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Numlock News: December 18, 2023 • Art, Wonka, O Canada

Dec 18

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By Walt Hickey

Welcome back! Just a heads up, this is the last week of Numlock of 2023, as we always take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Before we kick off, Saturday marked a really thrilling anniversary: It’s been nine years since I started writing a daily morning newsletter, first at FiveThirtyEight and now at Numlock. Thanks so much to everyone who has read, supported, shared, paid for, contributed to or just enjoyed this along the way. I’ve got some exciting things planned for year 10 of this project. Thanks for reading.

Art

It has been a remarkable week for cheap thrift store art that cost $4, as there were two separate instances in which art poached from a secondhand shop has hauled in big bucks at auction. One of those sales closed the loop on the New Hampshire couple that found an N.C. Wyeth painting for $4 and sold it at auction for $191,000, only for the buyer to renege and pull out of the sale. That painting has been sold after Heritage Auctions read about the story and found a buyer, who bought it for a six-figure sum. In the other, a glass vase found at a thrift store in Richmond, Virginia, for $4 has turned out to be a production of the Italian glassmaker Venini designed by Carlo Scarpa, and has sold at auction for $107,100 at Wright Auction House. I’m not unconvinced that this is all merely a buzz marketing campaign for buying stuff at thrift stores.

Theo Belci, The Art Newspaper and Matt Stevens, The New York Times

Wonked

Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet, made $39 million at the domestic box office this past weekend, beating out expectations and giving the family film momentum heading into the otherwise quiet holidays. The movie has enjoyed solid reviews and pretty good word of mouth, and has made $96.6 million internationally to boot. It’s a potential sign of relief in the otherwise punishing economics of Hollywood musicals, which have suffered so consistently at the box office that increasingly the studios are attempting to obscure the fact that they’re actually musicals.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

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Good Dam

In 2007, an ecologist studying satellite imagery of wooded areas in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park spotted a lake that had emerged in the time since photos were taken back in the 1970s, and was able to attribute that to the recovered population of beavers in the area. The lake was the result of what was, upon inspection, the largest beaver dam in the world, 2,790 feet long, so large that it produced a lake that is 17 acres in size. As far as we know, since then the dam and the lake it produced has only been exposed by one person, a guy from Maplewood, New Jersey, who set out to check it out and took some neat pictures of it.

Ian Frazier, YaleEnvironment360

Bad Dam

The federal government has given the go-ahead to breaching four Lower Snake River Dams, a contentious quartet of infrastructure that has posed a serious impediment to marine life. They were built in the 1970s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help hydropower and agriculture, but a major impact of their construction is that cutting off the river has been a primary cause of declines in Snake River salmon, and many salmon runs are in danger of extinction. The plan will direct money to the region to get alternative power sources and sources of irrigation. In order to breach the dams, an act of Congress is necessary.

Anna V. Smith, High Country News

We Stand On Guard

In the National Hockey League, since 1987 it’s been mandatory to play both the Canadian national anthem and the American national anthem before any contest between Canadian teams and American opponents, and then in contests between two American teams they can just stick to the “The Star Spangled Banner” and in contests between two Canadian teams they can just stick to “O Canada.” It’s a neat system — some border towns, like for Buffalo Sabres games, play both anyway — but one that has revealed a troubling reality that American anthem singers are sometimes very, very bad at knowing the Canadian anthem. Despite Canada reliably sending its finest singers — Drake, Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne — south, America has not answered with the mere courtesy of knowing our next door neighbor’s song. Indeed, on four separate occasions in 2023 alone, an American singer has botched “O Canada” at a hockey game, and it’s got some thinking something’s got to change.

Ian Mendes, The Athletic

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Volleyball

Broadcasters and advertisers are seeing potential in volleyball at the college level and the burgeoning pro level, with the Athletes Unlimited indoor pro women’s volleyball league’s third season logging better and better numbers. The pro league saw ratings up 42 percent, driven especially by a move to ESPN. Last year’s college championship hit 786,000 viewers despite going up against an NFL game, though that was down from the 1 million viewers who watched two years ago in a game shortly after a dominant performance at the Tokyo Olympics. Ad spend wasn’t great last year — $90,000 for the whole event — but this year the event is moving to a midafternoon Sunday time slot in an attempt to better develop the audience.

Asli Pelit, Sportico

Long Short Video

The expectation is that next year will see a number of the successful short video platforms — TikTok first and foremost, but competitors Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts among them — hike the allowed amount of time that a video can run for. This would subvert some of the original appeal of the short video app, and make their bite-sized video into a more traditional meal hawked by the leading video platforms, but they have their reasons. In October, TikTok started testing 15-minute videos, up from the current five-minute limit, and Reels is testing 10-minute videos, up from now three minutes. The reason for the shift is obviously money, not user experience, as it’s way more obvious how to cram an ad into a 10-minute video rather than a two-minute clip.

Kevin Tran, Morning Consult

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