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Spirit

In February, Spirit Airlines was working through its Chapter 11 bankruptcy and cut a deal to sell 20 of its yellow A320 jets for $533 million to CSDS Asset Management, a company that deals in aircrafts. Well, in a somewhat fitting moment for the customer service icons at Spirit, that sale appears to be unraveling, with the lawyers that represent the legal remains of Spirit suing CSDS over missed deadlines and, with $507 million as yet unpaid, missed payments. On the other side of the transaction, UCK Airports, a Qatari firm, was lined up to buy six of those jets from CSDS, but since CSDS hasn’t actually bought them, it looks like UCK Airports is not getting its jets.

Tom Quinn and Zana Scarlett, 9fin

Godzilla

Godzilla Minus Zero has made $31.6 million from 3,254 theaters, a huge start for the film and the single largest opening day for a live-action foreign language film in North America ever, beating the $17.8 million record notched by Hero in 2002. The movie made 74 percent of its ticket sales in premium large-format, which makes sense, because if there’s one thing the biggest screens in the world are probably meant for, it’s a Godzilla movie. I saw the film in 4DX — the one where the seat moves and there’s fog and water and stuff — and straightforwardly, I’m not going to lie, the ultimate tactile impact of Godzilla Minus Zero was essentially the sensation of riding a mechanical bull. It has been two days, and I still feel as if Godzilla personally kicked my ass; this is not a joke. You should absolutely see it in 4DX.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Kickers

Former Canadian Football League kicker Tadhg Leader returned to Ireland and founded Leader Kicking in 2022, which works with Gaelic footballers who want to make the leap to the American game. It’s been a highly successful effort, as, according to the group, there are now 20 Irish athletes active across NCAA Division I and the NFL. There’s precedent for a society realizing that it’s actually easier and more lucrative to kick an American football than kicking the ball in their local variety of rugby; a similar effort in Australia that began in 2007 to mint punters out of Aussie has resulted in six current NFL starters from Australia.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

NCIS

After Grey’s Anatomy, the best-performing show on streaming since 2020 is humble workhorse NCIS, which has racked up 219.89 million minutes streamed since. According to CBS, over the life of the show, it’s made $10 billion and is particularly popular in Europe. This makes sense, as any American who has ever flipped on television while visiting a European country can attest; if there’s one thing that continent likes, it’s competent, aging investigators from obscure government law enforcement bureaus investigating grisly crimes in the vicinity of the coast. As far as I can tell, it’s the single most popular genre after panel shows and Eurovision.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Tires

Bridgestone is best known for its automobile tires, but they’re also responsible for producing ultralarge tires for specialized applications, behemoths that can have a diameter of four meters and weigh six metric tons, used in things like mining and construction. It’s a great business to be in; the profit margins for passenger and light truck tires are around 10.7 percent, but the specialty tire business has profit margins nearly double that at 20.1 percent. Globally, the market for off-the-road tires is projected to rise by half to $28.19 billion by 2034. The beads where the tire meets the wheel rim use more than 3,000 meters of steel cable on a mining tire, and a curing stage that takes 20 minutes for a car tire needs 12 hours for a 63-inch tire.

Seiya Ota, Nikkei Asia

Ganges

Cleaning the Ganges River has been the subject of a $4.5 billion program in India over the past decade. The river remains dangerously polluted, despite the construction of hundreds of sewage treatment plants and other waste infrastructure, and the industrial base that dumps into the river supports a region responsible for 40 percent of the country’s economic output. A Bloomberg analysis of 2,000 kilometers of the river using satellite imagery over the past decade found that just 10 percent of the area showed signs of sustained improvement.

Shruti Srivastava, Krishna Karra and Lou Del Bello, Bloomberg

Unconformity

The Great Unconformity is the name for the fact that we’re missing more than hundreds of millions, or in some places, over a billion years of the rock record; for example, in the Grand Canyon, a layer of sedimentary rock that’s 540 million years old is directly on top of another layer that is up to two billion years old. The reason for this has been a mystery; a new theory tested on an Australian supercomputer puts mantle movement as a cause, with the massive but slow movement pushing continents up and down. When the continental blocks were pushed up — as had taken place on the ancient continents of Laurentia, Baltica and North China, which were lifted up between a billion and 540 million years ago — the layers of sediment that had built up eroded away, often scraped away by enormous ice sheets of the Snowball Earth period, and then when the blocks sank again, new layers of sediment formed. Meanwhile, in Australia and South America — where there is less evidence of the Great Unconformity — there were only two cycles of uplift and subsidence over the past 900 million years.

Santosh Dhungana and Nicholas Flament, The Conversation

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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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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Chris Dalla Riva about his new story on the decreasing size of Broadway orchestras published on his newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Broadway’s orchestras have shrunk and scaled back over the past several decades, a new analysis found. For musicals that debuted from 1990 to 1994, the median size of the pit was 23 musicians, a figure that has gradually shrunk to 14 musicians in the 2010 to 2014 classes of musicals and down slightly more since. That’s due to the total demise of the large orchestra; for the shows that came out in the 1990 to 1994 cohort, 54.1 percent had at least 21 members; in the 2020 to 2024 cohort, that’s down to 8.9 percent.

We also spoke about how the concept of the album has evolved, Billboard messing around with what counts as sales, and Chris’ adventures in listening to one album a week. Chris can be found on his newsletter and…

Read more

Wind

Revolution Wind is up and running off the coast of New England, with the Ørsted offshore wind farm now the largest in New England. The wind farm is off the coast of Rhode Island, has 65 turbines, can generate 704 megawatts and could power 350,000 homes. Despite facing challenges from the federal government, wind power hit an all-time peak in New England at 2,400 megawatts last Friday. It will meet five percent of Connecticut’s electricity needs and 20 percent of Rhode Island’s, and will save ratepayers $500 million annually by 2028. Though much has been snarled by opposition, a 924-megawatt wind farm called Sunrise Wind off the coast of Long Island has completed the work of installing all foundations, and an 800-megawatt, 62-turbine project, Vineyard Wind, will reach full power soon.

Miriam Wasser, WBUR

Soccer

A semifinal soccer match for the Minas Gerais Under-20 Championship resembled a hockey game in Brazil, resulting in a world record 53 red cards. The game was between Uberlândia and Mamoré, and all told, 43 players, eight members of the coaching staff and even two Uberlândia board members were dismissed. The previous record was 36 red cards in 2011. Mamoré was up 3-1 when one player taunted the opponent’s bench; this led to an altercation that began in the 54th minute of the second half, where the game was subsequently paused for 40 minutes, at which point the referee gave up, abandoned the game and declared it over.

Ffion Wynne, BBC News

Engravings

A new study published in Antiquity described 280 Paleolithic engravings found in a cave in Spain. The cave, Cova de la Font Major, was excavated in 1957 and has since become a tourist destination; the engravings went a long time without being noticed, and may have even been graffitied over in some cases by more recent visitors. The engravings were first spotted in 2019, at which point tourist access to the cave was limited.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American

Life Without Parole

Outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced he will commute the sentences of all 548 people currently condemned to death in the state of California, commuting their sentences to life without the possibility of parole, an act which would be the single largest death row commutation in the nation’s history. California implemented a moratorium on executions in 2019; the 548 people affected by the commutation are a fourth of the total number of people on death row in the United States and make up the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. Of the commutations, 166 need no additional act beyond the governor’s commutation for their death sentence to be converted to life without the possibility of parole, and the other 382 were twice convicted of a felony, which in California requires four judges of the California Supreme Court to proceed. The seven-justice court has a vacancy, and of the six current justices, two were appointed by Newsom, three by his Democratic predecessor Jerry Brown and one by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Chris Geidner, Law Dork

Ready to Drink

Beer companies have been muscling in on market share previously held by liquor companies thanks to ready-to-drink cocktails, which have become 10 percent of U.S. alcohol sales by volume, up from three percent a decade ago. Sales by value of RTD is up 28 percent over the 52 weeks ending October 17. Even as beer has suffered, the companies that make beer and have diversified into canned ready-to-drink beverages have found a lifeline. Boston Beer, which is best known for Sam Adams, also owns Sun Cruiser and a number of other RTDs, and at this point, actual beer is just 15 percent of Boston Beer’s volume.

Carol Ryan, The Wall Street Journal

Broadway

Broadway’s orchestras have shrunk and scaled back over the past several decades, a new analysis found. For musicals that debuted from 1990 to 1994, the median size of the pit was 23 musicians, a figure that has gradually shrunk to 14 musicians in the 2010 to 2014 classes of musicals and down slightly more since. That’s due to the total demise of the large orchestra; for the shows that came out in the 1990 to 1994 cohort, 54.1 percent had at least 21 members; in the 2020 to 2024 cohort, that’s down to 8.9 percent.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Dubreuillosaurus

Dinosaur fossil auctions are controversial, because they take one-of-a-kind natural scientific specimens and sequester them to the whims of a private collector, potentially never to be seen again. It’s bad enough when it’s, say, a T. rex, but a new auction in Paris by the Millon auction house has sparked even more controversy because they’re auctioning off the Dubreuillosaurus fossil. That is, the only fossil we have of Dubreuillosaurus — the sole specimen, what’s known as a holotype, the fossil that researchers compare other fossils to in order to determine if they’re the same species. It’s an incredibly unusual auction and one that could set what the paleontology community considered a terrible precedent: selling off scientifically unique holotypes to a person who could very well decide to never again share it with the research community. The fossil has been on loan to the National Museum of Natural History by its discoverer, André Dubreuil, and since his death in 2024, his heirs have decided to flip it to the highest bidder, where it is expected to fetch $280,000 to $390,000.

Nicholas St. Fleur, National Geographic

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Anime

The annual report from the Association of Japanese Animations puts the overseas market for anime at 2.54 trillion yen (US$16.1 billion), which is now considerably larger than the Japanese domestic market for anime of 1.91 trillion yen (US$12.1 billion). The international market first passed the domestic market in 2020, and since 2023, the global business has pulled up and away compared to the more modest growth of domestic sales. However, there’s a somewhat crucial problem here for the actual studios and animation houses responsible for the anime, and it comes down to a preference for licensing the content out rather than cutting distribution deals that are more favorable: Because of the existing structure, only 5.5 percent of overseas anime sales trickle down to Japanese studios, which is vastly lower than the games industry (92 percent) or film industry (22 percent).

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Harley

While sales volume for Harley-Davidson is down to 132,535 motorcycles last year, down from the sales peak of 344,000 bikes in 2006, the company has managed to face unfavorable demographic and economic headwinds relatively well. Despite an aging fandom and the kind of interest rates and gas prices that make one reconsider spending $46,000 on a bike, globally, sales are up four percent so far this year. With new models designed for the European market, as well as three-wheeled “trikes” that are squarely aimed at the affluent but older Harley-Davidson faithful that perhaps has lost a bit too much dexterity to manage a two-wheeled motorcycle, Harley has defied expectations.

