Numlock News: April 22, 2024 • Ghosts, Crocs, Quasi-Moon

Apr 22, 2024

Next Big Thing

Terence Reilly made his name as the guy who made Crocs, the brand of clogs, into a genuinely hot item over the course of a five-year stint as chief marketing officer. In 2020, he bounced over to a new job over at a company which also successfully managed to ride marketing lightning: Stanley, which saw its 40-ounce water bottles jump from a $73 million business in 2019 to a $750 million business last year. In a big shakeup, the executive has now jumped back to Crocs, this time as the president of the shoe brand Heydude, which was acquired in 2021 at a price of $2.5 billion. Heydude enjoys a similar aesthetic reputation as Crocs once did, and as of 2023 was posting $950 million in sales. And, just because I’ve always wanted to appear in the cynical “before” montage in a documentary about an eventually successful brand, I’ll go on record here saying that I’d never be caught dead in a pair of Heydudes, and they’ll never catch on.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Swift Sales

In a single day, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has become her largest sales week for an album in the U.S. with 1.4 million copies sold, beating out the 1.359 million copies of 1989 (Taylor’s Version). That’s not even factoring in streaming equivalents, and only included CD, vinyl, cassette and digital download purchases of the album, so no funny business. The 31 songs generated 243.4 million on-demand audio streams just on April 19, and counting those streams the album earned 1.6 million equivalent album units. It’s easily the top-selling album of 2024 so far, beating out the 188,000 sales of Cowboy Carter handily. On vinyl alone it’s a juggernaut; the 600,000 combined sales of vinyl LPs on day one makes it already guaranteed to be the second-largest sales week in the modern, post-1991 era of vinyl.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

Historical Markers

The United States has over 180,000 active historical markers throughout the country, but little in the way of a national policy or code regarding what and who ought to be considered historical, or for that matter what actually happened that was commemorated. For instance, three separate states claim to have the site of the invention of anesthesia, two states claim to have Daniel Boone’s bones, two states claim to have sent the first telegram, and Texas inexplicably claims to be the site of the first successful airplane flight. Not to mention the material issues: Over 500 markers describe the Confederacy in glowing terms and 70 percent of markers that mention plantations don’t mention slavery — yikes. Some of them are barely history to begin with, including 14 markers memorializing a ghost, two markers about a witch, one about a vampire, and one about a wizard. California had one commemorating a dead mastodon that, upon further analysis, turned out to be a dead circus elephant.

Laura Sullivan and Nick McMillan, NPR

Uncrustable

Smucker’s brand of premade sandwich-esque ravioli called Uncrustables has been on a tear, reaching $686 million in sales in 2023 and poised to hit $1 billion in sales in 2026. Bought by J.M. Smucker Co. in 1998 for $1 million, the investment has repaid hundreds of times over every year. Since 2019, sales of the snack are up 136 percent, and last year sales increased by 34 percent alone. It’s building a third factory in Alabama on top of the two existing factories that are solely devoted to producing Uncrustables.

David Crowther and Millie Giles, Sherwood News

Ejiao

Ejiao is considered a luxury product in China, a substance that is extracted from donkey hides. The domestic donkey population in China has sharply fallen, so the demand has been met by exports from Africa. That has caused problems in rural areas, where donkeys that are essential for many farming tasks have instead been killed for the cash values of their skins, so much so that in February the African Union approved a ban on the slaughter of donkeys at its heads of state summit. Demand has gotten completely out of hand: In 1990, ejiao makers in China needed 200,000 donkey hides a year to meet demand, a figure that today is somewhere between 4 to 6 million donkey hides per year, or roughly 10 percent of the global donkey population, estimated at 53 million.

Michael Schuman, The Atlantic

“Moon”

Earth has a bit of a hop-on in asteroid 469219 Kamo‘oalewa, which ranges from 40 to 100 meters across and rotates at a brisk one rotation per 28 minutes. It follows an orbit around the sun, but it moves in sync with the Earth, so it’s sort of along for the ride with us. A new study in Nature Astronomy has a fascinating theory about the rock, even going so far as to point to its precise origin. The argument is that it’s from the moon, and that a 1.7-kilometer-wide asteroid hit the moon, creating the 22-kilometer-wide Giordano Bruno crater, which is the youngest large crater on the lunar surface. In doing so it ejected as many as 400 fragments the size of Kamo‘oalewa, and depending on how long ago that collision happened, some fraction of those still survives.

Daniel Clery, Science

Go East, Young Man!

Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta on the island of Java to a proposed new city called Nusantara on the island of Borneo, and the government has begun enlisting influencers to get young Indonesians excited to move to the new capital. Jakarta is overcrowded and, most significantly, it’s sinking at an alarming rate, so the hope is to coax lots of citizens to move to the as-yet unconstructed new capital. 1.9 million people are expected to move in from Jakarta. It’s not the first time a country built a capital from scratch — Brazil built Brazília in 1960, Egypt is building a new administrative capital 30 miles away from Cairo, and obviously no sane person would create Washington, D.C., where it is unless they were desperate to wrangle a national bank out of the cold, dead hands of Thomas Jefferson — but it is a big sell to the people of Indonesia. Half the country’s population is aged 18 to 39, so the hope is that the influencers can move the needle.

Michelle Anindya, Rest of World

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