Spotify appears to be testing a “Social Listening” feature that lets friends control the music that’s playing next together.
This new feature is somewhat similar to Spotify’s very own collaborative playlist feature, but the difference here is that ‘social-listening’ adds a real-time element to it. The feature is essentially meant to let you join forces with friends, family to decide what plays next, regardless of whether the person is physically near or not.
Spotify
Software engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who’s kicked up quite a reputation for discovering unreleased app features by digging through code, recently spotted the feature and posted about it on Twitter. Manchun Wong found the feature buried in Spotify’s Android app code, which she combs through to reveal what the feature is all about.
The link to control my music will only work for those with access to Social Listening, meaning only Spotify employees for now
The “Social Listening” feature is currently only available to Spotify employees as part of a test, but Wong does attach screenshots of the feature in her tweets.
When connected to Spotify’s Social Listening, you will show up on the “Already connected” list
The “Now Playing” UI will show the amount of friends listening
In Spotify, there’s a button that takes you to your connected devices, which normally allows you to determine what device you’re playing your music on. For those with the new feature, the option “Connect with friends” appears in that menu.
When you choose that option, Spotify generates a QR code for you along with a link, or an option to “scan code.” You can either share your code or link with a friend or scan someone else’s code. Once you do, the “Now Listening” section of Spotify becomes social! It will show who’s listening in the “Connect with friends” module, and anyone connected can control the music.
Wong does, however, mention that she was not able to determine how real-time or interruptive the feature is, because of the feature still being in an unreleased state.
Trouble is brewing for a Chinese electronics giant, students sent a rocket into actual space, and the highly infectious measles just won’t go away. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.
Today’s Headlines
Huawei may have been dealt a critical blow in its war with Trump
President Donald Trump has deemed Chinese electronics giant Huawei a national security threat—a problem the company thought it could weather. But now some of its suppliers are backing away, potentially leaving Huawei crippled. How bad is it? “This is like telling Coca-Cola that they can’t use carbonated water.”
A rocket built by students has reached outer space
A rocket built entirely by USC students soared past the Kármán line—the boundary that marks the end of Earth’s atmosphere—reaching 339,800 feet and a top speed of 3,386 mph. It’s only the second amateur rocket group in history to have accomplished the feat. The students’ next goal? Claiming the highest amateur rocket launch in history.
Cocktail Conversation
In 2000, the US declared the deadly measles virus eliminated. But since January 1 of this year, measles has sickened 880 people across 24 states—more than all the cases of the past three years combined. That declaration could be officially reversed this September, entering us into a dark era of highly infectious disease.
WIRED Recommends: Cannondale Treadwell
Cannondale’s latest addition to its bicycle lineup clocks in as a lightweight fitness bike—i.e. a hybrid of sorts. It’s no hassle to run errands or zip down to the beach with, but it’s also effective for longer expeditions. The really cool thing? It can track all your rides with onboard sensors.
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It's a beautiful day. The family's in attendance, side dishes and beer in tow. Your sister-in-law brought a trunk full of Super Soakers. It's BBQ time. Time to kick back in the yard and fire up the … stove?
Hmm, that doesn't sound terribly exciting, does it? But that's basically what you're doing when you cook out on a gas grill, which is powered by the same largely flavorless fuel as your kitchen stove.
True fact: Cooking on a gas grill is more convenient than cooking with charcoal.
It's also a lot less special. And, scientifically speaking, it creates less flavorful food.
To understand why, you first need to understand that flavor and taste are not the same thing. "Within flavor, we have taste compounds and we have aroma compounds," says Gavin Sacks, associate professor of food science at Cornell University. "Our brains just aren't designed to decouple them."
True fact: A gas grill is more convenient. But it also creates less flavorful food.
In other words, a burger is more than the sum of its ingredients. Sure, there are chemical processes occurring in your food that alter its flavors as it heats—amino acids interacting with sugars, fats breaking down, and so on—but this delicious chemistry happens whether you cook on gas, charcoal, an electric burner, even an engine block.
What charcoal brings to the party is a healthy heaping of aroma compounds, the other half of the power couple that is flavor. In fact, aroma might be the super starlet in that relationship, because our tongues are actually pretty limited. "There are only five taste receptors that are well-agreed-upon to exist within your taste buds," Sacks says. He's referring to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the new kid: umami.
Anything else you perceive while eating—that smoky deliciousness, for example—is courtesy of aroma.
What charcoal brings to the party is a healthy heaping of aroma compounds, the other half of the power couple that is flavor.
Aromas are released when you bite into your food. They travel up your retronasal cavity and light up your olfactory receptors. That neurological signal mixes with whatever your taste buds are saying and tells your brain what's going on in your mouth.
Of course, even food cooked on a gas grill gives off aromas—all food does. But food grilled over a charcoal flame has a special one: guaiacol.
Guaiacol is an aroma compound produced when you use heat to break down lignin, the resin responsible for holding strands of cellulose together to form wood. "It has a smoky, spicy, bacony aroma," Sacks says. "In fact, the flavor that most people associate with bacon is largely degraded lignin."
