Search Results for: wired

Scrap the To Do Lists

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Like many people, Laurie Penny grew up with the concept that success is achieved through hard work. As she writes for Wired, this attitude — combined with the body’s physiological inclination to respond to threats with agitated alertness — has made productiveness the metric of choice for coping with the “clusterfuck of the Corona Crisis.” However, productivity does not provide a solution to this plight. This isn’t happening because you didn’t work hard enough, and it won’t be fixed by optimizing your morning routines and adopting a can-do attitude. In fact, this is a crisis that could overturn the whole social order. So, even though most of us are desperate to feel normal, we should give ourselves a break and stop trying to self-optimize to the background noise of roommates, kids, and our inner critics.

Right through the white-knuckle ride of my twenties and beyond, I clung to work as a way of protecting myself when I was scared, when I was hurt, when the future seemed to collapse on itself like a stack of marked cards. No matter how many marches I go to, there is some part of me that believes that if I can only self-optimize a bit harder then the world will right itself, no one I love will suffer, and death will have no dominion. So when the coronavirus crisis began, I started writing myself ambitious to-do lists on giant sticky notes—because when every cultural certainty starts collapsing in my hands like wet cake, writing ambitious to-do lists is how I calm down.

I would exercise in the mornings and write in the evenings. I would cook. I would sort out my finances. By week three, I would finally finish my book. I would organize my time so I had no time to feel any emotion other than manageable, everyday anxiety about my workload, with occasional breaks for feeling appropriately grateful that I still have a job I can do from home. Unfortunately, somewhere between writing those to-do lists and watching overpromoted incompetents invite their voters to kindly die to keep the economy going in the manner to which it has become accustomed, the entire concept of linear time seemed to disintegrate, which really played havoc with my calendar.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

MANHATTAN, NY, FEBRUARY 25, 2011. Chef and Author Gabrielle Hamilton, is seen in her restaurant named Prune in Manhattan, NY. (Photo by ©Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Gabrielle Hamilton, Nicholas Thompson, Anna Badkhen, Alex Perry, and Caleb Johnson.

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1. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

Gabrielle Hamilton | New York Times Magazine | April 23, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,831 words)

“Forced to shutter Prune, I’ve been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.”

2. To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past

Nicholas Thompson | Wired | April 20, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,971 words)

“After 20 years of long-distance competition, I ran my fastest. All it took was tech, training, and a new understanding of my life.”

3. The Pandemic, Our Common Story

Anna Badkhen | Granta | April 16, 2020 | 28 minutes (4,780 words)

“Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.”

4. The True Story of the White Island Eruption

Alex Perry | Outside | April 15, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,610 words)

“It was supposed to be a routine six-hour tour, including the highlight: a quick hike into the island’s otherworldly caldera. Then the volcano exploded. What happened next reveals troubling questions about the risks we’re willing to take when lives hang in the balance.”

5. A Way Back

Caleb Johnson | The Bitter Southerner | April 21, 2020 | 25 minutes (6,276 words)

“E.O. Wilson’s big ideas for saving nature and humanity along with it.”

No Time Like the Present

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Robert Burke Warren | Longreads | April 2020 | 5 minutes (1,174 words)

What day is it?

In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or read them) every day, while social distancing at home with my wife and son. Like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, I am “unstuck in time.” Surely, many days have passed, but no, it’s been only one or two. A week seems a month, a month a season. Last week? No. Yesterday.

I know I’m not alone. “March was the shittiest year ever,” goes the meme.

Whereas once we lamented “Where does the time go?” meaning it’s racing too fast, now we move through denser space, longer minutes filled with yesterdays for which we pine, and tomorrows we either fear, or fixate on with rapacious longing. Or both. Routines — job, school, shopping, socializing — are disrupted, crippled, or gone. In this strange, new “now,” we fill space with worry and/or desperate hope, visiting a conjured future and/or hazy yesterdays, all out of our control. Unstuck in time. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Too true, Bill.

And we don’t know what day it is.
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9,000 Seconds, With Only 47 to Spare

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In this personal essay, Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief of Wired, writes about what he has overcome spiritually, mentally, and physically, to continue to improve as a runner, running a sub-2:30 marathon at age 44. Thompson considers the role that running has played in his life (he’s overcome cancer) and how his father inspired him to excel. Thompson knows that hard physical training, technology in the form of GPS watches, heart rate monitors, and nutrition regimens are important, but he believes running is simply a form of hide and seek with your own brain, ever vigilant in protecting the body from injury.

