Spider-Man

Spider-Man: Brand New Day earned the third-highest grossing second weekend on record with $145 million domestically. The movie has now made $655 million domestically and another $1.67 billion globally, and the momentum is so strong – and the August so sparse — that some analysts are wondering if this movie might be the first to hit $1 billion domestic or $3 billion globally, two heretofore unseen milestones at the box office. The Force Awakens topped out at $936.6 million domestically, while Avatar stands at $2.9 billion globally. And speaking of Avatar, this past weekend The Odyssey just beat its IMAX record, with $289 million in IMAX ticket sales, and it hasn’t even opened in China yet.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Diamond

A group of publishers is settling with Diamond Comic Distributors over the fate of inventory held in Diamond’s warehouses when the company — which long served as the intermediary distributor connecting dozens of publishers big and small to hundreds if not thousands of independent retailers that sell comics — went bankrupt in 2025. Initially, Diamond attempted to sell off that inventory, but publishers sued, arguing that it was their property just stored in Diamond’s warehouses. Possession being nine-tenths of the law and whatnot, after more than a year of litigation, the publishers have agreed to forfeit $619,410 in fees to get their inventory back.

Christian Holub, Publishers Weekly

Voyager

In a maneuver described by the Voyager mission manager as the most important thing from the team managing the spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, engineers have successfully pulled off a procedure termed “big bang” on Voyager 2. It could extend the spacecraft’s operation by another two years, and will soon attempt it on Voyager 1. Both missions were launched in the 1970s, did a flyby of several planets and are now hurtling away from our solar system in the vacuum of space. They have been able to survive long, long beyond their initial mission timeline thanks to clever engineering fixes and instrument retirements that keep the power on despite the onboard nuclear power source decaying and losing about four watts of power generation annually. The “big bang” procedure reduces power demand by 10 watts per year without any critical components becoming too cold.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Preakness

The Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes are launching a six-race series next year and leaving the Preakness Stakes out of it, a move which may jeopardize the already troubled notion of the “triple crown” even further. The Preakness has previously occured two weeks after the Kentucky Derby and three weeks before the Belmont Stakes; that’s a tight turnaround that means many winners of the Derby essentially forfeit their chance at a Triple Crown and skip the Preakness in order to rest up ahead of the Belmont. Of 95 horses who ran at the Kentucky Derby in the past five years, only 13 horses started at the Preakness. The operators of the Preakness are trying to make their race more palatable by pushing the race back eight days.

Jim Chairusmi, The Wall Street Journal

Punk Inc.

In a move that has sent shockwaves through the goth, punk, alternative rock and emo scenes, Spencer Spirit Holdings has made a deal to acquire Hot Topic, which would consolidate the two iconic mall brands under a single corporate umbrella. One company would control the 650 Spencer’s locations, 615 Hot Topic locations and other properties such as Spirit Halloween (either 1,550 stores or zero stores, depending on the month?) and BoxLunch (280 locations). Researchers from the Umbrella Academy have long feared consolidation in the pop punk space; this simple plan will doubtless come under scrutiny at the starting line from regulators seeking to jump into the fray and avoid negative market fall out, boy, or even a panic! at the disco and maybe obtain a little new found glory in the process.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

Cylons? Jury’s Still Out

A new survey found the antiquated tech that Americans are nostalgic for and would like to use again, as well as the tech that is better left in the past. Vinyl record players are the standout here; 42 percent miss them and want to use them again, beating out the runners-up: digital camera (36 percent) and DVD player (29 percent). Dial-up internet service was the biggest “glad I no longer use,” with 81 percent assigning it there, followed by the floppy disk (68 percent), pager (68 percent), fax machine (61 percent) and rotary-dial telephone (57 percent).

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Contract Manufacturing

One reason that the Korean beauty industry is able to innovate so quickly and capitalize on new trends so fast is that many of the hot startup brands are hiring one of two massive, discreet cosmetics industrial powerhouses with large menus of pre-made and vetted product bases to start from. Kolmar (founded in 1990) and Cosmax (started in 1992) have become the two largest original design manufacture companies in the K-beauty space. The two giants have propelled Korea over the United States to become the second-largest exporter of cosmetics in the world after France, with $11.4 billion in exported cosmetics. How it works is that, for instance, Kolmar has a catalog of 150 semi-finished products, and fabless companies (essentially brands that lack manufacturing facilities themselves) hire them out. This is a huge base of clients; Korea was home to 28,412 fabless cosmetics businesses in 2025, quadruple the level of a decade ago, and many of them are just selling stuff actually made by one of two large players.

Nami Matsuura and Na Kiyoung, Nikkei Asia

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Liquids

Beverage sales in the food retail industry last year hit $295 billion, up three percent year over year. Thing is, that’s far shy of the seven percent average annual sales growth notched in the beverage business from 2019 to 2024. Alcoholic beverage sales dropped two percent to $74 billion in 2025, while sales of nonalcoholic drinks increased by five percent over the same period. Energy drinks were up 15 percent, coffee beverages up 13 percent, carbonated beverages six percent and bottled water and milk each up four percent.

Catherine Douglas Moran, Food Dive

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Myoglobin

A new study utilizing microbial engineering found that plants engineered to produce animal protein — myoglobin — within their chloroplasts were pretty good at the task. Using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, the myoglobin yields were 800 mg per kilogram dry weight in tobacco plants and 810 mg per kilogram in lettuce. Straightforwardly, that’s a fraction of real meat — which comes in at 8,100 to 11,200 mg per kilogram — but given how much more efficient plant cultivation is compared to livestock, it is still a remarkable source of protein.

Frontiers

Bluetooth

In 2025, Bitchat was launched, a messaging service that allows phones that are close to one another to communicate messages across Bluetooth even when the official mobile networks have been taken down. This is particularly consequential in countries where the government often resorts to internet blocking when civil unrest develops. The biggest test for Bitchat came just a few weeks ago, when India’s government cut off a number of mobile networks over increasing grassroots dissent; Bitchat reached an all-time high of 430,000 daily active users in India on July 26; from the 20th to the 26th, India was responsible for 74 percent of downloads.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

Squishy

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a war on counterfeit squishy toys. CPSC has to date identified 55 shipments of squishy toys that violate policy — breaking or tearing during foreseeable use, containing excessive levels of prohibited chemicals, failing to comply with federal requirements regarding water beads and lacking warnings and certifications otherwise required — and as a result has prevented 355,683 units from entering the country.

Natalie Miller, ToyBook and CPSC

Starters

The NFL preseason is officially on, as the most popular sports league in North America careens toward season kickoff. That said, preseason has meant less than ever before: Once the venue by which teams try out talent on the cusp of the starting lineup, these days it’s rarer than ever to see actual starting talent on the field. In 2025, 9.8 percent of pass attempts in preseason games came from quarterbacks who would eventually start in week 1, down from 32.4 percent in 2012.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Graded

Beckett Collectibles, one of the companies that evaluates the quality of trading cards, has called a temporary pause on online grading submissions. As it stands, the company has too much of a backlog to continue to accept new orders, echoing similar moves from industry leader PSA. According to the company, the number of cards submitted over the past year was up 102 percent, and the number of trading card game cards graded was up 159 percent.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Pluto

A new study published in the Planetary Science Journal explores evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to the surface of Pluto along cracks in the iconic heart-shaped glacier on the surface of the dwarf planet. Sputnik Planitia is a glacier made of frozen nitrogen that is larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. New analysis indicates that the linear features seen on the glacier appear to be occasionally wetted, and the liquid in question is probably liquid nitrogen. This furthermore indicates that the surface of Sputnik Planitia is likely less than one million years old, meaning that Pluto’s heart appears to have been for our eyes only.

Southwest Research Institute

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Anime

Twin Engine is an anime production company responsible for hits such as Witch Hat Atelier and Vinland Saga, and this week, it announced a joint venture with a titan of the industry, Bandai, the toy company that owns licenses for Mobile Suit Gundam, One Piece and Dragon Ball. The four-billion-yen (US$25.35 million) joint venture is a possible sign of a shift in the strategy within Japan’s sprawling entertainment business. While it is globally popular, the industry still sees some of the largest and most successful companies struggle financially. The longstanding process of producing anime, the production committee system, has been rife with production problems and often results in the animation studios hired on contract losing out on profits. This format linking Bandai and Twin Engine as partners up front would seem to level that playing field.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Puma

The presence of fierce carnivorous cats in an area made the adjacent roads significantly safer for drivers, a new study of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington found. When pumas were present in an area, deer were more active during the day than at night, and were 15 percent less likely to be in areas with lots of roads, instead opting for remote areas. As a result of those behavioral changes, there was a 67 percent reduction in the likelihood of a deer-vehicle collision, and a 76 percent decline in the expected number of collisions between vehicles and deer over five years. For me, a longstanding advocate of Vision Zero in my community, the conclusion is obvious: It’s well past time we released dozens if not hundreds of cougars into Manhattan.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Phone Home

A nationwide field experiment across 80,000 K-12 school principals in the United States involved those administrators getting an email from a fictitious two-parent household with both a mother and a father interested in enrolling a child, with each email listing both parents, each with a phone number, asking for a call. The emails randomly varied the names and the wording, and the study found that when neither parent appeared more available than the other, mothers were 1.4 times more likely than fathers to get the first phone call, and of principals who called someone back, 60 percent contacted the mother first. Even when the fathers were presented as having significantly more availability to talk, many principals still called mom first.

Laura K. Gee, Kristy Buzzard and Olga Stoddard, The Conversation

Moonshot

Scientists are confirming that a rogue SpaceX rocket has indeed crashed into the moon as was previously forecasted. Despite the efforts of many, it appears nobody actually managed to directly observe the collision, which involved a four-ton Falcon rocket upper stage slamming into Earth’s satellite at 8,700 kilometers per hour. While we missed the moment of impact, the evidence of a collision is clear: the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope observed a stream of sodium and lithium stretching several kilometers into space for five to ten minutes after the projected impact.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Pringles

Pringles are assembled from a potato dough that is fried on a production line, and thanks to a new implementation of the long-touted “digital twin” production technology. Kellanova is approaching a perfectly consistent chip product. Three factories in Poland, Belgium and Tennessee produce 705 million pounds of Pringles per year. The digital twin tech, operational on one line in Poland, has delivered a 10 percent improvement in Pringles quality, a 13 percent reduction in waste and a 40 percent return on the upfront investment.

Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal

Generally

Last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping promoted two officers to full general, an ordinarily routine procedure that, thanks to purges in the People’s Liberation Army, has increased the number of full generals serving on active duty in theater commander leader grades by 50 percent. Yes, out of 27 such leadership posts, 21 of them have no confirmed occupant, and just six full generals are on active duty in those posts, the rest held by lieutenant generals in an acting capacity. This follows a three-year purge, the deepest in the military since the Cultural Revolution.

Christopher Nye, Nikkei Asia

Kahlo

The Gelman Collection is a trove of artworks consisting of 10 Frida Kahlo oil paintings and over 100 other works from other Mexican artists, a collection which came into the possession of prominent Mexican businessman Marcelo Zambrano in 2023. For the first time in decades, the works were exhibited in Mexico, but financial engineering on the part of Zambrano — who pledged the art as collateral for a loan from Santander, Spain’s largest bank — risks Mexico losing control of some of its most significant artistic and cultural heritage. Santander will manage the 161 works, calling it the Gelman Santander collection, and they will be shipped to Spain, where they will remain through at least 2030. Needless to say, it’s caused a major controversy in Mexico: Kahlo produced only about 150 paintings in her life, and as of 2025, less than 50 are on display in Mexico, with only eight in public museums. The Gelman collection generated $400,000 to $1 million in annual revenue from 2012 to 2022; Zambrano purchased the collection with a loan from Sotheby’s, a loan which was later replaced with the Santander loan.

Andrea Navarro and David Alire Garcia, Bloomberg

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Games

The video game business can be a difficult one, but it’s reassuring to know that first-time developers are able to take their ideas and build a loyal following. For instance, a teenager from New Hampshire launched This Game Costs $10, and seeing the potential in the format and realizing that the maximum price in the Steam store is $200, followed it up with This Game Costs $200. Within a short time, thousands of Steam users in China actually bought the game, resulting in $1.3 million in revenue. That money quickly evaporated when the players realized the game was phoned-in junk and were overwhelmingly refunded, but at the end of the day the developer still made $2,000 from the at least 10 people who thought it was worth spending $200 on a joke.

Patricia Hernandez, Polygon

Gotta Make The Calendar

A new study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that any municipality that would like to stock their fire department with hunks need only to ensure that the person leading the fire department is themselves a hunk and also to ensure that the station crew’s leadership is appropriately staffed. More specifically, the researchers analyzed annual physical fitness test data from 838 firefighters across 99 fire stations and found that when a crew had a fit and actively engaged captain and lieutenants, the crew scored meaningfully higher on physical readiness tests. Furthermore, when only a captain led the crew with no lieutenants, the scores were significantly lower.

