Month: March 2019

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A Star is Born: Lady Gaga's Most Iconic Roles

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Let’s get this out of the way: Lady Gaga's greatest performance is her portrayal of Lady Gaga. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta has always treated music, and her place in it, like performance art, a Warhol-ian tribute to every creature of the zeitgeist who came before. And her depiction of the turn-of-the-millennium pop star known as Lady Gaga will always be some of her best work.

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That's not to say she's inauthentic, but as anyone who read the recent New York Times Magazine profile of the singer knows, Gaga is an evolving being, constantly consuming and repurposing culture to make a statement. It's hard work, and while the person of Gaga and the persona of Gaga may be similar, at least some of it is a character.

But what about Gaga's other roles? The ones that don't involve a spending 72 hours in a giant egg? Most of them have been in genre work—but with A Star Is Born, which features her most prominent screen role to date, opening tomorrow, we thought we'd comb through them to establish just what are Lady Gaga's best performances, ranked from maybe-not-so-best to best.

6. La Camaleón, Machete Kills

How do I say this? Machete Kills is not a good movie. Danny Trejo could not save it, no matter how many sleeveless leather vests he wears. Lady Gaga's killer-in-disguise isn't in it that much (possibly a blessing, for her), but she's a sight for sore eyes when she shows up—even if just makes you wish you were watching the "Telephone" video instead.

5. Bertha, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Gaga's part as diner server Bertha in Robert Rodriguez's Sin City sequel is fairly small. She wears a great wig and big eyebrows, but only has about four lines, including "times are tough all over," which is how a lot of people feel about this movie. That said, she's charming, and gets to turn her New York accent up to 11.

4. Scáthach, American Horror Story: Roanoke

Gaga may not have had that much to do in Roanoke—probably for the best, considering she was recording an album, prepping for a Super Bowl halftime performance, and dealing with chronic pain—but she excelled at all of it, mentally manipulating Kathy Bates (who played The Butcher in Season 6 of AHS) into doing unspeakable acts and turning Cuba Gooding Jr. into her zombified sex slave. There's also the possibility that Gaga could get to bring her back: Scáthach was the original Supreme (the No. 1 Witch in the AHS world), and since the other Coven witches are returning for the currently-airing AHS: Apocalypse, there's a chance she will too.

3. The Countess, American Horror Story: Hotel

Lady Gaga—like Sarah Paulson, like Angela Bassett, like Darren Criss, like Evan Peters and Kate Mara—is a core member of the Ryan Murphy Collective. Murphy may be one of TV's busiest writers, but he knows how to do great things with Gaga—like turning her into The Countess, vampiric proprietor of the Hotel Cortez. The character gave Gaga the opportunity to hit every campy note she was capable of (as well as the chance to wear approximately 10,001 great looks). Full disclosure: I switched this role and her part in AHS: Roanoke in the ranking many times, and while it feels precarious to deny top billing to a super-powerful witch of the woods, the Countess stole the show and cinched Gaga a Golden Globe, so…

2. Herself, Gaga: Five Foot Two

In this documentary, about the chaotic period leading up to the release of Gaga's fifth studio album Joanne and her now-iconic Super Bowl performance (remember the drones?), Germanotta is, theoretically, not acting at all. But it's still riveting to watch the artist work, like seeing the Wizard of Oz before getting a full face of makeup. Going through a break-up, recording an album, dealing with fibromyalgia—it's a testament to the sheer perseverance pop stardom takes. It also contains her brilliant exegesis on the reasoning behind her many personas: They are, she reveals, each funhouse-mirror visions of what the music industry wants female performers to be, grotesque and "bleeding" symbols of what fame did to many women before her. (Be sure to stick around for the mid-credits scene where she jokingly tells producer Mark Ronson about her fear that she's always giving Beyoncé panic attacks with her antics.)

1. Ally, A Star Is Born

Unlike many of the other roles on this list, which in one way or another riff on Lady Gaga’s persona, this role—if anything—pulls from her life pre-Gaga, or from her life if Gaga had never taken off. At the beginning of director/star Bradley Cooper's remake, her Ally is already performer, but she’s doing a drag performance of "La Vie En Rose," not singing her own songs; she’s an artist who hasn't had the opportunity to build herself into a juggernaut yet. A lot has already been made of her role in A Star Is Born, and a lot more will undoubtedly be made in the future (practice the phrase "Oscar-winner Lady Gaga" just in case), and all of it is deserved. The possibility that Lady Gaga could play an aspiring musician was never a stretch, but the depths of power and vulnerability she reaches as Ally are remarkable. So is the music, much of which she co-wrote and all of which she (and Cooper) sang live during filming. It's Gaga at her best, raw and fearless—and there’s nothing more all-consuming than watching her rise.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Reigns Is Coming to Game of Thrones, and the Rest of This Week in Games

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It's the end of summer, which means things are quiet, but not that quiet. This week, we've got Xbox rentals, the ongoing problem of sexy games on Steam, and some card-swiping royalty gameplay in the Game of Thrones universe. ? Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure gamification …. ?

We've Got More Details on Microsoft's Xbox Subscription Service

Like everyone in the games industry, Microsoft has been working to figure out most successful ways to distribute their games and systems to the masses. Does the traditional model still work in 2018? Or is there a better way? Game streaming is one option a lot of people have tried, or are interested in—Microsoft included—but a recent report by The Verge suggests they're opting for another route, too: console subscriptions.

Remember when you could rent, like, a whole Dreamcast from Blockbuster for a week? It seems like it'll work like that: according to early sources, the subscription from Microsoft Stores will include an Xbox One (either the S or the fancy X version), Xbox Live Gold, and the Xbox Game Pass, which offers various games for download on a subscription basis, for $34.99 a month. It's an interesting deal, though I'm not sure how many people want to go to a physical location to rent a console. Still, alternatives to the current method—i.e., buying another big videogame-running brick every five years—are always welcome.

The Situation for Sexy Steam Games is Supremely Sticky

Steam's problems with content regulation are old hat to anyone who is familiar with games by now, but this story still is pretty jarring: with a new content moderation system in progress, Steam has seemingly halted the approval process for some adult games until the new system is finished. According to a report by Kotaku, several developers have found themselves stuck in release purgatory for months, with no clear answers and no end in sight.

It's understandable for Steam to not want certain content on its platform—that's its prerogative. But withholding both approval and clarity from developers isn't particularly good for anyone.

