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45 Articles

VIDEO Serena Williams in Conversation The tennis legend talks with WIRED about race and equality. Watch the athlete and entrepreneur discuss how far her sport has come, being a role model, and standing up for yourself and others. ON THE WEB: video.WIRED.com WEB Black Friday Roundup Every year on Black Friday, we assemble a massive list of all the best online shopping bargains. Visit WIRED.com on Friday, November 27, to save big bucks this holiday season. WEB + PRINT The Future of Football As Super Bowl 50 approaches, WIRED and Sports Illustrated have teamed up for a new series that examines what football will look like 50 years from now. Don’t miss a play. ON THE WEB:WIRED.com/sb100 SB 100 WIRED Sports Lliustrated VIDEO Voices Against Online Harassment Participants from our online harassment roundtable (page 108) share their own experiences and discuss what can be done…

From Silicon Valley’s stubborn diversity problem to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s call to “lean in” to the digitally enabled nationwide rise of Black Lives Matter, the wired world is squarely at the heart of today’s conversation about race and gender. ¶ So earlier this year, we decided to devote all of our attention to these important matters and dedicate an issue of wired to equality and the future—and we had the great good luck to have Serena Williams join us as guest editor. Because Williams isn’t just a tennis champion and singularly great athlete; she’s been a leader in the fight for equal representation and pay in her sport as well as being a passionate advocate for giving girls in Africa the same access to education as boys. With her…

Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code, a nonprofit in San Francisco that teaches girls of color to code and design games. Common played James Bevel in the 2014 film Selma. The rapper also cowrote and performed the film’s Oscar-winning song, “Glory.” Billie Jean King, once the world’s highest-ranked woman in tennis, was one of the first openly gay major American athletes. DeRay Mckesson is a former school administrator and probably the most recognizable face of the new online civil rights movement. Adria Richards is a DevOps engineer who became the target of an online mob in 2013. She works on software that reduces online harassment. Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of the New America foundation, wrote the blockbuster Atlantic cover story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Bijan Stephen is an associate editor at…

Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Dr. Dre, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Eminem: If it weren’t for Jimmy Iovine, you might not know those names. Oh, and those ubiquitous Beats headphones? That was Iovine too. Now the legendary producer (and head of Apple Music) wants to do something even grander: save the music industry. As September’s cover story (“Relentless”) reported, Iovine and Dre have teamed up to found an undergraduate program at USC for training the next generation of leaders. Their hope is to assemble “a pipeline of professionals, equally at home in the worlds of tech and culture,” Jason Tanz wrote. If they succeed, it won’t just mean a bunch of new creative talent— it could change the way we think about education. Re: “Relentless” “CAN DRE AND IOVINE TEACH THE NEXT GENERATION…

ARGUMENT: THE ELECTION RECYCLE CAMPAIGN TECH NEEDS R&D, NOT CONSTANT DO-OVERS

IT WAS LATE November 2008, and Dan Wagner’s post–Election Day high was wearing off. Just a few weeks before, the Obama for America team had gotten their guy elected, and people like Wagner, a member of the analytics staff, were getting a whole lot of credit. Headlines hailed Obama’s campaign as the most digitalsavvy in history. For Wagner, winning felt good. ¶ But weeks after the Election Day rush, as Wagner was lying in bed in Michigan, a crushing realization hit him: Every tool he had built, every algorithm he had written, all the work he had done was about to spend the next three years rotting at the bottom of a code base in Chicago. “It was pretty brutal,” Wagner says. “The incredible contribution that dozens of engineers and analysts…

ARGUMENT: THE ELECTION RECYCLE CAMPAIGN TECH NEEDS R&D, NOT CONSTANT DO-OVERS

ALPHA GEEK: LEADING LIGHT PIXAR’S NATURAL WONDER

Illuminating Brushwork Sharon Calahan, director of photography on The Good Dinosaur, painted concept art for characters (like main dino Arlo) and landscapes. AS A DIRECTOR of photography at Pixar, Sharon Calahan makes it her business to know environments. So when her director on The Good Dinosaur, Peter Sohn, said he wanted the movie to have a rugged, pioneer feel, Calahan knew just the place: Jackson, Wyoming, where she’d spent time painting landscapes. She took the crew there on a scouting trip so they could soak up the region’s treacherous terrain, harsh weather, and big sky. The Good Dinosaur, out in November, represented a unique stylistic challenge for Calahan. Unlike her previous projects at Pixar—as varied as Ratatouille (“soft and warm and romantic,” she says) and Cars 2 (“a guys’ film with shiny metal”)—this…

