It’s been more than three years since college student Justin Lin binge-watched the first season of Netflix’s “Squid Game” in two days. Now, he can’t wait until Season 2 launches on Netflix on Dec. 26.

Lin was so excited that he drove from the San Gabriel Valley to Hollywood to don a green tracksuit and compete against other fans for a seat at the U.S. premiere.

“It was really exciting — we were all on our heels. We were all on our toes,” Lin said after he watched the first episode of the new season.

The show, about debt-ridden people so desperate for money that they compete in deadly games, remains the most popular program on Netflix with more than 330 million views to date of its first season. In the Korean drama’s first 91 days on Netflix, “Squid Game” Season 1 captured 265.2 million views — the largest amount ever on the platform for any program.

Tom Nunan, a former network and studio executive who teaches at UCLA, thinks the second season could be even bigger.

“The first season was so beloved,” Nunan said. “Now you have something that’s an established title. People don’t have to rely on word of mouth. You’re going to deal with the existing fan base worldwide, along with everybody who wants to check it out for the first time.”

Netflix’s audience is also bigger compared to when “Squid Game” launched in September 2021. Back then, Netflix’s subscribers were nearly 214 million members in the third quarter of 2021. It has since grown 32% to more than 282 million globally.

“I have a lot of confidence that our members who watched Season 1 will definitely love Season 2, and those who actually have not been introduced will find Season 2 will also resonate with them as well,” said Minyoung Kim, Netflix’s vice president of content for Asia Pacific (not including India) in an interview last month.

The second season, a Golden Globe nominee, starts where “Squid Game” left off, with the main character on a mission to end the deadly games.

Netflix has leaned into its international programming, taking big bets on local stories that resonate in specific countries and regions. Sometimes those narratives become global hits, like “Squid Game.”

“Squid Game broke records and became our most popular show ever, proving that great stories can come from anywhere,” said Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, on stage at the “Squid Game” U.S. premiere earlier this month at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. “The cultural impact was massive globally.”

The first season had a budget of $21.4 million or about $2.4 million an episode, according to Bloomberg. Netflix declined to comment on the budgets for either season, but it’s clear the filmmakers had more resources for the new one. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told the Hollywood Reporter: “This time, I was able to fully realize my creative vision, whether it was the set building or CGI. We didn’t have to compromise.”

Netflix has put significant marketing dollars behind the show, hosting fan events in cities that included Sydney and Paris. The streamer also has partnerships with major brands, including Puma, which created the tracksuits the contestants wear in Season 2 and are selling a version of it to fans. Other items include “Squid Game”-themed Crocs and a limited edition “Red Light: Green Light” beef jerky from Jack Link’s.

The company also rolled out a multiplayer game, “Squid Game: Unleashed,” which is available to non-Netflix subscribers for a limited period of time. Netflix announced Monday that it will reward gamers who also tune in to the show, giving them cash or wild tokens in the game based on the number of episodes they watch of Season 2.

And of course, there are the legions of “Squid Game” fans sharing the hype.

“They’ve built a lot of anticipation for it and everyone’s ready for it,” said Jacqueline Yang, a 28-year-old content creator based in downtown L.A. who watched all of Season 1 in one day.

Earlier this month, 1,700 fans, including Yang, participated in a 4.56K run (a reference to Season 1’s main character, Player 456) that started at L.A. City College. They were given tracksuits similar to the ones on the show.

During the event, fans were asked to choose to run through one of three large shapes — a circle, a triangle or a square (the symbols that cover the faces of the masked guards overseeing the show’s games). Participants who chose the correct symbol could attend the screening.

Lin and a friend chose the triangle — the right choice, it turned out.

Yang also chose the triangle, but her mother was not so lucky. The family was separated as Yang’s mother competed in two subsequent games — “Red Light, Green Light” and the scratching of a lottery ticket — but failed.

And even though her mother left the premiere early (Yang’s boyfriend picked her up), she didn’t leave empty-handed; she took home the tracksuit.

“My mom is like, ‘I guess we have our Halloween costumes for this next year,’” Yang said.

