WIRED UK Nov/Dec 2020

ADAMA JALLOH Jalloh photographed Gift Ajimokun, a diversity and inclusion consultant, to open the Work Smarter section. “Gift is passionate and confident, and I wanted to convey all that with just a look,” she says. “I like to bounce between showing aspects like power and playfulness.” SHAMIL TANNA Tanna photographs Richard Browning this issue – the real-life Iron Man who flies using a jet suit. “I tried to make him look like a super hero,” he says. “The tech on the suit still looks kind of home made, so while I’d like to try it one day, I’m not quite ready to strap a jet engine to my arm.” JUMI AKINFENWA Akinfenwa writes about the burden being placed on Black employees to “fix” their workplaces. “There are definitely those who feel the pressure to take…

Back in March, when office workers began the strange, unexpected remote working experiment, there was gnashing of teeth and wailing from some executives – how could workers be industrious if they weren’t clocking in and out of a physical space five days a week? Surely the allure of Netflix and establishing a kitchen garden on a tiny balcony in a three-person flat share would sideline their sales calls? A parent home schooling a child could not be expected to file those all-important TPS reports? But there was another type of manager: one that supported their team and devolved responsibility to those working on the front line of the business. As the days turned into weeks and months, what became clear was that the data – for instance, a Stanford study showing…

The hardest thing about creating a scale model of Edward Snowden’s head is getting the glasses right. This is Echo Chamber – a copper-lined life-size replica of the NSA whistleblower’s head. It sits over a home voice assistant, such as an Amazon Echo, and blocks it from hearing you and connecting to the internet. May Safwat – an artist and filmmaker, and a lecturer at the Kingston School of Art – came up with the idea after having conversations with friends and family members who were convinced their smart speakers were listening to them, even if they hadn’t said one of the wake words (like “Alexa” or “OK, Google”). She had the idea of creating a physical object that could give a sense of control: Edward Snowden was the obvious choice. “I…

A tima Lui was in primary school when she first learned that “nude” is not universal. Now 30, she still recalls playing with a white friend’s makeup and struggling to find colours that complemented her rich skin tone. “I would try to put [her makeup] on and it would just make me look like a clown,” says Lui, who is of Sudanese and African-American descent. “I think back to how my mother barely wore makeup. Now I know it’s because makeup just wasn’t made for her.” The cosmetics landscape has long been unfriendly terrain for anyone on the wrong side of beige. Before Rihanna introduced her ground breaking Fenty Beauty line with 40 shades of foundation in 2017, pushing competing brands to diversify their palettes, people with darker skin had few…

Thierry Breton’s career could not be more different from a typical Eurocrat’s. The French commissioner responsible for the European Union’s internal market and shaping its digital policy describes himself as an engineer, a scientist, an economist, an entrepreneur, a professor, a CEO – and a politician. Over the course of his career, he has launched a software-engineering startup, led major tech and telecom companies such as Thomson, Atos, and France Telecom, acted as France’s economy and finance minister, and taught global governance at Harvard. In the 1980s, Breton also had some success as a writer of science-fiction novels – in which he (rather presciently) envisioned a world run by technology billionaires where computer viruses and fake news threatened the global world order. As a young entrepreneur selling software in New York…

On the International Space Station, it can be hard to keep track of time. The Sun rises and sets 16 times every 24 hours, and the clocks are permanently set to Greenwich Mean Time. But, no matter how you measure it, November 2, 2020, will be a very important milestone for the ISS – this date marks 20 years of continuous human habitation in space. In Interior Space, a new book released to mark the occasion, Chicago-based photographer Roland Miller and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli – who spent 313 days in space – have worked together to photograph the interior of the long-serving space station in detail for the first time. It’s intended as an historical artefact as much as anything – as the ISS is due to be abandoned in 2024,…