How to succeed in comedy (by really, really trying) p.

66

24.04

FE ATURES

98
A Chronic Mystery
There are thousands of
diferent strains of cannabis.
Understanding their genetics
is the key to transforming
pot from a budding business
to a high-ying industry.
B Y K AT I E M . PA L M E R

66

76

84

92

Get Busy, Stay Busy

#jihad

In a Perpetual Present

Add to Cart

Why comedy stars like the

guys from Silicon Valley now
have to conquer YouTube,
podcasts, Twitter, and more.

ISIS is better at social

media than you are. How
the Islamic State is using the
tools of the West against it.

The strange case of

the woman who couldnt
remember her past
and cant imagine her future.

The app-fueled,
farmer-friendly, totally
delicious plan to
kill the supermarket.

BY BRIAN RAFTERY

BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER

B Y E R I K A H AYA S A K I

BY COURTNEY BALESTIER

APR 2016

PRESTON GANNAWAY

CONTENTS

24.04

30

10 Release Notes

GADGET LAB
51 Fetish

Behind the scenes of this issue

Sonys stunning new HDR TV

displays insane detail

16 This Issue

52 Head-to-Head: Remotes

From the editors desk

Logitech Harmony Elite vs.

Savant Remote + Host

19 Comments
Reader rants and raves

54 How to Surround Sound

Superhero Power Move
Ta-Nehisi Coates puts his spin
on Black Panther

ALPHA

Arrange your speakers to create

perfect 360-degree audio

My Space: Jonathan Weiss

32 Infoporn

56

Americas global plant invasion

23

How to Make Condoms

Dip them, wash them, zap them
and then enlarge them

34

Argument
The (actually very complicated)
reality of virtual reality

FILE: //

BY PETER RUBIN

26 Name Check
Startup monikers make no sense

58 Kindergarten Inc.

37 Bye-Bye, Birdie
Let the people mass-delete tweets

The education super-conglomerate

that wants to conquer the world
BY ANYA KAMENETZ

26 Finding Keanu
How Key & Peele writers
take their humor from sketch
comedy to the big screen

40 Heavenly Feature
Shooting an Imax movie from space

44 Mr. Know-It-All

28

On obligatory use of tness trackers

46 WIRED Cities: Pittsburgh

Play air hockey against a robot,
worship at the altar of Andy Warhol,
taste hortobgyi pie

40

ASK A FLOWCHART
106 What Tech-Inspired Strain of
Cannabis Should I Smoke?
BY ROBERT CAPPS

ON THE COVER

Whats Inside
Johnson & Johnsons
No More Tangles Spray

48 Smiley People
Emoji: Think of them as an upgrade
BY CLIVE THOMPSON

All covers photographed by Art Streiber

for W IRE D. Wardrobe styling by Sharon
Williams. Prop styling by Anthony A.
Altomare. Makeup by Rebecca Alling;
makeup assistant, Debra Schrey. Hair
by Mary Ann Valdes; hair assistant,
Melissa Malkasian. For wardrobe credits,
see page 74.

RELEASE NOTES

WHO
TO FOLLOW

Twitter

Instagram

Brian Levine
@briantlevine

Art Streiber
@aspictures

Tekko
@teamtekko

Kumail Nanjiani
@kumailn

Ta-Nehisi
Coates
@tanehisicoates

Thomas
Middleditch
@tombini

Leafly
@leafly

Justin Fantl
@fantl

Steep Hill
@steephilllab

Lenny
@lennyletter

Will McCants
@will_mccants

Bonnaroo
@bonnaroo

Tyler
Schnoebelen
@tschnoebelen

South
by Southwest
@sxsw

SF Sketchfest
@sfsketchfest

The Upright
Citizens Brigade NYC
@ucbtheatreny

WIRED Photo
@wiredphoto

Alma Haser
@almahaser

HOW ALMA HASER

MAKES THOSE ORIGAMI
PORTRAITS

o illustrate Susie McKinnons inability to attach emotions to her own

personal history (In a Perpetual Present, page 84), wired commissioned images from ne-art photographer Alma Haser, who sometimes
incorporates origami to create poignant, complex portraits. Haser
cast three models to represent McKinnon. Finding three women who
looked similar but at vastly diferent ages was a challenge, Haser
says. I asked a lot of friends and friends of friends. She succeeded,
and after photographing the models individually at her small studio
in the south of England, Haser printed one large portrait and up to 90
smaller images of each woman. Then she meticulously folded the smaller photos into shapes inspired by kusudama origami. Next she placed the origami
gure over the face of the large portrait and rephotographed the construction
to create the striking nal image. The fragmentation of the faces is meant to
reect McKinnons inability to draw on emotional memory, an abstract concept now made concrete. The woman is there, and all the pieces are present,
Haser says, but the faces are unrecognizable; as McKinnon cant recognize
the emotional experiences of her own life.

T
0

APR 2016

COURTESY OF ALMA HASER (TOP & @ALMAHASER); RACHEL LEVIT (@LENNYLETTER); ANDREW JORGENSEN (@BONNAROO);
MARIA KANEVSKAYA (@SXSW); JANE SEIDEL (@UCBTHEATRENY)

Some of
Hasers origami
photos take
up to 24 hours
to produce.

EDITORIAL
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THIS ISSUE

Sure, we did five

covers, but we all
know who the
funniest four guys are.

OF SOCIAL MEDIA

ork with me for a second: Brian

Rafterys piece on the side gigs
of the stars of the television show
Silicon Valley (page 66) and Brendan Koerners take on how jihadist group ISIS uses social media
(page 76) are in some ways the
same story. Both explain how a small group
of radicals, cut of from the mainstream, has
leveraged the power of digital connectivity. A terrifying band of killers and a pack of
edgy comedians both interpreted the obstacles to their goals as a sort of censorship
whether in the form of military eforts to end
their gruesome atrocities or the admittedly
more prosaic difficulties in getting a prestigious, high-paying gigand routed around
it. Tech-bro posturing aside, the real Silicon Valley has more ambivalence about technologys increasingly dominant place in our
lives than you might expect. The innovators
and engineers who power our future know
that not every possible outcome is a good
one; Koerners story about ISIS is from one
of the darker timelines, a world where the

W
0

0
1

0
6

PORTRAIT BY STANLEY CHOW

PIED PIPERS

invisible infrastructure of the modern age

drives every revolution, no matter who its
victims might be.
All the more ironic, then, that Silicon Valley is such a deft skewering of startup culture, technological obsession, and the clash
of digital versus real life. I suppose I could
take that a little personally, considering that
this magazine has dedicated itself to journalism about all those things. Thats why we
put the shows actors on the coverand on
a cover on the cover. Its everything their
characters would hope for, and its everything the show makes fun of them for wanting which is exactly what made us think
of putting them there. Whos funny now?
So I dont have any problem with the
intersecting through lines of Koerners and
Rafterys stories. Theyre inversions, two
seemingly unrelated worlds that turn out
to reect each other, however distortedly.
We couldnt have predicted these particular
outcomes of everyone getting the Internet,
going on social media, and building doppelgngers who live in virtual space but have
more influence than flesh and blood ever
could. ISIS gured outat around the same
time that multiple-gigging comedians did
that social media lets them trade anonymity
and security for reach, for penetration into a
world already full of signals. That isnt just
their story. Its ours too. And yours, I bet.

SCOT T DADICH
Editor in Chief
@ S DAD ICH

APR 2016

COMMENTS

@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

B O LT F R O M T H E B LU E

COMING SOON: ELECTRIC CARS that can travel 200 miles

on a charge. In the February issue, Alex Davies reported
that General Motors, under the leadership of CEO Mary
Barra, will beat Tesla chief Elon Musk in the race to build
a true long-range electric car when it debuts the Chevy
Bolt later this year (Power Play, issue 24.02). And yes,
we were just as surprised by Chevys supremacy as many
of you. Richly ironic, Davies wrote, for a company that
went bankrupt just seven years ago and killed its own
electric vehicles twice before. But its proof that even
a century-old dog can pull of a spectacular new trick.

Re: Power Play

GM HAS AN IMPRESSIVE
TEAM, AND MARY BARRA IS AN
IMPRESSIVE LEADER.
Ari Jaaksi (@jaaksi) on Twitter

Re: Power Play

The author wrote that chiey
Toyota is missing from the list of
electric car contenders, because
the Japanese are focused on
hydrogen fuel cell cars. Apparently he missed that Toyota has
been leasing a limited number
of Tesla-powered RAV-4s for a
couple of years in California.
Doug Keene via email
Writer Alex Davies responds:
The Tesla-based RAV-4 was
a minor program, born from a
2010 deal between Toyota and

APR 2016

Tesla, that helped the company

meet Californias requirement
that it sell some zero-emission
vehicles. Those cars may still be
on the road, but Toyota ended
the Tesla deal in 2014, no longeroffers new electric RAV-4s,
and is now focused on hydrogenpowered electric cars.
Every EV owner, me included,
has been looking forward to this
momentan afordable electric
car with a 200-mile range. Give
GM credit for pushing ahead.
2JohnLars on WIRED.com

Re: Getting There:

Welcome to the new
age of transportation
Disruption to automotive mobility
is starting to look
very exciting,
assuming the lawmakers remain
pragmatic.
Anisch Bakrania
(@bakraniaa)
on Twitter
I imagine that by
the middle of the
century well use
manual cars the
same way we use
horses today. Well
keep our pride
and joys at a track
or on private land.
Maybe therell
even be a few rural
parts of the world
that allow us to
drive ourselves.
chuckjaeger on
WIRED.com

I understand
recapturing time.
I understand recapturing productivity.
But for some of
us, driving is downtime, without
corporate interruptions, smartphone
chatter, Twitter
feedsall the
interconnectivity
that dominates
modern life.
andybo on
WIRED.com
Self-driving cars
will be standard in
15 to 20 years, will
be exponentially
safer than human
drivers, will allow
faster travel at
higher speeds, and
will completely
negate the concept
of car ownership.
ericmatthew86
on WIRED.com

COMMENTS

Re: Thought Experiment:

A neurologist had electrodes
implanted in his own brain
Awesome article. Phil Kennedys
sentiments toward progress and
his willingness to self-experiment
really resonated. Zenos paradox
was a poetic analogy of the currentstate of things.
Rich Lee on WIRED.com

Re: Why Outlook Is the Future:

Microsofts mobile app rethinks how we
experience email
My outlook on Outlook is: I only use a
Microsoft product if theres no alternative.
In email, there is, so I will not use it. Once
bitten, twice shy.
trisul on WIRED.com
Outlook for iOS gives home users a consistent experience, and the app scales well to
a small device. It gets good reviews because
it bests the native app. Its that simple.
capeleopard on WIRED.com

The world needs more brave

scientists to accelerate progress
and encourage others.
Julia Ogun (@ogunjulia) on Twitter
As Im reading this, Im thinking
how great it would be to have a
direct interface from my thoughts
to typing so I could document all
my H&Ps [history and physical
examinations] while Im walking
from one patient to the next.
Herodotus38 on Reddit

@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

I couldnt help thinking that

his science was a bit mad and
that he had become more
consumed with this evolution
than with trying to heal people.
But the determination!
Yolanda Marie Demotto on
Facebook

Re: Clout: The 20 tech insiders dening the 2016 campa

THESE ARE NOT YOUR

PARENTS POLITICS. ITS
A NEW WORLD.
Kirk Anderson (@kirkrand) on Twitter

Re: Lessons of
Super Bowl 100:
Imagining the
future of football
Steve Rushin is a
genius. This needs to
be time-capsuled for
review after Super
Bowl C. Sorry, 100.
Jamie Kruspel
(@jamiekruspel_TD)
on Twitter
More likely the
actual game will
get more violent
as audiences need
more spectacle to
hook them in to
watch a live event
or watch anything,
really, in real time.
Robot avatars

armed to the teeth

will replace real
players, who end
up manipulating
their robotic
counterparts with
enhanced psionics.
monirom on
WIRED.com
I loved your story
about Super Bowl
100. Theres just
one thing I dont
believe: that the US
in 2066 will be so
backward as to use
yards and inches
especially after the
NFL goes global.
Cmon, guys.
Jakub Chabik
via email

Re: Hi, Human. Lets Rap.: Why

bots need to master small talk
I can see a lot of frustrating
times ahead as we research
how to prevent the robot
from chitchatting away our
timeand, of course, batting
away the commercials that
will later be built into all that
verbal diarrhea.
trisul on WIRED.com
Great, now even robots will
tell me I have to watch Making
a Murderer.
@oddstu on Twitter

UNDO
Alex Skatell is 29, not 26 (Clout, issue 24.02).

APR 2016

ARGUMENT

NO ESCAPE
THE COMPLICATED REALITY
OF VIRTUAL REALITY

ALPHA

BY PETER RUBIN

of being ridiculed
by wired readers of 2076, who
will no doubt happen upon this
essay courtesy of their NeuroVizs Back in My Day function, its worth saying that our
gadgets have never been more
attractive. Between user interface design, user experience
design, and I guess what youd
call design design, our most
forward-looking devices are also
the best looking and the easiest
to use. Our phones are our computers are our stereos are our
brushed slivers of heaven. God,
even thermostats are gorgeous.
Everything is seamless and wireless and frictionless and painless.
But do you know what needs to
be all those things, more than
anythingand isnt? Virtual
reality.VR, as weve all been
hearing for four years now, is
the very manifestation of that
promise. As the boundaries of the
frame melt away, so do the
boundaries of your expeAT THE RISK

APR 2016

SHOUT

ALPHA

rience. You can connect to anyone, anything, anywhere. With

the arrival of the Oculus Rift and
HTC Vive headsets this spring,
thats happening right now.
Whats going on directly outside
of the headsets, though, is a little
less seamless. OK, a lot less. OK,
ne: Its downright clunky.
Every high-end consumer
headset coming out this year
and that includes Sonys PlayStation VRis rmly grounded
by a wired connection. (Im not
talking about underpowered
giveaways like Google Cardboard.) The more ambitious the
device, the messier the physical
setup gets. The HTC Vive, which
supports room-scale VR, lets
you roam around your living
room like youre in the Holodeck. Its amazing. But before
you jump behind the wheel of a
race car or go rock-climbing in
a desolate jungle, youll need to
get all your furniture out of the
damn way. Then youll need to
place motion-tracking base stations around the perimeter of
your new, post-furniture space.
Oh, and youll need to run a cable
down your back to a box that connects to your computer. Inside
the headset youll be realizing
the dawn of a world-changing
technology, but on the outside
youll be a meatsack tethered to
a computer like a Matrix baby.
These gymnastics might sound
standard for any new electronics
product. From videogame consoles to surround-sound setups,
were accustomed (if exhaustedly
so) to a sea of cables and the nicky feng shui of interoperability.
But VR isnt an all-in-one device:
Its a prosthetic one, grafted onto
the already complex organism
that is your desktop computer.
And that makes a frictionless user
experience even more crucial. VR
demonstrations up to nowas

ARGUMENT

weve seen at electronics shows

and developer summits, festivals
and movie theatershave been
immaculate, proctored experiences, free of setup woes and
diagnostics. But now that were
nally forced to re-create it in our
homes, its clear that were just
getting started. As transformative as VRs power is, its rendered

THE MORE AMBITIOUS

THE VR DEVICE, THE MESSIER
THE PHYSICAL SETUP GETS.

moot if the logistics discourage us

from using it. Headsets that stay
in a box are no good to anyone.
BELIEVE ME : It feels awful to
confess that VR is anything but
perfect, to acknowledge even
the slightest reservation in my
otherwise Martin Shkrelilevel
condence in VR. But while Im
a believer, and an early adopter,
Im also a consumer. I think about
what I know VR can be, what it
will be, and I think about me,
today, in my living room, confounded by a calibration issue
with the brand-new PC I bought.
Obviously, the next decade
will bring dizzying leaps forward. Headsets will shrink and
lighten, transforming from
strap-laden albatrosses into
something resembling a pair of
sport sunglasses. Screens will
leapfrog toward a resolution
close to natural human vision.
(Consumer VR clocks in around
2K; the pixels wont seem to vanish until the displays reach 16K.)
The tethers that bind us will disappear, replaced by either small
wearable processing units or all-

Senior editor
Peter Rubin
(@provenself)
writes frequently
about virtual
reality for WIRED.

in-one systems on a chipno

separate PC required.
The people doing the heavy
lifting in VRthe scientists,
the engineers, the developers
know all this. They know this is
a rst step, and they know that
even getting to kinda-medium
mass adoption will be a slow process, let alone the cultural ubiquity that so many people predict.
Cables are going to be a major
obstacle in the VR industry for
a long time, Palmer Luckey
tweeted last year. (Luckey is the
kid who jump-startedand Kickstartedthe current age of VR
back in 2012, when he cobbled
together a Rift prototype out of
black tape and a ski-goggle strap.)
Yet analysts and forecasters are
falling over each other with their
bullishness. A Goldman Sachs
report in January claimed that
VR could be a $182billion market
by 2025potentially twice the
size of the videogame industry.
Expectations like that depend
on a first wave of high-end VR
devices that you go back to.
Theres a reason that when you
look at photos of people in VR
headsets, they have that same
slack-jawed half-grin on their
faces. Thats not just fantasy
its feeling. But that feeling will
soon need to be easier to come
by. In a time of unprecedented
aesthetic consideration, those
wires will have to fall away so
the experience of putting the
headset on can be as smooth as
what happens inside it. Otherwise, theres a nontrivial (and
nonvirtual)chance that 2016
becomes the nal wistful footnote in VRs star-crossed story. 

APR 2016

HUH?

CALL ME
ANYTHING
STARTUP NAMES
MAKE NO SENSE

SILICON VALLEY, youve lost your mind. Your company names are
made-up garbage nonsense! Ever heard of Kabbage? Yes, thats a
real namefor a company that ofers small-business loans online.
Does the name make a lick of sense? Absolutely not. Then theres
Sprinklr. We wont bore you with what it does, but we will tell you
it doesnt sprinkl anything. And the less said about MuleSoft, the
better. Heres a list of some of the most valuable startups in the
world (in no particular order). Each is worth at least $1 billion.
OK, we made one of them upa fake unicorn, if you will, in a forest of real unicorns. But with ridiculous names like these, we bet
you wont be able to nd it.* Julia Greenberg

Actifio
Adyen
Anaplan
Automattic
Avant
BlaBlaCar
CureVac
Delivery Hero
Docker
Ele.me
EleFant

*Its Snapdeal. Not! Thats worth $5 billion. Delivery Hero? Farfetch?! Wrong again. The fake one is EleFant.

RULES OF
AMUSEMENT
KEANU S

The brilliance of Key & Peeles sketch comedy lay in its absurdist handling of themes that others
wouldnt touch. But in Keanu, out in April, cowriters Alex Rubens and Jordan Peele, both
of K&P, had to expand that signature style to an engaging two-hour movie. When we asked
Rubens to distill his comedy writing experience, he gave us these key (and Peele) takeaways.
Comedy Needs Drama: Rubens points to pursuing delight as the guiding principle behind
both K&P and Keanubut delight depends on seriousness. In order to get a laugh, he says,
there needs to be a turn. Tear It Up: Rubens describes both Jordan Peele and Communitys
Dan Harmon as capable of looking at something thats working and saying, We have to
start over. Thats sometimes terrifying and maddening, but it always results in something
better. Flying Solo Is Overrated: Once wary of collaboration, Rubens has embraced it. A
group of smart, funny peoplewho actually care and are all devoted to trying to make something goodcan come up with an idea that no single person ever could. CHARLEYLOCKE

ZOHAR LAZAR

Fanatics
Farfetch
ForeScout
GrabTaxi
Gusto
HelloFresh
Houzz
Infinidat
InMobi
ironSource
JustFab
Kabam
Kabbage
Klarna
Lookout
MarkLogic
Medallia
MongoDB
Mozido
Mu Sigma
MuleSoft
Nutanix
Pluralsight
Powa
Quikr
SimpliVity
Snapdeal
SoFi
Sprinklr
Stemcentrx
Tango
Tanium
Thumbtack
UCar
Uptake
Wish
ZocDoc

PHOTOGRAPH: STEVE DIETL/ WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.

ALPHA

ALPHA

WHATS INSIDE

JOHNSONS
NO MORE
TANGLES SPRAY
UN-KNOT
YOUR LOCKS
Behentrimonium
Methosulfate
The kryptonite of
tangles, BTMS is a
molecule derived
from rapeseed oil,
and its engineered
for super-desnarling
properties:Its positively charged head
cozies up to keratin, the negatively
charged protein in
hair, and its long
carbon-chain tail (22
carbons!) coats the
strands, making them
slippery and their
knots easy to untie.

Cetearyl Alcohol

Dimethicone

BTMSs partner
in crimetheyre so
tight that BTMS
is often mixed with
cetearyl alcohol
before its sold to
manufacturers like
Johnsons. A combo
of two chemicals,
cetyl alcohol and
stearyl alcohol, its
an emulsier that
helps stabilize the
whole formula.

This is a two-for-one.
Not only does the
silicon-based compound make hair
shiny, frictionless,
and easy to comb,
but it also keeps
liquid from frothing
up when sprayed.
Because, cmon, this
is a hair spray, not
a hair foam.

Sodium
Benzoate,
Citric Acid

Another silicon-based
hair-friction reducer.
No, its not totally
redundant. See, trisiloxane evaporates.
So instead of clinging
to hair and gunking it
up, trisiloxane slowly
wafts away, leaving
dry hair softer and
lighter. Youll never
know it was there.

Whats the point of

no more tangles if
you end up spritzing
yourself with mold
and bacteria? A preservative like sodium
benzoate keeps
nasty pathogens out
of the spray, even as
the bottle sits in the
warm, moist petri dish
otherwise known as
your bathroom. Citric
acid lowers pH, which
helps BTMS remain
stable and kills a few
uninvited critters too.
These two widely
used chemicals also
show up in acidic
foods like juice, soda,
and vinaigrettebut
dont go putting this
spray on your salad.

THE VOORHES

Trisiloxane

Polysorbate 20
Johnsons spray consists of ingredients
that have to cooperate. Polysorbate
20 is a stellar emulsier thats likely
here to ensure a unied front. It binds to
both water and oily
compounds, forming a bridge between
antagonistic types
of molecules. There,
now lets all be
friends and work this
comb through that
rats nest.
SARAH ZHANG

APR 2016

ALPHA

COMICS

Panther Anatomy
THE AESTHETIC

THE STORY

The opening page

of Black Panther #1
begins with Black
PantherTChallas
alter egoin crisis.

Coates will attract a

non-comic-reading
crowd, who Stelfreeze
is welcoming with a
more naturalistic look.

POWER MOVE
TA-NEHISI COATES
PUTS HIS SPIN
ON BLACK PANTHER
GIVEN THE HONORS bestowed on journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates

in the past yeara MacArthur genius grant for his writing on race and politics, a National Book Award for his bestselling memoir, Between the World and Meits a pleasant
surprise that his next major project is a comic book. But
the Atlantic magazine correspondent is an avowed Marvel fanboy, and the fact that hes writing a new series for
Black Panther, comics rst mainstream black superhero,
feels like the perfect pairing of subject and scribe. Black
Panther debuts in April, with art by Brian Stelfreeze, and in
May the character joins the Marvel Cinematic Universe in
Captain America: Civil War. (A stand-alone movie, helmed
by Creeds Ryan Coogler, is due in 2018.) Coates shares
his take on comics newest claws clbre. MarkYarm

What sold you

on the Black Panther
gig?
I mean, it was Marvel
and it was a comic
book. I would have
written anything
for them. When I
started reading comics, there was no
Black Panther series
in motion, and he
wasnt in the Avengers at that time
either, so I wasnt
as up on him as
other people. Once
I went back and
did the really heavy
research, I began
to feel like I had
my particular take
on the character.

