Table of contents for July/August 2020 in WIRED

Young couples squabbling over organic vs. not, misaligned wheels screeching down laminate aisles, overhead lights casting an enervating pall over the proceedings, and only 17 more items on the list to go: The modern grocery shopping experience has never failed to live up—which is to say down—to that piercing DeLilloism from White Noise: “Here we don’t die, we shop.” But that, friends, was the Before Times. At our peril, we were, dubiously blessed with the privilege to sniff cilantro with unmasked nostrils, to glovelessly test-squeeze avocados beside strangers sneaking bites of blueberries. The only consolation was the illusion of efficiency, of pleasing design, easing our way to self-destruction: what DeLillo called the supermarket’s “psychic data.” Now there’s hope for genuine salvation—in the real data of Instacart. I open the app,…

I didn’t grow up knowing about supply chains. It’s not as if a parent sat me down and said, son, we need to have a conversation about how petroleum turned into your Boba Fett. But somehow supply chains are normal now—one of those things a reasonably sophisticated nerd is supposed to know about, like Crispr or blockchain. You can drop supply chains into a conversation and look wise. Walk around your house and pick up anything. Look at your roommate or spouse, even your dog, and say, “Wild to think how this got here, right?” They’re out of bananas at the deli? Supply chains. Your monthly box of fancy shaving supplies is late? No matches on Tinder? Supply chains. They’re always there to explain things, like little mental farm sets…

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE MONITOR The skin above my left eyelid is migrating. Where it’s headed, I’m not sure. All I can glean from the giant image of me on Zoom is: downward. Perhaps the skin is seeking rest on the pillows that have appeared below my eyes. (Hello, my wrinkly Eastern European foremothers—I see you in my face.) Day after day, for eight, nine, 17 weeks now, logging on and off and on again, waiting for coworkers to arrive in endless Zoom rooms, there I am. Staring at me. I’ve seen the droop drop, the lines etch, the chins multiply. Oh, those chins! Between meetings, I feel their weight. Even when I turn the camera off, walk away, the insecurities follow. My mind disobeys reason and wanders to them,…

JABRA ELITE ACTIVE 75T $200 A sure path to peace of mind is to choose earbuds that are as rugged as possible. The Jabra Elite Active 75t are rated as fully dust- and waterproof. Ergonomic design made them super comfortable on my runs and indoor workouts, with multiple eartip sizes that all but guarantee a perfect seal for the whole 7.5 hours of battery life. You may remember being embarrassed by your parents’ Jabra hands-free phone earpieces a decade ago, but those years of telephony experience means these buds sound fantastic and work exceptionally well for calls and Zooms. (But you should really log off and get outside.) BEATS POWERBEATS $150 Beats’ latest in-ears for workouts are doppelgängers for the much more expensive (and wirefree) Powerbeats Pro, except for the…

ON JANUARY 20, BOTH THE United States and South Korea confirmed their first cases of Covid-19; Taiwan reported its first case the next day, and Singapore followed two days later. Epidemic parity began and ended there. By the end of March, those three Asian countries had largely contained at least the first wave of their outbreaks—and, not only that, had done so at relatively minimal cost to their citizens’ routine way of life. The same could scarcely be said of the US. The story behind this divergence was obvious: The governments of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore were prepared to test, to trace, and to isolate, and ours was not. Such a vast discrepancy in basic preparedness was, however, almost incomprehensible to many American observers—it seemed impossible to imagine that…

TREK CHECKPOINT SL 7 When it’s OK to go out and about, do so carefully by choosing an activity that by its very nature is socially distant. Like cycling. Trek’s new carbon adventure bike, Checkpoint SL 7, is a good accomplice that gobbles up any type of road you put under it. The IsoSpeed frame is forgiving, with some flex at the point where the seat tube and top tubes meet, just beneath the saddle. This design soaks up bumps on rough terrain without sacrificing the snappy responsiveness I expect from a high-performance two-wheeler. The bike’s new SRAM 12-speed wireless electronic drivetrain gives it at least 20 hours of cable-free shifting per charge and lets cyclists hyper-tune the controls by adjusting the shift points through Trek’s companion mobile app. The…

GARMIN FENIX 6S PRO $550 Garmin’s Fenix series of wearables are the best all-around outdoor sports watches. When I’m lost in the woods, I can scroll through detailed maps on the 1.2-inch color display, using the built-in compass to orient myself. By selecting different time intervals to ping GPS and Glonass satellites, I can also slow the rate at which the location-finding drains the battery. Not only does the watch track granular data on everything—pace, altitude, blood oxygen levels, and heart rate—the accelerometer that counts my steps can also detect a fall, alerting my emergency contacts if I accidentally stumble off a cliff. POLAR GRIT X $430 For long days on the trail, Polar’s watch buzzes with the occasional reminder to eat or drink; since it’s tracking the duration and…

