Table of contents for December/January 2021 in WIRED

A picture, captured six years ago, still manages to make me envious: five of my childhood friends, intoxicated and sprawled out on a sleeper couch, grinding away at various games on their handheld Nintendo 3DS consoles. It was a year after college graduation, and we’d taken a brief, undeserved vacation to the Delaware shore. We’d all had trouble acclimating to post-college life and decidedly did not have our shit together. For two days, my friends huddled and gossiped about their virtual friends in the 3DS life-sim game Tomodachi Life. Whenever they had a free moment, they’d begin unzipping those fabric cases. I didn’t have a 3DS, so I grabbed a friend’s Polaroid and snapped the picture. My $170 pink 3DS arrived a week later; I bought it out of FOMO.…

Oh, so there’s a pandemic and suddenly you all want to protect the Post Office that brings you medicine and socks? Suddenly you’re America’s number one Census fan and think public health is really cool? Well, welcome to the Infrastructure Appreciation Society. Seriously, my God, welcome! I cannot tell you how happy I am you’re here. Membership has been falling for decades. Please visit our website. ■ One of the oddest outcomes of our long global disaster has been an emergent appreciation for big, shared, legacy institutions and the infrastructure they support. I see it on Twitter, I hear it in conversations, I read it in the news. People care about mail sorting. They want Stars and Stripes to keep publishing. They want people with medical degrees, not politicians, to…

DEAR CLOUD SUPPORT: There’s a lot of discussion about artificial consciousness and the possibility of machines gaining self-awareness once they become sufficiently complex. But isn’t the most complex system in existence the internet? Is it possible that the internet could become conscious, and if it were already, how would we know? Also, why aren’t more people talking about this? Sincerely, [422] UNPROCESSABLE ENTITY Dear [422], Your question brings to mind Balk’s third law: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” Logging on already provides a daily megadose of paranoia (mass surveillance), epistemic vertigo (deepfakes), and fremdschämen (thirstposting). Imagine the day when this colony of horrors becomes unified, intentional, and self-aware. I say this not to alarm you, only to suggest why the prospect of a…

HE WAS ONE OF 750,000 PEOPLE, give or take, who passed through Grand Central Terminal that day. He worked as an attorney in a high-rise on 42nd Street that had direct access to the station, where trains departed every few minutes to 122 towns in New York and Connecticut. He and his wife ran a small firm, specializing in estate law, on the 47th floor of the building; he spent his hours there helping people negotiate death. At the end of the workday on Friday, February 21, the man made his way to the platforms for the New Haven line, boarded a train, and rode 30 minutes north to a commuter town in Westchester County called New Rochelle. At that moment, there were 34 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the…

Honorable Mentions @threepanelcrimes, via Instagram THE MOON REVEALED ITS DARKEST SECRET. @CFX1, VIA TWITTER “ENJOY,” IT SAID, AND ATE MARS. @COUNTGRINGO, VIA INSTAGRAM HAND ME MY IPHONE—PICTURE TIME. @FOGCITYNATIVE, VIA INSTAGRAM ON ITS BACK, WE TRAVELED FAR. @_ANNALYSENKO, VIA INSTAGRAM WE SAW THE HORIZON. IT MOVED. @MOGON_AVE, VIA TWITTER ENTRELZIDOR SNEEZED. EARTH WAS FREE AGAIN. JOHN REES-WILLIAMS, VIA FACEBOOK AND THIS BLACK HOLE HAD TEETH. @DEVTOMLINSON, VIA INSTAGRAM “A LITTLE EARTHY FOR MY TASTE.” @BRAMBEDILLO, VIA INSTAGRAM Every month, we ask for a new six-word story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Submit your ideas there, along with the hashtag #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit the archive at WIRED.com/six-word to see how we’ve illustrated our favorites.…

