Numlock News: September 25, 2025 • Geocorona, Arcade, Huntington's

By Walt Hickey

We’re coming up on the last day of Numlock’s big annual sale, 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support it, now’s the time to subscribe:

Dams

The Nature Conservancy has announced it has finalized a purchase agreement to spend $168 million to purchase and oversee four hydroelectric dams on the Kennebec River in Maine, a crucial step on the path to removing said dams. The four structures are the only remaining obstacles between the mouth of the Kennebec River in the Gulf of Maine and the confluence with the Sandy River. Their removal has long been sought after by advocates for the endangered Atlantic salmon that lost access to their spawning grounds in the Sandy River. There are still five dams further upstream on the Kennebec, but the real prize is eventually unlocking the superior fish habitat of the Sandy River. Two additional dam removal projects on tributaries of the Sandy River mean that 825 miles of river and stream habitat will eventually have uninterrupted access to the Gulf of Maine once again. This could benefit not just Atlantic Salmon but also river herring, Atlantic sturgeon and American eel.

Emmet Gartner, The Maine Monitor

Space Weather

Three spacecraft were launched Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center. They are bound for a 1.5 million-kilometer journey to the L1 Lagrange point, which lies at a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the Sun where the pull from each cancels the other out. All told, about $1.6 billion worth of missions were riding that single rocket. The star of the show is IMAP, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, which will study and map the Sun’s heliosphere. The second mission tacked on to the L1-bound carpool is the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, which will observe Earth’s exosphere, a cloud of hydrogen gas around Earth that gradually fades away into space. Finally, the third mission that gave the Falcon 9 rocket permission to use the HOV lane is Space Weather Follow On-L1, which will monitor space weather for NOAA and warn of geomagnetic storms.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Steam

SonixLegend has become the first Steam user to own 40,000 distinct paid games on the Valve platform, with 40,031 games owned, 22,137 DLC and somehow 26,976 wishlisted. According to SteamDB, the user has an account worth $248,000 to $642,000, depending on how big a sale they caught. This is indeed the vast majority of the 45,000 full-profile paid games available on Steam. Of course, SonixLegend is just like the rest of us, and has spent the most time playing 551 hours of the free-to-play Alien Swarm shooter, and has earned one achievement or more in only 261 games.

Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

Kimmel

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s first show upon returning from suspension smashed records for Jimmy Kimmel Live! viewership, and by a lot. Tuesday’s episode had 6.26 million viewers according to preliminary Nielsen numbers, the largest audience for a standard episode in the 22-year history of the show, about triple the show’s average. Kimmel’s show still managed this feat despite 66 affiliates owned by Nexstar and Sinclair blacking out the show, nailing the record despite not airing in 23 percent of television sets. The YouTube video of the program’s first 28 minutes has passed 15 million views (a record for the channel), and across other social media platforms, the video scored 26 million views.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Earthquake

A new study out of MIT sought to figure out where exactly the energy released in an earthquake goes. They found that only one percent to eight percent of the energy released in an earthquake goes to shaking. It’s heat that ends up being the biggest release of energy, with the friction of the rocks sliding against each other along a fault line causing underground temperatures to spike high enough to melt quartz. Indeed, between 68 percent and 98 percent of the energy released in the simulated earthquakes in the lab dissipated as heat.

Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American

Arcades

Genda is a rapidly expanding operator of arcades that started in Japan but has been on an acquisition and expansion spree in North America in anticipation that U.S. markets will be potentially massive for the Japanese-style arcades. Genda’s North American business is looking for 72.5 billion yen (US$490 million) in annual revenue by 2030, and has made four acquisitions in the past year that have added 160 amusement arcades and 13,000 game corners to its portfolio. Its latest news is consolidating 14 American subsidiaries into three, and the Dallas-based claw machine operator Kiddleton will soon become Genda Americas.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Huntington’s

The University College London Huntington’s Disease Centre announced that they had found a type of gene therapy that, after being applied over the course of 12 to 18 hours of brain surgery, slowed Huntington’s Disease by 75 percent in a study that involved 29 patients. It is an incredible achievement in the treatment of a disease that had heretofore been a death sentence. The disease is caused by an error in our DNA called the huntingtin gene. The error turns a normal protein needed in the brain into one that kills neurons, and if one parent has Huntington’s, there’s a 50 percent chance that a child will inherit it.

