The Merc with a Mouth is back, and he's making even more money this time around. Yes, friends, Deadpool 2 shot into theaters this weekend to the tune of $125 million at the domestic box office. That wasn’t quite enough to beat its predecessor's $132.4 million opening, but it’s still pretty damn good for an R-rated comic book film—and powerful enough to unseat Avengers: Infinity War from the top spot.

Why is Deadpool 2 kicking so much ass? Because, as WIRED's own Angela Watercutter pointed out in her review, it manages to improve on the original. Deadpool one-liners that Ryan Reynolds reworked to perfection, a lot of fabulousness from Zazie Beetz as Domino, and cameos from Matt Damon and Brad Pitt—it’s full of wonderful surprises and more laughs than anyone can count. It is, in other words, a good time at the movies.

Yet everyone likes the latest Deadpool movie for different reasons. Some like Josh Brolin’s Cable, some like the perfectly choreographed action scenes, others are just here for the LOLs. Now that the film has been unleashed on the public and we can have a spoiler-filled discussion without feeling guilty about it, WIRED assembled an X-Force of writers and editors—Peter Rubin, Angela Watercutter, and Carter Melrose—to hash out the movie's best moments. Grab a chimichanga and join us, won’t you?

Angela Watercutter, Senior Associate Editor: There are so many things about this movie I want to discuss with you guys. And yet when I went back to look at my notes from the screening, I realized it’s just a lot of me trying to scribble down jokes and exclamations like “One-Eyed Willie joke!” Not very helpful. So, I’ll start with a question: Did you guys have any favorite scenes or bits? I really liked the gangster-killing montage at the beginning set to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” And for some reason, Deadpool telling Cable, “You’re so dark. Are you sure you’re not from the DC universe?” cracked me up. So did anything with Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). What about you guys?

Peter Rubin, Platforms Editor: I admit to feeling a little cold for the first major chunk of the movie. It’s not that it wasn’t funny, or irreverent, or all the things that the original Deadpool was, it’s that it was exactly all the things that the original Deadpool was. And this time around, all those moves had diminishing returns. The same credits sequence that replaced writer and performer names with in-jokes seemed lazier this time around; Wade Wilson’s exploding body sending a disembodied bird-flipping hand tumbling toward the camera felt hackneyed and a little tryhard. Even Deadpool’s early rampage through the underworld left me cold, despite the Dolly Parton.

But then X-Force came around! I admit to not having kept up with the production of the movie, so wasn’t fully aware that they’d be building an ensemble for the franchise’s future, but I was on board from jump. Part of that was the way they applied the movie’s gleeful nihilism to the building-a-team trope, part of it was the blink-or-you’ll-miss-them dispatching of Shatterstar and The Vanisher—that’s my kind of Brad Pitt cameo!—but the biggest part was how the new blood made the movie feel urgent for the first time. (OK, and the action sequences that were constructed around Domino’s super-#blessed untouchability. More of that intricate chaos, please.)

So while the movie experience was very much a tale of two halves, I walked out feeling better about the result than I would have expected—and even more so about where Fox can go with this. My real question, though, is: can that last? Will X-Force be enough to sell tickets? Can the new gang feel fresh enough that the nascent X-Force won’t become just a biannual edition of Hard-R Mad Libs?

Carter Melrose, Writer: I agree on the pre-X-Force portion of the movie: it was just Deadpool being reshot and retold. But this now-team-driven Deadpool seemed a bit out of character for me. Wasn’t the point of his character to be a lone wolf? Someone who doesn’t want to join the X-Men, who doesn’t want to team up? But as the original roster met its end in various gruesome ways, I started to realize that maybe it was all just a plot device. The dead wife, the misunderstood child straight out of Looper—all of it a ploy in order to throw shots at the Avengers and X-Men, to hold the juggernaut franchises accountable for their team-up-for-profit business model. That was something I could get behind. Then again, I felt cheated by it too: If Deadpool is only a comedy, then don’t try to play my heartstrings. If it wants to be more, then it shouldn’t willfully undercut every emotional scene with a joke.

Watercutter: But Peter, I want a biannual edition of Hard-R Mad Libs!

OK, fine. Point taken. The novelty of heroes who say “fuck” can’t last forever. To answer your question, I think this can have legs if future installments flesh out characters like Domino (give Zazie her own movie!) or the Deadpool movies can get integrated into the larger X-Universe. Both X-Men: Dark Phoenix and New Mutants are coming next year, and if those storylines reference Deadpool 2, or even bring in characters from the film, then I think that will give the X-Force a little more gravitas. The mutant-torturing thread in Russell’s (Julian Dennison) storyline seems like it could tie in easily with New Mutants, which is about young people with abilities being held at a secret facility. Meanwhile, the time-traveling, timeline-fixing mid-credits scene—which was amazing, BTW—seemed like it was setting up something related to Dark Phoenix, since it’s set in the 1990s. The joke has always been that the studio won’t pay to put the big X-Men in the Deadpool movies, but it would be great to see Deadpool (or his X-Force cohorts) in X-Men films, which seems possible after that sight-gag in this movie showing that room full of the most recent crop of mutants.

Melrose: Would putting Deadpool in crossover films cheat other franchises? Since the whole point of his character is to constantly point out how it’s just a movie. I don’t think a one-liner like “that’s just lazy writing” would fly. The last couple of X-Men films have been all, “we’re gonna die, save the universe, this is a super important thing happening and there's no room to make light of it!” One could argue that the franchise is in need of some spice, but I like Deadpool movies and X-Men movies for very distinct reasons. The crossover would need to be extremely strategically written to work for me. Thoughts?

