26 of the Most Fascinating Books WIRED Read in 2020
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One of the best things about working at WIRED is the number of topics we get to be interested in. That range really shows when you look at the book excerpts we’ve published this year. We are allowed to interrogate park benches and poker statistics, census machines and cosmic rays. The books that fascinate us might loop us thousands of years into the past, introducing us to the inventor of the wheel, or they might immerse us in the burned-out, Slack-addicted Millennial present. Whatever the topic, these are books that dive deep and tell stories in a smart, deeply researched, beautifully written way. We've dropped in some of our favorite quotes below as a kind of sneak peek; pick presents for your friends and family (the nice ones get two), and save a few for yourself to dig into in the new year. —The Editors
by Michael Bond
People who have been truly lost never forget the experience. Suddenly disconnected from all that surrounds them, they are plunged into a relationship with an utterly alien world. They think they are going to die. Horror-struck, their behavior becomes so confounding that finding them is as much a psychological challenge as a geographical one. One ranger with 30 years’ experience told me, "You’ll never be able to figure out why lost people make their decisions."
Lost is a cognitive state. Your internal map has become detached from the external world, and nothing in your spatial memory matches what you see. But at its core, it is an emotional state. It delivers a psychic double whammy: Not only are you stricken with fear, you also lose your ability to reason. You suffer what neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls a "hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion." 90 percent of people make things a lot worse for themselves when they realize they are lost—by running, for instance. Because they are afraid, they can’t solve problems or figure out what to do. They fail to notice landmarks, or fail to remember them. They lose track of how far they’ve travelled. They feel claustrophobic, as if their surroundings are closing in on them. They can’t help it; it’s a quick-fire evolutionary response. Robert Koester, a search and rescue specialist with a background in neurobiology, describes it as a "full-flown fight-or-flight catecholamine dump. It’s essentially a panic attack. If you are lost out in the woods there is a chance you will die. That’s pretty real. You feel like you’re separating from reality. You feel like you’re going crazy."
Courtesy of Doubledayby Andy Greenberg
Black chunks began to fly out of an access panel on the generator, which the researchers had left open to watch its internals. Inside, the black rubber grommet that linked the two halves of the generator’s shaft was tearing itself apart.
A few seconds later, the machine shook again as the protective relay code repeated its sabotage cycle, disconnecting the machine and reconnecting it out of sync. This time a cloud of gray smoke began to spill out of the generator, perhaps the result of the rubber debris burning inside it.
Assante, despite the months of effort and millions of dollars in federal funds he’d spent developing the attack they were witnessing, somehow felt a kind of sympathy for the machine as it was being torn apart from within. “You find yourself rooting for it, like the little engine that could,” Assante remembered. “I was thinking, ‘You can make it!’”
by Harold McGee
Some animal excrements have a distinctive makeup and smell that can be traced to a particular diet or metabolism. Horse excrement is less offensive than many, and was even described as “sweet” by the 18th-century physician and natural philosopher George Cheyne. The horse and its microbes digest its plant foods quickly and only partly, so much of its excrement is relatively odorless fiber. The volatiles are dominated by the carbon rings cresol and phenol, which we also encounter in asphalt and disinfectants, and which can therefore seem less specifically fecal. By contrast, cattle are endowed with several stomachs, including the microbe-packed rumen, and they have the habit of regurgitating the rumen contents for another chew to get the most out of their plant feed. The excrement of beef and dairy cattle is therefore rich in the full range of metabolic volatiles. Omnivorous pigs get some of their nourishment from high-protein animal materials, and they produce excrement especially rich in branched acids, sulfides, and carbon rings. For some reason the pig gut and its microbiome are notably prolific of fecal-smelling skatole, some of which is transported from the intestine and stored in fat tissues all over the body, where it can contribute to the special “pigginess” of pork.
Courtesy of University of Chicago Pressby Benjamin R. Cohen
So it is that adulteration was a problem in the past, adulteration is a problem today, and adulteration will be a problem tomorrow. Pure food crusaders thought they had solved it for good; we probably think we’ll solve it now. They didn’t, and we won’t. Adulteration’s presumed antithesis, purity, is a dreary if not constant pursuit.
