Numlock News: May 21, 2026 • Nereid, Schlitz, Pigeons

May 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

I’m back, after a lovely week and a half in Japan! I want to thank all the folks who filled in for me, I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I did. I’ll plug their work again down below, but for now, let’s shake off some rust.

Box Office

Now 20 weekends into the year, the North American box office is doing pretty well all things considered, with the cumulative box office coming in at $3.18 billion so far, up 16.2 percent over the $2.74 billion logged through the first 20 weekends of 2025. Sticky hits like Michael, The Devil Wears Prada and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie have managed to pull the overall box office upward, along with the likes of Project Hail Mary, all despite the kind of superhero fare that would ordinarily be bolstering studio revenues.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Alaska

Geological instability is of specific concern in Alaska; retreating glaciers, permafrost thaw and intense weather are causing more frequent landslides. Studying landslides is hard and predicting them even moreso. Getting the resources and monitoring equipment out in the field can face local opposition as a desire to learn what the ground is doing is overwhelmed by what knowing this information may do to property values. In Alaska, geologist Bretwood “Hig” Higman has worked to study these shifting landscapes through inexpensive, widely deployed radar instruments. They are enclosed in mason jars to deter animal interference and enter the field at about $300 a pop, and are now monitoring over 50 slow-moving landslides.

Christian Elliott, National Geographic

Triton

A new study out of Caltech looked into Neptune’s moon Nereid and concludes that it may be the last of the original moons of Neptune that survived an incursion by Triton, which is the largest moon of Neptune. Compared to the other gas giants, Neptune has got comparatively few moons, with just 16. Triton is believed to have been captured by Neptune billions of years ago in a process that scattered the rest of its original moons and pushed them into new, doomed orbits. Nereid — at 350 kilometers across and taking a whole Earth year to orbit Neptune — is odd because it has a highly elliptical orbit, getting within 1.4 million kilometers at its closest and 9.6 million kilometers at its furthest from Neptune. It is that same orbit that might have allowed it to survive the Triton incident.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Schlitz

Pabst Brewing Company will discontinue the once-beloved Milwaukee beer brand Schlitz, and the last batch of Schlitz will be brewed on May 23 at the Wisconsin Brewing Co. Launched in 1849 by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, the beer sent the brewer skyrocketing to No. 1 until it was supplanted by Anheuser-Busch in the 1950s. Schlitz itself closed its home brewery in 1981 and was purchased the following year by Stroh, which was in turn bought by Pabst in 1999. The final batch will be released as a limited release on June 27.

Stephen Bradley, Vine Pair

Memory

A new survey found that 41 percent of Americans have a lot of memories from when they were age 16, with 52 percent having little memories of that time in their lives. Push back the clock a decade and things get much fuzzier: Nine percent of respondents have a lot of memories of that time, while 59 percent have a little and 24 percent have nothing at all. Overall, 61 percent of the Americans said that their memories of childhood were predominantly positive, while 13 percent said they were mostly negative.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Pro Se, You Say?

It used to be if you wanted to find a sycophantic and obsequious lawyer who believed every single thing you said unconditionally, you had to know Robert Kardashian, but now this service is available to everyone in the form of AI chatbots, many of which are aiding pro se defendants in filing their cases. Legal aid is obviously the right of all people, but the immediate downstream impact is that dockets are now being clogged up with far more self-representing (pro se) defendants than typical, which does have direct implications for how well the legal system actually functions. Over the course of an 180 day period from 2024 to 2025, the number of pro se entries on federal dockets surged 158 percent compared to a similar period from before there were widely available chatbots. One study released in March found that the number of plaintiffs suing without a lawyer doubled to 39,000 nationwide in the 12 months ending September, 2025, up from a pre-2022 average of 19,700.

Steven Church, Bloomberg

Columbia livia

When did the rock dove become domesticated, and leave the craggy cliffs they called home to become the common pigeons that have appeared in municipal centers the world over? A new study published in Antiquity pushes that date back considerably, having studied bird bones found in the harbor city of Hala Sultan Tekke in Cyprus that dated to 1650 to 1150 BCE. An isotope analysis found that the pigeon diet was nearly identical to the diet of the humans who lived there, a tell-tale sign on either domestication or partial domestication. Previously, the earliest direct evidence of pigeon domestication was from 323 to 265 BCE at a Hellenistic Greek site.

Antiquity

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