Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2025 från WIRED

In our November/December Big Interview issue, Garrett Graff spoke with Secretary of State Antony Blinken about American diplomacy in the 21st century, and Lauren Goode talked to billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban about why he started a low-cost pharmaceuticals company (because “disrupting an industry that everybody hates, that’s fun”). On WIRED.com, Kate Knibbs visited the Internet Archive—the actual building—for a look inside the digital library’s struggle to survive in court and online. RE: “THE DAD-ROCK DIPLOMACY OF ANTONY BLINKEN” Why does Graff portray Blinken’s work as benevolent “dad-rock diplomacy”? He’s as guilty as Where’s Daddy, the Israeli army AI algorithm that identifies targets when their families’ cell phones are in proximity to each other. He’s as wrong as Gospel AI, which automates genocide by maximizing casualties with no human oversight. Blinken…

BY HIS OWN estimation, JB averages about three dates a week. “It’s gonna sound wild,” he confesses, “but I’ve probably been on close to 200 dates in the last year and a half.” There was the woman who demanded he call her an Uber home after their date at a bar in Greenpoint, even though she lived right around the corner—“a five-minute walk from her house.” There was the woman he met for brunch who looked like Lolo Jones and who said she would never date a man with a mental illness. “I’m like, hold on—no anxiety, no ADHD?” JB says. “I just felt like she was ruling out a lot of people.” There was the first-year law school student 10 years his junior. There were the two different women,…

RIDES ___ THE GOLDEN ROAD KINDRED MOTORWORKS VW BUS Despite being German, the VW T1 Microbus is as Californian as the Grateful Dead. And while peace and love have been replaced by hackathons and pickleball tournaments, luxury EV conversion specialist Kindred is keeping the hippie dream alive. Gone is the original 46-horsepower engine, replaced by a 294-hp direct-drive AC motor and 74-kWh battery capable of hauling you and seven friends for up to 200 miles. And, unlike the original, it will even bring the van all the way up to the speed limit. $249,000 and up KARMA KAVEYA Hailing from the OC, Karma is an all-American, all-electric car brand producing some truly luxurious vehicles. The Kaveya supercar’s performance is balanced with a cruise-worthy range of 250 miles and 45-minute fast…

1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen write an interpreter of the programming language Basic for the first microcomputer and start Micro-Soft. 1980 Microsoft partners with IBM to make an operating system. 1985 Gates, with Steve Jobs at his side, announces Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh. Excel will become a pillar of the company’s GUI-based Office suite. 1988 Apple sues Microsoft for allegedly stealing the Mac interface but ultimately loses the suit. 1995 Gates writes his “Internet Tidal Wave” memo, which mobilizes the company. Windows 95 launches with the Internet Explorer browser bundled in. The internet portal MSN launches. 1998 The US Department of Justice files what will be a successful antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. 2000 Gates steps down as CEO and Steve Ballmer assumes the role. 2001 Xbox comes out…

$8,000 Cost of a flight from New York to London on Bark Air, a charter airline for dogs (and sometimes their owners), whose amenities include pillows sprayed with pheromones and a moisturizing nose balm. 90% Reduction in the force of storm waves hitting coastlines when artificial reefs of lab-bred corals or oysters are deployed offshore, according to projections by Darpa’s $67.6 million Reefense project. 900K Garments shipped daily in July to customers in the United States by the fast-fashion giant Shein, thanks in part to an AI platform that allows suppliers to rapidly change what they’re producing, based on demand. 5% Psychedelic alkaloid content of a mushroom cultivar from the British Virgin Islands, the most potent in a new generation of super-strong mushrooms. Typically, psychoactive varieties contain about 1 percent.…

Nearly everywhere on earth, when you’re stuck in traffic, you’re still surrounded by the usual sea of heads attached to shoulders attached to arms attached to steering wheels. But in a tiny handful of places—in Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Wuhan, China—you can find yourself flanked by taxis with no one in the drivers’ seats, picking up passengers, unsupervised by any human. And if you live in one of those cities, the sight probably doesn’t even prompt a double-take anymore. It’s like the future is suspended between those who’ve never encountered it—and those who are already a little blind to it. Granted, practically everyone has been numbed by the hype cycle. Autonomous cars—one of the canonical sci-fi conveniences—were the hottest thing in tech for a few years around 2018.…

MARY SPRINGOWSKI HAS BEEN OBSESSED WITH microchips ever since the accident in 2016. That was the year a loaded parts cart at a Ford plant in northeastern Ohio rammed into her leg and tore her Achilles tendon, laying her up for weeks. A 25-year veteran of Ford and the United Auto Workers, Springowski was a team leader at the Cleveland Engine Plant, building 4-cylinders for a few different vehicles. She was also a member of her hometown city council in Lorain, Ohio, about 25 miles to the west along Lake Erie. Lorain, a city of about 65,000, used to thrive on factories: plants that built ships and cars, forged steel and bronze. One facility made close to 16 million Ford vehicles over nearly five decades—Thunderbirds, Fairlanes, Falcons—before it closed in…

Nine years ago, a pair of freshly weaned British longhair kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different than any other, except that they’d been created in a lab. They were clones: genetically identical to their predecessor, now sadly deceased. It had taken seven months and cost $50,000, but that cat was one of the first pets to be commercially cloned in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand dog, cat, and horse clones have followed, and every year the waiting list grows longer. Of course it does. Haven’t you ever wished your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now it can, sort of. WIRED spoke to a longtime customer…

ICE CREAM IS deceptively simple—just a few ingredients mixed together and frozen, how hard can that be? But making it actually involves a finicky science of water, fat, and air. In Denmark, engineers at Tetra Pak, the biggest food packaging company in the world, are fine-tuning that chemistry to make ice cream that’s more delicious, more cost-effective—and even ice cream that’s more sustainable and easier to transport in a warming world. Tetra Pak may be most famous for its packaging business, but it also takes a sizable scoop of the estimated $113 billion ice cream industry. One of its continuous freezers, which it sells to ice cream brands all around the world, can pump out 4,000 liters every hour. Its production lines churn out 2 million ice cream sticks every…

JAIME TEEVAN JOINED Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company’s respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era. Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged. A method of artificial intelligence called deep learning was proving to be a powerful enhancement to software products. Google, Facebook, and others went on a tear to hire machine-learning researchers. Not so much Microsoft. “I don’t remember it like a frenzy,” Teevan says. “I don’t remember drama.” That was a problem. Microsoft’s focus remained largely on milking its cash cows, Windows and Office. In 2014, Microsoft…

—@rasmusvarnichblumensaat, via Instagram Honorable Mentions Biological brains are so last-century. —@evanskopp, via Instagram Tell us about “medical bills” again. —@boomerdell, via Instagram Empathy: now available in drink form! —@dmcdev, via Instagram We engineered viruses to deliver serotonin. —@anna.aglietti, via Instagram Somebody else still rents her face. —@cato_brr02, via Instagram The body’s ready for brain three. —@caseyboyle, via Instagram At age 150, the metamorphosis begins. —Jacob Terracina, via email Appendix holds key to extended memory. —Todd Zimmerman, via email Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and WIRED.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have illustrated past favorites. Disclaimer: All #WIREDSIXWORD submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any…