The Mobile Hit Reigns is Coming to Westeros

Reigns is an immensely clever game, a mash-up of the mind-numbing minutiae of ruling a kingdom with the mind-numbing habit of swiping right or left to run your dating life. Sassy and artistic, Reigns and its sequel have been a mobile smash hit;—and now their creators, alongside publisher Devolver Digital, have done the natural thing, and teamed up with the folks who made Game of Thrones. Introducing, uh, Reigns: Game of Thrones, due out in October in Android, iOS, and PC.

When it comes out, you'll be able to take on the roles of various royal types from the universe, beginning as Daenerys and unlocking more as you go along, die, and try again. Can you get to the Iron Throne? Or at least survive the winter? I probably can't; I'm terrible at these sorts of games.

Recommendation of the Week: Shenmue 1 & 2

In this current age of the remaster, this is no doubt one of the big ones. The Shenmue games, first released for the Dreamcast in 1999 and 2001, respectively, were epochal in so many ways. Their DNA is all over modern-day open-world games, slice-of-life role-playing games, and the entire genre of modern, peaceful indies. A fascinating soap operatic story of seeking a father's killer mixed with bits of brawling, romance, and regular life simulation make Shenmue and its sequel two of the most distinct, and fondly remembered, games of their time. Now, they're on modern consoles and PC. Check 'em out.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

The Napa Fire Is a Perfectly Normal Apocalypse

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Blame the wind, if you want. In Southern California they call it the Santa Ana; in the north, the Diablos. Every autumn, from 4,000 feet up in the Great Basin deserts of Nevada and Utah, air drops down over the mountains and through the canyons. By the time it gets near the coast it’s hot, dry, and can gust as fast as a hurricane.

Or blame lightning, or carelessness, or downed power lines. No one yet knows the cause of the more than a dozen fires ablaze around California, but fires start where humans meet the wild forests, where people build for solitude or space or beauty. Things go wrong in those liminal spaces, at the interface between the wilds and the built.

So blame sprawl, or civilization’s cycling of wilderness into rural into exurban into suburban—urban agglomerations with an ever-expanding wavefront.

Blame all of it. There’s a reason the great Californian writer Raymond Chandler called it the Red Wind—winds “that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Those winds blast down from the mountains and fan small fires into infernos, and sometimes those infernos maim or kill a city. In 1991 it was in the hills of Oakland. And this past weekend it was Napa and Sonoma, and the town of Santa Rosa. At least 15 people are dead. More than 1,500 houses are gone. The skies of the West are full of dust and ash.

Pushed by the wind, fires can throw burning embers a mile and a half ahead. The fire front starts moving faster than anyone can respond, jumping from ridgeline to ridgeline.

A fire’s progress through the forests and wildlands of North America isn’t exactly formulaic, but scientists understand it reasonably well. In the city, though? “Most wildland firefighters are not trained in structural protection, but the urban fire departments are not trained to deal with dozens or hundreds of houses burning at the same time,” says Volker Radeloff, a forestry researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “When these areas with lots of houses burn, the fires become very unpredictable.”

Buildings, the material bits of cities, don’t burn like woodlands. “A wildfire typically doesn’t last in one spot more than a minute or two. In grass it can be like 10 seconds,” says Mark Finney, a US Forest Service researcher at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. “But structures can burn for a long time. That means they have a long time to be able to spread the fire, to be able to ignite adjacent structures.” They throw off embers as they decompose, and those wide walls emit and transfer heat.

In Southern California, Santa Ana fires push into populated areas more frequently. They kill more people and destroy more buildings. Diablo-powered fires aren't as common in the state's northern half, but they're not unknown.

Fires happen without Santa Anas too, of course, but “they typically don’t grow bigger,” says Yufang Jin, an ecosystem dynamics researcher at UC Davis and lead author on a 2015 paper about the difference. “During summertime in southern California, the typical wind pattern blows from the ocean to inland. The wind speed is usually not that strong, and the relative humidity is usually high.” That can tamp a fire down.

During Santa Ana season, conditions are the opposite. And the particularly bad Diablo winds in the north this year come after the end of a drought that left plenty of fuel. Fire researchers sometimes fight about whether meteorology or fuel conditions are more important to wildfires; this past weekend had both—the perfect firestorm. Cal Fire, the agency responsible for wildfires in the state, has issued another Red Flag Warning for the same conditions later this week. According to a spokesperson, roughly 4,000 firefighters are already deployed.

    More on Wildfires

  • Adam Rogers

    The West Is on Fire. Blame the Housing Crisis

  • Joe Eaton

    How Bizarre Is This Year’s Wildfire Season, Really?

  • Laura Mallonee

    The Hellish Beauty of California's Wildfires

California housing policies are more likely to push single-family houses out into the edges of communities than encourage the construction of dense city centers. Climate change makes wet seasons wetter and hot seasons hotter—which builds fuel. “Based on analysis using climate model projections, the frequency of Santa Ana events is uncertain,” Jin says. “But all the models agree that the intensity of Santa Ana events is going to be much stronger.”

Models say the same thing about sea level rise and hurricanes. A continent away from the fires in California, cities along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean have been battered by tropical cyclones, one after the other. This year, ocean water heated by a warming climate, unusually wet weather, and a lack of the vertical wind shear that can tame a big storm combined to produce an anomalous season. It has already been a fire season and a hurricane season that are, as researchers say, consistent with models of a changing climate.

Cities are not immortal. Economics and wars can kill them, but so can storms and fires. That’s especially true if cities aren’t built to resist—if cities are built in ways that make the change worse instead of fighting it.

So keep thinking about blame as northern California rebuilds—if regulations get brave enough to insist on denser cities, less flammable materials, different ornamental vegetation, underground power lines. The risk of fire will never be zero, but everyone knows what would knock a few points off. Whether anyone will make those changes—well, the red wind makes people do crazy things.

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Science

NASA Sets a Fire in Space—For Science!

NASA started a blaze aboard the unmanned Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo vehicle. It’s the Spacecraft Fire Experiment. Seriously, that’s exactly what NASA is calling it.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Every Celeb and Brand That Told Me to Vote in the Midterms, Ranked

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Over the weekend, someone I kind of know posted something from someone I don’t know at all on Facebook. “Wow,” it read. “I can’t believe this is why Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson split up.” It included a picture of the couple as well as a link—to the registration form on Vote.org. I shared it. It quickly became one of my most popular posts.