Translation: Cooking over charcoal makes your food taste like bacon. Let me repeat that: blah blah charcoal blah blah BACON.
So if you have two identical steaks, cooked at identical temperatures, for the same amount of time, where the only difference is that one is cooked over charcoal and one is cooked over gas, what will be the end result? The charcoal-cooked steak will taste more like bacon.
Back in March, Xiaomi started sending out beta builds of the Android 9 Pie update for both the Redmi 6 Pro and the Redmi Note 5 Pro to interested testers in India. And now it looks like all the bugs have been ironed out, because the stable update is rolling out for both devices.
It’s arriving over-the-air in India, as MIUI 10.3.2.0.PDMMIXM for the Redmi 6 Pro, weighing in at 1.6GB. This release includes the May 2019 security patch level. You also get face unlock support for App lock, the ability to stay on the lock screen after using face unlock, and to restrict the opening of the notification shade on the lock screen. As you’d expect, plenty of bug fixes are built-in too.
If you have the Redmi Note 5 Pro in India, then you’re getting MIUI 10.3.1.0.PEIMIXM based on Android 9 Pie, and this also comes in at around 1.6GB and packs the May 2019 security patch level, but no specific MIUI-only changes according to the changelog.
Both updates are rolling out in stages, so it may take a while before your particular device pops up the notification. Xiaomi has promised that the Redmi Y2 will get Android Pie around June.
The somewhat implausible notion of R-Type Final getting a sequel has come a step closer to becoming a reality, with the crowdfunding campaign for R-Type Final 2 kicking off late this coming Monday (June 3rd), with Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC all being target platforms.
It’s in development from Granzella, with permission from original developer Irem and with key staff members from the R-Type series involved. The design comes courtesy of Kazuma Kujo, who worked on R-Type Delta, R-Type Tactics and, of course, R-Type Final. Some new detail on R-Type Final 2 was revealed ahead of the campaign, with a ‘real-time level function’ that dynamically changes difficulty on the fly depending on the player’s abilities.
There’ll be a variety of ships available, unlocked through meeting certain conditions, while older levels will return ‘with new expressions and interpretations’. It’s the humble goal of the team behind R-Type Final 2 to ‘an R-Type that is better than any other R-Type titles’.
The Kickstarter campaign – which will commence around 4pm BST this Monday – offers 14 tiers, including getting a digital copy of R-Type Final 2 and its soundtrack for $40 and up to having an operator calling your own name out at the start of the game and being featured in the credits for a cool $2,500. Impartiality be damned – I’ll be opening my wallet come Monday.
Why is the prospect of an R-Type Final sequel so exciting? It’s a new instalment in a banner shmup franchise, for one, but also a follow-up to one of the most fascinating examples of the genre, with the 2004 PlayStation 2 presenting a uniquely melancholy take on the form. Here’s hoping the crowdfunding campaign is met with some success.
This story is part of a series on how we make time—from productivity hacks and long walks to altering the function of our own circadian clocks.
Pooping today is a plugged-in, plugged-up project. At least three-quarters of Americans, including 96 percent of members of Gen Z, shit with their smartphones. Straining away, they text, date, and Google "hemorrhoids" at three times the pre-iPhone rate. I have a friend who spends his longer movements calling his mother. Amazon sells hundreds of toilet paper holders with phone shelves. Among the top rated is an aluminum rack touting its "versatile convenience": "the large, wide design not only holds your cell phone, it can be used as a rest for baby diapers, girl used pad … or other accessories."
I used to DM during every BM. Then, one afternoon a few years ago, I slipped into a poop portal. Backpacking through remote wilderness in searing heat, I felt the telltale pang. Coffee, eggs, chorizo, and water were all rushing—screamingly—to the exits. At the nearest rest stop, I dashed into a bathroom so single-mindedly I didn't turn on the lights and collapsed onto the toilet. The immediate release, shrouded as it was in shadow, was cosmic, like waking up from a nightmare, realizing it's Christmas, I'm 5 years old, and can fly. Though I haven't yet been able to recreate every condition, to this day I try to dump in total darkness: no lights, no phone, the gulf between mind and body quaked shut.
WIRED Series
A Tour of How We literally and figuratively Make Time.
The (c)rapture I felt was likely a case of "poophoria," explains Anish Sheth, the gastroenterologist and coauthor of toilet-side staple What's Your Poo Telling You? "Some have compared it to a religious experience, others an orgasm," he says. The exact science is unknown, but Sheth thinks the sensation may result from "a slightly prolonged buildup, an overdistension of the rectum, and immediate collapse by passing a sizable stool, which fires the vagus nerve and releases endorphins." Lights-out pooping, Sheth adds, may "help with a proper rate of exit."