ALPHA GEEK: LEADING LIGHT PIXAR’S NATURAL WONDER

ROAD RAGE JUST PARK YOUR OWN CAR

YOUNG MEN IN BRIGHT blue blazers are taking over the streets of San Francisco. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this, except these guys (I’ve never actually seen a woman) are valets. Not for the Valentino-clad patrons of a posh restaurant or hotel, mind you—these valets are rushing around on infantilizing scooters, ready and willing to serve hoodie-wearing you the ultimate city-dweller fantasy. ¶ They work for Luxe, the soi-disant Uber of parking. With its $25.5 million in funding, the year-old startup has created a suave app that lets you summon a prescreened driver to your location so he can pick up your vehicle, park it in a secure lot, and retrieve it whenever you want—all for $5 an hour or $15 a day. Others have wised up to…

ROAD RAGE JUST PARK YOUR OWN CAR

Tissue-Velcro n. [ 'ti-'shü-'vel-'krō A synthetic hook-andloop scaffold for labgrown organ tissue. The Velcro-like biodegradable mesh can hold together layers of heart or lung cells, which could allow surgeons to rapidly patch vessels and valves. And just like Velcro, those layers can also be ripped apart to study how organs work. narcopaloma n. ['när-kō-pä-'lō-m ] A pigeon taught to smuggle drugs into prisons. Trained using a feeding regimen, the narcopaloma is released to fly into jails with small bundles of cocaine and marijuana strapped securely to its breast. The name—“drug dove” in Spanish— became popular after guards nabbed one west of San José, Costa Rica. cybertypes n. [ 'sī-b r-tīps] Three-dimensional x-ray images of newly described organisms. Cybertypes supplement holotypes, the specimens required to classify species. The first cybertype— for a millipede aptly dubbed Ommatoiulus avatar—was recently posted…

WIRED CITIES: GOIN’ TO KANSAS CITY BBQ, BEER, AND BALLYHOO

“The Plaza at night is an almost magical place. The profiles of all the old Spanishdecor buildings are illuminated for several blocks with Christmas lights. It’s a fun place to walk. — Bill Zahner, architectural metal designer (New York’s 9/11 Memorial, KC’s Kauffman Center) MIDWESTERN CITIES tend to sprawl, but in Kansas City a revitalized urban core has drawn dreamers back downtown. Supercharged by the introduction of Google’s high-speed gigabit service in late 2012, this former stockyard town in Missouri now regularly hosts startup pitch sessions, hackathons, and— inevitably—converted-warehouse parties. In fact, even the city’s most celebrated tradition (not counting amazing barbecue) has received an upgrade. On Thanksgiving, revelers will turn up for the Plaza Lighting Ceremony, when 15 blocks of the historic outdoor shopping district will twinkle with tens of thousands…

WIRED CITIES: GOIN’ TO KANSAS CITY BBQ, BEER, AND BALLYHOO

INFOPORN: WHAT SILICON VALLEY FIRMS PAY TO PLAY

TECH COMPANIES SPEND a good chunk of cash lobbying for their interests. To determine what those interests actually are, we asked nonpartisan research organization MapLight to sift through lobbying payments for the past few years. Not surprisingly, Facebook and Google spent the most on online advertising legislation; Microsoft tried to sway laws affecting cybersecurity; and everyone worries about copyright issues. But some expenditures were more altruistic: Intel dropped $1.2 million to support a bill that would allow gay and lesbian Americans to sponsor their foreign-born partners for citizenship. Here’s a breakdown of what some prominent tech companies spent to get the government they want. SOURCES: MAPLIGHT, OFFICE OF THE CLERK OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SENATE OFFICE OF PUBLIC RECORDS…

