By Walt Hickey

Limp Bizkit

The band Limp Bizkit is suing Universal Music Group, alleging that it owes $200 million and had not paid out royalties for decades. According to frontman Fred Durst, UMG claimed that he was never paid any royalties because the band was still recouping up-front advances. The lawsuit says that UMG put the figure paid out in recoupable advances at $43 million, but alleges that that’s the result of “fraudulent accounting practices” that charged costs to the account to cancel out revenues that were coming in. It’s a stark reminder that while the vocalist might be the face of the band, the bassist the backbone, and the drummer the heart of the band, the most important person in the band is invariably the accountant.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Pre-K

A new working paper printed in the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the implementation of a publicly subsidized child care program in New Haven, Connecticut, which began in the 1990s and is seeded with a lottery system, as the number of interested families exceeds the number of openings. This offers one of those clever natural experiments that economists love, and the researchers then tracked the long-term outcomes of those families to figure out what public child care offers. Based on the analyzed tax data, full-time day care for preschoolers generated $6 in economic benefits for every dollar spent on the program, mostly in the form of extra pay for parents. It furthermore found that the increase made the earnings of the parents of kids who got into universal pre-K higher than the income of the parents whose kids did not win the lottery, and stayed persistently higher at least seven years after the fact.

Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post

Utah Hockey

The swift relocation of the NHL franchise that was previously the Arizona Coyotes to Utah presented all sorts of logistical challenges given the abridged timeline the new ownership was given to put a team together. The sale of the franchise to the new Utah ownership only included the 70 players, coaches and staff, not any material assets, which meant the new organization had just about six months to build an entire NHL operation from scratch ahead of their opener last night. The buyer owned the Utah Jazz, so at least they had a front office operation to sell the seats, but it’s been a sprint. Even a jersey takes 18 months to design, so the Salt Lake Hockey Club had to really make things happen quickly. Needless to say, Salt Lake has obliged them: 34,000 people put down a deposit for season tickets, double the Delta Center’s capacity.

Dennis Romboy, Deseret

Sahara Flooding

The Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco has flooded with more water than seen in decades, with two days of rain in September leading to several areas getting more rain in hours than they ordinarily would get in a year. The rain, an extratropical storm, has interrupted what has otherwise been six consecutive years of drought and will refill groundwater aquifers. Lake Iriqui, which is a lake bed that has been dry for the past 50 years, now had water rushing into it, and the village of Tagounite managed to get 100 millimeters of precipitation in a 24-hour period — unheard of.

Sam Metz and Baba Ahmed, The Associated Press

Pinks

Norway is dealing with an onslaught of pink salmon, a Pacific Ocean species introduced to their waters by way of an ill-fated Soviet hatchery program launched in 1956 that upon its failure decades later managed to flood pink salmon and crowd out the Atlantic salmon that long defined the Norwegian palate. The number of that native species is down 50 percent, making the issue serious enough to warrant government programs designed to kill the pink salmon off. In 2021, Norway killed 111,803 pink salmon in traps, and in 2023, the Norwegian Environment Agency put $5 million toward knocking off the species, placing barriers in 13 rivers. The real issue? Norway’s fish-farming industry (highly lucrative) and fossil fuel industry (the reason they’re basically cold, socialist Saudi Arabia) are key contributors to the rise of the pink salmon.

Jude Isabella, Hakai Magazine

Follows

A new study from Pew looked at who 664 respondents followed on TikTok, turning up 227,946 different accounts that were followed by the survey group. Of these, 46 percent were “mid-tier” creators with between 5,000 and 1 million followers, 38 percent were smaller accounts, and just 6 percent were mega-influencers with over 1 million followers. Overall, 59 percent post about pop culture, 37 percent post viral music and dance performances, 36 percent are in humor or comedy, and 32 percent do stories, vlogs and personal updates. Overall, users aged 18 to 34 followed about three times as many accounts as those aged 50 and up, and what’s especially remarkable — and speaks to the fractured nature of the attention on the platform — is that of those 227,946 accounts, only 5 percent were followed by five or more of the users in the study, demonstrating that colossal, viral fame is harder to wrangle on the heavily personalized TikTok algorithm while niche-based, fandom-oriented popularity is far more common.

Regina Widjaya, Samuel Bestvater and Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center

Challengers

The war between pickleball and tennis continues to simmer, as the upstart sport contends with the establishment over court space and the pace of play. While pickleball is absolutely a rocket ship these days — the Sports and Fitness Industry Association reported a 223.5 percent increase in popularity over the past three years and over 10 million people playing in the past 12 months across 65,000 courts — tennis isn’t some lumbering, boring incumbent. Indeed, tennis is having a pop culture moment of its own, with 24.5 million players this year and the US Tennis Association aiming for 35 million players by 2035. However, the shift is clear, with 10 percent of tennis courts repurposed for pickleball, according to the USTA. The tennis powers that be also believe they have a pickleball counter: Red Ball Tennis, which is its attempt to appeal to the more low-key, running-minimal, recreationally-inclined fans of pickleball, which it’s hoping to grow from its current fandom of 20,000 players at 500 venues.

Joshua Robinson, The Wall Street Journal

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