The “silly season” of news coverage used to refer to the dog days of summer, when there was so little of importance happening that newspapers and cable channels filled the vacuum with fluff.

Not this year.

Starting in October and gaining intensity through the season, Americans have found themselves awash in panicky health and safety warnings about previously unappreciated threats.

It started with warnings about your black plastic spatulas and other such implements. Spurred by a study and press release issued Oct. 1 by the Seattle nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, news organizations from coast to coast — including The Times — posted articles advising consumers to ditch their black food utensils and children’s toys with black plastic pieces.

The black spatula panic was soon outrun by the drone panic, which has Americans scanning the skies for menacing aircraft.

As is typically the case, both of these panics springs from a nugget of truth. It’s true, for example, that chemicals that could theoretically harm people’s health at high exposure levels can be found in some household products — chiefly chemical flame retardants in black plastic electronic devices that have been banned from new uses but have been getting recycled into the consumer stream.

It’s also true that drones, ranging in size from the lightweight models deployed by hobbyists to large commercial models, are becoming a pain in the neck, with the largest craft posing a real danger to commercial aircraft.

But the distance between those nuggets of reality and the level of public hysteria is so great that the latter can be explained mostly by two factors: the desire for clicks on news sites and to fill newspaper columns, and the impulse of preening politicians to show they’re attentive to constituents’ concerns, no matter how dubious.

Let’s take these panics in order, starting with the black utensils. For a time, press advisories that people ditch their black spatulas were impossible to ignore. The most alarmist was probably an offering from The Atlantic, which was headlined: “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula/It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil.”

The piece ran under an illustration of a black spatula dripping sinister goblets of melting plastic, against a background of bilious green. It gave prominent space to the Toxic-Free Future study, as well as to research papers by the British scientist Andrew Turner, who has been studying the contamination of household goods by those electronic flame retardants for years.

A few points about the Toxic-Free Future paper, which spurred all that news coverage. First, it’s based in part on a massive mathematical error. The paper calculates that users of “contaminated kitchen utensils” would have a median intake of BDE-209, one of the common flame retardants, of 34,700 nanograms per day. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.)

The paper states that this daily exposure “would approach” the reference dose set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, which the the paper says pencils out at 42,000 nanograms per day for a 60-kilogram adult. Pretty good ground for concern, since the EPA uses the reference dose to measure the level of health risk from exposure to a toxin.

Except: 7,000 times 60 isn’t 42,000; it’s 420,000. The median intake for a 60-kilogram adult, in other words, isn’t anywhere close to the EPA’s reference dose.

Toxic-Free Future has issued a correction to its paper, acknowledging that the daily intake it calculated doesn’t “approach” the EPA reference dose but is one-tenth of the reference dose. (The Times has followed up with an article about the correction; several other publications that went to town on the black utensil threat have also done so.) But it also says “the calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper.”

Megan Liu, the paper’s lead author, told me that it wasn’t really designed as a risk assessment, but chiefly as a study of how much of these contaminants has entered the consumer economy through kitchen utensils, children’s toys and other products. “Flame retardants shouldn’t even be in these products at all,” she says, which is true.

Yet the issue for the average consumer is how dangerous are these products, really? The answer is, not very.

In a study cited by Liu’s paper, researchers found that some chemicals leached from a black spatula into cooking oil.

The Atlantic’s take on this was that the paper “found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil.” Not so readily, however: The researchers cut a black spatula into small pieces and basted them in 320-degree cooking oil for 15 minutes. Who does that? As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz points out, “most people don’t leave their spatulas in the fryer and walk away for a quarter of an hour.”

More issues are related to this paper. One is that 60 kilograms, or about 132 pounds, isn’t the average weight of American adults. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventgion places the average weight for an adult male at about 200 pounds, and for a female about 171.

Using those weights would have shown that the potential for health effects is even more remote than the overheated news coverage of the paper suggests. In any case, the evidence for long-term human health effects from the normal exposure to these chemicals is scanty. It comes almost entirely from experiments on lab mice and rats subjected to doses unlikely to occur in the real world, and to an experiment on human cells also in the laboratory.

