You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. Heads up: Per tradition, we’re taking off the week between Christmas and New Years. Happy Holidays!
5 trademarks
Vince McMahon has sold $100 million worth of WWE stock to fund a company called Alpha Entertainment LLC. Alpha Entertainment, meanwhile, recently filed for five trademarks related to something called an “XFL.” Wait, wasn’t Vince McMahon the same Vince McMahon who once tried to launch an alternative to the NFL called the XFL? Now, I’m just a simple internet writer with a simple mind and simple tastes, but gosh these sure seem like interestingly timed business moves. [ESPN]
5 movies
Of the 50 highest grossing films of 2016, only five movies passed the “Hagen Test,” which asks (i) do half of one-scene roles go to women? And, (ii) does the film’s first crowd scene feature at least 50 percent women? The Hagen Test is one of 12 new tests we put together for analyzing gender equity in Hollywood. Some other findings: Zero films had strong Latina leads, five films featured a black women in both a position of power and a healthy relationship, and zero movies had a majority female crew. [FiveThirtyEight]
30 percent
Shares of Papa John’s are down about 30 percent since the beginning of the year. Not coincidentally, the company announced on Thursday that founder John Schnatter will step down as CEO next month. Schnatter, you may remember, stepped into some controversy earlier this year when he pinned weak Papa John’s sales on NFL players protesting discrimination by kneeling during the national anthem. [AP News]
40.2 million acres
The top 100 private land owners in the U.S. own a combined 40.2 million acres, an amount of land roughly equivalent to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine combined. That’s up from only one New Hampshire and Maine’s worth of America (27.2 million acres) in 2007. [The Washington Post]
$100 million
A proposal by Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee to teach refugee children in the Middle East has a received $100 million prize from the MacArthur Foundation. [The Chicago Tribune]
10 days
That’s the number of days Significant Digits will be off for Christmas and New Year’s — from tomorrow to Jan. 1, 2018. Our next edition will be on Jan. 2. Happy Holidays!
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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.