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Printing The Onion
While not profitable yet, The Onion is making money with subscriptions to its print edition.
Filled with spoof ads and satirical headlines that often take swings at the news of the day, the Onion has more than 53,000 subscribers paying as much as $9 a month. The publication has a new deal to sell its papers at Barnes & Noble, and is expecting about $6 million in revenue this year—up from less than $2 million in early 2024.
The Onion isn’t profitable, but Chief Executive Ben Collins aims to turn a profit next year. “People like getting something in the mail that’s not f—ing awful,” he said.
The publication’s results show that old-fashioned media products can find a niche despite changing reader habits and an unforgiving digital landscape.
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Robot rentals assisting human workers
Industrial robots are becoming more affordable for small and midsize companies, especially in situations where the companies can rent the machinery. The robots perform the repetitive, physically breaking work, allowing people to remain healthier and perform more valuable work.
Buying a robot could cost as much as $500,000, and Mr. Calleja wasn’t even confident that one would work. Instead, he rented a robot from Formic, a Woodridge, Ill., firm that takes care of installation, training, programming and repairs. It costs about $23 an hour, roughly the same as a human.
“We have very low turnover because we try to make jobs easier,” Mr. Calleja said of the company, which is outside Detroit. “We are a small facility, but we produce about 65,000 pounds of food a day.” Stacking it was “a backbreaking job,” he said.
In an era when manufacturers consistently list attracting and retaining workers as a top challenge, companies are automating some of the worst jobs in their plants as a worker retention strategy.
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Banana Ball growth pushing up against MLB
As Banana Ball grows, where does it fit in the sports landscape with Major League Baseball?
On a Friday night this summer, the New York Yankees packed Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in a rematch of last year’s World Series. An hour south that same evening in Anaheim, another major-league stadium hosted a sold-out ballgame, but the contest had nothing to do with the nation’s most venerated sports league, Major League Baseball. It was between a troop of dancing ballplayers called the Savannah Bananas and a rival of their own creation, the Firefighters.
MLB officials say they view the independent Bananas not as competition but as a complement, an aid to the number of baseball and softball fans everywhere. To MLB, the Bananas are an entertainment product — not competitive with an established sport and closer to a stadium-filling concert, or a sport-adjacent show like the Harlem Globetrotters of basketball.
But Jesse Cole, the Bananas’ owner, sees what he’s creating as much more than just baseball vaudeville.
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Top 10 animal movie performances
The Ringer proposes a top 10 list of animal movie performances. Amusing at the very least, and the top choice is, well, a choice.
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The Rise of the Groomzilla
Perhaps because most of my friends are past the getting married stage of life, but apparently, groomzillas are a new trend.
On subreddits like r/weddingshaming, you’ll find viral posts in which users vent about or seek advice on managing the groomzillas in their lives, like the groom who demanded his groomsmen spend more than $4,000 on an elaborate, multi-day bachelor party, or the guy who insulted his bride’s appearance during the first look, commenting that her makeup and manicure didn’t look good and that her gray hairs “stood out.” Over on r/bridezilla, one post spells out all the ways a woman’s fiancé actually out zilla’d her — reviewing and approving every placecard, centerpiece, and decoration himself, in addition to requiring he and his bride learn the Charleston (and perform it) and hand-roll 75 chocolate cigars to give guests in custom bands and cigar boxes.
The rise of the groomzilla is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when a groom’s investment manifests in controlling, aggro behavior — well, then we’ve created a monster. On the other, it feels like progress that hetero men are finally helping shoulder the labor of planning nuptials.
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The value of an unread library
Kevin Dickinson on the value of an unread library:
Shelves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. They provide the foundation for a healthy and robust intellectual humility.
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Ocean carbon removal
It feels like science fiction. Sinking carbon into the ocean to combat climate change. But that one on the key idea is to address the problem.
Researchers are looking into a wide range of approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere. Some are straightforwardly technical, like direct air capture in giant facilities can use massive fans and specialized membranes to trap carbon dioxide. Other approaches lean on nature, like growing trees and trapping carbon in their biomass underground.
Oceans cover the majority of our planet, and in fact they already suck up roughly 30% of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions through a whole host of routes.
