Numlock News: November 24, 2025 • Machu Picchu, THOR-05F, For Good

Nov 24, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

For Good

Wicked: For Good made $150 million domestically and $76 million overseas, which is good for $226 million and the fourth-best global opening of the year, behind Lilo & Stitch, Jurassic Park: Rebirth and A Minecraft Movie. It managed to do so well despite having the remarkable disadvantage of being based on the second half of Wicked, a play with an infamously weak second act. All told, North America accounted for 62 percent of sales. However, the studio hopes that percentage will eventually skew a bit more global. The Wizard of Oz tends to have a bit more of a constituency in the U.S. than the rest of the world, where making educated minds, vital organs, counseling services and affordable transits home tends to be part state-supplied social services rather than difficult quests requiring highway infrastructure.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Dummy

The long-sought female crash test dummy is moving forward, with the NHTSA unveiling THOR-05F (or the Test Device for Human Occupant Restraint, 5th-percentile Female) after over a decade of development. The hope is to better model what seat belts, airbags and other in-vehicle safety amenities do to a rather small woman. European officials plan to add it to their tests, and in the U.S., it mostly came down to more testing and consideration. Each individual crash-test dummy can cost more than $1 million.

Camila Domonoske, NPR

Secondary Sales

When retailers receive a return, it is often cheaper for the retailer to just chuck it in a box with its brethren and sell it off to a secondary marketplace. Retailers (like Dollar General or T.J. Maxx) or flea markets then engage in the labor-intensive work of sorting all the material and figuring out what is actually valuable for sale. Secondary sales were worth $846 billion in 2024, up from $297 billion in 2008. In general, that is a good thing, and means that perfectly good items have a chance at not being thrown into a landfill brand new. Some of the faster-growing buyers include factory outlets and salvage dealers. You can also just buy one of those aforementioned mystery boxes, but be forewarned; one mystery box full of anonymous returns that sold for $742 weighed 450 pounds, featuring 430 packages containing 582 items, taking two full days of work for four people to sort and log. Fully 68.4 pounds of it was just plastic and cardboard packaging trash.

Annamarie Conte, Wirecutter

Leave

While working conditions in medieval England were brutal for peasants, in some places the workers got better sick, annual and bereavement leave than plenty of workers get today. In the U.K. today, workers are entitled to 28 days of annual leave and have no statutory rights for bereavement leave. However, a new paper found that peasants on the estate of Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire were entitled to a year and a day of leave if sick, and widows were granted leave upon the death of their husbands. Generally, tenants were entitled to a fortnight or a month of sick leave. If that is somehow pretty competitive with modern-day standards, perhaps that’s more of a reflection of the modern-day standard than, you know, the generosity of feudalism.

Alex Brown and Grace Owen, The Conversation

Video Games

Total video game spending is up three percent year to date compared to 2024, and that’s being driven by a 10 percent rise in mobile gaming spending, the smash-hit Nintendo Switch 2 and the surprise over-performance of Battlefield 6. Surprising, because the game has generally been considered the “is Pepsi okay?” of first-person shooters after category leader Call of Duty. The news here is that Battlefield 6 has become the best-selling game of 2025 so far and produced the highest single-month sales of any game in the industry since 2022. The Switch 2 is also a hit; it sold 328,000 units in October and is outpacing the original Switch by 68 percent.

Natalie Miller, The Toybook

Smoking, Hot?

Cigarettes and cigars are making their way back into movies and television shows, according to data from the Truth Initiative and the NORC at the University of Chicago. Appearances of cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products in movies are up 10 percent year over year, and about half of the movies that came out in 2024 had an appearance of tobacco. Smoking rates remain low — these days, around 11 percent of Americans say they smoked a cigarette in the past week — but the fear is that, much like vaping, the progress of decades of anti-tobacco efforts is always at risk of being undone with cultural shifts.

Laura Cooper and Terell Wright, The Wall Street Journal

Machu Pichu

A city is having intense arguments over the current state of its public transit system. The reason this is a noteworking story? The city in question is the 15th-century Inca city of Machu Picchu. The site attracts 1.6 million tourists per year, but there’s a dispute over who gets to provide the bussing services to the site. For the past 30 years, the bus company Consettur has been responsible for shepherding about 4,500 tourists a day from a train station in Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu. The tourists skip a two-hour walk, with a round-trip ticket costing $24 for a foreigner and $15 for a local. But Consettur, 38% owned by the local district council, has lost its license to operate that transit link to a rival bus company, San Antonio de Torontoy. This has infuriated locals who, as recently as September, blocked the railway line in protest of what they claimed was an insufficiently open bidding process. The price to access Machu Picchu itself is $57.

Jane Chambers, BBC

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