New York’s Museum of Modern Art is under siege. Well, a virtual siege, at least. A group of renegade artists has co-opted the brightly-lit Jackson Pollock gallery on the museum’s fifth floor, turning it into their personal augmented reality playground. To the uninitiated, the gallery remains unchanged; Pollock’s distinctive drip paintings are as prominent and…
Brent looks like the archetypal thirtysomething tech guy. Clad in dark jeans and a button-up, the marketing director fits right in at his startup in San Jose. He landed the gig with the usual Silicon Valley pedigree, having worked at a couple of startups and Fortune 500 companies. He keeps a regimented gym schedule. He’s…
Dangling like a piñata from a polyester rope, I’m inching up a 1,000-year-old tree named Grandfather. This forest in Northern California’s Santa Cruz Mountains is said to be the only place where one can legally climb a redwood. I’ve covered about 100 feet in 30 minutes, halfway to the top. Suspended in my saddle—a sort…
In its four decades, the internet has seen a lot of conceptual alchemy, but there's nothing quite so odd as the Cult of Kek. The maybe-maybe-not religion is the brainchild of the so-called alt-right, some of whom claim to believe not only in white supremacy, but also in the supremacy of an ancient Egyptian deity…
The first installment of Marlon James' Dark Star trilogy tests the reader's commitment. "The child is dead. There is nothing left to know." Of course, that's not entirely true—620 pages follow. James, a deft stylist with a taste for violence and grand revelation (just look to his Man Booker Prize–winning historical saga, 2014's A Brief…
Just imagine the fanfiction now. It’s the kind of thing people write on social media after a tense scene between two heavily “shipped” characters, or when fan-favorite actors get cozy off set. It’s also what Potterverse creator J.K. Rowling said to a shocked Carnegie Hall in 2007, moments after she revealed that she’d “always thought…
Happy Monday, and welcome to another installment of The Monitor, WIRED's roundup of the latest in the world of culture. In today's news, HBO has finally coughed up a release date for the final season of Game of Thrones, Netflix is facing a lawsuit, and it looks like the Super Bowl won't be marooned without…
To try and summarize the comic book career of Stan Lee is almost impossible. He was the primary—at times, sole—writer for Marvel in the 1960s when the company was becoming Marvel Comics. He was involved in the co-creation of almost all of the company’s most well-known characters, from Spider-Man to the X-Men, with Iron Man,…
Since its inception, the #MeToo movement has received copious backlash: Survivors brave enough to speak up face harassment and doxing, while the media speculates about how being outed as an abuser will impact men’s careers. But until a few days ago, #MeToo hadn’t inspired a full-on hashtag-slinging countermovement. Now there’s #HimToo. The hashtag and its…
Despite how easy it looks in James Bond movies and heist flicks, good disguises are hard to pull off. A good wig and some makeup don't make you a new person—full transformation requires a full attitude adjustment. Just ask any contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. And when you're a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency,…