The woman remembers the first time she got a smartphone. It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, […]
In December, WIRED took stock of then 17 known criminal investigations swirling around Donald Trump, Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and Trump’s network of businesses and business partners—probes by not just Special Counsel Robert Mueller but by at least a half-dozen other federal, state, and local investigators. In the months since, there have been […]
On a brisk day in March 2016, Stephen Allwine walked into a Wendy’s in Minneapolis. The smell of old fryer grease hung in the air as he searched for a man wearing dark jeans and a blue jacket. Allwine, who worked as an IT support technician, was lean and nerdy, with wire-rim glasses. He was […]
PART ONE Brad Young, a lawyer at TripAdvisor, arrived at the company’s offices in Needham, Massachusetts, on October 12, 2015, to find an email from his boss, Seth Kalvert, the company’s general counsel. In itself that wasn’t strange. As a travel site built on crowdsourced wisdom, where hundreds of millions of ordinary people post reviews […]
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room […]
A few days before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.” I’m […]
Thirty years ago last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack. Ten years ago last Friday, then FBI Director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his […]
The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to […]
Three days after last Christmas, a 25-year-old Los Angeles man named Tyler Barriss allegedly called police in Wichita, Kansas, and pretended that he’d murdered his father and was holding hostages in a house near the city’s downtown. Barriss thought the house belonged to an avid Call of Duty gamer he wanted to harass, but he […]
The typical Wichita City Council meeting is a dull affair, dominated by bureaucrats droning on about street repairs, zoning codes, and general obligation bonds. But even before the April 17, 2018, meeting was called to order, its atmosphere was electric. As the council’s wood-paneled chambers filled up that Tuesday morning, a dozen or so spectators […]