By Walt Hickey

Durian

A bumper crop of durian during the same year that many plantations have mature trees of a promising new variety has sent the Malaysian market roiling, prompting some vendors to just give the fruit away. Malaysia ordinarily produces about 550,000 tonnes of durian per year, but 2026 has been abundant, and it crashed the price of the beloved fruit across Asia. One factor fueling the issue is the Musang King, a particularly prized variety in China known there as the “Hermès of durians.” The issue is, once it started getting popular, a bunch of farms switched over to it and all those farms’ orchards reached maturity at around the same time. Some sellers are dropping the price by a third to 50 ringgit per kilogram.

Koh Ewe and Kelly Ng, BBC News

Chosen

The company behind a money-printing spin on an iconic franchise based on the hottest I.P. ever told has been dragged into court amid allegations of screwing over early investors. The Chosen, a high-budget television show that adapts the timeless story of a carpenter from the Levant who makes good, made its $11 million budget for the first season thanks to crowdfunding that meant that 16,000 Series B stockholders had skin in the game on the Lamb of God. The franchise has gone on to be a massive hit, bringing in tens of millions at the box office, ahead of what (and I’m just intuiting based on the source material) is poised to be a shocking final season. In March, 5&2 Studios cashed out those Series B stockholders at $3.75 a share, which many investors viewed as their version of 30 pieces of silver. The plaintiffs allege that the original math from 5&2 was that The Chosen and its follow-up movies and television shows could generate $1.4 billion from 2026 to 2029, implying a $150 million enterprise value. Instead, they claim, insiders cooked the numbers, dropping the revenue projection to $722 million, which dropped the valuation to $52.9 million and prompted the $3.75-a-share kiss on the other cheek goodbye. Behold, The Day of Judgement is nigh, not on the plain of Armageddon, but in Wilmington, at the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Eriq Gardner, Puck

Supersonic

A new Federal Aviation Administration proposal would repeal a policy dating to 1973 that banned non-military aircraft from traveling faster than the speed of sound while over U.S. soil. The ban originally came because the shock waves stemming from supersonic jets’ sonic booms can cause property damage, and were also considered to be incredibly irritating: In the 1960s, the FAA and U.S. Air Force conducted sonic boom testing over Oklahoma City over a six-month period in order to gauge what inhabitants felt, and there were thousands of complaints and damage claims. What’s changed in the interim? Well, on one hand, the regulator proposed a limit on sonic boom overpressure to not exceed 0.11 pounds per square foot at the surface, but more importantly, rich people want to do this so the government doesn’t actually care all that much about what you think anymore.

Allyson Versprille, Bloomberg

Brick

The next trendy device is one specifically designed to disable the rest of your trendy devices. The Brick is one of many phone-locking gadgets to emerge in response to people getting concerned about their screen time; it locks off parts of a phone’s operating system and apps once the phone taps a small plastic brick. According to SimilarWeb data, downloads of the Brick app rose from 14,000 last October to 33,710 in November, then 103,632 in January, and there were 59,729 downloads in May alone.

Ashley Wong, The Wall Street Journal

Keeping Up With The Faroes

The local government has approved a plan that would link up Shetland’s mainland to neighboring islands in the Scottish archipelago by tunnel, a project that would replace an ailing ferry system. A feasibility study first proposed adding two tunnels — one connecting Shetland to Yell and then another tunnel from Yell to Unst, with two possible further tunnels to Whalsay and Bressay to come. Currently the council operates a ferry system connecting nine islands. Unst is the most northerly island in the United Kingdom, and is the site of the U.K.’s only spaceport. The tunnel investment paid off big for the Faroe Islands, 200 miles to the West, which counts over 20 tunnels of which four run under the sea within the self-governing nation in the Kingdom of Denmark.

James Cook and John Johnson, BBC News

Caviar

The company that sells Kaluga Queen brand caviar went public on Tuesday in a Hong Kong IPO, a big move for the company that has a 36.1 percent market share for sturgeon roe. China was responsible for 54 percent of global caviar production in 2025 thanks largely to Kaluga Queen, which exports about 80 percent of its roe, particularly to Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and Singapore, with domestic sales accounting for just 16.2 percent of revenue. China is projected to account for about two-thirds of caviar production by 2030.

