WIRED March 2021

RE: “2034” RE: “WHO GETS THE FIRST SHOT” This makes all kinds of objective sense, and yet I would rather die than reward extroverts. —Sam Sanders (@DreamSong77), via Twitter Distributing a vaccine based on some rubric of how responsibly an individual responded to pandemic safety protocols, if it were possible, is not moral if it potentially causes the disease to spread more than it needs to. The moral approach is to distribute the vaccine in a way that saves the most lives. If that means we vaccinate everyone who shows up to party for spring break 2021, then that is what we do. —Kvaw, via Reddit RE: “THE MESSENGER” I am not American, but I was impressed by the depth and sobriety of Patrice Peck’s article. I learned a lot from the story (the past,…

THE DAY OF January 6, when he hurled down the lightning bolt that cast Donald Trump out of Twitter and into outer darkness, should have been @jack’s debut as an imperial overlord. But @jack never seems to flex. This can be maddening. Just when you want him to act Churchillian, @jack is more reticent than ever, a cipher, more Sphinx than Zeus. Last summer, The New York Times asked Jack Dorsey whether he’s “one of the most powerful people on earth,” and his voice was like a dial tone: “No.” On January 13, @jack threaded ambivalently about the Trump ban, ruminating on the question of how to address “offline harm as a result of online speech” while holding sacred “the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet.” He left his…

I ONCE WORKED for a few weeks at a big, busy company, and one day I asked, jokingly, “Where do I go to cry?” An hour later, I was taken aside and told in seriousness about a specific stairwell. Another person there led me on a five-minute walk through the skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference room, and then made me promise to keep the location a secret, a vow I have kept. (They also cried.) I think of those as “weeping paths,” part of the secret map of every office. You cannot sob at your desk, so you must go on a journey, smiling at the floor, until you find a place where emotion can flow. Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the 17th…

IN THE DISMAL early days of the pandemic, a vaccine seemed depressingly far off. Historically, the average time to develop a new vaccine was 10 years—far too long for our current emergency. But then something happened to shift things into overdrive: serious government action. The White House and Congress created Operation Warp Speed and started plowing some $18 billion into it. The Feds authorized huge, multibillion-dollar preorders for vaccines, and with such a large guaranteed market, pharmaceutical firms moved into high gear. The government also threw its logistical know-how at the hellish challenge of distributing the vaccines. Scientifically, of course, we were prepared and lucky. Genetic sequencing was advanced and speedy, and scientists cooperated globally. But it was the critical push from governments (the US and others) that propelled the fastest…

125M Increase in the number of people worldwide exposed to heat waves between 2000 and 2016. 10K The number of “microcovids” equivalent to a 1 percent chance of catching Covid-19, according to a risk-tracking effort called the MicroCovid Project. $22M Covid relief funds delivered as of mid-January to 600,000 informal workers in Togo, targeted with help from machine-learning algorithms that seek signs of poverty in satellite photos and cell phone data. 140K Viewers who watched the Capitol invasion play out on DLive, a Twitch-like game-livestreaming platform that has become a haven for extremists.…

Why are there all these separate cases against Google, instead of just one? The simplest answer is that Google has a dominant position in multiple markets. This opens it up to different lines of attack that don’t all fit in the same lawsuit. Two of the cases focus on Google’s monopoly in online search and the advertising that appears above search results; the third focuses on its control over what you might call non-search advertising. OK, so what are the cases? The US Department of Justice filed the first case in October, joined initially by 11 Republican state attorneys general. This is the narrowest of the three lawsuits. It claims that Google has used anticompetitive tactics to protect its monopoly over general search and prevent rival search engines from getting a foothold. Most…