John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal

Swift

Successful scientific careers end in lots of different ways — a gold watch and a pleasant retirement here, a quit-and-go-corporate there, an “emeritus” adjective there — but it’s rare that it ends with an accomplished contributor vaporizing in the atmosphere over North Sumatra after a botched rescue attempt. And yet, that is exactly what happened to the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory yesterday. After a 22-year career scanning the sky for gamma-ray bursts, the satellite succumbed to the inevitability of gravity. Swift’s orbit declined from 600 kilometers in 2004 to 370 this year; NASA commissioned a rescue attempt to try to save it by giving it a boost, but the rescue failed in August. Swift generated 7,000 papers, detected 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and spotted 1,400 supernovae, so in one sense, it died as it lived: proving that there are remarkable explosions in the sky if you know where to look.

Daniel Clery, Science

Tungsten

In 2025, the world mined 85,000 metric tons of tungsten, with the overwhelming majority of that — 79 percent of global tungsten production — coming from China. Export controls surrounding the crucial metal have caused challenges for all sorts of production chains, and the ones having a particularly difficult supply crunch are companies that produce micro drill bits for use in chip manufacturing. These are specialized tools that resemble needles but are made out of strong tungsten carbide, drilling micro-holes in circuit boards and chip substrates that allow connections across multiple layers. As chip substrates have become more complex, demand for the tungsten bits has surged from producers like Sumitomo Electric, Kyocera and Mitsubishi Materials, but they’re all having trouble getting their hands on tungsten. Prices for ammonium paratungstate from China rose from 212,750 yuan (US$31,900) per metric ton in February to 530,000 yuan as of this week, and prices outside of China are three times the cost of the Chinese stuff.

Cheng Ting-Fang, Nikkei Asia

Champlain

Lake Champlain, which straddles New York and Vermont and heads up into Quebec, supplies drinking water to 200,000 people. For the past several decades, though, phosphate pollution has fueled explosive blooms of the often toxic cyanobacteria known as blue-green algae, which choke the ecosystem and threaten water supplies. Vermont is responsible for two-thirds of the phosphorus that flows into the lake, mostly from agriculture, but stormwater runoff exacerbates the issue. A decade ago, Vermont state leaders set out a 20-year plan that, by 2036, would tighten up cleanup targets to keep phosphate pollution out of the lake. Halfway in, a billion dollars spent, and having only targeted the low-hanging fruit, Vermont is just 35 percent of the way to the goal.

Jonathan Mingle, Seven Days

Bantu

About 350 million people across sub-Saharan Africa speak one of the approximately 500 Bantu languages, and new research indicates that may be the result of a sustained migration across the continent by a single community that occurred starting 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, rather than just the spread of a tongue. A 2009 genetic study has found that Bantu-speaking people from western, central and southern Africa were more closely related than expected given the relative distance. A 2024 genomic analysis of 1,763 Africans found the greatest genetic diversity among Bantu speakers in western Africa and a decline in diversity the further you got; this kind of finding is consistent with a population on the move from one place to another. The current theory is that a group of Bantu-speaking people from north of the Congo rainforest crossed the forest and reached the southern fringes 2,500 to 3,500 years ago, at which point they split into an east-moving and a south-moving group.

Katarina Zimmer, Knowable Magazine

Amaze, Amaze, Amaze

A new technique described in a new paper in Nature has increased the sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope as much as 15 times in one test, which has proven especially useful when trying to observe exoplanets. Most of the over 6,000 known exoplanets have been discovered indirectly by watching a star go dim for a bit or when a star moves it’s orbiting, which has limited us to mainly giant planets imaged when they’re young and still hot from formation. This new technique for using JWST’s optics has managed to capture a previously known exoplanet, 51 Eridani b, at a wavelength of light (4.3 micrometers) that it had not been detected before. The team will now look again at all the coronagraphic images from JWST so far to see if this newly calibrated technique can spot planets that had previously been missed.

Daniel Clery, Science

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Solar

Many Nigerians skip the grid and generate their own power at home, but rising fuel costs and surging imports have made solar equipment an increasingly popular option, with the tech showing up on wedding registries. Equipment needed to keep a three-person home powered costs $4,500, which will pay for itself in about 16 months; that said, that’s seven times the price of a new petroleum generator, even if the $200 a month in fuel costs will end up costing more in the long run. There are financing options, but most of the $8.5 billion spent on small-scale solar across the region was paid upfront in cash.

Yinka Ibukun, Bloomberg

Clicking Heads

A new study published in Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance compared the mental processing speeds of players of the game Counter-Strike, and found that players who had logged over 5,000 hours of gameplay on the game demonstrated significantly faster mental processing speeds than those new to the game, on average 90 milliseconds faster at reacting under test conditions. Before you suggest that it appears that we have made a brilliant way to train optimized thinking and leadership out of gamers, I wish to remind you that we don’t want to make Ender’s Game from the acclaimed sci-fi novel whose title escapes me that goes something like Don’t Make Ender’s Game and its beloved sequels Really, I Have Nothing But Remorse For My Role In Ender’s Game and of course My Society Was Annihilated Thanks To Ender’s Game.

Amy Pullan, University of Sheffield

Netflix

For a while, Netflix wanted to keep its watch time up because the amount of time people spent on the platform was a reliable proxy for how likely they were to continue to pay for Netflix. Lately, as the company has pursued advertising, those watch time metrics are even more important, and the bad news is that they’ve been declining. In the first half of 2026, the average Netflix subscriber watched 1.64 hours daily, a figure that is down from 1.72 hours in the first half of 2024 and down from 1.81 hours in the first half of 2023. That decline couldn’t come at a worse time, as Netflix needs per-subscriber viewer hours to go up in order to squeeze more money out of its ad clients.

David Wainer, The Wall Street Journal

Age

Heading into last night’s midterms, the average age of the House of Representatives was 58, and the average age of the Senate was 65, which, in a country where the average American is 39, is slightly out of step. A new study found that Americans place higher levels of trust in hypothetical political committees where there are differences in the age of the participants. One hypothetical committee tested was entirely politicians aged 60 and up, while the other had an equal mix of politicians under 40 and over 60. Respondents were 21 percentage points more likely to perceive decision-making as fair when the committee drew from multiple generations. It’s been said that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit, but there is something to be said for simply side-stepping the issue by stocking the tree-planting committee with at least a couple of people who may actually stand to enjoy the fruit.

Ulrika Lundin and Sara Bjurenvall, University of Gothenburg

Valve

Indie games have been missing their launch dates due to a glut of games attempting to get through Steam’s approval process. Ordinarily, this takes about three to five business days to complete, but there’s been a sharp increase in games submitted to Steam because we gave every developer on the planet a $20 per month piece of software that writes pretty serviceable game code, not to mention the reality that every indie developer on the planet has been rushing to ship their game before GTA6 drops and dominates global playtime. October’s Steam Next Fest had 7,240 games, up 65.2 percent over the event held in June. Since the disclosure became required, 49.9 percent of games released have an AI disclosure.

Jay Peters, The Verge

Botnet

Google has shut down a botnet called x.cpe that was running on what Google claims to be 1.3 million Android TV devices, specifically Google-certified boxes. The compromised boxes were sold by Videostrong under the MECOOL brand and were running residential proxies for traffic and modules engaged in ad fraud schemes. Synthient, which worked with Google, Japan’s National Police Agency, and Trend Micro to disrupt the network, published a list of 182 device model names that were in the botnet and counted 1,472,554 infected devices.

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica

Nuke an Asteroid

A new study published in Icarus found that the location where one irradiates an asteroid has a big effect on how much momentum gets imparted and how much spin gets induced. One simulated deflection found that after an X-ray burst, an asteroid’s deflection velocity ranged from 0.8 millimeters per second at one angle to 3.9 millimeters per second at a different angle, a sign that precisely where the asteroid is hit can have as much as a fivefold difference in how much the asteroid is moved by a nuclear burst.

Sandia National Laboratories

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Tunneling

China is the top producer of tunnel-digging equipment, with state media saying that the country’s global share of the business is around 70 percent of the market, led by top producer China Railway Engineering Equipment Group. The tunnel-boring machines have recently come under export controls. Beijing argues that in addition to their uses in building subways and roads, tunnel-boring machines can also be used for military purposes, and so the government has curtailed exports to countries and regions with disputes with China. For India, this seems to be pretty targeted, as it is a massive buyer of the equipment, importing $103.75 million worth of tunneling machinery in 2026, of which $70.32 million was from China. While there is some shifting around of boring equipment that can be done, a real issue is that China has also curbed exports of components, and this kind of machinery gets a lot of wear and tear.

Bloomberg News

Halloween

In the week that led right up to Halloween, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson notched No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, logging 9.3 million streams in the United States from October 23 to 29, up 49 percent week over week. Other songs that fit the spooky vibe also made it to the charts, with “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell up 52 percent week over week to 6.3 million streams, and “This Is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas up 68 percent to 6.1 million streams. Missing the Hot 100 but making it to the streaming charts, we have “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, which hit 5.8 million streams, and “Ghostbusters” with 5.9 million.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Fuels

Orders for ships that don’t run on oil are running 57 percent ahead of last year, with 53 orders for alternative-fueled vessels in October. In 2026, there have been 364 alternative-fueled vessels ordered, mostly consisting of liquid natural gas-fueled vessels with 230 orders (63 percent of the total). Of note were the four ammonia-fueled car carriers ordered in October, which is a sign that the fuel alternative is still of interest to shipping companies despite being very early in development.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

DST

On Sunday, clocks fell back to standard time, which means that we got this year’s cycle of the “man, it would be great if we had permanent Daylight Saving Time.” The fact is, people think they want that, but when countries have actually implemented this, usually people hate it and roll it back. The United States famously tried permanent DST in 1974 and quit that very same year — it sucks to send kids to school when it’s dark out — and a Russian attempt at permanent DST that started in 2011 wrapped up in 2014. Looking at all cities that have tried to have later winter sunrises, most don’t stick with it. Looking at cities that get nine to 9.5 hours of winter daylight (New York, Chicago, Madrid, etc.) and a sunrise at 8:30 a.m., if they were forced into winter DST, only 35 percent of people who had experienced it are still living under it today. The rest having usually voted or legislated their way back to either the seasonal time-shift or permanent standard time.

