By Walt Hickey

Blockbusted

Between Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water and Elvis, this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees is the highest-ever grossing class of films, with all 10 nominees crossing over $1.5 billion at the domestic box office. The first two films in the list were the two top-grossing films of the year, while Elvis came in at a respectable 11th place for the year and did extremely well for a musical film. Through the 1980s and 1990s, it was very rare to see fewer than two films from the top 20 grossing movies of the year in the Best Picture nominees, even with only five nominations to go around, with the highest-grossing film of the year winning in the case of Rain Man, Forrest Gump and Titanic. By the late 2000s, it became rare to have more than one high grosser in the crop of nominees, a trend that the Academy has sought to reverse by opening up the field to more than five nominations.

Nate Rattner, The Wall Street Journal

Yerba Mate

The average Argentinian or Uruguayan drinks over 26 gallons of yerba mate a year, a caffeinated beverage that in many places — though pointedly not North America — serves as a local substitute for coffee. While it’s the most consumed beverage in South America, the stuff that’s sold as yerba mate in the States is not, in fact, the bona fide article, which is bitter and tastes like freshly cut grass. The commodity as it’s available in North American supermarkets is more an ingredient added to or as the centerpiece of energy drinks, canned instead of the standard prep which has a more communal style.

Lauren Silverman, The Atlantic

Parks

The National Park Service currently has 28 different studies on its work list, a backlog that has been frustrating Americans who had hoped that the paperwork to get new parks on the books would have been done sometime closer to filing in 2019. One such project is the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative, which would create a 64th national park in the middle of Georgia, and which would still have to go to Congress after it eventually escapes from the Solicitor’s Office. Other studies include one that would preserve the childhood home of George W. Bush, four potential new national parks in California, Tennessee, Ohio and Colorado, as well as new national trails and scenic rivers.

Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Bogardus, E&E News

Europe

Since the end of the Second World War, European democracies have had varying stability that depends somewhat country to country, according to an analysis from Pew Research Center, with the typical parliamentary European nation seeing a change in government at least once every two years. Some are more known for their stability — the median government in Germany lasted 2.89 years, the median Spanish government lasted 2.82 years, and Luxembourg saw its median government last 4.55 years. Despite their recent attempts to subvert the stability trend, the U.K. is at this end of the spectrum, with the average U.K. government lasting 2.73 years. At the other end of the spectrum we have Belgium, where the median government lasts 0.79 years, Finland, where it lasts 0.85 years, and of course Italy, where the median government lasts just shy of a year at 0.98 years.

Laura Clancy, Sarah Austin and Jordan Lippert, Pew Research Center

Known Unknowns

Data breach disclosures from affected companies are getting sketchier. Two years ago, 100 percent of breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center saw the affected institution include victim and attack details. In 2022, of the 1,802 breaches tracked by the organization, fully 66 percent did not include such details, which is bad news because 400 million individuals were affected by those hacks and may be unaware of it. Data breach disclosure law is handled, if at all, at the state level and in many cases don’t require victim details.

Tonya Riley, Cyberscoop

Deduction

A new analysis from researchers at the U.S. Treasury Department and the University of Michigan found that in joint returns filed by opposite-sex married couples in 2020, the man’s name was listed first 88 percent of the time on the return. That is, in fact, somewhat closer to gender parity compared to the historic rate, which as recently as 1996 saw the man’s name listed first on 97 percent of joint returns. The newest generation of joint filers is appearing to push things along as well, as 76 percent of couples who filed jointly for the first time in 2020 put the man’s name first. If you think “well, perhaps in the spirit of gender equity we should switch,” that’s a viable solution, and one done by fewer than 2 percent of married couples.

Richard Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

Subways

New York is switching away from its Metrocard system, which had its flaws. A 2005 study of the swipe system found that out of 2.4 billion Metrocard swipes logged over the course of 22 months, fully 688 million of them failed, a 29 percent failure rate. The MTA brass thinks this is some kind of design flaw — it’s not, it gives something stupid for us locals to be proud of being good at whole also meaning that on any given morning there is a 71 percent chance your subway system will make you feel like Fonzie — but some stations were especially bad, like the 54.5 percent swipe failure rate at Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. The issue is the system they’re replacing it with — OMNY — isn’t exactly great, with double charges abound, and many New Yorkers lacking access to contactless credit cards or phones with an infinite battery life. Anyway, given that my interpretation of the New York City seal is two guys waiting for a subway complaining about how a bunch of rats are stuck in the busted turnstile, it’s the very nature of the place to be mildly frustrated about transit.

Andrew Egan, Tedium

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