University of East London

Carnivores

A new study published in Nature confirms a theory floated by none other than Charles Darwin in 1875, that some species of plant from the genus of flowering alpine plants Saxifraga were likely carnivorous and consumed nutrients from insects trapped in their sticky glandular hairs. The modern researchers studied S. candelabrum, which is found on the Tibet Plateau, and found insect prey on the glandular hairs of 43 out of 45 surveyed specimens, with the mature plants averaging 71 trapped insects each. By using fluorescence tagging, it was determined that the plants can indeed potentially digest prey. Fruit flies were then labeled with a stable form of nitrogen and fed to the plants, and researchers found a commensurate increase in nitrogen levels.

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Pepsi

Pepsi is launching one of its most successful European products in the United States: gazpacho. PepsiCo owns Alvalle, which sells refrigerated gazpacho in cartons in Spain, Portugal, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Russia. It was originally founded in Spain, where it is the most popular in the category and commands a 17 percent market share. Pepsi tends to sell most of its wares in the middle aisles of supermarkets, where the snacks and beverages are, and is aiming to get a foothold in the perimeter of grocery stores, which has outpaced the rest of the grocery business by 15 percent in 2025.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Blocking Out The Sun

A new study of the 2023 wildfires that hit forested regions of Canada found that the drifting smoke from those blazes was responsible for a three percent drop in solar power generation in not only the United States but also Europe. The generation drop cost $2 billion, of which $711 million was lost in the United States, and $1.17 billion was lost in Europe, mostly Germany.

Michael Le Page, New Scientist

Colorado

With the states that are part of the 1922 Colorado River Compact at an impasse over a new plan to manage the water that supports 35 million to 40 million people across seven American states, 30 tribes and two Mexican states, the federal Bureau of Reclamation has released its new management plan for the next decade. It would involve cutting water allotments originally proposed by Arizona, California and Nevada to the tune of 1.5 million acre-feet in 2027 and 2028 and then cuts of three million acre feet thereafter. The 1922 compact assumed 17.5 million acre-feet of water was available; the historical average has been closer to 14.7 million acre-feet, and that number dropped to 11.2 million acre-feet from 2020 to 2024. On the demand side, average use and evaporative loss came in at 13 million acre-feet.

Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News

Le Porge

The village of Le Porge in the south of France is experiencing a secondary negative effect from the wildfires hitting that country when a large cache of 400 heretofore unknown World War II explosives were detonated by the heat. The ammunition depots were buried inside the village by both the French and the Germans and subsequently forgotten about.

Ottilie Mitchell, BBC News

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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Fiber

Kimberly-Clark relies on wood fiber for most of its core products, from Scott paper towels to Huggies diapers to Cottonelle toilet paper, and after years of R&D, the company is prepared to reveal what it believes may be a future source of fiber: hesperaloe. In early tests, the plant’s fibers have been capable of swapping in for wood fiber in those paper products, and the fibers are both stronger and softer at that, not to mention less environmentally damaging. With 30 patents on the plant, and $250 million in R&D over 20 years, Kimberly-Clark considers it the viable alternative to wood fiber that bamboo and recycled paper have not entirely panned out to be.

Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal

Ticked Off

Ticks have become a serious public health risk, with ticks and Lyme increasingly discussed in public health circles with the same tone that mosquitoes and malaria once were. Those pests were at one point the target of a successful eradication campaign in North America that eventually led to the CDC, and a serious campaign would now subject ticks to the same level of control. However, that would probably involve killing lots and lots of deer: The deer population has rebounded without any real predators, and at any given season, a single deer can feed 1,500 female deer ticks, which can lay 2,000 eggs, good for producing three million deer ticks per deer over one breeding season. Hunting is good for reducing the density of deer down from 70 to 40 per square mile, but to break the disease transmission cycle you’d have to get down to less than 10.

Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

Danube

Romania is addressing its serious climate-change issues sensibly, by exploding them. The military detonated a rock formation in the Danube River that — amid a serious drought — had been preventing water from getting to the country’s sole nuclear power plant. This required 180 kilograms of explosives. The low level of the Danube has caused problems at energy facilities all along the river’s considerable length; in Hungary, the government had to shut down most of the power generation at a 2,000 megawatt nuclear power station because of the low water levels.

Irina Vilcu and Andra Timu, Bloomberg

Endowment

The fundamental rule of managing a financial endowment for an institution is that you do not touch the principal amount and live only off the interest. The situation at a number of small, private colleges is getting sufficiently bad that many are indeed spending restricted endowments just to keep the lights on. Almost 200 private colleges tapped into restricted endowments in 2025, up from 131 schools that had to do so in 2021. Overall, the percentage of private nonprofit colleges drawing on endowments at a rate of more than seven percent was up to 19.3 percent in 2025, up from just 9.7 percent in 2016.

Douglas Belkin, The Wall Street Journal

Beef

Meat consumption dropped 2 percent by volume in June year over year, with processed meat sales down 5 percent. Processed lunch meat was down 9 percent, frankfurters were down 8 percent, and bacon was down 6 percent. Beef, which is pricey, dropped 2 percent and veal sales were down 12 percent; both of those categories saw 12 percent inflation year over year.

Sam Silverstein, Food Dive

NASA

The critical mineral miner 3 Proton Lithium has set its eyes on a remote site in the Great Basin Desert in eastern Nevada, which has been assessed as containing 1.78 million tons of tungsten. That would be worth $152 billion based on the current (very high!) prices for the metal, and would also be five times larger than the next largest tungsten deposit in the United States. There is a problem, though: Lots of that tungsten is in lands reserved for NASA to calibrate Earth-observing satellites. Basically, a 92 square kilometer region of Railroad Valley has been used for over three decades by satellites to calibrate their precise location. Because the dry lake bed has a consistent color, it’s easily visible from space, undisturbed and free of vegetation and basically an ideal featureless landscape to calibrate optical instruments on Landsat and other satellites.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American and Jamie Smyth, Financial Times

Pyrogeomorphology

An unfortunate issue that can happen after a wildfire is that burned lands are subsequently very susceptible to mudslides and other debris flows, like the ones seen in Colorado just a few weeks ago. There are 21.8 million Americans who live within thre miles of where a fire has burned in the past two decades, double the number from 2000. In California, researchers project that changing atmospheric temperatures may result in rainfall intensity increases of 18 percent, which in turn will lead to a 110 percent increase in the probability of a major debris flow.

Jen Pierce, The Conversation

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Welcome back!

Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal

Spider-Man: Brand New Day smashed even the highest of expectations, making $355 million from 4,487 theaters in North America, the second-largest debut in box office history and just $2 million behind the record held by Avengers: Endgame. Thanks to the continued performance of The Odyssey — which incidentally also stars Tom Holland and Zendaya and also features Jon Bernthal in a crucial supporting role as a deeply violent colleague — this past weekend was the single best weekend at the North American box office in history, with $430 million across all movies in the marketplace, well above the $402 million made over the Endgame weekend.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Air Con

China State Railway Group is boasting about delivering air conditioners from their manufacturers in China to buyers in Europe within just 15 days by rail thanks to a route that was originally designed as a flagship project of the Belt and Road initiative back in 2013. Rail links between China and Europe have existed, but the China Railway Express is particularly shining in this moment, when sea routes between Europe and Asia have been snarled by tensions in the Middle East, and sea routes take 40 days to transport goods. Air conditioners have been shipped from China to Europe at a significantly higher rate than normal given the extreme heat on the continent, and manufacturers like Midea Group and Gree Electrical Appliances have switched to rail to ensure that HVAC systems get to market while it’s still hot.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Sargassum

It’s one of the worst seasons ever recorded for sargassum in the Caribbean, with millions of metric tons of the brown seaweed washing ashore and fouling miles upon miles of beaches. This is a new issue; before 2010, there was virtually no issue with sargassum abundance. In 2011, the numbers hit one million metric tons across the Caribbean, then 40 million last year. Mexico’s tourism authorities are trying to protect key beaches and regions by enlisting more boats to collect sargassum and installing bigger barriers off the coast; this year, authorities collected 96,151 metric tons, up from 92,783 metric tons last year. It’s getting so bad — and so consistent — that several companies are developing projects specifically to exploit the onslaught sargassum for biofuel production potential.

Sarah Morland, Reuters

Link

The Link satellite is still in a bad way, spinning out of control in orbit. Its mission is to rendezvous with NASA’s Swift gamma ray observatory and push Swift into a higher orbit before the instrument burns up in the atmosphere, both extending the life of a valuable mission and demonstrating the potential for such orbital-boosting tech. The good news is that the ground team is working to fix the satellite and has confirmed that its electric thrusters and important hardware are still in good condition. They’ve also been able to use the thrusters to control altitude and spin, and as of Friday, the team managed to cut the spin rate in half from nine degrees per second to four degrees per second. Once the spin rate is reduced further, communication will get much easier, at which point the goal will be to recover the now inoperable reaction wheels and restore control.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Lettuce

The cyclospora outbreak that is believed to have originated in Taylor Farms lettuce sourced from Mexico is prompting a consumer pullback from all manner of leafy greens, and prompting lettuce growers who are well outside of the affected region to plow their lettuce back into their fields. On the consumer side, the reaction has been swift: Foot traffic at Chopt is downs 12 percent in July and Taco Bell is down 21 percent. In supermarkets, unit sales of fresh lettuce was down 8.7 percent year over year in the four-week period ending July 18, a decline roughly commensurate with 7.6 million pounds of lettuce. Interestingly, of 37 vegetable categories tracked by NielsenIQ, 28 saw significant sales declines, an indication that the government response to the specific cyclospora outbreak has been so befuddled that people are simply evading chlorophyll out of an abundance of caution. In reaction to the demand pullback, many farmers in California (not where the outbreak happened) who grow romaine lettuce (not even the affected kind of lettuce!) are chopping up their fields and plowing them back into the soil.

Amira McKee, The Wall Street Journal

All Hail The Mysterious Gap

The Great Oxidation Event is a massive and dramatic change that happened on the Earth’s surface. For two billion years, Earth had basically no oxygen in its air or oceans. Then, 2.45 billion years ago, life evolved and began to fill the world with oxygen, an event termed The Great Oxidation Event. There’s an issue, though, which is that mineral analysis appears to indicate that oxygen-producing microbes actually evolved hundreds of millions of years before the GOE. So, there’s a strange gap between the point when we should’ve had an oxygen-lousy planet and the point at which we in fact did. The level of oxygen also seems to have risen and fallen over 200 million years, which is even odder. A new explanation focuses on continental shelves, arguing that their expansion around the time of the GOE was the trigger that may have set off the event, tectonic shifts driving the change and ensuring that oxygen production wasn’t just swallowed up by the oceans.

Paul Voosen, Science

Art

Baby Boomers collected vast troves of art, and as the generation succumbs to the inevitable, that means that something like $1 trillion worth of art is going to change intergenerational hands. The Boomers were responsible for an explosion in the art business; the roughly 150 art galleries in New York in 1946 doubled by 1961 and then doubled again by the early 2000s. As for the market itself, in 1988 there were 8,300 artists tracked in the Artnet Price Database, meaning they had a work sold at auction; as of 2012, there were 90,275. Hard-won collections making their way to the next generation is already having significant effects on both the art market as well as museums, because if there’s one thing that is rarely passed on from one generation to the next it’s taste. Many inheritors would rather the works their parents collected find a gallery where they’re actually wanted. One estimate has that there are about 1,000 collectors in the world with an art collection worth $1 billion or more, and perhaps conservatively, 3,000 who own at least $100 million worth of art; back of the napkin math, that means something like two $100 million art collections getting inherited every week.

Felix Salmon, Bloomberg

Correction: An earlier version of this newsletter misstated the current rotational speed of Link.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Jack Raines, author of the book Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties which is in stores this week. Jack and I worked together at Sherwood News where he was responsible for some of my favorite stories, he has had a longrunning newsletter about money and has always had some fascinating ideas.

The book is available wherever books are sold, and he recorded an audiobook available wherever you get your audiobooks.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Jack Raines, it is so good to talk to you. A former colleague of mine at Sherwood and the author of the brand new book Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties. Thanks for coming on, man.

Walt, thanks for having me.

I’ve known this book was in process for a long time. I have been so delighted to actually get it in my hands. You are just such a gifted and talented writer. You’re very incisive. I think that you have a way of seeing the world — whether it’s how business works, industry works or even personal finance works — that I think is just revelatory.

Just taking a step back before we get into the nuts and bolts of the book, what got you interested in money? And how do you see money as potentially differently than other folks do?