INFOPORN: WHAT SILICON VALLEY FIRMS PAY TO PLAY

RECORDIT-YOURSELF GRIMES KEEPS GOING HER OWN WAY

Essential Grimes 1. “Oblivion,” from Visions 2. “Go,” with Blood Diamonds 3. “SCREAM,” from Art Angels ELECTRO-POP MUSICIAN Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) admits she didn’t really know what she was doing when she made her last album, 2012’s gauzy Visions. Still, that release— self-produced in GarageBand over about two weeks—was an out-of-the-ether success, setting Boucher on a path to stardom: She signed with Jay Z’s Roc Nation management company, toured with Lana Del Rey, and recorded a track with Bleachers for an episode of Girls. Despite this elevated profile, the 27-year-old remains fiercely DIY, honing her studio skills and dismissing suggestions that she work with outside producers. Her latest release, Art Angels, is bolder, noisier, and more out there than Visions. Take “SCREAM,” which features obscure Taipei rapper Aristophanes spitting Mandarin over digitally processed…

RECORDIT-YOURSELF GRIMES KEEPS GOING HER OWN WAY

MIND THE GAP A BRIDGE FOR DISASTERS

12 weight of the mobilebridge in tons (it can support a 5-ton vehicle) When a major flood or earthquake strikes, people need help—quickly. One challenge is getting to them. Roads can crack open; fields can wash away; bridges can collapse. Tem porary structures haven’t always proved practical— they’re too flimsy or take days to set up. But Ichiro Ario and his team at Hiroshima University hope to fill that void with the Mobile bridge, a collapsible overpass that can rapidly span gaps and support cars carrying emergency supplies. Though Ario’s studies in materi als science and origami informed the design, the real inspiration for the accordion-like mechanism came from watching his son play with a toy pistol: Whenever he pulled the trigger, a section of the barrel would scissor out. The…

MIND THE GAP A BRIDGE FOR DISASTERS

HOW STUFF WORKS RANDALL MUNROE EXPLAINS IT ALL

TO DESCRIBE COMPLEX THINGS like rockets and trees, it helps to use simple words. Really simple words. That’s what Randall Munroe did for his upcoming book Thing Explainer. Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of the 2014 best seller What If?, drafted blueprints for various devices and systems—using only 1,000 common words to describe them—from washing machines (sorry, boxes that make clothes smell better) to nuclear bombs (machines for burning cities). “It forced me to learn more about the stuff I was describing,” Munroe says, “since I couldn’t just say the name of the thing.” Test your nerd cred: Flip to his periodic table (gah, the pieces everything is made of ) and quiz yourself. Quick, what’s a rock that makes glass blue? EXCERPTED FROM THING EXPLAINER: COMPLICATED STUFF…

HOW STUFF WORKS RANDALL MUNROE EXPLAINS IT ALL

ANGRY NERD: LET THE MONSTER DIE!

IT’S ALIIIIIIIVE! The new movie Victor Frankenstein brings the mad doctor’s story shambling into theaters all over again—this time from the point of view of sidekick Igor. What a fantastic …-ally boring, warmed-over technique! I love Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as much as anyone, but we’ve had at least a dozen film adaptations of her story in just the past three decades. (And I’m not counting Monster Squad or Frankenhooker.) Even the idea of giving it the alternate-POV treatment isn’t original—the animated feature Igor did that seven years ago. In fact, we’ve already had a vampire movie from Van Helsing’s perspective, a Sleeping Beauty movie from Maleficent’s perspective, and an Oz movie from the Wizard’s perspective! What’s next, the waiter’s version of My Dinner With Andre? Sloth’s telling of The Goonies?…

ANGRY NERD: LET THE MONSTER DIE!

Q: I TAKE PHOTOS OF MY FOOD IN RESTAURANTS ALL THE TIME. IS IT OK TO DO THAT AT THE FAMILY THANKSGIVING DINNER TABLE?

A: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality.” That’s an oft-quoted bit from On Photography, the influential 1977 essay collection by Susan Sontag. She argued that photography is a way of “refusing” to absorb new environments and experiences “by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” Also: “Essentially, the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”¶ On and on Sontag went, describing how the innocent-seeming act of snapping pictures degrades what’s photographed and detaches us from the world. And this was three decades before phonecams transformed photography from “widely practiced amusement,” as Sontag put it, to omnipresent, mindless tic. Now here you are, on the cusp of carrying that intrusive, modern habit into maybe the…

Q: I TAKE PHOTOS OF MY FOOD IN RESTAURANTS ALL THE TIME. IS IT OK TO DO THAT AT THE FAMILY THANKSGIVING DINNER TABLE?

