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It’s exciting in general to get yourhands on a gaming machine for the first time, asI did this morning in New York at Nintendo’s first big Switch preview. But it’s doubly fun because Switch, coming March 3 for $299, is sounique. At its core, it’s a tablet with a 6.2-inch screen (a little bigger than an iPhone 7 Plus). You can slip it into a dock that hooks up to your TV if you want to play on a bi...

If you’ve ever witnessed a 4K OLED television playing HDR video, you’ve seen the pinnacle of TV tech. The black levels look like deep space. The contrast is perfect. The colors are stunning. Every frame mesmerizes, a twinkling, tack-sharp work of art. At CES, incredible OLEDs from LG and Sony and equally stunning LCDs from Samsung dominated the news. With good reason. They’re all gorgeous. But whi...

Every smartphone is a good smartphone now. Doesn’t really matter who makes it—huge companies like Apple and Samsung, upstarts like Nextbit and Blu—or which flashy features it has or doesn’t have. As long as you have around $250 to spend, you’re positively spoiled for choice. That’s great news for you, and it’s been terrible news for HTC. HTC’s last phone, the HTC 10, was a very good phone: It did...

When Apple set out to build a smartphone, the team tasked with doing so didn’t planon changing the world. It didn’t foresee theApp Storebecoming a billion-dollar business full ofbillion-dollar businesses like Uber, Snapchat, andWhatsApp. It wasn’ttrying to reinvent howpeople communicate, shop, and even hook up. It was tryingto buildan iPod that made phone calls. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Heading into the craziness ofCES 2017, it was hard to see how LG could make its OLED televisionsany better. Cheaper? Sure. But better? We’re talking about TVs that some say offerthe best picturein the history of television. Yet LGmanaged to crank up thewow factor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Ezra Edelman set out to make the documentary O.J.: Made in America, he had one goal: To make a five-hour movie about howthe 1995 O.J. Simpson murder case a flashpoint for talking about race and the American criminal justice system. Not only didhe hit his goal, but he overshot that runtime by about three hours. “No sane person would do this,” Edelman says now, sitting in a lounge in New York’s...

Now that Chrome OS users can get the millions of apps in Google’s Play Store, tech firms are developingentirely new kinds of devices for the platform. After months of speculation, rumors, and delays—which may have had something to do with the Note 7 battery scandal—Samsung announced the new Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro today at CES. The Plus and Pro are two flavors of one device, but it’s ha...

Watch out, LG. Sony is entering the OLED television arena with a fetching TV. We’ve long known Sony could build a sweet OLED. It rolled into CES a few years ago with a stunning 56-inch 4K OLED set, but it never went anywhere. And because Panasonic doesn’t sell its OLED here in the US, LG has had the market to itself. That ends this year. Sony’s Bravia OLED A1E is gorgeous, it’s slim, and it sports...

One of the most enduring views of CES happens to be one of the first things anyone sees there. You squeeze through the crowds of businessmen, hangers-on, and professional conference-goers, and push through the doors of the Las Vegas Convention Center. You walk down the hallway that's somehow already filthy, even though the show started just 16 seconds ago, and you look to your right. Learn more ab...

In November, WIRED published a special issue guest-edited by President Obama. The magazine’s features editor Maria Streshinsky says that working with the president was an exciting opportunity for everyone at WIRED, especially editor in chief Scott Dadich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a lab buried under the Apennine Mountains of Italy, Elena Aprile, a professor of physics at Columbia University, is racing to unearth what would be one of the biggest discoveries in physics. She has not yet succeeded, even after more than a decade of work. Then again, nobody else has, either. Aprile leads the XENON dark matter experiment, one of several competing efforts to detect a particle re...

2016 was a year that felt entirely out of control. At times, it was a blur a blur; at others it was dreadfully long, challenging moments personal and collective stretching into little eternities. This year’s videogames weren’t explicitresponses to anything that happened this year—games rarely works like that, especially where multi-million dollar development cycles are concerned—but entertainment...

