By Walt Hickey

Penn

Penn Station in New York is getting $72 million for an extensive renovation, adding a 30,000-square-foot public plaza, 18 new escalators, 11 elevators, and an additional eight street entrances. Originally designed by rabbits, the warren underneath Madison Square Garden is a sore spot for the city and in desperate need of a renovation. Most compelling for guys who live in Queens but really like Amtrak, they’re also throwing in a new underground connection to the Herald Square stop. This replaces the original plan for the site, which is to keep everything exactly the same except you engrave into the edifice: This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

Ronny Reyes, New York Post

Alaska

Warming temperatures have some in Alaska eyeing agriculture that was not previously possible in the tundra. Anchorage hit 90 degrees in 2019 for the first time on record, and average annual temperatures are increasing faster than in any other state. By the mid-2070s, the growing season in Fairbanks — which in the 1980s ended in late August — might actually extend well into October. Researchers planted 150 hazelnut seedlings at the Matanuska Experiment Farm just to see how they’d endure the weather, and while most of them survived the spring, many didn’t make it to September. Still, finding hardy lineages of hazelnuts (which are produced most successfully in Oregon) are seen as a solid contender for the vanguard of Alaska calamitously warming into the American bread basket.

Zaz Hollander, Anchorage Daily News

Crash

Lots of the most dangerous roads in America have something in common: They’re state-managed roads in municipalities. When municipalities are responsible for roads, they can be proactive and responsive to the desires of the community, so dangerous intersections get addressed and speed limits get toggled until a better ideal is found. When states operate roads, on the other hand, they’re dealing with lots of different stakeholders and inherently don’t want to handle any one road fundamentally differently than the entire portfolio. Jam one of these unsupervised highways into a densely populated area and you’ve got a recipe for disaster; while only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, 66 percent of traffic deaths in the 101 largest metro areas happen there.

David Zipper, Vox

Winnipeg

The Jets look incredible this year — no, not those Jets. The Winnipeg Jets of the NHL have started their season 15-1, but even that might not be enough to save the team. The Winnipeg Jets have the second-lowest valuation in the NHL, and a year after Arizona’s hockey franchise imploded, the team is stressing over their own numbers. The Jets play in an arena with a 15,004-seat capacity, the smallest in the league, but last year they were only at 88 percent capacity despite a pretty solid season. Talk of relocation is heating up, as season ticket deposits were down 27 percent compared to the previous three seasons, down to 9,500 from 13,000.

Jason Clinkscales, Sportico

That Many Submariners? Nay, More.

For the first time ever, Rolex has let slip how many Submariner watches it’s produced over the decades, putting the figure at 4 million watches from 1953 to 2020. Based on current prices, that’s $46 billion worth of watches, and then if you count the Submariners made from 2020 onward, it’s closer to $50 billion. The watch market has been hot, but volatile, and guesstimating the actual supply has always been an inexact science, with Rolex generally understood to produce around a million watches — excuse me, timepieces — per year. The secondary market for used luxury watches is projected to rise to $35 billion by 2030. If you’ll excuse me, as a man in his 30s who recently was reminded of the existence of the Rolex Submariner, it’s time to spend the rest of my day drooling over pictures of Submariners on the internet.

Andy Hoffman, Bloomberg

Battle

A team of archaeologists has discovered the location of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in present-day Iraq, a battle that took place sometime in 637 or 638 CE and was a crucial historical moment in the spread of Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula. What’s really wild is how they found it: by poring over declassified American spy imagery from the 1970s to pinpoint the battle to 30 kilometers south of the city of Kufa on the Euphrates. The researchers spotted a six-mile-long double wall, which corresponded to a detail in the historical sources that describe the battle and the routes taken on the way to it.

Durham University

Heist

A gang in Columbia has stolen 3.2 tons of gold from a large industrial concern, gold which is worth $200 million based on current prices. What’s fascinating is how they stole it — namely, by straight up stealing the mine. The armed militia with some 7,000 members infiltrated the Zijin Mining Group’s gold mine near Buriticá, seized tunnels, and worked with illegal miners to extract an amount of ore equal to 38 percent of the mine’s total production, digging improvised tunnels that connected to the more established official tunnels and poaching the gold out from under the mine operator.

Juan Forero, The Wall Street Journal

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