The beat goes on

Good morning Staker, hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Home sellers are delisting at record numbers, Campbell’s exec fired for unsavoury comments, research reveals the 4 phases of human brain development, and Lindsey Buckingham spills the tea 😎

But first our weekly poll!

According to a report published by Redfin, homeowners trying to sell their properties are delisting them at a pace not seen in nearly a decade.

The listing platform found 70% of the homes that were listed in September had been on the market for 60 days or longer. 85,000 sellers delisted their homes that month, up 24% compared to Sept. 2024, and the most for the month of September in eight years.

Redfin said weaker demand has caused prices to fall to the point where a significant number of listed properties are at risk of selling for a loss. While average listing prices were up 1.3% year-over-year, they were down 1.4% compared to August.

“The frequency of delistings is keeping inventory tighter than it looks on paper,” said Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin. “When tens of thousands of homeowners pull their homes off the market rather than accept a low offer, it effectively reduces the supply of homes that are actually available for buyers. That keeps sale prices elevated.”

Prices astonishingly remain about 50% higher than they were just five years ago, but those who bought inside that window, and are now looking to unload what’s become an unsustainable investment, are increasingly at risk of taking a loss.

While mass delistings are keeping prices elevated for now, swaths of properties could be relisted at the same time in spring, causing prices to fall again.

Campbell’s announced yesterday that it fired Vice President of Information Technology Martin Bally. The executive was secretly recorded trashing the company’s soup and making racist remarks by a former employee who’s suing the company for what he claims was a retaliatory firing.

Robert Garza filed his suit on Nov. 20 in the Michigan Circuit Court for Wayne County, claiming he was let go shortly after reporting Bally’s comments to his manager.

Bally was recorded saying he doesn’t eat Campbell’s soup because he doesn’t like “chicken that came from a 3D printer,” before saying the products are made for “poor people” and he’s “not poor.” He was also recorded calling Indian workers “idiots” whom he doesn’t like working with.

Campbell’s stock price had fallen to a nearly 15-year low by the time the company announced it had fired Bally.

“We are proud of the food we make, the people who make it and the high-quality ingredients we use to provide consumers with good food at a good value,” the company said in the statement.

“We know that millions of people use Campbell’s products, and we’re honored by the trust they put in us. The comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate—they are patently absurd.”

Well, okay, you don’t have 4 brains. But it turns out your brain has 4 phases of development.

A major study involving 4,000 participants ages 1-90 years old concluded the human brain goes through four distinct “turning points” in its lifecycle, with neural rewiring occurring at 9, 32, 66, and 83 years old.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterised by different phases. It turns out that brains also go through these eras,” said Prof Duncan Astle, a researcher in neuroinformatics at Cambridge University and senior author of the study.

“Understanding that the brain’s structural journey is not a question of steady progression, but rather one of a few major turning points, will help us identify when and how its wiring is vulnerable to disruption.”

Childhood tends to end at 9 years old, which marks the early beginnings of adolescence. Perhaps most surprisingly, “adulthood” doesn’t really begin until 32, and lasts the longest of any phase. The authors described the turning point at 66 as the beginning of the “early aging of brain architecture,” which lasts until 83 when the “late aging” takes place.

The transition to adulthood at 32 doesn’t necessarily relate to milestones like parenthood, though the authors suggested the two could coincide by design.

The early and late aging phases were described as epochs during which brain connectivity progressively erodes as the presence of white matter slowly decreases.

Though the Butterfly Nebula is located in the constellation Scorpius, it was the Gemini South telescope in Chile that captured this stunning new image of the planetary nebula located 2,500-3,800 light-years away from Earth.

Planetary nebulae actually have nothing to do with planets. In reality, these nebulae are the remnants of dead stars that ejected their gas into the ether when they ran out of fuel.

The Butterfly Nebula, however, is peculiar in that its gas first started leaking when it expanded into a red giant as its fuel reserves depleted. Initially a star similar in stature to the Sun, it grew 1,000 times that size before collapsing into a white dwarf.

Gas moving slower due to the intense gravitational pull of a white dwarf created the thick ring that almost looks like the knot of a bowtie. The gas outside the ring formed what now looks like the wings of a butterfly, 2,000 years after the ejection began.

Intense ultraviolet radiation emanates from the center, heating the gas in the wings and giving them their colors: oxygen in blueish-green, hydrogen in glowing red, and nitrogen in deep-red/violet.

Lindsey Buckingham has always gone his own way, and his new album will be no different, according to the musical virtuoso himself.

"This new album is just representative of the culmination of everything that I've learned from making solo albums over the last 25 years," he said in a social media post. "I feel like this particular album is the culmination of holding a certain line ethically and idealistically that I've managed to maintain for many years. I'm really excited about this piece of work."

His most recent record was a self-titled LP released in September of 2021—his first album after undergoing open heart surgery in 2019. His first solo project, entitled Law and Order, came out in 1981 and peaked at number 32 in the United States.

"In a moment when I realized the only way I was going to explore the left side of my palate was to do solo work,” he told Stereogum in 2018. “Law and Order was a bit, shall we say, sarcastic as a body of work, a bit camp, maybe a bit too camp, almost verging on a comedy album in some ways in terms of the irony that was there and the sensibility."

Details of the new record, including release date, have yet to be announced.

Mixed bag

Happy Friday, Staker! It’s time for another round of trivia à la carte 🥳 

We’ve got a set of 10 random questions—the only thing connecting them is that they’ll make sense if you were born in the ’60s. So walk on down memory lane with today’s trivia!

Complete the game and earn a shot at a $25 Amazon eGift Card ;)

Winner will be notified on Monday afternoon. Keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget to check your spam folder!*