Numlock News: June 15, 2026 • Knicks, Nets, The Alien

Jun 15, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day made $44 million at the domestic box office and another $48.9 million abroad for a global opening of $92.9 million, beating studio expectations and giving hope for a solid Spielberg-style hold for next week’s numbers. Director-driven high concepts have been a hit at the movies while franchise fare has faltered — Obsession and Backrooms have held strong, while Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu have missed the mark — and it’s all come together in a domestic box office that is not only running 13 percent ahead of last year, but is also pacing just 3.4 percent behind the high-water mark year of 2019.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Knicks

The City of New York exorcised a half-century of ghosts with the first Knicks NBA Championship win in 53 years, a moment that sent the city into the streets and prompted local pillars of the numbers-newsletter community to get “why am I the admin of a groupchat called RIP DOWN THE CONGESTION PRICING CAMERAS AND MOVE THEM EVEN FURTHER UPTOWN” levels of drunk. The Knicks were a team uniquely constructed for this era of basketball and managed to deliver when it counted, finishing the playoffs with the single highest point per game differential compared to the regular season, a best-ever +14.9 points per game difference.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Hantavirus

Researchers studying the hantavirus outbreak that hit the cruise ship MV Hondius have identified a new lead in determining the origin of the Andes virus that hit the ship and prompted a global scare. While early reports pegged the likeliest vector on an excursion bird-watching trip to a landfill, genomic evidence about the virus strain, along with a reconstruction of the four-month road trip that preceded their cruise, indicate that the landfill may not be the source. Already it was a tough timeline; the incubation period of the virus is seven to 39 days, and patient zero developed a fever just five days after the excursion. The new theory is that the couple was exposed to the virus when they passed through Neuquén in their motor home 60 days before the cruise, potentially by picking up a stowaway rodent in the vehicle at that time.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

Japan

The total number of tourists to Japan is holding steady despite a major drop in visitors from China. In April, Japan welcomed 3.6 million visitors, down 5.5 percent year over year, but with new records for the number of visitors from South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and also France. That month saw a 56.8 percent year over year decline in visitors from China, which follows a diplomatic dust up between the two countries from six months ago related to Taiwan. Spending from Chinese visitors was down 50.4 percent; China accounted for 24 percent of total foreign visitor spending in 2025, but this year it’s down to 11.6 percent. This has led businesses that has previously catered to Chinese visitors to pivot.

Mayuko Kurihara, Nikkei Asia

Nets

A new analysis of insecticide-treated nets looked at 25 experimental studies assessing malaria incidence or malaria-related deaths and found that the nets are still very successful in combatting malaria. In Asia, ITNs were linked to a 68 percent decrease in malaria cases and an 18 percent decrease in related deaths, while in Africa, they cut cases by 29 percent to 40 percent. The somewhat wide variation in effectiveness indicates that while the nets may be a generally successfully and widely-applied solution, there could also be more complex factors related to mosquito diversity, insecticide resistance and overall compliance depending on the locatio of the studies.

Simon Wesson and Natasha Chen, Taylor & Francis Group

Potatoes

Archaeologist working at an Inca site found two rare 500-year-old freeze dried potatoes on the arid coast of southern Peru. They’re the only such potatoes found in more than a century. Potatoes have been grown in the Andes for thousands of years, and ancient Andeans developed a way to preserve potatoes where they exposed the root vegetables to mountain winter night frosts and then thawed them in the sun, repeating until they were chuño, a convenient freeze-dried source of calories that can last for years.

Sandee Oster, Phys.org

SPR

The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we’ll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 700 million barrels in 2009. Any deal to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would still need months to reverberate through the global energy economy, so that’s a substantial drawdown in reserves. Commercial stocks of oil are also being pushed to their limit; tanks need to have 10 percent to 15 percent capacity in storage to keep operations normal, and one storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma has drawn inventories down to 21 million barrels, a hair above its 20 million barrel limit.

Collin Eaton, Benoit Morenne, and Michael R. Gordon, The Wall Street Journal

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