthy oligarchs has now shed some of those tycoons. It is a somewhat circuitous path towards a 2019 promise from then-candidate Volodymyr Zelensky who took office opposing the “oligarchization” of politics. The domestic political rivalries that fueled oligarch-controlled media companies gave way to an external fight, and several of the more pro-Kremlin oligarchs — Viktor Medvedchuk, Igot Abramovich and Vadym Stolar — have either left for Russia or the French Riviera. Those that remained loyal have either rebranded as pro-Western philanthropists or began to play ball with the government. The very structural assets and heavy industries that fueled the oligarch’s wealth and gave them outsized power came under attack from the Russians; Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine, saw his fortune cut in half to $7 billion after the invasion.

Paul Hockenos, Foreign Policy

Canada

Canadian liquor brands have enjoyed a boom in local consumption after several provincial liquor authorities cut the sales of American imports after repeated persistent insults from the highest levels of power in charge of their ally and neighbor. The Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation reported that sales of spirits from the province are up 14.5 percent over the past year, with Cape Breton’s Blue Lobster Vodka being a particular breakout hit. When the Liquor Control Board of Ontario — one of the biggest purchasers of alcoholic beverages in the world, supplying booze to 16 million people in the same province where the Toronto Maple Leafs play — removed U.S. products from sale, that cut off $705 million annual sales in U.S. spirits. The LCBO has since reported a 52 percent increase in sales of wine from Ontario-grown grapes and 94 percent increase for sales of deluxe Canadian whisky.

Evan Rail, VinePair

Tech

While American technology giants boast about shrinking their workforces, Chinese tech giants are doing the same, but are keeping it quiet. Last year, Alibaba cut headcount by 34 percent, Baidu’s employee count dropped seven percent and BYD cut 10 percent of their workforce, information only known because the companies disclosed it in annual reports at the end of March. While Silicon Valley talks about their layoffs loud enough for Wall Street to hear, China’s tech plays it close to the vest, in no small part because the layoffs run counter to a Beijing policy of keeping the urban unemployment rate below 5.5 percent through 2030, and adding 12 million urban jobs in the process.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

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The Story of Everest

Mountaineers and “icefall doctors” have successfully cleared a route past a massive piece of ice that had been preventing them from reaching Camp 1, and they have already fixed ropes up to Camp 2, which lies 6,400 to 6,500 meters high. The 30-meter-high serac has still pushed preparations weeks behind schedule for a season in which 425 climbers have permits to summit the mountain; climbers will move out of Base Camp starting tomorrow. Clearing a path up Everest is a major annual endeavor, but an increasingly economically crucial one; the Department of Tourism said the climbing season will generate 924,222,675 Nepalese Rupees (US$6,114,955) in government revenue from the permits.

Phanindra Dahal and Olivia Ireland, BBC News

Fire Sale

Oregonians who buy nicotine pouches are paying a 65 cent tax on each tin because the state had a shockingly bad fire season in 2024 and was looking for a way to stash some money away for the next one. Wildfires burned 1.9 million acres in Oregon that year, costing the state $350 million in firefighting expenses alone; it had budgeted just $10 million. This has become a theme across the West as supercharged wildfire seasons overwhelm budgets that were at one point entirely sufficient. Idaho has $38 million budgeted, but a bad year could run them double that. Montana saw that the $40 million special account of 2008 was woefully below what may be needed; the legislature upped that to $152 million in 2023.

Kylie Mohr, High Country News

Mesonet

The 2,500 airports in America with weather stations constitute the backbone of the weather data network that fuels forecasts across the country, but there are lots of people who live more than 20 miles from an airport and therefore tend to get lower-quality weather forecasts than the rest of us. To fill in the gap, a network of 3,000 “mesonet” stations across 38 states constitute an intermediate network that can cover areas with inadequate weather monitoring stations. A new mesonet in Wisconsin, for instance, involved the installation of 78 new stations on three-meter tripods in open areas, and their installation is already resulting in NWS flash flood warnings in regions that might otherwise not have gotten an early warning due to reduced coverage.

Chris Vagasky, The Conversation

Cocaine Hippos

Breaking news on the Pablo Escobar invasive hippopotamus front; the son of an Indian billionaire has offered to buy them. For those inexplicably out of the loop on the most important story in the world, drug lord Pablo Escobar illegally imported a male and female hippopotamus to Colombia using the proceeds of his global pharmaceutical development and sales business. When he was killed in ’93, nobody wrangled the hippos from Hacienda Nápoles, so now there are hundreds of them thriving in the jungle. The government has tried a sterilization campaign, but recently indicated they will just euthanize 80 of the hippos. Enter Anant Ambani, the son of Asia’s richest man, who has announced that he is willing to take and care for the (one must assume remarkably inbred) population at his private zoo in Gujarat, and while Colombia has not yet commented, one must imagine Bogotá is willing to hear him out.

