Search Results for: wired

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Tana Ganeva, Garrett M. Graff, Janelle Monáe, Ellen Cushing, and Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder.

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1. Flimsy plastic knives, a single microwave, and empty popcorn bags: How 50 inmates inside a Michigan prison prepared a feast to celebrate the life of George Floyd

Tana Ganeva | The Counter | August 6, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,397 words)

Michael ‘Thompson came up with a way to mark Floyd’s death inside: a special meal that he’d share with the inmates in a “celebration” honoring Floyd’s life…After they returned their cells, each man sat in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. And then they began to eat.’

2. The Furious Hunt for the MAGA Bomber

Garrett M. Graff | Wired | August 12, 2020 | 32 minutes (8200 words)

“Scarred by trauma and devoted to Trump, a man began mailing explosives to the president’s critics on the eve of an election. Inside the race to catch him.”

3. Stacey Abrams and Janelle Monáe on the Fight for Democracy in an Election Season for the Ages

Janelle Monáe | Harper’s Bazaar | August 10, 2020 | 20 minutes (5,152 words)

‘The former Georgia Representative talks to singer and fellow Atlantan Monáe about voter suppression, Joe Biden, and whether Abrams herself will one day run for president. (The answer: “Absolutely.”)’

4. I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist

Ellen Cushing | The Atlantic | May 13, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,881 words)

“Our minds work in particular ways that make us all receptive to conspiracy thinking,” says Rob Brotherton, a psychologist and the author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. ”

5. The Way of the Goldfinch

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder | Emergence Magazine | July 15, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,525 words)

“Watching a goldfinch sway on a blade of grass, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes to her soon-to-be-born daughter about beauty, balance, and lessons of uncertainty.”

When Boomers Must Zoom

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Anne Fadiman has spent the last 15 years teaching writing with only one requirement — a round table in the smallest possible room, to enable an intimate environment for her students to learn. A self-proclaimed Boomer with limited technological knowledge, moving her class online due to COVID-19 filled her with fear. Bravely, she signed up for a course to learn the intricacies of Zoom. She tells us all about in Wired:

Brian addresses us from his bedroom, which has an impressive record collection, an electric-guitar case, a full wastebasket, a bowl of pet food, and a bed whose duvet is slightly askew. He has a beard and a voice so soothing that he sounds as if he is telling a bedtime story. This is exactly what we need. The other faculty members who are taking the class—I see their diminutive heads, some of them gray-haired, arrayed in a vertical column on the right of my screen—are probably as terrified as I am.

Brian is an excellent teacher. He shows us how to sign in to the university’s Zoom page and calmly guides us through the mysteries of Gallery vs. Speaker View, Spotlight Video, Microphone Mute and Unmute, Chat, Screen Share, Whiteboard, and Breakout Rooms. I’ve heard Zoom images described as “squares,” but I see now that they’re horizontal rectangles, each inhabited by a face. In addition to us real students, Brian has four pretend students, one per rectangle. Two of them, Clare and Timberley, whose names are displayed below them in white, are fellow educational technology staffers. They wave at us. The other two—Barry, a small blue teddy bear, and Yoda, who is crocheted—do not wave.

With a class full of Gen Zs who grew up on screens, Fadiman was confident that her students would have no issues learning through Zoom rather than IRL. But she found that they missed being together — and the physical expression of sharing food or touching an arm to offer support. Beyond the class, her students were also missing out on rites of passage others have taken for granted.

It’s worst for the seniors. Senior spring is supposed to be the best time they’ll ever have in college, the time to consolidate friendships and check off their bucket lists and try to hook up with people they’ve always considered out of their league, because it’s now or never. They’ll miss Senior Week: Bar Night, the Last Chance Dance, the Day of Service, the senior picnic. They’ll miss Commencement.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Lucas Waldron, Nadia Sussman, Thalia Beaty, and Ryan Gabrielson, as well as Jamil Smith, Cynthia Tucker, Venkatesh Rao, and Sirin Kale.

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1. “Somebody’s Gotta Help Me”

Lucas Waldron, Nadia Sussman, Thalia Beaty, Ryan Gabrielson
ProPublica | June 16, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,543 words)

“But abuse by law enforcement inside jails remains largely out of sight and harder to document.” Phillip Garcia was in psychiatric crisis. In jail and in the hospital, guards responded with violent force and restrained him for almost 20 hours, until he died.