APR 2016

The plot involves

a terrorist attack on
Black Panthers kingdom of Wakanda,
which spurs a popular revolt. How
influenced were
you by the ongoing
war on terror?
A lot. I was also influenced by the recent
wave of revolution
through the Middle
East and the American Revolution.
Once these revolutions are done
they might be perceived as heroic,
but it doesnt always
look heroic at the
time. It might look
downright villainous.

I mean, the American revolutionaries

tarred and feathered people.
Whats your take
on the politics of
Wakanda?
Wakanda is the
most advanced
nation on earth,
and yet it has the
most primitive form
of governance on
the planet: absolute
monarchy. The one
case an absolute
monarch can make
is I keep the people safe. What happens in a country
where thats no longer true?

THE DESIGN

THE SUIT

Stelfreeze says the

conflict-filled background
panels add to the
burden resting on Black
Panthers shoulders.

Why does the

comics story arc,
A Nation Under
Our Feet, share its
title with Steven
Hahns 2004 Pulitzer
Prizewinning
book about black
political power?
Hahns book is all
about the grassroots.
Hes interested in
the little movements
of the people who
are underneath, of
the slaves whose
stories havent
been told. As much
as this is the story
of TChalla, youre
going to see him
grappling with the
nation underneath.

BRIAN STELFREEZE

Black Panther already

has one of the most
badass uniforms in comics, Coates saysso
they didnt change much.

And supervillains
with cool powers.
Lets not forget that.
Its not a dissertation.
Did you ever feel
you were getting
too didactic?
Not reallyI have
a venue to express
my political thought.
This isnt my chance
to talk about #BlackLivesMatter in comic
book form. This is
not a propaganda
sheet. This is supposed to be fun to
read. The politics are
in the background.
Whats in front is
people punching
each other.

ALPHA

Jimsonweed

Area occupied by plant

Known by science
types as Datura
stramonium, this
member of the
nightshade family
is thoroughly toxic
and can bring on
hallucinations.

Australia

5.8 million
square miles

Africa

Pacific
Islands

SOURCES: UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ, CZECH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, IDIV LEIPZIG, UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, UNIVERSITY OF GTTINGEN; BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY FELIX PETRUKA

Asia

INFOPORN
Europe

FROM AMERICA
WITH SEEDS
OUR GLOBAL
PLANT INVASION

Plants native to

by the name. The Jerusalem

North America
artichoke isnt native to the holy land. Its an American plant that has invited itself to dinner everywhere from Libya to New Zealand on the basis
of good looks and great taste. And its far from
the only North American species to embark on
a conquest of foreign territory. The black locust
tree, originally imported to France in the 1600s,
has become one of the most invasive trees in
Europe. Even sneakier, the common tumbleweed
has spread to environments as remote as Saudi
Arabia and Siberia by hitching a ride with American crop seed. Human activity has completely
reshuffled the worlds plant life, and more than
13,000 species are now living outside their natural habitat. Thats quadruple the expected number, according to University of Konstanz ecologist
Mark van Kleunen, who, along with his colleagues,
recently documented the great rerooting. Nearly a third of those expats
Jerusalem artichoke
started out in Canada, the US, or MexFarmers grow
ico, and this map shows the 15 plants
this tasty tuber
that have most successfully emigrated
on purpose in
many placesbut
abroad. None of them has a passport.
it escapes and
JonathonKeats
displaces native

520 DESIGN

Mexican poppy

Spotted spurge

Century plant

Common evening primrose

Sulfur cosmos

Canada goldenrod

Common sunflower

Common tumbleweed

Shaggy soldier

Jerusalem artichoke

Black locust

Cultivated tobacco

Sweet potato

Jimsonweed

species too.

Red-root amaranth

DONT BE FOOLED

South America

APR 2016

ALPHA

PROCESS

HOW TO MAKE CONDOMS

DIP THEM, WASH THEM,
ZAP THEM AND ENLARGE THEM
coming out and your clothes are coming off. Its
time for a spring fling, baby. But are you ready for action?
Sales for one of the worlds biggest condom manufacturers,
Ansell, heat up with the temperature, whether its the companys Lifestyles line in the US and Australia, KamaSutra in
India, Manix in France, or Blowtex in Brazil. To keep up with
demand, 5 million condoms slide of factory lines every day
hopefully never to slip of anything else again. L E X I PA N D E L L

THE SUN IS

1. Harvest

2. Dip

Not far from Ansells

factory in Thailand,
workers carve shallow grooves into the
bark of rubber trees
so the milky latex
inside can ow along
a metal gutter into a
cup below. Each tree
produces 20 to 40
grams of the stuf per
tapping and can handle extractions every
few days for more
than 20 years. The
latex is spun in a centrifuge to separate
out the solids, resulting in a concentrated
batch thats then
rmed up with chemical stabilizers.

Dong-shaped glass
molds are doubledipped in a vat of
latex (or, for latexfree condoms, a synthetic polyisoprene
cocktail). Once the
molds cool, a blast of
water strips the condoms of. Ansells
most common mold
is for the straight
shaft, a standard
condom with a reservoir tip. But condom
molds can be made
magnum-size, studded, ridged, or ared
for a more ergonomic t. A rim is
added, and the rubber is vulcanized.

3. Wash & Dry

A rinse cycle
removes any excess
residue from the
condoms. Before
they reach the dryer,
theyre coated with
cornstarch powder
so the latex doesnt
stick to itself.

3
IAN TEH

4. Zap

5. Squirt & Wrap

6. Test Again

Each condom, now

resting on a metal
phallus, is jolted
with electricity to
ensure its holefree. If the machine
detects voltage
passing through an
opening, the condom is tossed in a
reject bin. The rest
are sucked up in
tubes, rolling the
condoms into their
familiar coin shape.

Little tubes douse

the condoms with a
variety of optional
coatings: benzocaine(the same stuf
thats used to numb
toothaches), warming lubricant, or
avors like watermelon, chocolate,
or margarita (gag).
A hot metal press
seals the condoms
in foil wrappers;
another machine
stamps on expirationdates. Finally,
a packing machine
readies boxes for
shipping to frisky
customersand
banana-wielding
sex-ed teachers
everywhere.

Workers pull some

rubbers from each
batch for random
inspection. Each
country has diferent standards that
condoms must be
able to tolerate. In
the US, they need
to be sturdy enough
to hold at least two
basketballs worth of
airthey can blow
up to about 2 feet
long before they
burst. Theyre lled
with water to test for
leaks, stretched to
the breaking point,
poked, prodded, and
nally aged for seven
daysall to make
sure they hold up in
your time of need.
5

APR 2016

ALPHA

SOCIAL MEDIA

BYE-BYE, BIRDIE
MY PLAN TO
BLOW UP TWITTER
Moments? Yeah, no. Old users are
annoyed; new users dont get it. Harassers are legion. Top
talent is jumping ship. The stock price keeps falling. Cofounder
and old-new CEO Jack Dorsey insists that Twitters mission
remains the same: Its a public messaging service that allows
anyones voice to reverberate instantly around the world.
Fine! Theres just one problemmessaging has fundamentally changed. This is the age of Snapchat, where you send
something and, poof, its gone. Tweets, on the other hand,
last forever. Thats why you agonize over those 140 characters, second-guessing your bad puns or tasteless jokes.
Sure, you can delete single tweets, but weird social pressure
practically forbids it. So instead, like so many tattoos, your
history of ill-advised of-the-cuf spasms of verbal outrage
becomes a permanent reminder of all the temporary feels.
This is not sustainable. But the solution is simple: Tweets
must be transitory. Imagine joining conversations without feeling like your thoughts will come back to haunt you.
Imagine a function that lets you set a tweet to expire along
with a joke (#thedress, the GOP debates). Imagine being able
to wipe your feed once a month, or once a week, as the news
cycle shifts. Imagine, really, the ability to delete all your
old tweets en masse. The glory! The freedom! (Third-party
services will do this for you already, proving the desperate need.) Never worry about overtweeting again. Facebook is already our digital archive; Twitter should be our
town hall. So @jack, live in the momentthis moment
and please, oh please, free the tweet. Julia Greenberg
TWITTER IS A MESS.

In-experience purchases

BY JO N J. E I LE N B E R G

CHARTGEIST

Apple VR
Expectations

Reaction to
Peach

Debuts on 4/20

Whoa! A hot new social network.

Interwoven potlines

Ive got to sign up.

Buzzworthy performances

OK. Now what?

Wait what were we

talking about?

I wonder whats happening

on Facebook

Milanese Loop headband

Flash-compatible
Something revolutionary
Crappy integrated earbuds

HOW MUCH TO EXPECT IT

APR 2016

High Hopes for Comedy

Centrals Time Traveling Bong

MEH

POTENCY

DUUUDE!

ALVARO DOMINGUEZ

PREVALENCE

ALPHA

MOVIES

The East Coast

of the US at night

HEAVENLY FEATURE
SHOOTING AN IMAX
FILM FROM SPACE
The First Orbital
Selfie Stick
To film themselves,
astronauts rigged
a camera to a pole.

0
4

LEXICON

JARGON
WATCH

FOR HER NEW Imax documentary about planet Earth, director Toni Myers knew

she wanted footage from the International Space Station. But she couldnt send
up a crate of old-school Imax equipmenttransport ships have more important
cargo to carry. So astronauts shot A Beautiful Planet, which comes out in April,
entirely with digital cameras. Theyre smaller and easier to use than their analog
predecessors, and Myers didnt have to wait around for the footageit downloaded straight to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Cinematographer James
Neihouse trained the astronauts to frame, light, and shoot footage from aboard
the ISS. The crewwhich included social media sensations Scott Kelly and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforettiset up Canon DSLRs around the station,
shooting through windows to capture rare views of earthly phenomena, like the
northern lights. The astronauts even replaced the interior panel of one window
to get a smudge- and scratch-free shot, which pretty much took an act of Congress, Neihouse says. Over the course of lming, the cameras circled Earth more
than 7,000 times, eventually traveling some 189 million miles. But the cameras
are unlikely to make the 250-mile trip back to the surface. Its cheaper to let them
burn up on reentry with the rest of the stations trash. SigneBrewster

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF IMAX CORPORATION; CAMERA ILLUSTRATION BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN; JARGON WATCH ILLUSTRATION BY L-DOPA

light recycling
n. / 'lt r-'s-kli /
'
Converting the heat
from a lightbulb into
more light. By coating old-school tungsten laments with
photonic crystals,
researchers are making incandescents
that could beat CFLs
in eiciency.
pedothems
n. pl. / 'pe-d -themz /
Mineral layers that
form around pebbles
over thousands of
years. Like tree rings,
they hold a chronicle of climate conditions.From the Greek
word for soil (pedon),
pedothems are a
dirt-cheap source
of priceless data.
lemmium
n. / 'le- m- m /
'
A proposed name
for a new element
in the periodic table,
honoring Lemmy
Kilmister, the late,
legendary frontman
of Motrhead. Element 115 is a volatile,
superheavy metal.
Pogojet
n. / p-g-jet /
A nonlethal gun that
varies bullet speed,
enabling it to shoot
much farther than
standard riot gear
without becoming
deadly up close. A
piston in the bullet
res it pogo-stickstyle, then exhaustgas jets tweak the
velocity in air.
J O N AT H O N K E AT S

APR 2016

ALPHA

MR. KNOW-IT-ALL

Q:

MY GIRLFRIEND GOT ME
A FITBIT, BUT THE DATA MAKES ME
FEEL LAZY AND ASHAMED.
DO I HAVE TO KEEP USING IT?
BY JON MOOALLEM

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with

my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song Fix
You came ona song, I remembered reading, that Chris
Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after
her father diedand I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all
over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had
torn them apart or whetheras these things often gothey hadnt
been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so
much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever
had been luminescent about their love. And thats when I thought about
you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.I also thought about Steve
Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys
walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. I started receiving daily updates,
she told me, about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed.
After a few weeks, I was like, Hey, Dad, youre really treating this like
a job. (She was also like, hey, Dad, I dont need all these updates.)

A:

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because

she studies consumer behavior at Duke
Universitys Fuqua School of Business, she
designed a study to test whether, as she put
it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to suck the enjoyment out of previously
pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.
Etkins study will be published in the April
issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
She ran a series of six experiments. In one,
for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack
of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking
how many shapes one group colored in while
letting others color freely, unencumbered by
quantication. She did similar experiments
with walking and reading, and in every one
discovered the same basic result. Measurement led participants to color more shapes,
walk more steps, and read more pages. At
the same time, however, it led people to
enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.
In short, people did more but felt worse doing
it. Tracking redened fun activities as work.
One problem here is that by focusing on
quantiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people
stick with activities. Therefore, measurement may sometimes actually undermine
sustainable behavior change, Etkin writes.
Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to
their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.
But you know all this. Its precisely the cycle
of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, alicting you: that feeling
that you can never take enough steps or unlock
enough REM sleep. (When you try your best
but you dont succeed When you feel so tired
but you cant sleep.) And, as it alicts you, it
widens the emotional space between you and
your girlfriendit feeds a smoldering grudge,
because she handcufed you with this thing.
She tried to x you, my friend. But her xing
made you feel more broken.
So youve got to talk to your girlfriend
and take the Fitbit of, even though Etkins
research suggests this is the worst thing you
could do. (When people start tracking then
suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they
also lose the benet of increased outputa
double whammy of underperformance and
joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the
only way for you and your partner to remain
consciously coupled. 

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

MRKNOWITALL@WIRED.COM

APR 2016

ALPHA

UBER OPENED AN AUTONOMOUS-DRIVING RESEARCH LAB IN PITTSBURGH LAST YEAR // NATIVES PROUDLY REFER TO THEMSELVES AS YINZERS // THE HILLY
C I T Y H AS 7 1 2 P U B L I C STA I R C AS E S , T H E M O ST O F A N Y C I T Y I N T H E C O U N T RY // A C A R N E G I E M E L LO N P R O F E S S O R I N V E N T E D T H E F I R ST E M OT I C O N I N 1 9 8 2 : - )

WIRED CITIES

YINZ GOIN TO PITTSBURGH!

THE RUST BELTS NEW TECH HUB
Do
For the best view of
downtowns bridges
and skyscrapers,
take a ride on the
Duquesne Incline,
an old-school funicular that lumbers to the
top of Mount Washington at 6 mph. Challenge a robot to a
game of air hockey
at the Carnegie Science Center, home
to the worlds largest
permanent robotics
exhibit. Take a 75minute trip to Fallingwater, a Frank Lloyd
Wright architectural
masterpiece thats
cantilevered above a
gushing waterfall.

The self-anchored Roberto Clemente Bridge was constructed entirely from steel manufactured by local mills.

Gooskis is like Iggy

and the Stooges
on draft: aggressive
tattoos, electric
nostalgia,and ample
but good-natured attitude slopping across
the bar and into your
lap. Dont wear
your good clothes.
Loukas Barton,
anthropology professor,
University of Pittsburgh

lon and the University of Pittsburgh used to

ee the city in droves after graduation, but
young engineers now have good reason to
stay put. Not only is Pittsburgh bursting
with cool, its fast becoming a center of innovation, luring entrepreneurs and venture
capitalists alike. Pittsburghs new geeky
edge will be on display this April at Tekko,
an annual celebration of Japanese pop culture that draws thousands of anime fans
and cosplayers to downtown. When theyre
not masquerading as Cowboy Bebop characters, visitors will get to explore a city full
of robotics startups, avant-garde art, and
boisterous dives. Brendan I. Koerner

See
Pay homage to one
of Pittsburghs favorite sons at the Andy
Warhol Museum,
where 900 paintings
and 350 films created by the eccentric
genius now reside.
Tour the splendid
Nationality Rooms
in the Cathedral of
Learning, a 535-foottall Gothic Revival

ROSS MANTLE

tower on the Pitt

campus; each of the
30 rooms is decorated to honor a particular country or
ethnic group whose
immigrants helped
build the city. Meditate on the impact
of genetic engineering at the Center for
PostNatural History,
which hosts a vault
of animal mutants.

Eat
Gorge on hard-tofind Hungarian delicacies like palacsinta
and hortobgyi pie
at Jzsa Corner, a
shoebox-sized restaurant where seat
neighbors are your
new best friends.
Splurge on exquisite
cocktails and succulent meats at Bar
Marco, located in a
refurbished 1890s
firehouse. At Arsenal
Cider House & Wine
Cellar, pair your
pints or bottles with
pizza or BBQ from
visiting food trucks.

APR 2016

ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD

THE TECH TALENT produced by Carnegie Mel-

ALPHA

CLIVE THOMPSON

Purists sniff. What have we become, children with crayons? Surely words alone
can convey emotional tone? Maybeif
youre a novelist with years of experience
in the patient forging and editing of prose,
McCulloch says. But we thumbfolk are writing speedily and conversationally, in bursts
on SMS or Facebook. Of the 20 most frequently used emoji, nearly all are hearts,
smilies, or hand gesturesthe ones that
emote. In an age of rapid chatter, emoji
prevent miscommunication by adding an
emotional tenor to cold copy.
We also use emoji to convey a sort of
ambient presence, when words arent
appropriate. Ryan Kelly, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, has found
that when texters finish a conversation,
they often trade a few emoji as nonverbal
denouement. You might not have anything
else left to say, Kelly says, but you want
to let the person know that youre thinking of them. So you send a couple of pandas. Or telescopes! Or some other symbol
that seems witty. This is another aspect of
emojimany are open-ended. Youd think
that would make them less language-like,
but in fact friends use that malleability to
invest specific emoji with their own private
meanings. (My wife and I use the Easter
Island head to connote absurdity.)
Indeed, people are even developing syntax and rules of use for emoji. Schnoebelen
found that when we use face emoji, we tend
to put them before other objects. If you text
about a late flight, youll put an unhappy
face followed by a plane, not the reverse.
In linguistic terms, this is called conveying
stance. Just as with in-person talk, the
expression illustrates our stance before
weve spoken a word.
All you social dystopians can unclutch
your pearls; no linguist thinks this bodes the
end of writing. Text is our most powerful,
go-to communication tool. For most people,
these ideograms are an upgrade. And what
an unusual one! Language always changes,
of course; slang is born, prances, and dies.
But its exceedingly raremaybe unprecedentedfor a phonetic alphabet to suddenly
acquire a big expansion pack of ideograms.
In an age where we write more than ever,
emoji is the new language of the heart. 

SMILEY PEOPLE
EMOJI: THINK OF THEM
AS AN UPGRADE
BY CLIVE THOMPSON

something curious about

why people use the skull emoji. Schnoebelen is a linguist and the
chief analyst for Idibon, a rm that interprets linguistic data. So
recently he got interested in emoji. He analyzed a million social
media posts containing those familiar little pictograms and found
that when people talk about their phones theyre 11 times more
likely to use the skull. Weird, right? But Schnoebelen thinks it
makes sense. Our phones, he points out, are social lifelines, and
when they malfunctiona weak signal, short battery lifewere
distraught. When you dont have access to your phone, or when
nobodys texting you, youre socially dead, he says. So we reach for
an emoji thats pregnant with that metaphor: the skull. Fully 92
percent of all people online use emoji now, and one-third of them
do so daily. On Instagram, nearly half of the posts contain emoji, a
trend that began in 2011 when iOS added an emoji keyboard. Rates
soared higher when Android followed suit two years later. Emoji
are so popular theyre killing of netspeak. The more we use
,
the less we use LOL and OMG. In essence, were watching the
birth of a new type of language. Emoji assist in a peculiarly modern task: conveying emotional nuance in short, online utterances.
Theyre trying to solve one of the big problems of writing online,
which is that you have the words but you dont have the tone of
voice, as my friend Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist and author, says.
TYLER SCHNOEBELEN HAS DISCOVERED

ZOHAR LAZAR

CLIVE@CLIVETHOMPSON.NET

SONY XBR-X930D 65-INCH

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

FETISH
SET
TO STUN
APR 2016

YOUR NEXT TV will be a 4K set, but do your eyeballs a favor and splurge on one that can
also handle high-dynamic-range content. The hot new shit in television tech, HDR screens
display a seemingly innite range of color with razor-sharp contrast and insane detail
even in the inkiest shadows and brightiest brights. The result is super-dramatic, hyperrealistic images: moonlit ocean waves that threaten to drench your carpet and explosions
that nearly singe your eyebrows. Sony has managed to pack the bright-as-blazes lighting
array required to deliver that enhanced picture into a panel less than an inch and a half
thick. Sure, HDR content is still scarce, but Mozart in the Jungle is streaming in HDR on
Amazon right now, and Sonys own Ultra HDR streaming service launches this year. Until
then, stream whatever you want with the built-in Android TV software
and use the set as an ultraluxe, dongle-free Chromecast. T I M M OY N I H A N

$5,000

JUSTIN FANTL

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

SMART REMOTES

HEAD-TO-HEAD
CLICKBAIT
The latest cofee-table candy bars control more
than just Fargo binges. DAVID PIERCE

Logitech
Harmony Elite
Connected
home connoisseurs
BEST FOR:

Smart homes are a

mess. What do you
mean my lightbulbs
arent compatible
with my dishwasher?
The Harmony Elite
ties all your so-called
smart appliances
together. With one
tap on its touchscreen, you can turn
on the TV and ip to
the news while also
brewing the cofee
and telling your Nest
to heat the living
room to 69 degrees.

$349

Savant
Remote + Host
BEST FOR: Set-top
streamer collectors

Even with fewer buttons than most smart

remotes, Savants
sleek clicker herds
your many boxes
Sonos, TiVo, Xbox,
Apple TVinto one
easy interface. Use
voice commands to
change channels,
switch sources, or
(with the optional
Lamp Control) even
dim the lights in the
room. Youll have to
nd a place for the
oddly shaped hub,
but at least its pretty.

$499

CANT I USE
MY PHONE?

If I sat you on your couch and blindfolded you, you could probably still turn on
the TV, switch to the right input, and nd Storage Wars. But what if I handed you
your phone instead? Could you swipe to unlock, tap the appropriate icon, type
something intelligible, and hit Play? What if I handed you my phone?! Now that
our TVs, lights, washing machines, and children are connected to the Internet,
we need a universal remote control to rule them all. But your smartphone is not
the answer. Its a tangle of folders, menus, and macros that only you know how to operate. What are you
going to do, leave your phone with the babysitter? Keep a list of required apps on the fridge? A good
remote works because anyone can gure it out. And a good remote haswait for itbuttons. You can
click buttons without looking down in the middle of the big play. Theyre always in the same place.
Buttons dont force you to download an app just to turn the AC up. Some smart remotes have a screen
for complicated things, and thats newho knows whats coming online next? But if you ever see
a slider where there should be volume buttons, take it back to Best Buy. Get a clicker that clicks. D.P.

JUSTIN FANTL

APR 2016

ter of your TV and

turn the boxes slightly
inward so they face
that spot. Start at 20
degrees, then try
tighter angles until
it sounds best. For
group viewing, widen
the soundstage by
twisting the speakers
slightly back toward
straight-on.

WIRELESS SPEAKERS

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

HOW TO
360 SOUND
Place your gear properly to envelop your ears
in cinematic splendor. MICHAEL CALORE

Subwoofer
1

Center Channel
This speaker handles
most of the spoken
dialog, so it should
sit as close to the
characters mouths
as possible: centerbottom of your TV.
Is your set bolted to
the wall? Mount the
center channel, too.
Is the dialog quiet
while the rest of the
soundtrack is deafening? If you have a
proper home theater
systemof course

you doyou should

be able to boost just
the center to bring
order and balance to
your sonic universe.

