By Walt Hickey

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Den of Thieves

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera won the weekend at the box office with $15.5 million in North America, about even with its predecessor and on the higher end of expectations for the caper. Of interest outside the top of the list is Better Man, the Robbie Williams biopic in which the U.K. singer is portrayed by a computer-generated monkey, an interesting conceit that nevertheless doesn’t overcome the reality that absolutely nobody in America knows who Robbie Williams is. The performer — who has seven No. 1s in the U.K. and six of the top 100 bestselling albums in the U.K., though who had the same approximate success crossing the Atlantic that the Titanic did — made $1 million in the U.S. across 1,291 venues, which is a tough number for a $110 million production budget.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Feels Like Neal Stephenson Wrote This One

Eleven years ago, a hard drive containing the access data for 8,000 bitcoins was accidentally discarded, and since 2013 the owner of that drive has been on a dogged search to dig up a landfill to find a haul that would today be worth $765 million. The Newport City Council, which owns the dump, says that excavating the landfill would allow harmful substances to escape, would raise public health problems, and that by law the trash isn’t even his property anymore. The case faltered before a judge, who found in favor of the council, meaning that the 2.5-inch drive containing what is alleged to be a remarkably valuable wallet.dat file will remain buried under tens of thousands of tonnes of waste.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Glow

The Kenya Space Agency is investigating a 500-kilogram object that crashed to Earth in Makueni County, Kenya, on December 30, a massive metal ring with a diameter of eight feet. The object is thought to be space debris, a ring separated from a rocket, though space trackers have been unable to pin down exactly which launch the object is from, and some believe it may not have even come from space. The most likely space-related possibility, according to one astrophysicist, is object 33155, the SYLDA adapter from the Ariane V184 flight in July 2008. That said, Arianespace officials said they don’t believe the debris was associated with the Ariane V given its diameter and weight, leaving this mystery open.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Military

The United States Army hit its recruiting goals last year for the first time in several years, breaking a slump that was worrying Pentagon brass. In 2024, the hitting of the goal was triggered by an increase in women enlisting: Almost 10,000 women enlisted for active duty in 2024, up 18 percent year over year, over a period when male recruitment increased 8 percent. For the Pentagon, this is a somewhat welcome surprise — the Army hasn’t tweaked all that much about its recruiting strategy at all. That said, women account for just 30 percent of juvenile arrests and are likelier to want to pursue higher ed, which makes them more likely to qualify and have interest in the Army. Male enlistments have fallen 22 percent, from 58,000 in 2013 to 45,000 last year.

Steve Beynon, Military.com

Hop Water

The new trend in beer-adjacent beverages is hop water, a nonalcoholic seltzer infused with hops, which can be appealing to brewers to produce because they’ve got the hops laying around and the margins are great. Off-premise sales of hop water were up 20 percent year over year for the 52 weeks through December 28, 2024, and sales tend to spike in January — sales in the first month of 2024 were up 48 percent year over year — given that some spend the month drying out.

Dave Infante, VinePair

Books

Sales of print books were up 1 percent in 2024, the first annual increase in three years, with unit sales of 782.7 million books. Adult fiction, up 4.8 percent, drove the growth, with fantasy in particular (up 35.8 percent) in the driver’s seat. Sales of romance novels were also up 9 percent, which is pretty much how you’d expect the romantasy phenomenon to break out on the ol’ balance sheet. The top-selling adult nonfiction book was The Eras Tour Book, which was self-published and sold 1.2 million copies, while the top children’s book was The Scarlet Shedder, the 12th volume in the Dog Man franchise by genre G.O.A.T. Dav Pilkey.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Violins

Huangqiao is a city in eastern China in the Jiangsu province, with a population of about 230,000. Roughly 10 percent of those people work for the local violin industry, which is a global powerhouse in the luthier business. Huangqiao alone accounts for 70 percent of China’s violin production and is responsible for 30 percent of all global production, home to 220 violin-making businesses. The town’s industry is now trying to move up the value chain and increase the quality of the produced instruments to compete globally, particularly as neighboring Vietnam becomes a rising producer of low-cost violins.

Noriyuki Doi, Nikkei Asia

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