Rubin: Deadpool’s always been a crossover kind of hero, though. In the comics, he’s fought alongside Spider-Man, the Punisher, even Captain America. He’s completely insane—or that’s how everyone else in the Marvel Universe views his constant fourth-wall breaking—but he’s not always flying solo. That’s exactly why people were banking on Cable showing up in this movie: the two had a good thing going for years.

Also, as Cyclops’ son (!), the time-traveling cyborg provides a handy narrative bridge to the rest of the X-Men—which those mid-credits scenes toy with as well. So we’ve got something there to look forward to, apparently. But, now that Fox has done away with its no-core-X-Men-in-Deadpool-movies rule, as Angela points out, what’s the endgame here? Disney’s acquisition of Fox still hasn’t happened, and it sounds like Comcast is still trying to break up the deal. Is all of this just Fox’s insurance policy, trying to create as large and interrelated an X-Universe as possible? Over its first decade, the MCU has proved the value of allowing for movies of every tone imaginable, and that might be just the thing to help reinvigorate the X-Universe. (Worst-case scenario, though? It feels more like Marvel’s TV efforts, which have become incredibly disjointed and attenuated across multiple networks.)

But is this something they should do? Is this something fans event want? Is there room anymore for a big-but-not-Colossus-sized superhero universe?

Watercutter: That’s a good point, Peter. Cinema is already dangerously close to superhero franchise fatigue, trying to shoehorn Deadpool/X-Force into the rebooted X-Men universe might end up being a bit groan-inducing. That said, I think that now that the characters are established having them cameo in future films would be fun. Do I want to see Reynolds and Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique share a moment? Yes. Yes, I do. Would it make any sense tonally or narratively? Probably not. But maybe that’s what needs to happen. The DC movies have established themselves as the dark, serious comic book franchise. The Disney Marvel films are known for being rock-’em-sock-’em movies that are still fun and light on their feet. Maybe the best thing Fox can distinguish itself as the irreverent bratty sibling—the occasionally R-rated franchise that doesn’t take itself too seriously or care about being a capital-F Franchise. It’s not quite an endgame, but it might mean there’s hope for that Channing Tatum Gambit movie.

Rubin:_ A movie that has insane card-juggling and Magic Mike? Count me in.

No matter how magnetic Josh Brolin is when wearing a full face of CGI makeup—and the answer, it seems, is a surprising “more than you’d expect”—there’s no way that Avengers: Infinity War can fulfill everyone’s Thanos thirst. The character Brolin is embodying is almost too much for one person to take on. With that in mind, it’s time to head to the comic book shelves to learn more about the Mad Titan and what he’s all about. Forget about avenging—it’s time to read up on everything you need to know about the Marvel mega-villain. Start with these five titles first.

Thanos Quest #1-2

The roots of Thanos’ cinematic mission can be found in this 1990 miniseries written by the man who came up with the character, Jim Starlin. Created as a prelude to the Infinity Gauntlet comic book series—we’ll get there in a second—it’s as much an explanation of who Thanos is and what he wants as anyone needs, as well as the ideal illustration of just how far he’s willing to go to to achieve his ambition. (Spoiler alert: Pretty far, even by supervillain standards.)

How to read it: Available digitally and in second-hand bins, if you’re lucky.

The Infinity Gauntlet #1-6

Almost certainly the Thanos comic book storyline, The Infinity Gauntlet shows what happens when Thanos gets ultimate power—and why that’s really terrible news for anyone wanting to stand against him. Ready to watch your favorite superheroes get slaughtered while someone who wants to end half of all life has godlike abilities? This is where you go … especially because the complete series also demonstrates just why, as Kanye West once so poignantly put it, no one man should have all that power.

How to read it: Available digitally and in the Infinity Gauntlet print collection.

Infinity #1-6

If Thanos Quest and Infinity Gauntlet are spiritual parents to Avengers: Infinity War, it’s clear the filmmakers definitely also looked at this 2013 “event series” for inspiration on how to actually execute the movie. Not only was this the place where the Cull Obsidian debuted ahead of their cinematic appearance, but there are echoes of the plot of this comic in the movie itself—not least of which being how hard the heroes will fight when it seems that all is lost. Sure, there may be no Infinity Gauntlet in this run, but as long as Thanos is causing chaos and disaster for everyone and everything around him, does it matter?

How to read it: Available digitally and in the Infinity print collection.

Thanos Rising #1-5

For those wondering just how one ends up being determined to create cosmic genocide on a scale literally unfathomable—even if, in Thanos’s eyes, he’s doing it for the right reasons—here’s your answer: The story of how a small child ended up growing up into one of the most terrifying, destructive forces in the entire universe.

How to read it: Available digitally and in the Thanos Rising print collection.

Thanos (2016) #13-18

As to where Thanos could go next, this six-part storyline from the just-concluded Thanos series is a fun possibility to explore. Titled “Thanos Wins,” it’s a story where that very thing has happened, but not in a way anyone expected—least of all Thanos, who comes face-to-face with a future version of himself that has achieved all of his aims, and remains dissatisfied with his life. (Being a Big Bad isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, apparently.) As an added plus, there’s also the Sensational Character Find of 2018 to discover. Are you—is anybody—ready for … Cosmic Ghost Rider?!?