SOME ASSEMBLY REOUIRED HIGH STYLE, PACKED FLAT

Out of the Box 1. A Campaign chair ($495) fits inside two standard boxes. 2. There are 13 individual pieces. 3. It assembles in less than four minutes. Ikea, that daunting sprawl of neutral pieces at DIY prices, doesn’t exactly appeal to the wellheeled shopper hunting for, say, a stylish new armchair. That’s why the West Elms and Crate & Barrels of the world exist: They design furniture with aesthetics and durability in mind. But have fun hauling that stuff home—a truck and a hefty fee are usually required. Now, a company called Campaign is making highquality furniture that travels Ikea-style. “We’re designing around the logistics and the delivery instead of thinking about it after the fact,” founder Brad Sewell says. Campaign’s couches and chairs pack flat, and they’re engineered to fit within UPS and…

SOME ASSEMBLY REOUIRED HIGH STYLE, PACKED FLAT

WHAT’S INSIDE: INSTANT MASHED POTATOES * FAUX BACON, REAL STARCH

Idaho Potatoes Extracting water lets the starchy tubers sit on the shelf for years without spoiling. Back in the 1950s, food scientists discovered that the best way to desiccate spuds is the “Philadelphia cook,” in which taters are partially cooked, cooled, steamed, and then dehydrated in a single-drum dryer to 6 percent moisture. Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate This molecule boosts overall stability, keeping rehydrated potatoes from turning into a lumpy glue. It includes stearic acid, an 18-carbon fatty acid chain, which also helps keep the mix from separating into its oily and watery components. Maltodextrin A nonsweet sugar that’s almost tasteless but helps to absorb the water you add to dehydrated potatoes, so they firm up instantly. This polysaccharide comes in a variety of chain lengths, from three to 19 glucose units long. The-OH groups in…

WHAT’S INSIDE: INSTANT MASHED POTATOES * FAUX BACON, REAL STARCH

BOND, REAL BOND ACTUAL GADGETS FOR 007

James Bond has had some badass tech over the years—wristwatch lasers, ejector seats. And now (at last!) real life has caught up. For the new film Spectre, Q should have just bought this stuff from eBay and knocked off early. 1. Bond version: Virtual reality glasses (Die Another Day) Real version: Mini Augmented Vision glasses Mini’s goggles are equipped with Wi-Fi and GPS, and they project a 3-D HUD. An external camera array allows you to “see through” the opaque portions of your car. 2. Bond: Face recognition database (Quantum of Solace) Real: Iarpa’s Janus program The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s creation recognizes people in photos even if their faces are in profile, out of focus, or poorly illuminated. 3. Bond: Aston Martin DB10 (Spectre) Real: Aston Martin Vulcan Aston Martin specially designed the DB10 for Spectre, but…

BOND, REAL BOND ACTUAL GADGETS FOR 007

THE SLOBBER CURE

Jazzie spent the summer in foster care, balancing naps on the porch with more demanding tasks like digging holes. The 5-year-old Lab mix had moved in with Richard Kay, a 62-year-old who’d been living alone on the outskirts of Tucson. The two were paired up as part of a clinical trial to see if dogs could do double duty as companions and probiotics-delivery devices—or as Chuck Raison, the lead investigator, puts it, “purveyors of microbial goodness.” Raison, a professor of human ecology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, knew that adults living under the same roof share about as much of the same bacteria with their canine pals as they do with each other, and that children who live with dogs tend to have lower rates of asthma. Raison…

THE SLOBBER CURE

ATTACK OF THE CLONES STAR WARS PROPS INVADE A VIDEOGAME

NOW THAT J.J. ABRAMS’Star Wars: The Force Awakens is just weeks away, the wait is more agonizing than ever. Sure, Disney has been shipping tie-in merchandise for months, but no mere toy will rescue us from the tedium. Unless that toy happens to be, say, a digital replication of an original prop, so realistic it’s like you’re wielding the real thing. And that’s exactly what’s coming with Star Wars Battlefront, a reboot of the classic videogame series. Using a combination of scanning tech and reference shots, developers at the Stockholm-based studio DICE modeled in-game weapons and set pieces after originals from the movies—and “brought them back to their original glory,” says Sigurlína Ingvarsdóttir, Battlefront’s senior producer. Suddenly, a little more waiting doesn’t sound so bad. Vader’s helmet The team at DICE relied…

ATTACK OF THE CLONES STAR WARS PROPS INVADE A VIDEOGAME

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY THE CLOUD MIGHT BE LISTENING

