Numlock News: August 29, 2025 • Orpiment, Megadoc, Storrowing
By Walt Hickey
We are off in observation of Labor Day on Monday! Be back on Tuesday, have a great weekend.
Megadoc
The making-of documentary Megadoc, the officially sanctioned documentary film detailing the production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, premiered at Venice Classics this week. As a result, new details behind the $120 million, 40-year germinating artistic passion project and financial fiasco have now come to light. I will be frank, this is my favorite genre of movie, whether it’s Burden of Dreams about the troubled production of Fitzcarraldo or The Sweatbox about the mess that was the production of The Emperor’s New Groove, this is exactly my jam. Reportedly, Megadoc does not disappoint. We even get some hard budget numbers, including $27 million spent on production design, $18.8 million on visual effects and $9.4 million alone on transportation. Anyway, I intend to be a good patron of the arts and buy a case of Coppola Wine to do my part to make Francis Ford Coppola whole.
Portrait of a Lady
The 18th-century Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi’s painting Portrait of a Lady was looted by the Nazis from the collection of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker after Goudstikker fled the Netherlands. That 1,100-work collection has been the subject of a hunt for the past eight decades, with heirs winning restitution of 202 other works in 2006. Portrait of a Lady was last traced to 1946, Switzerland, in the possession of Friedrich Kadgien, a high-ranking Nazi who fled Germany after the war. After which, the portrait went missing. Well, the work has been spotted in an unlikely place: the Kadgien family is selling a property in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and an examination of the photos on the estate agent’s website contained what appears to be the painting on a wall. When Argentinian police raided the house on Tuesday, a tapestry was instead in its place. Another painting believed to be in Kadgien’s possession, a floral still life by Abraham Mignon, was spotted by another researcher in a Facebook photo from one of the Kadgien sisters.
Senay Boztas, The Art Newspaper
Beatles
This fall, The Beatles will reissue their Anthology project, which is a four-volume set available as eight CDs and 12 LPs. This is the latest in a string of projects executed by the businesses controlling the catalogs in an effort to keep the Beatles relevant 55 years after they broke up. It is no easy feat to remain the biggest band in the world that long after breaking up. Since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991, the Beatles have sold 74.1 million albums in the United States, a figure that beats every other musical act over that period, a period in which the band was not even active. Since 2021, they have racked up 11.9 million equivalent album units in the U.S., on par with actually active streaming-first artists, and the most of any band.
Sardine’d
In Boston, it’s far from uncommon that a truck gets stuck because it is too tall to safely make it under one of the lower-than-usual overpasses in the city. The phenomenon is known as getting Storrowed since the incidents along Storrow Drive are notorious. This year so far, there have been 36 Storrowings that required police intervention on the three main roads that run along the Charles River, with bridge collisions accounting for slightly less than half of them. It’s not like people aren’t warned; there are over 40 signs along the most common thoroughfares indicating that the roads are for cars only. But Storrowings tend to heat up this time of year, when out-of-towners are there (some with U-Hauls) to drop off kids at college.
Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal
Cameras
A recent study found that speed cameras installed in New York City school zones reduced crashes by 14 percent and speeding tickets by 75 percent. The science has historically favored these kinds of interventions, with jurisdictions that use automated enforcement at intersections seeing fewer collisions and fatalities than intersections without automated traffic enforcement. Overall, while a few motorists get mad at their existence and their rollouts are never perfect, traffic cameras generally score high marks.
The Devil Wears Orpiment
A fascinating new study found that animals that live in an incredibly high-pressure, toxic environment can themselves become incredibly toxic as a result of the strategies they employ to survive. I will say, it’s a biological discovery that is somewhat obvious to anyone who has worked a corporate job for any length of time whatsoever. There is an undersea worm called Paralvinella hessleri that is the only known animal to colonize the hottest parts of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the western Pacific. The researchers found that P. hessleri accumulates vast amounts of deadly arsenic from its environment — a number described as “staggeringly high,” on the order of 10,000 μg/g, quite a bit higher than any other known arsenic hyper-accumulator — to the point that arsenic alone accounts for more than one percent of its body weight. The researchers found that the accumulating arsenic reacts with hydrogen sulphide (also toxic), forming orpiment — As2S3 — a mineral that can safely reside in a single layer of epithelial cells and which makes the worms a bright yellow.
Mohana Basu, Nature News, PLOS Biology
Electric Arc
Nippon Steel, which recently bought U.S. Steel, is investing $4 billion in a new electric arc furnace steel mill that is poised to open as soon as 2029. The mill will make steel products from scrap using two electric arc furnaces, with the goal of producing three million metric tons of steel annually. Nippon Steel, as a condition of its acquisition of the American icon, pledged to invest $11 billion into the company by 2028. The greener-than-usual mill will also join another suite of improvements at an Arkansas steelworks producing electrical steel sheet for autos as well.
Naoki Matsuda and Arata Shigeno, Nikkei Asia
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:
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: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·
Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·
Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
Have a nice holiday weekend!
I believe he sold his wine business to finance Megalopolis. So alas, that case of wine unfortunately won't help!