Tabla de contenidos para June 2019 en WIRED

Friends, I am enmeshed. Snared not in a love triangle but in a love wheel, your humble narrator spinning swoonily at its hub. O vertigo! My ardor radiates, spoking out toward an ever-shifting array of paramours, a true and sacred bond connecting each of us. I love them all equally, yet they remain mutely unaware of one another. Stranger still: I luxuriate in the multitudes. I am no lusty profligate, no bed-hopping heartbreaker. Were my sleek jumpsuit to include pockets, I would store in them no record of my dalliances. Mine is a pure and selfless love, one predicated on comprehension rather than on conquest. I speak them into sentience, we meld with sweet frisson, then they return to stasis. Do you despise me? You may not once you know…

Photoshop played an outsize role in the odious college admissions scandal that broke earlier this year. Rick Singer, the concierge to the stars who pleaded guilty in March to money laundering and racketeering in a scheme to get rich children into luxury-brand colleges, used the software to graft the heads of teens onto the muscled bodies of elite athletes. With the Photoshopped water polo image in particular, the one that helped an undistinguished high schooler get recruited by USC, Singer seems to have created a mythological creature—a Ceto for the digital age. Call them the Collegiae: They’ve got the heads of princesses and the bodies of serpents. To mark the moment, a Twitter friend, Peter Mohan, ginned up an image of me as a Collegiae. At first it didn’t compute.…

Lately I’ve been hearing complaints from my techie friends about San Francisco. Sure, the city is a mecca for anyone who wants to build a startup—with ample capital, helpful angels, and some of the best software talent on the planet. But it’s becoming a monoculture. “You go to dinner and tech is literally all people talk about: tech, tech, tech,” sighs my friend David Silva, an engineer who lived in San Francisco for five years before decamping for the East Coast. Tech has crowded out other subjects of conversation. That, I’d argue, is a good reason to break the region’s lock on software development. Different cities have different moods and obsessions. Spreading the creation of software to other parts of the country doesn’t just expand economic opportunity, it also encourages…

NO FUND AT ALL Socialism schmocialism—I’ve never minded redistributing a bit of wealth to help a creator realize their dreams (or cover a few medical bills). I’m Angry Nerd, not Scroogey Nerd. But backing a project on Kickstarter these days? RIP my inbox: Hey, we just added a new stretch goal! Hey, if you upgrade your pledge, we’ll be so close to unlocking another pledge goal! Hey, we added a one-of-a-kind macaroni art pledge tier for just $100 more! How much is the stretch goal for cutting the crap and finishing the damn job? Even when the fund-raising’s done, the alerts linger, like a clingy friend at night’s never-ending end. Oh, here’s another piece of art. Oh, we just got the color separations. Oh, I just wanted to let you…

$2,750 PER PAIR EARGO NEO Best for: Chronic customizers Eargo’s product comes with a pocketable charging case and two tiny hearing aids that nestle into the ear canal. They’re nearly invisible; a whisper of a cable pokes out from each aid like a bug’s antenna. Eargo says its latest model has better acoustics and provides more volume than previous versions, although the Neo is largely meant for folks with mild to moderate hearing loss. The barely there buds also introduce a feature that one can only hope other manufacturers start to emulate: gesture controls. Double-tapping on your ear will cycle through four audio presets, from Quiet Conversation to Noisy Restaurant. Presets can be tweaked in the app, which also includes remote support from real humans—so you can leave the fine-tuning…

The debate rages everywhere—in parenting groups, online, in advice columns. And of course, very vocally at home. Kids beg for more, more, more screen time. Today more than half of US parents of teens limit their access to devices. At least somewhat. But there’s hardly a consensus on what is right and wrong. (For some guidance, see “Happy Meal,” page 50). Mostly, everyone’s finding their own way through, figuring out what works for their own brood. Like these three families. LEVEL 1 > Lockdown Kids > Esme (8), Skyla (5) Parents > Ia & Jon | Santa Cruz, CA Monitoring tech used: None, but the kids don’t have handheld devices, and the family doesn’t have cable or streaming TV. Their antenna brings in only one children’s network: PBS Kids. Jon…

