Numlock News: October 23, 2025 • House Hunters, Ghosts, Spies

Oct 23, 2025

Ghosts

Ghost hunting — that is, the phenomenon where spirits are not simply believed to exist but actively pursued by people claiming expertise in the matter — became an international phenomenon in 1848, when a pair of sisters claimed that they had determined a way to communicate with the dead through a knocking code. The sisters instantly became international celebrities and fabulously wealthy in the process, amassing a fortune of $500,000 (or about $20 million today) within five years. The American Civil War — a massive casualty event that bereaved millions of households — only accelerated interest in spiritualism. The war made the search for ghosts and the means to converse with them a reliable American institution that is still extremely lucrative for practitioners and skeptics alike, not to mention the television networks that broadcast the practice.

Alice Vernon, The Conversation

Bond

A tax filing from EON Productions in the United Kingdom has hammered down the final sale price of James Bond at precisely $20 million. In February, the longtime producer of James Bond agreed to sell its interest in the franchise to Amazon in a deal that sources placed at $1 billion. To be clear, the deal is probably worth way more than that sticker price, as the Broccoli family will still be exposed to the Bond franchise’s financial windfalls given the joint structure of the deal. Not to mention the various earnouts, bonuses and stock options that will add up to the final sale price. But still, a bald captain of industry summoning a comically low sum of money and ignoring the effects of decades of inflation in a spy movie is more of a pace with that other British spy franchise.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporer

Billboard

Billboard announced it will begin messing with its flagship chart yet again, as the economics of streaming have allowed songs to persist on the Hot 100 well beyond their initial blast of popularity. The evolution of the chart through the decades means that a list originally expressing popular singles with actual sales has become an amalgam of streaming and radio spins. This has had the effect of rewarding inoffensively popular songs that have a relatively high streaming floor with record-setting runs on the charts, such as “Blinding Lights” remaining on the chart for 90 weeks. Until this week, Billboard bumped a song from the Hot 100 if it fell below No. 25 after 52 weeks or below No. 50 after 20 weeks. Now the criteria is getting tighter, and songs will fall from the charts if they drop below No. 5 after a year and a half (78 weeks), below No. 10 after 25 weeks and below No. 50 after 52 weeks. Yes, surely this will solve the problem of nobody knowing what music is actually popular anymore.

Stephen Thompson, NPR

Chair

Police in Spain announced they have successfully busted a criminal group responsible for, what I think we can all agree, is at best the second-most audacious heist conducted on the European continent this week: the theft of 1,100 chairs from outdoor seating areas at restaurants and bars in Madrid over the past two months. Yes, the crime spree has shocked the nation and threatened their way of life by systematically stealing patio furniture worth around 60,000 euros from 18 different restaurants. Not exactly the Louvre, to be sure, but hey, at least the police caught them.

The Associated Press

Scents

Some who follow the fragrance scene have called out a trend of sweeter smells from the industry, a trend pinned on the industry responding to the GLP-1 phenomenon through offering customers sweet things that don’t require an appetite to enjoy. Of the fragrances released in 2024, 22 percent were classified as “gourmand,” a category that encompasses decadent and sweet-smelling scents. That number is only marginally higher than the 19 percent in 2023 but still meaningfully higher than the 15 percent seen in 2022. Demand and interest are certainly up; almost all of the top 10 bestselling fragrances on TikTok shop in the first eight months of the year contained notes like caramel-vanilla or strawberry-marshmallow, as the country seems dead-set on the idea of smelling like a vape.

Julia Press, Bloomberg

Humbug

Deloitte’s annual forecast for holiday retail sales shows consumers dialing back holiday spending, averaging $1,595, a decline of 10 percent over last year. The projection is $902 spent on retail goods this holiday season (down 14 percent, from $1,043 last year) and $694 spent on experiences (down six percent). According to the survey data fueling the analysis, shoppers intend to trade down, chase deals and reuse items from past holidays.

James Zahn, The Toybook

House

The flywheel upon which the global economy turns, the load-bearing beam holding up the cracked firmament of the United States society, the singular belief system that is managing to hold a disintegrating monoculture together, the apotheosis of the innovative age of domestic mass production and distribution that defined a generation of American hegemony; it lives still, I tell you. Yes, the HGTV television network has greenlit a further 400 episodes of House Hunters. The program launched in October 1999 and has heretofore presented over 2,400 documentaries on the bloodsport and the glory of the domestic housing market. The program and its more worldly cousin, House Hunters International, still attract 13 million primetime viewers per month. Fans have fallen in love with these desperate morons week after week as the hunters manage to pick domiciles for reasons that demonstrate that the “rational actor” is a convenient fiction developed by economists to help them sleep at night.

Michael Schneider, Variety

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