By Walt Hickey

First Class

The cost of a Forever U.S. postage stamp will rise from 68 cents to 73 cents in July, following a price hike just this past January and the sixth increase since January 2021. Still, could be worse: Comparing the U.S. to 30 other peer countries, there are just four countries with cheaper stamps than the United States, and the 26 percent increase from June 2018 to June 2023 is half the average stamp price increase of 55 percent of those countries. One driver of the price hikes for first-class mail is declining volume, with the number of mailed items down 68 percent since 2007.

Bill Chappell, NPR

The Boy and the Heron

The Academy Award-winning Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron continues to crush it in China, earning $12.8 million in its second weekend and bringing its box office haul to $93.8 million after just 12 days, making China the movie’s highest-grossing territory. Other films playing well in China include Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, with $110 million total, as well as Kung Fu Panda 4, which has made $45.6 million. The Chinese box office is up 6 percent year over year.

Patrick Frater, Variety

Oil!

The Department of Interior has increased the amount of money that drilling companies must pay up in order to guarantee that regardless of the eventual fate of the company, there will be funds to clean up wells at such time that they go bust. As it stands, 84 percent to 99 percent of bonds for wells on public lands don’t cover the full cost of cleanup, raising the minimum bond for a public land oil and gas lease from $10,000 to $150,000. For companies with multiple leases, that increases from $25,000 to $500,000. The range of costs to plug an orphaned well on public lands ranges from $20,000 to $145,000, with the median cost of $71,000. As it stands, there are 90,000 unplugged wells on Bureau of Land Management land.

Nick Bowlin, High Country News

Tracker

The big hit on television this season is Tracker, a crime drama following a guy named Colter Shaw as he travels the American heartland finding missing persons for money week after week. It’s pulling in an average of 10.5 million viewers a week on CBS, a figure that rises to 14.8 million viewers when other platforms are factored in. Launched right after the Super Bowl, it was the top show on Paramount+ in February and March and has been increasing viewership week after week. The main complaint is that Colter, the eponymous tracker, does not in fact appear to do much actual tracking in the wild.

John Jurgensen, The Wall Street Journal

Blocker

An analysis of web-filtering software implemented across 16 school districts found that the blocking technology was often overzealous, blocking access to materials well beyond their remit. Overall, there were 1.9 billion blocks of web pages over the course of a single month across the 16 school districts in the analysis, and often the software would arbitrarily block legitimate academic work, as well as content that would be considered supportive of LGBTQ+ youth, such as the Trevor Project.

Tara García Mathewson, The Markup

Cars

Over the past several decades, students that otherwise would have biked or walked to school are now getting picked up by cars, while rates of students getting bused in have declined slightly. This is causing chaos, as schools that were built in an era where students bused, biked or hiked to class now have to deal with swarms of vehicles twice per day. In 1970, only 16.3 percent of students aged 6 and up were driven to school in a private vehicle, which rose to 46.4 percent as of 2009 and in 2022 all the way up to a majority of 53.2 percent. Contrast that with biking and walking, which fell from 42 percent of students in 1970 to 10.6 percent of students in 2022.

Scott Calvert, The Wall Street Journal

Dungeons & Dragons

Hasbro, the game maker, generates most of its profits through Wizards of the Coast, the division that contains both the narrative tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering. It’s generally understood that Magic’s sales are an order of magnitude — a “major multiple” — of D&D’s, which makes the 2023 results for the division especially interesting. Overall, Wizards of the Coast sales were flat, but they reported that Magic: The Gathering sales were up 3 percent to 5 percent. The issue is, given that sales were flat, that would imply that a 3 percent to 5 percent growth for Magic means something like a 30 percent drop in Dungeons & Dragons sales, a number not exactly out of step with retailers’ reports about the state of tabletop. Part of this is likely that the 5th Edition of D&D is getting a bit stale in the eyes of consumers, and the trove of content in a single book can be more than enough to fuel months of adventuring.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

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