2. The Power of Black Lives Matter

Jamil Smith | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,809 words)

“How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next.” Do you know the names Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi? You do now.

3. The Way of John Lewis

Cynthia Tucker | The Bitter Southerner | June 16, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,817 words)

“As federal troops and militarized police descended on protesters, John Lewis pleaded for nonviolence. Cynthia Tucker shares her hope that a new generation of activists can learn from his courageous and peaceful fight for ‘beloved community.'”

4. Pandemic Time

Venkatesh Rao | Noema | June 8, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,337 words)

“The distorted experience of time through the COVID-19 pandemic reveals it to be an atemporal liminal passage between two great historic eras.”

5. ‘It’s Bullshit’: Inside the Weird, Get-Rich-Quick World of Dropshipping

Sirin Kale | Wired UK | May 1, 2020 | 10 minutes (4,035 words)

“$750,000 of sales, and around $100,000 of profit for Despin, in just 11 months. To this day, he has never seen or touched the product.”

How To Make $1000 PER DAY From ANYWHERE In The World!!! Totally Not Shady!

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Making your millions while working on a tropical beach in your swimwear is the ideal for many digital nomads dreaming of breaking away from the 9-5 for good. As Sirin Kale discovered for Wired UK, dropshipping is one way people have been earning big just by clutching their Macbooks. Dropshipping is a “fulfillment” method where an entrepreneur identifies a product — usually through Chinese eCommerce platform AliExpress — that they think they can sell to European or American consumers. They then create a website using Shopify, and identify and target buyers. You never even see the products you sell. 

The town, once a stop-off for backpackers en route to Ubud’s yoga studios and hippy scene, has in recent years become a hub for self-described “digital nomads”. In Canggu’s cafés, barefoot westerners run fledgling companies from MacBook Pros. When not talking Facebook ads or cost-per-click, they socialise exclusively with each other. “The thing is, not many Indonesians are on a level with bule [an Indonesian term for foreigners],” explains one digital nomad over the fart of hot tub jets in Amo, a luxury spa. Around us, statue-like men wander in and out of steam rooms (CrossFit is big here), talking about e-commerce and intermittent fasting.

Inside the city’s co-working spaces (Dojo is the oldest in Canggu, Outpost the new challenger), people are building business empires selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met. Welcome to the world of dropshipping.

Those who make it in dropshipping are idealized by people desperate to follow suit. Some dropshippers are adding to their profits by selling courses on how to achieve success to their acolytes, while others have stepped away from a business they now recognize as unethical.

A gruff, profane Australian who speaks his mind, Craig, 41, has banned anyone from selling dropshipping courses in Dojo. “My main gripe is that you’re selling a course for $6,000 to a person from middle America who’s put all their funds into this, and you’re teaching them to sell avocado slicers online with 40 other people who are also selling avocado slicers,” he says.

Some dropshippers are shuttering their stores, and shipping out. Louden is one of them. Despite the fact that he’s earning executive-level pay while wearing boardshorts, he wants to leave dropshipping behind. He’s aware that even the most successful dropshipping store will eventually run out of steam: when the cost of Facebook advertising increases beyond your marketing spend, you’re done. “At the end of this year, we’re probably done with dropshipping,” he says. “I want to build brands – actual ones – that provide value to people.”

I’m reminded of a comment one of the statue-men made amid the ice baths and steam rooms of Amo Spa. I’d asked him if he was a dropshipper, and he’d laughed and said that he wasn’t any more: “I’m doing something ethical.”

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What Happens When You Go Offline

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Stressed by constant connectivity, exhausted by having to rely on his computer and phone to communicate, artist Sam Winston decided to see what would happen if he tuned out all of modernity’s noise. Instead of just going camping or leaving his phone at home during a long bike ride, he isolated himself in the dark for a few days in his east London studio. “No screens,” Tom Lamont writes in 1843 magazine. “No sun. No visual stimulation of any kind.” Winston taped all his studio windows. He prepared all his food, slept, and worked in darkness. His experiment revealed a lot about the function and capabilities of the human mind under the opposing conditions of constant stimulation and the calm of deprivation. Many of us can relate to Winston’s urge to tune out, if not the way he went about it. Now that so many of us are hunched over our phones during shelter-in-place, relying on screens for news, entertainment, socialization, and work, the onslaught of information is more apparent than ever. Winston wasn’t simply escaping a glut of screens and information. He was escaping our era, one which has evolved so quickly that humanity has barely had time to adjust. A study in 2011 found that on a typical day Americans were taking in five times as much information as they had done 25 years earlier,” Lamont reports, “and this was before most people had bought smartphones.”