Low frequencies
are diicult for your
brain to locate spatially, so you can plop
your sub anywhere it
sounds good. To test
your arrangement,
play something with
a lot of bass and slide
the speaker around.
A few minutes of Marley will help you nd
a primo spot. Dont
shove it right up
against a wall or into
a cornerthat makes
the low end boomy
and overwhelming
instead of punchy.

Stereo Left
and Right
To squeeze the most
syrup out of Hans
Zimmers strings,
place these speakers
a few feet from either
side of the screen,
then toe in: nd the
spot on your sofa that
lines up with the cen-

Surround
Channels
These are for ambient efectscars
passing, birds chirping, distant gunshots.
Place them on stands
or shelves just above
ear level and aimed
at your head, either
beside or just behind
the couch. Move any
sound-wave-sapping
objects between
you and the speaker.
Never put them on
the oor: It ruins the
surround efect.
5

The Room
Yes, your decor may
be deadening the
drama. A carpet is
better than bare parquet, and the more
echo-killing curtains
or fabric wall coverings, the more
sonic swagger that
soundtrack will have.

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you ask? Clear your calendaryoull be watching
every movie you love all over again. $5,094

JUSTIN FANTL

MY SPACE: OSWALDS MILL AUDIO

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

THE HOUSE
OF THE SPEAKER
Enter the lair of obsessed audio gear wizard Jonathan Weiss.
QUIZ A HI-FI ENTHUSIAST about radical speaker design and youre bound to get a
disquisition on Oswalds Mill Audio. Known among the analog cognoscenti simply
as OMA, this boutique company manufactures the kind of rareed components
that audiophiles drool over: 7-foot-tall loudspeakers with conical horns, glowing
tube amps nestled in walnut chassis, and turntables with slate plinths as thick
as phone books. It is here, in a 19th-century stone fortress in rural Pennsylvania
lled with enough vintage audio hardware
2
to stock a museum, that OMA founder Jonathan Weiss envisions, assembles, tests, and
tweaks his next masterpiece. Rene Chun

This Old House

Oswalds Mill is
a four-story,
10,000-square-foot
house-mill in scenic
Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Brawny
German immigrants
used to grind flour
here between massive millstones. Built
around 1800, its
now the only known
house-mill left in
the country. All these
things about the
millits immense
size, secluded setting, and historic significanceappealed
to Weiss. So he

bought the place

and electrified it. As
it happens, those
2-foot-thick stone
walls make it the perfect lab for developing audio products.
2

Movie Muscle
Long before Quentin Tarantino needed
special film projectors
for The Hateful Eight,
Walt Disney needed
special amplifiers to
screen Fantasia in
theaters. This is an
original 1940 RCA
system used in one of
those venues. It has

four separate amplifiers, one for each

sound channel. Touch
the wrong leads
and youll get zapped
with 1,500 volts of
DC juice. These
beasts were locked
in cages to safeguard projectionists,
but Weiss prefers to
keep his triode amps
under glass.

Variac, slowly bring

up the voltage, and
they start to glow
its like magic. A
Variac is essential
when working with
old electronics; it prevents voltage spikes
and surges that
can fry your gear.
4

Groove Crush
3

Amped Up

Just your average

collection of vintage
RCA amplifiers. It
blows my mind that
these machines still
work, Weiss says.
I hook them up to a

Weiss record collection is big. Conservative count: 12,000.

His go-to reference
discs for setting up
a turntable system
are Ser Una Noche
and La Segunda, both
produced by Santiago Vazquez and

APR 2016

Todd Garnkle. In the

jazz stacks, Mood
Indigo from the reissue of Masterpieces
by Ellington, paired
with a good mono
cartridge, gets a lot
of play. Those giant
horns, an OMA signature, are designed
to work with Weiss
low-wattage triode
tube amps.
5

Rock Solid
A couple of Weiss
personally modied
record players.
The Technics SP-10
MKIII direct-drive
turntable on the left
rests on a vibrationsmothering, 210pound slate plinth

(quarried and cut

locally). The Gates
CB-100 on the right
is a 16-inch transcription turntable.
In the 1940s, live
radio shows were
recorded on 16-inch
acetates, and
stations around the
country needed
a turntable big
enough to play those
discs. On the lower
shelf is one of
Weiss dual-chassis
phono preamps.
6

Horn of Plenty
The hefty black contraption attached to
the back of that gorgeous walnut horn is
the RCA MI-1428B,

a magnicent piece
of engineering that
went out of production in 1939. It was the
best eld coil driver
of its era. Some connoisseurs think its
still the best. Weiss
cornered the market
on these beauties
long ago; studying
them is part of OMAs
R&D. Inside that silver
thing that looks like
a perforated cofee
can is a tiny ame in
a quartz cell heated
to 1,000 degrees Celsius. This is mad scientist tech from the
1930s: a tweeter with
zero mass, just the
thing for transmitting high-frequency
sound waves.

REED YOUNG

PAY GRADES
The proportion of the worlds primary-school
students enrolled in private institutions.
FILE://EDUCATION

13%

12%

11%

10%

Kindergarten Inc.
How the company
behind Common
Core and the US
testing-industrial
complex plans
to conquer
the entire world.

GROOMING BY JOANNA BERNACKA; CHART SOURCE: THE WORLD BANK

BY ANYA KAMENETZ

F O R D E C A D E S , the
major landmark of Balut, Tondo,
a densely populated slum
squeezed against Manilas North
Harbor, was a monumental pile
of often-smoldering trash nicknamed Smokey Mountain. It
used to be sort of pretty, actually, says Nellie Cruz, a lifelong resident. She points to the
spot, now bulldozed, across a
reeking, garbage-strewn canal
from where we stand with her
13-year-old son, Aki.
The scene is humble, yes, but
Nellie, a single mother, isnt destitute or desperate. Shes a modern, upwardly mobile megacity
dweller, the kind youre equally
likely to meet in Shanghai or

APR 2016

Parents know that

education for their
children is the only
route out of poverty,
says Pearsons
chief education adviser,
Michael Barber.

2003

So Paulo, except with better

English skillsthe legacy of
the Philippines history as a US
colony and one key to its current economic growth.
Both Nellie and Aki carry
iPhones, for example, though
the devices were given to them
by Nellies sister, a nurse, who
lives in the San Francisco Bay
Area. The Cruzes immaculate,
doll-size family compound has a
caged rooster in the front yard,
Christian inspirational wall
decals, and a strong Wi-Fi signal. In contrast to the screentime panic among US parents,
Nellie is OK with her only child
spending time in his attic bedroom, gaming and browsing
science pages on Facebook,
rather than out on the street
exposed to the pounding sun,
the omnipresent lth, and the
drug gangs on the corner.
The same protective but
ambitious impulses were at
work when it came to choosing
a school for Aki. He attended
Catholic institutions when he
was younger. Then Nellie lost
her job in marketing. So for
sixth grade, Aki went off to
public school.
There were 58 students in
one classroom, he tells me.
Only some of us, the Section
1stop performersgot to
sit in the classroom. The others
studied in the corridor. Nellie didnt like her quiet, polite

JAMES DAY

2013

2008

child having to mix it up with

kids from all walks of life, as
she puts it.
So for seventh grade they
found a new option at the other
end of the street from the public school, housed in a former
umbrella factory. The sign outside reads a p e c s c h o o l s :
affordable world class
education from ayala and
pearson.
APEC isnt just new to Tondo
or Manila. Its a diferent kind
of school altogether: one thats
part of a for-profit chain and
relatively low-cost at $2 a
day, what you might pay for a
monthly smartphone bill here.
The chain is a fast-growing
joint venture between Ayala,
one of the Philippines biggest
conglomerates, and Pearson,
the largest education company
in the world.
In the US, Pearson is best
known as a major crafter of
the Common Core tests used
in many states. It also markets learning software, powers online college programs, and
runs computer-based exams
like the GMAT and the GED. In
fact, Nellie already knew the
name Pearson from the tests
and prep her sister took to get
into nursing school.
But the company has its eye
on much, much more. Investment rm GSV Advisors
recently estimated the

FILE://EDUCATION

annual global outlay on education at $5.5 trillion and growing

rapidly. Let that number sink
in for a secondits a doozy.
The gure is nearly on par with
the global health care industry, but there is no Big Pharma
yet in education. Most of that
money circulates within government bureaucracies.
Pearson would like to become
educations rst major conglomerate, serving as the largest private provider of standardized
tests, software, materials, and
now the schools themselves.
To this end, the company is
testing academic, financial,
and technological models for
fully privatized education on
the worlds poor. Its pursuing
this strategy through a venture called the Pearson Afordable Learning Fund. Pearson
allocated the fund an initial
$15million in 2012 and another
$50 million in January 2015.
Students in developing countries vastly outnumber those
in wealthy nations, constituting a larger market for the company than students in the West.
Here in the US, Pearson pursues its privatization agenda
through charter schools that
are run for prot but funded by
taxpayers. Its hard to imagine
the company wont apply what
it learns from its global experiments as it continues to expand
its oferings stateside.
The low-cost schools in the
Philippines are one of Pearsons
11 equity investments in pro-

Anya Kamenetz
(@anya1anya) is the
author of The Test,
a book about
standardized testing
in US schools.

grams across Asia and Africa

serving more than 360,000 students. Two of the most prominent, the Omega Schools in
Ghana and Bridge International
Academies based in Kenya,
have hundreds of campuses
charging as little as $6 a month.
They locate in cheaply rented
spaces, hire younger, less-experienced teachers, and train and
pay them less than instructors
at government-run schools. The
company argues that by using a
curriculum reecting its expertise, plus digital technology
computers, tablets, softwareit
can deliver a more standardized, higher-quality education
at a lower cost per student. All
Pearson-backed schools agree
to test students frequently and
use software and analytics to
track outcomes.
Not every Pearson-backed
chain will succeed, but the company can use the outcomes to
assess which models work best.
Pearson will have a stake in the
winners; the Afordable Learning Fund takes at least one seat
on each board. The goal is to
serve more than a million students by 2020.
Like any global scheme,
the fund has a mastermind:
Michael Barber, Pearsons
white-haired, indomitable yet
excruciatingly polite chief education adviser. As a McKinsey
consultant to the nation of Pakistan starting in 2010, Barber
implemented an educational
system that now sees nearly
three out of four residents of
the second-largest city, Lahore,
attend low-cost private schools,
many paid for by government
vouchers. Now hes taking his
ideas global with Pearson.
The growth of privatized
education is igniting a global
debate. Last April, major teachers unions in the US, UK, and
South Africa signed a letter to
Pearson CEO John Fallon that
read in part: By supporting

the expansion of low-fee private schooling and other competitive practices, Pearson is
essentially ensuring that a large
number of the worlds most
vulnerable children have no
hope of receiving free, quality
education. In July, the United

tic. In 2014 the company was

implicated in an FBI investigation of unfair bidding practices for a $1.3 billion deal to
provide curricula via iPads to
the students of Los Angeles
Unied School District. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Pearson

Nations Human Rights Council

adopted a resolution that called
for monitoring all private education providers.
Pearsons corporate reputation doesnt help matters. In
the US, just the mention of its
name is enough to make some
education activists apoplec-

monitored the social media

accounts of students taking
its Common Core tests and had
state oicials call district superintendents to have students disciplined for talking about the
exam. Barber himself points out
to me that his face appears as
the seventh-scariest person in

PEARSON

education reform on an anti

Common Core website.
Yet in many parts of the
world, low-cost private schools
are a big step up from existing
public schools, where buildings may be falling down, philanthropic grants are used to

People think Pearson is

this big company going
after these markets
in a predatory way,
says Katelyn Donnelly,
managing director
of Pearsons Afordable
Learning Fund. Im
always like, wow, I wish
we were milking money.

line local oicials pockets, and

teachers dont bother to show
up. The father of Nobel laureate and youth education advocate Malala Yousafzai himself
started a chain of low-cost private schools in Pakistan.
Barbers thesis is simple: If
his company can ofer a better

option, millions of families like

the Cruzes will vote with their
feet. Technology and globalization are going to change everything, including the status quo
in education, he says.

ITS THE LAST week of

the rst academic year at Akis
new school in Tondo, and it feels
pretty much like the last week of
school anywhere. The students,
four classes of seventh graders
totaling 123 kids, are excited,
dressed up for a play; their
families are happy and proud.
Katelyn Donnelly, my companion in Manila, is the managing director of the Afordable
Learning Fund. We started
here from the ground up, she
says of APEC, explaining that
she and Barber have taken a
more hands-on role in the Philippines than in any of the other
school systems that Pearson has
invested in. We were struggling to nd the next couple of
schools to back. So we thought,
OK, well, maybe we can build
one from scratch.
Their Filipino partner is Fred
Ayala, who opened the rst call
center in the Philippines and
eventually sold his business
to the Ayala Corporation (no
relation). Taken together, callcenter and other white-collar
work that can be done over
phones or the Internet account
for 1 million jobs in the island
nation. Ayala thinks it should be
twice that. The limiting factor
is the supply of skilled talent,
he says. You have education
systems producing kids that
have good academic foundations but are not as employable
as the employers would like.
Ayala assembled a board of
executives with international
experience to create an education company that would mold
middle and high school students into the perfect entry-

level employees for foreign

corporations. The execs had the
on-the-ground knowledge and
connections; Pearson brought
the educational expertise and a
$3 million investment.
The biggest obstacle to
expanding here, Donnelly
tells me, is the dearth of available facilities within safe walking distance for kids. So APEC
decided to rent a few rooms here
and there, close to students, in
neighborhoods all over the city.
Because space is tight, the
schools have no nurses oice
and no science lab. Some have
no gym or play space. One
amenity offered everywhere
is closed-circuit cameras, a nod
to parents paramount concern:
physical safety.
Pearson models do vary by
setting and the visions of individual entrepreneurs. All of
them, though, save money on
teachers and claim they still
deliver a superior education
even though most research
shows that teacher quality is
the single most important factor in a students education.
Donnelly and Barber draw parallels to US charter schools,
which employ younger, lessexperienced teachers without union protections, and
to Teach for America, which
places recent college grads into
the countrys most challenging classrooms with just five
weeks of training.
Youre getting younger,
not-formally-qualied teachers, so youre paying them a lot
less, Donnelly says. Youre providing a lot of the content and
the training centrally and trying to figure out how you can
make them successful. Each of
our investments is doing that in
slightly diferent ways. In the
Philippines, teachers are supervised by a more experienced
master teacher who floats
between schools. In its rst year,
the school in Tondo had smaller

They may not

be dissecting
frogs, but
they know
how to shake
hands and
put together a
PowerPoint.

class sizes than the nearby public school, but it doesnt plan for
it to stay that way.
The curriculum, designed
with much input from Pearson, hints at innovative, progressive ideas about education,
like interest-driven learning and collaboration. Every
classroom has computers and
Internet access. There are also
frequent standardized tests
and a custom-built software
system that uses analytics to
manage applications, admissions, parent satisfaction, and
student outcomes.
Most important, all instruction is in English; thats the
number one academic priority the parents I talk to mention. Students tutor each other
in various subjectsAki is a
mentor in English and science
but a mentee in math. Through
the Life Labs curriculum, students work in groups to create
public information campaigns
on topics like safe smartphone
use. They may not be dissecting frogs, but they know how to
shake hands and put together
a PowerPoint.

ABOUT A MONTH after

my visit to Tondo, I sit over tea
and sandwiches with Michael
Barber in a cozy chamber at his
airy oices on Londons Strand.
The white art deco building,
overlooking the Thames, sports
the largest clockface in the city,
nicknamed Big Benzene for the

APR 2016

FILE://EDUCATION

buildings rst tenant, Shell oil.

Barber, 59, is in the midst of
treatment for a rare form of skin
cancer. Although hes pale and
thin, with a fresh scar behind his
left ear from surgery, he makes
a point of saying he has never
felt better. He spent the previous day cycling some 50 miles
in the English countryside.
Barbers quest to transform
education began when he was a
young man, married with three
daughters, teaching school in a
newly independent Zimbabwe
in the early 1980s. His initial
idealism about the yearning of
rural black Africans for education and the aspirations raised
by self-rule faded to frustration
with the slow pace of change.
Later he became a key member
of Tony Blairs administration,
where he focused on schools,
health, and literally running the
trains on time. Next came his
stint at McKinsey, during which
he started his work in Pakistan,
and then he brought his mission
to Pearson. He depicts working
in the private sector as the ultimate expression of his pragmatism. Are we going to get more
children education by building
more and more public schools?
he asks me. In the developing
world, that plan hasnt worked.
Pearsons Afordable Learning Fund, on the other hand, is
winning the ground war of
creating higher-functioning
school systems, he says. Now
its time to tackle the air war
of public opinion. We want
to be judged on our performance, he says.
The most comprehensive
global review of research on

low-cost private schools was

published in 2014 by the UKs
Department for International
Developmentand its worth
noting that Barber advised the
agency on education in Pakistan at that time.
The review found strong evidence of better learning outcomesthat is, test scoresat
private schools than at public schools. Thats probably in
part because the teaching is
in fact better. Compared with
teachers at government-run
schools, which can be dogged
by corruption, those at tuitioncharging schools in developing countries are more likely
to show up, to spend more time
providing efective teaching,
and to be paid regularly for it.
However, other analyses have
pointed out that the students
at fee-charging schools tend
to come from families with a
little more money, which generally correlates with higher
test scores. Theres an X factor too, harder to quantify: It
could be that for-prot schools
attract more parents like Nellie,
who place more of an emphasis
on education and whose children would therefore do better
in any setting. Critics of charter schools in the US make a
parallel argument, accusing
them of creaming of the most
engaged families.
On the negative side, the 2014
review found weak and inconclusive evidence that low-cost
private schools are truly afordable or accessible to the poor.
Research by groups that
oppose for-prot schools goes
further. The Privatization in
Education Research Initiative
reports that when schools arent
free, poor students must work
one day and go to school the
next, and boys are educated in
favor of girls. The oicial position of many groups, including the UNs Committee on
the Rights of the Child, is that

charging a fee, no matter how

low, excludes the most needy
and magnies social divisions
like those between Aki and his
neighbors in Tondo, for example.
History suggests they are
right. Starting in the 1980s, the
World Bank, as a condition of

policy. David Archer of the international development group

ActionAid, who cofounded that
campaign, believes that the
power of free is one good reason school enrollment has risen
by 50 million worldwide in the
past 15 years. The clear evi-

Some fear that Pearsons privatized school chains,

like APEC in the Philippines (above), abandon the
worlds poorest and most vulnerable students.

lending, pushed about 90 poor

countries to raise revenue by
charging fees to attend public
schools. When evidence showed
the tuition was excluding millions of children, a global campaign to abolish the fees gained
traction, and in the early 2000s
the World Bank dropped the

dence is that when you charge

children, the poorest cannot
aford to go, he says.
Barber has an answer for that
too: government-funded vouchers to make private schools free
to the poor. The question is,
how do we get every child a good
education? Not how we x our

PEARSON

COURTESY OF PEARSON

public system, he says. Parents know that education for

their children is the only route
out of poverty, and they have
often been frustrated with public schools. Those who oppose
choice for parents are really
only opposing choice for the

poorthe wealthy always have

choice. Vouchers, he says, level
the playing eld.
Jishnu Das, a lead economist
at the World Banks Development Research Group, has questioned the data behind Barbers
claims of great improvements
in Pakistans schools. He doesnt

think much of the voucher idea

either. He says its perfectly ne
for private providers to compete
in the free market, just as they
do in the preschool market in
the US. If Nellie can aford $2 a
day for her only child to have a
chance at a better future, thats
her prerogative.
But its a real mistake, Das
says, for government to put a
thumb on the scale by diverting large amounts of cash away
from already struggling public
schools toward private providers: If the government cant be
trusted to run schools, it cant
be trusted to price vouchers.

DONNELLY rst met

B a r be r a t Mc K ins e y. S he
worked closely with him in
Pakistan and came with him to
Pearson in part to advance the
low-cost model. People think
Pearson is this big company
going after these markets in a
predatory way, she says. Im
always like, wow, I wish we were
milking money.
Starting schools in the developing world is far from a quick
or easy buckmargins are thin,
costs and red tape must be cut as
much as possible. Its a struggle
getting these companies breaking even and getting growth
and trying to wade through a
mire of regulations, she says.
Still, in the Philippines at
least, the odds favor Pearsons
bet on APEC schools. The government is in the midst of a
huge expansion of its school
system, making 11th and 12th
grades compulsory by 2017.
Thats 2.7 million more students
in just two years. APECs competing low-cost model is of to
a good start, with 24 branches
and 3,300 students and plans to
add 5,700 more next school year.
Its hard to argue with the
mission of local entrepreneurs
like Fred Ayala who strive to

ofer a better educational option

to their communities. In Tondo,
Akis mobile phone and his
impeccable English, both of
which hes currently using to
learn about global warming
and interstellar travel, really
do look like catalysts for a better life for his family.
But a matchup between a
$9 billion public company
and the impoverished governments of developing countries
looks lopsided, to say the least.
If Pearson achieves its vision,
only the most destitute would
remain in public schools in the
worlds largest and fastestgrowing cities. Or those schools
would close down altogether,
as governments increasingly
outsource educationa fundamental driver of development and democracy, a basic
human right, and a tool of selfdeterminationto a Western
corporation. Teaching would
become a low-paid, transient
occupation requiring little training. And Pearson would try to
bring the lessons it learns in
Africa and Asia to education
markets in the US and the UK.
One morning in Manila, I had
breakfast at a five-star hotel
with James Centenera, who
had worked closely with Donnelly and was key to launching
the APEC schools. In his view,
for-prot schools have quickly
become an accepted part of the
educational landscape here
just another option. Im glad
people have stopped asking
whether the schools are better.
Startled, I realized his remark
spoke to a mantra of Barbers:
irreversibility.
In other words, create enough
momentum around any change
and youre no longer arguing
the merits of your idea. Youre
simply treating it as a fact on
the ground and rallying others
to the cause.
What makes this a most efective path to change is also what

The only
check on its
progress
will be the
tests that
Pearson itself
creates.

makes it terrifying and infuriating to critics. Inserting

itself into the provision of a
basic human service, Pearson
is subject to neither open democratic decisionmaking nor openmarket competition. The only
check on its progress will be the
tests that Pearson itself creates.
B a r b e r s te m p e ra m e n t
doesnt allow for a wisp of
doubt. He downplays nice little
initiatives and little boutique
projects. To him, the only scale
that matters is globalhistoric. His heroes are Churchill,
both Roosevelts: leaders who
slammed their sts down on the
table of world events, rearranging all the gures on the game
board at once. Ever polite, he is
nonetheless unyielding. I recognize that to get really good
things to happen is a bit of a
struggle. So Pearsons grand
experiment on 360,000 kids
continuescapturing just a
little more of that $5.5 trillion
with each passing day. 

APR 2016

FEATURES | 24.04

The New Comedy Economy 066 | The ISIS #

#Jihad 076 | A Strange Case of Amnesia 084 | Bye-Bye, Supermarket! 092 | Weed Science 098

Elena Kovyazina

HAVE A HIT
TV SHOW LIKE
SILICON VALLEY ?
GREAT.

