By Walt Hickey

If you want to read something fun about the Oscars, I have a post I’m pretty proud of over at the Numlock Awards newsletter, all about how Oscar bait has been replaced by Oscar chum. Last big post of the season, shout-out to all the movie fans who follow the spinoff newsletter.

H-Mart

Korean supermarket H-Mart has been expanding at a steady clip from its humble origins in Queens, with outposts on the West Coast, Canada, and United Kingdom and something like $1 billion in annual sales. It’s got a number of tailwinds in its favor; when it first opened, Americans of Asian descent were 1.5 percent of the population, but today stand at 7 percent, and communities that can sustain an H-Mart have emerged in cities hardly synonymous with longstanding Asian communities, places like Atlanta and neighboring Gwinnett County, Georgia, which has gone so far as to brand itself as the Seoul of the South. It’s not just popular within Asian-American communities either, and has ridden the Korean wave into popularity across demographics, with something like 30 percent of shoppers now non-Asian.

Adam Chandler, Bloomberg

Saturn

In a shocking expose, Saturn has been found to have an additional 128 moons that had previously been unknown, bringing the total number of moons of Saturn to 274. This blows the doors off the rest of the solar system: Jupiter’s got “only” 95 moons, Uranus just 28, Neptune 16, Mars two, and of course Earth is a notorious moonogamist. Most of the moons in the new batch, which was revealed by astronomers in a paper that will soon be published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, come in at just a few miles across, but nevertheless possess the trackable orbits around Saturn that make them bona fide moons. They’re all small and orbit at a highly angled slope and in many cases travel backward around the planet compared to the more established moons, and altogether many are considered to be fragments of collisions with other moons. One subgroup has been named Mundilfairi (after a Norse god) and encompasses 47 of the 128 new moons, which may have resulted from a collision in Saturn’s orbit about 100 million years ago. The discoverer gets to name them, so if you or a loved one has come up with any new gods, pantheons, or mythological figures lately, please get in touch as it really seems we’re liable to run out of gods with this haul.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times

Sunshine

Florida has passed California in terms of new utility-scale solar capacity added, building out 3 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2024, behind only Texas. On the residential side, Florida is behind only California in terms of rooftop installations over the past five years. Even though the state’s only pulling 8 percent of its electricity from solar, there is a bright future for the source in Florida, in no small part due to residential demand for self-sufficient and resilient power generation in a state that has hosted 34 billion-dollar weather disasters in the past five years alone. Even though the state government isn’t exactly going out of its way to get solar online, due to state law municipalities have little control over power plant installations, and any plant with a capacity under 75 megawatts is exempt from review and permitting.

Alexander C. Kaufman, Canary Media

GNX

Kendrick Lamar’s November release of the album GNX has secured its third nonconsecutive week as the top album in the United States, pulling in 90,500 album equivalent units according to Luminate. This information came more than a day behind schedule, as it was a remarkably close weekend, and the animosity between the contenders meant that accuracy was a must: see, Tate McRae’s So Close To What came in with 87,000 units, but Drake and PartyNextDoor’s album $ome $exy $ongs 4 U arrived with 90,000 units, necessitating the additional hours of scrutiny.

Thania Garcia, Variety

Fiction

According to the latest data from 18 international territories in the book market, 16 of them saw big increases in demand for fiction books even if nonfiction sales are stalling or falling. Five countries saw double-digit increases in revenue for fiction in 2024, including India (up 30.7 percent), Mexico (20.7 percent), Brazil (16.4 percent), Spain (12.0 percent) and Portugal (11.4 percent). Social media was cited as a major driver. Meanwhile, nonfiction sales were up in only six regions, and at rate way lower than fiction.

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Honk

New York City’s implementation of a congestion fee to drive below 59th Street in Manhattan has been a fiscal and traffic success, but new data shows that it’s had a huge impact on quality of life as well. Complaints to 311 over motorists who honked way too much are down by a staggering 69 percent compared to the same period of 2024 inside the congestion relief zone, as the reduction in traffic has compelled drivers to shut the hell up, I’m walkin’ here.

Jose Martinez and Mia Hollie, The City

SO2

In 2020, a new international regulation required that the sulfur content of ships’ emissions be cut by 77 percent. One reverberation of this, unexpected and potentially unwelcome as it may be, is that cloud cover over the ocean is actually down, and one new finding published this week is that lightning over shipping lanes dropped by nearly half, seemingly overnight, right after the regulations went into effect, declining by about 50 percent.

Chris Wright, The Conversation

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