James Gallagher, BBC News

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock News: September 24, 2025 • Reese's, Feastables, Shrimp

By Walt Hickey

Three days left in Numlock’s largest annual sale, and it’s the biggest one we’ve ever done: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support it, now’s the time to subscribe:

Spooktacular

A U.S. District Court judge has issued a ruling on a lawsuit filed in federal court against Hershey. The suit alleged that the confectioner bamboozled customers, claiming that the company’s seasonal Reese’s peanut butter candies lacked the decorative details that Hershey’s claimed made them spooky. The suit claimed that the details on nine Reese’s products — a bat-shaped candy, a ghost-shaped candy, a football-shaped candy — did not look as they were supposed to. The bat was missing eyes, the ghost missing eyes and a mouth and the football missing laces, a lack of consistency in the application of frosting details that plaintiffs alleged meant they overpaid. The judge ruled that this was stupid, that the plaintiffs did not actually suffer economic harm and that their proposed class action would not be receiving their desired $5 million in damages.

Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

Shrimp

Americans consume 5.5 pounds of shrimp per person per year, and 40 percent of that comes from India, which exported $2.5 billion worth of shrimp to the United States in the 2023-24 fiscal year. There, the exported shrimp is a major industry and source of jobs, with over 450 shrimp hatcheries, 50 feed mills, 100,000 shrimp farms and 240 processing plants fueling the American maw with crustaceans. And 75 percent to 85 percent of that shrimp is bound for America. That said, trouble looms in the form of a 50 percent tariff, which has decimated the industry.

Diaa Hadid and Almaas Masood, NPR

Mr. Beast

Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber and human greed exhibitionist behind one of the largest and most inescapable media brands online, is the face of an increasingly large company. Beast Industries employs 450 people — 300 making videos, 100 in the chocolate business pushing out Feastables — and generated $450 million last year in sales, about $200 million of which came from the chocolate. Investments in Beast Industries value it at $5.2 billion. That being said, it’s still losing money overall (hey, massive cash giveaways make great content, but you ultimately have to give away massive amounts of cash), and it finished $60 million in the red last year. Even the cash on the cutting room floor is shocking in scope: in 2023, it spent $10 million to $15 million shooting videos that were never released because they weren’t up to snuff.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Punts

Punts (a move in which a football offense makes a tactical decision to surrender the ball to their adversaries, but also sets the opposing team far back in yardage by enlisting the aid of a specialist called a punter) are on the decline. Sure, you wouldn’t know it if you’re a Giants fan, but punts have been getting rarer as kickers manage field goals from yardage that once seemed unthinkable. For most of the Super Bowl era, teams averaged around five punts per game, give or take a half a punt in either direction. In 1960, teams averaged 4.92 punts per game, 4.85 punts in 1980 and 4.98 punts per game in 2000. This five-punt trend continued through around 2017, when there were 4.77 punts per team per game. Then, the dropoff; by 2020, there were 3.71 punts per team per game, and this season it’s down to 3.65 punts per game.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

Dog

The Rijksmuseum’s ongoing analysis of the magnificent Rembrandt van Rijn painting “Night Watch” has determined that the painter may have used an earlier illustration of a dog as a model for the dog in the painting. The dog in the 1642 masterpiece appears to be a near-identical copy of a dog drawn by fellow Dutchman Adriaen van de Venne, illustrated in 1619 in pen and ink. Thank god these men are dead, or the discourse on Tumblr would be downright nuclear. Allegations that a major commercially successful artist tracing material painted by a more obscure illustrator would have, I assure, absolutely torn the Rembrandt fandom asunder, and would have necessitated a Notes app apology at minimum and a likely pausing of their Patreon.

Mike Corder, The Associated Press

Clergy

The Roman Catholic Church is contending with a bit of a personnel problem, a long-term recruiting crisis that has resulted in a clergy that has been spread thin. Globally, the number of seminarians training for the clergy declined by 14,000 from 2011 to 2023, when it stood at 106,495. St. Patrick’s seminary near Dublin was once the world’s largest and could fit 500 students. Today, that number is down to just 15 new seminarians per year. In Italy, which long stood as sort of a papal farm team, many long-established seminaries dating back centuries have enrollment that only stands in the dozens.

