A New York State of Mind

Lifetime took a chance, hoping that millennials (the most likely audience) would find the show. But because many young viewers don’t have cable TV access or think of it as an option, they missed it. The ratings weren’t terrible: The show averaged about 1.1 million viewers a week, including DVR and delayed viewing. Still, even though Lifetime executives loved the show and optioned a second season before the first debuted, the numbers simply weren’t high enough to justify continuing the expensive series on their network.

“You” wrapped on Lifetime in November. From the beginning, Netflix had the second-run U.S. rights and first-run global rights of the show, which is produced by Warner Horizon Scripted Television. When Lifetime passed on a second season, Netflix decided to take over the series completely and ordered Season 2 as an official Netflix original.

A few weeks later, it proved to be a wise decision: Season 1 started streaming and sparked an Internet frenzy. Mentions on social media skyrocketed. The stars gained hundreds of thousands of new Instagram followers. Badgley seemed amused at the renewed attention, as he started tweeting back to fans who found his deranged character inexplicably charming. (Note: Gross.) On Thursday, Netflix executives announced in a shareholder letter that they estimate more than 40 million member households will watch “You” in its first four weeks on the streaming service. (As usual, there’s no way to verify these numbers, because Netflix isn’t monitored by a third-party.)

Washington, where Harper was an MVP, rookie of the year and a six-time All-Star, made a 10-year, $300 million offer in October. “I grew up in front of those fans and that city, and I enjoyed every minute of it,” Harper says. “But I didn’t know if I fit into their plans. About $100 million of that contract was deferred ‘til I was 65 years old.” He stops and turns his palms to the sky in disbelief. Few people can turn down a $100 million retirement fund; Bryce is one. “It’s like, 'What does that do for me? What does that do for my family?’”

In the end, just six teams held meetings with Harper and only three – the Phillies, Dodgers and Giants – stayed relevant through late February. But in a parallel world of weirdness, Harper’s fame grew. The longer it lasted, the more his story seeped outside sports. Can you believe a ballplayer turned down $300 million? The saga reached Peak Bryce on Feb. 26, when the Twitter feed of the band Smash Mouth made headlines with an unhinged, unsubstantiated screed about a fracture within the Giants’ front office. Ownership was all-in, Smash Mouth said, but new president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi wasn’t. Amazingly, insiders with direct knowledge say the tweet caused Zaidi to refute Smash Mouth – half-jokingly – during the team’s final face-to-face meeting with Harper.

When Harper told his agent, Scott Boras, that he wanted a lifetime deal – with a no-trade clause and none of the agent’s signature opt-outs – Boras said, “Well, teams don’t want to employ you at 35, much less 39, so we’re going to have to give something up to get that.” The casualty, to use the term loosely, was the average annual salary – $25.3 million. Manny Machado’s, to pick one, is higher. Harper didn’t care.

It took Segway a decade to hit its initial 13-month target to sell 100,000 units of its original two-wheeler. In 2018, just three years into production, Segway-Ninebot will sell 1m scooters, up from sales of 600,000 last year. Ninebot’s factory in Changzhou builds over 5,000 scooters a day. The firm’s backers, which include Xiaomi, valued it at $1.5bn in its latest funding round.

Nope. Sheikh’s avatar doesn’t have the beard or owlishly round glasses he wears in real life (ostensibly they’re harder to get right, so he did the capture without them), but it’s him. It’s him so much that when he invites me to lean in and take a closer look at the stubble on his face, it feels incredibly invasive to do so. It’s so much Steve Lombardi that, when he later walks into the room for real, I feel like I already know him—despite never having met him in the flesh. The results aren’t perfect. When people are speaking excitedly, their avatars’ mouths don’t move quite as much as their tone would suggest; hair is visible to the individual strand, but has a hazy aura around it; tongues look a bit fuzzy. But the aggregate effect is overwhelmingly something along the lines of this shouldn’t be possible.

We asked an engineer with experience building wireless charging systems what obstacles Apple was working to overcome. “Over time, these harmonics add up and they become really powerful signals in the air,” explains William Lumpkins, VP of Engineering at O & S Services. “And that can be difficult—that can stop someone’s pacemaker if it’s too high of a level. Or it could short circuit someone’s hearing aid.” If Apple’s multi-coil layout was spinning off harmonics left and right, it’s possible AirPower couldn’t pass muster with US or EU regulations.

Part of what’s astonishing about the AirPower cancellation is how last-minute it was, right on the heels of the AirPods 2 release. But Lumpkins says that happens sometimes. He speculated that Apple had AirPower working in their labs: ”Well, so what always happens is you get it functional first. No one looks at [Electro-Magnetic Interference] until the end.” The FCC rules for wireless charging devices like AirPower are quite strict, and limit exposure at 20 cm (8 in) above the device to 50 mW/cm^2.

Of course, the United States does have a few clusters that look ripe for rail, notably Texas, and the Eastern Seaboard. And instead of high-speed rail between these cities, we have the Acela, which takes eight hours to travel from Washington to Boston and shakes like a maraca player with a meth habit. Why haven’t we built something better? Because truly high-speed rail needs to travel in a fairly straight line; you don’t want to be taking a sharp curve at 300 miles per hour. Our current rail infrastructure isn’t that straight where it needs to be. Building newer, better, straighter rail lines would require the government to buy all the land between Point A and Point B and tear down anything that happened to be in the way. Because we’re already really, really rich, what’s between Point A and Point B is no longer farmland; instead we have a great deal of highly valuable real estate that will be very expensive to purchase — which we’d have to, because unlike China, our constitution gives the government limited ability to displace inconveniently located people.

The sidewalk in front of her office was stained with feces. The street smelled like a latrine.

“Some parts of the Tenderloin, you’re walking, and you smell it and you have to hold your breath,” Ms. Warren said.

As she does every morning, she hosed down the urine outside her office. The city has installed five portable bathrooms for the hundreds of unsheltered people in the Tenderloin, but that has not stopped people from urinating and defecating in the streets.

The Public Works Department and a nonprofit organization in the Tenderloin picked up 100,000 needles from the streets over the past year. The Public Health Department, which has its own needle recovery program, has a more alarming figure: It retrieved 164,264 needles in August alone, both through a disposal program and through street cleanups.