Lorretta Chen, Nikkei Asia

Bugs

Over the past three centuries, scientists have described about one million species of insects. The field of entomology understands that it’s a long way off from describing all of the insects on Earth, though, and the consensus was that in total, given what we know about the distribution and diversity of insects, there are probably something like six million species. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences increases that number considerably by pulling from a statistical technique developed by epidemiologists, suggesting that there may be as many as 20 million insect species on the planet.

Annie Roth, Science

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By Walt Hickey

BTS

BTS has notched their second consecutive month as the top tour in the world as of May, grossing $127.8 million selling 641,000 tickets across 12 shows entirely in North America, with nine shows in the United States and three in Mexico. Though this particular chart only goes back to 2019, they have now beaten out the Rolling Stones for the biggest monthly gross by a group. So far since the Arirang World Tour kicked off in April, the tour has grossed $204 million and sold 1.1 million tickets. It has more than 50 shows to go in the year and is probably just days away from beating the $213.9 million notched in BTS’s Love Yourself World Tour in 2018-19.

Eric Frankenberg, Billboard

Equestrian

Former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt left baseball to bet on a different horse in the sports investment space, putting his weight behind the Premier Jumping League, an equestrian competition. The league announced on Monday that it has managed to sell its very first franchise for an eye-popping price of $50 million. Even among nascent sports leagues that cater mainly to rich guys, that number stands out: SailGP franchises were selling for $5 million to $10 million in the series’ first two seasons, the Pro Padel League’s New York team was valued at $10 million in 2025 and Major League Pickleball only recently got its franchise expansion fees into the eight figures when the Palm Beach Royals paid $16 million to join.

Justin Birnbaum, Sportico

Drone Shows

It’s an exciting time for the companies competing in the drone show business, as technical and equipment advances and robust audience interest have combined for a fiercely competitive industry catering to entertainment in the sky. Even the American industry concedes that a lot of the action is in China — currently the largest drone show record is being traded between Chinese outfits, and stands now at 33,615 drones — but all kinds of events are buying up drone programs, from municipal holiday celebrations to church events. The cost of this kind of show scales with the number of drones flying that day, and generally comes in at $150 to $200 per drone.

Sheon Han, Wired

Cyborgs

In 2021, researchers first demonstrated that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled by electrodes implanted in the cerci organ, and by 2024 the team was able to get a swarm of 20 such cyborg insects to coordinate, with the goal of developing biological robots that could be released after natural disasters to search for survivors. Cockroaches, while not exactly lovable, could be viewed as a bit of an out-of-the-box platform for such applications, the authors argue. Now the Nanyang Technological University team has taken things further, and developed a way for the roaches to operate underwater. They’ve 3D-printed a watertight resin suit with a tank of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide that links to the spiracles that enable the cockroaches to breathe the oxygen that results from the reaction. This means that the roaches can move underwater with remarkable speed; on land they clocked the cyborg roaches going 87.5 millimeters per second, and in the water, the roaches moved at 78.4 millimeters per second. That will be an important figure to remember when things goes terribly wrong and technologically-empowered insects attempt to enact their revenge.

Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist

Colorado River

Four states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — that constitute the Upper Basin states of the Colorado River have pumped the brakes on a deal that would bring water from the river to Native American communities that are owed a share of the river. It has been 118 years since the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government indeed owes tribes water, but as it stands, there remains the single largest outstanding unresolved claim to the river’s water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe. Currently, 22 tribes have recognized rights to use 3.2 million acre-feet of water, which comes in at 22 percent to 26 percent of the water; many tribes don’t fully use that recognized right while these other tribes have negotiated, sued and bargained for years to get the water they are owed. A deal was struck between the Navajo and Hopi — who have had a somewhat contentious relationship in the past — and Arizona, but the Upper Basin states balked at the proposed settlement and have since worked to stymie a resolution in Congress.

Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Alex Hager, KJZZ News-Phoenix

Romance

For years, first-run romance television content was evenly split between scripted romance television and unscripted stuff, but lately the scripted stuff has been on a tear, accounting for 83 percent of commissions in the first half of 2026. Of those, 40 percent are literary adaptations. Romance popularity is up seven percentage points to 49 percent as of 2026 among audiences 18 to 24. The shift lately has been the literal switch away from reality and towards fantasy. It seems audiences are drawn to the fully-plotted bodice ripper (or hockey sweater-ripper, depending on your tastes) adaptations and away from the messy, built-in-the-edit gamified reality show romances where 25 people who want Instagram followers pretend to compete for the affections of someone who we will soon find out posted something heinous in 2017.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Russia

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is beginning to have serious ramifications domestically within Russia, as new Ukrainian tech that can destroy Russian infrastructure even in Moscow has led to economic and psychological ramifications, capped off by a mid-June attack that disabled the largest oil refinery in the capital through 2027. Ukraine’s efforts have reduced refining capacity by an estimated 700,000 barrels per day, and over half of Russia’s regions are rationing fuel. This has caused other issues: high inflation, a labor shortage for the first time in modern history, inevitable government spending cuts and residential construction down 40 percent in Q1. It’s all warning signs for economic trouble that has rattled many among Russia’s elite. Complicating matters further is that ending the war might not actually solve this problem, as the economic shock of cutting all the government money that had been pouring into defense industries might cause an even larger problem.

Peter Frankopan, Foreign Policy

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By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Hacky Sacks

The bean-filled footbags best known as the genericized brand Hacky Sack are once again popular, a 1990s throwback that had faded for much of the 21st century but has evidently caught on among the youth, fueled in no small part by shortform video apps. While many are selling for between $5 and $15, this is a hobby we’re talking about, so naturally premium products are emerging, and one design advertised as “the Missile” is now selling for $23. That’s a remarkable price point for what is effectively a bag of beans, yet it’s still down from $34 in May.

Miles J. Herszenhorn, Bloomberg

Jackass

Toy Story 5 made another $70 million domestically in its second weekend release, a relatively standard decline, which brings its global total up to $585 million after 12 days, keeping it on pace to beat the $1.07 billion made by Toy Story 4 to be the highest-grossing film in the franchise. It held off new competition in the form of Supergirl, which came in a bit below expectations at $38 million domestic, and Jackass: Best and Last, which brought in $8.2 million domestically and $1.9 million overseas.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Yachts

There were 1.2 million registered boats in Florida in 2024, up 20 percent compared to 2023. It’s causing problems in densely-packed waterways, and the sticker shock of maintenance is leading to scores of abandoned vessels across the peninsula. This is a particular issue in Miami-Dade, where there are 73,000 boats, with high demand for marina space meaning that the less-affluent boat owners have been priced out. And given that repairs, docking, fuel, and insurance can add up to 10 percent of a boat’s value, some people are simply ditching their floating money pits. Florida spent $13 million to remove abandoned watercrafts in 2024.

Michael Smith, Bloomberg

Missions

A new study from the Planetary Society sought to figure out which NASA missions got the best return-on-investment. After looking at 90 NASA science missions from 1994 to 2023, it found that while the most expensive billion-dollar missions did indeed produce the most highly cited papers, there is a sweet spot for missions that cost $250 million to $750 million that led to a fast time-to-science (just six years) and a solid balance of reliability, scientific productivity and speed.

Mona Patterson, Science

Payroll

This forthcoming negotiation between the MLB Players Association and Major League Baseball is being touted as a situation where the players are focusing on their share of total revenues while the fans are most concerned with reducing the vast disparities between different payrolls. Or is it? No, there’s a third thing at play here, specifically the owners trying to pull off a shell game that obscures the real issue at hand, which is that they want to tie player pay to baseball revenue in a moment when revenue is less certain, and when the real action is in the spiking value of these teams. Since 2011, reported revenues are up 116 percent, payrolls are up 75 percent, but franchise valuations are up 464 percent.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Containers

The newest report from the World Shipping Council about containers lost at sea is out, with the industry estimating that 1,478 containers were lost overboard last year out of 280 million containers transported overall. That is up from 576 containers last year, driven by just a few major incidents (the MSC ELSA 3 sinking off the coast of India with 640 lost containers paramount among them) but still overall well under the historical average.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Interstellar

Interstellar objects have passed through our solar system for its entire existence, but only in the past few years have we managed to spot them, track them and study them. Three such objects have been found, 1I/'Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS, and new information about 3I/ATLAS puts a fresh perspective on just how old some of these objects are. 3I/ATLAS travelled at 68 kilometers per second as it approached the sun, and a new paper published in Nature using James Webb and Atacama Compact Array found that the comet contained conspicuously low levels of carbon-13, levels that would imply it formed about 12 billion years ago — the earliest stages of galactic history, and before the formation of our own solar system.

