WIRED June 2021

Readers share their painful memories, medical mysteries, and musical dreams: RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” Technology makes healing from old wounds incredibly difficult. And it’s really hard to opt out.—@ameliaboone, via Twitter RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” Over the weekend, my phone pushed an “on this day in 2020” photo of me in my New York apartment, drinking a beer, waiting for a video call with friends to start. I felt so ambushed and overwhelmed I thought I might cry. This piece explores so much more than why tech companies won’t quit sending you unrequested digital memories, but that part alone was comforting enough to reassure me I’m not losing my mind. —Gyan Yankovich (@GyanYankovich), via Twitter This story really captures the nuance of our digital memories and the unintended side effects of algorithms that resurface them…

ALL PEOPLE WANT to enact a paradigm shift, don’t they? Even if it’s not mRNA, or Lego, we want at least, on our one chance on Earth, to make a meme happen. So imagine the excitement on April 7, when more than 200 physicists from seven countries convened on a Zoom call for a kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party. What was to be disclosed was not a baby’s sex but the fate of particle physics. While the rest of the world has spent more than a year preoccupied with epidemiology, this team of physicists has spent three years collecting data for something called the Muon g-2 experiment, a much anticipated project headquartered at Fermilab, a physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that is overseen by the Department of Energy. The physicists…

THE BOOK OF PREDICTIONS is a 500-page anthology from 1980, assembled by the same people who gave us The People’s Almanac. It’s a simple conceit: They asked various experts and sci-fi types (with the occasional psychic or spoon-bender) to imagine the next 50 years. I bought the book years ago, left it on the shelf at the office, and never read it. If anything was predicted, it was this pandemic. And yet somehow we didn’t believe it was happening. Many still don’t. I found myself thinking often in the past year about predictions, long and short-term, and reading up on predictive frameworks and forecasting methods (i.e., browsing Wikipedia). My mind kept wandering back to this volume with its bright-yellow slipcover, one forbidden commute away. I could have ordered another copy, but…

SOMETIMES I’M REALLY WRONG. In 2008 I heard about a funky new search engine called DuckDuckGo, took one glance, and predicted it would die a quick death. After all, back then Google was on the rise and the fields of tech were littered with the wreckage of rival search engines, like starships shot out of the sky. How could a new one succeed? (And with a name like that?) Worse, DuckDuckGo’s business model was paddling against the current. Its central feature was a commitment to privacy: Its code wouldn’t track you at all. A delightful idea, to be sure! But it seemed like financial suicide when all other tech giants—Google and the ascendant Twitter and Facebook—were racing in the opposite direction to build surveillance-capitalist tools for scraping together as much data as…

2/3 Decrease in the US share of global chip manufacturing since 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. 13 Gigawatts of electricity produced annually if the 4,000 miles of canals in California were covered with solar panels—enough energy to power 9.8 million homes and shade to save 63 billion gallons of water from evaporation each year. 61.2K Instances of alleged harassment and hateful conduct that Twitch acted on in the second half of 2020. The platform sent 16 reports of potential terrorist behavior to law enforcement. 100X Amount of carbon released by a peat fire compared to a typical wildfire. Scientists call them zombie fires because they can appear to be extinguished only to flare up months later.…

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