By Walt Hickey

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Nosferatu

After just 10 days in release, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu has crossed the $100 million mark at the global box office, a stellar opening for an art house movie. It’s made $69.4 million domestically since its release on Christmas and $26.8 million overseas, an encouraging sign for the increasing health and vitality of the global box office, which, like Count Orlok, has gone from desiccated and disgusting to increasingly intriguing and compelling for reasons I cannot put my finger on. Hopefully Hollywood learns the right lessons from this hit and greenlights a whole series of reboots from the hot I.P. of the year 1922 — pictures like sadomasochistic bullfighting vehicle Blood and Sand, flapper court drama Manslaughter, and Man to Man, which has a synopsis far less compelling than I originally envisioned based on the title.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Ford

Ford reported great electric-vehicle sales for 2024, moving 97,865 pure electric vehicles, which was short of GM’s total EV sales (114,400) in the year but still saw big gains in several key models, with Mustang Mach-E sales up 27 percent to 51,745 units, the F-150 Lightning up 39 percent, and the E-Transit up 64 percent. It’s been such a good run that Ford’s extending an initiative it launched back in October to give buyers a free home electric-vehicle charger and free installation — overcoming some understandable hesitation about leaving internal-combustion engines behind — which was only intended to run through January 2 but has now been extended through the end of March.

Umar Shakir, The Verge

Raw

Netflix tonight will air live the 1,650th episode of an iconic and long-running soap opera in their quest to enter the live television space. The show is a classic soap about warring families, fierce rivalries, diabolical villains and — of course — arguments so deep and beliefs so sincerely held that words fail and no option remains but violence. I speak of course of Monday Night Raw, which began airing in January 1993 and is at this point the longest-running weekly episodic series on television. Tonight it begins day one of a 10-year deal with Netflix.

Joe Reedy, The Associated Press

Forklifts

Retail orders for forklifts fell 28 percent in 2023, the largest decline in 14 years. That was in part due to an inevitable slowdown after a frantic two-year period of warehouse construction in 2021 and 2022 that followed pandemic-related surges in needs for warehousing space. However, it’s also a potential sign of things to come, given that forklifts remain some of the most dangerous devices used in American workplaces — about 7,500 people per year are injured in forklift-related incidents — and are seen as a potentially strong contender for replacement, automation or systemic overhaul. Some factories are explicit about intentions to go forklift-free and use overhead cranes or electric pallet jacks instead.

John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal

Party

In 2023, according to time use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event over an average weekend or holiday, which is down by 35 percent since 2004, when 5.6 percent indulged. As many in public health circles have cited the “loneliness epidemic” and the decline in close friendships as a serious mental health situation, perhaps the solution is right in front of us: to just have more actual parties and host more. Now I’m not saying we name Andrew W.K. to be the secretary of health and human services or anything; I’m just observing you could do worse.

Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

History

The history industry is thriving, with sales of books about history up 6 percent in the United States, outpacing the overall book business. In the U.K. and Ireland, the granular data is remarkable: Ancient history sales increased 67 percent from 2013 to 2023. The podcast side of the business is booming, with hits like The Rest is History (which gets 12.5 million downloads a month), Revisionist History and the classic Hardcore History leading a resurgence in interest in the genre. While this kind of demand glut can ordinarily cause all sorts of problems for a sector enjoying sharp increases in demand, I have it on good authority that the overall supply of history increases fairly consistently, at the rate of approximately one new day of history added per day, precluding any possibility of a serious shortage.

Will Dunn, Bloomberg

Yellowstone

New research that measured the conductivity of rock in the Yellowstone hot spot has for the first time offered up a higher resolution look at precisely what’s cooking in the caldera, building a three-dimensional map of what’s molten where dozens of kilometers down. They found two major sources of basaltic melt that start about 50 kilometers down and merge around 20 kilometers below the surface, essentially looking like a thick wishbone made out of molten rock. The whole system contains somewhere between 4,000 and 6,500 cubic kilometers of molten basaltic material, which is a fairly rowdy statistic, but the good news is that the amount of melted crustal material is less than 500 cubic kilometers’ worth, so eruptions the likes of which could reorganize the Rockies are not really seen as especially likely given current conditions.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

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