WIRED October 2022

IN A COUNTRY RENOWNED for its extraordinary hospitality and for extended meals around the family table, Loaye Al-Nahedh is the standard-bearer for a nationwide convenience-food movement that is changing the face of eating in. When the Saudi government implemented its Vision 2030 plan to open up society, liberalize the country’s economy, and unlock a new generation of startups and entrepreneurs, Al-Nahedh reasoned that it would not take long before young Saudis joined the global ready-meal revolution. “More than 60% of Saudis are under 35, and they want to participate in the lifestyle changes that they see in other parts of the world,” Al-Nahedh explains. “At the same time, we have become a more modern and dynamic economy. There has been an acceleration in work and activity. Time is becoming a scarce resource,…

IN SEPTEMBER 2005, a fun film editor named Robert Ryang took The Shining and cut together a new trailer for it, making the axe-driven horror flick seem like a sweetheart family movie. YouTube hadn’t broken out of beta yet, so Ryang posted his humor gem to a private quarter of his employer’s website and gave some friends a dotmov link. One of them posted the link to his blog, and Ryang was an overnight sensation. The New York Times took notice, observing with awe: “His secret site got 12,000 hits.” Ryang also achieved the highest goal of 20th-century humankind: He started getting calls from Hollywood. HELLO, IT’S HOLLYWOOD. I was a TV critic in those days, and when I first saw Ryang’s masterwork— buffering, buffering—I wasn’t sure if I was eligible to…

DID YOU KNOW that you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the great online library of all things, and load up within your web browser an ancient, decrepit emulated computer—a DOS box from 1991, a black-and-white Mac, a green-and-black Apple II—and run the WordPerfect of yore, boot old Hyper-Card stacks, or use 1979’s VisiCalc as God intended? Perhaps this does not seem miraculous to you. Fair. Moore’s law has taken us from 250 billion or so CPU churns per year on the earliest Macs to a quintillion potential clock cycles on a good gaming PC, a healthy 4,000,000X increase. Anyone with sense might reasonably ask, What? Why use a shiny new computer to run old spreadsheets? And I might nod and shrug, but inside I am a translucent plastic…

“FUNDAMENTALLY, IT’S an electric business jet—it just happens to take off and land vertically,” says Alex Asseily, vice chair of German aerospace startup Lilium. He’s talking about Jet, the company’s all-electric, fixed-wing aircraft that recently soared over its first few regulatory hurdles and is expected to enter production next year. Just don’t call it a flying car—Asseily sees it as more of a minibus. It’s one of dozens of eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft being developed around the world. There are two main designs: The first, which includes those from Lilium and California-based Joby, has fixed wings like a plane but engines that tilt to change the angle of thrust, so it can take off and land without a runway—much like the UK’s groundbreaking Harrier fighter jet. The other…

EVER SINCE Grand Theft Auto 3 pioneered the open-world genre in 2001, it seems like sprawling realms have become prerequisites for would-be blockbuster games. Our consoles are now packed with enormous, richly detailed 3D worlds to explore—and they just keep getting more expansive. By one calculation, GTA 5 is over six times larger than GTA 3; another estimate puts Elden Ring’s map at a massive 79 playable square kilometers. That got us wondering, which game is the biggest? Turns out, there’s no clear answer. Publishers generally won’t talk specifics, perhaps out of fear their in-game worlds will seem small in comparison to others. Of course, it isn’t the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts—diminutive maps often offer a more realistic and compelling experience. But that hasn’t…

I USED TO WORRY about using too much electricity. If a family member forgot to turn off the AC, I’d snap at them: “What, you want the planet to cook extra fast?” If I found lights left on overnight, I’d fume. I was insufferable. In my defense, I’d been worrying about climate change ever since Jim Hansen’s 1988 landmark congressional testimony. With every blast of AC, I knew more carbon was being pumped into the atmosphere. So I turned into an energy miser. I’d go around the house turning off lights; if no one else was home, I’d leave the AC off, even on blazing days. Then something fundamentally shifted my psychology around electricity: I installed solar panels on my house. I quickly found myself awash in energy. The installers had predicted the panels…