By Walt Hickey

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Like A Prayer

Deadpool & Wolverine just nabbed the record for best-ever second weekend for an R-rated film with another $97 million, the eighth-biggest second weekend in the history of the domestic box office and a feat that appears to signify a comfortable billion-dollar trajectory. Globally, it’s made $824 million. In other goings-on at the cinema, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap made $15 million, a bit softer than hoped, but with a reasonable $30 million budget the hike to profitability isn’t impossible. One movie did bomb badly, though: Harold and the Purple Crayon, an adaptation of a children’s book about an imaginative 4-year-old. The film, having made the inexplicable decision to cast a 43-year-old man as the titular role, opened to $6 million, a disastrous opening weekend given a budget of nearly seven times that.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

A23a

The massive iceberg that could is A23a, a colossal expanse of ice that is the largest berg on earth. The thing refuses to die: It broke free from Antarctica in 1986, but was so big it got stuck in the mud in the Weddell for decades, breaking free in 2020 as part of that year’s unique cocktail of calamity. Refloated, it made a mad dash for the equator. In April it entered the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a massive flow, but instead of jaunting into the South Atlantic it’s… stopped. It's north of the South Orkney Islands, gently rotating at a rate of 15 degrees per day, counterclockwise. There are a thousand meters of water underneath it, so it’s not stuck. Instead, it’s in a vortex because the iceberg is interacting with a 100-kilometer bump in the ocean floor called Pirie Bank, where it’s expected to remain for some time.

Jonathan Amos and Erwan Rivault, BBC News

Doped

The doping era in the Cold War had put some records in the shot put, hammer and discus competitions completely out of reach by clean players for decades. Because those players used so much gear — in 1986 Yuriy Sedykh threw a shot put 86.74 meters, setting a record that stands to this day, but also one time allegedly turned in a sample so full of the steroid stanozolol that the detection machine was contaminated for the next several samples and tossed out false positives — the record books have been elusive. Until now, that is, thanks to new techniques and training: In April, a Canadian hammer thrower got within 8 feet of Sedykh’s record, the discus record was broken in April by a Lithuanian, and the steroid records now seem beatable, too.

Rachel Bachman and Robert O’Connell, The Wall Street Journal

Weird

A new poll has found that 48 percent of Americans consider themselves to be weird, with 13 percent of Americans calling themselves “very weird.” Younger, more liberal respondents tended to be more likely to embrace the title, while older or more conservative respondents said they were not very weird or not at all weird.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Gold

A cache of gold in the form of darics was found in Turkey after being hidden for about 2,400 years. A daric was equal to about a month’s pay for a soldier, so the cache is very intriguing indeed, particularly given the times during which it was accumulated and stored. Considering that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to leave all that gold in the floor of a house and tell no one, the speculation is that the individual met a violent end, one way or another. One theory is that they were a mercenary who, due to the tumult of the time, met an end in one of the various wars of the region. I choose to think this is sort of an Achaemenid Fargo situation, and that the briefcase of money was lost in the sands after a heist gone bad by a real William H. Macy type.

Franz Lidz, The New York Times

Novelous

If there is a utility that machine learning might have when it comes to creative work, translation is one of the higher-regarded ones. For instance, light novels in Japan are a phenomenally popular format for works, with over 1,500 published in small paperback forms per year. However, despite the international popularity of the format, translation still isn’t cheap enough to get all of them translated. Shogakukan is a major publisher, but nevertheless only gets 10 of these into English a year, while rival Kadokawa has its North American light novel sales already up to a fifth of its manga sales. That’s prompted Shogakukan to launch a new app in the U.S. and Canada with officially tapped but AI-assisted translations of a medium that was hard to spread.

Annu Nishioka, Nikkei Asia

Cables

The world’s largest suppliers of electric cables are remarkably busy, as long-distance transmission and direct-current power are needed in larger quantities. A kilometer of cable from Nexans costs €1 million ($1.1 million), and people can’t get enough of it. Their factory in Halden, Norway — the tallest building in the country, 50 floors high, so that the cable can stay straight through the use of gravity alone when they insulate it — that factory is sold out until 2028, and other companies are reporting backlogs of 12 years.

Will Mathis and Eamon Farhat, Bloomberg

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