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The Pleasure and Promise of the Sci-Fi Romance

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Among the scant books in my tiny rented room in San Francisco, I’ve kept a spine-worn copy of Romeo and Juliet. It’s the one I read in my high school English class, the pages yellowed, the margins filled with scribbled notes. Since the play was written in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the nature of love—irrational, all-consuming—has been told and retold in countless movie adaptations. I hold onto the book to revisit those insights, and also because I’m prone to nostalgic literary tendencies like keeping old books.

I am also a personal tech writer in 2018. It’s my job to keep tabs on how our rapidly shifting technology is shaping not only how we communicate, but how we empathize, trust, show affection. We now have questions about love that Romeo and Juliet can’t answer. How does 24/7 connection bring us together and drive us apart? How will AI change the definition of humanity? What will love look like 20 years from now? How about 100?

There's no doubt that some of what Shakespeare crystallized in his plays will endure, in some form. But when I speculate on the nature of love and tech, I look to a younger form of drama: the sci-fi romance movie.

Granted, the sci-fi romance is not a new genre. It is, however, an underappreciated one, in part because the incongruity of romance and science fiction makes it incredibly challenging to pull off. Consider the 2013 film Her: How do you even begin to tell the story of a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant?

But it’s precisely this seeming incompatibility of genres that makes them so powerful when they operate in harmony. One comes from a tradition as old as stories themselves. The other fixes its gaze to the future. When the two genres converge successfully, it produces a novel narrative by which to reimagine and reassess the ways we love.

The tech at the center of Her is artificial intelligence. The movie is set in a near future, where people are at once hyperconnected and profoundly lonely. Lovelorn Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) forms an unexpected relationship with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The film is fearless about its exploration of the irrationality of love. In one scene, Theodore asks his best friend Amy (Amy Adams) if loving an OS makes him a freak. Amy, who is suffering her own heartache, says “I think anybody that falls in love is a freak.” The line’s a bit trite, sure, but the observation is startling in that it would resound as well and true in a traditional romance as it does in this speculative context.

In other words: Love is strange. Sci-fi simply turns the dial and embraces the weirdness.

In that way, love and sci-fi are perhaps not so diametrically opposed. They’re both fueled by the optimistic allure of the what-if. What if we fell in love, against all odds? Or, as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) poses: What if we fell in love, but it ended so bitterly that we decided to forget we were ever in love at all? Unlike Her, Eternal Sunshine is set in a world we recognize, with the minor addition of a medical venture that promises jilted lovers a procedure that erases all memories of their ex. For anyone who has experienced heartbreak, it’s an enticing prospect. Who wouldn’t want to forget that one ex? Eternal Sunshine explores the hypothetical by way of a radical, nonchronological romp through memory.

Still, while some plot points and presentations are innovative, many of these films suffer a glaring problem that feels anachronistic for a genre that claims to represent the future. The sci-fi romance has tended to depict women in outdated ways, inheriting the sexist traps that afflict both parent genres. Her dwells so utterly in Theodore’s loneliness that the primary role of its female characters, human and AI, is to develop the male protagonist. Ex Machina reduces its robot Ava to a sexy pile of wires, reflective of (and unwilling to challenge) the real-life gender problems with AI. And while Kate Winslet as Eternal Sunshine’s Clementine asserts her character beyond sexist tropes, the protagonist is still Jim Carrey starring as a Lonely Dude.

Still the fusion of two genres holds tremendous potential. I don’t doubt that we’ll see more sci-fi romances in our queues before long; the resurgence of genre content we saw this summer, coupled with Netflix’s relentless investment in sci-fi, will not likely be abating into the fall.

For now, the most promising sign from the genre comes not from film, but from TV. The “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror begins with a meet-cute, in the technicolor 1980s: Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) timidly wanders into a nightclub. She’s drawn onto the dance floor by a carefree Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and the budding chemistry between them is unmistakable. We relax into the familiar warmth of a rom-com. That is, until we slowly realize that the beach town is not what, or when, it seems.

“San Junipero” begins and ends as a love story, but one with a twist that deftly draws together conflicts concerning mortality and second chances, easily ranking it as one of the strongest episodes of the series. It represents my highest hopes for what the sci-fi romance can achieve: a reflection on how forms of love and desire have been restricted, and how tech could be an avenue to explore more just realities.

Thus far, creators in the genre have had no difficulty expanding our conceptions of science and technology; filmmakers easily dream up fictional gadgets and gizmos aplenty. Nevertheless, the genre suffers when its understanding of human relationships, particularly in its depictions of women, continues to be woefully unimaginative. The future of the sci-fi romance is less dependent on the ingenuity of the tech than it is on filmmakers’ insights on questions about love that have endured the test of time. If a sci-fi romance wants to present a meaningful projection of love in the future, it would do well to portray more kinds of relationships and more nuanced shades of love.

Maybe then we’d get a story worth keeping, a story set in a moment in time but impervious to time’s passage. One that, centuries from now, someone can cherish on her bookshelf in a shiny, futuristic San Francisco as dearly as a well-loved copy of Romeo and Juliet—be it a book, or hologram, or whatever the hell we’ll be reading on by that point.

How We Love: Read More

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

How to Not Fall for Viral Scares

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Who knows what the kids are doing online, right? They’ve got their TikToks and their Snapchats and their flop Instagram accounts, while parents are still posting on Facebook and Twitter. The disconnect between how the olds and their children use the internet leads to parental anxiety, and in the case of this week’s resurfacing of the viral fake Momo challenge, panic and misinformation.

The Momo challenge, according to breathless news reports and posts from worried parents and law enforcement, is a game circulating on social media that encourages kids to engage in increasingly harmful behavior until, eventually, they’re supposed to commit suicide and upload the video to the internet.

Momo is basically every parent’s nightmare. But as multiple outlets have pointed out, there’s no evidence that it's a real viral challenge. The admittedly freaky image of “Momo” is based on a sculpture by a Japanese artist. While claims of suicides connected to the challenge started surfacing last year, according to Snopes, authorities have never definitively tied any cases to participation in an online game. YouTube—which had been reported as hosting Momo videos—released a statement Wednesday saying it hasn’t encountered Momo videos on the site, and the “extremely online” teens reading warnings about Momo from their parents have responded with, well, eye rolls.

