Big-Story

Marissa Mayer didn’t say AI is Death, destroyer of worlds or even AI needs ethical guardrails.

Instead, she said it’s the sun—life-giving, bright, shiny, endlessly giving. Thus, the former Google engineer and CEO of Yahoo, who has worked on artificial intelligence for 25 years, christened her startup Sunshine. It’s devoted to AI-empowering family and social life with photo sharing, contact managing, and event planning.

As I spoke with Mayer in Sunshine’s candy-colored digs in Palo Alto, I was so stunned by her boosterism that I ended up mirroring it. “By gum, you’re right!” I said, all but slapping my knee. Intelligent machines are our bosom buddies. Anthropic’s Claude had that very morning given me canny insight into a personal matter.

Jake Sullivan was standing in the middle of his office, which occupies an airy, sunlit corner of the West Wing, looking like he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands. He was taking me on a perfunctory three-minute tour of the space, even though the office tour is, perhaps, the most tired trope of the magazine profile—and, I’d been warned, Sullivan is not a fan of magazine profiles. At least, not the ones that are about him.

With Alfonso Cuarón, you never know what’s next—and sometimes neither does he. The director leaps from genre to genre: from a Dickens adaptation, to a sensual road movie about two teenage boys, to a blockbuster Harry Potter sequel, to a dystopia about infertility, to a thriller set in low Earth orbit, to a meditative drama about the housekeeper in a wealthy Mexican household, filmed in black and white. What unites these stories is Cuarón’s particular sensibility, or what he calls his “cinematic language.” His camera rarely stops moving. His films regularly deliver tiny, unexpected moments—a woman shyly revealing herself to be pregnant in Children of Men; a stranded astronaut making radio contact with an Inuit man and his dogs down on Earth in Gravity—that feel intimate and grand at the same time.

For someone so new to celebrity, Bobbi Althoff sure is good at it. Gliding into a cramped, bohemian studio space tucked into the 14th floor of an office tower in Los Angeles’ Arts District, Althoff is well dressed, well coiffed, and appropriately entouraged—she arrives flanked by a makeup artist, a PR rep, and a woman shooting “BTS” (behind-the-scenes) footage of this interview for Althoff’s social media accounts.

Althoff, who’s 27 years old, just has it, that indescribable presence, that gravitational pull. A person who makes sense as somebody that everybody knows. And a lot more people know Althoff now than they did a few years ago: In 2021, her relentless attempts at taking off on TikTok finally stuck, and she established herself as a viral, albeit subversive, member of Mommy TikTok. That’s also where Althoff honed the awkwardly funny, deadpan persona that became her calling card and led to The Really Good Podcast, which is now in its third season.

The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: “You can take your blindfold off now.” I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The prize. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. A golden treasure.

The thing about family, Josh Johnson wants me to know, as he scoots closer and angles his phone in my direction, is that they suck at boundaries.

It’s morning in New York City, a pinch shy of noon, and we are on the subject of family because Johnson’s phone won’t stop buzzing. At first I assume it’s work, and I want to ask if this is a common occurrence now, if his recent rise to semi-stardom has prompted a wave of attention. I want to know how he’s handling it, or not. I want to hear what has changed for him, and if his dad’s passing, in 2016, afforded him any perspective.

Mark Cuban was confident he wouldn’t be recognized in Boston Common. This was early June, and it happened to be the day of the Boston Dyke March, billed as an “anti-capitalist intersectional gender liberation” event. Earlier that day, outside of his hotel, people had bum-rushed the billionaire, angling for an autograph or selfie. Basketball fans on the street lit up at the sight of him—the minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. But as we strolled the 50-acre stretch of green, considered the oldest public park in the US, Cuban the capitalist assured me that this anti-capitalist crowd couldn’t be less interested in him.

It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their “spare time.” Astro Teller, the head of Google X, had agreed a few months earlier to bring all the robot people into the lab, affectionately referred to as the moonshot factory.

Here’s a flash of Antony J. Blinken’s turn as US secretary of state: In his first year, he navigated America’s messy exit from Afghanistan. In his second, he tried to rally the world to Ukraine’s side following Russia’s invasion in February 2022. His third and, now fourth, have been defined by the Israel-Hamas conflict. In between, he has tried to box in rising Chinese aggression in Asia and slow Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon, even as the Islamic republic has (repeatedly) plotted to assassinate his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, for his role in killing Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. Don’t forget either about the normal mix of crises, coups, summits, treaties, global elections—more humans will vote in 2024 than in any year in world history—and, this summer, the biggest prisoner swap with Russia since the end of the Cold War.

ten years ago, WIRED published a news story about how two little-known, slightly ramshackle encryption apps called RedPhone and TextSecure were merging to form something called Signal. Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity—created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in a single room in San Francisco, spread word-of-mouth by hackers competing for paranoia points—into a full-blown, mainstream, encrypted communications phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of people have now downloaded Signal. (Including Drake: “Cuban girl, her family grind coffee,” he rapped in his 2022 song “Major Distribution.” “Text me on the Signal, don’t call me.”) Billions more use Signal’s encryption protocols integrated into platforms like WhatsApp.