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The post didn't originate with Grande, but it could have. Grande, along with uncountable scores of celebrities, brands, and apps, were working overtime to encourage people to vote, or at least insert themselves in the political conversation on Tuesday as people in the US headed to the polls. Google, of course, got in on the action, turning the day’s doodle into a “Go Vote” message rendered in the company’s signature colors and font. So, naturally, did Facebook, posting “It’s Election Day!” messages and giving users the ability to share that they voted.

If the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that a celebrity endorsement doesn’t necessarily clinch an election for one candidate or another. But the overall hum of voices saying “Go vote!” can motivate—or at least remind—people to get to the polls. (Peer pressure!) And as these midterms loomed, it seemed the cacophony of digital Get Out the Vote efforts was getting out of hand. Here are some of the best and worst we saw—from Tinder to Torchy’s Tacos.

22. Tinder

Before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee this morning, I got a message from Tinder. (Not exactly the East Coast's prime time for Tinder notifications.) “It’s time to get your vote on, because every single vote counts!” Yes, the app that has been encouraging us to make bad decisions and judge folks on the least valuable information available would like you to decide the future of America. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

21. James Woods

Fresh out of Twitter Jail for a misleading tweet about the midterms, actor and butt of Entourage jokes James Woods posted the above message asking people to not just vote, but to #VoteRed.

20. Tomi Lahren

…And now a word from conservative commentator Tomi Lahren.

19. Torchy’s Tacos

Honestly, this one is a bit confusing. Is salsa Republican? Is guac a Democrat thing? (Yes, we know, those are types of tacos at Torchy's.) Regardless, get munchies after the polls.

18. Twitter

Never one to miss out on a Moment or an opportunity to get involved in democracy, the official Twitter account on Twitter posted “thank you, vote.” The message was a riff on Grande’s new single “Thank u, next,” which…

17. Ariana Grande, Retweeting Twitter

For those who missed the tweetstorm about it, pop’s premiere shade-thrower Ariana Grande dropped her latest single late Saturday night—about 30 minutes before her ex-fianc´e Pete Davidson’s show, Saturday Night Live, hit the air. The song, in which Grande thanks her former lovers (including Davidson) for their service, was, in the singer’s own words, “a smash,” and quickly took over streaming services and Twitter. Not too long after the social media service used her song to encourage folks to hit the polls, Grande herself did the same.

16. Lucky Charms

Seriously? Have we not learned that luck has nothing to do with who wins elections??

15. The Rock

While many celebs just used words to encourage voting, Dwayne Johnson opted for a thirst trap. Well, a thirst trap that also doubled as a dig at his buddy Kevin Hart, but a trap nonetheless.

14. Kevin Hart

Speaking of Kevin Hart, he also voted (very early, from the looks of it), and would like you all to do the same.

13. Idris Elba

Speaking of thirst traps, People’s new Sexiest Man Alive, Idris Elba, also used the announcement of his new title to motivate the masses—an especially civic-minded overture, considering he's a Brit. Always a class act, that Idris.

12. Isiah Whitlock Jr.

The Wire star Isiah Whitlock Jr. wasn’t about to let Elba’s tweet stand, though. In addition to his famous Clay Davis rejoinder, he also had this to say: #GoVote.

11. The Milwaukee Bucks

Yes, even NBA teams are asking that you participate in something besides your fantasy league. Small forward Khris Middleton, at least, seems to be on board; his teammate Giannis Antetokounmpo may not be, but his Greek citizenship gives him a pass.

10. Kate Walsh

Lots of folks did some variation on the “Me Voting in 2016 vs. Me Voting in 2018” meme. Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice star Kate Walsh’s just happens to be our personal fave. (Though WIRED contributer Jenn Wood had a doozy too.)

9. Will Ferrell, via Funny or Die

You know what this election cycle hasn’t had enough of? Dance routines. Thank the East Lake High Spartan cheer squad, then, that Will Ferrell and Funny or Die are here to rectify that.

8. Ice Cube

There are worse ways to announce you’re about to drop new music.

7. William Barton

Ice Cube not enough of a motivator? Maybe this rallying cry from pro Hearthstone player William Barton will work?

6. Every Outfit on Sex and the City

The Instagram account Every Outfit on Sex and the City, which, yes, posts about all of the fashion on HBO’s iconic single ladies show, became something of an unofficial get-out-the-vote campaign during SATC star Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial run in New York earlier this year. Miranda didn’t make the ballot, but the folks behind the feed would still like you not to be a Samantha and instead vote for someone. (You’re welcome to be a Sam in other ways, though, of course.)

5. Frank Ocean, via Beats 1 Radio

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from R&B wunderkind Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio on Beats 1. But he brought it back Tuesday morning with an only-kinda-cryptic image of a voting booth—and then promised merch to fans in select cities who could prove they'd voted. Thanks, Frank.

4. Demi Lovato

Singer and actress Demi Lovato has been nearly radio silent on social media since July when she entered rehab following an overdose. But she got on Instagram today to say she's "so grateful to be home in time to vote!" She went on to say "One vote can make a difference, so make sure your voice is heard!"

3. RuPaul

Much like the fine crew behind Every Outfit on Sex and the City, RuPaul would like you to get a squirrel friend to the polls. SISSY THAT VOTE.

2. Beyoncé

Beyoncé, who sent out a plea to her fans to vote via email in the 24 hours before the midterms, took to Instagram to announce support for Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Republican Senator Ted Cruz in her home state of Texas. If anyone can get people to the polls, it’s Beyoncé. The queen has spoken.

1. Steak-umm

We’ll leave you with this—just in case you do need a frozen meat company to tell you what to do.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

What It Takes to Be an Expert Human Echolocator

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Daniel Kish sees more than you might expect, for a blind man. Like many individuals deprived of sight, he relies on his non-visual senses to perceive, map, and navigate the world. But people tend to find Kish's abilities rather remarkable. Reason being: Kish can echolocate. Yes, like a bat.

As a child, Kish taught himself to generate sharp clicking noises with his mouth, and to translate the sound reflected by surrounding objects into spatial information. Perhaps you've seen videos like this one, in which Kish uses his skills to navigate a new environment, describe the shape of a car, identify the architectural features of a distant building—even ride a bike:

Impressive as his abilities are, Kish insists he isn't special. "People who are blind have been using various forms of echolocation to varying degrees of efficiency for a very long time," he says. What's more, echolocation can be taught. As president of World Access For the Blind, one of Kish's missions is helping blind people learn to cook, travel, hike, run errands, and otherwise live their lives more independently—with sound. "But there’s never been any systematic look at how we echolocate, how it works, and how it might be used to best effect."