My variant of thyroid cancer was eminently treatable, and in the months that followed I recovered slowly. At first, I would step out of my apartment and struggle to walk the one block uphill from my apartment, in Brooklyn, to Prospect Park. But in due course I could walk anywhere, and eventually run. One glorious day, I both ran 10 miles and talked optimistically with my wife about having children. Fitness came back faster than I expected. Nine months after the diagnosis, I ran 15 slow miles in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado, and burst into tears as I came down from the last peak.

So why do runners have limits? And why do the limits differ from one person to the next? In part, it’s because of physiological factors: blood oxygen levels, lactate, muscular strength, each of which has a genetic component. But there’s another theory, put forward by a sports physiologist named Tim Noakes. As he puts it, in what he calls the central governor model, part of the reason we slow is because our brain is telling our body to stop because it’s scared. It doesn’t want you to overheat or develop a stress fracture in your shin, so it preemptively hits the brakes. If Noakes’ theory is right, it implies a mind-body dilemma. We all can go faster. We just have to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brain is our brain.

Hitting my goal meant running a marathon in 9,000 seconds, and I crossed the line with just 47 to spare: 2:29:13. Only one person older than me went faster that day. My family sent texts full of emojis and love. Finley came running to congratulate me, to celebrate, and to reveal that, having seen me the week before, and toward the end of the race, he’d worried I’d pushed it too far. For the first time, he said, I had looked like I was truly exhausted. I’d made it. I’d done it. But now it was time to stop for a while.

We give our children our genes and our love, and we don’t have any idea of what, in the end, they’ll do with them. My grandfather scarred my father by trying to push him into sports; my father inspired me by taking me running around the block. Maybe one of my sons will write a tell-all one day about the pressure his father put on him to be something he didn’t want to be. Or maybe they’ll find that they love the sport too, and I’ll end up drinking beet juice with my grandkids.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Sandra Upson, Helen Ouyang, Francesca Mari, Jordan Ritter Conn, and Jesse Davis.

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1. The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

Sandra Upson | Wired | April 14, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,112 words)

“Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. But then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable — for a long time, no one could make sense of it.”

2. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same.

Helen Ouyang | The New York Times Magazine | April 14, 2020 | 43 minutes (10,800 words)

Dr. Helen Ouyang reports from front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. “It’s no longer getting through this day or this week; we are in the deep now, the interminable. For doctors to survive this pandemic, we have to feel each moment — even if it makes each moment more difficult to endure.”

3. The Shark and the Shrimpers

Francesca Mari | The Atlantic | April 16, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,079 words)

“A well-known attorney helped land a $2 billion settlement for Gulf Coast seafood-industry workers. But who was he really representing?”

4. “Everyone Is So Afraid”: COVID-19’s Impact on the American Restaurant Industry

Jordan Ritter Conn | The Ringer | April 14, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,771 words)

“For Café Rakka in Tennessee and its fellow restaurants nationwide, the Coronavirus pandemic has become a crisis unlike any in living memory. With tolls both human and financial, there’s no guidebook for how to move forward.”

5. Let’s Stay Together

Jesse Davis | The Bitter Southerner | April 14, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,881 words)

“Memphis photographer Jamie Harmon took to the streets and asked his neighbors to stand for portraits of life under lockdown.”

Genius, Interrupted

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Lee Holloway was a brilliant coder, co-founder, and master architect of Cloudflare. He was “the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones.” But over time he became withdrawn, sleeping for days at a time, unable to engage with his family or friends. And his affect, when he did speak, was strangely flat. As Sandra Upson reports in this exceptional piece at Wired, no one knew a degenerative disease — frontotemporal dementia — lurked inside his brain, slowly killing off cells in his frontal and temporal lobes, irrevocably altering his personality in startling ways.

He was the master architect whose vision had guided what began as a literal sketch on a napkin into a tech giant with some 1,200 employees and 83,000 paying customers. He laid the groundwork for a system that now handles more than 10 percent of all internet requests and blocks billions of cyberthreats per day. Much of the architecture he dreamed up is still in place.

He was becoming erratic in other ways too. Some of his colleagues were surprised when Lee separated from his first wife and soon after paired up with a coworker. They figured his enormous success and wealth must have gone to his head. “All of us were just thinking he made a bunch of money, married his new girl,” Prince says. “He kind of reassessed his life and had just become a jerk.”