Paulin Kola, BBC News

Planet

A new survey of Americans found that, beyond Earth of course, Mars is the favorite planet in the solar system, with 19 percent of respondents saying that the red planet is their favorite. This is followed by the deeply photogenic Saturn (14 percent), Jupiter (eight percent) and Venus (six percent). About seven percent of respondents wasted their ballots by saying Pluto, which is famously not a planet. Also 55 percent of people don’t have a favorite planet, what else is the point of all that astrology? I’m afraid this is a dismal and frankly ungrateful showing from Earthlings, who failed to recognize their silent protector, their constant guardian, the big guy himself Jupiter. Do you think that Mars is capable of capturing hoards of asteroids and safely marshaling them towards its Lagrange points? Do you think that Mars would take a comet for us if the situation presented itself? Do you think that Mars is the one thing standing between us and the barbarians of the Oort cloud? Sure, Gustav gave it the best entrance music, and it is inhabited entirely by robots, but if Mars is the bringer of war, consider it brought.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Grocery

A new projection from the Food Industry Association and NielsenIQ predicts that online grocery sales will grow to $452 billion by 2028. Already, most of the grocery dollar growth is happening online, with 72 percent of growth in the grocery business last year coming from the online space. This year, sales are projected to come in at $363 billion, an improvement on the projection from last year. Online grocery sales are expected to increase at a rate of 11.6 percent annually, while in-store sales are expected to stay flat and grow only about 0.62 percent annually.

Jeff Wells, Grocery Dive

Microwave

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning an experiment as soon as this fiscal year to transmit electricity collected on an orbitting solar panel to Earth by way of microwaves. A 2023 CalTech experiment successfully transmitted microwaves from a satellite to the ground, but this experiment will try to get some actual electricity out of the process. This test — the Ohisama Project — will send a satellite with a two-meter-wide solar panel into orbit at 450 kilometers. The satellite will convert that electricity into microwaves that will be targeted at a location in Japan. The goal is to figure out exactly how wide of an area the microwave receivers will need on the ground; receivers will be spread within a 40 kilometer radius centered around Saitama prefecture, with tests taking place over months. The satellite’s power generation capacity is very small at 720 watts, but a successful test could advance JAXA’s goal of a power-generating satellite with a 2.5 square kilometer solar panel in geostationary orbit producing one gigawatt of electricity by 2050.

Mana Kuroda, Nikkei Asia

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PCB

The price of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has risen sharply since Iran struck the Jubail petrochemical complex in April, which halted the production of the high-purity polyphenylene ether resin — a base material of circuit boards. That facility is responsible for 70 percent of the world’s high purity PPE resin, and as a result, PCB prices are up 40 percent in April compared to March, with lead times increasing from three weeks to 15 weeks. Besides the resin, copper accounts for 60 percent of the raw material cost of a PCB, and that too may rise in costs given the 30 percent increase in the price of copper foil seen this year. Multilayer PCBs are selling for 1,394 yuan (US$204) per square meter; the higher-end kind seen in AI servers can cost 10 times that.

Che Pan, Liam Mo, and Hyunjoo Jin, Reuters

Station Wagons

The humble but efficient station wagon — an automobile style also known as estates in the U.K., Kombis in Germany and breaks in France — has been steadily going out of style as SUVs and crossovers gobble up market share for the kind of cars that can comfortably fit a family. In 2017, 2.45 million station wagons were sold globally; as of 2025, that’s down to 1.39 million rolling off the lot, a decline of around 40 percent. Germany is the biggest market for them; there, about 15.1 percent of new cars sold are station wagons.

Chris Bryant, Bloomberg

Piracy

Two pirate raids of merchant vessels off the coast of Somalia raises new concerns about the renewed threat of Somali pirates to global shipping. A cargo vessel carrying cement from Egypt to Mombasa was hijacked off the coast of Garacad, with nine pirates taking control of the vessel. This followed another attack on Wednesday, when an oil tanker was taken by pirates off the coast of Puntland. Piracy had been successfully reined in off the coast of Somalia over the past decade thanks to international naval patrols; needless to say, attentions are elsewhere at this time and the opportunistic attacks are raising worries of a possible resurgence.

Omar Faruk, The Associated Press

Premium

Last year, 17 percent of film tickets sold were for the premium large-format screens, up from 13 percent in 2021. Consumers are willing to pay more to see movies on bigger screens and with better sound, and at this point, cinemas angling to get butts in seats are trying to figure out just how big a screen they can add and how much they can charge for it. There simply aren’t enough IMAX screens to meet demand; Regal went so far as to charge $50 for opening night seats to the 70mm IMAX screening of Dune: Part Three, and they sold out in minutes.

