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…
Meet the Star Wars Fans Building a Full-Scale Millennium Falcon
In the world of Star Wars fandom, there are fans, and then there are fans: the cosplayers, the Funko completists, the crawl-reciters. And then there's Greg Dietrich, who has spent the last six years of his free time building a full-size replica of the Millennium Falcon’s iconic cockpit in a garage in Huntsville, Alabama. Today,…
HTC's Most Important CES Announcement Isn't the New Vive Pro Headset
This week at the Consumer Electronics Show, HTC unveiled a new headset as part of its Vive virtual-reality line. The Vive Pro isn't an entirely new generation of VR hardware, but it's an impressive incremental upgrade, boasting integrated audio, a 2880 x1600 display that matches Samsung's Odyssey as the highest-resolution consumer headset, and improved ergonomic…