Numlock News: November 4, 2025 • Lichen, Whiskey, Streams

Nov 04, 2025

Junior

Even after a show peters out on Broadway, it can have a long, productive life in secondary licensing — being trimmed or adjusted into junior versions of the show that can then be sold to schools looking to put on plays for a flat rate of around $700. The Addams Family, for instance, closed on Broadway in 2011 after just a year and a half, but has had a huge afterlife on the high school stage. By 2019, it became the most popular high school musical in the country. Once Upon a One More Time, a Britney Spears jukebox musical, has been doing great on the junior circuit in no small part because the girl-to-boy ratio in the play can be pretty high. That ratio is always a concern, given the generally understood demographic of interest in musicals at that level.

Elissa Nadworny and Lauren Migaki, NPR

Lichen

A new study found a lichen that is a pretty good paleontologist. Published in Current Biology, a new paper identified a species of bright orange lichen that preferentially colonized exposed dinosaur bones at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. Essentially, the lichen likes the calcium-rich chemistry of the substrates in fossils. This means the distinct spectral signature of lichen-covered fossils can be detected by a drone flying 30 meters above the ground, scanning the Badlands for signs of ex-life.

Phie Jacobs, Science

Louvre

The recent robbery at the Louvre has put a new spotlight on museum security and the changing practices of ensuring that the stuff in museums remains where they are. A preliminary report on the Louvre found that new security systems tend to focus only on the temporary exhibition spaces, with 60 percent of the rooms in the Sully Wing and 75 percent of the rooms in the Richelieu Wing not protected by video surveillance. This is not merely a Louvre problem, either. According to the National Association of Heritage Conservators and Museum Professionals, most of the 1,200 museums labeled Musées de France operate with a small staff and often employ fewer than 10 people.

Dale Berning Sawa, The Art Newspaper

Toys

A new report from Circana points to an improvement in the toy business after two flat years of sales. Data from January through September shows a seven percent increase in dollars compared to the same period a year before and a three percent increase in unit sales. Collectibles — trading cards, action figures and pop culture products — increased by 33 percent, and licensed products from movies, sports, games and other pop culture properties were up 14 percent, driving that growth.

James Zahn, The Toybook

Whiskey

Booming sales United States prompted a reversal of the Irish whiskey business’s recent decline. The business was nearly dead 50 years ago, at one point dropping to just two working distilleries in the country. That rose to four by 2010 — three in the Republic of Ireland (Cooley, Kilbeggan and the New Midleton Distillery that makes Powers and Jameson) and one in Northern Ireland (Bushmills) — but as of 2024, there were over 50 makers active. Contrast that with Scotland, where there are 152 whisky makers and the value of whisky exports is six times that of Ireland. Premium exports to the United States have helped the Irish whiskey business, with imports of high-end premium whiskey growing 826 percent from 2023 to 2024. As a whole, exports to the U.S. tripled to 6.1 million cases from 2012 to 2022, as the U.S. accounted for 40 percent of all Irish whiskey sales. However, sales are down to 4.8 million cases last year, due to rising costs in the cash-intensive business.

Evan Rail, Vinepair

Oil

Abandoned oil wells pose a threat to groundwater and emit methane. The question of how best to handle their cleanup is an issue that lots of states are just beginning to handle. At the national level, there are an estimated 2,500 inactive wells on federal lands managed by the Park Service, of which 93 are orphaned abandoned wells. Of those, 70 are currently leaking methane. Anyway, there was one guy left working on it for the Parks Service to plug the wells with cement, and his contract was not renewed last month.

Maxine Joselow, The New York Times

Suit

A lawsuit filed by the rapper RBX alleged that Spotify has deprived artists of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue shares, citing stream fraud and specifically arguing that the artist Drake’s performance on the platform constitutes evidence of that fraud. Drake became the first artist to achieve 120 billion total streams, but they allege that inauthentic activity was responsible for 37 billion streams from January 2022 to September 2025. The lawsuit claimed that there are individual accounts listening exclusively to Drake for 23 hours per day, though they did not make clear how they performed that analysis.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica

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