Before I get started, the whole meta angle of, “You should be my boss and I sign this book deal while working for you.” There’s like seven levels to this. It makes it a lot more fun.

I mean, on the money stuff, it’s funny. I had never really looked at money in a vacuum. I think a lot of people think about careers as “How much money am I earning at this age?” Or “Do I get equity and companies by this?” Or it’s always “How much money do I think I’ll be making? And what do I set my net worth to be by different points?”

It’s not that I’ve never tracked that stuff or don’t care about it, but I’ve always viewed money as how much utility or life enjoyment I can get from my dollars at different points in life. And how much do I think I’m going to want to be able to get from different points in life? So this whole book, Young Money, I wouldn’t even really call it a personal finance book as much as a book on opportunity costs.

Money and time are the two inputs that really go into that. You have a finite amount of money and finite years in your life. Within that, you have finite years within each specific period of your life: early 20s, late 20s, 30s, 40s, so on. You have years where you don’t have kids. You have years where you do have kids. At each of those points, you’re going to want to optimize for different stuff, and it’s going to cost different amounts of money to do that.

Throughout the book, a big thing that I’m focusing on is thinking through how do you maximize how much satisfaction you get from each life stage and how much money does it take to do that? And that number is a lot less in your 20s. The dollars needed per unit of fun at 24 is just way different than it is at 44, right? So the biggest thing I try to reframe is not just thinking about money as a number, as much as where you are in a particular stage of life; how much you actually need to get what you want.

Yeah, I think that’s what I’ve always really enjoyed about your work. You have a reputation as a guy who writes a lot about money, but I think that realistically, the dominant theme of your literary work is ultimately utility, right? And how you actually execute on that.

Yeah, yeah. I joke that I write about the human experience as I see it, but money happens to be a necessary but not sufficient input for that.

That’s fun. Let’s talk about some of the ideas that you get out of the book. I think one of the more compelling chapters that actually really gets at what we’re talking about here is the case for living life backward. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how that can affect people’s perception of their own current situation as well as where they actually want to go?

Yeah, I mean, I was a pretty angsty 24-year-old. I also think it’s a byproduct of being a Covid college graduate, where I basically spent the first year and a half out of school working remotely, which sucks. But I was sitting there. I knew I was going to start grad school in a year or a year and a half. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my 20s, slash with my life. And I had all of these half-baked ideas and plans and paths.

I ended up talking to this guy, Dr. Jim Jackson. He used to be the pastor at my grandparent’s church, and he was the pastor at a megachurch in Houston. Now, he has a couple of businesses, executive leadership coach. He’s worn a few different hats. We ended up chatting, and he was the one who first laid out this idea of living life backwards. But basically, his take was that you have to set constraints on your life to figure out what you want to do with your life. Because as long as you’re in this headspace of there are a bunch of hypothetical things I would like to do, it becomes really, really difficult to stack rank and then go execute on them.

But when you really work backwards from, all right, say I live to 85 or 90, and then I’m going to die. What are the things I actually want to do with my life or want to have experienced in my life before I reach that point? And then you can actually start, saying “Okay you can’t do it all. So what are the things that actually matter?” As you work backwards from grave, not to be morbid, to the present day, what’s the order of operations in which you need to do those things to either make them possible or to maximize enjoyment from them?

For me, it’s something that I really wanted to do. I was a big travel junkie as a kid. I really romanticized this idea of backpacking the world. I just thought that was the coolest thing any person in their 20s could do. It was a thing that I was “Oh, maybe I’ll travel for a month or two before grad school or maybe after business school or whatever.” Of all the things I wanted to do, the most stressful one was wanting to go see as much of the world as possible and do it in a cheap, fun, thrill-seeking way. And that conversation has made it very, very clear that a lot of this other stuff I had time to figure out — career stuff, family stuff, where I’m going to live when I’m older.

But the big adventure I wanted to go on had an expiration date that was probably in a year to a year and a half. By thinking through life backwards and thinking through what are the more holistic, long-term things I want and what are the actionable things I should go after now, it frankly gave me the confidence to just take a leap. A few months later, I quit job number one and I bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona. On the outside looking at it, it seemed impulsive, but it was actually pretty structured and planned.

Yeah, I really think that it’s just very thoughtful. A lot of the book talks about both this idea that’s very common in discussions about money, which is compounding, but also expanding that outward to other elements of life.

Yeah. I have a chapter called “Memories Calm Down Faster Than Money.” Money is a very easy thing to conceptualize and turn into a scoreboard because it’s like a physical asset and a number. You know how much money you’re making and how much your net worth is at any given point. But it’s like there’s tradeoffs to everything. And if you hyper-optimize for money at certain stages in your life, then there’s other things that could compound — like relationships, memories, there’s certain things you might spend money on when you’re 24, 25, 26, that a financial advisor might say you should contribute more to your 401k because that extra $5,000 a year will compound and be worth $100,000 in retirement.

That’s fine, but the flip side is when you’re at retirement age, do you think you would spend $100,000 to get back the experience that you could have spent $5,000 on when you were young? If the answer is yes, then maybe you should have spent that money earlier, right? It’s easy to see how money compounds because you can open Excel, put in 8 percent return, 40 years, $10,000 and enter, and you can see how much money that you would have if the market keeps growing.

But it’s much harder to conceptualize, “How much fulfillment will I get from the memories created now that you can experience through nostalgia?” Or a time spent with friends when you’re only going to live in New York City with your best friends for so many years before people move off and get married. I’m, maybe a bit to a fault, much more on the cap of it’s okay to overspend a little bit in your first five to 10 years of adulthood if it means making memories that you’ll cherish for the next 30 to 40 years.

That’s kind of funny. Viewing the inevitability of nostalgia as a fundamentally compounding element.

Yeah, it’s funny. Bill Perkins, he’s a really good writer, successful, out of people who’ve won life, I would put him up there. And then he is very rich and ran an energy fund. I think he’s produced a movie. He’s a pro poker player. He’s also a really good writer. And he wrote a book called Die With Zero, where he coined the term “memory dividends,” which I love. And it’s basically this idea that, every time you get to experience a memory that you enjoyed, that’s a form of payment or dividend, just like you get dividends from stocks. You should be trying to optimize for creating as many of these memory dividends as possible.

I dig that a lot. I want to talk about another pretty pervasive theme in the book. You spend a lot of the back half talking about status. Status and money can feel very interchangeable, but also are very fundamentally different things. People can attain status without money. People can attain money without status. The difference between those two things is a source of a fairly considerable amount of consternation and anxiety across lots of different social groups in America, I would say.

Obviously, when you write a book, you spend years working on this sucker. But these chapters feel very, in particular, suited for a lot of the moment right now and feels rather relevant in terms of the difference between social status and money, and where that can bite and where that might not.

My take in general is that most people want money, but I actually think the desire for status to both be respected and revered by your peers, and candidly to feel like you are better than other people. And I don’t even mean that in a conceited way. Humans are inherently status monkeys. Everybody is comparing themselves against other people in some way. Status happens within domains. Writers compare themselves to writers. Investors compare themselves to investors. Athletes compare themselves to athletes.

It’s a thing from the time that you’re in middle school playing basketball or trying to figure out which girl to ask to the homecoming dance up until you’re a 40-year-old hedge fund manager. Status games, I think, are an entirely pervasive thing that we can’t fully escape. The interesting comparison of money to status is that a lot of things that give you status give you money. And I would argue that anybody who achieves high net worth through their own work, probably gains status with that.

The money on its own does not equate status. Example being if you win the lottery and you get $100 million, nobody’s gonna consider you high status. You got lucky, right? Versus if you build a company and sell it for $100 million, it’s a different game. If you’re born into a high net worth family, and you start off with $100 million, your last name is high status. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will respect you until you do something to live up to that.

This desire for status is as pervasive as the desire for food or water or oxygen, and that everybody wants acceptance from other people. And I think it leads to a lot of people making career choices that oftentimes are lucrative and well-paying, but are really a path towards status approval.

People make certain job choices out of undergrad. You go to a competitive school, you think there’s only like two or three jobs you can do. You go be a consultant, you go be a banker or you make plans to go to law school. And that’s because historically, those are the jobs that are paid well, but also there’s this higher social cache, a level of approval. You work at Goldman, that validates you, right?

The issue is, you get there, and then there’s another status level. The easy route for me to pick on, having gone to a business school, it’s the people who go into investment banking, private equity, business school, and then that’s private equity or hedge funders trying to climb the finance ladder. That ladder gets more and more narrow at the top, and there’s also just always another level to it. The issue of chasing status is that, one, there’s actually never an endgame. There’s just never a point where you have “top status,” there’s just always another level of thing that you can strive to achieve. The irony of status is that the people who actually have the most status probably weren’t chasing it to begin with.

I have a buddy, he’s been a bond trader for eight, nine years now since college. Really good at it, makes a lot of money. He just interned at a bank in college and just loved the game of figuring out which numbers were gonna go up and down and playing it. It has never felt like a job to him. It’s like an arcade, right? And he makes good money now. He’s probably one of my wealthiest late 20s friends. But there’s other people who go into that job because they see finance as a status thing and trading as one of many status games you can play within that.

The difference between those two people is that the former, my buddy Tucker, he actually loves what he’s doing, and that makes him more inclined to spend extra time on it and work harder on it and make more money doing it. The person who takes the same job because they feel like it’s what they’re supposed to do, might initially make a high income, but they’re just gonna flame out. They’re not gonna win. If you’re pursuing status in the same field that somebody else is just doing a thing that they like, you’re just gonna get your ass kicked.

So my take on all this, it’s not that optimizing for money is a bad thing. I think all things equal, more money is better. But if you’re just chasing status for status sake, you’re inevitably gonna hit some point where somebody who wasn’t chasing status is in the same domain as you, and they’re gonna kick your ass. And then you’ve made this thing that you’re doing such a core part of your identity, that when you lose it to someone else, I think it leads to a lot of soul searching.

So my whole take on status is that I don’t think we can totally avoid it. I think it’s always a thing that’ll exist. But if you’re gonna play a status game, you at least want to be in a field where you have independent interests and desire to do well in that thing.

A lot of times you see people’s attempt at a second act in their career being the thing that they actually truly want to do. I think a fun thing about your book is that it’s just saying “You should just have that be the first one.”

Right, right. I mean, there’s nuance to this, right? This is actually very ironic. I was working for you for a year, but a big part of the reason I wanted to make my career pivot was I realized I love writing, but I didn’t necessarily want to be in media. I like writing books and blog posts. I realized I didn’t want to be a traditional journalist. And it’s okay. So I went after the more passion-y career path for a bit, and then moved into the investing world, because it’s another thing that I’m independently interested in.

But there’s also a lot of long tail offshoots where if you play out 100 scenarios, they might be more lucrative than if I stay in the media path, right? There’s people who have gone the headstrong route, made a lot of money, and then they decide, “Okay, I now want to be a writer.”

I’ve been reading 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. I don’t know if you’ve read it yet. I’m a bit of a history dork. It’s about how the Rothschild banking industry got built out and all these financial bubbles in Europe. Really fascinating. The guy who wrote it was like a long-time worker for the World Bank, was in asset management in London, presumably made a lot of money in finance. But then he left to write and he won a Pulitzer for one of his books.

Phenomenal writer. I actually don’t think he would change the order of operations and just write. I think by having the financial stability that he gave himself, he could focus solely on the writing without having to worry about the book advance or a number of copies sold or whatever. Going back to the living life backwards framing, he probably implicitly had some version of, “I’m going to make a lot of money and I also want to write, but I can write over the course of my entire life and I have career traction to compound more money now.”

It’s not like what he did was right or wrong, but I actually don’t think he would change the order and just be a writer the whole time. By front loading money in his career early, he gave himself a lot more leeway to spend time working on the written word without having to worry about the economic outcomes. So my take away on all of it is that the most important thing is not any particular choice or order of operations, but just being really self-aware and having a strong level of intentionality with whichever path you choose.

Now that you’ve sold me on that other guy’s book. Why don’t we sell people on your book.

Why don’t you tell people a little about the book, where can people find it and where can they find you?

Yea, 100 percent. So the book, again, is called Young Money by Jack Raines, subtitled A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksmillion.

The audio book will be on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to books. I recorded a whole audio book in two days. That was a lot of fun. I spent like 11 hours a day, two days in a row and we were done. It was great.

I heard it can be a gigantic pain to do those.

I was going to say, did you do an audio book for yours?

No, I left that one to the professionals.

Yeah, no, I enjoyed it.

But anyway, yes, you can download it anywhere. As far as where to find me, you can look up Jack Raines on basically any social media platform.I have a cowboy hat in my profile picture. It was from my headshot — first day of Sherwood News two years ago, three years ago, whatever it was. Anyway, yeah, look for the Jack Raines cowboy hat picture. Yeah, buy your copy of Young Money. Comes out two days after this gets published, August 4. Preorder, buy your copy. Hope you enjoy it.