LET’S SAY YOU’RE TALKING to your brand-new Apple TV. You click the remote and rainbow-colored sine waves on your flatscreen indicate Siri is listening. It’s slick: You ask for a channel or to replay a scene and it responds smoothly. But then you say, “Show me some new comedies,” and maybe it suggests... Pixels. Of course, Pixels is a wretched movie, so you look at the next suggestion, and oh, man: Hot Tub Time Machine 2. Now you’re cursing into the remote, just to see what happens. ¶ The thing is, Apple TV doesn’t keep your foul language to itself. To understand your speech, it sends the audio to Siri’s cloud servers, where it’s processed—and archived, for up to two years. ¶ Welcome to the latest, weirdest phase of our…

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY THE CLOUD MIGHT BE LISTENING

FETISH LET’S DANSK

THE DEFAULT DUTCH OVEN for most cooks is Le Creuset. It’s been that way since the brand showed up in the hands of Julia Child on PBS in the 1970s. But that doesn’t mean you should buy one. That French pot may be great for simmering cassoulet, but it’s never been displayed at the Louvre or MoMA. It hasn’t won four international design awards either. Those tributes belong to this Technicolor gem: Dansk’s Kobenstyle. The elegant enameled pot, the brainchild of Danish designer Jens Quistgaard, was released in 1956 and became a big hit with the mid-mod crowd. Integral to its design is a bit of dinner theater—remove the lid with a flourish and place it on the table, where it instantly converts into a trivet. Order a modern-day recasting…

FETISH LET’S DANSK

HOW TO SLOW BUZZ

1 Grind 10 ounces of beans very coarsely. Baratza Encore Grinder $129 2 Slowly add 40 ounces of cold filtered water, then stir. Soma Pitcher $39 3 Wait 12 to 16 hours, then drain through a filter. Oxo Cold Brew Coffee Maker $50 4 Dilute with two parts water to one part concentrate—it’s very strong! WE REGRET TO inform you that you are abusing your coffee. If you brew it hot—and we know you do—many of the lovely flavors in the beans get stripped out by the heat. But when you cold-brew your java, steeping the beans in cold water for 12 to 16 hours, the process extracts all the best flavors and leaves the harsh, bitter notes behind. “When you filter the next day, you’re getting a smooth, low-acid brew that tends to be more naturally…

HOW TO SLOW BUZZ

HEAD-TO-HEAD COUNTER KINGS

Breville Smart Oven Pro BEST FOR: Genuine gourmands stuck in urban microkitchens This culinary marvel is small in stature, but it’s roomy enough to cook a 5-pound bird. It also has a 10-hour slow-cook function, an ingenious defrostthen-cook function, and an interior light. Ten presets make quick work of everything from toast to roast. Best feature: Open the door and magnets pull the rack out for easy access to your squash frittata. $270 KitchenAid Convection Digital Countertop Oven BEST FOR: Microwave cooks who dream of being Iron Chefs All the needs of a budding chef de cuisine crashing in mom and dad’s basement are here: three rack levels, big-boy heat, a convection fan, and nine presets. The closer is the Asado Roast function: Five heat elements kick in at different times during the cook cycle to…

HEAD-TO-HEAD COUNTER KINGS

FETISH WEIGH AHEAD

$ 100 Must-Weigh Recipes in the iPad App Anzac Biscuits Granola Oatmeal Cookies The Best Burger ONE OF THE BEST restaurant tools has been slow to catch on in home kitchens: the humble scale. Americans’ reluctance to use weight to measure ingredients has a lot to do with our recipes being written in a volume-centric style. Weight measure is more accurate—dry ingredients can compress when you scoop them, introducing variations in volume—but we still stick with our cups. The Drop scale and its attendant app could get you to change your ways. It connects to an iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth LE. The iPad app offers nearly 300 recipes. It weighs each ingredient onscreen as you add it and gives step-by-step recipe guidance—from flour in a bowl to cookies in the oven. (The…

