Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2025 från WIRED

WHEN EVER I GET a new job, the first thing I do is call my dad. And the first thing he asks me is: How much are they paying you? The man’s obsession with dollars and cents is lore in the Drummond family. But his zealous interest in the size of my paycheck is for very good reason: Money runs the world, after all, whether you have any or not. So, Mr. Drummond figures, you may as well try to make as much as you can. My inherited pathologies aside, WIRED’s interest in money is as obvious as it is enormous: We cover an industry awash in trillions of dollars, and that industry just so happens to be shaping everything about the way we all live. But who exactly has…

Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he spotted a cartoonishly huge bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The guy was coaching a woman through a set of cable rows, and the 18-year-old Colvin paused to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and lumbered over, Colvin got concerned. He figured he was about to be accused of ogling the man’s girlfriend—one of gym culture’s cardinal sins. But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm on college; he wanted…

ON THE EVENING of November 19, art adviser Adam Biesk was finishing work at his California home when he overheard a conversation between his wife and son. The son, in his early teens, was saying he had just made a ton of money on a cryptocurrency that he himself created. Biesk knew his son played around with crypto, but to turn a small fortune before bedtime seemed far-fetched. “We didn’t really believe it,” Biesk says. But when the phone started to ring off the hook and his wife was flooded with angry messages on Instagram, Biesk realized the kid was telling the truth—if not the full story. Earlier that evening, at 7:48 pm Pacific time, Biesk’s son had used a website called Pump.fun to release 1 billion units of a…

Now 69, he’s looking back: at getting tosse d in the slamm e r, going undiagnosed (maybe!) on the autism spectrum, and tripping on LSD. HIS NEW MEMOIR, Bill Gates doesn’t mention any study of William Wordsworth’s writings. But when I read Source Code: My Beginnings, I thought of the English poet’s famous line from 1802: “The child is father of the man.” Nearly the entire volume is devoted to Gates’ early years, with Microsoft’s origin story entering the narrative in the final chapters. (A second volume will discuss his company, and a third will focus on his work with the Gates Foundation.) In more than 40 years of interactions with Gates, I have found him resistant to self-reflection. He’d often mock my attempts to engage him in a deep…

PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS surrounded himself with crypto enthusiasts. That’s no coincidence. In 2024 the cryptocurrency industry spent millions backing friendly congressional candidates, plenty of whom were Republicans, and many crypto execs endorsed Trump. Here, we’ve mapped the most crypto-crazed members of the president’s inner circle and the biggest donors to three procrypto super PACs: Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, and Protect Progress. Crypto firms felt mistreated under the Democrats. Now, with a more sympathetic man in charge, the industry’s largest donors are seeking change. They want clear rules for their businesses and a say in which agency polices those rules. And they want Trump to deliver on his campaign promises to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse and to create a national “bitcoin stockpile.” They hope Trump’s presidency…

HyperDrive NET 6-in-2 USB-C Hub 2025 marks the 10th anniversary since Apple removed all the useful ports from its laptops. Whether you celebrate or commiserate, chances are you still find yourself needing an extra input now and then. For that, we have this hugely practical, impressively designed six-in-one USB-C hub that includes a gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and twin USB-C, plus a pair of USB-A 3.0 ports for hooking up anything a little more old-school. The hub’s aluminum enclosure matches the color of your MacBook’s shell, and its shape makes it feel like a natural extension of the laptop instead of some alien appendage. Check before you buy, as not all current MacBooks are compatible. $100 Hoto Precision Screwdriver Pen (Manual) This alloy aluminum screwdriver is outfitted with 24 steel precision…

FOR A WHILE in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small supercomputer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet. At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters. True to form as a monster, Hydra was also isolated and strange.…