Numlock News: July 17, 2023 • Dead Reckoning, Teff, BandLab
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
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Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One won a pyrrhic victory at the box office this weekend, bringing in a muted $56.2 million from Friday to Sunday amid hopes for a $60 million-plus opening. That said, the film did open on a Wednesday and the five-day number that captures those premiere nights — $80 million — is considerably better looking, though a $300 million budget will do the film no favors when it comes to recouping. Internationally the film looks great, bringing in $155 million overseas despite a weak $25.4 million in China. The Mission: Impossible movies tend to be leggy, and this one may very well continue to draw viewers once the competition gets less intense come August.
Seats
There are no minimum airplane seat regulations in the United States, and the FAA has gone so far as to concede in court that they can’t do anything about it unless it’s necessary to protect passenger safety. Last year the FAA put out a request for comment on if seat sizes were a safety issue, and the public was considerably more enthusiastic than the feds: Over 26,000 comments came in over a single three-month stretch.
Joseph De Avila, The Wall Street Journal
Hotline
Last year the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline switched from a 10-digit number to 988, hoped to be an easy-to-remember and convenient overhaul of the system. The result, a year on, is an unqualified success: Texts to the lifeline are up considerably, and wait times are down from 2 minutes 39 seconds to a mere 41 seconds. The $1 billion launch of the 988 line also prompted many states to invest in the 200 local call centers that form the backbone of the hotline, but owing to a tight labor market it’s been hard to fully staff them.
Ryan Levi and Dan Gorenstein, NPR
Comedies
The comedy genre on television is faltering a bit, with the classic pure-play comedy diminishing in popularity. In 2012, broadcast television networks aired 31 comedies in prime time, a level that as of fall 2022 was down to 14, with NBC not airing any comedies at all. This coming fall is poised to be even worse with just 10 comedies on the broadcast slate, but that’s lower than usual owing to the U.S. writer and actor labor action. Nevertheless, even the comedies that do make it to air — and for that matter, the comedies that get recognized for Emmy consideration — are more often than not just dramas with a couple comedic elements. From this year’s crop, only Abbott Elementary and Only Murders in the Building are half-hour comedies in the typical sense, with The Bear and Barry heavily infused with drama, while hour-long Ted Lasso, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Wednesday at this point are more dramedies if anything.
Teff
Teff is a small grain that’s a staple in Ethiopia, where 90 percent of the crop is grown globally and where teff grains account for two-thirds of the daily protein intake in the typical diet. They’re used to make injera — a type of flatbread — as well as all kinds of other applications one would expect from a staple grain. In the U.S., teff’s popular among Ethiopian and Eritrean-Americans, with the Teff Company putting up annual sales of around $1 million a year, but there’s buzz behind the grain and it could find a place in mainstream American cuisine the same way that other previously regional grains, like quinoa, have. It’s got a short growing season, is full of fiber and requires less water than other grains to grow, and it’s gluten free, which has solid traction among some niches. Acreage is up 25 percent among farmers that supply to Teff Company.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Offices
The United States federal government has an enormous amount of office space, and it’s being underutilized. This was a problem well before the pandemic changed the way that a lot of people work, and has only gotten more abject as a shift to hybrid has cemented. According to the results of a preliminary Government Accountability Office assessment of 24 agencies, 17 of those agencies reported that less than 25 percent of their office space was in use. GAO further found that if an agency called in all employees for a day, it’d still be just two-thirds full, and so it probably makes sense to either part with or reconsider the use of a bunch of federal office space.
Lamar Johnson and Kevin Bogardus, E&E News
BandLab
BandLab is a free mobile music-making app that’s used by 60 million registered users. The app helps people make songs, sure, but goes a step further and helps the musicians — many of whom are amateurs — get onto streaming services. It’s been around since 2016 but hit its stride in the past year, with 200 million TikTok videos tagged #bandlab in April. Several artists who got their start on BandLab have bagged record deals, including Diego Gonzales, d4vd, thekid.ACE and ThxSoMch, and three of those artists are teenagers. Also interesting: 40 percent of the users are women, who have long been underrepresented on the producing side of the music business.
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