WIRED December 2021/January 2022

In our October issue, Maia Szalavitz examined an algorithm doctors are using to predict patients’ likelihood of becoming addicted to opioids—leaving many Americans cut off from pain medications for dubious reasons. In our November issue, Brendan I. Koerner told the tale of a clinical trials company owner who fabricated data, going so far as to steal his own employees’ blood. And Adrienne So followed Tour de France icon Greg LeMond on his quest to build an ultrafun electric bike. Readers share their medical misgivings and bicycle boosterisms. ON GREG LEMOND: “In this telling, winning is redefined as living with integrity.”—Steve Miner, via mail@wired.com RE: THE PAIN ALGORITHM The other part of the opioid prescription story is that doctors are terrified of malicious prosecutions. Being judicious, assessing risk, consulting the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, and the…

HOSTILE SUSPICION OF OTHERS, encompassing everything from the position of their mask to their stance on mandates, has marked this wretched pandemic from the start. Now, in perhaps the unkindest cut, suspicion is aimed at people with long Covid—the symptoms that may afflict as many as a third of those who survive a first hit of the virus. One theory is that Covid infection riles up the body’s defenses and can leave the immune system in a frenzy, causing shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, and brain fog. In The Invisible King- dom, her forthcoming book about chronic illness, Meghan O’Rourke reports that doctors often reject these symptoms as meaningless. When medical tests for these patients come up negative, “Western medicine wants to say, ‘You’re fine,’” says Dayna McCarthy, a physician…

IT’S NEVER A BAD TIME to delete your Facebook account. Chances are good you use it less than ever, and every time you do log in you’re greeted by a slurry of reheated viral news and life updates from two or three distant acquaintances. Lately, though, people have been hit by a torrent of new reasons to pull the plug. There’s the seemingly endless series of news stories reporting that the company now known as Meta Platforms ignored internal research about the various harms its products cause. There was the prolonged outage that made you think maybe so much of the world’s internet activity shouldn’t run through a single platform. There’s the general sense that Facebook is probably, on the whole, not so great for society. If you’ve hit that wall,…

$82B Amount of venture capital funding that poured into American startups from July through September of this year—about as much as VCs invested in all of 2017. 14% Portion of VC investment in 2021 that has gone to startups with all-female or mixed-gender founding teams—the smallest percentage in five years. 50M Number of LinkedIn users in China in mid-October, when the social network announced that it was ceasing operations there, citing a “significantly more challenging operating environment.” 20°F How much higher temperatures can soar in cities compared to the surrounding countryside, where swaths of trees “sweat,” releasing water vapor and cooling the air.…

One of the streaming music apps I use creates customized playlists for me, and it’s scarily good at predicting songs I’m going to like. Does that make me boring?—PLAYING IT SAFE Dear Playing It Safe, I once read somewhere that if you want to slowly drive someone mad, resolve, for a week or so, to occasionally mutter, “I knew you were going to say that” after they make some casual remark. The logic, as far as I can tell, is that by convincing a person that their thoughts are entirely predictable, you steadily erode their sense of agency until they can no longer conceive of themselves as an autonomous being. I have no idea whether this actually works—I’ve never been sadistic enough to try it. But if its premise is correct, we…

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