Westworld Is Turning Into Lost—for Better or for Worse
I never should have started watching Westworld. Not because I didn’t think it’d be good. An HBO show based on a Michael Crichton idea starring Evan Rachel Wood with all kinds of artificial intelligence? Sign me up! The problem wasn’t that Westworld wouldn’t be enjoyable, it was that it’s the kind of show that invites…
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Will Bother Some People. Good.
There is a scene in Star Wars: The Last Jedi—I won’t say too much, but you'll see it yourself—where a young Asian woman does a brave, selfless thing to help the Resistance. It’s a very sweet, very Star Wars Hero Moment, but it's also an important one. Los Angeles Times film writer Jen Yamato called…
Stop Expecting Games to Build Empathy
What do games do for us—and what do we owe them for that? It's an odd question, but it seems to come up, in one form or another, whenever a gaming controversy hits the news. Gaming is no longer a young medium, but it's still somewhat opaque from the outside, which makes games an easy…
From Get Out to Wonder Woman, These Were the 10 Best Movies of 2017
All told, 2017 was a surprisingly great year for movies. There were wickedly smart horror flicks like Get Out, wonderfully imaginative superhero movies like Thor Ragnarok, and brilliant dramas like Lady Bird. There was also a little thing called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Not every flick was perfect, but there were a lot of…
Is a Meme Born in a Private Account Still a Meme?
I write a lot about memes—the phenomenon, writ large. So it caught me off guard last week when, scrolling through Instagram, I found myself barred from the very thing I was reporting on. Major meme accounts were suddenly private, and left my follow requests dangling—for days and days. I was reduced to trawling through the…
What We're Most Looking Forward to at This Year's Comic-Con
Every year, the tradeoff is real: What panel are you willing to sacrifice in order to see another? Even in a year when HBO and Marvel are staying away, the days at Comic-Con International are so stacked with events that hard choices need to be made. We feel that pain, and are here to help.…
Living in Demon's Souls as the Servers Shut Down
When I begin Demon's Souls, I am not alone. My avatar's character model is overlapped by a ghost. It runs out ahead of me, raises a spectral shield, and charges into the unknown. I wish it luck, and creep carefully forward. Related Stories This ghost is another player, and for the time being Demon's Souls…
Fortnite Season 5 Is Here, and the Rest of the Week in Games
Welcome, dear reader, to the first edition of Replay, where we look the happenings in the gaming industry and play catch-up at the end of another busy week. This time, we've got some really unfortunate firings, a rare boon for independent creators, and time travel a la Fortnite. Let's get to it. Fortnite's Fifth Season…
Black Panther and Netflix Get Historic Oscar Nominations
Hello, and welcome once more to The Monitor, WIRED's roundup of the latest in the world of culture. We hope you had a nice Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. What's been going on since the end of last week? Welp, Black Panther got a historic Oscar nod, M. Night Shyamalan's trilogy-ending almost-superhero film Glass…
Has Tech Ushered in a Golden Age of Long-Distance Dating?
At the party where I met my current boyfriend, I asked him a Sophie's Choice question of my own invention. Would you rather, I asked, spend the rest of your life on a deserted island, completely alone but with modern conveniences like a smartphone, laptop, and good WiFi? Or would you spend it wherever you…