There are certain inexorable laws of nature that every building in New York City must abide by. For instance, the taller your building — and the higher your personal residence within it, well:

We’ve already seen the layouts for some of the lower full-floor apartments in superscraper 432 Park Avenue, but this unit, which takes up the entire 92nd floor, is the highest apartment in the building to be listed so far. It follows logically that it also has the highest price — $79.5 million. (The 87th-floor penthouse was listed for $74.5 million last month, but the listing was removed for unknown reason four days ago.) Unit no. 92 has all the customary 432 Park amenities, such as oak flooring and cabinetry, marble baths, and a wood-burning fireplace, but the really enticing part — besides the height — is the sheer number of rooms contained within its gargantuan floorplan. The 8,255-square-foot full floor contains six beds and seven-and-two-half baths in total, as well as a dining room and library.

The law that the material condition of a residence is almost directly correlated to the height of a building does not apply solely to the condos primarily built to contain the wealth of rich foreigners in this marvelous age of residential megatowers — no, not at all, although it can manifest itself in different ways:

And a building’s height can be an indicator of its condition

, the comptroller’s office said. In most housing types, a taller building suggests relatively few problems. But in public housing, the reverse has proved true: The highest percentage of deficient units (40.5 percent) was found in buildings over 20 stories.

Some laws are indeed universal.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, New York Times technology writer Farhad Manjoo tells us more about what happens when you have a hi-tech electronic garbage can that keeps breaking.

Almost everything in my house is automatic/electronic in some way. But after three infrared-enabled automatic kitchen trash cans I’m done.

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) August 25, 2014

Farhad! So what happened here?

I use machines for everything. I’m that kind of guy. I cook sous vide, I’ve got a Japanese bidet toilet with heated seats, my soap dispenser is automatic, and my plants are watered on a very precise timer. So when I have some garbage to throw away, you can bet I’m not going to bother with jamming on a pedal to open up some dirty, germ-laden trash vessel, like the way they used to do in medieval times. Nope, no manual labor for me, no sir. When I get home after a long day of typing words, my hands laden with trash, I want a machine to react to my very proximate presence, to open up like Ali Baba’s cave, a gaping, infrared-enabled maw just begging for my trash.

So I bought one. All the way back in 2006, Amazon informs me, a year before the iPhone came out, I bought an iTouchless Deodorizer Touch-Free Sensor 13-Gallon Automatic Stainless-Steel Trash Can.

And all was good. For a year, at least, that thing was magic. You’d go near it and boom, it’d open, happy to take your trash. And after a few seconds the lid would come down slowly, sated, joyful as a sleepy puppy. I’m telling you, life was good. When people came over they couldn’t stop talking about this trash can. It was something they’d never seen before. Look at it; it’d just open for you when you had something to throw away. Kids who came over would play with it. Literally they would go around the house looking for garbage only to be able to experience the joy of this trash can. Who could ask for anything more from a household gadget, especially this lowliest of all gadgets?

Then it broke. Who knows why, some kind of gear problem or something. It was just out of warranty, apparently, so I had to buy a new motor-lid-part-thing to get it working again. And it worked fine, for a time, until that broke too.

So then I had to buy another one. This one lasted I think eight months. Oh, those were good months. Then one day, again, horrors. It’s gone.

At this point we just forgot about it. We began using it manually. Let me describe what I mean: See, an automatic trash can does not, by design, have any good manual way to use it. There’s no pedal. There’s no little lip in the lid in which to slip your fingers and pull it up. Nope; instead you’ve got to pry your fingers into the trash can’s mouth, then lift up with great force, and then — see, this is the worst — you’ve got to remember to close it, because a broken automatic trash can’t even do the basic thing of obeying gravity to shut itself. So our trash can was always open, and our kitchen always kind of reeked.

We’ve lived that way for at least a year, I’d say. I always thought I’d get around to calling the company to complain. But I never did.

What now? Where do you go from here? Might you return to an all-manual home?

No, we’re keeping all the gadgets, but we did finally ditch the automatic trash can. I spent many long minutes on Amazon researching all the different auto trash can brands and from what I can tell, they all break. Apparently we can now make computers that recognize language and faces, and our cars can drive themselves, but the long-lived automatic trash can remains just beyond collective human capacity.

I did buy a really nice manual trash can. It’s got some kind of patented system to make it shut really quietly and smoothly. It’s also guaranteed to live a very long time. We’ve had it for about a week. No one is cooing over it. There’s nothing unusual about how it works: You step on it and throw your shit in. But let me tell you, after so many months using my fingers to claw open that defective old autocan, this manual one is a dream.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I guess the easy conclusion is: Sometimes the old stuff is best, sometimes they got it right the first time, don’t reinvent the wheel, etc. etc.

