By Walt Hickey

Summer

The summer box office came in at $3.67 billion domestically, which is down 10.3 percent year over year, a double-digit decline that’s got the industry downright delighted. Things were lookin’ pretty rough earlier in the summer, with May revenues coming in 29 percent under the 2023 levels after a string of misses. However, hits from Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2 as well as other, more modest hits like Twisters and Despicable Me 4 kicked the summer into gear. While the numbers are still off from last year, the ramifications of last year’s strikes had expectations low going into the season, so a mere 10 percent isn’t half bad.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Yearbooks

A new study analyzed 14.5 million high school yearbook photos from across the United States going as far back as 1930 and as recent as 2010, using machine learning to tag the photos with descriptive statements about attire, hair and more. The clean-shaven in suits look naturally gave way to the scruffy, the long-haired, and so on and so forth. One interesting element tracked over time was individuality, which found that in the 1930s young women were more likely to dress differently than classmates compared to their male classmates, and then over time that changed until men dressed more distinctly than women did.

Sofia Shchukina, NPR

Turf

According to the NFL Players Association, 92 percent of players prefer to play on grass over turf, saying that it’s easier on their bodies and leads to fewer injuries. The owners have a crucial counterpoint, that grass is a little more expensive, so really we gotta consider both sides here. The league is split — 17 teams play on turf, 15 on grass — but strangely, if there’s something that’s going to change football, it’s football: The 2026 World Cup will see 11 NFL venues install grass fields.

Eben Novy-Williams and Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Aliens

In the United States, the percentage of people who believe UFO sightings offer proof of alien life increased from 20 percent in 1996 to 34 percent as of 2022, with 24 percent of Americans saying they’ve seen a UFO. A new paper argues, uh, that’s all getting to be a little much, and something that used to be a quirk is now developing into a legitimate societal problem. Beliefs in conspiratorial cover-ups are on the rise, with 68 percent of Americans telling Gallup in 2019 that they thought the government knows more about UFOs than it’s saying. One cause? Well, the History channel has been airing Ancient Aliens for 20 seasons and has racked up 13.8 million YouTube subscribers in the process, so, there’s that?

Tony Milligan, The Conversation

Hallmark

It’s fall, which means one thing: All the Hallmark Christmas movies have better get into post-production soon if they want to hit their release date. There have been 864 Hallmark TV movies since 2000, and the bible that defines them is thorough. Leads must be strong, female, early to mid-30s, and they have to have an easy-to-understand profession. Usually this is in the creative arts of some kind — 26 percent of jobs in Hallmark movies are in the field — and the percentage who are Big City Lawyers has slipped from over 1 in 10 in the early 2010s to less than 5 percent since 2020. On that note, as recently as 2021, half of all Hallmark TV movies involved someone returning to their hometown, a figure that in the past two years has slipped to under 30 percent.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Taxi

American Transit Insurance Co. is a 52-year-old company that insures 64 percent of the 117,000 taxis and for-hire vehicles in NYC. It’s the largest player in the largest such market in the country, and bad news, it also posted $700 million in net losses in the second quarter and it sure looks like it’s in deep trouble financially. This follows years of disagreements between ATIC and their actuary, and a failure would throw the entire transit ecosystem of the most consequential metropolis in the hemisphere into chaos, or in industry terminology, “The Full Hochul.”

Laura Nahmias, Claire Ballentine, Natalie Lung and Zeke Faux, Bloomberg

Mercury

BepiColombo is an ESA and JAXA probe en route to the planet Mercury. It was launched in October 2018, it’s done three flybys of Mercury, two of Venus, and one of Earth, and then it’s planning to pull off several more through January 2025. It’s going to pass within 165 kilometers of Mercury’s surface on September 4, which is 35 kilometers closer than planned, giving it a chance to test 10 of the 16 instruments on board and take a look at parts of the planet that won’t be accessible once it’s in orbit. That orbit will get pushed back by the maneuver by 11 months, and it’ll instead arrive to orbit Mercury in November 2026.

Dennis Normile, Science

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