INSIDE
THE NEW
COMEDY
ECONOMY
by
Brian Raftery

Art Streiber

T H E G A M E S B E G I N as they so often dowith

a poop joke.
Its a late-January morning and were on a
giant back-lot soundstage in Los Angeles, where
cast members of HBOs dot-comedy Silicon
Valley are hunched over their laptops, tossing
out beta-male insults. Todays scene gathers
four of the shows actorsThomas Middleditch, who stars as the appable app developer
Richard; Kumail Nanjiani as the put-upon programmer Dinesh; Martin Starr, a k a Gilfoyle,
the fatalist-Satanist tech wiz; and Zach Woods,
who plays milquetoast consigliere Jaredas
their characters meekly plot revenge against
a former ally whos sold them out. After a few
takes, however, the actors start going of script,
lobbing improvised one-liners the way 5-yearolds smack around balloons.
We should mail him a bag of his own poop.
We should get him suspended from LinkedIn.
We should sign him up for all the podcasts
he doesnt like.
Are they all gold? They are not. But as the
actors become both more drained and more
limbered up, the Silicon set becomes a rolling
riff-tide of free-form, ever-escalating jokes,
even when the cameras arent on: The phrase
ding-dong is inserted into random lines (Lame
City. Population: ding-dong). Of-key Michael
McDonald impressions are trotted out and
dueled. For one scene, Woods improvises nearly
half a dozen versions of the same line, reshaping and recasting it each time and throwing in
references to everything from Harriet Tubman
to Anne Frank to the sufragette movement. At
one point, an in-character spat ends with Starr
Senior writer BRIAN RAFTERY (@brianraftery)
wrote about an epic RV in issue 22.04.

6
shouting, Go masturbate and cry! The subsequent response, which involves a trash can
9
and bodily uids, is so crass that some of the crew members wince.
Most of these on-the-spot ourishes will never make it to air, as Silicon is a twisty,
tightly scripted show, one that captures all the dick moves (and dick jokes) of an industry
thats often unaware of its hypermasculine alpha-bro hilarity. But for the cast members,
this kind of exploratory eing around would be tough to cork; its an almost tic-like reex,
the result of years of late-night legwork. Along with T. J. Miller, who plays the smart-ass
sage Erlich, these actors have spent years working in every comedic climate imaginable,
from midnight improv gigs to far-ung stand-up sets to network sitcoms. But now their
individual paths have led all these thirtysomethings to a blue-chip series with a revered
creator (Oice Spaces Mike Judge) and multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.
Its the latest victory for an all-new kind of comedy star: Middleditch, Miller, Nanjiani,
Starr, and Woods are all avatars of an emerging upper-middle class of actors, stand-ups,
and improvisers. Gone are the days when comedy fame was dened by a ratings-#blessed
sitcom or eight-gure paychecks or a huge arena-lling tour. Those opportunities exist
only for a shrinking cadre of big-name performersthink Melissa McCarthy, Kevin Hart,
Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen. For everyone else, theres a new comedy gig economy built
on a hodgepodge of podcast appearances, sketch show cameos, commercials, more podcast appearances, indie-lm appearances, script work, web shorts, ensemble TV roles
and, if all goes well, a WTF With Marc Maron
appearance in which everyone bonds over their
familiar to all kinds of media, the era of huge mass-market tentpoles has given way to a
failed Lorne Michaels auditions.
seemingly limitless number of outletssome well known, others almost secret-societyIts kind of like creating a comedy Voltron,
like in their nichenessin which performers can reach audiences directly. With the
says Paul Scheer, a writer-performer who has
advent of new media, ultimate goals were torn down and made less important, says
worked on projects of all formats and sizes,
Cameron Esposito, a stand-up, writer, and actress (Drunk History). Obviously, every
including TV shows like The League and the
comic would still love to be a guest on Fallon or do stand-up on Comedy Central. But all
eyeballs are no longer pointed to the same place. You cant just go on network television
movie-skewering podcast How Did This Get
or appear on a late-night show and assume youll have the attention of Hollywood.
Made? You have a lot of different segments
Besides, to any performer whos watched their favorite comedian get defanged by
that connect together to become one big career.
some prime-time oater of a sitcom or be reduced to a whiny-girlfriend sidekick role,
A TV star is a movie star is a web star.
mainstream domination isnt as enticing as it was years ago. Instead, the comedy stars
Thats a heretical strategy compared with the
enabled by the web and ennobled by years of do-it-yourself slogginghave become
80s and 90s, when comedians made a funnyaccustomed to making, and controlling, nearly everything that bears their names.
person pilgrimage that, in theory, took them
Growing up, it was my dream to be plucked from the stage and put on a sitcom that
from the red-brick trenches of nightclubs to the
somebody else wrote, where my life would be like Jennifer Anistons, and I would get
stages of The Tonight Show or Saturday Night
boobs like hers, says writer-performer Jessica St. Clair, who cocreated and costars
Live to, nally, a gleaming residuals-strewn parin USAs sitcom Playing House as well as the podcast WOMP It Up! But after being
adise ofering network sitcoms, movie deals, theexcused from a few sitcoms, I realized that if Im going to actually be successful, Im
ater tours, and book contracts. Not every option
going to have to write for myself. Adds Lennon Parham, her Playing House (and
worked (unless you were Tim Allen), but if you
WOMP) partner: When we started out, we said yes to everythingits from that
stuck to the one or two that did and made sure you
hunger, and the fact that you never know where works going to come from.
were as mass-appealing as possible, you wound
Eschewing big, dopey sitcoms and moviesor at least being choosy about which
up with a giant fan base and a grotto in Vail.
ones you surrender tomeans not everyone will earn megabucks in this new gig econSuch a path is rarely trod anymore, in part
because the biggest comedy shows arent the
omy. But the rewards, at least creatively, promise to be far greater. Maybe you dont
cultural monoliths they once were. In a pattern
get fat and happy and complacent, and you dont buy a bunch of catamarans, says
Silicons Woods, who went from little-seen web videos to a
scene-stealing turn on NBCs The Oice. But in return you
get to do your weirdo ideas with your friends, as opposed
to some sitcom that you sleepwalk through.
Opening spread
That communal ethos is part of why comedy has become
(from left): Kumail
Nanjiani, Zach
one of the most skillfully executed pop-cultural commodiWoods, Thomas
ties we have, a never-ending swirl of Good Stuf, regardless
Middleditch,
of medium. Its genuinely ridiculous how much ace comedy
T. J. Miller, and
Martin Starr.
is out there, and how it encourages happy gluttony: You
could spend an afternoon catching up on The Carmichael
Show or devote a weekend to watching nothing but Silicon Valley, Key & Peele, and Broad City or clear your entire
week to listen to every single Paul F. Tompkins appearance

Typography by Braulio Amado

Team Humor

HOTOGRAPHS: BYRON COHEN/FX (THE LEAGUE); COURTESY OF ADULT SWIM (CHILDRENS HOSPITAL); COURTESY OF STARZ
NTERTAINMENT (PARTY DOWN); COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT (BURNING LOVE); GEMMA LA MANA /NETFLIX (WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER)

(121 episodes and counting!) on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast. Being a comedy fan
now is like being a lm lover in the 70s or an Iran-Contra enthusiast in the 80s: Every
day, it seems, theres something new and boundary-warping to get passionate about.
And its all instantly within reach, via a gazillion diferent (and still evolving) formats.
I missed the cash-cow lm and television years of the 90s by virtue of when I was
born, Silicon Valleys Miller says from his trailer one day, during a break in lming. (Hes
35.) But this is a very Wild, Wild West timeand I mean that in the Will Smith sense of
the phrase. Nobody knows whats going to happen or emerge.
As he talks, Miller has a half-eaten salad on his desk, a black-and-white Jimmy CagThe new comedy order didnt
ney gangster movie playing on mute in the background, and a travel agent on hold on his
happen all at once: It was pioneered
phone. The shows about to wrap shooting for the weekend, but no ones taking a day of.
by a fresh crop of TV shows working
with a more fluid form of ensemble.
Miller is heading to London to promote his role in Deadpool. Middleditch, meanwhile,
Along with Silicon Valley,
y these five
will y to Sundance, where hes premiering a new lm, Joshy, costarring many of his
series have helped to transform the
comedy-class peers. Woods does regular weekend performances at the Upright Citizens
comedy economy. PETER RUBIN
Brigade Theatre, and Nanjiani is of to New York City to prep as host of the Independent
Spirit Awards. As for Starr, hes working on
one of a handful of pilots hes sold to varthe opening of a brand-new Upright Citious networks. Making it in comedy these
izens Brigade theater in Manhattan, the
days means wearing a wider variety of hats,
future breeding ground of performers like
but none of them are complainingwhen
Woods, Scheer, Ellie Kemper, and Aziz
would they even have time to?
Ansari. For comedy nerds and aspirants,
Most of our friends who are successthat year marked the multifront emerful in comedy are the ones working in at
gence of a new and form-busting mode
The League (20092015)
least three diferent disciplines, Miller
of humor: hyper-intelligent, deeply perThis FX phenomenon was a
says. The best way to become a successful
sonal, and occasionally surreal. It was a
filthy first: a successful ensemcomedian in our day and age is to become
good time to dive in.
ble show where just about every
core cast memberfrom Paul
the most well-rounded comedian, with the
It also happened to be the year that
Scheer to Nick Kroll to Mark
strongest and deepest skill set. To keep
Millerwho started doing stand-up as
Duplass to Jason Mantzoukas
up, the denizens of Silicon Valley and their
a teenager, at the urging of a high school
had day jobs. And with recurring
appearances by Seth Rogen,
peers have to work just as hard as the dingteacherrelocated from Denver to Chiit dovetailed nicely with the
dongs of Silicon Valley.
cago, where there were more live-show
Apatow-verse.
opportunities. Some of his earliest gigs
did not go well, including a promotional
event for a local light beer, which, for Chicagoans, might as well qualify as an alien
technology: He tossed out free shirts, only to have them thrown back at him.
Not long after arriving, he met Middleditch, a skilled improviser who had moved from
British Columbia. They eventually created a two-person experimental improv show, Practice Scaring a Bear, at the citys renowned ImprovOlympic Theater. Despite the venues
prominence and the actors growing reputations, there were nights when only one person
showed up. That was disheartening, Middleditch, now 34, says. But we were like, Well
do the show for this guy, because we just want to perform together. Everybody in comedy
has something like that happen to them: They bomb, or no one shows up. Youre like, Hey,
Im funny, trust me! And the world collectively goes, Yeah, you and everybody else.
Middleditch was an avid gamer, which is why Miller introduced him to another newly
ITS TOUGH TO PINPOINT the exact moment
arrived Chicago transplant: Nanjiani, a stand-up whod recently graduated from colwhen comedy (Wanna come over and
watch Seinfeld?) evolved into Comedy
lege in the Midwest and who would wind up bonding with Middleditch while playing
(Wanna come over and listen to this podGears of War. Nanjiani had lived in Pakistan until he was 18; hed barely even seen
any stand-up until arriving in the US, and he quickly became obsessed, spending two
cast about Seinfeld?). But there is one
years recording and watching every TV special he could. I was like, You can just tell
year that, in retrospect, now seems downjokes and make a living? he says. It felt like freedomyou could talk about anyright epochal: 2003, which saw the arrival
of the decades most influential sitcom
thing, and as long as it was funny, you were successful. And its the easiest of these to
(Arrested Development) as well as its most
get started on, because you can write something in the morning and go try it at night,
revolutionary sketch series (Chappelles
and you dont need anybody else.
Show); 222, the uncut version of Patton
Over time, Nanjianiwho was working a tech job by day, helping schoolkids fix their
Oswalts debut stand-up album; multilaptopsbuilt up his routine, a mix of personal and cultural observations; in one early
bit, he talked about how much harder old videogames were, a spiel that was captured
ple performances of Sarah Silvermans
in an early online video (Youre already a robot, he says about a transforming, toughbreakthrough show Jesus Is Magic; and

O
Get
Rea
for
Mar
Sta
2.0

Childrens Hospital (2008)

Party Down (20092010)

One of the rst web series to

transition to TVits now seven
seasons deep on Adult Swim
this deadpan medical-drama satire serves up 15-minute doses
of nely titrated absurdism.
Creator Rob Corddry is joined
by Lake Bell, Rob Huebel, gigcomedy surprise Henry Winkler,
and seemingly dozens more.

Starz lightning-in-a-bottle cult

hit in many ways led to todays
TV comedy landscape. The
cameo-packed show not only
ofered an outlet for sketch
comedy veterans like Jennifer
Coolidge and Ken Marino (a main
cast member in four of the ve
properties on this list), it brought
Martin Starr back to TV.

plus:
Get Ready
for Martin
Starr 2.0
The Rise and
Fall (and
Rise and
Fall and
Rise) of
T. J. Miller

FAST,
SMART,
AND

WAY OUT OF CONTROL

Burning Love (20122013)
Another web-series-made-good
(E! aired it on TV), BL skewered
Bachelor-type romance reality
shows with three seasons worth
of Hey, its [character] from [cult
show/movie]! comedy xtures.
If theyre in this WIRED story
Starr, Nanjiani, Scheer, June
Diane Raphael, Jessica St. Clair
they were likely on this show.

Zach
Woods
The
Wizard
of
Comedy

STRAIGHT
UTTA BC!

dy

tin
rr

The Disruptive Power of

THOMAS MIDDLEDITCH

Wet Hot American Summer:

First Day of Camp (2015)
After a 2001 movie that established comedys cast-everyone
ethos, the creators cooked up a
Netix prequel series. The show
was just as star-studded as
the movie, but it also boasted a
laundry list of gig standouts
(Scheer, Bell, Jordan Peele)
hanging with the big guns.

to-kill enemy. Why do you also need to

be a murder boat?!). YouTube was relatively young at that point, but Middleditch
and Millerlike other comedic performers around the country, including Tim &
Ericwere already using it to test out
ideas (one of Millers clips was titled, simply and accurately, Dick on Face). Wed
be making weird short films until 4 am,
even when we had to work the next day,
says Middleditch, who later found a manager in part because of his online work.
Some of the videos were shit and some
were good. But you put your tentacles out
as much as you can.
By the late 00s, each of the trio found
themselves being beckoned to the coasts.
Middleditch was doing improv on a cruise
ship when he heard Saturday Night Live

Inside the Mind

of KUMAIL NANJIANI

was holding a Chicago casting call; while he

didnt land a spot on the show, he did wind
up with a network holding deal in New York.
Nanjiani was soon there too, getting occasional guest turns on The Colbert Report
and writing on Comedy Centrals Michael
and Michael Have Issues (the show gave
him his rst acting work but was quickly
canceled). Miller, meanwhile, eventually
relocated to Los Angeles, shooting a TV
pilot and nabbing a lead part in Cloverfield, the rst of several lm and TV roles.
Throughout these years, Middleditch,
Miller, and Nanjiani faced signicant setbacks: There were unconsummated pilot
deals, canceled sitcoms, apathetic or downright antagonistic crowds. Yet none of them
got discouraged enough to quit. And why
would they? Everywhere they looked, new
venues and avenues were opening up, and
many of their peers were getting regular
work. Comedy didnt seem like such an
ify career. When I told my parents that I
was quitting my day job, they were pretty
supportive, says Nanjiani, 38. It didnt
make sense to them, obviously, because it
is a stupid thing to do. But they said, OK,
do it and see what happens.

7
0 1

PLUS:
Inside
the
Mind of
Kumail
Nanjiani

WARDROBE STYLING BY SHARON WILLIAMS. PROP STYLING BY ANTHONY A. ALTOMARE. MAKEUP BY REBECCA ALLING; MAKEUP ASSISTANT, DEBRA SCHREY. HAIR BY MARY ANN VALDES; HAIR
ASSISTANT, MELISSA MALKASIAN. ILLUSTRATIONS BY FELIX PETRUSKA; REFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHS FOR ILLUSTRATIONS: GETTY IMAGES

evening in Hollywood, a crowd of nearly 100 twenty- and

thirtysomethingshalf male, half female,
though the amount of hoodies makes it
hard to know for surehas bunched up
near the entrance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. Tonights big show is ASSSSCAT, a
long-running, all-improvised joke-gumbo
in which Woods frequently performs. For
more than an hour hell tag in and out of
various scenarios and characters; one minute hes a selsh suicide-hotline employee,
the next hes fending of a knife-throwing
rabbit. As with all good improv shows, the
whole thing is hypnotic in the moment and
thoroughly asinine in the retelling.
Woods, 31, has performed in hundreds of
shows like thesemaybe even thousands.
In the early 2000s, he was an unlikely comedy prodigy, riding the train from his suburban Pennsylvania home to take improv
classes at UCBs New York theater while
he was still in high school. One night, early
on, he and a fellow performer started discussing their futures. I remember saying, I just want to temp and do improv at
night, Woods says. He was 16 years old.
Improv performers had always had
O N A N E A R LY S U N DAY

limited career optionsat least compared with stand-ups, who enjoyed the crucial
advantage of being able to go on the road by themselves. Improvisers could bask in
the fizzy-headed uplift of wowing a crowd at a sold-out black box theater, but when it
came to actual paying gigs, options were limited: There was the wide-eyed, slim-margin
chance that theyd wind up on SNL or get a recurring gig on Conan, but for the most part,
they had to either sweat through pilot season, work on a sketch packet, or undergo an
endless, joyless crush of commercial auditions.
Early in his career, Woods tried out for a Starburst commercial that demanded he
don a Rastafarian wig and feed candy to womenall while shirtless. I have this weird
indentation in my chest, so right away the casting agent looked at it with either undisguised disgust or curiosity, he says. And I would have to put a Starburst in these womens mouths in this wig under fluorescent light at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday. I was
like, Is this how I want to spend my life?
But as the decade went on, the number of job options expandednot just for improvisers but for every phylum of comedy performers. The unchecked expansion of YouTube,
coupled with the arrival of sites like Funny or Die and CollegeHumor, suddenly provided
comedians a chance to give even their most idiosyncratic notions a wider audience (Woods
wound up starring in several web shorts with titles like Adam and Eve in the Friend Zone
and Most Awkward Boy in the World Goes to the Deli). In recent years, podcasts have
allowed comics to eld-test new characters and talents, develop long-running narrative
threads and callbacks (Hey nong man!), and promote themselves directly to audiences
all without needing an actual stage or the approval of higher-ups. Its not like I need to
have a network say yes to me, then put up all these diferent hoops to jump through,
says comedian and actress Lauren Lapkus (Orange Is the New Black), who hosts the popular podcast With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus and is a regular on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Ican record a show on Tuesday and put it out on Wednesday, and people get to know
what were doing, even if they dont live in a place where comedy is accessible.
Yet one of the biggest game-changers for comedians came courtesy of the most oldfashioned medium of all: television. In 2009, the year before Woods popped up on The
Oice, his future Silicon-mate Starr was appearing in a new sitcom that proved to be a
harbinger of things to come. Party Down was a smart, bawdy ensemble show about a
group of squabbling cater-waiters that, in its own quiet way, led the radical transformation of televisionhowever one dened it.
Starr was no stranger to TV; hes the veteran in the Silicon
Valley cast. He began working as a child, making commercials
and infomercials, before nding himself on NBCs Freaks &
Geeks, the Paul Feigcreated, Judd Apatowproduced comedy
that documented with alarming exactitude the awkwardness
and unease of adolescence (Starr, then 16, played the gangly,
The Rise and
Dallas-loving Bill Haverchuck). With a cast that included Seth
Fall (and Rise
Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel, Freaks would inadverand Fall
and Rise) of
tently become a farm team for the brainy-bro comedy wave of
T. J. Miller
the 2000s. But from the moment the show premiered in 1999, it
seemed almost comically doomed: Freaks was simply too innocent and fragile to live, like some cherubic urchin who starts
coughing halfway through a bad British drama.
When Freaks was canceled after 18 episodes, Starr took it
reasonably well; the biggest bummer, he says, was that someone broke into his car on the last night of taping and stole all
his personal photos from the set (not to mention the weed hed
hidden in the glove compartment). I think I just assumed that
there would be an innite amount of work from that show, Starr
says one morning in the Silicon living room, which is decorated
with pot magazines, dog-eared sci- novels, and empty candy
wrappers. Judd and Paul were very protective of us, because
we were all really young and naive to what this business was.
In the years that followed, Starr did guest turns on shows like
Roswell and Undeclared, even starring in a multicamera pilot

7
alongside Seinfelds Wayne Knight (aka Newman), where he quickly learned
3
that mainstream sitcoms werent his thing. (The show was called Frozen
Chunk Guy, Starr says, in a very Martin Starr deadpan. It didnt get picked
up.) By the time he was 22, Starrfrustrated and depressed over the lack
of workhad red his agent and decided to quit acting for good, even spending a day trying
out for a barista job. (He didnt get the job but walked away with $2 in tip money.) A few years
later, he got an ofer to appear in Apatows Knocked Up, which led to more studio comedies
(Walk Hard) and an acclaimed indie drama (Adventureland) before he landed Party Down.
The show premiered on then-obscure pay-cable channel Starz. Its bereft-of-the-dial status wasnt a demotion, though, but an indicator of how most small-screen comedy would
soon be consumed: on countless channels and platforms at a time, regardless of when or
where it rst aired, by sensibly sizedand this is importantultraloyal audiences.
In the years since Freaks demise, the big networks grip on audiences had begun to

Comedys New (and

Overworked) Standouts
The key to joining the Silicon Valley guys in the new world
of comedy: Work like mad. Thanks to a never-ending parade
of ensemble TV series, movie roles, podcasts (especially
Comedy Bang! Bang!), online videos, and comedy festivals,
theres always more to do. J O R DA N C R U C C H I O L A

Hannibal Buress

Ron Funches

Key credits: Broad

City, stand-up
2015 rsum: 5 TV
shows, 3 movies
Comedy Bang!
Bang! episodes: 1
Current workload:
The Eric Andre
Show (TV)

Key credits:
Undateable,
@Midnight With
Chris Hardwick
2015 rsum:
8TV shows, 1 short,
1movie, 1 miniseries
CBB episodes: 0
Current workload:
Trolls (movie)

Jordan Peele

June Diane
Raphael

Key credits:
Key & Peele
2015 rsum:
8 TV shows,
1miniseries
CBB episodes: 2
Current workload:
Keanu

Key credits: Grace

and Frankie
2015 rsum: 5 TV
shows, 2 movies
CBB episodes: 2
Current workload:
How Did This Get
Made?

Keegan-Michael
Key

Lauren Lapkus

weaken, with cable emerging as the source

of a weirder, more idiosyncratic kind of
comedy. Adult Swim had debuted with latenight oddities like Aqua Teen Hunger Force;
FX was experiencing an unlikely smash
with the legit nutso Its Always Sunny in
Philadelphia; and a pre-Portlandia IFC was
running the cult sketch-show hit The Whitest Kids U Know. Each of these series
brazen, silly-smart, and outrreected
the sensibilities of its creators, who clearly
had been given enviable creative leeway.
But they also satised the desires of their
young, advertiser-adored viewers, who
were more likely to glom on to the more
rugged kinds of comedy theyd seen on
the web, which was making the sanitized
22-minute sitcom look archaic.
Today, nearly every major (and minor) network has at least one original comedy in its
portfolio, from cable stations like BET (Real
Husbands of Hollywood), truTV (Billy on the
Street), and USA (Playing House) to streaming services like Hulu (Diicult People), Net-

Jason
Mantzoukas

Lennon Parham
Key credits:
Playing House,
Veep
2015 rsum:
5 TV shows
CBB episodes: 10
Current workload:
WOMP It Up!
(podcast)

Key credits:
Key & Peele
2015 rsum: 14 TV
shows, 6 movies,
1 White House Correspondents Dinner
CBB episodes: 1
Current workload:
Keanu (movie)

Key credits: Orange

Is the New Black
2015 rsum: 5 TV
shows, 1 movie, 2
shorts, 1 videogame
CBB episodes: 32
Current workload:
With Special Guest
Lauren Lapkus
(podcast)

Key credits: The

League, Transparent
2015 rsum: 8TV
shows, 1 short,
3movies
CBB episodes: 23
Current workload:
How Did This Get
Made? (podcast)

Kristen Schaal

Paul Scheer

Jessica St. Clair

Paul F. Tompkins

Key credits:
The Daily Show
2015 rsum: 7 TV
shows, 3movies
CBB episodes: 2
Current workload:
The Last Man on
Earth (TV), Bobs
Burgers (TV)

Key credits:
The League
2015 rsum: 11 TV
shows, 2 movies, 2
shorts, 2 miniseries
CBB episodes: 16
Current workload:
How Did This Get
Made?

