WIREDの November 2020 の目次

“You earn public confidence in small drops,” warned former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb in August, when the agency overstated the effects of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19. “And you lose it in buckets.” Others share his sense that people’s faith in scientific leadership may be foundering. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sees widespread suspicion of the process as “a looming problem” for the release of a vaccine. Bioethicist Zeke Emanuel worries that we’ve fallen into a “fever of distrust.” I’m not so sure they’re right. Most data point the other way, toward the opposite problem: Public trust in science has been so unwavering in recent decades, so impervious to scandal or discredit, that it seems more apt to worry about whether…

Welcome back to the e-Portal, [STUDENT]! We hope you enjoyed the summer protests and return ready to continue your learning journey under the guidance of our nine tenured professors and their 70,000 adjunctbots. We’ve used your current facial expression to select classes to match your mood. As always, we believe that education is key to an enlightened life and affirm that an advanced degree is critical to winning one of the non-inherited spots in the annual job assignment lottery and avoiding the National Service kelp camp draft. Good luck! Millennial Gerontology. Caring for senescent members of the millennial generation carries special challenges. To gain empathy for this cohort, we will divide into “hives” and use Facebook simulators. We will also review critical texts such as Vox explainers and the poetry…

Playdate If you logged countless hours crushing Tetris blocks on road trips in the Family Truckster, this game machine looks familiar to you. But while the Playdate has a joyfully retro design, with springy buttons and a black-and-white screen, it’s no mere Game Boy nostalgia trip. For one, there are no cartridges. Games are delivered over Wi-Fi; the first “season” of titles will arrive over the course of the 12 weeks after launch. (The purchase price includes that initial batch.) Then there’s the crank: You’ll keep it nestled against the housing for some titles, but in others you’ll deploy it as a supplemental controller—to make a character run, say, or to advance a side-scrolling map. Playdate is made by Panic, the Portland, Oregon, company behind last year’s irreverent hit Untitled…

I’m in the end stages of a Fortnite battle royale. The game’s lethal storm circle is tightening around the combat zone, a sleepy beach town with a bubblegum-pink ice cream parlor, and the handful of remaining squads are duking it out for survival. My three teammates, who are all children, are taking intense fire. One squares off with an especially ruthless competitor and is promptly dispatched. “Watch out, that kid is sweaty,” he warns. Another falls to a grenade burst with a cry of “I’m knocked!” A third pleads for the Fortnite equivalent of a field medic: “Rez me!” And then—suddenly, alarmingly—the game is in my hands. A torrent of instructions, piped out in shrill voices, comes crackling through my headset. As I chug a health-restoring Shield Potion, a grinning…

BEST FOR: POWER SEEKERS Microsoft Xbox Series X The new Xbox looks as boring as the Dunder Mifflin building, but its dedication to speed and efficiency would please any executive board. It easily renders 4K games, with support for 8K too. Titles like Madden NFL 21 load from its 1-terabyte solid-state drive faster than Tyreek Hill on a 50-yard run. It also does real-time ray tracing—positioning and drawing beams of light as they bounce off moving objects—which makes the sunlight glinting off the Ring in Halo Infinite seem just shy of reality. On a budget? Get the Series S for $300. It plays the same games but with less brawn, half the storage, only 1440p resolution, and no Blu-ray drive. $500 BEST FOR: VIBE PLAYERS Sony PlayStation 5 Just like…

■ BEST OVERALL Razer Opus This is our top pick for gamers looking for a set of killer wireless cans, no matter the gaming system. Powerful active noise canceling eliminates distractions and keeps your head in the game, and THX-tuned audio brings an added dose of cinematic drama to whatever you’re playing (or listening to—music sounds fantastic as well). Soft leatherette-wrapped memory foam earpads keep them cozy all day. They’ll stay alive the whole time too, thanks to a battery that lasts around 25 hours. The mic isn’t great, but the upsides make up for it. $200 • BEST FOR PC SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless The stretchy elastic headband and foam-padded earcups are a signature of the Arctis lineup, and they make for a comfy, snug fit. A built-in boom…

