feb 2017

| Spoiler Alert

49
Trends That
Will Shape
the Very Near
Future

THE NEXT
LEAP FORWARD IN
Cyber warfare
Self-driving cars
Delivery drones
Creepy-smart homes
Gene hacking
and more!
© Cylance 2017
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CYBERATTACKS
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ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE.

Cybersecurity that predicts, prevents and protects. cylance.com

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 25.02
FEATURES

68 Complex
Childish Gambino. Atlanta.
Lando Calrissian. Welcome to the
strange, emotional, industry-
altering world of Donald Glover.
BY ALLISON SAMUELS

46
What Lies Ahead:
49 Trends That Will Shape
the Very Near Future
The cyber cold war will heat
up, Snapchat will actually be
important, drones will blot
out the sun, the climate will still
change, and more.
PLU S : Clive Thompson on
the Facebook problem

60
John Arnold’s Next Mission
After Enron, after his hedge
fund, the 42-year-old billionaire
has a new project: wage war
on bad science.
BY SAM APPLE

76
The Battle for the
Soul of San Francisco
Well-off tech workers
come face-to-face with the
city’s neediest residents.
STYLING BY OLORI SWANK; GROOMING BY JADE PERRY

BY CHRIS COLIN

86 Coat by COS

Jihadi Rehab
A controversial new program
aims to transform terrorists back
into normal young Americans.
BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER

FEB 2017 JOE PUGLIESE 0 0 5

 CONTENTS

25.02 23 GADGET LAB

10 This Issue
From the editor’s desk 31

ALPHA
Burst the Bubble
13 Tips for reengineering your
media diet

23 Real or Fake Fetish

Selfie-incriminating scofflaws Nike’s Air VaporMax FlyKnit is a
triumph of design minimalism

24 32 Gearhead: Ski Season

Powder-perfect wooden skis,
a helmet for your noggin,
sleek gloves, and boots that
This Is a Test won’t torture your feet
It’s time for all of us to stand up
for the climate—and civilization 34 How to: Bicycle
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
Have fun in the saddle again
with the right handlebars, pedals,
18 Cool Beans and, uh, seat
How UC Davis professor Bill Risten-
part uses coffee to teach engineering 37 Level Up:
Head Shots
The NFL must do more about Workout Headphones
19 Infoporn concussions Each of these sweatproof earbuds
Netflix and chill. And binge. will push you a little harder

24 Jargon Watch
20 Mr. Know-It-All The latest in the WIRED lexicon
On mourning the end
of a Snapchat streak

26
FILE: //
38

22
Face Time
Why millions of kids watch videos
Holy Bricks, Batman! of people putting on makeup
BY JAMIE LAUREN KEILES
How to make your own stop-motion
Lego action flick

27 Love Hacks
MacGyver your way to romance
ASK A FLOWCHART
28 Get Up to Speed
Bright Idea Learn faster with high-velocity 96 What Trend Should
The ho-hum LED bulb gets a technology I Start This Year?
luxe makeover BY CLIVE THOMPSON BY ROBERT CAPPS

0 0 6 FEB 2017
 BEHOLD THE FUTURE.
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 THIS ISSUE

Paula Scher, Graphic Designer Tinker Hatfield, Footwear Designer

Platon, Photographer

Christoph Niemann, Illustrator Es Devlin, Stage Designer

Ilse Crawford, Interior Designer

Bjarke Ingels, Architect

Ralph Gilles, Automotive Designer Dave O’Connor—and I built a team of today’s

best-known documentarians. Every epi-
sode stands as its own film, adapting the
design sensibilities of our subjects. And
DESIGNS FOR TOMORROW if I may geek out for a moment, aside from
the usual Steadicams and drones, we used
anamorphic prime lenses—the best glass on

N
O ONE CAN KNOW the future. But you can chase it. That has always ▲
the market—mounted on a Red Epic Dragon
been one of WIRED’s central animating philosophies—that you For the eight camera shooting 4K HDR. It looks fantastic.
episodes of the
can figure out what’s to come by a close read of the here and now. To verify that independently, I asked
Netflix documentary
This month we’re giving you a guide to our current thinking series Abstract, WIRED’s esteemed culture desk to review
we traveled around
on that, to the outbreaks of tomorrow that we’re watching and the world, talking the show. They told me to bugger off—some
tracking. I hope you’ll like the tour. ¶ To me, the 49 trends we to designers about nonsense about a “conflict of interest.”
their vision and
focus on confirm something I already suspected: We’re mov- creative process. Whatever. I get this whole page every month.
ing to a future of intentionality. That’s a key tenet of design think- And I’m confident that the show will do more
ing, the main force shaping and pushing technology and innovation than just bring deeper meaning to things you
of all kinds. So I want to tell you about another project of mine in can see and feel. We were all working from
that same spirit. ¶ For the past couple of years I’ve been working on what, in the end, is a particularly WIRED
a TV show called Abstract: The Art of Design. It premieres on Net- point of view. If we’ve done it right, Abstract
flix on February 10. Now, this isn’t WIRED on Netflix. But the show will help you understand the future by seeing
ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW; PHOTOGRAPHS: NETFLIX

shares some base code (in part because I’m the creator and an the intent behind the objects that surround
executive producer). Abstract is an eight-episode documentary us—and the beauty in the decisions that led
series about creativity, about visionary designers who shape the to them. So here is my totally nonobjective
world around us—from architecture to illustration, cars to typog- review: It’s awesome. I rate it two thumbs up,
raphy. ¶ I can guess what you’re thinking, because I have watched five stars, and 100 percent fresh.
a lot of design documentaries. Restrained, polished, pretty—so
many of them look like a moving version of a coffee table book.
You’ve got softly lit interviews, esoteric conversations, and sub-
tle tracking shots of wide landscapes beneath unobtrusive music.
Most of it is clean, minimal, and boring as hell. ¶ We’re not doing SCOT T DADICH
that. My partners and fellow executive producers—Morgan Neville Editor in Chief
(who won an Oscar for 20 Feet From Stardom) and RadicalMedia’s @ S DAD I CH

0 0
1 0 FEB 2017
ACTUALLY,
IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE.

INTRODUCING THE HYDROGEN FUELED TOYOTA MIRAI.

CONSIDER IT ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.

TOYOTA.COM/MIRAI

©2016 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

ARGUMENT

THIS IS A TEST
STAND UP FOR THE CLIMATE—
AND FOR CIVILIZATION. ALPHA

BY BILL MCKIBBEN

DURING HIS CAMPAIGN for presi-

dent, Donald Trump promised to
end action on climate change and
kill the climate treaty adopted
in 2015 in Paris. To truly under-
stand why that’s such a big
deal—perhaps the biggest deal
ever—you need to think about
a few things. ¶ Yes, you need to
think about the oft-repeated but
nonetheless true and alarming
statistics: 2014 was the hot-
test year ever recorded till 2015
snatched the crown—till 2016
obliterated the record. Last sum-
mer featured some of the hot-
test days ever reliably recorded
on this planet: 128 degrees
Fahrenheit in cities like Basra,
Iraq—right at the edge of human
endurance. Global sea ice has
been at a record low in recent
months. ¶ But you need to
think about more than that.

FEB 2017 DAVIDE BONAZZI 0 1 3

 ALPHA GLOBAL WARMING

Think about the slow, difficult,

centuries-long march of science
that got us to the point where
we could understand our peril.
Think of Joseph Fourier in the
1820s, realizing that gases could
trap heat in the atmosphere;
John Tyndall in the middle of
that century, figuring out that
carbon dioxide is one of those
gases; and the valiant Svante
Arrhenius in the 1890s, calculat-
ing by hand how the global tem-
perature rises in lockstep with
carbon dioxide levels. Think of
Hans Suess and Roger Revelle
in the 1950s, fumbling toward an
understanding that the oceans
would not absorb excess CO2—
the first modern realization that it clear we faced great danger. The Paris accord That too is an aspect of what we
would limit the global
CO2 must be accumulating in the Think of the men and women temperature rise to call civilization.
atmosphere and hence, as Rev- who educated those scientists 2 degrees Celsius— None of this should be taken
unless the incoming
elle put it, “human beings are and who built the institutions administration for granted. The building blocks
dismantles it.
now carrying out a large-scale in which they were educated of our common home—science
geophysical experiment of a kind and who organized the learned and diplomacy and also civil-
that could not have happened in societies that supported them. ity—are hard-won, and history
the past nor be reproduced in the And think of the forums—like would indicate that they can
future.” Think of Charles Keel- the UN and its Intergovernmen- fade fast. In fact, we now seem
ing in 1958, installing the first tal Panel on Climate Change— likely to start tossing them away
real CO2 monitor on the side of that brought them together based on nothing but the polit-
Mauna Loa and for the first time from across the planet to com- ically useful whim that climate
watching the CO2 level steadily bine their knowledge. change is a hoax. When Trump
rise. Think of the scientists who All this, taken together, is one announced on the campaign trail
built on that work, using satel- part of what we call civilization. that he would “cancel” the Paris
lites and ocean buoy sensors to Now think of the men and agreement, it represented an
erect a scaffolding of observa- women of the diplomatic corps, assault on civilization as surely
tions; think of the theorists who who over generations have as announcing that he would PHOTOGRAPH: JONATHAN RAA /PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES

used that data and the new power learned to build bridges across jail his political opponent rep-
of supercomputers to build mod- nations, to sometimes reconcile resented an assault on democ-
els that by the 1980s had made disputes short of war. The Paris racy. He’s backed down from the
accord was a triumph for them, latter plan and, under pressure,
not because it solved the prob- said he now has an “open mind”
lem (it didn’t, not even close) but about Paris—though his chief of
because it existed at all. Some- staff clarified that his “default
how 195 nations—rich and poor, position” is that climate change
those with oil beneath their sand is bunk. In any event, he has
and those that have to import it— packed his transition team and
Bill McKibben is the
Schumann Distinguished managed to agree that we should cabinet with a small band of cli-
Scholar in Environmental limit the rise in temperature to mate deniers who have blocked
Studies at Middlebury 2 degrees Celsius this century action for years. Already they’ve
College and founder of
global grassroots climate and set up an intricate architec- announced their intention to end
campaign 350.org. ture to at least begin the process. NASA’s climate research, which

0 1 4 FEB 2017
 ALPHA GLOBAL WARMING
CHARTGEIST
BY J O N J . E I L E N B E R G

has been a bulwark of the scien- we are ill prepared to handle, as

tific edifice. If they have their way, the xenophobia of this election Phrases
there will be no more satellites season showed. “OK, Google”
carefully measuring the mass of Which is why we need to rise “Hey, Siri!”
ice sheets so we can track their to the occasion. Not only in our “Alexa!”
melt, no more creative and fasci- day jobs but in our roles as cit-

POPULARITY
nating “missions to planet Earth” izens—of city, state, country,
that the space agency has run so planet. Engineers should, by all
successfully. We seem intent on means, keep developing the next
blinding ourselves, on ripping generation of batteries; but that
out the smoke detectors even as work is merely necessary now,
“Hi, honey.”
the house begins to burn. not sufficient. We must not watch
Trump’s team can’t, by them- idly as Trump takes a hammer to
TIME
selves, change everything. Engi-
neers and entrepreneurs have
done their jobs magnificently
over the past decade, as the
WE SEEM INTENT ON BLINDING
price of a solar panel has fallen OURSELVES, RIPPING OUT THE
80 percent. Because of that work,
the potential for rapid change is
SMOKE DETECTORS EVEN AS
finally at hand. Denmark gener- THE HOUSE BEGINS TO BURN. John Wick 2
Mad Keanu
ated nearly half its power from
wind in 2015, and not because it
cornered the world’s supply of
breeze. Given the new econom-
ics of renewable energy, progress the mechanisms of our civiliza-
will continue. (See “Green Energy tion, mechanisms that can’t be
Sad Keanu
Will Prevail,” page 48.) But the rebuilt in the time we have. We
climate question has never been need to resist in all the nonvio-
about progress per se; we know lent ways that we’ve learned over Glad Keanu

that eventually we’ll move to the past century and in new ones
RUN TIME
the sun and wind. The issue has that the moment suggests. There
always been about pace, and now will be marches and divestment
Trump will add serious friction, campaigns, pressure to be put on
quite likely shifting the trajectory city halls and statehouses. We
of our path enough that we will will not lack for opportunity. If
never catch up with the physics many join in, then civilization will
of climate change. Other assaults not just endure but will emerge Valentine’s Treats
on civilization and reason even- stronger for the testing, able to
tually wore themselves out—fas- face our problems with renewed Flowers

cism, communism, imperialism. vigor. At best, it’s going to be a

But there’s no way to wait out cli- very close call. !
mate change, because this test Cards
has a timer on it. Melt enough
ice caps and you live on a very Candy hearts

different planet. Either we solve

this soon or we don’t solve it. FaceTime
from Holiday
And if we don’t, then the cas- Inn Express
cading crises that follow (mas-
sive storms, waterlogged cities, AGE OF RECIPIENT
floods of migrants) will batter
our societies in new ways that

0 1 6 JUN 2016
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 ALPHA COOL BEANS

BREWMASTER
BILL
INSIDE THE
COFFEE LAB
AS A CHEMICAL ENGINEER who studies the motion of flu-
ids, Bill Ristenpart deals with a lot of spattered blood
and aerosolized pathogenic mouse phlegm. But when
it comes to teaching wary freshman the basics of mass
transfer and thermodynamics, the UC Davis profes-
sor relies on a less messy (and more potable) liquid:
coffee. Beans go through so many complex chemical
changes that they can easily form the basis of a whole
curriculum. ¶ Called the Design of Coffee, it has become
the most popular chemical engineering course in the
country, enrolling a quarter of Davis’ freshman class
each year. After spending the semester deconstruct-
ing coffeemakers and determining pH levels by taste,
the 500-odd students compete to engineer the tastiest
brew using the least amount of energy. Which isn’t easy,
Ristenpart says, because “we know very little about cof-
fee.” Though Americans down some 400 million cups a
day, nearly everything about java, from the microbial
intricacies of fermentation to the molecular basis of fla-
vor, remains a mystery. ¶ So Ristenpart is overseeing the
Findings From UC Davis’ Java Studies development of a 6,000-square-foot center devoted to
coffee research: sustainability, chemical makeup, and
1. Buying the same 2. Hints of cardboard, 3. Coffee grounds
bag of beans every anyone? Coffee could become the preparation protocols. One target? The industry’s sacred
week doesn’t tasters tend to get next hot microbiome
guarantee the same pretty creative with therapy. Like breast brewing guidelines—calibrated, as Ristenpart tells it,
flavor. Even if that their descriptions, milk, they’re loaded to the tastes of 1950s housewives. “There are all these
roast looks just as so the lab built a with oligosaccha-
dark as your last data-driven flavor rides, sugars that rules of thumb out there,” he says, “but very rarely does
batch, hyperspectral wheel to standardize promote the growth anyone have hard data to back it up.” Hear that, coffee
imaging might reveal they way we talk of good bacteria in
it’s suspiciously light. about coffee. your gut. snobs? Time to go back to school. —Gregory Barber

ANIMAL MATING RITUALS, BY MAX DURATION OF SEX: SPONGE (NO CONTACT—MALE SQUIRTS SPERM INTO THE SEA): 0 MINUTES // BONOBO (QUICK AND DIRTY): 10 MINUTES //
FLATWORM (FIRST TO STAB SPERM INTO THE OTHER BECOMES THE FATHER): 1 HOUR // BROWN ANTECHINUS (MALE’S IMMUNE SYSTEM FAILS AND HE DIES): 14 HOURS //
QUOLL (MALE EJACULATES MULTIPLE TIMES): 24 HOURS // NEOTROGLA BARKLICE (FEMALE INSERTS PENISLIKE ORGAN INTO MALE TO COLLECT SPERM CAPSULES): 70 HOUR S

CAIT OPPERMANN FEB 2017

 ALPHA

INFOPORN
The Walking Dead
Horror zombies
gobble up human
NETFLIX
AND CHILL.
brains, humans
gobble up zombie
Portion of horror.

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viewers who

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29
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in more comfortable, anticipating an epic “Net-
gs flix” sesh. But before you get down to business,
find out what your partner likes, and be open
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38 that you both enjoy what’s coming. You see,

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4
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SOURCE: NETFLIX; PHOTOGRAPHS: AMC ( THE WALKING DEAD ); MYLES ARONOWITZ/NETFLIX ( JESSICA JONES ); PAUL SCHIRALDI/NETFLIX ( OITNB )

Is

50% 5
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(viewers watch less than two hours

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per day to complete the season)

rd
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Hooked episode
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viewers will finish the season)

2
73

0%
9
66
0 Marvel’s
Jessica Jones
Viewers might take
a little longer to fall
in love, but once
they do, it’s always
date night.
Le
ngt
h
of
se
as
on
1
(m
in
ut
es
)

Orange Is the
New Black
It’s the longest
season of the bunch,
and half of viewers
still finish in a week.

0 1 9
2
73
 ALPHA MR. KNOW-IT-ALL

with the rigging and, before Folch can com-

prehend what’s happening, she sees the floor
racing toward her.
She is falling, most likely to her death. And
it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of
my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping
colleagues calling out as she speeds down at
them. What happens next is unexpected, and
yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,”
Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”
She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces!
Remember, she’s basically tied to an enor-
mous rubber band, and this serene feather of a
woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab
a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had
freaked out and come down with an intense
energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and
steeled herself—her body would have shat-
tered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen
Q: apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”
And here’s the most helpful part of the

MY BEST FRIEND DROPPED OUR story: It never occurred to Folch, after being
dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When some-

SNAPCHAT STREAK, AND—LAME AS thing goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one
to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—

IT MAY SOUND—I’M ACTUALLY HURT. put loyalty and trust first. You say to each
other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you,

WHAT SHOULD I DO?

and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I
trust you,” she explains.
“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch
BY JON MOOALLEM
says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t
always return your snap. And it’s probably
not because they don’t love you but likely
just because none of us, zipping around on
Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are our phones and in real life simultaneously,
wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those swinging like trapeze artists between these
A: pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be
pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize
between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic the many distant and private emotional bur-
bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! dens our little snaps might bear. We will let
And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all
and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally micro- deserve some slack, some good faith—espe-
dosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. cially from our best friends.
You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership,
You’re dropped. ¶ Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but
to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica refusing to think of the inevitable disappoint-
Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the ments of life as requiring forgiveness in the
dropping. ¶ Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much first place. “You create unconditional rela-
of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she tionships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you
was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. don’t disappear from the picture.”
And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel And so my answer is: Move on. You’re
something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re deal- fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch,
ing with? No, she did not. ¶ It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the who knew, deep down, how to handle being
day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted dropped and how to bounce back too. !
80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness.
And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation

0 2 0 CHRISTOPH NIEMANN MRKNOWITALL@WIRED.COM FEB 2017

 ALPHA DESIGN

Shade

Artist Claire Norcross

researched flowers
and pinecones as she
sketched possible
designs. Arranged in
tiers at gradually nar-
rowing angles, the
petals redirect light
without casting shad-
ows and are slightly
curved to create a dif-
fuse reflection, which
softens the light into

INNER GLOW
a glare-free glow.

THIS LED
BULB IS
Facets

Plumen tapped jew-

A BRIGHT
eler Marie Laure
Giroux to luxe up the
aesthetic. Her break-
through? Adding

IDEA
dimples, which create
localized shadows,
lending an exagger-
ated illusion of
depth and the kind
THE LIGHT BULB might be the sym- of preciousness
Plumen desired.
bol of innovation, but changes to its
design over the years haven’t been
very inspiring: Compact fluorescents
are typically spirals of ugly, and LED
bulbs tend toward a bland aesthetic.

DIAGRAMS BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN; OPPOSITE PAGE: ILLUSTRATION BY LEON EDLER

Now a startup called Plumen is spark-
ing a shift with its latest bulb, the
003. Cofounder Nicolas Roope bills
Bulb
it as the Tesla of illumination—as
luxurious as it is efficient. The $200 Norcross drew inspi-
light (yes, that’s a lot of scratch, but ration from scientific
flasks and bell jars,
the 003 is so stunning you should designing a bulb that
think of it as an objet d’art) houses an she says looks “like
aluminum shade that was shaped by you’re capturing a
flower or encapsu-
an artist. The anodized metal warms lating this treasure
the light, directing bright rays down- within it.”
ward while reflecting a glow to the
side. “We’re seeing the swan song
of the Edison bulb,” Roope says.
“But what does the future look like?”
Elegant and inviting, apparently.
—joseph bien-kahn

0 2 2 JAMES DAY
 POLITICS TRUE CRIME

REAL OR FAKE
UNSMOOTH
CRIMINALS
Tech-enabled wrongdoers are
shooting themselves in the foot—
by shooting themselves on their
phones, recording their misdeeds,
and posting the videos for all the
world (and the cops) to see. It’s so
preposterous, we bet you won’t
be able to tell the real crimes from
the fake. — E LI S E C R A I G

Snack Attacks

Two Utah teens broadcast them-

selves stealing tubs of frozen
treats from an ice cream truck. A
local saw the livestream on Peri-
scope and called the authorities.
OR
A pair of ravenous Arizona stoners
were caught trying (and failing) to
work the fryer at a Taco Bell after
hours, thanks to a giggle-filled

BURST THE BUBBLE

video that went hyperlocally viral.

