Translation

Japan’s cultural industries make a lot of their money abroad, but slow or absent translations of that output continue to fuel a manga and anime piracy scene. It has gotten sufficiently bad to the point where the government is looking into ways to speed up translation efforts. Specifically, the Japanese government is weighing subsidies for 15 companies intended to expand the overseas market for Japanese entertainment, with eligible companies including publishers, streaming companies and game and IP companies like Bandai Namco. A report of what’s under consideration points to an 11.5 billion yen (US$71 million) subsidy intended to cover half the cost of overseas promotion, which includes translating works into foreign languages.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Northern Sea Route

In 2009, Germany’s Beluga Shipping was the first to complete a commercial voyage along the Northern Sea Route, which takes ships from the Pacific ports in East Asia to Europe by going up and over Russia rather than around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Suez Canal. The pro is that it’s much faster and can be done in 20 days rather than the 40 days it takes through the Suez or the 55 days around the Cape, but the con is that it’s frozen solid most of the year, and when it’s not, the route is still pretty risky. Still, by 2018 Maersk managed the first container ship transit, and as of 2025, transit cargo volumes reached 3.2 million metric tons across 23 container voyages, up from 15 voyages the prior year. Interest is up, but the Arctic Circle still is perilous; among vessels over 100GT, there were 253 machinery damage or failure incidents in Arctic Circle waters from 2016 to 2025, 67 wreckings or groundings, 54 fires or explosions and 29 collisions. Factor in other concerns — Russian sanctions, icebreaker availability, the fact that Frankenstein canonically lives up there — and it’s still far from a standard route.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Nanostacking

IBM revealed a new prototype chip that it claims will enable Moore’s Law to continue to stand, making faster and more efficient chips possible thanks to a promising new strategy of jamming even more transistors into that chip. Transistors are already so small that quantum mechanics has become an issue, given they’re down to a few dozen nanometers in size. However, IBM found its approach can do as much as 50 percent more work in the same amount of time thanks to a layering of the transistors in a vertical stack, with electrons moving through channels that are made of three nanosheets, each 15 atoms thick and spaced nine nanometers apart.

Sophia Chen, MIT Technology Review

Vesuvius

The Library of Herculaneum was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, an event that also destroyed the city of Pompeii. Scorched papyrus scrolls from the library that were too fragile to open physically are now being unwrapped digitally and revealing lost books. The Vesuvius Challenge has managed to digitally unwrap 1.5 meters of text written across 22 columns from a two-centimeter-wide scroll that discusses ethics and may have been written by the Stoic Chrysippus. While the eruption contributed somewhat to the knowledge of humans at the time — Pliny the Elder’s groundbreaking experiments in the field of emergency response during the eruption have led to tried-and-true wisdom that stands to this day such as “don’t take a boat to the site of a volcanic eruption and take a nap at your friend’s house” — thanks to these discoveries, it’s contributing even more now.

Hayley Bennett, New Scientist

Private Brands

Grocery store private brands — the ones that up until a few years ago were called “generics” — have been a solid source of growth for the industry, as stores increase their supply and quality of in-house brands and consumers looking to save money on food amid inflationary pressures are willing to make the switch. Overall, private brand dollar sales grew 2.8 percent over the 52 weeks ending March 22, outpacing the 2.6 percent dollar growth in name brands, with unit sales for private brands up 0.6 percent compared to the 0.2 percent growth in name brand sales.

Catherine Douglas Moran, Food Dive

Parking Lots

Traffic collision data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration undercounts people injured or killed in automobile collisions because the data only includes serious crashes that take place on public streets. This means that traffic fatalities in parking lots and driveways are not actually tallied, and are actually a bit of a black box in general, given that nobody is keeping track of them. According to a 2021 study from AAA, 20 percent of all collisions in the United States happen in parking lots, and a 2021 estimate from NHTSA put fatalities from “non-traffic crashes” that occurred on private property at about 12 percent of all official pedestrian deaths in 2021.

David Zipper, Bloomberg

Carbon Capture

Carbon capture has been a fixture of research and development in green tech for decades at this point, in no small part because the oil industry keeps pushing it, but while solar and battery tech has ramped up from theory to R&D to commercial to industrial scale, carbon capture is pretty much still stuck on theory. In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that we would have to bury 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2025 to avoid dangerous levels of warming, and U.N. analysis puts the figure at six billion tons every year by the middle of the century. This has not happened even a little bit: currently, all the carbon capture in the whole world is permanently burying less CO2 than one large power plant emits annually.

Kate Worth and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

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

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

Slate

The average new vehicle sold in the United States in May went for $49,220, with the typical small and midsized pickup going for $43,044, and the average new electric vehicle going for $54,532. Slate Auto, an American automobile manufacturer backed by Jeff Bezos, sees a niche that is not being served: people who don’t want to pay 50 grand for any of those things. The company announced it will launch its new electric truck at the price point of $24,950, fulfilling a promise to launch a vehicle squarely in the mid-$20,000 range. Be warned, the baseline Slate is going to be rather blank, with no touchscreen, speakers or automatic windows, and it will have no autonomous setting, though there will be plenty of à la carte customizations. It’s an interesting bet, one that is less on electric trucks in particular but rather that the American vehicle owner has a much lower appetite for added bells and whistles than the auto industry currently believes.

Rani Molla, The Verge

Kites

The red kite — Milvus milvus — is native to Western Europe, and has stable populations in Sweden, Germany, France and Southern Italy. However, in Spain, populations have plummeted since the 1970s, and are gone from some regions entirely. The nonprofit Acción por el Mundo Salvaje has embarked on a project to bolster the population by importing birds from England, where the birds are doing rather well, in a move that is actually only possible thanks to a conservation project in the other direction that started in the 1990s. Britain’s population of red kites was down to 160 breeding pairs in 1995, but thanks to a project that imported birds from Spain when the Spanish population was stable, rose to at least 4,600 breeding pairs as of 2023. The U.K. is returning the favor, and while the program to reintroduce kites into Extremadura poses challenges, drawing on the now-stable population of U.K. kites will hopefully help establish a foothold.

Greg Noone, bioGraphic

Turtles

A new study tracked sea turtles embarking on sea journeys of over 1,000 kilometers that take them from their nesting grounds in the remote Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean to their foraging grounds in the Seychelles and Saya de Malha Bank. It’s an impressive journey, one that takes 27.5 days to complete on average and goes from one generally remote outcrop of islands to another, which is an impressive feat of submersible navigation. What’s their secret? According to the study, the turtles are actually pretty much winging it, finding that they tended to just aim in a direction and swim for a while, veering off course constantly and occasionally reorienting to get back on track, yet another instance in which Finding Nemo was basically a documentary.

Phie Jacobs, Science

A5

In April, 76.4 percent of beef traded in wholesale markets in Japan was rated A5, the highest possible grade of Wagyu beef. That’s up from 17.5 percent of beef carcasses rated A5 seen 15 years ago, the result of a steady increase in quality and breeding, and producers chasing the high prices that A5 wagyu commands, which tends to be 10 percent to 20 percent higher than A4 wagyu. That said, a fascinating economic situation is unfolding, as there’s so much of a glut of A5 on the market now that the price premium of the increasingly uncommon A4 is — owing to supply and demand and consumer inflationary pressures — actually resulting in a shrinking price premium for A5 over A4. Basically, Japanese consumers are going to A4 because it’s cheaper and inflation has stung, but producers have put a lot of A5 out there, and they can only export so much of it; wagyu beef exports of 12,628 metric tons in 2025 was up 17 percent year over year, and triple the pre-pandemic level. As a result, the price gap between A4 and A5 is now down to just 6.5 percent, the lowest on record.

Koki Kubota, Nikkei Asia

Forward Of You

Another hockey romance television show has skyrocketed towards the top of the charts, with this new series — Off Campus on Prime Video, based on the book series of the same name — expanding on the steamy hockey romance trend that Heated Rivalry brought into the mainstream, using the frankly baffling romantic tactic of “adding women.” Hey, if that’s what gets you going, it’s a free country. That’s prompted a surge in sales for Elle Kennedy’s book series, upon which the tv series is based, with weekly sales of The Deal peaking at 50,575 print units in the week ending May 30, up 970 percent from the week ending May 9. With sales of that first novel prompting sales of the sequels as well, year-to-date print sales for Kennedy’s work is already up 269 percent compared to the full year of 2025.

Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly

Toys

The latest report from the Japanese Toy Association saw the domestic market for character merchandise and toys derived from entertainment growing 9.3 percent to 665 billion yen (US$4.1 billion) for the year ending March 2026. Categories with IP ties are now 57 percent of the domestic toy market, up 13 points over the past seven years, with card games and trading cards accounting for 29 percent of the market. One category to keep an eye on is plushies, which grew 38 percent year over year. This is a crucial benchmark, as the next edition’s April ’26 to March ’27 data will include systemic shocks like the new Haikyuu! movie and of course, Me Going To Japan Back In May And Kind Of Going A Little Overboard At Mandarake.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Antediluvian or Anti-diluvian, Makes No Difference

Counties that were in the top 10 percent of the U.S. when it came to the share of homes that are very vulnerable to flooding saw a bit of an exodus from mid-2024 to mid-2025, as the costs of insuring vulnerable properties and the risks of living in them appear to be having an effect on movement in the aggregate. Those high-risk counties lost a net 63,357 residents over the period, double the outflow (heh) of the previous 12-month period. On the other side of the ledger, the counties with low flood risk gained a net of 70,000 residents.

Leslie Kaufman, Bloomberg

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

ASML

ASML is the company that makes the machines that make semiconductors, and it has had a pretty stellar couple of years. Through the 1990s, chipmakers used visible light to carve transistors, and in the mid 1990s they switched to deep ultraviolet, which brought the wavelength of the light down from 400 nanometers to 193 nanometers. Nine years ago, ASML rolled out machines that used extreme-ultraviolet light radiation and shoot lasers at tens of thousands of times per second that can get transistor features down to a resolution of 13 nanometers. These machines cost over $100 million apiece, and semiconductor manufacturers snapped them up. Now ASML has got a new machine, one that has a resolution of eight nanometers, selling to chip fabs for $400 million each. The Dutch company is responsible for 90 percent of all chip lithography tools worldwide.

Clive Thompson, MIT Technology Review

Host With The Most

Team USA has surpassed expectations at the World Cup, pulling off two wins with a +5 goal differential to start the tournament. That is the best two-game start for the U.S. at the event since 1930, when the team was up +6, a bygone era where presumably the “hydration breaks” involved restorative, invigorating, nutritious cigarettes. Based on their pregame Elo ratings, the U.S. is beating expectations by 2.42 goals per game, the eighth-best showing in the group stage in the history of the World Cup.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Maya

Researchers studying remains at multiple Maya burial sites in Belize dating to the Classic period (250 to 900 AD) found genomic data related to 107 distinct individuals from 341 samples. What’s most interesting is that for 24 of those individuals, skeletal elements were found at two places: in the Plaza Tomb, below a house at a site known as Muklebal Tzul, and in Bats’ub cave, 26.5 kilometers away. To be specific, that cave contained 226 teeth from at least 24 different people arranged near the body of an adult woman; genomic data from the skeleton indicated she was the ancestor of some of the people interred in the elite tombs. The study was shared on the repository bioRxiv, but you can bet that I forwarded this one to my dear colleagues and research collaborators at the Proceedings of the Society for Tooth Fairy Research.

Chris Simms, New Scientist

Frogs

The FrogWatch USA program is overseen by the Akron Zoo, and sees volunteers around the United States surveying frogs and toads to gather information that helps researchers determine the range and population of amphibian species. One place that this research happens is Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which is a site of the census — 70 acres of biodiversity in the middle of the Boston metro area, and the site of multiple such citizen science projects as a result.

Cara Giaimo, bioGraphic

P.O.’d

As of the most recent data available from 2018, there are 21 million P.O. boxes in the United States. In areas where mailbox home delivery is not viable — rural areas that might be relatively off-grid and are expensive to service for the USPS — the local post office generally arranges for citizens to get free P.O. boxes at the nearest post office. Of those 21 million P.O. boxes, about 1.3 million of them are free, and about 60 percent of those free boxes are in the West. While those free boxes cost the post office $39 million per year, the logistical math ought to work out given the negated cost of delivery; that said, for a number of communities, the post office not only does not offer home delivery within city limits, but also charges people to get a box, which has infuriated residents.

Susan Shain, High Country News

Primates

In November 2025, the CDC decided to phase out monkey research, and the scientists who were working with the animals at the time — which were mostly used in HIV-prevention studies — hoped they would either be transferred to other biomedical programs or retired to one of the seven National Primate Research Centers. Instead, the CDC’s leadership plowed ahead with a plan to send 162 rhesus and pigtail macaques en masse to a sanctuary in Texas that’s home to 250 primates of many species, which caused concern because the rushed timeline would run counter to the ordinary policy of slowly integrating new monkeys into large social groups to minimize harms. The CDC has backtracked somewhat and put out a contract opportunity regarding the monkeys’ eventual destination. The issue, though, is that the contract opportunity is specifically written so that only its preferred destination would actually qualify.

