By Walt HickeyD.C.-area readers! Tonight at 7 p.m., I’ll be interviewing my friend Olivia Walch at One More Page Books in Arlington, Virginia, about the release of her new book, Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed up and What To Do About It. It’ll be fun — you should come out for it.
Ay, I’m Walking Increasingly Cautiously HereThe taxi business in New York is trying to deal with an insurance crisis ever since the report that American Transit Insurance Co. is insolvent and posted $700 million in net losses in the second quarter of last year. This is a problem because 60 percent of the 120,000 for-hire vehicles in the city are insured by the troubled company, but it prompted New York City to look into a rule change that would require taxi and ride-share drivers to be covered by a solvent and responsible insurance carrier. Lobbying from Uber prompted a change in direction for the rule, which will now merely require that policies come from a company authorized to do business in New York state, which is admittedly still higher than the low bar the industry wanted of allowing non-state-licensed carriers.
TrickyAt the X Games in Aspen, Colorado, snowboarder Hiroto Ogiwara of Japan and skier Miro Tabanelli of Italy both pulled off the never-before-accomplished feat of landing a 2340 in competition, a jump in which the athlete completes 6.5 rotations. It’s been a pretty sweet moment for winter sports, as the tricks on the slopes come the same weekend that “Quad God” Ilia Malinin landed six quadruple jumps at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, as well as a now-legal backflip. Diana Moskovitz, Defector and Joe Hernandez, NPR WatchingThe data is in, and America’s favorite streaming television shows are the stuff that used to air on the major networks and was acquired for streaming, and also Bluey. Yes, 55.62 billion minutes of Bluey were watched on Disney+ last year, or just short of 1,400 aggregated lifetimes’ worth of Bluey. That’s damn close to the 57.7 billion-minute record set by Suits in 2023, which was the largest amount of time spent watching a show in a given year, according to Nielsen’s data. The other heavy hitters on streaming include hit network shows like Grey’s Anatomy with 47.85 billion minutes, NCIS (35.91 billion), Young Sheldon (32.08 billion), The Big Bang Theory (29.12 billion) and Criminal Minds (28.40 billion), with the rest of the top 10 being animated shows like Family Guy (42.44 billion), Bob’s Burgers (36.80 billion) and SpongeBob SquarePants (27.87 billion). Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
PantsLevi’s started seriously analyzing its sales in 2020, cutting a deal with a cloud provider and running machine-learning algorithms on its sales in 110 countries and at 50,000 points of distribution. This allowed Levi’s to clue in on a single, crucial discovery, an innovation that would fundamentally change the way people clothe themselves from the waist down, an insight so world-upending that it took bleeding-edge technology and a desert’s worth of silicon to ascertain: Loose jeans are back. Thanks to the work of a fleet of scientists, Levi’s was able to get a jump on this trend, and reported in October that loose fits were indeed up 15 percent in the quarter. While many in the denim community are calling for controls, not since Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller designed the JNCO Jean has the threat to the global order been so pronounced. Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal Kansas City ShuffleIf there’s fatigue of the Kansas City Chiefs dominating the NFL, it’s not really showing up in the polls just yet. A new poll taken before the NFL’s conference championship games found that 61 percent of football fans had a positive impression of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, with teammate Travis Kelce having a 58 percent positive rating. As a team, Kansas City had a 48.3 percent popularity among polltakers, but discontent with the dominant KC team is on the rise, going from 4 percent negative to 10 percent negative from 2020 to 2024, the seventh-highest rating in the league. Kansas City has the fourth-best positive rating in the league, behind only the Green Bay Packers, the San Francisco 49ers and the New York Giants, the last of which is especially weird because I’m a Giants fan and even I don’t have a positive opinion of the New York Giants.
DamsAn ambitious plan to add a mega-dam on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been beset by financing difficulties and delays, and the ambitious end goal — a structure with twice the power generation of the Three Gorges Dam, one which would be the largest hydroelectric plant in the world and would supply power to many of the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack electricity — was just dealt a new setback, as the Three Gorges Corporation has pulled out of the project. The Grand Inga Dam remains a dream, albeit one that could generate 40,000 megawatts of electricity at a time, which could provide the catalyst for industrialization of the region. If work begins on Inga 3 in 2026, two turbines could be running by 2032, which would in turn finance the other turbines and then the rest of the dam. Wedaeli Chibelushi and Emery Makumeno, BBC News Cozy GamesVideo games with low stakes and contemplative gameplay have become a genre unto themselves, with new research even bearing out the idea that playing those games might have positive effects on their players. One study took 80 undergrads and gave them either the chance to play a casual game like Flower or the chance to do a 20-minute mindfulness meditation session that was intended to reduce stress. It found that there wasn’t any difference when it came to blood pressure or heart rate after meditating vs. playing one of the games. Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: MCU · Fanfiction · User Magazine · Reentry · Panda Dunks · Net Zero · Spiraled · On The Edge · Luggage · The Editors · Can’t Get Much Higher · Solitaire · Posting Nexus · Memorabilia · Drainage Tile · Desert Surfing · Music · Congestion Pricing · Underwater Sound · Hunts Point · Queer Olympics · Energy Drinks · Baseball Movies · Trillion Trees · Risk Aversion ·Packaging · Ice Cores · Stadium Names · Uncertain · Green Homes · Political Future · UFOs · Antarctica Comms · Rot Economy · The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD ·Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
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