Category: Story

"Where do you want to hang out?" Max asked me. "Do you like pandas?" Do I like pandas? This is like asking if someone likes tacos, or sunshine, or the sound a puppy makes when it curls up on your lap. I looked at him a little more closely to see if he was joking,…

Look, last week’s news cycle spun a lot faster than most. Like Ludicrous Speed fast. You’d be forgiven if you spent so much time following the latest developments you didn’t have time to actually check social media to see how people were responding to them. Fear not, we read Twitter so you don’t have to.…

Millennials are, like, so 2000-and-late. Marketers now hope to sell stuff to kids born after 1995—so-called Generation Z. And this latest demographic designation is just as removed and reductive as any other. This is how marketing firm FutureCast puts it: “They view their identity as a curated composition.” (So … selfies are a thing!) “All…

In anticipation of Sunday's Emmy Awards, this week WIRED staffers are looking back at some of their favorite shows from the past year. The crisis of television in 2017 is a straightforward one: There’s just too much of it. This may seem an enormous allegation, but consider the medium’s gluttonous expansion in the past decade.…

Bless the sound designers and Foley artists who worked on Splatoon 2: the hypercolored team-based shooter boasts a squish-per-minute count that has got to be the highest in videogame history. In one illustrative sequence, I sink into the ground and burrow along a path of luminescent purple ink of my own creation—then burst back to…

On October 27, three of the biggest videogames of the year arrive, all at once: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Assassin's Creed: Origins, and Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey. Together, these three titles represent a cross-section of the big-budget gaming industry, from a family-friendly run-and-jump romp to a bloody rampage through a Nazi-filled alternate history. From…

"Don't feed the trolls" remains indispensable guidance for the internet, if only because trolls exist solely to get a reaction out of you. Ignore them and they lose all power. But the most fiendish trolls are evolving from weekend anglers who occasionally reel people in to Deadliest Catch-level professionals using bait so effective that people…

In Silicon Valley, love’s many splendors often take the form of, well, many lovers. For certain millennials in tech—as well as, rumor has it, a few middle-aged CEOs—polyamory holds especial appeal. Perhaps that’s because making it work is as much an engineering challenge as an emotional one, requiring partners to navigate a complex web of…

Friday brought with it some terrible news: the Twitter Egg would be no more. The company announced that it was retiring the default user avatar in favor of something that "encourages people to upload images that express themselves." While the new solution—a LinkedIn-style featureless gray bust—isn't exactly exciting, it's also un-yolked from the egg's super-harassy…

For a while there, Netflix was on a roll. Over the course of about four years, from House of Cards to Stranger Things, it produced one hot new show after another. The platform gave its series healthy budgets, their stewards complete creative control; renewal for multiple seasons was seemingly a fait accompli. Then, in the…