What"s New

6:10

Sacramento Eases Into the Self-Driving Scene

What"s New ·

2018/08/02

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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3:48

How Technology Shapes the Way We Read

What"s New ·

2018/08/01

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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6:17

Goodreads and the Crushing Weight of Literary FOMO

What"s New ·

2018/08/01

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 more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:32

When in Nature, Google Lens Does What the Human Brain...

What"s New ·

2018/07/31

AI-powered visual search tools, like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search, promise a new way to search the world—but most people still type into a search box rather than point their camera at something. We've gotten used to manually searching for things over the past 25 years or so that search engines have been at our fingertips. Also, not all objects are directly in front of us at the time we’re searching for information about them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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7:27

'The Polity' Is Libertarian Space Opera Done Right

What"s New ·

2018/07/31

The Polity series by English science fiction author Neal Asher is a limitless thrill-ride of grotesque aliens, badass hardware, rogue AIs, and deadly secret agents. It’s got everything a science fiction fan could want from an action-adventure story, and that’s definitely by design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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10:00

Why I’m Deleting All My Old Tweets

What"s New ·

2018/07/30

While I gave birth to my first child in 2015, my brother sat across the street from the hospital in a bar, live tweeting his experience of waiting to meet his nephew. As the hours of my long labor wore on, my brother got drunker and his jokes more off the wall. When my son was finally born and I went to send an email birth announcement, I found that everyone already knew. Emails had flooded my inbox already congratulating me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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9:15

Polk Command Bar Review: Alexa Tries Hard to Power a...

What"s New ·

2018/07/27

Earlier this year, my home was infested with smart speakers—I've used a lot of them at this point. But I’ve never used an Alexa device as dedicated to the cause as the Polk Command Bar, a soundbar that wants to be an Amazon Echo so badly that it’s practically in cosplay. It’s designed to look like engineers smushed an Amazon Echo Dot right into the center of it. In many ways, that's precisely what Polk did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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7:40

The Importance of Letting Go of So-Called Dirty Pain

What"s New ·

2018/07/27

I was walking through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn with another parent I’d just met at a child’s birthday party. “I like it here,” he observed. “But the people smell bad.” Hgst. Someone has commented on the odor of an entire people. A bad moon rose. Then another. All around us were men in tzitzit, fedoras. I stabbed at the map on my phone. “I don’t smell anything,” I lied; the air was thick with the hot scent of political anguish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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32:02

A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online...

What"s New ·

2018/07/26

Everybody is searching for something. Paul Ashby’s search began with an unexpected phone call on July 8, 2017. It was a Saturday night in Townsend, Tennessee, a small town just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An affable Army vet with gray hair, a goatee, and wire-frame glasses, Paul worked as a concierge at a rustic event space called the Barn. He was dressed in his usual top hat and coattails that night, greeting guests who were attending a wedding. Learn more about your ad choices

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10:10

The 'Guerrilla' Wikipedia Editors Who Combat...

What"s New ·

2018/07/26

Susan Gerbic spent her career photographing babies at a department store in Salinas, California, just 100 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the retired 55-year-old has dedicated her life to something entirely different: Wikipedia. As a member of the skeptical movement, Gerbic is committed to promoting critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and empirical evidence—particularly when it comes to fringe ideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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6:33

Congress May Love Flying Cars, But the Skies Still...

What"s New ·

2018/07/25

Lamar Smith has liked the idea of flying cars since he was a kid growing up in Texas. So when the Republican representative from San Antonio was walking along the National Mall a few months ago, he became fascinated with a remote-controlled flying car operated by 10 year-old boy and his mom. “The advantage of this one is that it flies so slowly you can stay out of trouble,” Smith told the hearing room at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, as he embraced his inner Oprah. Learn more

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6:34

Dive Under the Ice With the Brave Robots of Antarctica

What"s New ·

2018/07/25

The lava fields of Hawaii. The peaks of the Himalayas. The crowds of a Justin Bieber concert. These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread. They ain’t got nothin’, though, on waters of our planet’s polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a puny human like you in a heartbeat. Robots, though? This is the stuff their tough-as-hell bodies were made for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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9:25