But I’m not buying it. The automatic trash can is a fantastic idea. It just hasn’t been implemented decently yet. There’s loads of money sloshing around Silicon Valley. Can’t someone throw five million dollars to automatic trash can research? Can we start an ice-bucket challenge for it?

Just one more thing.

Have you heard that Apple is holding a press event this week to announce (everyone thinks) a watch and a phone? I’ll be there covering it, but some small part of me will be disappointed when they don’t unveil an auto trash can. It’s the future, man. Have you ever seen them hop on a pedal to throw stuff away on Star Trek? No.

Kickstarter, You listening?

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

1. Business Insider:

The Fappening served as a dumping ground for the nude celebrity photos that were leaked last weekend. In a strange move, Redditors within The Fappening started donating to the Prostate Cancer Foundation “in honor of” Jennifer Lawrence, one of the celebrities who was affected by the massive hack.

2. Yishan Wong, CEO of Reddit, in a post titled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul”:

We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize.

Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.

The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. The role and responsibility of a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers.

3. Recode, one day later:

Reddit, the social news site with a big Web footprint, is raising a big funding round — with help from some of the people who helped launch the site nine years ago, including co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other people associated closely with startup incubator Y Combinator.

Sources said the almost-anything-goes site has reached a preliminary agreement to sell less than 10 percent of the company for more than $50 million. That could give the company a valuation of upwards of $500 million.

These investors likely include some of the biggest names in venture capital, some of whom are also invested in the image site Imgur, the primary host on which Reddit users posted and reposted the celebrity leaks. Without Reddit and Imgur, finding these images would have been much harder. With Reddit and Imgur, the photos were cataloged and promoted and made extremely easy to view, browse and comment upon.

Reddit characterizes itself as a sort of internet government; Reddit’s largest shareholder is Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast, but it is raising money from venture capitalists who hope to make a large profit from their investment. Reddit hit “new traffic milestones, ones which [they would] be ashamed to share publicly,” during the celebrity leaks; due to its size, Reddit is now apparently valued at half a billion dollars. Reddit’s management can’t seem to shut up; Reddit’s reported investors are pathologically unable to shut up. This is completely and obviously untenable: You can’t have both your vintage internet self-serving absolutism and your millions upon millions of new internet dollars. Either the money wins, or a toxic and convenient misappropriation of the concept of free speech wins. Everybody else on the greater internet, as usual, loses.

Update: Reddit’s CEO apparently followed up with… I’m not even sure what to call this?

Indeed, my post’s title contained an anachronistic usage of a gendered noun where modern usage would almost certainly have preferred “Person” or “Individual.” Why in the world would I do that?

…That is what the inclusion of “man” in the title means. I’m a man, and the blog post was written, inevitably, for the men who read it.

Is this the worst unforced public statement in recent internet history? Anyway, thanks to reader Peter for that one.

Image: The fastest-growing NSFW subreddits of the last 24 hours.

Correction: Advance Media is the largest shareholder in Reddit, which was spun out from the company. Reddit is no longer a full subsidiary.

The Huffington Post, a publishing company worth hundreds of millions of dollars that is nestled within AOL, a media company that has a market cap of nearly three-and-a-half billion dollars, has successfully convinced people to donate forty thousand dollars to it, as if it were a charity in need of the largesse of its readers, in order to “to ensure on-the-ground coverage from Ferguson remains a part of the national conversation.” It is truly a golden age of journalism.

Are we approaching a senior food utopia, where evolving tastes and aging foodies will restore dignity to the elderly diet?

The Chefs there purée roasted, free-range chicken for residents who can’t eat solid food, then mold it into an approximation of the real thing, garnishing the plate with a reduction of balsamic vinegar… In a nation where food has become a cultural currency and the baby-boom generation is turning 65 at a rate of 8,000 people a day, it was only a matter of time before expensive ingredients, elevated cooking techniques and old-fashioned food snobbery hit the nursing home.

Or, actually, is it a refinement of the senior lifestyle dystopia, where, according to their means, some doomed people eat delicious food while others are coaxed into nourishment by apps?

For people with memory loss, waiters may use photographs on tablet computers to help them order and serve food on red plates. People tend to eat more when there’s a strong contrast between the food and plate, some studies show. For people who can’t eat solid foods, a consortium of European countries is investing in 3-D technology that can transform, for example, pineapple purée into something that looks like a pineapple ring on the plate.

