Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i WIRED

“As a 12-year-old, I’ve spent much of my life on screens, in school and at home, which can definitely be fun. But I also struggle with depression, and sometimes I feel like I haven’t done enough ‘kid’ things. When I grow up, will I feel like I wasted my childhood?”—Future Me Dear Future, The ability to project oneself into times yet to come, to think about the present as one phase in a much longer life, is a sign of uncommon maturity—though this prudence often comes with burdens of its own. You appear to be searching for a way to “live deliberately.” That phrase, as you might already know, comes from the opening line of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a literary experiment that was similarly driven by a suspicion of…

(1) A QUINTILLION MINIATURE MASTERPIECES I ARRIVE IN Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than Meta and…

AT THE MIDNIGHT SUN Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, they say you never get the same shot twice. That’s because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and as the underground permafrost thaws, it deforms the course’s fairways. This express defrost unlocks ancient organic matter—a lot of it. (The world’s permafrost holds twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.) Microbes feed on that liberated matter and fart out plumes of methane, a gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. And as thawing permafrost releases more methane, it raises global temperatures—which thaws more permafrost, which releases more methane. It’s the dreaded climate feedback loop, and scientists are using an array of tech to better understand it. “We know…

A REVOLUTION IN weight loss is apparently underway. Last fall, the US Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked review of the diabetes drug tirzepatide—sold under the brand name Mounjaro—for weight loss, after a clinical trial showed that people with a body mass index (BMI) labeled “overweight” or “obese” lost as much as 22.5 percent of their body weight on the highest dose. Upon approval, the weekly injectable will be the latest drug in a booming bio-medical sector that aims to combat, if not cure, the problem of “excess” weight. For pharmaceutical companies, the race to market is, as usual, financially motivated. Weight-loss drugs are rarely covered by insurance, and companies are finding plenty of patients ready to pay more than $1,000 a month for tirzepatide and its cousin semaglutide (brand names:…

WHEN I FIRST see Margaret Atwood, she’s bundled up. Red hat over her famous silver curls, long puffy coat, boots befitting a Canadian winter. The right outfit for a profoundly gray Toronto day, especially since she’d trudged over to meet me. “I walk every-where!” she says merrily, unspooling her scarf. I almost feel bad for taking a cab to the restaurant. She’s come to discuss her new book, Old Babes in the Wood. It’s her ninth collection of short stories, adding to a sprawling body of work that includes 17 novels and 18 volumes of poetry. Old Babes is Atwood at her most whimsical: A snail swaps bodies with a human, an alien tries to translate a fairy tale, a seance summons the ghost of George Orwell. The collection is…

Aventon Abound The first cargo bike from this leader in competitively priced ebikes is a study in flexibility. Carting the kiddo to school? Add a back seat and gripper bars to the long rear platform. Blissfully child-free? Install front and rear racks to haul groceries and garden supplies. The easy-riding step-through frame fits pilots up to 6' 3". The Abound’s pedal-assistance system uses a rear hub motor with a torque sensor, adding a smooth, even boost that varies depending on how hard you’re cranking. In the lowest of the four assistance levels—the power-sipping yet capable Eco mode—you can eke out 50 miles on a charge. The range drops if you load the bike up to its 440-pound capacity, liberally thumb the bar-mounted throttle, or blast around town in Turbo mode…

THERE’S NO TEMPERATURE GAUGE. THAT BROKE several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell trouble coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slipping in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That’s when you know it’s time to stop. This doesn’t happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000-pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat. I start looking for a place to pull over. There’s nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, and limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east, as far as I can see, the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward a desert valley floor, dust-swept and brown. Dotted…

In 2018, young entrepreneur Abdulkader Almkinzy shook up the car rental market in Saudi Arabia by launching online platform Telgani. The aggregator has helped take rental services in the country to a whole new level. “We are building a more convenient, efficient, and sustainable car rental industry.Abdulkader Almkinzy Founder and CEO, Telgani” AS SAUDI ARABIA OPENS UP to the world, entrepreneurs are making it easier than ever to explore this vast and ancient land. Since 2018, when young entrepreneur Abdulkader Almkinzy and his co-founder Ali Alfehaid launched online rental platform Telgani, visitors and locals have been able to order a vehicle in just a couple of clicks and have it delivered to their doorstep within an hour. “It used to be very hard to hire a car and almost impossible for…

WE SAW IT written once that software was eating the world. What really happened, it seems to us, is that software made a world of its own and invited us there to be eaten.¶ These days, we’re lighting out for other worlds—real places, rather than ghostly spaces conjured by soft-ware. Take our local hardware store. The sights, the sounds of actual machines, the advanced tools that still seem built to thrill. We enter to the whirring music of the key duplicator. We seek counsel from people in many-pocketed vestments. We smell the sacred scents of oiled metal, dusty cardboard, evaporated varnish, PVC fumes, and bags of fertilizer with leaky seams. We imagine everything it took to build this world: millennia of trial and error, oceans of brow sweat, megatons of…