Flagship

Netflix mails its last DVD

Netflix sent out its last DVD-stuffed red envelope on Friday. The video company started its business in 1998, mailing DVDs to customers so they wouldn’t have to make the exhausting trek to the nearest Blockbuster. Customers listed films they’d want to watch and Netflix would send them a selection each week. But in 2007, the company started offering streaming over the internet, and over the years that squeezed the DVD snail mail service out: Now non-streaming services account for just 0.6% of Netflix’s revenue. Some customers still like it, especially those in rural areas with poor broadband, but for Netflix, the cost of sending DVDs by mail now far outstrips the profits.

Sheeran releases Autumn Variations

Ed Sheeran released his latest album, Autumn Variations, his second with celebrated producer Aaron Dessner, who moonlights as a record-maker when he’s not playing guitar for The National. Whereas Subtract — the previous album on which the duo worked together — is a profoundly autobiographical and personal record, the latest one is mostly a series of portraits based on Sheeran’s friends. Although Autumn Variations may not have “tub-thumping choruses,” Subtract had, the Financial Times wrote in its four star review, “it’s a change for the better.”

‘Fleetwood Mac’ dominates US

Europe took a 4-0 lead on the first day of golf’s Ryder Cup for the first time. Tommy Fleetwood and Rory McIlroy — a pairing known, inevitably, as Fleetwood Mac — won the fourth and final round of the day, to ease Europe’s nerves after a bruising defeat two years ago. The biannual Ryder Cup pits the best male European golfers against their American counterparts: Europe retained the Solheim Cup, the women’s equivalent, last week, despite the U.S. taking a first-day clean sweep. Team U.S.A. will be hoping for a mirror image of that result in the men’s game this weekend. The afternoon was more even, but after the first full day’s play, Europe lead 6½ to 1½.

The rise of Brazilian heavy metal

A new book documents the growth of Brazil’s 1980s heavy metal scene. Extreme metal was the natural musical outlet for young people in a country emerging from a 21-year-long military dictatorship: “The Brazil of girls and coconuts and paradise beaches existed, but not in our reality,” Max Cavalera, lead singer of Brazil’s biggest metal export, Sepultura, said, in United Forces: An Archive of Brazil’s Raw Metal Attack, 1986-1991. “Our Brazil was dirty and grey and all it offered was crime, drugs or fucked-up factory jobs.” The grim reality inspired extreme music: The drummer for one band, Vulcano, used human tibias as drumsticks. Sepultura, who sold 20 million records, “was always about attitude over perfection,” Cavalera said. “You don’t sound that good, but you love what you’re doing.”

US exports baseball tradition to Japan

Japan has long sent some of its best baseball talent to the United States. Now the U.S. is exporting one of its most memorable baseball traditions to Japan: eating peanuts at the ballpark. American peanut exporters are targeting Japan’s devoted baseball fans in a bid to boost sales and visibility abroad. The market will be a tough nut to crack, though. Japanese sporting fans are known for leaving stadiums cleaner than they found them, so the idea of littering the stands with peanut shells might be beyond many. “Peanuts at a ballpark? Hmmm, I don’t get it,” a supporter of the Yakult Swallows told The Wall Street Journal.

Each week, we’ll tell you what a great independent bookstore suggests you read.

Staff at the Livraria da Travessa in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, recommend Salvar o Fogo, “Save the Fire,” by the Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior. His first book, Torto arado (“Crooked Plow”), sold 700,000 copies and was hailed by the Financial Times as “An impressive first novel by an important literary voice.” Salvar o Fogo tells the story of a girl in rural Brazil stigmatized as a witch: It is “Epic and lyrical, with the power to move, enchant and outrage the reader.”

Chapel Down, England’s biggest winemaker, said it expected to double its revenue by 2026, thanks in part to climate change. Warmer temperatures mean that more of southern England is suitable for wine-growing, and Chapel Down is expecting a record harvest after a warm spring and late summer, which is ideal for the yield and quality of grapes, the Financial Times reported. Sales of sparkling wine, which make up more than two-thirds of Chapel Downs’s business, went up 45% this year compared to last. A 2022 study found that land dedicated to viticulture went up 400% between 2004 and 2021, to 9,300 hectares. Chapel Down’s CEO called the news “bittersweet.”

The number of Bangladeshi TV companies looking to acquire rights to broadcast Argentinian football’s third division, where the country’s national team captain plays. Long before Jamal Bhuyan began plying his trade for Patagonian side Sol de Mayo, Lionel Messi, Argentina’s captain, sparked a soccer obsession in Bangladesh. Messi’s dazzling displays in last year’s men’s World Cup turned thousands into devout fans, fuelling an obsession that culminated with the reopening of the Argentinian embassy in Dhaka this year. Among those traveling in the delegation to reopen the embassy was the football agent that signed Bhuyan, who Sol de Mayo hope will lead the team’s run into the second division.

• The newest opportunity for selling to climate-conscious businesses is data.
• A $100 million U.S.-backed plan for Kenya to lead a multinational security force to help Haiti restore order is attracting growing criticism.
• Democrats say it’s time for Menendez to go. Republicans say not so fast.