Numlock News: July 22, 2026 • Galaxies, Magic, Big Boy

Jul 22, 2026

By Walt Hickey

MTG

Hasbro, the trading card company that has a number of unprofitable side bets hawking toys, posted $1.14 billion in revenue, fueled by a record $545.3 million from Magic: The Gathering alone, which was up 32 percent year over year. The operating profit from the Wizards of the Coast (mostly Magic, a little Dungeons & Dragons) and Digital Gaming (basically just Monopoly Go!) were responsible for $270 million in profit, which was, in fact, higher than the $253 million posted by the company as a whole, indicating that they’re mainly making Mandalorian and Grogu merch as a charitable act. Meanwhile, on an alternate Earth 2 where that movie was instead released with the title The Baby Yoda Movie, Hasbro is now worth more than Nvidia.

Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Football

The 2026 FIFA World Cup final where Spain beat Argentina notched an average of 38.94 million viewers on Fox, a figure that doesn’t even include the 23.9 million viewers who caught the Spanish-language coverage on Telemundo or Peacock. That’s a massive number for the broadcast; it is the most-watched soccer match on record in the U.S., crushing the 33.09 million who tuned in to watch the United States lose to Belgium, and it came in 132 percent higher than the 2022 World Cup Final. The final’s viewership peaked in the 5:45 to 6 p.m. block, when 51.69 million tuned in. It is now the most-watched non-NFL broadcast since 2016, when the Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Big Boy

The largest locomotive in the world is a 1.2 million-pound steam-powered engine built in 1941 to haul freight over the Wasatch Mountains in the American West. It is named Big Boy 4014 and was part of a roadshow (railshow?) designed to convince people it’s not such a bad idea for Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern to merge. Anyway, it’s making grown men cry and burning up the message boards. There were 25 Big Boy locomotives made for Union Pacific in the 1940s, and they were retired in the ’60s as diesel electric engines became far easier to maintain, with just eight still existing today. And 4014 is the only one that still works, using 250 gallons of water and 15 gallons of fuel per mile.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

Hits

Netflix has been under scrutiny lately given the lack of major shows that have been able to penetrate into the culture following the release of the final season of their flagship show, Stranger Things, at the end of last year. Netflix remains a hit-driven business, so the success of its top tier is the bellwether of its cultural impact. Across 8,193 shows listed in the first half of 2026, the top 20 (0.24 percent of shows) were responsible for 8.5 percent of the views. The top 200 shows accounted for 30.8 percent of the views, and the top 500 were responsible for about half despite being 6.1 percent of shows.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Flip

Astronomers are attempting to figure out whether the Milky Way did a flip at any point, specifically wondering if galaxies like ours — those with slowly rotating stellar halos — are more likely to have experienced a disk flip at one point or another where the orientation shifted by over 90 degrees. The Milky Way’s stars are mostly in the flat spiral disk, but around that is a large but sparse and slow-rotating stellar halo, most of which are stars originally formed in other galaxies. New research studied 25 Milky Way-like galaxies and found that in simulations, the slow stellar halo was often found in those that had a head-on merger with another galaxy at some point, and then subsequently had a disk flip as a result of the collision. We do know about the first part — the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus dwarf galaxy collision 10 billion to 11 billion years ago — but now we think that may have sent us off our axis.

Royal Astronomical Society

Ore Into Iron

Earth’s core is mostly iron, and the magnetic field of our planet is the result of the molten outer core moving around the solid inner core. We know that the field has existed for at least four billion years, but given that the inner core is thought to have formed only a half billion years ago, what precisely kept that dynamo going for the prior 3.5 billion years is as yet unresolved. One less-understood part of this is the melting point of iron at two million atmospheres, a temperature generally thought to be around 6000 kelvin. A new study puts that melting point much lower, at 4420 to 5220 kelvin, and given the other substances in the mix, it’s probably 4284 kelvins. What that means is that the cooling of the core alone might have been just fine to produce the magnetic dynamo even before there was a solid inner core.

James Dinneen, Science

HENON

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that might cause issues here on Earth can only be detected with around 15 minutes of warning time, and even that is the result of putting a spacecraft at the L1 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth. A new project from the European Space Agency aims to give us more time, with the Heliospheric Pioneer for Solar and Interplanetary Threats Defense (HENON) mission set to launch in 2027. This project will travel in a special 15 million-kilometer orbit that will allow it to sample the solar wind much earlier and report back if the ion situation is getting a bit rowdy upstream. This could hypothetically give us two to three hours of notice rather than the 15-minute response window we now have.

Royal Astronomical Society

Very fun interview in the Sunday Edition this week as I speak to the phenomenally talented artist Carey Pietsch, whose work illustratingThe Adventure Zone series of graphic novels concluded this week with the release of The Adventure Zone: Story and Song. Carey’s work on TAZ was trailblazing; I am fascinated by these books in no small part because it’s an adaptation an a novel use of a novel medium in a novel medium. I was a big fan of the podcast upon which these books are based and I love this series of graphic novels.

The book, The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is available anywhere books are sold, do check out the unlocked interview.

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read.

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.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·