Innehållsförteckning för December 2022/January 2023 från WIRED

In our October issue, Jason Anthony traveled to Denmark for a four-day Larp (live-action role-play) experience at a mock gay-conversion-therapy camp. In November, Tom Simonite profiled Loyal, a startup aiming to prolong the lives of dogs—and advance antiaging science in the process. And on WIRED.com, Ruha Benjamin chronicled her home birth experience, proposing an alternative for Black women who, because of racial disparities in health care, are three to four times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women. RE: “LOVE & LARP” The need to always feel safe has kept me from doing many things. The idea that thorny spaces, as compared to safe spaces, might be useful and even necessary is one I have not contemplated before. —Kate Timony This kind of immersive experience is…

A MONTH EARLIER, in June 2017, a team of Royal Thai Police officers had arrived at the Courtyard Marriott in Sacramento, California. Jen Sanchez, a veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agent, had been assigned to bring the delegation on a flight from Bangkok to California to coordinate with the US team—to iron out any intercontinental wrinkles on the Bangkok end of what had come to be known as Operation Bayonet. The Thai cops met the American agents, analysts, and prosecutors at the US attorney’s office, with more than two dozen people arrayed around the room. The two countries traded Power-Point briefings. Ali and Erin, expert cryptocurrency-tracing FBI analysts from Washington, DC, walked the Thais through a “Bitcoin 101” presentation and detailed how they had tracked Cazes’ hidden cash flows. The Thais…

ON A TYPICAL day, the Private House Buddhamonthon development on the western edge of Bangkok offers a quiet respite from the traffic jams and diesel fumes of the city’s central neighborhoods. The cul-de-sac where Alexandre Cazes lived in that semi-suburban enclave was dotted with yellow trumpetbush blossoms. The only sounds were of palm fronds and banana trees rustling in the breeze and the chatter of tropical birds. But on the morning of July 5, that street would have seemed unusually busy to anyone paying attention. At one end, a gardener was trimming the foliage, and an electrician was busy with a nearby wiring box. Inside the house at the street’s dead end, a model home and sales office for Private House’s real estate development firm, a man and woman were…

“SOMETHING NEW FOR DINNER?” SHE LAUGHED. —J C Thrush, via email It wasn’t long enough for me. —@Anna_Wenner, via Twitter And so long lived the Queen —Giacomo, via email Too bad I never stopped growing —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook There was still no edit button —@ThatKP3, via Twitter In the end, there wasn’t one. —Jason Anderson, via email I woke up again and again. —@mirnanassar, via Instagram They said someday, but it’s today. —@VijayLRoy, via Twitter I should’ve had that looked at. —J. Fredrick James, via email 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. Disclaimer: All #WIREDSIXWORD submissions become the…

EVERY WEEKDAY at 9 am, Abel clocks in from an office he recently started renting in Chicago. He skips breakfast and works until 2 pm, when he logs off and finally eats a meal. Nice short day for a tech job. But Abel isn’t working just one job—he’s holding down four full-time gigs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000. Abel started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was doing higher-quality work faster than his colleagues. “I found myself with a lot of free time,” says the 35-year-old. “With rising inflation, I figured taking a second job was a way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids, and we’re trying to save to…

EARTH IS TEEMING WITH UNKNOWN SPECIES, AND THEY’RE DYING OFF FASTER THAN EVER. NOW BIOLOGISTS ARE IN AN URGENT BATTLE OVER AN OLD QUESTION: HOW SHOULD HUMANITY CATALOG LIFE? (1.) THE BOTTLE HELD A THIN BROTH, LIGHT BROWN, WITH SOME uncertain chunks of dark matter bobbing on top—a soup, maybe, but one that you’d never want to eat. Once it was poured into a white plastic tray, the chunks resolved into insects. Here were butterflies and moths, the delicate patterns of their wings dimmed after a week or two in ethanol. Here were beetles and bumblebees and lots of burly-looking flies, all heaped together, plus a bevy of large wasps, their stripes and stingers still bright. Michael Sharkey took out a pair of thin forceps and began examining his catch.…

ON THE MORNING OF THURSDAY, JUNE 3O, 2O22, TWO LARGE LUXURY BUSES PULLED UP TO A GRAND HOTEL IN MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA. MILLING ON THE DRIVEWAY WERE THE MEMBERS, STAFFERS, AND TRUSTEES of the Oversight Board. Set up two years ago by Facebook, now Meta, this august gaggle exists to second-guess the company’s most controversial actions. The board members, who’d already logged countless hours on video calls and email, were spending their first week together in person. The buses rumbled off, whisking the 23 Zoom buddies to Meta’s headquarters 4 miles away. The group made its way across the mammoth Gehry–designed complex to a verdant outdoor amphitheater known as the Bowl. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s outgoing chief operating officer, greeted the crowd in the midday heat. Next up was Nick Clegg, the…

ON JUNE 22, 2017, two days after the Hansa takeover and less than two weeks before the date of the planned AlphaBay takedown, Michael Gronager and Jonathan Levin, cofounders of the world’s leading cryptocurrency tracing firm, Chainalysis, happened to be in the Netherlands. So was an Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations agent named Tigran Gambaryan. They had all flown to The Hague, halfway across the small country from the Driebergen office where the Dutch were pulling Hansa’s puppet strings, for a Europol conference focused on virtual currency investigations. As contractors with no security clearance, Levin and Gronager were unaware of what Gambaryan knew: that by this time, all the interlocking pieces of Operation Bayonet were falling into place. The Dutch Hansa takeover was underway. A team of Americans targeting Alpha-Bay…

ON JULY 20, after running Hansa for 27 days, the Dutch prosecutors decided it was finally time to give up their game—over the objections of several members of the Driebergen team controlling the site, who had more ideas for surveillance tricks still up their sleeves. In a press conference at the Dutch police’s national headquarters in The Hague, the head of the agency dramatically pressed a large red plastic button to shut down the site. (In fact, the button was just a prop; an agent sitting nearby with a laptop sent the simultaneous command to the server that finally pulled Hansa offline.) Simultaneously, the US Justice Department announced the news in a DC press conference in which Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke about the coordinated action against both AlphaBay and…

I FIND IT a good philosophical exercise to imagine the last tweet. It could come centuries hence, when a cryptobot offers a wistful adieu to another cryptobot, or in 2025, when Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated president for life, pushes the big electromagnetic pulse button on the Resolute desk. Or it could come in a few months, when Elon Musk realizes that aggregating human despair has no upside, regrets plowing his electric clown car into a social media goat rodeo, and shuts the whole thing down with a single “lol.” (Way to own the libs.) What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh. Lately it feels like the last tweet could come any day. The whole…

When Neil Buckland, an artist based in Seattle, met a geologist named Tony Irving a few years ago, he had no idea it would launch an extraterrestrial collaboration. Buckland was at the University of Washington photographing ultrathin slices of meteorite for a project Irving was working on. The cut space rocks didn’t seem particularly exciting at first. Then Buckland peered at the 30-micron-thick samples through a pair of polarizing filters. He was stunned by the vibrant collage of hues. Inspired by the photographic possibilities, Buckland went back to his studio and got to work designing a camera system built around a microscope lens attached to a Pentax DSLR. To create his images, he captures a 2-millimeter-square section of a sample at up to 40,000X magnification, then moves the camera slightly…

ONE DAY IN 1992, near the northern pole of a planet hurtling around the Milky Way at roughly 500,000 miles per hour, Kelly Drew was busy examining some salmon brains in a lab. Her concentration was broken when Brian Barnes, a zoophysiology professor from down the hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, popped by her bench for a visit. With a mischievous grin, he asked Drew—a neuropharmacologist early in her career—to hold out her hands and prepare for a surprise. A moment later, she felt a hard, furry lump deposited in her palms. It was some sort of brown rodent with dagger-like claws, curled up into a tight ball and so cold to the touch that Drew assumed it was dead. To her astonishment, Barnes gleefully explained that it…

IN THE LAST days of June, the Americans descended upon Bangkok like a tropical law enforcement convention. They included nearly 20 agents, analysts, computer forensic experts, and prosecutors from the FBI, DEA, IRS, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police. More than a dozen members of the group checked in at the Athenee, a five-star hotel a few blocks from the US embassy, which advertised that it was built on grounds once owned by a 19th-century Siamese princess and featured eight restaurants and a rooftop complete with a garden and swimming pool. It was, the prosecutor Grant Rabenn noted, certainly the nicest hotel he’d ever managed to book on the government’s per diem. With just days until their planned bust, Rabenn, Hemesath, and the…

THE DAY BEFORE Cazes’ death, Paul Hemesath had returned to Bangkok from Phuket and was staying at a new hotel close to NSB headquarters. As he walked toward the station the next morning, past the lush gardens of the Royal Thai Police Sports Club, he was in a spectacular mood, still feeling the afterglow of one of the biggest victories of his career. “Here I am in Bangkok, the sun is shining,” he remembers thinking. “Things are going great. This is incredible.” As he approached the station, an FBI agent drove alongside him in a car and told Hemesath from the window that Cazes had been found unresponsive in his cell. Must be taking a nap, Hemesath thought to himself, perhaps in a state of denial. But as he walked…