By Walt Hickey

Gross

The 2023-24 Broadway season saw total grosses hit $1.54 billion, a tad south of the $1.58 billion collected last year in box office, which is still 17 percent off the 2018-19 gross in the last full pre-pandemic year. Attendance was also flat — 12,287,708 butts in seats — across 39 new productions, down slightly from the 40 new productions last season. Among the issues is that the suburbs of New York have not turned out in force, with the audience from the burbs coming in at 14 percent of the total audience. In the 2018-19 season, revenues hit $1.8 billion across attendance of 14.76 million, and producers hope that things will get back toward that.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Glacier Bay

Lots of glacial cliffs in Alaska are collapsing, and it’s causing problems for tour boat operators and cruise ship captains. Tens of millions of cubic meters of rock and ice can fall into fjords in the state, and those can cause large waves and literal tsunamis under the wrong conditions. The instability is a serious risk, especially given the increase in marine tourism to the very imperiled glacial areas most poised to collapse. During tourism season, Glacier Bay will see two cruise ships per day, or 260 per season, and with 4,000 people on each boat you’re talking some serious issues if the wrong ice slips.

Christian Elliott, Hakai Magazine

Instant Replay

Sports leagues across the world have turned over their tensest moments to a familiar image: a craggy old man looking at an iPad and trying to figure out what the league’s corporate headquarters is trying to say a referee’s call should be. This image — a minute of stunned silence on national television, a brief interview with hideous men — graces every television all the time, everywhere, in every sport. That is, everywhere except one place, one Valhalla where eyes are allowed to be eyes: Swedish professional soccer, the Allsvenskan. It’s the only major league in Europe’s top 30 to never broker Video Assistant Referees. Fans got ticked when they tried to implement it. One study reviewing every contentious decision in 240 games of a season found that VAR would have appeared 41 times absent the system. Nobody is mad it did not.

Joshua Robinson, The Wall Street Journal

Gyros

The Hubble Telescope is down to its last two gyroscopes, prompting NASA to put it in single-gyroscope mode. Those devices spin at 19,200 revolutions per minute, three of them are used to figure out where the telescope is in space at any given time, and until recently there were three of them. One of them is now broken, and as a result they’re flying Hubble in single-gyro mode, cutting productivity by 12 percent but keeping the instrument’s ability to function for years more. NASA has flown 22 gyroscopes across various servicing missions, and there are six onboard now. The two that remain are workhorses: Gyro 4 has operated for 142,000 hours, and gyro 6 has operated for 90,000 hours. While an additional servicing mission is considered a low priority, there is still a 70 percent chance that the Hubble can maintain its science operations through 2035.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica and Michael Greshko, Science

Equestrian

Equestrian competitions remain serious risk factors for traumatic brain injuries, especially given that one of the competitors in a given eventing competition weighs the better part of a ton. Some things can mitigate the risks, like riders maintaining high levels of fitness or horses being checked for health and injuries regularly, and there have been some new safety features like clips and pins in fences that can minimize dreaded rotational falls. Since 2012, the rate of rotational falls — just envision the worst thing that can happen to a horse when it fails to cleanly jump over a fence — is down 55.5 percent.

Olivia Hampton, NPR

IRS

The IRS and Treasury Department announced that the Direct File program — where taxpayers with vanilla returns across 12 states could file for free using tax filing software designed by the feds — will be going nationwide next year, opening the program to all 50 states. This year, there were 141,000 people who paid their taxes through the Direct File program, and 90 percent of them rated the experience as “above average” or “excellent.” While people with more complicated tax situations will continue to rely on the services of talented tax professionals — you know, your media business owners with book sales and a day job and a peculiar little money pit upstate — it’s the TurboTax and H&R Blocks of the world that are potentially in trouble.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Laminectomy

In the realm of life, there are all sorts of fascinating creatures. For some, there’s nothing more so than the invertebrate. Utterly lacking a spine, these creatures manage to subsist on anything from waste to detritus to just whatever is laying around. How? Their lack of backbone and ability to contort in whatever manner is available can somehow facilitate an existence, however modest. From the humble amoeba to the stalwart worm, invertebrates maintain a capacity for survival despite a complete absence of god-given fortitude, rudimentary mettle, and sinew. Their methods are often disgusting — some lack a stomach, others lack guts, some even don’t have a single nerve — but nevertheless, they can be worthy of study. Does a total lack of spine make you interesting? Anyway, I forget where I was going with this, but Kathy Hochul just canceled the tax on congestion for no apparent reason, and will leave New York City $1 billion short in transit funding every year indefinitely.

Christopher Robbins, Hell Gate

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