David Luhnow, Margherita Stancati and Jon Emont, The Wall Street Journal

Movies

The United States used to account for most of the global box office, but China has risen up to challenge it, sort of. China’s movies tend to do remarkably well in China, without seeing the kind of numbers overseas that American movies can pull off. However, he size of China’s domestic market is so large that it still means a solid chunk of global box office revenues going to films originating in the Middle Kingdom. Most major box office markets don’t sustain themselves only through domestic production; just 21 percent of U.K. box office is for movies from the U.K., 54 percent of Japan’s box office is for Japanese movies, 59 percent of India’s box office is Indian movies,and 44 percent of the box office in the United States goes to films produced by companies in the United States. In China, that figure stands at 98 percent, which puts it on par with international cinema pariah Russia, which has a 100 percent domestic market.

Dorothy Gambrell and Tom Fevrier, Bloomberg

Numlock doesn’t run ads and can be what it is because of paid subscribers who support it. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support the newsletter, now’s the time to subscribe:

We’ve had a pretty fun run of Sunday editions lately. Check them out:

Numlock Sunday: Dave Infante on the decline of homebrewing and the ascent of Buzzballz

Numlock Sunday: Chris DeVille on Such Great Heights and the indie rock explosion

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock News: September 23, 2025 • Meteorite, Counterfeits, Casinos

By Walt Hickey

It’s time for Numlock’s largest annual sale, and it’s the biggest one we’ve ever done: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support it, now’s the time to subscribe:

Fur

For years, the use of fur in the fashion industry was a lightning rod for controversy and heated protest roiling the business. It dragged the luminaries of fashion into uncomfortable situations, dragging the industrial treatment of the animals front and center at the biggest events. That has mostly subsided at this point since the protestors have won for all intents and purposes, with PETA shifting strategies a bit and working behind the scenes to successfully push brands like Chanel and Gucci out of the fur business. The technology to produce faux fur has advanced and become an altogether successful replacement. The traditional fur business has essentially collapsed over the past several years; Covid-19 outbreaks ravaged Danish mink farms, and reduced demand sent the fur industry’s value plummeting from $14.7 billion in 2013 to just $3.4 billion as of 2023. Fur production also dropped 85 percent in Europe from 2018 to 2023. The animal products still used are less controversial — shearling, for instance, and leather — given that those pelts are the byproduct of the meat and wool industries anyway. Either way: pretty much a clean win for PETA on this one.

Dana Thomas, Bloomberg

Casino

New York State has up to three state gambling licenses up for grabs in the New York City area, which led to eight proposals for various gaming-related projects in New York. Over the past week, each of the three proposals for a casino on Manhattan — one in Times Square, one in Hudson Yards on the West Side and most recently one slated for a parcel near the United Nations — was voted down by community panels, the most recent voted down in a 4-2 vote. Civic leaders are decrying this lost opportunity for Manhattan; after all, without a casino, how else can we possibly expect tourists to get ripped off in the tourist centers of midtown?

Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press

El Ali

Thousands of years ago, a meteorite crashed into what is now Somalia — 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel that has been locally known as Shiid-birood for centuries. The rest of us know it as the El Ali meteorite. It had rested there relatively peacefully for years, surviving an attempt by the Italian army to remove it during World War II and attempts made by militias after the 1991 collapse of Somalia’s government. In 2019, opal hunters took a 90-gram sample and were able to confirm it was indeed not from this world, and then in February 2020, the stone was removed. At the time, the area was controlled by an affiliate of al-Qaeda; its removal was violent, and it was eventually driven away and sold to a mining company for $264,000. The meteorite then went on to Mogadishu, and since appears to have been moved to China, held in storage in Yiwu. It is selling for $3.2 million if the buyer wants the whole thing, or $200 per gram if they don’t.

