Numlock News: October 23, 2026 • Lorax, Seagrass, Armchair Expert

Oct 23, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Lorax

In a new deal that honors both the letter and the spirit of the work, glorified bargain bin Five Below will produce and sell exclusive plastic crap related to The Lorax, the Dr. Seuss conservation tale warning against commercialization, exploitation and myopic industry. Yes, in a brilliant business move that connects intellectual property commercialization, brand exploitation and keeping a close eye on industrialized production, this pointless junk — including a licensed Lorax Squishmallow that replaces the Truffula Tree stuffing now banned under CITES with clean, durable plastic — starts at just $5. Taking the long view, that’s an incredible deal given that these branded tchotchkes with the visage of a conservation Cassandra will very possibly one day outlive the actual child it’s given to, thanks to the resilience of modern polyurethane and the near guarantee that the extruded stuffing will gently break down into long-lasting and bioaccumulating microplastics.

Natalie Miller, Toybook

Panama

The Panama Canal has reported fiscal year 2026 data, reporting 13,951 vessel transits in the year ending September 30, up 4.1 percent year over year. Total tonnage transiting the canal rose 6.5 percent to 521 million tons. Overall, revenue hit $6.6 billion, up 16.6 percent year over year. The canal has recently increased daily booking capacity to 33 slots thanks to improvement in watershed conditions despite a withering El Niño.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Game

The average NFL game duration has hit 3 hours, 11 minutes this season, up seven minutes over the recent average. That is a shift in the wrong direction compared to other sports that have attempted to rein in their runtime and cut out the tedious elements that spark delays; Major League Baseball games, by comparison, are down from 3 hours, 11 minutes as recently as 2021 to 2 hours, 45 minutes as of this past season. One reason for the football delay is that penalties are spiking this year, hitting an average of 15 penalties per game, the highest since 2005 and up from 11.4 penalties per game as recently as 2023.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Armchair Expert

After years in the top 50 podcasts, Armchair Expert by Dax Shepard has quietly fallen out of the top of the charts, dropping from No. 50 in the first quarter of the year to No. 59 as of the most recent quarter. The program appeared in Edison Research’s top 50 listened podcasts for every quarter from 2022 to 2025. One reason for Armchair Expert’s decline is new competition in the niche — if people want to hear a celebrity talk to another celebrity about what it’s like being a celebrity, Amy Poehler is now available — but also it’s a sign that podcasts that signed exclusive deals with Spotify, such as Shepard’s, are losing out on a YouTube audience that is still pretty considerable and valuable for discovery.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Candy

Rising costs of confectionaries are causing a Halloween pinch, with candy prices up 15 percent in 2026, rising at a rate of four times inflation. Roughly 65 percent of ingredient costs in the candy industry come from the cost of cocoa beans, sugar and corn syrup, and all of those are having supply chain problems, hiked prices and import issues. If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the invisible hand of the market. Sure, candy’s expensive, and surveys found that people are reportedly buying less of it and buying cheaper stuff, but the good news is, thanks to the skyrocketing inflation seen in cartel-priced eggs and heavily-tariffed toilet paper, the vandalism that such cheapskate candy behavior on Halloween might provoke has been priced out as well.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Carriages

The New York City Council passed a bill Thursday that will ban horse-drawn carriage rides by June 2028, causing widespread disappointment in Ohio, probably. The legislation includes a concession to the 150 remaining carriage drivers, where the city must offer career counseling and referrals in the city’s transit and taxi industries, where they may be shocked to find we have developed mechanisms of locomotion that exceed one horsepower. The bill has critics, and many wonder how exactly the city intends to make 59th Street smell like horse dung, or who will blast “Empire State of Mind” on repeat for no reason, or who will rip off the Europeans once we get rid of the horses. I am on a London fact-finding mission to discover the future of New York’s next obsolete tourist-baiting transit option, and the answer is clear: I’m bringing Lime e-bike jousting to CitiBike, and I dare the government to stop me.

The Associated Press

Bacteria

Seagrass roots tend to sit in sediment that has very little oxygen content, and if anything, has buildups of sulfide that can poison plants. One way the planet’s 72 species of seagrasses can thrive in such an inhospitable environment is through bacteria and other microorganisms that can fix nutrients consumed by the plants, converting toxic sulfides into something useful. One issue, though, is that humans tend to pass an enormous volume of antibiotics — some 9,500 metric tons passed through sewage treatment plants and into rivers, of which 3,300 metric tons make it to the ocean — and those chemicals are doing what they are designed to do: killing those helpful bacteria. In lab studies, the leaves of seagrass in water treated with doses of antibiotics grew a third slower and lost much of their pigment compared to the control grass.

Scarlett Buckley, bioGraphic

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Jake Lahut, who is behind the outstanding and scoopy politics newsletter The Hut. We talked about he surprisingly rapid salience of the data center issue, and a surprising twist in campaign rhetoric since the start of the year, and dove into some significant and experimental shifts in how campaigns are being conducted. Check out The Hut, I really enjoy it:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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