In this hyper-personalized, autoplaying, all-you-can-eat mediascape, it helps to distinguish the healthy stuff from the junk. Fortnite? Probably not a great form of screen time. Video chatting with grandma? What familyunifying wonders hath Jobs wrought! Screen time, then, has become a slippery concept. Does typing a paper in Google Docs count? What about using a mapping app? Fortunately, researchers are beginning to study screen-based media in all its forms, instead of just lumping everything together like they used to. Some types of screen fare are like sugar: Limit consumption, especially before bedtime, and watch for signs of overindulgence—obesity, aggression, grade slippage. Others are more like proteins and veggies: Make sure kids get a balanced diet that includes exercise, IRL socializing, snoozing, and yes, screens. Above all, though, know thy child—some…

What I like about slime is that it’s about nothing. Instagram is filled with videos of the shapeless substance. They often begin with a glob of vibrant, wobbling slime on a white surface. Manicured hands soon enter the frame, stretch and pull the goo, then drizzle it back onto the table. The effect is inexplicably transfixing, soothing even, like a spinning mobile mesmerizing a baby. But after spending considerable time scrolling through these clips, I started to see something in the void: a squishy, candy-colored subculture, made up of millions of young, mostly female fans. They promote their creations, compliment each other in comments, participate in slime drama—and gather at slime conventions. So I showed up on a sunny Saturday morning in April at the World Slime Convention in Hershey,…

I HAVE A LIFELONG obsession with the dark and creepy. As a little kid, I liked weird, scrompy music and unpleasant sounds. I was also obsessed with literary horror—the Goosebumps series, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In third grade, I read Stephen King’s Rose Madder, which involves domestic violence and is totally not an appropriate book for that age. It was my first woman-turns-on-all-of-y’all horror novel. Later on I got into horror movies and all the adjacent genres. I’d rummage through the dollar bins at the Salvation Army, trying to find that ultra-obscure early-’80s Italian movie that some people claimed was actually a real murder. Then, a few years ago, Shudder came about. It’s very punk how they do things. The people behind it are appealing to a…

NOTHING TELLS PEOPLE they belong to an institution like asking them to help out, so at the Library of Congress we built an open source software package called Concordia that allows crowdsourced transcribing. Then we set up By the People—a site that invites people to transcribe handwritten and original documents. Transcription really called to us because it is how you get people deeply into the library’s collection. They are reading images of primary source material. They’re reading Clara Barton’s diaries, Mary Church Terrell’s papers. They’re reflecting on history. Anybody can volunteer; one person transcribes and another person validates that transcription. The site went up in October, and 4,200 people have set up accounts. So far 43,040 images have been transcribed and more than 11,000 validated. People sometimes ask for help,…

“Google Maps! My mom spent far too much time poring over printed MapQuest directions so she could drive me to my friends’ houses. One wrong turn, and there was no such thing as ‘recalibrating route.’” —Louise Matsakis, staff writer and author of “Let’s Goo!,” page 56 “Having gone to boarding school in Hawaii and then college on the East Coast in the ’80s, it would have been nice to be able to FaceTime my family in Micronesia every once in a while. Thanksgivings wouldn’t have been so lonely.” —Jay Dayrit, director of editorial operations “Spotify. I could have found so much more great music! Until I was old enough to join Columbia House—where I used the initial offer to score, say, a dozen Rush cassettes for a buck—my options were…

A decade ago, Amazon abruptly deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of its American customers. The move instantly evoked the “memory holes” in the novel’s totalitarian dystopia, and it inspired about equal measures of shock, outrage, and jokes. (If a fictional Amazon in a dystopian novel had performed the same mass deletion, critics would have said it was too on the nose.) But in hindsight, Amazon’s action was also a striking harbinger of a shift that has only become more pronounced since then: our wholesale tilt toward becoming a tenant society. In that particular case, Amazon said the books had been added to the Kindle Store by a vendor who didn’t actually have the rights to them. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder,…

