By Walt Hickey

Soto

Juan Soto set the record for the largest contract in the history of sports, agreeing to a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets. He will depart the crosstown Yankees, where his contract was valued at $31 million in 2024. The contract with the Mets comes with a $75 million signing bonus. It’s a test of an unstoppable force (Juan Soto’s talent at baseball) and an immovable object (the Mets’ inability to bag a ring). In some ways, this is one of the oldest stories in sports, the timeless saga of “man with promising talent signs to squad of cosmically doomed bastards and lets the gods roll the dice on the outcome.” It’s up there with the great trinity of Platonic stories in sports; namely, (1) Underdog team wins championship, (2) Underdog team loses, but learns a valuable lesson about resilience, sportsmanship or how to be a good person anyway, and of course (3) There is ⁠nothing in the rule book that says dog cannot play this sport.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Vaporized

The increased amount of material in orbit means that more and more stuff we send into space is burning up in the atmosphere every year. When this was just an occasional event, it wasn’t really construed to be an issue, but now we’re talking real numbers and researchers want to find out what impact those falling and vaporizing satellites will have on our atmosphere as a whole. In 2019, 115 satellites burned up in reentry, while as of November we’ve already hit 950 satellite reentries in 2024. That was one motivation for a worldwide group of atmospheric scientists monitoring the reentry of the Salsa satellite, a 550-kilogram spacecraft, which was the fifth satellite to have an observation campaign based around its atmospheric vaporization.

Tereza Pultarova, MIT Technology Review

The Disney Armada

The Walt Disney Company is spending $12 billion to launch seven new cruise ships between now and 2031, beginning with its recently unveiled Disney Treasure in New York. This will expand the size of its fleet from six ships to 13 ships, which will presumably fulfill Walt’s dream of building a navy larger than Lithuania’s. Disney is a generally small player in the cruise business all things considered — it’s got about 5 percent of the Caribbean market, and just 2.5 percent of the global market — but the cruise business is hot, and cruise travel has already surpassed prepandemic levels.

Bruce Gil, Quartz

Trucks

Vehicles in the United States are getting taller, and that’s causing visibility problems and claiming lives. Vehicles with hoods higher than 40 inches are 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than other vehicles, and the heavier vehicles that are becoming the norm are also causing physics problems for pedestrians that they hit. This phenomenon has set up an arms race: If everyone else has a big car, and big cars tend to fare better in accidents because they are big, then you don’t want to be the only one in a small car, so the average car continues to get bigger.

Marin Cogan, Vox

Trees

Sales of Christmas trees are holding steady, with 14 percent of households buying a live tree last year while 80 percent of Americans have an artificial tree. There are 2,880 farms dedicated to solely growing Christmas trees, and then 13,000 that dabble in the business and sell a few alongside other, more traditional crops. A tree might sell for $20 wholesale and retail for $75. Overall, the business for Christmas trees and decorations stands at $5 billion.

Peter Green, Quartz

Streaming

Paid subscriptions to streaming services will hit 2 billion by 2029, according to Ampere Analysis, up from 1.8 billion today. The forecast has subscriber revenue climbing significantly faster than individual account growth, and expects streaming revenue to increase 30 percent by 2029 as services jack up prices and get their subscribers to pony up for better packages. Ampere estimates that subscription streamers will generate $170 billion per year in 2029, and about 29 percent of the market will be controlled by Netflix.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Formaldehyde

According to the EPA, continuous daily exposure to the chemical formaldehyde above 7 micrograms per cubic meter can cause decreased lung function and several other maladies such as allergic reactions or asthma symptoms. An analysis of air samples from a number of common locations turned up elevated levels of formaldehyde at lots of them. A sample taken at an Ashley Furniture, for instance, found levels 13 times the EPA’s threshold for causing decreased lung function, a nail salon had levels six times the threshold, and a Raymour & Flanigan had levels seven times the safe level.

Topher Sanders, ProPublica

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