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Congratulations, Los Angeles! You’ve got the worst traffic in the world. In exchange for the sunshine, gorgeous beaches, and A-plus tacos, you’re forced to whine incessantly about all those damned cars clogging the 405. You don’t live in LA and you’re sick of hearing about how bad they’ve got it? Well, have some sympathy. You’d whine too if you spent 104 hours a year slogging through traffic. Lear...

You already have yourreasons for hating San Francisco. The tech bros. The housing crisis. Twitter. The jerks on Lombard Street trying to charge a toll to drive down their stupid winding street. If you need another, consider the traffic. Oh god, the traffic. San Francisco Bay Area commuters spend an average of 78 hours creeping through gridlocked traffic each year, according to the Texas A&M Transp...

Our language and our conception of time have much in common. Both proceed as a march, one thing after another. (You’re not reading this sentence backward, just as you can’t travel back in time.) From that, well, straightforward observation spring the wondrous complexities of Ted Chiang’s 1998 sci-fi short story, “The Story of Your Life” (the basis for last year’s hit movie Arrival). Learn more abo...

In this golden age of TV, when there’s more on offer than you could pack into six lifetimes, it’s still way too difficult to find anything to watch. All your favorite shows and movies residein different apps, on different boxes, plugged into different ports on your TV. And so you end up paralyzed. How many times have you sat in front of your TV, watching a video on your phone? A medium once so bli...

Like John Oliver and baseball, unlimited data plans are back! To be fair, they never left for some people. But one of the weekend’s biggest bits of news is that Verizon just reinstated its unlimited monthly data plan. For Verizon customers, an all-you-can-eat data plan hadn’t been available for new subscribers since 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the last couple of years, Chromebooks have quietly infiltrated the computer market. Google's affordable "just a browser" devices are the best-selling computers in schools, and they're percolating around boardrooms and cubicles. Last fall, more people bought Chromebooks than Macs-and that's not going to switch back anytime soon. Now Google's out to convince you, regular human, person of sound...

A couple of years ago, the luxurious leather-wrapped Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H7s were our favorite Bluetooth headphones. The over-ear H7s sounded as gorgeous as they looked, and they even smelled great. The problem, if anything, was the price. At $400, the H7s weren’t the cheapest options by any means. And while the new $300 Beoplay H4s aren’t exactly bargain-bin cans either, they offer nearly the...

Flipboard exists in stark contrast to your Facebook News Feed or Twitter timeline. It doesn't rely on your high school friends to share whatever junk they're reading, nor does it ask you to follow the right combination of 800 people. Flipboard's always been a quieter place that you can fill with news stories you like. Today, Flipboard is rolling out a brand-new version of its platform that introdu...

This week, Vizio, which makes popular, high-quality, affordable TV sets, agreed to pay a $2.2 million fine to the FTC. As it turns out, those same TVs were also busily tracking what their owners were watching, and shuttling that data back to the company’s servers, where it would be sold to eager advertisers. That’s every bit as gross as it sounds, but Vizio’s offense was one of degree, not of kind...

What do a Web 1.0 pioneer, a Russian-born fisherman, and a scientist who shoots lasers into poop for a living have in common? America’s first 100 percent vegetarian trout. Bill Foss, Kenny Belov, and Rick Barrows have spent years weaning their farmed fish off of industrial fish food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know what gaming PCs look like, right? Big, LED-lit cubes that look ready to hatch tiny evil cyborgs. Lesser Doctor Who villains. Mean but tidy igneous rocks. You get the idea. The Volta V, from Computer Direct Outlet, disagrees. It thinks a gaming PC looks like a beautiful, handcrafted wooden box. Thank goodness. The Volta V, which ships this March, provides a high-powered option for people w...

Here at WIRED Book Club, we tend to read newer writers. Ted Chiang isn’t exactly that. Since publishing his first short story, “Tower of Babylon,” in 1990, he’s averaged less than a story a year, quietly cultivating a modest but devoted fan base that recognizes his work for what it is: sharp, spare, intensely thought-through science fiction. “Literary,” as some like to call it. Learn more about yo...