All through the fall my head was spinning, and I steered into the spin by watching Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Errol Morris’ rhapsodic 1997 documentary about a bunch of monomaniacs features a xylophone-heavy score and the roboticist Rodney Brooks. I wanted to hear Brooks dilate on robots in his cosmic way again. As it happens, this fall had also seemed like the right time to clean the hell out of my apartment. To that end, I bought a Roomba, the blockbuster robovac Brooks coinvented in 2002, five years after he went public in the Morris movie with his theories of what robots ought and ought not to be. Among his most famous aphorisms: “Robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor.” So while Roomba purred…

DO MORE EVIL The heroes of my youth—J. K. Rowling, Pizza Hut, and most of all Disney—are the villains of my adulthood. This is only natural for a curmudgeon of my caliber; to mature is to make enemies. To learn, in other words, to vilify. What’s unnatural is the reverse process: heroization. This I never do, and not just because I can barely pronounce it. The very act arrests development. So of course the Walt Disney Company excels at it. Once a minter of great heroes, it’s lately sunk to the business of heroizing great villains. You remember Maleficent, eidolon of evil, dragon lady writ literal? In not one but two pop-feminist productions, Disney has defanged and unwinged her. The only thing edgy about nu-Maleficent is Angelina Jolie’s cheekbones. Being…

Hardware: Your aging official Xbox One controllers should work with new Series X games. Sony’s DualShock 4 controller is compatible with the PS5 but only to play PS4 games. PlayStation VR headsets and controllers should work for older titles too. Your favorite headphones should work on either new console, though you may need a dongle to connect. Games: Microsoft plans to support all Xbox One titles on its new machine, which includes a wide selection of older games. The PS5 will have some backward compatibility for old PlayStation games, but support will be more limited. Remember, if you want to play older games you own on disc, you’ll need to pony up for the version with a Blu-ray drive.…

Prep Your PC You’ll need a computer that can handle the games and the streaming software you choose. OBS Studio is the most popular utility for Twitch broadcasting, and it’s free for Mac and Windows, so start there. The strain on your PC can get intense if you’re streaming high-resolution, high-detail games, so we’d recommend a machine with a modern quad-core processor, at least 8 GB of RAM, and an up-to-date video card like an Nvidia GTX 2060 or newer. If you’re starting from scratch, plenty of manufacturers will sell you a gaming PC designed for streaming, with high-end components and specs to spare. If you’re strictly a console gamer, you could stream directly through the Twitch app on Xbox or the Share menu on PlayStation. Sharpen Your Image You…

In a calmer spring—when facts weren’t so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust—what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot. But this was not a calmer spring. A week had passed since a Black man named George Floyd died while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. People who had been trapped at home during a tense pandemic spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis…

In the years before he became America’s most powerful spy, Paul Nakasone acquired an unusually personal understanding of the country’s worst intelligence failures. Growing up, he was reared on his father Edwin’s recollections of December 7, 1941: how Edwin, then age 14, was eating a bowl of cornflakes with Carnation powdered milk when he saw Japanese Zeros racing past the family’s screen door on Oahu on their way to attack Pearl Harbor. They were so close that Edwin, who would grow up to become an Army intelligence officer, could see one of the pilots. “I can still remember to this day,” Edwin would recall years later, “that he had his hatchimati—his headband—around, goggles on.” Decades later, Paul himself experienced another disastrous surprise attack on America at close range: He was working as…

The electric tingle of espresso, whipped cream, and sparkling water in a Snowy Plover; watching strategic and extremely belligerent ruby-throated hummingbirds hide in bushes to sneak-attack their enemies, hover protectively over their territory, and fight for hours on end over access to sugar water; whale song on loop—thaaAAaaNk yoOOou, YouTube; Last Chance U on Netflix; the haptic feedback on my PlayStation controller; Charli XCX’s 11 quarantine bangers (and a 30-week-old fetus kicking out of rhythm to them); waking up to an AQI of 20; a paddleboard shudder on the Oakland Estuary—was that a rogue wave or something else?; bumping terrible club music for my toddler; “Tranceport” by numün; ditching the hand grinder for a Baratza Encore; the pitterpatter of tiny kitten feet.…