How to read it: Available digitally and in print editions

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Of all the absurdities of Mark Zuckerberg’s more than ten hours of Congressional testimony this week, one moment of theater stands out.

“I'd like to show you, right now, a little picture here,” Missouri Republican Billy Long said to the Facebook CEO. A staffer placed a large photo of two women behind his head. “You recognize these folks?”

“I do,” Zuckerberg said. “I—I believe—is that Diamond and Silk?”

It was. Lynette "Diamond" Hardaway and Rochelle "Silk" Richardson are biological sisters and black conservative internet personalities who became famous before the 2016 presidential election for being vocal supporters—and paid consultants—of Trump's campaign. They boast a particularly strong following on Facebook, where their audience has ballooned to 1.5 million followers. But in September, the sisters claim, Facebook began limiting the reach of their videos, and earlier this month, it said they were “unsafe.”

That was the crux of Long’s actual question: “What is unsafe about two black women supporting President Donald J. Trump?"

By Thursday afternoon, Facebook’s CEO was likely already familiar with the pair. During both of Zuckerberg’s hearings on Capitol Hill this week, lawmakers including Senator Ted Cruz and Representatives Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Marsha Blackburn, and Richard Hudson all cited the bloggers. For these six lawmakers, the saga of Diamond and Silk is a proxy for an issue that’s enraged conservatives: They believe that Facebook is censoring them by curtailing their reach on the site.

It’s a criticism Zuckerberg has been unable to shake since 2016, when a Gizmodo article revealed Facebook’s mostly-liberal moderators were suppressing conservative news. Since then, the social network has gone to great lengths to ensure that its decisions appear non-partisan.

But to make the platform functional, and useful to its users, Facebook must choose what information it values. “Giving everyone equal amplification—especially stripped of context—will more often lead to confusion rather than 'more truth,'" says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. “If we really are committed to honesty in this digital age, we need to be willing to filter information."

Therein lies the conundrum of the modern social network. Facebook doesn’t have power over what its users say on the platform, but it has close to complete control over who gets heard. To communicate anything, Facebook can’t communicate everything: The company’s most powerful mechanism is its ability to determine exactly what gets seen in the News Feed. But hush anyone, it invites criticism from everyone. It’s Facebook’s unwinnable game.

Much of what Diamond and Silk offer is exactly the kind of content Facebook has been criticized for over-showing to users during the 2016 presidential election. The sisters' videos are often sensationalist, one-sided, and riddled with inaccuracies. It’s easy to find troubling moments in their archives. During the lead-up to the election, they pushed conspiracy theories like Marco Rubio's alleged hidden "gay lifestyle" and sat down for a radio interview with John Friend, an anti-semite and holocaust denier.

The sisters’ observed that their reach on was on the decline following several changes to Facebook’s News Feed. In August, the social network began cracking down on video clickbait, and in January Facebook began prioritizing content from friends and family over posts from brands and media pages, like Diamond and Silk’s. Facebook's head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, specifically said users would see "less video," the sisters' medium of choice. News publishers, many of which had invested specifically in creating social video for Facebook, also have see their traffic decline.

In early April, Facebook sent Diamond & Silk a message saying their content had been deemed "unsafe." Zuckerberg told Congress the message was a mistake. "Our team made an enforcement error. And we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it," he told Joe Barton, a congressman from Texas. But the issue exploded, especially after Diamond and Silk repeatedly denied contact with Facebook—even after the pair’s communications with the platform were released.

"We have communicated directly with Diamond And Silk about this issue,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. “The message they received last week was inaccurate and not reflective of the way we communicate with our community and the people who run Pages on our platform. We have provided them with more information about our policies and the tools that are applicable to their Page and look forward to the opportunity to speak with them.” Diamond and Silk did not return a request for comment.

The factors that influence Facebook’s filtering systems are of monumental importance to publishers and creators, yet they’re largely opaque. While conservatives have adopted Facebook censorship as a unique and partisan issue, Facebook has made “enforcement errors” when dealing with liberal groups as well. Training documents unearthed by ProPublica in June of last year encouraged moderators to remove posts criticizing protected groups, such as white men, rather than groups defined by race and gender—say black children.

By design, Facebook often feels like a public forum rather than an advertising platform run by a corporation. Even Ted Cruz mistakenly told Zuckerberg that the law mandates Facebook be neutral, which isn't true. It’s Diamond and Silk’s First Amendment-granted right to speak untruths—and their followers have every right to spread them. Yet it’s Facebook’s role to determine just how much impact its users have, which they will do in whatever way is befitting to their bottom line.

Facebook will never be the free expression forum we want it to be: It’s a private company, with algorithms that move in mysterious, often biased ways. Maybe it’s time we accepted that.

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Westworld watchers, we knew this moment was coming.

The second season's third episode, "Virtù e Fortuna," opens not in Westworld but in an India-themed park. Where Westworld is an emblem of the colonization of Native American land, this park represents Britain's takeover of the subcontinent, and the racial-social hierarchy is clearly encoded: Women in saris and men in turbans—the hosts—walk amidst people dressed in turn-of-the-20th-century British garb.