Binti: Home doesn’t pick up exactly where its Hugo-winning predecessor left off. In that novella, Binti—a brilliant Himba woman in what is possibly a future Namibia—jets off for the galaxy’s finest university. The trip goes horrifically wrong, but by the end, she’s there, has a new friend, and is ready to start learning. So you might expect the sequel, released yesterday, to cover Binti’s first ye...

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft-the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web-to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. So dig in and geek out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Toy Fair is almost upon us, which makes this week basically Christmas Eve for Nerf fans. Here are three blasters you can unwrap early: the Raptorstrike, which uses Nerf’s most accurate darts yet; the Twinshock, the first blaster to shoot two Mega darts at once, and the Modulus Regulator, which… well, it’s dope. While these three aren’t the full extent of Nerf’s 2017 arsenal expansion, each adds a...

It’s a tedious task you’ve been putting off for what could be years. But this is finally the weekend you do it; you’re going to clean your computer inside and out. That means scrubbing down those keys, wiping the fossilized fingerprints off your screen and deleting all the files that secretly downloaded when you were trying to figure out how to make a GIF. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...

Elon Musk is supes annoyed with LA's atrocious traffic and wants to dig a tunnel under it all. It's true that getting around Los Angeles is a pain, but this is a tremendously stupid idea. Not because tunnels are expensive (true), or because he'd need a pile of permits to start boring(also true), but because his harebrained scheme won't actually help. I am actually going to do this - Elon Musk (@el...

There are two types of people in the world: Thosewho just know they could never get away with using an iPad as their only computer, and everyone else. And the odds are you're one of those true believers. The truth is, you can (probably) totally do this. Unless youspend your days in Photoshop or Premiere, or you absolutely need some kind of esoteric accounting software, you don't need all the compu...

In the fall of 2016, when Nick Fox, Google's vice president in charge of messaging products, first showed me the new Allo messaging app, he started with a slide. "This is our overall approach and strategy to communications," he said, pointing at a bunch of app icons separated into three columns. On the left, consumer products-Allo and Duo. On the right, enterprise, which is where Hangouts is going...

In a recent episode of MacGyver, Angus (that's what his REALLY close friends call him) builds a Leyden jar with some very simple components. Of course there is some awesome physics here, so I will obviously go over this. Full disclosure-I'm currently the Technical Consult for the MacGyver show. What is a Leyden Jar? A long time ago, humans were just starting to figure out this whole electricity th...

This afternoon, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 45th and final President of the United States. In addition to all of the usual pomp and circumstance—OK, well, maybe not the usual pomp and circumstance, because we understand he had some trouble lining up performers—there will be a full slate of fine entertainment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The camera market has long been segmented into three basic categories: Cameras for professionals, models for the so-called “serious hobbyists,” and models for the newcomer. From DSLRs to action cams and point-and-shoots, most cameras are squarely aimed at one of these three markets. The market for aerial photography (aka drones with real cameras on them) is about 150 years younger, and therefore s...

The best place on the planet to watch a movie is almost certainly from the center seat in the second-to-last row of the David Keighley Theater at IMAX’s headquarters in Playa Vista, CA. The theater seats 95, all in the shadow of a screen 60 feet wide and 42 feet tall. Twelve channels of sound project from the walls, the ceiling, and the deep recesses of your soul. Everything is black, with deep bl...

It is not enough to resolve to read more in the New Year—as something like 12 percent of Americans do. You must have a plan, a program, a structure. And, crucially, a group of wonderful, intellectually adventurous people to be accountable to. Welcome to WIRED Book Club, back for 2017 and better than ever. If this is your first time, here’s how it works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

So, Nintendo’s Switch is pretty fantastic. Or, rather, it could be if it gets some killer games. But after watching the company’s livestream today and playing around with the new console, we had questions. Fortunately, Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s president and chief operating officer, was there to answer them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices