WIRED January 2020

Cold winter nights offer me, sunniest of sapiens, precious few comforts. TV only numbs the pain, and Twitter wriggles a finger in it. For deliverance, I turn to Spotify, that jolly green thumbprint. Pulling up Friend Activity, I’m transfixed and touched by how loved ones are shooing away their own shivery horrors. Hassan, a new dad searching for a new career, was just playing “I’m Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill,” a mumbling trance by Grouper. My sister chose an Avett Brothers track that I know is her sonic security blanket. Hilary, I see from the tooting speaker doodle beside her avatar, is still up on the East Coast, combating insomnia with Yves Montand. I join her stream, and a mournful French lullaby I’ve never heard before swells my…

“Humans just can’t fathom a billion dollars. Casually we mix ‘billion’ and ‘million’ in the same sentence, but they’re apples and Death Stars. And until we get our arms around that, some fundamental stuff about the American economy will elude us.” —Contributor Chris Colin (page 70) “The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico is 1,000 feet wide, but it has the resolution of a 0.8-mm optical telescope, which is significantly smaller than the average backyard variety.” —Contributor Laura Mallonee (page 24) “Segregation has such a nasty, knotty history in America. And when the idea struck—Would the internet actually work better if users were isolated along cultural lines?—I shied away. But the most dangerous ideas are sometimes the most worthwhile, especially if there’s truth embedded within. Over time I was amazed at how…

When American public schools macramé’d together the words language, arts, and English, starting in the 1970s, they created a tangle: ELA. Q The neo-discipline must have bewildered teachers. There’s a long tradition of teaching individual languages and their literatures, a long tradition of teaching fine arts, and a less long but still solid tradition of teaching linguistics. But how do you teach ELA? The phrase English language arts itself comes to kick off what should be a kid’s lifelong awe at the boundlessly beautiful English language with jargon that is neither English, nor language, nor art. Q But STEM: come on. Way worse. The acronym, coined in the early 1990s, is pedagogical vapor. It Pasteur-pipettes into a flask all kinds of clashing and differently scaled fields of study, with no…

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The days of June 1996 were honeyed with promise. In San Francisco’s SoMa district, electronic music animated a loft dance floor as E. David Ellington and Malcolm CasSelle raised their glasses in celebration. Along with friends and colleagues, they had gathered to toast the success of their new platform, NetNoir Online, a hub of “Afrocentric culture.” Though scrubbed from so much official history, black culture on the web thrived in the mid-’90s. Net-Noir launched on the 130th anniversary of Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery, and users flocked to its news articles, online classes, and discussion forums. The platform soon found itself among a loose constellation of digital havens that together constituted “the soul of the internet”: Melanet, GoAfro, Universal Black Pages, and the Brooklyn-founded Cafe Los…

In the summer of 2014, Markie Miller discovered she’d been drinking toxic coffee. Miller lives in Toledo, Ohio, where fertilizer runoff from farms had caused blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, her water supply. The city issued an alert at 2 am, but by the time Miller saw it she’d already been sipping her morning java. “I’m like, shit, what did I just expose myself to?” she says. The warning not to drink or wash in the tap water lasted for two days, but the anger did not subside quickly. Miller started meeting with other residents to figure out how to protect their water. But what to do? There aren’t great options for individual citizens to take legal action when a lake has been wrecked. You could sue a…