Ben Fritz, The Wall Street Journal

Tungsten

A Vietnamese bet on tungsten mining is paying off, with the owners of the Nui Phao tungsten mine estimating that net profits will be 150 times higher than they were last year amid a spike in tungsten costs outside of China. Vietnam is a distant second when it comes to the production of Tungsten, producing about 3,000 metric tons of metal content, well behind the 67,000 metric tons produced by China, which accounted for 79 percent of global production. Tighter export controls for Chinese tungsten have sent prices for the metal spiking outside of China; the benchmark price for ammonium paratungstate in Rotterdam and Baltimore ranged from $2,800 to $3,289 this month, up from $330 to $355 in February 2025. The Nui Phao mine appears to be a big possible winner, as industrial and defense needs mean that tungsten is in high demand.

Mai Nguyen and Yuji Nitta, Nikkei Asia

Sewers

The limited amount of time that wastewater spends in sewers has made sewer networks a rounding error when it comes to greenhouse gas emission inventories, even though that which gets flushed can be a potent source of methane later on its journey. A new study suggests that practice may not be entirely right, with sewers worldwide emitting an estimated 1.18 to 1.95 million tons of methane annually based on a simulation of 3,000 different pipeline scenarios. That would add 1.7 percent to 3.3 percent to the global methane emissions.

City University of Hong Kong

Vertical

Quibi, I’m so sorry, you were right, you were just early: Omdia projects that the global vertical video market will grow 27 percent this year to $14 billion, and increasingly Americans are getting hooked on microdramas. Sure, China is the most mature market in the space, accounting for 83 percent of total revenue, but several apps are developing highly engaged audiences among Americans that rival some streaming networks. For instance, a viewer of ReelShort averaged 35.7 minutes per user per day on the app in the fourth quarter of 2025, which came in ahead of the 24.8 minutes average for a Netflix user in the same period. Microdrama apps racked up 5.78 billion hours of viewing time last year, and despite the smoking crater that was Quibi, those are the kinds of numbers that attracts attention from studios thinking that maybe the world is finally ready for this.

Stephanie Prange, Media Play News

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Welcome back!

Box Office

The Michael Jackson biopic Michael made $97 million at the domestic box office, making back nearly double its budget for reshoots. The movie opened very strongly, making $217.4 globally against production costs that neared $200 million. A sequel is in development which will presumably dive into everyone’s favorite thing about Michael Jackson: the events of his personal life from the early 1990s onward. Given the box office, even a third film is being considered, and I can only imagine the fans are speculating ravenously over who will be cast as Elizabeth Taylor and Washed Up Brando fleeing New York City in a rental car after 9/11.

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

Moonshot

Nike’s long-sought decade-long moonshot project to design a shoe that can help an athlete run a sub-two hour marathon saw that goal reached not once but twice this past weekend at the London Marathon…by runners wearing Adidas shoes. Winner Sebastian Sawe finished the race in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, and second-place runner Yomif Kejelcha pulled off the feat in 1:59:41. Both runners were wearing the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, a state-of-the-art running shoe.

Sara Germano, Sportico

Gravity

Physicists have devoted considerable attention towards measuring the strength of gravity, a constant known as “big G.” While the relative strength of other fundamental forces have been measured, gravity is a hard one both because it’s the weakest of the fundamental forces and because you can’t shield an experiment from gravity. A new measurement by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, using a reproduction of a 2007 French experiment, has found a value of big G at 6.67387×10^-11 meters³ per kilogram per second². Please adjust your instruments appropriately.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

Splits

A new study published in Nature Communications finds that the ongoing continental split-up of Africa is further along than understood. The 500-kilometer long Turkana Rift — a segment of the East African Rift System and the meeting point of three tectonic plates — is the site where two plates are drifting apart, which will eventually cleave the continent and form a new ocean between the split lands, it’s all very exciting. The new study found that the crust at the center of the rift is only 13 kilometers deep, much shallower than the 35 kilometer deep crust at other points in the rift, which is a sign that it’s getting pulled apart. It should still be a few million more years before the split.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

Cars

Lots of people who bought cars during the pandemic are deeply underwater on those vehicles, meaning the amount they owe is considerably higher than the actual value of the vehicle. Among car buyers who traded in a car to buy a new one, 30 percent had negative equity on their trade-in, owing an average of $7,200. One thing that may have caused the surge is the emergence of the 84-month (seven year) car loan; 42.6 percent of underwater buyers had an 84-month loan, about double the level of a decade ago.

Ryan Felton, The Wall Street Journal

The Wind Rises

Airlines are in serious need for aviation mechanics, as 40 percent of those in the field are over the age of 60 and nearing retirement. As it stands, the labor shortage is projected to hit 7,000 certificated mechanics next year, meaning the field is understaffed by about 12 percent. Entry level salaries are up 50 percent since 2020, and major airlines are offering large signing bonuses to recruit workers. The pipeline has some issues; a third of seats in aviation maintenance tech schools are empty and dropout rates are high, but what’s particularly tough the schools inability to hire instructors because the industry is so desperate for experienced techs that professionals can make way more in the field than in the classroom.

