Innehållsförteckning för March 2022 från WIRED

LATELY I HAVE been trying to get through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s big report, the one that came out late last year, called “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” It’s a challenge because (a) I must, um, learn as I go, and (b) the PDF is nearly 4,000 pages of aggregated, footnoted, illustrated scientific consensus about weather. That’s too much consensus; everyone agrees. Yet obviously they—the hundreds of IPCC-affiliated scientists who compiled this behemoth—want us to read it, right? The thing exists, so I should at least try. Plus it’s free to download. I love a bargain. However, the gigantic PDF broke my e-reader. In time I got it to work, but the font was too small. So I used a command-line program called mutool to…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, it felt like we could see the future. Boosters were rolling out. Schoolage kids were getting their second shots in time to visit grandparents over winter break. Life in the US seemed to be sliding toward something that looked like normal—not pre-pandemic normal, of course, but some post-pandemic variant of it. Then came Omicron, squashing hopes for the holidays as completely as Delta chilled hot vax summer. As we now know well, it turned out to be vastly more transmissible than its predecessor, though whether it causes milder disease or has been blunted by vaccination is debatable. It’s not the new year we wanted, but it’s the new year we got. And it exposed a rancid truth: The vaccines worked but weren’t enough to smother the…

→ BEST PC Asus Zenbook 17 Fold Foldable gadgets are still finding their place, but Asus’ design for a laptop-tablet hybrid is one of the more promising efforts. Fully opened, the device works as a 17-inch display, with a kickstand so it can be used as a monitor. Folded like a clamshell, the bottom half becomes the virtual keyboard on a sort of touchscreen laptop. If you prefer physical keys, the Fold pairs with an included Bluetooth keyboard, which fits over the bottom of the screen, making the setup almost indistinguishable from a regular laptop. The concept is intriguing, but we’re waiting to see how it works in practice. $TBD —Eric Ravenscraft → BEST IN HOME ENTERTAINMENT Samsung 2022 Eco Remote TVs are getting prettier, but we weren’t blown away…

LOOKING FOR A FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVE? TELEGRAM HAS NO TARGETED ADVERTISING, NO ADDICTIVE ALGORITHM, COURAGE IN THE FACE OF AUTOCRACIES, AND HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF USERS. IT'S ALSO A HAVEN FOR EXTREMISTS, A HOTBED OF MISINFORMATION, AND THE PERFECT PLATFORM FOR PLOTTING INSURRECTION. ON JANUARY 6, 2021, as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters began gathering for a rally near the foot of the Washington Monument, Elies Campo was spending a poignant afternoon at his family’s home in Tortosa, Spain. January 6—the feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day—is the high point of the holiday season there, when relatives visit and children open their presents. And Campo, a 38-year-old Spanish engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, had been largely stranded away from home since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.…

In our February issue, Vince Beiser investigated the promises and pitfalls of carbon capture technology. Boone Ashworth profiled a New Zealander whose Twitter account has become a vital source of information about wildfires for Californians. Oscar Schwartz chronicled the saga of a woman who was convicted of killing her four children, only to have new genetic research cast doubt on the verdict. And Arielle Pardes explored Miami’s much-hyped tech scene. Also, in December/January, Tom Simonite told the story of a photographer who created his own deepfakes. Readers shared their gratitude, latitude, and fortitude RE: “THE BIG INHALE” “I bet every geologist can feel their heart racing already.”—@HuginnMuninn, via Twitter RE: “THE BIG INHALE” Your reporting on opponents of direct air capture is woefully uncritical. Environmentalists do more harm to their…

FOR AS LONG as technology startups have been spectacularly on the rise, many more have been spectacularly in decline. Failure is a near certainty when starting a company. Even founders with the right credentials, cash, and customer base regularly see their businesses crash and burn, while only the lucky ones manage to pivot their way out of a death spiral. Would-be entrepreneurs encounter booby traps everywhere they turn. Three recent books break down these threats and how founders can confront them. Lak Ananth offers counterintuitive advice: Don’t avoid failure—anticipate it. He’s a managing partner at the venture capital firm Next47 and a veteran of the first dotcom boom. His book, Anticipate Failure, suggests that startups fall short due to problems in seven areas: product, technology, team, timing, business model, customers,…

