Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2022 från WIRED

RE: “THE END OF ALCOHOL” Sobriety as a service (and a vibe) is creating some … complicated issues. — S. E. Smith (@sesmith), via Twitter RE: “THE CRYPTO TRAP” It’s horrifying to read about this type of evil among us, but I am thankful for the miraculous occurrences—Jonathan Levin memorizing the characters of the address and sharing them with Janczewski and Gambaryan—and the massive work that went into arresting these predators and saving victims. Some things just can’t be unseen. I wish all the best for the mental health of those who worked on this case. —Tony Leung I can’t help but feel even more disillusioned about the blockchain. The web was supposed to be about information, and the blockchain started as nothing more than an insanely inefficient way to…

FOR MILLENNIA, cities have thrived by attracting people with diverse backgrounds and talents. But as the world warms, urban centers are attracting much more of something less desirable: excess heat. A city’s roads, buildings, and other infrastructure absorb the sun’s energy, raising temperatures far above those in surrounding rural areas. This “urban heat island” effect varies significantly, not only from neighbor hood to neighborhood but from block to block and even house to house. A person’s actual experience of heat may vary dramatically—and dangerously—from what their local weather forecast tells them to expect. And with climate change driving more extreme heat events, it’s increasingly difficult to keep vulnerable populations safe. “I often talk about heat as the silent killer, because it doesn’t get the headlines that tornadoes, flooding, and blizzards…

ANOTHER DAY, another deadline: To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025,” according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. This is how we live now—not in the Biblical end times but in a permanent “time of the end,” in the words of 20th-century philosopher Günther Anders. Just take a look around: The mega-droughts, wild-fires, and category-busting hurricanes we see today are the result of emissions past—a hauntological quirk of the carbon cycle. The acute stress of the pandemic slowed time for some and sped things up for others. Dispatches from the war in Ukraine, which once might have arrived on the nightly news, are transmitted through our screens 24/7. And trends move at the speed of…

ABOUT SEVEN minutes into my second conversation with the actor, writer, and director Taika Waititi, he confessed, somewhat abruptly, that he doesn’t like being around people. There was “absolutely nothing loaded” about the remark, he assured me—but he also seemed to mean it. “It’s just really draining,” he said. “With whoever—it doesn’t matter who. Even my family. But definitely people I’ve never met before.” It was a hard claim to believe. Outwardly, Waititi can seem extroverted in the extreme. He’s goofy and antic, with an easygoing familiarity and a seemingly bottomless amount of energy. While filming, he’s known for keeping his sets lively: playing music, launching into bits of oddball comedy, and sometimes doing directorial “costume changes” where he vanishes and then reappears in a different outfit. Cate Blanchett once…

To a photon, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations. The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core,…

MADISON MARQUER WAS PLAYING A SHOW IN A CONVERTED GARAGE IN DENVER WHEN HE MET HER. IT WAS 2014 AND HE WAS A JUNIOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, a baby-faced Eagle Scout from Cheyenne who’d become a fixture in Laramie’s college-town punk scene. That night he was on guitar for a band called Medicine Bow, earning his reputation as a magnetic performer—a blur of flailing limbs and sweaty, close-cropped hair as he tore through songs about SpongeBob SquarePants and ecological collapse. In the crowd was Katherine Landvogt, a petite and paleskinned 20-year-old who wore cat-eye glasses. After the set, she went up to Marquer (pronounced “Mar-care”), and they eventually got to talking about music. Landvogt was a guitarist, too, though she was earning her living as a house cleaner. She…

EVER SINCE RUSSIAN forces started their all-out invasion in February, Ukraine has been hailed as an exemplar of how to defend against violent tyranny on the 21st-century battlefield. The country spun up an “IT Army” of volunteer hackers to take down Russian websites, used the Starlink satellite internet system to maintain communications as its own infrastructure was being destroyed, and launched a social media blitzkrieg to win support from around the world. By contrast, Russia’s leaders, despite having a far more powerful traditional army, have been stuck in the obsolete strategic thinking of the previous century. They were seemingly unprepared for the powerful, precise, Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones that Ukraine has used to decimate Russian tanks and ships. Russian cyber-security systems were frail too: Hackers who had signed up for…