Sure,withThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wildthere’sone more high-profile game coming to Wii U. But Nintendo is also releasing the new Zelda for its upcoming new console, Nintendo Switch. And it’s not even promising that the game will be there for its March launch, just a vague “2017.” By the time Zelda finally ships, you may have already upgraded your console. Learn more about your ad choices....

Ifirmly believethat thekitchen isan incredible source of knowledge, and that you can’t truly understand something you love until you try making it yourself. If you love beer, these truisms yield a glorious thing. Homebrewing is somethingof a national passion, but I’ve never delved into it, mostly becausethere’s so much great beer producedby people who know what they’re doing. Learn more about your...

You know the space agency best for the way it uses probes, landers, telescopes, and satellites to show you worlds beyond your own, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has plenty of tools for taking a close look at Earth, too. To study the home planet’s atmosphere, weather, ice masses, and oceans, NASA operates a diverse fleet of aircraft planes, from the high-fling ER-2 to the Gl...

Audioengine enjoysa strong reputation for high-quality speakers at prices that won’t make you cry. TheHD3 desktop speakers retail at $400, which places them at the upperend of Audioengine’s desktop line of powered boxes, but below the top-endHD5 speakers. I held high expectations for the HD3s. AsI unpacked them, I felt pangs of nostalgia over the wires and cables. It’s been awhile since I plugged...

With each new Star Wars movie, fans wait to see how their favorite characters, new and old, will be styled. And, with some of the most iconic and influential hairstyles in pop-culture history, the franchise has a high bar to clear when it comes to its characters’ tresses. Because as Yoda says, “Hairdo. Or do not hairdo. There is no try. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...

Not everyone wants to—or can—spend the holidays next to a fire or gorging on fowl and carbs. Some people (read: us) see holidays as a chance to catch up on movies and gorge on popcorn and Starburst. Luckily for those folks, there are a lot of good movies in theaters right now—and even more ways to see them. But going to the movies can be stressful. There are lines, jockeying for good seats, and th...

It’s that time of year again—the time when we all look back at the past 12 months and try to figure out what the hell just happened. Here on The Monitor, things are no different. In fact, that’s what this week’s entire episode is about. Yes, this week the WIRED Culture team started talking about 2016 and realized: Hey, you know what? This was a pretty good year for pop culture. Learn more about yo...

It was Valentine’s Day. I made a dinner reservation at Milano just in case, and the needles from the Christmas tree were everywhere. I even found some in the bathtub. I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but neither does the fact that I got a birthday card from President Bush in the mail. The guy hasn’t been in office for years, not to mention I’m a Democrat. Anyway, the box that flashes, the People...

My host’s expression went cool. He was a middle-aged man with a wide face and shoulders and pale stubble on his cheeks and chin that held the promise of a lush beard. In the four hours I’d spent in his home since the evacuated rail from Nové MÄ›sto had deposited me in Sagrado, he’d been nothing but jovial and expansive. His warmth and his pleasure in having a guest had lulled me into feeling safe....

Lately this feeling or maybe it's a thought what's the difference great another thing to think about add it to the list. Hard. To feel. Sure about anything it's in the CUPBOARD. NEXT TO THE MOUTHWASH. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want to know what's coming next from Shinola, the hipster-chic brand of watches, bikes, and seemingly all things leather, walk into the company's store in midtown Detroit. Go through the minimalist cafe; around the table of branded footballs, briefcases, and ping-pong paddles; and past the jewelry case. Then look right, through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. That's where I findSteve W...

That five-inch phone in your pocket, the one you absolutely can't live without, does damn near anything these days. It is the Great Usurper, rendering everything from newspapers to music players to actual human interaction all but obsolete. People embraced smartphones faster than any other gadget in the history of the world, creating a trillion-dollar industry that is expected to reach more than s...

Do you love getting onto an airplane? Because, let’s be honest, nobody is their best self when trying to muscle an overstuffed rolling bag down a narrow aisle and then up into an overhead bin that’s exactly, precisely, slightly too small for it. Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore! Because starting in 2017, United Airlines is taking away your right to put a bag in the overhead altoget...