By Walt Hickey

Shells

A general principle of contemporary warfare is that it’s important to have lots and lots of ammunition to shoot your adversary, but a project to shore up the United States’ stock of 155 mm artillery shells has turned into a huge mess. General Dynamics was, by 2022, the only producer of the shell bodies in the United States, operating a factory in Scranton that had been producing with the same methods since the Korean War. An Army project to revolutionize the production line has gone very badly, as a $533 million project — that led General Dynamics to employ a Turkish subcontractor — has produced not a single shell.

Jesse Coburn, ProPublica

Romantasy

Sales of the red-hot literary category of Romantasy are down 23 percent in 2026, but that’s in part due to the fact that neither Sarah J. Maas (who writes A Court of Thorns and Roses) nor Rebecca Yaaros (who wrote Fourth Wing) has a new book out this year to add to their respective 26.9 million and 11.6 million copies sold in the U.S. Still, the genre is on the cusp of being a billion-dollar business in publishing; in 2025, Romantasy sales hit $930 million, up from $590 million in 2023.

Hannah Miller and Madison Muller, Bloomberg

Urchin

Japanese company Hideup has developed the “Coike,” or the “urchin,” which has begun to completely dominate American fishing. The bait sells for $15 to $20, but the original can fetch an order of magnitude more online. They do not resemble any particular prey — to fish they may look like a group of young fish, to us they look a bit like a wriggly urchin — but fish really, really love biting it, and experienced anglers concede they catch basically anything, defying the conventional wisdom that the best way to catch a fish was to “match the hatch” and mimick the actual prey that fish eat.

Jason Gay, The Wall Street Journal

Shipping

A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that shipping along rivers is responsible for a uniquely high fraction of emissions attributable to shipping in general. The analysis looked at 20 billion ship tracking records from 2019 to 2022 along 12,289 navigable rivers and canals, and found that inland vessels produced 164 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022 alone, good for 24.7 percent of total shipping emissions that year. Just 20 major rivers accounted for 69 percent of the emissions.

Paul Arnold, Phys.org

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Lotus

The Biscoff cookie, known best to fliers as the best possible snack to get on an airplane (fight me in the comments), has been attempting to expand into the United States. The Belgian snack food company’s team-up with Mondelēz has managed to increase its household penetration to 10 percent and has enjoyed a boost this year thanks to a viral TikTok recipe that has made Biscoff cookies a central part of a cheesecake recipe. In the first half of 2026, volume and revenue are up 20 percent.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Know Thy Enemy

The Dallas Cowboys, with $1.3 billion in revenue, $510 million in operating profits and a valuation of $15.5 billion as of 2026, are the most valuable franchise in American sports, up 22 percent over 2025. The team’s local revenue is 70 percent higher than the Los Angeles Rams, which are the second-highest-earning team in the league. However, the real action for the Cowboys is in their merch, which operates outside of the NFL’s overall shared merchandise system and brought in $200 million in annual revenue alone.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Nothing

Netflix has extended its deal to license Seinfeld for another five years in the U.S. and Canada, and Paramount will extend its right to air the show on basic cable for another three years. The show, which started airing in 1989, remains one of the largest draws to the small screen even today, with 60 million Americans watching Seinfeld in the first half of 2026. It is the most-watched non-network series when it airs on Comedy Central and the second most-watched thing on TV Land.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter

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

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