The moon landscape was always the first Destiny game's best trick. While its sequel has moved more in the direction of space opera, the original had a foot firmly planted in retro-futurist space exploration aesthetics and the broad optimism that comes with them. Things might be bad in Destiny's far-flung future, and evil may lurk…

On August 12, an unidentified whistle-blower filed a complaint, addressed to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, concerning the behavior of President Donald Trump. Ever since that report became public a week ago, Trump and his defenders have done their best to discredit both its contents and the author. But underneath the…

Facebook, which owns the eponymous social network (for posting text and photos), Instagram (for photo sharing), WhatsApp (for text messages), and Messenger (also text messages), has created yet another way to connect with your friends. It’s called Threads, a camera-first messaging app for chatting with the people in your inner circle.On its face, Threads looks…

Good day, and welcome to a new edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. This week there’s a lot of attention being paid to the upcoming release of The Joker, but a few other noteworthy bits have happened as well. For one, Will Smith is on TikTok now. For another? Well, read on to…

Shakira Mabika moved to Cape Town, South Africa, from her native Zimbabwe to escape homophobia—the country's late president, Robert Mugabe, considered gay people "worse than dogs and pigs"—only to encounter similar prejudice, compounded by xenophobia, in Cape Town's Delft township. The South African Constitution provides strong protections for transgender people like Mabika, but on the…

Here are some self-evident truths: Humans need to produce less carbon dioxide—assuming we care a fig about our children’s well-being. But even that’s no longer enough. CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached 400 parts per million, a huge increase over historical levels of around 300 ppm. The fact is, we also need to figure…

The next time you're hunting for a parking spot, mathematics could help you identify the most efficient strategy, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics. It's basically an optimization problem: weighing different variables and crunching the numbers to find the optimal combination of those factors. In the case of where to…

This is the second conversation between WIRED editor Nicholas Thompson and Knox Robinson, an elite runner and former editor of The Fader, about the IAAF World Championships of track and field. Here is the first installment of their conversation about the medals, controversies, and magic moments in Doha.Nicholas Thompson: OMG, what is happening? It’s the…

Jaclyn Baumgarten grew up sailing on Lake Michigan. Her happiest memories take place on boats with her family, carefree on the open water; as adults, her older brothers both purchased boats so they could extend their nautical adventures. So when they each called one week to separately complain about the expensive upkeep on boats they…

TikTok, the wildly popular social media app that revolves round 15-second video clips, has become a major cultural force. It has birthed chart-topping hits like “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, incubated new subcultures like VSCO girls, and become the default way to goof off at work. But there's a simple facet of the…