WIRED December 2022/January 2023

In our October issue, Jason Anthony traveled to Denmark for a four-day Larp (live-action role-play) experience at a mock gay-conversion-therapy camp. In November, Tom Simonite profiled Loyal, a startup aiming to prolong the lives of dogs—and advance antiaging science in the process. And on WIRED.com, Ruha Benjamin chronicled her home birth experience, proposing an alternative for Black women who, because of racial disparities in health care, are three to four times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women. RE: “LOVE & LARP” The need to always feel safe has kept me from doing many things. The idea that thorny spaces, as compared to safe spaces, might be useful and even necessary is one I have not contemplated before. —Kate Timony This kind of immersive experience is a genuine gift. Ironically,…

OHM’S LAW (V = IR) states that the voltage across a conductor is proportional to the current flowing through it. Hooke’s law (Fs = -kx) states that the force needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance is proportional to that distance. Moore’s law states— Well, that one doesn’t state. It wagers. It hazards a guess. It contains no constants, no special functions, no variables, no equations at all. Movie directors will find in Moore’s law nothing like the kind of pretty runes that John Nash or Ben Affleck might scrawl on a window with a wax pencil. In fact, Moore’s law is less a law than a flier, a bit of Johnson-era bookmaking. Every year (or two) for a decade—or so the “law” goes—engineers would maybe, probably, double…

I FIND IT a good philosophical exercise to imagine the last tweet. It could come centuries hence, when a cryptobot offers a wistful adieu to another cryptobot, or in 2025, when Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated president for life, pushes the big electromagnetic pulse button on the Resolute desk. Or it could come in a few months, when Elon Musk realizes that aggregating human despair has no upside, regrets plowing his electric clown car into a social media goat rodeo, and shuts the whole thing down with a single “lol.” (Way to own the libs.) What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh. Lately it feels like the last tweet could come any day. The whole tech…

WHEN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC reached the Middle East and local businesses experienced an overwhelming surge in online sales, Abdulaziz Fahad Al Jouf was there to provide help when it was needed most. In those difficult early months of 2020, the Founder and CEO of the digital payments company PayTabs enabled unprecedented numbers of merchants to adapt to the new normal, launch websites, convert visits into sales, and reinvent their businesses for the digital age. “During the pandemic, global e-commerce volumes increased by over 40 percent, and more merchants than ever signed up to PayTabs,” Abdulaziz says. “Propelled by this growth, we are venturing into new markets and accelerating our expansion.” Launched in Saudi Arabia in 2014, PayTabs now serves nearly all parts of the Middle Eastern payments market. The company’s wide range of…

EVERY WEEKDAY at 9 am, Abel clocks in from an office he recently started renting in Chicago. He skips breakfast and works until 2 pm, when he logs off and finally eats a meal. Nice short day for a tech job. But Abel isn’t working just one job—he’s holding down four full-time gigs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000. Abel started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was doing higher-quality work faster than his colleagues. “I found myself with a lot of free time,” says the 35-year-old. “With rising inflation, I figured taking a second job was a way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids, and we’re trying to save to buy…

When Neil Buckland, an artist based in Seattle, met a geologist named Tony Irving a few years ago, he had no idea it would launch an extraterrestrial collaboration. Buckland was at the University of Washington photographing ultrathin slices of meteorite for a project Irving was working on. The cut space rocks didn’t seem particularly exciting at first. Then Buckland peered at the 30-micron-thick samples through a pair of polarizing filters. He was stunned by the vibrant collage of hues. Inspired by the photographic possibilities, Buckland went back to his studio and got to work designing a camera system built around a microscope lens attached to a Pentax DSLR. To create his images, he captures a 2-millimeter-square section of a sample at up to 40,000X magnification, then moves the camera slightly and…