WHEN I COME TO PARIS TO SEE TONY FADELL'S NEW device, a clean rain has washed the city and the sun is out. Fadell and I hail a taxi. When he gives the address for Ledger-a maker of hardware wallets for the cryptoverse-he speaks in French, but even after six years abroad, there's still Detroit in his voice.
At the meeting we enter, everyone is speaking English. People are sitting at a large table. On the walls are labels such as PHOTO ASSETS, VIEW FROM LANDING PAGE, USER FLOW, with big printouts taped below. Fadell strides to the front of the room.
"We've got seven weeks to pull this off," he says. "Are we going to pull this off?" The people in the room say yes, they will pull it off. They sound confident, weary, but ready for the next round of work. Each person says what they have done since the last time they met.
Fadell responds with questions. What's the drop-dead date on the plastic blanks? Where's the press release? Are we recording the click-click-click? I want to hear it! The click remark reminds everyone, as if they needed it, that Fadell once led the team at Apple that created the iPod, with its elegant clicky wheel and revolutionary interface. He also cofounded Nest and created its smart thermostat, which Google then acquired.
Fadell circles the room to examine the printouts, which describe the product rollout. A man with a video camera follows him, recording the moment for posterity and promotional use.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 2023 de WIRED.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.