Numlock News: August 7, 2025 • Scorching Cells, City Shake Up, Deportation Capital

Aug 07, 2025

By Rachael Dottle

Walt is out on vacation, and filling in today is Rachael Dottle, a visual journalist at Bloomberg.

Scorching Cells

Many U.S. households and offices need AC all summer long to bear the increasing number of hot days. However, for the more than one million incarcerated individuals across the country, access to AC can be limited, and conditions are extreme. Concrete prisons with HVAC systems (built based on a historical climate that no longer exists) exacerbate the summer heat at many of these prisons. Reuters found that 266 state prisons experience temperatures that require AC every single day in the summer. Around 20,000 pages of temperature documentation from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation show how many prisons experienced and sustained indoor temperatures over 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the day.

Disha Raychaudhuri, Clare Farley, Travis Hartman and Adolfo Arranz, Reuters

Street View

New York City is covered in text — restaurant signs, graffiti, posters, ironic t-shirts, MTA service signs … there’s always something to read, possibly also in Manhattan’s favorite font (no, not Helvetica)! Through an analysis of publicly available Google Street View panoramas, you can now search through 138 million snippets of text instantly with a search engine made by media artist Yufeng Zhao. A story covered by The Pudding maps the geography of words like “pizza,” “gold” and “iglesia,” showing a city of spatial patterns and a rich urban environment full of layers. Is it unsettling to think about how much surveillance there is across the city and how much detail you can extract from publicly available imagery like Street View? Yes, yes, it is. At the same time, is it very cool to search the whole city across years and boroughs? Also yes.

Yufeng Zhao, Matt Daniels, The Pudding

Back-to-School

Summer is over, school shopping is here and tariffs are impacting just about everything parents think their kid needs for their dorm. About 90% of imported thermoses, table fans and microwaves in April and May came from China — and all have seen double-digit tariff increases. Tariffs on materials like steel and aluminum are also up 20 percentage points compared to last year, which may drive up the prices of cheap dorm furniture. Not everything is affected equally, though, so price comparisons across materials and countries could save serious cash; while polyester bedding has seen a 27 percentage point tariff increase, cotton bedding has only gone up 3 percentage points.

Andre Tartar, Bloomberg

Short n’ Sweet?

Songs have been getting shorter, especially with the increase of streaming in the 2010s, followed by the launch of TikTok and its explosive growth. In 2019, the average top 40 song in the UK was just three minutes, 12 seconds, compared to around four minutes in the early 2000s. Artists have been dropping things like intros and pre-choruses to get right into catchy melodies that play well in 15-second clips. There is some pushback, though. The first six months of 2025 have seen multiple songs like Chappell Roan’s four-minute 18-second “Pink Pony Club” defying these attention-deficit trends. Pop songs also seem to be getting happier, more evidence that we’ve entered another recession pop era — like 2009, 2024 had higher average positivity scores based on Spotify metadata.

Mark Savage and Jess Carr, BBC

City Shake Up

Over 100 Istanbul officials have been detained since mid-March. This includes the mayor, who was arrested just days before he planned to announce his run for Turkey’s president. Their arrests, seen by many as a crackdown on political dissent by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have not only disrupted day-to-day governance but also stalled critical projects such as ones aimed at fortifying the city against earthquakes. Among the other city leaders arrested were the heads of the city’s water utility, housing authority, public transit authority and urban planning agency, as well as eight district mayors from the political opposition.

Jennifer Hattam, Bloomberg

Deportation Capital

A deportation facility/airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, has become a crucial part of Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants. Since January, more than 40,000 people have been shuttled through this system, and over 200 deportation flights have departed from Alexandria. With tens of billions of dollars in additional funding now directed toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Louisiana is at the leading edge of an expansive and aggressive nationwide effort to expel immigrants. The state locks up more people per capita than nearly any other in the U.S. Unlike other states, a majority of Louisiana’s prisoners are held in local jails, with the state paying local sheriffs a daily rate per inmate, a lucrative system and incentive for the state.

Brent McDonald, Campbell Robertson, Zach Levitt and Albert Sun, The New York Times

Check out Rachael’s outstanding work at Bloomberg.

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 ·