Courtesy of Hodder & Stoughtonby Roman Mars and Kurt Kohslted
The object that Savić considers a particular masterpiece of unpleasant design is the Camden bench. Unlike spikes, which scream their hostile intent, the Camden bench is innocuous in its appearance, although it’s rather lumpy and not particularly inviting. Designed by Factory Furniture for the London borough of Camden, the bench is a strange, angular, sculpted, solid chunk of concrete with rounded edges and slopes in unexpected places.
The complex shape of this seating unit makes it virtually impossible to sleep on. It is also anti-dealer because it features no slots or crevices to stash drugs in; it is anti-skateboarder because the edges on the bench fluctuate in height to make grinding difficult; it is anti-litter because it lacks cracks that trash could slip into; it is anti-theft because recesses near the ground allow people to tuck bags behind their legs away from would-be criminals; and it is anti-graffiti because it has a special coating to repel paint. On top of all of this, the object is so large and heavy that it can also serve as a traffic barrier. One online critic called it the perfect “anti-object.”
by Emily Willingham
The way spiders use their pedipalps can illuminate the question of “what makes a penis.” The male has a pore where sperm emerges. He captures the sperm on silk he’s prepared for the purpose and draws it up like fluid into a turkey baster, pulling it into his palpal bulb at the end of his pedipalp and stuffs the bulb into the female, releasing the sperm. The two steps of insertion and ejaculation can take no more than a five-count in some species.
Is the pedipalp–palpal bulb combination a penis? It involves a tube, intromission, and ejaculation. It seems to fulfill all of the elements of “something that inserts into a partner’s genitalia during copulation and transmits gametes” and then some.
But the spider also uses its pedipalps to taste and smell, definitely not familiar uses of a penis to us. Some spiders even use part of the pedipalp, a bit just under the palpal bulb at the tip, to make music (stridulate) as part of a courtship ritual. That’s not very penislike from our perspective (I’ve yet to hear of a human penis making music), either, but perhaps we should start viewing these organs as what they are: penis capable, sure, but also able to do so much more in the world of sensory communication and courtship.
by Anne Helen Petersen
Part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best-laid plans for self-preservation. They ransack our free time. They make it increasingly impossible to do the things that actually ground us. They turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization. They are the neediest and most selfish entity in every interaction I have with others. They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption. They steal joy and solitude and leave only exhaustion and regret. I hate them and resent them and find it increasingly difficult to live without them.
Read the full excerpt.by Terry Virts
The thought 'I hope this disintegration eventually stops' did cross my mind, but there was nothing I could do in either case. There were constant banging and ripping noises as I watched pieces of the blanket (and who knows what else) fly by my window. Then came the parachute. We had had a briefing by crewmates who had done this before, and they basically said, “You’re going to think you’re going to die, but don’t worry, you won’t.” And you know what? It felt like we were going to die. But, thanks to the briefing, Samantha Cristoforetti, my Italian crewmate, Anton Shkaplerov, my Russian crewmate and Soyuz commander, and I had a blast when the drogue chute came out. We were hooting and hollering and yelling in Russian, “Rooskiy gorkiy!” Which means “crazy roller coaster!” In the F-16 community, we would have called this phase of flight “Mr. Toad’s wild ride.” The tumbling lasted a few minutes until the main parachute finally deployed and we were stable and calm, back at one g.
by Jo Marchant
What’s rarely mentioned today about Aschoff and Wever’s famous bunker, built just a few years later, is that it contained not just one underground apartment, but two. The parallel units were almost identical, with matching beds, kitchens, and record players. But there was a very important difference: One of them was completely enclosed within a hefty capsule of cork, coiled wire, glass wool, and steel, through which no electromagnetic radiation could pass; anyone living inside was completely cut off from the Earth’s magnetic field. The aim was to show that the shielding made no difference to the volunteers’ biological clocks, and prove, once and for all, that Brown was wrong.
Between 1964 and 1970, more than 80 volunteers stayed in the two units. As Aschoff predicted, their circadian rhythms did continue. But there was a problem; the results in the two groups were not the same. In the unshielded bunker, isolated from clocks and sunlight but still exposed to magnetic fields, people’s sleep and waking patterns departed from the solar day, reaching an average period of 24.8 hours.