Ask WIRED

Hey Know-It-Alls! How much screen time should my kids get?

Momo appears to be another example not of dangerous behavior going viral, but of a hoax going viral. It’s what youth advocate Anne Collier calls a “viral media scare.” These are the “razor blades in the Halloween candy” myths of today. And just as that pernicious worry spread in the offline era, Momo and its ilk are boosted along the way not only by concerned parents trying to warn others, but also by the news media, which picks up those warnings and amplifies them.

The result, experts say, is that while the Momo scare didn’t start out real, the attention it’s receiving can actually have the opposite effect of what’s intended: All these warnings can raise the risk that teens or young children would learn about the challenge and take it seriously—or at least be freaked out by the scary image of Momo itself.

When Trying to Help Hurts

If you see a warning on social media about a dangerous viral challenge, like the tweet that seems to have reignited the interest in Momo this week, take a breath. Pause. Before you hit retweet or share, ask yourself two things. “‘Do I know who this behavior will benefit? And what information am I lacking?’ If you can’t answer what you don’t know, and if you can’t answer who is going to benefit from your action, then pause,” says Whitney Phillips, a professor of media literacy at Syracuse University.

Hoaxes like this are created by people with an agenda. And that agenda is virality and panic. The moment you share, you are playing right into their hands.

Playing into their hands isn’t just bad because it gives bad people what they want. It also risks actually hurting the children you’re hoping to help by sharing the information in the first place. “The immediate risk is that more people will be exposed to the hoax, with some of those, possibly, attempting to enact the behaviors,” says Phillips. Virality itself can be a vector for harm. Additionally, some bad actors out there might try to capitalize on the virality of Momo and use it as a weapon to target vulnerable kids; essentially, to copycat on what the hoax claims to be and then attempt to push kids to actually harm themselves.

It’s not just parents who are vulnerable to accidentally spreading hoaxes in an effort to help children. One WIRED staffer said their child’s school sent around a warning about Momo this week, and Taylor Lorenz at The Atlantic notes that even law enforcement can be taken in, choosing to err on the side of sending a warning rather than ignoring it. Speaking as a parent myself, I understand it’s hard to ignore an alert about something that could potentially hurt your kids.

Hoaxes Play on Our Reptilian Brains

As parents, it’s our job to keep our children safe. And the internet, with all its nooks and crannies and fast-moving parts, presents a particularly fraught minefield for kids. Chantal Pontvin, a parent I interviewed earlier this month about social media and kids, put it this way: “My friends have a lot of fear about social media and their children and what they might be doing. They have no interaction with their kids online. They have no idea,” she told me.

Couple that opacity with stories like the one this week about cartoons on YouTube being spliced with instructions on how to kill yourself—videos that have been confirmed to exist—and it’s enough to make some parents want to raise their kids in the woods without internet access. It certainly creates a feeling that something like the Momo challenge, or the Tide Pod Challenge or the Blue Whale game, or any of the other viral hoaxes could very well be reality. The world is a crazy place!

Monica Bulger

“All compelling hoaxes have a kernel of truth,” says Monica Bulger, senior fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum, who studies children's rights and media literacy. “And they play into our reptilian minds.” By that she means not only that they play into our biggest fears, but that they sound similar enough to other stories we’ve heard that our brains, which largely run on autopilot, interpret them as being true. This is the illusory truth effect—a glitch in human reasoning that makes things that are familiar feel true. It’s why sometimes even fact-checking a lie can ultimately lead to more people believing it, because it increases the lie’s exposure.

Viral hoax creators know this. “Many meme creators are highly skilled at playing to fears and biases. There are the general things that parents fear, and the top one is child safety,” says Bulger. “Parents need to remember that just because something feels right doesn’t mean it is. You actually can’t trust your gut.” The best way to guard against this cognitive glitch is just to be aware of it.

So what should you do next time you come across some dire warning on the internet, especially if it’s something that hasn’t been debunked? Dramatic reports about kids’ behavior online can be a bit like other kinds of high-profile incidents prone to misinformation, and experts have some suggestions for how to treat them.

Pause, but Then What?

Bulger says that after you pause, wait. Wait a few days. Wait before talking to your kids. Wait and see if you get an actual warning from your school or law enforcement. And if you do get one, like my colleague did, consider whether it includes corroboration. School districts and police departments are authorities, sure, but enough of them have proved to be just as vulnerable to these panics. Are people reporting that any children have actually encountered this or hurt themselves? If the answer is yes, then talk to your child about it. If they bring it up, react with understanding, not panic.

There’s a good reason not to just immediately bring up with your child every viral meme or challenge that you hear about. You could traumatize them, says Bulger. She notes that constant panicked warnings from parents to kids about what they are seeing online are a little like active shooting drills in schools, in that they themselves can do damage. “What causes more harm, the initial meme or the panicked response to it?” she asks.

What’s clear, though, is that like shooter drills, warnings about the Momos of the internet are responses to a real problem. The internet is, in fact, a dangerous and hard-to-understand place. It’s full of creeps, bullies, conspiracy theorists, and extremists. And though hoaxes and memes are most often harmless, they aren’t always. Take Pizzagate, which resulted in someone shooting into a restaurant, and SlenderMan, which inspired two tweens to try to kill their classmate. “Part of what makes our contemporary moment so anxiety inducing is that nothing makes sense,” says Phillips. It’s hard to tell truth from fiction, meme from contagious suicide pact.

What you can do to help your kids navigate this crazy world is encourage an open dialogue about social media and the internet. This will make them resilient, and more able to see something like Momo and not fall victim to it. Don’t, says Bulger, respond by trying to control everything your kids see online. After a certain age, at least, they will come into contact with the internet whether you like it or not.

“So be a safe space for your child to talk to you. It shouldn’t be this constant bombardment of questions about these hoaxes—did you see this Momo thing? Embed internet and media literacy in the daily rhythms of the family,” says Bulger. She wants you to let your kids know: “We’re all online, we’re all figuring this out, and we are a safe space for you to talk about anything you see.”