Jonti Horner, The Conversation

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

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Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Translation

Japan’s cultural industries make a lot of their money abroad, but slow or absent translations of that output continue to fuel a manga and anime piracy scene. It has gotten sufficiently bad to the point where the government is looking into ways to speed up translation efforts. Specifically, the Japanese government is weighing subsidies for 15 companies intended to expand the overseas market for Japanese entertainment, with eligible companies including publishers, streaming companies and game and IP companies like Bandai Namco. A report of what’s under consideration points to an 11.5 billion yen (US$71 million) subsidy intended to cover half the cost of overseas promotion, which includes translating works into foreign languages.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Northern Sea Route

In 2009, Germany’s Beluga Shipping was the first to complete a commercial voyage along the Northern Sea Route, which takes ships from the Pacific ports in East Asia to Europe by going up and over Russia rather than around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Suez Canal. The pro is that it’s much faster and can be done in 20 days rather than the 40 days it takes through the Suez or the 55 days around the Cape, but the con is that it’s frozen solid most of the year, and when it’s not, the route is still pretty risky. Still, by 2018 Maersk managed the first container ship transit, and as of 2025, transit cargo volumes reached 3.2 million metric tons across 23 container voyages, up from 15 voyages the prior year. Interest is up, but the Arctic Circle still is perilous; among vessels over 100GT, there were 253 machinery damage or failure incidents in Arctic Circle waters from 2016 to 2025, 67 wreckings or groundings, 54 fires or explosions and 29 collisions. Factor in other concerns — Russian sanctions, icebreaker availability, the fact that Frankenstein canonically lives up there — and it’s still far from a standard route.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Nanostacking

IBM revealed a new prototype chip that it claims will enable Moore’s Law to continue to stand, making faster and more efficient chips possible thanks to a promising new strategy of jamming even more transistors into that chip. Transistors are already so small that quantum mechanics has become an issue, given they’re down to a few dozen nanometers in size. However, IBM found its approach can do as much as 50 percent more work in the same amount of time thanks to a layering of the transistors in a vertical stack, with electrons moving through channels that are made of three nanosheets, each 15 atoms thick and spaced nine nanometers apart.

Sophia Chen, MIT Technology Review

Vesuvius

The Library of Herculaneum was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, an event that also destroyed the city of Pompeii. Scorched papyrus scrolls from the library that were too fragile to open physically are now being unwrapped digitally and revealing lost books. The Vesuvius Challenge has managed to digitally unwrap 1.5 meters of text written across 22 columns from a two-centimeter-wide scroll that discusses ethics and may have been written by the Stoic Chrysippus. While the eruption contributed somewhat to the knowledge of humans at the time — Pliny the Elder’s groundbreaking experiments in the field of emergency response during the eruption have led to tried-and-true wisdom that stands to this day such as “don’t take a boat to the site of a volcanic eruption and take a nap at your friend’s house” — thanks to these discoveries, it’s contributing even more now.

Hayley Bennett, New Scientist

Private Brands

Grocery store private brands — the ones that up until a few years ago were called “generics” — have been a solid source of growth for the industry, as stores increase their supply and quality of in-house brands and consumers looking to save money on food amid inflationary pressures are willing to make the switch. Overall, private brand dollar sales grew 2.8 percent over the 52 weeks ending March 22, outpacing the 2.6 percent dollar growth in name brands, with unit sales for private brands up 0.6 percent compared to the 0.2 percent growth in name brand sales.

Catherine Douglas Moran, Food Dive

Parking Lots

Traffic collision data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration undercounts people injured or killed in automobile collisions because the data only includes serious crashes that take place on public streets. This means that traffic fatalities in parking lots and driveways are not actually tallied, and are actually a bit of a black box in general, given that nobody is keeping track of them. According to a 2021 study from AAA, 20 percent of all collisions in the United States happen in parking lots, and a 2021 estimate from NHTSA put fatalities from “non-traffic crashes” that occurred on private property at about 12 percent of all official pedestrian deaths in 2021.

David Zipper, Bloomberg

Carbon Capture

Carbon capture has been a fixture of research and development in green tech for decades at this point, in no small part because the oil industry keeps pushing it, but while solar and battery tech has ramped up from theory to R&D to commercial to industrial scale, carbon capture is pretty much still stuck on theory. In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that we would have to bury 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2025 to avoid dangerous levels of warming, and U.N. analysis puts the figure at six billion tons every year by the middle of the century. This has not happened even a little bit: currently, all the carbon capture in the whole world is permanently burying less CO2 than one large power plant emits annually.

Kate Worth and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

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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: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·

Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·

Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018