Do Not Operate

HOW TO REENGINEER
REEN
A Good Samaritan called 911 after
seeing a livestream of a Florida
woman saying “I am super drunk

DI
YOUR MEDIA DIET
in the USA and the light is red” and
“Let’s see if I get a DUI.” She did.
OR
One drunk outside Reno, Nevada,
tried to hot-wire a bulldozer at a
YOU’VE HEARD BY NOW that you’re living in a so-called
s filter bubble, construction site. The Instagram
where everything you see online only reinforces ce your core beliefs, video captured him falling off the
Trending turning you into a superficial parody of an opinionated
na person. I know, machine and into a pit below.
liberal? Try
podcasts from because I’m no model netizen myself. Throughout tthe election season, Creature Features
the Ricochet I muted, unfollowed, and even unfriended people who h were driving me
network. More Animal activists broke into Sea-
conservative? nuts. My bad: Those are the exact people I should’vev been engaging
World and filmed themselves
Give Keepin’ with the whole time. Today I want to reach back out, t and you should spray-painting “Justice for Tilikum”
It 1600 a shot.
too. In other words: Refriend. Refol
Refollow. Unmute. You also l need to do the Companies on the whale tanks.
can use your
opposite and mute a few people with hw whom you mostt agree. They tell browser history OR
you what you already know—which is fun un and empowering,
w sure, but and cookies to Two Florida men who picked up a
serve you all
doesn’t energize the synapses. And don’t stop op there. Cutu back on cable great horned owl and took it for a
kinds of targeted
booze-fueled joyride found them-
Check out talk shows, change your internet homepage, ssubscribe b to some new content, so clear
selves in big trouble with Fish and
them out and
promising (if
early-stage) and stimulating email newsletters, and spice p
up your p
podcast lineup. select Do Not Wildlife after one of them posted a
Track in your video on Facebook.
bias-mitigation Finally, don’t let algorithms rule your feeds. By pushing
pu back on com- settings wherever
tech: An app
called Discors panies’ ability to target you with advertising and ssearch results, you’ll you can. It’s
no guarantee,
and the Chrome see a less skewed mediascape. Don’to worry! This is not about curbing but some sites
extension
EscapeYourBubble your activism or driving everyone e to the center. Nobody benefits from will honor your
request.
curate point-
counterpoint that. It’s about knowing what other
h people are saying so you can be
articles, while a fiercer, more thoughtful advocate at for your ideas—whether you’re
Jigsaw’s Unfilltered
.news data viz happy with the election result or not.
no Because a more daring media
shows the day’s diet and a commitment to challenging ng our own preconceptions will
headlines—from
everywhere. equip us all to handle whatever’s coming gnnext. —Emma Grey Ellis

Florida owl abduction

FEB 2017 TIMBA SMITS Real: ice cream heist, drunk in the USA,
 ALPHA SPORTS

HIT PIECE
WHEN THE 2016 NFL SEASON opened with a
rematch of the previous Super Bowl, it made
headlines for the wrong reasons: Carolina

HOW TO TACKLE
Panthers quarterback and reigning MVP Cam
Newton suffered a barrage of shots to the head
yet was never checked for a concussion. It

THE NFL’S was a bruising reminder that, despite efforts

to boost safety, dangerous collisions happen
all too often. And when the season ends with

CONCUSSION MESS Super Bowl LI in February, the league will still

have failed to face its concussion epidemic
head-on. ¶ The link between concussions
and chronic traumatic encephalopathy is
strong enough for the NFL to have settled an
estimated $1 billion class action with retired
players in 2015. The league has since strength-
ened its concussion protocol, which calls for
any player showing symptoms to be benched
until they pass a battery of tests. Trouble is,
the athlete’s own feedback remains essential
for diagnosis—and players can be reluctant to
self-report. “You’re at the mercy of the answer
they give you,” says Robert Cantu, cofounder
of Boston University’s CTE Center. And even
the most thorough sideline test would fail to
identify subconcussive events. Though less
dramatic, these impacts still destroy neurons
and can occur many times per game—piling
on long-term damage with each hit. ¶ So what
to do? Cantu argues the league should elim-
inate not just helmet-to-helmet hits but all
targeted head hits. Timothy Gay, a physicist
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has
advocated adding accelerometers to each
helmet, so researchers can collect real data
to work with. But Gay, an ex-lineman, knows
change must start with the sport’s gladiato-
rial mindset. “The thing I loved as a player,
and that we all love as fans, is the inherent
violence in the game,” he says. Changing that
culture may be the most brutal battle yet.
—Joseph Bien-Kahn

JARGON
groupalization n. / grüp- -lī-'zā-sh n / Yahoo’s idea for taking the personalization of online ads to
'
the street. Billboards and signs outfitted with cameras, mics, and scanners would profile passing

WATCH
groups of pedestrians or motorists—inferring demographics from car models, say—to serve up
targeted ads. vertical walking v. / v r-ti-k l 'w -kiŋ / Scooting from floor to floor in a building with
'
a new arm-and-leg-powered lift. The effect is a little funny (picture shimmying up a utility pole—
without the pole), but it uses no electricity, takes up minimal space, and is actually easier than
climbing stairs. Asgardia n. / as-'gär-dē- / The first nation-state in space. Named for Asgard, home of
'
the Norse gods, it’ll initially be located on a satellite to be launched this fall, at which time the founder plans
to seek UN recognition. More than half a million Earthlings have registered as citizens. —J O N AT H O N K E ATS

0 2 4 ISRAEL G. VARGAS FEB 2017

©2016 Volvo Car USA, LLC
 ALPHA DIY

HOLY BRICKS,
DESPITE THE BLOCKY, herky-jerky quality of
the visuals, 2014’s The Lego Movie and this
PHOTOGRAPHS: STYLING BY SCOTT STONE; ILLUSTRATION BY MARLY GALLARDO

February’s spinoff, The Lego Batman Movie,

BATMAN!
were not actually filmed in stop-motion. It
would have cost tens of thousands of dollars
to buy the bricks alone. But Lego Batman’s
director, Chris McKay, labored to replicate the

HOW TO MAKE A analog effect digitally, drawing on his work

for TV shows like Robot Chicken. So we asked
him for some tips on how to make a (legiti-

STOP-MOTION
mately stop-motion) Lego movie of our own.
Low-budget, of course—we don’t have tens
of thousands either. —signe brewster

LEGO FLICK
0 2 6 JOSEPH SHIN
 HOOKUPS

LOVE—
THERE’S A
HACK
FOR THAT
LIKE ELVIS, I’m huge in Japan.
I learned this after a breakup,
when a spiral of depression
led me to the conclusion that I
needed to relocate to a part of
New York where my chances
for a rebound—I mean love!—
were high. First, I downloaded
the dating app Happn, which
tells you when other singles are
in a one-block radius. Unfortu-
nately, an experimental jaunt
indicated that the critical mass
of available women lived in my
ex’s new neighborhood. I now
had to get out of the city entirely.
I lacked the funds to Eat, Pray,
Love around the world in person.
But thanks to location-spoofing
apps—I used FakeGPSFree—now
you can globe-trot on Tinder,
toggling from Spain to Sweden in
two taps. After hours of testing,
I determined that I am the Ryan
Gosling of Asia. Vietnam, Korea,
Hong Kong—turns out they all
love a blond, 140-pound nerd.
Eventually, though, the prospect
of giving up good pizza made
me bring the search closer to
home. I attempted one final hack
in uncharted dating territory:
Venmo. It turns out two out of
five cute strangers will respond
Anchor Light It Up Pick Your App Embrace to an out-of-the-blue $1.35 pay-
Everything Imperfection ment “for being sexy.” (Who
Good illumination is And ... action! Apps knew you can chat in Venmo?)
Getting that per- essential to achiev- like Stop Motion Stu- As you’re manipulat- Unorthodox? Sure. But if you
fect stop-motion feel ing a professional dio save you from ing figurines through stand out, some people can’t
requires keeping look, but the small having to manually a scene, don’t try help falling in love with you.
both your camera scale of the Lego stitch hundreds or to create hyper- I learned that from the King.
and the set nice and pieces makes it tricky thousands of images realistic movements. —S H A NE S NOW
stable. McKay recom- to use traditional into a video. Simply It’s OK to have your
mends a GorillaPod, stage lighting. Craft open the app, take Lego star’s hand go
a flexible tripod that and hobby stores— a photo, move your from up in the air to
can anchor a phone especially those character a tiny bit, down on a table in
to most surfaces. selling trains and hol- and then repeat. “You one frame. As McKay
Securing the Legos iday figurines—usu- have to build or find says: “I think that is
is easier, since the ally stock mini LEDs. everything you need beautiful in its own
pieces are designed McKay says they give on set. You can’t charming way.”
to stick together. Lego sets a cinematic draw your way out of
Just weigh down the sheen that makes a problem,” McKay
sides of the set to the bricks look larger says. “It’s a lot more
make sure you don’t and more alive. like live-action film-
accidentally move it making than it is like
between frames. animation.” Except
you can bend surly
actors to your will.

FEB 2017
 ALPHA

people dealt with the original info boom, the

Gutenberg press. It produced such a flood of
books and pamphlets that readers learned

GET UP TO SPEED
to vary their reading speed—sometimes zip-
ping through pages, sometimes lingering to
absorb. (“Some books should be tasted, oth-

LEARN FASTER WITH ers swallowed,” noted 16th-century intellec-

tual Francis Bacon.)
I can feel my mind trying the same trick

HIGH-VELOCITY TECH
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
with video. If I’m learning a new coding tech-
nique on Lynda.com and I hit a section that
puzzles me, I’ll slow down to 1X and loop dif-
ficult moments over and over. But if I’m in my
comfort zone, I’ll race along at 1.5X. Some peo-
ple are even pushing the limits of endurance:
Programmer Max Deutsch recently created a
TIKITU DE JAGER, a coder living in Greece, wanted to learn to program speed-listening app that allows paces as luna-
in iOS. So, like a lot of us do when we want to pick up a new skill, he tic as 10X. (Beyond even 5X, he admits, “it’s
started watching lessons online. At the outset everything was new, past the point of enjoyable.”) Most of his 10,000
so he’d watch carefully and take notes. But as De Jager’s knowledge users, a hard-core crowd, listen at 3X to 4X.
grew, he wanted to zip past familiar material. That’s when he started Frankly, I doubt I could make sense of
speeding up the videos. ¶ Now De Jager races along at 2X speed, slow- speech at that pace. But research suggests
ing down only when he hits challenging stuff. “You go, ‘OK, OK, OK, I that moderate acceleration doesn’t hurt
get the point’—until something new comes along,” he says. ¶ Power comprehension. Studies by educational-tech
consumers of podcasts already know that 1.5X speed is their friend. researchers Ray Pastore, of the University
About half the people who use podcast app Overcast listen on Smart of North Carolina Wilmington, and Albert
Speed, which gooses the audio by eliminating moments of silence. Ritzhaupt, of the University of Florida,
Ten percent of Audible listeners crank up the speed dial. And as online found that people listening to scientific info
videos become an increasingly important platform for acquiring at 1.5X understood just as much as those
new skills, speedup behavior is edging into the mainstream. Nearly listening at 1X. Video, Pastore says, is even
10 percent of people watching Khan Academy videos view them more amenable to speedup, because the
faster than normal. ¶ Sure, we could bemoan this trend as another visual and audio cues reinforce one another.
bleak marker of our hypermetabolized world: We’re racing through Now, you might argue that this hummingbird-
life, grimly optimizing every waking moment! (Overcast actually pace sipping of culture deforms the aesthetic
tells you how many hours of your life it has saved you.) But me, I’m in experience. Maybe so. But people seem to
favor of overclocking video and audio. It’s a clever adaptation. In an make nuanced distinctions about which
age where more and more information arrives as multimedia, we’re genres can withstand acceleration. Audible
reinventing the noble art of skimming. ¶ Skimming, after all, was how has found that its listeners race along with
just-the-facts info—like newspapers and busi-
ness books—but play classic novels at regu-
lar speed, to savor the performance. We’re
creating cultural norms in a world of speed.
Yet our current tech and strategies for
parsing audio and video are crude, barely
Gutenberg-level. Speed isn’t enough. We
need tools that nimbly parse multimedia.
Imagine—as Overcast creator Marco Arment
does—voice dictation so good that every
podcast comes with an autogenerated tran-
script. You could zip forward by clicking on
the text you want to hear or, he says, “share
an interesting clip just by selecting the text
you want.” If we’re going to speed up, we
should make sure we don’t lose control. !

0 2 8 ZOHAR LAZAR CLIVE@CLIVETHOMPSON.NET FEB 2017

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Healthy-ish
A NEW SITE FROM BON APPÉTIT

LAUNCHING

1-24-17

good food. good health. good vibes.

B O N A P P E T I T . C OM /H E A LT H Y I S H
 NIKE AIR VAPORMAX FLYKNIT
FITNESS

FETISH
NIKE’S SHINY-NEW power-lacing HyperAdapt may be hogging the limelight these days,
but the latest addition to the company’s iconic Air line also deserves some applause. A
triumph of minimalism, the VaporMax uses less air than usual in its pressurized sole. But
don’t be deflated: Nike’s designers used sensor-laden shoes to determine where their

GAS
athlete-testers needed the most support, then placed air chambers only where necessary.
The shoe contains less of most everything else too. Gone is the foam midsole, the rubber
STYLING BY AMY TAYLOR

outsole, and three layers of glue, leaving just the sole and the FlyKnit body—breathable,

SLIPPER
nearly weightless polyester yarn that tightens along with the laces. At just 8.8 ounces,
the VaporMax is strides ahead of the bulky Air Max shoes of yesteryear but still deliv-
ers the legendary bounce. Kicks this buoyant might even get a certain writer
outside for a run—or at least down to the corner store. —JOSEPH BIEN-KAHN $200

FEB 2017 NIK MIRUS 0 3 1

 FITNESS
SKI SEASON 3

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0 3 8
 FILE://CELEBRITY

Beauty vlogger Alan

Macias (@alannized) at
Beautycon LA last year.

Face Time
Why millions of
kids watch videos
of people putting
on makeup.
(Hint: It’s not
about makeup.)
BY JAMIE LAUREN KEILES

TAYLOR IS 14 but a
young 14, with the poreless
face of an American Girl doll.
Her hair is sandy blond and
parted down the middle. She
is smart but not savvy beyond
her years, with the quiet confi-
dence that educators seek when
they speak of getting girls into
soccer or STEM. She talks like
someone who is certain of what
she knows but who hasn’t yet
realized the vastness of what
she doesn’t. For this reason,
I trust Taylor entirely as she
lays out the details of the online
beauty scene, a teen subcul-
ture as sprawling as it is poten-
tially valuable. ¶ “I’m into
singers—Selena Gomez,

FEB 2017 ANGIE SMITH

 FILE://CELEBRITY

Taylor Swift—but YouTube is scene, where Tana would soon Tana meetup, she looks shell- and the same as fans. As growth
a different category. It’s not appear alongside other beauty- shocked with joy—and wears and legitimacy began separat-
something you were hired for, scene YouTube stars. These stars hardly any makeup. ing the groups, the event caught
it’s not something you were respond to myriad names—cre- “I’m going to put the pic- the eye of investor Moj Mahdara,
born into—it’s something you ators, influencers, beauty gurus, tures from today on my wall,” who took a stake in the company
do for a passion.” “the talent”—titles that con- she explains. “So I want to look in 2013. A year later she tran-
Taylor’s own passion, at least vey their indeterminate fame, more like my actual self.” I’ve sitioned to the role of CEO and
for now, is YouTube star Tana as well their receptiveness to heard similar logic applied to saw potential for something big-
Mongeau. I first came into con- both marketing and being mar- weddings, graduations, and ger than a trade show. In a 2015
tact with Taylor on Twitter last keted. Most of them produce other milestones to be photo- interview with Fast Company,
summer when I was looking for extensive and often mesmerizing graphed for posterity. For teens she imagined a far-reaching
teens who could help unpack
Tana’s appeal. Tana is 18, lives
in Las Vegas, has produced
more than 130 videos about
everything from how she does
her makeup in the morning to
boyfriends to pumpkin spice to
racism—and has 2.1 million sub-
scribers on YouTube. The only
thing Taylor might love more
than Tana is God. Her timeline
Cpation tktk Ximod
is one half retweets from The que eos quas eatempo
Gospel Daily, the other half pleas ratemque praepel
experovit voluptae andi
for Tana’s attention: ut quaerore nimi, ut eici
officiam quatiis.
RT @The_Gospels:
May the grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, & the love of
God, & the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit be with you all.
-2Cor 13:14

#ISupportTanaBecause
she supports us. everyday.
in everything we do.
we are family and always got
each others back. <3
Women sample e maakeup YouTuber Tana Mongeau
When I first talked to Tay- at Beautycon LLA in a and Taylor, at Tana’s
lor she was preparing to start space set up to
o look like first meetup; beauty
a classroom. swag for the stars.
high school near her home in
Washington state, though that
was hardly the biggest event in
her near future. Her mom had
booked a trip to Beautycon LA,
an event for the online beauty makeup tutorials on YouTube, like Taylor who’ve made it to brand—“Vice Media for a 16-
plus brand-sponsored posts Beautycon, it isn’t a stretch to to 24-year-old girl.” That tar-
across other social platforms. say today feels as momentous. get market has since stretched
Taylor was looking forward to to include boys who can con-
meeting Tana face-to-face after tour, gender-fluid teens, women
months of following her online. of a certain age, and, as she
On the morning of Beauty- IN THE BEGINNING, puts it, “anyone who loves to
con, Taylor texts me a photo like 2011, Beautycon was feel great about themselves.”
Jamie Lauren Keiles
(@jamiekeiles) is a
so I will know who to look for launched as a trade show for Beautycon Media today is
freelance writer in the sea of other teens. When YouTube creators, though cre- one part Coachella, one part
living in Los Angeles. I find her in line for the official ators back then were mostly one Sephora, and one part (or more)

FEB 2017
 Tana talks to
BEAUTYCON
fans like they’re
up late at a
sleepover,
a consulting firm for brands that Despite such inscrutability to Already the premium swapping racy
are thirsty for access to this slip- even an interested adult, Beau- ticketholders are milling. All stories.
pery generation. The enterprise tycon LA claimed 15,000 guests across the halls vendors are
now includes Beautycon Box (a this year. That’s 8,000 more running schemes to goad guests
cosmetics service), Beautycon than in 2015, and 10,000 more into online engagement. The
Digital (a social-first editorial than the year before that. simplest offers a small bribe,
platform), and one-day festi- In the morning before Beauty- like a lip gloss, in exchange for
vals in LA, London, New York, con opens to the public, my ride a like or follow. Other brands
Dallas, and Dubai. drops me off at the foot of the LA have arranged Instagrammable
These festivals boast pop-up Convention Center. Through the backdrops in the hope that fans
shops and live tutorials but doors, a blush-colored banner might pose and post. The booth ing skewers, licked clean of the
for Conscious Period organic mock chicken being proffered
tampons is decked with pink by Gardein.
toilet tissue, a golden toilet, and I pause for a moment at the
pink mock graffiti that reads: edge of the music stage to watch
don’t go with the flow. the Vine-famous Nebraskan
On a long pink carpet at the pop-rap duo Jack & Jack. The
front of the hall, the talent are pit is packed, but the crowd
arriving and granting inter- stands still, shooting steady
views to YouTube-only out- footage with phones in the air.
lets like CelebSecretsTV. If Beautycon plays out on a digital
they have anything in common, stage as much as it does inside
it’s flawless contour makeup. the convention center. When I
Diversity happened naturally spoke to Taylor before the fes-
at Beautycon from the start. tival, she outlined her social
YouTube, as a platform, has media strategy for the day—a
low barriers to entry, which cross-platform plan of near-
benefits groups long shunned professional caliber. Beauty-
by old media. Success on the con is not an IRL event with an
site doesn’t demand a cer- incidental web presence, nor
tain look or a vast network of is it the offline extension of an
well-connected friends. The online community; it’s both,
day before, at Beautycon head- though the fans seem unboth-
quarters in Hollywood, Mah- ered by such distinctions.
dara had made it clear: “I’m not Leaving the stage, I spot
trying to change anything. I’m musician Courtney Love walk-
just trying to reflect the time in ing casually across the floor,
which we live.” The gay daugh- unnoticed. Many Beautycon
ter of Iranian immigrants, she fans were born not only after
explained, “I can relate to feel- Kurt died but after the 2002
ing like I don’t fit in. Not mar- break-up of Hole. What eludes
keted to, written off for being them isn’t just the context of
a certain size, shape, gender her fame but possibly her cat-
preference—a million things.” egory of celebrity in general.
Soon after the festival opens
to the public, the lines on the
advertise the “creators” as the portends the tone for the day: floor grow so knotted that I
main event. Few of the You- you don’t need lipstick, lip- eventually lose sight of where YOUTUBE CREATOR
Tubers headlining Beauty- stick needs you. This year’s each ends. Through periodic meetups are scheduled in hour-
con LA lay claim to their own festival is taking place in West polling of queued-up teens, I long blocks throughout the day.
Wikipedia page nor a single Halls A and B—around 200,000 catch wind of free lotion at QVC, Tana is one of the few with two
piece of coverage in a main- square feet in all. Admission free hand massages at the booth solo meetups, and the line for
stream publication. The only starts at $19.99 and scales for Yes to Carrots, and a meet- her first is overflowing its cor-
real way to crack their biogra- quickly to the VIP Total Pack- and-greet event with Justin ral. A girl holds a glue-sticked
phies is by stalking their posts age—a $299.99 extravaganza Bieber’s ex-girlfriend hosted poster: yo u r s u p e r h e r o
across social media or watching with early-entry brunch and by a cotton-ball brand. Bored wears a cape, mine wears
hundreds of hours of YouTube. professional hair and makeup. and lost moms mill about hold- mac honey love lipstick.

0 4 1
 FILE://CELEBRITY

Taylor is close to the front, shared with the fuckboy him- was that creators can’t sell. be misleading. There’s a rumor
feet from the chair where Tana self. She reassures her fans: In the backstage lounge, some that PewDiePie, who had the
will sit. As we wait, she shows “I’m never gonna not tell raw- brand reps still have hope as highest number of YouTube
me a framed poem she wrote— ass stories from my life.” What they dump free product on who- subscribers last year, made
entitled “An Influence”—that comes next is an exegesis on ever will accept. Creators load $12 million in 2015.
includes sweet (if dystopian) the Kylie Jenner Lip Kit, which up on five brands of mascara; “That’s like Tana times 100,”
couplets like: “An environ- segues naturally into heartfelt hair extensions and blow-dryers Worona says wistfully (though
ment which provides a positive reflection on mass shootings. overflow from free totes. An he won’t say specifically what
escape / Through a false world (“Don’t you see this pattern?”) overwhelmed bag-check guy she makes). He watched Tana
that reality shaped.” The poem Over the course of 10 and a half struggles to stow it all, wad- from afar for two months, wait-
is signed, “God Bless, Taylor.” minutes, she’s funny and rude ing through what must be a ing for the growth of her audi-
The online beauty scene, for and confused and compassion- cool million in makeup. The ence to slow. It hasn’t yet. As
Taylor, is less about the makeup ate and the hundred other feel- hope of the reps is free expo- her manager, his goal is to pro-
than following creators as one ings that tangle the teen brain. sure, though a likelier outcome long that growth and assemble
might General Hospital. Perhaps She presents herself as wise is a deal for sponsored con- a career path that’s sustain-
this is why she loves Tana Mon- but still flawed, ever remind- tent—paying a creator to film able, like personalized mer-
geau. Tana doesn’t claim any ing viewers to Like and Sub- an endorsement. The past half chandise and touring. Besides,
beauty expertise (and some- scribe. Together, day by day, decade has seen a Wild West of Tana isn’t exactly what he calls
times she actively rejects it). they’ll untangle adolescence. spon-con, with brands throwing “brand-safe.” She swears a lot.
Her videos take the form of ebul- “She’s created such a positive money at anyone with follow- Her most-viewed videos have
lient monologues, looping from environment on the internet,” ers, a desperate plea to reach titles like “Crazy Bitch in Tar-
silly into serious back to crass. Taylor tells me. “To the point the youngest consumers. As get” and “I Got Banged With a
Taylor calls Tana a storytime where the amount of interac- this strategy has begun to bear Toothbrush.” She goes eagerly
YouTuber. She communicates tion with her following has middling returns, the metric of on record in support of Black
with fans like they’re up late at really made it feel like more choice has shifted to engage- Lives Matter and other touchy
a sleepover, giddy from sugar, of a family.” ment—a creator’s ability to issues that make brands run in
swapping racy stories. In “I Talk move fans to interact. What’s fear. In a world of vetted and
About Drinking and Smoking,” called family on the main floor sanitized teen content, she is
for instance, she faces the cam- is a target market backstage. frank and plainspoken and what
era in an oversize T-shirt, mock- TO KEEP TABS ON the According to Tana’s manager, fans always call “real.” Taylor
ing the squeaky-clean tone of movement of creators around Jordan Worona, an entry-level says it isn’t the edgy content
beauty YouTube, before mock- the festival, I’ve switched on full-time influencer with a few that keeps her watching, but
ing herself for a former crush Twitter alerts, per Taylor’s million followers can expect Tana’s openness and willingness
on Lil Wayne. She delivers an advice. My phone flickers to be paid like a “low-level to speak what’s on her mind.
update on “I Dated a Fuckboy”— constantly, annotating real- teacher”—between $20,000 She’s a role model, for sure, but
an earlier tale of a duplicitous ity. Phone charging stations, and $40,000 a year. Worona she isn’t a Role Model. When
suitor, which unfortunately was scattered about the hall, over- lost interest in managing “Hol- Worona solicits new opportu-
flow with Medusas of commonly lywood talent” when he realized nities, he most often compares
used cords. I stop to plug in the extent to which YouTube her to Chelsea Handler or Joan
TEENAGE FAN CLUB beside two older women, mark- was still in flux. “The trajec- Rivers. When all else fails, he
edly out of place for their lack of tory of the career is still being talks in marketing hyperbole:
20M
a teen. They tell me they work developed,” he says. Everyone “I mean, this is the girl who,
in high-end cosmetics and have is making the rules up as they on a monthly basis, is getting
come to Beautycon on an espio- go. “You could work, right now, views that American Idol got.”
YouTube Subscribers (as of Dec. 2016)

