By Walt Hickey

Packers

The Green Bay Packers are just one of the 32 teams of the NFL, but what makes them especially interesting is their ownership structure, where shares of the franchise are owned by thousands of people rather than the otherwise normal “one weird rich guy who wants to buy the love of a municipality” of the NFL. This ownership structure gives us a look inside the actual operations and profits of an NFL team rather than the estimates that dominate the rest of the field, and the data is in. The Packers had revenues of $654 million in the 2023 season, up 7.2 percent year over year, most of which — $402.3 million — was their equal share of the NFL’s media rights, sponsorships, licensing and international business. Local revenue, as in the money generated by getting people to go to the Packers games and buy Packers stuff, hit $251.8 million.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Skelly

One of the most important products in the United States of America is Skelly, the 12-foot-tall Home Depot skeleton that has essentially become the main way for people who reside in the suburbs to demonstrate that they’re cool. The skeleton has undergone a renovation, with new, customizable LED eyes. The base model skeleton sells for $299, but if you’ve got a Skelly you can buy the new eye kit for $29.98. Home Depot will also sell a limited edition servo Skelly animated by motors for $379. I remember when our grandparents kept up with the Joneses by having a greener lawn, and honestly one of the vanguards of human progress is certainly the preponderance of spooktacular entities that can be measured in meters.

Andrew Webster, The Verge

Stegosaurus

A one-of-a-kind statue of a stegosaurus put up for auction by Sotheby’s has sold for $44.6 million, vastly higher than the anticipated price of $4 million to $6 million and the highest ever at auction for any fossil. On one hand, selling off immaculate fossils to private hands robs the world of magnificent, awe-inspiring scientific specimens, and it’s prompted consternation from paleontologists who worry that the most dazzling remains of the most compelling creatures to bestride the Earth may be sequestered away in the homes of humiliating dilettantes. On the other hand? Seems like rich guys might be realizing that, as the buyer was hedge fund magnate Kenneth Griffith, who has been a significant financial supporter of Chicago’s Field Museum, home to a number of gorgeous dinosaur specimens.

Andrew Mambo, NPR and Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal

Religion

The most vibrant genre in books right now is religion, with sales up 12.1 percent in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023. It just makes sense: Established fandoms with premium IP featuring beloved characters with incredible abilities have been blowing up the box office for years, and while they’re slightly less intense than comic book fans, the opportunities to mine this content is undeniable. Books like Mostly What God Does and Practicing the Way have sold (respectively) 155,000 and 130,000 copies. The original interconnected franchise, the Bible, has sold gangbusters, with the top five bestselling Bibles moving 365,000 copies in the first six months of the year.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Salmon

It is a record salmon run in the Pacific Northwest right now, with 740,000 sockeye salmon making it past the Bonneville Dam at the border of Washington and Oregon, 235 percent above the 10-year average. There is an issue, though, as the water is far too hot for the fish to endure comfortably, hitting levels of 83 degrees despite a preference of 68 degrees. The question has become whether human intervention will be needed to get the fish to the streams in which they were born. Overall, the Columbia River Basin’s salmon and steelhead have been decimated over the past decades, with four of the 16 stocks spawning above Bonneville Dam going extinct and seven listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Jennifer Yachnin, E&E News

Reality

Data from FilmLA indicates that on-location filming of reality television has collapsed in Los Angeles. From April to June, the report found that filming dropped 57 percent compared to the same period of 2023, to 868 total shoot days. Overall, reality television production is down 18 percent this year compared to the first half of 2023. And before you get all high and mighty, just think about the businesses that depend on the shoots, like terrible restaurants you otherwise wouldn’t ever go to if not for the fact that a Vanderpump owned it, or the helicopter rental company that The Bachelor uses during dates with an acrophobic woman, or the vintners that make wine that OSHA has deemed safe for throwing in the face of a despised rival.

Katie Kilkenny and Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Monsoons

RAMA is a network of 25 moored buoys in multiple lines around the equator in the Indian Ocean, buoys that measure temperature, salinity and pressure down to 500 meters of depth, a crucial monitoring network to gauge the strength of monsoons. It’s operated by NOAA (from the U.S.) and India, South Korea and Indonesia, and the goal is to forecast weather in the least-monitored ocean. The pandemic seriously disrupted research cruises, and as a result, since the end of 2022 the RAMA array has only returned 2 percent of the expected data, down from 87 percent pre-pandemic. A new cruise will bring the RAMA array back to around 50 percent.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Science

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