David Grimm, Science

Hydration Breaks

The decision to add “water breaks” to the World Cup outside of the ordinary halftime — even for teams competing in domed, air-conditioned stadiums — had more than a whiff of greed about it, and reports indicate that the added commercial breaks are indeed making broadcaster Fox a fortune. According to media buyers familiar with the amout that hydration break ads are selling for — between $200,000 and $750,000 depending on the matchup and the stakes of the game — the six minutes of hydration breaks per game are adding up to $2.5 million and $9 million per game. This means that the water breaks are reaping the broadcaster at least $250 million, and possibly $500 million to $600 million, on top of the ordinary commercial breaks.

Steven Zeitchik and Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

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

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

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

Gucci “Gucci” Louie “Louie” Fendi “Fendi” Prada

A clever new study managed to analyze data from an e-commerce platform that hawks dupes, or counterfeit goods designed to imitate the aesthetics of designer brands, and found that based on the zip codes of the fakes, there are some interesting patterns about who buys counterfeits. Namely, it’s a U-shaped distribution, where the highest-income and lowest-income places were vastly higher consumers of fake designer gear than middle-income areas. Shoes and bags accounted for 85 percent of orders, with the average counterfeit transaction-to-official-price ratio coming in at 35 percent of mass-market shoes (think: Nikes), 10.7 percent for luxury shoes, 8.4 percent for accessible luxury bags (like Coach), and 0.55 percent for ultra-luxury bags (like Chanel and Hermes). Indeed, it seems like the prices of counterfeits are only moderately different from tier to tier, with a fake ultra-luxury bag averaging $54 compared to the $32 for accessible luxury.

Rebecca Seel, Informs and Nan Chen and Mengqi Xiang, Marketing Science

Taking A Gamble

Procter & Gamble controls roughly 60 percent of the U.S. laundry detergent market, thanks mostly to the 38.3 percent market share held by flagship detergent Tide. That sector is responsible for lots of P&G’s revenue — fabric and home care was 36 percent of their business — which is why it’s such a big deal when they come out with a new laundry detergent product designed by its in-house R&D that could upset the whole business: Tide evo, a detergent tile that is the result of a decade of research and development. P&G’s three-inch squares made up of detergent fibers cost almost twice as much as a tub of the company’s 2012 hit Tide pods, and it solves what chemists saw as the key limitation of Tide pods: that it wasn’t feasible to add more chambers to the pods if they wanted to add more features.

Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal

Drawer

A new survey of over 4,000 Americans found that the most common thing a person does with a device they are finished using is storing it, with 39 percent of respondents just holding on to it in a box or a drawer. Only 11 percent recycled it, 11 percent traded it in and nine percent resold it. People who were worried that recycling a device would compromise their data — a valid concern — were 14 percent more likely to store it instead. I am in this crowd: You can take my old laptops from my cold, dead hands, I will be buried with my 2009 Sony Vaio like the heathen kings of old, my sarcophagus protected by a phalanx of monitors that only have a VGA 15-pin connector port to beguile and confuse intruders, my tomb encased in a dense mesh of 7.4mm 5.0mm round tip laptop charging cords that inexplicably don’t fit into any of the laptops I have saved, my crypt protected from looters by a pile of lithium ion batteries that have swollen concerningly and could go off at any moment. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Eric Williams, Payam Saeedi and Stacey Watson, The Conversation

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

Olivia

Olivia Rodrigo’s third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, entered the charts at No. 1, and is good for one of the longest titles ever for a No. 1 album. That said, there have been two No. 1 albums in the history of the Billboard 200 that have managed the feat coming in at even longer. It took decades of music to work our way up to these incomprehensibly long titles; while Frank Sinatra was the first to notch a seven word title at No. 1 in March 1956 with Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, it wasn’t until 1980 when Donna Summer’s On the Radio: Greatest Hits: Volumes I & II that got us to nine words, though I think we can all agree that the ampersand is doing some pretty heavy lifting for a “word.” The first 11-worder came in 2002 with P. Diddy & Bad Boy Records Present … We Invented the Remix, with again that load-bearing ampersand. But the winner is a clean victory: 16 words for the 2016 record from The 1975 called I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.

Paul Grein, Billboard

Blackberry

There has been a surfeit of blackberry-infused whiskey on the market, which is interesting given that blackberry is a relatively uncommon fruit and Americans consume on average just 0.09 pounds of them per year, good for the fifth-most popular berry. Still, it’s been making some waves in spirits, with the Crown Royal Blackberry launching in 2024 to pretty massive success that spawned a host of imitators, including Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Blackberry (cited specifically in Brown-Forman’s earnings report as a driver of their first sales increase in two years) and now, Evan Williams Blackberry.

Aaron Goldfarb, Vinepair

Vehicles

Vehicles have mutated over the past decades, with sales of SUVs and pickup trucks causing the hood of an average passenger vehicle to now be three feet high. This has been catastrophic for pedestrians who are hit by these cars, as collisions that may have been survivable are now becoming deadly due to the height of the cars and their ability to knock people down. The average U.S. man would be knocked down by 29 percent of vehicles on the road in 2002, but would be knocked down by 39 percent of vehicles today. Add in the fact that the bulkier frames have created blind spots that simply didn’t exist a decade ago, and hundreds of pedestrians a year would not have died in collisions over the past 25 years if vehicles remained about the same size, according to estimates.

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros, The New York Times

California

A new study out of the University of California, Santa Barbara puts a number on the amount of coastal dunes that California has lost since 1850 to land use changes and development, finding that the state has lost about 60 percent of the dune systems that existed when it entered the union. At that time, California had 739 square kilometers of coastal dunes, but 165 years later, that’s down to 300 square kilometers. Only 18 square kilometers of that was lost through natural processes.

Sonia Fernandez, University of California - Santa Barbara

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

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

Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed the long weekend.

Toy Story

Toy Story 5 made $160 million in North America, good for the second-largest opening weekend in history behind Incredibles 2. With another $152 million abroad, the global haul of $312 million is likely just the start of a solid run for the movie, given the relative lack of movies competing for families right at the start of summer. With how this kind of animation legs out, it would be a surprise if the new release doesn’t beat out Toy Story 4’s $1.07 billion.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Mogami

Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force has been sailing the Mogami-class frigate since 2022, and newly-relaxed laws regarding arms exports has many allied countries eyeing the Mistubishi Heavy Industries vessel with some envy. Frigates are the bread-and-butter of naval defense strategies these days, getting them right isn’t always easy; the American next-generation frigate program has been troubled, with the first FF(X) frigate costing the Navy $1.4 billion. By comparison, the Mogami-class costs $710 million, and while that’s more expensive than Britain’s Inspiration-class frigate (which sells for $330 million), the Mogami-class can be operated by a crew of just 90 thanks to ample automation, down from the typical 100 to 140 personnel needed to operate the Mogami-class’ peers. Australia’s buying three of them and then cut a deal to build eight domestically. New Zealand and Indonesia are also in the market, and Japan’s offered Indonesia and the Philippines older vessels.

Jason Douglas and Junko Fukutome, The Wall Street Journal

Deep Synoptic Array

Construction will soon begin on the Deep Synoptic Array, a telescope spread over 120 square miles of desert in Nevada, made up of 1,650 20-foot-diameter dish-shaped antennas. It’s got a unique funding structure — Caltech is leading the project with funding from Schmidt Sciences, a new philanthropic venture pushing money into astrophysics — and it’s going to collect an enormous volume of data that will be combined and processed in real time. This will allow the DSA to survey about 100 times faster than other radio observatories. In a somewhat fascinating illustration of the nature of the work, the project will rely on both Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs to handle the data processing, as well as thousands of modified cake pans purchased from bakeware manufacturer Fat Daddio to produce the feeds that convert electromagnetic waves into signals.

Joseph Howlett, Scientific American

Vending

The number of operating vending machines in Japan fell about 20 percent from 2013 to 2025, dropping to about 1.95 million units. The largest operator of the machines — which are seemingly everywhere in the country, and contain a much wider arrangement of products than vending machines in other countries — is Coca-Cola, followed by Suntory Beverage, which has 340,000 vending machines. Because products sold in vending machines tend to be a little more expensive than what you’d buy at a more typical retailer, inflation can be a real strain on the business, and annual sales volume per machine is down to 207 cases, off 60 percent from the peak in 1996. Suntory is eyeing new ways to use all that hardware in the field, and has settled on targeting anime and pop fans with on-demand printing of trading cards and similar blind-box products.

Tsugumi Kim, Nikkei Asia

GoPro

The California-based company GoPro has shed a large chunk of market share to rivals DJI and Insta360, Chinese companies that entered the action camera market and have since devoured it. GoPro essentially invented the market niche in 2002, and by 2022, it still held a 75 percent market share. Now, the company is disclosing concerns about its ability to continue operating, as its market share has fallen calamitously over the past three years, dropping to 18 percent, with DJI and Insta360 now combining for about 80 percent of the business on the backs of superior editing features and newer, fresher models. Naturally, GoPro is looking into that well-worn pivot that so many American consumer technology companies pursue once competition from abroad has eaten their lunch: sell it to the Pentagon, which can’t buy Chinese tech.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Gim

The Korean company that owns Bibigo is breaking ground in August on a new land-based plant in Cheonan for the large-scale cultivation of gim, which is a roasted seaweed that is important to Korean cuisine. As Korean cuisine grows in popularity abroad, it has put pressure on gim supplies due to higher demand and, thanks to rising sea temperatures, less consistent supply. Land-based seaweed farms will also allow gim to be harvested year-round rather than just in winter. It’s hard to overstate how quickly Korean cuisine has become popular; Bibigo recorded 1,100 percent growth in U.S. retail sales from 2020 to 2024. And listen, I know how difficult an engineering problem it can be to successfully cultivate and breed a massive amount of algae in a sun-drenched pool in a bustling, historic urban center; needless to say, our guys in Washington have experience in the matter and stand ready to advise on this challenge.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Admiralty Islands

In early May, satellites detected an underwater volcanic eruption in the Bismark Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific. Pumice, a stone that results from volcanic eruptions, can form rafts that persist for months or even years before eventually sinking. This part of the ocean isn’t well mapped, so we don’t know precisely where the volcano is, but the eruptions appear to be ongoing. And now, communities in the Admiralty Islands are getting inundated by rafts of pumice stone that has drifted from the eruption site and clogged up several coastlines, with layers of pumice reportedly several meters thick blanketing the shore on Lou Island and Baluan Island. Fragments have been found on the coast of Manus Island as well, which is 125 kilometers northwest of the volcano.

Lindsey Doermann, NASA

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

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

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson, who’s book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine is out in paperback this week. We had her on a little over a year ago and it’s great to have her back. She’s also a phenomenal movie critic over at the New York Times.

We talked about the current state of the movies, Jackass, Disclosure Day, and why Didion is more relevant than ever. Just a note, we do talk quite a bit about Disclosure Day and while we don’t “spoil” anything per se, once we get into that bit you may want to skip ahead if you’ve yet to see it. You can find her at Alissawilkinson.com and the New York Times, and you can find her excellent book at your local bookshops.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Thank you so much for coming back on. It’s great to have you back.

It’s good to be back. Thank you.

You are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, …

Read more

Hull

Demand for specialized teams of divers to remove biofouling from the hulls of shipping vessels has surged on the news that the United States and Iran may have come to terms on the conflict that has snarled trade through the Strait of Hormuz. The fees commanded by crews who go underwater to scrape barnacles from ships have jumped 60 percent, from $5,000 to $8,000 per ship in the Persian Gulf. Currently, around 600 vessels remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, going on 16 weeks into the conflict as ports tend to ban barnacle-encrusted vessels from mooring because the dense barnacle structures can harbor invasive species.

Stella Mackler, Bloomberg

Emmys

This year at the Primetime Emmy Awards, there have been 1,573 submissions across 17 performer categories, a decline from the 1,706 submissions sent in in 2025. The Boys and Saturday Night Live submitted the most contenders for acting prizes, with each submitting 28 contenders, followed by 24 submissions from The Pitt. While studios tend to pick who they’ll submit for a push at the award shows, technically there’s nothing stopping actors or their representatives from self-submitting; for instance, nine of 24 acting contenders for The Pitt were self-submitting. Often that works: when Game of Thrones ended in 2019, the show bagged 32 nominations, and three of those — Alfie Allen, Gwendoline Christie and Carice van Houten — were self-submitted outside the studio’s awards strategy.

Clayton Davis, Variety

Champs

This past weekend saw the conclusion to both the NBA and NHL seasons in massive, long-awaited victories for long-suffering franchises, and audiences tuned in. On Sunday, the 2026 Stanley Cup Final’s sixth and last game in which the Carolina Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights drew 5.9 million viewers on average, the largest audience since 2019, peaking at 7.2 million viewers in the final minutes. The series averaged 5.2 million viewers, which was also the best viewership since 2019. Saturday, though, blew that out of the water, as the decisive fifth game of the NBA Finals averaged 24.5 million viewers and peaked at 33 million viewers. The series averaged 20.6 million viewers, the best since 1998, when NASCAR impresario and baseball legend Michael Jordan was apparently playing.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter and Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Paywall

A new analysis out of Notre Dame looked into the behavior of 209.2 million page views of a major United States newspaper’s website, and found that while 59.2 percent of readers who hit a paywall left the site immediately, the practice of paywalling nevertheless had a significant effect on revenue. Following the paywall, 18 percent shifted to free content on the site, while one in 10 managed to bypass the paywall, presumably through either the classic Jedi mind trick (clearing cookies) or the ol’ lockpicking trick (refreshing and pressing ESC until you clip through the wall). Still, those two out of every 1,000 viewers who bypassed the paywall the right way — a credit card — add up, and paywalls act as a significant nudge, with readers who encounter a paywall being 84 times as likely to subscribe as those who do not. Anyway,

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Shannon Roddel, University of Notre Dame

Football Fever

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has, within just four days, become as popular in the United States as the 2022 FIFA World Cup was on its final day, according to a new survey that tracked how much people reported having conversations about the cup in either year. In 2022, a week prior to the World Cup starting, just 7.2 percent of Americans had talked about it, 9.4 percent had on the day it started and by the very last day of the 2022 World Cup, 26.4 percent of Americans had talked soccer. This year, as the U.S. hosts, interest is far higher: A week before the tournament, 21.7 percent were into it, by kickoff day 24.8 percent had talked about it and just five days in, 27.1 percent have discussed it.

Rishad Dsouza, YouGov

Geoengineering

While much of the conversation about atmospheric solar geoengineering has been entirely theoretical — dispersing reflective aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight rather than absorb its heat makes sense on paper — the actual practicalities of that kind of venture are still science fiction, and whether it’s the utopian or dystopian kind of science fiction is furthermore in question. A lab at the University of Chicago is attempting to hammer down some of those engineering variables into constants. However, they’re running into trouble designing an aircraft that could actually get the material to required altitudes, in the right places, to meaningfully reduce warming. One conceptual aircraft design considered by the lab would require a fleet of 270 to disperse a million metric tons of material annually, which would be good enough to reduce global surface temperatures by 0.26 degrees Celsius.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review

Swift

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched by NASA in 2004 to a 600-kilometer orbit. Since then, it has fallen to 370 kilometers, and while NASA had originally anticipated that the telescope could function well into the 2030s, as it stands — thanks to a peak in the Sun’s activity that pushed it downward by creating extra drag — it could fall into the atmosphere by the end of the year. That’s a big loss, as Swift has already notched its fair share of astronomy wins, with the observatory responsible for discovering the most powerful gamma ray burst ever recorded, the BOAT, in 2022. This has prompted NASA to roll the bones on a promising mission, hiring Katalyst Space Technologies in 2024 for $30 million to build a LINK rescue craft that will, within a few weeks, launch, attempt to catch up to Swift, grab it and then boost it into a higher orbit, adding years of life to the telescope.

Daniel Clery, Science

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

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

Battery

In 2025, battery energy storage stations cost $78 per megawatt-hour generated, which is down 27 percent year over year. That is also down significantly from $185 per megawatt-hour generated in 2020, as the price of the storage batteries themselves has dropped to $70 per kilowatt-hour thanks to a surge in production by manufacturers based in China. That $78 per megawatt-hour generated is particularly significant: It means that the levelized cost of energy for battery tech is now less than OG gas-fired power plants, which came in at $102 per megawatt-hour, and is on the cusp of edging out coal’s $77 per megawatt-hour.

Mao Kawano and Koki Izumi, Nikkei Asia

Bonvoy

A group of 51 hotel owners representing about 1,000 Marriott-branded hotels are now pressing the brand to share more of the revenue reaped from the Bonvoy loyalty program with the franchisees. The program added 43 million members last year and ended the first three months of the year with 283 million members, and when those members cash in on their loyalty points, the hotels get a reimbursement from the brand that, according to the franchisees, lowballs them. Marriott makes a whole lot of money from credit cards that pay into the program, fees totaling $716 million in 2025, up from $410 million in 2019, and fee revenue is expected to increase by 35 percent to nearly $1 billion this year.

Kate King, The Wall Street Journal

Reptiles

Reptilian pets are increasing in popularity, with the number of households in the United States possessing a pet snake increasing from 810,000 in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2024. This has spurred the industry that supplies care and feeding for those snakes, and has spawned a unique form of factory farming that breeds hundreds of millions of mice and rats annually to feed them. The thing is, unlike animals raised for human food, mice and rats aren’t covered under the Animal Welfare Act, so the operations that produce them have no animal welfare oversight.

Kenny Torrella, Vox

Butterflies

A new study published in Nature Communications looks at butterflies of the Heliconius tribe; they are interesting because of their uniquely long lifespans compared to other butterflies, which tend to live for only a few weeks. Some species of Heliconius butterflies tend to live three times longer than even close relatives; for instance, Dione juno butterflies live only 14 days, but the Heliconius hewitsoni has a maximum lifespan of 348 days, nearly a year. The study suggests that the cause of that abnormally long life is that at the one species in the tribe does not show any physiological decline as it ages and delays the aging process.

Joanne Fryer, University of Bristol

FroYo

Somehow, frozen yogurt has returned: In the United States, servings of frozen yogurt rose 26 percent year over year to 87 million in the year ending March, according to Circana, driven in large part by younger consumers who presumably missed the initial two waves of frozen yogurt shops. The first was in the late 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with a number of fitness fads and a low-cal era. The second was in the 2000s when the likes of Pinkberry emerged, pushing build-your-own froyo cups, and now it appears we are once again in a froyo phase. I’m setting my calendar for the late 2030s as an ideal time to invest in a dairy.

Rainier Harris and Daniela Sirtori, Bloomberg

Justice

A new study published in Judicature finds that in general, serving on a jury makes people tend to have a better attitude towards the court system, which incidentally comes at a time when a smaller fraction of trials are actually going to jury. Survey respondents who had reported for jury service in the past five years viewed courts as more legitimate and trusted courts more. Meanwhile, the percentage of adults who said they reported for jury service in the previous five years fell from an average of nine percent before 2020 to just four percent in 2025.

Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

Tortoises

Florida has been developing many regions that were previously the habitat for the gopher tortoise, a native species that has been considered for placement on the Endangered Species List given the habitat loss due to new construction. There has been a relocation program in place since 2009 that requires developers to hire authorized individuals to relocate gopher tortoises on land slated for development. From 2009 to 2023, over 97,000 tortoises have been moved around the state, enough to make the gopher tortoise the most-relocated animal in the Southeast and leading some scientists to conclude that about a third of the entire gopher tortoise population of the state of Florida has been relocated at some point in the past 15 years.

Stephanie Castellano, bioGraphic

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

Minesweeper

While the United States and Iran are reportedly approaching a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it will realistically be some time before the number of ships that pass through the Strait daily — currently around 12 to 15 vessels per day — recovers back to the 120 to 140 vessels from before the war began. One reason is mines, which naval forces have placed at some locations in the Strait. An operation by conventional minesweepers and underwater drones to clear the Strait could take 40 to 50 days before the insurance, shipping and oil companies are satisfied that it’s sufficiently safe to sail. Given that a supertanker and its cargo of crude oil are worth about $300 million, war risk underwriters can understandably get skittish even at a whiff of mines.

Jonathan Saul, Reuters

Pufferfish

There are about 200 species of pufferfish that live in the warm waters of the world, and currently three can be found in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, among them the silver-cheeked pufferfish. As water temperatures warm, the population of silver-cheeked Lagocephalus sceleratus has exploded in the waters off of Greece, and they are wreaking havoc on the fishing industry. Native to the Indian and Pacific oceans and the Red Sea, the fish made its way to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, and has been causing damage to nets and eating the catch of fishermen off Greece’s coast. Ordinarily, invasive species can go directly onto menus. However, pufferfish have a deadly toxin that makes them inedible, which removes that option of population control. Furthermore technically a pufferfish is considered class one waste, the same tier as industrial waste, making them annoying to dispose of on top of everything else. Instead, the fishing industry is lobbying the government to pay the agencies to catch and kill the species.

Will Vassilopoulos and Angelos Tzortzinis, Agence France-Presse

Microbiomes

Researchers analyzed the oral and gut microbiomes of 430 people living in 230 households, identifying microbial strains and figuring out what was common across people. Overall, cohabitating individuals shared 19 percent of their gut microbiome and 26 percent of their oral microbiome strains. That’s significantly higher than the commonality of microbiomes overall; among individuals in different households, there was just six percent shared gut microbiome and zero percent shared oral microbiome. The oral microbiome is probably from kissing: romantic partners shared 44 percent of their oral microbiome.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Power

A new poll found that billionaires, CEOs, men and white Americans are seen as having the most power in the United States, with 75 percent of respondents saying that billionaires have a lot of political power, compared to just eight percent who said the same thing about workers. In general, 64 percent said workers should have more power, 54 percent said small-business owners should, 51 percent said women should have more power and 45 percent said the same about both scientists and public-school teachers. Overall, 62 percent of respondents said that billionaires should have less political power.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Cruises

China’s government wants to improve the cruise industry serving the country, seeing it as a pathway towards tourism growth. Globally, there were 37.2 million cruise passengers last year, of whom just 1.14 million hailed from China, good for about 800 passengers per million people. Globally, the average is around 4,600 cruise passengers per million people, and in the United States, it’s about 60,000 passengers per million. China could be a beneficiary of the cruise book; While more than 90 percent of cruise ships in operation are built in Europe, China handles 60 percent of global orders for merchant ships in general. Learn how to install a Lido Deck on one of those suckers and who knows what might happen.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

COBOL Cowboys

The last of the original generation of programmers and architects of IBM’s Common Business-Oriented Language are retiring, and that’s an issue for many state and local agencies that rely on mainframes built from that codebase for taxes, licensing, justice and benefits. The systems are stable and consistent and work well, so they’ve often never been updated, but the shrinking pool of specialists who can keep them running is a point of concern. According to IBM, 89 percent of state governments use mainframes, and thousands of agencies across states and localities rely on the systems.

Jennifer Nelson, Route Fifty

Fragmentation

The upper stage of a Zhuque-2E commercial rocket made by Chinese company LandSpace broke up in heavy traffic orbit, and anywhere from 100 to 150 pieces of debris are now in orbit between 208 miles and 263 miles up, at an inclination of 54.5 degrees to the equator. The debris might be a threat to Starlink satellites, which tend to be at that lower altitude. The good news is that most of the broken pieces will probably fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere within a few months.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

Welcome back!

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day made $44 million at the domestic box office and another $48.9 million abroad for a global opening of $92.9 million, beating studio expectations and giving hope for a solid Spielberg-style hold for next week’s numbers. Director-driven high concepts have been a hit at the movies while franchise fare has faltered — Obsession and Backrooms have held strong, while Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu have missed the mark — and it’s all come together in a domestic box office that is not only running 13 percent ahead of last year, but is also pacing just 3.4 percent behind the high-water mark year of 2019.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Knicks

The City of New York exorcised a half-century of ghosts with the first Knicks NBA Championship win in 53 years, a moment that sent the city into the streets and prompted local pillars of the numbers-newsletter community to get “why am I the admin of a groupchat called RIP DOWN THE CONGESTION PRICING CAMERAS AND MOVE THEM EVEN FURTHER UPTOWN” levels of drunk. The Knicks were a team uniquely constructed for this era of basketball and managed to deliver when it counted, finishing the playoffs with the single highest point per game differential compared to the regular season, a best-ever +14.9 points per game difference.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Hantavirus

Researchers studying the hantavirus outbreak that hit the cruise ship MV Hondius have identified a new lead in determining the origin of the Andes virus that hit the ship and prompted a global scare. While early reports pegged the likeliest vector on an excursion bird-watching trip to a landfill, genomic evidence about the virus strain, along with a reconstruction of the four-month road trip that preceded their cruise, indicate that the landfill may not be the source. Already it was a tough timeline; the incubation period of the virus is seven to 39 days, and patient zero developed a fever just five days after the excursion. The new theory is that the couple was exposed to the virus when they passed through Neuquén in their motor home 60 days before the cruise, potentially by picking up a stowaway rodent in the vehicle at that time.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

Japan

The total number of tourists to Japan is holding steady despite a major drop in visitors from China. In April, Japan welcomed 3.6 million visitors, down 5.5 percent year over year, but with new records for the number of visitors from South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and also France. That month saw a 56.8 percent year over year decline in visitors from China, which follows a diplomatic dust up between the two countries from six months ago related to Taiwan. Spending from Chinese visitors was down 50.4 percent; China accounted for 24 percent of total foreign visitor spending in 2025, but this year it’s down to 11.6 percent. This has led businesses that has previously catered to Chinese visitors to pivot.