Dan Vergano, Scientific American

Shipping

In August, inbound shipping to the 10 largest ports in the United States increased only 0.1 percent, while outbound volume dropped 2.6 percent. This, however, is really out of sorts with the record increases in shipping volume seen in the rest of the world — Far East export figures set a new record and were up 6.3 percent year over year. The tariff-induced slowdown in trade is expected to be a pretty big deal as the rest of the year goes on, particularly as we get to the part of the year where holiday shipping would ordinarily kick off. The National Retail Federation expects that inbound volume in the remaining four months of 2025 will be down 15.7 percent compared to the same four months of 2024.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Top Songs

Summer is now officially over, and there was conspicuously not an obvious “song of the summer.” The decline of programmed radio, the ascent of streaming and personalization and the general disintegration of the mainstream have made it very difficult for any song to achieve the kind of ubiquity necessary to be the song of a season for everyone. In 2016, the top 10 audio-streamed songs in the U.S. as of the middle of the year accounted for 0.16 percent of all on-demand audio streams, a figure that is down to 0.05 percent of the overall streaming this year. Plus, the top of the charts are turning over slower than ever. “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims is still on the top 10 streaming songs after 109 weeks on the charts, meaning that it has as good a case to be the song of this summer as it does to be the song of last summer, and perhaps the summer before that, too.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Counterfeits

Authorities in China have cracked down on the rash of counterfeit Labubus from homegrown toy company Pop Mart that have flooded resale apps. It’s an intellectual property crackdown that is considered pretty rich by every other copyright holder contending with dupes that often originate in China. From January to mid-August, authorities have found 237 cases of counterfeiting nationwide and have seized 1.83 million units intended for export to 61 countries. Pop Mart’s own efforts with the U.K., France and other countries have turned up 7.91 million fakes. Turns out the secret to spotting a fake Labubu is you’ve got to count the teeth; a real Labubu has nine teeth.

Tomoko Wakasugi, Nikkei Asia

RV

According to the latest data from the Census, as of 2023, about 342,000 people in the United States live full-time in an RV, boat or van. That is up 41 percent from 2019. A big driver is the cost of living and housing shortages, and according to data from the RV Industry Association, about a third of those residents have children. The majority of these residents also earn less than $75,000 per year. It’s a bigger story than a mere #vanlife trend for young professionals and remote knowledge economy workers, or just retirees living in an RV. With affordable housing shortages in the cities where the jobs are, living in an RV can be the best option for lots of lower-income Americans.

Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News

Numlock doesn’t run ads and can be what it is because of paid subscribers who support it. Once a year in September, we run the best sale we’ve got: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support the newsletter, now’s the time to subscribe:

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock News: September 22, 2025 • Nebula, Necromancy, Infinity Castle

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

It’s time for Numlock’s largest annual sale, and it’s the biggest one we’ve ever done: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support it, now’s the time to subscribe:

Demon Slayer

With another $17.3 million at the domestic box office, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — Infinity Castle has made $103 million stateside with another $451 million internationally for a global cume of $555 million. That’s nipping on the heels of Superman, which would position Demon Slayer to be the top-grossing comic book movie of the year if this momentum holds. It’s the first in a trilogy of films, which is a bullish sign for the box office, and a sign that young audiences may not be as immune to the charms of going to theaters as some in the industry had feared.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

731

Meanwhile, on the other extreme of Japan’s cultural soft power, the top movie in China right now is 731 or Evil Unbound, which is about Imperial Japan’s biological weapons program during its World War II invasion of Manchuria. It made $345 million yuan (US$42.2 million) on its opening day, a Thursday, when 272,000 screenings were held across the country. It accounted for 99.7 percent of all screenings in China that day and went on to make 1.1 billion yuan (US$154.6 million) through Sunday. Despite the unconventional release day, it is now the fourth-biggest opening day in China this year, and ticket sales are poised to grow during the October 1-8 Golden Week holidays. Right now, there’s a lot going on in China to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, including the release of Dead to Rights this summer, a film about the Nanjing massacre of 1937, which became the top-grossing movie of the summer.