ON THE MORNING AUGUST 6, 2019, merchants along Apliu Street unbolted the padlocks to their metal stalls and heaved open the heavy gates to their stores. They had resumed their place in the solar system of Hong Kong’s local economy—selling everyday items at bargain prices. At the far end of the street, a saleswoman fussed with her stock of flashlights and laser pointers. Throughout the day, the street hummed with pedestrians. That evening, Keith Fong, a 20-year-old college student at Hong Kong Baptist University, arrived to peruse the wares. It was boiling hot, and Fong was dressed in the uniform of the young: untucked dark tee, black shorts, and sneakers. If the merchants had remained closed that day, no one would have blamed them. The day before, the city had…

THE PRINTER RAN OUT OF FLAVOR.—Stuart Hodgson, via email Suddenly I realized, I’m the food. —@nicoestr, via Twitter So full. Way too many gigabytes. —Jim Frentz, via email Call the server, my soup’s pixelating. —Rock Veenstra, via email I was hungry. So was it. —Jake McCormack, via Facebook Steak pill exploded in the hydrator. —Shelvine Berzerk Erasmus, via Facebook Waiter, my soup has been bugged! —@nostalgicbookishness, via Instagram Please check genome compatibility before eating. —@sebastiancastro, via Instagram Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? At the beginning of each month, we ask for new ideas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WIRED.com/six-word, where you can also see how we’ve illustrated past favorites.…

IT USED TO be that if you were a technophile you were also very possibly, to some degree, a conspiracist. The two were adjacent; some of the foundational texts of nerddom are basically conspiracies repackaged as fiction or parody—The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Book of the SubGenius. When the internet showed up, it became the place to go for the good stuff. It could teach you about the cabals that run the world, or about how ghosts are just time travelers. I took to it like a duck to tainted water, armed with the names of FTP sites written in a notebook. It was just the stuff for a powerless adolescent looking for order. The alternative—that I was a normal person instead of a suppressed genius—was unthinkable. As the internet grew,…

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2021, a Russian Nudol anti-satellite interceptor was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 650 miles north of Moscow. The target: an aging surveillance satellite. The missile strike was a success, but it left behind a cloud of debris so large that astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to seek shelter aboard two crew capsules in case an evacuation was necessary. “The orbital environment is already highly polluted due to the routine activities of the space powers, let alone when they start deliberately blowing things up in orbit,” says Bleddyn Bowen, an expert in space warfare at the University of Leicester in England. Russia isn’t alone in intentionally producing orbital shrapnel: the US, China, and India have taken plenty of shots at satellites. Based on data…

IN 1799, the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt set off on a trip through the Americas, cataloging all he could find: plants, minerals, capybaras, canals, etc. Humboldt proposed that the world was “one great living organism where everything was connected”—a theory that would inspire Charles Darwin. He introduced the concept of ecosystems and was among the first naturalists to note humanity’s destructive impact on Earth. ¶ In 2017, photographer Christopher Edward Rodriguez came across Humboldt’s writings. He’d been thinking about what a camera can really see when nearly every inch of the planet has been “shaped, directed, and photographed to death.” He adopted Humboldt’s ideas and set off across the Americas to create a series of images that show the planet “as if it’s never been seen before.”…

IT IS JULY 10, 2021, a Saturday, and Sean Holihan is on a short flight down the East Coast of the United States. The non-profit strategist and his partner are coming home from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they spent the week with friends they hadn’t seen since the pandemic began. Everyone was vaccinated, and the state had dropped its mask mandate, so the holiday felt gloriously normal. The group rented cottages and hung out together, sharing brunch and cocktails, hitting the beach in the afternoon and dinner and shows at night. Provincetown was its old delirious self: 60,000 visitors turned a mile-long portion of Commercial Street, the main thoroughfare, into an impromptu parade, and crammed into nightclubs so crowded that you had to slide skin to skin to get outside for…