And most importantly, don’t panic.

Updated on 2-28-2019 at 9:41pm EST to correct details about the Pizzagate-related shooting.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

What Good Is a Supercomputer If It Can't Show Off?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

In Tampa, the conference center’s roof leaked. In Austin, the airport flooded. In Reno, conference organizers had to wait until a motorcycle rally was over before they could do some setup.

During preparation for the SC Conference, a supercomputing meeting, there’s always something getting in the way of networking. But the conference, held annually in November, is perhaps more sensitive to water, delays, and herds of bikes than your average gathering. Because every year, a group of volunteers shows up weeks in advance to build, from the literal ground up, the world’s fastest temporary network. The conference's attendees and exhibitors—from scientific researchers to industry bigwigs—need superfast, reliable connections to stream in the results of their simulations and data analysis. Called SCinet, the network “takes one year to plan, three weeks to build, one week to operate, and less than 24 hours to tear down,” according to its catchphrase.

After all, what good is high-performance computing if its results can’t reach the wider world?

This year, in Denver, one difficulty was elevation—not of the city itself, but of the exhibit hall. The 188 volunteers built up the networks' 13 equipment racks on the floor below the big, main space, constructing the infrastructure that could eventually handle around 3.6 terabits per second of traffic. (For reference, that's probably around 400,000 times more powerful than your personal connection.) And then, after construction, they had to move those millions of dollars of delicate equipment—down a hall, into an elevator, up a floor, and across the exhibit hall.

On November 8, volunteers moved the equipment on customized racklifts. “Welcome to the crazy,” someone said, unprompted, as he rushed past. The SCinetters moved like tightrope walkers, servers in tow, toward the elevators.

One floor up, a guy wearing a Scooby Doo hat pulled up with a forklift, gingerly skewered one rack, and began to lift it to the central stage. As the rack approached the platform, other volunteers put their hands on it, like digital pallbearers. When they were done, eight racks sat on the stage—the beating, blinking heart of the network. Among other duties, it coordinates with the five other racks scattered strategically around the room, ready for the exhibitors that needed 100 gigabit connections, and those requiring mere 1 or 10 gigabit hookups.

The demonstrations started on November 13. NASA brought out a simulation of how shockwaves from meteorites affect the atmosphere—and then how their effects reach the ground, from impacts to tsunamis. Also on board: a simulation showing how person-transporting drones could work, and a global weather prediction model. The Department of Energy presented about particle accelerators, quantum computing in science, and cancer surveillance.

The company Nyriad Limited, meanwhile, has aligned its stars with the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research, to develop a "science data processing" operating system for a telescope called the Murchison Widefield Array, which itself is a precursor to the Square Kilometer Array. The Square Kilometer Array will require more computing power than any previous one: Its data rate will exceed today's global internet traffic. Nyriad, at the conference, revealed its first commercial offering, spun out of its SKA work: a fast and low-power storage solution useful beyond the world of astronomy.

But their talks would have been all talk were it not for the homebuilt network that let them show and tell. In the weeks leading up to the actual conference, the SCinet volunteers laid 60 miles of fiber and crafted 280 WiFi access points for the nearly 13,000 attendees and their attendant devices. Oh, also, they had to have a network service provider crack up a road to illuminate a dark fiber connection.

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SCinet requires lots of physical and mental labor, but people keep coming back because it's their brand of fun—and the kind of professional development they could never get at an individual institution. “They get to touch and play with equipment that they normally wouldn't get to touch and play with in their day jobs,” says Jackie Kern, former general chair of the whole conference and of SCinet. They learn new networking tricks, bring back big-kid versions of their knowledge base, and meet some of the world’s top network types. “It’s a Rolodex moment,” says Jeffrey Schwab, current SCinet chair.

Also, it’s summer camp for people who like to tape fiber to floors. “Everyone wants to be here,” says Schwab.

And the organization is trying to help make it more welcoming to more different kinds of people. Kate Petersen Mace helps run the Women in IT Networking at SC program, which has fully funded 19 women volunteers' attendance since 2015 (around 22 percent of the total number of volunteers, this year, were women). In the male-dominated networking network, that kind of professional opportunity can be rare. Mace says she has often been the only woman in a given professional space. “I got kind of used to it and didn’t think about it,” she says. But the differences and the deficits snap into relief once there are more women in the exhibit hall (real and proverbial), watching the blinking lights on a set of server racks together alongside their male colleagues. "You feel more empowered to speak up," says Mace.

A few hours after the first rack lift, Jim Stewart of the Utah Education and Telehealth Network, who co-chairs the architecture team, treks up to the exhibit hall. All of the equipment is on stage, and SCinet volunteers have installed mirrors behind it, so passersby can appreciate the effort in all dimensions. It won’t last long, though. Remember the catchphrase? “…less than 24 hours to tear down.”

Stewart surveys the hall, thinking, apparently, of creation and destruction. “We’re not even done turning it up, and we are talking about getting out,” he says.

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A Guide to Finding Your Ideal Movie Ticket Subscription

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

A year ago today, MoviePass introduced a radical new business model: Go see a movie a day, every day, for just $10 per month. At the time, it seemed too good to be true. As it turns out, it was.

The company has since burned through cash at an unsustainable rate, aggravating customers with limited screenings, punishing anti-fraud measures, and general uncertainty about the future. Today, in a bid to stay afloat, MoviePass officially abandoned its unlimited buffet. It still costs $10 a month, but that now gets you three tickets instead of 30, and often not to the showtimes you'd prefer.

Plenty has been written already about what went wrong, and what could still go right. But the most important lesson of MoviePass' wild first year? Movie ticket subscriptions are here to stay. Even if MoviePass eventually goes under—or if you're just ready to bail—enough similar services have cropped up over the last year that one likely has a combination of cost and convenience that suits you just fine. Here's what each one offers, and who it might work best for.

MoviePass

You're sick of hearing about it by now, aren't you? But wait! You might not know everything! MoviePass has gone through so many incarnations since it first introduced the unlimited plan—remember when it briefly switched to an iHeartRadio bundle?—it's worth taking stock of what exactly it has on offer. Starting today, MoviePass will transition from its $10 unlimited plan to one that offers three movies per month for the same price, plus up to a $5 discount on tickets over that limit.

Yes, that's less than it offered before, by a lot. But realistically, the majority of MoviePass customers likely won't notice the difference; the company says that only 15 percent of its three million subscribers see four or more movies in a given month. And because MoviePass is more tightly restricting the number of movies it allows, it'll hopefully loosen some of its draconian antifraud measures, including the one where it made some heavy users upload photos of their ticket stubs. It’s also doing away with the surge pricing it had previously introduced to help stanch the bleeding.

If the story ended there, MoviePass would remain a solid budget choice, a less permissive but more realistic—and sustainable—version of the service people signed up for in the first place. Unfortunately, MoviePass is also continuing to limit the availability of first-run films under this new plan. This past weekend, for instance, subscribers had only two options: Mission: Impossible—Fallout or Slender Man. The available showtimes weren't peachy either. On top of which, according to recent reports MoviePass had automatically converted users to this new plan, even after they cancelled their accounts.

The company claims it was a bug. Either way, it's one last reminder that every time MoviePass scrambles for solid footing, its customers get trampled.

Who it's for: Loyalists! True believers. People who already signed up and can't be bothered. And honestly, it's still a good deal if you don't mind second-run fare.

Sinemia

Think of Sinemia as the tortoise to MoviePass' hare. It's not flashy, it's not insanely cheap, but it works, and has prices that make sense for both you and the gods of finance. In fact, it already has a sustainable P&L, thanks to a strong existing business in Europe, where subscription plans have thrived for years.

Sinemia has not one plan, but several. Four bucks gets you one standard movie ticket per month. Seven gets you two. Nine gets you two also, but those can include 3-D and IMAX formats. (MoviePass doesn't allow for those at any price yet.) And for $14, you can get three movie tickets of any kind you like. Those prices will each go up by a dollar after Labor Day.

If you plan to see exactly three movies per month, that makes Sinemia more expensive than MoviePass. But if you’re partial to 3-D and IMAX, the markup is well worth it. And even if you're not, Sinemia lets you reserve seats ahead of time online, and more importantly has no showtime blackouts. For infrequent moviegoers, its lower-tier plans seem like a no-brainer.

Like MoviePass, you can use Sinemia at pretty much any theater. Unlike MoviePass, it also offers family plans for up to six people. The company has also forged partnerships with ride-share services and Restaurants.com, showing a glimpse of the broader potential of movie ticket subscription services that rivals haven't found much traction with yet.

Who it's for: People who know they’ll only see one or two movies a month, but still want a discount. People who want to put their whole family on the same plan. IMAX stans.

AMC Stubs A-List

After months of complaining loudly and often about MoviePass' unsustainable pricing—which, well, vindication—the biggest movie theater chain in the United States decided to get in on the action itself. In June, AMC introduced A-List, a part of its Stubs loyalty program, offering three movies per week for $20 per month.

There’s lots to like about A-List, not least of which is convenience. Sinemia and MoviePass are both basically glorified debit cards tied to an app. There's inherent friction in trying to glom that onto a theater chain's business. But A-List is all AMC, meaning all of the mechanics of signing up, reserving seats, and more flows through the AMC app with ease. You can see films in 3-D or IMAX, go to repeat viewings, and even see two movies in one day, as long as there’s a two-hour buffer between them. Members also benefit from other Stubs perks, which basically comprise discounts and upgrades on concessions.

What else is there to say? It’s the most movies with the fewest limitations, other than one big one: You have to use it at AMC theaters. There are 380 of those, so most people won’t have a hard time finding one, but it’s worth making sure before you sign up. That also might limit your ability to find indie fare that fits under your subscription. Otherwise, it's also the most expensive plan by a decent margin. You can get what you pay for, but only if you use it.

Who it's for: People who see lots of movies no matter what. Especially wide-release movies. Especially at AMC theaters.

Cinemark Movie Club

Not to be outdone (or maybe more accurately, to be outdone but not by as much) Cinemark introduced its own subscription service last December. The third-largest theater chain in the US, Cinemark offers what appears on the surface to be the lesser plan. For $9 per month, you get one ticket to a 2-D movie. That also happens to be roughly the average price of a movie ticket, so how much you really save depends on what market you live in.

But Movie Club distinguishes itself as being the only service that lets unused tickets roll over to the following month. Leftover tickets also never expire, making it much less likely that you'll fall into the trap of paying for something you never use. You'll also get seat reservation, companion tickets priced at $9, and 20 percent off concessions, which could add up quickly given the going rate for popcorn these days.

Who it's for: People who live near a Cinemark, go to movies fairly infrequently, and know themselves well enough to admit that they won't actually use the service they signed up for. Which is honestly more people than you'd think.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

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

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The West is burning, and there’s no relief in sight. More than 80 large wildfires are raging in an area covering more than 1.4 million acres, primarily in California, Montana, and Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Taken together, that’s a wildfire larger than the state of Delaware.

California has declared a state of emergency as wildfires burn outside Los Angeles and threaten giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park. In Oregon, the Eagle Creek fire is tearing through the scenic Columbia River Gorge. Seattle, Boise, and Denver are socked in under a haze of smoky air and ash that experts predict could linger until the first snowfall in the mountains.

But nowhere are the fires more devastating than in Montana, where more than 1 million acres of forest burned this summer, and more than 467,000 acres are currently burning in 26 large fires that line the mountainous western side of the state.

Philip Higuera, a professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, is used to seeing smoky air from his office window in September, but nothing like the thick smoke filling Missoula Valley right now. He recently spoke to CityLab about the fires raging across the West, what we can do about them, and why this year’s big burn might be the new normal.

Breathing the air in Missoula today feels like chain-smoking Chesterfields. Schools aren’t letting the kids out at recess, and public health authorities are saying active adults and children should avoid outdoor exertion. It’s easy to get the impression that this is an extraordinary and unprecedented fire season. But you study forest fires over a timespan of thousands of years. How unusual or unique is this fire season?