“The race is on in senior housing,” explains a character in this short piece of speculative science fiction, published by the New York Times.

★★ The coolness was gone again, even at eight in the morning. Teens abled with their backpacks and another teen with a backpack hurried to catch up. A napkin flapped down to the plaza in the clear light. Cirrus clouds wisped this way and that on the sky. In the evening, a breeze pushed back on the way down into the subway steps, sustained like the air coming over a sailboat’s prow. No such wind reached the midblock stretches east of Penn Station, becalmed in the oncoming dark.

It’s easy, and not wholly unwarranted, to roll one’s eyes at the aisles of exotic, imported “superfoods” in your local yuppie grocery store. These superfoodstuffs are often flavorless, or even outright unpleasant. (Goji berries: worthless, shriveled, lame-tasting superfruits.) Sometimes their packaging claims holistic or magical properties like cancer prevention or weight loss, which is very clearly superbullshit. But seeds, even some of the trendy, irritating ones, like quinoa, are healthful and flexible and typically totally delicious. You should not ignore them just because they have misleading or silly packaging or because Jared Leto once said in an interview that he loves them in his morning smoothie with reclaimed grass clippings and powdered binturong urine.

As for what denotes a seed, well, I am going with the common culinary understanding rather than the scientific one, which defines seeds as an embryonic plant, concealed within a fruit. (Proper nuts, like chestnuts, hazelnuts, acorns are actually a combination of seed and fruit themselves, meaning they don’t have an external fruit. Walnuts, confusingly, are a seed, not a nut, but anyway.) In other words, I am limiting the definition of “seed” to “things which are commonly called seeds,” which excludes pine nuts, legumes like beans or peanuts, and cereals like oats or wheat. Here are some good or popular seeds and what to do with them, and, more importantly, what NOT to do with them, because it is more fun for me to tell you what you’re doing wrong than to tell you how to do something correctly.

1. Quinoa

We all know about quinoa, right? Protein-packed pseudo-cereal seed, hated by one of the proprietors of this web concern, etc. I love quinoa, provided it’s prepared properly, which is to say, as if it was rice: Two parts salted water, one part quinoa, brought to a boil then covered and simmered for around fifteen or twenty minutes until the individual seeds are translucent except for the little tail thing in the middle. Like rice, it also stir-fries well, especially when a day old, and it has enough protein that you can just serve it with vegetables and get a full meal.

Even though quinoa is sold dried, cooked quinoa is soft and fluffy, so it should not — repeat, not — be thrown into a leafy salad the way that some other crunchy seeds, like sunflower and pumpkin, often are. It provides zero textural assistance and it’s too small to be easily eaten with a fork when mixed fully into the salad. A scoop of quinoa dumped on top of a salad infuriates me. It’s like putting protein powder on your salad: wrong and bad. My favorite thing way to serve quinoa is with roasted vegetables: Take broccoli florets, a handful of walnuts, thinly sliced onions, and very coarsely chopped garlic, toss in olive oil, spread evenly (DO NOT CROWD) on a baking sheet, top with sprigs of fresh thyme, and bake at four hundred degrees, until the broccoli is crispy around the edges. (If it’s not crispy, you didn’t use enough oil. Pour in more oil. This whole meal is composed of vegetables and nuts and seeds, so you can add more oil, and it’ll still be healthy.) Serve over quinoa with a squeeze of lemon. I probably eat this twice a week.

2. Pumpkin

Pumpkin seeds, or pepitas, are very underrated! You can eat them year-round, unlike pumpkin or pumpkin-inspired foodstuffs, and because they’re bigger than the other seeds on this list, they can handle different kinds of preparation than the rest. My favorite way to eat them is one of the simplest, as a sort of Mexican bar snack. Get a cast-iron pan hot on the stove, WITHOUT OIL, and toss in a handful of pumpkin seeds. (Seeds are very oily; they don’t need more oil on the outside. All they need is heat to bring up the temperature of the oil inside.) When fragrant (that means when a nice smell wafts out of the pan), toss with chile powder, ground coriander, salt, and let them sit for a second (or two) to allow the heat of the seeds to take the raw spice flavor away. Serve in a bowl with lime juice squeezed on top and probably a Mexican beer.