15M nage mission to solve their own with the top influencers in the
issues reaching Generation Z. world. If you were an acting
With a good deal of eye- agent, you would have to wait
TAYLOR SWIFT

rolling, they recount their 10, 15, 20 years before you would THE FANS IN TANA’S
YUYA

10M
brand’s failed attempt at a have some of the top talent.” m e e t u p l i n e a re p e e k i n g
AR IA NA G R AND E

meetup with a YouTube star On YouTube, the top is often through the curtain, hoping to
SELENA GOMEZ
B ET HANY M OTA

at a shopping center. They’d still fleeting. Creators rise to glimpse her backstage. A secu-
G RAV 3YAR DG I R L

5M booked the creator for a Friday fame under viral conditions, rity guard asks me who every-
afternoon, a time when parents then fade into obscurity in the one is here for, and I struggle
were still at work. Without rides span of a year. Creators who to explain how and why she is
or cash, the teens didn’t show. stick around are well poised famous. Taylor smooths and
0
According to the pair of industry for big payouts, though hard resmooths her hair in antici-
YouTube Beauty Star
Traditional Celebrity spies, the lesson to be learned stats are mythic and can often pation, whispering to nobody,

FEB 2017
 BEAUTYCON

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.” After ing up interest through scar- nal touchstone. Tana’s talent is
a few beats Tana emerges, her city of information. cultivating an online sense of
minidress laced all the way THE CHEAPEST READ But even if Pitt did want to closeness and managing the
down the front. The effect is on Tana Mongeau’s success get closer, it’s unlikely he’d be flow of interaction to sustain
somehow more wholesome is that she’s famous for being able to actually pull it off. He’s it. Too much interaction and
than it sounds—think cool best famous. She doesn’t sing or act busy shooting movies, get- she floods her market; too little
friend of your older sister. It’s or dance or otherwise exhibit ting divorced, whatever else. and she risks seeming distant.
easy to imagine her climbing any nameable skill we tradition- YouTube stars, by contrast,
out a window to go drink light ally expect to justify stardom. aren’t busy with anything. They
beer at a party. She waves to She’s not even all that focused have little real work outside
the crowd with exuberance, on makeup. In the case of a Hol- of fan relations, which isn’t BEFORE LEAVING the
and I’m extra-journalistically festival I visit the main stage
overcome with a desire for to watch Tana appear on the
her to like me. As the meetup #True2You panel. The YouTube
begins, fans approach one by creators strut onstage in a burst
one, presenting their gifts and of confetti, filming the crowd
posing for photos. You might with their phones as they walk.
imagine this as stilted or for- Taylor is sitting in the very first
mal, but Tana makes brace- row, still beaming. The stars dis-
faced middle schoolers seem cuss everything from ignoring
positively carefree. She sings the haters to the importance of
“Happy Birthday” to the cam- love and the best Snapchat fil-
era for their friends, promises ters. The message, in the end,
to follow them back on Twitter, is to always stay positive, live
and ends many of the meetups with love, and be true to your-
with an outright “I love you.” self. I’ve forgotten the festival
It does not sound like promo- was ever about makeup.
speak when Worona tells me Taylor would later tell me
she could do this every day. that the best part of Beauty-
Taylor directs her mom on con was during the panel, when
how to shoot video. When its Tana mouthed “I love you” from
her turn, she rushes Tana with the stage. In the week after the
a hug, then carefully steps back festival, as she waited to start
to present her with the poem. high school, Taylor would tweet
They establish the fast inti- at Tana 570 times. She would
macy of two women in a bar also retweet The Gospel Daily:
bathroom, all drawn-out vow-
els and overemphatic gestures. RT @The_Gospels:
Tana takes the framed poem in Hear my prayer,
her hands, studies the text, and God. Don’t hide from
seems authentically touched. my request.
Top: CEO Moj Mahdara
“Do you want to be in my (left) with Tyra Banks
Pay attention to me and
vlog?” she asks. (center). Bottom: You- respond to me.
They squeeze into the frame of Tube star Jenn Im back-
–Psalm 55:1-2
stage at Beautycon.
the camera, and Tana speaks nat-
urally to an invisible audience. Tana, in the end, would fave
“Hi, I’m here with Taylor and lywood star, fans accumulate to suggest that they are with- two of the tweets. !
she came all the way from Wash- as the byproduct of work; fan out talent. Famous for being
ington.” relations necessarily come sec- famous is a constellation of
Taylor, less practiced, compli- ond. You and I won’t likely meet soft skills not easily described
ments Tana in the third person. Brad Pitt, and even if we do, by a single-word title. By offer-
“She’s so amazing!” we can’t ever truly meet him. ing their lives up for constant
The two say “I love you,” and Tabloid reputation, casting, PR consumption, and closing the
Taylor exits the stall, retrieving spin, and velvet rope all help gap between fandom and star-
her phone from her mom on the ensure the relationship stays dom, a creator attracts and
way out. Tana greets her next distant. Such distance is likely earns trust from their fans, who
fan with a familiar “Yaaaaas!” to improve Pitt’s career, driv- rally around them as a commu-

0 4 3
 A Bigger Splash

FEATURES | 25.02

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN 0 4 5
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49
Trends That
Will Shape
the Very Near
Future

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 WHAT LIES AHEAD

Green Energy Will Prevail

Acts of God are on the rise. Insurers now pay nearly four times as much
to policyholders hit by natural disasters than they did in 1980. That’s
because God has had a major assist from fossil-fueled industrialization.
With the Paris climate agreement, the world’s emitters sought to slash
carbon across the public and private sectors. (See Bill McKibben’s essay,
page 13.) The US Clean Power Plan targets coal; China is enacting a cap-
and-trade system; India is betting big on solar. The deal sends a clear signal

01
to companies: Invest in green business models. After Donald Trump was
elected, more than 360 companies signed a letter urging him to uphold the
agreement. Many are hewing to it anyway. Google will reach 100 percent
renewable energy in 2017; Facebook and Amazon are following suit. Busi-
ness leaders will aim to sway Trump from his anti-green stance with eco-
nomic calculations. Investing in clean energy isn’t just imperative for the
environment—it’s essential for US competitiveness. —Nick Stockton

RUS S I A H AC K E D OU R the purposes of influenc- the Netherlands that have

election and got what it ing elections,” says Dmitri approaching elections, but
wanted: The spies believed Alperovitch, CTO of secu- also subtler data sabotage
to have stolen and leaked rity firm Crowdstrike, which and maybe even attacks on
thousands of emails from the was the first to link the Rus- physical infrastructure. (The
Democratic National Com- sian government to the DNC mayhem of a few leaked
mittee last year injected hack, months before US emails looks tame in compar-
RUSSIAN chaos and distraction into intelligence agencies con- ison to the kind of hacker-
CYBERTRICKS Hillary Clinton’s campaign firmed Russia’s involvement. induced shutdown that hit a
WILL and doubt into the minds of “They’re going to abso- Ukrainian power plant in late

02
E S C A L AT E American voters about the lutely attempt to do it again.” 2015.) The Obama admin-
legitimacy of the US elec- Unlike in that other cold war, istration promised to keep
toral process. And the victory the security world has yet Russia in check. Donald
of Putin’s preferred pres- to settle on a form of mutual Trump’s friendly approach
idential candidate means deterrence. So expect esca- to Putin and dismissal of
the Kremlin’s information lation: not only outright promises to defend NATO
warfare tactics will only get hacking and social media allies have practically dared
more aggressive. “They’re disinformation in countries Russia to press its luck.
weaponizing information for like Germany, France, and — A N DY G RE E N B E RG

Snapchat Will Matter

First your parents learned how to text, because you stopped pick-
ing up the phone. Then they got on Facebook so they could see what you
were up to at school. And they’re about to find you on Snapchat. For hyper-
connected #teens, snapping is like talking—only with videos, doodles,
and filters. Sure, everyone’s on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and
Instagram too. But Snapchat is where people share what’s happening in
their lives in real time. Meanwhile, Snap Inc., the company, is growing:
03

Last year it released Spectacles, the camera-glasses that have become the
season’s must-have millennial accessory. They capture the world the way
people see it—which is thrilling to watch. And as of this writing, Snap was
rumored to be going public, so we can expect it to push for more users
and revenue. This once adorably inscrutable app is suddenly poised for
global domination. So get ready for your parents to complain that if you
really loved them, you’d keep the snap streak going. —David Pierce

tavis coburn
 25.02

Telecoms Underrepresented minority

graduates in computer
Underrepresented minority
graduates in computer

and science vs. minorities using

those degrees in tech:
science vs. minorities using
those degrees in tech:

Content RECENT PAST 18% / 5% NEAR FUTURE 19% / 6%

Creators
Will
Get Cozy
W hat w e wan t : to watch any-
thing on any device at any time. Why
THINGS
we might not get it: Last fall, AT&T
signed a deal to buy Time Warner YOU WILL
for $85.4 billion. That’s a prob-
LEARN
lem, because AT&T previously just
owned “dumb pipes.” The compa- TO LOVE
ny’s business was to simply transmit
TV channels and streaming content
to our screens without regard to
where it came from. But the merger
means that AT&T will own CNN,
HBO, and others. As a result, those CHATBOTS

channels may get easier and cheaper

to watch for AT&T customers, while
other stuff might get more difficult
to access. “A combined entity could
lock consumers into a system that FECAL
TRANSPLANTS
has dedicated content,” says Aija
Leiponen, a Cornell University pro-
fessor who specializes in the effects
of technological change on the econ-
04

omy. “This deal is not geared toward

BIKE SHARING
creating more choice for consum-
ers.” (And the new administration
seems pretty friendly with the big
telecoms.) But the kings of the inter-
net will fight back: Amazon, Face-
EDIBLES
book, and Google are building their
own broadband pipes and stream-
ing media empires. Via its Fiber
service, and by buying other pro-
viders, Google is offering internet ,
WHOEVER S
access in some US cities; Facebook REPLACING
is testing mobile internet service in BEAU
the developing world; and Amazon WILLIMON

may start offering home internet

connections in Europe. As the old
guard tries to build a wall around
our eyeballs, the new media mas-
ters will chip it away, giving us
what we want, when we want it.
—Cade Metz

0 4 9 johnny cobalto
 WHAT LIES AHEAD

Drones Will Black Out the Sun

Drones are here, and they promise to change the world: beaming the internet everywhere, accel-
erating warfare, transforming televised sports, and, yes, shuttling impulse buys to our doorsteps.
THINGS They’re already delivering packages to online shoppers in China and blood to hospitals in rural Rwanda.
But in the US, the prospect of terrorists using UAVs to launch bombs or wireless malware attacks has
THAT WILL spurred strict rules: no flying beyond the operator’s line of sight, at night, or over people. Now regu-
DIE lators are slowly giving commercial drones more liberty. In the past six months, the FAA has granted
14

over 200 waivers exempting pilots from restrictions. CNN can glide over crowds; BNSF Railway can fly
out of the pilot’s view; HBO can film at night; Disney World can choreograph a drone light show. Pilots
for Project Wing, the forthcoming drone delivery service from Google parent Alphabet, can fly up to
20 drones at once in a designated area. (Last fall, it teamed up with Chipotle to test burrito delivery
at Virginia Tech.) And this year, the FAA is expected to reassess the rule barring flight over people,
THE HOME portending a future of drone utility inspections and Amazon deliveries from above. —Alex Davies
BUTTON

THE MICROBIOME
FREE BIRTH ISN’T JUST
CONTROL ABOUT YOU
ANYMORE

YOU A LRE A DY K N OW that you

have a microbiome: the bacte-
EMAIL ria that live in and on your body,
FROM YOUR subtly (and not so subtly) influ-
FRIENDS encing your health. But while
you’d probably love to know
what germs are going to make
you thinner/healthier/more reg-
ular, human microbiome ther-
apies are going to be slow to
work their way through the FDA’s
approval process. Don’t hold
your breath for a magic germ pill.
And don’t be so self-centered.
See, everything has a micro-
biome, whether it’s a subway
platform or a cornfield. Luckily,
research that can help us under-
stand those communities will hit

Concerts Will Be Our Soap Operas

the market a helluva lot faster. 16
One company, Indigo, has been
analyzing the bacterial composi-
tion of agricultural staples to see
In recent years, the tightly choreographed, super-expensive stadium shows that have long been how pesticides and fertilizers
a music industry staple have morphed into multicity soap operas. Will Drake ignite (or defuse) a may have changed the balance
of the plants’ symbiotic bugs
new beef? Will Taylor Swift strut out (and/or show off) one of her superfamous surprise-guest pals? over time. Indigo then concocted
What will Adele talk about during her off-the-cuff midset monologues? Will Bruce Springsteen try new combinations of germs
to set yet another live-show run-time record? All of these outings featured story lines that were intended to help crops grow
faster or in harsher conditions (it
played out between songs and then broadcast worldwide via social media, where they kept the art- harvested its first crop last fall:
ist in the news cycle long after the last encore had faded. And they were likely inspired by perpetual 50,000 acres of drought-
15

tour-de-forcer Kanye West: The confrontational/inspirational midshow spiels that were a staple of resistant cotton). Meanwhile, sci-
ICONS: MARCO GORAN ROMANO

entists at the Argonne National

his 2013–2014 Yeezus tour proved that even the most prefab spectacle could find time for moments Laboratory are applying simi-
of unforced, unpredictable storytelling, not to mention moments of actual suspense. And while lar research to create healthier,
West’s Saint Pablo tour was cut short by decidedly more pressing dramas, we hope his next outing more robust bug populations in
hospitals and homes. Call it
has a happier ending—and we expect more artists will take his cue in 2017, turning the stage into a community immunity.
place not just for noise but for narratives. —Brian Raftery — K ATI E M . PA LM E R

tavis coburn 0
 25.02

1 Self-driving
cars will be
everywhere
There are honest-
to-goodness self-
driving Ubers ferrying
passengers in
Pittsburgh; Baidu’s
fleet of autonomous
electric taxis is zipping
around Wuzhen, China;
and commuters in
England and Sweden
will start whizzing
along the highways in
Volvo carbots.

2 You will be
tracked
Insurance companies
3 4 will use smart
dashcams and tracking
devices to adjust
your rates. And now
that electric vehicles
pose an existential
threat to gas taxes,
state governments
will experiment
with mileage-based
taxation.
2
3 Power trains
get a power-up
Expect 15 pure
electric models to
hit the US market
this year, including
the modestly priced
and longer-ranged
Chevy Bolt and Tesla
Model 3. But petrol-
based propulsion
isn’t going away. It’s
getting better. Nissan
Infiniti’s insane (and
insanely complex)
variable-compression
engine—which wrings
diesel-level oomph
and efficiency out
of a 2-liter turbo gas
power plant—goes into
1 production this year.

4 Public transit
will team up
with startups
Last fall, the bedroom
community of Summit,
New Jersey, launched
an Uber pilot program
offering parking-
pass holders free
rides to a nearby train
station. We’ll see
more partnerships
between ride-sharing
services and public
transportation.

5 Robotrucks hit
the highway
Self-driving trucks
outfitted by Otto—a
startup Uber acquired
last year—are making

The American Way of Driving Is Over

deliveries. The first?
Fifty thousand cans
of Budweiser. But
truckers won’t be
totally out of work yet;
For decades, the car has been the all-American signifier of who you are, a declaration of independence, Otto’s rigs can self-
a place where you are master. Now American innovation is leaving this tradition in the dust. Ride hailing, drive only on the
17

highway. Ten-four,
self driving, data mining: Technology is taking the wheel. Enjoy the ride. —Aarian Marshall good botty.

julian glander 5 1
WHAT LIES AHEAD

Design Won’t Be So White SOFTWARE

WILL
For years tech giants have designed products and services for con- PROTECT
nected Westerners and then adapted them for the rest of the planet. But ITSELF
that’s changing, because the users coming online around the world—Silicon
Valley calls them the Next Billion—are not like you. And their relationship
with technology is fundamentally different from yours. Consider India. In
2015 the country surpassed a billion mobile phone subscriptions, but most F O R A LL TH E B IT S and bytes
involved, cybersecurity is a
users still endure download speeds hundreds of times slower than connec- human endeavor. To protect our
tions in the US. To Google, this problem looked like an opportunity, so it sent networks and email and banking
a team to India to reimagine YouTube with simple menus, large video thumb- apps, we need flesh-and-blood
22

programmers. The trouble is,

nails, and lively and responsive sharing functions that work even without a humans can’t possibly find and
connection. Last September, in Delhi, it launched YouTube Go, a nimble app patch every single hole—or even
with a dead-simple interface that lets users view and share videos phone-to- find them fast enough. So online
services continue to get hacked.
phone, sans internet. “I call it reverse innovation—designing specifically for But last summer, Darpa, the
the developing world and doing it there first,” says business strategy expert research arm of the US Depart-
Vijay Govindarajan. “The way automobiles changed America 100 years ago, ment of Defense, ran the first
hacking contest open only to
the mobile revolution is going to change India.” Eventually these better, security bots (submitted by their
smarter projects will find their way back to the West, making them good for human handlers) that can patch
the Next Billion—and good for you too. —Robbie Gonzalez holes on their own. Turns out, the
bots can find simple bugs faster

24
than human engineers—and in
some cases they can pinpoint the
GIGS WILL most complex of security holes,
bugs that shape-shift every sec-
GO TO ond. The contest included one
of these tranformers, and a bot
I N 1 0 TO 2 0 Y E A R S

THE ROBOTS built by researchers in Southern

NURSE A I R LI N E C O M P U TE R
P I LOT PROGRAMMER
California managed to both find
and patch it. That means bots
will be able to fix security holes
Likelihood with a speed that was never
human before possible. And the security
industry is now putting its weight
Likelihood behind the idea. This will eventu-
automated CON STR U C TI O N TA X I TE LE M A R K E TE R
ally make online services safer.
DRIVER And your data will be safer too.
SOURCE: THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT , BY CARL BENEDIKT FREY AND MICHAEL A. OSBORNE
—CADE METZ

No, You Won’t Get Your

Own VR Rig
Plunking down a grand or more on a high-end headset and PC might
seem tempting, but given all the kludges and cables still involved, this
won’t be the year for your Personal Immersion Cave. Instead, you’ll be
piggybacking on other people’s R&D budgets—and planning VR date
night. At places like Salt Lake City’s “hyper-reality” theme park, the
Void, visitors will be able to battle ghosts or roam temple ruins that are
25

mapped perfectly to their real-world stage. Imax is planning a handful

of VR theaters, and HTC is pushing to put its Vive headset in cafés and
arcades all over the globe. Eventually the tech will have a place along-
side—or in lieu of—your home theater. Until then, though, the biggest
investment you’ll be making in VR is a babysitter and tickets to leave
real reality behind on a Friday night. —Brian Barrett

tavis coburn
 25.02

Microsatellite launches from Microsatellite launches

2008 to 2016: expected from 2017 to 2025:
730 2,460

We’ll Fight
a New
THINGS
Drug War
THAT WILL

REFUSE

TO DIE
Criminalizing drugs is as
American as doing them. But
the days of outright prohibi-
tion are over, as the prescrip-
tion opioid crisis has burned
MOSQUITOES through the suburbs and dras-
tically shifted the public’s notion
of addiction. “Opioid addiction
is more relatable than the past
perception of heroin junkies
HOVERBOARDS lying in the street,” says Katha-
rine Neill, a drug policy expert at
Rice University. Reframing drug
abuse as a public health problem
rather than a criminal one has
FITNESS prompted reform-minded leg-
TRACKERS islation from both parties. And
while prescription meds are
now being held at arm’s length,
recreational drugs are being
embraced. Eight states voted to
BATHROOM- legalize weed in some form in the

35
MIRROR
SELFIES last election, bringing the total to
ICONS: MARCO GORAN ROMANO; CHART: MICROSATS ARE LESS THAN 50 KG; SOURCE: EURO CONSULT

29, and researchers are studying

the drug’s medicinal applications
for everything from migraines
to multiple sclerosis. Loosen-
THE WHITE ing attitudes toward illicit drugs
NATIONALIST aren’t limited to weed: Research-
MOVEMENT ers are also testing psychedel-
ics for treating mental disorders
like PTSD. While Donald Trump
has pledged to combat the opi-
oid crisis by improving access to
EMAIL FROM treatment and abuse-deterrent
POTTERY BARN
painkillers, his appointees have
also called for stricter marijuana
enforcement and drug sentenc-
ing. Good luck with that: Such
Body parts people will stimulate: a hard-line stance would run
FAKE NEWS ON
FACEBOOK Their back (for pain)
counter to state reforms—and
Their brain (for depression) the $6 billion marijuana indus-
Their vagus nerve (for everything!) try. —Nick Stockton

0 johnny cobalto 5 3
WHAT LIES AHEAD

1 The
Bluedouches
will take over
Your headphones
will be wireless. And
you’ll never stop
wearing them,
because they’ll
connect to your 1
voice assistant, your
fitness tracker, and
your universal
translator. Last time
we tried the “wear
something in your
ears all the time”
thing, we got the
Bluedouches. Guess
that’s all of us now.

2 Your clothes
will be gadgets
Thanks to tiny
batteries and tinier
sensors, your Under
Armour shoes will tell 2
you how many steps
you took, and you’ll
change the song by
swiping your hand
across the sleeve of
your Levi’s jacket.
Because fitness bands
will refuse to die.

3 Your house
will be smart …
Telling Alexa to turn 4
off the lights is just
a first step toward
Alexa knowing
when to turn them
off without you even
asking—right before
starting the popcorn
and loading the next
episode of The Man
in the High Castle.