But when magnetic fields were also blocked, the volunteers’ circadian cycles deteriorated further. Their day length slipped even longer. There was significantly more variation between individuals. And their different rhythms were much more likely to become uncoupled. As mentioned earlier, Aschoff championed desynchronization as one of his key discoveries. Yet over those six years, it only ever occurred in the shielded bunker, cut off from the Earth’s magnetic field. Wever found that if he exposed the volunteers to a similar artificial field, all of these effects were reversed.
Courtesy of Penguin Booksby Cody Cassidy
The full‑size wagon first appeared approximately 5,400 years ago, and it may be one of the first inventions in history to go viral. Archaeologists have discovered full‑size carts from southern Iraq to Germany within a few hundred years of each other at a time when cultural barriers were particularly impermeable. The wagon, it seems, was irresistibly useful.
When I asked David Anthony, an anthropologist and the author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, what explains this viral growth, he believes part of the reason may be the wagon’s sheer size: “These were probably the biggest wooden machines anyone had ever seen,” he says. They would have been loud; they would have been slow. And they were powered by teams of oxen, which were by themselves some of the largest animals in the steppe.
The invention of the wagon was the prehistoric equivalent of Sputnik; it did not go unnoticed. Because the two oldest wheels archaeologists have found vary significantly in design—one has an axle fixed to the wheel as it does on a modern train, the other spins freely on the axle like on a modern car—Anthony suggests that at least some wagon builders copied what they saw from afar without being able to inspect it closely.
by Rebecca Giggs
Cuteness, as the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has best detailed, is not merely a matter of smallness, softness, the cartoonish and the infantile. All cute things invite fondling, but nothing is cuter than when it’s vulnerable, helpless, or pitiful. Sloths are dear, but sloth orphanages are dearer. Being hobbled or injured, engaged in pratfall or blunder: that’s cute. A baby dolphin is sweet. A baby dolphin that has stranded is sweeter. It needs us. It needs. The little dolphin has had a little accident. A diminutive object with an “imposed-upon aspect”—this is the sweetest thing of all. But such creaturely objects (for cute animals are objectified) can cause us to grind our teeth. Ngai writes that cuteness “might provoke ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones,” inciting “desires for mastery and control as much as [a] desire to cuddle.” Cute things should be soft and twistable, because they need to be capable of withstanding the impulse to violence they arouse (think of the aggression young children sometimes display toward their toys). When cuteness, a quality of products and pictures, is turned back onto the natural world, then the impulse to squash animals—to touch, pinch, and squeal—is amplified.
Grebowicz attaches this feeling—cute aggression—to technology. The need to connect, she argues, extends in two directions: The desire to be closer to animals, and the desire to make meaningful contact with other people. A selfie with a darling animal might be one of the few remaining digital forms in which a demonstration of heightened pure emotion, and enthusiasm, is freed from irony. Miniature intensities, these pictures make a show of relinquishing power to the animal’s untroubled virtue, its goodness. The animal is artless: It can’t pose. It doesn’t know what a camera is for. That kind of authenticity is currency, online.
by Eugenia Cheng
In the process I learned things about being a woman, and things about being a human, that I had steadfastly ignored before. Things about how we humans are holding ourselves back, individually, interpersonally, structurally, systemically, in the way we think about gender issues. And the question that always taxes me is: What can I, as a mathematician, contribute? What can I contribute, not just from my experience of life as a mathematician, but from mathematics itself?
by George Zaidan
Suppose you think it takes you 20 minutes to burn without sunscreen. If you slather on SPF 100, you might think you can gallivant in the sun for 33 hours and not get burned. That’s some hot nonsense. Here’s why: First, you have no idea what the “time it normally takes me to burn” is. Second, that number is not fixed. It changes dramatically based on the time of day, time of year, where you are on Earth, what’s underneath you (sand? snow?), and what’s above you (clear sky? clouds?). And third, you almost never get the full protection of the SPF listed on the label. Why? Many reasons, the simplest of which is: Few of us, studies show, apply as much sunscreen as they use in the official test, 2 milligrams per square centimeter of skin.
That’s a lot of sunscreen. I tried putting that much on one summer and I felt like I had walked through an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! carwash. For this reason, most people seem to apply half this amount or less. And this leads to another misconception: that people put on “too little” sunscreen. This is . . . meaningless.
Nobody tells you how much butter to put on yourself; you just go for however much feels right. Same with sunscreen. Just be aware that “what feels right” is probably about half what the FDA mandates. That’s actually one reason the bottle says to reapply: because it knows you didn’t put on “enough” the first time around.
by Rachel Lance
All the men were panting hard, pale and sweating. Bauer himself had a splitting headache and felt like he was about to be sick. Bauer knew these were the signs of carbon dioxide buildup, caused by the fact that they kept inhaling the oxygenated air they had brought down with them and exhaling noxious CO2. Their blood was becoming more acidic with every breath from the invisible but dangerous CO2, and he knew that they did not have much fresh air supply left. He was also concerned about the anchors and chains that were striking the submarine so loudly, because he thought her thin hull might rupture from their repeated hits. The submarine had an escape hatch, but the pressures of the ocean held it firmly shut. Bauer reached up a pallid, trembling hand and gripped a seacock valve tightly in his palm, twisting it open. Water poured in and started to flood the submarine.
Witt and Thomsen immediately pounced on Bauer, one slamming him down and sitting on his chest, the other scrambling to restrain his arms and close the valve. Wide-eyed, they yelled that he was trying to commit suicide and drown them too. But Bauer had opened the seacock because he was a man who wanted to live, and because he was also a man who understood physics.
by Maria Konnikova
Poker does have an element of chance, to be sure—but what doesn’t? Are poker professionals “gamblers” any more than the man signing away his life on a professional football contract, who may or may not be injured the next week, or find himself summarily dropped from the team in a year because he failed to live up to his promise? We judge the poker player for gambling; we respect the stockbroker for doing the same thing with far less information. In some ways, poker players gamble less than most. After all, even if they lose an arm, they can still play.
by Sarah Scoles
Arnold’s sighting, however he felt about it, began an epidemic. Soon, other people around the US started to see their saucers. The night sky opened up, kicking off a ufological period insiders refer to as a “flap”: a period of increased sightings. The term also has the contextual tinge of the word’s other definition, “an increased state of agitation.”
by Kenneth R. Rosen
We’ve been in isolation together for weeks. First, self-isolation because we had returned to our home in America after leaving Italy, thinking we’d put distance between us and the coronavirus, and then under state-mandated stay-at-home orders from Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker.
I’m with people I love and trust, but the distance, which helped our relationships stay strong in the past, is gone. I hear everything. House noises. Chewing. Ants in the walls, I could swear. When and what my dad is doing in the bathroom.
Senses are turned up when under lockdown. I feel under siege, and there’s little I can do to protect myself. No bulletproof vest, no surgical mask, can give me the distance I suddenly crave. The rest of humanity feels the same way: Slathered in hand sanitizer and socially distanced, they are blanketed in worry. People who normally move through the world with little fear of attack suddenly fear everyone, dreading a lethal enemy that’s everywhere and nowhere.
Courtesy of Basic Booksby Andrew Whitby
For Frederick H. Wines, a census employee who saw the machine in operation, this process of counting and sorting people by electricity approached a religious experience. “Under the mysterious influence of the electric current running through the machine, they organize themselves, as though possessed of volition … I can compare this current to nothing less intelligent and powerful than the voice of the archangel, which, it is said, will call the dead to life and summon every human soul to face his final doom.”
Courtesy of Ballantine Booksby Donna Jackson Nakazawa
I was not, of course, the only patient with inflammation in my body who also complained of a change in mental well-being. Such patient stories had even led some epidemiologists to begin to associate inflammatory diseases to brain-related symptoms. In 2008, researchers reported that patients with multiple sclerosis were several times more likely to suffer from depression and bipolar disorder. A 2010 analysis of 17 studies showed that 56 percent of patients with lupus—which manifests in inflammation in the organs of the body—reported cognitive or psychiatric symptoms.
