More often than not, when people buy books online, they do so by clicking little thumbnails of novels and essay collections on Amazon’s website. Those thumbnails then materialize as physical copies on their doorsteps in a matter of days. Easy-peasy. The online retailer is the most dominant force in American bookselling today, accounting for over…
When Twitter suddenly announced it was shutting down Vine in 2016, fans immediately started campaigning to bring the beloved short-form video app back. Dom Hofmann, one of the original cofounders, has been working on doing just that for years. After a few stops and starts, his new app Byte finally launched last week. It already…
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. What’s been happening this week? Well, we’ve got some horrific meme news (that’s a good thing, for once) and also some updates on Disney+ and The Batman. Here we go!Seth Rogen Is Working on a Movie About a Killer MemeIn the…
Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) wanted supporters to fund his memes—but he may end up paying for them instead. On Monday, King and his campaign for reelection to the House of Representatives received a cease-and-desist letter from the attorneys of Laney Griner, the mother of 2011’s most ubiquitous meme, Success Kid: a baseball-shirted cherub clasping a…
As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaches, 36-year-old marathoner Desiree Linden is capturing hearts and headlines. This February, Linden will toe the line at the US Olympic marathon trials in Atlanta. Two months later, she’s lining up at the storied Boston Marathon, and—if all goes according to plan—she will represent the United States in Tokyo in…
For as long as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China has been raging, public health officials have kept their eyes on one key variable: whether the virus was continuing to spread even far away from the epicenter in Wuhan. Last week, when the World Health Organization decided against declaring the outbreak an international…
In mid-November, as his House colleagues on Capitol Hill were consumed with questions about Ukraine and impeachment, Senator Mark Warner took to CNBC’s Squawk Box to discuss what he saw as one of the most important problems facing the country: Fitbit.Or, more specifically, the danger of allowing Google to swallow up the personal fitness and…
Earlier this month, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk appeared on stage in Shanghai to celebrate the opening of Tesla’s new 9.3 million-square-foot factory there, and the start of production for the Model 3, the company’s affordable sedan, in Asia. But he was also in Shanghai to dance. Musk shuffle stepped and waggled his hands.…
As I write this, a pixelated little goose is dragging a bad meme onto my desktop and tracking mud all over my Google doc. The screen is cluttered with terrible cartoons, including one of the goose smoking a pipe while floating smugly in a pond. When I pushed the period key at the end of…
From more than a block away, I hear the man playing the trumpet. It’s a little after 9 am Wednesday, and his classical sonata carries through the air nearly undisturbed, a remarkable feat given the player’s choice of corner. He stands at the usually cacophonous junction of Fremont and Market streets in downtown San Francisco,…