In October, Brendan I. Koerner tracked down the players in an alleged cheating scandal that rocked the poker industry, while Clive Thompson examined YouTube’s efforts to curb the spread of conspiracy theories on its platform. For our election security package, Benjamin Wofford profiled Dana DeBeauvior, the chief clerk and election administrator of Travis County, Texas, who led the charge to build a secure electronic voting system. Readers share annoyances, theories about conspiracy theories, and electoral optimism. RE: “THE SHOWDOWN AT STONES” As an online poker player from years ago, I was very interested in the article. But I must say, I felt “cheated.” I really thought there would be some vindication for Brill and was even more annoyed that the “cheat” was not uncovered. —David Topping, via mail@WIRED.com Ripped the…

One sleepy Sunday morning in May 2019, Glenn Greenwald was sitting in his home office in Rio de Janeiro when he received a phone call from a number he didn’t recognize. He didn’t answer. But 30 seconds later a WhatsApp message arrived from Manuela d’Ávila, a Brazilian leftist politician who had run for vice president the previous year alongside the center-left Workers’ Party’s candidate for president; their ticket had come in second to the far-right former military captain Jair Bolsonaro. “Glenn,” she wrote, “I need to speak to you about something urgent.” Greenwald, the American journalist who broke the story of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, didn’t know d’Ávila well, so his interest was piqued by the weekend message. When she explained that she had stumbled into a huge potential story…

CHAPTER ONE the JESUIT BARK In the mid-1600s, a Jesuit priest serving in Peru got a useful tip. The indigenous people there, he learned, were using the bark of a particular kind of tree to treat fevers. The priest, who’d probably gone a few rounds himself with the local diseases, got ahold of some of the reddish-brown bark from this “fever-tree” and shipped it back to Europe. In the 1670s, what came to be called Jesuit bark had made its way into a popular patent medicine, along with rose leaves, lemon juice, and wine. That was the beginning of the impressively effective bark’s role in pharmacology (and its side career in mixology). In the mid-1700s the prolific Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus gave the tree’s genus its name—having heard a fanciful…

String Theory A lot has changed in the 66 years since Fender released the go-to ax of Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, and John Frusciante. The venerable American-made Stratocaster, however, looks about the same. The latest update makes the neck even more playable, with a satin finish and rolled fingerboard edges. The redesigned pickups use alnico alloy magnets with different strengths for each string, resulting in a more balanced tone that punches as much crunch into low-end riffs as screaming solos. Fender American Professional II Stratocaster $1,500 STAFF PICK “I’ve finally discovered why dads in Tommy Bahama shirts love pretending they’re Eric Clapton.”PARKER HALL Youth Lounge Nugget’s rugged, frameless sofa is a pandemic parenting panacea. Kids can turn it into a fort, runaway truck ramp, or human catapult. Four pieces of…

THESE DAYS MY INNERMOST THOUGHT WHEN I GAZE OUT AT THE MANMATTAN SKYLINE THROUGH THE OFFICE WINDOW ISN’ OMG, IT’S WTF It’s September 2019, To keep my community safe, I started a Substack newsletter called Coronavirus News for Black Folks. It gave me a kind of second sight. To trace the arc of racial health disparities week after week, it turns out, is to see in advance where America is headed—and to understand how blind it’s been. Everything about it makes me tired: the rigid weekly content quotas, the uncertainty over whether I’d been spared for my work or simply kept for optics, the fatigue of pitching stories about Black and brown celebrities to an unsupportive white editor. These days my innermost thought when I gaze out at the Manhattan skyline…

“The city of SHENZHEN in JULY. The weather is HOT, the trees brimming with LIFE …” So begins the baritone voice-over in a video shot in the summer of 2018 by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and posted to YouTube. It chronicles a corporate event in the slightly corny style of a 1960s educational film, starting with aerial drone footage of Huawei’s campus—an island of lush greenery surrounded by the high-rise buildings of the city known as China’s Silicon Valley. A spirited orchestral version of Beethoven’s “Turkish March” plays as a town car wends its way through the campus, pulling up to a stately white structure mixing classical Greek architecture and the wide overhanging rooftops of China’s great pagodas. There’s a bit of the White House tossed in too. Two…