It’s not—even in the context of the 21st century. In the Northern Rockies, we had a very large fire year in 2012, in 2007, in 2000, and to an extent in 2003. In this region, 1910 remains the record-setting fire season. If we surpass that, I would be surprised. Events like these are not common on a year-to-year scale. On the other hand, when you look at the role fire plays in ecosystems, you have to look at a longer timescale, and these rare events are what’s expected every once in a while.

Why is this fire season so dramatic?

The main reason there is so much burning right now is the strong seasonal drought across the region. The term we use is that these fires are “climate enabled.” The drought makes most of the vegetation, live or dead, receptive to burning. In Missoula, we had the driest July and August on record and the third-warmest July and August. With those types of conditions, we expect widespread burning. But people underestimate the role that seasonal climate plays in these events, and we start to grasp at lots of other things to explain it.

Aside from the bad air, are most urban residents in fire-affected parts of the West safe?

Aside from that really important impact, I give a cautious yes. There is a risk. And that risk is highest in the wildland-urban interface. If you are living there, you should know that you are living with a much higher risk for exposure to wildfire. And part of the job of educators and U.S. Forest Service outreach is to make that risk known. Eventually insurance companies will also get on board. Floods are obviously on insurance companies’ radar front and center. Wildfire is still not frequent enough that they design programs around it.

Should people in the fire-prone West be living in places like that—in the suburbs and exurbs out in the forested edges of urban areas?

Every place on our planet has some natural phenomenon that is not friendly to humans. If you live on the East Coast, you are going to experience hurricanes. If you live in the Midwest, you are going to experience tornadoes. If you live across forested regions in the West, you are going to experience wildfires. We need to develop in a way that is cognizant of these processes—that is not ignorant of the way the planet, and the environment you live in, works.

Why are these fires so hard to put out?

This goes back to why the fires are happening. The fuels are extremely dry. And most areas burn during extreme weather conditions—the days when it’s hot, humidity is low and there are high winds. These are the conditions in which fires quickly double in size. They are also the conditions where it’s most dangerous to put people in front of the fire. Also, a lot of these fires start in very remote areas with rugged terrain, and just putting people on the ground comes with some risk.

Montana alone has already spent tens of millions of dollars trying to suppress wildfires this summer, and two firefighters have been killed. Is that having any impact, or is it like driving down the expressway throwing bags of money out the window?

When you say it’s not working, the key question is, What’s the goal? “It’s not working” assumes the goal is to have no fires. We will fail if that is the goal. Most of these ecosystems that are burning have evolved with fire. We expect them to burn. We need them to burn if we want them to continue to exist.

So it’s like trying to stop rain?

It’s like trying to stop an earthquake. Trying to stop a volcano. To me, the goal can’t be to have no fire. That’s gotten us into trouble when we pursued that goal. I think the metric should be how much area has burned that we wanted to burn compared to how much burned that we didn’t want to burn. Or closer to the nugget, how many resources were harmed—how many houses were lost, how many people were either directly or indirectly killed?

You don’t see raging forest fires as a failure of suppression efforts?

No. Knowing how climate enables and drives these large fires, I think that it would be impossible to put these fires out.

There is a school of thought that says we should not suppress wildfire because it allows smaller trees and underbrush to accumulate, which leads to larger, hotter fires later. So why not just let it burn?

I think as soon as you live in these environments you will quickly abandon that too-simplistic view. Maybe when I was a graduate student living in Seattle that seemed more like a possibility, but you can’t just let it burn. That would not be wise. It really comes down to what you can afford to burn and what do you want to protect. If the fire is in the wilderness, that’s great. If it’s burning toward a community, that’s not so good.

There’s good fire and bad fire?

There is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum would be the wilderness fire that is not going to impact anyone—good fire. The fire that burns down your house or kills people—bad fire.

Another school of thought says we should allow more logging to clear trees and help prevent wildfires. Does that hold water?

I don’t think that holds water. That is based on the assumption that fires are occurring because there is more fuel available to burn than in the past. That’s generally not what’s driving this. It’s the drought. It’s true that if cut, there is less fuel in the forests. But in a lot of cases, there is what’s called slash—woody debris—left on the ground that will carry fire across the forest floor, which is what you need for it to spread.

The simple answer—if you want to eliminate fire, then pave it. There will be no fire.

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Is climate change partly to blame for this year’s fires? Are wildfires in the West set to get worse because of it?

That’s what future climate models project. We can’t say this individual fire was because of climate change. We can’t say this year was because of climate change. But these types of years are what we expect to see more frequently. I heard an analogy that I think is useful. If a baseball player is using steroids and hits a home run, can you attribute that home run to steroids? You can’t—but you know that at some point some component of that was brought to you by this artificial input to the system.

There was a study that came out last year, which looked at fire occurrence in the Western United States over the last 40 years using climate modeling. The conclusion was almost half of burning we have seen over the past several decades can be attributed to climate change due to anthropogenic sources. The fire season has gotten significantly longer across the West, on order of 30 days or more during the past few decades.

What are you and your family doing to live through the fire season?

Personally, I made the decision to not live in the wildland-urban interface. I live in the urban part of Missoula. We had one HEPA air filter. Last week we ordered two more. That’s our adaptation.

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Rockstar's Crunch Controversy and the Rest of the Week in Games

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Click:Peptide Inhibitors

This week in games, we've got more news on the industry's ongoing labor problems and the messy relationship between art and capital. Making things is hard—and making them with integrity and care for all the people involved, at least when money and bosses are involved, can be a lot harder. Let's take a look.

Rockstar's Work Week Is, Allegedly, Nothing to Joke About

The big news this week comes after Dan Houser, VP at Rockstar Games, claimed in a reported piece at Vulture that some members of the team developing Red Dead Redemption 2 had worked 100-hour weeks to ensure the game shipped on time and on target. While Houser framed this as a bit of a boast, the increasingly labor-conscious games press and community took it, rightly, as an admission of guilt. 100 hours is too much time for anyone to work, at just about any job.

