By Walt Hickey

Three’s A Crowd

Challengers, the Zendaya-starring Luca Guadagnino movie about three people who play literal and metaphorical tennis, made $15 million this past weekend, the second-best performance for an R-rated original film since the onset of the pandemic. The movie made another $9 million overseas, with audiences coming out in force to watch the provocative music video to a tennis-themed Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor concept album.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Wine

A records request from the Financial Times to better understand the British government’s £3.66 million wine cellar operated out of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has come up slightly short of hopes, though the government’s booze stash remains intriguing. The wine cellar is used to get foreign dignitaries drunk, and its selection is stocked by a retired diplomat as well as four Masters of Wine. The cellar is stocked with French reds, but Government Hospitality refused to offer a copy of the wine cellar stock list and furthermore ruled out identifying the Masters of Wine who serve on the committee, which sets us all up for a real inebriati situation: to steal from Mitchell and Webb.

Louis Ashworth, Financial Times

Tortured Poets

The numbers are in, and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was a smash hit for the current era of music distribution, pulling in 2.61 million album-equivalent units in the first week of release, the best weekly figure for any album since Adele’s 25, which moved 3.482 million units in 2015. That number is generally considered to be unbeatable given the changes in how bestsellers are calculated and the differences in consumption and media buying habits. The album also propelled Swift to the best-ever week in streaming for an album, with 891.37 million streams. Even setting aside streaming, the record sold 1.914 million copies, the third-biggest sales figure since Luminate’s sales data began in 1991.

Chris Willman, Variety

Connected

The islands of Mauritius and Reunion off the coast of Madagascar are connected to the rest of the internet through three cables, one of which is a 13,500-kilometer South Africa Far East submarine fiber cable belonging to Mauritius Telecom, Vodaphone Group and Orange SA. On Friday, those cables sustained a technical malfunction that knocked out a good amount of internet to the island, jeopardizing its financial and tourism industries. The effects have already been felt, with SBM Bank halting operations as of Friday due to the interruption. Mauritius Telecom has since restored connectivity, and said that the cable had not been damaged as originally feared. It’s been a rough time for subsea cables, with three cables off the coast of Yemen severed by rebels and four cables near the Ivory Coast damaged after seismic activity.

Kamlesh Bhuckory, Bloomberg

Manga

Sales of manga in the United States have quadrupled since 2020, and the format has come to dominate in just a short time. Out of the 44.7 million graphic novels sold in 2023, 21.8 million (49 percent) of them were manga, and unit sales in the first nine months of 2023 were 351 percent higher than the same period of 2019. This is motivating lots of companies, from established players in the manga space to new entrants, to dive in. Many manga series are being developed specifically with an English-speaking audience in mind, and the shift in demand has had an impact on what product gets made and what spreads.

Deb Aoki, Publishers Weekly

Grocery Runs

Grocery prices are up 21 percent in three years, and one thing that’s changed is that people make more runs than they used to, go to more stores pursuing different sales, and buy less on each given run. Overall shoppers are making 8 percent more trips than they did last year, and traditional grocers have shed a bit of market share, accounting for 66 percent of total consumer spending on food at home, down from 69 percent in 2017. Fueling that is people going to more and often specialized stores for their food: Americans bought food and beverages from an average of 20.7 retailers in 2023-24, compared to 16.8 retailers in 2019-20.

Rachel Wolfe, The Wall Street Journal

Permian

In New Mexico and Texas, the removal of vast quantities of oil from the ground as well as the disposal of vast amounts of wastewater underground have caused parts of the Permian Basin to sink while other parts are pushed upward. From 2017 to 2020, oil production in the Delaware Basin subregion of the Permian tripled, and over the period some parts of the land subsided more than 5 inches while other parts expanded more than 2 inches. Normally, the ground shifts by less than a tenth of an inch per year. When production hit a high in 2023, some parts of the basin had subsided by over 11 inches compared to 2015, while other areas saw expansion of up to 5 inches. You can even see water laws on the map: New Mexico has more restrictions on water disposal, so companies ship 2 million barrels of water across state lines and into Texas every day, with the Texas side of the border expanding while the New Mexico part has sunk.

Benoît Morenne and Andrew Mollica, The Wall Street Journal

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