Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från WIRED

Readers share their painful memories, medical mysteries, and musical dreams: RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” Technology makes healing from old wounds incredibly difficult. And it’s really hard to opt out.—@ameliaboone, via Twitter RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” Over the weekend, my phone pushed an “on this day in 2020” photo of me in my New York apartment, drinking a beer, waiting for a video call with friends to start. I felt so ambushed and overwhelmed I thought I might cry. This piece explores so much more than why tech companies won’t quit sending you unrequested digital memories, but that part alone was comforting enough to reassure me I’m not losing my mind. —Gyan Yankovich (@GyanYankovich), via Twitter This story really captures the nuance of our digital memories and the unintended side effects…

SOMETIMES I’M REALLY WRONG. In 2008 I heard about a funky new search engine called DuckDuckGo, took one glance, and predicted it would die a quick death. After all, back then Google was on the rise and the fields of tech were littered with the wreckage of rival search engines, like starships shot out of the sky. How could a new one succeed? (And with a name like that?) Worse, DuckDuckGo’s business model was paddling against the current. Its central feature was a commitment to privacy: Its code wouldn’t track you at all. A delightful idea, to be sure! But it seemed like financial suicide when all other tech giants—Google and the ascendant Twitter and Facebook—were racing in the opposite direction to build surveillance-capitalist tools for scraping together as much…

DAVID TEJEDA HELPS deliver food and drinks to tables at a small restaurant in Dallas. And another in Sonoma County, California. Sometimes he lends a hand at a restaurant in Los Angeles too. All at the same time. He does this work from his home in Belmont, California, by tracking the movements and vital signs of robots that roam each establishment, bringing entrées from kitchen to table and shuttling dirty dishes back. Once in a while he needs to help a lost robot reorient itself. “Sometimes it’s human error, someone moving the robot or something,” Tejeda says. In that case, he looks through the bot’s camera to find a landmark, like a certain piece of art on the wall, to get his own bearings, enabling him to maneuver the machine…

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.. Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages. “No one at McDonald’s…

Honorable Mentions SO THAT’S AN AI SELF-PORTRAIT? —JASON COHEN, VIA FACEBOOK I PREFER BOSTON DYNAMICS’ EARLIER WORK. —@SSCARSDALE, VIA TWITTER NFT OR NOT, IT IS GREAT. —PETER BOERSMA, VIA FACEBOOK NOT AS GOOD AS BANKSY’S VIRUS. —SIMONO WRIGHT, VIA FACEBOOK BRAVE TO SHOW AN UNFILTERED CANVAS. —@ALCESTRONAUT, VIA TWITTER NOT WHAT TELEPORTATION WAS INVENTED FOR. —@ARTURO_THRDEZ, VIA TWITTER SHAME MORTALS WILL NOT APPRECIATE IT. —@ASYLBEK0205, VIA INSTAGRAM REMINDS ME OF THE BEFORE TIMES. —JACQUELINE JAEGER HOUTMAN, 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. Disclaimer: All #WIREDSIXWORD submissions become the property of wired. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned.…

ALL PEOPLE WANT to enact a paradigm shift, don’t they? Even if it’s not mRNA, or Lego, we want at least, on our one chance on Earth, to make a meme happen. So imagine the excitement on April 7, when more than 200 physicists from seven countries convened on a Zoom call for a kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party. What was to be disclosed was not a baby’s sex but the fate of particle physics. While the rest of the world has spent more than a year preoccupied with epidemiology, this team of physicists has spent three years collecting data for something called the Muon g-2 experiment, a much anticipated project headquartered at Fermilab, a physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that is overseen by the Department of Energy.…

Timothy was 10 years old when his personality changed overnight. A concussion during a family ski trip in December 2016 left him unsteady on his feet, but that was just the first sign something was wrong. The strawberry-blond boy who played on the chess team and looked forward to Mandarin lessons became withdrawn, obsessive, and suicidal. Back home in Marin County, California, he said “bad men” had surrounded his family’s house and were trying to get him. Timothy’s parents, Rita and John, took him out of school while doctors tried to decipher what was going on inside his head. (The family members’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.) Rita suggested that her son take up knitting to fill the time. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. Compulsive thoughts…

WHAT FOLLOWS WILL BE THE BEST ARTICLE YOU’VE EVER READ ABOUT WRITING AND SCIENCE FICTION. Just kidding. Sort of. The sci-fi writer R. A. Lafferty used to make claims like that. For most of his career, he’d tell people he was “the best short story writer in the world.” Smart move, in theory. Makes you want to read him. We’re suckers for superlatives. Best, greatest, most important. When Lafferty did it, he was joking. He was also being perfectly serious. Everything Lafferty put his name on was outrageous, insidery, and truth-seeking: a serious joke. But then, so is life itself. Therefore, Lafferty might be right. He might really be the best there ever was. Just one problem: Nobody reads him. They didn’t when he was alive, and they don’t now…

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THE BOOK OF PREDICTIONS is a 500-page anthology from 1980, assembled by the same people who gave us The People’s Almanac. It’s a simple conceit: They asked various experts and sci-fi types (with the occasional psychic or spoon-bender) to imagine the next 50 years. I bought the book years ago, left it on the shelf at the office, and never read it. If anything was predicted, it was this pandemic. And yet somehow we didn’t believe it was happening. Many still don’t. I found myself thinking often in the past year about predictions, long and short-term, and reading up on predictive frameworks and forecasting methods (i.e., browsing Wikipedia). My mind kept wandering back to this volume with its bright-yellow slipcover, one forbidden commute away. I could have ordered another copy,…

THIS LAW KEEPS INTERNET COMPANIES FROM BEING HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT PEOPLE POST AND SHARE. IT HAS VAST CONSEQUENCES FOR CIVILIZATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE. SOME PEOPLE WANT TO GET RID OF IT BUT DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS. OTHERS SAY THAT ALTERING IT WOULD BRING THE WHOLE INTERNET CRASHING DOWN. I THE LIE WAS SORT OF FUNNY, UNTIL IT WASN'T. In the weeks after the 2020 election, as Donald Trump’s quest to remain in office met one courtroom defeat after another, his shrinking legal team concocted a baroque conspiracy theory to explain how the presidency had been stolen. At a surreal press conference in late November, Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani—the latter dripping with mysteriously brown-tinged sweat—explained that Dominion Voting Systems was secretly linked to rival voting…

JERE WORK UP on the morning of October 24, 2020, expecting what Finnish college students call normi päivä, an ordinary day. It was a Saturday, and he’d slept in. The night before, he had gone drinking by the beach with some friends. They’d sipped cheap apple liqueur, listened to Billie Eilish on his boom box. Now Jere (pronounced “yeh-reh”) needed to clear his head. He was supposed to spend this gray fall day on campus, finishing a group physics project about solar energy. The 22-year-old took a walk around the lake near his apartment outside Helsinki. Then, feeling somewhat refreshed, he jumped on the bus. The day went quickly. Jere caught up with his friends, many of whom he hadn’t seen since the pandemic began. They chatted about their Christmas…