Numlock News: August 21, 2026 • Soju, Kenny Chesney, Algo Feeds

Aug 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Labubu

The unthinkable has happened: an explosively popular trend featuring the eye-watering sales growth of a small, cute item marketed to consumers who wish to collect them has, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, turned out to be a passing fad. Yes, Pop Mart has been forced to dial back expectations related to Labubu sales after revenue increased a pathetic 24 percent year over year to 17.2 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion) in the six months ending June, a calamitous decline from the sustainable and sober 200 percent growth recorded a year before.

Bloomberg News

There Goes My Life

An appeals court has ruled that a woman who lost $310,000 in a scam perpetrated by an individual impersonating the country musician Kenny Chesney cannot, in fact, sue the actual Kenny Chesney in an attempt to get some of the money back. The woman was contacted on LinkedIn in 2021 by a fake Kenny seeking cash that he needed in order “to appear at an awards show, to repair instruments and to pay for music videos.” The plaintiff sued the star for negligence, arguing that he should have taken proactive steps to warn fans about potential bad actors.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Time Zones

With the NFL on the cusp of a new season, expect to see a bunch of stories about the league’s global expansion and how much interest there is in an international expansion of the NFL. This is obviously a load of junk, as the international games have abysmal viewership, and sports cannot seem to get around the fundamental time zone problems of international broadcasting, namely that the events must be consumed live and people don’t like watching things when they would rather be sleeping. The World Cup and Olympics remind us of this every few years, and F1 is an ongoing cautionary tale. The average U.S. viewership of the championship game of the World Cup since 1994 is entirely based on timeslots, with championships airing from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. averaging 4.2 million viewers, while those airing between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. getting 27.22 million.

Entertainment Strategy Guy

Working Class

A new study found that on average, just 2.2 percent of legislators across 97 democracies are working class, despite 69.9 percent of the people within those democracies hailing from said class. In the United States, only 1.1 percent of legislators who get elected have previously held a working-class job.

Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes, The Conversation

Lost In The Sauce

Overall, 46 percent of respondents in a survey indicated that they preferred social media content be delivered through a chronological feed, with just 26 percent of respondents preferring the algorithm-based feed. While this effect is mediated by age a bit — young people born into a world of algorithmic feeds do indeed tend to prefer them — it’s the amount of time that people spend on social media that has the most pronounced effect. Among those who spent less than an hour a day on social media, 54 percent prefer chronological feeds and 18 percent prefer the algorithm. Among those who spent more than four hours, that flips, with just 38 percent preferring chronological feeds to 44 percent preferring algorithm-based feeds.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Landfill

A new analysis looking at landfills in the United States has found multiple instances of them logging temperatures vastly higher than the threshold at which environmental regulations demand action, and that has caused toxic emissions and literal geysers of the disgusting leachate liquid that results from running water through a trash heap. A temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit is a key threshold, above which action is necessary to determine a cause and reduce heat to avoid a breakdown of normal chemical processes. Over two decades, 20 of 100 landfills analyzed had reported temperatures north of 170 degrees Fahrenheit.

Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle, Bloomberg

Soju

Sales of the Korean spirit soju, which is distilled from grain, are rising significantly, with soju volumes in the United States projected to grow at an annual rate of 16 percent through 2029. That’s getting large booze conglomerates interested in the space, with Sazerac announcing its first soju brand.

Lauren Deppen, Food Dive

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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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