Numlock News: September 24, 2024 • Miley Cyrus, Shohei Ohtani, Novo Nordisk

Sep 24, 2024

Prices

Novo Nordisk A/S is making a lot of money off of Ozempic and Wegovy, but argues that the high price is justified because of the research and development costs that went into creating the drugs. That argument is about to get a little harder to maintain, as the drugs — which brought in $50 billion up through the second quarter and will make $65 billion by the end of the year, barring any changes — will very soon blast past the $68 billion that Novo Nordisk has spent on all research and development for the entire company conducted since 1995. The list price of Ozempic is $968.52 per month, but generic manufacturers said they could make it for less than $100, and one study put the number at $5 per month. That’s pretty high: Lipitor, a bit of a standard when it comes to “pricey miracle drug nevertheless consumed by lots and lots of people that made its manufacturer unspeakably rich in the process,” only went for $150 per month ($215 after adjusting for inflation) before it fell out of patent in 2011.

Robert Langreth and Tanaz Meghjani, Bloomberg

NFL

A new survey of 1,980 people who played in the National Football League between 1960 and 2020 found that 681 reported they believed they had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head. According to the survey, conducted by Harvard University, 176 respondents additionally reported a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia. CTE can’t be diagnosed in living patients, only after death; as a result, self-reported symptoms of the affliction, which include depression and self-harm, are the best we've got for a little while.

Becky Sullivan, NPR

Radio

While streaming services beef up the size of the long tail, making older hits more money and turning songs that aren’t just singles on hit records into overperformers, over on terrestrial radio things are getting pretty spiky. It appears that programmers don’t have a ton of good ways to figure out what people want to hear, so the adult contemporary stations have just been slamming a big red button labeled Play Miley Cyrus’ song “Flowers” until they come up with a better idea. The song has been at No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart for an aggregate 57 weeks, and has also scored 18 weeks at the top of the all-format Radio Songs chart, 17 weeks at the top of Adult Pop Airplay, and lock, stock and barrel 106 weeks atop all the airplay charts they maintain. That makes it far and away a historical front-runner, beating out “Blinding Lights” (87 weeks across all airplay charts), “Despacito” (74 weeks) and “Blurred Lines” (72 weeks), all of which were run into the sonic ground.

Gary Trust, Billboard

The Best Game

Shohei Ohtani, a guy who is trying to single-handedly beat the game of baseball, achieved something unprecedented last week by becoming the first player to ever get 50 home runs and 50 steals in a single season. He got that in a single game against the Miami Marlins, scoring the 50th steal in the first inning and the 50th homer in the seventh. That said, his performance in the game as whole is worth considering: In that single game he had six hits (including two doubles and three home runs), 10 RBIs and two stolen bases. That puts him tied for sixth place for most hits of all time, tied for fourth for most total bases (17) and tied for second for most runs created in a single game (18). Most exciting, though? Ohtani got 9.73 base-out runs added, which encapsulates how the team’s chances of scoring changed over the course of a plate appearance, the single highest level of that statistic in history. That makes the argument that that game might have been the best performance for a ballplayer ever.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Saudi Arabia

One big shift over the past several years has been the rise in demand for locally sourced content on streaming services. Take, for instance, Saudi Arabia, where the streaming service Shahid has increased its market share from 11 percent in the second quarter of 2022 to 19 percent in the first quarter of 2024, jumping to the top streaming subscription platform in the country and eclipsing Netflix. One reason for that is the availability of local titles: Neflix's catalog in the Middle East is 96 percent foreign titles to 4 percent local Arabic-language titles, while Shahid is 57 percent foreign, 43 percent local. To compete, Netflix is pumping money into new seasons of Arabic content like Dubai Bling and Finding Ola and funding new shows like Love Is Blind, Habibi and Basma.

Stephanie Prange, Media Play News

Churches

According to a survey of over 5,000 Americans conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, Gen Z is breaking a trend, with 40 percent of women describing themselves as religiously unaffiliated compared to just 34 percent of men. Historically and in every other age group, women are consistently more religious than men. The diverging trajectories are interesting and require lots of long-held ideas and assumptions about demography and sociology to undergo scrutiny. The cause is obviously nuanced, but recent social and political developments in the U.S. are seen as likely part of the soup here.

Ruth Graham, The New York Times

Shellfish

Japan is a major producer of shellfish, which by way of the transitive property of the marketplace means that Japan is a major producer of empty shellfish shells. Japan produces 450,000 tonnes to 500,000 tonnes of scallops in a given year, which by weight are half shell, so that means you’re talking around 250,000 tonnes of scallop shells produced annually. For the 150,000 tonnes of oysters caught in Japan, that's 80 percent shell by weight, so 120,000 tonnes. They’re usually dried and pulverized for fertilizer and civil engineering work projects, but processors are pursuing other possible uses, such as using them in ingredients for dyes, detergents and even fabrics.

Takumi Sasaki, Nikkei Asia

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