A study published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology takes a big step toward answering these questions, by measuring the mouth-clicks of Kish and two other expert echolocators and converting those measurements into computer-generated signals.

Researchers led by Durham University psychologist Lore Thaler performed the study in what's known in acoustic circles as an anechoic chamber. The room features double walls, a heavy steel door, and an ample helping of sound-dampening materials like foam. To stand inside an anechoic chamber is to be sonically isolated from the outside world. To speak inside of one is to experience the uncanny effect of an environment practically devoid of echoes.

But to echolocate inside of one? I asked Kish what it was like, fully expecting him to describe it as a form of sensory-deprivation. Wrong. Kish says that, to him, the space sounded like standing before a wire fence, in the middle of an infinitely vast field of grass.

This unique space allowed Thaler and her team to record and analyze thousands of mouth-clicks produced by Kish and the other expert echolocators. The team used tiny microphones—one at mouth level, with others surrounding the echolocators at 10-degree intervals, suspended at various heights from thin steel rods. Small microphones and rods were essential; the bigger the equipment was, the more sound they would reflect, reducing the fidelity of their measurements.

Thaler's team began the study expecting the acoustic properties of mouth-clicks to vary between echolocators. But the noises they produced were very similar. Thaler characterizes them as bright (a pair of high-pitched frequencies at around 3 and 10 kilohertz) and brief. They tended to last just three milliseconds before tapering off into silence. Here's a looped recording of one of Kish's clicks:

The researchers also analyzed the spatial path that the sound waves traveled after leaving the echolocators' mouths. "You can think of it as an acoustic flashlight," Thaler says. When you turn a flashlight on, the light distributes through space. A lot of it travels forward, but there's scattering to the left and right, as well." The beam patterns for clicks occupy space in a similar fashion—only with sound instead of light.

Thaler's team found that the beam pattern for the mouth-clicks roughly concentrated in a 60-degree cone, emanating from the echolocators' mouths—a narrower path than has been observed for speech. Thaler attributes that narrowness to the brightness of the click's pitch. Higher frequencies tend to be more directional than lower ones, which is why, if you've ever set up a surround sound system, you know that a subwoofer's placement is less important than that of a higher-frequency tweeter.

Thaler and her team used these measurements to create artificial clicks with acoustic properties similar to the real thing. Have a listen:

These synthetic clicks could be a boon for studies of human echolocation, which are often restricted by the availability of expert practitioners like Kish. "What we can do now is simulate echolocation, in the real world with speakers or in virtual environments, to develop hypotheses before testing them with human subjects," Thaler says. "We can create avatars, objects, and environments in space like you would in a video game, and model what the avatar hears." Preliminary studies like these could allow Thaler and other researchers to refine their hypotheses before inviting echolocation experts in to see how their models match the real thing.

These models won’t be perfect. To keep measurements consistent, Kish and the other echolocators had to keep still while inside the chamber. “But in the real world, they move their heads and vary the acoustic properties of their clicks, which can help them gain additional information about where things are in the world,” says Cynthia Moss, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University whose lab studies the mechanisms of spatial perception. (Thaler says her team is currently analyzing the results of a dynamic study, the results of which they hope to publish soon.)

Still, Moss says the study represents a valuable step toward understanding how humans echolocate, and perhaps even building devices that could make the skill more broadly achievable. Not everyone can click like Kish. “I’ve worked with a guy who used finger-snaps, but his hand would get tired really fast,” Moss says. Imagine being able to hand someone a device that emits an pitch-perfect signal—one that they could learn to use before, or perhaps instead of, mastering mouth-clicks.

I ask Kish what he thinks about a hypothetical device that could one day produce sounds like he does. He says it already exists. About a third of his students are unable or unwilling to produce clicks with their mouths. "But you pop a castanet in their hands and you get instant results," he says. "The sound they produce, it's like ear candy. It's uncanny how bright, clear, and consistent it is."

But Kish says he's all for more devices—and more research. "We know that these signals are critical to the echolocation process. Bats use them. Whales use them. Humans use them. It makes sense that those signals should be studied, understood, optimized." With the help of models like Thaler's, Kish might just get his wish.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Forget Cute Apps—Here’s How Our Couples Keep It Together

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Mixing technology and romance can create a dangerous cocktail. Few people know that better than we do here at WIRED. Not only do we report on the chaos, but as a tech-curious bunch, we’ve had more than our fair share of mishaps and dud apps deleted after just a few days. (Ever wondered what it’s like being on dating apps in San Francisco? “People think it’s interesting that I work for WIRED,” says editorial assistant Lydia Horne. “But sometimes they just want to pitch me their startup’s latest products.”) Still, we’ve persevered. And some of us have found ways to weave technology into our romantic lives in genuinely useful ways.

The key is to mostly steer clear of apps directly marketed at couples. No one really needs a new messaging service—or calendar, or photo album, or shared list generator—preloaded with extra-cutesy emojis.

As a throng of proud, self-described nerds, we’ve discovered that many of the most practical apps and devices for streamlining relationship matters are the same ones you use in your social life, and even at your office. Here are some of the unlikely relationship heroes WIRED staffers swear by.

The Business (Apps) of Love

Kimberly Chua, Senior Digital Producer: “I’ve been a bridesmaid in three weddings, and any method of communication was always woefully inadequate. To plan my own wedding, I’ve been using Slack for messaging and the spreadsheet app Airtable. Slack lets me organize conversations with my bridesmaids by topic: Here’s where we talk logistics, here’s where we talk about dresses—I even gave them a private channel where they can talk about me. Airtable lets you sort tasks into separate views so my fiancé and I could easily divide the work. It felt silly at first to use the tools I was using at work, but it became very obvious we needed a way to create as little stress as possible, and that this was it.”

Emily Dreyfuss, Senior Writer: “We used an Excel spreadsheet to name our son. We had 72 name choices and we couldn’t agree, so we put them all into a spreadsheet. My husband wrote an algorithm to let us do blind voting and narrow it down by half. The algorithm let us rank each name and got rid of the bottom ones, and it let us save one so that the other person couldn’t vote it out. It was all very complicated! When we were left with four names, we left technology behind, headed to the hospital with all four choices, and picked based on the baby’s face.”