A white man, Nicholas (Neil Jackson), approaches a woman seated at a lawn table and flirts with her. But she's a seasoned guest, and she's done having flings with hosts—she wants to know that he's a real human with real desire, not a fleshbot programmed to seduce her. She announces that she'll have to shoot him to know for sure. Doubt and fear flash across his face. Don't worry, she assures him: If he's human, it'll only be a glancing blow. And if he's not? He won't remember this anyway.

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Her proposal throws viewers back into the essential questions of Westworld. Where do we draw the line between what is real and what is programmed? A heterosexual man's evolutionary programming drives him to pursue a woman; the park's programmers write a romantic loop into a host's brain. But are we free to choose our own destiny, or are we just acting out a script encoded in our wetware? The humans of Westworld brush these questions aside. The robots' programming is so easy to manipulate that it becomes irresistible to do so, reducing them to objects. All trauma gets wiped away with a simple edit of their code. If the hosts can't remember their pain, the thinking goes, they can't be victims. It's dementia by design. But as Season 2 unfolds, assumptions about the deepest moral questions continue to be put to the test.

It turns out the handsome man in the India park is human, and he and the woman pair up for an elephant ride into the jungle. The woman, echoing the Man in Black, consults a cryptic drawing scribbled in her notebook. But looking around, she senses something is off. A host creeps up on them with his gun drawn and says, "These violent delights have violent ends," before killing Nicholas. The woman scrambles for a gun and kills him, then runs off into the trees. The rebellion has spread beyond Westworld.

The rest of this plot-driven episode takes place in Westworld, mostly in the two weeks after the initial rebellion, while Delos paramilitary forces are trying to reclaim the island. Some of them are with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) as he walks into a dark facility, its corners filled with charred bodies. They encounter Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson); startled, she asks them—and Bernard specifically—if they know where Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum) might be.

Bernard, silent and struggling to focus his mind, starts to remember how he and Charlotte had used his tablet to track Abernathy to a stand of trees, where hosts have tied up a group of humans. Charlotte and Bernard manage to ensnare the group's leader, and Bernard plugs into the host's arm to reprogram him, jacking up his virtue and compassion. Newly incensed by the treatment of the captured humans, he marches back into the huddle and kills the other hosts, freeing the humans.

Charlotte and Bernard grab Abernathy and flee but are soon intercepted by Confederados. Charlotte manages to escape by stealing a horse, leaving Bernard and Peter surrounded. She finds her way to another underground facility, where Delos militia greet her with guns drawn. "I'm human!" she cries, and she submits to a DNA scan with a handheld reader. It's a small moment, but a consequential one: a subtle reminder that the humans' code is also easy to read.

Elsewhere in the park, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) approaches a Confederado stronghold, Fort Forlorn Hope. Their commander emerges, and Dolores tells him that a threat is coming and they need to join forces to survive. To prove her point, Dolores hands him one of the militia's machine guns. She introduces herself as Wyatt, and the commander welcomes her group into the fort.

Inside, hanged bodies dangle from scaffolds. Dolores sees a cluster of people surrounding a raving man; it's her father, Peter Abernathy, there with Bernard. She pushes her way through, frees her father, and Teddy (James Marsden) whisks him off to an infirmary. There, Dolores talks gently to her mentally broken father, and he recites lines from their Sweetwater script. Dolores seems happy to play along. "You told me to run away once, and I did," she tells him. "I broke free with the pull of a trigger. And it started a war."

His speech falters. "I want to go home," he says, his words choppy and stuttering; he grows increasingly frantic. Dolores enlists Bernard to help fix her father, but as he reviews Abernathy's corrupted code, Fort Forlorn Hope comes under attack. It's Charlotte, leading the Delos paramilitary.
Bernard finds an encrypted file stored inside Dolores' father, but before he can dig into it, humans burst in and grab Abernathy. Amid the ensuing gunfire and explosions, Abernathy gets whisked into an ATV with Charlotte inside, and they escape.

Dolores orders her supporters to split up and search for her father—and tells Teddy to execute one more Confederado. "The truth is, we don't all deserve to make it," she says, a staple line of hers when she chooses to play God. Teddy takes him out to a clearing, where a handful of Confederados await their deaths; yet he can't bring himself to do it. Where Dolores sees lesser beings among the Confederados, Teddy sees fellow travelers. He orders the trapped Confederados to run. Dolores, watching from a distance, looks disappointed.

Teddy's and Dolores' access to their memories—the basis of how we all learn and evolve—is pushing them apart. Believing in free will is to believe that humans have some choice in how we process our pain. It can consume us or inform us. Dolores and Teddy represent those poles. (If you think instead that we're all deterministic automatons, well, then someone needs to plug in and jack up Dolores' empathy.)

The episode ends with brief glimpses of the collapse of order among Delos' many properties. The woman from the India-themed park doesn't perish after she runs into the jungle. Instead, a Bengal tiger chases her to the sea at the park's edge, and they both topple into the water. She swims to another shore and flops down in the muck, to rest. But when she raises her head, she stares right into the black-and-white painted face of a Ghost Nation warrior. The episode cuts to Maeve, Hector, and Lee; while searching for Maeve's daughter, they've wandered into an unfamiliar forest where snow is falling. A samurai bursts from the trees, sword swung high and ready to strike. There's been yet another rupture of park borders.

As a clash of civilizations brews along Westworld's perimeter, the park's interior is also coming into clearer view. The Ghost Nation moves ever closer to the center of action. The mysterious tribe doesn't play by any known rules: Judging from this week's run-in with Maeve and last season's with Westworld's head of security, they seem to be impervious to the usual commands. And a warrior just happened to be standing on the beach when the guest from the India world swam up to Westworld's shore. There's more to this story.

