By Walt Hickey

Vinyl

For the second year in a row, vinyl records outsold CDs, with people buying 43 million vinyl records and just 37 million CDs. Vinyl’s pricier anyway, so vinyl accounted for $1.4 billion worth of revenue compared to just $537 million from CDs, and while CD revenue was up the overall, the volume was down 700,000 CDs sold. Streaming dwarfs them all — $14.4 billion in revenue — and scored 84 percent of the music revenues in the U.S., with physical sales accounting for 11 percent, 3 percent to digital downloads, and 2 percent to synch revenue from licensing out to movies, television, physical locations and other outlets.

Wes Davis, The Verge

Postdocs

The latest data out of the NSF found that the number of STEM postdocs employed at U.S. institutions in the fall of 2022 was down 1 percent to 62,750 postdocs. Among U.S. citizens and permanent residents who worked as postdocs, that number was down 8 percent, with the number dropping from 29,755 to 27,289 over the period. The exact cause is unclear, but given that the biggest shift was in the biological and biomedical sciences, and that the U.S. biotech industry is booming and vacuuming up talent wherever it can get it, it’s more a sign that interest is declining in academia amid an increased exit to industry from the notoriously badly paid jobs working as postdocs at universities.

Katie Langin, Science

Televisions

Walmart is buying Vizio, the television maker, for $2.3 billion, and it’s got people skittish because Vizio is one of the only companies in the connected television business that actually shares some of the data that it collects through its automatic content recognition system. To be clear, all of them — Samsung, Roku, LG, Vizio — collect information on what a given television is watching, but Vizio at least licenses out that data to third parties and ad measurement firms like iSpot, Nielsen and VideoAmp. The concern is that once rolled up into Walmart, the data from their 23 million connected televisions in the U.S. could potentially see limitations, which could send a shock wave through the ad business and the businesses that rely on it.

Patrick Coffee, The Wall Street Journal

Foreign Language

Thanks to a number of factors — pandemic disruptions, funding cuts, genuine movement on real-time translation tech and an indisputable isolationist current among some sections of society — enrollment in foreign language courses is way down. As it stands, total enrollment in courses teaching a language other than English at American universities is down 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, and it’s not merely the Americans who are slipping when it comes to becoming polyglots: Only 8.6 percent of Australian high school seniors studied a foreign language in 2021, and universities in places like New Zealand and South Korea are closing some European language departments.

Louise Matsakis, The Atlantic

Games

Video games, which remain the unheralded but nevertheless undeniably mainstream medium of culture right now, are seeing increased attention from advertisers who want to up in-game advertising. This year alone, they’ll hike ad spending by 40 percent, with the projected spend on video game ads hitting $8.5 billion this year and rising to $11.5 billion by 2027. Reality is, while the metaverse never really panned out, games are so obviously the monoculture at this point — 213 million people game in the U.S. — that it was only a matter of time before Madison Avenue people found out about it. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine that the Don Draper of today is right now microdosed out of his gourd at a retreat on the Pacific Coast, about to crack exactly how Mountain Dew is going to make the iconic advertisement of a generation in Helldivers 2 next month.

Jennifer Maas, Variety

Culverts

Lots of concern about blocked rivers and streams comes from dams, but there is a smaller menace to migratory fish in the form of culverts, which are installed under roads or rails to facilitate the flow of water. That said, they can still be serious impediments, and in 2022 the U.S. Federal Highway Administration launched a $1 billion program to replace culverts known to block waterways that are important to fish and the ecosystems they’re part of. That might not even be near enough: California alone has an estimated 200,000 culverts under just its state highways, more than the 100,000 found in Germany and the 60,000 in Great Britain.

Ben Goldfarb, Hakai Magazine

Gowanus Canal

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is downright iconic for its pollution, and for the fact that whenever it rains too hard the sewage system of New York overflows into it. There has been a remarkable cleanup effort underway, targeting the 600,000 cubic yards of coal tar that defiles the canal, but the project is six years behind schedule and costs 13 times the original $78 million cost, with a current projected costs of $1.5 billion to fix this water. The EPA is now worried that the entire effort may have been stymied by the delays, as the canal may need to be re-dredged owing to the continued pollution because the overflow tanks haven’t been installed.

Rosemary Misdary, Gothamist

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