By Walt Hickey

Frank

The storied banking house JPMorgan Chase & Co. is dealing with a deeply embarrassing and expensive fiasco in the form of legal fallout from their acquisition of Frank, a student finance company whose founders were recently convicted of cooking the books prior to their acquisition and defrauding the bank. Last week, executive Charlie Javice was sentenced to seven years for the scheme, which resulted in JPMorgan buying the company for $175 million. Adding insult to injury, however, is that the terms of that deal required JPMorgan to cover future legal costs for the accused executives, meaning that the bank had to fund the legal defense of two people charged with defrauding it. That legal bill came to $115 million, dwarfing the $30 million spent on Elizabeth Holmes’ legal defense. The money is in no small part going to the army of lawyers — 19 officially appeared for Javice and 16 on behalf of the other defendant, Olivier Amar — working on their behalf.

Bob Van Voris and Jef Feeley, Bloomberg Law

Din Tai Fung

Taiwanese restaurant Din Tai Fung has 17 locations in the United States and averages $27.4 million in gross sales per location annually, which would put it at the top of its class in per-location sales. By comparison, Del Frisco’s Double Eagle pulls in $13.8 million per location, Smith & Wollensky does $13.4 million, The Cheesecake Factory does $12.4 million and Nobu Restaurants does $10.1 million. Din Tai Fung has a cult following and a large presence internationally as well, with 165 locations worldwide. This includes opening locations in Manhattan, Singapore, Dubai and Disneyland in 2024.

Brent Crane, Bloomberg

Axolotls

Ever since being so threatened in the wild that they made the endangered species list in 2006, the amphibious salamander native to the region around Mexico City, known as the axolotl, has been catapulted to international recognition and notoriety. It’s in no small part because the animal basically looks like a Pokémon. There was an axolotl Squishmallow in 2019, a Minecraft presence by 2021 and it was added to the 50 peso note in 2022. A million are kept as pets worldwide. Now, there’s a publishing boom: between this year and next, there are no fewer than 12 books coming out — Axolotl and Axolittle, The Great Axolotl Escape, Little Axolotl, My Axolotl Life, Axl the Axolotl Is Not a Frog and Dawn of the Axolotl among them — in addition to of course the eight-book series Axolotls! that launched in January. That is good for upwards of 20 axolotl-adjacent literary properties hitting shelves in 2025 and 2026. If you’ll excuse me, I need to mine the IUCN Red List’s Class of 2024 to figure out which critically endangered animal is going to make a lot of money in publishing five years from now. My money’s either on the critically beguiling Seychelles Sheath-tailed Bat, the jaunty Tymphrestos Mountain Grasshopper or the endearing-and-endangered Socotra Karst Crab.

Joanne O’Sullivan, Publishers Weekly

Lithium

Lilac Solutions is attempting to extract lithium from the Great Salt Lake in the continued quest of battery supply chain companies lining up consistent sources of the crucial cathode fodder. Direct Lithium Extraction is a new way to extract lithium from rocks, and Lilac wants to commercialize it. Instead of evaporating lithium brine, there’s a chemical or physical filtration process that pulls the ions out. Indeed, the Great Salt Lake isn’t even that ideal of a place to try to extract lithium — there, the desired lithium is 70 parts per million, compared to 200 parts per million in California’s Salton Sea and over 700 parts per million at another site in Argentina. However, the thinking goes that if they can get the equipment to work there, it’ll work at the other sites too.

Alexander C. Kaufman, MIT Technology Review

Chocolate

The spiking price of cocoa has driven confectioners to innovate the chocolate out of their chocolates this Halloween. Some of this has just manifested in the form of smaller candies; your standard Reese’s cup is a two-pack that weighs 1.5 ounces, but the seasonal Peanut Butter Pumpkins are individually-wrapped 1.2-ounce servings that, let’s be honest, are pretty heavy on the peanut and light on the chocolate. Kit Kat Counts, a vampire-themed treat, is an ounce lighter than the snack size. But there’s more, including chocolate-free Cinnamon Toast Crunch versions of Hershey’s Kisses, salted caramel-coated Butterfingers, Kit Kats encased in vanilla cream and M&Ms filled with berry-flavored peanut butter.

Yasmin Tayag, The Atlantic

Home

Today, 1.5 million more adults under the age of 35 live with their parents than a decade ago, an increase of 6.3 percent. While urban rents have gone up four percent per year, wages have risen only 0.6 percent, meaning it’s a real squeeze for people attempting to leave the nest. The wages, coupled with tough math on starter homes — the median house price in the U.S. is up 90 percent in the past 10 years — have pushed the median age of a first-time buyer up from 31 years old a decade ago to 38 years old today.

Rohan Shah, The Conversation

Honk

A new study presented subjects with videos of people driving as if they were in front of them, behaving at times courteously and at other times like jerks. One segment of the study wanted to figure out how likely people were to honk at those driving aggressively, and asked participants to rate on a five-point scale how likely they were to engage the horn. The study found that the overall likelihood of honking at a bad driver was 2.59 on the five-point scale, so essentially a neutral response. However, the actual experiment focused on the bumper sticker on the car in the video; when the bumper sticker supported the political party that the subject opposed, the likelihood of honking increased up to 3.12, a statistically significant leap. Neutral stickers, no stickers and in-party stickers came in pretty much normal, so good news for the ☪☮⚥✡ı☯✝ crowd out there.

Rachel Suzanne Torres and Benjamin David Farrer, Frontiers of Political Science and Michael Miller, University of Cincinnati

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