Vanessa Cai, South China Morning Post and Wataru Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Necromancy

Stan Lee, the Marvel impresario who presided over some of the comic book company’s most creatively fruitful years, has been dead for seven years, and his final years prior to his demise at the age of 95 were rife with allegations that he was being exploited in his old age for money. The reveal of the Stan Lee Experience at L.A. Comic Con does not exactly refute that allegation. Fans can enter a 1,500 square foot enclosed booth where they can take photos with a hologram of Stan Lee, or have a three-minute one-on-one “conversation” with this dead man. If you want to interact with the ghoulish simulacrum, it’ll cost $15 to $20 to enter.

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter

Nebula

A clever study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters has pulled off the remarkable task of charting the growth of a nebula over the course of more than 100 years. The nebula in question, IC 418, was discovered on March 26, 1891, by astronomer Williamina Fleming at Harvard Observatory, one of 59 nebulae discovered by the astronomer. It’s at +9th magnitude and 18 arcseconds in diameter, roughly 2,000 light-years away and 0.2 light-years across. What’s cool about IC 418 is that there have been spectroscopic measurements taken of the nebula since the very beginning of the technique in the 1890s, with the first such observation from 1893. These observations were made consistently thereafter all through the modern era. The study looks at this over a century of data to track the death of the star over the course of decades. The central star has been increasing by 3000 degrees Celsius since discovery – 1000 degrees every 40 years — as it transitions from a red giant to a white dwarf.

Universe Today

Coachella

In a surprise move, the music festival Coachella has released its lineup months ahead of when it usually does, with Justin Bieber and Sabrina Carpenter headlining. Coachella used to sell out without even having to announce a lineup. However, after a few down years, it appears that the promoters of the top festival in North America have to add a little extra juice with big names. One big shift this year is the decrease to just six hip-hop acts at the festival, down from 10 hip-hop acts last year and nearly 70 percent down from the most recent peak of 19 hip-hop acts in 2022.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Reusable

Eliminating single-use cups can go a long way towards reducing the amount of waste from restaurants and retailers going to landfills. The American hospitality industry has taken the bold, innovative, and cutting-edge perspective of just letting Europe figure this one out and doing whatever they decide works. Some things under experimentation? In Aarhus, Denmark, 70 cafes are participating in a citywide returnable cup program where customers who buy drinks can get the beverage in a durable cup that can be returned at any one of 28 receptacles around the city. The receptacles will refund them 78 cents upon deposit. That program has a return rate of 87 percent and has saved 1.1 million disposable cups. Cups chipped with RFID stickers are also being trialed, which takes a deposit linked to the card of around $2.45 to $2.70 that is refunded when they return the cup to a bin with an RFID reader. It’s worked at music festivals and even Blenheim Palace in England, the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Blenheim Palace boasts a return rate of 85 percent and has eliminated 400,000 single-use cups per year, saving $81,000 in the process.

Saabira Chaudhuri, The Wall Street Journal

GTA

Next year’s release of Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be a massive moment for the video game industry, the kind of release that will signify both the end of one era and the beginning of another. That sounds heavy, I know, but the reality is that GTA’s sales figures are projected to be enormous and console-defining. As of June, Sony has released 80.2 million PlayStation 5 consoles since its release in 2020, and GTA IV will be exclusive to the PS5, presumably squeezing out any last remaining demand for this generation of PlayStation consoles. Currently, DFC Intelligence predicts that 40 million copies of GTA VI will sell in the first year of release, good for $3.2 billion in revenue. The Grand Theft Auto franchise also has a long tail, and its predecessor still generates about half a billion dollars annually. For Sony, it’ll not only get 30 percent of digital sales, but is also projected to move a few more million PS5s this year, months ahead of GTA VI. Sony is projected to finish the year with 86 million consoles installed, more than double the 36 million Xbox Series X/S. Even so, just as this will push the PS5 to its peak, there’s only one way to go from there; soon, Sony will prep for the inevitable PS6.

Lu-Hai Liang, Nikkei Asia

Numlock doesn’t run ads and can be what it is because of paid subscribers who support it. Once a year in September, we run the best sale we’ve got: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support the newsletter, now’s the time to subscribe:

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Numlock Sunday: What song does everybody know?

Introducing your future national anthem.

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, something fun!

