WIRED UK

MEETING THE MUSIC MAN Christopher Hunt photographed Corite founder Mattias Tengblad, who wants to restore agency—and income—to artists on Spotify: “He’s a veteran of the music industry, and while we had a nice, relaxed shoot, there was also a very interesting discussion regarding how its future might look. Corite sounds like it could really help musicians.” CAPTURING A PLANETARY CHAMPION “Being able to create a striking portrait of a brilliant mind like Friederike Otto made this WIRED story the dream assignment,” says Maria Lax, who shot our cover. “We used a gorgeous studio near my home in East London, with a team that consisted of friends—the atmosphere was so calm and creative that the day hardly felt like work.” FIONA DUNLEVY Dunlevy explores the world of medtech devices which harvest their power from the human…

In 2005, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Thomas Friedman declared the world to be flat— a metaphor suggesting that all organizations across the world were competing on a level playing field, other than the fixed costs of labor. Friedman’s belief—that geographic challenges had lost relevance—articulated a view of the world in which borderless trade would increase economic growth and precipitate seamless global integration. Politically, this view has been under threat for some time: resurgent nationalism in the US, China, India, the UK and some parts of Europe (not to mention the Russian version) has driven governments away from economic integration towards policies boosting local business interests. As with so many other trends, this was accelerated by the pandemic: misfiring supply chains led to constraints on consumer goods, and shortages of…

It was four days after the eruption when Christopher Horsley ran into the rebels. The British photographer had spent the previous night camped near the summit of Mount Nyiragongo, a 3,470m-tall stratovolcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), enduring recurring aftershocks on the ash-covered slopes. The volcano’s sudden eruption on May 22, 2021, wreaked havoc on the surrounding area: lava flows reached the outskirts of the city of Goma, 15 km away, cutting off a key highway; at least 364,000 people were displaced, with 120,000 of them losing their homes. An estimated 32 people lost their lives. Horsley went there after the initial eruption, escorted by scientists from the Goma Volcano Observatory (GVO) and a team of armed rangers from the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de le…

In May 2006, Stockholm was the unlikely frontline in the fight for the future of the music industry. The city’s police raided Swedish-owned file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, and seized its web servers. Meanwhile, Daniel Ek was about to launch Spotify. It was a turning point, says Mattias Tengblad, who had just taken over as commercial director at Universal Music in Sweden. “We had politicians defending young people for using The Pirate Bay. It was felt the industry was finished,” he says. “But, in no time, Spotify had a million subscribers. In a few years it had two million Swedish users from a population of nine million.” But while Spotify was once the solution, today it is the problem. In July 2022, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) reported that artists…

It was the biggest match of Andre Odeku’s career. A week earlier, the 18-year-old forward had been playing in the seventh tier of the English football pyramid. Now, he was lining up for Burnley’s Under-23 side in a trial game, with a view to signing for the then-Premier League club’s academy. “Their scouts invited me for a week’s training,” explains Odeku. “I’d never really been on those kinds of pitches before: the grass was so lovely and flat, and there were Premier League players training next to us. They liked what they saw, so they wanted to see me up close in a game.” In footballing terms, Odeku had been plucked from relative obscurity, discovered while putting in Erling Haaland-like numbers for the development team of semi-pro north London side Haringey…

In February 2022, Graeme Cavers and his team of archaeologists set off in search of a mysterious underground passage called a “souterrain”. There are around 500 of these Iron Age structures scattered throughout the Scottish Highlands, but nobody knows what they were built for, and no one has ever discovered one intact. “Perhaps they were for storage, such as grain in sealed pots, or dairy products like cheese,” says Matt Ritchie, resident archaeologist at Forestry and Land Scotland. “Perhaps they were for security, keeping valuables safe, or slaves or hostages secure. Or perhaps they were for ceremonial purposes, for household rituals, like a medieval shrine or private chapel.” Site surveys can help shed light on the condition and structure of souterrains, but they can take at least a week using traditional methods,…