3. Sesame

Love sesame seeds. Big huge flavor. But as with other seeds, people seem to think you should eat them raw. No: Toast them in a dry cast iron pan, the same way you did the pumpkin seeds, until golden and fragrant. Be careful; they will burn very quickly. Once done, they’ll go great with pretty much everything. I like to make a noodle salad with them, which I will happily admit is an attempt to rip off Trader Joe’s Spicy Thai Chicken Noodle Salad. To make your own rip off, cook soba or ramen or any kind of vaguely Asian noodle and cool it down. Then add shredded carrots and toasted sesame seeds. Then toss with this vinaigrette: take ginger (either fresh or frozen, though mine is mostly frozen) and grate it with a microplane directly into a cup; add a neutral oil (grapeseed is good), rice wine vinegar, mirin, a little sesame oil (like two drops), brown sugar, chili garlic paste (the red stuff in the little jar made by the Sriracha people) and salt; I prefer to do this in a tiny glass tupperware, put the lid on, and shake vigorously, but whisk if you want, I suppose.

Also, I haven’t made this sesame ice cream, but it looks amazing.

4. Sunflower

Sunflower seeds: very good seed. I like to use sunflower seeds (and walnuts) as a substitute for pine nuts, because who can afford pine nuts, and the texture and oil content is similar. So: sunflower seeds make a very good pesto. They work well with basil, but I actually prefer something a little less sweet; arugula and parsley, along with some lemon juice and olive oil, make for a really nice, peppery, herbal pesto. Or try a brittle. This recipe looks good.

5. Flax and Hemp and Chia Seeds

These all kind of suck. If you’re a vegan bodybuilder, I’m sure that flax and hemp seeds are a godsend but let’s not pretend they taste great, while chia is trendy garbage that promises to turn into tapioca-like pudding but it never, ever will. It is a liar and I hate liars.

6. Buckwheat Groats

“Groats,” lol. Anyway, buckwheat groats, better known to some (ahem, Jews) as kasha, is in the rhubarb family. They’re interesting; we’re used to seeing buckwheat in pancakes and soba noodles, but unless you grew up eating the weirdest Jewish dish of all time (kasha varnishkes, a mix of buckwheat groats and bowtie pasta???), the groats themselves may not be familiar. Groats can be cooked like pasta — tossed it into a pot of boiling water and then straining once done — or like quinoa/rice, by simmering until it absorbs all the liquid in the pan. I prefer the second way because the flavors can be better controlled and because the texture is a little less gummy, but it doesn’t matter. Just don’t cook it in the risotto-style as if it was arborio rice, since it will never exude the weird magical starch that makes arborio risotto so creamy.

Buckwheat groats have a much stronger flavor than quinoa, dark and nutty and earthy, and so lots of recipes pair it with earthy stuff like beets and mushrooms. Nope! Disagree! Earth + earth means no flavor contrast. I like treating buckwheat groats like farro or barley, and think they work especially well with bright spring flavors like peas, asparagus, lemon, and parmesan. Try this recipe, but substitute the farro for buckwheat groats; it’ll be both sturdier and more interesting.

Crop Chef is a new column about the correct ways to prepare and consume plant matter, by Dan Nosowitz, a freelance human who enjoys hot salads and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo by Emily

by Kevin Lincoln

INT. OFFICE — DAY

In the gleaming, unblemished offices of an internet media company, located in a revitalized industrial district now home to seed-funded start-ups, dozens of young people sit in front of computers. The computers seem angry; the office looks like the inside of a soda can. A calendar reads “August 15.”

DEREK sits in front of one of these computers. He’s wearing a collared shirt and jeans. He tried to wear a denim jacket once, but he felt like a cowboy, in a bad way.

Derek is talking to GWYN, who he would like to sleep with, but also respects, as a person.

DEREK: It’s horrible.
GWYN: Yeah.
DEREK: It’s all so horrible.
GWYN: Yeah.
DEREK: The Internet is like a garbage can.
GWYN: I guess so.
DEREK: I feel like I’m always putting garbage in a garbage can.
GWYN: I’m going to go get Sun Chips.
DEREK: Can you grab me a seltzer?
GWYN: Sure.

Gwyn leaves. Derek turns to face his computer. TweetDeck blinks back at him.

Derek had a dream about TweetDeck the night before. He tried to have sex with it.

In the send box of TweetDeck, Derek types: “August needs to end.” He clicks send. The tweet is favorited nine times, once by an editor Derek admires and once by a girl he is in love with, although he’s never met her. No retweets.

Derek reaches for his seltzer, but it isn’t there yet.

GUS rolls up in his chair, which has wheels on the bottom so that Gus can roll up to Derek in it. Gus is dressed exactly the same as Derek is. This is a figure of speech, usually, but today, it was embarrassing: they were dressed exactly the same.

