Numlock News: June 20, 2018

Luxury Ownership

The Millennial generation and the cohort that follows in our broke footsteps account for 30 percent of luxury good sales globally, according to Bain & Company, a figure poised to rise to 45 percent by 2025. The luxury business is in an interesting existential struggle of figuring out what, precisely, even is luxury anymore. Top-tier labels are now selling sneakers and sweatpants in order to juice sales, and figuring out whether "luxury" is defined by the item itself or the brand slapped on it is a tier of philosophical thought I never got to in college.
Marc Bain, Quartzy

LGBTQ Americans

A BuzzFeed/Whitman Insight Strategies poll of 880 LGBTQ Americans found that the top issue for 19 percent of the group is gun control,followed by 16 percent who said health care, 13 percent who said the economy or jobs, and 12 percent who said LGBTQ rights. This fervency seems to have grown out of the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people and led to absolutely no legislative changes at the state or national level. The poll reported 47 percent of LGBTQ adults said their support for changing gun laws rose after the Pulse massacre, and 43 percent said their views stayed steady.
Dominic Holden, BuzzFeed News 

Comedy Writers

An analysis of the writers behind 12,300 episodes of the top 100 comedy series on IMDb found supremely disappointing stats about the composition of writing rooms. About 52 percent of the episodes were written without a single woman writing, compared to less than 1 percent without a single male writer. All told, 81 percent of writing credits went to men.
Oliver Gladfelter and Michael Hester, The DataFace 
 

New Yorkers

A recent Quinnipiac poll of New Yorkers found that 75 percent of Democrats preferred experience over someone new to politics. This may prove to be a source of consternation for actress and activist Cynthia Nixon's bid for the governor's mansion against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is vying for a third term.
Shane Goldmacher, The New York Times 
 

Home Prices

In 1988, there was only one city in America where the average home price was over six times the annual median income. Today there are22 such cities. That number is poised to rise: in 13 of the nation's largest 100 cities, home prices rose by more than 10 percent last year. Thirty years ago, you could buy a home in 72 of the the largest 100 cities in America with less than 18 months of that city's median salary. Today, that's only possible in 25 cities.
Michael Hobbes, HuffPost 

Film and Television Tax Credits

California lawmakers have passed a revised version of their film and television tax credit program, which will now require applicants to report diversity statistics to the state. The tax credits are worth up to $330 million annually, and the new version with the reporting requirements goes into effect in 2020, should Gov. Jerry Brown sign the bill, as is expected.
Associated Press 

Comic Book Sales

May was a massive month for comic book sales from brick-and-mortar shops, with $49.05 million worth of comic books, graphic novels and magazines ordered from primary distributor Diamond Comic Distributors. That's the highest since November 2016, and a 2 percent beat of May 2017. The business has had a series of consecutive quarters where sales were down year-over-year since 2016, so this is welcome news that people may actually still be interested in stories about superheroes, I was getting worried there!
John Jackson Miller, Comichron