Olivia Walch, Contraclockwise

Dinosaur Blood

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have found traces of blood from a 115 million-year-old dinosaur. The finding purports to have isolated the oldest-ever dinosaur red blood cells from the hind limb of an Aratasaurus museunacionali found in Brazil. This topic is pretty controversial in the field, and researchers have spent decades trying to find evidence of dinosaur blood in fossils; at least 14 studies have tried to describe red blood cells in fossils, but none so far have been especially convincing within the field. The hints of fossilized cells in the bone include rounded structures with sunken centers that were 23 microns long and 20 microns wide on average.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, Science

Fencing

The American West has roughly 620,000 miles of barbed wire and other fencing, infrastructure that, while simple, has permanently altered the ecology of the West. Fences are used for ranching, but they also corral and sometimes kill the natural inhabitants of the region and impede migration routes, fragmenting ecosystems. Two events — one, a series of fires devastated large expanses of grazing land and, in some cases, destroyed the fencing that contained them, and two, the commercialization of virtual fence technology around 2021 — coincided in a new set of pilot efforts to fence in herds using tech rather than thousands of miles of barbed wire.

Kylie Mohr, High Country News

Bottle

A new study found that the thickness of a plastic bottle and the weight of a cardboard package have an impact on whether or not it’s recycled, with consumers thinking that lightweight materials are better off trashed rather than recycled. Essentially, if it feels like trash, it ends up in the trash, which is an issue because packagers have attempted to reduce their packaging use by making packaging thinner and, yes, more lightweight. In some cases in the study, lightweight packaging was 92 percent more likely to end up in the landfill than more substantial packaging. The average density of plastic containers found in recycling bins was 60 percent higher than the density of the plastic containers found in trash bins, and each gram per fluid ounce of density increased the chance of being recycled by a factor of 9.86.

Savannah Peat, University of Georgia

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:

Subscribe now

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Spooky

Studios didn’t release any major new movies this past weekend because they got spooked by Halloween falling on a Saturday and outcompeting a new release. The surprise winner of the weekend was You Can See Everything, which has hit No. 1 at the box office for the first time in its third week, a relatively rare feat, making $10.6 million, narrowly beating Clayface with $10.4 million. The stop-motion fantasy film Wildwood from Laika made $7.5 million, dropping only a respectable 39 percent. In fourth place was Wicker, which made $4.1 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Magnetic Tape

Fujifilm is the world’s largest producer of magnetic tape, and is investing 10 billion yen (US$63 million) to scale up its production capacity of a data storage medium that became popular in the 1950s. Despite the significantly more advanced computer systems these days, magnetic tape remains a crucial storage backup medium for companies that have large data storage needs. Fujifilm’s LTO Ultrium 10 tape uses fine hybrid magnetic particles that combine barium ferrite with strontium ferrite, selling to large cloud computing companies that want to back up their data at low costs and for long-term storage.

Nick Indge, Ars Technica

ACOTAR

A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth installment of the smash-hit A Court of Thorns and Roses romantasy series, has sold 1.7 million copies on its Tuesday release date last week. That is a 600 percent increase on day-of-release sales compared to the previous installment. The number included preordered and day-one sales worldwide for the English-language print edition; it doesn’t even include the audiobook sales or translated editions of the book. When all is said and done, A Court of Spintered Harmony is tracking to be the largest book release of the year.

Jennifer Maas, Variety

Dog

A new investigation published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology has identified the name of a dog that appears in a painting found in the tomb of a noble who died 3,500 years ago. We only know about 100 dog names from ancient Egypt, and so artisans painting three dogs with collars and inscribed names over the heads of the animals was a great opportunity to figure out new names for the pharaoh’s phidos. Two of the dogs’ names had already been translated: Kenii, which means “Strong One,” and Maaty, which means “Trusty.” The third’s inscription was faint, but has been determined to be a name previously unknown to Egyptologists in the world of canine names: Duaty, which is often an epithet of Anubis, and means “He-of-the-Underworld.”

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Laughing Cow

Bel Group is a French cheese company that produces the Baby Bel and Laughing Cow brands of snacks, and it’s trying to scale up sales in the United States. As it stands, the company doubled its market share in the past five years and has products in 7.5 percent of households. In France, a Laughing Cow is an iconic after-school snack, but the United States has lots of cheese-based snack competition. As a result, household share pales in comparison to the popularity of the snacks in its home markets, where it reaches 30 percent of French households and 90 percent of Moroccan households.

Jillian Deutsch, Bloomberg

Pumpkin Ale

After a spike in national popularity, pumpkin beer remains a regional staple in New England, where the drink has roots in Colonial America and a society that was down to ferment pretty much anything, including cheap gourds. It made a significant comeback in the 1990s when Shipyard Brewing launched Pumpkinhead Ale in ’96, and the brand remains the market leader though there’s a slew of new competition. Sales are different state by state, according to the Barrel One Collective of 15 New England brands, with sales of UFO Pumpkin up 18 percent in Rhode Island, Harpoon Pumpkin Cider up 9.3 percent in Connecticut, and Clown Shoes Pumpkin Sombrero up 28 percent in New Hampshire.

Joshua Bernstein, VinePair

Antarctica

Tourism to Antarctica has been booming and is expected to grow significantly in coming years. In the early 1990s, only around 8,000 tourists a year were visiting Antarctica, but by the 2023-24 season, that rose to 122,000 tourists, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators — an organization whose very existence so shocked a revived Ernest Shackleton that he would presumably die instantly of yet another heart attack. It’s a tough industry to forecast — Antarctica doesn’t exactly have a government that wants to boost tourism — but one forecast puts 450,000 tourists a year down there by the 2033-34 season. Operators are getting ready; Viking currently has two expedition ships suitable for polar regions, with another two on order.

Tasmin Lockwood, Skift

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

A quick election-week detour!

A few months ago I talked a little about some bigger picture stuff I’m working on with this post:

People seemed to enjoy that, so here’s another look at what I’m into.

Simon Forman was an astrologer and physician in early modern London. There was a period of time where all people who practiced medicine incorporated at least some astrology in their efforts, we’re talking in the period of time that Galenic physiology and Paracelsianism were giving way to other methods, but basically just roll with me that for quite a while the appropriate amount of astrology in a doctor visit was usually not zero.

Forman was, decisively, coming in at the end of that heyday, and had generally poor relations with the medical establishment of early modern London. I’m simplifying, but you get a sense that one reason he had such a substantial (and often well-connected!) customer base was that when the plague rolled in, he stuck around while other physicians wisely go…

Read more

Have a great weekend!

Prelude

In a thrilling finish, the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series, providing the first World Series victory in the history of the team. It was a matchup that proved decisively that teams in smaller markets and spending well below the league average on payroll can still compete without arbitrary rules reining in player compensation. Anyway, now Major League Baseball is on to its next big fight: The owners arguing that small-market teams can’t compete at the highest levels and the only solution is arbitrary rules reining in player compensation. Yes, MLB and MLBPA are on an off-season labor relations collision course with the collective bargaining agreement expiring December 1, and the expectations are that it will be a brutal lockout. A hard salary cap at $245.3 million replacing the current luxury tax would force the nine teams above the cap to cut player compensation by $627 million, and a proposed salary floor of $171.2 million would force the 12 teams below it to increase their spending by only $548 million.

Justin Birnbaum and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Alcohol

And, in more bad news for the Brewers, household spending on alcohol in the United States is at a record low, with alcoholic beverages accounting for 0.77 percent of average expenditures in 2025, just $630 per household. The lowest since this state was first tracked in 1984, it surpasses the depths logged in 2020, when the pandemic led to a sharp curb in alcohol spending, accounting for just 0.78 percent of household spending.

Aidan Williams and Redd Brown, Bloomberg

Concentrated Solar

Concentrated solar energy is the strategy of extracting energy from sunlight by using large arrays of mirrors to direct sunlight at a central point where it is turned into heat that can drive generating turbines. While costs fell quickly enough to compete with nuclear power, the costs of photovoltaic panels fell so low that the economics for a suitable solar site made sense to use panels rather than mirrors. A U.S.-based startup called 247Solar is working with India, though, to build a small, one-megawatt concentrated solar plant that’s designed to use fossil fuels if there is a shortfall in renewable generation. A field of heliostats heats ambient-pressure air to 970 degrees Celsius, heating up ceramic pellets the size of a gold ball, which would allow the solar energy to be stored and last long enough to generate power nine to 20 hours after the sun sets.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

Texthip

South Korean young people have pushed the #texthip (#텍스트힙) trend into the mainstream, which emphasizes that the written word is cool. It’s led to a surge in book sales and consumption among young people eager to unplug. According to a March survey from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, on average, 38.5 percent of adults read at least one book in the previous year, but among people in their 20s that figure was 75.3 percent, which defied declines seen in every other age cohort and was actually up year over year. In the first quarter of 2026, purchases of fiction, poetry and drama by people in their teens and 20s were up 13.6 percent.

Thu-Huong Ha and Sohee Kim, Bloomberg

Agriculture

It has been a brutal year for farmers, but don’t worry, it’s not all bad in the world of agriculture, as there are success stories if you know where to look. For instance, poppy cultivation is up 330 percent, and opium production is up 400 percent in Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime — the first major increase in production since a narcotics ban was imposed by the Taliban in 2022. Cultivation is now at 43,000 hectares, up from just 10,000 hectares a year earlier.

The Associated Press

Manx

A new study of Manx shearwaters, which are small seabirds that fly long distances and live at relatively high latitudes, has found that the birds can actually suffer from a version of jet lag after undertaking swift journeys across the Atlantic, with the birds’ body clocks diverging from local time. The birds breed on islands near the U.K. and Ireland and can fly 1,000 kilometers west to mid-Atlantic fishing grounds when gathering food for a chick. They fly in a relatively straight line home, relying on the position of the sun. Based on data from almost 4,000 such foraging runs, researchers found that the flight tracks on especially rapid return flights deviated clockwise when out of sight of land. It’s not a huge deviation — over a 1,000-kilometer flight, they’d have to fly only an extra five kilometers to reach its colony — so it didn’t exert evolutionary pressure through natural selection, but it is neat and is evidence that polar animals might get this kind of circadian rhythm offset over their migrations.

Michael Le Page, New Scientist

Productivity Awaits

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is the large popular fanwork archive and community that hosts a colossal library of fanfiction. On Thursday, the site went down for maintenance, and hours later the Organization for Transformative Works that runs AO3 announced that the site would, in fact, go down for two to four weeks following the discovery of evidence of a security incident. The site hosts 18.4 million works across 82,900 fandoms.

Samantha Cole, 404 Media

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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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

The Odyssey

In an exciting moment for nominative determinism, a cruise ship called the Odyssey has encountered a desperate situation stemming from mishaps and mistakes of its pilot, causing terrible problems for those onboard with little hope that it will complete the journey. The 642-foot cruise ship sold passengers on a years-long voyage around the world, with passengers paying Florida-based Villa Vie Residences $100,000 and up for a cabin. Setting sail from Belfast in October 2024, the cruise has since been to 60 countries. Due to spiking fuel costs — reportedly up to $6,000 to $8,000 per cabin — the Odyssey has since been stuck in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where it forced all 203 passengers to disembark. This essentially abandoned a bunch of affluent retirees in what is literally the central hub of an international scam industry that relentlessly targets them specifically.

