WIRED December/January 2021

A picture, captured six years ago, still manages to make me envious: five of my childhood friends, intoxicated and sprawled out on a sleeper couch, grinding away at various games on their handheld Nintendo 3DS consoles. It was a year after college graduation, and we’d taken a brief, undeserved vacation to the Delaware shore. We’d all had trouble acclimating to post-college life and decidedly did not have our shit together. For two days, my friends huddled and gossiped about their virtual friends in the 3DS life-sim game Tomodachi Life. Whenever they had a free moment, they’d begin unzipping those fabric cases. I didn’t have a 3DS, so I grabbed a friend’s Polaroid and snapped the picture. My $170 pink 3DS arrived a week later; I bought it out of FOMO. It quickly…

In October, Brendan I. Koerner tracked down the players in an alleged cheating scandal that rocked the poker industry, while Clive Thompson examined YouTube’s efforts to curb the spread of conspiracy theories on its platform. For our election security package, Benjamin Wofford profiled Dana DeBeauvior, the chief clerk and election administrator of Travis County, Texas, who led the charge to build a secure electronic voting system. Readers share annoyances, theories about conspiracy theories, and electoral optimism. RE: “THE SHOWDOWN AT STONES” As an online poker player from years ago, I was very interested in the article. But I must say, I felt “cheated.” I really thought there would be some vindication for Brill and was even more annoyed that the “cheat” was not uncovered. —David Topping, via mail@WIRED.com Ripped the poker world apart? It did…

For the past four years, the cacophonous American presidency has seemed to drown out quieter, more harmonious human endeavors, which is to say all human endeavors. When was the last time that an album or movie or novel stayed top of mind for more than an hour? The last movie I saw in a theater, just before they all closed in March 2020, was Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. Set almost entirely in 1820, the film chronicles the friendship of prospectors in the Oregon Territory, shy baker Cookie and resourceful killer King-Lu, who together set up shop selling biscuits made with milk stolen from a rich man’s cow, whose udders they drain under cover of night. It’s strange as hell. It also has soul-stirring silent passages, and loose or dead ends,…

Oh, so there’s a pandemic and suddenly you all want to protect the Post Office that brings you medicine and socks? Suddenly you’re America’s number one Census fan and think public health is really cool? Well, welcome to the Infrastructure Appreciation Society. Seriously, my God, welcome! I cannot tell you how happy I am you’re here. Membership has been falling for decades. Please visit our website. One of the oddest outcomes of our long global disaster has been an emergent appreciation for big, shared, legacy institutions and the infrastructure they support. I see it on Twitter, I hear it in conversations, I read it in the news. People care about mail sorting. They want Stars and Stripes to keep publishing. They want people with medical degrees, not politicians, to run…

While you’re surfing the web, you ought to thank Jacob Thornton for making it so pretty. He’s a programmer who, along with web designer Mark Otto, created Bootstrap, free software that the pros use to make their sites look spiffy. If you’ve ever noticed that a lot of websites have the same big chunky buttons, or the same clean forms, that’s likely because an estimated one-fifth of all websites on the planet use Bootstrap. One reason for its spread is that Thornton and Otto made Bootstrap open source. Anyone can use it without permission, and anyone can tweak it and improve it. Thornton didn’t get a salary for making Bootstrap. When he and Otto first released it, back in 2010, they had day jobs working for Twitter. But both were…

THESE MASKS DON’T WORK Something has happened to my Instagram feed. By which I mean, nothing has happened to my Instagram feed. It remains as artsy and overfiltered as ever, an infinite grid of happy little squares framing tidy apartments whose inhabitants wear things like makeup and jeans. This, in 2020, is crisis-level denialism. Authenticity has never been the currency of the Insta-realm—that would be Lightroom presets—but I really did believe that global tragedy would snap at least some of you out of your supersaturated daze and into this gritty, icky dimension. Where are the posts about the everyday catastrophes? Neglected kids screaming into crucial Zoom meetings? Asymmetrical bangs after a backyard haircut? The loaf of sourdough so collapsed and chewy the dog won’t even sniff it? Something, anything, to capture…