By Walt Hickey
Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.
Forgeries
Police in Bavaria have seized a collection of forged artworks that were being attributed to Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Juan Miro and Frida Kahlo. This comes after coordinated raids in 11 towns in Germany, five cantons in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. They allege that a 77-year-old German and 10 accomplices conspired to commit fraud with art forgeries, and had been tipped on to the case after their primary suspect tried to sell two works presented as original Picassos out of the back of their car to a buyer who went on to alert the authorities. Additional investigation turned up roughly 20 more works, including a copy of a painting in the Rijksmuseum by Rembrandt called The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild. The sellers were looking for 120 million Swiss francs and audaciously claiming that the one in the museum was actually the fake.
Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper
Zubeen Garg
Last month saw the death of Zubeen Garg, a cultural icon in India’s Assam state. His recording career was, like many singers in the country, enormously productive; one large collection of cassettes has 38,000 songs from Garg in its collection, including many songs that cannot be found today. Music ownership is a generally contentious issue, but for a singer with Garg’s diverse career — he sang in 40 languages and dialects — figuring out who owns what and what can be published becomes chaotic rather quickly. Several songs have contested ownership, and just 1,033 of them have been registered with the Indian Performing Right Society so far. In India, where singers might have massive oeuvres and perform in many languages, this is far from an issue unique to Garg’s catalog; SP Balasubrahmanyam sang over 40,000 songs and was in a protracted legal dispute with composer Ilaiyaraaja.
Hurricane
Melissa has rapidly intensified to become the third Category 5 hurricane of the 2025 season, and is poised to strike Jamaica at near peak strength this morning. The storm is now the 45th Category 5 hurricane since records began in 1851 in the Atlantic basin. The only season to produce more Category 5 storms was the notorious, destructive 2005 season, which produced Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The Dvorak satellite intensity estimation technique, which is a standard for estimating hurricane intensity without direct observations, hit T8.3 on Monday, the highest-ever logged in the Atlantic.
Michael Lowrey, Eye on the Tropics
I want to shout out a great newsletter called Semafor Media, written by a friend of mine, Maxwell Tani, and Semafor’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. It dives into the fascinating political, cultural and financial forces shaping global news organizations. I’m personally a huge fan; each issue is full of really thoughtful analysis and the occasional colossal scoop. In my experience, it’s basically where the news gets its news — check it out and subscribe for free here.
Receipts
It turns out that new image generation models are getting really good at producing convincing fake receipts, which some people have evidently submitted to companies on expense reports. AppZen, a software provider, said that receipts accounted for 14 percent of fake documents submitted in September, up from zero percent last year. The Fintech company Ramp flagged $1 million in fraudulent invoices in just 90 days. Corporate brass is getting suspicious; SAP found that 70 percent of CFOs think that employees are using AI to falsify travel expenses or receipts, with 10 percent certain it’s happened in their company.
Cristina Criddle, Financial Times
Comics
Graphic novels have achieved a new normal in book stores, with 41 million units sold in the 12 months leading up to September 2025. Admittedly, that is down 4.7 percent compared to the same period a year before. However, that is still a much higher level than seen prior to the pandemic and reflects a broadly higher baseline interest in comics. The novel-length comics for kids are now 36 percent of the market, fueled by the success of books like Dog Man, Warriors, Wings of Fire and The Baby-Sitters Club, which sent kids’ comics up five percent in unit sales. Also having a great year are horror comics, with the sales of horror comics up 25 percent year over year, outpacing even the 18 percent overall growth in horror books.
Uncontacted
The London-based Indigenous rights organization Survival International released a new report identifying 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups in 10 different countries, 95 percent of which reside in the Amazon rainforest. Many are facing threats; 65 percent are threatened by logging, 40 percent by mining, and 20 percent by agriculture. According to the analysis, half of the groups could be wiped out within 10 years without government intervention and protection from violence, organized crime and disease exposure.
Steven Grattan, The Associated Press
Swift
It’s always tough to gauge the success of an album now that an album’s revenue is no longer “record sales” but rather “a diversified stream of various different physical and digital products all priced dynamically and generally illogically.” For a smash hit like Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift, this exercise borders more on Fermi estimation, where we’re honestly just trying to figure out what order of magnitude we’re dealing with here. To get the revenue, we’d have to combine wholesale prices quoted by merchants — $23.49 for vinyl, $10.34 for CDs — and retail pricing on the Swift web store (where Swift kept the retailer’s cut and made at least 25% above wholesale). Add to that the wholesale 70 percent cost of the 358,000 digital album downloads and the standard $0.0053 rate per stream, Swift and Republic Records were likely looking at $80 million in U.S. revenue in the first week and something closer to $135 million globally. And that doesn’t even begin to count the merch.
If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·
Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·
Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
Hurricane Melissa's barometric pressure is down to 892 millibars, tying it for the third strongest hurricane in the Atlantic basin since they started keeping records. I went through a Category Five Hurricane (Andrew, in 1992), and it's horrible, to say the least. Sending my best to the good people of Jamaica right now.
I subscribe to Semafor, and can attest to the uniqueness and quality of information contained. Sign up, you'll be AMAZED!