Of course, if you’re inclined to eliminate all artifacts of modern commerce from your life, no one is stopping you. Liu and her colleagues observe that kitchen implements made from wood or stainless steel are widely available. They’ve also properly noted that among the real problems with the recycling of plastics in consumer goods is that we don’t know anything about how much goes into which products and where they’ve come from.

Some legislatures have moved toward requiring more disclosure, which is to the good. But if you spent the last few weeks or months doing a hard target search for black implements in your house, you probably didn’t have to.

Now on to the drones. When I first heard of New Jersey residents expressing panic over mysterious lights overhead, I flashed on the Firesign Theatre line, “Big light in sky slated to appear in East.” Except that the Firesign Theatre was a satire troupe of the 1960s and ‘70s, the line originated in their parody of a post-apocalyptic news broadcast, and the game was given away by the title of their best album, “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.” The current panic appears to be for real.

All the worrying got me thinking about the interview I conducted in September with Sean M. Kirkpatrick, who had recently retired as the Pentagon’s chief investigator of UFO reports. As he had written in a Scientific American op-ed, he and his team had been overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,” producing “a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.”

Sound familiar?

The claims of an invasion of the Eastern seaboard by swarms of drones has every marker of a groundless social media frenzy. This started with some truly baroque partisan speculation; on Dec. 11, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) cadged himself some airtime on Fox News by claiming that his home state was under attack from Iran.

“I’m going to tell you the real deal,” he said. “Iran launched a mother ship that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”

Three days later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, declared “this has gone too far,” grousing that mystery drones had closed down a metropolitan New York airport. The bare-bones reporting on this event might have made people think that JFK or LaGuardia had been attacked by mystery drones. In fact, the airport was Stewart Airport, which is 60 miles from Manhattan, is served mostly by the ultra-low-cost Allegiant Airlines with routes to Florida, and was closed for one hour.

My favorite performance was that of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, who reported via X that on Dec. 12 he “personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence … (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes.”

It didn’t take long for Hogan to be inundated with responses from astronomers and meteorologists that what he had videotaped weren’t drones flying over his house, but the constellation Orion, which as meteorologist Matthew Cappucci informed him crisply, is “made up of stars between 244 and 1,344 light years away.”

Since then, neighborhood groups in New Jersey have organized “sky watches” to track the invading swarms and traded reports via their Ring doorbells. Donald Trump advised people to shoot the drones down, which is a good way to make things worse.

Some people conjecture that the drone hysteria is the product of the public’s mistrust of government. That doesn’t explain much, since a large share of the hysteria has been promoted by elected officials themselves. Politicians are naturally averse to calling their constituents idiots, so they have been responding by demanding more transparency from government officials at the Pentagon and other agencies. It’s always safe for politicians to assure voters that they’ll hold bureaucrats’ feet to the fire.

The problem here is that government agencies have been very clear about what’s happening overhead. The “drone” sightings, they say, are of commercial or U.S. military aircraft, helicopters, and perhaps drone flights by hobbyists wanting to get in on the fun. Most of it is surely the product of ignorance. How much more do we need federal agencies to explain?

“Most people don’t look at the sky,” notes Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist. “They don’t know what airplanes look like up there, particularly at night, and they don’t know what the stars and planets look like. They can’t estimate distance — which is tricky in the sky — and they aren’t aware of how things can seem to move. They aren’t aware of how to check if those objects in fact are moving.”

There may be one other explanation for why there are so many purported drone sightings in New Jersey. As the blogger Kevin Drum writes, there are a lot of drones in New Jersey, in part because a state law “indemnifies drone fliers against lawsuits from New Jersey landowners for use of their property for drone overflights.”

So, sure. New Jersey loves drones, which nobody noticed until a local congressman decided to blame Iran.

That should cover the hysterias of the moment. Black spatulas won’t kill you, and the lights in the sky aren’t alien spaceships or Iranian bombers. Any questions?

Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America are being sued by the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over alleged unchecked fraud on the Zelle payment app — setting up a legal showdown that the incoming Trump administration could quash as soon as next month.