Key credits:
Playing House
2015 rsum:
8 TV shows, 1 movie
CBB episodes: 18
Current workload:
WOMP It Up!

Key credits: Mr.

Show, stand-up
2015 rsum: 9 TV
shows, 5 movies
CBB episodes: 131 (!)
Current workload:
Spontaneanation
(podcast), No, You
Shut Up! (TV)

Where to See
Comedys
y Hottest
Gig Workers
Hey nong man! Are you tired of everyon
ne you know spouting
nonsensical comedy-cool-kid catchphra
ases you dont
understand? Generally just looking for more funny stuf?
Either way, heres where to nd the laug
ghs. B . R .

Get Ready for

SF Sketchfest

Every January, this

three-week San
Francisco confab
brings together big
and gonna-be-big
names for performances and panels;
this years lineup
included everyone
from Maya Rudolph
to a mostly reunited
Kids in the Hall.

Largo at the
Coronet
The LA theatera
hub for both music
and comedyfeatures stand-up
and improv shows
hosted by the likes
of Judd Apatow,
Sarah Silverman,
and Pete Holmes.
4

3
2

4
5

The
Disruptive
Power of
Thomas
Middleditch
Riot LA
The weekend festival is a well-curated
alt-comedy shindig that includes
stand-up (Janeane
Garofalo), live
shows (Paul F.
Tompkins No, You
Shut Up!), and even
a roast battle.
5

SXSW

All joking a salad,

the indie podcast
studio/network
is the home of
not only the longrunning Comedy
Bang! Bang! but
also such hit shows
as How Did This
Get Made? and
improv4humans
and a few dozen
others besides.

The three-in-one
Texas festival (interactive, lm, and
music) has in recent
years become a
hub for performers
and podcasts, as
well as networks
the Silicon Valley
pilot premiered
there in 2014, as
did Girls two years
before that.

Bonnaroo
Whats that? You
dont want to watch
Wayne Coyne ride
a giant bedazzled
inatable girafe?
Then head over to
the festivals Comedy Theater, where
past performers
have included Hannibal Buress, Reggie Watts, and
Natasha Leggero.

plus:
Inside the Mind of
Kumail Nanjiani

Earwolf

2.0

The Upright
Citizens Brigade
Theatre
With multiple venues in New York
City and LA, this
theater and school
was the early home
of every comic
you loveAziz
Ansari,Silicon
Valley s Woods,
and SNLs Kate
McKinnon.

ix (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), and Amazon (Catastrophe). And thats

in addition to YouTube, sites like CollegeHumor and Funny or Die, NBCs allcomedy online service Seeso, and the countless other online venues putting
up new sketches and series every day. None of these shows are a drop in the
Big Bang Theorydominated ratings bucket, but all have devoted audiences.
Even my bathroom mirror is now emerging as a really exciting outlet for
new content, says June Diane Raphael, a writer and actress whos appeared
on big-network shows like New Girl as well as streaming series (Netixs
Grace and Frankie) and web programs (the hit Burning Love). There are
a million ways to get your work out there, albeit with varying pay scales.
That onslaught of options, and their uctuating salaries, means that many
comedians diversify their career portfolios by using a steady giga sitcom
stint, a writing-room spot, regular stand-up engagementsto let them do
whatever they want. I always hear this story about the Will & Grace cast
getting Porsches when they got picked up for a second season, Scheer
says. Were not in that world anymore. But when you have a bigger anchor,
it allows you the freedom to not have to worry about making ends meet.
It also relieves comedians of the pressure of tailoring their act for one
monolithic, mainstream audiencea near-necessity during the fournetwork era that resulted in so many anemic sitcoms. Instead, everybody
can work on what they want to do and what works for them, says Ron
Funches, a stand-up and writer who stars on the NBC sitcom Undateable
while also touring regularly and appearing on multiple cable series (Drunk
History, @Midnight) and podcasts. Not every comic has the personality
that you want to build a whole show around. It was diferent [years ago],
because there were fewer optionsthere were only so many networks and
only so many ways to be seen. Now you can have a show on YouTube that
still gets enough of an audience for you to tour of of and live of of. Youre
not waiting in line for NBC or ABC to decide youre worth something.
Party Down, alas, arrived a bit too early
for this revolution: It was canceled by Starz
in 2010 despite nearly unanimous good
7
0 4
reviews. (If it had premiered just a few

WARDROBE CREDITS, OPENING SPREAD AND SECOND SPREAD: ALTERNATIVE APPAREL T-SHIRT, VINCE HOODIE, PAIGE DENIM JEANS (NANJIANI); HYDEN
YOO SHIRT AND PANTS, CAKE FOR MONARCHS BLAZER (WOODS); STEVEN ALAN SHIRT, HYDEN YOO PANTS (MIDDLEDITCH); PAIGE DENIM JEANS (MILLER);
RAFFI SWEATER, AE GOLD JEANS (STARR). WARDROBE CREDITS, SINGLES: HYDEN YOO JUMPER (MIDDLEDITCH); BOSS SWEATER, HYDEN YOO TROUSERS,
VANS SHOES (WOODS); HYDEN YOO T-SHIRT AND BLAZER, AE GOLD JEANS (STARR).

MARTIN
STARR

years later, in time for the rise of show-saving Twitter laughtivists, it likely would have
survived far longer.) For Starr, it was the second time a beloved show he was working
on was prematurely killed. By the time he was ofered the Silicon part in 2013, he says,
I knew that it was a great possibility that this show will not be as appreciated as perhaps we feel it deserves to be. You know that everythings eeting, everythings passing. (He was raised Buddhist, which may explain all that equanimity.)
But, he says, that also helped inspire the Silicon cast members sense of camaraderie,
as evidenced in part by the groups on-set playfulness. We all just care about each other,
and we all want the show to be funny, he says. You have ideas for other people, and that
brings value to the whole group. I mean,
its just as much fun to watch someone
else nail an idea that you had as it is to fuck
around and nd something for yourself.

JESUSGAWDALMIGHTY !

About 15 minutes before hes due onstage, Miller is calmly bulldozing his way around
a beat-up backstage area, looking for an opening act. Hes about to perform an evening
headlining set at Riot LA, a four-year-old comedy festival in downtown LA. Dressed in
jeans and a mile high till i die T-shirt, hes wandering the halls trying to track down
some comics; the ones who were supposed to appear before him tonight are currently
stuck in traic. At one point, he tries to cajole a friend to take one of the slots, even though
shes never done stand-up before. Youll bomb, he says, but itll be great!
Every few minutes, Miller takes a handheld mister out of his
back pocket and sprays his facea prop he uses in his set, though
one that no doubt comes in handy as hes running around the
venue. Though he doesnt look it, Miller is exhausted: He spent
part of the week nalizing a Super Bowl ad for Shock Top beer
and has just own in from London. Since he got to LA years ago,
Miller has worked in almost every modern pop-cultural milieu
and genre imaginable: commercials, network sitcoms (Carpoolers, Goodwin Games), family movies (Yogi Bear, Big Hero 6), talk
shows (Chelsea Lately), a Transformers sequel, podcasting, even
a comedy hip hop record (Extended Play, in 2011). This is all while
doing stand-up that, in recent years, has laid bare his interest
in philosophy, with digressive bits about death and idioms.
Not surprisingly, when Miller talks about comedy, he speaks
of both its curative powersan escapist drug he helps bring to
othersand its practical, real-world, capitalistic applications, all
with equal sincerity. To Miller, comedy is an egalitarian art form,
one that invites all types and levels of talent but rewards hustle
most of all. And he thinks it hasnt even begun to peak yet. If more
stand-ups took acting classes and made videos, if more improvisers would do stand-up, if more actors would start a podcast, their
work would probably jump to a much higher caliber, he says at
one point. And I really believe in work over talent: I dont think
Im as talented as a lot of people, but Im much more successful
than them, because I worked harder than anybody around me.

To watch behind-the-scenes
video of our Silicon Valley
photo shoot, go to WIRED .com.

Just before taking the Riot stage, having

finally tracked down his opening comics, he tells a story from his very first
stand-up gig in Chicago: It was supposed
to be a quiet open-mic night at a jazz club,
where Miller arrived to nd a near-empty
room. After practicing in the bathroom, he
came onstage and saw there were actually
300 people there, none of whom knew or
cared who he was. He won them over with
an ironic lineThanks so much for coming out to see me tonightand a good
prostitute story, and immediately booked
a follow-up gig.
At that next show, though, he bombed.
Horribly. I ate shit, he says.
It could have all ended there, of course.
Miller could have given up and gone back to
Denver. Or he could have become another
road-warrior comic, eking out an existence
from town to town. But things being what
they are, there were other places he could
goan outskirts-stretched club, a beery
theater, a late-night online-video shoot,
an improv class where you meet your new
collaborators, maybe even a festival where
a desperate headliner needs an opener on
short notice. These days, theres always
one more room to work. 

Zach Woods
The Wizard of
Comedy

The Rise
and Fall (and Rise
and Fall and Rise) of

T. J. MILLER
PLUS: Inside the Mind of Kumail Nanjiani







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after Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered

14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino,
California, the married couples landlord invited
the media to tour their home. Inside the sparsely
furnished town house, news crews trained
their cameras on the dirty dishes that filled
the kitchen sink and the Arabic-language books
that were stacked in a closet. But each journalist inevitably gravitated to the blue-carpeted
room that belonged to the killers 6-monthold daughter, now an orphan since her parents
had elected to die in a shoot-out with police.
The image of the babys crib, piled high with
stufed animals and fuzzy blankets, became an
instant symbol of the unfathomability of Farook
and Maliks crime.
The cribs emotional resonance with the
American public was not lost on the editors of
Dabiq, the English-language magazine that

Contributing editor BRENDAN I. KOERNER

(@brendankoerner) is the author of The Skies
Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden
Age of Hijacking.

the so-called Islamic State regularly publishes

as a PDF. In the issue that circulated on social
media in January, Dabiq ran a two-page paean to
Farook and Malik, the latter of whom used Facebook to pledge her loyalty to the Islamic States
leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, just minutes after
the San Bernardino attack commenced. The
story featured a photograph of the infamous
crib, which it inverted into a tribute to the killers courage: Syed and his wife did not hold
back from fullling their obligation, read the
caption, despite having a daughter to care for.
That message, like so many other pieces of
Islamic State propaganda, was crafted not just
to stir the hearts of potential recruits but also
to boost the organizations ghastly brandto
reinforce Westerners perception of the Islamic
State and its devotees as ruthless beyond comprehension. All terrorist groups seek to cultivate
this kind of image, of course, because their power
derives from their ability to inspire dread out of
proportion to the threats they actually pose. But
the Islamic State has been singularly success-

ful at that task, thanks to its mastery of modern

digital tools, which have transformed the dark
arts of making and disseminating propaganda.
Never before in history have terrorists had such
easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions.
The Islamic State recognized the power of digital media early on, when its brutish progenitor,
Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, discovered the utility of uploading grainy videos
of his atrocities to the Internet. As the group
evolved, its propagandists surpassed and humiliated their bitter rivals in al Qaeda by placing a
premium on innovation. The Islamic State maximized its reach by exploiting a variety of platforms: social media networks such as Twitter
and Facebook, peer-to-peer messaging apps
like Telegram and Surespot, and content sharing systems like JustPaste.it. More important, it
decentralized its media operations, keeping its
feeds ush with content made by autonomous
production units from West Africa to the Caucasusa geographical range that illustrates why it
is no longer accurate to refer to the group merely
as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),
a moniker that undersells its current breadth.
Today the Islamic State is as much a media
conglomerate as a ghting force. According to
Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, an October
2015 report by the Quilliam Foundation, the organization releases, on average, 38 new items per
day20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in
languages ranging from Russian to Bengali. The
groups closest peers are not just other terrorist
organizations, then, but also the Western brands,
marketing rms, and publishing outtsfrom
PepsiCo to BuzzFeedwho ply the Internet with
memes and messages in the hopes of connecting with customers. And like those ventures, the
Islamic State hews to a few tried-and-true techniques for boosting user engagement.
Among these is the groups use of narrowcastingcreating varied content that caters to
niche audiences. (Think of those BuzzFeed listicles aimed at groups like Army brats or Florida
natives.) Only a fraction of the Islamic States
online output depicts the kind of sadism for
which the group is notorious: Far more common are portrayals of public-works projects,
economic development, and military triumphs,
frequently aimed at specic Muslim enclaves
throughout the world. This content is meant
to convince prospective recruits of the veracity of the organizations core narrative: that its
empire is both stable and inexorably growing.
(The Islamic States slogan is Baqiya wa TatamaddadRemaining and Expanding.) So far,

OPENING SPREAD: REUTERS; RICHMOND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (POLICE CARS)

digital propaganda of this sort has helped motivate more than 30,000 people to turn their backs
on everything theyve ever known and journey
thousands of miles into dangerous lands, where
theyve been told a paradise awaits.
But the most significant way in which the
Islamic State has exhibited its media savviness
has been through its embrace of openness. Unlike
al Qaeda, which has generally been methodical
about organizing and controlling its terror cells,
the more opportunistic Islamic State is content
to crowdsource its social media activityand
its violenceout to individuals with whom it
has no concrete ties. And the organization does
not make this happen in the shadows; it does so
openly in the Wests most beloved precincts of
the Internet, co-opting the digital services that
have become woven into our daily lives. As a
result, the Islamic States brand has permeated
our cultural atmosphere to an outsize degree.
This has allowed the Islamic State to rouse followers that al Qaeda never was able to reach. Its
brand has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it
has transformed into something akin to an open
source operating system for the desperate and
deludeda vague ideological platform upon
which people can construct elaborate personal
narratives of persecution or rage. Some individuals become so engrossed in those narratives that
they scheme to kill in the Islamic States name,
in the belief that doing so will help them right
their troubled lives. Here in the US, the groups
message has found a foothold among people
who map their own idiosyncratic struggles and
grievances, real or imagined, onto the Islamic
State ideology. These half-cocked jihadists, while
rare, come from all walks of American life, creating a new kind of domestic threatone that is
small in scale but endishly diicult to counter.
This phenomenon has a historical precedent,
however, which has largely been forgotten: the
American skyjacking epidemic of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, in which scores of wayward
souls claimed fuzzy political motives for seizing commercial aircraft. Those hijackers, like
the Islamic States crowdsourced allies, were
often deeply inuenced by mediain their case
TV and newspaper coverage of past hijackings,
which they sought to imitate. Government measures eventually brought the skyjacking crisis
to a rapid halt, an outcome that will be much
tougher to achieve in todays circumstances; a
reckless government crackdown would actually
play into the hands of the Islamic State, which
wants nothing more than to bait the US into an
overreaction that erodes our unity and freedom.
So far, most attempts to neutralize the Islamic
States media juggernaut have proven inept. That
is because the architects of our countermeasures
fail to grasp what makes the organizations content and distribution method so distinctive. We

Milestones in Terror Tech

must admit, however grudgingly, that the Islamic

States propagandists are now as adept at social
media as we are. They got that way by diligently
analyzing how the West manufactures and consumes information. To chip away at what theyve
created, we must now learn from them.

An extremist movements success

often depends on its ability to
master the latest means of communication. VictoriaTang

Film

Ku Klux Klan
When the original Birth of a Nation
debuted in 1915, it inadvertently
furnished the Ku Klux Klan with
a major recruitment tool. The threehour epic depicts mayhem in the
postCivil War South as blacks gain
poweruntil a valiant KKK restores
order. The Klansmen continued
to use it as agitprop to drum up
support, showing the lm in meetings as late as the 1970s.

Television

PFLP
In the heyday of trustworthy evening
newscasts, the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine carefully
coordinated hijackings to gain exposure on TV. In September 1970,
the PFLP forced three ights to land
in Jordan. After herding all the
passengers of, the PFLP blew up
the planesand held a press conference showcasing the hostages.

Telecom

Zapatistas
The Zapatista National Liberation
Armys cadres were early adopters
of the Internet. Armed with
personal laptops, fax machines,
and cell phones, they not only disseminated policy positions on
listservs but also took advantage of
conferencing systems, such
as PeaceNet and La Neta, to coordinate among themselves.

Internet

Al Qaeda
Al Qaeda loves the Internet. The
group has shared its ideology
globally through thousands of websites. In the early 2000s, leaders
would broadcast their messages on
oicial sites, then acclaimed jihadists discussed these messages
on forums, and nally individuals
took to chat rooms to further dissect these ideas.

Social Media

The Islamic State

The Islamic State understands
the value of tailoring its content to
specic audiences across diferent feeds. To maintain some control over the inherently noisy social
media landscape, the group allows
certain caliphate insiders to serve
as emissaries to particular online
communitiesestablishing those
elite users as minor celebrities.

A
At the 2:10 mark in a video entitled The Meaning
of Stability #2, which the Islamic State released
in mid-January, a soon-to-be suicide bomber
appears on camera alongside his explosivesladen truck. There is nothing remarkable about
the fact that this masked young man is moments
away from incinerating himself and untold others in a Libyan citysuch farewell scenes are
common in these videos. But this is the rst time
an Islamic State bombers last moments will be
captured by a drone.
A minute later, after the bomber has hugged his
comrades good-bye, the drone soars high above
his truck as he drives through an urban block and
detonates his payload. The video shows a wideangle shot of the carnage from the sky; it then
cuts to footage of someone holding a Samsung
Galaxy phone thats displaying the drones-eye
view of the explosion. It was a seminal moment in
one of the Islamic States favorite media genres.
The Islamic State has long taken pride in its
air for developing content that is innovative and
repugnant in equal measure. Back in 2004, when
the organization was known as al Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI), it earned substantial notoriety by releasing videos showing the beheadings of captives
such as Nick Berg, a telecommunications engineer from Pennsylvania. This novel propaganda
tactic rankled Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian
surgeon who was then the top deputy to al Qaeda
founder Osama bin Laden. He wrote a letter to
AQIs leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which
he urged him to be mindful of how depictions
of extreme bloodshed might damage al Qaedas
reputation. I say to you that we are in a battle,
and that more than half of this battle is taking
place in the battleeld of the media, al Qaedas
Zawahiri wrote. And that we are in a media
battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our
Umma [Muslim people]. He asked Zarqawi to
refrain from future beheadings, lest the masses
be turned of by images of his cruelty.
But Zarqawi ignored his superiors request.
Cultivating broad appeal was not his plan; in the
parlance of American politics, he aimed to play
to the base. Zarqawi was trying to recruit from
the extremist fringe that gets excited by this sort

of behavior, says Will McCants, a senior fellow

at the Brookings Institutions Center for Middle
East Policy and the author of The ISIS Apocalypse. Zarqawis videos, spread via Internet
forums and email, made their way onto the hard
drives of aspiring jihadists who were energized
by their gore. Zarqawi believed that attracting
such vicious ghters was the key to fullling his
fantasy of creating an Islamic state.
As Zarqawi was pioneering his video strategy, a
jihadist theorist who wrote under the pseudonym
Abu Bakr Naji published an ebook that would
become the Islamic States blueprint: 2004s The
Management of Savagery. The book argued that
jihadist groups should venture into regions beset
by anarchy, where local populations would welcome their ability to institute basic governance
and Islamic sharia law. Over time, these regions,
like inkblots, would expand and coalesce into a
contiguous Muslim empire, or caliphate.
To abet that process, Naji urged jihadists to
combat the deceptive media halo that the West
had supposedly created. He felt there was this
Western narrative, particularly this American
narrative, that America is this unconquerable
nation that is undivided, undefeated, and can
never be thwarted, says McCants, who translated The Management of Savagery from the
original Arabic. But he argued that if the jihadists had their own media capabilities that were
able to provide the truth, it would undermine
the deceptive media halo. To that end, Naji
advised his readers to study the Wests media
so they could understand how best to mimic its
methods of persuasion.
After Zarqawi was killed by an American air
strike in June 2006, AQI rebranded itself as the
Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The organization was
considered a middling menace until it ramped
up operations in war-torn Syria in 2013, thereby
transforming into the now-familiar ISIS. Under
the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a wily
political operator who claims to be a descendant
of the prophet Muhammad, ISIS took advantage of Syrias misery to put Najis theories in
action: It swept into cities where chaos reigned
and brought some semblance of order through a
combination of administrative competence and
raw brutality. At the same time, ISIS exploited
sectarian tensions in Iraq to capture a signicant chunk of that country, including the pivotal northern city of Mosul.
The shrewd use of digital media was integral
to ISIS lightning-fast expansion in 2013 and
2014. The groups media wing, al-Furqan, documented every aspect of its ofensives, paying
special attention to the grisly fates of members of
the Syrian and Iraqi regimes. The fourth installment of the Clanging of the Swords video series,
for example, released in May 2014, plays like a
satanic episode of Cops: Videographers with

The Anatomy of the IS

Propaganda Machine
The Islamic State grabs headlines
with execution videos, but those
gruesome clips make up only a
small percentage of the organizations total media output. B.I.K.

Genre

Immigrant Testimonials

Example

Those Who Have Believed

and Emigrated

Description Fighters from every corner of the

world tell their stories in their native
languages, usually while sitting in
bucolic settings. Many speak of how
they were not permitted to practice
true Islam in their home countries.
Their children are shown attending
schools, playing in gardens, and eating delectable meals.

Genre

Economic News

Example

Food Security: Aspects From the

Work of the Agriculture Administration
in the Province

Description Blue-collar workers go about their

daily business in a suspiciously cheerful manner: Farmers till crops, bakers
roll dough for bread, shopkeepers
make change for satisfied customers.

Genre

Battle Porn

Example

Explosives of the Thrones #2

Description Islamic State soldiers fire mortar

rounds and rockets toward unseen
enemy positions, as lilting nasheeds (a cappella holy songs) fill the
soundtrack. Suicide bombers drive
trucks into buildings, and the camera lingers on the resulting plumes of
black smoke.

Genre

Valentines to the State

Example

And They Gave Zakah

Description Merchants and other businessmen

interact with the Islamic States
government employees, like tax
collectors and religious police.
Everyone pronounces themselves
grateful for the order that the Islamic
State has instilled.

