By Walt Hickey

Clark

Caitlin Clark made the most of any WNBA player ever last year at $11.1 million, but only 1 percent of that came from her WNBA salary, which after bonuses came out to $100,000. The real money came in the form of an estimated $11 million in endorsement revenue after cutting deals with Nike, Gatorade, State Farm, Wilson, Hy-Vee, Xfinity, Gainbridge, Lilly and Panini. The Nike money — an eight-year deal worth over $3 million a year — constitutes the bulk of that. This is a pretty significant phenomenon in women’s sports, with athletes making a strikingly low percentage of their money from their actual salary: Simone Biles earns 99 percent of her money from sponsors, and freeskier Eileen Gu made only 0.3 percent of her $22.1 million in earnings from direct compensation.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Risky Business

“Nonadmitted” insurance is becoming the new normal in many places that face untenable economics when it comes to insuring houses, like coastal Florida or wildfire-prone California. Essentially, insurance tends to be a heavily regulated field, with governments ensuring that insurers have enough money to compensate those they insure, that they’re maintaining high-quality business practices, and that price hikes are limited year to year. When those insurers won’t touch you, maybe you can go to a state-backed insurer, but when even those go out of reach, nonadmitted insurance is there. They have none of the protections or backing of the government and existed at first to insure the comically uninsurable, like nuclear waste projects or fireworks factories. Nonadmitted premiums rose 27.5 percent from 2022 to 2023, compared to 13.8 percent among the admitted market. The number of nonadmitted policies in Florida rose 73 percent to hit 92,000 over the past 14 years.

Sophie Alexander and Leslie Kaufman, Bloomberg

Bye

It used to be that bye weeks in the NFL were a chance for teams to recharge and come out roaring, with a noted improvement in their odds of winning the week coming off the bye compared to teams that hadn’t managed to have the extra time off. This advantage has all but disappeared. From 2002 to 2010, teams coming off a bye were found to have a 2.2-point advantage compared to non-bye teams in the game immediately following the week off. From 2012 to 2023, that fell to a 0.3-point advantage. What changed? NFL researchers point to a 2011 rule change as part of the collective bargaining agreement that said teams cannot spend the whole bye week practicing, and that players needed at least four days off. Turns out it wasn’t necessarily the R&R that was causing a bye week advantage, but rather the extra time prepping.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Sophomore Slump

There’s a popular adage that the second album produced by a band often comes in a little weaker than their debut or even subsequent album. The reasons provided can be so general as not to be particularly useful — bands trying something out of their range or perhaps just repeating covered ground, or becoming either too musically indulgent or perhaps just being too bottled in about their newfound fame — but the reputation of the sophomore slump is a real one. A new study sought to figure this out, looking at 2,078 album reviews of 387 artists by 38 critics published in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide and comparing that to Rate Your Music ratings of 4,030 records from 254 artists. The study found that the reputation mostly comes from critics, and suggests that the very reputation of a sophomore slump may have an impact on its continued appearance; listeners don’t seem to observe a unique slump between the second and third album.

Eric Hamilton, University of Florida

Guinness

A new viral trend called “splitting the G” has prompted a surge in interest in drinking Guinness among younger drinkers, with the objective of quaffing the exact amount of beer so as to reduce the level of beer in a cup down to the level where the meniscus aligns with the horizontal line in the letter “G” on a branded pint glass. That’s a precise way of saying that the kids invented a new drinking game and now they’re all drinking a ton of Guinness. Dubliner, a bar in Boston, sold more Guinness than any other bar or restaurant in the city of Boston last year, and this year the bar reported that it’s selling 63 percent more of the beer just to keep up with the trend.

Luke Fortney, The New York Times

Erebus

Mount Erebus is a 3,800-meter-high volcano in Antarctica around 40 kilometers from McMurdo Station, the largest research base on the continent. This month, new sensors have been installed on the rim of the volcano, which is most assuredly active. A new worry is that warmer temperatures might actually be stimulating the volcano, which is the top of a magma system that goes something like 150 kilometers through the crust and into the mantle. The cause for concern is that according to one theory, when the weight on a volcano is lifted, gas escapes and magma can be released during an expulsion of pressure, and one way that weight might be lifted off a volcano in Antarctica is from ice melting off. Another volcano 1,500 kilometers away from McMurdo, Waesche, lies dormant, but a laboratory analysis of rocks in its vicinity found that 90 percent of them were from eruptions that took place during periods of warm temperatures between the ice ages, which is the kind of unexpected correlation that gets some putting on their Is There Causation? hat.

Paul Voosen, Science

Drill

The U.S. Park Service oversees Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the climactic battle of the American Civil War in 1863. The park needs guides with a thorough level of expertise, and competition is stiff. The Park Service has issued licenses to guides since the 1930s, and it keeps the number of guides at 150-ish and only offers the notoriously difficult test to become one when the ranks sufficiently thin out. It’s not especially lucrative, but it is very prestigious and a great gig for the right kind of retiree or part-timer. As it stands, there are about 130 guides, so now the test — up to 180 questions and three essays — is on offer for the first time since 2017. That round, 97 applicants became nine new guides, illustrating just how tough the test can be. There will be about 160 people sitting for the exam on Saturday, and those who meet the mark will eventually be interviewed by guides in a mock tour to determine who will join their number.

James Fanelli, The Wall Street Journal

This week in the Sunday edition I talked to Gary He about his new book, McAtlas. It’s a gorgeous new coffee table book, a photography-filled deeply-reported round-the-world adventure into one of the most interesting companies on the planet. I unlocked the interview — check it out, it’s a fun read!

Numlock Sunday: Gary He photographs the McDonald's empire

Dec 1

Walt Hickey

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