How did we get here? "We used to be highly aware of where our shit was going and what it was used for," says Susan Morrison, author of Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics. Tudor Londoners hired "gong farmers" to schlep their droppings to the country, and land owners bequeathed dung heaps in their wills "because shit was worth something." But the proliferation of private bathrooms in the 17th century, as psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte argues in History of Shit, accelerated the rise of individualism and negligence. Today, Morrison says, "we prefer not to confront our shit, and that's dangerous. The less mindful we are of where what we eat goes, the less we consider our impact on the environment."
Sure, it's more polite and discreet to email while excreting than at dinner. Certainly, reading on the toilet, as Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel put it, is an "attempt to preserve the equilibrium of the ego; part of one's bodily substance is being lost and so fresh matter must be absorbed through the eyes." And of course, humans have feared sitting alone with their thoughts long before smartphones came on the scene. In 1952, novelist Henry Miller wrote a 9,000-word jeremiad against bathroom-reading "cowards," claiming "the moment these sorry individuals are not active, not busy, they become aware of an awesome, sickening emptiness in themselves." But now our phones are doing the sickening. To disconnect from 21st-century technology in the bathroom is healthy. To also disconnect from the 19th century and flick off the lights is an urgent return to nature.
Browning in blackness brings ethereal gifts. I am one with the early Homo sapiens who shat in the field by starlight, and with my pre-industrial ancestors who made midnight mud pies between first and second sleep, having nothing to ponder but the majesty of the task at hand. Whether it's 30 seconds of zen or 20 minutes of pyrotechnics, I am at the mercy of my body, as I always am but rarely appreciate. I become acutely aware that anything I gobble—Cornish cuttlefish at Alain Ducasse or a half-eaten McRib from the dumpster—will peristaltically boogie through the digestive tract's 30 feet (longer than the world record long jump), and thanks to the valves of Houston, the puborectalis, and scores of other muscles and glands in exquisite polyphony, emerge on the other end to be purified through invisible miles of pipes and cauldrons and transform into fertilizer for happy grub to gobble. All I have to do in this rigmarole is chew and flush. My bowels vacated, I am flooded with gratitude for my body and for infrastructure.
Zak Krevitt
I am one with the communal toilet shitters of ancient Rome, noticing fellow defecators. (In public restrooms, I just close my eyes. Coworkers don't take kindly to you whispering from your stall, "I must have darkness.") I make discoveries. I've found that the most avid gamers, who tap their touchscreens into submission, are the least likely to wash their hands. I hear men fart, grunt, titter, shuffle, and sigh. It isn't pleasant, but I hear our shared struggle. For a few blind moments each morning, I see that we are one.
I am one. Engaged in pure animal act, I'm reminded that at our most base we can be our most human. With no tiles to count and graffiti to read, I turn inward. There is a sly pleasure in sneaking into daytime darkness, pulling a fast one on society. But the greatest joy is to experience your unencumbered mind when it is alert, the rarest of treats in modern life. More so than with an oxymoronic mindfulness app, I am present. I meditate through a secularized, bastardized version of the Jesuit Examen. I contemplate relationships, failures, and death. (I am among smells of decay.) I make associations. I have ideas. A bowel movement, above all human projects, is the body's way of making time for the mind to roam.
When I leave the bathroom's sacred filth, I plunge back into the vortex, surrounded by screens until slumber. But, having walked into my mind for a moment, I am temporarily a little more purposeful, a little more attuned to signs of life within and beyond the screens, (a lot) less full of shit. Fellow dumpers, follow me to this poophoric pootopia. Follow your breath, follow your bowels. Enter into darkness to ignite your innermost fire. And whatever you do, turn the lights on before you wipe. It's not worth the risk.
Over the past week, both Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the same appeal to American nationalism, with differing degrees of subtlety: Breaking up Big Tech will only help China.
It's a politically expedient plea as calls for regulating tech intensify amid growing concern about China's tech prowess and an escalating US-China trade war. But the argument rests on the idea that what's good for Facebook and Google is good for America. It also ignores how Silicon Valley is simultaneously seeking growth through partnerships with some of those same Chinese competitors, such as Google's investment in JD.com and reported talks with Tencent to bring Google Cloud to China.
Sandberg made her case against breaking up Facebook explicit. In an interview Friday, CNBC asked if Facebook was prepping for a big antitrust battle. In response, Sandberg recounted recent private meetings with Democrats and Republicans in Washington. There, she said, she heard that "while people are concerned with the size and power of tech companies, there's also a concern in the United States with the size and power of Chinese companies, and the realization that these companies are not going to be broken up."
Schmidt was less direct but conjured the same fears of falling behind China. On Sunday he told the The Telegraph there is no legal basis to break up tech companies, arguing that "regulatory bias" in the West against Google and other American firms hurts consumers and hands China a competitive advantage on everything from privacy to data collection. “Chinese companies are growing faster, they have higher valuations, and they have more users than their non-Chinese counterparts,” said Schmidt, who will step down from Alphabet's board in June. “It's very important to understand that there is a global competition around technology innovation, and China is a significant player and likely to remain so."
Google and Facebook declined to respond to questions from WIRED.
Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly offered to let President Xi name his first-born child, laid the groundwork for this strategy during a congressional hearing last year. Asked if Facebook was too powerful, Zuckerberg rerouted the conversation toward Chinese internet companies. He said American tech policymakers "should be thinking about" those companies because they pose "a real strategic and competitive threat." (Zuckerberg even spelled out the China defense in his notes for the hearing, photographed by the Associated Press, which included the line "Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.")
It's not a new line. Dominant companies and their defenders have made the same argument for decades. In the late 20th century, some argued that Japan's rising power was a bigger economic threat than anticompetitive practices by Microsoft or IBM. In March, both Qualcomm and Apple used Washington's fear of falling behind China in 5G to plead their case in a bitter fight with each other over patent royalties.
But this appeal to American nationalism has been getting more play recently as the on-again, off-again trade war with China appears to be back on. Nicol Turner-Lee, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, says concern about falling behind China is valid, especially in regards to artificial intelligence and advanced 5G wireless networks. But, she adds, the China defense is among the few plausible arguments Big Tech can bring before Congress right now. "They can't say, 'We know we're allowing people to mess with our elections, but don't break us up. We're good for democracy, don't break us up,'" she says.
Turner-Lee says American legislators don't necessarily want to intervene in tech company operations, but they want tech companies to behave responsibly and clarify their relationship with Chinese companies around data security, surveillance, and other vulnerabilities. Regulators probably looked kindly on Google, for instance, for adhering to the US government's new sanctions against the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei; on Monday, the ban was delayed 90 days, allowing Google to send security patches and updates to existing Android-based Huawei devices.
Some US antitrust officials sound unmoved by the China card. "America doesn't become competitive by propping up politically connected tech companies, we compete by making sure the best ideas can come from anywhere and anybody," Rohit Chopra, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, told WIRED. Makan Delrahim, head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, recently spoke out against the idea of "national champions." In March he congratulated the EU for blocking a rail-manufacturing merger. "Obviously there's national security and other considerations that factor in, but with respect to that [merger], creating a national champion even if you would harm consumers is not the way to do it," Delrahim said.
When WIRED asked Facebook whether Sandberg initiated concerns about China during her meetings in Washington, a spokesperson for Facebook pointed WIRED to recent comments from members of Congress, to show that legislators are also concerned. Representative Ro Khanna (D-California), who represents Silicon Valley, has called for greater regulation and antitrust scrutiny of the sector. But he recently told The Hill that regulators should be cautious. "Look, what we don’t want is the only big tech companies to be Chinese—Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent." In early April, Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) told CNBC that if regulators were to "chop off the legs of Facebook and Google," then those companies "might be replaced by Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent—companies that are totally enmeshed with the Chinese government in their global economic plan." A spokesperson for Warner declined to comment, beyond standing by his statements.
"I don't think competition with China means, in any way, that we give tech a pass from antitrust enforcement," Khanna told WIRED by email. "What it does mean is that we need to be nuanced and strategic in how we strongly enforce antitrust law and not reflexively call for breakups of a company just because it's big."
Khanna said US tech companies should work with US officials to protect American interests as they try to compete in China. "US tech companies have an obligation to help the United States and not to help the Chinese advance their surveillance state," he wrote.
Economic policies that seek to prop up homegrown companies as "national champions" have a bad track record, says Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. The fact that regulators did not hold back on IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft "helped us ensure a generation of American supremacy in tech. Frankly, the fact that Japan never took on their monopolists ended up hurting them," Wu told American Conservative last year. "I do accept and understand that there are advantages to scale, but there is a point where the advantages of scale run out. There are disadvantages to scale, and I think there's a difference between scale and monopoly."
A TeslaModel 3 sedan that crashed into a truck on a Florida highway in March, killing its driver, had its Autopilot semi-autonomous feature engaged, according to a new report from the National Transportation Safety Board. The driver is at least the fourth person to die in an Autopilot-related crash. What's striking about the March 1 crash is that the details are nearly identical to those of the first publicly reported, deadly Autopilot crash, in May 2016. In each case, a Tesla running Autopilot on a Florida highway struck a truck cutting across its path, killing the Tesla's driver.
Alex Davies covers autonomous vehicles and other transportation machines for WIRED.
CEO Elon Musk has bragged about his cars' self-driving capabilities and promised they'll be fully autonomous starting next year. But critics say the Autopilot system—which requires that drivers remain attentive and ready to take control of the car—doesn't do enough to ensure that drivers pay attention, and that Tesla makes the system seem more capable than it is. The new crash casts doubt on how well Tesla has responded to those critiques, even as it moves to offer more ambitious technology.
In the March crash, according to the NTSB's preliminary report, the red Tesla Model 3 was driving south in the right lane of State Highway 441 in Delray Beach, about 50 miles north of Miami. The truck pulled out of a private driveway on the right side of the road, heading across the highway and intending to turn left, going north. The truck slowed as it crossed the southbound lanes, the report says, "blocking the Tesla's path."
