What's New

The Traveling Wilburys were a short-lived phenomenon. From 1988 to 1991, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty—each a star in their own right and with a robust catalog to their name—combined their talents and experiences to produce two albums. That’s 21 songs in 112 delightful minutes of music, a testament to the power of collaboration. Learn more about your ad choices...

I have a confection to make. Ugh! No, I don’t want to bake a cake. Let me type that again. I have aconfessionto make. I worked for many years as a software developer at Apple and I invented touchscreen keyboard autocorrection for the original iPhone. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) was a software engineer and designer at Apple for more than 15 years. Learn more about your ad choices....

Two years ago, when Lenovo first unveiled the futuristic Yoga Book, the company held it up alongside a hardcover Dr. Seuss book to demonstrate how thin and light it was. It had a “Halo” keyboard: a bottom half that lit up to create a digital keyboard. You could write directly on this keyless keyboard, too, as though it was a notepad. It was a whole lot of new tech packed into a tiny, $500, fold-ov...

The American military has a funny way of thinking about size. Some ground vehicles are sized not necessarily for battlefield functionality, but rather to fit inside the cargo airplanes that will take them to said battlefield. And pilot size and weight restrictions aren’t written to limit who can stuff themselves inside a tight cockpit, but who can be blasted out of one. Learn more about your ad ch...

I’m 40 feet from the Jaguar, mint chocolate chip ice cream dripping down the cone onto my fingers, when I hear the purring from under the hood. Strange, I think. First off, the car is parked. Second, it doesn’t have an engine. It’s only after a moment that I realize the sound is the car defending itself against the brutality of a summer day in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Learn more abo...

Dating in 2018 can be a challenge. I'm sorry, let me rephrase: It suuuuuuuuccckkkkksssss. Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and others are the dater's tools of choice , and yet hating them is the one thing we can all agree on these days. They're often more hazard than help, and the forced psychoanalysis of every picture and witty answer can shake even the most durable of confidences loose....

If you're a consumer electronics brand, what do you do when your hit product—a best-seller and a critical darling since its debut—turns five years old? You buy it a new suit, of course. Ultimate Ears has updated both of its cylindrical Bluetooth speakers. The Boom 3 and Megaboom 3 have a refreshed look, slightly updated capabilities, and a new lower price. The Boom 3 is $150, which is a $30 price...

So you wanna tweet? Great—you're gonna (mostly) love it. Everyone from the President to Malala is tweeting it up these days, but it may take some getting used to if you're a new kid on the block. Twitter is where news is broken, links are shared, and memes are born. It's also a place for chatting with friends. Yet unlike Facebook, Twitter is public by default. And that's not a bad thing. Learn mor...

Change is hard. Changes to a beloved website's interface can be downright loathsome. So maybe your stomach lurched when you logged into Gmail recently and saw the merry news that your email now “has a fresh new look.” “Oh god,” a colleague messaged me when our personal accounts were automatically migrated to the redesigned Gmail last week. “I feel so uncomfortable. Learn more about your ad choices...

Let’s just get it out of the way: my wife and I met each other online. This was more than 15 years ago, when “online” meant either chatrooms or some sort of personals-based website. (It was the latter.) We had the internet, but not in our pockets; texting and emoji had yet to worm their way into the mainstream, so we learned each other’s rhythms before read receipts and the tyranny of the three do...

Among the scant books in my tiny rented room in San Francisco, I’ve kept a spine-worn copy of Romeo and Juliet. It’s the one I read in my high school English class, the pages yellowed, the margins filled with scribbled notes. Since the play was written in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the nature of love—irrational, all-consuming—has been told and retold in countless movie adaptations. Lear...

Visions of the future tend to be clear-cut. Cars will drive themselves. Air taxis will fill the skies. Smartphones will have notches. The renderings and trend reports tend to elide the messy road map to that future. Yes, advances in lightweight materials, electric propulsion, and aeronautic controls have put the dream of electric people-packing quadcopter drones within reach. A few more years of d...