The three financial institutions, which co-own the app along with four other large banks, were accused in a lawsuit filed Friday of rushing to launch the service in 2017 without putting in place proper consumer safeguards in order to compete with popular payment apps such as Venmo. The result, according to the lawsuit, were fraud-related losses of more than $870 million over the last seven years.

“Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra.

The 91-page federal lawsuit claimed that hundreds of thousands of consumers at the three banks made complaints about being defrauded but were “were largely denied relief, and some were even told to try getting their money back by contacting the person who had defrauded them.” The CFPB said the three banks accounted for 73% of Zelle activity last year.

The lawsuit was immediately attacked by Early Warning Services, which operates the app on behalf of the banks, as “legally and factually flawed” and claimed the lawsuit could be counterproductive by “incentivizing” criminals to make bogus fraud claims that institutions would have to pay — raising the app’s costs and driving away credit unions and community and minority-owned banks offering Zelle. Some 2,200 financial institutions use the service.

“Zelle is relied upon by 143 million enrolled American consumers and small businesses, and we are fully prepared to defend this meritless lawsuit to ensure their service does not suffer,” said Jane Khodos, a spokesperson for Early Warning, which was also named as a defendant.

Bank of America, in its own statement, said that “more than 99.95 percent of transactions across the Zelle network go through without incident. When a client has an issue, we work directly with them.”

JP Morgan Chase also denied the allegations and alluded to political overtones raised by Early Warning, saying the CFPB’s action was a “last ditch effort in pursuit of their political agenda.” Wells Fargo did not return messages for comment.

The CFPB, established in 2011 in the aftermath of the financial crisis, has long been criticized by Republicans as a “runaway” agency whose actions are heavy handed and stifle economic growth.

The first Trump administration sought to rein in the bureau and redrafted proposed rules aimed at tightening regulations on payday lenders. Consumer advocates considered the final regulations watered down. The new Trump administration could terminate the Zelle lawsuit when it takes power next month.

Some critics want to abolish the agency altogether. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading an effort to streamline the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, criticized the agency in a November post on X that said, “ Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court turned down an effort by a payday lending trade group to declare the bureau’s structure unconstitutional because it is funded by bank fees instead of congressional appropriations.

The bureau, which boasts it has gotten consumers more than $21 billion in relief, has stepped up its enforcement actions recently ahead of the change in administrations.

On Monday, it filed separate lawsuits against Walmart and Rocket Mortgage over alleged financial wrongdoing. And earlier this month issued landmark rules that could lower the costs of bank overdrafts to as little as $5.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, led by outgoing chair Lina Khan, sued Los Angeles cash app Dave Inc. last month, accusing it of misleading its financially vulnerable customers about fees it charges and the amount of money it gives out. The company denies the allegations.

The CFPB in its lawsuit claimed that without adequate safeguards Zelle allows fraudsters to create multiple email addresses and mobile phone numbers in signing up for the service that it can link to the same or different bank accounts, leaving consumers unaware of who they are sending their money to.

It claimed the banks allowed repeat offenders to hop between banks, with the banks not sharing information about fraudsters and acting too slowly to restrict or track criminals. It also claimed that it did not act on the hundreds of thousands of complaints they received to prevent further fraud.

In response, Early Warning claimed it has “highly effective multi-layered fraund and scam prevention measures” that in 2023 resulted in reports of frauds and scams decreasing by nearly 50% despite a 27% increase in transaction volume.

The company said it had made “every effort to engage and cooperate” with the bureau before the lawsuit was filed, which it said is part of the agency’s “pattern and practice of regulatory overreach.”

The bureau’s lawsuit was applauded by the National Consumer Law Center, which said, “The CFPB is standing up for people who weren’t able to get the big banks to take their claims of fraud seriously and return their hard-earned money. The CFPB helps ordinary people who’ve been hurt by big banks.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who spearheaded the creation of the agency, came to its defense last week and called on Trump to work with the agency to help American families by temporarily capping credit card interest rates at 10% — a pledge he made on the campaign trail.

“That would be a real boost for millions of families across this country,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “If he’s true to his word here, and I think we ought to take them at his word, then the CFPB can help him do that.”