Backchannel

The Pacific Northwest is due for a massive quake. I trained to help rescue efforts in the aftermath—by racing around the city on an electric kid hauler.

Balaji Srinivasan—technologist, investor, prophet, troll—says let the old world sink. Find your tribe and build your bespoke society, or get left behind.

In Scandinavia, role-playing weekends get immersive and extreme. This Larp seemed like fun—until my queer American brain snapped.

In the last two weeks of the war, an ad hoc team armed with group chats, QR codes, and satellite maps launched a mad dash to save imperiled Afghan allies.

The novelist makes the Earthly rituals of sex, marriage, childbirth—and all of human life—appear delightfully outlandish.

Ask an absurd question, and xkcd’s Randall Munroe will give you a (somewhat) serious answer. An exclusive excerpt from his upcoming What If? 2.

The Freedom of Information Act helps Americans learn what the government is up to. The Poseys exploited it—and became unlikely defenders of transparency.

Sophia Papp emerged from an accident with her personality transformed. She tried to continue on as before—until she realized she could reinvent herself.

In the Great Lakes, sea lampreys are a scourge. In Europe, they’re an endangered cultural treasure. Can biologists suppress—and save—the species?

The porous rock beneath the Gulf Coast launched the petroleum age. Now entrepreneurs want to turn it into a gigantic sponge for storing CO₂.

As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Critics say it’s all a bad trip.

What do a Real Housewife, an Olympic athlete, and a doula have in common? They’re all being paid by an ad-tech startup as influencers—peddling not products but ideologies.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally shifted my view of … everything. I had to meet one of the minds behind its world-tilting revelations.

He tried to save his wife through the video game they loved—and nearly lost himself. Then he signed up to lead a fledgling team of gamers in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors.

A truly planetary politics would extend decisionmaking to animals, ecosystems, and potentially AI.

In a queer vacation hot spot on Cape Cod, an ad hoc community proved that Americans can stifle large outbreaks—if they want to.

A dispatch from the Amazon: A beloved leader was the first Indigenous person in Brazil to die of Covid—a loss entwined with her people’s fight for sovereignty.

I just wanted to be a scientist, not a trailblazer. But in my field, people like me are anomalies—and we face constant scrutiny for our race and gender.

In a one-on-one interview with WIRED, the embattled president expresses clarity amidst the chaos.