By Walt Hickey
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Spooktacular
A U.S. District Court judge has issued a ruling on a lawsuit filed in federal court against Hershey. The suit alleged that the confectioner bamboozled customers, claiming that the company’s seasonal Reese’s peanut butter candies lacked the decorative details that Hershey’s claimed made them spooky. The suit claimed that the details on nine Reese’s products — a bat-shaped candy, a ghost-shaped candy, a football-shaped candy — did not look as they were supposed to. The bat was missing eyes, the ghost missing eyes and a mouth and the football missing laces, a lack of consistency in the application of frosting details that plaintiffs alleged meant they overpaid. The judge ruled that this was stupid, that the plaintiffs did not actually suffer economic harm and that their proposed class action would not be receiving their desired $5 million in damages.
Shrimp
Americans consume 5.5 pounds of shrimp per person per year, and 40 percent of that comes from India, which exported $2.5 billion worth of shrimp to the United States in the 2023-24 fiscal year. There, the exported shrimp is a major industry and source of jobs, with over 450 shrimp hatcheries, 50 feed mills, 100,000 shrimp farms and 240 processing plants fueling the American maw with crustaceans. And 75 percent to 85 percent of that shrimp is bound for America. That said, trouble looms in the form of a 50 percent tariff, which has decimated the industry.
Diaa Hadid and Almaas Masood, NPR
Mr. Beast
Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber and human greed exhibitionist behind one of the largest and most inescapable media brands online, is the face of an increasingly large company. Beast Industries employs 450 people — 300 making videos, 100 in the chocolate business pushing out Feastables — and generated $450 million last year in sales, about $200 million of which came from the chocolate. Investments in Beast Industries value it at $5.2 billion. That being said, it’s still losing money overall (hey, massive cash giveaways make great content, but you ultimately have to give away massive amounts of cash), and it finished $60 million in the red last year. Even the cash on the cutting room floor is shocking in scope: in 2023, it spent $10 million to $15 million shooting videos that were never released because they weren’t up to snuff.
Punts
Punts (a move in which a football offense makes a tactical decision to surrender the ball to their adversaries, but also sets the opposing team far back in yardage by enlisting the aid of a specialist called a punter) are on the decline. Sure, you wouldn’t know it if you’re a Giants fan, but punts have been getting rarer as kickers manage field goals from yardage that once seemed unthinkable. For most of the Super Bowl era, teams averaged around five punts per game, give or take a half a punt in either direction. In 1960, teams averaged 4.92 punts per game, 4.85 punts in 1980 and 4.98 punts per game in 2000. This five-punt trend continued through around 2017, when there were 4.77 punts per team per game. Then, the dropoff; by 2020, there were 3.71 punts per team per game, and this season it’s down to 3.65 punts per game.
Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal
Dog
The Rijksmuseum’s ongoing analysis of the magnificent Rembrandt van Rijn painting “Night Watch” has determined that the painter may have used an earlier illustration of a dog as a model for the dog in the painting. The dog in the 1642 masterpiece appears to be a near-identical copy of a dog drawn by fellow Dutchman Adriaen van de Venne, illustrated in 1619 in pen and ink. Thank god these men are dead, or the discourse on Tumblr would be downright nuclear. Allegations that a major commercially successful artist tracing material painted by a more obscure illustrator would have, I assure, absolutely torn the Rembrandt fandom asunder, and would have necessitated a Notes app apology at minimum and a likely pausing of their Patreon.
Mike Corder, The Associated Press
Clergy
The Roman Catholic Church is contending with a bit of a personnel problem, a long-term recruiting crisis that has resulted in a clergy that has been spread thin. Globally, the number of seminarians training for the clergy declined by 14,000 from 2011 to 2023, when it stood at 106,495. St. Patrick’s seminary near Dublin was once the world’s largest and could fit 500 students. Today, that number is down to just 15 new seminarians per year. In Italy, which long stood as sort of a papal farm team, many long-established seminaries dating back centuries have enrollment that only stands in the dozens.
David Luhnow, Margherita Stancati and Jon Emont, The Wall Street Journal
Movies
The United States used to account for most of the global box office, but China has risen up to challenge it, sort of. China’s movies tend to do remarkably well in China, without seeing the kind of numbers overseas that American movies can pull off. However, he size of China’s domestic market is so large that it still means a solid chunk of global box office revenues going to films originating in the Middle Kingdom. Most major box office markets don’t sustain themselves only through domestic production; just 21 percent of U.K. box office is for movies from the U.K., 54 percent of Japan’s box office is for Japanese movies, 59 percent of India’s box office is Indian movies,and 44 percent of the box office in the United States goes to films produced by companies in the United States. In China, that figure stands at 98 percent, which puts it on par with international cinema pariah Russia, which has a 100 percent domestic market.
Dorothy Gambrell and Tom Fevrier, Bloomberg
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