Since then, a number of Rockstar employees have claimed that it's not true, and Houser himself has modified his prior statement; still, it's not a good look. Whether or not Rockstar's version has evolved over time, crunch remains a big problem—and nothing to brag about.

Another Company Might Be Finishing Telltale's The Walking Dead

Moving from labor issue to labor issue, Kotaku reports that Skybound Games is working on a deal with the late Telltale Games to finish the final season of The Walking Dead—news that's either promising or troubling, depending on how you look at it. Swooping in to finish the work of people who got laid off is generally not considered a very pro-employee thing to do, and even if it's intended in the most innocent way by Skybound it still emphasizes the ugly messiness of the entire Telltale Games situation, and the need for better worker protections in the industry.

But according to Kotaku, that may not be how this deal goes down, and that Skybound Games could actually re-hire former Telltale devs to finish their own work, which would be a pretty nice thing to see. It's not severance pay, but it's something.

Love Indie Games? Love Commercialization? Loot Crate Has You Covered

The newest entrant in the indie games marketplace is Loot Crate, which now offers "Loot Play," a new curated "box" of five indie games a month. Loot Crate is one of the biggest purveyors of randomly assorted pop culture goodies around, and this turn is another sign of how heavily commercialized the indie games space has become (or, possibly, always was). Art is, really, just another commodity to sell in packages along with stickers and action figures and kitschy t-shirts. I can't begrudge anyone for selling out, people have to get paid, but it's still more than a little strange.

Recommendation of the Week: Call of Duty: Black Ops II on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, & PC

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 hit shelves last week, but if you're hankering for a solid fix of the franchise, I might actually recommend a trip back to 2012. Black Ops II is a strange, fascinating game, elevating its unusually ambitious singleplayer campaign with a surprising amount of player choice. The action stretches from the '80s, in full late-Cold War glory, to a speculative and disastrous future. The Black Ops series is Call of Duty at its most grim and its most over-the-top, but Black Ops II makes both of those looks work for it. (The multiplayer is really solid, too.)

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Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It's Full-Tilt Insane

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Atlas, the hulking humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics, now does backflips. I’ll repeat that. It’s a hulking humanoid that does backflips.

Check out the video below, because it shows a hulking humanoid doing a backflip. And that’s after it leaps from platform to platform, as if such behavior were becoming of a bipedal robot.

To be clear: Humanoids aren’t supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move effectively, much less kick off a tumbling routine. The beauty of four-legged robots is that they balance easily, both at rest and as they’re moving, but bipeds like Atlas have to balance a bulky upper body on just two legs. Accordingly, you could argue that roboticists can better spend their time on non-human forms that are easier to master.

But there’s a case to be made for Atlas and the other bipeds like Cassie (which walks more like a bird than a human). We live in a world built for humans, so there may be situations where you want to deploy a robot that works like a human. If you have to explore a contaminated nuclear facility, for instance, you’ll want something that can climb stairs and ladders, and turn valves. So a humanoid may be the way to go.

If anything gets there, it’ll be Atlas. Over the years, it’s grown not only more backflippy but lighter and more dextrous and less prone to fall on its face. Even if it does tumble, it can now get back up on its own. So it’s not hard to see a future when Atlas does indeed tread where fleshy humans dare not. Especially now that Boston Dynamics is part of the Japanese megacorporation SoftBank, which may have some cash to spend.

While Atlas doing backflips is full-tilt insane, humanoids still struggle. Manipulation, for one, poses a big obstacle, because good luck replicating the human hand. And battery life is a nightmare, what with all the balancing. But who knows, maybe one day humanoids will flip into our lives, or at the very least at the Olympics.

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New Avengers: Endgame Trailer Does 'Whatever It Takes'

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It's perhaps no surprise that Marvel is not doling out much in the way of plot in the ramp-up for Avengers: Endgame. The latest trailer, like the one before it, leans heavy on sad heroes promising vague action. But what it does have? Fashion.

The lack of anything approaching a spoiler makes sense. Avengers: Endgame represents the culmination of 11 years of orchestration across 21 films. Besides, the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer already mostly probably confirms that everyone makes it out OK. So rather than focus on the pledges to do "whatever it takes"—the key to defeating Thanos was Imagine Dragons all along—let's zero in on what really matters here. Starting with Hawkeye's hair.

Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) sat out Avengers: Infinity War, and apparently spent that time fashioning himself into a grim samurai, a nod to the character's transformation into Ronin in the comics. More important, he gave himself a glorious mohawk, possibly an act of protest over having been left out of the last big fight, or of grieving over his (potentially, probably) atomized family. Or he's been listening to a lot of Rancid, maybe?

Elsewhere, the assembled team has upgraded its kit, favoring a matching white armored ensemble over their individual looks. This raises questions, as well, given that some members of the team—Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), in particular—derive their powers from their outfit. One suspects they'll explain this with a single line of dialog!

If it seems silly to focus on sartorial choices, well, there's just not much more to go on. Hawkeye cocks an arrow; Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) fires a gun. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) shows up, but you knew that. Marvel's apparently keeping the Endgame goods to itself until the movie comes out on April 26. Which, honestly, fine. It's taken 11 years to get here; another six weeks can't hurt.

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The Most Promising Cancer Treatments In a Century Have Arrived—But Not For Everyone

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

In 1891, a New York doctor named William B. Coley injected a mixture of beef broth and Streptococcus bacteria into the arm of a 40-year-old Italian man with an inoperable neck tumor. The patient got terribly sick—developing a fever, chills, and vomiting. But a month later, his cancer had shrunk drastically. Coley would go on to repeat the procedure in more than a thousand patients, with wildly varying degrees of success, before the US Food and Drug Administration shut him down.

Coley’s experiments were the first forays into a field of cancer research known today as immunotherapy. Since his first experiments, the oncology world has mostly moved on to radiation and chemo treatments. But for more than a century, immunotherapy—which encompasses a range of treatments designed to supercharge or reprogram a patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells—has persisted, mostly around the margins of medicine. In the last few years, though, an explosion of tantalizing clinical results have reinvigorated the field and plunged investors and pharma execs into a spending spree.

