Numlock News: July 10, 2026 • Fervo, Ballads, Cats

Jul 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Books

Unit sales of print books were flat in the first six months of 2026, down 0.3 percent. Adult fiction was up 5.7 percent over the period, while adult nonfiction was down 5.8 percent. The genre of nonfiction that sustained the biggest collapse was self-help, which dropped a calamitous 24.3 percent year over year. But I wouldn’t worry about them too much; those guys know how to get back on their feet by Looking Inward and Facing The Facts, In These Five Easy Steps ($28.99 US, $32.99 CAN, available April 2027). The top-selling book of the first half of 2026 was Theo of Golden, which moved 1,197,952 units, followed by Project Hail Mary, which sold 829,089. Other books in the top 10 include Dungeon Crawler Carl (446,460 copies), Heated Rivalry (384,004) and The Housemaid (354,188), as well as the graduation perennial Oh, the Places You’ll Go! with 481,967.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Turbines

Data center developers in Texas are exploiting state law to secure on-site power sources like diesel generators without the typical level of scrutiny. They’re skirting by on getting permission to operate them with minor permits known as “permits by rule” and “standard permits,” which are generally used by gas stations and dry cleaners, not OpenAI’s Stargate project. Under just the minor permits, Stargate got 10 turbines and 62 backup diesel generators that are allowed to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and 1,000 tons of harmful air pollutants annually. It was only after that did Stargate bother trying for a major air permit, which would add 41 more turbines and 18 more generators. It’s not just Stargate: Since 2024, at least 38 data centers have pulled off the permitting maneuver.

Evan Simon, Floodlight

Buses

The New York City Subway is the jewel of the region’s transit system, but the bus system is the workhorse, and the mayor and governor unveiled a plan to speed up one of the slowest bus systems in the U.S. The average city bus in New York moves at eight miles per hour, while the trains go 18 miles per hour. A host of proposed changes, including 28 dedicated bus lanes and a replacement of 40 percent of the fleet, would increase speeds by up to 20 percent. The bus network carries 2.75 million people per day, so a speed increase from eight to 10 miles per hour would in the aggregate be transformational stuff.

Stefanos Chen, The New York Times

Geothermal

Fervo, the enhanced geothermal company, has drilled Sawtooth 7, a 19,448-foot-deep well, one that includes a 7,500-foot span laterally across the subsurface. It took just 21 days to drill, which was the same amount of time it took to drill the smaller Phase I wells. By comparison, the company’s Project Red well in Nevada hit a depth of 11,220 feet in 70 days. The numbers are looking better and better for geothermal; costs are on track to get down to $5,500 per kilowatt, which is progress from the $7,000 per kilowatt costs of its Cape Station wells and on track for the target of $3,000 per kilowatt in the long term.

Matthew Zeitlin, Heatmap

Ballads

Chinese pop music sounds different than the beat-driven tunes favored in many other countries, with ballads regularly topping the charts. An analysis of 8,562 songs on NetEase Cloud Music, the Chinese streaming platform, found that just 4.1 percent of songs were “passionate and high-spirited” while the most popular emotional registers were “sad and depressed” (29.4 percent), “calm and relaxed” (19.5 percent) and “confiding and lyrical” (18.1 percent). One reason for this is that the primary way of interacting with pop music in China is not dancing as it is in many other countries but rather karaoke, which is an 86.3 billion yuan (US$12.8 billion) business and the centerpiece of China’s music industry.

Tiffany Ap, Bloomberg

Cats

Outdoor cats are tenacious hunters, and a new analysis of 533 studies on cat diet and predation events published over the course of a century finds that cats consume, at one point or another in the scientific record, nearly 2,100 different species of animal, of which 347 are in some capacity threatened, endangered or even extinct. While birds (47.1 percent of species consumed) were the most common prey, followed by reptiles (22.2 percent) and mammals (20.7 percent), at least seven percent of the species consumed by cats are insects and other invertebrates, mostly beetles. All told, 148 specific invertebrate species were identified across the studies as consumed by cats. Listen, domestication inherently involves a trade-off; dogs traded their autonomy for security, chickens traded their tenacity in exchange for global ubiquity and cats traded one vet visit per year in exchange for the right to kill literally any living thing on the face of the Earth that their feline nerve dares them to.

Christopher A. Lepczyk, Daniel Rubinoff, and Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk, The Conversation

Slop

New data from Pangram, a company that purports to detect AI-generated writing through a browser extension, reveals just how clogged up some of the internet has become with AI-generated posts. LinkedIn appears to be the biggest hotspot, with 30 percent of short-form content and 41 percent of long-form content on the platform flagged by the software as fully AI over the course of the second quarter of the year. Medium was also in bad shape, with 31 percent of the longform content appearing to be AI-generated, followed by X, with 29 percent.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

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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; SEN 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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