Numlock News: November 21, 2025 • Batman, Superman, Skateboarding Rivalry
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Thou Shalt Read The Fine Print
Earlier this week, Fox News Media announced that it will be releasing a splashy 52-episode star-studded podcast series called “The Life of Jesus Podcast,” which the company revealed would feature over 100 actors of some notoriety. This, however, came as a surprise to at least a few of those actors, who never actually signed on to make a podcast called “The Life of Jesus” for Fox News. It appears that in order to produce this podcast, Fox Faith went and acquired an audiobook published in 2010 called The Truth and Life Dramatized Audio Bible, which indeed is a star-studded audiobook of the New Testament. The audiobook features the voices of Kristen Bell as Mary Magdalene as well as Brian Cox as God. Other cast members, such as Sean Astin, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and more were also mentioned in FOX’s press release. It appears that at least some of this 52-episode new podcast may very well be ripped from the 23-hour audiobook. I mean, from a production level, it’s idiosyncratic, but it’s not like they’ve added much new source material in the intervening 15 years.
Cheyenne Roundtree, Rolling Stone
Teenagers
The sport of competitive skateboarding has long been a young contenders’ game. However, thanks to the success of a number of teenage competitors on the women’s side of the sport — No. 2-ranked Rayessa Leal and No. 1-ranked Chloe Covell in particular — next month’s Street League Super Crown Championship is poised to be especially interesting. As of 2013, the average member of the top 5 athletes across all categories on The Boardr was 22.0 years old, a sign of how youth-dominated skateboarding is. Since then, that figure is down to 18.3 years old. Among the vert Top 5s for men and women, that’s down to 16.4 years old now. These decreases are largely thanks to the women’s game: the best women’s skaters fell from an average of 20.2 years old in 2013 to just 15.9 years old in 2025.
Wreck
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot has returned to the Billboard charts, reaching No. 15 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart dated November 22. The spike in listenership coincided with the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. If you’re unfamiliar with that historical event, have I got a six-minute explainer for you. The song racked up 3.7 million official U.S. streams, up 140 percent week over week. I will point out that this implies the song does, in fact, pull hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of listens in your typical week anyhow.
Superman No. 1
A pristine copy of Superman No. 1 found in an attic sold for $9.12 million at auction on Thursday, a new record for the most expensive comic of all time. The 1939 comic book — graded 9.0 out of 10 — beat out a copy of Action Comics No. 1 that sold for $6 million in 2024. Comic prices rose sharply during the pandemic but have since cooled off, with the prices for some books even declining by a third or more.
Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter
Moss
A new study looked at what happens when you take Physcomitrella patens (known as spreading earthmoss) and plant it into a particularly extreme habitat. They did this by taking spores of the moss and strapping them to the outside of the International Space Station for nine months, exposing them to various levels of light filtration. All of the spores, upon return to Earth, posted excellent rates of germination. Even those fully exposed to UV radiation had an 86 percent germination rate, which is pretty close to the 97 percent germination rate those spores enjoy on Earth.
Batman
A new study published in npj Mental Health Research found that when an individual dressed as Batman entered a car on the Milan subway, people were more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors like giving up their seats. The control condition observed the behavior of 138 passengers on the subway when an experimenter who appeared to be pregnant boarded the train with an observer. In that scenario, passengers offered up a seat to the woman 37.7 percent of the time. In the experimental case, another experimenter dressed as Batman entered the same car as the pregnant woman, using another door. When the Bat was on the scene, 67.2 percent of passengers offered their seat to the pregnant woman. The researchers attribute the effect to an unexpected event (Batman) making people more aware of their surroundings, with the situational interruption providing the necessary mental shake-up to get someone out of their seat.
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Phys.org
Pascal’s Wager
Christie’s has yanked a machine designed by Blaise Pascal in 1642 from an auction where it was expected to sell for 2 million to 3 million euros. The machine is one of the earliest calculating machines, and was nicknamed “Pascaline,” one of 20 arithmetic machines made by the mathematician. Four heritage organizations went to a French court to block an export certificate, arguing that the device is a national treasure. Five of the eight surviving Pascalines are in French public collections already, but scholars argued that this particular machine is the only one of the eight that was developed for land surveys and thus remains a national treasure. The case will proceed in court. If formally labeled a national treasure, the state can deny an export license for 30 months, which is a grace period for national collections to raise money to buy it.
Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper
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I am glad that Gordon Lightfoot's music has apparently reached a new generation of music listeners, even after his death. He was a great storyteller, and I would submit that "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is arguably the best of his stories.