What's New

The Traveling Wilburys were a short-lived phenomenon. From 1988 to 1991, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty—each a star in their own right and with a robust catalog to their name—combined their talents and experiences to produce two albums. That’s 21 songs in 112 delightful minutes of music, a testament to the power of collaboration. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I have a confection to make. Ugh! No, I don’t want to bake a cake. Let me type that again. I have aconfessionto make. I worked for many years as a software developer at Apple and I invented touchscreen keyboard autocorrection for the original iPhone. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) was a software engineer and designer at Apple for more than 15 years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two years ago, when Lenovo first unveiled the futuristic Yoga Book, the company held it up alongside a hardcover Dr. Seuss book to demonstrate how thin and light it was. It had a “Halo” keyboard: a bottom half that lit up to create a digital keyboard. You could write directly on this keyless keyboard, too, as though it was a notepad. It was a whole lot of new tech packed into a tiny, $500, fold-over tablet, but not all of that tech was fully-baked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The American military has a funny way of thinking about size. Some ground vehicles are sized not necessarily for battlefield functionality, but rather to fit inside the cargo airplanes that will take them to said battlefield. And pilot size and weight restrictions aren’t written to limit who can stuff themselves inside a tight cockpit, but who can be blasted out of one. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I’m 40 feet from the Jaguar, mint chocolate chip ice cream dripping down the cone onto my fingers, when I hear the purring from under the hood. Strange, I think. First off, the car is parked. Second, it doesn’t have an engine. It’s only after a moment that I realize the sound is the car defending itself against the brutality of a summer day in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dating in 2018 can be a challenge. I'm sorry, let me rephrase: It suuuuuuuuccckkkkksssss. Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and others are the dater's tools of choice , and yet hating them is the one thing we can all agree on these days. They're often more hazard than help, and the forced psychoanalysis of every picture and witty answer can shake even the most durable of confidences loose. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you're a consumer electronics brand, what do you do when your hit product—a best-seller and a critical darling since its debut—turns five years old? You buy it a new suit, of course. Ultimate Ears has updated both of its cylindrical Bluetooth speakers. The Boom 3 and Megaboom 3 have a refreshed look, slightly updated capabilities, and a new lower price. The Boom 3 is $150, which is a $30 price drop from the $180 Boom 3. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

So you wanna tweet? Great—you're gonna (mostly) love it. Everyone from the President to Malala is tweeting it up these days, but it may take some getting used to if you're a new kid on the block. Twitter is where news is broken, links are shared, and memes are born. It's also a place for chatting with friends. Yet unlike Facebook, Twitter is public by default. And that's not a bad thing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Change is hard. Changes to a beloved website's interface can be downright loathsome. So maybe your stomach lurched when you logged into Gmail recently and saw the merry news that your email now “has a fresh new look.” “Oh god,” a colleague messaged me when our personal accounts were automatically migrated to the redesigned Gmail last week. “I feel so uncomfortable. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Let’s just get it out of the way: my wife and I met each other online. This was more than 15 years ago, when “online” meant either chatrooms or some sort of personals-based website. (It was the latter.) We had the internet, but not in our pockets; texting and emoji had yet to worm their way into the mainstream, so we learned each other’s rhythms before read receipts and the tyranny of the three dots. There was no pin-dropping, no swiping, no Instagram archaeology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Among the scant books in my tiny rented room in San Francisco, I’ve kept a spine-worn copy of Romeo and Juliet. It’s the one I read in my high school English class, the pages yellowed, the margins filled with scribbled notes. Since the play was written in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the nature of love—irrational, all-consuming—has been told and retold in countless movie adaptations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Visions of the future tend to be clear-cut. Cars will drive themselves. Air taxis will fill the skies. Smartphones will have notches. The renderings and trend reports tend to elide the messy road map to that future. Yes, advances in lightweight materials, electric propulsion, and aeronautic controls have put the dream of electric people-packing quadcopter drones within reach. A few more years of development, a few more after that of regulatory wrangling, and boom: takeoff. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The audio market is full of headphones that strive to put out the most balanced, best sound signature possible, so listeners can hear every sonic detail in their favorite tunes precisely as "the artist intended." It’s a noble pursuit, but it assumes we’re all hearing the same things. In reality, much like eyesight, we all hear differently—and our ears continue to change as we age. I enjoyed using the Nuraphones when I reviewed them earlier this year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Venmo, the popular payment app owned by PayPal, has become the default way millions of Americans settle a check, pay a friend back for coffee, or buy a concert ticket off Craigslist. Writers have argued that Venmoing makes us petty, and that the app has nearly killed cash. Fewer have questioned whether it’s really the best service for exchanging money, or storing sensitive banking information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a late June day in 2012, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis uploaded five videos to YouTube. Each featured a quintet of monochromatic cartoon robots, catchy songs, and an educational slant. Six years, 150 songs, and 500 million views later, StoryBots is now a kid’s entertainment empire. It also just happens to be one of the best shows on Netflix, with the second season of Ask the StoryBots arriving on the streaming provider today. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Right now, one of the world’s largest mass gatherings is taking place in the desert of Saudi Arabia. The hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites, is required of every observant Muslim who can perform it. More than 2 million people have poured into the country, over land, by air, and in massive charter deployments, from essentially every place around the globe where Muslims reside. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

They say you never forget your first sous vide precision cooker. Actually, nobody says that. Even now, in an era when vacuum-sealed food bags having become the latest benefactor/victim of the app-guided cooking trend, most people genuinely don't know what I'm talking about when I tell them I sometimes cook with a sous vide wand. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The shop has no sign. Or rather, the sign is obscured by some kind of bunting. The glass doors are papered over. You gotta know what's back there, like a speakeasy. Venturing to open the door, I find I still can't get inside. Between me and a cramped 180 square feet or so of convenience store-like shelves—yogurts, bags of exotically-flavored freeze-dried peas, refrigerators full of juice, and pre-packaged sandwiches—is a turnstile. It is a shop. I will shop. There's a reader on the right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I’m not a morning person, yet for the better part of a decade, I started my weekday mornings the same way: Peel myself out of bed, zombie shuffle to the shower, and listen to podcasts with heavy eyelids on the way to the office. When I got there, I’d head straight to the Keurig machine for a pick-me-up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most Saturdays, my husband Seth and I spend approximately the whole day with our phones aimed at our son, taking pictures of him from slightly different angles. There’s a diptych of him dancing in the bagel shop. There’s one of him scooting in the park. Until a few weeks ago, we'd spend our Saturday night bickering over beers about who got to post which photo to our separate Instagram accounts. It’s a glamorous life. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Let's get this out of the way: A lot of norms were disrupted in the videogame industry this week. There was news of a writer at a top gaming site allegedly plagiarizing reviews, and also reports that the Chinese gaming market is having troubles. Oh, and Diablo III is making the leap to the Nintendo Switch. Up is down, down is up, and a lot of things are out of whack. So let's expect the unexpected and get right to it. PSA: Do Not Plagiarize Your Game Reviews. Seriously. Don't. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Of all the striking things about the interview with Elon Musk The New York Times published Thursday night—the tears, the lack of regrets over certain tweets, the fact that rapper Azealia Banks may somehow be part of Tesla’s financial future—was Musk’s claim that he’d be ready to abandon his role as Tesla CEO and chairman. “If you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job,” he told the paper. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In his short story “Rattlesnakes and Men,” science fiction author Michael Bishop describes a town where everyone is required by law to own a dangerous rattlesnake. It’s a scenario that he says is no more absurd than how America treats access to guns. “We lost our son at Virginia Tech in 2007, in the shootings there,” Bishop says in Episode 322 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's almost time to send the kids back to school, and that means you'll want to check out our Back to School buying guide ... but before that, there are a few tech and gaming deals you may want to peep for yourself. With some help from our friends at TechBargains, we've compiled our favorite deals for the weekend. Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 is Available for Preorder We gave the new Samsung Galaxy Note 9 an 8/10 and our coveted WIRED Recommends award. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A year ago today, MoviePass introduced a radical new business model: Go see a movie a day, every day, for just $10 per month. At the time, it seemed too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. The company has since burned through cash at an unsustainable rate, aggravating customers with limited screenings, punishing anti-fraud measures, and general uncertainty about the future. Today, in a bid to stay afloat, MoviePass officially abandoned its unlimited buffet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The hexagonal slices of wood don’t look like much. There’s the shape, sort of interesting in its architectural way, and the neutral wood color. A few are studded with bright, white lights, right in the center, which is fun. And the way the hexagons, each the size of a manhole cover, have been bunched into clusters feels natural and sensible. Surely a Fibonacci sequence is hiding somewhere in there. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You probably learned how to track your heart rate in school: Put your finger on a pulse point, like the inside of your wrist, and count how many pulses you feel in a minute. That yields your heart’s beats per minute, or bpm. Cool trick! you thought. And you promptly forgot about it. But your heart rate can be a useful piece of data. It’s a reliable metric for setting fitness goals that puts your cardiovascular health—ahem—at the heart of your workout. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In my eight years on college campuses—first as a student, and then as the girlfriend of a grad student—my cheap, beater bike was stolen four times. Once, the wheels were gone. Another time, the seat. Twice, it just vanished into the ether, leaving only a busted U-lock and broken dreams in its wake. Even if the bike itself only cost fifty or a hundred bucks, the inconvenience was annoying. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back-to-school shopping might evoke memories of wandering through big box store sales and throwing Trapper Keepers and pencils into a shopping cart. But nowadays, you're more likely to hunch over a laptop to hunt for great prices than you are to fight for a parking spot at the local mall. If you're looking for college essentials, or a great laptop or tablet, we have a few suggestions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I often worry I'm an under-reactor. It's not that things don't affect me, or that I'm needlessly stoic—born-and-bred Midwesterners like me tend to be level-headed. (Or at least as even-keeled as one can be in 2018.) This is a purely performative kind of reaction I'm talking about: I don't add the "angry" face to Facebook posts from old high-school classmates, don't "heart" nearly as many tweets as maybe I should. I probably don’t even double-tap enough sunset posts on Instagram. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Among the heads of publicly traded companies, Tesla’s Elon Musk might just be the most whimsical, the most impish, the most delightfully trolly. But Musk may be ready to give up that distinction. On Tuesday afternoon, the electric carmaker CEO tweeted that he was considering taking the company private, and that he had secured funding to do so. https://twitter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The work of polemicists like Sarah Jeong, recently hired to The New York Times editorial board, is to make arguments in public space. Polemicists can be insufferable. They get to be gadflies and think themselves Socratic. They’re belligerent. They have a reputation for laziness and Twitter addiction; they often shun shoe leather. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Many of my car journeys are within a mile of my house, hauling toddlers and groceries to and fro. It would be much easier, more fun, and better for the environment, if I could replace at least a few of those trips with an electric cargo bike. However, a few hurdles stand in my way. The first is cost. I loved the versatility and power of the R&M Load, but at $7,000, it costs as much as my current car. Going completely carless would justify the price, but it’s hard to make the commitment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Seattleites got a serious scare on Friday evening when an airport employee stole a large turboprop airplane owned by the Alaska Air Group from the area’s Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and took it for an unauthorized flight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If policymaking is never easy, and military policymaking is very difficult, it stands to reason that space military policymaking is basically impossible. Yet today, in a speech at the Pentagon, Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a sixth branch of the US armed services: a SPACE FORCE! But can that really happen? Well, let’s proceed with the go/no-go. SPACE FORCE! President Donald Trump? “Space Force all the way!” So that’s a GO. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Welcome to Replay, our weekly roundup of all the gaming news and happenings you might've missed while you were, y'know, playing games. This week, we've got Elon Musk's attempts to put games in cars, Valve's return to actually making games, and the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. Ah, Elon Musk. Your Teslas may be losing money, but you're never going to run out of ideas, no matter how impractical and expensive they are. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A funny thing happened in the six years since Samsung first announced its line of Galaxy Note smartphones. A few things happened, more accurately. In an effort to compete with the Note, other phone makers started making large-screened phones, and later, edge-to-edge displays. Big phones got better-looking, in general. Many were imbued with powerful graphics processing. And eventually, the software on other phones began to support features like split-screen multitasking. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The shark wasn't working. It was the mid-'00s, and Jan de Bont—director of such big-screen velocities as Speed and Twister—was showing off a small sculpture of carcharodon megalodon, the ancient shark that was to be the star of his next film, Meg. Based on Steve Alten's 1997 book, about a deep-sea diver who encounters a prehistoric underwater beast, Meg had been the subject of a million-dollar movie-rights deal before the book was even published. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Would you like a Mod to go with that Moto? After three iterations of the Moto Z, it’s clear that Motorola still believes in its line of snap-on magnetic phone accessories. And it should. There are a lot of intriguing Mods you can buy, including a photo printer and a fancy Hasselblad-branded camera, and they all work interchangeably with these Z phones. Unfortunately, Moto Mods haven’t become a selling point yet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Squeeze the trigger of a gun and a spring unwinds. A bolt lurches forward. On that piece of precision-milled steel is a firing pin that ignites a spark and initiates a sequence of events which, if the human will is powerful enough and mechanical tolerance is not exceeded, often ends in death. And tolerance for Martin Kok was running out. As a teenager living north of Amsterdam, Kok sold fish and later cocaine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Saturn may be photogenic, but Mars is our nearest neighbor. As the planet approached its closest point to Earth, Hubble had a look. Yes, those summertime dust storms are raging on, and the swirling red particle clouds are in sharp contrast to the bright white polar caps. But also making cameos in the image are the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They’re tiny: Phobos is 14 miles across, and Deimos just 8 miles wide. Reaching for the stars is a lot more fun when the stars are closer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's 1981, in a version of reality where the Cold War was waged not human to human, but human to extraterrestrial enemy from beyond the stars. To fight, we developed robot bodies to wear in space; these Ship-Selves are advanced and almost unkillable, weapons and homes and clothes and identities all rolled into one. And, of course, we got teenagers to pilot them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years ago, I took a weekend wilderness survival class. Deep in the remote woods of Oregon’s coast range, we strung plastic sheets up with fishing line for shelter and practiced signaling with tiny pocket mirrors. Enthralled, I watched as the instructor slowly teased a cotton ball daubed with petroleum jelly into a roaring campfire. Survival class aside, fire starting isn’t one of my skills. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Once upon a time, there was a fringe news outlet with a loud and dissenting opinion. A fatal shooting, it claimed, was not at all what it seemed to be: It was a hoax, orchestrated by some shadowy force—probably Communists—bent on replacing freedom with dictatorship. This was untrue, but that didn’t stop the outlet from naming and insulting alleged collaborators. And so the media outlet was sued for defamation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In singularly unsurprising news, Brookstone has filed for bankruptcy. The company will shutter its remaining 101 mall storefronts, officially closing out an era that began its fade years ago. Even if you won’t mourn its disappearance—even if you haven’t stepped inside a mall since the Mallrats era—it’s worth a moment of appreciation, and a full accounting of what’s been lost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a book that drove me away from books. This wasn’t a trauma of distaste, or indulgence: not a literary bad mussel, not waking up on the floor of someone's house with a swimming head and the knowledge that I could never again be within smelling distance of their first editions. My aversion was borne of fear. The fear took root in 2016—which, while decidedly not-great in general, was very much a great year for books. Especially fiction. Especially especially speculative fiction. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in the last presidential campaign season, reporters on the tech and politics beats began noticing a rise in far-right memes that supported Trump. Memes being memes, these seemed initially like weird, off-color jokes. They wondered: What the hell is going on? Was this shitposting ironic or serious? Or both? Either way, it seemed newsworthy. The memes were climbing the trending lists on every social network and landing on the front page of Reddit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Quick, think of a California hotbed of technological might. There’s Silicon Valley, duh. And enterprising Silicon Beach, down in the state’s sunny, laidback southland. But cast thine eyes north, young techies, past the agricultural innovation stronghold at UC Davis and the domed, white capitol building where the bureaucrats and public officials controlling the nation’s largest state economy play. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The fact that you're even reading these words represents a victory. Wordpress-powered websites publish more than 77 million posts each week. The New York Times runs about 150 stories every day. (Here at WIRED, it's more like 15 or 20.) Last year, 687.2 million books were sold in the United States—and that's just print versions, not e-books. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consuming pop culture is my job. Well, writing about it is my job, but that makes keeping tabs on movies, television, podcasts, Twitter/Instagram feeds, and everything else a professional necessity. Yet, there's one high-protein item that always seems to be missing in my media diet: books. It's not that I don't read them—I've got two to three going at any given time—it's that I feel like I don't read them enough. How do I know this? Fucking Goodreads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices