By Walt Hickey

Cancellations

Ambitious, multi-city tours for musicians are cancelling amid a mismatch between demand and the shows on the calendar. Touring itself is expensive, more so than ever, and as a result, artists hoping to make money on a tour can feel the need to book more dates in bigger venues at ticket prices that their audiences simply can’t bear. The Black Keys canceled a tour with an intention to scale back, but the Jennifer Lopez situation is probably the most acute example of a failure to understand the actual market of an artist. The average ticket price among the top 100 tours increased from $91.86 in 2019 to $122.84 in 2023, and the “dynamic pricing” chicanery from the likes of Ticketmaster ain’t helping.

Zach Schonfeld, Stereogum

China

Anime titles have been a rare overseas success in China, which has been on an inward turn when it comes to its cinema preferences. On the backs of the country’s animation success, Japanese films are the second-largest category of imports into China, after the U.S. and Hollywood’s slowing but still robust engine. There have been 75 anime films out of Japan that got released in China since 2015, and of those, 40 percent have cleared the 100 million yuan threshold, with six posting revenues north of 300 million yuan ($42 million) in China. The First Slam Dunk made $75.8 million in China last year, Suzume cleared $117 million in China last year as well — more than it made in Japan! — and The Boy and the Heron has reaped $109 million this year in China, vastly more than the $57 million it made at home in Japan.

Patrick Frater, Variety

Lost at Sea

A new report from the World Shipping Council commends the global shipping fleet for notching an all-time low in lost containers, with just 221 out of 250 million containers transported lost at sea, a huge improvement from the previous low of 661 containers. Furthermore, a third of those containers that went overboard were even recovered. As recently as 2020, almost 4,000 containers were lost at sea. One thing helping was the relatively successful year for ships without major losses, as a single major incident can be responsible for thousands of lost containers, like when the MOL Comfort lost 4,293 containers in 2013.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Battery

When Taiwan was rocked by a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in April, the power grid took a drop, which was observed by hundreds of battery-swap charging stations in the country. Gogoro offers such battery-swapping services for electric scooters, and has a network of 12,500 stations across Taiwan serving 600,000 monthly subscribers. When the system detected that power was dipping, those charging stations stopped pulling power, in doing so lowering power demand by 6 megawatts, which helped tide the system through 12 minutes of grid recovery, after which they resumed charging. It highlights how vast battery networks can have a major stabilizing force in power systems, even if they’re not pumping power back into the networks.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Graphic Novels

In April, U.S. graphic novel sales for adults were up 11 percent year over year, fueled by the releases of Chainsaw Man, Vol. 15 and Lore Olympus, Vol. Six. On the kids graphic novel side, though, things were down 13 percent year over year, but my god the numbers of the top book are still staggering. In its third month of release, Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder by Dav Pilkey moved 117,488 copies, almost three times the top-selling book for grown-ups, proving yet again that the most important franchise in American literature is still Dog Man.

Brigid Alverson, ICv2

Setter

American boys are coming out for volleyball in record numbers, and while there are still many more high school and college girls playing the sport, a years-long effort to shore up the event for men has begun to have an effect on the numbers. The numbers of boys playing high school volleyball in the U.S. is up 56 percent over the past decade. For schools hoping to add men’s volleyball, the existence of the women’s facilities makes expansion cheaper than many other sports. While the ratio of female players to male players is still 6-to-1, in 1983 that figure was 30-to-1 in high schools and 11-to-1 in colleges.

Rachel Bachman, The Wall Street Journal

OceanGate

Thousands of leaked documents surrounding the implosion of the OceanGate submersible bound for the Titanic have emerged amid an investigation into what went wrong, and some of the recklessness contained within is genuinely staggering. The viewport was made from 9-inch-thick acrylic and was only rated to 650 meters, or a sixth of the depth to the Titanic, and an independent expert said the design might fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives. Nevertheless, the window was installed. A January 2018 report identified 27 issues with the vehicle, so that guy was quickly fired and sued for breach of contract. There is a literal email in here with a chart that has a skull and crossbones pasted on the region below 4,000 meters, and then the statement, “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin.” The hull — claimed to last 10,000 dives — was already having issues after less than 50.

Mark Harris, Wired

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