Allison Pohle, The Wall Street Journal

Upfronts

Every May is upfronts season, when American television businesses tout their programming for the next year to the advertising industry, selling most of their commercial time in the process. As television has become a diminished business, the show still goes on, but tends to now involve forms of advertising sales beyond the standard inventory, including streaming ads. Ad commitments to broadcast primetime were down 2.5 percent to $9.1 billion in 2025 and cable was down 4.3 percent to $8.68 billion, while dollars bound for streaming increased 17.9 percent to $13.2 billion. That said, about 65 percent of total U.S. ad spend at this point is going to Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, and this year’s cable ad spend is projected to drop 10 percent with broadcast expected to dip five percent.

Brian Steinberg, Variety

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Have a great weekend!

The Simpsons

California has become desperate to hold on to fleeting jobs in the television and film industries, and the studios based in Los Angeles are electing to film their movies and shows outside of the historical production area, opting for cheaper shoots in Canada, the UK, or whichever state is offering the juiciest incentive at this particular point in time. As a result, Sacramento has decided to play hardball and will offer those very same shooting incentives to preserve the behind-the-camera crew jobs and local acting work that serve as the lifeblood of the industry. One of the 38 movies granted subsidies from the California film office is, in fact, The Simpsons Movie, which will get $21.9 million for shooting the film in the state. Given that The Simpsons Movie is animated, it’s not entirely clear in the math how that will benefit the sound stages logging a 62 percent occupancy rate, but that which cannot be explained with the science of Professor Frink can likely be explained with the arts of Mayor Quimby.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

The Way Is Shut

The icefall doctors who prepare the ropes and ladders on Mount Everest ahead of the climbing season are reporting that there’s a big block of ice in the way and they’re having trouble doing their jobs. There is a 100-foot high unstable chunk of glacier blocking the path that sits 600 meters below Camp 1. This late in April, the icefall doctors working for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee — which secures the ropes as far as Camp 2 — normally would have already fixed the route all the way up to Camp 3, but because there is a colossal block of ice in the way, they have had to wait it out. Scaling it was deemed too risky, an alternative route to Camp 1 would be too challenging and the Department of Tourism is weighing options that would include airlifting teams to Camp 2 by helicopter so they may begin to open the route above the ice block while they wait for it to melt.

Ashok Dahal and Simon Fraser, BBC News

Traffic

Since 2022, traffic cameras have caught one specific pickup truck speeding through school zones and running red lights over 547 times in the borough of Staten Island, with the vehicle receiving 187 camera-issued tickets in 2025 alone — an average of one every other day. Based on the data, this vehicle is piloted by the second-most-reckless driver in New York City. The truck — a 2022 RAM 1500 — weighs at least 4,775 pounds, and the tickets are only automatically given when a vehicle is going 11 miles per hours above the legal limit. Based on Department of Transportation data, a city driver who received more than two moving violations per year is 40 times more likely to cause a crash that results in death or serious injury than a driver who never does; this driver has received between 116 and 180 moving violations in each of the past four years. Since 2022, that is $36,650.02 worth of speeding tickets. Streetsblog, curious as to why nothing has been done about this and why the law or consequences does not appear to apply to this particular car, discovered that the driver of that RAM 1500 is, naturally, an officer in the New York City Police Department.

J.K. Trotter, Streetsblog

Odometer

A new study published in the Journal of Marketing Research looked into how the specific number on the odometer of a used car impacted the eventual sale of that vehicle, and found that left-digit bias — the phenomenon when $1.99 feels materially cheaper than $2 — has a big effect on pricing and sale timing. Based on DMV records of 4.8 million used car transactions in Texas from 2014 to 2021, cars that were just below a 10,000-mile odometer threshold sold 6 percent faster than cars just above that threshold.

Hope Reese, University of Texas at Austin

Glass

A study of wine packaging published in the journal Cleaner and Responsible Consumption found that while consumers did indeed tend to appraise wine sold in a glass bottle more highly than wine sold in other packaging, perceptions are changing and consumers are open to new options. Aluminum was the second-most popular choice for wine packaging (with those in the study assigning a 19.3 percent to 26.2 percent discount for aluminum-packaged wine compared to glass) followed by PET plastic packaging (a 31.1 percent to 36.9 percent discount) and then — bad luck, Franzia — a 38 percent to 54 percent discount for flexible bags.

University of Arkansas

Cigarettes

Several countries in Asia have lagged behind their peers when it comes to reducing tobacco use, and one reason is that in many of those countries, the very same government trying to rein in smoking is also the owner of the tobacco company. The Japanese government owns a 37.6 percent stake in Japan Tobacco, the largest player in the domestic market for cigarettes, and collected 156.05 billion yen in dividends (not to mention the tax revenue) from the tobacco business. China’s government fully owns China National Tobacco, which has a 96 percent market share, and India’s government has a 28 percent stake in ITC, which dominates the business. Those conflicts of interest have made it hard to build the kind of political coalition necessary to unwind lucrative investments and commit more fully to smoking cessation.

