By Walt Hickey

Fantasy

The romantasy trend is real, as books that blend romantic plots into fantasy genres fuel a banner year so far for the entire book industry. In the second quarter of 2024, unit sales of print books were up 1.1 percent over the same quarter last year, and fueling that is the adult fantasy category, where sales in the first half of the year are up a remarkable 85.2 percent compared to the first half of 2023. That’s vastly outpacing the already-strong 6.3 percent increase across all of adult fiction, and the rising tide has also boosted science fiction and the suspense genres’ sales by around 20 percent each.

Jim Milliot and John Maher, Publishers Weekly

Lanternflies

Scientists have been trying to find out how spotted lanternflies, an invasive pest in the U.S., have expanded their territory so quickly despite being introduced in Pennsylvania just 10 years ago. They found that the flies may very well be hitching rides on cars and buses, and to figure out if lanternflies were capable of holding on for dear life under various levels of wind speed, they put a number of the bugs through a wind tunnel. After testing 900 of the insects across six stages of life, they found that 48 percent of the bugs clinging to wiper blades were able to hang on through sustained wind speeds of 100 kilometers per hour, and if they were in the scuttle panel between the windshield and the hood, they survived 100-kilometer-per-hour winds 60 percent of the time. That’s thanks to the their claws, which are hooked to help them grip plants. Early adult female lanternflies — you know, the kind carrying 300 eggs — were particularly excellent at riding out the winds.

Hannah Richter, Science

Churn

New data from Ampere Analysis found that 42 percent of U.S. streaming subscribers actively subscribe, cancel, and resubscribe to streaming services based on whether or not shows they like are on the network. What they also found was that people who bought into bundles, like the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, were 59 percent less likely to churn, so, you know, that’s how they get you. Finding ways to cut back on the subscribe, watch, and churn crowd’s savvy strategies is going to be increasingly important to streamers as the years of milk and honey come to a close.

Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter

Termites

A new study of termite mounds near the Buffels River in Namaqualand, South Africa, has dated the mounds to be 34,000 years old, a remarkable age for mounds that are to this very day still inhabited by termites. The previously known oldest mounds were from Brazil and were 4,000 years old. These make up the earliest of termite hills, according to the study, and existed while glaciers covered large parts of Europe and Asia. The mounds are about 100 feet across and go about 10 feet underground, and honestly given that square footage and having had a look at them, if they listed for rent in New York they’d probably get like $2,200 a month for a pre-war garden apartment with a mild bug problem.

Gerald Imray, The Associated Press

Insurers

An analysis of billions of Medicare records found that private insurers involved in Medicare Advantage have made hundreds of thousands of specious diagnoses from 2018 to 2021 that meant they got money from the government, including for patients that received no treatment, or claimed diagnoses that contradicted what doctors actually said. Major insurers would add insurer-diagnosed issues like diabetic cataracts, morbid obesity, and emphysema to client records and bill the government despite no treatment actually being procured. About 18,000 Medicare Advantage recipients had an insurer come up with an HIV diagnosis, which gets insurers another $3,000 per year, even though less than 17 percent of patients with insurer-driven HIV diagnoses were actually on antiretroviral drugs, and it appears that almost all of those people didn’t have HIV. All told, Medicaid paid insurers $50 billion for diagnoses that they themselves added over the period.

Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty, Anna Wilde Mathews and Mark Maremont, The Wall Street Journal

Car Theft

Canada is a hot spot for car theft, where the 262.5 auto thefts per 100,000 people is now vastly more than the 220 per 100,000 of England and Wales, and getting distressingly close to the 300 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people in the United States. In 2022, there were 105,000 cars stolen in Canada and Interpol listed it among the top 10 worst countries for the crime, a reputational blow if there ever were one. Lots of those end up shipped overseas to get sold, and one issue is that the staff at Canadian ports don’t have the authority to inspect most containers. In customs-controlled areas, only border officers can open up a can without a warrant, and with 1.7 million containers moving through the Port of Montreal alone in 2023, that’s a lot of unsuspecting ways out of Canada for a boosted set of wheels. From December to March, border officers found almost 600 stolen cars in 400 shipping containers in the Port of Montreal.

Nadine Yousif, BBC News

Grinds

The Faroe Islands are a self-governing archipelago within Denmark, far in the North Atlantic. A controversial custom of the islands which has aroused the ire of animal rights groups is grindadráp, where long-finned pilot whales are hunted by local communities. It’s got a bit more nuance than your typical whaling story, as the pilot whales are not remotely endangered, and the hunts aren’t commercially driven as none of the harvested meat or blubber leaves the archipelago’s population of 54,000 across 17 islands. Industrial whaling is an obvious issue, but the subsistence whaling practiced by the Faroese — who have killed an average of 687 pilot whales annually since 2010, out of a global population of 800,000 — is in a gray area of conservation and the rights of remote island and often Indigenous cultures to hunt.

Paige Cromley, Hakai Magazine

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