Joanna Pearlstein, Deputy Editor, Newsroom Standards: “I married a fellow geek, and as is evident to anyone who knows me, I love spreadsheets. For our wedding, we used Google Sheets to track costs, guests, seating arrangements, the dates on which thank-you notes were written and sent. Using Google allows me to make sure the spreadsheet is available on every computer, which is important."

Saraswati Rathod, Researcher: “I moved to San Francisco after the last lesbian bar closed down, so I didn’t really get to participate in that community until I found Meetup. On Meetup anyone with an interest can easily get a group of queer women together and basically take over a bar for the night. To me, these Meetup groups have become a staple of San Francisco’s queer community and it’s how I met the woman I’m currently dating—so it really is kind of like a digital-age bar that way.”

Logistics

Chua: “My fiancé does all the shopping because he does all the cooking, but we needed a place where we could easily keep one shopping list. The Google Home app makes it really easy, even though he’s on Android and I’m on iOS. It’s perfect: The second one of us opens the fridge and realizes we’re out of milk, they can just shout “Hey Google, add milk to the shopping list.” I can even add last-minute things while he’s shopping. We never forget anything anymore.”

Emma Grey Ellis: “So this is a good example of a tech application that would be stalky in a casual relationship, but is supremely useful in a marriage. Neither my partner nor I are particularly good at keeping an eye on our texts while we’re moving about the city. To make things worse, neither of us has any chill. So to avoid hassling each other while we’re driving and sending texts, like “Where are you? Did you die?” (or less dramatically, “Are you still at the store?”) we constantly share our locations through Google Maps.”

Anonymous: “There is an app called Private Photo Vault for those things you don’t want uploading to the cloud. It’s password-protected, and more importantly, as soon as you upload an image to the vault, it disappears from your Photos app. That way you don’t have to worry about anyone running into something racy (or just weird) if they scroll too far.”

Rebecca Heilweil, Reporting Fellow: “I’m in an old relationship that’s new to long distance. Besides always existing in each other’s lives through text messages, we’ve been prescheduling surprise meals for each other with Caviar. The trick is to put the other person’s phone number in the delivery contact information, and to not ask what they want first.”

Alex Baker-Whitcomb, Manager of Audience Development: “When we were at a distance and feeling terrible that we couldn’t celebrate together, we’d send each other bottles of alcohol with Saucey. It was the perfect way to say ‘Sorry I can’t be there with you, but here’s some champs.’ ”

Peter Rubin, Platforms Editor: “Beyond the obvious three words—Kindle Shared Library—my wife and I carved out a little piece of the cloud for ourselves. We got a home server, and set up various devices to auto-backup. Now, if our phones or Dropboxes fill up with photos or other docs, we just keep the essentials and nuke the rest, knowing they're nestled in the sweet embrace of our NAS.”

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Would You Put the Genetically Modified Arctic Apple in Your Pie?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

On the last Monday of September, 32 field workers stepped onto a 15-acre experimental plot in an undisclosed part of Washington and made apple harvest history. The fruits they plucked from each tree were only a few months old. But they were two decades and millions of dollars in the making. And when they landed, pre-sliced and bagged on grocery store shelves earlier this month, they became the first genetically modified apple to go on sale in the United States.

The Arctic Apple, as it’s known, is strategically missing an enzyme so it doesn’t go brown when you take a bite and leave it sitting out on the counter. It’s one of the first foods engineered to appeal directly to the senses, rather than a farmer’s bottom line. And in a bid to attract consumers, it’s unapologetic about its alterations.

The apple has courted plenty of controversy to get where it is today—in about a hundred small supermarkets clustered around Oklahoma City. But now that it’s here, the question is, will consumers bite? Dozens of biotech companies with similar products in the pipeline, from small startups to agrochemical colossuses like Monsanto and Dupont are watching, eager to find out if the Arctic Apple will be a bellwether for the next generation of GMOs, or just another science project skewered on the altar of public opinion.

Neal Carter bought his first apple orchard in 1995, up in the gently sloping valley of Summerland, British Columbia. When he started, the future president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits didn’t have grand plans for upending the industry. But in his first few seasons he was struck by just how many apples (and how much money) he had to throw away on account of browning from the routine bumps and jostles of transit and packaging. Most years it was around 40 percent of his crop.

When you cut an apple, or handle it roughly, its cells rupture, and compounds that had been neatly compartmentalized come in contact with each other. When that happens, an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, or PPO, triggers a chemical reaction that produces brown-colored melanin within just a few minutes. Carter thought there had to be a way to breed or engineer around that. So when he came across Australian researchers already doing it in potatoes, he wasted no time in licensing their technology, a technique known as gene silencing. Rather than knocking out a gene, the idea is to hijack the RNA instructions it sends out to make a protein.

The problem, Carter found out later, was that apples were a lot more complicated, genetically speaking, than the potato. In taters, the browning enzyme was coded into a family of four sub-genes that were chemically very similar. All you had to do was silence the dominant one, and it would cross-react with the other three, taking them all down in one go. Apples, on the other hand, had four families of PPO genes, none of which reacted with the others. So Carter’s team had to design a system to target all of them at once—no simple task in the early aughts.

To do it, the Okanagan scientists inserted a four-sequence apple gene (one for each member of the apple PPO family) whose base pairs run in reverse orientation to the native copies. To make sure it got expressed, they also attached some promoter regions taken from a cauliflower virus. The transgene’s RNA binds to the natural PPO-coding RNA, and the double-stranded sequence is read as a mistake and destroyed by the cell’s surveillance system. The result is a 90 percent reduction in the PPO enzyme. And without it, the apples don’t go brown.

It took Okanagan years to perfect the technique, which was subject to regulatory scrutiny on account of the viral DNA needed to make it work. Today, with the arrival of gene editing technologies like Crispr/Cas9, turning genes on and off or adding new ones has become much more straightforward. Del Monte is already growing pink pineapples, Monsanto and Pioneer are working on antioxidant-boosted tomatoes and sweeter melons, J.R. Simplot has a potato that doesn’t produce cancer-causing chemicals when it’s fried. Smaller startups are busy engineering all kinds of other designer fruits and veggies. And it’s not obvious how exactly this new wave of gene-edited foods will be regulated.