Kenji Kawase, Nikkei Asia

Coral

Submersible robotics have demonstrated promise when it comes to restoring coral reefs. One device, the Deployment Guidance System, is the first automated underwater coral planter, which when attached to a boat can identify suitable planting sites for coral autonomously. The pricing is great: each DGS should be able to plant about a million coral seedlings over the course of its operational lifetime at a cost of $1 per seedling, well under the $8 per seedling commonly paid by coral restoration projects today. Coral stressing robots are also under development; under lab conditions, coral can be gently heated and put under temporary heat stress in order to toughen up the fragments, where they can then be replanted in the reefs to multiply and produce resilient descendants. Researchers envision a suite of underwater robots able to maintain and preserve these reefs.

Ryan Hesketh, bioGraphic

In the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Alex Mayyasi from NPR’s Planet Money, the beloved podcast that invented an entire version of audio storytelling, who is out with a brand new book from the show called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life, a delightful anthology all about the ways money and the economy affect nearly everything in our daily lives. The book is available wherever books are sold. Alex is a regular contributor to the Planet Money podcast, writes his own Substack, and will be out with a his next project, the Gastronomics podcast available on Spotify, soon. Check out our interview here.

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

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Anyone?

High ticket prices and new levels of inhospitable hosting has put a pall over the expected tourism surge for the World Cup games in the United States, and has sent prices dropping sharply in the major metropolitan areas that had been gearing up for the games and the guests. Following the reveal of the schedule in December, prices across 96 hotels in the 16 markets that will host games were charging $1,013 per night around the opening match in their city, well above the $293 average for the equivalent stay three weeks earlier in May and an average price gouge of 328 percent. Well, four months on, prices for those dates have dropped sharply. While still much higher than normal, the average rate was down 40 percent to $579 per night across the hotels in the sample, which aligns with reports that hotels have actually not logged the expected surge in visitors.

Henry Bushnell, The Athletic

Solar

The Iran War and resulting oil shock has sent countries all over the world scrambling for solar panels, and the largest producer of the commodity, China, saw huge demand increases in March. China exported 68 gigawatts worth of solar panels, cells and wafers in March, which was double the capacity shipped in February. For perspective, 68 gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the entire solar capacity of Spain. A total of 50 different countries set a record for Chinese solar imports in March of 2026, and an additional 60 saw the highest imports in at least six months. China’s solar industry is currently built to overcapacity, so they can scale up rather quickly as demand persists; the capacity utilization rate for solar was as low as 40 percent, which means that a lot of idle production lines can get to work very quickly to satisfy this newfound demand.

Shotaro Tani and Wataru Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Kratom

A new study published in the journal Addiction found that the number of kratom exposures reported to United States Poison Centers has increased 65-fold from 2010 to 2023, hitting 1,242 cases that year. Kratom is a plant with psychoactive qualities that, when consumed in high doses, can resemble the effects of opioids, and it’s usually sold at the bad gas station in town. The number of kratom exposure events associated with a severe outcome (life-threatening effects, significant residual disability or death) reached 158 cases as of 2023.

Jean O'Reilly, Society for the Study of Addiction

Leafs

Rogers Communications brought its stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to 75 percent last year after buying the 37.5 percent stake held by BCE, and Rogers has indicated it would purchase the remaining 25 percent in the second half of this year. MLSE owns three Toronto-based teams: the NHL’s Maple Leafs, the NBA’s Raptors and the MLS’ Toronto FC, and given that Rogers already owns the MLB’s Blue Jays, this will put Rogers in a rare class of sports ownership only comparable to Kroenke Sports & Entertainment — the only other conglomerate that can claim to own three or more major sports teams. Rogers has plans to consolidate the sports holdings and then bring in minority investors that will value the whole kit-and-caboodle at C$25 billion (US$18.25 billion). Owning a chunk of the four teams can be pretty attractive for an investor; this effectively locks up the entire sports scene of the fourth-largest city in North America under one roof, and given that you’d own the Leafs, you know you’re going to be free every June.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Supermarket Sweep

A new study found that the excessive use of additional product displays in supermarket aisles can actually reduce the overall sales in a supermarket, even though those secondary placements are designed to encourage impulse buying of the products they feature. In a field experiment, sales increased by 11.5 percent after removing displays from a congested aisle, even if that meant fewer products were on display overall.