Gabriele Steinhauser, The Wall Street Journal

Train

Transnet Freight Rail, a government-run South African railroad company, claims to have sent the longest train ever on a test run. The train was 7.6 kilometers long and composed of 696 freight wagons which were being shipped empty from the Saldanha Bay on the coast inland to the Sishen iron ore mine on a two-day journey. Most freight trains top out at a half mile to 1.5 miles long (.8 to 2.4 kilometers), but South Africa and Australia run far longer trains; the previous record was an Australian train that reached 7.24 kilometers and went from an iron ore mine to a Western Australia port in 2001.

The Associated Press

Atkins

The Atkins brand has been suffering due to the increased adoption of GLP-1s and people reaching diet goals without the same extent of diet control that sustained Atkins for years. Sales are down 20.9 percent over 2026, and with an estimated 55 million Americans — double today’s total, and 15 percent of the population — expected to be on GLP-1s by 2035, the brand is attempting to pivot. The target audience Atkins is looking at is consumers who took GLP-1s, got to their goal, stopped taking the meds and are looking to maintain weight.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Electrolyzer

An electrolyzer is a device that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, a technology that has been commercialized by primarily European and American scientists. China has set ambitious climate goals that require the development of green hydrogen as well as infrastructure that consumes it. Thanks to state support, China accounts for 70 percent of global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity, and it is producing more machines than the domestic hydrogen market can absorb — a phenomenon that resembles what happened with solar tech.

Katie Brigham, Heatmap

The Light Between The Oceans

Lady Elliot Island is at the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef, and there are precisely two lighthouses on it. One was built in 1873 and decommissioned in 1995, when the second took over lighthouse duties for the island. However, visitors to the island report seeing a third lighthouse, a phenomenon known as a phantom lighthouse illusion, and it’s so common that the island talks about it in the tourism guides. A new study attempted to figure out what’s going on with this illusion by recreating it under VR conditions. It found that when looking outwards to sea with one’s back to the real lighthouse, at a certain distance, it may seem as though the rotating beam of light is coming from out in front of you. Earlier observers reported the illusion happening when they were one to four kilometers from the real lighthouse, but the study found that a distance of just 70 meters should be enough to get the illusion to work.

Simon Cropper and Charles Kemp, The Conversation

ED138

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted what appears to be a newly discovered dwarf planet in our solar system. The object is in an especially bright part of the sky but escaped notice until now. The object is designated ED138, and it’s somewhere between 600 and 1,500 kilometers across. In order to be a dwarf planet and not merely a chunky asteroid, the object must be large enough for its own gravity to make it roughly spherical, and an asteroid with a diameter over 600 kilometers probably should do the trick. ED138 takes 281 years to orbit the sun and does so on a path that is 25 degrees off from the rest of the solar system, which is consistent with an object that had its orbit messed with by mighty Neptune. More observations will be needed to confirm that it is indeed a dwarf planet, but if it is eventually recognized by the International Astronomical Union, it would be the sixth known in our solar system along with Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

Eels

Patience Seamount is a submerged mountain off the coast of Tasmania, and it is absolutely lousy with eels. Every year, it’s the site of a massive gathering of basketwork eels for still unconfirmed reasons, but let’s just say that biologists have a theory about what the eels are up to. A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that the gatherings contain as many as 2.8 million eels, a biomass of 3,550 metric tons, figures arrived at following nine acoustic surveys of the serpentine saturnalia.

Paul Arnold, Phys.org

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Ropeless

Crab traps are typically dropped from fishing boats, suspended from buoys, and then hours later dragged up by boats that hunt them. Ropeless traps promise to both catch the crabs but also avoid trapping the whales that have been snared by conventional traps, though their implementation can be controversial. Box crabs are not often the target of anglers — Dungeness crabs are far eaasier to catch given their habitats in the intertidal zone — but the 600 meter deep crustaceans are viable targets thanks to new approaches where gear can be sunk down with ropeless, pop-up systems. One of interest — $1,500 per unit boxes from Sub Sea Sonics and Guardian Ropeless — smashes rival systems on price, which can reach $8,000 per system.

Madeline Ostrander, bioGraphic

But It Might Work For Us

High school graduation rates peaked in 2025 at 3.9 million, and smaller colleges are attempting to attract these matriculants by starting football teams. In the last decade, 62 four-year college football programs have been added or restarted and, given three shut downs and three closures on net, 56 football program have kicked off. Will it work for them? Who knows. High school graduates are projected to fall to 3.4 million by 2041. A recent study from the University of Georgia of 36 colleges that added football  programs found that, besides a one-year jump in male enrollment due to obtaining a football team, when factoring in the cost of running the program, tuition revenue per student in fact did not increase.

Eric Olson, The Associated Press

Cars

There was once a time in this country where you could turn on an NFL game and — presumably after spending a suitable amount of time saluting the flag — watch an honest-to-god automobile commercial to split up the action. That time has come to an end, according to new data, which found that in 2026 automobile advertiser share of overall U.S. ad spending has fallen to 8.9 percent of the pie, down from 11 percent as recently as 2023, and down from a recent high of 14.8 percent in 2013.

Patrick Coffee, The Wall Street Journal

Horror

Horror become an increasingly important pillar of the American box office, with 18.2 percent of box office revenues this year deriving from horror films, up from 15.8 percent a year ago, and 9.5 percent five years back. Not only is horror doing superb at the box office, but once again it’s prestigious, with Oscars recognition and critical recognition across the board.

Tiana McGee, Anurag Rao and Travis Hartman, Reuters

Canadian

A new study analyzed how Canada speaks compared to a large-scale study conducted by McGill in 1972. Some things remain the same: Canada still calls it icing, not frosting, says “different than” rather than “different from,” spells it “travelled” not “traveled,” and calls it “defence” and not “defense.” That said, some things have changed since ‘72: 84 percent spell it “color” now, compared to 35 percent in ‘72, and it’s now decisively “snuck” and not “sneaked,” “dove” and not “dived,” and centre and not center. That said, some things remain the same since ‘72; it wasn’t addressed in the survey, but I must surmise that “The Leafs are a disgrace this year” probably sounds about the same?

Charles Boberg, Claire Henderson and Jackson Mundie, Cambridge University Press

Opera

Opera is in a state of flux, as regional opera houses attempt to find ways to connect with a new generation of audiences and national houses try to balance budgets in an industry that defies simple categorization and accounting. In New York, the Met costs about $326 million as of 2025 to operate, which is substantially more than the $70 million made from box office and tours. In London, the $73 million box office isn’t remotely close to the $125 million spent on performance. Most companies rely on contributions from individuals or governments who support the work, but the money comes from very different places depending on which side of the Atlantic you reside. In Europe, 68 percent of the income of repertoire company income came from governments, compared to 2 percent in the United States.

Elias Leight, The Wall Street Journal

Labubu

It was impossible to see coming. Financial markets have been rattled in light of the news that Pop Mart’s Labubu brand has seen sales fall calamitously. American sales of the toy fad have fallen by 70 percent to 75 percent, in Asia-Pacific outside of China sales are down 65 percent to 70 percent, and in Europe they’re down 50 percent to 55 percent. Sales in China, thank god have held; according to the report they’re down by a reasonable 5 percent to 10 percent at physical stores, even if they’re down 45 percent to 50 percent over online channels. Who could have possibly seen this pullback coming, a pullback that incidentally resembles nearly identically what happened to Furby, Tamogathchi, Beanie Banies, Funko Pops, and countless other direct examples of this exact situation.

Wataru Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

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.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Hey! Tonight I’m going to be part of the Garbage Day Hallowmeme live show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, if you’re looking for something fun in New York tonight come on out it’s going to be a great show and there’s still some tickets available. Doors at 6:30.

Sinokor

Rates for very large crude carriers have increased over 1,600 percent this year amid the war in Iran, and WhatsApp messages from shipping titan Sinokor’s brokers to other people in the industry are under a renewed spotlight for the impact that they’ve had on the Baltic Exchange benchmark rate. The oil tanker market’s benchmark price point is TD3C, which is the cost of shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to China. Sinokor has benefited from skyrocketing rates, given that it is the owner of 83 supertankers. Such a fleet would have made $143 million a month on average last year. That monthly revenue has exploded: In July, such a fleet would have made $509 million, $1.4 billion in September, and $2.1 billion in October. Sinokor’s revenue for all of 2025 was $5.5 billion.

Alex Longley, Archie Hunter and Weilun Soon, Bloomberg

FBI: PSA

On October 13, thieves robbed a FedEx truck idling outside of the PSA facility in Santa Ana, California, and, in doing so, took two full pallets (and some of a third) of trading cards that were being transported between their owners and the PSA card grading facility. The FBI is now involved, and more details about the extent of the robbery have been revealed, with 6,451 graded cards stolen, most of which are Pokémon and sports cards. Among the possibly most expensive cards stolen were a 1933 Babe Ruth card and a 1935 Bronko Nagurski card.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Clean Air

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 202 facilities in 29 states and Puerto Rico have been exempted from clean air regulations, among them some of the worst industrial polluters in the country. There are 3.3 million people who live within three miles of at least one of the facilities. These include 71 coal plants, 71 chemical plants, 40 sterilizers, 19 facilities involved in the steel business and one copper smelter. It is the largest presidential intervention in the enforcement of the Clean Air Act since it was signed.

Eric Lipton, Maxine Joselow and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times

Fish

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology analyzed nearly a thousand environmental DNA samples collected along Japan’s coastline, which came to 2,672 samples from 316 locations when combined with previous samples taken from as far back as 2017. Thousands of different fish species appeared in the samples, but what was particularly interesting was the 126 species of fish that were found in places further north than ever previously recorded.

Danielle Ellenby, OIST Graduate University

Translation

A new study published by the Coalition for Language Equity in AI Research looked into how languages other than English, and especially those with non-Latin scripts, pay a significant penalty when it comes to the economics of AI token use. Essentially, AI is more expensive for languages with a smaller online presence. Among the 20 most popular languages on the internet, the most expensive of those languages used 1.5 to five times as many tokens when inputted into an LLM; when the set was expanded to 200 languages, the token gap was significantly higher. For instance, Shan is the most verbose language available in the FLORES-200 language dataset, but it only takes 42 percent more characters than English to express the same thought. Yet, the best-case scenario was 2.7 times as many tokens for even the most equitable tokenizer.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

Riyadh

Riyadh Air is a new air carrier that operates out of Saudi Arabia, but thanks to the risks of actually landing at airports in Riyadh, Riyadh Air in fact no longer flies to Riyadh. It hasn’t cancelled the flights, exactly; instead, it’s moved from the Riyadh hub to the Al Qassim airport. This is a 434-kilometer drive away, which now involves a 4.5-hour bus trip overland right after or before the flight.

