By Walt Hickey

Welcome

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service has hiked the price for a visa to get into the United States for a global musician on tour. Prior to the first of the month, it cost $460 to file visa paperwork, a figure that rose to a minimum of $1,615 for a performer attempting to enter the country. It gets worse for bands, which must pay on a per-performer basis, meaning that your typical rock band of four is going to pay $6,460 to come to the States, up from $1,840 a few weeks ago. If you want that expedited, that’s going to be another $2,805 per application, and that’s not refundable in the event that it’s denied. It’s also a comparatively massive price hike, given that the last time the fees were increased it was from $325 to $460 in 2016.

Maria Sherman, The Associated Press

Litigation

Investing in lawsuits has become an atypical but often lucrative game for some funds, essentially bankrolling a portion of the suit in exchange for a portion of an eventual verdict. One sterling example of this was a suit between the shareholders of a nationalized oil company and Argentina, where a company called Burford Capital bankrolled the plaintiffs and got $6.2 billion out of the $16 billion verdict, despite putting up just $17 million behind the suit. Right now, litigation finance is a $15 billion industry within the United States, with Burford alone spending $140 million since 2019 on antitrust cases.

Max Knoblauch, Sherwood News

Cables

Subsea cables are a critical element of global tech and communications infrastructure, with 800,000 miles of subsea cables from 600 systems all crossing the oceans of the world. Maintaining that unimaginable web of cables is a surprisingly small fleet of cable ships: There are just 77 cable ships in the world, most of which lay new systems. When one of those cables breaks — as happens an average of 200 times per year — an even smaller class of ships is capable of responding and fixing them, with just 22 of those ships being repair vessels, many of which are decades old.

Josh Dzieza, The Verge

HELP

Three sailors who attempted to embark on a fishing trip on a 20-foot skiff on March 31 in Polowat Atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia did not return, prompting an extensive search. The men were found on April 9 on Pikelot Atoll, an uninhabited island 0.28 miles long and 0.17 miles wide located 115 miles away from Polowat. They were found by the U.S. Coast Guard, which searched 78,000 square nautical miles, after subsisting on coconuts and water from a well on the island, and were found because they did the thing you always see in movies where they literally spelled out “HELP” on the beach in palm tree branches, which was spotted by plane.

Andy Kalmowitz, Jalopnik

Church

A new working paper posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research sought to examine the polling data that indicates 22 percent of Americans reported attending religious services on a weekly basis. They did this by looking at geodata from smartphones of 2 million people in 2019, and found that while 73 percent of people did indeed step into a place of worship on a primary day of worship at least once over the course of the year, just 5 percent of Americans studied in fact did so weekly, significantly smaller than the data people reported to pollsters.

Devin G. Pope, NBER

Snakes

A new study published in Lancet Planetary Health plotted climate models on data from the habitats of deadly, venomous snakes, concluding that unless emissions are cut, many snake species will lose their habitats and move to places they don’t currently inhabit. Three viper species — Bitis rhinoceros, Vipera aspis and Vipera ammodytes — will lead the charge, and will likely inhabit more areas near rural communities. That will have a human toll: About 400,000 people per year in Bangladesh are bitten by venomous snakes, 95 percent of those in rural communities, and treatments can be difficult or in some cases impossible to distribute in time.

Bárbara Pinho, Scientific American

Kelp

Kelp forests are critical resources, not simply for ecosystems but for the people who live near them. Worldwide, kelp forests are responsible for $500 billion in economic activity, and fish that are born or grow in kelp forests are responsible for a large and growing percentage of global human protein consumption. Indeed, kelp itself is handy; scientists estimate that seaweeds alone could sustain 1.2 billion people in, say, a nuclear winter. Kelp also sequesters an estimated 173 million tonnes of carbon annually, and that could actually be up to 268 million tonnes. It’s under threat as habitats have been destroyed owing to climate changes, increased carbon dioxide in the environment, and more.

Paul Tullis, Hakai Magazine

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