Mayuko Kurihara, Nikkei Asia

Nets

A new analysis of insecticide-treated nets looked at 25 experimental studies assessing malaria incidence or malaria-related deaths and found that the nets are still very successful in combatting malaria. In Asia, ITNs were linked to a 68 percent decrease in malaria cases and an 18 percent decrease in related deaths, while in Africa, they cut cases by 29 percent to 40 percent. The somewhat wide variation in effectiveness indicates that while the nets may be a generally successfully and widely-applied solution, there could also be more complex factors related to mosquito diversity, insecticide resistance and overall compliance depending on the locatio of the studies.

Simon Wesson and Natasha Chen, Taylor & Francis Group

Potatoes

Archaeologist working at an Inca site found two rare 500-year-old freeze dried potatoes on the arid coast of southern Peru. They’re the only such potatoes found in more than a century. Potatoes have been grown in the Andes for thousands of years, and ancient Andeans developed a way to preserve potatoes where they exposed the root vegetables to mountain winter night frosts and then thawed them in the sun, repeating until they were chuño, a convenient freeze-dried source of calories that can last for years.

Sandee Oster, Phys.org

SPR

The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we’ll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 700 million barrels in 2009. Any deal to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would still need months to reverberate through the global energy economy, so that’s a substantial drawdown in reserves. Commercial stocks of oil are also being pushed to their limit; tanks need to have 10 percent to 15 percent capacity in storage to keep operations normal, and one storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma has drawn inventories down to 21 million barrels, a hair above its 20 million barrel limit.

Collin Eaton, Benoit Morenne, and Michael R. Gordon, The Wall Street Journal

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

Have a great weekend!

Napster

In what must come as a shock to absolutely nobody, the oft-traded corporate corpse of music file-sharing service Napster has once again found its way into the legal system, with U.S. authorities accusing a North Carolina man of fraudulently obtaining an ownership stake in Napster by promising to invest $3.6 billion that he absolutely did not have. The indictment, unsealed yesterday, claims that over the course of 2024, the man obtained 239 million shares of Infinite Reality (a quarter of the shares) by pretending he had access to $55 billion in cash, of which $3 billion would be invested in the company. After purchasing the streamer for $207 million in March 2025, Infinite Reality changed its name to Napster. In 1999, Napster launched as a file sharing service that was legally speaking nuked from orbit by record companies; it was eventually sold to Rhapsody in 2011, then MelodyVR in 2020, then Hivemind Capital Partners and a crypto company called Algorand in 2022, then of course the 2025 acquisition by Infinite Reality, with the acquisition of Napster repeatedly serving as a canary-in-the-coal-mine for whenever a market niche has obviously passed its top.

Rachel Scharf, Billboard

Nurdles

In 2025, the MSC Elsa 3 sank 15 miles off the coast of southern India, and while the 13 overboarded containers of hazardous materials were a problem, it’s the 70,000 bags of nurdles on deck that were one of the most diabolical issues. Nurdles are the raw materials used in plastic manufacturing, bean-sized blobs that are melted in the course of making larger plastic items, and only 7,920 of the 71,540 bags on MSC Elsa were recovered. The remaining 1.6 million kilograms of tiny nurdles subsequently washed ashore, resulting in a beach where researchers are still finding 1,500 to 3,500 pellets per square meter of beach.

Kamal Thiagarajan, bioGraphic

Dead Pool

The Glen Canyon Dam is in trouble, as the Colorado River reservoir at Lake Powell has been taxed by decades of drought, and this summer will be a trying one for the dam. At full pool, Lake Powell’s surface reaches 3,700 feet of elevation, a level not reached since 1998. At 3,590 feet, it’s considered at Fish Pool, the minimum level Powell needs to keep smallmouth bass from getting downstream, which is a problem for native fish down there. We are well past that minimum: Currently, Powell is at 3,528 feet. At 3,370 feet, Powell is at Dead Pool, below which the river outlets literally cannot be used and no water can pass through Glen Canyon. At 3,500 feet, the Bureau of Reclamation declares de facto Dead Pool, where the agency will begin to halt releases, expecting downstream impacts and instability to both power and water supply.

Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

Cable

According to a new MoffettNathanson analysis, the number of subscriptions to bundled television came in at 40.9 million subs, down 9.7 percent compared to 45.3 million subs in the same period last year, and down 20.3 percent from Q1 of 2024. Since March 2020, major providers have shed 48.7 percent of their video customers, losing 38.8 million households, and when you go back a decade, that’s a loss of 57.1 million bundled subscriptions since Q1 of 2016. When counting in gains made by vMVPDs (like YouTubeTV, Sling TV, Hulu and Fubo), the loss is a little less grisly, as 62.2 million homes now subscribe to some kind of video service. Still, that’s a loss of 27.5 million homes cutting all ties with pay TV since 2020.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Climate

The latest Indicators of Global Climate Change report has been published in Earth System Science Data, the efforts of a team of over 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries. It found that human activities pushed global warming to 1.37 C in 2025, and that Earth will surpass 1.5C in about four years. Global greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high as of 2024, reaching 56.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalents.

University of Leeds

Scale

While the United States and France are the leaders in the global nuclear power industry, with the most and second-most in the world, China is getting serious about nuclear power and has been able to scale its fleet, and fast. In 2024, the average time it took to build a new reactor in China was five to seven years, compared to a global average of nine years and a recent U.S. average of 15 years. The reason is that in much of the world, every nuclear reactor has been a special unique snowflake, custom from beginning to end, while China set about standardizing the process and setting up a uniform project management system, even going so far as to build them in batches of six or more at a time.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Deep Space Network

The Artemis I mission four years ago caused issues for NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is a global array of antennas that communicate with far-flung spacecraft and which was diverted away from those science missions and towards the uncrewed moon mission. The situation articulated just how in-demand the DSN is, with currently about 40 missions relying on the antennas in California, Spain, and Australia. Every time one of NASA’s missions outlives its original intended mission, it adds a burden to the DSN, and over the next 10 years, another 40 missions are projected to need the DSN. The system needs help: Last year, one of the three antennas in California was damaged while tracking the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter. It’s been inoperable ever since and will cost $4.1 million to $4.6 million to repair.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

A little FiveThirtyEight reunion in the Sunday edition this week as I spoke to Neil Paine about the current moment sports. We covered the NBA finals — exciting stuff for your local Queens resider — The Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in one go. You can find him at Neil’s Substack for daily updates on all things sports data, his Sherwood newsletter Scoreboard diving into prediction markets, and you can find him in your ear with his NASCAR podcast, Podracing.

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Correction: An earlier version of this piece listed an incorrect volume of fuel oil.

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

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

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

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

Take A W

The United States and its allies have been largely weaned off Chinese exports of the metal tungsten, which is essential for making ultrahard tools as well as used in semiconductors, electronics and weapons. China has an 80 percent market share for the metal, and has begun to cut off countries aligned with the United States; Japan, for instance, has not imported any Chinese tungsten since February. And while the United States’ last domestic tungsten mining operation ended in 2015, tungsten is still being extracted — not from mines underground but from old garages and scrapyards, with U.S. tungsten scrap now selling for a premium. Tungsten scrap that was going for $40 per pound a year ago hit $167.50 per pound in May thanks to surging demand from allies, with Japan, for instance, importing 1.72 million kilograms of tungsten scrap from the U.S. in the first quarter, a large spike compared to the 2.2 million kilograms imported over all of last year.

Azusa Kawakami, Shunsuke Akagi and Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Bikes

Protected bike lanes that physically separate and protect cyclists from motorists go a long way towards incentivizing bike use compare to bike lanes that are just painted on to the asphalt, a new analysis of 72 million Citi Bike trips recorded from 2013 to 2024 found. According to the analysis, adding in any kind of bike lane does promote bike use, but the increase is much more pronounced when the integrity of the bike lane doesn’t just rely on the kindness and generosity of motorists: Citi Bike stations near painted bike lanes and sharrows saw an increase in usage of about 14 percent, while those near newly installed protected bike lanes saw an average increase of 18 percent, good for an additional 379 rides per station per month.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Pave Paradise

Risk of flooding in the United Kingdom has increased because people are installing hardscapes into their gardens, with impervious surfaces adding up. Gardens are about five percent of the total land area of Britain, and in London, they’re 41 percent of the land. The total area in England that is defined as permeable enough to absorb rain declined by 173,000 acres from 2001 to 2022. Garden design is an element of that, especially in urban areas, and as paving slabs became a trendy way of making low-maintenance gardens, they’ve made some areas of London more flood-prone.

Olivia Rudgard, Bloomberg

Nostalgia

Food trends have turned decisively nostalgic, with formats and flavors that had long gone out of style making a comeback. For instance, creamsicle flavors are appearing on menus 37 percent more than they had been four years ago, with other phased-out flavors like baked Alaska and ice cream floats also appearing more and more on menus. Some of this is just the industry exploiting the trend cycle; while a dirty martini or frozen yogurt may come off as dated to those who were around for the initial go-round, they sure seem just as new and interesting as chili crisp or Dubai chocolate to a Gen Z consumer who weren’t around the first time.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Cones of Dunshire

A new survey probed how Americans felt about board games, finding that we are a competitive people, with 44 percent of respondents indicating that it’s at least somewhat important to win when one plays a board game. That’s compared to a mysterious eight percent who said it’s “not at all important” if they win. When it comes to which games people play, the classics tend to win out, with Monopoly (81 percent have played at least several times), Checkers (76 percent) and Scrabble (64 percent) coming in as the most-played. Getting deeper into the shelf, 23 percent said they had played Risk at least several times and 25 percent Backgammon; plunging deeper into the specialty board game store crowd, just nine percent had played Catan a few times, eight percent Ticket To Ride and six percent Wingspan.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Marriage

The percentage of people who told the General Social Survey that their marriage is “very happy” has slipped from 67 percent in the late 1980s to 61 percent as of 2024, with a decisive slide following the pandemic. From 1987 to 2013, several relationship dynamics have changed among both married couples and those who cohabitate, with reported levels of fairness within the relationship declining somewhat over the period, the level of disagreement up slightly and the level of interaction sloping downward. One cause of this cited by researchers is people working longer hours in order to make ends meet.

Alvin Chang, The Pudding

Whalefall

A new study published in Nature describes a fascinating undersea site, the largest whale graveyard ever found, a place that spans over 740 miles of seafloor containing at least 485 whale skeletons from across five million years. The Diamantina Fracture Zone extends from the southwestern tip of Australia to the Indian Ocean, and over the course of about 30 dives in the region, researchers kept on finding whale skeletons; 33 fossil samples were dated between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old, preserved thanks to slow sediment accumulation. This has made for a site with a whale-remains density reaching up to 759.5 individuals per square kilometer, indicating that there may be 10 million whale carcasses down there.

Chinese Academy of Sciences and Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

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

Pineapple

The pineapple business Fresh Del Monte has spent years developing special and limited-edition varieties of the fruit that have been selling at eye-popping price points. Your standard pineapple goes for like $3, but the company’s premium pineapples can sell for hundreds. Their Honeyglow specialty pineapple, which is ultra-sweet, serves as the entry point to the world of pricey pineapples, selling for $5 to $8. The Pinkglow is pink, and goes for $30. Their Rubyglow is the real rare article, it’s a cross between a typical pineapple and the inedible Morada pineapple, with a red exterior and a sweet yellow interior; it’s a fickle fruit to grow and averages $395 each. It takes about 15 years to develop a new variety of pineapple using conventional breeding, and once you’ve actually got the desired fruit, pineapples take 18 months to grow.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Heraldry

The College of Arms was founded in 1484 and operates as a part of the United Kingdom’s Royal Household, tasked primarily with genealogical research to determine who is eligible to use an existing coat of arms and also granting new heraldry to people and companies that pay them to do so. This comes up in Britain, as you’re technically not allowed to join the Order of the Garter without one, but it also comes up in America. Despite the anti-monarchial disposition of my country’s founders, in the interim, a bunch of wannabe subjects yearn for the trappings of aristocracy and are willing to shell out to score a shield so they can cosplay gentility. The fee is about $12,000 for the genealogical research and design work that goes into granting the arrivistes arms, and the College of Arms grants about 120 per year, with about a tenth going to non-British citizens.

Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

Conflict

The latest data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program found that the number of interstate conflicts doubled for the second year in a row in 2025, according to data published in the Journal of Peace Research. Last year, there were eight interstate conflicts, the highest figure since UCDP began collecting data in 1946, up from two in 2023. Overall, there were 65 conflicts in which states were involved on one or both sides during the year (including not just inter-state wars but also internal conflicts). That number is the highest since 1946, and 13 of those conflicts saw at least 1,000 battle-related deaths over the course of the calendar year, the highest number since 1992. With 244,600 people killed in organized violence in 2025, it was the second-bloodiest year since 1994, when the Rwandan genocide occurred.

Uppsala University

Sunscreen

In 2020, Congress ordered the FDA to overhaul how it approved sunscreens in an attempt to make it easier to approve worldwide sun protection formulas for use in the United States, which technically treats sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug and therefore has made it onerous to get new chemistry approved. In 2024, DSM Nutritionals asked the FDA for approval of a sunscreen based on bemotrizinol (BEMT), which is a sunscreen in use already in Europe and Asia. Following a safety review, it has become the first new sunscreen ingredient approved for sale in the U.S. since the 1990s. It comes at a moment when counter-scientific wellness movements have attempted to make an enemy out of chemical sun protection; from 2021 to 2024, the percentage of Americans who believe sunscreen is toxic increased from 17 percent to 24 percent.

Dylan Scott, Vox

Play

The $40 billion youth sports industry has led to a surge in construction of private facilities where competitive leagues can practice and train. Hundreds of millions of dollars has been poured into developing retail and entertainment complexes built around youth sports. A 2025 survey from the Aspen Institute found that 20 percent of kids aged six to 17 play in a private club, as wealthy families ditch community sports programs for in-depth and expensive training.

Patrick Sisson, Bloomberg

Pods

The market for coffee pods was estimated to be $40.49 billion in 2024, and that’s projected to rise to $58.19 billion in 2030. There’s a significant amount of waste that results from this style of coffee distribution, with each cup of coffee made requiring a container (usually plastic) to go to waste, a problem that some producers have attempted to solve through recycling programs with little success. Lavazza is introducing a single-serve coffee pod that does not have an individual wrapper or coating, a coffee tab called Tablì, following a successful introduction in Italy. The pods and the device that uses them are the result of five years of R&D and over 15 patents.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Scrat

A fascinating new study analyzed the fossilized feces of ground squirrels who lived during the last ice age that was found in permafrost and managed to unlock a new way to study the world that exists beyond the scope of carbon dating: ancient DNA preserved in 700,000 year old scat. DNA tends to age very badly, but DNA in ancient poop tended to hold up considerably better than in ancient lake bed sediments, and is host to a vast trove of environmental DNA. The analyzed samples ranged from 17,000 years old to 700,000 years old, finding genetic traces of grasses, flowering herbs, arachnids, insects, large mammals like mammoths, bison and horses and more. If there’s a downside to this incredible discovery of the DNA of ancient species, it’s that I shudder to think how the next Jurassic Park sequel is going to handle and incorporate this particular coprolite.

Moria Donovan, bioGraphic

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

Audiobooks

The audiobook market is ripping right now, with revenues in 2025 hitting $2.43 billion, up nine percent year over year. There were 750,000 active titles last year, up 43 percent from 2024. Among consumers, those who listened to audiobooks averaged 3.8 audiobooks in the last year. Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed AI future of audiobooks has not really materialized, with AI-narrated audiobooks representing just 0.03 percent of sales in 2025.

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Odeonsplatz

A new study published in Heritage Science used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study Feldherrnhalle, a 1934 painting by successful German impressionist painter Erich Mercker, who worked from 1920 to 1973, depicting the Feldherrnhalle monument in Munich. Those dates might be a bit of a tell of what they found when they looked at a blue-and-white Bavarian flag depicted in the scene, finding that the flag has indeed been overpainted and originally depicted a red Nazi flag, and that the painting was probably originally called something more like Die Stätte des 9. November, commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch. Also overpainted were wreaths on a monument and two conspicuously raised arms of passers by. The tell? Oil paints containing significant amounts of titanium white were used where they didn’t exist anywhere else in the paining, and one tube of Titanium White 10103 Schmincke was indeed found among Mercker’s paint tubes. The analysis indicates that Mercker likely carried out the revisions himself, possibly in haste or without attention to detail.

Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin Für Materialien und Energie

Horses

A new study found that 51 percent of mature light-breed horses in the United States are obese, which is twice the rate of horse obesity found in horses in Denmark or Australia. This presents an interesting quandary to determine why precisely the horses are overweight, given that American horses are not uniquely sedentary and do not actually choose what they get to eat, and in fact the people who do pick what they eat are well-meaning owners who have put them on typically standard diets.

Joshua Moen, STAT News

Variant

Anyone who has hit up a comic book shop lately has seen how reliant the business has become on variant covers, which are versions of new comic books that have different covers and are designed to incentivize fans and collectors to buy multiple versions of the same book, or to push potential fans into buying a book that features a guest cover by one of their favorite artists. Data from a direct market retailer obtained by ICV2 found that variant covers accounted for 37.2 percent of unit sales and 43.4 percent of dollar sales for DC comics, 33.5 percent of unit sales and 38.7 percent of dollar sales among Marvel comics and 28.6 percent of unit sales and 33.7 percent of dollar sales for all other comics.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

Economic Success

In moments of economic crisis, there’s always an inclination to look to countries that are actually pulling off successful transformational change. Thanks to renewed tech imports, tighter integrations of the defense-industrial complex with regional allies, more reliable energy and diplomatic efforts and a robust housing boom that has built more homes in the capital than Los Angeles or Chicago in 2025, it’s clear that North Korea, where the economy expanded 3.7 percent in 2027, is a country on the move.

Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin, The Wall Street Journal

We Stan ‘Em

Currently, AI servers consume between 6,000 and 8,000 metric tons of tin per year. That’s currently expected to skyrocket to between 22,000 and 25,000 metric tons of tin per year by 2030, as tin is a crucial ingredient in solder. One concern for the business is that things are a bit complicated on the supply side, with the latest mining policy rolled out by the Indonesian government (which is the second-largest producer after China) possibly threatening supply and constraining quotas down to 55,000 to 60,000 metric tons of production, down from 78,000 metric tons actually produced in 2019.

Natsumi Kawasaki, Nikkei Asia

Sediment

A new analysis of the world’s freshwater reservoirs finds that over half will be functionally dead by 2060 at current rates, owing to sediment buildup behind the dams. Based on satellite imagery of 550,000 reservoirs around the globe, the amount of water being lost annually to sedimentation is over 36 cubic kilometers, which is essentially the volume of the Three Gorges Reservoir in China. Arid regions are most at risk, with over 99 percent of dams in, for instance, Namibia in danger, as are 96 percent of dams along the Western Australian coast.

James Woodford, New Scientist

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

Welcome back!

Mandalorian

Scary Movie made $55 million domestically in its opening weekend, beating out fellow newcomer Masters of the Universe, which made $29.3 million and came in at No. 2. This result is perhaps illustrative of what happens when you mistime your nostalgic cash-in, given that Scary Movie is the latest film in a 25-year-old franchise while Masters of the Universe is the latest from a 44-year-old franchise. By all rights, if you were trying to sell a $200 million movie to the grown-up children who watched your show (and their kids), you should have released Masters of the Universe about 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Backrooms made 2.5 times as much money as a Star Wars movie in its third weekend, if you’re wondering about the overall health of the Nostalgia Industrial Complex.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

A Different Physics Question Than Originally Planned

Last week, a New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin exploded at Cape Canaveral, Florida. While it’s going to take some time before the full analysis of the explosion is complete, the blast holds important data for an otherwise small data set of what happens when a methane/liquid oxygen (methalox) rocket explodes. After all, the only rocket larger than New Glenn to explode with a full load of fuel on or near its launch pad is a Soviet N1 rocket from 1969. For the time being, military officials are treating methalox rockets with 100 percent TNT blast equivalency, which sets a wide keep-out zone around the rocket when it’s being fueled. The Blast Danger Area for last week’s test had a diameter of 7,174 feet, and an average distance of 3,587 feet from the pad. The furthest debris found so far was half a mile away.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Protein

A new blog post has sent researchers who study cancer and aging into a tizzy, following a molecular biologist’s discovery that hundreds of papers seemed to list the wrong antibody test. It comes down to confusion between antibodies recognizing p16INK4a — a tumor-suppressing protein — and antibodies recognizing p16-ARC, which shapes molecular skeletons, both of which are available to purchase from antibody sellers like Thermo Fisher Scientific. It’s not clear whether the papers contain a typo, whether the wrong antibodies were ordered in the first place or whether it’s a misprint, but the analysis checked the antibody product codes listed in 334 studies and found that in 312 of them, researchers used p16-ARC to look for p16INK4a, the wrong molecule.

Mitch Leslie, Science

El Niño

In a move to prepare for what could be a potentially gnarly El Niño season, the Panama Canal Authority is cutting the maximum authorized draft for vessels by half a foot, from 50 feet to 49.5 feet tropical fresh water. This is the first canal restriction this year, and while it’s nowhere near draft restrictions implemented during the 2023-24 drought, it’s a sign that canal administrators aren’t taking chances with another weather event that could (further) disrupt global shipping. Traffic through the canal year-to-date is up eight percent year over year, averaging 38 vessels per day, with the five weeks ending mid-May seeing transits up 16 percent year over year as demand for U.S. crude oil spiked.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Nothing New

Pop culture media derived from franchises is high across a number of different formats, with 35 percent of films released wide last year being part of larger franchises, up 60 percent compared to 1997, when less than 20 percent were. Songs on the Hot 100 are staying in the top 10 for 16 weeks longer than they did in 1959, and when it comes to video games, novelty among the top games are the exception. The last time there was more than one game not from a franchise in the Circana annual top 10 was 2014.

Amanda Shendruk, Not-Ship

Numbers Station

A fascinating article in Inside GNSS argues the United States Military, which operates the Global Positioning System, has used the system to quietly broadcast codes for its encryption network over a 176-bit GPS sequence labelled “Subframe 4, Page 17,” essentially openly piggybacking on GPS to deliver cryptographic keys. This conclusion resulted from analysis of open-archive Global Navigation Satellite System recordings maintained by the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences — 12 million observations of sequence “Subframe 4, Page 17,” which produced 3,994 unique 176-bit messages.

Becky Ferreira, 404 Media

Bedtime

A new study analyzing the cellphone use of adolescents found that on nights when teenagers used their smartphone for an additional 20 minutes in the hour before bedtime, they had eight to nine more minutes of late night use later that night. This makes sense; texts or posts that one sends before bed invite replies that must, by definition, come somewhat later. In general, pre-bedtime smartphone use was linked to greater late-night use; those in the study who averaged 20 minutes of pre-bedtime phone use had between 37 and 41 minutes of late night use, on average.

Hannah Miller, American Academy of Sleep Medicine

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

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

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

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

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Neil Paine, a Numlock regular and one of the most comprehensive sports writers I know. Neil covers everything, so we talked a little bit about everything. Specifically, it’s a real busy time for certain sports. We covered the NBA finals — exciting stuff for your local Queens resider — The Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in one go.

I absolutely love having Neil on, and as always, he’s writing and recording some phenomenal projects. You can find him at Neil’s Substack for daily updates on all things sports data, his Sherwood newsletter Scoreboard diving into prediction markets, and you can find him in your ear with his NASCAR podcast, Podracing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Neil’s Substack

Analytical but narrative -- blending the past and future of sportswriting

By Neil Paine

Neil, thank you so much for coming back on.

Thanks for having me again, Walt.

You are one of the most comprehensive consummate sports writers that I know. You cover everything. You have a newsletter, Neil’s Substack, that is a daily must-read for me and I think is just one of the most diverse spectrums of coverage that you can see out there. I feel like we have talked about this in the past, but you, I believe, are one of the only guys who covers both NASCAR and the WNBA regularly for large sports websites.

You’re telling me that the Venn diagram is not widely overlapping?

I mean, listen, perhaps there’s somebody in Indianapolis who covers the Fever and the 500, but I’ve yet to meet them.

Oh, I think Scott Agness, the guy who got his Fever credential pulled this past week, people should check him out on Substack. He covers Indiana sports, so he actually would cover the Indy 500, the Brickyard as well and then would cover the Indiana Fever. So he’s probably the other guy in that sliver of the Venn diagram.

We found him. But I wanted to talk to you because, we were just mentioning before we got on the phone, this is a particularly, secretly, extremely busy time for sports. We’ve got the NBA Finals. We’ve got our beloved NHL Stanley Cup Finals. And we’ve also got, imminently, the World Cup coming up. And again, your newsletter is just so fascinating in understanding all these topics. And I wanted to have you on to talk a little bit about what you’ve been reading, watching, writing, all that stuff.

