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COVER: Crowd Control / by Bill Wasik / pg. 76
__From the Arab Spring to the London Riots to Occupy Wall Street, a new breed of revolutionaries – networked and mobile – provides an arresting model for how social media can fuel civil unrest. WIRED’s Bill Wasik, one of the originators of “flash mobs,” takes readers through the rapid evolution of crowd mentality and investigates how social media helped make 2011 a year of mass unrest.
__The YouTube Laugh Factory / by Ben Austen / pg. 84
__Most entertainers move to Hollywood with dreams of making it big. Now, a new generation of YouTube comics, singers, and goofballs has started building a studio system for viral video, proving once again that small is beautiful. Author Ben Austen outlines the new rules for turning one-click wonders into (somewhat) valuable brands.
How to Count a Calorie / by Jeffrey M. O’Brien / pg. 90
For years Weight Watchers has helped people track how much they eat by assigning point values to foods. In 2010 a new CEO __turned the long-established model on its head, __radically changing how it determines these values, especially for fresh fruits and vegetables. Would a million loyal Weight Watchers members make the switch? The result may surprise you.
Plus: What’s inside Enzyte male enhancer (pg. 32); Clive Thompson on the Instagram photo-sharing app (pg. 34); Tested & Rated: iPhone camera add-on lenses (pg. 38), e-readers (pg. 45); The best way to watch TV (pg. 66)