Gene editing gets around most of the existing laws that give the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture authority over biotech food crops. In January, the Obama administration proposed a rule change that would look more closely at gene-edited crops before automatically approving them. But earlier this month the USDA withdrew that proposed rule, citing science and biotech industry concerns that it would unnecessarily hinder research and development.

Carter, whose fruits were cleared by the USDA and the FDA in 2015, says his Arctic Apples are evidence the existing process works. But there were times when he wasn’t sure they were going to make it. “It took us close to 10 years, where we had the apples, we had the data, we kept submitting answers to questions, and then wouldn’t hear anything back,” says Carter. “It’s a bit of a black hole, and that whole time you’re not sure if you’re going to even be able to pay your electricity bills and keep your lights on.”

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Talking to Carter, Okanagan still feels like a small family business, especially when he says the word “process” with that endearing, long Canadian “O”. This year’s Arctic Apple harvest amounted to 175,000 pounds—just a drop in the apple bucket. But shortly after its US regulatory approvals, his company was acquired by Intrexon Corporation, a multinational synthetic biology conglomerate that owns all the other big-name GMOs you might have heard of. Like Oxitec’s Zika-fighting mosquitoes, and the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon.

That’s one reason customers might be wary of the Arctic Apple. Another is transparency. While Carter says they’re taking that literally—the bags have a plastic see-through window to view the not-brown slices for yourself—others say Okanagan hasn’t gone far enough in telling people how its apple was made. The letters G-M-O don’t appear anywhere on the bag. Instead, in accordance with a 2016 GMO food labeling law, there’s a QR code, which you can scan with a smartphone to get more information online.

Some consumer groups think that doesn’t go far enough, but scientists counter that they’re focusing on the wrong things. “Breeding technologies are just a distraction from the big questions,” says Pam Ronald, who studies plant genetics at the University of California and who is married to an organic farmer. “Like, how do we produce enough food without using up all our soil and water? How do we reduce toxic inputs? Those are the grand challenges of agriculture today, that technology can help address.”

Ronald works on food crops designed to fight food insecurity in the developing world—like drought-resistant corn and vitamin-enriched rice. When she first heard of the Arctic Apple at a conference in 2015, she wasn’t that impressed. It’s not exactly a famine-fighter. But when Carter sent her a box of fruits a few weeks later, her kids had a different take. They brought them into school to show to their biology classes, and according to Ronald, their classmates just went wild. “Kids really hate brown apples, and it made me realize I don’t really like them either,” she says.

Living where food is abundant, most people don’t really grasp how GMOs touch their lives. “It’s that distance that consumers are removed from agriculture that creates the fear,” says Ronald. “But if you see a brown apple you’re probably aware that you throw it away, and maybe you feel guilty about that. Connecting biotechnology to something you can see and feel and taste like that could be transformational.”

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Meme It Up With 11 Sure-Fire Last-Minute Halloween Costumes

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

According to Google's "Frightgeist" map of trending costumes, there's no way around it: it's gonna be a very Fortnite Halloween. From Miami up to Boston and Anchorage down to LA, the Epic Games title is dominating people's searches for holiday getups. (At least, mostly; New England seems to be really into unicorns and fairies, and Glendive, Montana inexplicably is into "The ’50s" as a costume idea.) You, though, are a free thinker. Just because you can put on some cargo pants or an orange shirt and do the "Shoot" dance doesn't mean you want to look like every other yob out there getting pushed around in a shopping cart.

But at the same time, Halloween is on a Wednesday this year, which means that the parties start tonight—and you, my friend, have likely not gone farther than Googling how to turn "The ’50s" into a costume. (The answer is Brylcreem and taffeta. However, the ’50s was not a better time. Please do not dress up like it.) You need a fix, and fast. What, you're going to drag out that Sexy Pizza Rat costume for yet another year? The madness ends, and it ends here. Thanks to the ceaseless churn of the internet, Fornite is far from the only easy solution to life's sartorial conundra. So take a cue from us, and take a cue from current events and meme culture. Most of these costumes are already lurking in your home, just waiting to be thrown together hastily before you leave the house to dodge the shopping carts.

Spot Mini, the Boston Dynamics Robot

Of course robots aren't going to take over world. So what if they can open doors? Or fight through human resistance to open more doors? Or do parkour? The only thing that would truly strike fear is if they could robo-twerk to Bruno Mars, which is obviously never gonna hap—sorry, what's that? Ah. I see. So then putting on knee-high black compression socks and a yellow tracksuit and doing a herky-jerky Running Man is less of a Halloween costume than a last-ditch effort to blend in. Got it. —Peter Rubin

The American Chopper Argument

This meme, derived from an episode of the reality show American Chopper where Paul Teutul Sr. fired his son Paul Teutal Jr., is actually a great way to lay out the simple facets of a debate. (Just like Plato used to do!) As the argument escalates, each frame of the meme lays out a different point from each side of the debate. For this reason, it probbably lends itself most readily to a duo or couple's costume. To execute it, one person needs to wear jeans, a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a grey handlebar moustache (also platinum hair and some fake arm tattoos, if you can swing it). The other person needs to wear jeans, a black T-shirt (with sleeves), and a black baseball cap. As for the debate itself, it's possible to pick a debate laid out in one of the many examples of the meme or create your own. Put the points of the debate on signs that you both can walk around with to act out the argument. Also, if you want to encourage interactivity, wear the costumes while carrying dry-erase boards so that your fellow celebrants can use you as props to lay out arguments of their own. —Angela Watercutter

Yanny—or Is It Laurel?

"Who are you supposed to be?"
"Larnef."
"Who?"
"Yannel."
"Wait, what?"
"Sorry, did you not understand me? Laruvel." Yes, simply by printing this out and hanging it around your neck (or just buying a t-shirt from its creator), you too can be as annoying as the many, many news stories about the senseless auditory illusion, none of which actually found the opera singer who recorded the snippet more than a decade ago. Well, none that weren't the one by our own Louise Matsakis, anyway. Nice one, Louise! —P.R.

The A Star Is Born Meme

No doubt Halloween parties this year will have more than a few variations on Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's characters from A Star Is Born. But the meme, that four-panel "I just wanted to take another look at you" bit, that one is not likely to be left in the shallow, either. So how do you do it? A couple of ways: You could make a couple T-shirts, like these superfans. If you have a spare car door lying around—or are handy enough to fashion one by hand—you could roll down the window, get a greasy mop like Jackson Maine's, and just walk around all night saying "hey!" and seeing who turns around to take a look at you. Bonus points if you can get a companion to play Ally/Gaga and find you charming all night long. —A.W.