The world is changing. From digital supply networks and data-driven personalized medicine; to anticipatory, seamless customer engagement, technology advances are giving rise to unprecedented opportunities for innovation and growth. But for some organizations these opportunities represent an existential threat of disruption. Today, only 10 percent of organizations have the digital strategy and the technology credibility required to deliver the business growth and transformation increasingly driven by digital capabilities. How can you better prepare your company to harness digital change? Any strategy must balance what may seem like contradictory missions. First, be bold in your ambitions, inspired by what’s possible and what’s coming next rather than allowing yourself to be paralyzed by institutional inertia. Second, don’t be distracted by the passing parade of shiny objects that promise far more than they…

$4,499 Q ACOUSTICS CONCEPT 300 BOOKSHELF SPEAKERS AND STANDS With their lacquered bodies perched atop elegant tripod stands, Q Acoustics’ Concept 300 speakers are visually arresting. They impress the ears as well; the British audio company’s newest bookshelf speakers pump out up to 200 watts of glistening audio. But with great power comes great vibration, and their design is all about mitigating the high- and low-frequency rumbles that can muddy a speaker’s clarity. The first line of defense is the ultrastiff cabinet construction. Interior bracing steadies the walls exactly where shaking is most likely to smear the crispness of the music. For added judder-killing, a gooey gel lives between the layers of fiberboard to absorb vibrations. Finally, a spring-loaded rubber foot connects each speaker to the tripod, ensuring that the…

If you use social media, you’ve probably come across Will Littlejohn’s work. Not that you’d know it—as director of sound design at Facebook, Littlejohn does not draw attention to himself. His sonic oeuvre includes the little whoosh you hear after uploading content through Facebook’s mobile app, signaling that your post is live. The subtle auditory affirmations are not only satisfying, they're also functional. With an aural status update, there’s no need to stare at a progress bar, leaving time to focus on more worthwhile activities, like your next selfie. Sound design is ubiquitous in technology, though the most memorable examples tend to be the failures. There’s the ceaseless beeping of your microwave, berating you for neglecting your leftover casserole, and the harsh bleating of the chip reader at the grocery…

A few weeks ago, I was out to breakfast with a bunch of my guy friends and my boyfriend, crammed into a leather booth at Orphan Andy’s, a diner a couple miles from where I live. We were off school that day, and one of my friends had a recurring dream about pancakes, so there we were. Per usual, I was vaguely annoyed by the omnipresent phone-checking of my friends, though this time it was accompanied by lighthearted banter of the “You dumbass, I’m going to beat you” sort, which oddly made me feel better. “What could possibly be so interesting?” I asked. This was met with a bombardment of mock disgust and the commandment to download Chess Time or leave Pancake Day. I suck at chess, but I already…

Nerds, we did it. We have graduated, along with oil, real estate, insurance, and finance, to the big T. Trillions of dollars. Trillions! Get to that number any way you like: Sum up the market cap of the major tech companies, or just take Apple’s valuation on a good day. Measure the number of dollars pumped into the economy by digital productivity, whatever that is. Imagine the possible future earnings of Amazon. The things we loved—the Commodore Amigas and AOL chat rooms, the Pac-Man machines and Tamagotchis, the Lisp machines and RFCs, the Ace paperback copies of Neuromancer in the pockets of our dusty jeans—these very specific things have come together into a postindustrial Voltron that keeps eating the world. We accelerated progress itself, at least the capitalist and dystopian…

IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION, the American astronauts who landed on the moon five decades ago were square-jawed superhumans, not the types to worry about something as banal as housekeeping. But they did, obsessively. Each time they got back to the Apollo Lunar Module after a moonwalk, they were shocked at how much dust they’d tracked in and how hard it was to banish. This was no earthly grime; it was preternaturally sticky and abrasive, scratching the visors on the astronauts’ helmets, weakening the seals on their pressure suits, irritating their eyes, and giving some of them sinus trouble. “It just sort of inhabits every nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin,” Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan said during his post-mission debriefing. Over the course of six…