University of Innsbruck

Radioactive

A number of exciting radiotherapies have hit the market, with several radioactive drugs demonstrating promise in treating cancer. If they do take off, an interesting supply chain issue would emerge, as the current supply of radioisotopes would not be enough to keep up with demand. In order to source the relevant isotopes, the pharmaceutical industry has people scouring nuclear waste stockpiles and discarded medical devices. The radiotherapy field was kick started in 2017 when Novartis launched Lutathera, which uses lutetium-177 to treat gastrointestinal cancer. It then released a second drug, Pluvicto, which uses the same isotope to treat prostate cancer, and together, the two drugs generate $2.8 billion a year. The broader radiopharmaceutical market is projected to grow to $39 billion in annual sales by 2032, and the industry is already trying to develop new ways to produce the alpha emitters that many think will serve as the backbone of the business.

Mark Peplow, New Scientist

New York

A new analysis from Karen Clark & Co. looks at the possible ramifications of powerful storms hitting New York City, estimating that a 1-in-100 year hurricane event in New York City would cost insurers more than $100 billion. New York has $9 trillion in insured property exposure, and while it’s considerably safer than places like Florida, 11 hurricanes have impacted New York since 1850. If the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 were to strike today, it would cause $20.9 billion in insured losses alone; if that hurricane were to make landfall in the Rockaways rather than out on Long Island, insured losses would be over $100 billion in the city.

Carrier Management

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

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QVC

Shopping television network owner QVC Corp has been undone by the retail version of nine-minute abs, as new technology platforms have emerged beyond cable, letting viewers watch others model and sell items from the comfort of the viewer’s own couch. The network owner — which owns both HSN and QVC — has filed for bankruptcy protection to try to reduce $5 billion of debt. New competitors have been relentless: TikTok shop, which is fueled by the same kind of direct-to-camera appeals from relatable semi-stars, made $15 billion in revenue in the United States in 2025, double the 2024 figure. The live selling platform Whatnot has grown to an $11.5 billion valuation after moving $8 billion in inventory in 2025.

Amanda Mull, Bloomberg

Battery

Chinese battery titan CATL has revealed their third-generation Shenxing battery, an iron phosphate battery that is the answer to a rival offering from BYD, and the Shenxing battery is posting seriously impressive specs when it came to charging. According to a report, charging the battery from 10 percent to 98 percent took just 6 minutes and 27 seconds, with the standard 10-to-80 benchmark taking just 3 minutes and 44 seconds. The battery also did great in the cold: At -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit), the Shenxing charged from 10 percent to 98 percent in just nine minutes.

Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica

Breezy

The global wind industry is facing serious headwinds. By which I mean, things are going great actually; headwinds are good when you’re talking turbines, those are specifically what you want, and last year was a bona fide bonanza for wind power installations. Globally, the wind industry installed 165 gigawatts of new capacity, up 40 percent from 2024, mostly driven by onshore wind (installations were up 42 percent to 155.3 GW) rather than offshore (up 18 percent to nine GW). Despite the best efforts of the government to stymie wind in the U.S., seven GW of onshore wind were added last year. Globally, the cumulative wind capacity is now up to 1.3 terawatts.

Reuters

Generation Lead

Lead paint, the chemical scourge responsible for historical fiascoes such as “Gen X,” is still very common outside of the United States despite domestic bans of the carcinogen and lead-poisoning hazard, lead chromate. A new study published in the Annals of Work Exposures and Health found 55 percent of consumer paints in Mexico contain lead pigments, some of which have levels up to 29 percent lead. Thing is, it’s often American companies internationally exporting paint that they can’t legally sell stateside: While the chemical manufacturer BASF phased out production of lead chromate as far back as 2012 and the global paint company AkzoNobel cut lead additives in 2011, Sherwin Williams continues to sell lead paint in Mexico.

Perry Gottesfeld, Occupational Knowledge International

Beliebers

Justin Bieber is enjoying a surge in popularity after a widely-watched Coachella set, with the artist’s catalog accumulating 160.2 million official U.S. streams in the April 10-16 tracking week, up 172 percent week over week. Generally, the Bieber oeuvre pulled in between 55 million and 59 million streams a week in the previous several weeks. Still, Bieber managed to get four songs on the Hot 100 chart and fully 17 tracks on the Global 200 with the Coachella performance.

Xander Zellner, Billboard

Storms

The middle class is getting squeezed from all sides, at least among hurricanes. In 2025 there was just one named storm, Hurricane Imelda, that came in as a “moderate” hurricane or around a Category 1, 2 or 3 storm, with eight storms maxing out as tropical storms and only four events scaling all the way up to major hurricanes. This appears to be part of a trend: Over the 30-year period from 1970 to 1999, about 45 percent of named storms were moderate intensity hurricanes. From 2000 to 2025, just 33 percent of storms ended up as Category 1, 2 or 3 hurricanes, with both the weakest and the strongest storms gaining share. Given that hurricanes are fueled by ocean heat and fed by certain atmospheric conditions to facilitate intensification, concerns are that the conditions supporting a “moderate” hurricane are becoming more uncommon, meaning those storms will either be supercharged or dispelled.