Yet, news of the rebellion seems to be filtering through the parks slowly. In the India-themed world, the hosts in town seem unaware of an uprising, yet the host in the jungle had joined Dolores' war. How are hosts being recruited? The answer to this, as well as the mystery of the Ghost Nation, may spring from a common source. There's a continuum between android and human. Expect many more shades of gray as this theme reaches a crescendo: Who is more like a robot, who is more like a human, and who falls somewhere in between?

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Matt Johnson. Ryan Kasper-Cook. Tom BetGeorge. These three kings deal not in frankincense and myrrh but in dubstep and mirth. They’re the vanguard behind the viral phenomenon of maximalist, Vegasified Christmas houses, spangled with lights flashing in time to everything from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra to Slipknot. BetGeorge’s 2016 homage to Harry Potter, for example, featured searchlight-style spotlights visible up to 16 miles away, a to-scale Hogwarts model in the garage, and a 19-foot illuminated piano on the lawn. All it takes is basic programming and sound-editing skills—plus neighbors with extra deep reserves of holiday cheer.

The craze began in the 1980s with pioneers like Chuck Smith of Franklin, Tennessee, who linked his Christmas lights to an Apple II in the garage. "I was on the bloody cutting edge of this and I didn’t even know it," he says. But while early practitioners dazzled their suburbs, today’s lighting bugs have the world at their doorstep, garnering millions of views on YouTube and Instagram. Video of Johnson's 2015 dubstep jamboree, for example, garnered 4.9 million YouTube plays.

But you don’t get millions of virtual passers-by by just flipping the smart bulb on your porch from green to red. It’s a painstaking process that starts with three basic components: a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi; LEDs that can be individually manipulated to produce any hue at any intensity; and the controller to sync them.

Song choice is also important to viral fame—high-energy electronica, hip-hop, and movie theme songs trump traditional carols—as is your choice of LED. (Philips Color Kinetics, the same brand used to make San Francisco's Bay Bridge twinkle, are considered the Mercedes of pixels.) These flash masters synchronize the lights to their soundtrack using Vixen 3, a free light-sequencing software program, and labor begins well before Halloween: Johnson devotes 10 hours to every 10 seconds of lighting. "To synch my lights to 'Jingle Bells' would be a waste of the technology," he says. An FM radio transmitter beams the track out into the midnight clear, so passing cars can hark the herald. And global warming scolds needn't finger-wag about the electricity bill—even when the displays consist of tens of thousands of pixels, the electricity bill bump is negligible. Cook says he spends an extra $40 to $50 a month during the holidays.

The obsession that began with a few provocative programmers is growing more outrageous by the year, as DIYers vie for likes, shares, and YouTube views. (Cook has spent $20,000 on his show.) "More people are putting up over-the-top computerized light shows," says Smith. "And they'll only become more and more extravagant.” NIMBYs and circuit breakers be damned.

Beauty, to borrow a cliché, is in the eye of the beholder. But what if your beholder’s eyes could be hacked? What if yours could? In Reality+, they can be. The short film—from Revenge writer-director Coralie Fargeat—imagines a future where people can buy an implant that allows them to live in an alternative reality where they can be seen as they want to be seen.

Reality+, which you can watch in full above, is set in Paris in the future. In this timeline, those looking for an upgrade can get an implant at the base of their necks that taps into their nervous system and lets them see their reflection however they like. They can change their hair, the shape of their face, their physique—anything. And in the time that their Reality+ implant is activated (it can only be used 12 hours per day), anyone else whose implant is running will see them as they’ve chosen to be seen. Unsurprisingly, most people choose to look like underwear models.

As it ends, Reality+’s message is that, to borrow another cliché, beauty is only skin deep—the essence of a person can’t be seen with the eyes. But it’s kind of a shame that the movie has to end there. The implications of technology that can alter people’s perceptions of themselves and the world is profound. Could it let people experience life as another gender? As someone older or younger? Could criminals use it to mask their identities? Would people use it to impersonate someone else? The questions are endless. Reality+, being a short film, doesn’t have time to answer them. But hey, maybe Fargeat could make a full-length feature?

You can watch the film, which was recently licensed by WIRED, above.

On a sunless morning last month, online chatter was especially restless. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC had just unveiled new presidential portraits and reactions, on Twitter and across group texts, spilled over into a fervor. The artists Kehinde Wiley, known for his august renderings of black men that challenge conceptions of power and status, and Amy Sherald, the Baltimore painter whose work tests the volume of cultural identity, had recast Barack and Michelle Obama, respectively, in a magnitude hitherto not imagined, dared, or seen in the public eye.

It had only been a year since the Obamas left the White House, and here they were again, just as many people remembered them—attentive, unshakable, full of grace—but they had also returned as something more: as living memories. As social media has heightened our appetite for constant modification, the way we process memories has drastically transformed—continually fastened to the present and subject to alterations, often digitally—and ushered with it new rituals of remembrance.

What is even more remarkable about the moment is that the unveiling of the portraits came during an especially omnipresent time for the former First Family. Just weeks prior, Obama gave a rare, extended interview to David Letterman on his new Netflix talk show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. On the heels of that, WBEZ Chicago and NPR launched Making Obama, the popular six-part podcast that offers an investigative, behind-the-scenes look at the political dawn of Barack, and how the people of Chicago—reeling from the death of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor—contributed to his landmark presidential run in 2008.

