By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

I’m hosting a show at Caveat in NYC on December 15th. We’ve got some excellent guests lined up; buy tickets here, I would love to see you there!

Box Office

It was one of the worst weekends at the domestic box office all year, with ticket sales coming in at between $38 million and $39 million, with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever leading the way at $11.1 million. The reason for the drought is that Avatar: The Way of Water is hitting cinemas this coming weekend and nobody wants to go up against that, hence the muted weekend. One movie in particular threw up good signals: The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser and is directed by Darren Aronofsky, was released in six locations and managed to secure the best per-location average — $60,000 per screen — of any film since 2020.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Hemophilia

Late last month the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a gene therapy to treat hemophilia B, a blood-clotting disorder. Hemgenix is a one-time treatment that costs $3.5 million, and delivers genetic code into liver cells by way of a modified virus that fosters production of clotting factor IX that people with hemophilia B can’t produce. It is the single most expensive drug in the world, but the producers argue that the cost is justified given how expensive the day-to-day hemophilia treatments are. They argue the one-time cost of $3.5 million would actually save the health care system $5 million to $5.8 million per person treated given they’d no longer need injections of factor IX, which in the U.S. averages $700,000 to $800,000 per year.

Miryam Naddaf, Nature

Tug

Europol said that the French amphibious assault carrier Tonnerre seized a Brazilian tugboat off the coast of Sierra Leone that was carrying 4.6 tonnes of cocaine, which Europol valued at €150 million (US$157.8 million). The vessel had been monitored ever since departing Brazil by Brazilian, American, U.K. and French law enforcement. The seizure happened in international waters 400 miles off the African coast, the latest haul of 15 tonnes of cocaine seized along that area of coastline.

Henry Pope, OCCRP

AM

Electric vehicles have a bit of an issue with AM radio, as the vehicles generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars and may disrupt clear signals from AM radio. FM signals are much more resistant, so they won’t get EV-induced static or hums. It’s come to the point where Tesla, Audi, Porsche and Volvo have just begun to remove AM radio from their cars, and Ford announced the 2023 F-150 Lightning would also drop AM. It’s possible to shield the interference, but that would add cost to vehicle manufacturing, and it’s not entirely evident to carmakers that AM is all that much of a deal-breaker for many consumers. That said, 47 million Americans listen to AM radio, 20 percent of radio listeners, and about a third are over age 65.

Michael Levenson, The New York Times

New Zealand

New Zealand’s aggressive efforts to eradicate tobacco use have been some of the most successful in the world. It was one of the first countries to ban smoking in workplaces in 1990 and taxes on cigarettes are up 165 percent since 2010. Auckland cigarette prices make New York City cigarette prices look like Virginia cigarette prices, and as a result just 10.9 percent of adults smoke in New Zealand, compared to 12.5 percent in the U.S. The country wants to get that as low as possible, and a new plan would roll out several impediments to new smokers, making it illegal to ever sell tobacco to someone born in 2009 or later, reducing the number of retailers who can sell tobacco by 95 percent, and cutting the level of nicotine in cigarettes below addictive levels.

Dennis Normile, Science

Qatar

It appears that Qatar will significantly miss expectations when it comes to the number of tourists brought to the country by the World Cup. Over the first 17 days of the Cup, Qatar logged 765,859 visitors, which was considerably lower than the 1.2 million the country was expecting, and given that a late surge is unlikely it’s probable there will be a deficit. There were 1.33 million match ticketholders — the most important of whom is obviously The One Guy Allowed To Bring His Trumpet Into Every Game For Some Reason — and 3.09 million tickets sold. Qatar has a population of 3 million, of whom 10 percent to 12 percent are Qataris.

Andrew Mills, Reuters

Jackass BC

A new paper published in Antiquity describes a remarkable archaeological find, a relief carved into a bench in Turkey that is believed to be 11,000 years old. It’s important because it’s a contender for the earliest known depiction of a narrative scene. Narrative art is as ancient as our species, with a 17,000-year-old set of cave paintings in France and a 44,000-year-old cave painting in Indonesia considered to be some of the earliest examples of narrative art. The Turkish carving is of note because they tell a progressive story, sort of like a comic strip, showing a similar set of scenes with differences that could be construed as a linear narrative. This incredible story gets at the very heart of what it means to be human, a story inscribed millennia ago that can again reverberate across our world, a tale that can bridge the eons to communicate essential truths about ourselves. Anyway, it shows a male human grabbing his genitals while also flanked by some leopards. Timeless.

Claire Voon, The Art Newspaper

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