By Walt Hickey

It Returns

Autumn is a season of contemplation. For several months, we will watch most of the vegetable matter around us slowly die, eject all but that which is necessary in an attempt to survive a winter, and visibly decay. It is a season built into the very vibration of our society, with the concept of The Harvest and the need to prepare for the coldest and darkest nights of the year being fundamental to the development of civilization, of cities, of economies, and of technology. There is something about this coming season — the chill, the scents, the sights, an inextricable crispness — that activates a sense memory. For centuries, the harvest was commemorated to better underscore the crucial nature of reaping for survival. One might say we’ve moved beyond that, with climate control and refrigeration and supply chains subsuming the need to recognize and dignify these precious months; while the mind forgets, the soul remembers, and the Pumpkin Spice Latte has returned to Starbucks for the 21st year, at the earliest it ever has, today, because once a year everything dies to remind us that we must live. Oh, also, a new thing called the Iced Apple Crisp Nondairy Cream Chai is coming out. Seems a little busy for my taste, though.

QSR Magazine

Tackle Football

Last year 4,094 girls played on 11-player high school tackle football teams, while another 42,955 girls played on high school flag football teams in specifically all-girls leagues. Though girls are less than 1 percent of players on tackle teams, as 1,031,508 boys played in the same period, that’s double the 1,992 girls who played tackle football in 2016. Either way, flag football is seeing some real growth, more than doubling in the course of a single season, with 20,875 girls having played in the 2023 season.

Rachel Bachman, The Wall Street Journal

Wow!

In 1977, researchers in search of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) monitoring data coming in from the Big Ear radio observatory at Ohio State University observed a 72-second intense radio signal come in on the extremely specific radio frequency of 1,420 MHz, a band of the electromagnetic spectrum held off-limits by human transmissions, which seemed to come from M55, the star cluster in Sagittarius. It was weird, and a researcher wrote “Wow!” next to it, so for close to half a century, we’ve had a strange signal nobody has really been able to explain. Given what SETI is all about, that’s obviously been a bit controversial. A new study comparing the Wow! signal to recordings at the Arecibo Observatory found eight similar Wow!-esque signals over the course of an hour of observing time, which the study argues means Big Ear coincidentally pointed at one of the many clouds of 1,420-MHz-emitting neutral hydrogen in interstellar space. Or so they want you to think!

Robin George Andrews, Scientific American

Ex-Pat Parrots

A new study argues that some birds have accents, and those accents can change over time. Researchers studied the yellow-naped amazon parrot in Costa Rica over the course of 22 years. The birds form long-term pair bonds and roost in large flocks, so are in relatively stable communities, all things considered. The initial studies in 1994 found three acoustically unique types of contact calls, which are some of the most common ways the birds communicate with each other: the North, the South, and the Nicaraguan dialect. Those dialects were unchanged as of the 2005 study, but then things got harder for the birds, as their population declined and their habitat was destroyed by intensive agriculture, making them critically endangered. By the third survey, in 2016, the boundaries between the North and South dialects changed a lot, newer dialects had begun to crop up in areas that previously only used the Southern, and more of the Northern birds were bilingual, also using the South dialect.

University of Pittsburgh

Luggage

The market for luggage is projected to increase 8 percent in the next decade, but the real action is taking things a step further and moving beyond lugging around baggage in the first place. U.S. airlines already raked in $33 billion from baggage fees in 2023, and the sheer size of that fee has some wondering if there isn’t a superior, perhaps older way to get one’s stuff to a destination. Luggage forwarding services, which are simultaneously “a trendy add-on service that uses the latest tech to get your things to your destination before you do” as well as “a thing one would read about in Dracula or some other 1800s novel,” are making a rebound after growing popular in places like Japan, India and Switzerland, even if they’re a ways off from market saturation in the U.S.

Allegra Rosenberg, Sherwood News

DVD Menus

The words “special features” used to mean something in this country, with DVDs and other physical media like Blu-rays loaded up with commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, perhaps even a noble blooper reel. In the United States, the percentage of people who have even watched a piece of physical media in recent years fell to 29 percent in 2024, down from 49 percent in 2019. As people turn away from the old ways and embrace the new, we’re leaving these rich cultural texts behind and leading audiences to ponder what filmmakers really think about the final cut, in what manner the chainmail team went insane, and who exactly was a bit of a prankster on the set. YouTube videos touring old DVD menus have racked up millions of views, just as a tour of the surviving ash heap previously called the Library of Alexandria by all rights would.

José González Vargas, El País

Liquidity

The Transportation Security Administration has long confined the amount of liquids and aerosols in carry-on luggage to an arbitrary 3-1-1 rule, a statute hatched from a gormless mind confined to Homeland Security and foisted unilaterally on a once-proud society. This rule, which is presumably based on how crucial it is to wear sunscreen and coif one’s hair before hijacking an aircraft, will be sticking around for a while, as the TSA says it needs 2,200 computed tomography scanners to determine whether a liquid is dangerous or not, is only 40 percent of the way there, and won’t reach its final goal until 2042.

Jacob Passy, The Wall Street Journal

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