By Walt Hickey

Oscars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reported their annual finances, and following last year’s ceremony — which saw record-low viewership, to the point that they ended up kicking back a little money to ABC — awards-related revenue took a bit of a dip, but on the whole the Academy is actually doing better than ever. Total awards revenue was $117.7 million, a little short of the guaranteed $120 million, and the Oscars reported giving back around 1.2 percent of the guarantee because of the 56 percent ding in viewership. However, the Academy is doing the classic twist that universities have done, which is to effectively become an incredibly successful hedge fund that on the side offers a few dozen annual statuettes: they made $70.3 million in income from their $709.2 million portfolio, up from $5.1 million last year.

Michael Cieply, Deadline

Jewels

In 2013, a mountaineer found a box containing $340,000 in emeralds, sapphires and rubies on Mont Blanc, compiling the single most persuasive argument I’ve ever heard to get into mountain climbing. The climber handed the gems over to the authorities in accordance with French law, and the cache was believed to be related to an Air India flight crash in 1966. Due to warming temperatures, the Bosson glacier on the mountain — the tallest in Western Europe — is receding and more of the decades-old wreckage has been exposed. After repeated efforts to find the rightful owners failed, the climber now gets half the gems, while the Chamonix government gets the other half.

Oliver Staley, Quartz

Dragnet

Life360 is billed as a family safety app and is used by 33 million people, mainly as a tracker for parents to monitor the location of their kids through their cell phones. However, under the hood of the app is reportedly a robust location data operation, and the company has made a great deal of money selling user location data to about a dozen clearinghouses that hawk it to all kinds of companies. In 2016, Life360 made $693,000 selling data it collected from users, a line of business that rose to the level of $16 million in 2020, or around a fifth of their entire company’s revenue. They also made another $6 million from a deal with Allstate’s Arity.

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, The Markup

Runnings Back

Jonathan Taylor of the Indianapolis Colts has been singlehandedly keeping the position alive as running the ball recedes from playbooks amid a preference for passing. In 2021, 28 out of the 32 NFL teams have a negative expected points added on running plays, meaning that on average, handoffs actually make the situation worse for 28 out of 32 teams. The Eagles, Browns and Bucs are behind the Colts in terms of getting solid yardage out of the run, and it’s thanks to Taylor, who has 1,378 rushing yards this season, 370 more than the runner-up. He gains 5.6 yards per carry — 30 percent above average — and looking to the advanced stats, gains 1.5 yards over expected per rush. And yes, I did write this up entirely to justify my searing, humiliating loss to Taylor owner Kim Bhasin in the fantasy football league this year — team name Jonathan Taylor Thomas, I seethe with envy — and to help you justify the very same loss in your league.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Line Up

As of November 16, there were 86 container ships in San Pedro Bay off the coast of Los Angeles, all lined up waiting for a berth at the Ports of Los Angeles or Long Beach. On November 22, that fell to 60 ships, a miraculous effort on the part of the global supply chain and the facilities that make it work. Or was it? Ships are “at port” when they’re within 40 miles of the port. On November 15, the Marine Exchange of Southern California said that pollution was getting too rough near the port and ships needed to back off. As a result, some ships in the line to get into L.A. posted up off the coast of Mexico. So as of December 5, there were in fact 96 ships waiting to enter the ports of L.A. and Long Beach, of which 56 were outside the 40-mile zone and thus not in port, and with the 31 ships docked that meant 127 ships were trying to unload.

Aurora Almendral, Quartz

Hawkguy?

A new survey asked 2,200 U.S. adults about superhero movies, and found that while the films remain incredibly popular — 64 percent of adults said they enjoy superhero movies compared to 36 percent who said they don’t — the group who could be described as “fatigued” has been rising in number. In 2018, 17 percent of respondents said they like superhero films but are getting a little tired of them, a group that has grown six percentage points to 23 percent. The survey also asked about name ID for the characters from the newest phase of the MCU, and found Groot, Blade, Shang-Chi and Ms. Marvel has the best name recognition, while most of the Eternals — Ikaris, Kingo, Druig, Ajak — had among the worst. The character with the worst recognition among the new, coming phase of Marvel movies and shows was Moon Knight, and to audiences’ credit the whole thing with Moon Knight is Moon Knight doesn’t really always have the best grip on who Moon Knight is either, so trust me you’re actually doing fine.

Sarah Shevenock, Morning Consult

Narcostate

Destroyed by years of civil war, Syria has emerged under President Bashar al-Assad as a massive exporter of illegal drugs, specifically the addictive amphetamine captagon. Officially produced under the auspices of the army and Assad’s younger brother, caches of the illicit upper have been found in ports the world over, including 95 million pills found in Malaysia, 84 million pills in Italy, 33 million pills in Greece, plus multiple major busts in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait. This year alone, 250 million captagon pills have been seized the world over, 18 times the amount of four years ago. The sophisticated smuggling network constructed by the Syrian exporters — most of the captagon leaves through Latakia on the Mediterranean, but some shipments are smuggled to Beirut— has also recently been found moving drugs like crystal meth. Global captagon seizures last year had a street value of $2.9 billion, vastly higher than Syria’s legal exports which totaled $860 million.

Ben Hubbard and Hwaida Saad, The New York Times

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