The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.Culture and entertainment are changing; so is this column. This isn’t the Monitor that you’re used to. Instead of a news roundup, this space will now be a weekly essay looking at the…
Like many people who live in urban areas, I have a small front yard. But it’s painstakingly cultivated. Here is the gate that my husband welded himself, there the strawberry beds. As the weather has warmed up, my preschoolers have spent more time outside on our stoop. On our little patch of land, with even…
Earlier this week, a comment from Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 response, offered yet another cautionary tale of what happens when scientific ambiguity meets political certitude. It went like this: At a press conference Monday, Van Kerkhove said that cases in which asymptomatic people spread the virus to others…
Giulio Berruti was asking an age-old actor’s question: What’s my motivation? The hunky Italian star—6-foot-3, dreamy blue eyes, perfect stubble—was on the set of Gabriel’s Inferno, a pulpy romance movie shot in New York last winter. Why, he asked a group of women a few feet behind the monitor on the soundstage, is Gabriel so…
Amazon announced on Wednesday it was implementing a “one-year moratorium” on police use of Rekognition, its facial-recognition technology. Lawmakers and civil liberties groups have expressed growing alarm over the tool’s potential for misuse by law enforcement for years, particularly against communities of color. Now, weeks into worldwide protests against police brutality and racism sparked by…
When protests erupted around the world after the death of George Floyd, who died in the custody of Minneapolis police, the threat of a global pandemic calmly took a backseat as a rush of justifiable rage against ongoing racial injustice flowed through all 50 American states and several countries around the world. As protesters took…
With 2.5 billion users worldwide, Google has a responsibility to make its Android operating system as secure as possible. But the company has at times struggled to adequately vet apps in the Google Play Store, allowing malicious programs through that thousands or millions of users go on to download. With Google’s release of the Android…
Here’s how in-person voting should look during the coronavirus pandemic: lots of polling places, fully staffed with well-protected election workers, each serving small numbers of voters who are able to quickly get in and out without having to congregate at length in close quarters. Here’s what happened in Georgia on Tuesday: not that.Despite a record…
Torn Banner Studios is promising that Chivalry 2 will deliver first-person slasher combat with up to 64 players at once, a big upgrade from a franchise that started life as a Half-Life 2 mod. The first game launched after an $85k Kickstarter in 2012, and now the Unreal Engine 4-powered sequel is coming to PC…
The official beta for the next version of Android is out now, and if you have a spare Pixel phone, I really do recommend you check it out. If you don’t, my recommendation is not to install it — betas are never a great idea on something you truly depend on, and your main phone…
