Q&A with the man who created Mosaic and Netscape, and has since funded some of the biggest companies on the web:
The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line—45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves.
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy?
I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on ‘Hard Copy’ and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, ‘City Confidential.’ And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.
Researchers have worked for years to develop a prosthetic limb controlled by the brain or myoelectric activity. For now, many still prefer the old prosthetics that use centuries-old technology:
Watching the arm intently as it goes through these motions, Lehman imagines his missing arm moving in the same way. This focused mental exercise triggers neuromuscular activity in his stump that the electrodes pick up. A cell-phone-sized computer velcroed onto the sling behind Lehman’s shoulder correlates the arm’s vocabulary of motions to Lehman’s desires. The hand pinches closed, Lehman tries to tell his missing hand ‘pinch,’ and the computer remembers the muscle activation that his thought engenders. He has to go through this routine every time he straps on the arm because the sensors never end up in exactly the same place. Lehman’s stump changes from day to day, too. He sweats. His skin stretches. His muscles swell and shrink. And, more fundamentally, Lehman’s brain changes. Tomorrow he might visualize his arm movements differently.
Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains – How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and build new ones.
Sense and Sensitivity by Andrea Bartz – Is it possible that some people are wired to take in more sensory information than others, and that are our attitudes towards sensitivity are misguided?
The Sniff of Legend by Karen Wright – “Human pheromones? Chemical sex attractants? And a sixth sense organ in the nose? What are we, animals?”
The Taste Makers by Raffi Khatchadourian – This trip to the heart of the flavour industry is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how modern food gets its taste.
You’ve Got Smell by Charles Platt – DigiScent is here. Will it take off, and if it does, will it be a fad or a technological revolution?
Seeing by Annie Dillard – An excellent essayist takes a personal, often abstract look inside the world of vision.
Master of Illusion by Ed Yong – How a neuroscientist from Stockholm can use mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to transport you outside your own body.
James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet:
The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.
The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot—nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.
The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches:
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.
Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby who mysteriously disappeared:
Hackety Hack solved the “Little Coder’s Predicament”: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the community of Ruby programmers who treated him with something approaching messianic worship, _why vanished.
On Aug. 19, 2009, his personal site stopped loading. He stopped answering email. A public repository of his code disappeared. His Twitter account—gone. Hackety Hack—gone. Dozens of other projects—gone.
A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner:
The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the most head-scratching of causes. Behold the sinister power of peer pressure.
Does a Sugar Bear Bite? by Lynn Hirschberg – A classic profile of Suge Knight at the zenith of his power. Maybe the best intro scene of any celebrity profile in history.
Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood by Evan Wright – Rob Capps, my editor at Wired, turned me onto Wright’s work. This is my personal favorite—a portrait of a man blessed with bottomless energy and ambition, though only the smallest trace of empathy for his fellow man.
Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser – A master class in narrative contrarianism. Deeply and elegantly reported, with a real human tragedy at its core.
A Better Brew by Burkhard Bilger – Perhaps the best story ever by one of my favorite writers. (His piece on cockfighting from several years back is a classic, too.) Bilger does a tremendous job of creating real tension, while never losing sight of his primary duty as an explainer of business and science.
And a few you’ll need a subscription to read:
Rock is Dead by David Samuels – This is what it felt like to be young in the ’90s. A terrifying portrait of morality adrift in a sea of excess.
Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson – There is no more badass reporter working in journalism today. No one else could have set up an interview with the most violent (yet complex) gangster in all of Rio’s slums. Truly intrepid reporting.
After Welfare” by Katherine Boo – The story that got me into Boo’s now much-heralded work. Still haunted by the scene of the two kids eating ramen and boiled eggs.
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