Hello! Welcome to the Monday edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news hub. Today, we’ve got some updates on Charlie’s Angels’ box office take (not good!), Sara Lee’s response to last weekend’s Saturday Night Live sketch (surprisingly positive!), and the internet’s campaign to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut (still happening, apparently!). Let’s get started.Why #ReleaseTheSnyderCut Is TrendingFirst, some background:…
Gaming on PC has always been an expensive hobby. Growing up, I used to dream about being able to afford a real gaming computer. Our family PC was running Windows 3.1 well into the heyday of Windows 98. I used to tear pages out of PC Gamer, and even WIRED magazine, and pin them to…
When right-wing and tabloid outlets published nude photos of former US representative Katie Hill last month, the images were easily distributed on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, using platform features intended to boost engagement and help publishers drive traffic to their websites. Together, those posts have been shared thousands of times by users…
After speaking at an MIT conference on emerging AI technology earlier this year, I entered a lobby full of industry vendors and noticed an open doorway leading to tall grass and shrubbery recreating a slice of the African plains. I had stumbled onto TrailGuard AI, Intel’s flagship AI for Good project, which the chip company…
OK, let’s get this out of the way first. Yes, they’ve edited the original trilogy once again. (Can we at least agree that “Maclunkey!” should only be used as an expletive from this point on?) And yes, there’s also a new (and very charming) trailer for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order that came out a…
Thanksgiving travel is the stuff of suffering: the crowding, the stress, the weather-induced delays, and, at least for some, dinner with the whole family. But come next year, your trip home, or anywhere else on a commercial airplane, may well demand something even worse: a trip to the DMV.As of October 1, 2020, the TSA…
Whether you’re trying to find a turntable so Mom and Dad can bust out their vintage vinyl collection, or you want to give the gift of great sound to a younger music enthusiast or middle-aged audiophile, it can be tough to find great-sounding gear that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. That’s where we…
At the beginning of October, a 31-year-old construction estimator named Samantha parked her Honda Fit on the street in Chicago. She left her backpack with a laptop and external hard drive in it under the backseat, and carefully covered the seat with a black blanket. Yet by the time she came back to her car,…
In late spring 2017, Andrea Ganna approached his boss, Ben Neale, with a pitch: He wanted to investigate the genetics of sexuality. Neale hesitated. One of the top geneticists in the country, Neale and his colleagues at the Broad Institute, a pioneering biotech hub in Boston, had a decade earlier developed software that made it…
In Star Wars movies, people flying the Millennium Falcon pull a very specific lever to jump the ship into hyperspace, which is technobabble for “Go very fast!” People do the same thing at Disneyland, on a ride called Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. It’s part of Galaxy’s Edge, a new billion-dollar, 14-acre expansion, and to get…