Deepthi Nair, Skift

Aurum

A new study published in the journal Land describes extensive hydraulic systems used by the Romans to remove gold from the eastern Pyrenees 1,700 years ago, with the researchers estimating that the mining operation displaced two million cubic meters of earth and produced artificial ravines and a 300-meter-wide excavation. This is a sign that Roman mining operations were more extensive than previously known, extending beyond the production centers of Las Médulas.

Mining.com

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Welcome back!

Malleable

Clayface won the box office weekend with $24 million in North America, beating out the documentary You Can See Everything with a nevertheless remarkable $19.5 million in its second weekend, a 28 percent jump. Clayface came in a bit soft compared to expectations, and pulled $19 million overseas. Stop-motion animated film Wildwood from Laika Studios pulled off $11.2 million in its opening weekend, smashing expectations, which is remarkable because its core demographic — sensitive men who write stats-driven morning newsletters — were traveling back from London this weekend and won’t be able to see it until later this week.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Winnie-the-Pooh

The New York Public Library is pushing back on rumors that it will return the collection of stuffed animals owned by A. A. Milne’s son Christopher Robin that inspired the beloved children’s book series featuring Winnie-the-Pooh. Obviously, these artifacts have played an important role in British culture, but the NYPL has to be realistic about these assets, which were donated by publisher Dutton Children’s Books to the library in 1987 in a deal that everyone agrees was completely legal at the time. Straightforwardly, the toys were acquired above board, and arguably they were rescued from destruction; the toys in the possession of the NYPL are certainly in better condition than any of the same toys bought from Harrod’s in 1921. The NYPL is designed to be a global institution with artifacts from many different cultures, and fulfilling all restitution claims for all the great museums would be ruinous. The NYPL attracts millions of visitors per year, and owning them allows Pooh Bear to be viewed in the context of other great children’s books rather than an isolated display. Also, come on, if we’d ever consider loaning them back, Britain would really have to get its fiscal house in order, and perhaps the regional unrest would need to quiet down a bit.

Hallie Golden, The Associated Press

A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, alleging that the company infringed on 274 of Elvis’ copyrighted songs. The suit was launched by a unit of Authentic Brands Group, which is a licensing company that controls the intellectual property rights of Elvis, though the suit was co-filed by other entities that have skin in the game on the songs of the King.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Hoover

The works of Colleen Hoover have been colossal successes within the book business, and have had solid performance on the big screen as well. So far, production company Heartbones Entertainment has adapted three of Hoover’s novels, with It Ends With Us making $351 million on a $25 million budget, Verity, which made $122 million and Verity. The movies in turn drive sales back to the books, too; Verity has sold 4.7 million copies since its 2021 release, and It Ends with Us has sold six million print copies.

Kerensa Cadenas, Publishers Weekly

Death

Japanese funerary rites involve cremation and burial, with the overwhelming number of Japanese decedents electing to be cremated: between 99.7 percent and 99.9 percent in a given year. Indeed, fewer than 400 people are buried without cremation annually. However, the country is facing a crisis related to the cost of burial, with funerals averaging 1.2 million yen (US$7,600), as of 2024, which is about a quarter of the average annual gross earnings of a Japanese worker. Plot and cemetery-use fees are expensive, amounting to 1.52 million yen in 2025, and even after the funeral, municipal and private cemeteries charge annual fees for land maintenance.

Mimi Hanaoka, The Conversation

El Niño

A new study published in Science Advances found that the state of the Pacific Ocean at the outset of a forecast may allow the possibility of predicting an El Niño or La Niña event up to a year in advance. Currently, these events can be predicted with confidence about six months ahead of time. However, any earlier prediction has been relatively elusive. The researchers analyzed 7,500 historical El Niño-Southern Oscillation forecasts and found that under La Niña conditions, forecasts performed consistently well.

Alexa Viani, University of Melbourne

Hemoglobin

Blood can take a number of different colors, colors that are the result of different adaptations in blood chemistry to support survival in unique conditions. For the most part, vertebrates have rich red blood thanks to the hemoglobin protein in red blood cells that contains iron atoms. Vertebrate blood is cherry red when the iron atoms attach to oxygen and brown-red when they’re not. The deer mouse, which can live 14,000 feet above sea level, has evolved hemoglobin that makes particularly tight bonds with oxygen, with similar alterations found in Andean hummingbirds and black-spotted frogs. Not all animal blood is red, though; Octopus and squid instead have hemocyanin, which has copper atoms rather than iron, so it looks blue when bound to oxygen, performing better in cold temperatures.

Claudia Steiner, 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; 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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Have a great weekend!

Lorax

In a new deal that honors both the letter and the spirit of the work, glorified bargain bin Five Below will produce and sell exclusive plastic crap related to The Lorax, the Dr. Seuss conservation tale warning against commercialization, exploitation and myopic industry. Yes, in a brilliant business move that connects intellectual property commercialization, brand exploitation and keeping a close eye on industrialized production, this pointless junk — including a licensed Lorax Squishmallow that replaces the Truffula Tree stuffing now banned under CITES with clean, durable plastic — starts at just $5. Taking the long view, that’s an incredible deal given that these branded tchotchkes with the visage of a conservation Cassandra will very possibly one day outlive the actual child it’s given to, thanks to the resilience of modern polyurethane and the near guarantee that the extruded stuffing will gently break down into long-lasting and bioaccumulating microplastics.

Natalie Miller, Toybook

Panama

The Panama Canal has reported fiscal year 2026 data, reporting 13,951 vessel transits in the year ending September 30, up 4.1 percent year over year. Total tonnage transiting the canal rose 6.5 percent to 521 million tons. Overall, revenue hit $6.6 billion, up 16.6 percent year over year. The canal has recently increased daily booking capacity to 33 slots thanks to improvement in watershed conditions despite a withering El Niño.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Game

The average NFL game duration has hit 3 hours, 11 minutes this season, up seven minutes over the recent average. That is a shift in the wrong direction compared to other sports that have attempted to rein in their runtime and cut out the tedious elements that spark delays; Major League Baseball games, by comparison, are down from 3 hours, 11 minutes as recently as 2021 to 2 hours, 45 minutes as of this past season. One reason for the football delay is that penalties are spiking this year, hitting an average of 15 penalties per game, the highest since 2005 and up from 11.4 penalties per game as recently as 2023.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Armchair Expert

After years in the top 50 podcasts, Armchair Expert by Dax Shepard has quietly fallen out of the top of the charts, dropping from No. 50 in the first quarter of the year to No. 59 as of the most recent quarter. The program appeared in Edison Research’s top 50 listened podcasts for every quarter from 2022 to 2025. One reason for Armchair Expert’s decline is new competition in the niche — if people want to hear a celebrity talk to another celebrity about what it’s like being a celebrity, Amy Poehler is now available — but also it’s a sign that podcasts that signed exclusive deals with Spotify, such as Shepard’s, are losing out on a YouTube audience that is still pretty considerable and valuable for discovery.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Candy

Rising costs of confectionaries are causing a Halloween pinch, with candy prices up 15 percent in 2026, rising at a rate of four times inflation. Roughly 65 percent of ingredient costs in the candy industry come from the cost of cocoa beans, sugar and corn syrup, and all of those are having supply chain problems, hiked prices and import issues. If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the invisible hand of the market. Sure, candy’s expensive, and surveys found that people are reportedly buying less of it and buying cheaper stuff, but the good news is, thanks to the skyrocketing inflation seen in cartel-priced eggs and heavily-tariffed toilet paper, the vandalism that such cheapskate candy behavior on Halloween might provoke has been priced out as well.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Carriages

The New York City Council passed a bill Thursday that will ban horse-drawn carriage rides by June 2028, causing widespread disappointment in Ohio, probably. The legislation includes a concession to the 150 remaining carriage drivers, where the city must offer career counseling and referrals in the city’s transit and taxi industries, where they may be shocked to find we have developed mechanisms of locomotion that exceed one horsepower. The bill has critics, and many wonder how exactly the city intends to make 59th Street smell like horse dung, or who will blast “Empire State of Mind” on repeat for no reason, or who will rip off the Europeans once we get rid of the horses. I am on a London fact-finding mission to discover the future of New York’s next obsolete tourist-baiting transit option, and the answer is clear: I’m bringing Lime e-bike jousting to CitiBike, and I dare the government to stop me.

The Associated Press

Bacteria

Seagrass roots tend to sit in sediment that has very little oxygen content, and if anything, has buildups of sulfide that can poison plants. One way the planet’s 72 species of seagrasses can thrive in such an inhospitable environment is through bacteria and other microorganisms that can fix nutrients consumed by the plants, converting toxic sulfides into something useful. One issue, though, is that humans tend to pass an enormous volume of antibiotics — some 9,500 metric tons passed through sewage treatment plants and into rivers, of which 3,300 metric tons make it to the ocean — and those chemicals are doing what they are designed to do: killing those helpful bacteria. In lab studies, the leaves of seagrass in water treated with doses of antibiotics grew a third slower and lost much of their pigment compared to the control grass.

Scarlett Buckley, bioGraphic

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Jake Lahut, who is behind the outstanding and scoopy politics newsletter The Hut. We talked about he surprisingly rapid salience of the data center issue, and a surprising twist in campaign rhetoric since the start of the year, and dove into some significant and experimental shifts in how campaigns are being conducted. Check out The Hut, I really enjoy it:

The Hut

A newsletter focused on campaigns, the tech industry's role in politics, and power. Also a home for Jake Lahut's freelance feature reporting, scooplets, analysis, and other notebook items (no paywalls, but pay to support).

By Jake Lahut

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Adidas

Shoe company Adidas spent something like $1 billion total on the World Cup, an outlay that rattled investors given the sheer size and doubt around whether or not Adidas can reasonably expect to make that back. The company supplied jerseys for 14 teams, ran myriad fan events and a blue chip ad campaign with the Cup that culminated in a 30 percent spike in marketing costs. And while measures of Adidas’ brand have shown improvement, the company missed earnings expectations back in July. That said, analyst still think there’s money coming Adidas’ way as a result of the World Cup spend, with something like €250 million to €350 million ($280 million to $393 million) in World Cup-related action to still be delivered this quarter.

Megan Graham, The Wall Street Journal

Bacon

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game contends that any actor in Hollywood can, within a reasonable number of steps, be connected to a film also starring Kevin Bacon. Drawing from a dataset of 169,000 actors, 1 percent of actors have appeared in a film with Bacon, 70 percent of actors just two movies away, 29 percent of actors three movies away, and less than 0.1 percent of actors four movies away. Running the data for every actor, it turns out no single performer can reach all of Hollywood within three degrees. Kevin Bacon’s remoteness score is 2.28, meaning an actor is on average 2.28 degrees from Bacon, however that’s only 175th-best in the industry. The center of Hollywood is, in fact, Samuel L. Jackson, who has a remoteness of 2.09, followed by Willem Dafoe at 2.13 and Robert De Niro at 2.14.