Yeah, June becoming the stealthy busiest sports month of the year is interesting because it does usually contain a lot in terms of the NBA and NHL finals, and then also the drafts from those two sports. Usually, it’s two sports happening at once. And yes, theFinals, usually, it’s done by the middle of the month. Then you can pivot, especially after the drafts, to like the summer baseball, WNBA — the slower rhythm of things until football starts.

Here, you’ve got the World Cup. It’s back in its rightful summer place because the last time that we had a World Cup, because they decided to have it in Qatar, they had it in the winter to make it bearable. Now that it’s in North America — it’s in Canada, the US and Mexico — it’s in a more normal time of the schedule. But that puts it right in the middle of this summer stretch.

So there really is no off time that we got used to in the past. Everything is converging. And all the cups are runneth-ing over, I think, is the way to say it. But it’s exciting, especially because you and I together work on this prediction market newsletter for Sherwood News. And that has kept me plugged in with all of these different things that have odds around them. And you can keep up with it that way. It’s been interesting to see the evolution of who’s favored in each of these sports as time goes on.

I would love to dive into some of your recent work. I think, as a New Yorker, I am obliged to first ask about the NBA Finals, which features a Knicks team that you recently wrote about. About how they’ve tried to become a team that has historically thwarted their ambitions, as well as a Spurs team that has managed to completely rebuild on the fly really, really quickly. And just really makes this finals particularly interesting. Do you want to talk a little bit about what’s going on over there?

Yeah, in a lot of ways, these are polar opposite approach teams, where the Spurs previously were a dynasty with Tim Duncan and Manu Ginóbili and Tony Parker, and of course, Gregg Popovich as the coach. And they’ve spun it forward. I made the comparison, which I know a lot of people are going to hate, people are rolling their eyes. But the New England Patriots, it’s similar because we saw them in the Super Bowl. We saw the Spurs now coming back to the NBA Finals.

And it’s like, okay, great, we didn’t even have time to really reset ourselves and these dynasties from the 2010s are like back in our lives and back in the championships. But the Spurs, once they got Victor Wembanyama, who is the most just uniquely great player in NBA history, I think it’s already fair to say that a 7-foot 5-inch guy that can shoot threes, go inside, block shots and just has this force. He really is like a video game creative character if you sat down in “2K.” I was joking about this with someone where it really was like this guy only existed as a created character in these video games in the past. And now he actually exists in real life. And you’re like, how is this real that this guy exists?

It reminds me of like John Bois’s “Breaking Madden,” where you would just turn a slider all the way to one end.

Dude, yeah, the Victor Wembanyama sliders are like height maxed out, BMI minimized and then all of the other stats are maxed out that you wouldn’t even expect from a man that size. And the effect is this guy is like a game-changing force. And that really has defined the Spurs. Like many teams that rebuilt, they hit a pretty low point in their recent history. And that allowed them to get the number one pick. It happened to be in the year that Wemby was available, and they were able to draft this all-time generational prospect. Then he has panned out in a way that not every super tall player has. A lot of these guys face injury concerns, whether it’s Yao Ming, Ralph Sampson was someone prototypical Wemby back in the ’80s. A lot of these guys ended up not being durable enough because the human body is not necessarily meant to be this big and still be able to be that mobile and stay healthy.

And right now, knock on wood he’s pretty young and early in his career, but he has stayed healthy enough to be this MVP-level player. He knocked off the Oklahoma City Thunder who were this budding dynasty, and instead sent them home, guaranteed that there would be an eighth consecutive year with a different NBA champion, which is the first time that’s ever happened in history. It’s this meteoric rise on one side.

And then on the other side, you have a Knicks team that had been banging their head against a brick wall for years and years and years. They went out and they got Jalen Brunson a handful of years ago, and that kickstarted this current process of the Knicks actually being good, which has been rare this century. But every year they just came up against a team, usually the Indiana Pacers for some reason. I don’t know why, but they kept going up against these teams that would beat them. They would have home court advantage, they would still lose. And it just felt like they had maxed out their potential.

Then they changed coaches this past off season from Tom Thibodeau to Mike Brown. That, along with trying again, you just keep trying, I guess this is a testament to stick-to-itiveness, but the Knicks finally got their breakthrough. And it’s very rare to have teams do that.

My piece that I wrote was, ironically, the last team to win this many games in the playoffs over a three-year period and not make the finals, and then make that leap in the fourth year was the Michael Jordan Bulls in 1991. They made the leap to the finals finally and answered those questions of could you build a great team around Michael Jordan? Which is an insane question to think about that people actually ask, but they did ask that. There were legitimate reasons to think, hey, maybe this guy is just maxed out at the Eastern Conference Finals. The Pistons kept beating him. He breaks through, obviously wins a lot after that. And the Knicks are the next team.

I obviously don’t think Jalen Brunson is quite as good as Michael Jordan. That would be a little bit of a hot take. But he epitomizes this whole idea of, you don’t have to be what people think you are from the beginning. He was a guy that was not overly well-regarded coming out of college at Villanova. He was picked 33rd overall during the second round. And he has just progressively grown into a far greater player than anybody thought he could be at multiple different stages.

When he went into the NBA with Dallas, people thought, can he actually even stick in the league? Then he proved that he could do that. Then it’s like, well, can he really be a starter? He was the sixth man of the year one year. And then he proved he could be a starter on a team that went deep into the playoffs. Then he signs with the Knicks at what is in retrospect a pretty bargain-basement deal. And people are like, can you really actually be the best player on a team? Well, he is the best player on a team, but they keep losing the playoffs. So then it’s like, yeah, can you really make the finals or win a championship with him as your best player? And then he comes out and is in the process of trying to prove that wrong.

So he is just proving doubters wrong at every different turn of his career. And that’s different from Wemby because Wemby almost hasn’t had doubters because you just take one look at a 7-foot-5 guy like him, and you’re like, well, obviously this guy is gonna dominate basketball for our lifetimes, basically. So it’s a very interesting juxtaposition of the two teams who, I think, are the two best teams. Oklahoma City had every chance to put San Antonio away and they’re up three to two on them. Then they lost two straight games, put away games and really showed up small in game seven. And Wemby and the Spurs stepped up big. So I think it’s a great matchup.

I also like how I leaned into this in our newsletter of the idea of like most of the time when Hollywood revives a franchise with a reboot from the late ’90s, it’s just an absolute disaster and sad. But in this case, this is a rematch of the 1999 NBA finals, and I think it already has shown that it has the potential to be far greater than the original, which ended in five games. The Knicks just didn’t have enough to be able to beat the Spurs. The Spurs went on to become a dynasty from there, and the Knicks went on to become nothing from there. They progressively slid into oblivion. I think in this case, it could be a much better series and maybe much brighter futures for both teams.

Yeah, I mean, listen, New York has an energy to it right now that is tough to describe. It’s fascinating what’s happened to these two iconic New York City institutions of the Knicks and the Roman Catholic Church when you some guy from Villanova on top of them.

Yeah. I know the Yankees have won, obviously, the most championships of any New York team. And the Rangers get people pretty fired up at different times. But I really think there’s something about the Knicks and maybe something about New York as this basketball mecca that when they’re good, people just freak out. They go crazy. It’s a little like an average Philadelphia Eagles postseason-type of reaction. But when the Knicks are good, the city of New York they go a little wild over it.

And I like to see because whatever the true spirit of New York is, I think the Knicks are the team that most typifies that. Despite having just the shittiest owner with Jim Dolan. It defies explanation, how the combination of that ownership and the team’s place in the heart of New York. But maybe that’s like, you suffer longer, it makes it sweeter when you actually taste success.

Yeah, and now he’s got his Sphere distracting him from actually running this team. So it’s been good lately.

I wanna turn our attention to another finals going on right now, which is the Carolina Hurricanes and the Vegas Golden Knights. It’s a good looking Cup, man. I’ve been really enjoying it. I mean, these games have been nail biters and I know that my friends in Carolina have been really, really sweating this one, but it’s been extremely enjoyable. We are having this conversation on Friday.

This interview is running on Sunday, so information will have happened in between our conversation and when people will be necessarily reading this. But it’s been a hell of a Cup to watch.

Yeah, I assume that Saturday night’s game will also feature one team going up two to nothing and then blowing that lead because the first two games featured that. [Ed note: lmao.]

And that’s actually the first time in the history of the finals that both of the first two games of a series had a team blow a two-nothing lead and eventually lose those games. It happened to Carolina in the first game and happened to Vegas in the second game. These have been wild shootouts. They’ve been back and forth. In each third period, there’s been a lot of lead changes and tying goals and things like that.

There was a controversial no-goal that then the coach of Vegas, John Tortorella — who is also just like this fiery, interesting character, I think it’s fair to call him — he did a replay challenge, failed the challenge, and it not only took away a goal potentially if they had gotten the challenge overturned, it could have been a goal for him. Instead, he took a penalty because he was wrong in the challenge and then Carolina scored on the power play and that ended up changing that game and Vegas ended up losing that game.

But it’s been this high-scoring, high-octane series. And that’s in contrast to how both of these teams were, leading up to the finals where their goaltenders were really dominant, Freddie Andersen and Carter Hart. But as I wrote and have been focusing on, there was always a sneaking suspicion that either one or both of these guys were going to turn into a pumpkin at some point because they were both playing way above what they had done during the regular season. Andersen was one of the worst goalies in the league during the regular season. Hart was his team’s third string goalie at one point during the season.

So you were like, yeah, this is gonna persist. And we’ve seen it not really persist and there’s a lot of reasons for that. But that has added to the flavor of it. And then I love the story of this guy, Brett Howden of the Vegas Golden Knights who had one goal in game one, two goals in game two and has had, I wanna say 13 goals. As of when you read this there’ll be an additional game, he’ll probably have scored a hat trick or something.

But going into that game three, he had 13 goals which was actually more than he had during the regular season. 13 in the playoffs, he had 12 in the regular season. Among players that had 12 or more goals during any regular season in the history of hockey, his 13 playoff goals is the most of anyone for players who had more playoff goals than regular season goals. This guy is turning into a completely different player during the playoffs than the regular season. And we see that kind of often in hockey, maybe not quite to this extent. Your stars, you can count on them to some degree, but mostly it’s who crawls out of the woodwork and puts together these heroic performances.

One of the charts that we ran in the newsletter around the Brett Houghton thing showed that Claude Lemieux was also heavily on that list of guys that scored more goals in the playoffs than in the regular season. He died, unfortunately, in the past few weeks. He was one of the great clutch performers in hockey history. It’s a tribute, I think, to see him show up on these lists because he was the epitome of that kind of player. Certainly a good player during the regular season, and he was useful to have on your team, but when you signed him and traded for him, you knew that you were gonna use him in the playoffs and he was gonna exceed all expectations when the calendar turned to April and May and June.

He always seemed to deliver, and that’s why he won so many different Stanley Cups. I think he won four Stanley Cups for three different teams, which is pretty rare. I’m not sure how many other guys can say that.

Yeah, reversion to the mean being one of the most powerful forces in the universe. You have told me in the past, listen, it’s just oftentimes who’s hot during the playoffs, what goalie’s hot, what goalie’s able to stay hot. Hockey is very fun to watch for that exact reason, so I’ve just been really enjoying it. This has been one of the most watchable Stanley Cups, I think, in quite some time.

Yeah, and one other thing about the Golden Knights is they fired their coach. I mentioned John Tortorelli, he did not coach, like, 95 percent of the games for this team during the season. They fired their coach, it was one of the latest coach firings in recent history, only later surpassed by the New York Islanders firing their coach like a week later this season with two games left in the year. I don’t know if this is a case study that you can apply going forward, but every time I see Vegas win more games in these playoffs, I’m like, man, a lot of teams are gonna look at this. Usually, in the past, if you were a coach and you were gonna go to the playoffs and you were a playoff-bound team, you could probably feel like you weren’t going to get fired with eight games left in the regular season, that was probably a pretty safe bet.

Now, all bets are off. I think teams are gonna look at this and be like, you’re not safe. We might fire you during the playoffs. We can fire you at any moment. Don’t get too comfortable coaching these teams. I don’t know, it’s a copycat type of sport, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that.

Did that work? I guess it did in this case, because he did push some different buttons than the previous guy that seemed to have gotten them to this point, but at the same time, you were talking about the powerful force of regression to the mean. Maybe the regression was positive for Vegas because they underachieved the whole year, and once you get to the point where you’re desperate enough to fire a coach, that’s probably also the point when the regression positively sets in and you start to play like you were actually supposed to play the whole year.

Yeah, I enjoy how generally hot seats are in coaches for hockey, but this seems to be dialing that quite hotter than it had been in the past.

And hockey coaches, I believe, have the shortest tenure on average of any pro-league coach. I think it’s only like two and a half years on average, which is crazy, and winning Coach of the Year is one of the biggest curses. You do not want to win Coach of the Year because they have a shorter lifespan from the moment they win that award going forward than the average coach. Think about that. You were just named literally the best coach, and that means congratulations, you have less job security going forward than if you were just not even in that conversation as the best coach. Isn’t that fucked up?