DYSTOPIAS RARELY INTEREST THE SCI-FI AUTHOR ADA PALMER. THEY HAVE TOO MUCH MORAL CLARITY FOR HER taste: Times are bad, the badness is well defined, and in fighting it people can delude themselves into thinking they know the right way to act. Palmer, who recently published the fourth and final book in her Terra Ignota series—a brilliant, ambitious, exhausting 25thcentury epic—does not believe that the future will be bad or good. It will be “weird,” she says. Also “scary and uncomfortable.” The world of Terra Ignota dispenses with a lot of 21st-century preoccupations. Global peace has reigned for 300 years. Climate change has been solved. Technology has eliminated most needs and indignities. The age is defined by a hypersonic flying car, which makes lunch in Tokyo and dinner in Santiago…

ONE December morning, my mother’s phone rang. She tugged the iPhone from the holster she kept clipped to the waist of her blue jeans and wondered who might be calling. Perhaps someone from church was checking in on her recovery from the coronavirus. “Hello?” she said. The voice that greeted her was masculine. The caller sounded concerned, and he told her something was wrong with her Amazon account. “Someone has access to your bank accounts through Amazon, and they can take all your money. I’m calling to help.” Her mind raced. Oh Lord, she prayed silently, Oh Lord, give me strength. The voice was warm and reassuring, and my mom tried to focus closely on his words. My dad was driving to work in his truck, and she was home…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, dotcom evangelists wouldn’t shut up about the web as a land of milk and honey, an egalitarian Eden. But their utopianism hit a reckoning in 2002: “Future Texts,” Alondra Nelson’s watershed essay about race and technology. “That race (and gender) distinctions would be eliminated with technology,” wrote Nelson, who was then a graduate student, “was perhaps the founding fiction of the digital age.” Nelson was right; this was fiction. Technoprophets of the 20th century envisioned a future free of bodies, and especially bodies that groan under the weight of social baggage—female bodies, Black bodies. But it wasn’t to be. Not only, as Nelson pointed out, would our “burdensome social identities” follow us online, but a new digital ruling class would frame those identities as obsolete among the…

THERE IS NO such thing, of course, as a quick jaunt to the moon or Mars. So to train for that alien terrain, astronauts need the next best thing. And you can’t get a much better next-best than strange and beautiful Iceland. Famously used by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s to prepare for their lunar excursions, the island nation’s unique landscape makes it an ideal test bed for missions to our heavenly neighbors. “You have subsurface ice. You have lava tubes. You have areas of intense volcanic activity,” says Daniel Leeb, executive mission director of the Iceland Space Agency, a nongovernmental research organization. “Iceland has the most diverse set of terrestrial analogues in close proximity to one another that exist anywhere on Earth.” The agency first made use of…

Honorable Mentions DON’T UPGRADE. I’M A GOOD BOY. —BENJAMIN LOPEZ BARBA, VIA EMAIL LET’S GO FOR A LONG SPACEWALK. —@COLINGROOM, VIA INSTAGRAM MY META DODO ONLY EATS NFTREATS. —@TRANSISTOR_RESISTOR, VIA INSTAGRAM ONE HOUR TO FINISH PRINTING REX. —@RYANREITZ, VIA TWITTER MY CLONED WOOLLY MAMMOTH NEVER SHEDS. —@ANDYMEDICI, VIA TWITTER WOULD YOU LIKE TRADITIONAL OR NONPOOPING? —MARC LEWIS, VIA EMAIL THE CRYSTALOIDS QUICKLY OUTLAWED PET ROCKS. —KASSIDY HELFANT, VIA EMAIL NINE LIVES LATER, NINE MORE LIVES. —@BILYBEL, VIA TWITTER 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.…