Innehållsförteckning för June 2022 från WIRED

Launched in September 2020 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by serial entrepreneur Abdulmajeed Alsukhan and partners Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Albabtain, after just four months Tamara closed $6 million of funding in the largest seed round in the country’s history. In April the startup topped that in style by raising no less than $110 million in a record-breaking Series A round led by global payments provider Checkout.com. Like many ecommerce companies around the world, Tamara is benefitting from the massive rise in online consumer spending that has taken place during the pandemic. Its BNPL solution allows consumers to pay for products in installments, without incurring any interest charges. The company’s revenues come from fees paid by merchants, who have fallen over themselves to partner with Tamara and offer their customers…

No Bull Knit Runners These minimal kicks are great for logging miles on the pavement or the treadmill, but they really outpace the competition when you’re running on a beach. The soles are thicker than you might need for sand stepping, but the rest of the shoe is light and breathable. The elastic ankle cuffs work as built-in gaiters, keeping sand out of your shoes better than any other pair we’ve tried. And while the stretchy mesh upper may look like a veritable sieve, the fabric is stitched up tight, so grains stay out. $159 Wahoo Fitness Kickr Rollr An indoor roller trainer is a great way for serious bike riders to keep fit in foul weather, but those contraptions require considerable technical skill. The cyclist has to balance their…

What could go wrong? IT’S GETTING LATE ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN DENVER when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. Pizza crusts and empty potato chip bags are piled up around me, evidence of the feverish hours I’ve spent hacking together a project with a trio of blockchain developers. I’m not a programmer, just a journalist with a law degree. Yet somehow I’ve gotten swept up in creating my own DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization, a favorite concept among the starry-eyed proponents of Web3—and it’s supposed to launch tomorrow. No doubt you have questions. So do I. Like: What happened to me? Three…

SHEIN BECAME ONE OF THE BIGGEST FASTFASHION BRANDS ON THE PLANET AND A STAPLE IN ZOOMER CLOSETS. BUT CRITICS WORRY THAT THE CHINESE COMPANY’S INCREDIBLY LOW PRICES MIGHT COME AT AN UNACCEPTABLE COST. LAST FALL, IN THE STAGNATION OF PANDEMIC LIFE, I BECAME FASCINATED WITH VIDEOS OF INFLUENCERS STANDING IN THEIR BEDROOMS AND TRYING ON CLOTHES FROM A COMPANY CALLED SHEIN. In the TikToks, hashtagged #sheinhaul, a young woman would hold up a big plastic bag and rip into it, releasing a cascade of smaller plastic bags, each containing a neatly folded item of clothing. The shot would then cut to the woman wearing one piece at a time, rapid-fire, interspersed with screenshots from Shein’s app showing the prices: an $8 dress, a $12 swimsuit. Down this rabbit hole were variations…

YOU WALKED DOWN Budivel’nykiv Avenue in central Mariupol in mid-February, you might not have noticed it. Rising between a Greek cultural center and a nightclub with a bowling alley was a seven-story building clad in gray siding, punctuated by a large white and orange logo that said “Kyivstar” above the entrance. You certainly wouldn’t have pinpointed it as one of the most important buildings in southeast Ukraine. But Kyivstar was one of the nation’s largest mobile and internet service providers, and behind the building’s bland facade was the central hub that powered 148 mobile base stations across Mariupol. Those stations transmitted wireless signals that residents of the city and beyond used to call loved ones, text friends, and get online every day. But that was then. For weeks, Russian troops…

WHEN BILL GATES took the stage at this year’s TED conference, he brought with him a battered wooden bucket he’d made by hand. With a wide mouth and small handles at the top, the water pail was a replica of one from ancient Rome. In the year 6 AD, a devastating fire prompted Emperor Augustus to organize the Cohortes Vigilum—the night watch. The watchmen relied on this not-so-disruptive technology to fulfill their duties as Rome’s dedicated firefighting squad. Standing in front of the crowd in Vancouver in his usual crewneck sweater and dress slacks, Gates used the prop to illustrate one of the points in his new book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He proposed a modern version of the Cohortes Vigilum that sounds almost like a pitch for…

Group chats; watching YouTuber Rachel Maksy hand-sew “terrarium sleeves”; dressing for frigid April weather (a tough needle to thread); 100 inches of tricolor silk noil woven on a rigid heddle loom; double-layer wool socks with just as many layers of Compeed blister pads underneath; repeated listenings of the Phantom Thread soundtrack; seeing Willow Pill lip-synch to “I Hate People” on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 grand finale; Old Navy’s vintage T-shirt midi shift dress; my favorite bath towel, unraveling nearly beyond saving; an old sweatshirt string turned cat toy; dog-adoption listings sent between roommates and bringing home a jowly boy named Frankie; the seat of my pants; a Twitter thread of wildlife videos featuring critters walking a mini red carpet; the yoga pose “threading the needle” to help a hunched-over…

IN 2003, VOLODYMYR ZELEN SKY, then 25 and freshly licensed to practice law, formed an organization “to make the world a better place using humor and creativity.” The organization was Kvartal 95 Studio, a production company that has created, among other hits, a sitcom about the zany burden of in-laws. The In-Laws suffered a setback in 2017 when one of its stars was banned from Ukraine for publicly supporting the Russian annexation of Crimea. But it’s Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the president of Ukraine, for which Zelensky, who is now the president of Ukraine, is best known. Stagecraft was practice for statecraft, and he now produces nonfiction video dispatches from the front lines of the war. They serve as field reporting, pleas for weapons, and arias…

“I read that Jack Dorsey, a cofounder of Twitter, claims to regret his role in creating the centralized internet. Given what we know about the divisiveness, violence, and misinformation that social media promotes—and now Dorsey’s remorse—is there anything left to redeem it?”—Following @Jack Dear Following, It’s never a good sign when the creator of a technology disowns his own creation, though it happens with surprising frequency. Einstein regretted his work on nuclear chain reactions, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Toward the end of his life, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian military engineer who designed the AK-47, realized with a pang of guilt that his invention had been responsible for more deaths than any other assault rifle. One might wish these men had displayed a greater dose of…