WIRED September 2021

Despite the name, Black Twitter is not a monolithic entity. It’s a place full of contradictions—similarity and difference, joy and pain, chaos and order. What unites it, though, is the intimacy of the interactions. For this issue’s cover, Aaron Marin was tasked with capturing that complexity. For inspiration, he turned to the work of graphic designer S. Neil Fujita, whose colorful geometries convey feeling and movement. As does Marin’s work here, each wiggling stroke contributing to a coherent, vibrant whole.…

Readers share their outrage, war stories, and childhood nostalgia: RE: “THE EXILE” “Dr. Gebru should have more choices than ‘Do I get paid by the DOD or by Google?’”—@JennyToomey, via Twitter RE: “THE EXILE” It’s rare that people or organizations can police themselves. Yet I also wonder how external organizations can know enough to understand how to police the large corporations. How would Gebru have known that the deep data sets were skewed unless she worked within the organization? —Kathryn Rice, via mail@WIRED.COM Gebru is a rock star. I only wish I could divorce myself of all things Google to protest their misogyny and racial bias. I am so embedded I’d likely have to figure out my landline phone number and go back to communicating with a telephone. Yikes! —Claudette Meehan, via mail@WIRED.COM It’s incredible how…

FOR A COHORT famous for feeling stupid and contagious, as Kurt Cobain put it, Generation X has turned downright self-congratulatory. The regular slighting of our generation in pop demographics is officially a source of performative delight. Sure, we’re perpetually overlooked. The bigger, louder, more heavily branded generations—the boomers, who preceded us, and the millennials, our successors—tend to Hoover and vape up all the oxygen. But our stealth also means we’re rarely blamed. We skulk around doing our own ordinary, all too human things (and for every Zadie Smith or Monica Lewinsky there’s a Ted Cruz or Alex Jones), and boomers, as usual, consume all the resources—including the nation’s deep reserves of contempt, which are largely aimed at them. The two big gens get the pollster love too: Polls fixate on those over…

WHEN MY WIFE started a little garden in our urban backyard, all I could think about were the worms. Also the bugs, and the dirt, which is of course filled with worms and bugs and composted corn cobs. But she was happy. She introduced me to many bees and enthused about borage, which is a flowering herb that bees like. We started to eat our own lettuce. You’re supposed to love nature, so I kept my mouth shut. But I find the whole idea of it genuinely horrifying. Part of the privilege of being a nerd is that you’re able to forget you have a body: You cruise around cyberspace, get a beverage out of the fridge, cruise some more. In the natural world, bodies are inescapable. Everything keeps growing, and…

I WAS NOSING around Facebook not long ago, doing the opposite of minding my own business, when I came to a stranger’s post, visible via a mutual friend. It began with the word “Warning.” My disinhibited scrolling self reacts to such admonitions like teens in a movie react to “danger” signs on a rusty chain-link fence. I flung down my bike, turned my baseball cap backward, and into the abandoned mine I went. “Warning,” the stranger had written. “This post could be a trigger for the trying to conceive/miscarriage community.” I belong to neither community, and as I clicked to read the whole story I felt an uneasy pulse of social-media sympathy—part goodness, part gossip. But at the bottom of the mine shaft, it turned out, was a surprise party with cake…

THE GRANDEST MIGRATION on Earth isn’t the journey of some herbivore trekking across Africa or a bird surfing tailwinds for thousands of miles, but the vertical movement of all kinds of animals in the open ocean. Species from fish to crustaceans hang out in the depths during the day, where the darkness provides protection from predators. At night, they ascend to the shallows to eat, until the sun rises. It’s a vast conveyor belt of biomass hidden beneath the waves. Recently a spy has been monitoring their movements: Mesobot. The new autonomous underwater vehicle looks like a giant AirPods case, only it’s rather more waterproof and weighs 550 pounds. Its specialty is locking onto individual organisms and following them around the ocean’s twilight zone, a chronically understudied band between 650 and…