The Ultimate Toxic Fandom Lives in Trumpworld

What"s New ·

2018/07/24

Lately, in considering the erosion of America, the image that first comes to mind is Mariah Carey's now-iconic "I don’t know her" GIF. The gleeful shake of Carey's head. The subtle mischief of her utterance. The animation frames our current moment with dead-on precision. In fairness, from its earliest days, America has never looked like we knew it could. Which is to say, America—a country of sharp contradictions and tangible evils—has never lived up to what it could be. Learn more about your ad

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12:04

Instant Pot Max Review: Not Quite Instant Success

What"s New ·

2018/07/24

Electric pressure cookers hit it big in American home kitchens a few years back because, along with the perceived lower risk of dinner on the ceiling, they cook food fast. Something like beef stew, which takes all day in a slow cooker, needs as little as 25 minutes under pressure. With an extra hit of power, Instant Pot's new six-quart Max promises to take that speed and turn it up to 11, getting dinner to the table even faster. Could it? I wondered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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5:45

The 'Ada Lace' Books Will Get Girls Interested in STEM

What"s New ·

2018/07/23

Emily Calandrelli, host of Xploration Outer Space and correspondent on Bill Nye Saves the World, thinks there aren’t enough female science geeks in fiction. She wants to help change that with her Ada Lace series of children’s books. “What I wanted to do was create a character that was female who had these types of adventures and did these types of science experiments,” Calandrelli says in Episode 318 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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7:10

‘Hereditary’ Proves Satanists Just Aren’t Scary Anymore

What"s New ·

2018/07/23

The new movie Hereditary, a supernatural thriller about family secrets, is one of the scariest films in years. But the movie was more than just frightening, says horror author Paul Tremblay. “From the opening frames of the film there was just this wonderful atmosphere of dread,” Tremblay says in Episode 317 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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7:00

Comic-Con 2018: *Doctor Who*’s First Female Doctor...

What"s New ·

2018/07/20

A fun game if you ever find yourself at a comics convention: Try to spot as many gender-swapped cosplayers as you can. Throughout years of going to Comic-Cons and other fan gatherings, I’ve spotted women in drag as Loki, Harry Potter, and—before Paul Feig's reboot—various Ghostbusters. (However, this tends to be a one-way phenomenon; rarely, if ever, have I seen men dressed as Catwoman or Stranger Things' Eleven, at least in a way that wasn't going for laughs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:51

Does Comics Culture Have an Inferiority Complex?

What"s New ·

2018/07/20

Here's the truth: Comic book publishing—yes, just the business of selling printed comics—is a billion-dollar industry. This month, 1,194 new comic books and 391 new graphic novels and collections will hit shelves. That's a lot of titles for a single month, and those aren't uncommon numbers. Comics are everywhere; even your grandma knows who Thanos is. If anything, comics are a bigger deal now than they've ever been. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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13:09

One Young Boy's Magnificent Obsession with Fans

What"s New ·

2018/07/19

It is a parent’s job to think her children are exceptional. Up to this point, I had spent many hours crafting a tale for myself that Leo’s fascination with fans was, in fact, proof of his genius. Now I was imagining a roomful of Leos, all in tiny white lab coats, all saving the world one vactrain at a time. Their origin stories were the same: “It all started,” they would say, “with the Lasko Wind Machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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8:38

The Complex Engineering of the Simple Hook That Could...

What"s New ·

2018/07/19

André Prager turns away from me for a moment, rummaging through a pile of stuff on the cart he has pulled into the small conference room. There are lots of cut-up pieces of cardboard, with a few bags of colorful plastic odds and ends mixed in. “I think the most valuable things in this building are cardboard and tape,” he says. He shows me a rectangle of foam-core with a straw, a broken pen, and a few thumb tacks stuck to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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