GUS: Man, August fucking does need to end.
DEREK: Seriously. I mean, it was enough with the war.
GUS: And then the domestic thing.
DEREK: And now this celebrity thing. It’s like August decided it was going to overwhelm us with shit.
GUS: No joke. It’s a deluge of shit.
DEREK: Apres August, no deluge. Of shit.
GUS: What?
DEREK: Nothing.
GUS: Can’t wait for this month to be over, dude.
DEREK: Halfway there. And then everything changes.
GUS: Thank God.

INT. DIVE BAR — EVENING

Gus, Gwyn, and Derek are sitting at a high-top in a bar downtown, next to a building that used to be a tenement but now contained rich people. They’re drinking beers. A chalkboard behind the bar says, AUGUST 31. Below that, it says SPECIALS. Below that, it says NOTHING.

GWYN: Can’t believe it’s almost September.
DEREK: I’m not sure I could’ve made it any longer.
GUS: I know. By the beginning of this week, it was just like… this month has to end. Or else, I will die. I will die.
DEREK: It felt like it got worse, too, didn’t it? Like, by Tuesday, I was already saying the week had to end. By Wednesday, I was saying the day had to end at like, 9:30 a.m. I wasn’t even in the office yet.
GWYN: Today I said an hour had to end, and it hadn’t started.
GUS: Whatever. It’s all behind us. In September, everything changes.
DEREK: So, like, is the Oracle running late, or what?
GUS: Yeah, sorry, he texted me and said he’d be here in a few. Apparently the L train got stuck crossing into Manhattan.
GWYN: Fucking L.
DEREK: Cool. Should we grab him a beer, or?
GUS: I don’t know what he likes. We can ask when he gets here.

Just then, THE ORACLE walks in through the front door. He’s wearing boots and Warby Parker eyeglasses. He joins the other three.

ORACLE: Jesus, sorry guys.
DEREK: No worries, man.
GWYN: It happens.
ORACLE: I pride myself on being timely.
GUS: Really, don’t worry about it. You want a beer?
ORACLE: Sure. Whatever you’re drinking.

Gus goes to the bar. The Oracle sits and rubs his eyes.

ORACLE: So. You guys want to know some shit?
DEREK: Let’s wait for Gus, it would be kind of lame to start without him.
ORACLE: No, you’re right.
GWYN: So like, how’d you get into…
ORACLE: Clairvoyance?
GWYN: Yeah, wasn’t sure what the word was.
ORACLE: Right, you’d think it’d be “oracling,” or, you know.

Derek and Gwyn both laugh.

ORACLE: But seriously, God told me to.
GWYN: That’s cool.

Gus returns with two beers.

ORACLE: All right. Let’s get down to business. What do you guys want to know.
GUS: First off, thanks so much for coming to talk to us…
ORACLE: Let’s not make a big thing about it.
GUS: Sure. OK. Well, August sucked, right? It sucked.
DEREK: Yeah, you know, the war, and the domestic thing, and the celebrity thing.
GWYN: Just the worst. So we were wondering, tomorrow’s September. The month is over. Everything changes. EVERYTHING. And we want to know what September’s going to be like. Figured we’d plan ahead.

The Oracle stares at them for a few seconds.

ORACLE: What?
DEREK: What do you mean what.
ORACLE: What?
GUS: What’s September going to be like?
ORACLE: It’s going to be the same. Why the fuck wouldn’t it be?
GWYN: But August is over.
ORACLE: You think just because the month is over, everything’s going to not suck?
DEREK: Yes.
GUS: Exactly.
ORACLE: Everything sucks because everything sucks. That doesn’t change because the fucking month is over.
DEREK: But the war?
GUS: And the domestic thing?
GWYN: And the celebrity thing?
ORACLE: Those don’t even affect you guys!
DEREK: I think they affect everyone.
ORACLE: They affect a lot of people way more than they affect you.
GUS: So.
ORACLE: Well, September’s going to be exactly the fucking same, because time is an illusion and you’re all obsessed with the symptoms, not the actual problems. So stop moping.
DEREK: Christ.
GUS: That’s a fucking bummer.

The Oracle turns to Gwyn.

ORACLE: So how long have you lived in New York?

INT. MEDIA OFFICE — DAY

Derek sits at his computer. He’s wearing a sweater over his collared shirt. Gus is wearing a denim jacket. He looks like a fucking cowboy.

A calendar reads “September 10.”

Derek opens TweetDeck. Last night, he dreamed that he and Tweetdeck had had sex, and then Tweetdeck was emotionally unavailable.

In the send box of TweetDeck, Derek types, “Man, I am so over September.” He clicks send. He gets seven favorites. The girl who he’s in love with retweets it.

Derek opens a new DM.

Kevin Lincoln is a writer in Los Angeles. Photo by Paul McCoubrie.