Awesome, thanks for coming on Jack.

Dude, thanks for having me.

Young Money by Jack Raines

Jack Raines' essays on all things behavioral finance, markets, work, and life.

Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Read more

Have a great weekend!

Fortitude

A production company is suing Netflix, alleging that Netflix compromised the sale of a World War II spy thriller starring Nicolas Cage when it lost an unencrypted master copy of Fortitude as it was stolen from Netflix’s office last month. Netflix is arguing that it doesn’t bear responsibility for the loss of the film because there was no encryption involved. The producers are suing for at least $105 million, arguing that the theft has made the film considerably harder to sell, given that they must now disclose to any potential buyer that a copy is out there in the wild. Either way, congratulations to Nicolas Cage, who is all but certain to nab the lead role in a heist movie in which he has to steal an unencrypted DCP from Netflix headquarters.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Red Lobster

The Red Lobster bankruptcy spawned litigation from creditors alleging that the company’s then-owner, the seafood seller Thai Union Group, convinced managers to launch the $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion that doomed the company in a bid to sell more shrimp. The seafood supplier has long disputed those allegations related to the Ultimate Endless Shrimp boondoggle, and will now have to defend itself in court over its role in the hubristic and brash promotion. Thai Union has suggested that it is implausible that it would jeopardize its initial $575 million minority investment in Red Lobster for what would amount to $33 million in additional shrimp purchases.

Jonathan Randles and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, Bloomberg

St. Mary’s

Over 20 years ago, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company was abandoned in the town of St. Mary’s in Newfoundland and Labrador. About 110 tanks, each holding 3,000 gallons of fermented fish sauce, were left behind and continued to ferment and rot over the years. This was aromatically disturbing to the town, which stank. This week, a C$1.7 million (US$1.21 million) project kicks off to remove the stockpile of rancid garum; it is to be sucked into trucks, transported to pits lined with high-density polyethylene and eventually buried.

Jim Morris, The Associated Press

Dyes

The U.S. federal government is pushing food manufacturers to remove synthetic dyes from their products, and while adoption of natural dyes has grown somewhat — sales of products with natural colors listed as an ingredient increased 24.4 percent in 2025, compared to a 0.1 percent increase for items with artificial colors — in dollar terms, growth of non-artificial dyes is remarkably slow. Products containing one of six FDA-certified colors accounted for just 7.1 percent of total food and beverage sales, and the supply of those colors increased from 11.5 million pounds in 2024 to just 12 million pounds in 2025. Reformulation is expensive and can require $50,000 to $500,000 in testing and regulatory reviews.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Mammoths

A new study analyzed genomic data from 521 woolly mammoths to determine their genetic sex, and found stark differences between mammoth remains found in dispersed natural settings and those found at accumulation sites, which result from human predation of herds. The mammoth remains found in the wild were 66 percent male and 34 percent female, which aligns with the idea that solitary males were more likely to die in natural traps like sinkholes. At accumulation sites, the mammoths were 70 percent female and 30 percent male.

Karin Tjulin, Stockholm University

Nepotism

Allegations of nepotism get thrown around the music industry a lot these days, but increasingly that’s less because someone has a musical lineage and more just because they come from money. A new analysis looked at every person who made the Billboard Hot 100 year-end list from 1960 to 2025, looking simply to see if each artist (or, in the case of a band, their frontman) had a parent who also had a Wikipedia page. After excluding parents who had a Wikipedia page exclusively because they sired a musician, the data indicates that even at their peak (in the 1990s, at 7.2 percent of artists) nepo babies never made up a particularly high percentage of musicians, and the 2.6 percent of the 2020s is a historical low.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Apophis

On April 13, 2029, the 340-meter-diameter asteroid Apophis will pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth, closer even than the altitude of geostationary satellites. Since the initial workshop about the encounter in 2020, three major missions are preparing to intercept Apophis and conduct science in its vicinity, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s DESTINY+ mission, which will be the first to survey the rock on its way to another asteroid, Phaethon. After that is a European Space Agency mission called Ramses that will ride the same rocket as DESTINY+ and essentially replicate the Hera mission that is due to arrive at the asteroid Didymos this year. Lastly, after the asteroid moves on from Earth, the OSIRIS-APEX mission from NASA will study it for 18 months following June 5, 2029.

Andrew Jones, Scientific American

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi over at Bloomberg who wrote New York, City of Scaffolding, Tries a Glow-up. Fola and I spoke about how these sidewalk sheds first started to darken our doorstep, why some of them last for decades, and how the city wants to change that. Akinnibi can be found at Bloomberg, on Twitter @FolaAk and on BlueSky.

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

Diamonds

De Beers could sell for $1 billion, a steep decline for the diamond monopoly once valued at $18 billion. As it stands, the leading bid for the Anglo American subsidiary is from Global Diamond Consortium, which is a group that includes the governments of Namibia and Angola, which would pay $750 million upfront and then $250 million later. The transaction would be subject to negotiations with Botswana, which owns 15 percent of De Beers, and also has a 50 percent interest in the joint Debswana, which produces most of the diamonds that come from Botswana. The carrying value of De Beers was down to $2.3 billion as recently as February.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Greek Myth Movie

While The Odyssey dominated the box office this past weekend, the live capture of the Broadway hit Hadestown was released in cinemas as Hadestown: The Musical, and made $10.2 million domestically across a little under 2,000 screens. Though overshadowed by the other mythological movie about an Achaean legend, that is good for the best-ever opening for a Broadway live capture at the box office, edging out the $10.1 million made by Hamilton, which topped out at $16.2 million domestically.

Brian Welk, IndieWire

Limited Edition Minis

Excavations at the Hohle Fels Cave in southwest Germany have uncovered a magnificent find: two 40,000-year-old carved birds made out of mammoth ivory. Their dimensions are tiny, at 2 x 1 x 0.5 cm, and are the smallest discovered so far, containing rich detail. They are of similar age, were discovered 1.5 meters from each other and may have even been carved by the same person. One figure is complete and appears to depict a brooding bird, but the other appears to be unfinished and has an outstretched wing. While exciting for archaeology, the find has presumably sent the miniature painting, modeling and tabletop wargaming communities into a tizzy — drastically pushing back the history of their hobby, cementing the recreational act of making little guys as a cornerstone of the human creative experience and presumably launching intense internecine arguments as to the species of the birds in question and whether the specific size of these ice age models indicates a fundamental human predisposition to either the 1:32 (one gauge) or 1:22.5 (“G scale”) scale.

Janna Eberhardt, University of Tübingen

Landslide

A new database developed by researchers at the University of Washington maps landslide risk across the entire United States and rates 128 million buildings based on landslide susceptibility. According to the analysis, 6.5 million people live in a landslide-prone region; the regions of Appalachia and the West Coast are at the most significant risk, containing about 80 percent of the people vulnerable to landslides. About 20 percent of the land in the United States is prone to landslides, though just two percent of the population live in them.

William Poor, University of Washington

Link

On July 3, the Link mission was launched into orbit, intending to send a satellite to NASA’s Swift gamma-ray telescope, which can push the instrument into a higher orbit to avoid a fiery re-entry and ensure an extended life for the spacecraft. It’s a rescue mission that has the dual purposes of prolonging the service of a satellite that lacks a propulsion system, while also serving as a proof-of-concept mission and tech demonstration for the commercial satellite servicing industry, a high-risk but high-reward mission. That risk, evidently, is real; the Link satellite has experienced issues with altitude control and an investigation has attributed the problem to two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels not operating as intended. Regardless of the outcome, NASA is already pleased with the results.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Aquiry

Researchers flew a plane equipped with lidar imaging equipment over 4,497 square kilometers of Brazil’s Southwest Amazon, and detected 396 new earthworks in the region, indicating that the area as a whole might contain as many as 24,000 to 30,000 in total. The geoglyphs spotted are a signature of the Aquiry civilization that existed there between 600 BCE and 850 CE. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that at the civilization’s apparent peak around 100 to 300 CE, there were potentially three million people living there, in an area about 183,000 square kilometers.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American and Julia Vaz, Science

Phones

For the first time on record, more Americans support a ban on students using cellphones during the entire school day than oppose it, with 48 percent of respondents backing a ban and just 43 percent opposing one, down from 53 percent opposed and 36 percent in favor as of 2024. Support for a ban on middle and high school students using cellphones during just class is considerably higher, at 77 percent in favor and 18 percent opposed.

Jeffrey Gottfried, Pew Research Center

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

FIFA

FIFA has, over the course of its history, been the Manhattan Project of corruption, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and weaponizing what grifters from just a generation earlier considered only theoretical. That legacy may very well continue as FIFA announced that it is looking to create a new entity: FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), within which the global soccer governing body would place the revenue-generating enterprises like media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. FIFA would then sell a 21 percent stake of that company at a $20 billion valuation, which would lead to $4.2 billion in cash flowing immediately and directly into FIFA coffers and then presumably immediately and indirectly to god only knows where.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Unpublished

The billion-dollar AI labs are being remarkably stingy at participating in the scientific publication process that made their entire industry possible, a new study has found. After identifying 317 AI companies that existed from 1998 to 2025 valued at over $1 billion each, those top-flight AI unicorn companies accounted for just one in every 1,000 AI papers published in 2025. Over half of the startups never produced a single qualifying paper out of 1,389 peer-reviewed publications and 688 preprints, and only 24 firms — 7.6 percent — produced any highly-cited papers.

Celina Zhao, Science

Sugar

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a proposed class-action lawsuit over the sugar content of Chobani yogurt may proceed. The company advertised some of its yogurt as sugar-free, but the suit alleges that Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt actually contained four grams of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener that the litigants contend is a sugar. Chobani argues that FDA regulation listed just glucose, fructose, lactose and sucrose as sugars, while the more expansive definition might include all monosaccharides.

Jonathan Stempel, Insurance Journal

Trek

A jaguar named Gaspar has smashed the record for dispersal of a tagged jaguar, traveling 2,122 kilometers from the time his tracking collar was fitted in November 2024 to when the collar stopped transmitting locations a year later. By comparison, the previous record for a tagged jag was 60 to 100 kilometers.

Joshua Rapp Learn, New Scientist

Streams

According to data from Nielsen, streaming television rose to 48.6 percent of total television watch time in May, up from 44.8 percent in May of last year. YouTube achieved a platform-best 13.8 percent of total watch time, up from 10.4 percent in May 2025. Thanks to the success of The Boys and a number of NBA and WNBA games, Amazon’s Prime Video saw a 25 percent year-over-year increase, good for 4.5 percent of total watch time in the month.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Rathlin

Rats can wipe out fragile bird populations on islands, and as a result, nearly 1,000 islands have attempted some form of invasive rodent eradication effort. These can be successful, but it’s especially challenging to kill invasive populations of vermin when there’s permanent human settlement on an island — as was the case for Rathlin Island, a 14-square-kilometer island that is home to Northern Ireland’s largest seabird colony, but also hosts invasive ferrets and rats that killed those birds. An initial effort to wipe out the ferrets required 450 traps set around the island, and as of March, the requisite two years have passed for the island to be certified ferret-free. The rats were a much bigger problem, as while there were just 98 ferrets, there were an estimated 10,000 rats. Thus began a massive effort involving 7,000 bait stations placed at 50-meter intervals all over Rathlin starting in September 2024. As far as people know, the last rat was killed in June 2025; if all proceeds as hoped, Rathlin might be declared rat-free next June.

Clare Wilson, New Scientist

Lydia?

Betelgeuse is the massive red supergiant that may be seen in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and it’s long beguiled astronomers. Lately, that interest has come from the cyclical brightening and darkening of the star, which has spawned speculation that there might be a smaller companion star and that the red supergiant is indeed in a binary system. A paper published in February led to the announcement that Hubble observations indicated there was a possible second star passing in front of Betelgeuse once every six years, and new data from the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope now appears to confirm it with a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The second star, now termed Betelgeuse B, was spotted in data from December 2024, when the companion star would be at maximum separation from the known star.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

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Emmys

The Emmy Awards are actually controlled by two separate organizations that have, for decades, been embroiled in an at-times acrimonious East Coast/West Coast feud. The Primetime Emmys are overseen by the Los Angeles-based Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or the TV Academy, while the New York-based National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or NATAS, oversees the Daytime Emmys, Sports Emmys, Children’s & Family Emmys, the News & Documentary Emmys, International Emmys and regional Emmys. ATAS, which has managed to get its show on an actual telecast, is the more well-heeled organization, with revenues over $53.5 million last fiscal year, compared to the $9.8 million in revenue for NATAS. Lately, things have been on the calmer side, so the waters are once again being tested for a possible reunification.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Casting

China’s microdramas are full of AI, with 95 percent of the 128,000 microdramas released in the first quarter of the year relying on the technology in some capacity. This has already led to some issues, with roughly 700 AI-related face theft cases over the past three years hitting Guangzhou’s Internet Court. To handle the demand for AI assets in a way that keeps things out of the courts, online platforms are paying people to license their likeness for AI-generated video content. ActID, one such company, has 300 clients licensing their images to AI production, with two AI drama productions licensing those faces so far and paying 99 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74) per episode.

Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou, Rest of World

Smilodon

Saber-tooth tigers, or Smilodon fatalis, went extinct about 12,000 years ago, though many specimens have been trapped in tar pits, which facilitates interesting research across hundreds of samples. Researchers analyzed 3,722 vertebrae from 849 adults and found lots of congenital deformities, including 48 fused vertebrae, 32 incompletely developed vertebral arches and three spinal nerve tumors. That last one is interesting; that would imply that among the Smilodon found in La Brea’s tar pits, 353 per 100,000 had the tumors, which are ordinarily remarkably rare. By comparison, that number is less than one in 100,000 for humans. What this indicates is that, as the population hit a bottleneck from which it never recovered, there were lengthy years of inbreeding among the population that led to the malformations.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Influential

Historically, brands that cut deals with social media influencers would aim high and work their way down the food chain, but the development of “advocacy programs” is enabling companies to find legions of people with relatively small followings who are one $10 gift card away from shilling their wares. According to Emarketer, influencers with fewer than 20,000 followers accounted for 19.5 percent of the total influencer marketing spend in 2021, a figure that is up to 45 percent of campaign spend as of 2026.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Imperial

A new poll from Nikkei and TV Tokyo found that 84 percent of Japanese respondents approved of allowing female emperors. The issue has come up, as there are just a few eligible men remaining in the line of succession, and for years, advocates of modernization have proposed either allowing women to inherit the Chrysanthemum Throne or at least allowing a son to inherit the title of emperor through their mother, currently not allowed. All told, 25 percent supported female emperors but not female-lineage emperors, 59 percent supported both female emperors and female-lineage emperors, and just eight percent opposed both. This comes after a revision to Imperial House Law that allows male-lineage male descendants from former imperial branch families to be adopted into the imperial family, a move that itself was supported by just 42 percent of respondents.

Nikkei Asia

Lighthouses

A new paper argues that while lots of signal-hunting for alien civilizations has focused on seeking out femtosecond lasers in high-energy bursts, perhaps it makes more sense to look for pulsing interstellar beacons instead. As it stands, our current astronomical surveys would not pick this up; any such beacon broadcasting at less than a nanosecond burst of light would not be seen by any SETI survey, except the PANOSETI project, which would be too low-resolution to capture such a “cosmic lighthouse.” The proposed project to search the local stellar neighborhood for such a beacon would involve a qCMOS detector, GPUs and diffractive-refractive lenses, with a one-meter telescope capable of detecting a 100 MW laser with a 10-microsecond pulse within 20 parsecs.

Andy Tomaswick, Universe Today

Photobiology

While chlorophyll understandably gets a lot of the attention, there are, in fact, many photosensitive proteins that science has become very interested in as of late, particularly as it relates to how animals register the length of day and when they ought to embark on important life events like migration. Opsins are photosensitive proteins that respond instantly to sunlight, and as of about 25 years ago, scientists thought they only contributed to sight. But beyond vision, opsins also govern lots of different behaviors ranging from body temperature to growth. While light-sensitive cells in the retina have understandably attracted most of the scientific attention, three other light-reactive proteins (melanopsin, encephalopsin and neuropsin, found in the retina, brain, skin, immune system and blood vessels) have recently become of significant interest.

Emily Laber-Warren, Knowable Magazine

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

Welcome back!

Buff Right Out

The Odyssey has made $639.6 million worldwide, of which $284.4 million was made domestically, $353.2 million abroad, and $140 million from IMAX. Still, a controversy has emerged: Universal contracted with the nonprofit Värmlands Vikingcenter in Sweden to borrow their boat Glad av Gillberga as one of the escort vessels in the Ithacan flotilla depicted in the film, paying a rental fee of $41,000. It’s impossible to spoil a 3000-year-old story, but needless to say, the boats in The Odyssey have a rather bad go of it, and according to the nonprofit, the hull was damaged, prompting the company to invoice Universal $6,000 for repairs. Universal says they’ve paid it; the Vikings dispute that charge. That said, from my limited nautical knowledge, any boat repair that cost a mere $6,000 will go down in history as the cheapest possible problem to ever need attention on a boat.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper and Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Packers

The Green Bay Packers are the sole publicly owned team in the NFL, and as a result, provide an unprecedented peek into the finances of the secretive sports juggernaut. Interestingly, the Packers reported a rare operating loss during the 2025 season of $1.1 million, down from an $83.8 million profit; the management had rather good reasons for the loss, and the answer is “Micah Parsons is an expensive gentleman to employ.” National revenue for the team — the NFL socialism — hit $453.2 million, up 4.8 percent, implying gross national revenue of $14.5 billion.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Checks

The usage of checks has declined sharply in the United States, but people are still using them for big purchases. In 2000, there were 42.6 billion checks written, good for 150 checks per American, with a total value of $40.3 trillion, indicating a typical check being for an amount less than $1,000. By 2024, there were only 9.2 billion checks written, only about 27 checks per person on average, but the total value was still rather high at $24.5 trillion, indicating the average check was for about $2,600. There may be change on the horizon, as the Federal Reserve is considering leaving the check processing business, which presents a possible phase-out moment for checks.

Jay L. Zagorsky, The Conversation

Museum

The Van Gogh Museum teamed up with researchers to figure out if visitor behavior should lead them to better layout decisions. The team randomly selected 25,000 out of 1.5 million visits to the museum from 2019 to 2021, and ascertained the visitor’s location and their progression through the museum based on their progression through the audio guide. The data contained some interesting information, not the least of which was that congestion led to engagement; when lots of people were looking at something, that made people passing by want to look at it themselves.

Mureji Fatunde-Iloeje, Ars Technica

Syria

A new study published in Heritage assessed satellite imagery of archaeological sites in Syria to determine the extent of looting and damage over the course of the civil war that gripped the country from 2011 to 2024. From 2011 to 2016, 13 percent of sites were looted, though from 2015 to 2025 fully 59 percent of sites were looted. One issue was the development of mechanized looting; bulldozers would scrape a site, looters would raid what was turned over, and the bulldozers would hit it again and again in order to dredge up valuable artifacts despite annihilating the site. Another issue that emerged was that the same kinds of locations that were advantageous for ancient settlements — accessibility, abundance of nearby resources, a solid view of the surroundings — were also valuable qualities for a military encampment during the war.

Amy Olson, Dartmouth College

Cleaning Robots

Chinese manufacturers account for 70 percent of the global market for household cleaning robots, a milestone cemented at the end of last year when the company that created the Roomba and essentially invented the category, the U.S.-based iRobot, was bought out of bankruptcy by a Chinese firm. Roborock is the biggest player, with a global market share of 27 percent as of late last year.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

LeBron James

Basketball superstar LeBron James has decided to take his talents to the Schuylkill, having elected to join the Philadelphia 76ers for their forthcoming season at an astonishing salary of $7.95 million over two years, or $3.88 million this season, 2.4 percent of the salary cap. This meagre pay is unprecedented for a player of LeBron’s talents: His 70.9 weighted wins above replacement over the past three years is the best ever for a player getting 2.4 percent or lower of the cap. The generally understood reason he’s playing so well for so cheap is that James, 42, is pursuing a ring with the kind of tenacity ordinarily only possessed by Sauron, in an attempt to surpass the number of championships won by Michael Jordan to advance his bid to be the greatest of all time.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi over at Bloomberg who wrote New York, City of Scaffolding, Tries a Glow-up.Here is what I wrote about it:

Building owners, particularly in New York, install scaffolding and sidewalk sheds as safety measures when possible facade issues emerge. The problem is that the cost of keeping the sheds up is often less than the cost of actually fixing the issue, which leads to stretches of sidewalk essentially permanently sheltered under temporary structures. There are currently 7,500 such sheds in New York City, covering 330 miles of sidewalk, enough to circle Manhattan 10 times, with an average age of 550 days, and some even now decades old. The oldest, a stretch of scaffolding in the East Village, has been up for over 15 years. Some of this is on the city — hell, two of the three oldest sheds are on city-owned buildings — but lately, the push has been to roll out new designs that are less ad hoc and ugly for what may be long renovations.

Fola and I spoke about how these sidewalk sheds first started to darken our doorstep, why some of them last for decades, and how the city wants to change that.

Akinnibi can be found at Bloomberg, on Twitter @FolaAk and on BlueSky.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Fola, thank you so much for coming on again. You do such interesting stuff, particularly about big cities like New York, and it’s always good to have you back.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

You most recently wrote a story about sidewalk sheds. Do you want to talk a little bit about what sidewalk sheds are for folks who maybe don’t live in a city that requires them?

Yeah, so sidewalk scaffolding, or they’re formally known as, sidewalk sheds, are safety structures that in New York City are put on the sidewalks to protect people from falling debris from the facades of buildings while maintenance work is being done or construction is being done. So they’re just a pretty basic safety measure in the city.

Can you talk a little bit about facades? Because I think that a lot of times people will see the scaffolding in the street and assume that it means, “Oh, there’s construction going on,” or, “Oh, they’re building something.” That is actually rarely the case. It is usually far more related to the avoidance of construction?

Yeah to answer that question, I’ll wind back a little bit. In the 1970s, uptown, a Barnard student was taking a walk in the evening and a piece of a building facade fell off and struck her and killed her. In response to this incident, in response to the tragedy, the city created and implemented these rules around facade maintenance and upkeep. Essentially what those rules do is they require every, it’s like on the cycle every five years, an inspection.

If there are issues that are found with the facade of a building, then a shed is required to protect people from falling debris, and then the building owner is required to make repairs. Now, in New York City, if you fast forward, there have been multiple layers of rules and regulations added on top of that. I think it’s a 1980s law.

Now, in New York City, you see thousands of these structures. I think there’s like 7,500 across the city, on the city streets. And what we’re finding today is that instead of doing the repairs, which can be costly, building owners will just leave the shed up and just defer maintenance, defer repairs. In some cases, they just don’t have the money, right? They’re undercapitalized, so they’ll just defer maintenance until they do have the money or they’ll just defer maintenance indefinitely. Some of these sheds have been up for 10 years. The oldest one, I think, has been up for 15 years. And so they’re just languishing on the sidewalks, and they look gross.

Yeah, it seems like it’s an interesting situation where the cost of a one-time fix is just going to be far more expensive than just putting up plywood and steel.

In some cases, there is construction going on. These are required if you’re building a building. In some cases, they’re there for construction, which also takes a long time. A building is going to take, in some cases, years to put up. So you can understand why there would be a shed up for that period of time. But in other cases, the sheds are languishing because of deferred maintenance. I’ll also note that two of the oldest sheds in the city are on city-owned buildings. So even the city is guilty of this deferred maintenance issue.

There’s not a lot of ways around the fact that if you have a dangerous facade, you need to protect people from the dangerous facade. And the conclusions have not necessarily been engineering-related or even structural legislation-related. They’ve instead been aesthetic.

Right. To a certain extent, it’s maybe an acknowledgment that we’re going to have to live with some version of these. I think the idea was, “Well, let’s make them look a little better than they look.” There have been a few iterations of these beautification attempts, and this most recent one falls in part in that category, right? These sheds are this dark green color. That was implemented, I think, during the Bloomberg era to make them uniform. They thought, “Well, if these things look uniform, they’ll look better.” And it’s clearly not.

There was a design competition around that same time. The winner of that design competition, the Urban Umbrella, tried to eliminate some of the cross-bracing, which can trap people on the sidewalk, which people often use as a leaning post or a pull-up bar. It eliminates that cross-bracing, it has these white steel posts, and instead, the structure is supported by something like umbrella prongs at the top that hold up the shed. These, too, were an attempt to make them look better.

The problem is that the green sheds are cheap. And the materials are ubiquitous. And they’re faster to put up. People are used to putting them up, so the Urban Umbrella hasn’t caught on to the same extent as the green ones because it’s too expensive for a building owner, who in some cases is deferring maintenance because they can’t afford it, to buy a fancy shed. There’s only like 100 and something of these Urban Umbrellas up in the city, again, compared to 7,000+ of the green sheds around.

Now, again, the city is releasing these new designs. The difference between these and the Urban Umbrella is that they are city-owned designs, not owned by a private company.. People will be able to use them open source, and the city hopes that’ll push down the cost of using the designs.

There have been some other things that the city’s doing with rules when it comes to costs, right?