An Absolute Unit

While the meme officially got its start in 2017, the spring is when the internet's love of majestic rotundity really took root. But here's the thing: you can't just be an absolute unit and expect people to know that's what you're doing. The key here is wordplay. So maybe carry a bottle of vodka in one hand and two plums in the other; now you're an Absolut eunuch! If you're heading somewhere with a lot of programmers, go as an Absolute Unix Terminal. (If you're not going somewhere with a lot of programmers, though, do not do this. Please.)

Gritty

OK, so full disclosure: you might actually need a lion mask to be able to pull off professional hockey's terrifying new mascot. And an Ernie mask to paste it on top of, just to give you the perfect slavering murder-rictus. Oh, and giant googly eyes. And a Philadelphia Flyers jersey. But you've got black sweatpants somewhere, right? I mean, who doesn't have black sweatpants? What, you've never dressed up like someone who skates around during commercial breaks and then lurks in the bowels of sports arenas, waiting to prey on innocents? I'm beginning to question whether you even want this. —P.R.

The "Him Too" Kid

You gotta hand it to Pieter Hanson. After his mom tweeted a (since deleted) picture of him in his Navy uniform and saying he "won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind” and the #HimToo hashtag, Hanson followed it up by creating his own Twitter account denoucing what his mom said, and #HimToo as well. This costume, then, is pretty easy. If you have Navy whites, complete with cap, just wear those. And maybe carry a sign with a big red slash through "#HimToo" for people who may not know the meme and just think your a sailor. Also, be ready to strike Hanson's now-famous pose. —A.W.

Is This a Pigeon?

You may not recognize the name, but you've definitely seen the meme. Derived from a scene in the anime The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird in which a humanoid thinks a butterfly is a pigeon, this year it became the go-to way to demonstrate any person or group's misunderstanding of some concept or topic. To make this a costume, you'll need a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a short black haircut (or wig), a red button-up shirt and grey trenchcoat, a thick hardcover book, and a fake butterfly that you can attach to your shoulder with some kind of spring-y wire. As for how you interpret the meme, that's up to you. Either consult Know Your Meme for some well-known examples, or be a smarty-pants and come up with one on your own. Once you have it, render it in bold type and attach it to your face, chest, and butterfly in the appropriate places. Then, flutter away. —A.W.

Blunt-Hitting Elon Musk

Live in Canada? Or District of Columbia, or one of the eight states that has fully legalized the recreational use of cannabis? Just grab an OCCUPY t-shirt and a pack of backwoods, and you can take it from here. Just don't threaten to take Tesla private and drive, if you know what we're saying. —P.R.

Lime Scooter

Not all memes live on Twitter. Some of them live strewn in the bushes in front of that church down your block, or clustered more than 20 deep in front of your subway station. They're great memes, and they provide a real service to people, they're just a little … annoying sometimes. Why not be a little annoying yourself? All it takes is a QR code slapped on your forehead, a black t-shirt/white shorts/green sneakers combo, and a willingness to fall over in front of people at the worst possible moment. Or, if you've got a friend of high-school age, just give them piggyback rides all night—as long as those rides involve you sprinting into traffic or down crowded sidewalks, with no helmets involved whatsoever. "Last-mile solution" never sounded so spooky! —P.R.

Redpilled Kanye West

MAGA hat? Check. Trump photo? Check. Now just call the photo "dad," call for overturning the 13th Amendment, and watch everyone's face crumple with grief and pity. Don't worry, you're still a genius—it's just that we're trying to bring you down. Yeah, that's it. —P.R.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

How Searching Became More Than an 'Internet Movie'

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It was 2016, and Aneesh Chaganty was fumbling through the most important phone call of his barely-begun career. The young filmmaker had been given 15 minutes to convince actor John Cho to star in Search, a mystery about a father trying to track down his missing teenage daughter. The characters’ ordeal—and their entire relationship—would be told via a series of screens, as its hero uses everything from Facebook to FaceTime to Reddit to solve his kid’s disappearance.

Other films have taken the same web-centered approach, like 2015’s horror hit Unfriended, but Chaganty wanted to do something different: “The Memento of screen movies,” he says. For Cho, however, the concept didn’t click. “It was the first time I’d spoken to a celebrity in my life, and I completely botched the call,” says Chaganty. “I didn’t tell him we were trying to do something new. His hesitation was that this wouldn't be a movie movie—that it would just be a YouTube video.”

Chaganty, 27, didn’t give up. He still had Cho’s number, so he decided to text him, to see if they could get some actual face-time together. The two eventually met for coffee in Los Angeles, no longer separated by a device. “He sat down, and I stood up and just pitched my ass off,” Chaganty says. He wound up selling Cho on the film, and a year and a half later, Search was screening at the Sundance Film Festival, where it would win multiple awards—and be scooped up for $5 million by Sony’s Screen Gems division. Newly retitled Searching, the movie opens today in several cities, following a highly promising limited-release opening weekend.

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Co-written with Sev Ohanian—who produced Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s breakout debut—Searching is the latest film to deftly employ small-screen habits to tell a big-screen story: This year alone, there’s been the speedy text-message chain that kicks off Crazy Rich Asians; the soul-baring YouTube videos of Eighth Grade; and the parent-baffling emoji-missives of Blockers. It’s a marked change from the countless goofy interfaces and Finder-Spyder searches that dominated movies and TV shows starting in the ‘90s. Now a new generation of filmmakers, many of whom came of age in the digital era, are finding ways to ensure the online experience is presented as IRL-ish as possible.

“Ever since [1998’s] You've Got Mail, people have been this trying to figure out how technology falls into a story,” says Chaganty. “House of Cards was one of the first shows to have text messages pop up, and that was revolutionary in its own time. But I think the success stories we’re seeing now is because people are saying, ‘How can we keep it accurate and realistic, and still serve the tone of the movie?’”

In Searching, Cho plays David Kim, a recent widower who’s constantly in touch with his only daughter, Margot (Michelle La). When Margot doesn’t come home after school one day, David begins scouring her online life—Venmo transactions, Facebook friends, livestream archives, even old Tumblr posts—in an attempt to figure out where she went. He also enlists the support of a deeply concerned detective (Will & Grace’s Debra Messing), whom he communicates with largely by FaceTime.