Genre

Mergers and Acquisitions

Example

Bayah to the Caliph of the Muslims

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Description Members of terrorist groups from farflung locales, such as the Philippines
or Somalia, pledge their allegiance
by reciting an oath to the camera, then
giving each other hugs.

handheld equipment ride along with ISIS death

squads as they pursue and assassinate Iraqi
security personnel, some of whom are shown
begging for their lives. These videos helped
persuade police and soldiers in other cities to
melt away rather than resist when they heard
that ISIS forces were on the march.
As it established the rudiments of a functioning state, ISIS also was building a decentralized
media syndicate. Each wilayat, or province,
now runs its own media oice, stafed by camera operators and editors who churn out localized content from Nigeria to Afghanistan. (In a
November 2015 interview with The Washington
Post, a former Islamic State camera operator
from Morocco claimed he had been paid $700
per month, or seven times more than the typical ghter.) The provincial media oices are
also responsible for managing media points
kiosks or roving vans that distribute indoctrination materials to the residents of newly
conquered cities (usually on USB drives or SIM
cards). Since the Islamic State tightly restricts
access to the Internet or mobile networks, the
groups audio and video become the only legal
digital information in the region.
To persuade foreigners to emigrate to the
caliphate, the Islamic State producesin addition to martyrdom videosliterature and videos
that emphasize its alleged utopian aspects, particularly the freedom from any trace of religious
persecution. What they are able to say now is
You dont have to just hold the idea of a caliphate in your mindthis is real, this is tangible,
and you can come here and ourish and bring
your families, says John Horgan, a professor at
Georgia State Universitys Global Studies Institute and the author of The Psychology of Terrorism. In one 21-minute video entitled Honor Is in
Jihad: A Message to the People of the Balkans,
a smiling Albanian ghter is shown holding his
pigtailed daughters hand at an outdoor market that abounds with fruit. He assures his fellow Albanian Muslims that if they come to the
caliphate, they will never again have to worry
about police nding your wives uncovered
during midnight raids.
The foreigners whove made the trek to the
wilayats arent necessarily expected to ght;
the Islamic State welcomes white-collar workers
too. This policy has been a boon to the organizations media departments, which have grown
more sophisticated as theyve added specialists
with experience in the Westmen like Ahmad
Abousamra, a former Northeastern University
computer-science student who became a top gure at the oice that specializes in non-Arabic
content. (Abousamra is rumored to have been
killed last year, though the FBI is still ofering a
$50,000 reward for his capture.) The inux of
talent has brought new levels of polish and cre-

ativity to the Islamic States media output: GoPro

cameras have been aixed to AK-47s and sniper
rifles, for example, resulting in first-person
scenes that seem plucked from the Call of Duty
videogame franchise.
Perhaps most important, this content always
places the stories of ordinary ghters front
and centera sharp break from the approach
favored by al Qaeda, whose media has typically focused on elite gures like Zawahiri.
They moved the focus from individuals who
are patricians to jihadis who speak the street
language, the vernacular, says Brian Michael
Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. That shift in narrative perspective has
put the Islamic State in sync with a generation
that is accustomed to creating and sharing
its own content. When young viewers check
out the Islamic States videos, then, they can
imagine themselves right there on the screen.
The Islamic States media strategy has also
taken a cue from the tech worlds ainity for
transparency. In the past, jihadist groups
tended to prefer using password-protected
Arabic-language forums to share and exchange
ideas, notes Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, the Quilliam Foundation report. The
Islamic State, by contrast, encourages adherents to operate on the Internets most public
networks, having determined that its worth
sacricing secrecy in exchange for publicity.



T
The Twit ter user who went by the handle
@abuionian was never one to equivocate.
A rabid Islamic State supporter who wrote
exclusively in slang-inected Englisha clue
that he probably did not, as he claimed, live in
Baghdad@abuionian wrote hundreds of posts
that seethed with hatred for the West: In just
this past December and January alone, he celebrated the deaths of German tourists in an Istanbul bombing, fantasized about making a British
journalist his sex slave, and hailed the spread of
Lyme disease in the US. He cannot have been too
surprised when Twitter suspended his account.
The Islamic State diferentiates itself from
its terrorist predecessors by virtue of its highquality media. But that content would still not
be so widely distributed via so many diferent
channels were it not for the groups willingness to crowdsource a great deal of its propaganda chores to total strangersdedicated
fans such as @abuionian.

Islamic State
fighters
on parade in
Syrias Raqqa
province.

'()'



And @abuionian probably didnt stay off

Twitter long. Jihadist keyboard warriors
take pride in their ability to return to the service
again and again, for that is how they achieve status within their tight-knit community. These
suspensions have become a badge of honor and a
means by which an aspirant can bolster his or her
legitimacy, wrote the authors of ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa, a December 2015
report by George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism. In most suspension cases,
a new (and often more than one) account with
a variation of the previous username is created
within hours. According to Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at the Program on Extremism,
the Islamic State has taken pains to assure individuals like @abuionian that they will receive
divine rewards for their endeavors on Twitter,
Tumblr, and Facebookfor hitting the kuffar
(unbelievers) where they live.
The cockroachlike resilience of the Islamic
States social media cheerleaders has bewildered
American law enforcement. At a January summit
with representatives from Silicon Valleys leading companies, Secretary of Homeland Security
Jeh Johnson implored the assembled executives
to devise better methods for sniing out extremists. Are there technologies used for the prevention of spam that could be useful? asked one of
the Key Questions items in an agenda obtained
by The Intercept. Or something like Facebooks
suicide process ow? (a reference to Facebooks
system for identifying users threatening to harm
themselves). But even the cleverest algorithms
are unlikely to foil the majority of the Islamic
States online acolytes, who are highly incentivized to route around countermeasures.
The Islamic State has fueled the growth of its
social media freelancers by parsing out information in a strategic manner. The group permits
select (and presumably trusted) people within the
caliphate to form relationships with Western supporters, usually through the messaging apps Telegram or Surespot; the chosen emissaries, in turn,
become celebrities in their online circles because

they have the inside scoop on the supposed dayto-day realities of life in Raqqa or Mosul. There
are a few supporters who, over time, have demonstrated a kind of access to those inside the Islamic
State, Amarasingam says. Those are the people
who tend to become authoritative and inuential,
the people who have that kind of access. These
elite users, or nodes, as they were termed in
the ISIS in America report, sufuse their social
media networks with exclusive content, thereby
creating buzzand allowing the Islamic State to
maintain a modicum of inuence over its crowdsourced partners.
Still, the Islamic State has clearly taken risks
by opting for openness. Because its supporters are so visible on social media networks,
they often attract law-enforcement scrutiny:
A good example is the case of Heather Cofman,
a Virginia woman whom the FBI zeroed in on
after she made statements like I love ISIS! on
Facebook. (Cofman, who tried to arrange for a
male acquaintance to travel to Syria so he could
become an Islamic State martyr, is currently
serving a 54-month federal prison sentence.)
But the drawbacks to the Islamic States online
strategy have been outweighed by the advantages.
On the most pragmatic level, social media has
lowered the bar of entry for recruitsthe curious have no problem nding the Islamic States
propaganda in numerous languages, and they can
easily connect with intermediaries who will facilitate their travel to the caliphate. (Jaelyn Young,
a Mississippi college student accused of trying
to join the Islamic State, allegedly planned her
thwarted trip to Syria by using her @1_modest_
woman Twitter account to form one-on-one relationships with ghters widows.)
But in a more meta way, the Islamic States
aggressive approach to social media may be most
valuable to the organization as a tool to stoke a
particular kind of paranoia in the West: Because
were already so anxiety-ridden over how Twitter and its cohorts are altering our lives, were
prone to freak out when sinister entities seem
more adept than we are at using the technology.
Were all just getting used to using social media
ourselves, as a society, so we overemphasize the
Islamic States efectiveness because they use it
too, says Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor

Like

at the University of North Carolina who studies

Islamic terrorism. In classic fashion, the medium
has become the messagethe mere fact that the
Islamic State has infected Twitter, itself one of
our chief objects of wonder and mystication,
dupes us into giving its brand far too much credit.

19

T
The case of Edward Archer may never make
much sense. On the night of January 7, while clad
in a white robe and white mask, Archer ran up to
an occupied police car in West Philadelphia and
red 13 shots from a stolen pistol; the cars driver
was hit three times but survived. At his interrogation, Archer was happy to ofer a motive: I
follow Allah and pledge allegiance to the Islamic
State, and that is the reason I did what I did.
Its possible that Archer had studied the incendiary words of Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the
Islamic States oicial spokesperson, who has
urged the groups sympathizers to kill Western
nonbelievers by any means necessary (including by destroying their crops). But a closer look
at Archers life raises doubts about the depth
of his engagement with the Islamic State: His
mother claimed that he had been sufering from
powerful hallucinations, and he was scheduled
to be sentenced on forgery charges just four
days after the attack. Individuals in the throes
of such personal crises are prone to latch on to
whatever bogeyman is preoccupying the American imagination at that moment.
There are people who, for whatever reason,
have some sort of personal diiculty or experience, some sort of break in their lives, and
are attuned to engaging in violence, Kurzman
says. And so they will glom on to whatever the
biggest, baddest revolutionary ideology of the
moment is.
That is precisely what happened time and
again during Americas skyjacking epidemic,
an apt historical parallel to the Islamic States
current crowdsourcing of violence. Throughout
President Richard Nixons rst term, hijackers
seized commercial ights every week or two,
often demanding passage to Cuba or six-gure
ransoms. (In 1969 alone, there were 38 hijacking
attempts in American airspace, including one in
which an AWOL marine, Rafaele Minichiello,
made it all the way from Los Angeles to Rome
aboard a TWA Boeing 707.) The perpetrators
of these crimes often said they were acting to
support one of the eras fashionable political
causesthe Black Power movement, for exam-

ple, or the crusade to end the Vietnam War. But

if you scratched beneath the surface, you often
found people in desperate straitspeople like
Roger Holder, a PTSD-alicted Vietnam vet who
ostensibly hijacked a Western Airlines jet to
Algeria as part of a convoluted plot to win the
freedom of American political activist Angela
Davis but was also keen to avoid a looming court
date for fraud. Or Paul Joseph Cini, an alcoholic
loner who claimed to be an ailiate of the Irish
Republican Army but who really hijacked Air
Canada Flight 812 and demanded a $1.5 million
ransom because he was sick of feeling worthless. (I wanted to stand up and say, Hey, Im
Paul Cini, and Im here and I exist and I want to
be noticed, he later explained.)
Evening newscasts, the cutting-edge media
of the late 1960s, played a signicant role in the
contagiousness of the hijacking epidemic, much
in the same way that sleek al-Furqan videos have
sparked numerous individuals desire to conduct
attacks for the Islamic State. When interviewed
in prison, many hijackers confessed that theyd
become intrigued after viewing news footage of
stolen planes; when they committed their own
crimes, they were often mindful of the fact that
their exploits would be aired to millions. (One
man, Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, even requested that
news crews come aboard the Frontier Airlines jet
that hed seized so they could live-broadcast his
speech about American racism.) The hijackers
also gleaned valuable intelligence from coverage
of previous incidents, which often led them to
modify their plans. When a former Army paratrooper named Richard LaPoint jumped out of
Hughes Airwest Flight 800 in January 1972, for
example, after having obtained a $50,000 ransom

ISIS is
a cult
that
wants us
to turn
on ourselves.
ISIS is

A c u lt

T H AT

Wa n t s u s

to turn

on our-

s e lv e s .

2k

in Reno, Nevada, he did so in stif cowboy boots;

as a result, he sprained an ankle upon landing
and was thus easily apprehended in a Colorado
wheat eld. Future parajackers made sure to
wear appropriate footwear.
The dozens of Americans whove been arrested
for allegedly plotting to commit violence for the
Islamic State, meanwhile, have often seemed
obsessed not only with viewing the organizations well-made content but also with contributing their own videos to the cause. A Kansan
named John T. Booker Jr., for example, who
stands accused of planning to open re on an
Army base, was radicalized by the al-Hayat
Media Center lm Flames of War; prior to his
arrest, he recorded a video of his own in which
he warned Americans to get your loved ones
out of the military. And a Florida man named
Harlem Suarez is accused of having concocted
a script for his proIslamic State video, one in
which he theatrically vowed to help raise our
black ag on top of your White House.
Because its violence was conned to specic
spaces, the skyjacking epidemic was easy to curtail once there was enough political will to do
so: Soon after a trio of hijackers threatened to
crash Southern Airways Flight 49 into a nuclear
reactor in November 1972, the airlines agreed to
make all passengers submit to preight security
checks. (Prior to that, most travelers could waltz
onto their planes without passing through metal
detectors or having their carry-ons searched.)
The still-nascent epidemic of Islamic State
inspired violence presents a trickier challenge,
since the vulnerable and angry souls whove
been triggered by the groups aura are carrying
out their attacks in various locales: at a cartoon
contest in Dallas, on a sidewalk in Queens, at a
social-services center in San Bernardino.
Since its impossible to harden security at
every public space in America, law enforcement
has focused on arresting suspected Islamic
State sympathizers before they can act. They
often use paid informants, many of whom are
familiar with law enforcements modus operandi because they have criminal records themselves. These informants frequently point the
FBI in the direction of suspects who sufer from
mental illnesses and are thus easy prey for sting
operations. The FBIs repeated targeting of people who clearly require psychiatric care has fed
into the Islamic States contention that Islam
is persecuted in the West. (When @abuionian
posted about one such sting on Twitter, he commented, Racist FBI doing what it does best:
framing Muslims/minorities.)
Because attacks persist despite the FBIs
aggressive use of informants, it is tempting to
believe that more draconian measures are in
ordersay, giving government the means to
decrypt Apples iPhone software at will. Yet that

is precisely what the Islamic State wants us to do,

as Abu Bakr Naji outlined in The Management
of Savagery. He described the need to manipulate Western nations into committing what he
termed cultural annihilation. This is a cult
that desperately wants us to turn on ourselves.

The Islamic State in the US

As of early March, 84 Americans
had been charged with attempting
to support the Islamic State in
some fashion. Here are profiles of
four typical cases. B.I.K.

Name

Nicholas Teausant

Date of Arrest March 17, 2014

Midway through last September, terrorism ana-

lysts noticed a coordinated shift in the Islamic

States media output. All at once, the various
wilayat media oices released a ood of videos
with titles such as Would You Exchange What
Is Better for What Is Less? and Muslim Asylum
Seekers to the Abode of the Disbelievers, all of
which excoriated the refugees who were eeing Iraq and Syria by the tens of thousands. This
propaganda was a clear indication of the Islamic
States anxiety over the outow of people from
its territoriesan anxiety that was underscored
in November when the group outtted one of
the suicide bombers who attacked Paris with a
fake Syrian passport. The Islamic State wants
the Western conversation about refugees to
center on whether theyre security risks rather
than the fact that theyre living proof of the
caliphates intrinsic dysfunction. The group
has gotten its wish to some extent, which does
not speak well for our ability to recognize our
adversaries intentions.
If the West really wants to destroy the Islamic
States deceptive media halo, we need to take
a page from them and foster our own forms of
crowdsourced messages. First and foremost,
Western nations must focus on broadcasting the stories of refugees, told in their own
wordswords that would strongly undermine
the remaining and expanding narrative that
is so crucial to the Islamic States identity. In
the organizations digital content, the caliphate
is depicted as a veritable Eden, a place where
placid lakes literally teem with fish and the
well-fed children are always smiling. What if
we gave refugees the digital tools and Internet
access necessary to produce content that not
only rebuts those depictions but also conveys
the daily horrors of living in a society where
callous men of violence run the show? To make
this possible, we must guarantee safety for
them and their families, for the Islamic State

Location

Blaine, Washington
A junior-college student who had a
brief stint in the National Guard,
Teausant pleaded guilty to attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic
State. He often posted pro-jihadist
messages on his Instagram account,
which he used as Assad Teausant
bigolsmurf. He told an FBI informant
that he would like to make a video
for the Islamic State in which he would
be the one white devil that leaves
their face open to the camera.

Name

Heather Cofman

Date of Arrest November 17, 2014

Location

Henrico, Virginia
Cofman praised the Islamic State
on multiple Facebook accounts,
under aliases such as Heather
LaAhad and Ubeida Ametova. She
told an undercover FBI employee
that she had tried to arrange for a man
she called her husband to travel to
Syria, where she wanted him to die a
martyr. (They split up before her plan
came to fruition.)

Name

Alexander Ciccolo

Date of Arrest July 4, 2015

Location

Adams, Massachusetts
The son of a Boston police captain,
Ciccolo is alleged to have planned
to use pressure-cooker bombs and
assault ries to attack taverns and
a state university. On his Facebook
page, he called himself Ali Al Amriki
and thanked the Islamic State for
killing American soldiers. An FBI aidavit notes that Ciccolo has a long
history of mental illness.

Name

Harlem Suarez

Date of Arrest July 27, 2015

Location

Key West, Florida

Suarezs Facebook account listed his
likes as Jihadist and Extraordinary
Prayer for ISIS. He was arrested after
attempting to buy a bomb from an
undercover FBI employee, allegedly
so he could attack cartoons, police,
and military.

is never shy about exacting retribution against

those who reveal its aws.
The US should also give Islamic State defectors, particularly those with American roots,
a chance to share their unltered tales of disillusionment. As things stand now, those who
return from the caliphate are more liable to
land in prison than in front of an audience; one
Houston-area man, Asher Abid Khan, is facing
30 years behind bars simply for going to Turkey, where he decided to abandon his plan to
enter the caliphate and returned home. Instead
of treating every returnee like an irredeemable
villain, our government should instead encourage them to share their own storiestales that
will not only illuminate the Islamic States wickedness but also highlight our own societys pluralism and mercy. Determining which returnees
are truly no longer threats will be tricky, but
deradicalization programs in Europe in particular are yielding data that can help us build the
right psychological assessment tools.
These authentic stories will always be more
powerful than coordinated government eforts.
The State Departments Think Again, Turn
Away public relations campaign, which has
the noble goal of countering the Islamic States
propaganda, has floundered since its inception because its content is comically stodgy.
The campaign is best known for its Twitter
account, @thinkagain_DOS, which features GIFs
and JPEGs that depict snippets of the Islamic
States eviltruthful images that fail to resonate because they look like public service posters
from the 1980s. No matter how valid the State
Departments message, it cannot expect to win
hearts and minds with content that is roundly
mocked as amateurish. (A new State Department oice, the Global Engagement Center, was
recently set up to counter the destructive messages of violent extremist groups, though it has
so far revealed few specics about its plans.)
If were serious about winning this media
game, time is of the essence. To offset some
losses in the Middle East, the Islamic State is
now moving to strengthen its North African
wilayats. The group is already on the verge of
turning Libya into its newest stronghold, which
is why its so important right now to dissuade
young men and women around the globe from
pledging their futures to the caliphate.
At the same time, we must also keep the Islamic
States menace in perspective, lest we fall into
the trap that Naji detailed in The Management
of Savagery: The Islamic State can succeed in
the long run only if were foolish enough to let
it terrorize us into abandoning our basic values
such as due process and privacy. We must resist
the distorting efects of the media halo that the
Islamic State has built for itself, while never forgetting the considerable power of our own. 

Like many American couples of modest

but comfortable means, Susie McKinnon and her husband, Eric Green, discovered the joys of cruise vacations
in middle age. Their home in a quiet
suburb of Olympia, Washington, is
filled with souvenirs and trinkets
from their travels. Theres a plastic
lizard in the master bathroom with
the words cayman islands painted
on it. From Curaao theres a framed
patchwork collage made of oilcloth
hanging in the entrance hall. On the
gray summer day when I visit them, we
all sit comfortably in their living room,
Green decked out in a bright shirt with
bermuda islands emblazoned on it,
from a cruise in 2013. As they regale
me with talk of their younger selves
and their trips to Jamaica, Aruba,
Cozumel, and Mazatln, they present the very picture of well-adjusted
adulthood on the verge of retirement.
Except for one fairly major thing.
As we chat, McKinnon makes clear
that she has no memories of all those
cruises. No memories of buying the
lizard or nding that oilcloth collage.
She doesnt remember any vacation
shes ever taken. In fact, she cannot
recall a single moment in her marriage to Green or before it.
Before you start to brace yourself
for one of those storiesabout the
onset of dementia, the slow dissolve
of a marriage into a relationship of
unrequited love, the loss of selflet
me reassure you: McKinnon hasnt
lost anything. Shes never been able to
remember those experiences.
For decades, scientists suspected
that someone like Susie McKinnon
might exist. They figured she was
probably out there, living an ordinary
lifehard to tell apart from the next
person in line at the grocery store, yet
fundamentally diferent from the rest
of us. And sure enough, they found her
(or rather, she found them) in 2006.
McKinnon is the rst person ever
identified with a condition called
severely decient autobiographical
memory. She knows plenty of facts
about her life, but she lacks the ability

to mentally relive any of it, the way you

or I might meander back in our minds
and evoke a particular afternoon. She
has no episodic memoriesnone of
those impressionistic recollections
that feel a bit like scenes from a movie,
always lmed from your perspective.
To switch metaphors: Think of memory as a favorite book with pages that
you return to again and again. Now
imagine having access only to the
index. Or the Wikipedia entry.
I know bits and pieces of stuf that
happened, McKinnon says of her own
childhood. But none of it bears a vivid,
rst-person stamp. I dont remember
being shorter or smaller or having to
reach up for things. I have no images
or impressions of myself as a kid. She
nds herself guessing a lot at what her
experiences must have been like: She
assumes the Cayman Islands were hot.
Perhaps she and Green walked around
a lot there. It was probably sometime
between 2000 and 2010, she ventures.
The way McKinnon experiences life
scrambles much of what we presume
is essential to being human. No less a
gure than the philosopher John Locke
argued that memory, the kind McKinnon lacks, is the very thing that constitutes personal identity. Its hard to
even imagine what it would feel like to
be without these kinds of memories;
when we do, we picture disaster. Last
years blockbuster Pixar lm, Inside
Out, hinged on the idea that if the main
character loses her core memories,
then her islands of personality collapse into nothingness.
McKinnon has no core memories
that she is aware of. But there can be
no doubt of her personality. She is a
liberal white woman who married a
black man despite her conservative
fathers disapproval. A Catholic who
decided somewhere along the way that
religion wasnt for her. Shes bashful
and sensitive. Intuitive, curious, and
funny. She has a jobshes a retirement specialist for the state of Washingtonand she has hobbies, values,
beliefs, opinions, a nucleus of friends.
Though she doesnt remember being a

part of the anecdotes that shaped her

into this person, she knows very well
who she is. Which raises the question:
Just how expendable is this supposedly
essential part of being human after all?
.

Music has a powerful way of evoking memories. For McKinnons husband, this is especially true of songs
by Motown acts like the Temptations
and the Miracles. They take him back
to weekend nights in Chicago when he
was young, when he paid a quarter to
go into someones basement and make
out with a girl as music played in the
dark. People called them quarter parties. Listening to Motown also reminds
him of Saturdays with his cousins at
the Regal, where for three bucks he
watched performers like Marvin Gaye.
It was always crowded and hot and
smelled of stale popcorn. The guys
wore $10 Ban-Lon shirts. The women
wore ankle-length dresses. Most had
processed hair, but Green was just
starting to grow out an afro.
He grins as he describes the scene,
peering through the eyes of a version
of himself from decades ago. This
was before he and McKinnon met as
coworkers at a hospital in Illinois; long
before they moved west and started
going on cruises. She was friendly
well, she was sexy, Green says of when
they rst met. To McKinnon, all this
mental time traveling seems magical.
Its hard for me to believe, she says.
Our ability to do thisto be the
rst-person protagonist of our own
memoriesis part of what psychologists call autonoetic consciousness.
Its the faculty that allows us to mentally reenact past experiences.
Memory researchers used to believe
there was just one kind of long-term
memory. But in 1972, Endel Tulving, a
Canadian psychologist and cognitive
neuroscientist, introduced the idea that
long-term memory comes in multiple
forms. One is semantic memory, which
allows us to remember how to spell a
word like, say, autonoetic. Years from

now, you might recall how to spell it, but

maybe not when and where you were
when you rst came across the word
and its denition, perhaps in wired.
Tulving argued that autonoetic consciousness is crucial for the formation
of another kind of long-term memory
episodic memorywhich integrates
time and sensory details in a cinematic,
visceral way. Remembering where and
when you learned how to spell autonoetic: Thats an episodic memory.
As it happens, McKinnon shares
Greens love of music. She even performs with a choral ensemble. Lyrics,
melodies, and harmonies stick with her,
thanks to her intact semantic memory. Similarly, she can tell you for a
fact that three months ago, she sang
a rendition of an old English folk song
onstagea solo. But only Green can
supply the scene: how she strolled onto
the stage alone and took her place in
front of a piano. Green says her performance brought him close to tears.
McKinnon thinks she must have felt
a mixture of condence and fear, but
really she hasnt the faintest idea.
She does, however, have a recording, and we decide to give it a listen.
She walks over to the living room CD
player, pops in a disc, and presses Play.
Are you ready? she asks nervously.
McKinnon retreats into herself, pacing
self-consciously between the sofa, dining room chairs, and kitchen counter.
An alto lls the living room, a voice
from another time. The water is
wide, the voice sings. I cannot cross
oer. McKinnon notices a tremble in
the voice and giggles with surprise.
Its as if shes experiencing the performance for the rst time.
.

