Numlock News: May 29, 2026 • St. Lawrence, Cologne, Broadway
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Going To Be All Right
LinkerBot is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of humanoid hands for robots. It’s a Chinese company that produces hardware for automation, specifically hands with five fingers and at least 11 joints that sell for between $600 and $15,000 depending on the level of dexterity and the number of joints required. They’re selling a lot of hands: last year the company shipped 10,000 robotic hands, a figure which comes in at 80 percent of global demand. The robot hand business is a lucrative one, as the company is currently seeking a round of financing that would set its value at $6 billion, and it is considering going public in Hong Kong.
Fragrance
The market for men’s fragrances has grown considerably in the United States in just the past few years, and in 2025 stood at $3.29 billion, up from $2.49 billion in 2021. The number of influencers hawking smells has also increased sharply, according to social media data, which found that while there has been an eight-fold increase in the number of fragrance influencers marketing to women from April 2024 to April 2026, that increase is 12-fold for the men. Some of them are giving advice like spritzing 100 times, which, come on, this is just Axe Body Spray with extra steps and a higher per-ounce price point.
Jeannette Neumann and Rainier Harris, Bloomberg
Daredevil-Foamer Hybrids
The NYPD argued Wednesday that a surge in subway surfing incidents — where a person, usually a teen, rides the outside of a subway car on an elevated track in New York — is partly attributable to transit keys making their way into the wild. Essentially, these are skeleton keys for MTA doors, and can open locked cab doors and sidewalk hatches, aiding would-be subway surfers in trespassing into areas where they can get on top of a train. How those keys have been obtained — stolen or copied — isn’t entirely clear, but since 2023, there have been 76 people caught carrying transit keys while subway surfing, which would imply that there are lots of them out there.
Perfectionism
A new study published in Psychological Bulletin argues that perfectionism rates among college students have been rising. The study looked at data from 307 studies conducted from 1989 to 2024 featuring data collected from an aggregate 82,000 American, Canadian and British college students. Since the early 2000s, perfectionistic concerns like fear of failure and the fear of being negatively judged by others have increased sharply. The researchers attribute some of that shift to social and economic factors, such as inequality.
American Psychological Association
Broadway
The Broadway League has released final numbers from the 2025-26 Broadway season, which concluded on May 24, 2026. Overall, Broadway shows made $1.91 billion in grosses and attendance hit 14.6 million. That is a slight bump on revenue (up one percent) and a slight dip on attendance (0.6 percent). While the flat numbers are a little troubling for an industry that was hoping the post-pandemic recovery would continue apace despite the dips in international tourism to the United States brought on by [gestures vaguely towards DC], the difference when it comes to attendance isn’t raising drastic concerns because the 2024-25 season was technically 53 weeks compared to the 52 weeks of this year.
Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter
Brexit
In a result that is kind of funny no matter which way you slice it, people across eight European countries (The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden) view the European Union considerably more favorably today than they did in 2016, just before Britain heeded the voices in the back of its head that told it to jump. In 2016, the median across the eight countries was 49 percent favorable to the EU, 48 percent unfavorable, while in 2026 that’s now 62 percent favorable and 36 percent unfavorable. The most direct reason for this is, having seen the economic and political stagnation that awaits a country after self-ejecting from the European community, more Europeans are willing to put up with Brussels if it means evading that particular English brand of fiasco. A nevertheless possible and frankly funnier theory is that the main thing holding back European approval of the EU was Britain’s very presence in it. Based on the UK’s recent results at the Eurovision polls, I don’t think we can entirely rule out that possibility.
Sneha Gubbala, Pew Research Center
St. Lawrence
The St. Lawrence River has gotten noisier, in part due to changing dynamics in global trade owing to United States tariffs, and it’s potentially dangerous for marine life that include the fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales that call it home. The Port of Montréal has been humming: Trade with Africa is up by 39 percent and trade with Latin America is up 12 percent, as shipments that may have made their way to Canada through the United States are diverted to go directly to eastern Canada’s largest container port to avoid tariffs. The surge in traffic has some calling for more mandatory slow-down zones, of which there are currently two, one around the Port of Vancouver and the other in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Caitlin Stall-Paquet, bioGraphic
This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday edition, I spoke with Christian Elliott, who is out with a great new article called “Lessons of a landslide detective” in National Geographic all about the glacial collapse, Alaskan landslides, and the detective-geologist trying to save the state. I’m such a huge fan of Christian’s work, and he’s been doing some boots-on-the-ground science journalism that we often cover at Numlock. You can find his work at at christianelliott.me.
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This seems like another -umbrellas cause rain theories.
I wonder if part of it is currency-related. Countries in the EU that haven’t adopted the Euro have had an easier time than those who try to keep up with the regs, *and* are unable to adjust circulating currency have had problems; “PIIIGS.”