FETISH WEIGH AHEAD

BENCHMARK LEADING EDGE

MINCE, JULIENNE, CHIFFONADE. The essence of French gastronomy is cutting, and from fillet knives for cleaning fish to tourné knives for carving spuds, cutlers in the town of Thiers have been making specialized knives for every sliver and slice of haute cuisine since the rise of the multi course meal in the 1800s. Yet there was one knife that could do it all. With its straight triangular blade, the French chef’s knife is the culinary equivalent of the smartphone. The tip can be used for peeling and trimming. The cutting edge is honed for precision slicing. The heel has a wedge shape suited to butchering meat. When garlic needs to be crushed, just press the flat side into service. Non-Gallic manufacturers like Japanese masters Global have put their own imprint…

BENCHMARK LEADING EDGE

Country | Score Where 15-year-olds in the US rank in relation to Japan and South Korea.* SALMAN KHAN sits at the head of a conference table, surrounded by about a dozen children, talking about Hitler. It’s late June, nine months into the first year at Khan Lab School, Khan’s educational R&D lab in Mountain View. At most schools, the students would be counting down the minutes until their summer vacation. But the Lab School eschews most of the traditional trappings of US education, including summer break. So the kids here don’t seem particularly fidgety. Or at least not any more fidgety than your standard group of 9-to 12-year-olds sitting in a warm room analyzing the decline of the Weimar Republic. Khan himself is the famed creator of Khan Academy, the online juggernaut that…

A DAY IN THE LIFE

9–9:15 am Morning Meeting A daily allschool meeting where students learn about things like current events, view the work of their fellow classmates, and focus on relationships. 9:15–9:45 Advisory Students break out into cohorts sorted by age. They attend one-onone meetings with advisers to set personal goals. (One ambitious 12-yearold hopes to launch a smallscale NGO.) Some days include “Goal Studio” time to work on these independent passion projects. 9:45–10:45 Literacy Lab, Part 1 Teachers cover all the essentials, from developing main ideas to composing blog posts. 10:45–11 Morning Break 11–11:30 Literacy Lab, Part 2 Instructors use digital tools like Lexia and LightSail to assess students’ reading levels and work with individuals on problem areas. 11:30–12 Inner Wellness Students improve their mental well-being by practicing mindfulness. 12–12:45 pm Lunch 12:45–1 Afternoon Meeting Another schoolwide gathering for announcements and updates. 1–2:30 Math/Computer Science Lab…

A DAY IN THE LIFE

The Ball Is in Your Court

Equality in the Digital Age Back in 2008, when I was competing in the US Open, I would keep little “match books,” where I’d write affirmations to myself and read them during matches. It worked pretty well. But before long I found an even better way to inspire myself: I started using affirmations as the passwords to my phone and my computer. (No, I’m not going to tell you what my current affirmation is!) You should try it. You’ll be surprised how many times a day you log in and have an opportunity to trigger that positivity. I love that I can use technology that way. Here’s one of the affirmations I gave myself when I was younger: “I will work in Africa and help kids and help people.” And I did.…

The Ball Is in Your Court

Trailblazers TRANSGENDER MODEL Rocero is the founder of the advocacy group Gender Proud. Back in 2003, I was living in San Francisco and dating a guy. Soon enough we found ourselves in the bedroom. This, of course, meant that I needed to talk with him about my gender history. I was young and still finding myself and said, “I have to tell you something.” I then explained I had been born a boy, even though, in truth, I never felt like a boy. I felt a sense of shame around the whole thing. He didn’t react well. “Come on, I’ll drive you home,” was his quick reply. Let me tell you, that was one silent ride. Right before he dropped me off, he looked over at me and said, “That’s why your knees…

Trailblazers VENTURE CAPITALIST Equality in the Digital Age “Meeker is a partner at Kleiner Perkins. On Wall Street at Morgan Stanley in the early ’90s, I thought I would succeed or fail solely on my own merits. That’s the way it worked when I was a kid, playing sports like tennis and basketball while growing up in Indiana. Wall Street was an intense, male-dominated place. But I didn’t think much about it at all. It was what it was. ¶ I later moved to California, joining the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. We invested in Square, the online-payments company cofounded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who was also one of the founders of Twitter. I serve on Square’s board, and I took notice of how Jack built the management team. In 2014, Square recruited…

Trailblazers CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST “Mckesson (center) is one of the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. As people of color, we have always faced issues of erasure: Either our stories are never told or they’re told by everybody but us. But in this moment we’ve become the unerased. Because of Twitter, Facebook, Vine, and Instagram, we’re able not only to push back against dominant-culture narratives, but also to talk to each other differently. ¶ I met Johnetta “Netta” Elzie (at right in photo) on Twitter. She and I knew each other digitally before we knew each other in person, and we trusted each other there first. And now we’re together all the time. ¶ There was this one night when Netta was going to a protest in St. Louis—the night…