One of my favorite parts of going on vacation is getting a chance to get away from it all, to kick back, relax, have a couple drinks, have a couple more drinks, really get pretty lit all things considered and then get into an inebriated discussion about what songs you think everybody really knows. I’d insist that if it came down to it, yes, as a matter of fact, I can probably sing “Welcome to the Black Parade” front to back, thank you very much, and then immediately fail to do it. Spurious, unverifiable claims such as “I bet more millennials know the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ than to the national anthem” get said, and cannot be unsaid. That’s what vacation is all about.

But one advantage of covering numbers, stats and culture all these years is that if one of those drunken arguments lingers in my brain, I can actually get to the bottom of it upon returning to my actual job. To do so, I reached out to the good people at YouGov — who we last featured in a Sunday edition last year and who I’ve been very eager to work with again — to get to the bottom of it.

Across two surveys, we asked respondents, “Which, if any, of the following songs do you think you know all or nearly all of the lyrics to? Select all that apply,” and presented a list of several songs.

You can check out the full data over at YouGov here, but I wanted to dive into some fun parts of the results here.

(If a table or chart hasn’t loaded fully in your inbox, or you want to mess around with the interactivity of it, just click through to the post online — it’ll work there.)

First up, the songs that pretty much everyone knows:

You will observe that we captured a lot of different options here — from religious staples (“Amazing Grace”) to pop hits (“Let it Be” and “Don’t Stop Believin’”) to patriotic songs (“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful”) to popular television theme songs (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Pokémon, and Spongebob Squarepants). We also covered a few songs that just feel sort of unavoidable in American life (“Baby Shark” or “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night”).

In general, the patriotic and religious classics seem to come out well ahead of any other. Oldies and classic rock anthems tend to make up the known songs of the more popular genre. Frankly, I must concede that Millennials have failed to adequately secure sufficient cultural hegemony to propel their generation’s pop to the center of the national consciousness.

That said, it is worth diving a bit deeper into the somewhat exciting crosstabs.

First up, gender. In general, women claimed to know the lyrics to songs in this set considerably more than men did, and on average claimed to know them by 6.6 points more on any given song than their male counterparts. However, there were a few specific songs that were vastly more well-known by one gender or another.

Men can’t be relied upon to be able to belt “Amazing Grace,” “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” “Let it Go,” “Jolene” or “How Far I’ll Go” with anywhere near the numbers that women could. On the other hand, men claim to be remarkably good at singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Piano Man” and “Take on Me” — a feat that any cursory appearance at a karaoke bar will indeed confirm.

But now, the main event. Let’s talk generational songs.

Obviously, the key differentiator for music taste is “did this song come out within 10 years of your 17th birthday,” a phenomenon that has been consistently explored. Needless to say, whether or not a roomful of people will know a song is highly dependent on who is in that room, and honestly, where that room is; a 50th birthday party on Long Island is way more likely to know “Piano Man” than “Welcome to the Black Parade,” is what I’m saying.

I pulled five songs for each age bucket in the data set — 18 to 29, 30 to 44, 45 to 64 and 65+ — that distinctly skewed towards one age bracket compared to the overall set.

As a denizen of the orange, 30 to 44 bucket, these results do check out. Please sound off in the comments if any of this resonates with you.

All that being said, perhaps yelling “I bet more millennials know the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ than to the national anthem” into the Adriatic Sea was a bit overdoing it. I’ll be the first to concede that. But, to my intense amusement, there were a few songs that consistently outperformed the United States National Anthem, when you crack it by age:

• “Jingle Bells,” “Happy Birthday” and “Amazing Grace” all beat the national anthem in at least one age demo.

• More people aged 18 to 29 knew the lyrics to “The SpongeBob SquarePants Theme Song” than the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and among the 30 to 44s, nautical nonsense came within a point of stripes and bright stars.

• Oh, also, more 18-29s knew “Let it Go,” from the film Frozen, than they do the National Anthem.

• “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey basically tied it among the 18-29s.

• “Hotel California” was within a couple of points from the “Star-Spangled Banner” among the 30-44s and 45-64s.

And, if you want to check out all the songs with their age splits in a sortable table, feel free to play around here:

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Edited by Crystal Wang

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