Numlock News: June 27, 2025 • Comics, The Academy, Putters

Jun 27, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Turnitin

The automated plagiarism detection software Turnitin is somewhat controversial, with disputes over its efficacy. Either way, colleges and universities shell out big bucks to have the tool on hand for faculty. However, staying true to the nature of their work, pretty much every deal Turnitin holds with a given college is fairly unique, with broad disparities in per-student costs depending on the university. In California, for instance, the Cal State system is charged $2.71 per student this year, with colleges within the system paying $3.19 per student for the AI upgrade. Meanwhile, South Orange County Community College is paying $3.57 per student for the same service. This adds up: U.C. Berkeley is on a $1.2 million 10-year contract, and the Cal State system paid an aggregated $6 million over the past seven years.

Tara García Mathewson, The Markup

Creditors

The Diamond Comics bankruptcy may have concluded with the company’s corporate assets being sold to new owners, but the old husk of Diamond Comics — which has lost $10 million in value over the course of the proceedings — has been funding the end of its operations with a loan from Chase. To service this loan, old Diamond is considering a divisive and extremely controversial move for the 128 creditors that previously did business with the largest middleman in the comics industry. Diamond might sell off the remaining inventory stored in their warehouses, even the comics, books and toys that Diamond doesn’t actually own. Those 128 creditors include not just large producers like Marvel and DC but also a host of smaller, independent comics companies that stored their products on consignment with Diamond in the interest of keeping the books available for sale.

Heidi MacDonald, Comics Beat

The Academy

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or AMPAS, has invited 534 people to join the ranks of Oscar voters. That is the largest batch of invites sent out since 2020, and it echoes last year’s sizable class invitation (487 invitations) after three consecutive years of nearly 400 people getting asked to join. Of the group, 55 percent are based outside the United States, and 41 percent are women. If all were to accept the invitation, there would be 10,143 voters for the Academy Awards.

Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter

Putters

The world of professional golf has been swept into a tizzy thanks to a new putter dominating the greens: the L.A.B. brand. The putters were designed to reduce or eliminate torque, that pesky twisting force that makes the head of the putter rotate in a non-ideal fashion. The new brand starts at $399 and can go for well over $1,00 after modification, which seems like a wild quantity of money to spend on a tool to shepherd a ball across a few yards of grass. However, they’re selling incredibly well: last year, the company sold 130,000 units, and this year it’s on pace to triple that.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Glove

The largest glove maker in the world is Top Glove Corporation Bhd., with manufacturing facilities in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam and a customer base that exists in 195 countries. That’s the number companies tend to throw out when they mean “yeah, all of them,” but don’t want to get too specific about whether or not they’re selling gloves to the North Koreans. Top Glove makes 95 billion gloves per year, exports them to 2,000 customers and posts a most recent quarterly net income of 34.7 million ringgit (US$8.21 million).

Justina T Lee, Bloomberg

Affiliation

Globally, among adults who were raised in a religion, 91 percent of respondents remained within their broad religious category (e.g., Christians remaining Christians, Buddhists remaining Buddhists) while just 3 percent switched to another religious category at some point during their adulthood. However, 6 percent became disaffiliated with any religion entirely. Among those religiously affiliated, 99 percent of Hindus and 99 percent of Muslims remained Hindus and Muslims, respectively. Among Christians, only 83 percent kept the faith, with 2 percent switching religions and 15 percent dropping out entirely. That level of disaffection was surpassed only among Buddhists, who saw 19 percent of respondents disaffiliate. Among those raised religiously unaffiliated, just 7 percent joined a religion.

Yunping Tong, Pew Research Center

Ukraine

Ukraine’s armaments industry has expanded significantly for deeply understandable reasons. With the $140 billion in military aid contributed by allies in NATO becoming somewhat less reliable, Ukrainians are pitching that those allies invest in Ukraine’s defense industry. They would then own a piece of what’s promising to be one of the largest European defense industries moving forward. The domestic arms industry in Ukraine has developed an output capacity of over $35 billion, but recent estimates hold that only $12 billion worth of orders have been placed. An investment in Ukraine’s defense business would mean Ukraine gets cheaper and quicker weapons to the front. At the same time, backers get an unprecedented R&D opportunity to test weapons in real battle conditions with instantaneous feedback rather than the customary years-long development and testing process.

Luke McGee, Foreign Policy

This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to my friend Manny Fidel, one of the hosts of NO SUCH THING, a podcast which launched last year and has soared in popularity to my utter delight. It’s a great show, and I wanted to have Manny back on again now that the show has actually launched. We spoke about topics including why Dasani tastes like that, why the TSA is still unpleasant, and why people used to look older.

Numlock Sunday: Manny Fidel on relentless curiosity and why Dasani tastes like that

Jun 22

"We talked to the famous water sommelier, and he told us that if you’re drinking water cold, it’s really gonna be hard for you to tell the differences in the taste. The coldness of the water is so abrasive that you’re not really thinking about the minerals or the creaminess of the water underneath the temperature."

Read full story

Manny can be found at NoSuchThing.show, there’s a ton of overlap in Numlock and No Such Thing consumers, so do check it out:

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