War of the Words

The year is 2108, and things aren’t going so well for Team Humanity. Earth is so overcrowded that people live in hive-like concrete cubicles called Public Residence Clusters and subsist on reconstituted soy. Things aren’t much better 30 light years away, in Earth’s run-down Outer Colonies. No wonder the hero of Marko Kloos’ first novel, Terms of Enlistment, joins the spacegoing military to escape those terrestrial slums. By Kloos’ second book, Lines of Departure, his protagonist is half a decade into a career that includes vicious interstellar conflict with an indestructible alien species. Think Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with maybe a dash of James Cameron’s Aliens. On March 19, 2015, Kloos, a former noncommissioned officer in the German military who now lives in rural New Hampshire, sat down at his computer…

War of the Words

Equality in the Digital Age Trailblazers PRESEASON COACH FOR THE ARIZONA CARDINALS “Welter was a training-camp and preseason intern for the Arizona Cardinals, working with inside linebackers. She’s the first woman to coach in the NFL. I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida, where football is kind of a religion. The whole town shuts down for games, and we would all go. I played other sports, like tennis, and team sports, including rugby, in college, but I was just fascinated by football. Right after I graduated, I went to an open tryout for a women’s team, the Massachusetts Mutiny. And I realized, “This is where I’m meant to be.” I left my business career to do it, and the most I was ever paid was literally $1 a game. I love everything about the…

Trailblazers MIXED MARTIAL ARTS CHAMPION “Rousey (below, with her dog Mochi) is an MMA champion and action movie star. On authenticity: I’ll let thousands of people boo me as long as I feel I was honest and authentic. That way, when I do something later that the fans like, they know it was genuine and not staged. I wouldn’t shake Miesha Tate’s hand after I beat her the second time, but I gave Cat Zingano a hug and a kiss after we fought, because I truly empathized with her in that moment. On the decision to turn pro: My mom was the senior statistical consultant at the University of Southern California. She really wanted me to go to college. I said I wanted to do MMA. She said it was the stupidest idea she’d…

Trailblazers FOUNDER AND CEO OF WALKER & COMPANY Walker’s startup sells health and beauty products designed for people of color. He is cofounder of CODE 2040, a program that places minority students in tech internships. I grew up in the projects. My mom was very strict and wanted me to succeed. I was part of the Boys Club of New York after-school program and was encouraged to apply to get a full ride to Hotchkiss, a prestigious boarding school. I got in, and it was the first time that I understood what wealth was. I knew I wanted to be rich. ¶ After college I started working on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers. One day the most senior black managing director, William Lighten, called me into his office and gave me some advice.…

How Tech Stacks Up

Equality in the Digital Age SUPPLY IS FAR FROM THE ONLY BARRIER TO MORE DIVERSITY IN THE SILICON VALLEY WORKFORCE. 520 DESIGN The statistics are pretty one-sided: The tech industry is overwhelmingly male and predominantly white. This lack of diversity is often blamed on a poor supply of qualified candidates. Yes, Asian workers have found their way into tech in large numbers, yet female, black, and Hispanic employees remain largely absent. But if you look at the data behind the pipeline that feeds the tech workforce—the kind of work I do frequently at Threestory Studio—some of the choke points become apparent. Jane Margolis, author of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, prescribes more computer science education in the schools and giving kids exposure to tech role models. That’s a start.…

How Tech Stacks Up

Take Back the NET

Silicon Valley is all about using tech to come up with solutions to gnarly problems. Yet the ugly reality of online harassment has remained intractable. The Internet, which has so amplified the voices of women, minorities, and LGBT folk, is still very much a free-fire zone for those who would shame, silence, or abuse them. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of 18-to 24-year-old women have been the target of online sexual harassment. Last year the issue erupted in the mainstream media with Gamergate. The online movement targeted a female game developer, making accusations about her sexual life and publishing her address and phone number, prompting her to move out of her home. In September, wired convened a roundtable of people deeply involved in…