The people close to Lee felt tossed aside. They thought he’d chosen to shed his old life. In fact, it was anything but a choice. Over the next few years, Lee’s personality would warp and twist even more, until he became almost unrecognizable to the people who knew him best. Rooting out the cause took years of detective work—and forced his family to confront the trickiest questions of selfhood.

Few disorders ravage their victims’ selfhood with the intensity of the behavioral variant of FTD. It takes all the things that define a person—hobbies and interests, the desire to connect with others, everyday habits—and shreds them. Over time, the disease transforms its victims into someone unrecognizable, a person with all the same memories but an alarming new set of behaviors. Then it hollows them out and shaves away their mobility, language, and recollections.

Because it is relatively unknown and can resemble Alzheimer’s or a psychiatric disorder, FTD is often hard to diagnose. As in Lee’s case, the early stages can be misinterpreted as signs of nothing more serious than a midlife crisis. Patients can spend years shuttling to marriage counselors, human resources departments, therapists, and psychologists. By the time patients learn the name of their disorder, they are often unable to grasp the gravity of their situation.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Lauren Markham, Ariel Levy, Brooke Jarvis, Audrey Gray, and Chris Dennis.

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1. The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed

Lauren Markham | LitHub | April 6, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,529 words)

On solitude, snow, and finding reasons to write.

2. A Missionary on Trial

Ariel Levy | The New Yorker | April 6, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,340 words)

“Renée Bach went to Uganda to save children — but many in her care died. Was she responsible?”

3. Why Old-Growth Trees Are Crucial to Fighting Climate Change

Brooke Jarvis | Wired | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,253 words)

Science has a lot to earn about the way ecosystems hold and process the Earth’s carbon, and how efforts like reforestation can help improve those systems’ effect on climate change. Two things are clear: Virgin forests sequester a lot of carbon, and humanity can’t keep clear-cutting forests and burning fossil fuels the way we have been.

4. The Baller

Audrey Gray | The Delacorte Review | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,492 words)

Weary and frightened by the scary science she encounters on the climate beat, journalist Audrey Gray finds hope in the form of octogenarian Ed Mazria, a former basketball player turned architect turned climate evangelist, who has an actionable plan.

5. Push Play

Chris Dennis | Guernica Magazine | April 6, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,969 words)

“It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.”

Did the United States Booby-Trap a Vital Soviet Gas Pipeline?

The flags of the USSR and USA hang over chairs on stage at the 1985 Geneva Summit. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Is it a tale too far-fetched to be true, or too bizarre not to be? Allegedly, a disgruntled KBG agent code-named “Farewell” gave away Soviet secrets to the French, who then promptly shared them with the US — giving the American government a veritable shopping list of the US technology most coveted by the Soviets. Enter Gus Weiss, an eccentric and brilliant insider in the US intelligence community. According to Alex French at Wired, Weiss devised the perfect plan to thwart the Russians: sell them what they want, but first make sure that technology is programmed to self-destruct, taking down a natural gas pipeline vital to the cash-strapped Russians.

Weiss proposed using the Farewell shopping lists to supply the Soviets with the products they sought.

But Weiss wanted the gadgets altered, pre-improved so that they would eventually fail. “The scheme was so goober-pea simple that nobody had come upon it,” Weiss wrote of his solution. Even if the Soviets sniffed out the American trickery, Weiss wrote, “the stratagem would still work as the Agency’s Red Star clientele would be forced to test and retest each recalcitrant unit, provoking delays and finger pointing in the Center, its puffed up potentates sniffing a Gulag behind their next performance appraisal … Real fake devices, false fake devices … The Soviets had set themselves up in exquisite fashion.”

That alternative plan is at the core of the legend of Gus Weiss. The best-known version of the tale goes like this: High up on the Soviet tech shopping list was software to regulate the pressure gauges and valves for the critical Siberian gas pipeline. According to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, the Soviets sought the software on the open market. American export controls prohibited its sale from the US. However, a small industrial software company located in Calgary called Cov-Can produced what the Soviets wanted. As Weiner writes, “The Soviets sent a Line X officer to steal the software. The CIA and the Canadians conspired to let them have it.”

The faulty software “weaved” its way through Soviet quality control. The pipeline software ran swimmingly for months, but then pressure in the pipeline gradually mounted. And one day—the date remains unclear, though most put it in June 1982—the software went haywire, the pressure soaring out of control. The pipeline ruptured, igniting a blast in the wilds of Siberia so massive that, according to Thomas C. Reed’s At the Abyss, “at the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at three kilotons.”

