ON COLORS
An image on the internet divides the world—brown and white, or blue and gold? Wired 2/26/15
Think the colors you see are the colors everyone sees? Or that everyone sees the same colors as you? Hah. No. Wired 2/26/16
The nanotech-based "structural color" Vantablack was made for space exploration. Then the artist Anish Kapoor came calling, and the art world got pretty mad about it. Wired 6/22/17
Hue. Saturation. Luminance. Sparkle. Fixing a door ding is about way more than color. (Also: Why the sky is blue and clouds are white.) Wired 7/25/18
What you call a color depends on how your culture and your language use it, day to day. Wired 9/26/17
A planetary probe's cameras see the colors of Mars the way a human might—and the way someone who evolved on Mars might, too. Wired 2/23/21
SCIENCE
Restricting and criminalizing abortion makes maternal and infant mortality worse and has all sorts of terrible socioeconomic effects. But restricting abortion also makes it much harder to study—and to prove the restrictions have those bad outcomes. Insider 7/12/22
An old malaria drug became the best hope to fight Covid-19—if you were a Silicon Valley huckster, or a president of the United States. Wired 11/11/20
The virus that causes Covid-19 spreads like an aerosol. Air purifiers fight that mode of transmission—but they're expensive. Time for some DIYpedemiology. Wired 8/6/20
As the US economy reopens amid a deadly pandemic, a dire question looms. Let's weigh the risks—and do the math. Wired 5/11/20
A treatment made from the blood of recovered Covid-19 patients seemed promising in March. Today … well, it’s still just promising. Wired 8/21/20
As public spaces reopen, scientists are racing to understand the mysterious and turbulent way the disease spreads through air—from person to person, and place to place. Wired 5/28/20
Population density didn’t make Covid-19 worse in New York City. If you want to know what went wrong, you have to think a lot smaller. Wired 5/20/20
The causes of the deadly stampede near Mecca remain the same as always: physics and evolutionary psychology. Wired 9/24/15
A new paper concludes that it takes more than four times as much energy to mine $1 of bitcoin as mining $1 of copper. Wired 11/5/18
Anti-abortion laws lean on the heartbeat as a defining moment of aliveness. But at six weeks, it indicates little more than cells and electrical activity. Wired 5/14/19
San Francisco's transit boss Jeff Tumlin is one of a new breed of planner trying to kick cars out of the city. That's good for business, good for people, and amazing for the planet. Wired 4/1/20
CULTURE
Bike lanes are good for cities and the environment, but adjacent businesses often resist them for fear of loss of parking and revenue. I read the research. It isn't so. (Here's a bibliography.) Business Insider 3/7/24
How building a black hole for the sci-fi epic led to a breakthrough in real-world physics. Wired 11/14
In 2012 a nongendered pronoun dropped into Swedish discourse. Today it's widely used—and it's nudging people to see the world a little differently. Wired 8/15/19
Building the Star Wars franchise anew meant creating a Forever Franchise—a shared story universe of books, movies, and games that, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will change narrative (and commerce). Wired 12/21/15
Cult-favorite writer-director Joss Whedon thrives on independence. So how is he handling Marvel's mega-ultra-awesome superhero blockbuster? Wired 4/30/12
Paperclips is a simple clicker game that manages to turn you into an artificial intelligence run amok—and teaches you to stop worrying and love destroying the world. Wired 10/21/17
How Disney's Imagineers created a whole new part of the Star Wars universe—a theme park “land” that’s also a location in a living fiction. Wired 11/18/19
Cruising the seas with a ship full of nerds celebrating geek culture taught me some lessons about inverting classic rules of social hierarchy—and the music of Jonathan Coulton (and Paul and Storm). Wired 12/19/14
In the heart of Flushing Meadows in Queens is one of the last relics of the 1964 World’s Fair—a steel alloy sculpture that represented the last hurrah of citybuilder Robert Moses, with an assist from Walt Disney. Smithsonian 6/17
BOOZE
The AAAS-Kavli award winning story of a Sherlock Holmes of fungus and his adversary, a wily black mold that lives on whisky fumes. Wired 5/17/11
A carbon-negative vodka company makes its beverage literally out of thin air, and sequesters planet-killing carbon to do it. Now that's booze you can use. Wired 11/7/19
The National Institutes of Health pulled the plug on what would have been a grand experiment in “healthy” drinking, funded by alcohol companies. Where can the field go now? Wired 6/25/18
No one really knows how drunkenness works, and hangovers are poorly understood, no matter what your friend tells you. Still, there are a few things you can try. Wired 12/17/18
If your Super Bowl Sunday includes cold brewskis, you'll want to get that climate change thing fixed. Just ask Budweiser, and the company’s new program to futureproof the barley genome. Wired 2/1/19