Take Back the NET

Common & Mahalia Hines

Trailblazers A HIP HOP ARTIST AND HIS MOTHER, AN EDUCATOR “Common is a Grammy-and Oscarwinning hip hop artist and activist. My mother has been a true example of the diligence, commitment, and passion it takes to drive kids to excellence. That will be her legacy— bringing that to Chicago. ¶ At home, education was something that was celebrated, something that was valuable. All of my friends knew that if I didn’t do well, then I wouldn’t be able to hang out. She had me in a computer class at the Museum of Science and Industry, and I would have to read books that she gave me to read—all in addition to school. Whether you know it or not at the time, all of that is feeding you: It’s giving you not only a…

Common & Mahalia Hines

Kimberly Bryant

Trailblazers FOUNDER OF BLACK GIRLS CODE “Bryant’s Black Girls Code organization has taught computer science skills to more than 4,000 girls in nine cities around the world. My daughter was never into combing dolls’ hair and playing with Barbies. She was into Legos and building things and playing with her Game Boy. By the time she was in middle school, she was old enough to go to an overnight summer coding camp. It was life-changing for her. She loved it. But the thing I noticed at the camp was that there were very few girls in the classroom. And there was one student of color. That was her. ¶ It really resonated with me because, growing up, I was a tagalong little sister who always wanted to prove that even though I was…

Kimberly Bryant

If you’re an American worker, chances are your job either doesn’t grant you much flexibility or else requires far too much of it. If you’re lucky enough to have a traditional 9-to-5 gig, you’re also probably unlucky enough to be held to the standard of what gender and labor scholars call the “ideal worker”: a hypothetical employee who shows up early, makes every meeting, never gets sick, says yes to every new project, is constantly available on mobile devices, and can jet off on a work trip at a moment’s notice. The cult of the ideal worker has been with us for decades, but it receives frequent updates. Consider the New York Times’ recent portrait of Amazon’s work culture, in which employees continually challenge themselves and each other to work harder,…

Ask Siri if she’s a woman. Go ahead, try it. She’ll tell you she’s genderless. “Like cacti. And certain species of fish,” she might say. So is Amazon’s Alexa. Microsoft’s Cortana. Samsung’s S Voice. And Google Now. But man, do they ever sound a lot like women. Culturally, we think of them as ladies too. (In Old Norse, Siri translates to “a beautiful woman who leads you to victory.”) We assign female pronouns to them, and in turn, they fold feminine turns of phrase into their robotic and occasionally inane answers to our requests. The world is about to start sounding even more feminine, as voice systems pop up in things that are not phones and prove to be a more effective interface than keyboards. Siri is an integral element to navigating…

GET UP, STAND UP

Scenes from Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, after the unarmed Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson. I In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world—word of a beating or an activist’s arrest or some brewing state of danger—you would likely head straight for a telephone. From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations. But you wouldn’t do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator— who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you’d dial the number for something called…

GET UP, STAND UP

AGENTS OF CHANGE THAT HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT: Amy Jellicoe; Obagi-C C-Clarifying Serum; Sirron Norris; Thooorin; #changetheratio; the men from U.N.C.L.E.; BART machines that, when fed a $20 bill, dispense only quarters in change; the San Francisco weather; #prayformarcus; Amy Schumer; the Sober Sisterhood; Obergefell v. Hodges; Daniel “007” Craig; Tobener Law Center; Nancy Heck Michelli, Ken Bagwell and the rest of Team Awesome; Marge Piercy’s “For Strong Women”; the Print Devils clan in Clash of Clans; Lea DeLaria; NYC meteorologists; Crest Whitestrips; my grandmother Lacie Flowers, a secretary for the NAACP of Leflore County, Mississippi, during the ’60s. WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance Maga zine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2015 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Volume 23, No. 11. WIRED (ISSN 1059–1028) is published monthly…

Billie Jean King

Trailblazers TENNIS CHAMPION Equality in the Digital Age “King won 39 grandslam titles, including a record 20 career titles at Wimbledon. She won a so-called battle-of-the-sexes match against Bobby Riggs in 1979. When I was 11, my friend Susan Williams took me to her coun try club. That’s where I first played tennis. And I said to myself, “I’m not going to be able to play much, because we don’t have the financial means.” But not long after that, I found out that the city offered free lessons in the public parks. That’s when I went home and told my parents I wanted a racket. ¶ When I was 12, I started to play tournaments. I real-ized everybody in my sport wore white socks, white shoes, white clothes, and played with white balls—and everybody…

Billie Jean King

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