By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! Sunday’s edition will go out to everyone — it’s a recap of some of the best books and launches of the year featured in our Sunday interview. Heads up that Christmas Eve is the last newsletter of the year.

The Phrase “Stunt Spectacular” Used To Mean Something In This Country

This week, an expectant nation was hit by two devastating news stories from the state of Florida. One is of a dream, deserted: The plan to build the world’s tallest roller coaster at a proposed park in Orlando called Skyplex, announced in 2014 to rise to 570 feet tall and with 10 inversions, has been formally scuttled. The coaster would have wrapped around an observation tower, which as a former Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 magnate, I have to concede is super dope. Following the closure of Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure, the tallest coaster in the world is in Saudi Arabia’s Quiddiya City, at 640 feet tall. In another blow to the American national identity, one of the longest-running water ski stunt shows in the country ended this week, with Legoland Florida ending the Brickbeard’s Water Stunt Show, the successor of a water-based stunt spectacular on Lake Eloise that dates at least as far back as the 1930s. The show, which featured not only fly-boarding but also wakeboarding and barefoot skiing, concluded nearly a century of pulse-pounding thrills and, dare I say it, wet and, yes, wild action.

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine and Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Holidays

This weekend, Sonic: The Hedgehog 3 will release in cinemas, and is projected to make $60 million, followed by Mufasa with $50 million domestically. Heading into Christmas, the box office gets a little funky, as lots of the rules evaporate with many students and plenty of workers on a break, meaning that weekday returns tend to be way better than usual. If you want to really center yourself on the reason for the season — the celebration on Christmas of he who conquered death itself and paved the way to everlasting life — Nosferatu opens wide December 25.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Flares

The 75,000-square-mile Permian Basin is the most productive oil and gas region in the world, and while most attempts to cut the carbon emissions of the region have focused on the major “super emitters,” the reality is that small sources are in the aggregate responsible for 72 percent of methane emissions from all oil and gas fields in the United States. There are over 130,000 active well sites in the Permian, some owned by massive petrochemical titans and some owned by tiny mom-and-pops.

Tammy Webber, The Associated Press

Burning Man

In a tough moment for radical self-reliance, the Burning Man festival is $14 million short of its fundraising goal to get out of the red, according to the CEO of Burning Man Project, which is in fact a real job and not the antagonist of a Neal Stephenson novel. The barter system rendered effectively useless outside of the Playa, the fundraising shortfall is the result of issues selling out the 2024 festival. Much of their revenue is made from an early presale of 4,000 tickets for vastly more than the typical main sale tickets, selling for $1,500 to $2,500, which typically bring in around $7 million from affluent fans of the festival who don’t want to risk missing out during the main sale. In 2024, though, sales of those early tickets fell from $6 million the year before to $3.4 million, which is causing a major cash crunch at the famously crunchy and infamously cashless event.

Katie Bain, Billboard

Tornado

In April of this year, there were over 400 tornadoes reported in the United States, the single highest count in 10 years. Through the month of November there were more than 1,762 tornadoes nationwide, the highest ever, significantly more than the 1,517 tornadoes in 2019 and vastly higher than the 886 tornadoes logged 10 years ago. I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s not simply the result of better detection technology, which is a typical go-to data processing question in this kind of moment; confirming and categorizing a tornado is a complicated process that can take some time. Researchers think that the increase may be linked to climate change.

Marco Hernandez, The New York Times

Returns

The era of free returns really does appear to be careening toward an unceremonious stop, as online retailers that were once as openhanded when it came to their return policy as they were with their delivery costs realize that they may have created a monster. While shipping costs might, for all intents and purposes, come out in the wash for a retailer of significant size, returns still bite. A return of a $100 item might cost a store $30, which is tough economics to crack. In 2024, total returns are projected to hit $900 billion, up from $309 billion in 2019, which seems pretty untenable; the average return rate doubled from 8 percent in 2019 to about 16 percent these days, which does mean the math on e-commerce has changed fundamentally.

Lora Kelley, The Atlantic

Branded

A new survey tracked the relationship between brand value and brand quality, finding that in general most brands come out ahead on both points. What’s especially interesting are the companies that fail one or the other — or both — questions. For instance, brands that have above-water quality but underwater value include Starbucks, Perrier, Jaguar and Ozempic, essentially prestigious ventures that are below the bang for the buck. On the other axis, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Motel 6, Temu and TikTok have good value but bad quality. Two brands stand as pillars of what some people call the “yeesh” sector: Amway is 2 percentage points underwater on quality and 4 points underwater on value, and Spirit Airlines is negative 15 points on quality and still somehow negative 4 points on value.

Rani Molla, Shewood News

This week, I spoke to Aylin Woodward, who wrote “AI Revealed a New Trove of Massive Ancient Symbols” for The Wall Street Journal. She also wrote “Neanderthals and Humans Mated More Recently Than Previously Thought,” which I linked out to last week. I’m a big fan of her coverage, and these stories as well as others I found deeply cool and are the exact kind of stuff that fascinates me, so I wanted to have her back on. Woodward can be found at The Wall Street Journal or at AylinWoodward.com.

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