Numlock News: July 7, 2023 • Skate, Elvis, Dinosaurs

Jul 7

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! And again, a huge thanks so much for all the folks whose subscriptions renewed this week. Five years of a sustainable, growing, indie media project was only possible thanks to consistent supporters and readers like you.

Skate Wing

The hot new fish dish at restaurants across the country is skate wing, a delightfully textured filet that’s got some density to it and is making appearances in all kinds of dishes. It’s been on the rise for at least half a decade even though it’s not exactly popular among home cooks. One advantage is price: A pound of skate wing goes for $7.99 at a New York seafood seller, compared to $14.99 for the same weight of cod filets and $34.99 for the amount of halibut. It’s also rather abundant; plenty of species of skate are not at all depleted or experiencing overfishing, meaning there’s a little less guilt on the plate. While skate’s been caught in New England for ages, much of it’s been exported, with large volumes going to Korea.

Bettina Makalintal, Eater

Paid Reviews

One rising hustle in Brazil is getting gig work through platforms like VintePila and Vinteconto as paid-off product reviewers. The fees start at 20 reais ($4) and the workers will then create a one-minute, natural-looking video reviewing a product. This is a solid scheme for the companies who hire them out, cheaply inflating ratings for products and getting better buzz around whatever they’re hawking, and for the workers it can be a good side hustle provided they emphasize the hustle: To make the equivalent of the minimum wage, they’d have to produce 83 minutes’ worth of those reviews a month. Naturally, the main person screwed over in all this is the prospective customer, who may not realize the person was paid to shill for a product they never actually used.

Gabriel Daros, Rest of World

We’re Caught In A Trap

Graceland, the tourist attraction centered around Elvis Presley’s mansion, has missed its July 1 principal and interest payments on its bonds, coming up $945,000 short on $1.8 million due this month. About $100 million in bonds were sold by an agency linked to the city of Memphis and Shelby County to renovate the mansion, but the pandemic utterly shattered tourism to the site, with attendance falling from around a half-million a year prior to the pandemic to 158,182 in 2020 and 272,708 in 2021. The Graceland bonds are still seen as potentially solid, as a return of tax revenue backing the bonds is on the way; in the first quarter, attendance was 95,995, significantly higher than the 56,703 from the same quarter of 2022.

Joseph Mysak Jr., Bloomberg

Gummies

The FTC and FDA issued cease and desist letters to six companies that are hawking pot-infused edibles in packaging that is designed to specifically evoke a more conventional snack food that isn’t laced with THC. The issue, naturally, is that the feds don’t like it when alcohol and drug brands emulate things that kids like to eat and drink. The companies have 15 days to remedy the problems. Products from the companies include pot edibles that are packaged like Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Pop Tarts, Sour Patch, Hot Cheetos, Doritos, Jolly Rancher Gummies, Gushers and Nerds candy, which yes of course that’s deliriously funny, screw The Man, but in the eyes of the law if you were trying to accidentally get a bunch of kids high then that specific menu of junk food sounds like it’d do the trick.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz

“Compostable”

In 2021, 7 percent of food service packaging was billed as compostable, though in reality nowhere near that amount is actually composted. What that claim tends to mean is that the packaging is compostable under some very specific kinds of conditions and 160-degree temperatures only really achievable in one of the country’s 200 full-scale food waste composting plants, only three-fifths of which actually accept compostable packaging. Needless to say, most of those packaging materials don’t go there, and as a result can’t really rot away as hoped; one type of compostable plastic showed no signs of degradation after 428 days of immersion in seawater, and compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years were still entirely functional.

Saahil Desai, The Atlantic

Lacrosse

Premier Lacrosse League, the outfit attempting to mainstream lacrosse as a watched, professional American sport, spent its first five seasons as a touring model, with its eight clubs not anchored to any specific city but rather traveling as a group from city to city for a big weekend of play. This has made establishing rooting interests among fans a bit atypical; according to the league’s data, anywhere from 60 percent to 70 percent of its fans don’t actually root for any team in particular. This coming 2024 season, the eight teams will be assigned to home cities, based on the data collected over the course of the first few years. One thing is certain: Whatever team gets assigned to Philadelphia sucks and I will root against those hooligans and miscreants until the end of time, whoever they may end up being.

Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal

Clever Girls

Researchers are attempting to figure out how smart dinosaurs were in general, and by comparing the relationship between brain size, body size and the number of neurons in existing birds and reptiles, they arrived at the conclusion that a large animal like Tyrannosaurus rex might have 2 billion to 3 billion neurons in its pallium. That would, to draw comparisons across eons, put it at a number of neurons similar to a baboon, advancing the argument that dinosaurs could have been rather smart. This further evidence brings us ever closer to settling the great debate of our era: Could velociraptors open doors?

Massimo Sandal, Scientific American

An unlocked Sunday edition that I really, really enjoyed, this week I spoke to M. Dean Cooper, who founded the journal of news and opinion Eleven-ThirtyEight, which is one of the most thoughtful, compelling and well-written sites about the Star Wars franchise. I first met Cooper in 2016, when I worked on a story called “Star Wars Killed A Universe To Save The Galaxy,” and I have been an avid reader of his ever since. This week Eleven-ThirtyEight is closing up shop after a 10-year run, and I wanted to do an exit interview with him. The site is going out strong: I can’t recommend last week’s essay, “Andor is a Blue Sky,” enough. It’s my favorite piece of criticism of the year. Read my interview with Cooper here.

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