The audio market is full of headphones that strive to put out the most balanced, best sound signature possible, so listeners can hear every sonic detail in their favorite tunes precisely as "the artist intended." It’s a noble pursuit, but it assumes we’re all hearing the same things. In reality, much like eyesight, we all hear differently—and our ears continue to change as we age. I enjoyed using...

Venmo, the popular payment app owned by PayPal, has become the default way millions of Americans settle a check, pay a friend back for coffee, or buy a concert ticket off Craigslist. Writers have argued that Venmoing makes us petty, and that the app has nearly killed cash. Fewer have questioned whether it’s really the best service for exchanging money, or storing sensitive banking information. Lea...

On a late June day in 2012, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis uploaded five videos to YouTube. Each featured a quintet of monochromatic cartoon robots, catchy songs, and an educational slant. Six years, 150 songs, and 500 million views later, StoryBots is now a kid’s entertainment empire. It also just happens to be one of the best shows on Netflix, with the second season of Ask the StoryBots arriving on...

Right now, one of the world’s largest mass gatherings is taking place in the desert of Saudi Arabia. The hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites, is required of every observant Muslim who can perform it. More than 2 million people have poured into the country, over land, by air, and in massive charter deployments, from essentially every place around the globe where Muslims reside. Lea...

They say you never forget your first sous vide precision cooker. Actually, nobody says that. Even now, in an era when vacuum-sealed food bags having become the latest benefactor/victim of the app-guided cooking trend, most people genuinely don't know what I'm talking about when I tell them I sometimes cook with a sous vide wand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The shop has no sign. Or rather, the sign is obscured by some kind of bunting. The glass doors are papered over. You gotta know what's back there, like a speakeasy. Venturing to open the door, I find I still can't get inside. Between me and a cramped 180 square feet or so of convenience store-like shelves—yogurts, bags of exotically-flavored freeze-dried peas, refrigerators full of juice, and pre-...

I’m not a morning person, yet for the better part of a decade, I started my weekday mornings the same way: Peel myself out of bed, zombie shuffle to the shower, and listen to podcasts with heavy eyelids on the way to the office. When I got there, I’d head straight to the Keurig machine for a pick-me-up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most Saturdays, my husband Seth and I spend approximately the whole day with our phones aimed at our son, taking pictures of him from slightly different angles. There’s a diptych of him dancing in the bagel shop. There’s one of him scooting in the park. Until a few weeks ago, we'd spend our Saturday night bickering over beers about who got to post which photo to our separate Instagram accounts. It...

Let's get this out of the way: A lot of norms were disrupted in the videogame industry this week. There was news of a writer at a top gaming site allegedly plagiarizing reviews, and also reports that the Chinese gaming market is having troubles. Oh, and Diablo III is making the leap to the Nintendo Switch. Up is down, down is up, and a lot of things are out of whack. So let's expect the unexpected...

Of all the striking things about the interview with Elon Musk The New York Times published Thursday night—the tears, the lack of regrets over certain tweets, the fact that rapper Azealia Banks may somehow be part of Tesla’s financial future—was Musk’s claim that he’d be ready to abandon his role as Tesla CEO and chairman. “If you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can ha...

In his short story “Rattlesnakes and Men,” science fiction author Michael Bishop describes a town where everyone is required by law to own a dangerous rattlesnake. It’s a scenario that he says is no more absurd than how America treats access to guns. “We lost our son at Virginia Tech in 2007, in the shootings there,” Bishop says in Episode 322 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn more...

It's almost time to send the kids back to school, and that means you'll want to check out our Back to School buying guide ... but before that, there are a few tech and gaming deals you may want to peep for yourself. With some help from our friends at TechBargains, we've compiled our favorite deals for the weekend. Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 is Available for Preorder We gave the new Samsung Galaxy Not...

A year ago today, MoviePass introduced a radical new business model: Go see a movie a day, every day, for just $10 per month. At the time, it seemed too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. The company has since burned through cash at an unsustainable rate, aggravating customers with limited screenings, punishing anti-fraud measures, and general uncertainty about the future. Today, in a bid t...