WIRED

The Wired mission is to tell the world something they've never heard before in a way they've never seen before. It's about turning new ideas into everyday reality. It's about seeding our community of influencers with the ideas that will shape and transform our collective future. Wired readers want to know how technology is changing the world, and they're interested in big, relevant ideas, even if those ideas challenge their assumptions—or blow their minds.

FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD • The sounds of Slack have a secret history.

SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS • There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you. Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

THE MYTH OF METAL • How I became a Python programmer—and learned to love our abstract world.

HAPPY HAUNTING

Readout • The world, quantified.

CLOUD SUPPORT • Spiritual troubleshooting for the everyday user.

The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem • He’s known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.

EFFICIENCY EXPERTS • From do-it-all multitaskers to essentials that perform one thing perfectly, this gear will help you get more done with less effort.

FEATURES

Can the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street? • When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit—on the eve of the company’s IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web’s most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?

REDDIT GROWS UP

WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD • They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.

The Fateful Eight • THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.

RUSSIAN, GO HOME • WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me—or seek peace in censored oblivion.

THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG • The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world—health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.

HOLOGRAM FLICKERS. HE WAS NEVER ABOARD. • —@AAnderson_3, via X