When all the usual places of inspiration and entertainment are closed to us, and we can’t even attend a funeral or sit beside a loved one in need, our outlook turns inward. To know what to look for when we turn inward, we turn to poetry and art. During the pandemic, these are doing what they’ve always done: finding us doorways to fresh knowledge of ourselves as human beings and as cocreators on this planet. Art teaches us to live a life that has meaning, by accepting the responsibility of becoming aware. Inside our little beehives, we are now growing more attentive. We’re paying attention to food sources, for example. We’re asking, who’s bringing my food to me? How is it prepared? We should also ask, when we go back…

ETHAN DIAMOND CEO OF THE ONLINE MUSIC PLATFORM BANDCAMP The pandemic has caused a lot of fans to reevaluate how they support their favorite musicians. We had a campaign to draw attention to artists who lost their income from touring revenue. In 24 hours, we raised $4.3 million. The next one we did raised $7.1 million. For the vast majority of artists, streaming services essentially generate spare change. Our business is modeled on a revenue share, where we only make money if the artist makes a lot more money. We’ve seen a big uptick in sign-ups from artists, labels, and fans, and in the amount of money flowing through the site—vinyl, digital sales, CDs, T-shirts, everything. We’ve just launched a vinyl pressing service, where fan orders finance the pressing of…

One morning in March 2020, Americans woke up to find all that was solid had melted into air. Remember? The first change was simple but sweeping: 316 million people were urged to stay home. Nearly all of us did as we were told. We were stunned but compliant. It helped that we had nowhere to go. Schools closed. Workplaces closed. No March Madness, St. Patrick’s Day parade, Houston Rodeo. A nationwide metamorphosis of this scale had never occurred. The air was swarming with invisible pathogens that could devour our organs. Any innocent Joe could shed them by the billions. We had to take this strange new set of givens on faith. Act first, and ask questions later. Over the first weeks, public transportation slowed; airports emptied; hair grew straggly, gray,…

“Quick, grab the binoculars!” My husband and I stand up from our camping chairs. I put my thermos down next to our other provisions—oranges, granola, two types of sunscreen—and squint through the lenses. “Is that an eagle?” Not quite. It’s just a robust crow, perched on a condo. It was the first beautiful weekend of the year and we’d wanted to bask in nature, but the pandemic limited our options. We can’t be picky about wildlife encounters, as our campsite for the foreseeable future is the roof of our Brooklyn apartment building. The building was once a three-story 1930s dairy plant with art deco flourishes, remodeled a couple of decades ago into an eight-unit residence. We feel lucky to live in a historical landmark, even with its old-building quirks, like…

In 2020 we all became Alice Nelson, the Brady Bunch housekeeper who occupied the center square in the show’s iconic tic-tac-toe board of faces. Except today, the Marcias and Gregs around us are yammering about KPIs, cost-cutting, and sourdough starters—and proving that, yes, those annoying futurists were right. We can do business from home. The benefits are obvious: no time lost getting to work, more flexibility for workers to care for children and elders, big savings on office leases, and, with fewer cars commuting on roads and fewer business travelers in the skies, way less carbon burned. Proof of concept in the bag, Silicon Valley is now gearing up to make remote conferencing our permanent reality. Sure, in the long view, the solution to far-flung connecting might be virtual reality,…

THE DAY AFTER SAN FRANCISCO CLOSED its schools, I noticed right away two children in my house. They were my children, I observed—not off getting educated but here in my living room, eating cereal, occasionally looking up at me. Texts from friends suggested similar situations all around town. Once in a while a stray bit of clarity drifts in, and on that morning, March 16, four days into what was officially but still only distantly a national emergency, I saw that 56 million children across the country were about to lose their minds. I’m not talking about the intense boredom and unease their new isolation would unleash. Anyone half paying attention had seen that problem coming. What concerned me were the 7,000 other things going on inside our children, the…

AS THE PANDEMIC WEARS ON, I’VE BEGUN TO forget what the inside of my office looks like. The last time I saw it was the second week of March, when my colleagues and I were told to work from home. Most of us had an easy enough time making the transition: At the Computational Health Informatics Program, an initiative jointly run by Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, we spend much of our time in front of screens anyway. We had been studying Covid-19 since late January, modeling its spread in hopes of understanding how it might evolve in the weeks and months ahead. Now we’d swap our desk chairs for couches. I switched off my office mood lamp and fairy lights, grabbed my laptop, and quickly familiarized myself…