Yeah. The other aspect of this, and to answer the other part of the question, is that in order to reduce the number of sheds on the street and keep them from languishing, it’s not just a beautification issue. There’s also a rules issue here, and the city is trying to address that this time. In addition to the new designs, the city has taken steps to increase fines for sheds that are languishing. And reduce permit renewal periods; people with sheds up have to renew your permit more often, so you have to say, “Hey, this is what the shed is up for. This is what we’re doing to address the issue, et cetera.” ]

The city is also in the process of easing some of the inspection schedules. For facades that use newer materials or a glass building that they just built, does it really need to be inspected every five years? You’re not at the same risk as a 100-year-old building that has a masonry facade that is crumbling, right? Increasing that schedule and allowing for different types of inspections, the city hopes, will create a situation where there are fewer sheds necessary and the sheds that are up are up for less time. It’s like a two-pronged attempt, to reduce the number of sheds and reduce the time that the sheds that are already up are up.

It seems like they’re ubiquitous in New York in no small part because we seem to take things more seriously than other cities do. Obviously, we have a lot more buildings, but it seems like Boston and Chicago have an inspection schedule that is a little less aggressive.

Yeah. And again, they have that leeway that allows for different schedules for different materials because, again, not all facades are created equally here.

I want to talk about another article of yours, and you can take some time to pull it up if you want. You had an article a little bit before this called, “Will Transit Be Any Better After the World Cup?” And I have been wondering this a lot, and so I guess I will just ask you the question in the headline of your article. Will transit be any better now that we’re after the World Cup?

I think for a lot of the World Cup cities in the U.S., the World Cup was an opportunity to think about how people move around those cities, right? They’re having a huge influx of guests and travelers and fans that are looking to get to games or to get to a fanfest and to move around their city. So a lot of these cities that don’t have robust public transit systems rolled out bus services, extended bus services, extended train services and the like. Some of those lines are temporary, or they’re temporary routes. They can just go straight to a stadium, shuttle bus service that goes to a stadium or to a fan zone. Many of those were just for the World Cup.

You also have cities like L.A. and Seattle that were already doing upgrades — L.A. for the Olympics in 2018 and Seattle just doing transit improvements that happened to coincide – that had pieces that coincided with the World Cup. Those, obviously, are just infrastructure improvements that will remain, and those will be used in those cities going forward.

What remains to be seen is if these cities see any of those improvements and say, “Hey, this worked really well for the World Cup, and this will also work really well for our city.” It’s hard to say right now. In Seattle, for example, they’re considering making an open street permanent. That’s not transit improvement, it’s just city improvement and they’re like, “Oh, this is nice, we might keep this.” New York — obviously, Mayor Mamdani is rolling out new bus lanes, it seems like, on a weekly or biweekly basis now. And there were bus routes that were implemented during the World Cup. It’s not clear if those will be used as a test run for a new bus route or bus lane or priority bus zone. Again, this is just all a long way of saying it remains to be seen. I don’t think anyone has come out and said, “This worked so great during the World Cup, we’re keeping it.”

Well, Fola, where can folks find you and where can they find your work?

Yeah, I’m a writer for CityLab, so you can find me at citylab.com. I’m on Twitter, @FolaAk. I’m on BlueSky and Bloomberg.com.

Read more

Have a great weekend!

Ghibli

Studio Ghibli Fest, the annual event where rep screenings of iconic films from the animation studio get rereleased in the United States, has quickly become an institution. Both a chance for parents to take their kids to movie theaters for the young-skewing fare as well as a chance for older nerds to see When Marnie Was There for the first time, the screenings have become a reliable hit. Upon launch in 2017, the initial release of five movies from the Ghibli Vault made $5 million; in 2024, the programming made $16.4 million in sales, and last year, eight re-released movies made $10.6 million, with the initial footprint growing from 640 to 1,100 locations.

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

Insects

New research using sonar has determined that the larvae of the lake fly Chaoborus edulis can dive to depths of up to 258 meters during the daytime in Lake Malawi in order to avoid predators like fish. This discovery is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is the realization that insects can dive that deep into water. It’s wild because if these bugs can dive that deep, it stands to reason that there’s nothing stopping other insects from doing so, underscoring the question of why there are no insects in the ocean.

Mary Randolph, Scientific American

Games Stopped

According to Circana, physical sales of video game discs peaked in the 12 months ending June 2009, a period in which 297 million units were sold. This makes intuitive sense to me, a millennial whose understanding of video games peaked around then, when Bioshock and The Orange Box were released. Those physical disc sales have declined steadily since, and in the past 12 months, just 37 million discs were sold. Physical software is simply on the way out, one reason that PlayStation recently made the call to phase out physical discs.

Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

Elvers

The wholesale price of eel in Japan in June was down 26.8 percent year over year, thanks in part to a large domestic catch that hit 15.3 metric tons in the fiscal year ending March. But it’s largely thanks to China, which introduced eight times the number of baby eels into aquaculture facilities in the 2025 year. Farm-raised eels still depend on wild-caught elvers; most farmed eels start as babies caught in rivers. In 2025, the eel supply in Japan hit 63,600 tons, with imports accounting for 72 percent of the total, and up to 70 percent of the baby eels coming from imports as well.

Satoshi Shimoda, Nikkei Asia

Transplants

Thanks to breakthroughs in technology, more and more organ donations that would not have been viable in the past are now possible thanks to medical and logistical breakthroughs related to “donation after circulatory death.” Overwhelmingly, organ donations came from people who had suffered brain death, a condition in which the brain has died but the circulatory system persists. This is because circulation is crucial for organs staying alive, and when people suffer circulatory death before brain death, their organs tended to die with them. The issue is, brain death happens in just 3 in 1,000 deaths that leaves organs usable for transport. New advances in making circulation persist mechanically after death now allow for donation after circulatory death; DCD donors supplied 219 organs to the system in 2000, but in 2025 supplied nearly 17,000 organs.

Pratik Pawar, Vox

Cuckoo For Coconuts

Vita Coco, the coconut water company that controls over half of the American market, has purchased Copra, a rival in the super-premium space, for $275 million. The category is booming: Copra projects full-year net sales for 2026 at over $100 million, having experienced a 48 percent compound annual growth rate over the past three years, while Vita Coco’s $216 million net sales over the second quarter were up 28 percent year over year.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Babel

A new study estimates that 2,000 years ago, humans spoke between 20,000 and 75,000 different languages, following a boom after the dawn of agriculture. This grew from the 5,000 to 6,000 languages spoken at the start of the Holocene era, 12,000 years ago, when there were between four million and seven million people in the world. Today, between billions of people, only around 7,000 languages are spoken.

Cody Cottier, Scientific American

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

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

Wedding

In lieu of the kind of wedding registries that marrying couples use for gifts in other parts of the world, Japan’s custom is go-shugi, cash gifts from guests that, conveniently, have pre-determined values depending on the relationship and social status of the guests and couple. Convention holds that for a friend’s wedding you give 30,000 yen (US$183), 50,000 yen if you’re going as a couple. Here’s the issue: That value has been fixed for decades; the process is always cash, and 30,000 yen is a lovely number for the gift because three 10,000 yen bills cannot be evenly divided in two, which fits with the occasion. It can’t really conveniently increase: An increase to 40,000 yen would involve the number four, which sounds like “death,” and 50,000 yen would be a steep 60 percent hike. Given Japan’s inflation, that means that couples are getting less in gifts and paying more for hosting the event, which is causing some pain.

Gearoid Reidy, Bloomberg

Coral

In the 1960s, fishing surveys conducted off the coast of West Africa found what appeared to be a possible coral formation over 50 meters below the surface. That’s very deep for a reef, and given the technology of the time, the researchers just moved on. A new study saw researchers return to the area with high-resolution sonar and underwater drones. They managed to find, to their shock, a living coral ecosystem all the way down in the twilight zone of the Gulf of Guinea’s continental shelf, with the reef consisting of scattered patches of coral on rocky outcrops. It’s not entirely clear if this is the same reef as spotted in the 1960s, or if it’s shifted over the years, but it is the first confirmed mesophotic coral ecosystem on that shelf.

Sanidhya Sharma, Scientific American

Boxed Office

A key public resource for box office data, The Numbers, has been offline since March, and new details show that an onslaught of AI-enabled scraping potentially motivated by people involved in prediction markets forced its servers — and the data files for 78,396 movies, 178,375 release records and 236,176 people — offline. For an independent website, new AI tools have made the scraping economically untenable. Google has scraped the web for years, but at least they send traffic back; for every five pages Google scrapes, Cloudflare reported that it sends one visitor. For every visitor that OpenAI sends to a website, they scrape 1,091 pages. For Anthropic, websites get one visitor for every 38,066 web crawls, a deeply unsustainable ratio for an indie website.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Sequoias

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park has an extensive prescribed burn program, and a new analysis of the forest’s health from space found that it’s been remarkably successful at keeping the trees in good health. The analysis looked at wildfire outcomes for 26,400 giant sequoias from 19 groves across the complex, and found that the prescribed burns over the previous decade reduced the odds of death by 77 percent. Trees that got prescribed burn treatments were four times as likely to survive as untreated trees, and prescribed burns prevented 1,900 sequoia deaths. If every tree had been treated, some 3,900 sequoias would have likely survived.

Kat Kerlin, University of California Davis

Florida Man

A series of reforms in the state have brought Florida’s property insurance crisis down from a national embarrassment to merely a national peculiarity. In 2018, the height of the crisis, 79.91 percent of homeowners’ suits against insurance companies nationwide were opened in Florida. In 2017, 16.46 percent of all homeowners insurance claims in the country originated in Florida, vastly higher than their percentage of the population. Insurers were bailing on the state not just because of its position as a speed bump for tropical cyclones but because of what appeared to be systematic and rampant fraud. Now, several years after reforms, claims originating from the Sunshine State remain disproportionate but no longer obscene: In 2025 Florida was responsible for five percent of claims and “just” 41 percent of all lawsuits.

William Rabb, Insurance Journal

Magic

A new paper published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reports the finding of millennia of microscopic plant remains from a large limestone cave in Australia. The findings are exciting because they’re evidence that grass was burned repeatedly in the cave for the past 25,000 years. What’s particularly interesting is that the burnt phytoliths are evidence that while the cave never appeared to be a place of everyday living — no evidence of food prep or consumption was found — the thin layers of ash still indicate instead that grasses and herbs were systematically burned there. It lines up with evidence from senior members of the GunaiKurnai community that ash and charcoal powder were integral for initiation ceremonies and the performance of magical rituals, a sign that the cave was the site of 25,000 magical practices.

Russell Mullett, Bruno David, and Elle Grono, The Conversation

Resells Seashells By The Sea Shore

A new study puts an estimated date on when mollusk shells first began being reused by other organisms for their habitat. This was a legitimate innovation; during the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago, the inside of shells remained uninhabited after the death of the creature within them. An analysis of fossils from around the world found that it was only during the Middle Ordovician, 460 million years ago, that evidence of new animals colonizing the shells began to emerge.

Merilin Reede, Estonian Research Council

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

MTG

Hasbro, the trading card company that has a number of unprofitable side bets hawking toys, posted $1.14 billion in revenue, fueled by a record $545.3 million from Magic: The Gathering alone, which was up 32 percent year over year. The operating profit from the Wizards of the Coast (mostly Magic, a little Dungeons & Dragons) and Digital Gaming (basically just Monopoly Go!) were responsible for $270 million in profit, which was, in fact, higher than the $253 million posted by the company as a whole, indicating that they’re mainly making Mandalorian and Grogu merch as a charitable act. Meanwhile, on an alternate Earth 2 where that movie was instead released with the title The Baby Yoda Movie, Hasbro is now worth more than Nvidia.

Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Football

The 2026 FIFA World Cup final where Spain beat Argentina notched an average of 38.94 million viewers on Fox, a figure that doesn’t even include the 23.9 million viewers who caught the Spanish-language coverage on Telemundo or Peacock. That’s a massive number for the broadcast; it is the most-watched soccer match on record in the U.S., crushing the 33.09 million who tuned in to watch the United States lose to Belgium, and it came in 132 percent higher than the 2022 World Cup Final. The final’s viewership peaked in the 5:45 to 6 p.m. block, when 51.69 million tuned in. It is now the most-watched non-NFL broadcast since 2016, when the Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Big Boy

The largest locomotive in the world is a 1.2 million-pound steam-powered engine built in 1941 to haul freight over the Wasatch Mountains in the American West. It is named Big Boy 4014 and was part of a roadshow (railshow?) designed to convince people it’s not such a bad idea for Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern to merge. Anyway, it’s making grown men cry and burning up the message boards. There were 25 Big Boy locomotives made for Union Pacific in the 1940s, and they were retired in the ’60s as diesel electric engines became far easier to maintain, with just eight still existing today. And 4014 is the only one that still works, using 250 gallons of water and 15 gallons of fuel per mile.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

Hits

Netflix has been under scrutiny lately given the lack of major shows that have been able to penetrate into the culture following the release of the final season of their flagship show, Stranger Things, at the end of last year. Netflix remains a hit-driven business, so the success of its top tier is the bellwether of its cultural impact. Across 8,193 shows listed in the first half of 2026, the top 20 (0.24 percent of shows) were responsible for 8.5 percent of the views. The top 200 shows accounted for 30.8 percent of the views, and the top 500 were responsible for about half despite being 6.1 percent of shows.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Flip

Astronomers are attempting to figure out whether the Milky Way did a flip at any point, specifically wondering if galaxies like ours — those with slowly rotating stellar halos — are more likely to have experienced a disk flip at one point or another where the orientation shifted by over 90 degrees. The Milky Way’s stars are mostly in the flat spiral disk, but around that is a large but sparse and slow-rotating stellar halo, most of which are stars originally formed in other galaxies. New research studied 25 Milky Way-like galaxies and found that in simulations, the slow stellar halo was often found in those that had a head-on merger with another galaxy at some point, and then subsequently had a disk flip as a result of the collision. We do know about the first part — the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus dwarf galaxy collision 10 billion to 11 billion years ago — but now we think that may have sent us off our axis.

Royal Astronomical Society

Ore Into Iron

Earth’s core is mostly iron, and the magnetic field of our planet is the result of the molten outer core moving around the solid inner core. We know that the field has existed for at least four billion years, but given that the inner core is thought to have formed only a half billion years ago, what precisely kept that dynamo going for the prior 3.5 billion years is as yet unresolved. One less-understood part of this is the melting point of iron at two million atmospheres, a temperature generally thought to be around 6000 kelvin. A new study puts that melting point much lower, at 4420 to 5220 kelvin, and given the other substances in the mix, it’s probably 4284 kelvins. What that means is that the cooling of the core alone might have been just fine to produce the magnetic dynamo even before there was a solid inner core.

James Dinneen, Science

HENON

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that might cause issues here on Earth can only be detected with around 15 minutes of warning time, and even that is the result of putting a spacecraft at the L1 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth. A new project from the European Space Agency aims to give us more time, with the Heliospheric Pioneer for Solar and Interplanetary Threats Defense (HENON) mission set to launch in 2027. This project will travel in a special 15 million-kilometer orbit that will allow it to sample the solar wind much earlier and report back if the ion situation is getting a bit rowdy upstream. This could hypothetically give us two to three hours of notice rather than the 15-minute response window we now have.

Royal Astronomical Society

Very fun interview in the Sunday Edition this week as I speak to the phenomenally talented artist Carey Pietsch, whose work illustratingThe Adventure Zone series of graphic novels concluded this week with the release of The Adventure Zone: Story and Song. Carey’s work on TAZ was trailblazing; I am fascinated by these books in no small part because it’s an adaptation an a novel use of a novel medium in a novel medium. I was a big fan of the podcast upon which these books are based and I love this series of graphic novels.

The book, The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is available anywhere books are sold, do check out the unlocked interview.

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Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read.

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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A Séance?

Spirit Airlines is in the midst of a bankruptcy, and its assets are being auctioned off. Some of the more interesting things owned by the budget airline were its takeoff and landing slots at La Guardia Airport, which has become an in-demand hub for many other domestic airlines. The Federal Aviation Administration restricts the number of flights at three airports in the U.S. — Reagan in Washington D.C., and JFK and La Guardia in New York — and those rights are valuable and can be sold. Spirit was selling the right to 22 daily departures and landings, good for 11 additional round-trip takeoffs and landings, and those were for the Marine Air Terminal, which is a fascinating art deco facility that plenty of other airlines have coveted. JetBlue won the rights, bidding $58.5 million, which adds 22 slots to their existing 31 slots at LaGuardia. Frontier narrowly lost with a bid of $57.5 million and now will still have just four slots.

Dietrich Knauth, Reuters and Meghna Maharishi, Skift

Trackflation

Teenage runners are posting record-smashing times at track meets that were otherwise inconceivable as recently as a decade ago, a phenomenon that the track world has deemed trackflation. At the New Balance Nationals annual championship meet in June 2025, over 100 kids broke a previous meet record. Track and field has more high school athletes than any other sport in the United States, with 1.1 million competing, beating out basketball’s 900,000. Athletes in middle schools are employing the training and recovery techniques that have been perfected at the pro level over the past few years, and track is not immune from the youth sports boom that has seen parents fork over small fortunes for equipment, training and resources — whether that’s the pricey sneakers that can shave two percent to three percent off a time, or the now favored sodium bicarbonate powder that can boost performance by 1.5 percent.

Brendan I. Koerner, Wired

Hazard Pay

Sinokor Group, which is the largest owner of supertankers in the world, has been offering extra pay for any crew willing to brave the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial ships and the seafarers on them have come under attack in recent weeks. At least 59 commercial ships have been attacked in and around the Persian Gulf since the beginning of the United States’ war with Iran, and getting tankers in and, more importantly, out of there has been a high priority for shipping companies and their customers. The rewards for doing a Hormuz run are considerable: Sinokor has reportedly offered an extra six months’ pay for seafarers willing to risk the Strait and make a return voyage from Saudi Arabia or Iraq to be unloaded in the Gulf of Oman. Captains make $15,000 a month on oil tankers, and a junior sailor might make $1,500 a month; moving a single shipload of oil would be worth millions to shipowners.

Charles Gorrivan, Alex Longley and Stephen Stapczynski, Bloomberg

BAC

In 2017, Utah passed a first-in-the-nation law that reduced the blood alcohol concentration limit for driving from 0.08 to 0.05 grams per deciliter. The fact that no other state followed suit does mean that we had the perfect environment for a pretty solid natural experiment, and the result is significant: A new study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that lowering the limit reduced alcohol-related crash injuries and fatalities by 11 percent or more, after comparing the Utah data with crash data from neighboring states. Alcohol is an increasing factor in crash fatalities and injuries, with alcohol-impaired crash injuries up 25 percent and fatalities up 15 percent.

Jeff Dodge, Colorado State University

Roboumps

Halfway into the MLB season, we have a pretty solid look at how umpires are doing against the robo-umps now assessing the strike zone. According to MLB, umpires have a 95 percent accuracy rate on all called pitches, which the league says is the most accurate ever. But when they do get challenged, an interesting pattern has emerged. Entering this week, umpires under 40 have been overturned 50.1 percent of the time when challenged, umps in their 40s have a 54 percent overturn rate, a 57.2 percent rate for umps 50 and over and a 58.2 percent overturn rate for umps aged 55 and over.

Jared Diamond and Sam Federman, The Wall Street Journal

The Brown Danube

Heatwaves and droughts have brought water levels in major European rivers down to levels not seen in decades. Romania’s state water management agency says that at the Romanian entry point of the Danube, the second-largest river in Europe, the flow was 1,700 cubic meters of water per second. That number is the lowest since 1996. On average in July, it would be 4,700 cubic meters per second. Several ferries and grain barges have cancelled service or are idled, which is bad news for one of Europe’s largest exporters of grain. The good news is that heavy rains upriver may soon improve conditions.

Luiza Ilie, Reuters

Collision

A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will smash into the lunar surface on August 5, and a new paper from 23 astronomers is calling upon the scientific community to point their telescopes to record it, if possible. The rocket was originally launched in January 2025, sending two landers to the moon for Firefly Aerospace and ispace, but the 10,800-pound upper stage that was meant to burn up on reentry actually entered a weird orbit around the Earth at a similar distance to the moon. At that point, we lost track of it, but it was recently found, and it’s now estimated to slam into the Moon at 2:34 A.M. EDT on August 5 near Einstein Crater at 5,400 miles per hour. It might be hard to see, but it’s worth trying to take a look; NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will image the site before and after the collision, and South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will try to catch it hitting the surface.

Claire Cameron, Scientific American

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey crushed expectations, making $257.8 million globally, of which upwards of $120 million came domestically. That’s good for the third-biggest opening of the year and the third-biggest opening of Nolan’s career, and given exceptional word of mouth and no studio willing to brave an opening release next weekend, room to run. Shot entirely on IMAX cameras, the film made $30 million domestically and $22 million abroad in IMAX screenings specifically. The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is uncontroversially agreed upon to be a polytropos guy; the story has not yet been adapted directly as a film, but has inspired beloved adaptations that include the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, ABC’sThe Bachelorette and a five-door North American minivan offerings from Honda.

Ryan Gajewski, The Hollywood Reporter

Fire Braveheart

In India, the army has been a primary way for poor men from rural areas to obtain financial security thanks to a generous pension system. That said, a 2022 shift in those veterans’ benefits is upending that security; the new hiring terms stipulate that after a four-year term of service, three-quarters of the soldiers — termed Agniveers, or “fire bravehearts” — will be decommissioned and will leave with none of the long-term benefits that had previously been afforded. Military pensions are pricey, accounting for two percent of India’s GDP. About 44,000 recruits join per year, which means that this year, tens of thousands of people in the military will get the boot and have little compensation to show for it beyond a 1.1 million rupees (US$11,440) exit bonus, and will not be granted the official status of “ex-servicemen” either. The rollout of the plan in 2022 was met with violent opposition; it remains to be seen how the effects of it will be received. It’s probably fine; after all, no country has ever had any issues with large, disenfranchised groups of underpaid military veterans being pushed out of the army by the thousands, right?

Soumyajit Saha, Nikkei Asia

World Cup

Anyone who tuned into one of the World Cup games saw the pregame lineups where a short clip of each player was shown, often doing some sort of bit, expression or gesture. Well, ESPN assessed all 747 player emotes from the 72 games that constituted the group stage, and found that the most common action was touching, kissing or pointing at one’s national badge (131 players doing that), followed by the classic do-no-wrong folding arms pose (121 players), a fist bump with two hands (87 players), the somewhat mixed metaphor of rubbing one’s hands together (59 players) and then the stoic hands on hips (34 players). Twenty players went elaborate and did more than one emote; 14 went stripped down and did absolutely nothing at all. Several players were entirely unique; Tunisia’s Mounib Chamakh moved the camera, Emam Ashour of Egypt did a lion growl.

James Tyler, ESPN

Romance

In the past three years, the American Booksellers Association reported that 232 romance bookstores have opened up across the United States, with at least 54 romance bookstores opening this year alone. That puts us on pace with last year’s full-year total of 120 stores opening, which was up from 58 stores in 2024. Niche bookstores have begun to trend in other genres as well, such as horror bookstores, fantasy and even cookbooks.

Claire Kirch, Publishers Weekly

Dingers

The Home Run Derby aired on Netflix this year, shifting away from the previous broadcaster and longtime MLB stalwart, ESPN. The presentation on streaming generated an average minute audience of 5.3 million American viewers, which was down 7.5 percent from the 5.73 million viewers last year when it aired on cable. Still, that’s good for the most-watched skills competition in sports, beating out the NBA’s Slam Dunk Competition. In a positive sign for baseball, this year’s median age of audience was 44.3 years old, the lowest number in more than a decade.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Football

As we come to the end of one kind of football event and approach the start of the season of another one entirely. A new poll looked at which sports Americans tend to prefer, and the answer is that American football still reigns supreme. Asked about pairs of sports and which they prefer, 65 percent of respondents prefer football to basketball, 69 percent prefer football over baseball, 71 percent prefer football over soccer and 76 percent prefer football over ice hockey.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Fish Stocks

A new study contends that hunter-gatherers deliberately transported live fish to lakes locked away in the mountains of Norway about 7,000 years ago, which the researchers argue enabled them to harvest fish stocks when they visited in the summer. This would be the oldest documented example of human-mediated translocation of fish. Lake Tesse, at an elevation of 850 meters, was covered by an ice sheet until 8,400 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of traps found in the area put the fish traps at 4950 BC. There aren’t other fish in these lakes beyond brown trout, and waterfalls prevent fish from getting there by swimming to them; given that it was under an ice sheet for millennia, the likeliest possible solution is humans brought fish up there.

James Woodford, New Scientist

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian ·

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

By Walt Hickey

Very fun interview this week as I speak to the phenomenally talented artist Carey Pietsch, whose work illustratingThe Adventure Zone series of graphic novels concluded this week with the release of The Adventure Zone: Story and Song. I was a big fan of the podcast upon which these books are based and I love this series of graphic novels.

Carey’s work on TAZ was trailblazing; I am fascinated by these books in no small part because it’s an adaptation an a novel use of a novel medium in a novel medium; none of the parts of of the phrase “adapted a hit TTRPG podcast into a mass market graphic novel series” existed twenty years ago, and now they are huge, and these books were a key reason why.

Carey can be found at careydraws.com, and you can find the comic The Adventure Zone: Story and Song anywhere books are sold or at theadventurezonecomic.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Carey, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to get to talk with you.

