By Walt Hickey

Welcome back! Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.

Capped Off

Captain America: Brave New World made a clean $100 million domestically over the four-day President’s Day weekend, plus another $92.4 million overseas. That’s above the domestic expectations but actually slightly short of the international one. Naturally, this raises pertinent and potentially unsolvable questions of why the international community might not be bum-rushing the multiplex to fork over their hard-earned local currency, all to watch a movie exploring the wild and improbably fantasy of shifting American geopolitical presence and the utterly imaginative idea that the U.S. might have impulsive political leadership.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Animation

Ne Zha 2, the Chinese animated film, made $275.3 million in China alone this past weekend, bringing in $1.64 billion total so far. That’s also $104 million in Imax alone, making it the highest-grossing Imax movie in China. It will soon pass The Lion King to enter the top ten highest-grossing films ever, and barring a massive and unexpected reversal, it’ll almost certainly pass Inside Out 2 ($1.69 billion) to become the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. Overall, the Chinese box office is now up to $2.77 billion for the year.

Naman Ramachandran, Variety

Fate Is Sealed

About 90 percent of the biomass of the ocean comes from the twilight zone of the body of water, an area that’s incredibly hard for scientists to get down to. Which is needed to reliably carry out the biomass analysis that helps determine the health of the marine ecosystem. New research, however, has found a clever proxy in an unlikely research partner: elephant seals. They can reach four meters in length, migrate 10,000 kilometers from North America to the North Pacific and spend seven months of the year hunting nonstop, diving as low as 1,000 meters below the surface to feed. For decades, UC Santa Cruz has monitored the weight and survival rates of northern elephant seals in California. New data shows that when cross-referenced to the incredibly difficult-to-gather data of ocean conditions, researchers are able to assess the health of the Pacific based on seal weight. The data suggests that the fish and squid populations in the deep seas go through a three to five-year cycle of abundance and scarcity.

Annie Roth, bioGraphic

Heritage

After fourteen years of brutal civil war, experts are beginning to return to Syria’s many archeological and world heritage sites to assess the damage and work towards restoring them ahead of long-hope-for tourism returns that might stimulate the economy. Home to six UNESCO World Heritage sites, the archaeological star of the show is Palmyra, a Silk Road hub that is the site of 2,000-year-old Roman ruins that hosted some 150,000 monthly visitors prior to the start of the conflict in 2011. Another site, Crac des Chevaliers, took damage from air strikes, while the 700 abandoned Byzantine settlements known as “The Dead Cities” have been thoroughly looted.

Sally Abou Aljoud and Ghaith Alsayed, The Associated Press

Comics

Unit sales of graphic novels were down slightly from 2023 to 2024, declining 8 percent over the year. The market for kids’ graphic novels — which is vastly dominated by the beloved Dog Man series — was up 1 percent, but the market for young adult graphic novels dropped a somewhat calamitously 34 percent. Graphic novels for adults were down 11 percent. Overall, though, things are pretty good: graphic novel sales are up 103 percent since 2018, and manga sales are up 187 percent. To be clear, any of these year-to-year shifts are riding on top of a huge post-pandemic boost to the medium.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

Lefty

The NFL Combine invites are out, and this year, there’s an exciting development for kicking nerds: we got a lefty. For the first time in 17 years, a left-footed kicker will participate in the event, a player out of the University of Pittsburgh named Ben Sauls. Since 2000, there have been just 15 left-footed kickers who have made a field goal in an NFL game, meaning that given the 181 kickers of any footedness that have made a field goal, lefties made just 8.3 percent of field goal makers. Their prowess, though, is deeply intriguing: of the top 20 all-time kickers, five are lefties who played in the past 25 years. Names include Morten Andersen (who is second in all-time made field goals) and Sebastian Janikowski.

Alex Katson, Wide Left

I want to shout out a great newsletter called Semafor Media, written by a friend of mine, Maxwell Tani. The newsletter is written by Maxwell and Semafor's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, and it dives into the fascinating political, cultural and financial forces shaping global news organizations. I'm personally a huge fan; each issue is full of really thoughtful analysis and the occasional colossal scoop. In my experience, it's basically where the news gets their news — check it out and subscribe for free here.

Sunburn

Skiiers and snowboarders are at unique risk of sunburn, in no small part because they’re getting it from all sides. For one thing, the Earth is roughly 1.7 percent closer to the Sun in, say, early January compared to the annual average. This means that they get about 3.3 percent more sunshine, though that’s not the factor moving the needle. The main contributing factor is reflected radiation from the snow or the “albedo.” Fresh powder usually rocks an albedo of nearly 95 percent, meaning that the solar radiation coming off the snow is nearly as strong as the solar radiation coming from the source.

Steven R. Fassnacht, The Conversation

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