That’s dead man walking. Incredible. That’s great.

I would like to finish with looking forward. I think a lot of this summer is gonna be talking about the World Cup. You had an extremely interesting story in Neil’s Substack, which, again, I highly recommend folks read, as well as reading Scoreboard, which is a very fun thing that we work on together, more focused on prediction market stuff. But Neil’s Substack, you had a very good post. Is the U.S. men’s national team finally ready for a breakthrough? I remember one of my about working to at FiveThirtyEight was that we would oftentimes have question headlines the answer to which was “uh, no.” I guess I would just put it to you. Is the U.S. men’s national team finally ready for a breakthrough?

Well, I didn’t say that they would win the World Cup, so I’m not automatically setting myself for Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. If there’s a question headline, the answer is always no.

I think they could be ready for a breakthrough if we define it as getting past the round of 16. So this is, I think, a really interesting World Cup. First of all, the U.S. co-hosting, we mentioned that earlier. They’ve lost in the round of 16 in three of the past four World Cups. They also didn’t qualify for the 2018 World Cup. We don’t talk about that.

But the question is have they hit this ceiling? They have not made the quarterfinals since 2002. Why can’t they get further than that? They just keep running up against teams where there seems to be a talent issue. They just can’t quite get it done at the end of these games. And they have made incredible progress. I say we will be jingoistic here as Americans. We had let our soccer program go to absolute shit in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s. We missed nine straight World Cups at that point.

Once we started to actually take it seriously, we made incredible progress leading up to the 2000s. But if you look at things like the ELO rating, which tracks how we’re doing over time, we have stalled out. We’ve hit a plateau. That might suggest like, well, why do we think that we would have any more of a chance this year than any other one? Well, the host country effect is pretty strong. It doesn’t seem to get diluted. They looked at this for 2002 when Japan and South Korea shared it. They both got the same effect that you would expect from a sole, no pun intended, host. So I have reason to think that the U.S. will get at least some boost from playing at home.

Also, the format has changed. And I think it’s a lot friendlier to at least making it out of the group stage, which at certain points has been a problem for the U.S., especially before this recent run of like hitting the round of 16. We would have loved to make the round of 16 at different times and couldn’t quite get out of the group stage. This year, because it’s expanded to 48 teams and there’s more groups and they also let third place teams from some of the groups. So in the past, you would only get the first two teams from a group to make it in. Now you can finish third in a group and still make it out.

So there’s a lot more chances to make the knockouts than there used to be. If you look at Polymarket, the U.S. has an 84 percent chance to make the round of 32, which would be your knockout first round instead of the round of 16, like it used to be. They also have a 46 percent chance to make the round of 16, so it’s kind of a coin flip whether they’ll get back to that usual spot. Then a 21 percent chance to make the quarterfinals. That’s not nothing.

If you look at who they might play, some of the draws are conditional on making the round of 32. They could be set up to have a decent shot at making the round of 16 and then going from there, hilariously or just ridiculously, they could play Iran. So think about the awkwardness of geopolitical sporting events so far. We played Canada in both men’s and women’s hockey at the Olympics. We played Venezuela for the World Baseball Classic and lost.

Now, somehow, it’s not hard to conceive of a situation where we finished as the runner up in our group, Iran finishes as the runner up in their group, and then we actually play each other in the first round of the knockouts in the World Cup.

I’m gonna push back on you a little bit because I think that what you’ve hit on is basically a version of the birthday problem, right? There are a lot of countries that we’ve pissed off. We could have drawn Denmark. I think it’s like one in nine countries have been menaced by the United States in the past, perhaps, one and a half years.

I wonder what happened one and a half years ago that caused that. But no, you’re right. If you start enough geopolitical conflicts, eventually you will play a team that is involved in that for one of these sporting events. But it would be just completely ridiculous. They could also play Switzerland, which would be like, okay, let’s go up against a neutral country, see what happens from that.

But the point is that the biggest reason to think that we could actually have this breakthrough is we just have more talent than we used to, relative to the top teams. There’s this great site, which is, I always look at the translated form of it, but it’s originally in German. It’s called TransferMarkt. So transfermarkt.co or whatever it is, gives a rough valuation in Euro to each player in major professional soccer. And when we lost to Belgium and Germany eventually won the World Cup in 2014, the collective valuation of our roster was just 10.7 percent of Germany’s total roster. So the value of our guys. And we didn’t really have that many guys in the European major big five leagues and all that stuff. We had some, but the majority of our roster were playing in the MLS and they were playing lower tier types of soccer leagues.

Now, if you look at us compared with France and Spain, those are the two co-favorites – if you look at a place like Polymarket, they’re both I think 16 percent each to win the World Cup — we are 25 percent of France’s total in our roster and we’re 32 percent of Spain’s total. So we basically tripled our talent relative to the top teams in the world since 2014, which was the time when I wrote the story for FiveThirtyEight about why we aren’t better at soccer.

So to me, that, in combination with manager Mauricio Pochettino. I know many coaches have tried to instill like, hey, let’s play a more advanced and less caveman-like style of soccer. And the results have been mixed at different times over time. But the reporting going into this tournament has been like, we really are trying to play this more modernized, fluid, complex style of soccer.

Now, I don’t know shit about soccer tactics. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that I know that much about it. I’m an uneducated American casual. But I will say, most of us are, as an American, casual soccer followers. But I will say that anytime that you have these reports about there being more talent, they’re trying to put in a more style that harnesses them more, it does seem like a good sign. In the past, we were characterized by our toughness and being counterattacking and all that, which is code for we suck and we never have the ball. And for us to score, we really need something to go bad for the other team.

I’ve always heard about how good our goalies are, which is usually a sign that they’re very, very well tested.

Yeah, exactly. If your best player is your goalie, which I think was true for Tim Howard and guys like that in the past, that’s probably a bad sign for soccer. So that all points to like, maybe we can do something, even if it’s not making it past the round of 16, just in terms of being more competitive. Maybe we’ll win a group, but that is another factor that we could look at here because of the way the draw shook out. We’re in group D, we have a fighting chance. We’re the favorite. Granted, we have the plurality but not the majority of the odds where Turkey is also in there.

So we’re at 39 percent to win the group. Turkey’s at 34 percent, Paraguay’s 18 percent, Australia’s 10 percent. So we’re favored to win a group. And if we win that group, then that changes the math around who we end up with. I wrote something for Polymarket about how in the past we talk about groups of death, this idea of through the draw or through FIFA’s shady under the table payments that they’ve accepted — not that I’m accusing them of that but would we really put it past them — you end up in a group with either harder or easier teams depending on how things shake out.

That has, through no fault of your own, this huge ripple effect on your chance of actually doing something in the tournament, making it out of the group stage even now. I think there’s paths of death, there’s not groups of death because if you go to the Wikipedia page for for the 2026 World Cup, I defy anyone at first glance to make heads or tails of their table of what happens with certain third-place teams or who plays someone depending on where they finish in the group.

It is just this insane matrix of different possibilities where if you win your group, then you might get matched up with the third-place team from one of five different groups. But if you’re the runner-up from the same group, you end up on the opposite side of the bracket against the runner-up from a different group. But if you finish third and you have the goal differential to beat out the other third place teams, then you’ll end up playing the winner of this other group.

I am shocked that European bureaucrats have come up with a system too convoluted, though that delivers a lot more equity, for Americans to understand.

I do think that there are certain situations that set themselves up where teams can, by virtue of being favored to win a group who they would play if they were If they were to win the group and then like how that would shake out from one of the other groups, they can get screwed now not just in the groups, but they can get screwed in the knockouts because of how they’ve been set up to kind of play different possible teams.

This wouldn’t necessarily be screwing the U.S. it would actually be pretty good for them in terms of being favored, but them possibly being matched up with Iran, there’s a bunch of stuff that would have to happen for that to play out. But that’s the case with every permutation of who you might play in the knockout bracket. I think there are paths of death where you can end up playing tougher teams. Despite winning your group it may actually be more beneficial to finish second in your group than to win it. We might see some weird tanking or some weird chicanery around where you end up in your group, as well.

So it adds this other layer of complexity to it by adding a bunch more teams, a whole new knockout round and more ways to get into the knockout. I didn’t see anything wrong with the old system, but you have to make sure that you get the host teams into the knockouts, if you’re FIFA, and get more money for more Confederations and so on and so forth.

Well, it’s gonna be very fun to watch. I congratulate them on their incredibly successful corruption. It turns out that the solution for American success is tighter integration of our labor with international businesses and importing high-quality talent from overseas. Who would have known?

That is true. A lot of the American coaches, including Pochettino, have come from other countries. We’ve had our share of American coaches for sure, but it does seem like our greatest periods of improvement have come when we have a non-American coaching team U.S.

Klinsman was not everybody’s cup of tea, but nevertheless really did seem to make a pretty substantial difference in the soccer development program in the United States.

Yeah, I think that you can point back to him and others as being pointing us in that direction toward being more like the best teams in the world, playing more like them.

Well, it’s gonna be very fun to watch. I would love to talk more, but we’ve gone a little long anyway. But honestly, it’s just always nice to chat, man. Generally, where can folks find you? I know that you can be found in people’s inboxes and in their ears and in lots of different places, so why don’t you rattle them off?

You can find me at neilpaine.substack.com, where, like you said, I write about kind of everything. Also Scoreboard for Sherwood News, check that out if you like to get a daily dose of prediction market-related content. I write a weekly column for nascar.com, which is, if you like auto racing, you can check that out. We do a podcast called Podracing, me and Tyler Lauletta for NASCAR, as well. If you haven’t gotten enough of me from these like umpteenth million other places, you can listen to me talk about NASCAR as well.

Edited by Crystal Wang

Have a great weekend!

Sunflowers

The volatile price of cocoa has sent major food brands scrambling to find alternatives with a similar taste and mouthfeel. The price of cocoa shot up from $2,846 per metric ton at the start of 2023 to as high as $10,710 per ton in 2025, and has only recently come down to around $2,471 per ton. For large food brands, that kind of volatility is hard to work with, hence the search for a broader range of cocoa-free chocolate. Barry Callebaut, a brand you have probably never heard of but which is indeed the largest cocoa processor and chocolate ingredient supplier in the world, hopes to have a cocoa-free chocolate called ChoViva, derived from sunflower seeds, available in the U.S. as soon as this year.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Hoops

There are about 2,900 basketball hoops in parks in New York City, and many of those hoops are missing nets. Whether the result of damage or deterioration, the parks department can be slow to repair those afflicted hoops. This has provoked community action; Some rec leagues fix ups the nets as a matter of policy, while others prefer the strategy of the basketball ronin, such as Craig Campanella, who goes around Queens attaching $10.99 white nylon nets to hoops missing them.

Katie Honan, The City Reporter

MAVEN

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft was launched in 2013 and orbited Mars for 11 years, well outlasting the original mission length, to study the planet’s atmosphere. On December 6, 2025, when it was on the other side of Mars in an occultation scheduled to last under an hour, it stopped phoning home. A computer 200 million miles away is hard to reach under even ideal conditions, and after months, NASA has called it and ended efforts to search for MAVEN. One concerning piece of data is that faint telemetry and Doppler shift data fragments teased out of the recorded signals in the hours after the signal loss indicates that MAVEN was spinning at 2.7 revolutions per minute, faster than expected. It indicates a problem the spacecraft couldn’t recover from and that its batteries were likely drained within hours. It’ll probably remain in orbit for another 50 to 100 years before, poetically, burning up in the very atmosphere it was sent to study.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Sagrada Família

Next week Pope Leo XIV will bless the Tower of Jesus Christ in Barcelona’s basilica, the Sagrada Família, which has finally been completed. The basilica itself has been under construction for 144 years at this point, but the recent installation of a cross on the central lantern tower of the church — the 18th and final one — completes the structure and will bring the cranes down. Obviously, as anyone who has embarked on a construction project can attest, work will indeed continue for another several years as the last odds and ends get cleared up. When 30-year-old Antoni Gaudí took over the project after less than a year of construction in 1882, he said that it’d be done within 10 years. When he repeatedly extended his deadlines on the project, he famously said “my client is not in a rush,” referring to God. Evidently disagreeing, the Almighty moved to replace management in 1926 when Gaudí was run over by a tram.

Alexandra F. Coego, The Art Newspaper

Boards

The percentage of corporate directors over the age of 70 is now 22.7 percent of all board members for companies within the Russel 3000. A new high, that is up from 18.4 percent as recently as 2023. While many companies sought younger board members throughout the 2010s in order to help in digital transitions, there has been a sharp increase in older board members since 2024.

