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You Can Now Live Out Westworld With Your Amazon Echo

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This Amazon Echo doesn't seem to understand that all I want is a whiskey. I'm seated in the Tribeca offices of marketing firm 360i and the haunting voice coming out of its little speaker just says, "Never heard of it." The problem is that me and 360i's creative director Andrew Hunter both gave the order […]

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While You Were Offline: And the Real Fake News Award Goes To…

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Maybe it's just us, but it seems as though everyone was on pins and needles last week. Between the looming shutdown of the US government, fretting over President Trump praising anti-abortion efforts, and everyone wondering just why Ja Rule was a trending topic on Twitter (no, really, why?), there was a lot of cause for […]

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How to Make—and Climb—a Frozen Waterfall

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Each winter, crackling and splintering ice echoes across the Uncompahgre Gorge, roughly 10 miles northeast of Telluride, Colorado. The sound signals high season at Ouray Ice Park, the world’s first and largest man-made frozen climbing grounds. The gorge’s walls are crisscrossed by 2 miles of pipes, crowned by a network of valves, showerheads, and faucets. […]

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Jupiter's Auroras Defy the Laws of Earthly Physics

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Since NASA’s Juno mission began orbiting Jupiter and sending data back to Earth last July, Juno scientists have all sounded pretty alike: They are very excited, and very confused. “Almost nothing is as we anticipated,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton told WIRED in May. “But it’s exciting that Jupiter is so different than we assumed.” […]

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The Real Reason You Use Closed Captions for Everything Now

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In this moment, there is only one thing I wish to know, and those are the words coming out of Sylvester Stallone’s mouth—if indeed they are words. I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Incomprehensibly, Stallone has a small part in it, speaking, as he often does, incomprehensibly. But, gosh, he looks very important. […]

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Inside Wyatt Cenac's Bold HBO Experiment on Policing in America

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Less than 24 hours before I arrive at HBO’s offices in midtown Manhattan on an early April morning, Saheed Vassell is fatally gunned down by police in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood weathering the cruel agony of gentrification. Vassell’s death was preceded by that of Stephon Clark on March 18 in Sacramento, and of Decynthia […]