Big-Story

WIRED: Hey.

Katie: Hey … ?

WIRED: It’s us. The collective consciousness of the WIRED editorial staff, here to help you talk about The Big Interview series.

Katie: Is this AI?

WIRED: Katie, what’s a Big Interview?

Katie: Is it weird that I’m being interviewed by my own publication?

WIRED: Hey, you created this monster. Answer the question.

Katie: It’s a conversation with someone we—me, and you, who are apparently the collective consciousness of WIRED—care about, think is interesting, and who is in some way shaping our shared future. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a technology executive or a world-famous scientist; these conversations span everything WIRED covers.

Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.

The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickax.

A plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history. Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the bag didn’t break. That’s because of the magical chemistry of plastic—essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, noodle-like molecules.

In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen had a simple yet controversial question: How much time might we have left to save it?

Off the southwest tip of Iceland, you’ll find what’s often called a “marginal” body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere. On Google Maps it gets three stars: “very windy,” says one review. It’s also where something rather strange is happening. As the rest of the planet has warmed since the 20th century—less in the tropics, more near the poles—temperatures in this patch of ocean have hardly budged. In some years they’ve even cooled. If you get a thrill from spooky maps, check out one that compares the average temperatures in the late 19th century with those of the 2010s. All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there’s one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.

You wake up on Election Day and unlock your phone to a shaky video of your state capitol. In the hectic footage, smoke billows from the statehouse. In other clips posted alongside it, gunshots ring out in the distance. You think to yourself: Maybe better to skip the polling booth today. Only later do you learn that the videos were AI forgeries.

A friend calls you, distraught. An anonymous acquaintance has put her in a series of pornographic deepfakes, and now the videos are spreading from site to site. The police told her to contact a lawyer, but the cease-and-desist letters aren’t working.

When Jon M. Chu enters the restaurant, I barely notice him. He looks like a regular customer here for an early lunch. He doesn’t project the air of a Hollywood big shot, though by any measure he is one. Chu directed the 2018 hit Crazy Rich Asians, and he’s currently at work on a two-part, $145 million film adaptation of the musical Wicked. Normally, I, the interviewer, would immediately rise to greet my interviewee. But I’m preoccupied listening to Chu’s father, Lawrence—the Chef Chu of Chef Chu’s—and his brother, Larry, who now runs the family restaurant alongside their dad. They’re rapid-fire talkers, regaling me with overlapping stories. And there are plenty of stories to tell about this place.

To understand Priscila Barbosa—the pluck, the ambition, the sheer balls—we should start at the airport. We should start at the precise moment on April 24, 2018, when she concluded, I’m fucked.

Barbosa was just outside customs at New York’s JFK International Airport, 5-foot-1, archetypally pretty even without her favorite Instagram filter. She was flanked by two rolling suitcases stuffed with clothes and Brazilian bikinis and not much else. The acquaintance who had invited her to come from Brazil on a tourist visa, who was going to drive her to Boston? The one who promised to help her get settled, saying that she could make good money like he did, driving for Uber and Lyft?

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights.