WIRED April 2019

Friends, readers, I have something to confess: A few days ago, I got an offer to Meet a Lovely Russian Woman in my EarthLink email inbox. Yes, there it is: I still have an EarthLink account. I swear I just use it for my Amazingly Cat account. And Facebook. I was intrigued. Russian women? I’m not even tempted by women, Russian or otherwise. But I was suddenly curious about who else was flooding my EarthLink account, so I started examining the senders in my mushrooming inbox: *Legendz XL, 1ink.com (to be fair, I do need new ink), /*/Male-Enhancements, ***Cannabis***, ///RemoveMoles//. All of them tucked between offers to buy fresh catnip. And Facebook notifications. As I scrolled through, I felt something stir. A rush of warmth, of love, surged through my capillaries.…

“WHAT DID YOU LEARN WHILE REPORTING YOUR STORY THAT INTRIGUED YOU THE MOST?” “From 2015 to 2017, the most active 0.1 percent of Reddit commenters were responsible for 12 percent of the comments on the site.”—Robert Peck (page 38) “That’s Princess on the cover, a genetically dehorned cow, but calling her by that name is a little taboo. Scientists aren’t supposed to give their research subjects nicknames—they get too attached, potentially distorting their results. And yet, inevitably, they do.”—Gregory Barber (page 50) “In 1972, most cystic fibrosis patients died before the age of 10. Today, people living with CF routinely live into their late thirties, old enough to have children of their own.”—Megan Molteni (page 56) “While it might sometimes feel like robocalls are inescapable, robocalling is actually only a problem in the English-speaking…

In our March issue, WIRED senior maverick Kevin Kelly (not pictured above) imagined the coming hegemony of augmented reality, with virtual worlds layered upon the physical; Darren Loucaides explored what happens when techno-utopians actually run a country; and David Dobbs told the stories of hand transplant patients grappling with the procedure’s long-term toll. Readers debated whether our vision was clairvoyant or distorted. “IN MEDICINE, JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING CAN BE DONE DOESN‘T MEAN IT SHOULD BE DONE.”—Robert Weber via mail@WIRED.com RE:“RIGHT AWAY THEY WERE MINE” After she lost her hands, an intricate hand transplant technique aimed to make her whole again. Then came the side effects. “Thank you for this article. In 1971, my left arm was severed by an airplane propeller and then reattached by a surgical team in Los Angeles. I was a…

PRESENTED BY The Wired Café @ CES (Consumer Electronics Show) was steps away from the craziness of the Tech West Convention Center and provided an oasis for invited guests and partners to relax and experience the newest innovations that our brand curates. In addition to on-site activations from our sponsors Arrow Electronics, National Geographic and Harley-Davidson that kept our 1000+ guests entertained and engaged, Wired also hosted guided tours of Tech West, providing insights into the trends that are set to shape the upcoming year.…

Every year, in late January, a small group of beetle-browed scientists, politicians, and journalists gather at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to ponder the end of the world. This is a day of solemn kitsch: the unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, the minimalist midcentury dataviz that, since 1947, has been adjusted to dramatize the imminence of global catastrophe. But that’s too many syllables. Let’s use the shorthand: doom. And it’s close at hand. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the nonprofit group that maintains the clock, used to set the hands based entirely on the probability of nuclear hellfire. Then in 2007 they added climate change to their calculus and, in 2017, cyberwar. The clock’s setting is largely impressionistic. To rough out a relative idea of how safe or…

In old spy novels, when two secret agents need to communicate with each other out in the field, one of them often leaves a document in an assigned place—tucked in the hollow of a tree trunk or between the pages of a certain library book. Once the first agent has safely vacated the scene, the second one moves in to fetch it. ▪ This maneuver—called a dead drop—may seem straightforward. But if you think about it, there’s a serious hitch: Somehow, the location of the dead drop has to be prearranged. ▪ This isn’t just a problem with the genre conventions of spy thrillers. For thousands of years, this was, in fact, a fundamental flaw in human communication. Whether you were Caesar, Napoleon, or a spy using shortwave radio during…