Numlock News: May 6, 2025 • Buttons, Hamilton, Gwaihir the Windlord

May 06, 2025

Rite Aid

Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy yet again on Monday, listing liabilities from $1 billion to $10 billion and planning to sell all of its assets to one or more buyers. Its previous bankruptcy cut the company’s debt by $2 billion, but even after emerging from that first go-around in 2024, it still owed $2.5 billion. As it stands, there are just 1,240 Rite Aids in the U.S., down from about 2,000 in 2023. For those unfamiliar, the company operated as a pharmacy for decades, only to make a fascinating pivot a few years ago by locking pretty much all of its items behind locked plastic cabinets (making it actually impossible to buy something from its shelves without the help of an attendant) and then firing most of those attendants anyway. This shift from “store you could buy items from” to “paranoid showroom for stuff you’ll just buy on Amazon” appears not to have been the right move.

Dietrich Knauth, Reuters

Hamilton

Hamilton: An American Musical, the soundtrack to the musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has now logged its 500th week on the Billboard 200 album chart. The album entered the chart at No. 12 in 2015, peaked at No. 2 in July 2020, and has stuck around ever since. Some of this, of course, is an idiosyncrasy in how the Billboard charts are now calculated: not by weekly album sales but driven largely by sustained streaming interest. Longer albums (like Hamilton, which has 46 tracks) inherently have an advantage given that a stream is a stream. It recently became the musical soundtrack with the longest run on the Billboard list, eclipsing the previous record-holder, My Fair Lady, which spent 480 weeks on the list, peaking in 1956.

Paul Grein, Billboard

Vilca

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 22 tubes made from bone discovered at Chavín de Huántar, an intricately carved Peruvian archaeological site occupied in the first millennium BCE. Upon analyzing the tubes — bird bones and deer bones — scientists found that six of them contained the same active ingredients as vilca. It is a substance that, when snorted, apparently provokes flowing, black-and-white hallucinations for about 20 minutes. In four of those six tubes, scientists also found the remains of tobacco roots and vilca pods, but no signs of burning, indicating these tubes were probably used for snorting, not smoking. It’s unclear what these were used for — possibly rituals — but onlookers fear that it’s exactly the kind of substance that would make Aaron Rodgers want to sign with the Jets again.

Lizzie Wade, Science

Met Gala

Last night was the Met Gala, which has become a major night for fashion. An analysis of 310 celebrity outfits from the photo archives of Reuters for the years 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024 has found a marked shift in the scope of the attire expected from attendees. By tracing the silhouettes of the head-on photographs of the outfits, analysts traced an explosion of layers, structured shapes, headpieces and fundamental reinventions of the gown format. The intersection of online virality from flashy and bold decisions on the red carpet has made the Gala into an aesthetic arms race, and a pretty thrilling one at that.

Ben Kellerman, Ally J. Levine, Tiana McGee and Travis Hartman, Reuters Graphics

Wellington

Two sculptures commemorating the efforts of aerial forces in wartime and the victory over totalitarianism by an international coalition are being removed from New Zealand’s Wellington Airport. I refer, of course, to the two eagles, one of which is being ridden by Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. The monument to the forces of Gwaihir the Windlord that turned the tide of the Battle of the Morannon has hung in Wellington Airport since 2013, each weighing 1.2 tons with a wingspan of 15 meters and hundreds of feathers produced by Wētā Workshop. The sculptures’ time has not been uneventful: in 2014, one of the eagles came crashing down during an earthquake, which is the second-most embarrassing thing to happen to the eagles since that business with the dwarves in the Misty Mountains. Nevertheless, they’ve stood as an inspirational idea in the airport, that even the most waylaid and troubled journeys can swiftly be solved by a deus ex machina once the gods have felt like you’ve suffered enough.

Koh Ewe, BBC News

Talk About It

A new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that the number of people using only psychiatric medication for treatment has declined for the first time in years, mostly thanks to an increase in the number of people who are also pursuing talk therapy. The number of American adults recieving psychotherapy increased from 6.5 percent in 2018 to 8.5 percent in 2021, an increase from 16.5 million to 22 million people. Talk therapy had been on the decline since the late 1990s, plateaued for a bit, but now is on the up again.

Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR

Reaction

In January, Europe’s crash testing organization began incentivizing automakers to put tactile controls back into the car in order to obtain the best safety ratings, as burying controls into a touchscreen console made for more distracted driving. As it stands, 97 percent of new cars released since 2023 contain at least one screen, and a survey of drivers found that 89 percent still prefer a physical button. Drivers who are distracted see worse reaction times than drunk or high drivers; according to the UK roadway safety charity IAM Roadsmart, response times of drunk drivers are 12 percent slower than those of your standard driver, those texting have a response time 35 percent worse and someone messing with Apple CarPlay has a reaction time 57 percent worse.

Carlton Reid, Wired

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