Owen Lacey, The Pudding

Volleyball

Two competing professional leagues have formed in the United States for women’s professional volleyball, with both Major League Volleyball and League One Volleyball (or “LOVB”) each serving up in the past two years, anticipating that the sports’ rapid growth at the youth level and a big focus at the 2028 Olympics will put the sport over the top culturally. There are some differences between the promotions: MLV has the standard locally-owned teams, draft, and free agency period seen in other sports leagues, while LOVB has league-owned and operated teams that are vertically integrated with youth clubs and add players through deals with the league. The next MLV season starts in January and will feature 26 regular-season games for each team, while LOVB tips off in December and will see teams play 20 games.

Katie McInerney, The Fixture

Pinball

Most of the pinball industry is historically based around Chicago, and every year it gathers for the Pinball Expo in October. Pinball has stabilized from a sharp decline in popularity caused by other games becoming available, and there’s actually some fascinating innovation going down in the space. The business is dominated by Stern Pinball of Elk Grove, Illinois, which controls around 90 percent of the industry and is largely fueled by licensing, such as a new game revealed this year tied to Fallout.

Nick Indge, Ars Technica

Toho

Japanese film giant Toho saw domestic anime streaming revenue decline 6 percent year over year to ¥5.5 billion ($35 million) in the six months ending in August, reflecting the changing demographics of the home Japanese market. Business is otherwise booming overseas, though, with international anime streaming revenue up 62 percent year over year, hitting ¥9 billion ($57 million) in the same six-month period. Overall, it’s good to be in the kaiju business, with Godzilla IP hitting a record high.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Pharmaceuticals

When the big employer in town goes belly up, it can be a struggle for communities to figure out how to adapt and find new companies to invest in a region. This has been a significant issue in Myanmar’s Shan state, where difficulties in the financial and sales sectors has forced the region to innovate and switch to pharmaceutical research and production. By which I mean, the various scam and fraud businesses that defrauded victims of $43.8 billion globally have been the subject of a government crackdown in the Mekong. This has in turn fueled a sprawling drug empire in Shan state producing methamphetamine, which is known as yaba or shabu depending on its form. It’s been a blockbuster product for the Golden Triangle, with $48.1 billion to $74.8 billion in sales within Southeast Asia alone.

Joseph Rachman, Foreign Policy

Overshoot

The United Nations says that it has now become impossible to avoid global warming above 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, with the primary goal now to ensure that the overshoot above 1.5C is as brief as possible. Emissions are currently on track to cause 2.8C of warming by the end of the century. The lowest possible overshoot would see global temperatures peaking at between 1.7C and 1.8C above pre-industrial levels, with a 50 percent chance that they fall back to 1.5C by 2100. Accomplishing that would require an 18 percent emissions cut by 2030, a 45 percent cut by 2035, and a 69 percent cut by 2040. Currently, under existing climate pledges, emissions will fall 5 to 8 percent by 2030 and 11 to 15 percent by 2035.

Madeleine Cuff, New Scientist

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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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Today I’m the guest on one of my favorite podcasts, No Such Thing, talking about the state of the romantic comedy. Check it out wherever you find your podcasts.

Dice

Hasbro, the toy company that serves as the convenient corporate wrapper for the astonishingly lucrative Magic: The Gathering card game, posted $517 million in operating profit. This is thanks to a 49 percent operating margin in the Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming segment of the business, which is responsible for the cash cows of Magic, with over $600 million in revenue, and the mobile game Monopoly Go!, which brought in $41 million in revenue.

James Zahn, The Toybook

Clovis

A blockbuster presentation at an archeological conference sets out the terms to challenge a long-held theory about the history of civilization in the Americas. In March, a cohort of archaeologists argued that a coastal site in southern Chile could be traced to 8,200 to 4,200 years old, dated thanks to a layer of volcanic ash. This would be 10,000 years younger than most researchers thought, which would challenge evidence that people arrived before the end of the ice age. The whole thing has caused a kerfuffle among archeologists.

Mike Price, Science

Scott’s Tots

In 2015, the Milwaukee Brewers ran a promotion called the “Timeless Ticket,” where in exchange for $1,000, the buyer could get admission to any game in the future, and become eligible to buy three additional tickets to that game at retail. Well, the Brewers have made it to the World Series for the first time since 1982, so obviously now is a great time to cash in on that. However, the team has become embroiled in controversy as it is offering only 400-level or standing room options. The team, which clearly assumed it would never amount to anything moving forward, has said that any Timeless Ticket holder who wanted World Series tickets would be able to keep those tickets as well as their Timeless Ticket to redeem at another game in the future, when presumably the Brewers suck again.

Steve Megargee, The Associated Press, and Justin Brinbaum and Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Glaciers

Rock glaciers contain debris as well as ice, and have been more resiliant in the face of climate change than their more typical icy glaciers. An analysis of rock glaciers in Grand Teton National Park from 1967 to 2014 found that rock glaciers did not have an increase in thinning rate between the historical and contemporary period, losing just an average of two inches annually, compared to snowfields that lost 1.9 feet annually and clean ice glaciers that lost 2.8 feet annually. The first global inventory of rock glaciers counted over 51,000 worldwide, compared to 274,531 pure ice glaciers.

Claudia Steiner, Knowable Magazine

To Extend Our Reach To The Stars Above

Hundreds of Pokémon cards and sports trading cards valued at $963,000 were boosted from a FedEx truck last week in California, bound for a company that appraises cards. Two pallets were taken from the truck, and a third pallet of cards showed signs of being disturbed. The theft was reported by PSA, the card grader.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

Skis

About $1.5 billion worth of cross-country ski gear is sold annually, with 5.5 million Americans participating in the activity, up from 4.6 million a decade ago. Nordic skiing has become increasingly popular, and with it, the cottage industry that services those skis and sells to those skiiers. Participation in the Worldloppet circuit, which involves skiing marathons in 20 countries, is up 35 percent over the past decade.

Bill Donahue, Bloomberg

Past Lives

A new study examined 1,678 reports collected by the Division of Perceptual Studies about cases of purported reincarnation. According to the report, the median intermission between death and purported rebirth was 16 months, however based on the reports there was an association between unexpected deaths and a somewhat speedier rebirth.

Josh Barney, University of Virginia Health System

Check out No Such Thing:

NO SUCH THING

No Such Thing is a podcast where three best friends and journalists settle their dumb arguments — and yours — by actually doing the research.

By Noah Friedman

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

Cookies

Cookie sales are flat, which is a problem for Mondelēz, given that it owns two of the largest cookie businesses in the United States: Oreo (with $2.1 billion in annual sales) and Chips Ahoy! (with close to $1 billion). The category that it’s seen some growth in is what’s internally grouped as “Americana,” which is basically all the other lesser cookies it’s got in the portfolio, including Nutter Butter, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, Teddy Grahams, Mallomars, Nilla Wafers and Honey Maid Graham Crackers. Individually, these cookies are crumbs compared to the Oreo machine, but they nevertheless add up to over $1 billion in sales, growing and snapping a two-year decline.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Quarters

Thanks to social media influencers shilling the business as a get-rich-quick situation, laundromats have become a trendy investment. The process of actually running a coin-operated laundry is slightly more hands-on than a TikTok might illustrate, but the content does great on social, so, much like vending machines a few years ago, the entrepreneurial side of the internet has convinced itself that fortunes are made one quarter at a time. There are roughly 30,000 laundromats in the United States and the business has stayed relatively flat for some time; a small location might change hands for $300,000, a large one for $3 million, and most are still mom-and-pops that average a 24 percent profit margin, according to the industry group.

John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal

Northern Sea Route

Russia’s Northern Sea Route connects the Pacific to European ports by going north around Russia, and while it’s only passable in Summer, it’s becoming more popular as the Arctic warms. The Center for High North Logistics has logged 104 confirmed transit voyages through the end of September, which is already more than the 103 logged in all of 2025 and 97 in 2024. Total cargo shipped is up 15 percent to 3.7 million metric tons, and the Center estimates that by the end of the season, 150 transits moving 4.5 million tons of cargo might make the journey, given the 45 potential voyages already underway or within the zone.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Secondhand

Thanks to large interest among younger consumers in general and young women in particular, a new survey found that 64 percent of Americans are somewhat or very interested in buying clothing secondhand. That figure is 78 percent among Gen Z respondents and 73 percent among women. Secondhand is also appealing to parents, with 72 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 interested in shopping secondhand.

Rishad Dsouza, YouGov

Aroma

Fragrance companies have seen a surge in demand for so-called gourmand fragrances, which are scents that specifically evoke rich, sweet smells like cherry, Tabasco, sesame, candy and toffee. These scents are growing in popularity among younger consumers, as well as — for some reason — buyers who are on GLP-1 drugs, the latter seeing a potential chemosensory link that is being actively researched by titans of the flavor and aroma industry, Givaudan and IFF. The shift has been pronounced: Two years ago gourmand scents had a nine percent market share, but today, that’s up to 24 percent, good for the second-largest fragrance group after florals.

Alexander Marrow and Denis Balibouse, Reuters

Svalbard

The municipality of Longyearbyen lokalstyre is home to 2,600 residents on Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago. Longyearbyen’s 2,600 residents get their water from a dammed lake called Isdammen, but higher temperatures are leaching metals into the pond, and now authorities have alerted residents that manganese levels are 25 times higher than the allowed 50 micrograms per liter recommended by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The reason is that thawing permafrost is exposing pyrite in the shale bedrock to the water, oxidizing it and generating acidity that leaches heavy metals from the rocks into the water.

Karen McVeigh, The Guardian

Vanquished

Mexico is drastically reducing the area that bars the fishing industry from using long walls of nylon mesh gillnets by 86 percent to just 1,562 square kilometers. The previous arrangement protected an area roughly the size of Connecticut from the fishing practice. The gillnets have been deadly for the vaquita, the small porpoise that has been driven nearly to extinction. Last year, scientists estimated that there were only seven to 10 vaquitas left, down from 600 in 1997.

Ana Isabel Martinez and Sarah Morland, Reuters

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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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

What’s On Second?

Street Fighter won the box office weekend, opening to $30 million, but the real shocker is that the No. 2 film in America, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, has made $15 million from 855 theaters. That’s double the already high expectations for the film and a huge number for a non-music or concert documentary at the box office. The movie was made in secret over three years for $7 million, and the movie leaves this weekend with outstanding buzz that could indicate some solid hangtime at the box office as well as bolster an awards season run. Documentaries don’t usually even get a wide release, and when they do, they tend to average like $3 million in their first weekend. It is the largest debut for any film playing under 1,000 screens since Borat and the biggest opening for a documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Game of the Year

The Game Awards, which recognizes the medium of video games in what’s generally become the highest artistic honor in the craft, has seen the jury of outlets that vote on the prizes become considerably more international. The United States has had the largest presence of any country on the jury, but this year, due to changes in the composition of the jury, that has changed. In 2024 and 2025, American outlets accounted for 24 seats out of the over 130 voters for the awards. The 2026 jury, though, sees an exodus of more mainstream lifestyle outlets from the jury. Now, there are just 17 American outlets on the jury, tied with the number of UK outlets, which rose from 14 to 17. Outlets from English-speaking countries account for 28 percent of the jury, Latin American countries now account for 21 percent of the jury and outlets from mainland Europe are now up to 27 percent of the jury.

