Society

Catch up on the most important updates from this week. More boosters are approved, kids’ shots prove effective, and more countries open up. Here’s what you should know: Want to receive this weekly roundup and other coronavirus news? Sign up here! Headlines The FDA and CDC approve Moderna and J&J boosters Yesterday, the US Centers…

It took more than a decade to get the comics series adapted. Now it’s been canceled before even finishing its first season. The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Perhaps it’s strange to focus on this as Dune—a big-screen…

The industry now has official guidance on design, materials, and more, but not security and privacy best practices.  Last week the International Organization for Standardization—which goes by its European initialism ISO—released its first-ever set of guidelines for the construction of dildos, vibrators, butt plugs, and the rest of the variegated world of human orgasmogenic creativity.…

From constant surveillance to algorithms that decide what we see, society is entering territory reserved for fictional dystopias. Here’s how to push back. The year is 2022. Robot dogs roam the streets beside police officers, a decentralized currency is revolutionizing the economy, digital citizenship and e-governments are emerging, jobs are being automated, and billionaires are…

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, digital artist Beeple, scholar Timnit Gebru, actor John Cho, and more will discuss some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Our world is facing some of the most critical challenges of all time. While the past decade ushered in dramatic technological acceleration, the last 18 months have kicked off a tectonic…

Technology companies like to operate as though their products transcend geopolitics. Swiping right from Israel and Palestine proves otherwise. From the other side of the military checkpoints and towering slabs of concrete that separate Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, a stranger greeted me through cyberspace. I was in my sister’s apartment listening to the…

Many people eligible for Covid-era rent assistance have trouble navigating a “tangled web” of agencies because they don’t have reliable internet access. A national moratorium on evictions expired in late August, after the US Supreme Court blocked a Biden administration bid to extend it. Many feared a drastic upswing in evictions, but instead filings rose…

To add fractions, you find the least common denominator—a term that has a certain resonance in our age of mass cancellation. Even a longtime number lover like myself cringes at the memory of grade-school arithmetic—mostly boring exercises of memorization and seemingly arbitrary rules that led to often obvious answers. These number numbing years effectively murdered…

Federal advisers meet again this week to discuss third shots, but it’s still not clear what the best timing is—or what the US owes the world. In the next few days, an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to debate who should receive booster shots for the Moderna and…

The Federal Aviation Administration is conducting a review and public hearings involving the space company’s expanded site in Boca Chica, Texas. On a foggy day in March, a prototype of SpaceX’s giant silver rocket known as Starship, dubbed Serial Number 11 or SN11, was supposed to reorient itself vertically while landing and deftly touch down…