Victor Swezey, Bloomberg

Easy Breezy

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal looks at a quasar known as J2318, found in the Pegasus constellation, and found that in the disk of matter surrounding the black hole, the wind speed is the fastest on record. The black hole has a mass 1.7 billion times that of the Sun, and according to the study, the gas is moving towards it at 30 percent of the speed of light

Sandra McLean, York University

NeeDoh

The global market for stress toys is projected to grow from $5.88 billion in 2025 to $7.95 billion in 2030, thanks in part to rising levels of stress and anxiety among adults and also presumably in part to the ability to cheaply produce more durable, malleable plastic products. This is a remarkably popular class of toy, the heirs to the fidget toy trends. And one of the stalwarts of the field is NeeDohs, which are squishy gel-filled stress toys that sell for $3 to $6 a pop and which have moved a lot of volume since emerging in 2017. The toymaker behind the viral toy has a plan to keep them relevant beyond this particular trend, which isn’t really saying that much, admittedly, because all toymakers behind viral toys usually say something like that.

Sunny Kim, Bloomberg

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke with Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, a physicist and journalist who is out with a new book, Entangled States: Life According to Quantum Physics. It’s a great read about the frontiers of physics, part memoir and part dive into the fascinating idiosyncrasies of particle physics. Entangled States is available wherever books are sold. You can find them at New Scientist or their personal Substack Ultracold.

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S’mores

According to Hershey’s, $250 million of their 2025 annual revenue was attributable to people using their chocolate to make s’mores, up nine percent year over year. Hershey’s sees significant growth opportunity in the s’mores business, and thinks it can generate another $50 million in chocolate sales annually over the next three to five years if it plays its cards right in getting people to make s’mores more often, presumably bring their tenuous alliance with the graham cracker and marshmallow forces to bear. Based on their data, households with children eat s’mores about five times per year on average.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Stadiums

Most of the 16 stadiums that will be hosting World Cup games in North America are being rebranded, with banners being hauled over the existing corporate branding and new, in some cases rather funny, branding taking its place. Lumen Field has become Seattle Stadium and Banorte Stadium has become Mexico City Stadium for the time being. FIFA is allowing Mercedes-Benz’ logo to remain on the Atlanta stadium only because removing it could cause structural damage to the retractable roofs. Several venues that host city teams miles away from their advertised locations are getting somewhat loquacious rebrands; Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara is now San Francisco Bay Area Stadium because they could get away with San Francisco Stadium, and the large air conditioner in the swamps of north Jersey ordinarily known as MetLife Stadium will for the time being become New York New Jersey Stadium.

Anne M. Peterson, The Associated Press

Bingo

Drake released 42 tracks at once, a shotgun blast of songs aimed at the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and in doing so, has reduced the number of Hot 100 ranks he has yet to hit. Drake has appeared on the Hot 100 with 402 different songs over the course of his career, the highest of any artist, and well ahead of No. 2 Taylor Swift, who has 276 appearances. He’s had so many songs on the list that after this most recent effort — thanks to “Firm Friends” peaking at No. 31 — Drake’s songs have now reached every single possible rank on the Top 40. In fact, out of all 100 of the possible peak ranks of the Hot 100 chart, Drake has had a song peak at all but five spots: Nos. 46, 77, 96, 98 and 99.

Gary Trust, Billboard

YouTube

According to Digital i, YouTube has surpassed Netflix in terms of daily usage per account. YouTube’s average daily usage per account has increased from 87.2 minutes in 2024 to 99.1 minutes in 2025, while Netflix saw a drop from 100.5 minutes to 93.4 minutes over the same period. YouTube has managed this by increasingly claiming viewership in the living room: YouTube was responsible for 35 percent of television viewing in the living room in December 2025, up from 28 percent in January 2024, while Netflix dropped from 35 percent to 31 percent over the same period.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Acne

In 2025, a number of acne-control skincare products were contaminated with benzene and subsequently recalled. Previously-unreleased results of government testing revealed that the level of benzene in the creams was remarkably high in several products. Based on the FDA’s testing of 105 products containing benzoyl peroxide, 85 percent of the products tested positive for some level of benzene. Some were pretty bad: 13 of the products were contaminated with benzene levels well above the two parts per million limit, while another 14 products came in between one and 1.9 parts per million. The worst of the lot came in at 30.2 parts per million.

Anna Edney, Bloomberg

Gamers

The latest data from the Entertainment Software Association found that 212.3 million Americans play video games for at least one hour per week, good for 67 percent of the population aged five to 90. Incidentally, that is up by 7.2 million people, or three percent of the population, compared to 2025. The median American is, if anything, a casual gamer, but still 27 percent of active players play for 16 or more hours every week.

Jen Glennon, Polygon

Catastrophe Gap

The overall value of uninsured natural catastrophe losses worldwide increased seven percent last year to hit an estimated $424 billion, according to the Swiss Re Institute. Insurance coverage has been going down in plenty of hazardous areas, such as California, where the fraction of residential property policies that cover earthquake damage dropping from 30 percent in 1994 to 12 percent as of 2024. Historically, annual insured losses have come in around a $100 billion annually. Insured losses came in at $107 billion last year, and have the potential to reach $186 billion by 2030.

Laura Millan, Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

Broadway

Broadway shows producers have been angling to get state-level aid to continue well past the period of time where Broadway was on its back foot following the pandemic-era industry distress. The funding, New York State money, has become controversial as it moves from an economic lifeline to basically an economic development investment. The producers argue that it’s vastly cheaper to launch productions elsewhere, particularly London where there is government support for the theater industry. Critics point out that New York awarded $33.5 million in tax credits to 19 shows this year (13 Broadway, six off-Broadway) of which just two are still running today.

Danielle Muoio Dunn, Bloomberg

Sargassum

May was a record month for sargassum piling up on beaches around the Caribbean, and even more foul-smelling rotting algae is expected to wash up this month. It’s killing wildlife and disrupting tourism. The 38 million metric tons of algae that washed ashore is the largest mass measured since researchers began studying the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in 2011, completely blowing past the previous record 22 million metric tons logged in June 2022.

Dánica Coto, The Associated Press

Noche De Los Grandes

The livestreamed Mexican AAA wrestling event Noche de los Grandes has become an instant classic, racking up a combined 2.24 million views since being streamed on May 30. The Monterrey match saw the culmination of a year-long storyline in a máscara contra máscara bout — mask vs. mask, where the loser is unmasked before the world in shame forever — between El Grande Americano (Ludwig Kaiser) and The Original El Grande Americano (Chad Gable). AAA, one of the largest professional wrestling promotions in Mexico, was acquired by WWE last year.

Joe Otterson, Variety

Huh?

New York’s hottest club is the sewer system, at least according to three separate surveillance footage videos of people inexplicably entering the sewer system. One video taken on Friday in Williamsburg captures seven people emerging from a maintenance hole in the middle of an intersection bearing shovels and tools and headlamps. Another saw seven people emerging from a maintenance hole at 2 a.m. in Gravesend in Brooklyn, only to head over to parked cars and change into fresh clothes. Those incidents have brought renewed attention to a May 5 video featuring three people in hip waders emerging from a maintenance hole cover on a street in Queens. Authorities are befuddled, but the answer is obvious to anyone who’s sampled the nightlife scene here: The speakeasy trend has gone too far.

Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press

Small Magellanic Cloud

A new paper looks into the movement of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way that is indeed being pulled apart thanks to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The researchers found that the millions of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud are actually moving outward at a speed of 17 kilometers per second; over the course of a few hundred million years — not much in galactic time spans — those stars could be displaced by several thousand lightyears. The phenomenon isn’t just seen on the outskirts of the SMC, but in the central regions as well.

Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam

Biological Clock

New York and Texas are separated by just a single time zone, which is good for the Knicks, as teams on the East Coast tend to perform worse when they head out west to play basketball since the athletes need to process jet lag. The win percentage of Eastern teams playing a road game that tips off at the equivalent of 4:30 to 6:29 p.m. ET is 39.7 percent. When the game is at 10:30 p.m. or later, that drops to 34.9 percent.

Jacob Feldman and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Airbag For The Sun

A new paper published in Space Weather from a small group of space weather scientists has sent waves through the field, arguing that it is indeed possible for humans to build a system that would mitigate the impacts of an otherwise devastating solar storm, a provocative pitch for a “StormWall.” Essentially, a one-in-100 year solar storm on the scale of 1859’s Carrington Event could cause massive damage to the power grids of Earth to the tune of $3 trillion. While forecasting has gotten better and tech has gotten more durable, that’s still a whole lot of possible damage. The proposed countermeasure would be a fleet of satellites that would release gas into space before the solar storm hits Earth, which simulations indicate would cut the intensity of a major event by half, “an airbag in the magnetosphere” in the words of one of the co-authors. The researchers estimated that just 400 tons of material would be enough to cut the strength of a geomagnetic storm by 60 percent.

Paul Voosen, Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roofs

A new analysis from Verisk found that the average cost of a roof replacement in the United States in 2025 was $17,631, up 33 percent year over year, and the average price of a roof repair was $4,699, up 25 percent year over year. While last year was a cheaper one for the insurance industry thanks to a lighter-than-normal hurricane season, there are reasons to be anxious about the state of the roofs over our heads. Based on aerial imagery analysis, 38 percent of roofs of U.S. residential homes show moderate to poor conditions. This varies a lot region-to-region; in New England, 18 percent of roofs are at least 31 years old, compared to just four percent in the South where hail and hurricanes lead to, in industry parlance, “higher turnover driven by severe weather events and rapid housing growth.”

Carrier Management

How Much Could It Cost, Michael?

In a daring art heist the likes of which we have seen only a few times before, someone stole one banana that was duct taped to the wall, a piece that constituted the perishable element of Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious artwork, Comedian (2019). It was being exhibited at the Centre-Pompidou Metz when the diabolical theft was perpetrated. A museum security guard reported that the work had been stolen, at which point authorities sprung into action by replacing the banana with one of the other bananas that they keep on standby in the inevitable event that the banana currently taking part in Comedian (2019) gets a bit dicey. This has happened before, specifically last year when a visitor actually ate the banana. The perpetrators remain unknown, but one must imagine them — fewer than a dozen thieves, but possibly more than 10 — standing by a nearby fountain as Clair de Lune plays, consuming a banana.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

Orld-way Up-cay

“EA Sports FC 26” is the latest version of the annual tentpole international soccer video game that was at one point the officially licensed game of FIFA, before officials decided to go their own way and make their own video game. The EA game is still incredibly popular, and with the World Cup on the horizon, the game is preparing with a conspicuously similar but legally distinct 48-team international tournament mode. The good news for EA is that it already has the license for 41 out of the 48 teams involved in the actual World Cup and can use their kits and player names. While Congo DR and Bosnia and Herzegovina are still in the game, they’ll have just generic kits, but Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Curaçao, Jordan and Qatar are just not in it and will get the Generic New England Coach treatment.

Dan Bernstein, Sportico

Stars

Does having a star make films succeed? The answer is generally yes, based on an analysis of the performance of 3,052 films, with films starring A-Listers likely to make back their budget 2.54 times over while films with lead actors in the upper middle tier of fame (50th to 75th percentile) make back their budget 1.91 times over. Most interestingly, though, is that these numbers are super genre-dependent: horror movies get very little with additional star wattage, with an A-lister adding just a difference of +0.25 in that ROI, but romance movies live and die by the stars over the title, with an A-lister adding +1.74 to that median ROI compared to a lower-tier fame actor. In factm, A-list romance movies have a 3.82x ROI compared to 2.08 for lower-fame leads.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Buffet

Vegas has been shedding its iconic all-you-can-eat buffets or years, with the closure of the MGM Gran Buffet on May 31 signaling an end to an institution; there are only about a half-dozen all-you-can-eat buffets left on the Strip, down from 10 times that number, and it’s coming at the same moment that buffets experience a surge in interest elsewhere. According to Yelp’s 2026 Trends forecast, there was a 252 percent increase in searches for “all you can eat buffet,” and a number of buffet brands have been enjoying success, such as Korean buffet KPOT rising from three locations in 2020 to 150 by the end of the year.

Gabriel Baumgaertner and Kate Krader, Bloomberg

Valve

The user base of Valve’s video game storefront Steam has reached 42 million concurrents at a time, up 60 percent over the past five years, and according to PrivCo Holding, generated about $5.2 billion in revenue in 2025 for a net income of $1.5 billion. All the more impressive: Valve had just 79 people working on Steam at last count.

Austin Carr and Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Supernova

A supernova named SN 2023vbw was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2023, and a new paper describes how weird this particular explosion was. While first classified as a Type II supernova, it weirdly ended up getting much brighter at around 190 days following the initial detection, which was different than the general brightness plateau observed in most Type IIs. And it eventually radiated an estimated 3 × 10⁵⁰ ergs over the course of the explosion, which is 10 times as much as a normal Type II. This would seem to mean that SN 2023vbw is a pair-instability supernovae, meaning it was a rare blue supergiant star that probably had 140 to 260 solar masses and low metallicity.

Shreejaya Karantha, Phys.org

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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