You are the artist behind the Adventure Zone series of graphic novels. The final book in that series comes out this week, Story and Song. It is the culmination of years of work on your part. How does it feel to bring this project down for a landing?

Wow, I don’t want to consider exactly how many years it’s been because I think I might turn into dust and blow away on the winds. But it really has been almost a decade of work, which is terrifying to look back on, in retrospect. All of us are just so incredibly proud of the way the final book turned out, and we also feel so incredibly lucky that we got to make a seven-book series adaptation of the TAZ: Balance podcast in the first place.

It is a challenging time for publishing overall, and making a series is never guaranteed, let alone one this long. At the start of the project, we had only signed up for two books, and I think it was very easy to say, “Oh, sure, we’ll get to make two, and then who knows if we’ll ever get to continue on to the end of the arc.” But by the time we finished the first one, we were all so completely locked in with, I think, the fever and need to keep going, that it was just a delightful surprise every time when we finished a book and the publisher somehow said yes. I say somehow, but it’s really the support of the readers that allowed them to keep bringing us back to do the next one, and the next one, and the next one, until we finally made it all the way to the end.

Yeah, I want to dive into a lot of the changes that you’ve seen.

For folks who might not be totally familiar, this is one of the most unique books out there just by virtue of where the story comes from and how it was created. This was a very seminal podcast. This was one of the first tabletop RPG podcasts to be very successful, if not the first that really got wide mainstream attention. This was the first graphic novel adaptation of them. Do you want to speak a little bit about where the story came from, what the story’s about and what these books are?

TAZ was my entry point personally to the live-play TTRPG podcast world. I think now, if we’re coming to the genre today, Critical Role and Dropout’s D20 are probably the first two big ones that you hit, but over a decade ago, my entry point was TAZ. My other favorite from that time that I still love dearly is Friends at the Table, whose Marielda campaign is a great standalone entry point, but I came to listen to The Adventure Zone in mid-2015.

At the time, I was tearing through inking a different comics project, and I was listening to a ton of podcasts to survive it, and a friend put me onto TAZ, and I was just immediately hooked. I think part of the appeal is obviously the story, right? This is four professional storytellers, professional comedians, improv actors. And they obviously are also family, so they know each other really well. Part of the appeal is getting to hear the story that they’re all building together, but the other piece is that it’s just immediately apparent that these four guys are having a great time. They are having fun together, they’re following each other where they want to take the story and also their characters, and I think that combination of really charming interpersonal chemistry with a really compelling story was what got me hooked.

The way that the McElroys pitched TAZ is the story of four fools who played Dungeons & Dragons so hard that they made each other cry. But to me, the core of this story is this balance of comedy and drama and joy. I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan, and that’s the fantasy that really appeals to me, something that uses a heightened setting to tell a story that’s ultimately about human emotion or self-emotion, personal emotion, whatever the case may be.

TAZ really hooked into the part of my brain that’s excited about comedic and lighthearted fantasy that has this core of being in this to tell you a good story, and we’re going to have a great time along the way.

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That Pratchett connection is amazing, because I love the TAZ podcast , I love the TAZ books, and I just read all of Pratchett recently, and those books were a miracle. They’d been on my radar for years, and I’d never gotten around to them, and they are now very much contending for my favorite book series ever.

Your contributions to the book, you did all this magnificent art on it, you did the colors on this thing are amazing. How do you translate this audio fantasy realm into visual storytelling?

I think translation is absolutely the right word for it. There’s already so much information in the podcast, not in just the audio descriptions of the world, but in the voice acting, in the music that Griffin McElroy composed for the show. The way that they are talking with each other around the table also gives you more information about how the characters feel about the world. All of that is this really strong starting point for what the feeling of the world is.

A lot of sitting down to design the visuals and talking with the McElroys about what the visuals for the comics would look like starts from that point of re-listening to the podcast, reading the first draft of the script and thinking about how to translate the sense of tone, emotion and place that you get from the podcast into a visual realm.

That translation is also really collaborative. We all sit down and talk. I should define who I mean by all: the original editor on this series was Calista Bell. She was the acquiring editor. She was a huge fan of TAZ, the podcast, as am I, obviously. She was a big part of why McMillan picked it up in the first place. After book two, Benjamin Wilgus came on as our editor. He’s also a huge TAZ fan. He’s also a comics writer and cartoonist. Calista on the first book, Ben on the second book, me and all of the McElroys sit down at every stage to talk like “Okay, here’s everyone’s priorities from the art. Here’s what the McElroys are thinking in terms of what they want to keep, what might be able to be jettisoned. Here’s the first draft of the outline. How are we feeling about this?”

I would then, after that first sit down, go back and listen to the actual podcast alongside reading the script and start to make notes on what we know we need to design that’s actually going to be in the book, what research do I need to do to give myself a stronger visual vocabulary that I can draw on to build that design.

TAZ is set in this middle ages European fantasy setting, except that it’s much more about what looks fun and cool than about what’s period accurate. A lot of that research eventually gets thrown out the window. Like I think it would be really cool for this character to have a cape even if that’s absolutely not accurate to what someone in this class might be doing at the time. A lot of the translation is done at that early stage of talking about that feeling you get from the podcast and how that translates into the character designs we all talk about and the setting we all talk about.

One of the more interesting parts of that translation in terms of challenge is what aspects of the podcast are not present in a comic? A big one is table talk and voice. That was a big thing when we sat down at the start. How much of these comic adaptations are going to be the characters that they are playing literally talking to the McElroys at a table versus what we eventually landed on, which is having the game master, the GM, as a metatextual insert that some characters can interact with and some can’t. That’s one piece is how do you translate table talk, which you can’t really do in a comic, into a comic.

The other really interesting challenge is the music. The music in TAZ is really, really beautiful and a huge part of the podcast’s appeal, especially around Crystal Kingdom when Griffin McElroy started making original compositions for the series. That’s obviously a tool that we don’t have in comics at all. I cannot do a Fisher Price listen and learn adaptation where you push a button on page 300 to hear the beautiful tones from the original podcast. As much fun as that might be, there is no budget for it and the logistics would be a nightmare.

Instead, you have to think about what this song is doing emotionally, tonally, plot-wise in the podcast. What feelings is it creating in the listener? Then how can you translate that purpose into comics form? Again, obviously, you don’t have that same tool set. You don’t have music, but what you do have is the toolkit and language of comics and the way that paneling, pasting, both the general structure of a page and the structure of panels within a page, both their size, their placement, their rhythm, whether the borders are angular or regular. You can use all of that toolkit to create a sense of rhythm and timing and rhyme in a way that really is a translation or an attempt to translate the feeling of the music with a totally different toolkit.

Yeah. I love that you pointed that out. I think that a lot of the work, particularly when it gets very kinetic aspects; obviously, there are moments in tabletop RPGs that are just people talking and trying to pick locks and then there’s combat. The ways that you actually accelerate the pace of reading just by what you do with the panels is really good.

As a reader, when watching a comic artist work on a project for seven years, not only do you watch the work evolve, but you watch them evolve. You watch them pick up some new tricks and that stuff. I think that this is your most visually ambitious work yet and just looks astonishing. Really, really, really good.

Thank you. For me, it has also been really exciting to have this visual record of my growth as an artist over time. I talk a lot jokingly about the TAZ GMs being my co-adapter and artist dissertation project, but it is also a dissertation where you are co-working with four, five, including our editor, complete geniuses. Not only are the McElroy’s all storytellers, all comedians, all actors, but they also have really specific skillsets that they brought to this adaptation that I learned a ridiculous amount from.

Clint wrote for comics long before TAZ and that meant he has not just this library of innovative, really fun, unconventional sound effects, but he also has all this experience with dialogue and pacing and plot. Obviously, Griffin McElroy was the GM for the TAZ Balance campaign. And that gives him this unique look at a story from beginning to end and the most care in crafting the big arcs of it, in addition to the improv and flexibility to adapt that into another medium and see how it changes knowing how it ends. Plus, he’s written in other mediums. He’s just incredibly good at big structural stuff.

And then Travis has a really good sense of not just character voice and being true to a character’s voice, even when the details of what’s happening are slightly different, but also how to connect the adaptation back up to the podcast original tone. Justin, he is so good at being able to spot a dialogue problem and immediately come up with a fix that not only is like, “Oh, this is pretty good,” but also is natural and it’s funny and it’s fun.

When Ben and I would talk about the thumbnails with the rough lettering in place before we kick it to the rest of the team, we’d both be like, “This dialogue isn’t working. We don’t know how to fix it. We’re just going to kick it to the rest of the team and Justin’s going to handle it.” And 99 times out of 100, he did.

That was a long pitch, a long way to ramble back around to say that it is impossible to encapsulate everything that I’ve learned over the course of making this project because making comics is a long course in learning how to do something new every day of your job. That’s part of why I love comics in the first place. You get to wear so many different hats and develop your skill in so many different tasks over time. But also in this case, this was an incredibly rare collaboration where not only did I learn something from my collaborators literally every time we sat down to talk about the book, but they also made it fun, which I think is really difficult to sustain over the course of an eight-year, I-don’t-want-to-count-how-many-page project.

But it was just a complete delight from beginning to end, which is part of why I wanted to sign on in the first place. But more importantly than that, that’s why we all kept it going, right? These are books we got to have just an incredibly joyful time making together along the way.

I’m so glad that you brought up Clint McElroy, the family patriarch, who had made comics in the 80s, because I was going to ask about that. He worked a bit for NOW Comics back in the day. And since you started working on this project, he has gotten back into the game, and they’ve done some work for a Thor event a few years ago. He is a bit of an old hand on this. I was wondering how it was to work with someone who had been from a different generation of comics production, how that was.

It’s great. Honestly, it’s fantastic. He has a great sense of not just writing, but writing for comics. For prose authors, authors coming from other mediums, it takes a while to adapt to not just the standard. You can only write one action per person, per panel, or else your artist is going to throw you out a window. How many words can fit in a dialogue balloon before it feels overcrowded? How many words can fit on a page? How do you make sure you’re leaving room for action? His background gave him that skill set in action comics and drama comics. And in translating that into a longer graphic novel format, he really brought his A-game in terms of making sure that from minute one the script was ready to go.

Just one last question before we wrap up. The thing that I really, really love about this project is that it was very much ahead of its time in so many ways when it launched. You’ve seen other projects come into this fold, but the main thing that I’m obsessed with is that its graphic novel series based on a tabletop role-playing game podcast. If you said that sentence as recently as 2007, you would have been committed. That just simply did not exist as any form of genre or medium for that. What has it been like to blaze a little bit of this trail?

I sound like a broken record, but I feel so incredibly lucky to have gotten to be a part of this project because it really was combining podcast, which I have no experience in, but love dearly listening to and which kept me company drawing a lot of earlier comics projects, with a medium that I think is so cool for its flexibility — its heightened reality, its ability to use color in a non-literal way and character design in an excessive, exaggerated way to convey to you emotions and tone that are difficult to do in any other medium. So getting to combine those two things is really exciting.

I am so stoked now that my work on it is done, I finally get to go read all of these other TTRPG comic adaptations that I took a stance of “I don’t want to read these right now.” I am so excited about them, but I don’t want to get in my own head about what other genres are doing or what other adapters are doing. In the same way that I had to take a big step back from looking at TAZ fan art and being a part of that fandom. So now I have this buffet in front of me.

Like oh my God, there’s so much I can catch up on. I’m excited about the Fantasy High webtoon. I haven’t gotten to read any of the Critical Role comics. And I know that the Kickstarter just launched for Jadzia Alexrod and Sarah Webb’s adaptation of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, and I love Sarah Webb’s cartooning so much. That one is immediately, like, the first thing. Give it to me. I want to read it right now.

Wow, I’m so jealous. Even the fact that you had to cool off on fan art for a bit, that takes a lot of discipline, but you got a feast ahead of you.

Right, this is the marshmallow test writ large. Now everything has a chance to blossom and explode, and I get to go read it all, and I’m so excited about it.

Amazing. All right, well, Carey, so the book is out. It is The Adventure Zone: Story and Song. Why don’t you tell folks where they can find it, where they can find you, what you’re working on.

So the book is out in stores everywhere. You can find it at theadventurezonecomic.com or wherever books are sold. I am currently working on an unannounced project with Abrams Fanfare. It is a middle grade original graphic novel that I just handed in my script draft for, and I am so stoked to get to talk more about it soon.

I think by the time this interview comes out on the 19th, we will be done with all of our big launch events, but I will be at Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland in mid-September. And I love talking about comics, so if you see me there, please come talk with me more about comics. I always love getting to do that.

Awesome.

What am I missing? Oh, you can find my work at careydraws.com, and that’s my handle on the social media that still exists at the time this interview goes live.

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