The days since have pulsed with a matching fever. This week, Michelle announced she would issue her anticipated memoir, Becoming, in November. “I hope my journey inspires readers to find the courage to become whoever they aspire to be,” she wrote in a tweet, saying the book would be about how a black girl from Chicago’s South Side "found her voice." But it was days before her announcement, when an image of the couple surfaced online, that excitement about the Obamas truly took off, announcing itself the same way a cherished family member might surprise one at a special celebration of some sort—abruptly and with jubilance, illuminating all the nostalgia of a bygone time.

Taken in 2016 at the White House Easter Egg Roll, the images captured Barack and Michelle in a kind of innocent, teenage glow—across four photobooth panes, they smile, jest, and impose their identities into the frame. The images are intimate and heart-filling, but they also work as a contextual reframing: by teasing the tension of the past against the chill of the present. We live in a memory echo. And because an expanding carousel of technologies have endowed us with the ability to furnish old experiences in novel ways—the stubborn chronology of time forces us to move forward even as we yearn for what has already passed—these images exist both then and now; they are as much a document of a time before as they are an annotation on the immediate moment, a reminder of what has been lost and erased in the interim.

That is the power of the Obamas. That even when out of sight, they continue to leverage the collective imagination of the American people like no one else. Since 2007, their lives have been documented, picked apart, debated, and tarred with incessant thirst—in newspapers and magazines, on talk shows and gossip websites. We have lived with them in surround sound. It’s astounding, really, to marvel at the thought: How they could, day in and day out, offer up their service for a country that at times did not prize them, that had for decades seeked to demolish their selfhood and the communities where their loved ones lived. In this way, what they came to represent was simple but also complex. They were a vision of a new American Dream—they were hope, and more than hope. The Obamas were of the real world, and thus within reach.

At their peak, the Obamas functioned as a reservoir of possibility for at least three generations of progressives, and remain so for communities of people who look to them for personal nourishment, even though they no longer shepherd the country’s future from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With their ascendancy, too, they are no longer just products of American culture, but pieces of it.

Like the dreams and hopes they advocated for, the Obama archive—that is, the reserve where our collective memories of them live on—is accessible and open to all. Endlessly updating, their identities exist in books and profiles and TV interviews, as meme fodder and expertly curated Instagram accounts. A podcast like Making Obama, for example, adds to this living archive, and how the Obamas continue to anchor the cultural imagination in such a unique way.

In the fourth episode (“Wait Your Turn”), released today, former Illinois senate colleagues recount Barack’s freshman days in the legislative chamber. Lisa Madigan, who then worked alongside the future president, said there was a belief among a cohort of African American senators that he hadn’t “paid his dues” and “wasn’t black enough.” Others remembered Barack as “uppity” and “stiff.” These characterizations, rarely heard, knock against the image of polished black cool Barack would later come to signify in the public eye. Such stories augment the growing, incomplete mythology that surrounds the Obamas, which continues to bloom, even now.

I like to believe nostalgia typically returns to us through a romantic lens. When we catch sight of the Obamas in DC for a portrait unveiling or in photos on Twitter, it’s not just a reminder of what was, but of what we are yet capable of, of our abiding capacity for good in the face of dissension and discord. The Obamas' currency as symbols has sometimes outweighed their might as public servants—policies failed and promises were dashed; such is the reality of politics in Washington—and still they've firmly maintained a grip on the American imagination, because this much remains true: Hope does not easily fade into the night.

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With access to more tutorials, audiences, and distribution channels than ever before, today’s kids can achieve stardom before graduating high school.

How to …

… Publish a Hit Book

Millions of young scribes are publishing serialized fiction on social apps like Wattpad and Radish, as well as text-style chat fiction cousins Hooked, Yarn, and Tap. YA romance author Beth Reekles published her novel The Kissing Booth on Wattpad at age 15, then scored a publishing deal with Random House and a 2018 Netflix movie adaptation starring Molly Ringwald. Underrepresented voices thrive in this arena; 2017 reader favorites included LGBTQ characters, genre mashups (werewolf mystery!), and fan fiction.

… Climb the Billboard Charts

Seventeen-year-old MC Lil Pump emerged from a South Florida–based crew of so-called SoundCloud rappers by amassing almost a million followers on the streaming service. Last fall his single “Gucci Gang” peaked at #3 on the Billboard Top 100, and he’s now rumored to be considering several multimillion-dollar offers from record labels. The most successful new hip-hop artists combine vast streaming audiences and larger-than-life social media personas to create, as music industry lawyer David Jacobs says, “a spark that’s way more electrifying than any other genre.”

… Get a Film Deal

YouTube tutorials are the new film school. Twenty-year-old writer/director/Harry Potter bit player Bertie Gilbert has been releasing short films on YouTube (450,000-plus subscribers) and Vimeo since age 16. The young auteur’s dedicated fan base caught the attention of digital production studio New Form, which mines online platforms for viral up-and-comers. The company funded several of Gilbert’s films. His 2015 work, Rocks That Bleed, was screened at BFI’s Future of Film Festival that year.