4 … But your
smart home
will be
weaponized
Connectivity opens
smart home devices
to cyberattacks.
While your Nest is
likely safe (you’re
receiving automatic
security updates,
right?), most internet-
of-things things
can be vulnerable.
Hackers have used
Devices Will Always Be Listening
exploits to cut heat
to entire apartment We had computers on our desks, then our laps, then in our pockets. Starting now, computers aren’t a
buildings during
freezing conditions, thing anymore. They’re everything. And everything will be listening, from your phone to your speakers to
mess with fire
alarms, and conscript
your TV. All those devices will get smarter and more personal too: Order “the usual” and they’ll know you
IoT devices into mean a large Hawaiian, side of breadsticks. You won’t even have to know which device you’re talking to. Just
malicious botnets.
shout your wishes into the air and wait for them to come true. —David Pierce and Lily Hay Newman

Cruising speed (mph) Flight time NYC–London (hours)

THE N 1,341
( CON COR DE) 3 1/2
SUPERSONIC
N OW 562 6 1/5
( BOEIN G 7 7 7 )
FLIGHT WILL
SOON 1,451
RETURN ( BOOM XB-1) 3 1/4

0 400 800 1,200 1,600

julian glander
 25.02

Congress Will Screw Up Privacy

Across the country, evidence lockers are filling up with smartphones that contain potentially
critical crime-solving information. But they’re locked, and at the moment it’s not clear whether the
government has the right to require built-in access channels. True, the Apple-FBI showdown over
the passcode-protected iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters ended with the agency back-
ing down. But the transition to a Trump White House and a Republican-dominated Congress all but
guarantees new legislation. (Remember, Trump is serious about “the cyber.”) And that’s worrisome: THINGS

41
Congress seems unable to account for the nuance of tech evolution—last April it proposed legislation
THAT WILL
that would essentially make personal encryption illegal. But as pressure from law enforcement and
intelligence agencies mounts, legislators will be more likely than ever to construct laws that bulldoze GET UGLY
protections, whether that’s forcing companies to break their own security protocols or putting back
doors in the encryption standards adopted by your favorite messaging apps. This is the year every-
one—not just techno-libertarians in tinfoil hats—becomes a privacy advocate. —Lily Hay Newman

WEBSITES

GENDER BARRIERS WILL

BREAK DOWN

OU R N E W V I C E pres- boy, James Charles; U.S.–CHINA

ident has spent much Transparent’s Hari RELATIONS
of his career fighting Nef—whose stars will
gay rights. And the continue to rise. (And
pain of his election for we can’t wait to watch
LGBTQ people is irre- Laverne Cox play an
futable. But here’s the Ivy-educated lawyer on
thing: Culture is march- the CBS drama Doubt.)
ing on. From modes What people can do is GADGETS
42

of dress to pronoun no longer tied to the

use to gender roles, sex they’re assigned
the world is breaking at birth. Gender may
out of rigid binaries. not be over, but its lim-
We have a new crop itations soon will be—
of icons—trans rocker no matter what Mike
Laura Jane Grace of Pence tries to do. FRUITS AND
the band Against Me!; —ANGELA VEGETABLES
CoverGirl’s first cover WATE RCUT TE R

We’ll Have Genetic Superpowers CONFIRMATION

HEARINGS

Biologists worldwide have fallen in love with Crispr for its rapid, efficient gene-editing
powers. Now they can swiftly engineer mouse strains with certain defects, letting them study
36

diseases (and explore potential treatments) more easily than ever before. Cures for humans are
next. The Crispr startup Editas Medicine expects to launch its first clinical trial, for a congen-
ital eye disease that causes blindness, this year. They’ll load up a virus with tools to snip out
the mutated gene, then inject it into a person’s retina. And the US National Institutes of Health
has already approved the first wide-scale trial of a Crispr-based cancer treatment: Scientists at
43

the University of Pennsylvania will remove T cells from cancer patients, make three edits, then
ICONS: MARCO GORAN ROMANO

reintroduce these immune responders back into the body to detect and attack cancer cells. In
China, researchers have already made similar tweaks to white blood cells to tackle cancer. But
they’re also pushing into dicier territory, using the technique to modify human embryos—and
thus potentially future generations. Scientists in the US may be fiddling with similar sorts of her-
>
itable modifications in mice but have no plans to do so in people. For now. —Katie M. Palmer

0 tavis coburn 5 5
 Facebook and Twitter
wield huge influence over how people understand the world around them. This is the year we confront that.

THE
SOCIAL
MEDIUM
IS
THE
MESSAGE
Social networks have been exposed. No one can pretend shifts. But his thinking could vibrate with anxiety at the com-
that they are simply neutral platforms—mere tubes and path- ing impact of electronic media. He suspected we could have too
ways, like phone lines, that allow us to share snippets of our much contact with each other—that we’d become fearful and
lives. That fiction was laid bare on November 8. angry by incessant exposure to the world at large. He might have
Over the next year the mainstream culture will grapple, looked at the rise of Donald Trump on Twitter and nodded in
for real, with the civic and political effects of our lives online. recognition; a young McLuhan had watched charismatic Euro-
Plenty of intellectuals, with eyebrows cocked, have warned pean fascists in the 1940s use radio to inject hypernationalism
that this reckoning was coming. But it took the US election— directly into the souls of their supporters.
and the ascent of Donald Trump, the insult-hurling, falsehood- When Trump won last year, to widespread shock, liberal critics
circulating tweeter-in-chief—to shine a blinding arc light onto attacked the major social networks for enabling several unset-
the role of technology on the political stage. tling trends. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were viral hot-
We are thus heading into a very McLuhan-esque year. Marshall beds for conspiracy theories and disinformation. Memes that
McLuhan—the Patron Saint of wired—made his name in the reared to life on image boards and fringe political sites—jittery
1960s, studying how pivotal technologies produced widespread, with misogyny and white nationalism and hatred of Hillary
nonobvious changes. The Gutenberg press, he argued, created a Clinton—made the leap to the mainstream on social networks.
spirit of “detachment” that propelled science while giving a new Dangerous falsehoods, like the idea that Clinton ran a child-
sense of agency to individuals. Electricity had a “tactile” effect, trafficking ring out of a pizzeria, spread widely; indeed, on Face-
keeping us in constant contact with the world via the telegraph, book the top 20 fabricated stories netted more engagement than
telephone, and TV. The photocopier imposed a “reign of terror” real stories from news sources that actually did factual reporting,
on publishers by letting everyday folks copy documents. as BuzzFeed found. (This isn’t a problem only in the US: Anti-
People assume McLuhan was always a cheerleader for these Muslim conspiracy stories are avidly circulated on Facebook in

BY

Clive Thompson
WHAT LIES AHEAD

0
Myanmar, while Germans trade Facebook posts claiming Angela ware created by Kate Starbird, a professor of design and engineer-
Merkel is Adolf Hitler’s daughter.) The same was true on Twit- ing, was able to distinguish with 88 percent accuracy whether a
ter, which turned out to be an efficient tool for small numbers of tweet was spreading a rumor or correcting it when analyzing chat-
people to widely propagate abuse and hate speech. ter about a 2014 hostage crisis in Sydney. And Filippo Menczer,
Meanwhile, the “filter-bubble” effect, which writer Eli Pariser a professor of informatics at Indiana University, has found that
had pinpointed years before, arrived in full force. As my friend Twitter accounts posting political fakery have a heat signature:
Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina They tweet relentlessly and rarely reply to others.
and author of an upcoming book about political organizing in the Social networks sit atop piles of data that can help identify bogus
digital age, tells me, “I’m Facebook friends with some people who memes—and they can rely on their users’ eagerness to help too.
support Trump, but I don’t recall seeing their Facebook updates— Sure enough, Facebook has already begun to develop tools along
it appears the algorithms assumed I wouldn’t be interested.” these lines. In December it unveiled a system that makes it easier
We can’t indict social media alone, or even primarily, for the rise of for anyone to flag a post if it seems like deliberate misinformation.
disinformation and politically abusive behavior. Traditional media— If a link that purports to be a news story gets flagged by lots of users,
cable TV, radio, newspapers—recklessly amplified nonsense this it’s sent to a human Facebook team. That team posts it to a queue,
political season (and were played shamelessly by Russia’s email where a group of external fact-checking organizations, including
hacking). They need their Snopes and Politifact, can
own reckoning. But social check to see if they think the
networks increasingly influ- story is suspect. If they do,
ence how people learn about THE NEW NEWS OUTLETS Facebook slaps a warning on
the world. According to the Percentage of US adults who …
it (“Disputed by 3rd-Party
Pew Research Center, about Fact Checkers”) and offers
44 percent of Americans FACEBOOK YO U T U B E
links to rebuttals by Snopes
Use
cite Facebook as a source of platform 67% or the other checking sites.
news. It is a crucial part of 48% If a user tries to share that
“where we put the cursor of story later on, Facebook
our attention all day long,” warns them before they post
Get 44% 10%
says Tim Wu, author of The news that it’s disputed. The goal
Attention Merchants. there isn’t to catch all falsehoods;
So here’s the question lin- the system targets the most
16%
gering in the air: How should blatant and viral posts.
SOURCE: PEW RESEARCH CENTER, 2016

social networks grapple 4% There are plenty of other

with their civic impact? 9%
2% tweaks platforms could
As we will discover, these make. Craig Silverman, a
issues will be devilishly hard BuzzFeed editor who has
to resolve. closely studied fake news,
TW ITTER R ED D I T
argues that Facebook and
The optimistic view is Twitter ought to make it eas-
that there’s good precedent ier to see the provenance of
for fighting crap online. a link; right now, those from
Back in the ’00s, internet giants waged a war against spam and carefully reported sources like The Wall Street Journal look the same
content farms. To cut down on spam entreaties from Nigerian as ones from conspiracy sites. The platforms could instead empha-
princes and the like, email providers used machine learning to size logos and names so a user might realize, “Wait a minute, this
detect spammish content; they also created shared blacklists. To domain name is HillaryClintonStartedAids.com,” Silverman says.
quash content farms—low-quality insta-websites designed to game Now let’s look at the filter-bubble phenomenon. If they wanted
Google’s number one slot—the search engine rolled out an ambi- to, Facebook or Twitter could compose algorithms that expose
tious new ranking scheme called Panda, which down-ranked sites us to people, ideas, or posts that aren’t in such lockstep with our
that used tricks like keyword stuffing (putting oodles of invisible, views. As when Facebook suggests related content, “you could
unrelated phrases on a page). Remarkably, it worked: Content use these mechanisms to surface ideas that are ideologically
farms vanished, and bulk spam is now mostly a marginal problem. challenging,” Pariser notes. Or as Tufekci argues: “Show more
Social networks could use similar strategies to solve their cur- crosscutting stuff! I’m not saying drown the users in it. But the
rent civic dilemmas. Consider fake news, an area where, as scholars default shouldn’t be we’re just gonna feed you candy.”
have shown, algorithmic analysis could help identify crap. Soft- Let your imagination go wild and you can concoct even more

Contributing editor Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) is the author of Smarter Than You Think.

25.02

5 7
 WHAT LIES AHEAD

aggressive, more ambitious reforms. Imagine if you got rid of all “Look, fake news is a real problem,” he says. “But do liberals
the markers of virality: no counts of likes on Facebook, retweets on really want to hand the decisions over to a single large corpora-
Twitter, or upvotes on Reddit! Artist Ben Grosser created a playful tion?” Asking the platforms to be granular arbiters of truth would
browser plug-in called the Facebook Demetricator that does pre- endow them with even more power than they already wield.
cisely this . It’s fascinating to try: Suddenly social media stops being
a popularity contest. You start assessing posts based on what they Whatever one can say about Donald Trump, he understands—
say instead of because they racked up 23,000 reposts. and masterfully plays—the media, old and new. He uses Twitter
Some scholars argue Facebook should go whole hog on editing to perform an end run around journalism, to utter falsehoods
and hire human teams to more comprehensively review trending that are repeated by his followers and circulated further by main-
stories, deleting ones built on lies. In fact, Facebook did just that stream news. When he attacks someone in a tweet, his support-
last year until a conservative outcry ended the practice. ers harass the target. Like other merchants of disinformation
The biggest impediment to all this change, though, is economic. online, Trump exhales such a cloud of half-baked assertions that
Traditional media organizations publish and broadcast nonsense it leaves people mistrustful of everything. If you can do that,
because it attracts eyeballs for ads. New media have inherited this hey: What does it matter if social networks slap a “Disputed”
problem in spades: Facebook and Twitter and YouTube know— label on your post? As Jon Favreau, one of President Obama’s
in vivid, quantitative detail—just how much their users prefer former speechwriters, puts it: “Trump doesn’t care if we think
to see posts they agree with ideologically, seductive falsehoods he’s telling the truth—he just wants his supporters to doubt that
included. Spam got on people’s nerves, so companies were eager anyone’s telling the truth.”
to stamp it out; on some level, any attempts by social platforms And yet Trump has millions of followers, eager ones. This is
to fight fake news and confirmation bias will come into conflict what gives pause to Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New
with their users’ appetite for them. York University. “You have to think about the demand side,” he
says. It’s not enough to ask why people spread political disin-
Nonetheless, public pressure did, in fact, prod Facebook to formation, he says. You also have to ask, “Why do people want
action after the election. Imagine if still greater pressure were to consume this stuff so much?”
to impel social networks to make even stronger moves against Ponder that and you begin to realize: There are limits to what
falsehoods and filter bubbles. Would we like the result? technological fixes can achieve in civic life. Though social networks
It’s unclear. Waging war on disinformation isn’t easy, because amplify American partisanship and distrust of institutions, those
not everyone agrees on what disinformation is. It’s unambiguous problems have been rising for years. There are plenty of drivers:
that “the pope endorses Donald Trump” isn’t true. But how about say, two decades of right-wing messaging about how mainstream
“Hillary Clinton lied about having pneumonia, so she’s a lying institutions—media, universities, scientists—cannot be trusted
snake”? The most effective disinformation usually begins with (a “retreat from empiricism,” as Rosen notes). And as my friend
an actual fact then amplifies, distorts, or elides; ban the distor- Danah Boyd, head of the Data and Society think tank, points out,
tion and you risk looking like you’re banning the nugget of truth we’ve lost many mechanisms that used to bridge cultural gaps
too. Online interactions are conversation, and conversation has between Americans from different walks of life: widespread mil-
always been filled with bluster, jokes, and canards. “The idea that itary service, affordable colleges, mixed neighborhoods.
only truth should be allowed on social networks is antithetical The old order was flawed and elitist and locked out too many
to how people socially interact,” says Karen North, a professor voices; it produced seeming consensus by preventing many from
of digital social media at the University of Southern California. being heard. We’re still fumbling around for new mechanisms
Or consider this example raised by New York University media that can replace that order and improve upon it, Pariser tells me.
theorist Clay Shirky: Activists last winter who supported the “It reminds me of how the secular world hasn’t found a replace-
Dakota Pipeline protests were encouraged to use Facebook to ment for some of the uses and tools that religions served. And
“check in” at that location, as a show of support and to confuse the new media world hasn’t found a replacement for some of the
police. Those false check-ins “are fake news,” Shirky notes. Any ways that consensus was manufactured in the old world.” This
policy aimed at enforcing truth on Facebook could easily be used is the year we need to begin rebuilding those connections—on
to quash that activity. our platforms and in ourselves. !

THE MOST EFFECTIVE

DISINFORMATION
HIDES AMID ACTUAL
FACTS.
25.02

0 eddie guy 5 9
At 14, he started his
first business. At 23,
he began making millions
for Enron. At 28,
he launched his own BRENT HUMPHREYS

hedge fund. At 33,

he became the youngest
billionaire in America.
At 38, he retired. by Sam Apple 0 6 0

John Arnold’s next

mission? WAGING WAR ON BAD SCIENCE.
 first millions as a wunderkind natural gas
trader at Enron, the infamous energy com-
pany, and he’d managed to walk away from
Enron’s 2001 collapse with a seven-figure
bonus and no accusations of wrongdoing

1
attached to his name. After that Arnold
started his own hedge fund, Centaurus
Energy, where he became, in the words of
one hedge fund competitor, “the best trader
that ever lived, full stop.” Then Arnold had
abruptly retired at the ripe age of 38 to focus
full time on philanthropy.
As Nosek tells it, John Arnold had read
about the Reproducibility Project in The
Chronicle of Higher Education and wanted

Brian Nosek had pretty much given to talk. By the following year, Nosek was
cofounding an institution called the Center

up on finding a funder. For two years

for Open Science with an initial $5.25 million
grant from the Arnold Foundation. More than

he had sent out grant proposals for

$10 million more in Arnold Foundation grants
have come since. “It completely transformed
what we could imagine doing,” Nosek says.

his software project. And for two Projects that Nosek had once envisioned as
modest efforts carried out in his lab were

years they had been rejected again now being conducted on an entirely differ-
ent scale at the center’s startup-like offices

and again—which was, by 2011,

in downtown Charlottesville, with some 70
employees and interns churning out code and
poring over research. The skeletal software
discouraging but not all that surprising to harder for them to go back and cherry-pick behind the data-sharing project became a
the 38-year-old scientist. An associate pro- their sexiest data after the fact—and easier slick cloud-based platform, which has now
fessor at the University of Virginia, Nosek for other researchers to come in and repli- been used by more than 30,000 researchers.
had made a name for himself in a hot sub- cate the experiment later. The Reproducibility Project, meanwhile,
field of social psychology, studying people’s Nosek was so taken with the importance swelled to include more than 270 research-
unconscious biases. But that’s not what of redoing old experiments that he had also ers working to reproduce 100 psychology
this project was about. At least, not exactly. rallied more than 50 like-minded researchers experiments—and in August 2015, Nosek
Like a number of up-and-coming research- across the country to participate in some- revealed its results. Ultimately his army of
ers in his generation, Nosek was troubled thing he called the Reproducibility Project. volunteers could verify the findings of only
by mounting evidence that science itself— The aim was to redo about 50 studies from about 40 percent of the studies. Media reports
through its systems of publication, fund- three prominent psychology journals, to declared the field of psychology, if not all of
ing, and advancement—had become biased establish an estimate of how often modern science, to be in a state of crisis. It became
toward generating a certain kind of finding: psychology turns up false positive results. one of the biggest science stories of the year.
novel, attention grabbing, but ultimately It was little wonder, then, that funders But as it happens, Nosek is just one of
unreliable. The incentives to produce posi- didn’t come running to support Nosek: many researchers who have received unso-
tive results were so great, Nosek and others He wasn’t promising novel findings, he licited emails from the Arnold Foundation
PREVIOUS SPREAD: GROOMING BY KRISTIN DANIELL

worried, that some scientists were simply was promising to question them. So he in the past few years—researchers involved
locking their inconvenient data away. ran his projects on a shoestring budget, in similar rounds of soul-searching and cri-
The problem even had a name: the file self-financing them with his own earnings tique in their own fields, who have loosely
drawer effect. And Nosek’s project was an from corporate speaking engagements on amounted to a movement to fix science.
attempt to head it off at the pass. He and a his research about bias. John Ioannidis was put in touch with the
graduate student were developing an online But in July 2012, Nosek received an email Arnolds in 2013. A childhood math prod-
system that would allow researchers to from an institution whose name he didn’t igy turned medical researcher, Ioannidis
keep a public log of the experiments they recognize: the Laura and John Arnold Foun- became a kind of godfather to the science
were running, where they could register dation. A Google search told him that the reform crowd in 2005, when he published
their hypotheses, methods, workflows, and Arnolds were a young billionaire couple in two devastating papers—one of them titled
data as they worked. That way, it would be Houston. John, Nosek learned, had made his simply “Why Most Published Research
 0 6 3

Findings Are False.” Now, with a $6 million Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had bit of a potshot. But given the long history
initial grant from the Arnold Foundation, tried and failed to replicate the findings of a of deep-pocketed business interests sowing
Ioannidis and his colleague Steven Goodman senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge doubt in research, his underlying question
are setting out to turn the study of scientific as “shameless little bullies.” After Nosek was a fair one: Who is John Arnold, and
practice—known as meta-research—into a published the results of his reproducibility why is he spending so much money to raise
full-fledged field in its own right, with a new initiative, four social scientists, including questions about science?
research center at Stanford. Gilbert, published a critique of the project,
British doctor Ben Goldacre also got an claiming, among other things, that it had
email from the Arnold Foundation in 2013. failed to accurately replicate many of the

2
Famous in England as a sharp-witted scourge original studies. The BMJ investigation, in
of “bad science,” Goldacre spent years build- turn, met with angry denunciations from
ing up a case that pharmaceutical compa- nutrition experts who had worked on the
nies, by refusing to reveal all their data, have US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the
essentially deceived the public into paying journal to retract Teicholz’s work was signed FORTUNE MAGAZINE once dubbed Arnold “one
for worthless therapies. Now, with multiple by more than 180 credentialed professionals. of the least-known billionaires in the US.”
grants from the Arnolds, he is leading an (After an external and internal review, The His profile in the public consciousness is
effort to build an open, searchable database BMJ published a correction but chose not to almost nonexistent, and he rarely gives
that will link all publicly available informa- retract the investigation.) interviews. But among hedge funders and
tion on every clinical trial in the world. The backlash against Teicholz also fur- energy traders, Arnold is a legend. John
A number of the Arnolds’ reform efforts nished one of the few occasions when anyone D’Agostino, former head of strategy of the
have focused on fixing nutrition science. has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds’ funding New York Mercantile Exchange, says that
In 2011 the science journalist Gary Taubes of science critics. On the morning of October in Arnold’s heyday, people in the industry
received an email from Arnold himself. Hav- 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee would discuss him in “hushed and reverent
ing spent more than a decade picking apart convened a hearing on the controversy sur- tones.” In 2006, Centaurus reportedly saw
nutrition science, Taubes soon found himself rounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by returns of over 300 percent; the next year
cofounding an organization with a substan- the BMJ article. For two and a half hours, a Arnold became the youngest billionaire in
tial grant from the Arnold Foundation, to roomful of testy representatives asked why the country. “If Arnold decided he wanted to
rebuild the study of obesity from the ground certain nutrition studies had been privileged beat hunger,” D’Agostino says, “I wouldn’t
up. And in 2015 the Arnold Foundation paid over others. But about an hour in, Massachu- want to bet on hunger.”
journalist Nina Teicholz to investigate the setts representative Jim McGovern leaned For all the swagger of that description,
scientific review process that informs the into his microphone. Aiming to defend the Arnold himself has virtually none. He is
US Dietary Guidelines. Just weeks before the science behind the guidelines, McGovern universally described as quiet and intro-
federal guidelines were due for an update, suggested that the doubts that had been cast spective. At Enron, a company famous for its
Teicholz’s blistering report appeared in over America’s nutrition science were being brash, testosterone-laced cowboy culture,
the prominent medical journal The BMJ, driven by a “former Enron executive.” “I don’t the perennially boyish-looking trader was
charging that the government’s panel of know what Enron knows about dietary guide- reportedly so soft-spoken that his colleagues
scientists had failed to consider evidence lines,” McGovern said. But “powerful special had to gather in close to hear him at restau-
that would have done away with long-held interests” are “trying to question science.” rants. “People would read into it, and they
worries about eating saturated fat. McGovern’s quip about Enron, a com- would say he’s just being cagey,” D’Agostino
And those are just a few of the people pany that hasn’t existed in 15 years, was a says. “And then, after a couple of years, peo-
who are calling out iffy science with Arnold ple were like, oh, no, he’s actually like that.”
funding. Laura and John Arnold didn’t start Arnold is still quiet. “Usually the division
the movement to reform science, but they of labor in most of our work is that I talk,”
have done more than anyone else to amplify Laura Arnold says in a phone interview. By
its capabilities—typically by approaching all accounts, Laura, who attended Harvard
researchers out of the blue and asking ,, College and Yale Law School and worked as
whether they might be able to do more with
“ IF ARNOLD an oil executive, has been equally influential
more money. “The Arnold Foundation has
DECIDED HE in setting the direction for the foundation.
been the Medici of meta-research,” Ioannidis
WANTED TO But when I visit the Arnold Foundation’s
says. All told, the foundation’s Research
BEAT HUNGER,, Houston headquarters in June, Laura has
Integrity initiative has given more than
I WOULDN T been called away on a family emergency,
$80 million to science critics and reformers
WANT TO BET ,, leaving John to do the talking. Arnold is
ON HUNGER.
in the past five years alone. 5' 10", trim, and blandly handsome, his
Not surprisingly, researchers who don’t unusually youthful appearance now some-
see a crisis in science have started to fight what concealed by a salt-and-pepper beard.
back. In a 2014 tweet, Harvard psychologist Arnold grew up in Dallas. His mother was
 BURN BRIGHT John Arnold’s brief but legendary career in finance. —M A R L E Y WA L K E R

an accountant (she would later help man-

age the books at his hedge fund). His father,
who died when Arnold was 18, was a lawyer.
By kindergarten, Arnold’s talent for math
was apparent. “I think I was just born with a
natural gift for seeing numbers in a special 1995
Starts a job at Enron four days
way,” he says. Gregg Fleisher, who taught him after graduating from college.
calculus in high school, recalls an occasion
when Arnold instantly solved a math puzzle
that had been known to stump PhDs. But he
also stood out for his skepticism. “He ques- 1996
At age 22, begins overseeing Enron’s
tioned everything,” Fleisher says. Texas natural gas trading desk.
By the time he was 14, Arnold was running
his first company, selling collectible sports
cards across state lines. Those were the
early days of the Internet, and he managed
to gain access to an online bulletin board
intended only for card dealers. The listings
let him see that the same cards were sold
at different prices in different parts of the
country—which presented an opportunity
for arbitrage. “Hockey cards didn’t have
much of a market in Texas,” he tells me. 2002
Starts his own hedge fund, Centaurus Energy.
“I would buy up all the premium hockey
cards and send them to Canada or upstate
New York.” He called the company Blue
Chip Cards. Arnold estimates that he made earned $750 million for the company. A for- overall, after taking the opposite side of a
$50,000 before he finished high school. mer executive at Salomon Brothers later told risky bet that another hedge fund, Ama-
Arnold graduated from Vanderbilt Univer- The New York Times that there were very ranth, had made on fluctuations in natural
sity in 1995, taking only three years to finish few incidents in the history of Wall Street gas prices. Amaranth, which was gambling
his degree. He started working at Enron four comparable to Arnold’s success that year. with money from large pension funds, suf-
days later. A year after that, at age 22, he was As Enron neared bankruptcy, executives fered a $6 billion loss and collapsed. By 2009,
overseeing Enron’s Texas natural gas trading scrambled to hold its operation together, Centaurus was managing over $5 billion
desk, one of the company’s core businesses. offering bonuses to keep traders on board. and had more than 70 employees. In its first
Arnold’s work at Enron—seeking to capi- Arnold was given $8 million, the biggest seven years, according to Fortune, the fund
talize on seasonal price differences in natural payout of all, just days before Enron filed never returned less than 50 percent.
gas—wasn’t all that different from what he’d for bankruptcy. He started Centaurus the But Arnold had to come down to earth even-
done as a teenager selling sports cards. In next year, bringing along a small group of tually. In 2010, Centaurus experienced its first
Hedge Hogs, a 2013 book about hedge fund former Enron traders, who worked out of annual loss. And though the fund bounced
traders, Jeff Shankman, another star trader a single large room. back the next year, tighter regulations on
at Enron, is quoted describing Arnold as “the Arnold says he wasn’t sure if he could match trading and a far less volatile market—thanks
most thoughtful, deliberate, and inquisitive the success he’d enjoyed as a futures trader to a growing supply of natural gas from shale
person” he worked with on the gas floor. But at Enron. As a pipeline company, Enron had rock—made it unlikely that Arnold would
Shankman recognized that he and Arnold a direct view onto many of the factors that again see the astonishing returns of only a
were different in one key respect: Arnold influence gas prices. Now he’d have to rely few years earlier. And so, at age 38, Arnold
had a greater appetite for risk, a quality that purely on his prowess with data. By law, nat- walked away from it all. He announced that he
seemed at odds with his quiet demeanor. ural gas pipelines had to make much of their was closing Centaurus in a letter to investors:
On some days at Enron, Arnold would trade information public, and around the time Cen- “After 17 years as an energy trader, I feel that
more than a billion dollars’ worth of gas con- taurus was forming, more of that information it is time to pursue other interests.”
tracts. In 2001, even as Enron was collapsing began to appear online. “A lot of people didn’t
amid an accounting scandal that covered know it was out there,” Arnold says. “People
up billions in debt, he was reported to have who did, didn’t know how to clean it up and
analyze it as well as we did.”
SAM APPLE (@samuelapple) teaches It wasn’t long before Arnold had the
science writing at the University of answer to his doubts. In 2006, Centaurus
Pennsylvania. reportedly generated a 317 percent return
 0 6 5

1988 Arnold tells me that he had lost some of “It became extraordinarily frustrating.”
Starts his first company at the his passion for trading. At the time, his net Then, one day in November 2011, he was
age of 14, selling collectible
sports cards across state lines. worth was estimated to be around $3 billion. listening to the podcast EconTalk, hosted
In 2010 the Arnolds had signed the Giving by libertarian economist Russ Roberts. The
Pledge, promising to give away at least half guest that day was science journalist Gary
their wealth—and he wanted to be as stra- Taubes, and he was talking about how the
tegic about that goal as he had once been prevailing dietary wisdom of the past 40
about trading. Arnold has said that the first years—that eating too much fat leads to
phase of his life was “100 percent trying to obesity and heart disease—arose from the
make money” and that it’s now “100 percent flimsiest of scientific evidence. The foun-
trying to do good.” As The Wall Street Journal dational studies, Taubes said, looked at the
noted, in “US history, there may have never diets and disease rates in various countries,
been a self-made individual with so much then essentially guessed at which items in
money who devoted himself to philanthropy the diet were responsible for the country’s
at such a young age.” good or bad health statistics. Worse yet,
whenever evidence came along that con-
2001 tradicted the consensus about the dangers
Pulls in a reported $750 million for Enron
of eating fat—often evidence that was much

3
even as the company goes down in flames.
stronger than the evidence for the dangers—
it was ignored or not even published. Hardly
anyone in the world of nutrition science
seemed willing to question the science
THE ARNOLDS had been dabbling in philanthropy behind the low-fat diet, even after Americans
for years, supporting a few handpicked pro- grew fat and diabetic in record numbers.
grams in education, criminal justice reform, The picture Taubes painted wasn’t of a
and other areas that were important to them. flawed study here or there but of a funda-
2006
Goes head-to-head with a rival But now, with their stepped-up ambitions, mentally broken scientific culture. During
hedge fund, which loses and
collapses; Centaurus boasts a
the couple entered a new realm. Arnold had the podcast, he mentioned that he was raising
317 percent annual return. always been ready to make huge bets, but it money in the hope of funding experiments
was ultimately his hunger for reliable data that might deepen our understanding of the
that made him a brilliant trader. That same root causes of obesity. Not long after the pod-
hunger would make large-scale philanthropy cast went online, he received a five-line email
far more challenging than he had anticipated. from Arnold. “From the little I know about
In a glass conference room at the Arnold the science of nutrition, your study makes
Foundation’s offices—which occupy the a lot of sense,” Arnold wrote. Like Nosek,
same space as the old Centaurus trading Taubes had to Google Arnold to learn who he
floor, a 15-minute drive from the glass tower was. Six months later the Arnold Foundation
whose entrance was once adorned with made a $4.7 million seed grant to the Nutri-
$ 2007
Becomes the youngest billionaire
Enron’s famous E—Arnold explains that his
and Laura’s initial plan had been to simply
tion Science Initiative (NuSI), the nonprofit
Taubes cofounded to support fundamental
in the country at 33.
locate the most effective organizations and research on diet and health. The next year
write them checks. But figuring out which the Arnolds promised $35.5 million more.
organizations were most effective turned (wired wrote about NuSI in issue 22.09).
out to be vexing. Nonprofits are very good Arnold is careful not to lump all researchers
at reporting their success rates and citing together when he talks about the problems
the science behind their interventions, but in science. But he tells me that listening to
2010 dig into their claims—as the Arnolds would Taubes and reading his book, Good Calories,
After seven years of reportedly
yielding 50 percent returns or try to do—and you find that they often omit Bad Calories, had been an “aha moment” for
higher, Centaurus experiences relevant context or confuse correlation him. “Science is built like a building,” Arnold
its first annual loss.
with causation. “The more you read the says. “One floor on top of the next.” In nutri-
research, the less you know,” Arnold says. tion, “the whole foundation of the research

2012
Arnold closes shop and
retires from Centaurus at
age 38, dedicating himself
to strategic philanthropy.
 0 6 6

had been flawed. All these things that we Foundation. But if you look at the studies
thought we knew—when we step back and that can’t be reproduced and other issues
look at the evidence base—it’s just not there.” facing science, “you start to think: What

4
Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a is evidence? What do we actually know?”
researcher’s work, he no longer believes the The Arnolds had already decided that, with
findings of any scientific study until he or decades of life ahead of them and almost
someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. unlimited resources, they had the time and
“A new study shows …” are “the four most money to evaluate charitable programs IN THEIR PHILANTHROPY, the Arnolds like to
dangerous words,” Arnold wrote on Twitter. properly, even when that meant paying say, they follow data where it leads rather
Together with Taubes’ work, Arnold for expensive randomized controlled tri- than let themselves be guided by ideology.
was also reading Ioannidis’ and Gold- als that could take years to complete. But And it’s true that, when it comes to polit-
acre’s equally devastating analyses. These now they were widening their scope. If they ical leanings, they are somewhat hard to
critiques of science amounted to a deep wanted to embark on truly “transformational pin down. The Arnolds identify as Demo-
philosophical quandary for the Arnolds, change,” as their foundation literature states, crats and were major financial supporters
philanthropists who had dedicated their it wouldn’t be enough to properly evaluate of President Barack Obama. In 2013 they
lives to a data-based approach to giving. this or that education or criminal justice donated $10 million to keep Head Start,
“In everything they do, they want to be program. They would also have to take on the early-childhood education program
evidence-driven,” says Stuart Buck, vice a far more ambitious project: The Arnolds for low-income kids, running through the
president of research integrity at the Arnold would have to try and fix science itself. federal government shutdown, and many of
the issues they’ve taken on, from criminal
justice reform to making prescription drugs
JOHN AND more affordable, are decidedly progressive.
Tim Errington
LAURA ARNOLD’S Cancer biologist Yet the foundation is also focused on reform-
ARMY OF SCIENCE Starting a project to redo
ing what the Arnolds see as a broken public
REFORMERS a large number of cancer
studies and see how many pension system—a project that, in practice,
Science is broken. Ben Goldacre hold up to replication.
Here are some of the Doctor Center for Open Science usually means cutting payments to retirees,
prominent people
trying to fix it—with
Creating a searchable funding: $1.9 million raising retirement ages, and switching new
online repository of
funding from the data from all the world’s workers to 401(k)-style plans. That focus
Arnold Foundation.
—M .W.
clinical trials. led Rolling Stone to call Arnold a “young
Center for Open Science
funding: $590,000 right-wing kingmaker with clear designs
on becoming the next generation’s Koch
brothers.” (In 2015, Bloomberg suggested
that Arnold may have somehow managed
to become less popular as a philanthropist
than he was as a billionaire trader.)
If John Arnold does have an identifiable
Brian Nosek ideology, it is that of a lifelong trader and
Psychologist quant: unsentimental, metrics-focused, inter-
John Ioannidis and Runs the Center for Open
Steven Goodman Science, a major hub of ventionist. He is unapologetic about having
Medical professors the science-reform move-
Launched a new Stanford ment, which pushes for worked at Enron, and he can be defensive
center dedicated to meta- transparency and mounts about the moral standing of Wall Street in the
research—the study of efforts to replicate studies.
the practice of science. Arnold funding: public mind. In 2015, after a cancer researcher
Arnold funding: $6 million $17.6 million was found to have falsified research data and
defrauded the government out of millions of
dollars, Arnold complained on Twitter that
the penalty, a five-year funding restriction,
was too light. Had something similar hap-
Gary Taubes
Journalist Nina Teicholz pened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpe-
Helped set up and run Journalist trator would have been sentenced to 10 years
a research center called Investigated the science
the Nutrition Science behind the US Dietary in jail and the bank would have been fined a
Initiative to investigate Guidelines for a report
the causes of obesity. published in The BMJ. billion dollars. “Is there something special
Arnold funding: Arnold funding: about frauds in the securities biz that they
$29 million $15,000
should be penalized infinitely more harshly
than other business frauds?” he went on. “Or
is Wall Street just an easy target while cancer
researchers and universities are not?”
 So it’s no surprise that, in practice, the to a recent online survey from Nature, more
Arnolds’ approach to giving has a lot in than half agreed there is “a significant crisis”
common with John Arnold’s approach to RESEARCHERS of reproducibility. The comedian John Oliver
investing. Laura tells me she sees her hus- HAVE THE spent 20 prime-time minutes on HBO last
band’s appetite for risk—an appetite she BEST OF May mocking the reign of terrible science on
says she shares—as the most obvious link INTENTIONS, TV news shows and in public debate: “After a
between his approach to trading and philan- BUT THE certain point, all that ridiculous information
thropy. Once the foundation has identified SYSTEM can make you wonder: Is science bullshit? To
areas where they believe they can make the REWARDS BAD which the answer is clearly no, but there’s a lot
biggest difference, they go all in. “We’re not BEHAVIORS. of bullshit masquerading as science.” (Some
looking to create an organization of safe of the background footage in the segment
success,” she says. “We’re looking to create came from the Arnold Foundation.)
an organization of thoughtful failure and Ioannidis, whose name is almost synony-
fantastic success.” mous with scientific skepticism, says he has
Arnold is, in at least one respect, trying seen immense progress in recent years. The
to make science a little more like finance. off that.” Figuring out exactly which rewards journals Science and Nature have started
In recent decades, math and science whiz- work best and how to simultaneously change bringing in statisticians to review their
zes like Arnold have invaded Wall Street, the incentives for researchers, institutions, papers. The National Institutes of Health is
bringing a level of scientific precision to journals, and funders is now a key area of moving forward with new requirements for
trading and often making fortunes in the interest for Goodman and Ioannidis. data sharing; starting as early as this year, all
process. And good traders, as Arnold sees At the Center for Open Science, Nosek has NIH-funded training programs must include
it, naturally come to appreciate something already begun to experiment with new incen- plans for teaching researchers the principles
that researchers too often miss: It’s very tives for scientists. Because investigating of reproducibility. “Now everybody says we
easy to be fooled by your own data. They and replicating research begins with having need replication; we need reproducibility,”
internalize the risk of mistaking correlation the data and materials necessary to do so, he Ioannidis tells me. “Otherwise our field is
for causation—not because they’re smarter is particularly focused on making science built on thin air.”
than scientists but because they have money more transparent. In 2014 he partnered with The Center for Open Science’s next big
riding on the outcome. “As a general rule, the the journal Psychological Science to offer undertaking is another reproducibility proj-
incentives related to quantitative research colorful “Open Data” and “Open Materials” ect—this one for cancer studies. In 2012 the
are very different in the social sciences and in badges for papers that met specific criteria former head of cancer research at the bio-
financial practice,” says James Owen Weath- for sharing. A 2016 study to determine the tech firm Amgen revealed the results of the
erall, author of The Physics of Wall Street. effectiveness of the badges showed that the company’s effort to replicate 53 “landmark”
“In the sciences, one is mostly incentivized number of articles that reported publicly papers in hematology and oncology; only six
to publish journal articles, and especially to available data had increased tenfold. “It’s a studies’ findings could be confirmed. So there
publish the sorts of attention-grabbing and stupid little badge,” Nosek says, but it works. is already widespread concern about repro-
controversial articles that get widely cited Nosek is also still campaigning to convince ducibility in the field. The center’s replication
and picked up by the popular media. The researchers to preregister what they plan to efforts, in turn, have inspired economists and
articles have to appear methodologically analyze and report in a study, so that they even tropical ecologists to plan reproducibil-
sound, but this is generally a lower standard can’t adjust their experiment on the fly or ity projects of their own.
than being completely convincing. In finance, hide less-than-dazzling results—a problem Whether all this momentum will lead to
meanwhile, at least when one is trading with that Goldacre is also tackling. To promote transformational change decades from now
one’s own money, there are strong incentives preregistration, the Center for Open Science is impossible to know. Arnold figures that
to work to that stronger standard. One is offered the first 1,000 scientists who pre- some of his specific grants might not work
literally betting on one’s research.” register their studies with the organization out as planned. (The foundation’s funding of
In my conversations with Arnold and his $1,000 each. Nosek says that the cash offers the Nutrition Science Initiative is now sched-
grantees, the word incentives seems to come were Arnold’s idea. uled to end in November.) More generally, it
up more than any other. The problem, they Denis Calabrese, the Arnold Foundation’s may not be possible to truly reform a system
claim, isn’t that scientists don’t want to do president, says they don’t expect immedi- where the incentives are already so deeply
the right thing. On the contrary, Arnold says ate results. The Arnolds have a “multiple- embedded. “It’s probably too big a lift for us
he believes that most researchers go into their decade timeline to work on problems.” Yet to expect we’re going to change researchers
work with the best of intentions, only to be led the most remarkable thing about the Arnold who have been around for decades,” he says.
astray by a system that rewards the wrong Foundation’s research integrity projects is Plus, systems of prestige and advancement
behaviors. Says Goodman, “Scientists really that they already appear to be paying off. die hard. “You don’t shift a culture over-
do want to discover things that make a dif- For one thing, the problems plaguing sci- night,” Nosek says. But as many Wall Street
ference in people’s lives. In a sense, that’s the entific research are now increasingly well veterans can testify, betting against John
strongest weapon that we have. We can feed known. Of 1,576 researchers who responded Arnold is usually a bad idea. !
cOM LE
P
by photographs
Allison by
Samuels Joe
Pugliese

Childish
Gambino.

Atlanta.

Lando
Calrissian.

Welcome
To the
strange,
emotional,
industry-
altering
world of

Donald
Glover.
0 6
8
DO AL
Glover
wishes
people
would clap more. Not that they should
applaud—he gets enough applause when he performs stand-up or when
he gets recognized from Atlanta, the TV show he both writes and stars
in. No, Glover’s talking about clapping to a beat. “I was listening to Donny
Hathaway’s album Live at the Troubadour,” he says. “You hear the crowd UP

harmonizing with every song and clapping to the beat on time. You don’t GREW

hear that at concerts anymore.” GLOVER in Stone Mountain, Georgia, about 20

& ROTHSTEIN (CAMP, JOSHUA TREE); PETER MOUNTAIN/EVERETT COLLECTION ( THE MARTIAN)
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHARLES CHRISTOPHER/NBC/GETTY IMAGES (COMMUNITY); IBRA AKE/WOLF
It’s an odd thing to notice, maybe, but Glover has been listening to a lot miles east of Atlanta; his mother ran a day care center and
of Hathaway lately, and to Bill Withers too—another soulful ballad singer. didn’t much care for music, but his father, a Postal Service
This may be part of the reason his onstage persona, Childish Gambino, worker, played everything from Hall & Oates to Funkadelic
has drifted from hip hop to something else. His latest album, Awaken, to the Police. “I remember listening to some of my dad’s
My Love!, sounds more like James Brown or Sly and the Family Stone. music as a kid, like Parliament. I’d hear a woman moan-
Possibly with a little Pink Floyd. ing and groaning, and it was so scary because she sounded
But more than that, Glover has been thinking a lot about performance terrified,” Glover says. “That music was filled with so many
and the different ways a performer can interact with an audience. Maybe it’s different real emotions and feelings that you could listen
like church, he says, like gospel music. In many African American churches, to it again and again.”
clapping hands and tapping feet were requirements for attendance. By day, Glover lived in his imagination. His Jehovah’s Wit-
“I don’t think black people go to church like that anymore,” Glover says. ness upbringing meant no television. He’d listen to bootleg
Glover’s giving audiences someplace new where they can clap along. audio of Simpsons episodes in bed at night, though he did
Lots of new places, actually. There’s the Burning Man–ish three-day manage to sneak into a viewing of Star Wars: Episode I and
concert in the desert that teed up his new album. Or, if you didn’t make catch the occasional Muppet movie. It was a little weird, and
it there, you can grab the virtual reality experience that goes along with he translated that weirdness into his own puppet shows, per-
it. Or just stream the album itself.
ALLISON SAMUELS writes frequently about popular cul-
He has, in other words, a lot going on. There’s his TV show Atlanta, the
ture. This is her first article for wired.
stand-up comedy, and the weird supporting roles in giant movies (Glover
was a rocket scientist who came up with the plan to save Matt Damon in
The Martian). Oh, and he’s going to play Lando Calrissian in the Han Solo
prequel Star Wars movie, set to begin filming in early 2017.
How does a young hyphenate put together a career like that in a time of
entertainment-industry turmoil? A team of creative advisers and man-
agers helps, but Glover was early to the multiplatform artist party. All of
his projects intersect in strange, intertextual ways. So amid all the differ-
ent platforms, there’s also world-building going on (both metaphorically
and, with his new project, virtually). Glover may not be as mass-culture
as some of the other artists experimenting in this territory—Beyoncé, DONALD GLOVER,
A Man for
Drake—but his ambition is to create something entirely new. all PLATFORMs
From music to TV to Star Wars,
Glover has just about every
performance space covered.
—GREGORY BARBER

Sick Boi
Debuts his
30 Rock first mixtape,
Starts a three-year performing as
run writing for Childish
NBC’s sitcom. Gambino.
0 0
7

2006 2008
L
to the flag. People don’t understand that.”
But Glover understands people. He has an almost preternatural
emotional intelligence; when we meet for the second time I give
him a hug, and he calls me out on it: “What’s up with that hug?
That didn’t have any feeling! Where’s my hug?” I try again. Glover
is happily missing much of the stifling bravado that weighed
down far too many male African American performers in, say,
D
forming for the foster kids his parents took care of. “Being a Jeho-
vah’s Witness amplified my own alienness,” he says. “Jehovah’s
Witnesses don’t celebrate Christmas. You don’t pledge allegiance

the 1990s. He’s in touch with all his feelings, and he seems to
think everyone else should be too.
Combine youth, empathy, alienation, and love of perfor-
mance and you get a drama major. Glover went to college at New
A
TEAM

OF
managers,

artists, and technologists—Glover

calls them Royalty—has had a say in almost every move in his
career since 2012. At the core are Glover’s younger brother
York’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he joined an improv com- Steve and Glover’s tour manager, Chad Taylor. Fam Udeorji
edy group. When Tina Fey saw some of the short videos Glover joined when Taylor met him on the road with Childish Gam-
made there, she hired him to write for her popular TV show 30 bino. They formed a management company, Wolf and Roth-
Rock. He had never written for television; he was 23 years old. stein—Wolf is Taylor’s nickname, and Udeorji named himself
“I decided I wanted to write for television because of Tina,” after Ace Rothstein, Robert De Niro’s character in Casino.
Glover says. “She was always so happy, and I was like, I want Taylor and Udeorji manage a few other musicians who often
to be happy like that too.” hang out with Royalty and offer input. Ibra Ake, a photogra-
It worked. He was happy. He did stand-up, made funny sketch pher and art director, is the visual and creative expert. Glover’s
comedy videos on YouTube, wrote for 30 Rock for three seasons, artist buddy Swank rounds out the group. Hiro Murai, who
and eventually joined the cast of the cult-hit sitcom Community, directed a bunch of Childish Gambino videos, and producer
playing the young, earnest, deeply nerdy Troy—the only mostly Ludwig Göransson often hang out too. Gathered together
normal person (a plumber messiah, but still). It was starting to for drinks in a Beverly Hills café, the subset of Glover’s team
seem like Glover could make a career out of that kind of code who join us look a little like fraternity brothers—not the jerk
switch, an African American cast before a mostly white audience. kind, the cute, smart, and nerdy kind. They used to meet
In 2011 Glover donned the Childish Gambino identity he’d worn every day, before the responsibilities of fatherhood started
in a few comedy videos and mixtapes and released a rap album. to rule Glover’s time, in a house he rented from Chris Bosh
It was more hipster than hip hop, to be honest, and earned mixed of the Miami Heat. “We’d just roll out ideas while making a
reviews, but it got him a whole new audience—and his second sandwich or talking about life,” Udeorji says.
album got two Grammy nominations. Small but significant parts in That’s how the idea for Atlanta began to come together. It
The Martian and Magic Mike XXL did even more. Whatever Glover was Glover’s hometown region, of course, but he had more
did, more and more people were starting to clap along to the beat. in mind than just depicting a city that has become a cultural

Awaken,
My Love!
Community Atlanta His third album
Stars as Troy Because the The Creates and stars previews at a
Barnes, an Internet Martian in the FX comedy three-day,
earnest jock/ Nominated for Appears as about two cell-phone-free Star Wars
nerd/plumbing Camp two Grammys “steely-eyed cousins making festival in Will play Lando
messiah, for five Releases his for his second missile man” their way in the Joshua Tree Calrissian in the
seasons. debut album. album. Rich Purnell. local rap scene. National Park. Han Solo prequel.

2009 2011 2014 2015 2016 2018

 Coat by GUCCI;
shirt by COS;
chain and ring
by CARTIER;
center for African Americans—Glover also wanted to explore what jeans by
it’s like to be young, talented, and black in the South. He had in mind KSUBI from
BARNEYS
two other African American–led TV programs, from the comedi- NEW YORK

ans Bernie Mac and Dave Chappelle. “Those shows were so honest
and so true,” Glover says. “Bernie Mac had a sister who was a crack
addict on the show. It wasn’t funny, but it was real.”
To the FX network, Glover pitched the idea of a black Ivy League Cage. “You never see that amount of time given to straight
dropout who returns to Atlanta and begins managing his drug- dialog. It was so real, like you were eavesdropping on some-
dealing cousin’s fledging rap career. It’d have drama, comedy, and one’s conversation. That’s good television.”
music but also deal with issues like mass incarceration, poverty, The crew even contributed visual flair. “I like it when
drug use, and fatherhood in the black community. “We like to sit black people are hit with a certain light, like purple,”
down with artists a few times and listen to what they say about Glover says. So he and Murai started experimenting.
their project,” says John Landgraf, president and general manager “It just felt good to play around with the look of the show.”
of FX. “With Donald, he didn’t always articulate his vision in a way
that we could see it, but his passions and ambition were clear. So
we felt confident in the story he wanted to tell and how he wanted
to tell it.” The challenge would be in getting the language and tone
of the show right. Mess that up and Atlanta would be considered
irrelevant or—worse—totally wack. Glover solved the problem in
a way that is, in retrospect, obvious but practically unheard of in
Hollywood: an all-black writing team, which included a few names
that had never written a script for television before. “It wasn’t a
conscious decision, really,” Glover says. “I knew I wanted people
with similar experiences who understood the language and the IN
mindset of the characters and their environment.” 2016,

Still, television is an industry that has only recently begun EARLY with Atlanta in production,
to acknowledge the need for diversity in front of the camera, Glover was also thinking about his next album.
much less behind it. “Listen, even BET wouldn’t have given him Roughly, he already knew what he wanted. “He came
that much freedom,” says one television and film executive. into our offices with a five-year vision of his music and the
“An all-black writers’ room is one thing, but for me it’s the number visuals that were to go with it,” says Daniel Glass, presi-
of writers who hadn’t written on a show before at all. Most networks dent of Glassnote Records, Glover’s label. “There aren’t
aren’t going to take that chance.” a lot of artists that have that kind of clarity about where
And it’s true, says Udeorji—one of the writers—that other net- their career is headed.”
works didn’t really get the concept. But even though there were times But fatherhood had altered his course. Glover doesn’t live
when FX wasn’t exactly sure where Glover’s team was headed, the particularly publicly—he didn’t announce his son’s birth on
network let them go there. “Donald’s a rapper who has unique expe- social media, for example—but he acknowledges that being
rience, because he worked with Tina Fey and that crew early on. That a dad changed his ideas about some things. He spent months
gave him a lot of clout with the network,” Udeorji says. “He showed returning to the sounds of his own childhood, listening to
us the ropes of character development and story structure and took the music his father played, and the first single from the new
the leadership role in the room, and then we just let the ideas out.” album, “Me and Your Mama” is a highly charged, funked-
That dynamic has led to some genre-breaking storytelling. Atlanta out lullaby of sorts for his new little one.
is a half-hour comedy about black people that makes no extra effort More than that, he wanted to find yet another way to con-
to explain black people to its viewers. You either get it or you don’t. nect with fans—not a traditional concert but what Glover
One episode, “Value,” spends an entire scene at a dinner with Van describes as a “shared vibration.” He called Udeorji and
(ex-girlfriend of Earn, Glover’s character) and her best friend. It’s Taylor with the concept: a three-day camping trip/per-
10 minutes of the most nuanced dialog seen on television between formance installation in the desert to debut new songs
two women of color as they land brutally honest viewpoints on each and show off wild new visuals. Glover called it Pharos,
other’s complicated lives. “That scene blew me away,” said Cheo named for the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the seven
Hodari Coker, a longtime TV writer who runs the Netflix show Luke wonders of the ancient world. “We were inspired by Kanye
and other artists, but the vision for most things comes from
Donald,” Taylor says. “For us it became figuring out how to
make it all happen.”
They watched concert films and talked about imagery they
liked—for example, the digital mountain from Kanye’s Yee-
zus tour in 2013. But bringing fans in became Miles Konstan-
0
7 2 tin’s job. The 22-year-old had started a fan site for Childish
 vibration.

Glover wanted not a concert but a “shared ”

traditional
Gambino in high school that so impressed Glover, he hired the kid.
Konstantin studied physics in college by day, and he and his two
roommates worked on Glover’s website at night.
For Pharos, Konstantin designed an app with a countdown and
a slowly approaching planet Earth—and the option to buy a ticket to
something for $99, locked to the owner of the phone and therefore
unscalpable. (Glover wanted to keep ticket prices down.)
Once you bought a ticket, you got a guidebook and an app-based
manifesto about the human condition during the digital age. The
first shows sold out in six minutes; Glover added two more. But
the concert came with a draconian rule: Members of the audience
would have to surrender their phones on entry. “Today, kids’ idea
of going to a concert is proving that they are there on Snapchat WALKED away
or Instagram,” Glover says. “We wanted to give them a complete DAVE
show and have their attention.” CHAPPELLE from his wildly
Even that didn’t dissuade anyone. “We weren’t completely popular eponymous show on Comedy Central (and the
sure how fans would handle that part, but Donald’s fans are very $50 million that came with it) in 2005. He was arguably
open-minded,” Konstantin says. at the peak of his success, but the mercurial comedian had
Step two: Build the set. The concerts would happen in a giant begun to feel that white audiences were laughing at his
white dome in Joshua Tree, California. Dancing zombies and sketches and jokes about black people without absorbing
ghostlike creatures would sway to the tunes on screens and inter- them, without picking up the social message.
act with sounds in their environments. Glover performed in Glover has made himself a student of Chappelle’s, including
a yellow grass skirt, long cornrows, and glow-in-the-dark tribal trying to understand that specific kind of disconnect with the
war paint. It was like a cross between Captain EO and Fantasia, audience. “On some level, the situation Dave faced is prob-
complete with a grand finale flight through space, featuring plan- ably already happening,” Glover says. “But that’s why it’s
ets moving to the beat. so good to have a room filled with people who understand
To get it all right, Glover went to Microsoft. “He came in with his what you’re trying to do. You’ve got to have someone will-
music and a story and asked how we could accommodate his ideas,” ing to say, ‘I don’t enjoy that.’ That makes you step back and
says Fred Warren, creative director for the company. When the rethink when someone says that shit doesn’t work.”
computer-generated characters planned for massive screens inside The parallel to Chappelle isn’t a perfect one. Both are influ-
the performance dome weren’t moving the way Glover’s group envi- ential African American comedians, but their MOs aren’t
sioned, Warren’s team figured they had only one choice: Go to the equivalent. Glover is much younger and fundamentally a
source. “We decided the best way to showcase the moves on the well-adjusted, middle-class kid. When he performs, he’s not
screen was to have Donald create them and use Kinect sensors to drawing from anger or a tough childhood. He’s connecting
capture his every dance move.” Glover spent a day at Microsoft’s to a wider emotional spectrum, and that seems to give him
New York office performing the movements of the zombies and a broader performance palette. Even Chappelle—a fan of
ghosts, much like in those puppet shows he used to put on as a kid. Glover’s—acknowledges the differences. “I can’t keep up with
Beyond the high tech animation, the new Childish Gambino album all the shit he’s doing, but it’s all damn good. That he can do
is pretty great. Awaken, My Love! is a chaotic mix of funk, punk, and it all blows me away,” Chappelle says. “But my show was a
R&B infused with a new age vibe. On more than a few tracks, Glover sketch show, and Donald’s is more of a regular sitcom. And
uses falsetto like Luther Vandross—and Withers and Hathaway. then we’re in a different time. Race is more nuanced today,
And once Microsoft had all that mo-capped performance and and that helps the message. It’s been 10 years.”
computer-generated set design, the next step was almost self- A lot changes in a decade. If Chappelle and the late Ber-
evident. You can buy Awaken, My Love! on old-school vinyl, but you nie Mac opened up possibilities for a performer like Glover,
can also watch the video in way-new-school virtual reality, opti- now it’s Glover’s turn to rough out a frame for the next gen-
mized for an Oculus Rift headset. It’s not quite like seeing Pharos eration. Leveraging personal work to reach unpredictable
in Joshua Tree, but it’s close. audiences who stay loyal through unpredictable projects
won’t be unusual—it’ll be the norm. And that’ll encourage
more weird media, beyond live shows and VR, and even more
unpredictability. Chappelle’s Show wore its politics on its
sleeve—the things Chappelle wanted you to understand
were text. Atlanta and the music and video work of Child-
ish Gambino are about feelings and subtext, opening new
Coat by COS; worlds for creators to explore and audiences to experience.
shirt by The worlds may be odd and their rhythms idiosyncratic—
TOPMAN STORES; 7 5
chain by CARTIER; 0 but you’re going to want to clap along. !
tear by Glover
 0 7 7

FOR THE

OF

BY CHRIS COLIN

In the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, tension simmers between thousands of wealthy

tech workers, who have recently moved in, and the city’s most destitute, who have lived there for
decades. A controversial 87-year-old minister has the best shot at healing the divide.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y A N D R E W R A E P H O T O G R A P H S B Y DA R C Y PA D I L L A
 I.

More than
10,000 tech
employees
now live
or work in
what has
historically
been San
Francisco’s
most destitute
neighborhood.

One day last summer Chirag Bhakta and a friend were As Tenderloin conflicts go, this one was relatively demure.
walking through the Tenderloin, the San Francisco neighbor- The insults escalated—but ultimately both sides walked on.
hood Bhakta has called home all his life. Wedged improbably Maybe they weren’t the punching sort. Maybe they had some-
between the city’s gleaming high-rises, tony Union Square where to be. Or maybe, at some subconscious level, everyone
shopping zone, and affluent Nob Hill district, the Tenderloin knew things were more complex than they were letting on.
is a sprawl of code-red despair. People shoot up openly, stag- Indeed, Bhakta sometimes fantasizes about conducting a
ger about in various stages of undress and untreated illness; more substantive conversation. But he also feels that bridg-
nowhere else in town is such an intricate, root-bound extreme- ing San Francisco’s two most polarized and symbolic mono-
ness of poverty on display. This level of misery is one of the liths—its growing tech community and its impoverished
most striking things a person can see in San Francisco, topped Tenderloin—isn’t his responsibility.
only by a relatively newer sight—that of well-to-do 23-year- “If they can read code, they can understand why gentrifi-
olds gliding blithely through this scene while playing Twilight: cation is a problem in the TL,” he says. “It’s not my job to hold
The Movie Game on their phones. their hand while they get to know their own neighborhood.”
The socioeconomic Maginot Line that long kept the TL apart On this, Bhakta is correct. That job belongs to an 87-year-
from the rest of the city has in recent years been breached, as old man three blocks over.
tech companies have pressed closer with their lavish mid-
Market offices and well-paid young employees. As a result,

R
these 40 or so blocks have become an epicenter for one of the e v e r e n d C e c i l W i l l i a m s is large and
country’s most pitched gentrification battles—pitched, argu- peaceful-looking, with a bushy beard and the
ably, because fighting about “gentrification” is just an easy way vaguely cosmic power to lure a dozen Zendesk
of fighting about larger and messier things: the growing chasm employees from a perfectly nice office building.
between rich and poor, sure, but also technology’s place in the It is a bright and cold day in San Francisco, and from their
world and, on days like this one, which side can act more car- glassy Market Street headquarters the crew walks toward
toonishly moronic. Bhakta and his buddy had turned onto Larkin Williams and his Glide Memorial Church, a beautiful but weath-
Street when they spotted four white guys in button-down shirts. ered building three grimy blocks and several galaxies away.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: TYPOGRAPHY BY TYPE SUPPLY

“I was like, fuck it, I’m going to do away with my filter,” Maybe the Zendeskers mapped their walk before they
Bhakta, 29, recalls. A tenant-rights-nonprofit worker by day, he came, or maybe they just looked for the line of hungry people.
watched the influx of tech companies lead to higher rents, more The line snakes down Ellis Street, past a boarded-up lot and
evictions, and a general sense of displacement in an already a single-room apartment building for the poor, then winds
marginal community. When he was growing up, his parents, up Leavenworth. For nearly a half century, Williams’ church
immigrants from India, had washed dishes and worked a cash has served three squares a day to the city’s most down-and-
register just blocks away. Bhakta could no longer hold back. out—roughly 800,000 meals a year of late—making it one
“Fucking tech bros ruining the neighborhood,” he spat. of the most ambitious soup-kitchen programs in the nation.
The guys let loose too. The Zendesk team proceeds past the food line, into an eleva-
“If you can’t afford it, get out!” one shouted. tor to a spartan conference room four floors up.
 0 7 9

II.

The Reverend
Cecil Williams
and his
wife, Janice
Mirikitani, are
preeminent
figures in
San Francisco
and the
powerhouses
behind Glide
Memorial.

The group—cheerful, mostly young—stands out among and before endeavors like Glide’s, hundreds of those users
some of the tougher clients Williams, his wife and the found- contracted HIV each year through dirty needles. In 2015 all
ing president of Glide, Janice Mirikitani, and their staff wel- of two new drug-related HIV cases were documented.
come as one of the city’s largest providers of social services. Among San Franciscans, Glide is a little like Burning Man,
With an operating budget of around $17 million, the church the annual art fest in the Nevada desert: You go or you resign
supports the city’s poorest and most disenfranchised. On top yourself to hearing about it year after year. A typical entry
of free meals, it offers legal counseling, child care, after-school point to the church is the famed Sunday service, a raucous
services, recovery groups, a meditation group, an acupunc- event that’s one part Occupy rally, two parts Prince concert,
ture clinic, a pregnancy support group, a grief support group, and zero parts brimstone. Williams arrived in 1963, straight
a healing-through-Negro-spirituals workshop. Glide also runs from the March on Washington, and one of his first moves
three supportive housing developments nearby, where res- was to take down the crosses. His view on running a church
idents receive social services in addition to a roof overhead. was: Open the place to everyone. If the idea sounds nice, that’s
The Zendesk employees gathering in the conference room 2016 talking. He welcomed Black Panthers and hippies and
have come at an odd moment in San Francisco history. As emis- drug dealers and prostitutes when that constituted full-on
saries of the tech world, they represent the forces that have heresy. Ditto the same-sex covenants he performed in the
exacerbated the city’s ever-widening economic disparity—the ’70s, decades before the world caught up. He called for the
very issue that most consumes Glide and, frankly, the whole city’s schools to be picketed in 1965 for what amounted to
town. From the latest gentrification skirmish to the endless segregation, he threw “Free Angela Davis” rallies and waded
Google-bus wars, the Bay Area often seems defined by tension into the debate after Native Americans took over Alcatraz in
around the tech community—tension that, in turn, echoes 1969. The finger waggers went insane every time. “Most of
the growing gulf between the haves and have-nots through- the city’s widely recognized historical events over the past
out the country. Armed with cotton balls and syringes, the four decades involved Glide,” reporter Jenny Strasburg once
Zendesk team has come to effect a small, back-channel undo. wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.
A software company dedicated to providing customer sup- All that history has left Williams less young than he once
port systems for more than 80,000 corporate clients, Zendesk was; these days the charismatic pastor takes a lift to the stage
hasn’t typically focused on helping its neighbors shoot smack. on Sundays and increasingly shares it with other speakers.
But assembling needle-exchange kits isn’t rocket science, and But his magnetism is undiminished, and he’s at his fieriest
in this case it’s actually a Trojan horse operation: “We bring on the subject of radical inclusion. Whoever you are and
them in with the needle exchange, and from there they learn wherever you come from, there’s always a place for you in
about our other services,” explains Jorge Vieto, Glide’s health this corner of the Tenderloin.
services navigator. Incidentally, the program also works on In a way, that inclusive ethos is being tested more now than
its own merits: San Francisco has about 22,000 IV drug users, it was when Glide welcomed the hippies and Panthers and drug
dealers. The arrival of Twitter, Salesforce, Spotify, Zendesk, and
CHRIS COLIN (@chriscolin3000) wrote about the other companies in the Tenderloin and adjacent mid-Market
Yelpification of everything in issue 19.08. corridor has ironically amounted to one of tech’s biggest dis-
ruptions, depositing more than 10,000 comparatively wealthy, gig putting things in bags? I expect a little half-assedness—
generally white employees into the city’s poorest, most diverse some bored texting, some lackadaisical me-and-my-needle-kit
neighborhood. Of course, the sudden appearance of pour-over selfies. I see the opposite. Two workers discuss the possibility
coffee and artisanal cocktails in once-funky neighborhoods is of assembling more kits back at the office. Others speak with
nothing new in the city. But over at Glide, Williams and others pride about having doubled Zendesk’s regular visits to Glide.
started to notice something else. At an institutional level and One senior IT guy named Doug enjoys volunteering here so
an individual level, tech was showing up at their door with a much that he comes on weekends. An engineer named Jim
specific if unspoken agenda: They wanted an intro. enthused that making the kits is disruptive. “The difference
“Many of them have chosen to live here and just don’t know you make is measurable.”
how to make a connection,” James Lin, Glide’s senior director
of mission and social justice, tells me—they have a neighbor-

O
hood, in other words, but scarcely know their neighbors. Enter ne day, a few dozen Twitter employees walk
Glide. The church had both the cred and the networks to facili- over to Glide to help prepare food during a peri-
tate an introduction between its oldest and newest residents. As odic Friday for Good company outing. In the
cofounder and minister of liberation, Williams has stood astride church’s aging industrial kitchen, CEO Jack
poverty and fame for half a century; he marched in Selma, he’s Dorsey slips on a hairnet and begins to dole out lunch.
counted the Mandelas and Obamas and Oprahs and Bonos of Dorsey is slender and unassuming, decked out in red high-
the world as friends. A newly arrived company looking for an tops and jeans. “Earlier I was cutting potatoes,” he tells
ally on these blocks, or perhaps a broker, could do far worse. me. The image is oddly destabilizing: On the one hand it’s
To Felicia Horowitz, wife of tech luminary Ben Horowitz uncomplicatedly good that a person who could pop over
and a devoted Glide supporter, the tech industry has to work to Paris for lunch has come to a dingy church basement to
extra hard for community acceptance—even as far more serve the poor. On the other hand is this naive but nagging
insidious local industries mostly escape public reprobation. thought: Couldn’t he, you know, feed these people forever?
Chirag Bhakta didn’t mutter about predatory lending bros That question has been a growing part of San Francisco’s,
ruining the neighborhood. At the center, Horowitz sees an and the nation’s, complicated relationship with its newest
abiding tech truth. “We’re outsiders. That’s what it comes industry. Is it unfair to expect a company to solve genera-
down to. We always have been,” Horowitz told me. tional poverty simply because it has set up shop nearby? Or—
and this question might require a channeling of Glide’s most

T
o critics, tech’s budding interest in the TL
is little more than reputation laundering. This
is an industry that has ushered in exploding
rents, driven beloved old establishments out of
business, and frayed the very fabric Glide works tirelessly to
the new
save. The community-minded overtures it does make are
mandatory in some cases. The so-called Twitter tax break
exempted participating companies from millions in payroll TENDERLOIN
taxes in exchange for moving into this neglected part of town
and some vaguely worded community engagement promises. The neighborhood has long been
These are concerns about which Williams does not give a known as a last stop for the city’s most
damn. While the city spins out in endless arguments about the GHVWLWXWH%XWDERXWÀYH\HDUVDJR&LW\
techies, Glide leadership has moved on to a more strategic ques- Hall enticed tech companies to move in
tion: What would Jesus do about a bunch of engineers moving nearby. Today, the area is an oddball
into the neighborhood? The answer so far: Love them. Help them tangle of tech companies, social-service
engage with this perhaps intimidating rung of society. Sure, centers, gleaming high-end apartments,
get them to cough up money. But mostly love them and, on this and single-room residences.
morning with the Zendesk crew, have them make needle kits.
“There’s more that unites us than divides us,” one of the
Glide workers says in his preamble to the group, and for a
Key
moment the gulf between user and coder feels navigable. The
volunteers gather around a set of folding tables stacked with
TECH COMPANY SINGLE-RESIDENT OCCUPANCY
bins full of needle equipment. Zendesk is considered one of
the city’s more generous companies (it has a robust giving HIGH-RISE APARTMENTS SOCIAL & COMMUNITY SERVICE

plan, volunteering is expected of employees, and in 2015 it

launched a nonprofit for community initiatives), but a tedious
 0 8 1

fundamental teachings—has the country reached a point massive construction boom followed, the buildings designed
where it’s outrageous to do anything but try? to absorb as many workers as possible: tiny single-room units,
As it happens, questions like these are currently being shared bathrooms, often no kitchen. Because of the way they
fielded in the Sanctuary. On Sundays, 200 congregants gather were plumbed and owing to policy decisions decades later
in the spacious, booming space for the rollicking Celebration. (that would make it difficult to convert the buildings to, say,
But today the room is being used for a kind of bespoke private luxury hotels or high-rises), these became a permanent fixture
sermon, as Nicole Brown, Glide’s director of institutional giv- in the neighborhood, making gentrification nearly impossi-
ing, loads up a batch of Twitter volunteers with Glide-think. ble. As the journalist Gary Kamiya has chronicled, many of the
“Glide is not church, please know that,” she begins. Rather, TL’s old buildings were declared historic and thus preserved.
it’s a place to reflect on the “tapestry of our shared humanity,” When local social-service nonprofits began buying these
a tapestry in which Twitter is a “cornerstone partner.” What buildings and becoming landlords to their clients, kicking
follows is a mix of absolution, local history, and private homily. out the working-class residents only became more unlikely.
“Our housing crisis did not start when Twitter moved onto In 1956 the city elected George Christopher, a Greek immi-
Market Street,” Brown assures them. “This is 30 years of grant (and the eventual dairy owner), to be its 34th mayor.
failed public policy. We wanted to remain a precious, beau- Christopher, a Republican, is generally heralded for luring the
tiful two-story city, and we did not build housing.” Giants from New York, building schools and firehouses and
What happened and didn’t happen on these streets is pools, and offering his home to Willie Mays after a local real
indeed more complicated than is commonly understood. In estate agent had refused to sell to him. But as Randy Shaw, the
the early 20th century the Tenderloin was the Paris of the founder of the Tenderloin Museum, writes in his 2015 book,
West, a lively center of vice brimming with nightlife and cul- The Tenderloin, Christopher’s deep “dislike of the Tenderloin
ture. What followed is both unique to these blocks and broadly became personal when his 27-year-old brother was arrested
familiar to anyone who has studied how healthy inner cit- on narcotics charges.” Despite the mayor’s efforts to keep the
ies plunge into cascading poverty—a blend of dumb policy, young addict away from these blocks—sending him as far away
dumb luck, structural racism, and the occasionally vengeful as the Sierras—he was no match for their draw; when Chris-
Greek dairy owner turned mayor. topher’s brother died an early death, Shaw writes, the mayor
The Tenderloin’s roots go back to the 19th century, when blamed the neighborhood. The city cracked down on gambling,
prospectors settled here after the Gold Rush. The neighbor- streetcars were ripped out, disruptive one-way streets were
hood grew—and then became rubble in the 1906 earthquake. A established, and all of it crushed the local economy.
t.
tS
ke
ar

Union
Van Ness

Square
Ave

GLIDE MEMORIAL CHURCH

ZENDESK
WIRED
t.
tS
ke
ar
M

TWITTER HQ N

MAP BY CLEVER°FRANKE
III.

New tech
workers in the
Tenderloin
were looking
for a way
to connect
with their
community.
So they went
to Glide to
volunteer.
Here,
a Zendesk
employee
helps make
needle kits.

In a sense, that was just the start. Christopher’s transfor- as something else—a rugged but proud working-class hold-
mation of the area dovetailed with a massive urban renewal out in a country that otherwise replaces such people with
scheme—many called it urban removal—in a nearby and rel- artisanal-pickle shops?
atively prosperous African American neighborhood. Though And if so, where do the artisanal pickle eaters fit in?
the Western Addition had an international reputation as a For her part, Nicole Brown opts for practical advice over
vibrant center for jazz and culture, redevelopment forces pat answers. “As you guys serve today, you’ll see some chronic
waged a successful campaign to label it blighted, and eminent illness. You’ll see folks who may never be job-ready,” she
domain sent thousands of residents packing. (Of course, those says. “But they still deserve to be housed, still deserve to be
homes had previously belonged to Japanese residents sent to smiled at.”
internment camps. How far back shall we go?) The displaced The Twitter volunteers pose for a quick photo (making heart
residents headed east to the TL, where housing was cheap. signs with their hands), then file downstairs to begin their shift.
When Lyndon Johnson launched his landmark War on There is, of course, the obvious reason for Williams to culti-
Poverty in the mid-1960s, San Francisco’s cut of the federal vate a relationship with tech: The Sunday donation basket only
money focused on communities that were historically dis- gets so full. In addition to its volunteers, Twitter has kicked in
advantaged because of race or poverty. But in the TL another cash grants of more than $150,000. Google gave Glide $100,000
marginal population had begun to gain prominence. Waves for an electronic storage system designed to give the under-
of young gay people fleeing intolerance and abuse back east housed ready access to personal documents for housing appli-
were turning up there, and in 1966 an early band of queer- cations. Microsoft has given hundreds of thousands of dollars’
friendly activists managed to get the Tenderloin designated a worth of software. Salesforce sends over more employees than
War on Poverty target district. It was right around that time any other company, last year hitting the 1-million-hours mark.
that a young Cecil Williams was ramping up the outreach Dropbox has sent volunteers and donated food and money on
programs in his new Glide Memorial Church. Valentine’s Day for the past two years.
Not much of this can fit into a brief talk to a group of Twit- For Williams, though, embracing tech isn’t just about
ter volunteers. For that matter it doesn’t really fit into any money. “I’ve discovered a brokenness in the tech community.
clear narrative about the Tenderloin whatsoever. Is the It has to do with self-definition. They’re not always good at
neighborhood a symbol of America’s neglect of its poor? So creating humanity,” he tells me. The companies aren’t just
bleak are things now, she explains to the group, that some of benefactors, in other words; in a sense they’re also clients.
Glide’s homeless and indigent clients commute from Antioch, If you belong to the tech world and feel an objection welling
45 miles away. (Recently, a chart made the rounds on the up, know that brokenness is not a crime in Williams’ book. On
internet showing how quickly the country’s wealth dispar- the contrary, it’s the channel on which we all relate. We’re sit-
ity is worsening. The median net worth among middle-class ting in his office with Mirikitani—a poet and activist, as well
Americans fell 19.1 percent from 1998 to 2013, and 52.7 per- as his wife of nearly 35 years. She’s a striking woman, hair
cent among the working class. Only the richest 10 percent tossed Cyndi Lauper–ishly to the side, with a quick mind that
managed to get richer, their median net worth shooting up toggles between the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, and
74.9 percent.) Or is the Tenderloin meant to be understood her early years in an internment camp in Arkansas. She and
 0 8 3

IV.
“Imagine a client who’s doubly or triply diagnosed, some-
one simultaneously juggling delusion, serious illness, addic-
Glide’s harm-
reduction tion, homelessness, a history of domestic violence,” Noon
strategy
favors
says. “Just getting this person through a day can be a mas-
evidence- sively inefficient proposition. It takes someone to pick them
based,
real-world up at the shelter, to help them with their Muni voucher to
solutions get to a doctor’s appointment, to advocate for them at the
over blind
ideology: Like appointment, to go to the pharmacy for the prescription and
many tech
companies,
to help them take it, and so on.”
it meets Being pressed for data isn’t a big deal, Noon says, and in a
people where
they’re at. way it’s been a helpful nudge for the team to log what it can.
But for all the measurable success of a program like a needle
exchange, some of the most ambitious efforts at Glide move
the dial in no immediately recognizable way. That can be a
stark reality to absorb in an industry whose very existence
is premised on transforming the world. In a way, Glide has
become a lab, with the accidental effect of illuminating how
tech does and does not approach nontech problems.
Needle kits complete, the Zendeskers are thanked and
turned loose. The distribution of the kits falls to Glide’s harm
Williams have a familiar banter (“Can I speak?” “No.”), and on reduction outreach team; volunteers can’t accompany them
the subject of tech’s spiritual needs, they finish each other’s until they’ve had six months of training. With the provisions
sentences. “I believe we’re more connected by our wounds that I wear a Glide sweatshirt and generally keep my mouth
than our comfort zones,” she says. “If a CEO is wounded by shut, I am allowed to come along for a day. We set out toward
something, a connection to that would be stronger than Civic Center, hoisting bins of clean needles and condoms and
money.” Put another way, the tech world’s C-suites could other implements for reducing harm.
need salvation more than stock options. As we walk I try to see these blocks as a new arrival might.
In many ways the Tenderloin looks like a movie version of
poverty: garishly, baroquely, almost implausibly destitute.

T
he Zendesk crew is finishing packing nee- It’s not just the many humans lying on the sidewalk (unclear
dle kits when Vieto, the health services navi- sometimes whether alive or dead). It’s not the overt shooting
gator, begins talking about Narcan, a up or the public psychotic episodes or the guy in a blazer and
medication that can yank opioid users out of sweatpants shouting, “Can I get a job? Can I get a job? Can I
an overdose, which his team has begun distributing to users. get a job?” It is the extent of all that. The despair feels com-
“Do you have any stats on how many Glide clients are using
it?” asks Zendesk’s corporate social responsibility program
coordinator. In response Vieto tells an anecdote about a
woman who seemed lifeless when they found her, barely Median
breathing. A shot of Narcan and she was not only revived but
chatty. Soon after, she came by Glide for training on how to household
income in
administer the medication to others.
An ordinary question; a reply that didn’t quite answer it
but was engaging nonetheless. I’d have given this little side
step no thought if I hadn’t already discussed with various
Glide workers the broader schism it seems to represent.
the TL was
$12,210.
“We noticed early on that when people from the tech com-
munity help, they’re very interested in metrics,” Kyriell Noon,
senior director of programs, tells me. “They want to see the
data, and they want to know the ROI for their giving.” A few blocks
away it
“They’re obsessed with impact!” Glide’s James Lin joked.
On its surface, impact would seem a reasonable obsession if
you’re sinking time and money into helping people in need. But
here’s the thing: When you’re working with layers upon layers
of brokenness—when you’re confronting the worst of what our
was $ 1 1 5 , 2 3 3 .
economy can do to people in 2016—the ROI can be minimal.
prehensive, a thoroughness of dysfunction abutting one of V.
the world’s great spigots of wealth. The median household
For nearly 50
income in the Tenderloin was $12,210 in 2013. A few blocks years Glide
has served
away, in the Financial District, the number was $115,233, three square
according to The New York Times. meals a day
to the poor.
All this makes it strange to say that the Tenderloin also That currently
feels like a happy place in ways. For the suffering, there’s a amounts
to about
warmth here, a distinct conviviality, that stands out against 800,000
meals a year.
the heads-buried-in-iPhones parts of town. People hang out
on corners talking about how last night was or what so and so
is up to. The colorful dive bars and funky theater spaces long-
time San Franciscans miss? They’re still here. It feels worth
noting this, if for no other reason than to draw a clearer bead
on a place that can feel overburdened by outsider gloom.
“Harm reduction kits!” the team calls as we walk, and a seg-
ment of San Francisco that I’ve only ever seen in the shadows
begins to emerge. Some people, lost in private trances, take
what they need and drift away. But most stick around and
chat. A Don Henley–looking fellow offers an assessment of
the mayor. An older woman just out of prison reflects on free-
dom. The Glide team talks to them all with a respect border- arts beauty—Vieto spots a young man struggling to get a
ing on deference. If they run out of a certain type of needle, needle into his vein. A phlebotomist by training, Vieto says
Vieto or another worker apologizes profusely. he is tempted to help him with the injection. If the needle
At the center of the day’s operation is Bill Buehlman, the hits muscle rather than a vein, Vieto explains, the guy’s drugs
outreach coordinator for Glide’s harm reduction programs. will be wasted, which means he’ll likely engage in even more
He’s a muscular guy with a simmering intensity; everywhere dangerous behavior to score again. In a way, helping would
we set up shop, he grins and takes a wide power stance, as constitute the full realization of the team’s philosophy: liter-
though prepping for God knows what—which, in fact, he has ally facilitating heroin use in order to reduce greater harm.
lived through. Before coming to Glide he was a user, did time Instead Vieto gives him a sterile needle kit and some wis-
in Texas and California. Many harm reduction workers are dom about vein care. As I watch I can’t help noticing an
in recovery, giving extra resonance to the movement’s man- unlikely affinity between harm reduction and tech. Both
tras, which are Glide’s mantras: No judgment. Unconditional prefer evidence-based, real-world solutions over blind ide-
acceptance. Meet people where they’re at. ology; both traffic in a clear-eyed approach to problem solv-
At one point—in front of City Hall, a gold-leafed, beaux ing. Meet people where they’re at. If the people aren’t happy
with taxis, devise an alternative to meet their needs. Squint
and you can see Cecil Williams as an early pioneer of user-

It’s a centered design, as it were.

But it’s also easy to see how a tech company could float

painstaking off in a bubble of underbaked solutioneering, often most

markedly in the murky realm of helping. Every few months
another app promises to bring tech’s disruptive power to
ANALOG bear on our most intractable problems. Last year saw the
launch of Concrn, an app that dispatches civilian volunteers

approach Glide to nonviolent crisis situations in the Tenderloin; sometimes

the civilians play the trumpet, to bring some playfulness to

takes. tense situations. In lieu of meaningful medical intervention,

they come bearing water and granola bars.

The deepest In his book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From
the Cult of Technology, computer scientist and former tech

poverty
evangelist Kentaro Toyama writes about tech’s enthusiasm
for silver bullets—your poverty-disrupting One Laptop per
Child programs, your inequality-leveling Khan Academies.

can’t be H A C K E D . Tech is always looking for that elegant little fix, he writes,
that leverages a small amount of work to crack an outsize
problem. Except when it can’t. In the most damaged corners
 0 8 5

VI.

Felicia
Horowitz, a
devoted
Glide
supporter,
attends one
of the
church’s
famous
raucous
Sunday
services.

of society the problems are so complex and sui generis that remarks—at the very moment Steph Curry hits a jumper. The
the reverse is true: It can take tons of effort to make the slight- crowd roars, and a flicker of confusion crosses Williams’ face.
est headway. It’s a painstakingly analog approach Glide takes. He leans farther into the microphone, but the game has gone
The deepest poverty in the Tenderloin simply can’t be hacked. into overdrive; the roar pivots into a permanent din, impervi-
ous to shushing. Inclusivity. Love. You can hear one out of five
words Williams says. Wenig takes the mic, tells the crowd how

I
t is a chilly Friday night, and a well-heeled, important Glide is to eBay’s 34,000-plus employees. “We do
invite-only crowd has gathered at Dirty Water, what we can,” he says. Another roar for the Warriors. Mirik-
an upscale bar on the ground floor of the Twit- itani attempts an intervention—“This is your mom talking,
ter building. The Warren Buffett Annual Power I want to tell everyone that’s chatting to pay attention”—
Lunch Auction Countdown Party is like any fund-raiser— but she is no match for Curry, or the timing of the universe.
wine, hors d’oeuvres, balled-up napkins—but for the prom- The situation feels hopeless—and innocent. You can’t blame
inent placement of two TV screens. The left features a photo fans for cheering; the Warriors are killing it. You also can’t
of Buffett himself, grinning impishly beside a large number: blame organizers for being annoyed; this was Cecil Williams,
$2,800,000. That is the current bid on a private luncheon for God’s sake. In the belly of the Twitter building, a perfect
with the famed investor. For 17 years, ever since he was intro- metaphor has arisen for the loggerheads at which tech and
duced to Williams by his then-wife, a Glide congregant, Buf- its neighbors frequently find themselves. On an individual
fett has been donating the proceeds of this event to the level people mean well; people always mean well. But some-
church. The idea of the fund-raiser tonight is to mill around times the problem is structural, bigger than any of us. To the
while that dollar figure grows. The right screen shows Game same small space, two different camps bring different pri-
Four of the NBA finals. Warriors up by 2. orities, and sometimes bridging that gap just isn’t possible.
For an hour or so the party thrums along. A real estate The auction clock ticks down to its final minute, then its
agent talks about helping Reddit with its recent move into final 30 seconds, then everyone starts shouting out the last 10
the Tenderloin. An advertising executive tells me about her seconds, New Year’s Eve–style. 10! 9! 8! (What might another
startup idea. The Glide Ensemble sings on one side of the bar, $50,000 do for the harm reduction crew?) 7! 6! (Just $1,000
and the Warriors crowd gasps and cheers on the other. The could get the after-school program art supplies.) 5! 4! (Even
auction is hosted by eBay, and CEO Devin Wenig opines on a hundred dollars could buy more damn peanut butter sand-
his industry’s relationship with the Tenderloin. “There are wiches.) 3! 2! 1! Then, in that final second, it happens—some
real issues about displacement and gentrification, but it’s anonymous Warren Buffett enthusiast swoops in and bids up
stereotypical to say tech doesn’t care,” he tells me. When the total by more than a half million dollars, to $3,456,789.
Williams and Mirikitani materialize, a stream of admirers There would be time later to despair over the necessity of
line up to have photos taken with them. There are so many auctions like this in the first place. For now everyone is whoop-
people waiting, the couple just keeps smiling as posers cycle ing, and the choir has exploded into song. I find a quiet corner
in and out of the frame. And then the evening takes a turn. and make a date to meet someone at Glide the next morning,
The auction deadline nearing, Williams stands to give where the breakfast line will be reaching down Ellis by 8 am. !
 0 8 7

CAN YOU
TURN
A TERRORIST
BACK
INTO
A CITIZEN?
In Minneapolis, one judge is hoping that homegrown
ISIS recruits can be reformed into normal young
Americans. Inside a controversial new program that aims
to reverse radical indoctrination.

BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY JACOB BURGE

 in case he was stopped: He swore he was
merely going on vacation and protested that
the agent was targeting him because of his
Somali heritage and Muslim faith. “I never
committed no terrorist crimes that you’re
accusing me of,” he snapped. But his outward
bravado masked feelings of panic.
Thomas informed Yusuf there was no
chance he’d be allowed to fly, so the teen
took a taxi home. His mom and dad were
waiting for him there: Other FBI agents had
just come by to let them know of their son’s
attempt to leave the country. Amidst all
LIKE MOST HIGH SCHOOL seniors, Abdullahi this, Yusuf managed to post a cryptic note
Yusuf tried to avoid hugging his father in on Twitter: “the weather is hot today.” The
view of other teens. But on the morning of phrase was a signal to Daud and the other
May 28, 2014, as he was being dropped off members of Yusuf’s circle of aspiring jihadis
in front of Heritage Academy in southeast that the law was closing in.
Minneapolis, the rail-thin 18-year-old, who Several months passed with no further
went by the nickname Bones, startled his word from the FBI, and Yusuf tried to move
dad with a tender good-bye embrace. Unbe- on with his life: He attended summer school,
knownst to his father, Yusuf believed he’d found a part-time job at Best Buy, and played
never see any member of his family again. paintball with his friends. In September,
Yusuf snuck out of school after first period Yusuf’s lawyer sent him an alarming text:
and walked two blocks to Dar al-Farooq Yusuf’s arrest was imminent. He flirted with
Como, a plain brick mosque on 17th Avenue. the notion of fleeing the country but ulti-
A friend picked him up in a Volkswagen Jetta mately decided to stay put. When a police
and took him to a light-rail station. There car finally pulled him over one late Novem-
Yusuf caught a train to the airport: He was ber day, the teenager went quietly.
set to depart for Turkey that afternoon, with Yusuf and five of his friends, all young
layovers in New York and Moscow. Once he Somali Americans from Minneapolis who’d
touched down in Istanbul, he planned to head schemed to fight in Syria, eventually pleaded
to the city’s famed Blue Mosque and use his guilty to trying to join the Islamic State.
iPhone’s MagicJack app to call a phone num- Yusuf and one of his codefendants, Abdi-
ber that he’d been given by another friend, rizak Warsame, went even further, agree-
Abdirahman Daud. Yusuf didn’t know who ing to testify and help convict Daud and two
would answer, but Daud had assured him this other members of the group whom the gov-
person would guide him into Syria and help ernment characterized as the conspiracy’s
him become a soldier for the so-called Islamic leaders. (Two additional members actually
State, better known in the West as ISIS. made it to Syria and were killed fighting for
0 8 8
Yusuf was moments away from boarding ISIS.) No matter their level of contrition or
his flight when he was pulled aside by FBI cooperation, however, the six men who took spend hours watching a YouTube channel
special agent John Thomas. The agent was plea bargains each faced up to 15 years in called Enter the Truth. The videos, all slick
part of a surveillance team that had been prison—a standard sentence for an Ameri- Islamic State productions, focused on the
watching Yusuf for a month, ever since the can found guilty of aiding the Islamic State. suffering of Syrian children and the moral
teen had shown up at the Federal Building But Michael J. Davis, the federal judge corruption of the West. Soon enough, Yusuf
in downtown Minneapolis to apply for an who presided over the Minneapolis ter- was wondering whether he should join the
expedited passport. During his interview rorism cases, was troubled. Some of the group in going to Syria.
with the passport examiner, Yusuf hadn’t defendants appeared to be malleable youths As he fielded guilty pleas throughout 2015,
been able to name the hotel where he’d sup- who’d been ensnared by sly recruiting tac- Davis thought about how he might offer
posedly booked a room or the Istanbul tour- tics. Yusuf, for example, was first lured leniency to the conspiracy’s least culpable
ist attractions he wished to visit beyond the into the group during pickup basketball at members. He could do so only if he knew
Blue Mosque. The examiner had reported a mosque. After the games, the men would for sure that the men would never again
this fishy behavior to his boss, who had in be tempted by jihadism. To that end, Davis
turn alerted the FBI. Contributing editor BRENDAN I. KOERNER began to research whether there are effec-
When Agent Thomas told Yusuf that he (@brendankoerner) wrote about the tive therapies for reforming extremists. He
knew all about his travel plans, the teen epic hack of the US Office of Personnel hoped to find a credible way to transform
reeled off the talking points he’d rehearsed Management in issue 24.11. Yusuf and his friends back into the ordinary
 people have a hard time breaking away from
the movement, however, because they fear
reprisals, social isolation, or disappointing
their friends. In a 1997 book that is often
hailed as the founding text of deradical-
ization, Bjørgo detailed how neo-Nazis can
muster the psychological strength to turn
their backs on their brutal pasts.
Bjørgo’s ideas were the catalyst for a series
of pioneering deradicalization programs
throughout Europe, all aimed at far-right
extremists who wanted to reinvent them-
selves. In 2010, one of the most well-known
of those programs, the Berlin-based Exit-
Germany, hired Daniel Koehler as an intern.
A Fulbright scholar who had studied religion
and economics at Princeton, Koehler was
preparing to pursue a master’s degree in
peace studies from the University of Ham-
burg. He became a full-time Exit-Germany
employee after graduating in 2011.
Koehler’s fascination with neo-Nazis began
during his teenage years in the Berlin suburb
of Teltow, where skinheads were as much a
part of the youth-culture landscape as skaters
or punks. “I was always kind of curious about
them,” says Koehler, a bespectacled, slightly
beefy man whose taste for graphic T-shirts
seems at odds with his Teutonic meticulous-
ness. “These were not stupid guys—they
went to high school, they made their A Lev-
els. And yet they were highly violent.” His job
at Exit-Germany, which required him to
forge close relationships with skinheads,
gave him the chance to explore how smart
young people can be enticed into devoting
themselves to twisted causes.
The start of Koehler’s career coincided with
a worldwide proliferation of deradicalization
programs aimed at jihadis. In 2012, Koehler
became a counselor at one such program in
young men they’d once been. This could W H E N T O R E B J Ø R G O began to study the Germany, called Hayat (Arabic for “life”).
spare the youths years behind bars—an neo-Nazi groups of his native Norway in the As he immersed himself in the challenge of
act of compassion that would undermine late 1980s, his fellow scholars of extremism figuring out what makes jihadis tick, he also
the Islamic State narrative that the West were solely focused on understanding how became keen to learn how other deradical-
despises its Muslim citizens. ordinary kids could morph into racist thugs. ization organizations approach their work.
Davis discovered that numerous nations, “There was this general idea that once a To his dismay, he discovered that many of
from Denmark to Indonesia, have devel- Nazi, always a Nazi,” says Bjørgo, a social those ventures lack any kind of scientific rigor.
oped methods for nudging young men and scientist who is now a professor at the Uni- Some, like Saudi Arabia’s government-run
women back from the extremist brink—a versity of Oslo. “The common perception counseling program for prison inmates, claim
process known as deradicalization. The was that you could prevent people from suspiciously high success rates yet don’t per-
judge became intent on starting the first joining, but once they joined, all was lost.” mit any outside scrutiny; others are staffed
laboratory for deradicalization in the US; he But Bjørgo came to believe that his col- by people who act on intuition rather than in
just needed to find an expert he could trust, leagues were mistaken. After interviewing ways validated by data. “The deradicalization
someone with a proven track record of liber- scores of far-right extremists in Scandina- field globally is more or less completely free
ating young minds from violent extremism. via, he found that the majority of neo-Nazis of any working standards, which is insane,”
One name kept coming up—that of 30-year- actually become disillusioned with their Koehler says. “Many of these counselors, they
old researcher Daniel Koehler. lives after a number of years; many of these do things because they feel right, but they
can’t explain to you why. They have no train- run’ or ‘I’ll help you raise awareness in your they lose the fervor that once made them
ing, no handbooks, no anything.” He notes, for school or your community.’ Anything that eager to kill. Reaching that point requires
example, that counselors often ask local cler- will get that person to really think about substantial resources, however: Koeh ler
ics to tell their clients that terrorist groups different ways to address the problem.” believes that each client needs at least
preach a false version of Islam—a tactic that After that seed is planted, a counselor four mentors plus an “intervention coor-
Koehler suspects is prone to backfire, since can move on to engaging a client about the dinator” and that full deradicalization can
extremist recruits are taught that religious pursuits they once enjoyed before jihadism be achieved only after a matter of years,
leaders in the West are not true Muslims. became their sole passion. If the individual not months.
Koehler’s frustration with the improvi- was, for example, a practitioner of tae kwon Koehler’s theories have not been univer-
sational nature of many programs inspired do, then a meeting can be arranged with a sally embraced by his peers, some of whom
him to delve deeper into research on derad- tae kwon do champion who is also a devout feel that he’s too much of an ivory-tower
icalization: He wanted to use the scientific Muslim and who can thus speak to the chal- figure—a person who may be great at ana-
method to ascertain which techniques yield lenge of balancing sports and faith. lyzing papers but, despite his time studying
reliable results and which are just folk cures. In Koehler’s ideal scenario, as a radi- neo-Nazis, lacks enough direct experience
In 2014 he founded both the German Insti- calized person is compelled to contem- with extremists to know how they really
tute on Radicalization and Deradicalization plate more and more run-of-the-mill issues, think. One veteran of the European derad-
Studies and the peer-reviewed Journal for
Deradicalization, two enterprises that have
allowed him to sift through mountains
of case studies to discern the mechanics
by which seemingly normal teens and
twentysomethings can be coaxed into
committing acts of terror.
Koehler’s key finding has been that all
extremists, regardless of ideology, develop a
sort of tunnel vision as they go through the The FBI now tracks an average of one person per month trying to travel to
territories controlled by the Islamic State. And because recruiters work largely
indoctrination process. An ordinary high online, would-be American fighters are not unified by geography, background,
school or college student, Koehler argues, gender, age, or race. Here are just a few recent cases. —L E X I  PA N D E L L
has a lot of problems (tricky classes, med-
dling parents, romantic woes) as well as
many potential solutions (study harder, find
a job, date someone new). A person who’s
journeying down the path toward radical- 2

ization, by contrast, sees their problems

and solutions each get winnowed down to 1 5
one—a process that Koehler terms “deplu-
ralization.” The solitary problem for these
individuals is always that there’s a global 4
3
conspiracy against their race or religion; the
solitary solution to such persecution is vio-
lence, with the goal of placing themselves and
their group in control of a revamped society.
Koehler sees little point in starting moral
or theological arguments with these young
2 4
JOSHUA VAN DONALD
people, who are more interested in becom- 1 HAFTEN, 34 3 MORGAN, 44 5
Madison, Landis,
ing warriors than debating the finer points SHANNON
CONLEY, 19 Wisconsin
JAELYN
YOUNG, 20, North Carolina
TAIROD PUGH,
47
of scripture. Instead, he advocates replu- Arvada, Colorado AND MUHAMMAD Neptune,
Van Haften DAKHLALLA, 22 Morgan, a New Jersey
ralization: the careful reintroduction of The teenager traveled to the Starkville, convicted felon,
came under FBI Syrian border caught the FBI’s Authorities
problems and solutions into a radicalized scrutiny after local in 2014, posting
Mississippi
attention for stopped Pugh, a
person’s life, so that they can no longer church leaders on social media The daughter selling an AK-47 former Air Force
caught her that he had taken of a cop and the under the table. serviceman who
devote all their mental energy to stewing sketching their an oath to the son of an imam Authorities later had been living
over their paranoia. If an Islamic State sym- building’s layout. Islamic State. He planned to use found that he had in Egypt, at an
As it turned out, paid middlemen their honeymoon posted pictures of airport in Turkey.
pathizer is intent on emigrating to Syria, for she planned to to take him to a as cover to fly to Osama bin Laden Agents found
travel to Syria remote meeting Istanbul and make and the al Qaeda 180 propaganda
example, Koehler suggests reminding them to marry an ISIS point, but no one their way to Syria. flag on Facebook. videos on his
that they’ll require food, water, and shelter militant she had showed up. A local Two FBI agents Morgan planned laptop. He
met online. She imam paid his way who had posed to go to Syria via was deported,
that could otherwise go to Syrian orphans. was arrested in back to Istanbul. as ISIS recruiters Turkey but was arrested in the
“So you can say to him, ‘Why not stay here Denver before He was arrested on social media turned back in US, and convicted
boarding a plane when he returned busted the couple Istanbul and later of trying to join
for now and I’ll help you organize a charity to Turkey. to the US. at a local airport. arrested at JFK. the Islamic State.
icalization scene, who spoke on condition vision tower. By the time their plates were Yusuf was born in a Kenyan refugee camp,
of anonymity due to his fear of Germany’s cleared, Davis was convinced that Koehler where he vaguely remembers having his ton-
strong defamation laws, says that Koeh- had the expertise and temperament to tackle sils removed without any anesthesia or pain-
ler’s ambition still far exceeds his wisdom: the delicate project he had in mind: the cre- killers. When he was 3 years old, he and his
“There are many people around here that ation of the Terrorism Disengagement and pregnant mother were permitted to move to
know much more, and more firsthand, about Deradicalization Program, the first govern- Minnesota; his father, who did not receive a
all this than Daniel, to say the least.” ment initiative of its kind in the US. visa at that time, wasn’t able to join them for
But such criticism may be inspired in part When the program was announced in another five years. The Yusufs initially lived
by envy, for Koehler is in high demand these March 2016, its mission statement was with 16 relatives in a single-family home,
days. In addition to running his research frank about the perils it means to address: then moved to a one-bedroom apartment
institute from his home in Stuttgart, he “Untreated radicalized individuals will in a crime-ridden section of north Minne-
has spent much of the past two years as a infect communities and continue to seek apolis. Because he was Somali, Yusuf was
globe-trotting consultant: He has advised opportunities to harm others and martyr routinely taunted by both white and black
officials in Belgium, the United Kingdom, the themselves.” Less than two months later, classmates at public schools. But he wasn’t
Netherlands, and Canada on how to set up Koehler traveled to Minneapolis to inter- shy about fighting back; as a second grader,
deradicalization programs. It’s because of his view Abdullahi Yusuf and several of his he once came to blows with a fellow student
prominence that Koehler’s name was men- codefendants at length so he could assess who’d torn the hijab off a Somali girl’s head.
tioned so often in the materials that Judge each man’s potential to be rehabilitated. Desperate for a sense of belonging as he
Davis gathered during his hunt for a derad- Davis vowed to give the German’s recom- became a teen, Yusuf fell in with a crew of kids
icalization model to emulate in Minnesota. mendations great weight as he pondered who entertained themselves by stealing cars
Davis, a 69-year-old former public what sentences to hand down. and smoking marijuana, often during school
defender who’s been on the federal bench hours; his grades suffered. But he eventually
0 9 1
since 1994, knew he had to be cautious, for got his schoolwork back on track after his
he was certain to catch flak for simply dar- father, a stern and hardworking truck driver,
ing to suggest that Islamic State supporters moved the family to a better neighborhood
might be worthy of redemption. Due to the and challenged Yusuf to earn his diploma.
Islamic State’s barbarity, the American jus- In September 2013, Yusuf’s history teacher
tice system has been harsh on the 60 people assigned him to give a presentation on Syria.
so far who’ve been convicted of either plot- Up until that point, he knew little about the
ting domestic attacks in the group’s name civil war that has engulfed the country. He
or attempting to reach ISIS-controlled ter- was outraged to learn of the Syrian govern-
ritory. Even when defendants have suffered ment’s atrocities against civilians and chil-
from mental health issues or were nabbed dren. It was right around this time that Yusuf
with the assistance of shady informants, was invited to a local mosque to participate
severe sentences have been the norm. The in basketball games—the ones that were fol-
story of Jaelyn Young, a former Missis- lowed by screenings of jihadist videos. The
sippi State University chemistry student, men at the mosque claimed that the Islamic
is typical: In August, the 20-year-old was State was primarily interested in protecting
sentenced to 12 years in prison for trying Syrian innocents, which meant that Yusuf
to become an Islamic State medic in Syria, THE APRIL CONVERSATIONS between Koeh- would be doing sacred work if he took up
even though she made it only as far as the ler and the Minneapolis defendants started arms for such a noble group.
Columbus, Mississippi, airport and had no awkwardly; there was no getting around Koehler describes Yusuf’s radicalization
prior criminal history. Davis was aware that the obvious strangeness of a white Ger- process as “by the book.” “These teenag-
if he was going to take a political risk by man trying to coax a Somali American teen ers, they are intrigued by the promise that
offering leniency to the young Somalis in into revealing his most intimate thoughts. they will immediately start to change soci-
his court, he’d need to present deradical- But thanks to his experience plumbing the ety and live out their ideals,” he says. “For
ization as something rooted in evidence, psyches of neo-Nazis, Koehler is adept at them, these movements are about freedom
not just optimism. getting strangers to open up about painful and justice and honoring their values.” As a
In October of 2015, Davis sent his chief moments from their past. The details he result, Koehler adds, newly minted extrem-
probation officer, Kevin Lowry, to the UK gleans from these conversations allow him ists often experience feelings of euphoria,
and Germany to meet with a slew of pro- to identify “cognitive openings”—small yet much like addicts who’ve just discovered
spective deradicalization partners. Based telling indications that an extremist really the drug that will be their doom.
on Lowry’s glowing review of his chat with wants to change and will therefore listen to Since his arrest in November 2014, how-
Koehler, the judge paid his own way to Ber- a counselor’s guidance. ever, Yusuf had developed an introspec-
lin that December so he could hear Koehler Of all the personal stories that Koehler tive streak: He had devoured books ranging
describe his methodology in person. The heard in Minneapolis, the one he found most from 1984 to Nelson Mandela’s autobiog-
two men met for burgers at Alex, a modish revealing was Yusuf’s, whose brief life has raphy, and he’d tried his hand at writing
gastropub beneath the city’s landmark tele- been filled with alienation and hardship. self-reflective poetry. (“I am an alleged
terrorist/I am not sure how that makes me
feel, I throw a fit/I am currently drinking a
Sierra Mist” reads the opening stanza from a
work he titled “I Am Human.”) Yusuf’s new-
found love of reading and writing was the
sort of opening that Koehler might exploit.
Koehler was less impressed by Yusuf’s
codefendants, who struck him as still too
enamored with extremist thought. One of
the men, for example, told Koehler that he
had soured on the Islamic State because it
sent child soldiers to the front lines without
proper training—an oddly technical reason
for turning against the group. When Koeh-
ler then pushed the man, whom he declined
to name, to give his definition of the word
honor, the man instantly replied that it cen-
tered on one’s willingness to sacrifice every-
thing for the greater good of one’s group. “So
his definition of honor was 100 percent in
alignment with ISIS’ definition of honor or
even a neo-Nazi’s definition of honor,” Koeh-
ler says. “The individual perspective was
completely taken out. I could see from that
how depluralized his worldview still was.”
Koehler also spent a week with Kevin
Lowry and 10 of his probation officers, who
are in charge of running the day-to-day
operation of the nascent Terrorism Disen-
gagement and Deradicalization Program.
He ran the officers through a series of train-
ing exercises designed to prepare them for
counseling extremists. In one exercise,
for example, Koehler displayed a col-
lection of Facebook footprints from a
hypothetical teen in the midst of being
radicalized by the Islamic State; these
included everything from comments on
videos about jihadis (“Brother reveal-
ing the truth behind the kuffr [sic]
media lies”) to anguished posts about
his fictional father’s disapproval of his
new lifestyle. The officers were supposed
to pick up on the fact that several of the
posts featured images related to photog-
raphy—one, for example, depicted a group
of Islamic State soldiers staring at a digital
camera’s screen beneath the caption “Jihad
Is Beautiful.” The intended takeaway was the other five men who’d pleaded guilty felt that the 21-year-old—who had briefly
that the teen had once dreamed of becom- listened in silence, Koehler shared his con- served as the “emir” of the group of wan-
ing a photojournalist, and that his replu- clusions with the room. Much of what he nabe jihadis—had repeatedly lied to him
ralization should involve cajoling him to shared about the defendants’ odds of being about the extent of his involvement in the
pursue that passion anew. deradicalized was surprisingly pessimis- conspiracy. Koehler explained that War-
Koeh ler spent the summer in Stutt- tic. He had little positive to say, for exam- same’s continued deceit suggested that
gart, where he wrote up his evaluations. ple, about Abdirizak Warsame, a onetime he wouldn’t be receptive to a counselor’s
He then returned to Judge Davis’ court- spoken-word artist nicknamed A-Zak. intervention; Koeh ler also said that he
room last September to testify at a two- Even though Warsame had joined Yusuf in feared that Warsame was likely to try to
day presentencing hearing. As Yusuf and cooperating with the government, Koehler join a jihadist group if given the chance.
 the new Minnesota program to work with
inmates; Lowry fears that extremists who
receive no treatment while incarcerated
will be impossible to deradicalize once
they’re released.
Anyone intrigued by Minnesota’s prom-
ise must also understand that, despite
plenty of encouraging anecdotes from for-
mer neo-Nazis and jihadis in Europe, there
is still little quantitative proof that deradi-
calization programs can weaken extremist
movements over the long term. In Ger-
many, for example, the number of hardcore
neo-Nazis has remained static over the
past two decades, even as Exit-Germany
and other programs have expanded their
reach. Better results may ensue as counsel-
ors improve their tactics in response to new
research, but progress will always require
saintlike patience: Getting an extremist to
permanently shed all of their poisonous
ideas is a lot like getting an opiate abuser
EVEN BEFORE HE took the witness stand to kick their addiction for good.
in Davis’ courtroom, Koehler had already “There was one case, a woman, she said
been contacted by agencies, including the it took her 10 years to be deradicalized and
FBI and the Department of Justice, looking leave her group,” says Mary Beth Altier, a
to learn more about deradicalization train- professor at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs
ing. That is a significant amount of interest who studies violent extremism. “Every day
given that the Minnesota experiment is still she would have to look in the mirror and
embryonic. But with a surprising number challenge her beliefs, because her brain
of Americans continuing to pledge their had been wired a certain way.” To make
allegiance to the Islamic State—at least matters even more challenging, research-
110 people have been charged in the US so ers don’t yet have a clear sense of how to
far—law-enforcement officials are eager keep the graduates of deradicalization pro-
to find ways to counter the organization’s grams from backsliding; in a world in which
appeal. And since extremism isn’t a prob- extremist propaganda and recruiters are
lem that will vanish once the Islamic State always just a broadband connection away,
is defeated, having deradicalization pro- reengagement is more of a threat than ever.
grams in place will help the authorities pre- The true value of deradicalization may
pare for the next threat to emerge; a threat be in what it signals to marginalized popu-
that could just as easily come from the far lations rather than in its ability to directly
right as from the world of violent jihadism. rescue hundreds of young people from the
But US judges and politicians would be clutches of extremism. For communities
wise to temper their expectations about such as the 40,000-strong Somali American
how much deradicalization can accom- one in Minnesota, seeing that their way-
plish, and how quickly. For starters, they ward members are treated with some mea-
should be aware of the obstacles that Kevin sure of compassion can hopefully reduce
0 9 3
Lowry has faced trying to recruit counsel- their feelings of persecution.
Koehler’s take on Yusuf was by far his ors and mentors for the Minnesota pro- “I think the proper development and
kindest. He applauded the now 20-year-old gram: Many people have declined the job implementation of these programs, and
for having attained “a very advanced stage because they fear being accused of cod- letting communities know these programs
of disengagement and critical reflection” dling terrorists. “It has been a challenge exist, goes a long way toward cultivating
and affirmed that he was sure to benefit to secure providers in this area,” he says, trust with these communities that are most
from further counseling. The final decision “as some are concerned about the con- at risk for radicalization,” says Kurt Brad-
on whether Yusuf would be allowed to con- troversy and risk involved with terror- dock, a communications lecturer at Penn
tinue working with the Minnesota derad- ism cases.” Lowry is also troubled by the State who is currently studying how best to
icalization program, however, would be fact that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has counter jihadist messaging. “If we show them
entirely up to Judge Davis. yet to indicate whether it will arrange for that we’re not just interested in draconian
measures, in locking them up and throwing remaining seven defendants, including the
away the key, that will be something that
develops a better relationship between us.”
three convicted at trial, to terms ranging
from 10 to 35 years.
When I reached Koehler to discuss the
COLOPHON
“THE ONLY REASON I’m alive today is because years of counseling and supervision that lay TRENDS THAT HELPED
I was stopped at the airport.” ahead for Yusuf, he was in Tunisia at a con- GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
Abdullahi Yusuf spoke as he faced Judge ference organized by families who’ve lost Water bottle flipping; Yamato’s Richmen,
the Lexus of noodle machines; doom metal
Davis on the morning of November 14. children to extremism. He was pleased that bands led by women—Myrkur, Darker,
Behind him, the courtroom’s gallery was Judge Davis had heeded his advice, espe- SubRosa, and Esben and the Witch; the
renewed relevance of The Origins of Totali-
packed with members of his family—the cially in light of the sharp right turn that tarianism, by Hannah Arendt; grief reading;
postelection Twitter and Facebook detoxes;
people whom, just two and a half years the US had taken a week earlier on Elec- hermits; karaoke night at Toad Hall; Frank
earlier, he’d been willing to abandon so he tion Day. “He could have gone along with Ocean’s Blonde; walking the Williamsburg
Bridge at 2 am; snappin’ with Spectacles;
could fight and die for the Islamic State. the foreseeable decline in governmental feminism; Biden-Obama memes; criticizing
Rory Gilmore’s journalistic ethics; criticizing
He was the first of three defendants to be interest in deradicalization, but instead he Marie Kondo’s tidy, perfect life; WIRED’s
Sunday Morning Motorcycle Ride Club; wild
sentenced that day. decided to push it further,” he said. “That’s and free eyebrows; A Tribe Called Quest’s
“I realize this is my second chance in life,” groundbreaking and brave.” first album in 18 years, We Got It From Here
… Thank You 4 Your Service; nun fashion;
Yusuf continued. “I now see a future for my But Koeh ler was also worried about not moving to Canada.
life in a way I didn’t see before.” whether the Minnesota program will receive WIRED is a registered trademark of
Though judges usually remain stoic the financial support it needs to function, Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copy-
right ©2017 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
when pronouncing sentence, Davis was, grow, and spread to other jurisdictions in a Printed in the USA. Volume 25, No. 2.
WIRED (ISSN 1059–1028) is published
at one point, on the verge of tears as he Trump administration. Even if there were monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division
addressed Yusuf: These terrorism cases reams of peer-reviewed data that attested of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Edi-
torial office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305,
had consumed two years of his life, and he to the long-term efficacy of deradicalization, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Principal
office: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center,
had agonized over how to strike the right the concept would be an extremely tough sell New York, NY 10007. S. I. Newhouse, Jr.,
balance between mercy and justice. The in a nation in which slowly enunciating the Chairman Emeritus; Robert A. Sauerberg,
Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer;
judge had to pause for a moment before phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” is a proven David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Offi-
cer; James M. Norton, Chief Business Offi-
confessing, “This is so difficult.” vote-winner. The fact that deradicalization is cer and President of Revenue. Periodi cals
postage paid at New York, NY, and at addi-
Davis described the months he’d spent still in its experimental phase suggests that tional mailing offices. Canada Post Pub-
researching deradicalization programs it will have few, if any, advocates at the high- lications Mail Agreement No. 40644503.
Canadian Goods and Services Tax Regis-
from around the globe, and he admitted est levels of American government. tration No. 123242885 RT0001.
that it’s still questionable whether deradi- The future of deradicalization in the US POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see
calization is anything more than a feel-good could well depend, then, on how effectively DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND
MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address
placebo. But, he said, “I’m going to take that Yusuf is able to tell his own story. He’s a long corrections to WIRED, PO Box 37706,
Boone, IA 50037-0662. For subscriptions,
chance.” And with those words, he informed way from even attempting that right now address changes, adjustments, or back
Yusuf of his fate: He would spend up to a as he adjusts to life in the halfway house: issue inquiries: Please write to WIRED, PO
Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037-0662, call
year in a halfway house, followed by two Koehler emphasizes that Yusuf is still in a (800) 769 4733, or email subscriptions@
WIRED.com. Please give both new and old
decades of supervised release. If he kept fragile place. addresses as printed on most recent label.
First copy of new subscription will be mailed
up with his counseling and didn’t break But if he can take full advantage of his rare within eight weeks after receipt of order.
any laws, he would never see the inside of a second chance and rejoin civil society, Yusuf Address all editorial, business, and
production correspondence to WIRED
prison cell. Few other American terrorism will become a living exemplar of the idea Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New York,
NY 10007. For permissions and reprint
defendants have been so fortunate, partic- that there can, indeed, be a road back from requests, please call (212) 630 5656 or fax
ularly in the age of ISIS. extremism. His redemption would affirm requests to (212) 630 5883. Visit us online
at www.WIRED.com. To subscribe to other
“It doesn’t make sense for me to send him that those naive enough to join what are Condé Nast magazines on the web, visit
www.condenet.com. Occasionally, we make
to prison,” Davis said. “I hope I’m not wrong.” essentially death cults should never feel like our subscriber list available to carefully
“I won’t let you down, Your Honor,” Yusuf all is lost, and that American society should screened companies that offer products
and services that we believe would interest
replied. think twice before treating them as such. our readers. If you do not want to receive
these offers and/or information, please
The degree to which Davis valued Koeh- His single anecdote will prove nothing advise us at PO Box 37706, Boone, IA
ler’s input became clear less than two hours definitive about deradicalization’s poten- 50037-0662, or call (800) 769 4733.

later, when Abdirizak Warsame appeared tial, of course. But sometimes it takes WIRED is not responsible for the return or
loss of, or for damage or any other injury
before the court. In keeping with Koehler’s an emotional story to inspire people to to, unsolicited manuscripts, unsolicited art-
dim view of Warsame’s potential for derad- demand better science. ! work (including, but not limited to, drawings,
photographs, and transparencies), or any
icalization, the judge sentenced him to 30 other unsolicited materials. Those submit-
0 9 4 ting manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or
months in prison, even though he had tes- other materials for consideration should not
send originals, unless specifically requested
tified for the government. to do so by WIRED in writing. Manuscripts,
“I’m not convinced you’re still not a jihad- photographs, artwork, and other materi-
als submitted must be accompanied by a
ist,” said Davis, in a line that paraphrased self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Koehler’s evaluation. But Warsame should
count
0 0 his 0 blessings: Davis sentenced the
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 BY ROBERT CAPPS

ASK A FLOWCHART
WHAT TREND SHOULD
I START THIS YEAR?
DO YOU DANCE?

YES NO

WHAT, LIKE
PERFECT—INVENT A WHY, YES! ARE YOU A
THE DAB OR
DANCE MOVE! YES I AM. BILLIONAIRE?
MILLY ROCK?
YES NO

YEAH, BUT THIS

IS WAY EASIER: JUST WHAT DO
COLLAPSE ON THE FLOOR I CALL IT?
AND CRY. START A BUSINESS
ARE YOU RETIRED? THAT CREATES THOUSANDS
OF JOBS!
YES NO

IT IS? THE AMERICA!

THERE’S NO
DONATE MOST OF MONEY IN
YOUR MONEY TO CURING THAT—WHAT
DISEASES. I SHOULD DO
IS START A
WELL, YEAH, BUSINESS THAT
YOU NEED ELIMINATES
PEER-REVIEWED THOUSANDS
STUDIES TO THAT’S HARD. OF JOBS.
PROVE THE
EFFORT GETS
GOOD RESULTS.

YOU SHOULD SILLY

PROBABLY JUST KEEP BILLIONAIRE, BUT YOU USE SOCIAL
EXACTLY!
ALL YOUR MONEY, THAT’S NOT A NEW MEDIA, RIGHT?
THEN. TREND!

SO INSTEAD, FOLLOW
UGH, THOSE PEOPLE WHO
BE THOUGHTFUL AND DUH.
PEOPLE SUCK. AREN’T LIKE YOU ON
NUANCED ON SOCIAL
MEDIA. SOCIAL MEDIA!

FINE, POST
DELETE YOUR PICTURES OF
GROSS! NEVER!
SOCIAL MEDIA? PEOPLE DOING
THE AMERICA.

0 9 6 FEB 2017
 THE ORIGINAL LIGHT BEER
When we invented light beer, we didn’t set out to be innovators or pioneers. We just wanted
a light beer that didn’t compromise on taste. Miller Lite, great taste with only 96 calories.

©2016 MILLER BREWING CO., MILWAUKEE, WI

av. analysis (12 fl. oz.): 96 cals, 3.2g carbs, <1g protein, 0g fat.
Slack is where work happens, for millions
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