The pipeline explosion is said to have cost Moscow tens millions of dollars it could ill-afford to waste.

You be the judge

Detective Fitbit

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The personal activity-tracking device, Fitbit, has become increasingly popular since it was first released in 2009. It was therefore only a matter of time until one would be worn by victims or suspects of crimes — and potentially be the key to finding out what had actually occurred. As Lauren Smiley explains for Wired, people are inadvertently wearing “a sort of black box for the body that reveals physiological truths that its wearer might prefer to conceal.”

At 90 years old, Tony Aiello was arrested for the murder of his stepdaughter, Karen Navarra. On the day of her death, Tony dropped by her house with a surprise treat of biscotti and pizza. He claimed she was alive when he left. Her Fitbit told a different story.

At a San Jose police station, Tony was hauled into a homicide interrogation room. “What the hell am I doing here?” he asked detectives Brian Meeker and Mike Montonye. Then he waived his right to remain silent and amiably rattled off his life history and answered questions about Karen, until one detective abruptly shifted the subject: Did Tony know what a Fitbit was? He shook his head. They told him that it was a watch with a step counter built into it. “Oh, nice,” Tony marveled, not seeing where the questioning was going. It also has a heart rate monitor, they said. “Oh, that’s better yet.”

The detectives continued: The data shows that Karen’s heart stopped at 3:28 pm, they told Tony. What’s more, they knew Tony was there at the time.

“Oh, no,” Tony said. “She was alive when I left.”

Should we be using Fitbit information in court cases? There are still no set legal standards for how and when this new type of data should be admitted. There are also no guarantees it can be relied on.

Smartwatches decipher heart rate using green LEDs that beam hundreds of times per second into capillaries through the skin. Those capillaries allow in more of the light when full of blood, and less between beats, and the device measures how much light is absorbed. That measurement is then siphoned through a proprietary algorithm to generate a heart rate figure. University of Wisconsin researchers looked at how well wrist-worn fitness trackers measured heart rate, comparing it to an electrocardiograph, the gold standard for heart monitoring. They found that the fitness trackers’ heart rate deviated more from the actual rate when a subject exercised on a treadmill than when at rest. (Fitbit won’t talk specifics about its accuracy, saying in a statement, “We are confident in the performance of all our devices” and that the company continues to test them.)

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How a Mom Penetrated the Pen to Hack the Warden’s Computer

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John Strand didn’t think it was a great idea to allow his mom to attempt to break in to a South Dakota prison as part of a “penetration” or “pen” test of their security systems. But as Lily Hay Newman reports at Wired, Rita Strand, age 58, insisted. Armed only with a fake badge and some confidence, she posed as a health inspector doing a surprise inspection and managed to gain access — unaccompanied! — throughout the facility where she planted “rubber duckies” (USB sticks with code used to compromise computer security systems) on several computers, including the one belonging to the warden.

“She takes off, and I’m thinking in the back of my head that this is a really bad idea,” Strand says. “She has no pen testing experience. No IT hacking experience. I had said, ‘Mom, if this gets bad you need to pick up the phone and call me immediately.'”

Pen testers usually try to get in and out of a facility as quickly as possible to avoid arousing suspicion. But after 45 minutes of waiting, there was no sign of Rita.

“It gets to be about an hour, and I’m panicking,” he says. “And I’m thinking I should have thought it through, because we all went in the same car so I’m out in the middle of nowhere at a pie shop with no way to get to her.”

Suddenly, the Black Hills laptops began blinking with activity. Rita had done it. The USB drives she had planted were creating so-called web shells, which gave the team at the café access to various computers and servers inside the prison. Strand remembers one colleague yelling out: “Your mom’s OK!”

In fact, Rita had encountered no resistance at all inside the prison. She told the guards at the entrance that she was conducting a surprise health inspection and they not only allowed her in, but let her keep her cell phone, with which she recorded the entire operation. In the facility’s kitchen, she checked the temperatures in refrigerators and freezers, pretended to swab for bacteria on the floors and counters, looked for expired food, and took photos.

But Rita also asked to see employee work areas and break areas, the prison’s network operations center, and even the server room—all allegedly to check for insect infestations, humidity levels, and mold. No one said no. She was even allowed to roam the prison alone, giving her ample time to take photos and plant her Rubber Duckies.

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