Oli Welsh, Polygon

Leap Second

Representatives from 69 countries attended a meeting of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Versailles, France on October 15 and voted to do away with the leap second. Since 1967, when we first developed atomic clocks, coordinated universal time (UTC) became based on the vibration of the caesium-133 atom, not how fast Earth actually pulled off during orbit. Given that natural fluctuations in the rate of rotation of our planet now meant that each year was slightly different, to keep UTC in sync with the heavens, people in 1972 introduced leap seconds, which could be added when the deviation between the atomic clocks and the astronomical clocks exceeded one second. Since then, 27 leap seconds have been added, but they’ve been irritating to implement, and it sure looks like Earth’s rotation is actually accelerating slightly and nobody wants to deal with a “negative leap second.” So, we’re doing leap hours now, and they’re not going to be a problem for several centuries.

Jo Marchant, New Scientist

Fare

Holiday airfares will hit their highest levels in a decade, with the average round-trip Thanksgiving ticket being 31 percent more expensive than last year and the round-trip Christmas ticket being 23 percent higher. According to Hopper, the average round-trip domestic airfare for the Thanksgiving travel period has reached $402 for 2026, a considerable leap when average fares haven’t exceeded $307 since 2017. The average monthly spot price of fuel is up 91 percent since February.

Rebecca Cadenhead and Alison Sider, The Wall Street Journal

Ethiopia

Land degradation in Ethiopia has become a significant economic drag on the country. Stripped forests mean fertile topsoil is being washed away, contributing to declining crop yields that cost the country some $4.3 billion per year in lost income, a problem in a country where 100 million people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. In the early 20th century, forests covered 35 percent to 40 percent of Ethiopia, but by 1989, that was down to three percent, and soon Ethiopia’s highlands were losing one billion metric tons of topsoil annually. That gradually recovered to 17.2 percent in 2019, but in a quest to accelerate that recovery, the government has launched a seedling-planting program that aims to plant 50 billion seedlings by 2030. The program planted 800 million seedlings in a single day in August. In 2023, national forest cover is up to 23.6 percent.

Samuel Abate and Freddie Clayton, bioGraphic

Microbialites

In only a few places across the world, such as Western Australia, there are fossil records known as microbialites — the oldest-known records of microorganisms — preserved in rock for 3.5 billion years. These fossil records are unique because they show how life responded to upheaval, as the microbialite record in Australia spans at least one and possibly two of Earth’s five major mass extinctions. A new study surveyed 50 years of microbialite research to look at how fragile these fossils remain, and how the sites where they may be found are vulnerable to both overcollection as well as damage. Sites such as Lake Clifton and Shark Bay have been damaged, possibly irreparably, by dozens of aurora chasers trampling thrombolites in a restricted area.

Heidi Jane Allen, The Conversation

Wagner

Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary organization founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, continues to hold a firm grip in the Central African Republic even years after the suspicious death of Wagner’s founder. His 28-year-old son, Pavel Prigozhin, has reportedly salvaged the operation and righted the relationship with the Kremlin. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, the business generates over $400 million a year, with the mercenaries seizing control of gold mines and serving as personal security for the CAR’s president.

Nicholas Bariyo, The Wall Street Journal

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.

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Jake Lahut, an independent journalist covering some fascinating topics about the word of politcs. Jake is out with a rebrand of his substack, The Hut. And he’s covering the tech of the politcal right and the election cycle.

We talked about canvassing approaches, the surprisingly rapid saliance of the data center issue, and a suprising twist in campaign rhetoric since the start of the year.

Jake can be found at The Hut:

The Hut

A newsletter focused on campaigns, the tech industry's role in politics, and power. Also a home for Jake Lahut's freelance feature reporting, scooplets, analysis, and other notebook items (no paywalls, but pay to support).

By Jake Lahut

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Jake, thanks so much for coming back on.

Yeah, great to be on, Walt.

You are the proprietor of a freshly rebranded The Hut. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you cover and what got you interested in this angle on politics?

Sure. I mainly viewed the newsletter at first purely as a delivery mechanism for any freelance work I was doing. And then I started to view it a little more as an extension of my time at Wired covering the influence of the tech industry on politics and the emerging tech right.

The other component in the midterms is that in my conversations with sources, they basically said that there’s a distribution problem for a lot of campaign stories that normally would have been told in past cycles. And that’s just simply because the whole ecosystem of local and regional papers and a lot of the campaign reporting that even the well-funded national outlets used to do has receded. So I try to pick and choose some interesting races that tend to go undercover and stand up a story that might not be worth the whole back and forth of a freelance agreement like my other stuff, but could still be interesting and inform the public without me necessarily being on the beat of a certain race.

That last one’s a really interesting observation I hadn’t even thought that much about. You’ve seen this very significant shift in resourcing for local publications. You get things that I would have expected to have been local news back in the day.

Yeah, and it’s really no shame to any of those outlets.

No, of course.

I got my start for the Schenectady Gazette and the Albany Times Union. And they both do still report on politics, but also they’re the only games left in town for print. It’s interestingly, they both looked at expanding their coverage into more of a Hudson Valley, because I really feel like there’s a huge gap in that area. I haven’t covered New York 19 that much, but it’s a really, really interesting district. It’s got a huge footprint.

I just think there’s way too much of a problem of the haves and have nots at the national level. For example, even something like the Republican Convention in 2024, it’s just very evident when you’re there that you have your New York Times, Wall Street Journal type outlets, the big networks. They have huge teams that go there, they’re basically popping up a temporary office. And then you got everybody else, who’s maybe sending one or two people.

And I think that in my conversations with other reporters this cycle, that that’s been the case on the trail, where there are a couple big storylines: Graham Plattner imploding in Maine, James Talarico emerging as a real contender in Texas, Abdul Al-Sayed looking like he was going to win the primary. Newsrooms send everyone in packs. And I think you can get a lot of good work done in that setting.

But for me, it’s more fun to zag when the rest of the competition zigs. There’s a pretty decent lane for that now that I personally didn’t anticipate being something that you could fill even just a few years ago.

Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about some of the fun stuff that you’ve come across in your lane. I think that some of it has become slightly more central to the national conversation. You have spent some time at Wired, in the 2024 election, people might recall that you were doing some really similar work when it came to Elon Musk’s GOTV operation that he was developing and spinning up single handedly for the Trump campaign. Now, you continue to cover the role and the shifting role that the tech industry is playing in politics. I guess I’m interested in what that’s manifesting in this midterms.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I think I’m curious about, and you can see under the surface if you look closely enough, is that there’s a recalibration happening at the big macro level. It’s pretty clear that a lot of these companies realize they’re going to maybe be investigated by the House Democrats in the shorter term. And they may very well have to be dealing with the Democratic president in the medium term. When you look at who these companies hire, as lobbyists, advisors, whatever, there’s a pretty good bipartisan selection of people there.

I’m continually surprised by how sources of mine from earlier in my career end up at companies like Nvidia or Coinbase or what have you. I think that Elon is maybe a surprising story in the midterm, because if you look at last year, he was looking to start his own party, the America Party. And he was essentially declaring he was going to pack up his toys and go home.

Now, I mean, the public money that he spent with America PAC and everything is upwards of $350 to $360 million. With the dark money, which is generally considered to be about a one to one ratio for him, that puts a conservative estimate there at over half a billion dollars that he’s spent this cycle. A question I just had going back to 2024 is whether he is actually any good at this other than spending a ton of money. Some answers to that are gonna be harder to tell.

For example, I had a lot of reporting about this contractor called Blitz Canvassing that worked for America PAC and also for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign back in the Republican primary that cycle. We’re not gonna know until the end of the year who the vendors were for Elon if he went back to them. But their approach is essentially to take the tech industry disruption mindsets to politics. I think that the money probably gets you a better return on your investment in ads.

I think there are innovative things they do with targeted ads and trying to combine that with the door knocking. But the door knocking itself is very notable in that they tended to go for paid door knockers who have really no interest or involvement in the campaign. And often in the case of canvassing under America PAC, they’re bringing in people from out of state, who may have a criminal record, the may not be able to drive, they may have a harder time finding employment in general. They basically give them multi-level marketing sales goals where if they hit a quota of a certain number of doors, which is essentially impossible to hit, they’ll get paid an extra amount of money. I think that it’s still an open question about whether that is an effective way to use a ground game versus the approach of having volunteers do it, or ideally a campaign or a state party try to train them and do it a specific way.

That’s before getting into any of the other stuff that I find really interesting about these guys, such as to what extent do people use personal AI models to get insight and predictions? There’s been a little hint of that with the Elon Musk documentary in the text that Ashley Sinclair talks about. This industry is still very early in being a major player in politics.

When you look back to the Obama era, the idea was just more or less in line with what other industries came to do as they mature, which is spend money on lobbyists, give campaign contributions, try to get face time with the principals in DC. Because the level of spending and the philosophical fervor around AI has gotten so intense, it’s almost like this has been turning into more of a holy war than a mercenary war for them. And that’s reflected in how they talk and how they spend the money.

That’s interesting. I do want to talk a little bit about that, because it does seem like one of the larger and straight up unexpected things about this election is how quickly data centers have become a very motivating issue. If you looked at the polling in like February, you weren’t really seeing this. But if you look at it now, it has crossed a lot of different demographics that ordinarily wouldn’t throw in together, environmentalists and suburban NIMBYs and lefties. It seems like it emerged out of nowhere. And it’s sticking in places that are, for me, very surprising. For example, Northern Virginia, which has been putting data centers in the ground since the 90s.

It really seems to me like it’s the one-two punch of data centers and Flock cameras. Both of them have a particularly dystopian valence to them, and they don’t seem to present most people with any real value for their lives. I want to give a shout out to my former WIRED colleague and my friend Molly Taft. I think they are the preeminent reporter on data centers in the country right now, who’s writing it for a general audience and not in a trade publication. And when you follow that arc going back to last year, I think that it’s a really interesting example of something that seems to be fluxing about how we understand politics today versus before.

There are both a lot of regular people who are being radicalized, who don’t really have extreme opinions on issues, but really hate this. And there is a horseshoe theory thing going on with the far left and the far right also not fully joining forces — there have been some rallies and whatnot — but they are joining forces to also gin up public support against this. And like is there some influence operation happening with China around American offices and data centers? Probably, but the organic sentiment just seems to be far outweighing whatever you could try to achieve with a foreign influence operation against it.