The Model 3's Autopilot system had been turned on about 10 seconds before the crash, and the car didn't detect the driver's hands on the steering wheel for the eight seconds immediately preceding the impact, the NTSB report says, which a Tesla spokesperson confirms. The car struck the trailer at 68 mph (the speed limit is 55 mph) without making any evasive maneuvers. It passed under the trailer, ripping off its roof and killing the driver, identified as Jeremy Beren Banner, age 50. (The truck driver was not injured.) The Tesla came to a stop on the highway's earthen median, about 1,600 feet away.
A photo of a Tesla Model 3 sedan involved in a fatal crash in Florida in March.
NTSB
The report does not say how far away the Tesla was when the truck pulled onto the road, nor does it note any weather conditions that would have affected the car's braking capability, so it's unclear if a driver not using Autopilot would have been able to stop safely. But some rough math says that a Model 3 driver would have needed a few seconds' notice to avoid a crash: At 68 mph, the car was covering 100 feet a second. A Model 3 going 60 mph needs 133 feet to stop. If that ratio holds, the Tesla in question could have stopped within 151 feet. Add in 1.5 seconds for the driver to register the truck and move his right foot to the brake pedal, and it looks like three seconds would be enough.
On May 7, 2016, 40-year-old Josh Brown died in very similar circumstances. His Model S had Autopilot engaged as it drove northbound on Highway 27A in northern Florida. A truck coming from the southbound lanes turned left across his path, headed for a local road. The Tesla did not slow before hitting the truck at 74 mph (on a 65 mph road), going under the trailer, ripping off its roof, and killing Brown. The car went another 297 feet, hit a utility pole hard enough to break it, and stopped 50 feet later. (The truck driver was not injured.)
When the NTSB issued its final report on the 2016 crash, it noted the truck driver should have yielded to the Tesla and that Brown was inattentive. But it also put some of the blame on Tesla for designing a system that allowed the driver to overly rely on the automation system for a prolonged period.
Since Brown's death, Tesla has reduced the time the driver can go without touching the wheel before the system issues audio and visual warnings. It has implemented a new hardware design and gone through several iterations of its software. But the circumstances of the crash indicate that while driving at highway speeds, the system remains incapable of detecting some stationary objects, or those moving perpendicular to the car. Similar systems offered by Volvo and Nissan have the same shortcoming. That's because radar is typically used to look for moving things, to filter out false positives like highway signs and overpasses, says Matt Johnson-Roberson, who codirects the University of Michigan Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles. This is likely the same reason at least three Teslas crashed into stopped fire trucks in 2018 (with no serious injuries).
The Model 3 involved in the latest crash was also equipped with cameras, which should, theoretically, be able to detect a truck crossing its path, Johnson-Roberson says. Tesla did not respond to WIRED's questions about how the system uses its radar and cameras or what steps it has taken to avoid this type of crash.
At the same time, Tesla is loudly bullish on the potential of camera-based computer vision to enable what Musk calls "full self-driving," needing no human supervision. Just last month, Tesla Autopilot vision chief Andrej Karpathy said Tesla believes it can use machine learning techniques and cameras to make its cars top-notch drivers. Musk went further, saying, "I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year."
In response to the latest crash, a Tesla spokesperson shared a statement saying its data shows that when the driver is attentive and ready to take control back from the car, "drivers supported by Autopilot are safer than those operating without assistance." But where Cadillac and Audi use eye-tracking systems to check that drivers remain attentive, Tesla relies on the comparatively unsophisticated method of checking when the driver touches the wheel—even as it claims it's delivering the future.
Grilling on a holiday, when you’ve got the day off, is easy. You can take your time; pull out your artisanal hardwood charcoal; light it in your chimney starter; build a perfect two-level fire; and lovingly tend your rib-eye, or your chicken breasts, or your pork ribs.
Holiday grilling is hobby grilling.
But what about the 22nd of June, or the 12th of August—when temps are in the 80s and all you want is to be in your backyard with a beer and a hunk of meat to cook? Instead, it’s 6 pm, you’re at the office, the kids need to eat by 7, and you still have to go to the store.
This, my friend, is why a gas grill rules.
Charcoal purists will tell you their preferred fuel leads to better flavor. This is nonsense.
Look, I like cooking on charcoal too—it has one indisputable advantage over gas: It gets much hotter. Glowing coals are at a temperature of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit; while gas burns at around 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s very little radiant heat from the flames.
And radiant heat is what’s really cooking your food on a grill. That’s why gas grills use some sort of surface to create radiation, whether it’s lava rocks or ceramic plates or the “Flavorizer Bars" on my Weber. These surfaces are heated by the gas flame, creating the radiant heat generated naturally by charcoal.
Charcoal purists will try to tell you that their preferred fuel leads to better flavor. This is, well, nonsense.
Your food doesn’t know what’s creating the heat below it, and once charcoal is hot, there aren’t any aromatic compounds left in the coals. According to the food science bible Modernist Cuisine, “Carbon is carbon; as it burns, it imparts no flavor of its own to the food being grilled.”
The characteristic flavor of grilled food comes from the drippings, not the fuel. When those drippings hit the heat source below, the oils, sugars, and proteins burst into smoke and flame. That heat creates new complex molecules that rise in the smoke and warm air to coat the food you’re grilling.
“The real debate should be whether charcoal is necessary at all.”
Nothing in that process relies on charcoal.
Intellectual Ventures founder, former Microsoft CTO, and barbecue world championship–winning chef Nathan Myhrvold has spent millions trying to understand the science of food and cooking. He’s serious about his meat, and as he argues in Modernist Cuisine, the real debate among the faithful "shouldn’t be about which charcoal is best. It should be about whether charcoal is necessary at all.”
Still not convinced? Know what’s worse than grilling on gas, you snob?
Not grilling at all.
I can walk in my door with a bag of groceries at 6:30 and have grilled chicken on the table at 7, a happy family praising a delicious dinner. The most precious commodity in the world, the one resource that none of us has enough of, that’s constantly dwindling until we die, is time.
A gas grill claws back time for you with every use. Grill three times a week over the course of a summer and you’ll have saved yourself a full day. A day! Think of what you can do with an extra day, provided to you by your gas grill.
Check out the other side of the debate: why charcoal is better than gas (the answer may surprise you).
The week started out with a bang, or several of them, really. Remember Meltdown and Spectre, the vulnerabilities that affected basically every Intel processor from the past decade? There's a related attack called ZombieLoad—yes, ZombieLoad—with similarly broad and bad impact. Serious stuff! But honestly, that's not even the worst disclosure of the week.
That distinction probably goes to Cisco. Researchers at security firm Red Balloon found that they could hack the company's ubiquitous enterprise router, meaning they could listen in on whatever traffic goes to and from those networks. Cisco then acknowledged that dozens of its products were susceptible to the attack, likely comprising millions of devices, and that a fix would require an on-site visit.
And there's more! Each week we round up the news that we didn't break or cover in depth but that you should know about. As always, click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Google has been on a big ol' privacy PR push lately, including a fancy New York Times op-ed from CEO Sundar Pichai extolling the importance of protecting your data. Which is a great sentiment that doesn't quite jibe with the revelation this week that Google also raids your Gmail account for signs of transactions, and collects them all on a separate webpage for your account. You can find yours here. It includes Amazon purchases, subscriptions, tickets, really anything for which you got an emailed receipt. Google says it doesn't use the information to serve ads, and that the page exists "to help you easily view and keep track of your purchases, bookings and subscriptions in one place." Honestly, it's no surprise that Google's machines can read your email. But it's hard to understand on what planet the company thought maintaining a hidden away page that catalogs your retail activity would read as anything but creepy and invasive. There's no easy way to delete that history, other than deleting receipts from your email or ticking through them one at a time on your Purchase page. To get at least a little control back over how Google tracks you, head to this preferences page and click "Do not use private results." Because naturally, Google chose to make the use of private results the default instead of opt-in.
As trade tensions between the US and China remain unresolved, President Donald Trump this week struck a blow to a favorite target: Huawei, the Chinese tech company that the US has accused of posing a national security threat. In an executive order Wednesday, Trump banned transactions that pose "an unacceptable risk"; the Commerce Department followed by placing Huawei on its so-called Entity List, which severely limits the extent to which US companies can do business with it.
In a lengthy investigative report this week, ProPublica reports that multiple data recovery companies that promised to beat ransomware with the "latest technology" called Proven Data Recovery simply paid off the hackers behind the SamSam ransomware instead. Paying isn't the worst idea when you're in that situation, but lying to customers and charging them fees on top of it kind of is.
Adobe Flash is finally going to die off next year, but it's not the only security-challenged product in the software company's stable. This week, Adobe released patches for dozens upon dozens of bugs, most of which relate to Adobe Acrobat and Reader. Don't worry, though; one still applied to Flash.
After 10 years, they're all still there — Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen and Trixie and Charlie Utter, and on and on. The residents of Deadwood, the mining camp, and Deadwood, the TV show, are all still hanging around one of the greatest settings for a TV series ever.
And even more people are coming back to town for a celebration of the newly formed statehood of South Dakota. Alma Garret and her daughter, Sofia, arrive on the train, as does Senator George Hearst, the closest thing Deadwood ever had to a villain. Deadwood: The Movie — the long overdue conclusion to David Milch's magnum opus Western — brings them all back together for one last two-hour journey.
A few characters are missing, whether because they died on the series, which aired from 2004 to 2006; because the actor who plays them was tied up in another gig (Titus Welliver's Silas Adams is absent due to a conflict with his role as the title character on Bosch); or because the actor who played them died after Deadwood left the air. (Most notably, saloon owner Cy Tolliver, played by Powers Boothe, who died in 2017, is no longer present.)
