WHEN I FIRST see Margaret Atwood, she's bundled up. Red hat over her famous silver curls, long puffy coat, boots befitting a Canadian winter. The right outfit for a profoundly gray Toronto day, especially since she'd trudged over to meet me. "I walk everywhere!" she says merrily, unspooling her scarf. I almost feel bad for taking a cab to the restaurant.
She's come to discuss her new book, Old Babes in the Wood. It's her ninth collection of short stories, adding to a sprawling body of work that includes 17 novels and 18 volumes of poetry.
Old Babes is Atwood at her most whimsical: A snail swaps bodies with a human, an alien tries to translate a fairy tale, a seance summons the ghost of George Orwell. The collection is bookended by bruising stories about Nell and Tig, a devoted couple Atwood introduced in 2006's Moral Disorder. This time around, Nell mourns Tig's illness and eventual death-it's a melancholy love story as affecting as any of Atwood's strongest work.
As the author sits down, I pull out a list of questions, eager for insight into her new collection and her seemingly indefatigable creative process. I got that, eventually, but with nothing to prove and no one left to impress, she seems happiest bantering. (By the way, in case Condé Nast's expense department is reading this: I didn't order the $45 foie gras. Or the whiskey. You try telling an 83-year-old literary legend what they can or can't order.) Atwood kicks off the conversation with a very WIRED opening line.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Did you know that, amongst other things, I'm also a tech entrepreneur?
WIRED: I heard you invented-was it a remote book-signing device?
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Denne historien er fra May 2023-utgaven av 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.