Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i WIRED

WHEN MY WIFE started a little garden in our urban backyard, all I could think about were the worms. Also the bugs, and the dirt, which is of course filled with worms and bugs and composted corn cobs. But she was happy. She introduced me to many bees and enthused about borage, which is a flowering herb that bees like. We started to eat our own lettuce. You’re supposed to love nature, so I kept my mouth shut. But I find the whole idea of it genuinely horrifying. Part of the privilege of being a nerd is that you’re able to forget you have a body: You cruise around cyberspace, get a beverage out of the fridge, cruise some more. In the natural world, bodies are inescapable. Everything keeps growing,…

Near the end of 2009, during the twilight months of a decade that saw the first Black man elected to the US presidency, Ashley Weatherspoon was chasing virality on a young app called Twitter. As the personal assistant for the singer Adrienne Bailon, a former member of the pop groups 3LW and the Cheetah Girls, Weatherspoon often worked on social media strategy. For weeks, she and Bailon had been testing out hashtags on both their feeds to see what would connect with fans. A mild success came with variations on #UKnowUrBoyfriendsCheatingWhen. Later, on a car ride around Manhattan, they began playing with #UKnowUrFromNewYorkWhen. “We started going ham on it,” Weatherspoon told me when we spoke on the phone in June. As the two women were laughing and joking, an even…

Jackson: When we first got on Twitter, we weren’t worried about people pretending to be Black. We took people for their word. They were who they were. Mayard: Now y’all over here tryna copy. Everything is a copy of Black Twitter. Every trend, every conversation. Humor. The idea of audacity. Y’all was never as audacious as Black Twitter. Obell: It starts with us, and then Black culture gets taken everywhere. We can always trace it back to a tweet or a joke or meme or whatever else, because we have that evidence. Mayard: From the Kardashian body down to the idioms used in ads. C. Thompson: I think, quite frankly, there is a healthy amount of gatekeeping that we ain’t doing. We let these white folks come at us any…

From the distant deck of the freighter, the yellow and red life raft looked almost like a misplaced toy, so small and bright atop the ocean’s heaving mass. As crew members of the Orient Lucky got a closer look, they saw a tall and lanky man waving his arms in their direction. It was September 25, 2016, a sparkling clear day on the ocean, and the Orient Lucky was roughly 100 nautical miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, headed to Boston. The captain, Zhao Hengdong, idled the black cargo ship, which was more than two football fields long, as chop pushed the raft toward it. A deckhand on the Orient Lucky flung down a life ring. The man, with a ragged bowl cut and scruffy beard, lunged for it. He hurled…

Readers share their outrage, war stories, and childhood nostalgia: RE: “THE EXILE” “Dr. Gebru should have more choices than ‘Do I get paid by the DOD or by Google?’”—@JennyToomey, via Twitter RE: “THE EXILE” It’s rare that people or organizations can police themselves. Yet I also wonder how external organizations can know enough to understand how to police the large corporations. How would Gebru have known that the deep data sets were skewed unless she worked within the organization? —Kathryn Rice, via mail@WIRED.COM Gebru is a rock star. I only wish I could divorce myself of all things Google to protest their misogyny and racial bias. I am so embedded I’d likely have to figure out my landline phone number and go back to communicating with a telephone. Yikes! —Claudette…

I WAS NOSING around Facebook not long ago, doing the opposite of minding my own business, when I came to a stranger’s post, visible via a mutual friend. It began with the word “Warning.” My disinhibited scrolling self reacts to such admonitions like teens in a movie react to “danger” signs on a rusty chain-link fence. I flung down my bike, turned my baseball cap backward, and into the abandoned mine I went. “Warning,” the stranger had written. “This post could be a trigger for the trying to conceive/miscarriage community.” I belong to neither community, and as I clicked to read the whole story I felt an uneasy pulse of social-media sympathy—part goodness, part gossip. But at the bottom of the mine shaft, it turned out, was a surprise party…