The world in the 21st century is no more richly textured or exotic to touch than it used to be. It smells about the same and there are no new flavours. Not since the coming of factories, then aeroplanes, domestic appliances and motorways has there been a serious uptick in sound pollution. Yet the spill of information and distraction that comes at us by eye has grown and grown ceaselessly for two decades, without any sign of a halt or plateau. DM! Breaking-news! Inbox (1)! This is a time of the scrolling, bottomless visual, when bus stops and the curved walls of Tube platforms play video adverts and grandma’s face swims onto a smartphone to say hi. People watch Oscar-nominated movies while standing in queues, their devices held at waist height. A Netflix executive can quip, semi-seriously, that he covets the hours we sleep (hours in which we do not, currently, stream Netflix shows). Apple has put an extra screen on our wrists and Google retains quiet hope that we will eventually wear a screen inside our specs. Big news lands in 140 characters or less, ideally with a startling picture or piece of video, else it doesn’t register as big news.

Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what’s-next-what’s-next of this world through our peepers. As an artist, Sam Winston was often on the lookout for topsy-turvy projects – weird, sidelong ways to unmoor familiar habits or nudge his work in new directions. He wanted to know what would happen, to him and to his work, if he hid away from the ocular blitz for a while.

Now, working and sleeping in his blacked-out studio, he began to notice new things. Without sunlight as a guide, the day’s rhythms came via aural clues he had been only dimly aware of before: the cessation of London’s air traffic overnight, or the sound of idling vehicles as they took fractionally longer to move off from traffic lights during rush hour. When he brewed cups of rooibos in a rote-remembered action at his tea station he noticed that he could hear the difference between hot and cold liquids as he poured them. He began to see, he later told me, “how intelligent our senses are. And how we just drown them in the tsunami.”

Winston found that he was productive in the dark, too, drawing until his pencils were nubs and creating a series of huge sketches – broad-stroked in places or crowded with overlapping sentences in his crabby handwriting – that would later become part of an exhibition at the Southbank Centre in London. Between drawing jags he had vivid daydreams, even hallucinations, “as if my brain was a digital radio left on search, constantly searching for an available channel”.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Franklin Foer, Andy Greenberg, Jerry Saltz Sara Selevitch, and Kyle Buchanan.

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1. Putin Is Well On His Way to Stealing the Next Election

Franklin Foer | The Atlantic | May 11, 2020 | 30 minutes (7,634 words)

Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it, by pitting people against one another, sowing discord, misinformation, chaos, and doubt about election integrity. The problem, that plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

2. The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

Andy Greenberg | Wired | May 12, 2020 | 55 minutes (13,941 words)

“At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.”

3. My Appetites

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | May 12, 2020 | 35 minutes (8,500 words)

“On eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.”

4. The Un-Heroic Reality of Being an ‘Essential’ Restaurant Worker

Sara Selevitch | Eater | May 12, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,166 words)

“The imperative to thank frontline workers has not extended into material protection and solidarity, from either the government or the general public.”

5. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic

Kyle Buchanan | The New York Times | May 12, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,370 words)

“I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

The ‘Accidental Hero’ Who Saved the Internet from WannaCry

Marcus Hutchins (R) the British cyber security expert accused of creating and selling malware that steals banking passwords arrives with his lawyers Marcia Homann (L) and Brian Klein (R) at US Federal Courthouse on August 14, 2017 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. / AFP PHOTO / Joshua Lott via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins was only 22 years old when he discovered the Achilles heel of WannaCry, a piece of ransomware that caused $8 billion in damage in 2017 by taking down Windows computers around the world — including in banks and hospitals — and encrypting their contents for a $300 ransom. As Andy Greenberg reports in this epic piece for Wired, Hutchins learned to reverse engineer botnets in part by creating and selling his own malware as a youth in England. Hutchins’ darkhat hacking was not without its innocent victims, and the FBI eventually caught up to him. But did he deserve leniency in sentencing, considering the good work he’d done stopping WannaCry in its tracks, saving lives in the process? You be the judge.

Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA’s highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.

Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch.

Hutchins says he still hasn’t been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.

I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he’s cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins’ fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Shawn Yuan, Marty Munson, Anna Merlan, Lauren Collins, and Drew Magary.