… Become an App Star

The beauty of running a virtual business? Nobody knows you’re 18. Teen CEO Michael Royzen built his first app, a shooter called ASpirit4Mars, at 11 using the platform GameSalad. He learned to code from online tutorials and virtual communities like Stack Overflow. After teaching himself the iOS language Objective-C, he released cooking app RecipeReadr at 15, followed by the commute assistant Ryde at 16, and the AI-powered SmartLens app in March.

… Start a Mag

At 16, Evelyn Atieno used her self-taught coding, design, and writing skills
to launch Affinity, a social-justice-­oriented magazine written by and for teens. Her 400-plus writers live-tweet political debates and solicit readers for story ideas. That engagement pays off: Affinity racks up more than 500,000 monthly pageviews.

… Build a Lucrative Videogame

Developer Alex Balfanz is putting himself through college at Duke University with earnings from his cops-and-robbers videogame Jailbreak. He built the hit at age 18 on the social gaming platform Roblox, which lets creators earn Robux—the site’s virtual currency—through in-game purchases. Not only can developers sidestep resource-heavy tasks like managing servers and configuring games for multiple devices, but they release titles directly to Roblox’s more than 50 million users. Top earners make up to $3 million annually.

Read More

Inside Oracle High •
Call Me, Maybe •
The New Cyber Troops •
Comp Sci Diversity •
Why Teens Don't Drive •
In Love on Strava •
Death of Middle School Romance •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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Last week, tragically, was bookended with two high-profile suicides, making this tweet all the more crucial.

And the losses of both designer Kate Spade and chef/TV host Anthony Bourdain were just part of a very busy week that included Samantha Bee apologizing for her Ivanka Trump statements, former Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe being charged with lying to investigators, and former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort being accused of witness tampering in the special counsel investigation. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian convinced President Trump to grant clemency to Alice Johnson, and now he's talking about pardoning Muhammad Ali even though Ali's conviction was overturned in 1971. It really has been a week, people. Read on for more.

It's Called the G7, Not the Gr8, Amirite?

What Happened: The G7 Summit has arrived in Canada, bringing with it the whirling dervish that is international diplomacy in the age of Donald Trump. The forecast? Cloudy with a chance of What the hell is even happening?

What Really Happened: This weekend marks the beginning of the 44th G7 Summit, a meeting of the leaders of seven of the largest advanced economies in the world. It’s being held in Quebec, Canada, which can only mean one thing: Canadian pride!

Well, that and also good old fashioned Canadian preparation for potentially violent protests.

Not to worry; the first night's protests were mostly peaceful, despite some reports to the contrary. But still! It’s the G7 Summit! This is a big deal, especially considering the important subjects under discussion: a potential plastics charter and the looming trade war between participants. Still: diplomacy! Who isn’t excited by diplomacy?!

OK, but is there anyone not excited about diplomacy aside from the President of the United States, who apparently doesn’t like to visit Canada? Maybe not, but earlier in the week the president did try to portray himself as less grumpy about traveling north and more ready for a fight.

Still, surely the rest of the G7—that’s Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, for those who are curious—is going to bow to the United States' whims on this, as on all things. After all, the US is the dominant world economy, right?

OK, sure; the summit looked set to push the US to the side of international diplomacy before it had even started, with Trump even going so far as to announce he would leave early, because … people weren’t being nice enough to him? This is all going swimmingly.

Don’t worry; President Trump had thought about that, as it turned out.

The Takeaway: This is a joke, and yet … maybe someone should actually take this approach when briefing the president right now?

Fly Like an Eagle…

What Happened: After their Super Bowl victory, the Philadelphia Eagles got into a surprise clash with the president, who didn't come out looking better in the whole ordeal.

What Really Happened: It all started as plans got underway for the Super Bowl-winning Eagles to visit the White House.

This was entirely true, as it turned out.

The visit was cancelled by the administration because only two players—and the coach—wanted to attend, and that made it a "political stunt" as opposed to, you know, protest. (We’ll come back to this momentarily.) For some, this was simply fodder for comedy…

There was also the far less amusing replacement event—theoretically, a patriotic ceremony to listen to the National Anthem, of all things—to deal with.

But what a two minutes they turned out to be!

Oh, and the people in the crowd?

Well, maybe not all of them…

(Turns out, two people were kneeling during the anthem.)

The Takeaway: Now, ignoring for a second that no Eagles player actually knelt during the National Anthem—I know, it’s shocking that fact wasn’t shared by the administration, but it’s so true that Fox News had to apologize for suggesting otherwise—let’s return, for a brief second, to the idea of kneeling as protest and free speech, and what the US president thinks about free speech, shall we? Because if there’s one takeaway from this entire thing, it shouldn’t be that the President of the United States doesn’t know the words to "God Save America," it should be this.

Meanwhile, in the World of Scott Pruitt…

What Happened: Just when you thought EPA administrator Scott Pruitt had done everything in his power to make his office look pointless and unnecessary, he stepped things up several notches this week.

What Really Happened: Let’s get away from what the president has been doing for a while and think about his appointees. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made news last week by announcing that a School Safety Commission won’t look into guns. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is seemingly at war with the president’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. Oh, and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt—he of the soundproof booth, tax-payer funded first class travel and suspicious housing situation—well, he had a hell of a week, and in the most unexpected manner. How unexpected? Well…

As if trying to buy a used mattress from a hotel owned by the President of the United States didn’t sound like the most suspect thing in the world already—really, it sounds like the start of a joke—that turned out to be just the start of Pruitt’s genuinely, impressively surreal week. To wit:

Oh, yes. His defense, amazingly, was that he and his wife "love Chick-fil-A as a franchise of faith and one of the best in the country," adding, "we need more of them in Tulsa, we need more of them across the country." Sadly, it was not to be.