Our April issue took a broad view of Crispr, the gene-editing tool that could allow scientists to grow human organs in pigs and breed heat-tolerant dairy cows. “Crispr could give us a more humane world,” our cover said. “Will humans let that happen?” Many humans wrote in to question that premise. Author Alex W. Palmer investigated the seedy world of robocallers; robocalling victims were eager to share their stories. Beyond WIRED, consumer advocate and serial presidential campaigner Ralph Nader bemoaned the scourge of graphic design; we offer him some relief. Re: “On the Trail of the Robocall King” Everyone who hunts down robocallers is a national hero. —S. E. Smith (@sesmith), via Twitter The robocalls I receive intensified after my husband was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and died. Sometimes I’m…

HobbyBear is expecting a package any day now. In it will be a Silver Play Button, a plaque that YouTube gives to creators who have surpassed 100,000 subscribers. HobbyBear has a little under 99,000 now, so he hasn’t quite earned the commendation. But give him a break: He’s only 6. See, HobbyBear is one-fifth of HobbyKidsTV, a family-run children’s channel with 3 million-plus subscribers. He and his two big brothers—HobbyPig, who’s 11, and HobbyFrog, 9—each have their own channels. HobbyFrog has a plaque, so Hobby-Bear wants one as well. “He gets really excited whenever we get something from Amazon,” says his mother, who goes by the stage name HobbyMom. “He asks ‘Is that my silver button?!’ every time.” “Sometimes,” HobbyBear clarifies. “OK, sometimes,” HobbyMom says. Listening to a 6-year-old reveal…

Amos and I were walking out of the gym after basketball practice last weekend when he saw a friend inside the lobby. He bolted to the window, rapped on the glass, and began performing a very particular dance. He put one hand—fingers in the shape of an L—to his forehead; his legs jutted back and forth like a dancing bear on a pendulum. Puzzled, I watched. Then I pulled out my phone. “Siri, show me a dance with an L.” “Whenever you feel me vibrating, that’s me doing the jitterbug,” answered Siri, as robotically unhelpful as ever. It was, of course, YouTube that provided the answer: “It’s ‘Take the L,’ from Fortnite.” “But he doesn’t play Fortnite,” I mumbled in protest. If Siri had eyes she would have rolled them,…

I CALL JAVASCRIPT the working man’s language. It’s not something they teach you in school; you learn it in a boot camp or on the job or out on your own. The real masters of JavaScript are college dropouts and military veterans. I know one amazing coder who’s a former MMA fighter. But JavaScript is everywhere. It’s in the web interfaces we use every day, in the deep backend recesses of our favorite applications. You want to try disabling JavaScript and going on the web? Good luck with that. Some programming languages are built for your happiness. JavaScript is like, screw you and screw your happiness. It’s like boxing; you pay for it in blood, sweat, and tears. It has a vast vocabulary and quirky idioms. (Don’t get me started…

THE U.S. MILITARY spends billions on IT, and I’m one of the people in charge of getting new software built and deployed. But I doubt I’ll ever build something people love as much as their free chat apps. mIRC, our weapon of choice, is free and open source—a type of Internet Relay Chat. We started using it almost 20 years ago, and it spread organically. Now it’s at the center of how we manage just about everything, from coordinating rescue missions and strikes to monitoring the ebb and flow of combat. The technology is so ubiquitous and simple, you can almost forget its importance—until a chat server goes down. For IT, that’s a five-alarm fire. In combat ops, it’s common to see officers with 30 chat windows open. Some will…

I WAS DIAGNOSED with mild to moderate hearing loss about 12 years ago, which is unusual for someone who was in their early thirties and had no clear cause. I had just gotten married, and I was missing some things that my wife was saying. Her voice was at the higher frequencies, where I have the most trouble. I started wearing a hearing aid a few years after that. I run an organization that puts on the largest open source developer conference in the world. We believe in these conferences because developers are so much more productive and successful when they interact in person. But the events were always difficult for me: In addition to having trouble hearing higher frequencies, I also struggle when there’s background noise. Just over a…