By Walt Hickey
We are off Monday in observance of Washington’s Birthday. Have a great weekend!
Romance
Romance novels generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2022, and individual market niches within the broader romance genre have popped up again and again. One of the latest to do so is crime-romance, where a heroine is attempting to solve a crime or evade a criminal all while having a romantic relationship. It’s a field with a long history, whether you’re talking about Agatha Christie writing romance novels under a pseudonym or even big names like Nora Roberts dominating the subgenre through the Death series of over 50 books. A new survey of fans conducted by academic researchers found that many reported lacing a bit of edge or sense of danger into a romance book helped avoid pitfalls like being too cheesy or predictable.
Lisa J. Hackett and Jo Coghlan, The Conversation
Shark Week
The International Shark Attack File, a research project maintained by the Florida Museum of Natural History, is out with its latest data on shark attacks in 2024. Last year saw 28 unprovoked shark bites in the U.S., down from 36 unprovoked bites in 2023. Half of them were in Florida, which has a massive shoreline, warm waters and high numbers of “people from Florida,” which one must only assume predisposes them towards rowdy animal encounters. More specifically, Florida is home to breeding grounds of the blacktip shark, which are not particularly good at differentiating between fish and humans as juveniles. Worldwide, there were just 47 unprovoked attacks, well under the ten-year average of 70 bites, and surfers accounted for 33 percent of all attacks.
Bolivia
Only 73 percent of Bolivians had access to the internet as of 2022, lagging well behind neighbors Brazil (80 percent) and Chile (89 percent). The deficit is frustrating enough that some are smuggling in Starlink systems, which (although not currently authorized) have considerably better connectivity than the state-run existing network, where most traffic relies on a single satellite, Túpac Katari 1. The satellite was launched in 2013 and cost $300 million, most of which was funded by a 15-year loan from the China Development Bank. The Bolivian government doesn’t want outside systems to come in and jeopardize the ability to repay that loan. The issue is: the internet stinks, and only around 10 percent of the national territory actually has mobile coverage.
William Wroblewski, Rest of World
Cars Down Pedestrians Up
New data from New York City’s Economic Development Corporation reveals that a key fear of opponents to congestion pricing — that hiking tolls for cars in lower Manhattan would cause a sharp decline in foot traffic, jeopardizing businesses — has not come to pass. In fact, it’s the opposite: pedestrian traffic in Manhattan was up 4.6 percent compared to last year during the program’s operating period in January. This means an additional 1.5 million more people walking around. That remains true even as 7 percent fewer cars entered the congestion zone, which is pretty much exactly what the program hoped to accomplish. Pedestrian traffic was up 18.5 percent in Midtown.
Delistings
Winter tends to see the annual spike in people pulling homes off the market, responding to lower demand in the cold months, and potentially taking the time to reconsider the sale price or make improvements ahead of a new listing. According to CoreLogic, 73,000 homes were pulled from sale in December, the single highest number in a given month going back to December 2015. That’s up 64 percent from December of 2023 and means that about a tenth of the properties on the market were yanked from sale. Home sales last year were at their lowest level in almost 30 years.
Carol Ryan, The Wall Street Journal
Logs
Wood, as a substance, is incredibly tough to break down, but a host of species have evolved specifically to take on the task. About a third of global deadwood decay is thanks to insects, with termites carrying most of the weight, particularly in tropical areas. In the savannah, termites can decompose dead wood even before the tree is dead, eating the dead heartwood from the middle of the living tree outward. They create a hollow organism that is both alive and actively being cleaned of dead wood tissue. Besides bugs, most of the decomposition is accomplished by microorganisms, especially fungi. They can apparently get very territorial: if you’ve ever cut through a rotten log and seen black lines running through the wood, that’s a barrier made out of melanin produced by a fungus to delineate regions of the wood it’s eating and to keep other rivals out.
Katarina Zimmer, Knowable Magazine
Thames
Researchers at the Natural History Museum, London, have used radiocarbon dating to get a lock on human remains found and removed from the River Thames. These remains were taken from the hundreds of skeletal remains recovered from the lower Thames over two centuries. Turns out, just chucking a body in the river when its original owner is done with it was a fairly popular pastime. Half of 61 dated individuals who went into the river did so in the Bronze Age or Iron Age, indicating that this may have been a pretty common way of handling the dead in prehistory. Overall, the radiocarbon dates ranged from 4000 BCE to a somewhat distressing 1800 AD, with remains from Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, medieval and post-medieval all found in some number or another.
This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday edition, I spoke to Julia Alexander, who writes the wonderful newsletter Posting Nexus. Julia is brilliant; her newsletter is all about attention and where we allocate it. She has a really keen eye on media and the ways we consume it, and whenever we chat, I feel like we could talk all day.
Julia can be found at Posting Nexus.
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