WIRED November 2021

In our September issue, Jason Parham gathered an oral history of Black Twitter, while Gregory Barber reported on a moral turf war between a rare buckwheat species and a Nevada lithium mine. In October, Noelle Mateer got lost in Instagram’s adorable hedgehog community and its dark consequences. And on Buckwheat has many varieties WIRED.com, Noam Cohen followed prolific Wikipedia editor Ksenia Coffman’s quest to rescue Nazi history from its online fans (read the story on page 32). Readers share their praise and pinings for flora and fauna: ON BLACK TWITTER: “If you don’t know, now you know…”—@artsted, via Twitter RE: “A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF BLACK TWITTER” Watching other Black people speak their truth, it gave me the courage to be like, “Well, even if nobody’s listening to me, I am going to say how I…

THE HUMAN PASSION for gouging burnable stuff out of the earth and reducing it to ashes may well be the end of us. But it’s not clear who the “us” is. Not you and me, obviously; we’ll be lucky to see 2100. But “us” can’t just mean our direct descendants, right? Does it have to mean hominids? Maybe humans of the far, far future don’t even have to have blood or DNA to count as survivors. Hundreds of millions of years from now, we primates could live on in our component parts: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. We could have a kind of immortality of the elements. Unlike the imperiled biosphere, Earth’s crust and mantle, which are charged with many of the baseline ingredients of humans, show no signs of decline.…

ON CUE, A FLOOD CAME. We had prepared with long plastic gutter extenders that snaked away from the house, but water seeped into the basement anyway. I have a small piece of Wi-Fi-connected wall art that shows in colored LEDs where all the trains are in New York City. We watched as line after line went dark. Then we spent a long night rescuing storage boxes and bailing puddles with a takeout container. When the water wasn’t burbling in, we checked Twitter, where you could see the storm in parallel—subway waterfalls, sink geysers, hallway creeks. There was a picture of someone trying to deliver food on a bike in waist-deep water. It all felt very cyberpunk: plastic tendrils coming off the house, social media threading the crisis in real time,…

IT HAS BEEN seven years since Palmer Luckey appeared on the cover of WIRED magazine. The June 2014 issue declared, “This kid is about to change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education—and reality.” This was just after Facebook acquired his virtual reality company, Oculus, reportedly for more than $2 billion. These days, Facebook Reality Labs, the augmented reality/virtual reality division, accounts for as much as 20 percent of the company’s entire workforce, with no sign of slowing down. But despite the many years, billions of dollars, and a global pandemic requiring at-home entertainment, the results thus far have been pretty lackluster. The headsets are spiffier and the games are more entertaining, but our minds nevertheless remain collectively unblown. It’s not just Facebook and Oculus.…

BACK IN JUNE, Jacob Eiting closed the Series B funding round for his startup RevenueCat. With that $40 million investment, Eiting hopes to expand his 35-person outfit (which makes a platform for managing in-app subscriptions) to 100 employees by the end of next year. But these days that’s not as easy as you might think. To court prospective hires, RevenueCat is offering a suite of perks—unlimited vacation, home office stipend—plus equity and salaries on par with some of the big tech companies, regardless of geography. Such enticements from startups were less common two years ago, before the pandemic. Now a feverish hiring market has driven salaries skyward, beefed up benefits, and encouraged companies to offer candidates more flexibility. “Part of it is like, ‘How can we stand out against the Googles…

120T Number of connections in a new neural network built by the startup Cerebras Systems on a cluster of AI-specific computer chips the size of dinner plates. 88K Peak weekly prescriptions issued in the US for ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, in August. That’s 24 times the pre-pandemic level. $9.6M Amount that fossil fuel companies spent in 2020 on Facebook ads presenting oil and gas as “climate friendly” and the companies as part of the “solution” to climate change. 8X Increase in strength of a wound-closing “glue” modeled on barnacle adhesive, compared to common surgical pastes and patches.…