Much of the early part of the film plays out on David’s computer, including an opening montage that condenses the first 16 years of his daughter’s life, as well as the final years of his wife’s cancer battle, into a series of clickable videos, calendar events, and email exchanges. It’s a niftily constructed and unexpectedly moving sequence, one that serves as a reminder of just how much of our existence plays out in front of us on-screen.

Chaganty began thinking about filmmaking when he was 8 years old, having seen a photo of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan in the newspaper India West. “I vividly remember thinking, ‘He looks like me. I want to do that,’” Chaganty wrote in a letter he posted to Twitter last week. As a middle-school student growing up in San Jose, California, he began using hand-me-down, slightly outdated cameras he’d been gifted by his parents, two movie-loving software entrepreneurs. Chaganty made home movies with titles like The Shed and The Attic, inspired in part by the no-budget short films Shyamalan had made as a kid. “I thought, ‘Oh, he made movies using the means I have now—which is no means,” says Chaganty. “Those really got me into filmmaking.”

He and Ohanian, 31, first met at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Afterward, the two collaborated on Seeds, a touching short-form travelogue shot using Google Glass. Chaganty would end up working in the company’s Creative Labs division for two years until quitting his job to pursue Searching. “I called my dad up after I started at Google, and told him about my day,” says Chaganty. “He was like, ‘Awesome. But remember: You’re coming back here to make movies.’ They’ve been very much, ‘Don’t chase a paycheck, chase your dream’ since I was growing up.”

While writing Searching, Chaganty and Ohanian took in as many crime-culture artifacts as possible, from the big-screen version of Gone Girl to Netflix’s Making a Murderer to episodes of Serial. Because the movie takes place on screen, the two wrote what they called “a scriptment”—essentially a 50-page outline featuring dialogue and action descriptions, but downplaying the technical specifics.

“Early on, we realized this couldn't be a script that said, ‘INT. — GOOGLE CHROME — FACEBOOK — TAGGED PHOTOS — NIGHT,” says Chaganty. “If you're trying to convince actors to be in a movie, that’s the worst way to do it.” And while the film itself was shot in less than two weeks, Searching’s editors spent months putting together the David Kim’s on-screen world: “Every single asset you see‚—whether it's a line of text on a text message, or an email window—had to be created from scratch.”

The glut of online ephemera in Searching means the filmmakers were able to spread hidden in-jokes, clues, and messages throughout the film—including a nod to the man who unknowingly helped launch Chaganty’s career nearly two decades ago. “There's a moment where we log onto Facebook,” he says, “and a news item that says, ‘M. Night Shyamalan: Filmmaker agrees to meet with super-fan director after director’s surprise cameo in film.’ Hopefully, someone will send him a screenshot, or tell him, ‘Go watch Searching.’” If so, it would give Chaganty a near-perfect twist ending of his own.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

A Time-Lapsed Glacier Collapse Is the Saddest Science Lesson

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

One of the first things you notice about videos of calving glaciers is the utter absence of scale. The craggy chunks of ice that break away could be the size of football fields or cities or maybe even whole states—but without a point of reference it can be next to impossible to say. They are unintelligibly immense.

That perceptual effect happens in person, too. "There's no real way to determine its size just by looking at it," says New York University oceanographer David Holland, whose research team has spent a decade observing glacier behavior in Greenland. A distant, dislodged iceberg might look small at first glance, "but then you'll watch a helicopter fly towards it, and the helicopter will shrink and shrink and shrink and pretty soon it just disappears."

Which is why you probably can't tell that the newly born berg in this time-lapse video is in fact 4 miles wide, half a mile deep, and over a mile long. A sizable chunk of Greenland's Helheim glacier, it's roughly the size of lower Manhattan and weighs between 10 billion and 14 billion tons. When it dislodged from Helheim and crashed into the ocean on June 22, it accounted for some 3 percent of the ice that Greenland is expected to contribute to the sea in 2018 in the span of just 30 minutes. Much of Greenland's ice deposits will occur in dramatic, short-lived events such as this.

That's exactly why this video is so valuable to Holland, whose team is studying how calving glaciers could contribute to catastrophic sea-level rise across the globe. "Abrupt sea level change is only going to happen one way, and that's with some big part of western Antarctica becoming violently unstable due to calving—or not," he says. "If not, then there will not be major, abrupt sea level changes." And to model whether and how Antarctica might fall apart, you need to understand the rate and processes by which ice breaks off. Greenland's icebergs—including Helheim—serve as fabulous natural laboratories.

Glaciers often shed pieces of themselves, but only rarely do researchers capture large events on camera. In the course of his career, Holland has seen it happen just three times. (The largest calving ever filmed was shot during the production of the documentary Chasing Ice, on the 17th day of a glacier-watching stakeout.) "You can be out in the field for two weeks with your camera on and the glacier just sits there doing nothing," says Denise Holland, David's wife and the logistics coordinator for NYU’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Global Sea Level Change. But that kind of documentation is essential to understanding—and modeling—how and why glaciers calve.

Consider the video above, which begins with a big so-called tabular iceberg breaking off from the main part of Helheim glacier. Almost immediately thereafter, a second type of iceberg, called a pinnacle iceberg, can be seen calving off toward camera-right. The tabular iceberg is built like a pancake: large, flat, relatively stable. But the pinnacle berg has an aspect ratio like a slice of bread. Tall and skinny, it wants to lie down, so as it separates from the iceberg from the bottom first, its feet shoot forward out from under it as it slides into the sea. Sheets of pinnacle icebergs proceed to rip off from the glacier in sequence, driving the tabular berg farther down the fjord and breaking it into smaller chunks. "It's like a house of cards: One piece falls off, and the rest of the pieces peel off one after the other," David says. "It's complete chaos."

That chaos can be difficult to model. Look closely and you'll notice that not all of the pinnacle icebergs in this video detach from the bottom first. Some separate from the top, reflecting a different type of structural failure. Different structural failures occur at different rates. If you don't know what those rates are, it's hard to say how accurate your models are.

"If you're going to project sea levels, you need to pass through the eye of the needle first and get the delivery of ice to the ocean correct—and that's not possible right now," David says. "It could be in the future, with more observation and more modeling, but this event had too much going on for anyone to responsibly say they could predict or understand what happened."

Until that future arrives, we'll have video like this one to remind us of the enormous complexity—and just plain enormity—of calving glaciers.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES