Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2024 från WIRED

FIRST THINGS FIRST: If you hate heights, being a wind turbine technician is probably not the career for you. Sure, we’ve had people who aren’t comfortable with heights be successful in the job. But I can safely say you’re climbing up 300 feet a day. (Sometimes literally: Older wind farms have turbines that you get up using ladders, although most places now use an elevator or trolley system.) A mechanical background or an electrical background is helpful. I got a job with a builder right out of high school and worked my way up until the housing market fell off around 2008. That’s when I decided to enroll in a one-year vocational program to train in power generation, with a big focus on wind energy. I was hired immediately after…

BECAUSE I HAVE A DEEP AND CHILDISH FEAR OF BEING EXPOSED as uncool, I try hard to act nonchalant when I’m around people with lives more interesting than my own. This is the tactic I employed last year when I met an OnlyFans star, a fit cosplayer and Japanophile who has soared into an enviable tax bracket by selling what she terms “exxxtra spicy content.” I made a show of calmly nodding along as she recounted how she’d ditched her plan to become a tech consultant after discovering that droves of admirers will pay $10.99 a month to watch her try on leggings or vigorously bring herself to climax. Despite my best efforts to appear blasé about the nuances of modern sex work, the creator caught me off guard with one…

TEN YEARS AGO, ELIOT HIGGINS could eat room service meals at a hotel without fear of being poisoned. He hadn’t yet been declared a foreign agent by Russia; in fact, he wasn’t even a blip on the radar of security agencies in that country or anywhere else. He was just a British guy with an unfulfilling admin job who’d been blogging under the pen name Brown Moses—after a Frank Zappa song—and was in the process of turning his blog into a full-fledged website. He was an open source intelligence analyst avant la lettre, poring over social media photos and videos and other online jetsam to investigate wartime atrocities in Libya and Syria. In its disorganized way, the internet supplied him with so much evidence that he was beating UN investigators…

Stand-Ins That Helped Get This Issue Out: Diet Pepsi; an electric desk fan in lieu of AC; the Taylor Swift song that sounds like Lana Del Rey; an empty space-heater box as a laptop stand; salad burnet instead of cilantro as a garnish; visiting Solvang, California, instead of Copenhagen; a new standing desk; photo editor Karen Williams; the phrases we ended up using instead of the (obviously superior) parasocial proletariat and terpsichorean temerity; grabbing medium-roast coffee beans instead of the usual dark roast during a hurried grocery store run; persuading a 2-year-old to give up his pacifier for a toy train; peanut butter on toast for breakfast and dinner; a different hairstylist; salt-free cooking alternatives: sesame oil, mustard powder, and so much vinegar. WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance…

ON A RECENT trip to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something new in the fruit section: a single pineapple packaged in a pink and forest-green box. A picture on the front showed the pineapple cut open, revealing rose-colored flesh. Touted as the “jewel of the jungle,” the fruit was the Pinkglow pineapple, a creation of American food giant Fresh Del Monte. It cost $9.99, a little more than double the price of a regular yellow pineapple. I put the box in my cart, snapped a picture with my phone, and shared the find with my foodie friends. I mentioned that its color is the result of genetic modification—the box included a “made possible through bioengineering” label—but that didn’t seem to faze anyone. When I brought…

Blinged-Out Bicycle J.LAVERACK ASTON MARTIN .1R Billed as the most bespoke bike ever produced, the .1R is a beautiful marriage of Aston Martin’s engineering power and the cycling finesse of British titanium-bike specialist J.Laverack. The frameset takes 515 hours of CNC machining to create and has been designed to have no visible bolts, screws, or attachments. It combines titanium lugs with carbon-fiber tubes, so every stem has been 3D-printed to the rider’s exact measurements. It also boasts the world’s first integrated brake calipers. Any exposed carbon fiber uses the same herringbone pattern as on the Aston Martin Valkyrie—or you can tell the configurator to dunk the whole thing in glossy Magneto Bronze paint, as in this example. Priced as quoted SPECS BUILD TIME 1,057 hours WEIGHT From 16.5 pounds…

PHILIP KIM knows what you’re thinking:  Breakdancing? At the Olympics? That’s not even a sport. He agrees with you, mostly. He just prefers you call it by its proper name: Breakdancing is something only outsiders say. Those who know call it breaking. But Kim, who is better known as Phil Wizard, is pragmatic enough to know that “breakdancing” is better for SEO. He usually doesn’t bother to correct people. So, let’s be proper: Kim is the top-ranked B-boy in the world and a favorite to bring home the gold for his home country of Canada. This has made him a hot commodity for every press outlet in the country, and he admits the pressure is getting to him. And the interviews all seem to follow a pattern: How’d you…

Dear Cloud Support: I’m a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it? —Gender Player Dear Player, It sounds like you have a lot of people in your life, Player, who think they know you better than you know yourself. I won’t pretend to have insight into your deepest self, but I can offer some ways of thinking about your choice: 1. Fantasy and fiction offer an escape hatch from your usual point of view and let you explore perspectives different from your own. Choosing a droid as your avatar doesn’t mean you’re a robot deep down. Reading a novel that portrays the…

ADSUM + ELAC DEBUT CONNEX DCB41-DS SPEAKERS Brooklyn-based Adsum creates stylishly restrained clothing and accessories; ELAC is a high-quality, low-hype German audio brand. Together, this disparate duo has redesigned the ELAC Debut ConneX powered speakers to create something with considerable drip. Adsum brings fresh magnetic grilles, bare tubular stands, squared-off corners, and a minimalist-loft-worthy custom paint finish. ELAC adds USB Audio, HDMI eARC, Bluetooth aptX, a phono preamp, and analog and optical inputs. $649…

ON A RECENT FRIDAY afternoon, I found myself interviewing the Internet’s Boyfriend. His name is Keanu Reeves. I introduce him this way because it may be the only time the actor has been treated as a side character in a story. Reeves’ kindness given that arrangement surprised me—boyfriend material indeed—as did the reason for our chat: a collaboration between Reeves and the main character of this story, the writer China Miéville. The two of them have written a book together called The Book of Else where, which comes out this summer and takes place in the world of BRZRKR, Reeves’ 12-issue comic. (Possibly also surprising: that Keanu Reeves made a comic book.) The idea for the collaboration was Keanu’s back in 2021, just after the first volume of BRZRKR was…

ONE DAY IN MARCH 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed the future to Joe Biden. Six months later, the president issued a sweeping executive order that set a regulatory course for AI. This all happened because ChatGPT had stunned the world. In an instant it became very, very obvious that the United States needed to speed up its efforts to regulate the AI industry—and adopt policies to take advantage of it. While the potential benefits were unlimited (Social Security customer service that works!), so were the potential downsides, like floods of disinformation or even, in the view of some, human extinction. Someone had to demonstrate that to the president. The job fell to Prabhakar, because she is the director of the White House Office…