Welcome to the Chinese Century |
Do you wish you were Chinese? Apparently a lot of Gen Zers on TikTok do. (If you’re already Chinese, congratulations.) The craze didn’t exist when we started planning our big “Make America China Again” issue last year, but the universe has a way of syncing things up. And/or, we’re prediction gods here at WIRED. Either way, we ended up publishing the issue at pretty much the perfect moment—this, as the meme goes, “Very Chinese Time.”
A lot of people worked on these stories, from our resident China experts (Louise Matsakis and Zeyi Yang) to freelancers like Olivia Cheng and Afra Wang. You might even spot my name in there, being feisty about a certain Chinese film franchise. Everything’s collected on a landing page, and it runs to no fewer than 23 elements, so I’ll shut up now. Go! Be Chinese! See how it feels.
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Story originally published in September 2020 |
A few details stuck out to me from last week’s Big Story on the renewed race to the moon. One was particularly jaw-dropping: SpaceX’s plan to send humans to the moon could involve as many as 40 (!) spaceship launches. Getting anything into space—let alone on the lunar surface—requires a shocking amount of fuel.
A WIRED story offers an alternative—or at least hope for one. In 2020 Daniel Oberhaus dove into a fringe corner of physics to profile Jim Woodward, a scientist working on a fuel-less propulsion system he called a Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive. Relying on a controversial theory about inertia and gravity, Woodward created a system he believed can one day shepherd humanity beyond our solar system, one half-millimeter at a time. The piece strikes an exquisitely hopeful note—where many scientists saw a quixotic mission, Oberhaus saw a testament to human determination. Woodward died last summer, and his work remains highly theoretical. However, there is no way to know whether his theory might one day unlock our galaxy. This week, send me examples of other far-fetched science, or comment under the story.
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WIRED talks to a postal worker, a teacher, two US citizens detained by federal agents, and six more Minnesota residents about life in an occupied American city. |
On this week’s episode of ‘The Big Interview’ podcast, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about maintaining neutrality in an online ecosystem increasingly hostile to facts. |
With Donald Trump’s actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States. |
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Earlier this week, WIRED audience development manager Elana Klein penned an essay on her relationship to her smartphone, writing about why it is that so many of us feel hopelessly enmeshed with our devices. Her thoughts resonated with many other WIRED readers, who had their own astute observations. One noted that reliance on a smartphone isn’t very different from reliance on a car. Despite the downsides of a car-centric system, “there is no real way to put the car genie back in the bottle,” another reader responded. “We really just want to address the negative parts of car/smartphone ownership without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” Others discussed “curating” the apps and notifications on their phones to limit distraction, noting that “you can own a smart phone and be dumb in how you use it.” A particularly informed reader wished the article had mentioned an early researcher in the area of the “extended mind”: “By framing this as pop-existential anxiety instead of systems design, the article dodges the harder implications,” they said. “Phones don’t just ‘consume’ minds accidentally. They reshape the representational ecology in which thinking happens, with real power, lock-in, and dependency consequences.”
Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line. |
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