The Numlock Podcast

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Chris Dalla Riva, author of the new book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves . Chris is a fixture here at Numlock, we’re big fans of his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher and have been eagerly waiting for this book, which tracks the history of music by coasting along the top o...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Alyssa Rosenberg, Sunny Bunch and Peter Suderman, the three panelists of the outstanding film podcast Across the Movie Aisle. I really enjoy the show and have been a longtime fan of their individual work. I think that they’re a group with genuinely diverse opinions but who have a lot of love for cinema and as a result have...

By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. I’m a huge fan of Alissa, she’s a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to wor...

By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better . Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. The book d...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olivia Walch, author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It . Olivia’s a good friend of mine and I’ve been hearing about her research and her work for years, and now she’s finally got a whole book diving into why ideal sleep is more than just the eight hours number...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report . Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting g...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios , out in paperback this week. I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel mov...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus . Julia’s brilliant, she’s been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was in...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Glenn McDonald, author of the new book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music . I’ve followed Glenn’s work for years now, and this book is the result of decades of work in the field, and comes from a perspective not only of technology’s bleeding edge but also a sincere, personal love of musi...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Zach Weinersmith, who with his wife Kelly Weinersmith wrote the brand new book A City On Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? , which is out this week. I loved this book. I’ve been looking forward to it for years since they announced it, and I loved their previous book...

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Justin McElroy, who you might know from his work on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me or The Adventure Zone. Wednesday will mark a shocking milestone: As of September 13, the Chicken Sandwich Wars will have gone on longer than the armed conflict of the American Civil War. Yes, the conflict between quick-service restaurants over w...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman, who writes the Soundbite newsletter. Here's a recent thing what I wrote about it: The hottest thing in music touring right now is selling affluent 30-somethings their old eye shadow and tight pants back for a considerable markup, with alt-rock bands making a killing on the road. The forthcoming W...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to my friend Neil Paine, a sportswriter at FiveThirtyEight who can also be found at Neil’s Substack . I’ve been following some recent spat going on in NASCAR between ownership and the different charters; here’s a recent thing I covered about it: NASCAR team owners collectively boycotted a quarterly meeting with NASCAR leaders...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Abraham Josephine Riesman who wrote the explosive new book out this week Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America . I have been looking to this one for a while, I was a massive fan of her 2021 book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee . The subject matter of this one will be of interest not just to wre...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic . Megan is a writer at The Atlantic , and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It’s a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the t...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Eric Vilas-Boas who wrote If Rotoscoping Isn’t Animation, Nothing Is for Vulture . Here's what I wrote about it: This year director Richard Linklater released the film Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, which is animated through rotoscoping. Essentially, live-action footage is painstakingly animated over using a technique...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World . It’s a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It’...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week I spoke to Kaitlyn Tiffany, the author of the new book Everything I Need I Get From You , out this week. The book is a deep dive into the nature of fandom, and how fangirls have been instrumental in the design, growth and evolution of the internet and social media. It’s a great look that combines digital culture and pop culture. The b...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week I spoke to Alison Griswold , who just restarted one of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing , which is all about companies in the sharing economy. Since pausing the newsletter, Griswold went to grad school with a concentration on sustainable cities, and is coming back with a renewed interest in the ways that tech companies are interac...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Philip Bump of the Washington Post , who a few weeks ago launched his newsletter How To Read This Chart . I’m a longtime fan of Bump’s work at the Post; he’s a really compelling writer and an outstanding blogger and has been weaving data journalism throughout his work so organically for such a long time I wanted to have hi...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to another Numlock Sunday podcast edition! This week, I spoke to Surya Mattu and Aaron Sankin, who wrote Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them for The Markup . Here's what I wrote about it: An analysis of 5.9 million crime predictions from a company called PredPol — predictions that informed policing in multiple cities ac...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to the brilliant Alex Abad-Santos who wrote “The Open Secret of Looking Like A Superhero ” for Vox. Here's what I wrote about it: Actors are increasingly turning to anabolic steroids in order to attain the figures necessary for movies today. While it’s not legal in the United States to use steroids or performance-enhancing dr...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Sarah Frier, the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram . The past two weeks has revealed a great deal of information about how Instagram and Facebook operate thanks for the most part to a trove of documents published by The Wall Street Journal. Sarah’s covered the inner workings of Instagram and its tenuous re...

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Ben Casselman of the New York Times who wrote “ The Pandemic Changed How We Spent Our Time ” and “ More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute ” with Ella Koeze . Here's what I wrote about it: The American Time Use Survey for 2020 dropped, and needless to say it turns out people may have a...

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to frequent Numlock guest Joanna Piacenza of Morning Consult, who this week published a deep report about travel and trust in the wake of COVID-19 . Here's what I wrote about it: Pre-pandemic, 51 percent of business travelers took at least four business trips per year, and a new survey from Morning Consult found that figure d...