But mostly, they're all still there, in Deadwood, the mining camp that became a microcosm of America and maybe even humanity, on the series I love more than any other ever made. (Somewhat regrettably, "they're all still there" includes actor Jeffrey Jones, who pleaded no contest to soliciting pornographic photos of a teenager in 2002, and whose character is peripheral enough in the scheme of Deadwood that when the actor turns up in a few scenes, it's actually a little jarring.)
There is something comforting about this, about imagining all of these people living their lives in the camp, even if we haven't been able to look in on them all these years. But there's also something heartbreaking about not having the chance to visit for so long. They're older and weaker, and so are we.
Deadwood: The Movie has a retro feel that ends up serving it well
Even Anna Gunn came back, as Martha Bullock!HBO
I mean what I'm about to say is a compliment, even if it might not sound like one: Deadwood: The Movie feels like the best TV episode of 1997.
Its rhythms have a very 1990s TV feel to them, right down to a closing musical montage that wouldn't have felt out of place on Northern Exposure. It takes its time getting into the story, spending its first 40 minutes or so on reunions and other matters of relatively little importance to the plot. And, yes, there is a plot — revolving around a disputed gold claim, as all plots on Deadwood inevitably must — but if you've never watched this show before, you might wonder what all the fuss is about before it kicks in.
The central idea of the film seems to be about the circularity of time and the way generations give way to the next. There's a brand-new woman who wants to ply her trade at the local brothel, The Gem, and the movie draws lines between her and many other women of the Gem from Deadwood's three-season run, but not in a way that definitively makes her the daughter of one of them or something. This is just the way life operates. People die, and more people are born, and everything lurches forward and backward in a way that suggests progress but, maybe, doesn't actually signal it.
Deadwood: The Movie is also deeply haunted by its past self. Frequently, the characters reflect on moments from the original show, and there are few series on TV as interested in the way death ripples throughout a community as this one. Some of the characters continue to ruminate on the death of Wild Bill Hickok, which happened in the Deadwood's fourth episode ever; even if Hickok's passing has no bearing on the events of the movie, those who loved him still miss him.
These glances toward the past mean you'll probably get more enjoyment out of Deadwood: The Movie if you've watched the whole series — but I don't think it's completely necessary to have done so. There is so much here that will be rich and meaningful to any TV fan, and its story is self-contained enough that you could use it as an entry point to the entire series. (That is if you don't mind being spoiled on several major events from all three seasons, which are depicted in flashbacks.)
The show comes by its ruefulness honestly. Deadwood: The Movie was originally supposed to be two movies, originally supposed to happen over a decade ago — closer to the end of the series. In the 13 years that have elapsed since Deadwood ended, series creator Milch, one of the greatest TV writers to ever have lived, has landed two TV series on the air that were both canceled after one season (John From Cincinnati andLuck), had several pilots passed on by HBO, and been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
This movie is, in all likelihood, his swan song, and it is infused with an impotent rage in the face of death, by the fact that you can try your damnedest, but you can't ever outrun the inevitable.
What makes Milch so good is the way he understands humans both as individuals — driven by often contradictory impulses — and as collectives. He understands that a scene shifts depending on who's in it, and that large communities of people will come to have a kind of group consciousness that shifts and changes based on the faintest trembles of the wind.
And he also understands mercy.
Deadwood began as a series filled with anger. It ends as a series about learning to move past slights and endure.
HBO
The first scene of Deadwood's pilot features Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant, who is honestly the best he's ever been in the movie) hanging a criminal himself, rather than letting a lynch mob do it. As a US marshal, he's a representative of "the law," but this far out on the frontier, the law has less meaning than it normally does. The scene embodies the central tension of Deadwood in microcosm: How do we build a civilization out of nothing? Under whose authority?
The first four episodes of the series — which climax in Hickok's death — are the most classically Western. But after Hickok dies, his murderer isn't immediately killed by the residents of the camp. Instead, they hold a trial and attempt to convict him in a more lawful fashion. Therein lies the optimism of Deadwood: Individuals may be driven by rage, but pull enough of them together and they might build a better world by balancing each other's furies.
That sense of balance is why Bullock and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) are the series' two central characters. Bullock is a man who's channeled his rage toward the more useful purpose of helping keep the peace, while Swearengen inverts that type — he's hidden his fundamental sweetness in the name of being a cutthroat bastard. Over the course of the original seasons, they learn better how to balance their true selves and the men they have to be to fulfill the role society requires of them. The joy of Deadwood: The Movie is in how Milch finds ways to continue these essential evolutions after another 10 years have passed in the two men's lives.
Deadwood was never just about that rage and sudden explosions of violence. Those elements were always part of its mix, but the series was always driven by mercy and kindness, by the small ways that people care for each other in times of need. And in the movie, there are moments when both Bullock and Swearengen find themselves in positions where they don't need to extend mercy, but they do it anyway, reaching out and taking someone else's hand, just for a moment, rather than spreading their anger further up and out.
