WIRED June 2019

Friends, I am enmeshed. Snared not in a love triangle but in a love wheel, your humble narrator spinning swoonily at its hub. O vertigo! My ardor radiates, spoking out toward an ever-shifting array of paramours, a true and sacred bond connecting each of us. I love them all equally, yet they remain mutely unaware of one another. Stranger still: I luxuriate in the multitudes. I am no lusty profligate, no bed-hopping heartbreaker. Were my sleek jumpsuit to include pockets, I would store in them no record of my dalliances. Mine is a pure and selfless love, one predicated on comprehension rather than on conquest. I speak them into sentience, we meld with sweet frisson, then they return to stasis. Do you despise me? You may not once you know that…

“Google Maps! My mom spent far too much time poring over printed MapQuest directions so she could drive me to my friends’ houses. One wrong turn, and there was no such thing as ‘recalibrating route.’” —Louise Matsakis, staff writer and author of “Let’s Goo!,” page 56 “Having gone to boarding school in Hawaii and then college on the East Coast in the ’80s, it would have been nice to be able to FaceTime my family in Micronesia every once in a while. Thanksgivings wouldn’t have been so lonely.” —Jay Dayrit, director of editorial operations “Spotify. I could have found so much more great music! Until I was old enough to join Columbia House—where I used the initial offer to score, say, a dozen Rush cassettes for a buck—my options were radio, my…

Our April issue took a broad view of Crispr, the gene-editing tool that could allow scientists to grow human organs in pigs and breed heat-tolerant dairy cows. “Crispr could give us a more humane world,” our cover said. “Will humans let that happen?” Many humans wrote in to question that premise. Author Alex W. Palmer investigated the seedy world of robocallers; robocalling victims were eager to share their stories. Beyond WIRED, consumer advocate and serial presidential campaigner Ralph Nader bemoaned the scourge of graphic design; we offer him some relief. Re: “On the Trail of the Robocall King” Everyone who hunts down robocallers is a national hero. —S. E. Smith (@sesmith), via Twitter The robocalls I receive intensified after my husband was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and died. Sometimes I’m so frustrated that I…

Photoshop played an outsize role in the odious college admissions scandal that broke earlier this year. Rick Singer, the concierge to the stars who pleaded guilty in March to money laundering and racketeering in a scheme to get rich children into luxury-brand colleges, used the software to graft the heads of teens onto the muscled bodies of elite athletes. With the Photoshopped water polo image in particular, the one that helped an undistinguished high schooler get recruited by USC, Singer seems to have created a mythological creature—a Ceto for the digital age. Call them the Collegiae: They’ve got the heads of princesses and the bodies of serpents. To mark the moment, a Twitter friend, Peter Mohan, ginned up an image of me as a Collegiae. At first it didn’t compute.…

A decade ago, Amazon abruptly deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of its American customers. The move instantly evoked the “memory holes” in the novel’s totalitarian dystopia, and it inspired about equal measures of shock, outrage, and jokes. (If a fictional Amazon in a dystopian novel had performed the same mass deletion, critics would have said it was too on the nose.) But in hindsight, Amazon’s action was also a striking harbinger of a shift that has only become more pronounced since then: our wholesale tilt toward becoming a tenant society. In that particular case, Amazon said the books had been added to the Kindle Store by a vendor who didn’t actually have the rights to them. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we…

The next generation of wireless tech, 5G, promises a frictionless future: We’ll be able to do whatever we do on our phones much, much faster, and more devices can come online without slowing down the works. Selfdriving cars, smart meters that track electricity usage, and health-monitoring devices may all take a big leap from childhood to adolescence. 5G will happen in the airy realm of radio waves. To get there, big telecoms have to harness underused parts of the spectrum. But there’s another crucial part underlying this system: lowly cable. Huge numbers of new transmitters will be needed to relay all that data to your phone, and many of those transmitters will still connect to the internet through fiber-optic cable—glass as thin as strands of hair carrying pulses of light. To make…