Yet, as compelling as this research was, it just did not make scientific sense at that time that being sick in the body could be connected to, much less cause, illness in the brain.
by Gerald Posner
Perez sat in the front row. She had bought off eBay an OxyContin “window shade” pen that had been one of the many small gifts the detail team distributed to doctors by the tens of thousands. She had wanted that pen because it was an example of Purdue’s aggressive marketing tactics. The pen’s pullout tab contained a simplified reference chart that made it easy for physicians to switch their patients using painkillers to OxyContin, without weighing the risks of OxyContin’s higher abuse potential. (Purdue says it stopped distributing the pens after the FDA began requiring stronger warning labels on OxyContin.)
In Haddox’s presentation, he extolled Oxy’s pain relief benefits and glossed over its potential for addiction, according to attendees. Perez stared at him and played with the pull-out shade. She was incensed by his unorthodox attitude about the risks of addiction.
When the conference ended, Haddox walked through a makeshift aisle between dozens of rows of folding chairs. As they passed one another, Perez says she “did not hear the word ‘now’ but felt the word ‘now.’ ” The 100-pound Perez rammed Haddox with her shoulder and sent him crashing into the folding chairs.
by Matt Parker
But then, in an unbelievably unlucky twist of fate, the crew doing the fuel check in Ottawa made exactly the same kilogram/pound unit error, and the aircraft was allowed to take off again without nearly enough fuel.
The fuel then ran out mid-flight.
There should be several alarm bells going off as you read this story. It’s so unbelievable as to strain credulity. Surely a plane will have fuel gauges to indicate how much fuel is left. Cars have such a gauge, and if one runs out of fuel, it merely rolls to a stop and causes a mild inconvenience: You have to walk to the nearest gas station. If a plane runs out of fuel, it also rolls to a stop—but only after dropping thousands of meters (or many more thousands of feet) out of the sky. The pilots should have been able to glance at the fuel gauge and see that they were running low.
by Geoff White
It had taken me a year to get any kind of lead as to his whereabouts. There were rumors he was in Germany, that he worked for the United Nations in Austria, that he’d moved to the United States, or even that he’d been hired by Microsoft. And now I was stumbling through a market in Manila, showing his name in the hope someone would recognize it. If I could find him, maybe I could ask him about the virus and whether he understood its impact. And perhaps I could get him to tell me, after 20 years, whether he was really the one behind it.
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Mohammed understood that in a country without polling or elections, platforms like Twitter could reveal how the public felt about a policy or a leader—an important consideration for a family living in perpetual fear of a people’s uprising. On the other hand, negative sentiment on Twitter could undermine a would-be ruler. As the Arab Spring showed, discontented youth could pose a threat to Al Saud rule. Or they could be co-opted by a reform-minded ruler and become the base from which his power sprang.
Read the full excerpt.
Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourtby Jamie Holmes
The task, in short, was to shrink components as delicate as old radio parts to the size of a tennis ball, cram them inside a bullet, and engineer this new “proximity fuse” to be rugged enough to work as it flew in the air more than 2,000 feet every second while spinning over 250 times. For this to work, the new “smart” fuse would have to be both small and very sturdy—qualities that seemed to challenge the laws of physics. The task, American scientists were told, was practically impossible.
Read the full excerpt.
by David Sax
Pulling out phones for selfies, the women explain in giddy tones how they’d just finished their first year of college in Baton Rouge and drove here directly after packing up their dorm rooms to meet Dupart. To these women, DArealBBJUDY is more than a larger-than-life figure marketing hair products through hilarious social media skits with celebrities. She is a budding celebrity herself, whose influence extends far beyond New Orleans, the beauty industry, and hip hop culture. She is a successful Black female entrepreneur, telling other young Black women just like her that they too can be entrepreneurs.
by Barton Gellman
Mere creation of such a database, especially in secret, profoundly changed the balance of power between government and governed. This was the Dark Mirror embodied, one side of the glass transparent and the other blacked out. If the power implications do not seem convincing, try inverting the relationship in your mind: What if a small group of citizens had secret access to the telephone logs and social networks of government officials? How might that privileged knowledge affect their power to shape events? How might their interactions change if they possessed the means to humiliate and destroy the careers of the persons in power? Capability matters, always, regardless of whether it is used. An unfired gun is no less lethal before it is drawn.
