Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från WIRED

I LIKE A get-rich-quick scheme—what American doesn’t?—and not too long ago I alighted on drop-shipping. The idea came up like this: Plastic straws were in the moral firing line, and if they were banned, I figured Americans would soon need another way to slurp our iced coffees. Twenty metal straws could be found on Amazon for $10, and I calculated I could sell them to cafés for $1.50 each, and they could charge $2 each, and we’d all do well by doing good. But then, as all who chase accelerated prosperity do, I got greedy. Surely I could find a cheaper wholesaler, an obscure Chinese clearinghouse where metal straws went for pennies. Realizing, too, that my modest floor space couldn’t hold much inventory, I was delighted to learn that manufacturers…

LG C1 OLED TV (65-inch) → RATING: 8/1O $2,100 WIRED OLED display delivers perfect blacks and infinite contrast. Almost zero input lag and 4K playback at 120 fps make it the first TV to offer a better gaming experience than a PC monitor. Includes Nvidia G-Sync and AMD Freesync tech for smooth PC gaming. Nice Wiimote-like remote. TIRED Smart TV interface a bit clunky. No easy way to cast from Windows, and no HBO Max app. Speakers sound flat and tinny. (As with most TVs, you need to grab a soundbar.) Static images can leave burn-in marks on the screen, but only after thousands of hours. —Parker Hall Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 Series Gaming Chair → RATING: 7/1O $429 WIRED Good range of adjustability. Four-way lumbar support allows for hours…

JUST BEFORE HIS DEPLOYMENT to Iraq in 2003, Ryan Kort spotted a paperback copy of Dune in a bookstore near Fort Riley, Kansas. The 23-year-old second lieutenant was intrigued by the book’s black cover, with an inset image of a desert landscape next to the title and the silhouettes of two robed figures walking across the sand. Despite its 800-plus pages, its small print made it a relatively compact cubic object. So he bought it and carried it with him to the Gulf, the only novel he packed in his rucksack along with his Army manuals and field guides. ¶ Kort read the book during moments of downtime over the next weeks, as he led his platoon of 15 soldiers and four tanks through the Kuwaiti desert, and later when…

200 Number of high-end laptops’ computing power required to run the systems in a typical autonomous vehicle, according to chipmaker Nvidia. 2.3% Portion of active Twitter users who have enabled two-factor authentication. The security feature has been available since 2013. 200K Dollars that gaming celebrity Richard “FaZe Banks” Bengston says he made per day running a gambling site where players use in-game virtual goods as currency for making wagers. 46 Max speed in mph of a hypothetical 220-pound house cat, according to the Journal of Theoretical Biology. A spider of the same weight would reach 35 mph.…

A couple times a month, my mom, or sometimes my dad, butt-dials me and accidentally leaves a voicemail that is several minutes long. I always listen to the entire thing, even though I’ve never overheard anything interesting. Why do I continue to do this? And is it OK to eavesdrop on people’s lives without their knowledge?—SCUTTLE BUTT Dear Scuttle Butt, The butt-dial voicemail is the most aesthetically underrated artifact of our time. Years from now, when cell phones are relegated to the museum of technological obsolescence, we will finally recognize the strange beauty of these ghostly dispatches, recordings captured without human intent, wisps of life that occasionally rose to the level of art. The muffled, vaguely sonographic rustle of a pocket, or a purse. The familiar voices that seem to…

Dylan Ehler came into the world running. He pummeled and squirmed his way through his mom’s pregnancy, kicked the hell out of her in the womb. He was a boy in constant motion. He moved when he slept. Almost as soon as he was crawling he was climbing. His parents—Ashley Brown and Jason Ehler—would walk into their living room, in a graygreen house in a place called Bible Hill near the town of Truro in Nova Scotia, to find him perched on the windowsill, grasping at the ledge above. When they brought Dylan home from the hospital, the three of them slept curled together on the sectional, bunking down in the living room. By his third birthday, he was still getting up in the night to crawl into bed with…

CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ and Frank Herbert both under-stood the power of schwerpunkt. A 19th-century theorist revered among military geeks the way Paul Brown is revered among football coaches, Clausewitz wrote that each war has a center of gravity—which is how schwerpunkt is usually translated—and that victory often flows to the strategist who identifies and seizes it. Depending on the type of conflict, the center of gravity might be an enemy’s logistics base or field army, a nation’s capital, or even an individual (see: Osama bin Laden in the war with al Qaeda). Whatever form it takes, a schwerpunkt is “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends,” Clausewitz wrote. In Dune, it’s the spice. In a world where computers and artificial intelligence have been banned, the spice,…

THE UNITED STATES is not the only superpower that has recently become wary of its homegrown tech industry. In late July, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that it was embarking on a six-month campaign to regulate the country’s internet companies, to rein in practices that “disrupt market order, damage consumer rights, or threaten data security.” But in contrast to Washington’s circular debates over how, exactly, platforms should be tamed, the Chinese Communist Party is moving with breathtaking decisiveness. “Every element of the bureaucracy is now aligned toward bringing private high-tech Chinese companies to heel to serve the party’s broader mission,” says Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies. Friction between Chinese president Xi Jinping’s government and the Chinese tech industry…

When the world’s largest search engine and social media company, the Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant ecommerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: the Every. Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within “Not too many people start this way,” Kiki said. Kiki was Delaney’s acclimator, assigned to show Delaney the campus and get her settled into her first rotation. Kiki was no more than 5 feet tall, with hair the color of Neptune and the build of a woodland fairy. “I don’t take it for granted,” Delaney said. “I’m so…

EVERYONE TALKS about the sandworms and the spice, but the coolest thing Frank Herbert invented for Dune—even he seemed to think so—was the stillsuit. Worn by the inhabitants of the desert planet Arrakis, stillsuits capture any moisture that leaves the body and recycle it back into drinkable water. They also look pretty sick, all tubes and piping and chest plates (a cosplayer’s wet dream). For Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation, costume designer Jacqueline West wanted the look of the stillsuits to reflect their ecological necessity. “It was such a prophetic book about a planet that was robbed, as ours has been, of its resources,” she says. “We wanted the suit to be made exactly as it would have been with Frank Herbert’s descriptions.” Could such a thing ever work in the…

In 2007 a new documentary called The Pixar Story screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival. It covered the wild antics of the studio’s founders as they crafted a new kind of movie—a fully computer-animated picture bursting with riotous colors and textures, ultra-vivid characters, and plotlines subversively seeded with mind-expanding wisdom. During a panel discussion afterward, the interviewer asked a provocative question. “This might be crazy,” she began, “but is there any connection between the world of the counterculture and psychedelics, and Pixar?” The panelists on stage—Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, both central to Pixar’s development—fell into an uncomfortable silence. Drugs and the counterculture are edgy subjects for employees of a Disney division beloved by generations of children. Finally, Lasseter said, “Is Alvy Ray Smith in the audience?” If Smith,…