Innehållsförteckning för November 2022 från WIRED

IN 1992, THE poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It’s a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects—orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her “Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeof” is what it sounds like. Her “Short Talk on Trout” is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book’s introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.” Right about when she published that, the internet started to take of. Fast-forward 30 years and one of the latest ways to avoid boredom, at least for me, is to stay up late and goof around with…

848% Increase since March 2021 in the number of websites blocked in Russia. 250M Number of phones from which data broker Fog Data Science pulls location information to sell to law enforcement agencies throughout the US. 67% Percentage of freight trains in the US that show up within 24 hours of their scheduled arrival time—down from 85 percent before the pandemic—adding to the country’s supply chain woes. 500 Number of screens and projectors at six Illinois high schools that hackers hijacked to rickroll 12,000 classmates as a graduation prank—one of the largest rickrolls ever.…

CELINE HALIOUA DROPS into a crouch and greets Bocce, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix with soulful brown eyes, like a long-lost friend. “Oh my god, you’re so beautiful!” she chirps. The two have just met in an upstairs room at Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, where light streams in through the open windows and urine occasionally streams onto the floor. About a dozen elder dogs, none taller than a kneecap, putter around on the gray linoleum or nap on blankets. When Halioua kneels, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, Bocce rests his head blissfully in her lap A tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is elderly, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. Bocce is one of…

“IF PEOPLE DON’T HAVE more children, civilization is going to crumble,” proclaimed Elon Musk from a Tesla factory late last year. As usual, he was treated as an oracle. Deepening the effect, he added, preposterously: “Mark my words.” Musk spoke his truth at a Wall Street Journal event while hyping his proposed Tesla bot, an android that performs grunt work. Only a bot army, he said, can meet the corporate need for laborers willing to work without rest, meals, or complaint. (Human dignity is a drag on profits.) But until the bots are up and running, Musk’s Squid Game still needs flesh-and-blood workers. “The fundamental constraint is labor,” Musk said. “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough: There are not enough people. One of the biggest risks to…

NILS FRAHM HAS spent a lifetime turning the sounds in his head into reality—and he has the equipment to prove it. Inside the composer’s studio in Funkhaus Berlin, a former radio broadcasting center once used by the East German government, you’ll find the Klavins M450—the world’s tallest piano, on which the lowest bass string stretches nearly 13 feet. In 2015, Frahm toured with three pipe organs fitted with microcontrollers that transformed them into wooden synthesizers; the instruments were so large that they needed their own dressing room. He has performed on the piano using toilet brushes, hitting the strings as if playing the xylophone. On stage, he shuttles between electronic drum machines, synthesizers, and self-built mixing desks. Right now, he’s brainstorming an instrument inspired by the whir of air-conditioning units,…

Dear Cloud Support: “I listen to a lot of books on audio. It works for me. But certain more literary friends of mine say it doesn’t quite count as reading. Part of me wants to read more, but I find it much easier to listen. What do you think? Should I care?”—Easy Listening Dear Easy, I wouldn’t put too much stock in what your “literary” friends say; they sound like bores. When it comes down to it, people who think about reading in terms of what “counts”—those who piously log their daily reading metrics and tally up the titles they’ve consumed on Goodreads—don’t seem to actually enjoy books all that much. Their moralistic gloom is evident in the extent to which reading has come to resemble exercise, with readers tracking…

BY LATE 2016, a pair of FBI analysts, both based in Washington, DC, had gained a reputation as perhaps the very best team of cryptocurrency tracers in the US government. (Per their request, they are referred to here by only their first names, Ali and Erin.) The two shared a focus on digital money laundering, a fascination with cryptocurrency, and a yearslong friendship. Despite working for different investigative groups in different offices, they had come to form a two-person team of their own, practically mind-melding into two lobes of a single Bitcoin-obsessed brain. And they operated almost entirely under the radar, only ever producing leads that they quietly handed off to other investigators, clues that appeared in no criminal affidavits or courtroom evidence. As it happened, on a winter morning…

BACK IN 2016, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann described home as “a feeling” rather than something you own. He was introducing WeLive, his concept for rental apartments where lease terms were flexible and living spaces came furnished, right down to the linens and toiletries. The idea swapped traditional tenancy for “membership,” allowing people to move between WeLive apartments as easily as Equinox members swipe into a gym in any city. WeLive didn’t live long. It began to crumble, along with the rest of its parent company, in 2019, when a bid to go public revealed that WeWork had been losing more than $200,000 every hour. After WeLive went into crisis mode and halted plans to open more locations, the two existing sites began to operate more like hotels. WeWork eventually sold…

Aarke Carbonator Pro There’s enough plastic in the world already, so stop using fizzy-water makers that require proprietary plastic bottles. The Aarke, with its riveted-on name tag and steel-and-glass construction, is a worthy upgrade. It’s elegant enough to stand proudly on your countertop instead of being relegated to the cupboard. Press and hold the single button on top and it spritzes sparkling water into a specially designed glass bottle that looks much nicer on the dinner table and treads more gently on the planet. Aarke’s carbonators use the same CO2 canisters as SodaStream does, making them easy to swap out every 60 liters or so. $349 Ninja Creami 7-in-1 Ice Cream Maker An ice cream maker has always felt like an appliance too far. Another stainless steel block on your…

ON THE MORNING of July 5, 2017, a gray Toyota Camry slowly turned into the cul-de-sac of a quiet neighborhood in Bangkok—a moderately upscale subdivision on the western edge of the city, where the pulsating capital’s downtown high-rises began to flatten out into highways and canals snaking through tropical forest and farmlands. Behind the wheel sat a woman who went by the nickname Nueng. A slight, 46-year-old agent of the Royal Thai Police with a short, boyish haircut, she wore a white polo shirt and black pants rather than her usual military-style uniform. Both she and the female officer beside her in the passenger seat were working undercover. Nueng’s heart pounded. For more than two years, law enforcement agents from around the world had been hunting the dark-web mastermind known…

BY MARCH 2017, the always aggressive Rabenn was ready to charge Alexandre Cazes with running AlphaBay. But his more cautious colleague Paul Hemesath wanted more evidence. They were still busy filing subpoenas for not only Cazes’ cryptocurrency exchange accounts but all of his online activity, from email to banking, which had begun to coalesce into a portrait of Cazes’ entire digital existence. It was only in April that they found a new element of that life, one that revealed Cazes’ daily thoughts to them with a level of detail they had never believed possible. Their investigation had led them to an online forum called Roosh V. The site, the team quickly learned, was a kind of hypermasculine, alpha-male, pickup-artist community, as well as a hive of misogyny, alt-right racism, and…