WIRED March 2022

Many people yes! Some people no! And a bunch of people won’t know what to think about you, which could be kind of cool because mystery really is underrated these days. If the person writing this ad were to see you with oatmilk, the answer would most definitely be yes, but the bias here is obvious. The real question is, Will you still like you with oatmilk? You are the only person who can truly reconcile that kind of existential inquiry and if you still haven’t turned the page yet, let’s take a quick jaunt through the pros and cons. On the one hand, oatmilk is generally just better for the climate than cow milk is—that’s something you could easily like yourself for supporting. Oatmilk also possesses a rare and thoughtful…

In our February issue, Vince Beiser investigated the promises and pitfalls of carbon capture technology. Boone Ashworth profiled a New Zealander whose Twitter account has become a vital source of information about wildfires for Californians. Oscar Schwartz chronicled the saga of a woman who was convicted of killing her four children, only to have new genetic research cast doubt on the verdict. And Arielle Pardes explored Miami’s much-hyped tech scene. Also, in December/January, Tom Simonite told the story of a photographer who created his own deepfakes. Readers shared their gratitude, latitude, and fortitude RE: “THE BIG INHALE” “I bet every geologist can feel their heart racing already.”—@HuginnMuninn, via Twitter RE: “THE BIG INHALE” Your reporting on opponents of direct air capture is woefully uncritical. Environmentalists do more harm to their cause than they realize when…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, dotcom evangelists wouldn’t shut up about the web as a land of milk and honey, an egalitarian Eden. But their utopianism hit a reckoning in 2002: “Future Texts,” Alondra Nelson’s watershed essay about race and technology. “That race (and gender) distinctions would be eliminated with technology,” wrote Nelson, who was then a graduate student, “was perhaps the founding fiction of the digital age.” Nelson was right; this was fiction. Technoprophets of the 20th century envisioned a future free of bodies, and especially bodies that groan under the weight of social baggage—female bodies, Black bodies. But it wasn’t to be. Not only, as Nelson pointed out, would our “burdensome social identities” follow us online, but a new digital ruling class would frame those identities as obsolete among the “raceless”—male and…

LATELY I HAVE been trying to get through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s big report, the one that came out late last year, called “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” It’s a challenge because (a) I must, um, learn as I go, and (b) the PDF is nearly 4,000 pages of aggregated, footnoted, illustrated scientific consensus about weather. That’s too much consensus; everyone agrees. Yet obviously they—the hundreds of IPCC-affiliated scientists who compiled this behemoth—want us to read it, right? The thing exists, so I should at least try. Plus it’s free to download. I love a bargain. However, the gigantic PDF broke my e-reader. In time I got it to work, but the font was too small. So I used a command-line program called mutool to split…

FOR AS LONG as technology startups have been spectacularly on the rise, many more have been spectacularly in decline. Failure is a near certainty when starting a company. Even founders with the right credentials, cash, and customer base regularly see their businesses crash and burn, while only the lucky ones manage to pivot their way out of a death spiral. Would-be entrepreneurs encounter booby traps everywhere they turn. Three recent books break down these threats and how founders can confront them. Lak Ananth offers counterintuitive advice: Don’t avoid failure—anticipate it. He’s a managing partner at the venture capital firm Next47 and a veteran of the first dotcom boom. His book, Anticipate Failure, suggests that startups fall short due to problems in seven areas: product, technology, team, timing, business model, customers, or…

60% → Acceleration in the past 70 years in the formation of thermokarsts—huge, carbon-spewing sinkholes in Arctic permafrost, which is melting as a result of climate change. $144M → Amount in transaction fees that the finance app Robinhood earned from Dogecoin trades in the second quarter of 2021. 99% → Portion of air passengers arriving in the US whose identities are checked by Customs and Border Protection using facial-recognition technology. 500M → Years it would take a candy-barsized block of uranium to radioactively decay into enough helium to fill a party balloon.…