Kozza Babumba, head of social at Genius: Pre-2007, we had never had a conversation about almost anything. As a community, we didn’t all talk about what it was like when we sang the national anthem. Or what it was like when OJ was driving in that white Bronco. We just watched it on TV. André Brock, author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures Black people have tried to create social networks and failed. Black people tried to create apps that would aggregate Black people to do certain things, usually for respectable purposes. Those also failed. Johnetta Elzie, St. Louis activist: I had all those things—BlackPlanet, MySpace, LiveJournal. I was on Facebook when you needed an invite to get on. I was kinda just bored. So I was like, OK, what’s…

—@phorne96 via Twitter Honorable Mentions SEEKING VITAL FLUIDS, THEY COMMANDEERED SNACKS. —SCOTT MEDINTZ, VIA EMAIL YOU LOOK NOTHING LIKE YOUR PHOTO. —@MARKGYLES, VIA TWITTER LIGHTS, CAMERA … WHERE DID IT GO? —THALIA925, VIA EMAIL THEY CAME, TOO LATE, FOR ELVIS. —BRUCE LYON, VIA FACEBOOK QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, COCKTAIL RECIPES WERE EXCHANGED. —JOHN WAGNER, VIA EMAIL DO YOU HAVE THE CORRECT SPACETIME? —RICHARD KRZEMIEN, VIA EMAIL I AWOKE WITH A PROBING THOUGHT. —@ANDYNEZ, VIA TWITTER TAKE US TO THE NIGERIAN PRINCE. —JUAN GARCIA, VIA FACEBOOK Every month, we ask for a new six-word story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Submit your ideas there, along with the hashtag #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit the archive at WIRED.COM/six-word to see how we’ve illustrated our favorites.…

THE GRANDEST MIGRATION on Earth isn’t the journey of some herbivore trekking across Africa or a bird surfing tailwinds for thousands of miles, but the vertical movement of all kinds of animals in the open ocean. Species from fish to crustaceans hang out in the depths during the day, where the darkness provides protection from predators. At night, they ascend to the shallows to eat, until the sun rises. It’s a vast conveyor belt of biomass hidden beneath the waves. Recently a spy has been monitoring their movements: Mesobot. The new autonomous underwater vehicle looks like a giant AirPods case, only it’s rather more waterproof and weighs 550 pounds. Its specialty is locking onto individual organisms and following them around the ocean’s twilight zone, a chronically understudied band between 650…

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Nobody could say exactly when the robots arrived. They seemed to have been smuggled onto campus during the break without any official announcement, explanation, or warning. There were a few dozen of them in total: six-wheeled, ice-chest-sized boxes with little yellow flags on top for visibility. They navigated the sidewalks around campus using cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. They were there for the students, ferrying deliveries ordered via an app from university food services, but everyone I knew who worked on campus had some anecdote about their first encounter. These stories were shared, at least in the beginning, with amusement or a note of performative exasperation. Several people complained that the machines had made free use of the bike paths but were ignorant of social norms: They refused to yield…

Brock: A lot of early Black tech adopters were really skeptical of what Twitter could do. Even Black folk were like, this is not a serious place. Clayton: Once the newness of the platform wore off, I think it was more like, OK, what do we do with our voices now that we found them? The murder of Trayvon Martin is when I first saw Black Twitter’s potential, and the potential of Twitter, to create actual offline change. Wesley Lowery, 60 Minutes+ correspondent: My first tweet about Trayvon Martin said, “Until a 17-year-old black boy can walk into any store in America to buy Skittles without being gunned down, we can’t stop talking about race.” It was one of those first instances of getting used to the idea that I…

BACK IN 2010, WALTER CHEN AND Rodrigo Guzman had a weird idea: a website where you write down the stuff you accomplished that day, and which then emails you a summary. It would be a productivity tool that worked by a neat psychological hack, impressing yourself with your daily wins. “Often you discover that you’ve done more than you gave yourself credit for,” Chen says. “And this kind of motivates you—inspires you!” Chen was a disenchanted lawyer; Guzman, a witty and talkative hacker. They built the tool in less than a week and launched it as IDoneThis. Soon they built an app by the same name and acquired 6,000 users. Within half a year, IDoneThis was the two creators’ full-time job. But then those users started clamoring for more. People…