Hello, dear readers. Welcome to today’s post-Super Bowl edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. As you might imagine, this latest installment includes a few of the Big Game trailers that dropped during last night’s Super Bowl LIV. There’s also some other cool news about David Byrne and Disney+’s Loki show. Tune in.The New…

In March, when cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom, the Japanese leg of the Olympic Torch relay will kick off at a soccer stadium 12 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (yes, that nuclear power plant). A nearby sports complex will also host the Games’ baseball and softball matches. That’s bound to surprise…

There are dozens of smart speakers on the market, and picking the best one keeps getting tougher.First, you need to decide which voice assistant you prefer. There are three worth using—Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri—and each has its ups and downs. Right now, we prefer Amazon- and Google-powered smart speakers, as they are the most…

In May 2019, WIRED joined the One Free Press Coalition, a united group of preeminent editors and publishers using their global reach and social platforms to spotlight journalists under attack worldwide. Today, the coalition is issuing its eighth monthly “10 Most Urgent” list of journalists whose press freedoms are being suppressed or whose cases demand…

It’s a strange time for Star Wars fans right now. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker closed a chapter of the main series in a way that divided critics, and now the future of the movie side of the franchise is in a bit of limbo. (Although, according to some, it could involve Taika Waititi,…

In late 2018, Krzysztof Czarnecki, a professor at Canada’s University of Waterloo, built a self-driving car and trained it to navigate surrounding neighborhoods with an annotated driving data set from researchers in Germany.The vehicle worked well enough to begin with, recognizing Canadian cars and pedestrians just as well as German ones. But then Czarnecki took…

Varidesk Proplus 30Best for: Cubicle commandos When a workspace is already crowded with furniture, the best sit-stand option is one that converts any desk into a dual-mode station. The multitiered Varidesk holds just the essentials—monitor, keyboard, mouse. Your wireless phone charger, headphone stand, and stacks of paperwork stay on the tabletop. Squeezing the paddlelike levers…

“Cheer,” a novel documentary sequence on Netflix, will seemingly be singlehandedly changing the vogue many folks judge about cheerleading. The veil follows the competitive cheerleading crew at Navarro College in…

When Uber and Lyft went public, it wasn’t the drivers who got rich — it was the executives, merchants and some early staff. In an period when it has change…

Following our explore at why so many startups are building OKR-focused instrument and why enterprise capitalists are pouring capital into their efforts, this day we’re asking an identical test about…