THE FIRST TIME someone invited me to a Slack Huddle - an audio call that happens inside the app - I didn't know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and moused away into the sad forest of a thousand open browser tabs on my computer.
Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my MacBook speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone-maybe a fake vibraphone?-with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud.
The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn't I hate it? On some instinctive level, I could tell - as I hunted through Chrome tabs one by one - that whatever circumstances normally produce elevator music had not produced this. This music wasn't canned; it was uncanny.
I'd scanned all my tabs twice, across two browser windows, before I realized the tune was coming from Slack. (By now an electric organ had replaced the vibraphone, and the sax seemed to be winking at how cheesy it was getting. Was this music... looking at me?) When I finally toggled the track into silence, I'm not going to say I felt bereft. But it wasn't long before I figured out how to play it again.
I went to the internet to see if anyone else had perked up at the Slack Huddle hold music. Sure enough, I found several uploads of it on YouTube, including one that looped it for 60 minutes. If anything, judging from comments, my reaction had been understated: "This has no right to be as good as it is." (211 likes.) "Absolute banger." (25 likes.) "So chill. After a long stressful discussion with my coworkers, I listen to this song to relax!" (59 likes.)
Denne historien er fra May - June 2024-utgaven av WIRED.
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Denne historien er fra May - June 2024-utgaven av WIRED.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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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.