The post-industrial history of the U.S. is something that I think the tech folks haven’t considered enough and why there’s a backlash to it. I am continually struck by how my Republican and Trump-world sources view this as a public relations and messaging problem, and they mostly blame Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amadei of Anthropic for that. I think what they don’t understand is that a lot of the forces that propel Trump to office are at play here with the data centers.

The Virginia example is one of the more fascinating ones because there’s been this industry and the data centers going in there, and it tends to be an area known for white collar work, but there are a lot of other people who don’t make a lot of money who are trying to live there. They have a lot of the same complaints against data centers that people in more rural areas do. When you have a manufacturing center that gets hollowed out like that in so many parts of the country, I don’t know why people are surprised when you’re trying to bring in this giant machine god thing that’s only going to employ a few dozen people for maintenance after the construction is over and you claim to be shocked that they don’t want it.

So the messaging has been bad on data centers, but also I think that this is only really the beginning of that arc and there’s so much more spending going to them and the growing the levels of compute needed for these models means the hyperscalers have to find a lot more turf and power resources to boot up these new ones. It’s really striking to me that that seems to be resonating much more with voters than, for example, DOGE or other tech industry incursions into politics. But I just think that it hits so many notes for the NIMBY response to people’s environmental concerns, whether that’s about water itself or just overall power usage, which is the actual bigger issue with them.

There’s the sci-fi nature of it. That’s where the Flock cameras really do play their role in the current zeitgeist because people don’t want to feel like they’re surveilled or just completely alienated from their careers and they just view this as a threat.

Yeah, the Flock camera connection is an interesting one because that does make sense that those are very intertwined.

A lot of election stuff does end up being surprising in this way, where the issue that ends up resonating in October isn’t necessarily one that you had on the board in March. What issues have fallen off the map? What are some things that people were interested in running on that they’re not anymore or ad angles that aren’t actually hitting as much as people had thought they were? I guess you always have a little bit of insight on that.

Yeah, I mean Zohran Mamdani was going to become this albatross to hang around the Democratic party, and you’re going to see so many of his quotes in ads, and he would be inescapable this cycle. It turns out that the actual ad spending doesn’t really back that up. I’m not sure if it was the Washington Sun or another outlet that actually pulled the expenditures on it. But he’s really not been the focus of a lot of advertising.

I think the other big ones would be immigration and also reproductive health care. If you had asked a lot of Democratic consultants back in like January, they would have thought that the dystopian ice occupation of cities and the killings of René Goode and Alex Pretty in Minneapolis would have been one of the top issues. That has not really proven to be the case. I think in some ways, also, there’s been a detente there in terms of either side wanting to use it in their messaging, because it’s become so negative for the Republicans that even though border security remains Trump’s consistent top issue in polling, his support has really, really fallen on this handling of immigration. Republicans don’t see it as much of an asset. And I think Democrats are looking around and noticing that the corruption angle writ large for them is much more effective.

They still have an advantage on things like health care, but you’re not hearing as much as you would have in previous cycles about the remaining anti-abortion laws and restrictions on the books, and what the midterms could mean at the state and local level. On that front, I think Democrats have really been trying to keep that as a consistent messaging theme from 2022 into 2024. That doesn’t mean neither of them are big, important issues for the public, but they’re just not the type of campaign workhorses that people might have thought they would prove to be. Also, looking at rural districts that have had Republican control for a long time, but also have really, really high numbers of white voters without college degrees, those issues might limp.

One that I was tipped onto early by former Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow is the first district in Michigan, which has the upper peninsula and a big chunk of the top half of the lower part of the state. That would be a really interesting one I would keep an eye on. The other side are a couple of squishy spots for Democrats that I’m not sure people were thinking could be tougher races.

I think that a lot of Democrat consultants looked at the map and thought, “Okay, Michigan with Al-Sayed could be the real prime defensive turf.” And instead, it seems like Minnesota and New Hampshire could have a surprise in store, or at least a closer market than people might have expected for how blue those states have been trending.

And I’m really curious about what’s going on with Tina Smith and with Chris Pappas over in New Hampshire around any perceptions of just an anti-establishment, anti-incumbency mood going on right now. Those are both technically open seats, yet it seems like there are some real challenges facing both of those candidates. Those are things that I think would be worth checking back on on election night, in both cases of the rural districts that might flip and then those two statewide races. They just don’t quite fit the overall narrative of the midterms. If you look closer, there are actually some factors that have been going on here that could affect both of them. And that’s mainly just a very strong “throw the bums out” mentality.

Yeah, it seems like there’s many other places where the “throw the bums out” mentality appears to be robust across the board. It seems like other factors are maybe weighing in other parts of it. Latino vote really seems to have made a significant swing if the current polls hold. And that might go to explain why places like Texas look currently like places like Texas do, and less so of why in Minnesota and New Hampshire, right?

Yeah. It’s also important, I think, to keep in mind that you have the same fissures faced with Latino vote as pretty much every other demographic group, which is by age and by college. And then the more interesting dynamic going on is, which immigration diaspora do you come from, where you have the most conservative segment of Latino vote in the Cuban American community in Florida. And the most liberal on that spectrum would be the Dominican and Puerto Rican descended folks in a place like New York City. But then you’ve got all these other ones that have not had the same micro identity, like folks who come here from Colombia, Venezuela, who now are in the second or maybe third generation in the U.S. And what’s the divide there by age.

But I think that how precipitous that fall has been for Trump is probably one of the top stories of the midterm. And I just think that because of how visceral and in plain sight, all of the ICE deportations, and uses of excessive force have been, it’s been very baked into the whole election environment. Even if it’s not getting a lot of attention, with advertisements or anything like that, it still should be understood as one of the fundamental shaping forces of this whole cycle.

Fascinating. All right. Well, you are an exciting independent journalist who has a very good publication that has just recently had an exciting rebrand. So I would like to give you the floor to pitch folks on The Hut and where they can find it and what you got going on over there.

Sure. So you just search The Hut by Jake LaHutt Substack or go to straightfromthehut.substack.com. We have a new homepage and color scheme, and we’re not very demanding of your inbox or your wallet. This is a probably two to three to maybe four articles a month type deal. And it’s all unpaywall. I, more or less, follow a Wikipedia or a Guardian model of pay to support, but I don’t paywall any of my stuff.

The Hut

A newsletter focused on campaigns, the tech industry's role in politics, and power. Also a home for Jake Lahut's freelance feature reporting, scooplets, analysis, and other notebook items (no paywalls, but pay to support).

By Jake Lahut

You can follow me on the main social platforms of Blue Sky, Twitter and TikTok. Very interesting how Millennials and Gen Z get their news from that latter platform, where my handle is @please_bringbackvine.

That’s a very memorable handle. Thank you, Jake.

Thank you Walt.

Edited by Crystal Wang

Read more

Have a great weekend!

Cubs

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Michael McCann, Sportico

Chromebooks

For years, tech companies worked to get their products into school districts, and while a cohort of educators and parents bristled at the educational impact of making all cognition digital, the tech crowd mostly won the argument, with things like the PSAT now entirely online. Well, there’s been a bit of a recent retreat from the Chromebook-driven educational format, and if anything, the driver of that is the tech companies. Thanks to the memory crunch, it has become very difficult for school districts to obtain the Chromebooks they want at the prices they can manage; a high school in Illinois reported that a Chromebook that cost the school $353 each in 2023 cost $400, then $412, then $427 and today was requisitioned at a price of $508 each.

Victoria Feng, The Atlantic

Antonym of Progress

Congratulations to the current 119th Congress, which has enacted a grand total of 121 laws, the second-fewest of any Congress in four decades. Only the 118th Congress — that was the previous one — passed less legislation, just 106 laws by this point in the term. Only 109 of the bills passed under this Congress were in any way substantive, spending money and the like, with the rest being entirely ceremonial. It is not entirely clear if the lame-duck period is going to be at all productive to get legislation past the finish line, either; while 61 percent of public laws passed in the last Congress were pushed through in the lame duck, given the current projections for the forthcoming election, it’s not obvious that the current minority party would have much incentive to play ball.

Drew DeSilver, Pew Research Center

College Football

College Football Playoff executives are reportedly nearing a deal with ESPN to expand the playoff to 24 teams, doubling the current field of 12 teams and sextupling the number of contenders compared to the initial four-team format. The details are under consideration, but the most important thing and the lodestar of the entire conversation is obviously the education of these scholar-athletes and the critical role that higher education has in producing informed and educated citizens. I’m kidding, the whole point is the something like $325 million for the new games.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Phono V

The table is set for what may be a tense and hard-fought negotiation over the future of mechanical music royalties, as the Phonorecords V proceeding that sets the royalty rate for music over the 2028 to 2032 period goes underway. The previous negotiation, Phono IV, was brief, peaceful and voluntary, but the aftermath has been incredibly controversial; after the agreement, Spotify and Amazon quickly reclassified the Premium and Unlimited plans as “bundles,” which gave them a lower royalty rate for music, a move that the music industry contends cost them $500 million. Either way, everyone is entering this negotiation with knives out. The National Music Publishers Association and Nashville Songwriters Association International want the greater of 20 percent of revenue or 40 percent of total content cost, $2.40 per subscriber and $0.004 per play, which would be a significant increase from the 15.35 percent Phono IV rate.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Inca

A number of new dates for archeological sites in the Andes is opening up the window for Inca civilization. Previously, the temporal extent of the Inca Empire was considered to be relatively brief, existing for just 94 years from its founding until the Spanish conquest. The traditional chronology had the Inca conquering what is now southern Ecuador between 1463 and 1471, but the radiocarbon dating of seeds and charcoal found there dated the outpost to between1432 and 1451. More accurate dating has expanded the possible range of the Inca, as previously, the just under a hundred years of existence was narrower than the possible error range of radiocarbon dating.

Lizzie Wade, Science

Thermals

As any Animorphs reader knows, large birds are able to fly long times and distances by exploiting air currents, saving energy and gliding in lieu of flapping. A new study looked at the locomotive patterns of 50 bird and bat species to figure out how much time the animals spent flapping, finding that larger birds tended to spend much more time soaring than flapping, with the proportion of flapping flight decreasing by about two percent for every one percent increase in body mass. Seven vulture species that were studied flew over 4.3 million kilometers, while flapping for only 0.1 percent to seven percent of their flight time, with the trade-off being that the larger soaring birds were more restricted in when and where they could fly.

Swansea University

This week in the unlocked Sunday edition, I spoke to the comics creator Punko at New York Comic Con! She is the creator of the horror comic Stagtown and the ongoing (and personal favorite) fantasy webtoon Cinderella Boy. Stagtown is a psychological mystery horror comic that’s a perfect read for spooky season, I would describe it as Junji Ito-meets-X Files paranoia-infused webtoon. This week was especially exciting for Punko with the release of the first print volume of Stagtown: Volume One.

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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: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · 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 ·

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