Scott St. George and James Done, Carrier Management

Bumpback Salmon

A new study looked at the impact of drugs and drug breakdown products in salmon, attempting to figure out what happens to fish who consume the drugs that make their way into waterways. One group of 35 fish got an implant containing cocaine, another got implants with benzoylecgonine which is a breakdown product of coke and a third group got a control implant. After two months, the control fish had settled 20 kilometers away from their release site, the cocaine-exposed fish were dispersed further and the benzoylecgonine-exposed fish made it 32 kilometers away from their release point. In addition to being pushed beyond their typical range, future studies may look into whether the fish developed incredibly intense opinions about rather boring stuff and then talked about the stuff constantly.

Erik Stokstad, Science

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Rain

Superstar artist Bad Bunny had three sold-out shows in Medellin scheduled, but with just days to go, heavy rains appeared on the horizon, threatening the production. With about 145,500 tickets sold across the three shows — a box office gate of $23.7 million, not to mention the food and beverage sales that may come — and given the incredibly tight timeline, Bad Bunny’s management team turned to a fascinating niche of the insurance industry willing to write a policy to insure against a washout. A transatlantic team of insurers devised a workaround of how to actually trigger the policy by installing a temporary weather station within the stadium and hammering out a bespoke policy that would trigger should rainfall exceed a certain amount or pass certain payout thresholds. The actual coverage amount has not been revealed, but Descartes Underwriting SAS, the Paris-based underwriter, has said that insurance can ordinarily provide up to $80 million worth of coverage for this kind of weather risk.

Joe Wertz and Mary Hui, Bloomberg

Well, Damn

While many oil wells in Texas can produce on the order of hundreds of barrels of oil per day, lots and lots of the wells within the state are barely producing any oil, and seem to be operating well below a threshold of viability because the cost of plugging a well is slightly higher than pumping a mostly dry one. About 99,000 wells in Texas — two-thirds of active wells — produce under 10 barrels of oil a day. In order to remain “active,” an oil well must produce just five barrels for three consecutive months, or at least one barrel over 12 consecutive months — both minimums set by state regulators. Those metrics have become targets for producers who don’t want to deal with the consequences of joining the 159,000 inactive wells in the state, which would require pricey decommissioning. This can cause enormous headaches for the people who live near the wells that, by all rights, should have been plugged years ago.

Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News

Dice

A new study published in American Antiquity describes 565 objects from across North America — all around the West and even dating to as far back as 12,000 years ago — as dice, which pushes back the timeline for evidence of human play by thousands of years. The findings indicate that Indigenous Americans were playing games 6,000 years earlier than anyone else on record. These pieces are mostly binary — resembling marked coins rather than six-sided dice — but could indicate that dice are possibly older than coins.

Aris Politopoulos, Angus Moi, and Walter Crist, The Conversation

Voyager

NASA has shut off one of the three remaining scientific instruments onboard the space probe Voyager 1 in order to save power following an unexpected drop in energy levels observed in February. The spacecraft is currently 15.78 billion miles away from Earth and is traveling at 51,000 miles per hour. The experiment that has been shut down is the Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment, which measured ions, electrons and cosmic rays, informing scientific understanding about pressure fronts within the interstellar medium. The remaining two instruments still working on Voyager 1 is the magnetometer and its plasma wave subsystem, and given its current power supply, NASA expects both instruments can continue operating this way for about a year.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Greek

A new analysis of the family names of all the 773 mollusk varieties found a somewhat funny bias in the naming of snails, clams and octopuses, specifically a bias towards giving them ancient Greek names rather than Latin ones. The study attributes this in part to a trend among 19th-century European scientists — a class of people who did a whole lot of the naming of molluscan animals — attempting to show off their high levels of education, according to the study published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Indeed, words derived from Ancient Greek makes up 71.8 percent of all of the family names of mollusks, with just 26.1 percent coming from Latin and 6.3 percent coming from eponyms (named after individuals). That last figure is particularly low compared to other taxa like birds or mammals, where discoverers like to name new animals after their colleagues or countrymen anywhere from 15 percent to 40 percent of the time.

University of Tokyo

Fungi

There are large, widespread networks of interconnected microbes that are tied together thanks to network-forming mycorrhizal fungi that facilitate their spread and connection. The western part of the United States is pretty rich in these kinds of subterranean ecosystems — it’s home to about five percent of all of the world’s ectomycorrhizal fungi hotspots — which can form symbiotic relationships with trees and shrubs across forests. A new atlas produced by the delightfully named Society for the Protection of Underground Networks estimates that 90 percent of mycorrhizal biodiversity hotspots are not within protected areas, leaving them vulnerable to destruction. With mycorrhizal fungi storing 13 billion tons of carbon, this destruction could have serious and global ramifications.

