WIRED September 2020

News from tomorrow Get WIRED is a new podcast about how the future is realized. Each week, we burrow down new rabbit holes to investigate the ways technology is changing our lives—from culture to business, science to design. Through hard-hitting reporting, intimate storytelling, and audio you won’t hear anywhere else, Get WIRED is the smartest, sharpest, most thorough show on how tech transforms what it means to be human. Listen and subscribe to Get WIRED on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.…

Recently, you would have found me cross-legged and forlorn in front of our junk drawer, sifting through a sea of wires. Wires. Blech. I shudder to even type it! (NB: “Type” is a bit of a misnomer here, as I’m currently beta-testing a VR app that lets me dance my words into being. Despite the sweating, it works a treat!) My hab-keeping had unearthed a crypt of connections past, a potter’s field of dangles and dongles long decommissioned. This is how we used to live, I thought glumly, striding with my armful of cables and chargers to the local e-shredder. But as I watched the machine’s brawny cable-rending teeth munch happily upon its new meal, I admit that I brightened. You see, electronic recycling is a rackety business—yet for me its…

Endless Summer For our June cover story, Andy Greenberg chronicled the transformation of Marcus Hutchins (left) from blackhat to whitehat hacker. In the magazine, Mara Hvistendahl wrote about iFlytek, a Chinese company that has built pervasive—and troubling—voice-recognition software. In our July/August issue, Evan Ratliff profiled a virologist who spent years helping to create pandemic insurance, which nobody bought. And Brian Barrett wrote about his friend Brian Wallach’s battle with ALS and Wallach’s work to help others who are suffering from the disease. At wired.com, Maria Streshinsky wrote about the struggle to protect vulnerable family members from Covid-19. Readers share their confessions, warnings, and highlevel support: RE: “A LIFE JUST OUT OF REACH” “Brian, the courage and strength you’ve shown in the face of daunting odds is an inspiration to us all.”—Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) via…

I was looking for an excuse to dip into psychedelic French feminism of the 1970s when a new Karen video barged into my timeline. There she was: Another white woman, shrieking, stabbing the air, berserk over obscure and chronically unmet needs. Q Bingo. Hysteria in public spaces! A sexist trope to be mischievously “reclaimed”! French feminists, if I remember right, often relish extravagant displays of feminine emotion as both a symptom of patriarchy—and a protest against it. L’hystérie Karennesque might yield to their analysis, and even introduce a new archetype of the unruly woman, akin to Molly Bloom or Medusa. Thus I consulted the work of Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), the Algerian-born rhetorician; Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), the scholar of abjection and horror; and Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), author of…

It’s a normal afternoon in July. I’m at work in my little corner, speaking into the camera. The children are in their rooms, regressing. I leave the bedroom-office to get more coffee. My spouse is in our small kitchen, kneading dough while on a video call of her own. I eavesdrop for a minute. She’s not a programmer, but she’s talking about a database. The database lists people who need food, cooks, drivers, and deliveries. We are past the New York City Covid-19 peak. Things have started to reopen, but our neighborhood is in trouble, and people are hungry. There’s a church that’s opened space for a food pantry, a restaurant owner who has given herself to feeding the neighborhood, and lots of volunteers. You have to get calories to…

Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and dreamed of creating a tech startup. “I had a zillion ideas,” he tells me. But he’d been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties you to your employer. A green card that would make self-employment possible was years away. “It felt like shackles,” he says. So he bailed. Alabur fled for a place where it’s much easier for ambitious immigrants to pursue the American dream: Canada. He discovered, to his delight, that Canada issues work permits to highly skilled immigrants in mere weeks, and permanent residency—the equivalent of a green card—in less than six months. In late 2018, he and his wife became permanent residents of Canada, and they’re now building a…