This is how civilization is built, in Deadwood's estimation: by way of a million tiny moments in which someone chooses not to do further harm when they could, but to find a way to treat others with kindness and charity. Deadwood often suggests — via lengthy shots that don't cut away but instead track from character to character, drawing them together into a web — that people are connected in ways that remain mysteries to them. The movie suggests not that future generations better understand the mystery, but that as they solve old ones, new ones are born. That's a natural part of progress.
It's 10 years later in Deadwood, and it's 13 years later for Deadwood. The place looks much the same as before, but it also looks a little smaller. The people are older, but they're still themselves. The viewers, too — we're all in different places than we were when the show first ran. (Heck, it was just 10 years ago that I began reviewing every episode of the series at the A.V. Club, a few years after the show had been canceled.) And even if there are the rudiments of a plot, what is most miraculous about Deadwood: The Movie is that all these people are still here. Life continues, as it must.
Deadwood: The Movie airs tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on HBO. All three seasons of the original series are available in their entirety on HBO's streaming platforms.
A cruise in a self-driving Tesla turned deadly, the air taxi of the future has taken flight, and climate change is speeding up. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.
Today’s Headlines
A new report on a fatal Tesla crash looks grim
A new report from the National Transportation Safety Board reveals that a Tesla crash in March marked the fourth person to die in an Autopilot-related incident. The car hit a truck on the highway while driving itself, sheering the roof off the car and killing the driver—a crash that was eerily similar to an earlier one in May 2016. Yet Tesla CEO Elon Musk continues to promise that Tesla cars will be fully autonomous next year.
Atmospheric methane levels are rising and no one knows why
The concentration of methane in the atmosphere rose steadily from 1983 until 2000, when it finally leveled off. But starting around 2007, it started to ratchet up again, and scientists aren’t really sure why. Climate change models didn’t predict this kind of rise, even though methane is responsible for about a quarter of total atmospheric warming to date. Not a good sign for us earthlings.
Lillium launched its 36-motor flying car
Lillium’s five-seat, electric flying air taxi has taken flight. While the company promises the craft will be able to fly 186 mph, its test flight was a little more modest: It hovered a few yards off the ground, and it landed. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and at the very least, it looks awfully cool.
Cocktail Conversation
Big tech companies have done a lot of apologizing—and also, a lot of head-nodding about future regulations coming their way. But behind closed doors, the groups that represent them are steering the construction of any new guardrails to their own benefit.
WIRED Recommends: Dyson V11 Vacuum
According to our reviewer, the Dyson V11 totally sucks. No, really. It has powerful suction capabilities, is super light, and has intelligent sensors that calibrate power based on what surface you’re on. The rub? Its $700 price tag is pretty expensive, but you get what you pay for these days.
More News You Can Use
Here’s why the writing in season 8 of Game of Thronesfeels off.
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Earlier this week, Appleannounced an update to its top-of-the-line MacBook Pro laptops. Most notably, that update included a change to the keyboards that have been causing problems for some customers in recent years. Apple said on Tuesday that the change related to a material in the laptop's third-generation keyboard, which uses a butterfly-switch mechanism. Now we have a little more insight into what those changes might be.
According to iFixit, the company that publishes online repair guides, sells parts, and shares information on consumer products after it has torn them apart, the new MacBook Pro keyboard does appear to have some different materials in it. But those changes still don't shed a whole lot of light on exactly which problem Apple is trying to solve for, as the iFixit report points out.
Using specialized equipment (called Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, for those who really want to know), iFixt discovered at least two material differences in the 2019 MacBook Pro keyboard.
Kyle Wiens, the cofounder and CEO of iFixit, notes that the metal dome switch that goes on each key—which he compared to the lid on a jar of jam, because of the way it pops back up when you press on it—appears to now be of a different material. There's a "difference in surface finish from the 2018 version to the 2019 version," which indicates that Apple may be using a different metal, heat treatment, or both.
The transparent switch cover material also appears to be made of a different kind of plastic coating. "The cover in the 2018 model is semi-opaque, somewhat tacky, and feels like silicone. The new model is clearer and smooth to the touch," the report notes. Readings from the FTIR analysis also seem to support that these are two different polymers, with the newer one strengthened with some sort of nylon material.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment when asked about the iFixit teardown report.
Apple has said before that the "vast majority" of its laptop customers haven't had issues with the keyboard, but since the launch of the 2015 MacBook, customer complaints have ranged from stuck keys to repeating keys to the space bar or shift keys not working.
While these new keyboards may include different materials, they are not newly designed. The keyboards on the 2019 MacBook Pros have the same butterfly-switch mechanism that was first introduced in the 2015 MacBook, although the butterfly-switch design has received updates since then.
Wiens says he’s skeptical these material changes will fix all of the issues with the newer keyboards. "What's clear is that they had multiple failure modes, and Apple has addressed it with multiple solutions," he says. Wiens points out that in 2018, Apple introduced another kind of keyboard fix with a silicone membrane that went under each key. "Will these solutions fix the issue? Time will tell," he says. "I'm skeptical, because the fundamental design is still the same."
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