WIRED March 2018
IN OUR JANUARY ISSUE, Lauren Smiley explored a company that created digital avatars to serve as caretakers for the elderly. Former bomb disposal officer Brian Castner traveled to Iraq to profile an investigator tracing the supply chain for the Islamic State's weapon factories. Novelist and writer Nathan Hill chronicled the burgeoning careers and rigorous training of the athletes in Overwatch League, a professional league of videogamers. And in our cover story, Mara Hvistendahl went to China to document a new social credit system firsthand -and examine what it says about the entities that collect our data en masse. Re: "Live Long and Prosper": Silicon Valley's immortalists will help us all stay healthy. "MAYBE INSTEAD WE SHOULD LEARN HOW TO BE LESS TERRIFIED OF DEATH". Woofer on WIRED.com Re: "The Terror-Industrial Complex": A weapons investigator…
troubled waters
BERLIN-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER Mustafah Abdulaziz has traveled the world to capture the primal relationship between people and water. When he arrived in Copenhagen's harbor to take the photos for our story on journalist Kim Wall ("The Final Voyage," page 60), Abdulaziz was met with limited daylight, freezing rain, and a vast area to cover: "The assignment was to explore the space, and the weather was really disagreeable. So the photos have a moody, foggy feeling." In college, Angela Watercutter studied the American Film Institute's top 100 list and remembers noting the number of movies directed by women: zero. So Watercutter, an editor for our culture desk, was thrilled to profile Ava DuVernay, the director of the new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (page 90). The force behind Queen Sugar and Selma,…
ai is my shepherd a short history of technology worship
I "BEWARE OF BUGS in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." That was how Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming (1968), expressed the difference between pristine mathematics and buggy reality. "When programming, you abstract away the entire physical world as much as possible, because it's messy. But then it comes back and bites you," Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform builder Postlight, told me. "You end up in these situations where 80 percent works, 19.9 percent is hard but there's an answer that makes sense, and the last 0.1 percent is absolutely insane." That fragment of chaos—the specter of unreason in the world—opens up room for magical thinking. For programmers, bugs become not so much human errors as super natural devils. So…
lab to table
FORGET FREE-RANGE, antibiotic-free, and grass-fed— tomorrow's burger will be lab-cultured. Scientists are creating a new slaughterhouse-free food group called clean meat: edible animal protein grown in a vat. Stem cells are extracted from animals, brewed in a bioreactor, fortified with nutrients like amino acids and glucose, and structured around collagen "scafolds." It's not just about cultivating the ideal boneless chicken wing: These miracle meats could reduce the planet-depleting land and water use of traditional animal agriculture by more than 80 percent. "From an investment standpoint, this is potentially a trillion-dollar market opportunity," says New Crop Capital partner Christopher Kerr, leading VCs to grab a stake in their labstock of choice. Last year, DFJ, Atomico, Fifty Years, and others invested $17 million in Memphis Meats' in vitro beef, chicken, and duck.…
missing links the women behind the web
CLAIRE L. EVANS has discovered the solution to our social media woes: "Go back to BBS." She means bulletin board systems, those grunge-era digital hangouts, like the Well and Echo, where users linked up based on mutual interests and supported one another. (So civilized.) Earlier this year, Evans even installed BBS server software on her Raspberry Pi to test her theory. "That kind of small-scale, self- policed social media could serve as a balm to us all," she says. ¶ As the author of a jaunty new history of women in computing, Broad Band, Evans spent years uncovering the contributions of tech's forgotten foremothers, from the developers of early compilers and Arpanet protocols to the makers of radical videogames and, yes, inclusive preweb forums. (Nearly half the users of Echo,…
solving march madness the key to top brackets: evolution
PREDICTING THE WINNERS and losers of March Madness is such a daunting challenge that it attracts math nerds like Starfleet voyagers lining up at Comic-Con. Statisticians, economists, Silicon Valley coders, the PhD quants at hedge funds and gambling syndicates: They've all tried to "solve" the outcome of the annual college basketball tournament's 63 matchups. "Every kid who takes a mathematical modeling class and who's a college basketball fan, the first thing they want to do is predict the NCAA tournament," says Ken Pomeroy, a former meteorologist who has become arguably the foremost college basketball numbers guru. His famous KenPom ratings measure the strength of all 351 NCAA Division 1 basketball teams using an old-school regression technique known as "least squares," which analyzes statistical variances in teams' past performances and helps predict…