Tabla de contenidos para September 2020 en WIRED

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I was looking for an excuse to dip into psychedelic French feminism of the 1970s when a new Karen video barged into my timeline. There she was: Another white woman, shrieking, stabbing the air, berserk over obscure and chronically unmet needs. Q Bingo. Hysteria in public spaces! A sexist trope to be mischievously “reclaimed”! French feminists, if I remember right, often relish extravagant displays of feminine emotion as both a symptom of patriarchy—and a protest against it. L’hystérie Karennesque might yield to their analysis, and even introduce a new archetype of the unruly woman, akin to Molly Bloom or Medusa. Thus I consulted the work of Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), the Algerian-born rhetorician; Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), the scholar of abjection and horror; and Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), author of…

WE’RE ALL DOOMED It’s 1:14 am and I can’t escape the downward spiral. Eyes near bleeding, I swipe my right thumb down, then up, in an anxious twitch. A tweet from Quartz journalist Karen Ho pauses the descent: “Hey, are you doom-scrolling?” Yes I am, Karen, and I hate myself for it. Doom-scrolling—the compulsion to constantly check Twitter, Facebook, Feedly, Reddit, Digg, anything and everything, so as not to miss a single modern misery—has been a pastime for years, but the pandemic turned it into my full-time gig. Then the worldwide protests over police brutality sent me into overtime. Endlessly addictive, the wretched habit is unraveling whatever shreds of sanity I have left. It must stop. I’m not saying I wish to check out completely. That helps no one. What…

It’s a normal afternoon in July. I’m at work in my little corner, speaking into the camera. The children are in their rooms, regressing. I leave the bedroom-office to get more coffee. My spouse is in our small kitchen, kneading dough while on a video call of her own. I eavesdrop for a minute. She’s not a programmer, but she’s talking about a database. The database lists people who need food, cooks, drivers, and deliveries. We are past the New York City Covid-19 peak. Things have started to reopen, but our neighborhood is in trouble, and people are hungry. There’s a church that’s opened space for a food pantry, a restaurant owner who has given herself to feeding the neighborhood, and lots of volunteers. You have to get calories to…

We might look back at 2020 as the year of maximum screen time. Severed by the pandemic from face-to-face interactions, we have been chained to our devices, making more video and watching more video than ever before. This ubiquity of moving images—this videocracy that first took shape during the aughts, with the rise of data-connected phones, Facebook, and YouTube—has become the chief way many of us view the world. And it’s dangerous. We anchor our public debates on video. We make judgments based on moving images and truncated sounds. They guide and structure the consideration of our public concerns. ■ Video resists thought. It breaks linear modes of argumentation and resists complexity, containing all within a frame often now the size of a human hand. Videos can mislead us even…

BEST FOR: RAMPAGING RUG RATS Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Edition The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition is a worthy tablet—not necessarily for the hardware, which is solid enough, but for everything that comes with it. The device includes a one-year subscription to Amazon’s Free-Time Unlimited (a $36 value). The service ensures that every one of the 2,000-plus videos, apps, games, books, Audible books, or websites that your child encounters on the 8-inch screen is age-appropriate. Parents can monitor their kids’ usage on their own phone with a dashboard that lets them set time limits and other restrictions. The two-year warranty comes in handy when Thing 2 drops the Fire in a puddle. $140 AMAZON’S FREETIME UNLIMITED INCLUDED COMES WITH ITS OWN PUFFY PROTECTIVE CASE BEST FOR: YOU’LL-GROW-INTO-IT KIDS Apple…

OBJECTIVE GET SETTLED Every kid needs a Zoom zone to call their own. “In a perfect world, a child has a designated study space with limited distractions, with all of their tech needs figured out and set up ahead of time,” says Sierra Filucci, editorial director of Common Sense Media, a non-profit children’s advocacy group. If they don’t have their own desk, set them up in a shared space, like the kitchen table. Use masking tape to mark out an area they can be in charge of. STEP BY STEP GEAR UP You’ll need a device with a camera. Laptops are the obvious choice: They’re the most versatile and require fewer accessories. (See page 22 for our student Chromebook picks.) Tablets can also work, especially ones designed for kids. A…

