Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i WIRED

It’s a tradition in computer science, dating back to the days of the earliest microprocessors, for rookie coders to pass a simple test. They must write a program, no more than a few lines long, that outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” As we look ahead to the coming months—to the end, we hope, of isolation and the start of new growth—we can’t think of a better message than that. So we asked Lisa Congdon, an artist based in Portland, Oregon, to put it on our April cover. The program isn’t ready to run quite yet; there’s still the vaccine rollout to worry about, and the emerging variants, and plenty else. But one day soon, the world is coming back, and you’ll want to say hello.…

Dear Seen— Turning off the self-view would seem to be the easiest solution, but it’s not one I would recommend—in fact, I’d strongly advise against it. From what I’ve heard, the sight of one’s image disappearing from the gallery inspires, almost universally, anguish, terror, and in some cases profound existential despair of the sort that Vladimir Nabokov claims to have felt when he came across family photos taken before he was born. It feels, in other words, as though you no longer exist. Your larger query—about the possible side effects of staring at yourself all day—is more complex and extends beyond the question of whether you’re a narcissist, which I will venture is unlikely. (Fear of narcissism, at least in the clinical sense, is self-disqualifying: Only those who don’t fit…

SOMETIMES, MATURE DOUGLAS FIRS SEND sugar to saplings via miles of underground, gossamer-thin mycorrhizal fungi. Through these same passageways (the “Wood Wide Web”) birches can loan carbon to fir trees in the summer, while firs pay it back in fall. And trees of different species might share nitrogen leached out of salmon carcasses left over from a bear’s lunch. When the pandemic hit, photographer Andres Gonzalez retreated to his home in Vallejo, north of the San Francisco Bay. He started devouring novels, including Richard Powers’ climate epic The Overstory, which was inspired partly by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s research on mycorrhizal networks. On long walks, Gonzalez began photographing redwoods in his neighborhood. To him, the trees, standing alone outside the braided forest, looked sick and isolated. But he knew…

By the time he stepped onto a bus in downtown Toronto for the first leg of a trip to Lake Tahoe in December 2012, Geoff Hinton hadn’t taken a seat for seven years. “I last sat down in 2005,” he often said, “and it was a mistake.” He first injured his back as a teenager, while lifting a space heater for his mother. As he reached his late fifties, he couldn’t sit down without risking a slipped disk, and if it slipped the pain could put him in bed for weeks. So he stopped sitting down. He used a standing desk inside his office at the University of Toronto. When eating meals, he put a small foam pad on the floor and knelt at the table, poised like a monk…

Twenty years ago, MARGARET MCKINNON walked away from an airline disaster unscathed—but deeply changed. So she dedicated her life to the study of how we remember trauma. Now she’s researching how shards of the pandemic may linger on in our minds. INSIDE THE NARROW AIRPLANE BATHROOM AT 39,000 FEET, MARGARET McKinnon tried to turn on the faucet, but she couldn’t get any water to come out. It was just past 5:45 am, Greenwich Mean Time, on August 24, 2001, and McKinnon was somewhere high above the mid-Atlantic. Her husband of less than one week, John Baljkas, was asleep where she had left him in a center block of coach seats. The Toronto newlyweds were on their way to a honeymoon in Portugal. With a little less than two hours to…

WHEN CHEN QIUFAN TOOK A TRIP TO THE SOUTHWEST CHINESE PROVINCE of Yunnan 15 years ago, he noticed that time seemed to slow down as he reached the city of Lijiang. Chen was a recent college graduate with a soul-sucking real estate job in the pressure-cooker metropolis of Shenzhen, and Lijiang was a backpacker’s refuge. Wandering through the small city, he was enchanted by the serrated rows of snow-capped mountains on the horizon and the schools of fish swimming through meandering canals. But he was also unnerved by the throngs of city dwellers like himself—burned out, spiritually lost, adrift. He wove his observations together into a short story called “The Fish of Lijiang,” about a depressed office worker who travels to a vacation town, only to discover that everything is artificially engineered—from…

20% Amount by which the value of bitcoin surged in just one hour after Elon Musk added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter bio. 1,300 Number of companies that lost IP and other data to ransomware attacks worldwide in 2020, according to cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. 7.7% Proportion of Amazon warehouse workers who suffered a serious injury on the job in 2019—nearly double the industry average, according to Reveal. 24K Number of g’s produced when the tiny, shrimplike amphipod snaps its massive claw in defense—so violent the critter could nearly explode itself.…

JUST AFTER THANKSGIVING—on Cyber Monday, to be exact—I impulsively dropped $60.52 on four expansion packs for The Sims 4, despite not having played the game for two years. Why did I do this? Who knows. Let’s blame the food coma. Or the pandemic. Take your pick. I’ve been playing The Sims off and on since the original game was released 21 years ago. Most of my playthroughs involve building an alternate or idyllic version of my own life. (Shout-out to the versions of me in other dimensions who made better choices and are chilling on a boat in the Mediterranean right now!) “Who am I?” is always the question as I pick my avatar’s interests and outfits in Create a Sim. This time, I went with realism: My Sim wanted…

Apple AirPods Max Wireless Headphones →RATING: 8/1O $549 WIRED Noticeably higher build quality than Sony and Bose rivals. Excellent controls, with a physical volume knob. Very comfortable. They work seamlessly with iOS devices. Industry-leading fidelity. Actually repairable—even iFixit is impressed. TIRED Expensive! 20-hour battery life is good, but it’s 10 hours shy of the competition. The case is silly and useless. And you can’t power them down completely?! —Parker Hall DJI Mini 2 Quadcopter →RATING: 8/1O $449 WIRED Lightweight, compact, and very portable. New, more ergonomic controller. Light enough that you don’t have to register with the FAA. 4K video (30 fps) and RAW images. In-camera video trimming and new panorama modes. More powerful motors deliver better performance in windy conditions. TIRED No obstacle-avoidance features—challenging for beginners. Lacks automated flight…

AS ADOPTION SEARCHES MIGRATE ONLINE, REGRETFUL ADOPTEES AND BIOLOGICAL MOMS ARE CONFRONTING PROSPECTIVE PARENTS WITH THEIR PERSONAL PAIN. THE INTERACTIONS CAN BE BITTER, NASTY, AND ENLIGHTENING. WHEN ERIN AND JUSTIN DECIDED TO ADOPT A CHILD at the beginning of 2016, they paid $25,000 to sign on with one of the largest, most reputable adoption agencies in the United States. They imagined an orderly process, facilitated by lawyers and social workers. They didn’t foresee the internet trolls who would call them cunts and psychopaths. Nor did they imagine they’d be filing a police report, or pleading with Facebook to delete posts that called them human traffickers. They didn’t expect the internet to be involved in the process at all. Erin and Justin (not their real names) met in Chicago in 2010 on a…

Speculation that helped get this issue out: What if, just maybe, I jumped into GameStop stock now? Is it possible to work long-term from an Airstream? Just hear me out: formal sweatpants. Will the baby birds nesting in my backyard survive this year? Is there a chance Indian food in Idaho is as good as we have here? Which of my beloved bars will survive? Booking a nonrefundable family vacation for August. How many days in a row is too many for microwave mac and cheese? Assuming my 3-month-old is quietly evaluating my every move and dad joke, to be tallied in a Final Judgment. What could possibly go wrong? wired is a registered trademark of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2021 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the…