Kylie Mohr, High Country News

Moonshot

Fresh off the success of the Artemis II mission, new concerns about the timeline of the Artemis IV mission — which would return to the Moon’s surface — have emerged. The particular logjam is about the spacesuits, which have been controversially delegated to a contractor rather than developed in-house at NASA. The current space suits, the ones in use on space walks on the ISS, have received no major updates in the last two decades. The mission currently scheduled for 2028 would entail using new space suits provided by Axion Space under a maximum $3.1 billion contract. The Office of the Inspector General at NASA has warned that if Axiom’s work encounters more delays, the suits might not be available until 2031.

Claire Cameron, Scientific American

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Welcome back!

Bears

Three residents of Los Angeles have been convicted for their part in an insurance fraud scheme that entailed filing claims on luxury vehicles that had been attacked by a bear. The attacking bear, however, was one of the conspirators who was in fact dressed in an improvised and somewhat comical bear suit. The California Department of Insurance kicked off an investigation after a claim filed on January 28, 2025 of a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost getting “destroyed” by “a bear” that got inside. Investigators discovered two further claims submitted to separate insurers — a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350 — and based on the final tally, the insurers were defrauded of $141,839. At one point, the Department of Insurance had to actually call in a favor from a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and ask, “Is this a bear or just a guy in a bear suit?”

Insurance Journal

Sneaker

The average weight of a running shoe is 8.8 ounces for a men’s size nine, but footwear companies are in an arms race (a legs race?) to get that weight as light as possible. A recent study found that an elite runner who is able to shed 3.5 ounces off their shoe might run a marathon about 57 seconds faster. This has led brands to trim as much from the shoe as possible — thinner shoelaces, nitrogen-injected into the soles — all just to shave weight. The newest entrant, the incomprehensibly named Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, weights 3.4 ounces in a men’s size nine and will see action in the London Marathon on April 26. Nike’s got a prototype at a comparatively hefty 6.2 ounces, one that propelled Jacob Kiplimo to a world record half marathon in Lisbon last month.

Rachel Bachman, The Wall Street Journal

Kuwait

As of April 15, the government of Kuwait, led by Emir Meshal al-Ahmad who took office at the end of 2023, has stripped citizenship from 71,059 people, a figure that represents about 4.6 percent of the country’s official population of 1.545 million. The government is attempting to redefine citizenship back to pre-1994 status, which excluded citizenship from the Bidoon residents of the northern tribes and only gave citizenship to those who were of the “founding nationality.” The concern is that Kuwait will extend the revocation beyond the already denaturalized individuals to include their wives, children and more, and that the eventual number of those stripped of citizenship might reach 250,000 to 300,000.

Fatimah Muhammed and Sultan Alamer, New Lines Magazine

Big Two

DC Comics has seen its market share in the comic book direct market rise to 34.7 percent as of Q1 of 2026, up from 32.9 percent in the same quarter of last year. Marvel remained relatively steady, seeings its share move from 29.6 percent in the first quarter of 2025 to 29.4 percent this year. They were followed by Image Comics (11.8 percent), IDW (4.2 percent) and Dark Horse (2.9 percent).

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

Tanks For Nothing

In April, 34 percent of all NBA games were decided by at least 20 points, the highest rate of any month in the history of the NBA. The second-highest month for such blowouts was March 2026, when 28 percent of games were decided by 20 points or more, and February saw the fifth-highest month on record. The end of the regular season has seen many squads throw in the towel, with some teams playing a bunch of G-Leaguers. For most of NBA history, the blowout rate didn’t climb up as the end of the season neared, but now it decisively has, as the tactical advantage of better draft picks overwhelms whatever honor stayed the hand of doomed squads in the past.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Battery

Power grids that once relied on gas and coal to make up for a drop in the production of solar or wind are increasingly using power banked over the course of the day, stored in batteries. The average cost of grid-installed battery has dropped 75 percent from 2018 to 2025 and is projected to drop another 25 percent through 2035. In 2025, the cost per megawatt-hour was $78, and in real 2025 dollars, that’s expected to drop to $58 per megawatt-hour in 2035. It’s produced a rarely-seen phenomenon in the construction business: a second, identical battery build-out approved just a few months later might come in at a fraction of the budget of the first. To say the least, it isn’t all that common in the energy industry.

Kiera Wright, Mark Chediak, and Petra Sorge, Bloomberg

Waste

During the height of the pandemic, food waste declined substantially across the supply chain, dropping from a record high of 74.6 million tons in 2019 to 56.4 million tons in 2020. Gradually, however, that number began to tick back up again, reaching 71.6 million tons as of 2023. Based on the data, though, the postpandemic increase has leveled off, with the 2024 food waste figure coming in at 70 million tons. However, that is still 29 percent of the total U.S. food supply.

Jacob Wallace, Food Dive

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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 ·

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Something a little different this week, a bit of a travel blog, this one for the subscribers only.

Read more