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1. Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup

Shawn Yuan | Wired | May 1, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,696 words)

“The dawn of a pandemic — as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet.”

2. What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America

Marty Munson | Men’s Health | April 30, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,255 words)

“The first five minutes — especially when it’s below 60 — can be so painful and you think, I don’t want to do this. But when you’re swimming in training, within ten minutes, your body goes numb and there’s this adrenaline and a thrill. I don’t understand it, but it’s incredible.”

3. I Tried Hypnosis to Deal with My Pandemic Anxiety, and Got Something Much Weirder

Anna Merlan | Vice Magazine | May 5, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,565 words)

“When I stepped through the door, I told him, I found myself in a room entirely lined with aquariums, in which large, spotted, neon-colored fish were floating. It felt peaceful, I told Brown. ‘There’s some purpose here. I’m not worried about the fish, they’re being taken care of.'”

4. Missed Calls

Lauren Collins | The New Yorker | May 4, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,423 words)

Lauren Collins’ father died in March of leukemia as the pandemic began to unfold, forcing her to learn to grieve in a time of enforced isolation. This essay is a remembrance of her father and an exploration of grieving from a distance.

5. I’m On a Pancake-only Breakfast Diet and I Wish I Started This Sooner

Drew Magary | SF Gate | May 4, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,979 words)

“MY NAME IS DREW AND I LOVE PANCAKES.”

How China Censored Citizens and the Press on COVID-19

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As Shawn Yuan reports at Wired, the Chinese government knew that a new SARS-like pneumonia had appeared in late 2019, yet they worked hard to keep this deadly virus a secret from their population and the world. As citizens shared accounts of the devastation with one another on social media, as reporters wrote and published stories about the outbreak, the Chinese government’s censors vigilantly deleted their posts and their accounts. Why? To conceal the extent of the outbreak and the inadequacy of its response, so that China could portray itself as a benevolent savior to its people and a generous friend supplying medical equipment to the world.

That night, just when Yue was about to log off and try to sleep, she saw the following sentence pop up on her WeChat Moments feed, the rough equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed: “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see dead bodies lying around without being collected and patients seeking medical help but having no place to get treatment.”

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her.

She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”

Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off.

The next morning, when she opened WeChat, a single message appeared: Her account had been suspended for having “spread malicious rumors” and she would not be able to unblock it. She knew at once that her late-night post had stepped on a censorship landmine.

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

While articles and posts that displease Chinese censors continue to be expunged across the Chinese internet, the messages that thrive on television and state-sanctioned sites are rosy: News anchors narrate videos of nurses saying how honored they have been to fight for their country despite all the hardships and video clips of China “generously” shipping planeloads of medical equipment to other countries hit hard by the virus are playing on a loop.

As the outbreak began to slow down in mainland China, the government remained cautious in filtering out any information that might contradict the seemingly unstoppable trend of recovery. On March 4, a Shanghai news site called The Paper reported that a Covid-19 patient who had been discharged from the hospital in late February later died in a post-discharge isolation center; another news site questioned whether hospitals were discharging patients prematurely for the sake of “clearing all cases.” Both stories vanished.

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Fear of Suffering Alone

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Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | May 2020 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

My ex and I used to watch the Doomsday Preppers reality show on the National Geographic channel together, and talk about how crazy those people were at the same time that we made mental notes about their good ideas. After watching enough episodes, we finally put together some basic earthquake supplies (the most likely disaster to hit us in the Pacific Northwest); we bought a rectangular plastic bin and filled it with freeze-dried foods, a first aid kit, hand-cranked radio, flashlight and extra batteries, extra clothes and shoes, our camping gear, some toilet paper, and a few random extras like playing cards and my expired pain meds from my cesarean (they could come in handy). We filled a couple jugs full of water and tried to remember to switch it out now and then. I put shoes under our beds (in case windows break, you need to be able to walk out of the house and not cut your feet), and continually reminded myself to get an extra pair of glasses (because without my vision, I’d be screwed and helpless). We would have gotten a very poor grade as preppers, but we did enough to feel a little better about our situation. And I knew that no matter what, we’d be in it together. That gave me comfort. I would not have to go through such a crisis alone.

Now, we are all going through a crisis, and I have been separated from my husband for five months. He moved out of our house on December 1st, a few months after we made the mutual decision to split. I have not once regretted this decision, which took many years of unease and heartache to finally reach, and I even started dating someone fairly quickly, enjoying my newfound freedom.

But now, we are going through a pandemic.
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