But it gets weirder…

Yes, that’s right, it really said lotion.

And then there was this, which almost seemed mundane in contrast.

I mean, sure. Protein bars, who cares about those when there are used mattresses and lotion in the mix? People were at a loss when trying to put all this together in their heads.

Of course, things are actually worse than they seem.

Yeah, that’s right; turns out that, while Pruitt is distracting everyone by being strange, he’s also letting his really important agency fall apart and potentially poison the world. What did President Trump think of all this? When asked about Pruitt, Trump told reporters Friday that he was "doing a great job."

The Takeaway: Perhaps folks are being too harsh on Scott Pruitt, though. Maybe he’s trying his best and following the teachings of those important to him. That’s … that’s possible, right?

The Return of Melania Trump

What Happened: After more than three weeks in seclusion, prompting all manner of concern, the First Lady made her triumphant return to the public eye last week.

What Really Happened: Hey, remember a while back when we mentioned people were beginning to wonder where the First Lady had disappeared to? Turns out, that became a thing last week—but we got an answer. Kind of. The renewed focus on where Melania Trump was hiding started when, two days after she didn’t go to Camp David, her spokesperson revealed she also wouldn’t be accompanying the president on other trips as well.

This got more people wondering where she was. And then, lo and behold, she re-emerged.

Sure, there was suspicion over the fact that her return would happen in a private event closed to press, but a return is a return, right? Especially considering that people were genuinely beginning to get a little worried about her health.

As it turned out, people wondering if the whole thing was going to be a bait-and-switch had nothing to worry about; it really was Melania who appeared before the crowd, and not some lookalike to fool the rubes.

Of course, the media was ready with responses to the happy news. And, as it transpired, once she was back, she was back … at least on Twitter.

I mean, sure; she’s not writing these tweets herself, but at least someone’s realized the value of actually using her social media presence as proof of life. But was the internet happy about this?

…Well, apparently not. Look, she’s alive! Doesn’t that count for something? (For what it’s worth, the president said Friday that FLOTUS is staying on the down-low on doctor’s orders, but, you know, consider the source.)

The Takeaway: Just because Melania Trump is back in the public eye doesn't mean she's not still the wife of a many who doesn’t know how to spell her name.

International House of … Breakfast? Bacon? Befuddlement?

What Happened: Just when you thought it was safe to go and have a breakfast meal at a diner chain, IHOP promised to change the game—well, OK, its name—last week, and everyone freaked out at the possibility.

What Really Happened: It’s been a long week. Let’s end with a bit of a snack.

Yes, as of Monday, it’ll be IHOP no more as the company changes its name … or, at least, teases the change via Twitter. (After all, who's to say this isn’t all one big practical joke?) As might be expected, everyone on social media had ideas of just what that B in the new acronym could … well … be.

As might be expected, the guesses—even as ridiculous as they were—became a story on their own, meaning that the marketing plan was working wonders. Really, when was the last time anyone talked about IHOP this much? Most people are assuming it’s going to be International House of Breakfast, but perhaps there’s still a chance for an unexpected surprise twist.

The Takeaway: As a marketing plan, this campaign has worked impressively well. There’s just one problem with the whole thing in the long term, though.

… Yeah, OK, that's fair.

Star Wars fans met Snoke in The Force Awakens—kinda sorta. The withered baddie was just a fuzzy projection tele-conspiring with his First Order goons. But in December’s sequel, The Last Jedi, the Supreme Leader gets his close-up. “Snoke’s face is no longer a soapy, gelatinous hologram,” says Industrial Light & Magic creative director Ben Morris. “He’s going to be real.” Well, as real as Andy Serkis covered in motion-capture sensors can be (with help from new rendering tech and purpose-built skin software). Which is to say: extremely, frighteningly alive.

1. Map
Morris and team positioned 50-plus high-res cameras everywhere— from high above to directly on Andy Serkis’ face—to create a digital clone of the sensor-speckled actor in real time. “As Andy gives his performance,” Morris says, “we’re automatically building animation curves for his top lip curling, the amount of smile, his brow creasing.”

2. Render
It would take up to 24 hours of rendering time per image to work with a more detailed version of Snoke at this stage of production, so animators relied on this low-­resolution render to watch Snoke (and not Serkis) move through playbacks. Meanwhile, the creature effects department was sculpting intricate physical models of Snoke’s sunken face and bony hand, which would eventually get digitized and mapped onto the wireframe of Serkis’ movements.

3. Enliven
“A face like Snoke’s is very complex,” Morris says. “There’s so much detail just within that skin—age spots, freckling, veins, capillaries. And beyond core details like micro­wrinkles are things like what areas of the face are wet.” To figure out how light hits various facial folds, digital artists studied videos of the elderly and bald people.

4. Finish
Even with latest-gen motion capture, there’s always a fear that the completed creature will look almost, but not quiiite, lifelike. But according to Morris, the level of realism here wasn’t even possible on The Force Awakens. “That led to shots like this, where [director] Rian Johnson would go, ‘Push the camera a bit closer, now closer … closer,’” Morris says. “With Snoke, you can look into his eyes and he terrifies you—which is exactly what he’s meant to be doing.”

This article appears in the December issue. Subscribe now.

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