McKinnon first began to realize that her

memory was not the same as everyone elses back in 1977, when a friend
from high school, who was studying
to be a physicians assistant, asked
if she would participate in a memory
test as part of a school assignment.
When her friend asked basic questions

about her childhood as part of the test,

McKinnon would reply, Why are you
asking stuf like this? No one remembers that! She knew that other people
claimed to have detailed memories, but
she always thought they embellished
and made stuf upjust like she did.
McKinnons friend was so disturbed
by her responses that she suggested
McKinnon get her memory checked
by a professional. McKinnon put
the exchange aside for almost three
decades. Then one day in 2004, she
came across an article about Endel Tulving, the researcher who had originally
characterized the diference between
episodic and semantic memory.
McKinnon read about how, at the
University of Toronto, Tulving studied an amnesic patient, K. C., who was
in a motorcycle accident at 30 that
resulted in brain damage affecting
his episodic memory. He could not
remember anything in his life except
experiences from the last minute or
two. Yet despite this deciency, the
patient could remember basic knowledge learned before his accident, like
math and history, and when taught
new information in experiments, he
could retain lessons, even though he
could not recall visits to the laboratory where he was taught. His case
became crucial to Tulvings theories
about memory.
Like McKinnon, people with amnesia usually lose their episodic memories and keep their semantic ones.
But amnesiacs tend to come by their
memory loss through brain trauma,
developmental disorders, or degenerative conditions. And they are often
impaired in their day-to-day functioning; they cannot live normal lives.
Reading about Tulvings case studies,
McKinnon recognized a resemblance to
her own experiencesminus the brain
lesions, injuries, or debilitating side
efects. Her brain and life, as far as she
knew, seemed to be healthy and intact.
One of Tulvings arguments struck a
particular chord. A prole of the psychologist reported his belief that
some perfectly intelligent and healthy

people also lack the ability to remember personal experiences. These people have no episodic memory; they
know but do not remember. Such people have not yet been identied, but
Tulving predicts they soon will be.
McKinnon felt too intimidated to
contact Tulving himself; he seemed too
famous. So instead she set her sights
on Brian Levine, a senior scientist
at the Rotman Research Institute in
Toronto who had worked closely with
Tulving and whose expertise in episodic and autobiographical memory
caught her eye.
On August 25, 2006, McKinnon sent
Levine an email that referenced Tulvings prediction about healthy people
with no episodic memories: I think
theres at least a possibility that I might
be one of the people he was describing.
Im 52 y/o, extremely stable, with
a very satisfying life & well-developed
sense of humor. Contacting you is a big
(and, frankly, scary) step for me Ill
appreciate any guidance you may be
able to give me.
.

I get a lot of emails from people with

various issues, Levine says. With
Susie, I felt like this was worth pursuing. So Levine invited McKinnon
to his lab in Toronto. His rst move,
in collaboration with researcher Daniela Palombo, was to begin looking
for some underlying physiological or
psychological explanation for McKinnons apparent lack of episodic memories: a neurological condition, trauma,
or brain damage caused by anoxia at
birth. They found no such thing.
Next, Levine ran McKinnon through
something called an autobiographical
interview, to vet her own report that
she lacks episodic memories. Before
the interview, his lab team spoke with
Green, a close friend of McKinnons,
and McKinnons brother and mother,
asking each for stories about McKinnon
that they would try to verify with her.
When Levine and colleagues quizzed
McKinnon about events that her friends

and relatives describedlike the time

she was in The Sound of Music during
high schoolshe had no such recollections, even when she was probed
with follow-up questions like Do you
remember any objects in the environment? The interview seemed to conrm that, sure enough, McKinnon had
no recognizable episodic memories.
Soon, Levine discovered two more
healthy individuals who also seemed
to lack episodic memories. Both were
middle-aged men with successful
jobs, one of them a PhD. One was
in a long-term relationship. Levine
put both men through the same battery of tests in his lab. He also ran all
three of his patients through an MRI
machine. Each showed reduced activity in regions of the brain crucial to the
minds understanding of the self, the
ability to mentally time travel, and the
capacity to form episodic memories.
Levine published a study about McKinnon and his two other subjects in
Neuropsychologia in April 2015. Since
then, hundreds of people claiming to
have severely decient autobiographical memory have reached out to
Levines team. Each must go through
a set of tests as well, he says, and results might lead to only a dozen or so
provable cases. But the response suggests that the discovery of McKinnon
and the other two subjects wasnt a
uke. It raises fairly large questions,
Levine says. What exactly does recollection do for us? If members of our
species can get by so well without episodic memories, why did we evolve to
have them in the rst place? And how
long are they liable to stick around?
.

Spend enough time with McKinnon

and its hard to escape the creeping
sense that shes not just diferent
shes lucky. Memories that would be
searing to anyone else leave little
impression on her. Like the time in
1986 when the couple was living in
Arizona and Green was jumped by a
group of white men while out shing.

When he came home, his head was covered with welts. She went to get ice
and she started crying, Green says. He
began to cry too. They felt terrorized.
Once again, McKinnon knows the
salient facts of the story, but the details
and the painful associations all reside
with Green. For McKinnon, the memory doesnt trigger the trauma and fear
associated with it. I can imagine being
upset and scared, but I dont remember that at all, she says. I cant put
myself back there. I can only imagine
what it would have been like.
McKinnon also quickly forgets arguments, which might be the reason she
and Green have stayed together so long,
she jokes. She cannot hold a grudge.
She is unfamiliar with the feeling of
regret and oblivious to the diminishments of aging. A 1972 yearbook photo
shows that she was once a petite brunette with a delicate face framed by a
pixie cut. (Dorky little innocent thing,
she says, looking at the picture.) On an
intellectual level, McKinnon knows that
this is her; but put the picture away and,
in her mind, she has always been the
60-year-old woman she is now, broadshouldered and fair, her face pinkish
and time-lined, her closely cropped
hair white and gray. She doesnt know
what its like to linger in a memory, to
long for the past, to dwell in it.
More than a decade ago a woman
named Jill Price came to the attention
of scientists at UC Irvine. She exhibited a condition that is pretty much
the direct opposite of McKinnons:
the researchers called it hyperthymestic syndrome, or highly superior
autobiographical memory. Price has
an extraordinary ability to recall just
about any fact that has intersected
with her life: July 18, 1984, was a quiet
Wednesday, as she writes in her memoir, and Price picked up the book Helter
Skelter and read it for the second time.
Monday, February 28, 1983, the nal
episode of M*A*S*H aired, and it was
raining. The next day Prices windshield
wipers stopped working as she drove.
In contrast to McKinnon, who has
received relatively little press atten-

tion, Price became an instant media

sensation. Diane Sawyer had her on
air twice in one day. Her powers of
memory, after all, seemed supremely
enviable, superhuman.
But as the UC Irvine researchersand a story in wirednoted,
Prices extraordinary feats of recollection were accompanied by a kind
of obsessive-compulsive xation on
recording the details of her life, one
that appeared to have taken root after
a traumatizing move to LA when she
was a girl. As an adult in her 40s, she
still lived with her parents. And she
buttressed her memory with cramped
pages full of notes on everything that
happened to her in any given day.
Which is all just to say: When it comes
to people with highly unusual memories, its not clear that we as a culture
are so good at choosing who to envy.
.

You might think that McKinnon would

lean on technology to help compensate
for her disorder. After all, she lives at
a moment when software companies
are churning out products that are,
essentially, surrogates for the very
faculties she lacks. Isnt a Facebook
feed a kind of prosthetic autobiographical memory? Google Photos will even
form gauzy retrospective mental associations for you: The articially intelligent software plunges straight into
your photo library, plucks out faces
and related events, and automatically
generates poignant little videossynthetic episodic memories. Other software tools aim to capture your entire
life in documentsemails, calendar
reminders, schoolwork, voicemails,
texts, snapshots, videos, and other
bits of recordable datato provide a
searchable database of your memories.
And yet the life-logging impulse is
lost on McKinnon. Once, she decided
to keep a journal to see if she could preserve her memories. I stopped doing
that after two or three days, she says.
If I get so obsessed with capturing
every moment because Im afraid of

In August 1953 doctors

in Hartford, Connecticut, removed both hippocampi from the brain
of Henry Molaison (H.
M.) in hopes of curing
his epileptic seizures.
The operation had the
desired effect, but it
also left Molaison with
profound amnesia and
rendered him unable
to form new memories,
much to the surprise of
his neurosurgeon. He
was, however, still articulate, intelligent, and
able to learn new skills.
Studied for decades
by MIT researchers,
his case fundamentally
transformed how psychologists understand
memory: It showed
that the brain handles
long-term and shortterm memory diferently
and that various functionsreside in separate
areas of the brain.

After a fateful encounter with a bale of hay,

a dune buggy crash,
andfinallya motorcycle accident, Kent
Cochrane (K. C.) sustained damage to multiple parts of his brain
and lost all memory of
his past experiences.
Cochrane could remember facts but not where
he had learned them,
offering scientists a
clue to the distinction
between semantic and
episodic memory. In
2005 a team of psychologists including Endel
Tulving wrote that K.
C.s case had helped
contribute to the eventual crumbling of the
neat and tidy singlememory, single-locus
model of amnesia.

losing the memory, Im never going to

experience those moments. And what
else, really, does she have?
She does use email, which sometimes
serves as a useful reference. But she
doesnt make a special efort to log her
experiences there. And she doesnt use
social media. No Pinterest. No Instagram. She had a Facebook account, but
she quit using it. It didnt interest her.
Even if she had a Facebook feed, she
would have very little to put there in
the way of photos or videos. McKinnon
once borrowed a video camera to lm
one of their departures on a Caribbean
cruise, but she didnt enjoy it. She lost
the feeling of the moment, she says.
She likewise doesnt take photos. She
says she doesnt nd them that compelling to look at. Sure enough, I notice
there are no pictures on the couples
refrigerator, shelves, or walls. No
framed wedding portraits. No posed
beach shots. There are just a few photo
albums in an upstairs oice.
McKinnon pulls down the album of
her 1981 courthouse wedding to Green
in Maywood, Illinois. Theres a shot of
the friends who surprised the newlyweds on the steps outside. Theres one
of Green opening a gag gifta set of
four mugs with images of cats having
sex. McKinnon is practiced at laughing
through all the anecdotes about the day
that she has memorized over the years,
with help from the album. But looking at the pictures, she says, feels like
observing somebody elses wedding.
Today, though, she learns something new about the day she married
Green. As we look over the album,
Green mentions a close friend who
attended the wedding. I didnt even
know she was there, McKinnon says.
Thats because there are no photos of
this friend. Because she was the one
behind the camera.
This actually feels like the kind of
error anyone could make: Doesnt the
person behind the camera often get
edited out of recall? Even when the person behind the camera is you?
While its abundantly clear that
McKinnon isnt using technology to

become more like us, its conceivable

that technology could, over the long
run, make us all a bit more like McKinnon. My iPhone now holds 1,217 photos and 159 videos just from the past
eight months. By focusing on clicking picture after picture, I may actually be blurring away my memories of
these experiences through something
researchers call the photo-taking
impairment efect. And by automatically storing all those photos in the
cloudwhich relieves my mind of the
burden of cataloging a bunch of memoriesI may be short-circuiting some
part of my own process of episodic
memory formation.
What would humanity lose if they
lost some of that ability? McKinnon
asks during one of our conversations,
as if wondering aloud for me. If they
had technology to replace it, what
would be lost? The human experience
would change, but would it be a plus?
Or a minus? Orjust a change?
.

I can hear McKinnon sniffling. Were sitting in a dark movie theater at Olympias Capital Mall, watching Inside
Out. Out of the corner of my eye, I see
that shes crying. Most of the movie
takes place in the mind of an 11-yearold girl named Riley. The girls emotions, represented as cartoon workers
in a control room, are on an emergency
mission to save her from psychological catastrophe: the loss of her core
memories, which look like little glowing orbs with video loops playing
across their surface. The core memories power her personality islands,
whichwell, its hard to describe,
but suice it to say the structures of
Rileys personality begin to crumble
when her core memories go missing.
McKinnon loves the movie, despite
the fact that it seems to present her
daily reality as an utter catastrophe.
(When we talk about the islands of
personality, core memories, and the
control room of Rileys consciousness, McKinnon laughs. If I have the

islands, she says, Im not sure theres

any connections to headquarters.)
Im surprised to nd out that, even
though she doesnt experience her
own life as a narrative, McKinnon
loves stories. Especially fantasy and
sci-: Game of Thrones, The Hunger
Games. Shes read all the books, seen
all the movies and episodes. She cant
remember what they were about, but
that just makes it better. Each time she
rereads or rewatches something, its
like experiencing it for the rst time.
(Heres another thing to envy about
her: She is impervious to spoilers.)
But she cannot for the life of her
make up a story. She does not daydream. Her mind does not wander.
This lack of imagination is common
among amnesiacs. Most of us can visualize a beach scene on command, for
example: We can picture lounging on a
chair with a pia colada in hand, roaring waves, grains of sand between our
toes. When McKinnon tries this mental
exercise, she can visualize a hammock,
maybe. And then theres probably a
palm tree. As soon as, in my mind, Id
try to grab that palm tree, I lose the
hammock. She cannot t the images
together into a finished puzzle. She
also cannot play chess, even though
her husband plays often. I cant hold in
my mind more than one move ahead.
In other words, not only does McKinnon lack a window into the past, she
also lacks a window into the future.
McKinnon and I did a lot that day.
We ate, we spoke, we walked around
the mall. But of course, she doesnt
remember the details, nor does she
seem to mind. While most of us experience life as a story of gain and loss,
McKinnon exists always and only in her
own denouement. There is no inciting
incident. No conict. And no anxious
sense of momentum toward the nale.
She achieves efortlessly what some
people spend years striving for: She
lives entirely in the present. 
ERIKA HAYASAKI (@erikahayasaki)
teaches in the Literary Journalism
Program at UC Irvine.

In 2006, Jill Price (A.J.)

became the first person
diagnosed with highly
superior autobiographical memory, a condition
marked by an involuntary, extraordinary
ability to remember
the past. Researchers at UC Irvine found
that Price could recall
extraordinarily specific and wide-ranging
detailsthe weekday
on which a specific episode of a TV show first
aired in the 1980s, for
instancegoing back
to when she was 14.
The researchers also
noted that she displayed OCD-like symptoms. Price quickly
became a media sensation, interviewed on
national TV and covered in countless articles, including a 2009
WIRED feature that
described her as
the Michael Jordan
of autobiography.
CHELSEA LEU

ADD CART
The app-fueled, farmer-friendly, totally delicious plan to kill the supermarket.

THERE IS NO greater temple to our industrialized food system than the American supermarket. With its bins of megafarmed produce,
attention-seeking boxes of processed foods, and generous, if anonymous, cuts of meat, it is a place of comforting predictability and
one-stop convenience. And like the American waistline, its also huge: A typical supermarket is 46,000 square feet and carries some
42,000 products. Problem is, its a terrible way to get food.Such scale demands a vast supply chain, with goods transported to
multiple distribution centers before they arrive at stores. This comes with costs, most notably in food loss. A 2014 report found that
43 billion pounds of retail food didnt make it to consumers, for reasons like mold, inadequate climate control, and other factors
the industry calls shrinkage (lets face it, thats embarrassing for anyone). All this is damaging to the environment and, because
it encourages mass production, gives us worse food (in terms of both taste and nutrition). The supermarket was once a modern
marvel, but, as they say, that register is closed: The $638 billion industry is ripe for reinvention.Thanks to the smartphoneaddicted consumer, GPS, apps, and the Internet, a new breed of startup is building systems that make it easier for producers to
know just how much to produce, for shoppers to order just what they want, and for food to get from one to the other faster and
with fewer stops in between. They range from oferings like Instacart, which gets us partway there by providing a digital portal
into existing stores, to more advanced services, like Farmigo, that show the potential to eliminate physical stores entirely. All
emphasize convenience. Many promote transparency, responsible practices, and shorter supply chains. The upsides: higher-quality
food, easier-than-pie delivery, a wider range of growers, and reduced waste and carbon emissions. The downsides: For now it
tends to be expensive, and the market will need to grow before these services can break out of elite cities. But the future they
promisethe end of the strip mall monolith and better and smarter food, to bootis hard to resist. Courtney Balestier

INSTACART
This concierge-style
service relies on the
WHERE 18 US metro areas,
existence of brick-andincluding Chicago, Miami,
mortar stores but does
New York, and San Francisco
the shopping for you
WHAT Almost the entire
often delivering in an
inventory of stores like Whole
hour or two. At some
Foods and Petco (in some areas
you can get Insta-booze!)
Whole Foods locations, Instacart even
PRICE At or above in-store cost,
has its own checkplus a delivery fee
out lines and staging
areas. When it comes
to traditional grocers, its truly a joint partnership,
says Vishwa Chandra, Instacarts vice president of retail
accounts. The company taps into inventory data and lets
stores set prices; Instacart gets either a fee or a percentage of the sale. According to the company, its customers
buy two and a half to four times as much as in-store customersand not just in the fancy (or not-so-fancy) chain
stores. Instacart partners with co-ops too. Its important
to have that breadth, Chandra says. We didnt want this
to be just the large guys getting online.

Illustrations by Jesse Harp

Lettering by Matthew Tapia

Place the
Order

Forget traffic jams

in the produce aisle:
Customers punch in
their zip code online
or via the app (A) to
see partnered retailers
in their area, from big
guys like Whole Foods
and Costco to local
shops like Bi-Rite in
San Francisco. They
also see whether
prices are currently at
or above regular store
prices. If an item is out
of stock, users can
choose an alternative
or tag a quality, like
sweet cereal, that
any replacement
should satisfy. (The
most-ordered item?
Bananas.)

the

Instacart shopperspart-time employees

who work with no minimum-hour requirement
(Boston alone has more than 400 shoppers)
have dedicated apps that notify them of new
orders. Each order is sent to a specic shopper,
and the apps algorithm tries to provide the most
efficient way to navigate the store to ll it (B).
The shopper scans the barcode of each item. If
it matches the customers request, its marked
as found (C); if, say, the shopper scans 2 percent
milk when the customer ordered skim, the app

ags the error. (Customers and shoppers can

also communicate through the app (D).) Once
the list is completed, the shopper checks out.
If theyre in a store with a dedicated Instacart
station (E), the cashier will conrm that the items
match the order. Orders are packed into bags,
which are then labeled, numbered, and held
for delivery. (Temperature-sensitive bags sit in
Instacart refrigerators and freezers until theyre
ready to go.) Instacart pays for the groceries
then gets reimbursed by the customer.

DELIVER

GOODS

Sometimes shoppers also deliver, but usually

independently contracted drivers (think Uber) take
over, loading orders into vehiclesor, in dense urban
markets like New York City, pushcartsand bringing
them to customers doors along a route determined by
the app for maximum efficiency (F). If an order contains
goods from more than one store, the app also takes that
into account, matching drivers accordingly. Tipping is
optionalmost Instacart customers do.
9

FARMIGO
In 2009, when Farmigo started gatherWHERE New Jersey, New
ing local producers
York, San Francisco Bay Area,
into a community
Seattle/Tacoma
marketplace, founder
WHAT Farm-fresh produce,
Benzi Ronen noticed
meat, and dairy; pantry items;
that half the farmers
snacks; breads; prepared foods
it approached had
broadband. He realPRICE Similar to Whole Foods
ized that with online
software he could create a network of farms and a transparent supply chain:
You can almost track a tomato like a FedEx package, he
says. And so Farmigo does, following the 500 items sold
in each region as they flow from the farmers (who earn a
hefty 60 cents on the dollar) to the warehouse employees, contracted drivers, and pickup-hub organizers. With
small staging warehouses and nimble pickup venues, Farmigo can apply the same decentralized model to dense
urban communities and sparser suburban ones in places
like New Jersey and Tacoma, Washington. Heres how.

PICK UP
When a customer arrives,
they scan the labeled Farmigo
bags (D) for their name, then
head home feeling satised
that they didnt have to deal
with a trip to Whole Foods.

6
Deliver

Goods

Drivers stock vans (which are easier to come by

than trucks and are better for navigating through
multiple stops in dense urban areas) with the
orders for ve to six pickup locations, then make
the rounds to the schools, houses of worship, and
gyms that serve as pickup nodes. Those spots are
chosen by either the organizers or Farmigo itself,
which reaches out to community hubs to see if
theyd be willing to host.

C R E AT E
Farmigo is strict about
locality and sustainability:
Each region has a sourcing
manager who interacts with
farmers (and producers like
bakers and cheesemakers),
all of whom meet the
companys family-ownership
and non-GMO criteria and
whose goods are certied
organic by the USDA or

MARKET
grown sustainably. Ronens
aim is to have 90 percent
of items produced within
150 miles of the market
communitythough Farmigo
does sell items like avocados
and lemons that it ags
as nonlocal. Of-limits?
Bananas. Non-US products
are not a line were willing

List
Available
Three or four days before the order window
opens, farmers input predictions for
that cycles harvest18 bushels of eggplant,
500 heads of broccoliinto Farmigos software
(A). This virtual inventory is updated constantly
during each order cycle to account for
changes in the eld.

PLACE
THE
ORDER

Customers log on, online

or via app, choose pickup
locations, and shop from
traditional grocery categories
(plus themed oferings like
Bestsellers Bundle (B),
featuring the weeks most
popular picks). The order
window opens ve to six
days before pickup (Mondays
and Wednesdays), and
customers can edit orders
until the window closes.

the

Rather than one centralized

warehouse, Farmigo
operates many small warehousesreally just staging
areas where orders are
packedto keep them closer
to both farmers and customers. The crew monitors
progress with tabletbased software(C): First,
9

team members do quality

inspections and update the
system if, say, the farmer
ran out of the spaghetti
squash you ordered and
is substituting butternut.
(Auto-generated emails
alert customers to switches.)
Foods are wrapped in
compostable protective

materials, and refrigerated

items are insulated in
inated cool sleeves with
biodegradable ice packs.
Everything is placed in
insulated containers for
easier stacking, and each
step is tracked. The minute
goods transition from one
point to another, you need to
store the information, Ronen
says. So if theres a break in
the process, you know whos
accountable.

Fill the
Order
When that window closes,
the system automatically
emails orders to the farmers
and producers, who harvest
or prepare accordingly (often
also creating short backstory
videos for customers).
Independently contracted
drivers deliver the goods
from vendors to the local
warehouse.

Place
the
Order

Online or via app, FreshDirect

customers shop a virtual store
personalized with their data: They
can order from favorites, repeat
past orders, and browse frequently
purchased products. In addition
to shopping traditional aisles,
consumers can sort according to
factors like organic, gluten-free, or
local. (The produce and seafood
teams also give their products
star ratings (A), indicating whats
best that day.) A feature called
Popcart lets users import all the
ingredients from any online recipe,
and virtual endcapslike the
impulse-buy magnets you see in
physical storespromote new
products, deals, and coupons, of
which there are more than 500 per
week. Once an order is complete,
the customer selects a two-hour
delivery window (B).

FILL

FreshDirect receives daily

and hourly deliveries. Since
everything happens in one
location, FreshDirect says, it
loses less food to damage,
shrinkage, and the like, so it

ORDER
needs about 50 percent less
inventory than a traditional
store would to fulll the same
sales. Goods are stored
in rooms set to optimal
temperatures(C)the deli

QUINCIPLE
This edgling company
brings farm freshness
WHERE Brooklyn and
to consumers doors,
Manhattan
ofering a set lineup of
goods (and supporting
WHAT Weekly boxes with a
balanced selection of regional
local growers and proproduce, dairy, meat, seafood,
ducers in the process).
and pantry items
Founded in 2013, Quinciple delivers 450 weekly
PRICE $49.90/box for delivery;
$42.90/box for pickup
boxes that emphasize
not just local but responsible farmers and producers around the Northeast (plus a few on the West Coast
and in the South). The brand strives for 100 percent supply
chain transparency and sets standards around responsible
animal husbandry and organic, biodynamic, and non-GMO
practices. We have smaller distributors, so we make sure
that whoever is eating our food can follow it back to whoever
is producing it, says Tori De Leone, a Quinciple community
manager. Since all customers get the same weekly box, the
company efectively buys in bulk directly from farmers.

1
Customers sign up for Quinciple
(A) and set their preferences:
home-delivered boxes or
pickup boxes left at designated
neighborhood shops. They can
choose to add a few specialty items
at additional cost, but otherwise
everyone gets the same box.
Subscriptions automatically renew
and can be paused for vacations.

Curate
the Box
About three weeks out,
employees plan loose
menus, usually starting
with a protein, which is
easier to predict (say, lamb
for a fall week). Then they
develop recipes around the
protein, adding vegetables
9

and grains (so that lamb

might inspire a Moroccan
menu that also calls for
cucumbers and yogurt) and
leaving room for last-minute
produce. Quinciple starts
talking to farmers two to four
weeks out, checking back
for quantity estimates
as the order nears. Producers can usually see a
week out whether theyll
have the quantities needed,
reducing surprises.

FRESHDIRECT

room at 34 degrees Fahrenheit, the

tomato room, 55and in-house
production follows the just-in-time
model, baking and making to order.
(On average, its 11 hours from order
to delivery.) The warehouse operates
24 hours a day; peak bakery time is
3 amtime to make the doughnuts.
Orders are packed using an
algorithm that prioritizes speed.

Deliver
the Goods

Orders are delivered according to the

customers account prole (including
instructions like Leave it with Carlton, my
doorman), and software manages it all:
planning tens of thousands of deliveries,
optimizing schedules, and adjusting to
traffic on the y (D). Due to the way the
system operates, drivers tend to frequent
the same neighborhoods and customers.
Its technology serving the face-to-face
business, says chief consumer officer
Jodi Kahn.

Launched in 2002, FreshDirect is an online twist on

WHERE Metro New York
the classic one-stop shop.
and New Jersey; parts of
It offers a huge variety of
Connecticut, Delaware, and
national and local products,
Pennsylvania
focusing on direct sourcing
WHAT Traditional grocery
and in-house production.
offerings; local foods; beer and
The whole show is run out
wine; pet, baby, and health
of a facility in Queens, New
products; catering
York, where 200 pros prePRICE Comparable to brickpare over 2,000 products
and-mortar stores
the bakery alone produces
14,000 loaves of bread and
5,000 croissants every day.
With long-standing relationships with farmers and suppliers,
FreshDirect can also sell products before they hit the (virtual)
store, doing advance recon like communicating with fishermen
about the days catch while theyre still on the boat. Altogether,
the company says, its system helps turn over inventory twice
as fast as typical brick-and-mortars dowhile filling orders
that are on average three times larger.

DELIVER
THE GOODS

Home-delivery boxes are dispatched by a

small truck service; customers get an alert
when their goods arrive. An in-house worker
uses a company van to distribute the pickup
boxes, 75 per trip, which are then available in
three- to four-hour windows. Unclaimed food
may be donated to the staf or, if space allows,
refrigerated for pickup the next morning.

Assemble
Box

Items arrive at Quinciples Brooklyn

warehouse one to three days before
delivery. The staf gets to work packaging
items, portioning bulk beans and blocks
of cheese, and weighing out allotments of
carrots. Frozen or refrigerated items go into
insulated pouches with ice packs. Three to
four days a week are spent building orders,
the rest preparing them for shipment. Boxes
are packed individually, labeled, and sent
out for delivery (B).
COURTNEY BALESTIER (@cfbalestier) wrote
about the pinball resurgence in issue 22.06.

CHRONIC MYSTERY
[+]

blueberry haze, purple kush, sour dieselthere

are thousands of strains of cannabis.
cracking their genetic codes may be the key to
t r an s f o r m i n g p o t f ro m a buddi ng bus i ne ss
to a high-flying industry.

by

KATIE M. PALMER

illustration
by
0

DAVID MCLEOD

photographs
by
PRESTON GANNAWAY

he says, looking down over a railing

at the lab. Its a world he has long
appreciated. Now hed like to give a
little back. Theres so much good
that can be done with cannabis, and
so little of it is being done.
As more and more states (23 so
far) are nding legal ways for people
to consume cannabis, Steep Hill
and labs like it are becoming more
important. Steep Hill quanties the
numbers you see on labels in dispensaries: how much tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the molecule that gets
you high) and cannabidiol (CBD, the
component of weed thought to alleviate seizures) are in a given strain
of pot. But any remotely dedicated
smoker will tell you that a strain is
more than its potency. Purple Kush
and Sour Diesel have diferent characters, different smells and tastes
and feels. Those are the result of
the interactions of hundreds of
moleculescannabinoids, yes, but
also another class called terpenoids.
Myrcene, for example, smells like
hops and mango (and some fans claim
it increases the potency of THC).
Beta-caryophyllene has the scent
of pepper. Theres also ocimene, nerolidol, pinenethe interaction of
all these chemicals creates whatever distinction exists between 78
LA OG Affie and, say, Green Crack.
So when someone drops of one of

[th e]

The marijuana analytics company Steep Hill

doesnt smell dank, or skunky, or loudunless
you happen to arrive when a client is dropping of
a sample. No seven-pointed-leaf logos ornament
the walls; no Tibetan prayer ags utter from the
doorframe. Inside, a half-dozen young scientists
work in a glass-walled lab to the sounds of whirring ventilation and soft jazz. The efect is one of
professionalism and scientic objectivity.
Still, this place is all about weed. And Reggie Gaudino, Steep Hills burly and dreadlocked
53-year-old vice president of scientic operations,
does look the part. Steep Hill is headquartered in
famously 420-friendly Berkeley, California, after
all. Ive been smoking since I was 13 years old,
Senior associate editor KATIE M. PALMER
(@katiempalmer) covers science at wired.

Cannabinoids

WHATS IN
YOUR WEED

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)

Marijuana is about more than just

THC. Molecules called terpenoids
the things that give you aromas like
lavender and citrusalso play a role
in the smoking experience, possibly
the medicinal qualities, and maybe
even the high. Someday growers
might be able to tailor the mix in a
given strain based on genetics,
sequencing and then breeding for
specic traits; for now, connoisseurs
are training their noses to detect
these chemicals. And analytics labs
are getting better and better at specifying which strains contain what.
BLANCAMYERS

Cannabidiol (CBD)

Strains
21%
ACDC
Blue Dream
Chemdawg
Cherry
Limeade
Dougs Varin
Fruit Punch

Cherry Limeades high

levels of THC make it
extremely potent.

Jack Herer
OG Kush

SOURCES: STEEP HILL LAB; SC LABS

those samples at Steep Hills reception, the lab swoops in to quantify

27 of the most prominent of these
avorful, experience-dening molecules. After eight years in business,
the company has accumulated and
tested thousands of samplesit
has stacks and stacks of plant tissue in test tubes in a giant freezer.
It has analytical chemistry on those,
and thanks to a deal with the marijuana review site Leay, the company
also has thousands of crowdsourced
reviews. When it comes to data on
weed, Steep Hill is, well, the bomb.
Its one thing, though, to know
what molecules are found in different weed strains. Its another to
know what those chemicals actually
doscientifically speaking. Their
aromas certainly affect the experience of consumption, somehow.
They might even underpin cannabiss
putative medicinal efectsghting
nausea, stimulating appetite, easing
seizures, and perhaps even more.
And its yet another thing to understand the genetic basis for those differences. Thats the key. Its what you
need if you plan to breed scientically, to enhance the qualities the
market might pay for. Even more
than legalization, thats how you
transform marijuana from an illicit
pleasure to a licit business. Every
other commercially important agri-

cultural plant in the world has had a

ton of research done on it, Gaudino
says. But here is this commercially
important crop that has so much
variation, and nobody knows what
that variations all about.
Plant biologists would love to
understand cannabis better. But
marijuana is a Schedule I drug in the
United States, as illegal as heroin.
Most academic researchers working
with it are limited to (pathetic) weed
grown at the University of Mississippi. Much of the research funding
comes from the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, which prioritizes studying ill efects over any potential good.
But Steep Hill has all those samples
and all those chemical proles. Now it
just needs the genetics. And Gaudino,
a geneticist and former patent agent,
has a plan to get that. The problem is,
deciphering the pot genome is, like,
way harder than it sounds.

[[ IN ]]

In 1993, the average THC content in

weed was about 3 percent by weight.
Over the next 15 years, breeders tripled the potency. Today, not even
a decade later, levels top out at a
whopping 37 percent. Thank the war
on drugs: As growers moved indoors

and out of sight, they drove up THC

levels. Then they could charge more
to pay for the costs of climate control and articial lighting.
Smokers have gotten savvier, too.
Increasing THC gets you higher but
lessens the plants ability to make
other, arguably more interesting,
cannabinoids and terpenoids. So
growers also set out to create new
breeds that would be as different
from one another as a chardonnay and a pinot noir. And it sort of
worked: Just like a vintner will rattle off a bottles tasting notes and
terroir, a Denver budtender can sell
a smoker on a plants piney nose and
its concentration of crystallized trichomes, hairlike protrusions that
contain high levels of psychoactive
cannabinoids. These kinds of characteristics, the ones you can see (or
smell), are a plants phenotype.
If you know your plants genotype,
thoughthe genes behind those
traitsthen you can grow the plants
with the traits you want much faster
and with extreme precision. Called
marker-assisted selection, its the
key to modern agriculture.
When Gaudino joined Steep Hill
in 2014, he looked at the companys vast trove of data and asked
CEO David Lampach what kind of
research their competitors were
doing. Lampachs response: What

Theres so much good

that can be done with
cannabis, Reggie
Gaudino says. And so
little of it is being done.

Terpenoids
ACDC has high levels of
cannabidiol, the molecule
thought to ease seizure
disorders.

Terpinolene

Alpha-pinene

Linalool

Limonene

Beta-myrcene

Beta-caryophyllene

0% (percent by weight)

4%

Pinene smells like

pine, and it opens
bronchial passages.

scientific officer of a firm called

Medicinal Genomics, made public the sequences for strains called
Chemdawg and LA Confidential. And
Jonathan Page, a biochemist with
Canadas National Research Council, had results for the Purple Kush
genome. But these werent the kind
of sequences anyone could use.
The problem is, geneticists dont
simply unspool all the DNA in a cell
and then run it through a scanner,
like the roll on an old-time player
piano. They break those miles of
code into teeny pieces, read those,
and then use the overlaps to put
them all back together like a jigsaw
puzzle. The go-to standard sequencing machine, built by a company
called Illumina, scans pieces of DNA
from 100 to 350 base pairs long. (A
single gene might comprise more
than 2,000 base pairs.)
This method isnt great for plants.
Their genomes are naturally full of
repeating sequences, which makes
it almost impossible to tell which
fragments overlapthey all look
the same, so you cant line them up.
Worse, plants tend to maintain multiple copies of their useful, core genes
as backups in case something goes
awry in their environment. (Unlike
animals, which can run away from
their problems, plants have had to
adapt to their protean surroundings.)
Cannabis breeders have made the
problems even worse. Theyve been
crossbreeding for so long to pump
up pots psychoactivity that modern strains can have as many as 11
copies of the gene that synthesizes
THC. If the crossbred genome were
a jigsaw puzzle, most of the picture
would be blue sky.
In the end, those first attempts
to sequence the cannabis genome
yielded hundreds of thousands of
tiny fragments, so many that nobody
could stitch them together. But Gaudino thought he could do better. Im
not a gambling man, but this was one
of the times that I gambled, he says.
And I went long. In 2014, Steep Hill

PLA N T
GENOMES A RE
TRI CKY TO
SEQUEN CE,
AND CANNABIS
D NA IS
PARTICULARLY
C HA LLENGING.

do you mean, what are people doing?

There are only three testing labs
worth anything in the entire US.
Gaudino was shocked. I asked,
Have you guys ever considered
genetic analysis?
Specifically, Gaudino wanted to
build a full assembly of marijuanas
800 million base pairs and 10 chromosomes to help breeders discover
more markers for specific traits.
Then, ideally, theyd be able to turn
up the expression of any of the hundreds of chemicals in weedsome
that smell great, some that get you
high, and some that might ease pain
or maybe even treat a disease. My
mad-scientist dream is a database
where you can type in what youre
looking for, Gaudino says. Youll
either get out the strain that exists
that does that or if it doesnt exist,
itll tell you what strains you could
begin breeding.
Other people had already tried
it. In 2011, Kevin McKernan, chief
Scientists at Steep Hill build
chemical profiles of pot
strains, quantifying levels of
THC and compounds like
linalool and pinene.
1

spent $1.1 million on a PacBio RS II

sequencer, one of fewer than 200 in
the country. Its a giant white box
sitting next to the freezer full of frozen buds, adorned with 8-inch-tall
Cheech and Chong dolls that Gaudino got when he was a kid. Unlike
the much cheaper Illumina sequencers, the PacBio reads fragments of
DNA as long as 53,000 base pairs.
Then Gaudino went to a Berkeley dispensary, bought a citrusysmelling Kush strain called Pineapple
Bubba, and spent $20,000 on
reagents and data-crunching to
sequence it. It wasnt a genome yet:
583 million base pairs shattered into
18,000 puzzle pieces. Still, they were
longer than anyone else had, easier
to reassemble. Gaudino just needed
more data to string them together.

[[ THE ]]

The Emerald Cup happens every

December at the Sonoma County
Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California, south of the cannabis-growing
heartland of Mendocino and Humboldt counties. In a sawdust-strewn
enclosure built for prize livestock,
the toasts of the Northern California weed-growing community set
up booths to advertise their wares,
compete to see whose is best, and
distribute samples to anyone with a
medical marijuana card. They stack
their entries on panes of glass in an
LED-lined case, bud upon perfectly
pruned bud.
Everybody is here to smoke and
share, maybe catch a band. Collie
Buddz and the Expanders are playing.
But outside an exhibit hall at the other
end of the grounds, a trio of geneticists has just presented a panel on
weed DNA. These are Gaudinos competitors, each working on their own
sequences and genetic products. And
theyre all having trouble pulling it of.
The variety in the hundreds of
Emerald entries has set the scien-

tists heads spinning, and not in a

good way. The plant is amazing
because of this diversity, says Mowgli Holmes, chief scientic oicer of a
Portland, Oregon, cannabis research
lab called Phylos Bioscience. But
all that variation makes genomic
assembly a nightmare.
Holmes is taking a crack at
sequencing the high-CBD strain
Cannatonic, sending it to genome
pioneer Craig Venters company Synthetic Genomics in the hope that its
PacBio could make sense of it. So far
it hasnt. I never want to see that
plant again, Holmes says to McKernan, the geneticist who sequenced
Chemdawg and LA Condential.
Cannatonic, like many of the
strains at Emerald, is a hybrid, crossbred between diferent strains to get
new traits. These modern plants are
more likely to be heterozygous, with
two versions of a given gene. They
yield stronger ofspring. But to put
together a good sequencea reference genomeyou need an exemplar thats homozygous, with two
matched sets of chromosomes.
Thats what a consortium of federally funded researchers did with
corn, for examplesequenced a
highly inbred strain.
Without a solid, inbred strain,
its unlikely that any of the weed
scientists can assemble a reference genome. Page, the Canadian
biochemist behind that rst, piecemeal Purple Kush sequence, says they
should try anyway. A Kush group,
a Haze groupwe should get references going, he says. McKernan
seems to agree. He has extracted DNA
from the winning plants so he can
sequence them when he gets home.
But even though no one says it
out loud, theyre all thinking the
same thing. Trying to find a reference genome is a suckers bet. Yes,
if you had a ready map for which
genes were on which chromosomes, each of their fragmentary
sequences would suddenly get that
much easier to assemble. Directed

breeding would be within reach. Once we have the

real reference, McKernan says, they all become
much more valuable.
Thats the trick. If these were academics, theyd
work together. Sequencing the maize genome took
33 labs, 157 researchers, $32 million, and four years.
But these people are in it for prot. If any one of
them invests in a solid reference genomenot just
the $20,000 to run the machine but the time and
terabytes it takes to assemble the dataeverybody elses crappy sequences increase in value
for free. If Gaudino keeps pumping money into
his PacBio sequencer to come up with a better and
better sequence, all it does is make his competitors more powerful.
Bummer.

[ [ SO ] ]

So Gaudino doesnt turn that machine back on.

Steep Hill cant really aford another $20,000 run
right now, anyway. Money is yet another advantage
that big academic collaborations have over a private lab. Gaudino is also working with a geneticist

[ + ]

A few weeks after the Emerald Cup, in

search of at least a hint of what those chemicals might do, Gaudino and Lampach drive
up to the Santa Cruz Mountains, through
redwood groves, along switchbacks cut deep
into rock. At the top they pull into the driveway of a house surrounded by gardens. Kymron deCesare comes out to meet themhe
is Steep Hills herbalist and the companys
second-most stereotypical stoner, with a
long, white beard and hair braided down to
his waist. Hes wearing bell-bottoms.
After lunch, deCesare decamps to his
garage lab, a small bench littered with dropper bottles and disposable plastic pipettes.
The bottles are all lled with concentrated
terpenoids. He suctions a half milliliter of
alpha-pinene out of a brown bottle, into
a rocket-shaped, inch-long micropipette
tube, and adds a half milliliter of limonene
drawn from a huge plastic container. Then
even less than that of beta-caryophyllene.
DeCesare brings the tube to a small outdoor shed next to a roaring re, where Gaudino is preparing a fat joint. Gaudino sprinkles
the contents of the tube onto the weed, rolling quickly before the liquid wets the paper.
He lights up, takes a seat on the swing set,
and passes to the left.
This isnt the first time theyve experimented with terpenoid enhancement.
Everyone here has good memories of
beta-caryophyllene: Lampach remembers
it as a crown chakra kind of efect. We got
this really short, intense head rush, Gaudino
says. I got this white noise in my head, and
then I started to get this visual response. All
the lights got kind of fractal, and then it was
like 30 seconds and it was gone.
Is it true? Replicable? Salable? Maybe.
Are the efects of the extra chemicals real or
placebo? Its hard to tell. This approach to
research has some distinct limitations. Soon,
Gaudino is ponticating, though about what,
even he probably isnt sure. Thats one of the
coolest things about the world, because
A flutter of wings stops him. A flock of
pigeons rises from the top of a redwood.
The group stares up, marveling in unison:
Whoa. Regardless of its relative terpenoid
concentrations, this is some potent weed. 

at the University of Colorado Boulder to

meld the PacBio sequence with an Illuminabased genome. The work continues.
None of this has been a waste of time. You
dont actually need a genome to nd genetic
markers. Geneticists can lump all the
unassembled sequences for, say, lemonysmelling plants into one group and search
them for a bit of DNA they have in common.
That could be a marker for lemony smell.
Steep Hill has already found a marker that
can tell male and female plants apart, so
growers dont waste time with male plants,
which wont produce buds.
Using a different genetic technique
looking at points of mutation called single nucleotide polymorphismsGaudino,
Page, and McKernan have begun constructing a crude evolutionary tree for cannabis. (The more SNPs two strains share, the
more closely related they are.) More practically, SNPs can distinguish one strain
from another. Medicinal Genomics, Steep
Hill, and Phylos Bioscience all have strain
identication products on the way to ght
counterfeits. You cant patent an illegal
product; holding onto IP in the weed business is tough enough.
But the world is changing. Cannabis is
becoming an economic force, and more
legal. Someone, somewhere, is going to
do this workto gure out how to modify
weed with the same ease that Monsanto
tweaks corn. And if Steep Hill can be there
helping crack the code, it stands to fundamentally change how the $40 billion pot
industry works.
Thats great for marketability and for
tasting notes, but the community has even
higher hopes. In the old days, youd smoke
what you could get, Gaudino says. Now,
therell be so much diversity in strains that
youll be able to pick the exact high you
want. Some biologists think terpenoids
and cannabinoids work together to activate the brains cannabinoid receptors.
Changing their balance, then, could alter
pots efects, calibrating the high or even
its medicinal properties. But research into
the neurochemistry of weed is just as far
behind as the genetics.

COLOPHON
HITS THAT HELPED GET
THIS ISSUE OUT:
Puf, the Magic Dragon; a visit to the LSD
Museum; Bowies original 1969 Space Oddity music video; linalool, a soothing terpene
found in lavender and cannabis; Adeles
25; Tennessee Valley Road; Damn the Torpedoes on vinyl; camping in LimekilnState
Park; Gelato #33, aka Larry Bird; 7-yearold sons onstage battle with Darth Vader
at Disneyland; any Little Shop sing-along
at Maries Crisis Cafe; Superb Owl; David
Eyres pancake; John Williams Imperial
March ad innitum; Mad Dogs; Beyoncs
Formation; all the LCD Soundsystem hits;
bumps of cafeine; Lil B #tybg; Alcatraz at
night; loud pop punk; Cocoa Crme Hits
with black tea; Bob Dylans Like a Rolling
Stone; rhythm stick; fatty marijuana cigarettes, lled with that sweet devils lettuce.
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other materials for consideration should not
send originals, unless specically requested
to do so by WIRED in writing. Manuscripts,
photographs, artwork, and other materials submitted must be accompanied by a
self-addressed, stamped envelope.

BY ROBERT CAPPS

ASK A FLOWCHART
WHAT TECH-INSPIRED SUPERSTRAIN
OF MEDICAL CANNABIS SHOULD
I CELEBRATE 4/20 WITH THIS YEAR?

INDICA OR SATIVA?

YOU SHOULD
HAVE JUST
SAID THAT!
PUMP ME UP!

FINE: DO YOU
WANT TO RELAX OR
GET AMPED?

I JUST WANT TO
GET HIGH, OK?

ARE YOU
LOOKING FOR
SOMETHING GROUNDING
OR SOMETHING
SPACEY?

WHAT?!

ARE YOU SOLO OR

WITH FRIENDS?

YOU SHOULD
HAVE JUST
SAID THAT!
CHILL ME OUT.

HOW DO YOU
CONSUME: SMOKE,
VAPE, EDIBLES, SALVE,
WAX, DAB, SHATTER,
OR BLOOPY?

DABBINGS NOT
JUST A DANCE.
BLAST OFF!

SUPER SPACEX
DAWG

WITH PEOPLE.

HOLD ON, LET

ME JUST INDEX
EVERY POSSIBLE
ANSWER TO
THAT QUESTION.

OH, MAN,
BLOOPY.
TOTAL BLOOPHEAD RIGHT
HERE, BRO!

VAPING IS THE
ONLY TRULY
HEALTHY WAY.

BULLETPROOF
KOFFEE KUSH

ARE YOU TRYING

TO HAVE DEEP
CONVERSATIONS?

PAGEDANK

GOTCHA! THAT ONES

NOT EVEN REAL.

THERANOS HAZE

BUT WHAT DO YOU

IM ALONEAT
LEAST IN
MEATSPACE.

WERE
SEARCHING FOR
MEANING IN
THE UNIVERSE.

WE JUST WANT
TO GIGGLE, TBH.

WHO CARES?
TAKE OUR
MONEY!

PRICE IS
NO OBJECT!

OCULUS SPLIFF
PRE-ROLLS

THAI
STICKIPEDIA

COMEDY
BHANG BHANG

IPO
THUNDERFUCK
EXPRESS

FINE, WE FOUND
THIS IN OUR
SPICE RACK.

APR 2016