Beauty product reviews on YouTube aren’t just about beauty products and internet capitalism. They’re a conduit for drama, loyalty politics, and “cancel” culture, as WIRED’s Emma Grey Ellis has learned throughout her reporting on some of YouTube’s biggest names. This week’s drama is centered around James Charles, a hugely popular 19-year-old beauty influencer and Tati Westbrook, an OG YouTube beauty guru and a mentor of James Charles. Coachella and hair vitamins were involved. Charles was cancell...
May 17, 2019•36 min•Ep. 406
Developer conferences aren’t just a chance for tech companies to incentivize app makers and show off the latest tricks and tools in software. The events also present an opportunity for companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google to assure the public that they are on it when it comes to issues like privacy, openness, and also, privacy. And companies often use the giant keynote stage to show off futuristic demos involving augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies. H...
May 10, 2019•52 min•Ep. 405
You might know Adam Savage as the co-host of the television show MythBusters , as the editor of Tested.com, or as the host of countless web videos that show him building machines, sewing costumes for Comic-Con, and occasionally blowing something up in his San Francisco workshop. Now Savage is the host of a new television show, Savage Builds , coming to the Science and Discovery channels on June 12. Savage has also written a memoir about his life as a maker called Every Tool’s a Hammer . We bring...
May 03, 2019•52 min•Ep. 404
What happens when your drop your phone and shatter the screen? Or when its battery starts to grow noticeably weaker? These common technological woes are things that you should be able to remedy yourself—just buy some parts, get some tools, and fix your device. But it’s not that simple. Gadget manufacturers have been increasingly restricting access to the parts, tools, and knowledge required for regular consumers to fix their broken tech. Instead, consumers have to turn to authorized repair techn...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 403
Uber filed to go public this week. No big surprise there; everyone in the industry has been waiting months for the ride-hailing giant to hit the accelerator on its IPO. What did raise an eyebrow were the details the company divulged in its filing—from how it views the future of its business to what it considers its primary challenges in the marketplace. This week, we invite WIRED transportation reporter Aarian Marshall back onto the show to break down all of the revelations in Uber’s S1 filing. ...
Apr 12, 2019•46 min•Ep. 402
We’re confused about what exactly this hoped-for Targaryen Restoration is about, politically. And is Game of Thrones, like, good anymore? Laura Hudson and Spencer Ackerman preview the political and social themes fueling the forthcoming final season of Game of Thrones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 12, 2019•46 min
This week, we’re joined by a special guest: freelance war correspondent Kenneth R. Rosen. Ken is working on a series of stories for WIRED about the reconstruction efforts in Syria. The first of Ken’s stories, “The Body Pullers of Syria,” published earlier this week. We talk to Ken about how he does his job, the tools he uses to report the stories of the men and women rebuilding the war-torn cities, and the methods he uses to stay safe in the field. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Apr 05, 2019•22 min•Ep. 401
Hormonal male contraception is not a new idea––in fact, researchers have been working on solutions for men the pill was invented for women. But early tests around male contraceptives were inconclusive, and as birth control pills exploded, interest in a male version of this waned. A new male contraceptive gel, one that reduces sperm count, could change that. It’s been in the works for more than a decade, WIRED’s Arielle Pardes reports this week, and it looks promising. Even if the gel eventually ...
Mar 29, 2019•48 min•Ep. 400
Google’s Project Stream, first unveiled last October, gave gamers a taste of what it would be like to stream heavy games directly from the cloud – from a Chrome browser, even. That effort has now evolved into something much, much more ambitious. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Google formally announced Stadia. Stadia is Google’s bet on next-generation gaming: It exists entirely in the cloud, with a physical, WiFi-enabled controller that connects to whatever computer...
Mar 22, 2019•48 min•Ep. 399
“Should this exist?” is not typically a question that technologists ask themselves, Caterina Fake says. The Flickr cofounder-turned-investor says that most entrepreneurs and engineers will ask themselves, “Can this exist, could this exist, how can we gain the funding to make this exist? Those are the conversations we’ve been having for the past 15 to 20 years about technology.” But that narrative in tech is evolving, Fake tells WIRED on this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, from one of ideation, optim...
Mar 15, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 398
Jessica Powell was the top communications executive at Google when she found herself Googling, in no uncertain search terms, how to quit her job at Google. She tried approximately 837 different tactics before she ended up taking the leap, and now she’s a startup founder, a contributor to Medium and The New York Times, and the author of The Big Disruption, a novel about a giant Silicon Valley tech company. The eventual burnout and dissatisfaction Powell experienced is not unique in Silicon Valley...
Mar 08, 2019•53 min
Microsoft just unveiled a brand new product, but it really doesn’t want to hype it. That’s according to Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft who is credited with inventing Kinect and HoloLens. Kipman joins the Gadget Lab podcast this week to talk about HoloLens 2, the next-generation mixed reality headset. HoloLens 2 has some significant upgrades: It’s lighter, more comfortable, and “smarter” than the previous version. Due to a new, patented optics module, its field-of-view is larger. But ...
Mar 01, 2019•52 min
At its flagship phone event this week in San Francisco, Samsung announced not one but four different versions of the new Galaxy S10: A phone with a 6.1-inch display, a plus-sized model, a “less expensive” version of the phone, and a handset that will support 5G networks when it ships. But the most interesting part of the launch was undeniably Samsung’s reveal of its new foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold. It wasn’t the very first time this phone was shown off, but this time around Samsung showed a ...
Feb 23, 2019•43 min
Product designer and internet native Chris Messina was lucky enough to snag the username @chris on Instagram back when Instagram was known as Burbn, and, like all of his early usernames, it became a part of his digital identity. But having an OG username has exposed him to hacks, scams, and generally shady online exchanges. It has also lead him down the path of more existential questions about life online––like, is the internet still fun? On this week’s Gadget Lab podcast we talk to Chris about ...
Feb 15, 2019•1 hr
Move fast and break app store rules: That very well may have been Facebook’s motto for awhile now, only, we’re just learning about it this week. After TechCrunch reported that Facebook was sidestepping Apple’s rules for enterprise apps and distributing a market research app to iOS users as young as 13 years old, Apple temporarily removed Facebook’s internal apps from its enterprise app program. Facebook wasn’t the only guilty party: Google also had its wrist slapped by Apple this week, for a sne...
Feb 01, 2019•49 min
Kids are particularly terrible for robots. At least, that’s what researchers in Japan discovered when they let a robot roam around a shopping center in Osaka in 2015. A group of kids antagonized the robot, forcing the researchers to program an algorithm that would give the bot the agency to evade abuse. That’s just one example of challenging social interactions between humans and robots, and one that technologists have almost certainly considered when building and designing delivery bots. Includ...
Jan 25, 2019•42 min
Self-lacing sneakers have been the dream since Marty McFly first rocked Nike MAGs in 1989, but most attempts at turning shoe leather into smart sneakers have been expensive, produced in small batches, and frankly, a little gimmicky. Until now: Earlier this week, Nike revealed Adapt BB, the company’s latest self-lacing basketball shoe. And these actually seem … smart. WIRED’s Peter Rubin joins the Gadget Lab podcast this week to talk about what it’s like to wear the new kicks, and describes all o...
Jan 19, 2019•47 min
We came. We saw. We touched a lot of gadgets. This week was the annual CES, one of the world’s largest consumer electronics show, and WIRED’s team was on the ground covering all of the top tech trends to emerge from the show. In this week’s episode of the Gadget Lab podcast, Mike, Arielle, and Lauren talk about CES’s big security #fail, what all of these connected gadgets mean for the future of healthcare, and robots. Lots of robots. Later in the episode, Arielle talks to Jen Wong, the chief ope...
Jan 12, 2019•53 min
If you had to sum up the year in tech in one word, what word would you choose? That’s what we at the Gadget Lab asked ourselves as we looked to somehow recap a year’s worth of tech-related drama in approximately 45 minutes. 2018 was the year that we learned about Cambridge Analytica; that social media’s role in the 2016 U.S. election came into sharper focus; that top tech executives were put in the Congressional hot seat; and that tech workers spoke out about everything from brutal work environm...
Dec 21, 2018•49 min
Most people, at this point, believe that climate change is a real thing that will harm future generations of humans. And yet, a cognitive dissonance exists around that knowledge and our sense of responsibility: A much smaller percentage of people believe that climate change is impacting them personally, according to Yale’s climate survey program. It is indeed impacting humans right now, with clear and compelling evidence that the global average temperature is much higher than anything modern soc...
Dec 14, 2018•56 min
