WIRED March 2019

“The beauty of working for WIRED is that you get to do something you’ve probably never done before, and you get to take some risks,” says Carl De Torres, the designer behind this issue’s cover and the illustrations for the cover story. We asked De Torres, who co-owns the studio StoryTK, to create imagery that would reflect Kevin Kelly’s story about the emerging “mirrorworld”—the convergence of the virtual and the physical. The results were … complex. “I know I’m onto something good when my graphics program is crashing and can’t understand what I’m trying to do,” De Torres says. “To me, that means you’re creating something new.” Fun fact: We ran our backwards-text cover by the US Postal Service to make sure it didn’t run afoul of regulations. Will we ever find…

ON THE BRINK IN OUR JANUARY issue, Jon Gertner profiled a crumbling glacier whose demise could reshape the world’s coastlines, and Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley took us to the remote site of a meteorite impact. Then, in February, Charles Duhigg reported on the anguish and euphoria of working for Elon Musk at Tesla. Readers emoted with similarly impressive range. Re: “The Breaking Point”: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is collapsing into the sea. When will it take the plunge? And what will it take to save our coastal cities? “I DON’T WANT TO RUIN CHRISTMAS OR ANYTHING BUT JESUS WEPT THIS IS SCARY.” Jon Birchall (@jonbir90) via Twitter Re: “Space Invaders”: After a chunk of rock plummeted from the heavens in remote Peru, meteorite hunters rushed to get a piece of the action. Then things got…

I HAVE A new friend, Melissa, who goes by “they.” Singular “they” has existed since Chaucer’s day, but for the past five years it’s been pressed into service as an epicene, addling reactionaries. I know others who use “they,” but with Melissa, rather than merely play the deferential ally, I’m determined to give my pal’s pronoun my all, to use the “they” with gusto, and to put my linguistic skills where my convictions about identity are. Narrator: It didn’t go as planned. Melissa told me that coming out as they at 35 was much harder than coming out as gay at 19. Friends and family seemed to want credit for their forbearance with Melissa’s first coming out, and now some acted inconvenienced: It’s always something with you. But for Melissa, “they” was…

AFTER RAISING $200 MILLION in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad. ¶ A new batch of food focused investment firms like the Kitchen Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments (run by Shake Shack titan Danny Meyer) are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-casual startups—or, as they say, “early-stage scalable restaurant concepts”—powered by AI and data-mining apps. ¶ Why all the fuss over lunch? These food platforms incorporate technology as a base ingredient. Nearly half of Sweetgreen’s customer orders are placed through its app; that data is used to tweak menu offerings and make…

TO RESUSCITATE A flooded Tesla, first extract any dead fish. Then strip out the leather—it may be infected with mold spores. And scrape salt from the car’s corroded high-voltage batteries. Finally, Rich Benoit explains, harvest parts from other damaged Teslas. (Don’t expect much support from the manufacturer, who’d likely prefer you just buy a new vehicle.) Benoit, a Boston-based IT manager, has been stripping apart e-cars for the past three years and chronicling the endeavors for more than 400,000 YouTube subscribers. Now he’s crowdfunding to open his own shop for totaled Teslas. In 2016, Benoit purchased his first fixer-upper, a waterlogged Model S rotting in a New Jersey auction yard, for just $14,000. “It was essentially a science experiment,” he explains over his day job’s lunch break. Tesla wouldn’t sell him…

Hello, Hollywood? I know I said I wouldn’t call again, but I can’t sleep, and it’s all your fault. For ages, summer—the season during which I flee the heat by watching superheroes punch super-baddies in AC-blessed theaters—has marked a very specific period in my equinoctial year. You began unraveling the cycle back in 2008, when Iron Man decided he owned the first weekend of May. The fifth month of the year is never summer. Period. Neither is the fourth month, but that didn’t stop you—greedy corporate time bandits!—from releasing Infinity War in April. Now, in a perversion of the Time Stone worthy of Thanos, Captain Marvel is coming out the first week of March. March! Great Gregorian gods, why? You’re messing with ancient circadian oscillations here. I’m so used to…