By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Columbus

Experience Columbus, the local tourism push from the city in Ohio, released the number we’ve all been waiting for, touting 51.2 million visitors in 2023, an all-time record. This claim is obviously stunning and can’t be right, as it implies that Columbus was as visited as, say, Chicago, which had 51.96 million visitors in 2023. That’s 1 in 6 Americans visiting Columbus, best known as “the city in Ohio — no, not Cleveland; no, not Cincinnati; the other one.” This gets at a somewhat testy issue within the tourism industry, namely that client cities are pushing tourism consultants to come up with elaborate definitions of “visitor” in order to make the number go up. One of the things that juke the stats in Experience Columbus’ case includes a “visitor” not meaning “a person” but actually meaning “one visit from one person,” counting every returner as a new visitor with no minimum duration so as to include layovers, passersby and day-trippers in the number. Anyway, I’m thrilled to announce that Numlock is the most-visited website on the internet, as we count “one byte of data” as a visitor.

Andrea Doyle and Dawit Habtemariam, Skift

Valparaiso

Valparaiso University needs money to pay for dorm renovations, and wants to sell off several art works in its museum to do so. They want to sell off a painting called “Rust Red Hills” by Georgia O’Keeffe (bought in 1962 for $5,700, with a current appraised value of $10.5 million to $15 million), the painting “The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate” by Childe Hassam (bought in 1967 for $9,000, currently appraised at $1 million to $3.5 million) and “Mountain Landscape” by Frederic E. Church (appraised in the original donation at $1 million to $3 million), but they’re having trouble legally justifying the deaccessioning. In an attempt to defend the sale of the first two, they’re arguing in court that the original gift was from a guy who hated modern art and insisted the acquisitions be “conservative,” that the paintings should never have been acquired in the first place, and they can totally be sold anyway.

Annie Aguiar, The New York Times

Twist

Twisters opened to $80.5 million, smashing expectations and becoming the latest in a line of movies to beat an outlook laid low by months of cruddy box office. The movie surpassed predictions between $40 million and $50 million, and comes almost three decades after the release of the original Twisters. It’s incidentally the best opening ever for a natural disaster movie, beating out the $68.44 million made by The Day After Tomorrow. It’s doing particularly well in the states of Tornado Alley.

Pamela McClintock and Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter

Prison

The FCC has voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls. Under the new rules, a 15-minute phone call will drop from $11.35 in large jails to just $0.90, and a similar call in a small jail will drop from $12.10 to $1.35, effective January 2025. This is a huge deal for the families of incarcerated people, with one nonprofit estimating that in the aggregate families will save at least $500 million annually that would otherwise go to a prison contractor. For the first time, video call rate caps have been adopted as well, capping the price of a video call at $0.11 to $0.25 per minute, depending on the facility. The eight companies that are responsible for 96 percent of the average jail and prison population’s phone service will still be able to make a profit with the rate cap, per the FCC.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Century-Old

Japan is home to 43,631 companies over 100 years old as of last September, and every year, around another 2,000 companies join that list. That said, some of the companies on the list have been struggling, according to a new report, and the bankruptcy rate among that class of businesses was up 95 percent year over year for the first six months of 2024. In those months, 74 businesses entered court-led bankruptcy, which is the largest number in the first half of any year going back to 2000 and on pace to exceed the 120 annual bankruptcies seen in 2008.

Nikkei Asia

Earthmovers

The humble stingray is responsible for moving thousands of tons of seafloor sand per year, given their hunting strategies of hovering over a single spot, flapping their wing-like fins, squirting water out of their mouths to displace sand and eating whatever comes up. For the ecosystem, this helps cycle nutrients into and out of the sand, which in turn makes it a better habitat for future creatures. A new study found that over the course of seven days in a single 2 percent of the Brisbane Water estuary, rays created 1,090 feeding pits and moved 8 tons of sand; scaled up to the entire estuary across the year, these animals are moving 20,000 tons of sand per year.

Jeanne Timmons, Scientific American

Rare Earths

Prices of rare earth elements are down considerably after overproduction from China, with the cost of neodymium down 23 percent the week of July 11 compared to late July 2023, dysprosium down 24 percent, and an overall price index from the Association of China Rare Earth Industry down 20 percent. In the 2010s, China was responsible for 80 percent to 90 percent of global rare-earth production, a figure that was down to about 70 percent last year. Overall global production has tripled since 2013, hitting 350,000 tons in 2023.

Shugo Yamada, Nikkei Asia

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