Weird things happen in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appearance of a suspicious package at George Soros’ residence in Westchester County didn’t initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI’s hulking New York field office. Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert known as a “nine-liner”—a brief update on an unfolding situation that, in the classic muddle of government communications, is actually 11 lines long. As a routine precautionary response, a team of bomb techs headed to Katonah, New York, to examine the yellow padded envelope. Given the rarity of mail bombs—the US Postal Service encounters about 16 a year, amid plenty of hoaxes—the technicians had good reason to expect it was a false alarm. But they quickly sent…

This past April, in the lead-up to Wisconsin’s spring election, there was a ruckus that, from afar, made no sense. There didn’t seem to be much to vote for. Bernie Sanders had already conceded, so the Democratic primary was a dud, and President Trump had no opponents. There was a state supreme court judgeship on the ballot, pitting a liberal, Jill Karofsky, against a conservative, Daniel Kelly, but even a liberal victory would only make a solidly conservative court one vote less so. And yet the race was all blood and claw. A Republican-backed ad accused Karofsky, a prosecutor, of offering “no jail time for a monster who sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl,” even though she’d had nothing to do with the sentencing. Karofsky said Kelly displayed “corruption in its…

Endless Summer For our June cover story, Andy Greenberg chronicled the transformation of Marcus Hutchins (left) from blackhat to whitehat hacker. In the magazine, Mara Hvistendahl wrote about iFlytek, a Chinese company that has built pervasive—and troubling—voice-recognition software. In our July/August issue, Evan Ratliff profiled a virologist who spent years helping to create pandemic insurance, which nobody bought. And Brian Barrett wrote about his friend Brian Wallach’s battle with ALS and Wallach’s work to help others who are suffering from the disease. At wired.com, Maria Streshinsky wrote about the struggle to protect vulnerable family members from Covid-19. Readers share their confessions, warnings, and highlevel support: RE: “A LIFE JUST OUT OF REACH” “Brian, the courage and strength you’ve shown in the face of daunting odds is an inspiration to us…

Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and dreamed of creating a tech startup. “I had a zillion ideas,” he tells me. But he’d been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties you to your employer. A green card that would make self-employment possible was years away. “It felt like shackles,” he says. ■ So he bailed. Alabur fled for a place where it’s much easier for ambitious immigrants to pursue the American dream: Canada. ■He discovered, to his delight, that Canada issues work permits to highly skilled immigrants in mere weeks, and permanent residency—the equivalent of a green card—in less than six months. In late 2018, he and his wife became permanent residents of Canada, and they’re now building…

Whether your kids are returning to class physically or virtually, they’ll need the right setup for learning—and maybe some gear at home to keep them edu-tained. Celestron’s line of StarSense telescopes is aimed at aspiring astronomers, and they’re especially fun for the littlest stargazers. Thanks to the companion smartphone app, even my 5-year-old can locate stars, planets, and nebulae all by himself. There’s no need to fully grasp complexities like declination, inclination, and azimuth; the Celestron app translates it into clear visual instructions. You simply mount the smartphone in the built-in cradle, which points the phone’s camera at an image of the heavens reflected in an angled mirror. This allows the app to scan the sky while your phone displays a map of the stars. Pick a celestial object and…

Setting up the device with the proper parental controls will let you block apps, set time limits, and review any game, app, or video your child tries to purchase. Follow these device-specific steps. Amazon Fire tablets: Set them up with an Amazon FreeTime account, which will let you manage their access from any web browser. Surf to parents.amazon.com to restrict content and time spent. Android phones and tablets: Create a Google account for them, then keep tabs on their usage and set restrictions with Google’s Family Link mobile app, which you install on your own phone. Apple iPhones and iPads: Give your child their own Apple ID, then set up Family Sharing. On any iPhone, iPad, or Mac, go to Settings > (your name) and add Apple IDs for your…

EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE IN SIX DYS, when George Floyd stops breathing under the knee of a white police officer. But for now, it is May 19, an ordinary day during a global pandemic, and Brianna Blackmon is just waking up in her bedroom in Columbia, South Carolina, where she lives with her boyfriend and their blue-nose pit bull, DJ. Blackmon showers, carefully applies powder-blue eyeshadow in the bathroom mirror, and marbles her lips with a muted sparkle gloss. The shirt she picks out is a simple crop top, on which the phrase “More Self-Love” is printed. Blackmon is a 23-year-old musician who performs under the name BJ From the Burbs. After she finishes her morning routine, she walks into her home office to record a new freestyle. The space doubles…