Innehållsförteckning för November 2021 från WIRED

I’m playing a sim-style game, and the nonplayer characters that you deploy have particular skills, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes. So I sometimes put them in situations that I know will make them uncomfortable, like sending a guy who is afraid of space out to mine an asteroid. The results can be hilarious. But I also feel a little uneasy that I’m not letting them live their best lives. Am I being unethical?—DUNGEON MASTER Dear Dungeon Master, Games of this sort allow ordinary mortals to live out the fantasy of playing God. You become the demiurge of your own digital cosmos, dictating the fates of characters whose lives, such as they are, remain subject to your whims. Playing them tends to raise the sorts of questions that have long been taken…

His bushy beard is saltier now than in his old author photos, but Neal Stephenson still pairs it with a characteristic, neatly shaved (and, not to get too phrenological about it, large) pate. So he’s easy to spot, even at the bar of a packed Seattle bistro. We’ve arranged to meet here to talk about his latest novel, number 17 over nearly four decades of wildly popular, cinder-block-sized sci-fi thrillers. That was the plan, anyway, but even as we say our hellos, it’s clear that two simultaneous disasters have enveloped us as surely as the swirling rush of tourists at lunchtime. Disaster number one: You can practically smell the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 massing microscopically. This was back in late July, just after the US Centers for Disease Control and…

THE HUMAN PASSION for gouging burnable stuff out of the earth and reducing it to ashes may well be the end of us. But it’s not clear who the “us” is. Not you and me, obviously; we’ll be lucky to see 2100. But “us” can’t just mean our direct descendants, right? Does it have to mean hominids? Maybe humans of the far, far future don’t even have to have blood or DNA to count as survivors. Hundreds of millions of years from now, we primates could live on in our component parts: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. We could have a kind of immortality of the elements. Unlike the imperiled biosphere, Earth’s crust and mantle, which are charged with many of the baseline ingredients of humans, show no signs of…

BACK IN JUNE, Jacob Eiting closed the Series B funding round for his startup RevenueCat. With that $40 million investment, Eiting hopes to expand his 35-person outfit (which makes a platform for managing in-app subscriptions) to 100 employees by the end of next year. But these days that’s not as easy as you might think. To court prospective hires, RevenueCat is offering a suite of perks—unlimited vacation, home office stipend—plus equity and salaries on par with some of the big tech companies, regardless of geography. Such enticements from startups were less common two years ago, before the pandemic. Now a feverish hiring market has driven salaries skyward, beefed up benefits, and encouraged companies to offer candidates more flexibility. “Part of it is like, ‘How can we stand out against the…

Houdini BFF The goal of the Swedish company Houdini is to make obsolete the concept of owning a quiver of outerwear—different jackets or pants for different activities. The company’s light, stretchy, and generously cut BFF line of wind- and waterproof apparel is made from recycled (and recyclable) hard-shell fabric that works for everything from bike commuting to cross-country skiing. When one of your BFFs wears out, simply ship it back to Sweden, where it will get reincarnated into something else. $400 JACKET, $320 PANTS Rab Baltoro Glove Rab doesn’t get a lot of publicity in the US, but the British company should be on your radar if you’re into outdoor adventuring—or frequently have to scrape ice off your windshield. The water-resistant Baltoros are surprisingly dextrous for mid-weight insulated gloves. They’re…

Hope that helped get this issue out: A surreal silent disco; the fabulousness of California sea otters; a tuxedo cat rolling in pink chalk dust; binge-watching Ted Lasso, you bet your biscuits!; Daniel Jones making it through four quarters without fumbling; the arrival of a long-delayed couch; a Becky Chambers ending; the roach problem seemingly going away on its own; My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones; Lassen Park Twitter updates; the tides and wind at Crown Beach in Alameda; Facebook pausing work on Instagram for kids; playing live music in front of an audience for the first time in nearly two years; being reminded of my younger self; anticipating my soon-to-be-repainted apartment—can’t be worse than the current dried vomit color; third Pfizer shot; new plants gifted from…

120T Number of connections in a new neural network built by the startup Cerebras Systems on a cluster of AI-specific computer chips the size of dinner plates. 88K Peak weekly prescriptions issued in the US for ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, in August. That’s 24 times the pre-pandemic level. $9.6M Amount that fossil fuel companies spent in 2020 on Facebook ads presenting oil and gas as “climate friendly” and the companies as part of the “solution” to climate change. 8X Increase in strength of a wound-closing “glue” modeled on barnacle adhesive, compared to common surgical pastes and patches.…

Arcade1Up Infinity Game Table (24-inch version) →RATING: 7/1O $65O WIRED Giant touchscreen table offers nearly 40 digital versions of board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Battleship, plus jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku, word searches, and a coloring app. Immersive animations and sound effects. Supports up to six in-person players. Splash-resistant. Sturdy construction. TIRED Very expensive. Some games don’t work as well in this format. Music can be annoying. Online multiplayer requires entering friend codes. We missed the pleasure of handling physical cards and game pieces. —Simon Hill Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 and Flip3 (shown here) →RATING: 7/1O $1,8OO/$1,OOO WIRED They fold! The Fold3 phone converts into a mini tablet, while the Flip3 can fit in almost any pocket. Fold3 makes multitasking easier. Nice 120-Hz screens. Good performance. Wireless charging, NFC, and 5G.…

In the spring of 2020, folks in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward started flocking to the Sankofa food pantry on Dauphine Street however they could—by car, on bicycles, rolling pushcarts on foot. The lines were brisk but constant as the cascading effects of the coronavirus pandemic swept through the neighborhood of pastel-colored houses. Some people had lost jobs. Others were caring for loved ones sick with the virus, or picking up food for people under quarantine. For Rashida Ferdinand, the director of the nonprofit that operates the pantry, the crush of demand posed a series of dilemmas—beginning with the fact that she could no longer allow people inside the building. But one thing was sure: Shutting down the pantry was out of the question. No matter what, Ferdinand says, “we…

IN a workshop in east Tennessee, Greg LeMond, the world’s nicest three-time Tour de France winner, is holding a piece of a supposedly unbreakable bicycle. He can’t stop talking about the short length of battered frame in his hands. Like many other cyclists, he is a gear nerd. But unlike other cyclists, LeMond is developing proprietary carbon fiber recipes, which he plans to use to build—of all things—ebikes. LeMond has faced a host of skeptics throughout his long and idiosyncratic career. Now I’m one of them. I maintain an expression of polite enthusiasm in the face of possible lunacy. We’re standing in his R&D facility, a nondescript warehouse down a quiet country road that we reached (how else?) by bike. This is where LeMond designs his new line of electric,…