Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i WIRED

RE: “2034” RE: “WHO GETS THE FIRST SHOT” This makes all kinds of objective sense, and yet I would rather die than reward extroverts. —Sam Sanders (@DreamSong77), via Twitter Distributing a vaccine based on some rubric of how responsibly an individual responded to pandemic safety protocols, if it were possible, is not moral if it potentially causes the disease to spread more than it needs to. The moral approach is to distribute the vaccine in a way that saves the most lives. If that means we vaccinate everyone who shows up to party for spring break 2021, then that is what we do. —Kvaw, via Reddit RE: “THE MESSENGER” I am not American, but I was impressed by the depth and sobriety of Patrice Peck’s article. I learned a lot…

EARLY LAST YEAR, just as quarantine boredom set in, Alex Marshall got an invitation to test a new app. Marshall, an investor at First Round Capital, hadn’t seen any of her friends or colleagues in months. But when she downloaded the app, named Clubhouse, she could hear many of their voices, as if they’d suddenly showed up at her house to hang out. Marshall was one of Clubhouse’s first 100 users, and she quickly got hooked on the app, which works like an audio chatroom. She joined rooms with friends and strangers and, once, the rapper E-40. Sometimes she and her partner, who also works in venture capital, would be sitting on opposite sides of their apartment only to discover each other in the same Clubhouse room. “It felt like…

THERE WAS NO CES in Las Vegas this year. No touching of gadgets, no in-person demos, no long lines at Starbucks. Instead, the annual consumer tech showcase was held entirely in cyberspace, replete with awkward Zoom calls, glitch-filled booth tours, and livestreamed press conferences with presenters standing 6 feet apart. Even though we could only experience CES from afar, we still were able to identify the products, components, prototypes, and trends that will shape the next few generations of consumer tech. —WIRED Gear Team → BEST LAPTOP Acer Chromebook Spin 514 Acer’s new Spin 514 has a solid aluminum chassis and high-end specs, but we’re most excited about its new chip. This is Acer’s first Chromebook using AMD’s Ryzen 3000-C series mobile processor, and it’s among the first models containing…

1 “Our Numbers Grow Every Year” ON A MISTY NOVEMBER MORNING JUST AFTER SUNRISE, I pulled up to a shooting range in central Texas with a borrowed AR-15 and a few hundred rounds of dubious-quality Russian ammunition that I’d ordered over the internet. I followed a pickup down a gravel road and over two cattle guards to the far end of the property. Then I parked in a field ringed by trees whose bark was scarred by stray bullets. A handful of men had already arrived, and they were loading ammunition into their magazines as the morning birds chittered overhead. After a while, a decorated US Army veteran named Eric Dorenbush gathered us into a circle and gave a short safety briefing—don’t point your barrel at anything you’re not willing…

Honorable Mentions HE DIED AS HE LIVED: ONLINE. D.A. SMITH, VIA EMAIL SHE WON CANINE VOTE BY LANDSLIDE. JANNA DETHMERS, VIA EMAIL “INTRODUCING YOUR NEXT PRESIDENT: VERSION 7!” BEN N, VIA EMAIL BUT IT WON THE ELECTORAL HACKATHON! ZACHARIE BARROU DUMONT, VIA EMAIL “I STILL CAN’T SMELL,” SHE WHISPERED. SEAN FITZGERALD, VIA EMAIL “I HEREBY PARDON ALL MY CLONES.” @MORGAN, VIA TWITTER SHE SMILED: MARS IS NOW INDEPENDENT. @SEPOHONPOKOK, VIA TWITTER FUTURE PRESIDENT BORN TODAY, SUPERCOMPUTER PREDICTS. ETHAN NOLL, VIA EMAIL 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.…

THE DAY OF January 6, when he hurled down the lightning bolt that cast Donald Trump out of Twitter and into outer darkness, should have been @jack’s debut as an imperial overlord. But @jack never seems to flex. This can be maddening. Just when you want him to act Churchillian, @jack is more reticent than ever, a cipher, more Sphinx than Zeus. Last summer, The New York Times asked Jack Dorsey whether he’s “one of the most powerful people on earth,” and his voice was like a dial tone: “No.” On January 13, @jack threaded ambivalently about the Trump ban, ruminating on the question of how to address “offline harm as a result of online speech” while holding sacred “the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet.” He left…

SOMETIMES THE MOST alluring stories we tell are the ones with the details left out. Objects and faces can be prettier in the half light. We see a faint shape and we add the lines and shadows we want. We hear one part of a story and add another part that we hope might be true. I first learned of the man called Mostly Harmless this past August. A WIRED reader sent a note to my tip line: The body of a hiker had been found in a tent in Florida in the summer of 2018, but scores of amateur detectives, and a few professional ones too, couldn’t figure out who he was. Everyone knew that he had started walking south on the Appalachian Trail from New York a year…

ONE AFTERNOON IN DECEMBER 2016, a woman named Laura walked through the gilded front doors of Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel toting an overnight bag. A towering neo-Gothic landmark, the Royal York is renowned for its luxury and celebrity clientele. Alfred Hitchcock stayed there, and so does the Queen of England when she comes to town. Laura, however, wasn’t a famous visitor. She had come for breast implants. Laura had wanted bigger breasts for as long as she could remember. As a child she’d gazed up admiringly at the hourglass silhouettes of her mother’s friends. “I remember thinking, I need that body,” she says. In high school, as her friends’ bodies transformed, her own development slowed. “I always felt like less of a woman,” she says. It was a feeling…

I ONCE WORKED for a few weeks at a big, busy company, and one day I asked, jokingly, “Where do I go to cry?” An hour later, I was taken aside and told in seriousness about a specific stairwell. Another person there led me on a five-minute walk through the skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference room, and then made me promise to keep the location a secret, a vow I have kept. (They also cried.) I think of those as “weeping paths,” part of the secret map of every office. You cannot sob at your desk, so you must go on a journey, smiling at the floor, until you find a place where emotion can flow. Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the…

1 The grift? Clean fuel subsidies. Jacob Kingston waited anxiously at the tiny airport in Brigham City, Utah, for the private jet. His new business partner from Los Angeles was arriving on this frigid January day in 2012, and Jacob desperately wanted to make a good impression. Too embarrassed to bring his humble Toyota Tercel, he had rented a Cadillac Escalade to pick up his guest. ¶ Jacob, a beefy 35-year-old with a large forehead topping a rectangular face and wide-open eyes, had high hopes for this visit. After all, he had three wives and many children to support. Jacob was already one of the top earners of the Davis County Cooperative Society—also known as the Order—a breakaway Mormon polygamist sect based in Salt Lake City that emphasized “consecrating” its members’…

A year ago, in January when John Mascola heard that a new coronavirus had been detected in an animal market in Wuhan, China, he left everything at his desk on the fourth floor of the US government’s Vaccine Research Center and walked up one flight of stairs to the office of a longtime colleague, Nicole Doria-Rose. Felicitously, Mascola, who is the center’s director, had been working on ways to immunize people against coronaviruses. A vaccine against this new bug, soon to be known as SARS-CoV-2, was the first priority, the only surefire way of halting the growing pandemic. Mascola and Doria-Rose, an immunologist, go way back. And they hoped there was another approach that might also contribute to the cause, one they’d been chasing for more than a decade. They wanted to…