Cantina Talk: Is Solo in Even More Trouble?
As one Star Wars saga ends, another begins… Or maybe another two? Three? As Solo: A Star Wars Story lumbers closer to its May release date, things are changing dramatically for short-form Star Wars stories as Rebels wraps up and the man behind Iron Man is handed the keys to the kingdom to bring the…
While You Were Offline: We Know What President Trump Did Last Summer
Last week was a busy one. Between the government shutdown and deciding whether or not—in light of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar being sentenced to 175 years in prison for decades of sexual abuse—the internet has a new hero in Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, a lot went down. It was also a week that marked…
While You Were Offline: The State of the Union Is Riddled with Typos
Before we delve into the darkness of the world this week, let's consider these two tweets from the past seven days that really tell any outside viewer exactly what they need to know about the platform that is Twitter (in addition to the stuff about Nazis and harassment, of course). Oh, social media! So many…
Elon Musk Wants to Put an Arcade in Your Tesla, and the Rest of the Week in Games
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. Elon Musk Wants to Put an…
Could a Text-Based Dating App Change Selfie-Swiping Culture?
Juniper was over Tinder. A recent college grad living in rural Connecticut, they’d been subject to the swipe-and-ghost thing a few too many times. Then, this spring, Juniper submitted an ad to @_personals_, an Instagram for lesbian, queer, transgender, and non-binary people looking for love (and other stuff). The post, titled "TenderQueer Butch4Butch," took Juniper…
Enter the Dreamscape: Location-Based VR Gets a New Player
As certain forward-thinking magazines predicted last year (ahem), VR’s first mass-culture moment has arrived not as a device but as a destination. There’s far more immersive potential in a dedicated VR facility—with its stagecraft and high-end components—than what’s currently possible in your living room. Already, companies like The VOID and Star VR are running bespoke…
WIRED's Top Stories in January: The Diversity War Inside Google
One of WIRED's biggest stories this month actually traces its genesis to a moment all the way back in August. That's when a Google engineer named James Damore published a 10-page memo criticizing what he called the company's "left bias" and its creation of "a politically correct monoculture." The missive sent a shockwave through Google,…
4Chan Is Turning 15—And Remains the Internet's Teenager
The internet makes sense in metaphors. Superhighways, clouds, pages, links. Facebook is a town square. Wikipedia, a kind of brain. So what about 4chan, the imageboard site where users post just about anything, with anonymity and impunity? If you trust 4channers themselves, it’s the internet’s soul. Well, that’s alarming. 4chan has never been a nice…
Hulu's Political Dramas Are Winning the Streaming Game
Last September, Hulu became the first streaming service to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama when its original series Handmaid's Tale bested traditional network heavy-hitters like Westworld, Better Call Saul, and This Is Us. When it won, it seemed to be in part because it was the right show at the right time: the dystopic…
You Too Can Fly a Spacecraft Around Mars—With Physics!
Recently, I gave my introductory physics course a fairly standard problem, based on the Matter and Interactions textbook. I've modified the question, but it goes something like this: Here's a diagram showing the spacecraft at the two different positions (along with a vector indicating the velocity). I suppose I should state that the only significant…