Though he didn’t have the molecular tools to understand why it worked, Coley’s forced infections put the body’s immune system into overdrive, allowing it to take out cancer cells along the way. While the FDA doesn’t have a formal definition for more modern immunotherapies, in the last few years it has approved at least eight drugs that fit the bill, unleashing a flood of money to finance new clinical trials. (Patients had better come with floods of money too—prices can now routinely top six figures.)

But while the drugs are dramatically improving the odds of survival for some patients, much of the basic science is still poorly understood. And a growing number of researchers worry that the sprint to the clinic offers cancer patients more hype than hope.

When immunotherapy works, it really works. But not for every kind of cancer, and not for every patient—not even, it turns out, for the majority of them. “The reality is immunotherapy is incredibly valuable for the people who can actually benefit from it, but there are far more people out there who don’t benefit at all,” says Vinay Prasad, an Oregon Health and Science University oncologist.

Prasad has come to be regarded as a professional cancer care critic, thanks to his bellicose Twitter style and John Arnold Foundation-backed crusade against medical practices he says are based on belief, not scientific evidence. Using national cancer statistics and FDA approval records, Prasad recently estimated the portion of all patients dying from all types of cancer in America this year who might actually benefit from immunotherapy. The results were disappointing: not even 10 percent.

Now, that’s probably a bit of an understatement. Prasad was only looking at the most widely used class of immunotherapy drugs in a field that is rapidly expanding. Called checkpoint inhibitors, they work by disrupting the immune system’s natural mechanism for reining in T cells, blood-borne sentinels that bind and kill diseased cells throughout the body. The immune cells are turned off most of the time, thanks to proteins that latch on to a handful of receptors on their surface. But scientists designed antibodies to bind to those same receptors, knocking out the regulatory protein and keeping the cells permanently switched to attack mode.

The first checkpoint inhibitors just turned T cells on. But some of the newer ones can work more selectively, using the same principle to jam a signal that tumors use to evade T cells. So far, checkpoint inhibitors have shown near-miraculous results for a few rare, previously incurable cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma, renal cell carcinoma, and non-small cell lung cancer. The drugs are only approved to treat those conditions, leaving about two-thirds of terminal cancer patients without an approved immunotherapy option.

But Prasad says that isn’t stopping physicians from prescribing the drugs anyway.

“Hype has encouraged rampant off-label use of checkpoint inhibitors as a last-ditch effort,” he says—even for patients with tumors that show no evidence they’ll respond to the drugs. The antibodies are available off the shelf, but at a list price near $150,000 per year, it’s an investment Prasad says doctors shouldn’t encourage lightly. Especially when there’s no reliable way of predicting who will respond and who won’t. “This thwarts one of the goals of cancer care," says Prasad. "When you run out of helpful responses, how do you help a patient navigate what it means to die well?”

Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb have dominated this first wave of immunotherapy, selling almost $9 billion worth of checkpoint inhibitors since they went on sale in 2015. Roche, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Abbvie, and Regeneron have all since jumped in the game, spending billions on acquiring biotech startups and beefing up in-house pipelines. And 800 clinical trials involving a checkpoint inhibitor are currently underway in the US, compared with about 200 in 2015. “This is not sustainable,” Genentech VP of cancer immunology Ira Mellman told the audience at last year’s annual meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. With so many trials, he said, the industry was throwing every checkpoint inhibitor combination at the wall just to see what would stick.

After more than a decade stretching out the promise of checkpoint inhibitors, patients—and businesses—were ready for something new. And this year, they got it: CAR T cell therapy. The immunotherapy involves extracting a patient’s T cells and genetically rewiring them so they can more efficiently home in on tumors in the body—training a foot soldier as an assassin that can slip behind enemy lines.

In September, the FDA cleared the first CAR-T therapy—a treatment for children with advanced leukemia, developed by Novartis—which made history as the first-ever gene therapy approved for market. A month later the agency approved another live cell treatment, developed by Kite Pharma, for a form of adult lymphoma. In trials for the lymphoma drug, 50 percent of patients saw their cancer disappear completely, and stay gone.

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Kite’s ascendance in particular is a stunning indicator of how much money CAR-T therapy has attracted, and how fast. The company staged a $128 million IPO in 2014—when it had only a single late-phase clinical trial to its name—and sold to Gilead Science in August for $11.9 billion. For some context, consider that when Pfizer bought cancer drugmaker Medivation for $14 billion last year—one of the biggest pharma deals of 2016—the company already had an FDA-approved blockbuster tumor-fighter on the market with $2 billion in annual sales, plus two late-stage candidates in the pipeline.

While Kite and Novartis were the only companies to actually launch products in 2017, more than 40 other pharma firms and startups are currently building pipelines. Chief rival Juno Therapeutics went public with a massive $265 million initial offering—the largest biotech IPO of 2014—before forming a $1 billion partnership with Celgene in 2015. In the last few years, at least half a dozen other companies have made similar up-front deals worth hundreds of millions.

These treatments will make up just a tiny slice of the $107 billion cancer drug market. Only about 600 people a year, for example, could benefit from Novartis’ flagship CAR-T therapy. But the company set the price for a full course of treatment at a whopping $475,000. So despite the small clientele, the potential payoff is huge—and the technology is attracting a lot of investor interest. “CAR-T venture financing is still a small piece of total venture funding in oncology, but given that these therapies are curative for a majority of patients that have received them in clinical trials, the investment would appear to be justified,” says Mandy Jackson, a managing editor for research firm Informa Pharma Intelligence.

CAR-T, with its combination of gene and cell therapies, may be the most radical anticancer treatment ever to arrive in clinics. But the bleeding edge of biology can be a dangerous place for patients.

Sometimes, the modified T cells go overboard, excreting huge quantities of molecules called cytokines that lead to severe fevers, low blood pressure, and difficulty breathing. In some patients it gets even worse. Sometimes the blood-brain barrier inexplicably breaks down—and the T cells and their cytokines get inside patients’ skulls. Last year, Juno pulled the plug on its lead clinical trial after five leukemia patients died from massive brain swelling. Other patients have died in CAR-T trials at the National Cancer Institute and the University of Pennsylvania.

Scientists don’t fully understand why some CAR-T patients experience cytokine storms and neurotoxicity and others come out cured. “It’s kind of like the equivalent of getting on a Wright Brother’s airplane as opposed to walking on a 747 today,” says Wendell Lim, a biophysical chemist and director of the UC San Francisco Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. To go from bumping along at a few hundred feet to cruise control at Mach 0.85 will mean equipping T cells with cancer-sensing receptors that are more specific than the current offerings.

Take the two FDA-approved CAR-T cell therapies, he says. They both treat blood cancers in which immune responders called B cells become malignant and spread throughout the body. Doctors reprogram patients’ T cells to seek out a B cell receptor called CD-19. When they find it, they latch on and shoot it full of toxins. Thing is, the reprogrammed T cells can’t really tell the difference between cancerous B cells and normal ones. The therapy just takes them all out. Now, you can live without B cells if you receive antibody injections to compensate—so the treatment works out fine most of the time.

But solid tumors are trickier—they’re made up of a mix of cells with different genetic profiles. Scientists have to figure out which tumor cells matter to the growth of the cancer and which ones don’t. Then they have to design T cells with antigens that can target just those ones and nothing else. An ideal signature would involve two to three antigens that your assassin T cells can use to pinpoint the target with a bullet instead of a grenade.

Last year Lim launched a startup called Cell Design Labs to try to do just that, as well as creating a molecular on-off-switch to make treatments more controlled. Only if researchers can gain this type of precise command, says Lim, will CAR-T treatments become as safe and predictable as commercial airline flight.

The field has matured considerably since Coley first shot his dying patient full of a dangerous bacteria, crossed his fingers, and hoped for the best. Sure, the guy lived, even making a miraculous full recovery. But many after him didn’t. And that “fingers crossed” approach still lingers over immunotherapy today.

All these years later, the immune system remains a fickle ally in the war on cancer. Keeping the good guys from going double-agent is going to take a lot more science. But at least the revolution will be well-financed.

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Kevin Hart's Tweets Didn't Doom Him—His Messy Apology Did

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

In the end, it wasn't the terrible tweets that ended Kevin Hart's chances for Oscar glory—though they certainly didn't help.

The several-years-old missives, filled with homophobic slurs, began circulating almost as soon as Hart was announced as the host of next year's Academy Awards ceremony. The 39-year-old actor and comedian deleted many of the messages, including a 2011 tweet in which he wrote that, were his son to play with his daughter's dollhouse, Hart would "break it over his head & say n my voice 'stop that's gay.'" But the internet quickly dug up several more crude and cruel statements from his Twitter feed, some of which included terms like "FAT FAG" and jokes about AIDS.

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By Thursday morning, Hart's Oscar-hosting gig was clearly in jeopardy, though it wasn't necessarily gone for good: A sincere apology—coupled with evidence that he'd matured and learned since those older jokes—possibly could have helped him.

But then, just as things were getting bad, Hart did something truly stupid: He decided to go back online.

In an Instagram post from that morning, Hart appeared bratty, defensive, and completely dismissive of the growing pushback (he also seemed kind of drowsy, possibly because he filmed it from a bed). "Our world is becoming beyond crazy," Hart complained, "and I'm not gonna let the craziness frustrate me … if you don't believe people change, grow, evolve as they get older, [then] I don't know what to tell you." In the accompanying caption, he wrote, "If u want to search my history or past and anger yourselves with what u find that is fine with me. I'm almost 40 years old and I'm in love with the man I am becoming."

By the day's end, that man had clearly become very, very annoyed. "I just got a call from the Academy," he said in a follow-up post, "and that call basically said, 'Kevin, apologize for your tweets of old or we're going to have to move on and find another host' … I chose to pass. I passed on the apology." He also appeared to pin the controversy to "internet trolls." It was an outrageous blunder: Faced with claims that his words had hurt others, Hart didn't bother to listen; instead, he simply lashed out.

His boastful resentment made his Oscar gig all the more ick-inducing—and all the more doomed. A few hours later, Hart tweeted that he was stepping down as host, giving his regrets to "the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past."

The tacked-on mea culpa, which was almost assuredly vetted (if not scripted) by a team of handlers, was an obviously insincere change of Hart: Only a few hours earlier, he'd been proudly and patronizingly asserting his righteousness. Now he was suddenly claiming to feel sorry for a controversy he never seemed to understand. In a year of botched celebrity apologies—from Roseanne Barr's doubling down to Lena Dunham's effing up—Hart changing his position from "sorry, not sorry" to "I'll say I'm sorry if it shuts you all up and I can finally take this nap I clearly need" was a new species of speciousness. At least when he was being an asshole, he was being honest to who he was.

It didn't have to be end like this. Hart's tweets were odious and vicious, and were probably going to sink his Oscar chances no matter what. But he was in a rare position to actually do some changing, growing, evolving, in a very public way. He's one of the biggest performers in the world, with nearly 35 million Twitter followers and an audience of 66 million on Instagram. Interacting with his fans—and bringing them along as he gets more and more famous—has been a huge factor in his standup and in his success.

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People listen to Hart. So what if he'd used this an as opportunity to listen to others—specifically, to those who were so hurt by this comments? No one likes the term "teachable moment," because it's flimsy, and overused, and makes whomever's using it sound like a YouTube life coach with a flailing Patreon account. And yet … this could have been a teachable moment, one in which Hart actually engages with his critics, instead of churlishly attacking them from his bed. For someone with Hart's visibility to grapple with the hateful words of his past—ones which still sting today—would be a fairly remarkable sight in 2018. It could have actually shown someone's ability to confront what they'd done in real time. The online-rage cycle we have in place now doesn't work: People yell, a celebrity scrambles to make nice, and the underlying problem is never addressed. No one learns a thing; no issue is ever really resolved.

Hart, though, is someone who constantly boasts of his own self-improvement. In his initial Instagram message on Thursday, he spoke as if he'd evolved since sending those homophobic tweets several years ago, yet the video itself proved he hadn't. "You LIVE and YOU LEARN & YOU GROW & YOU MATURE," he wrote in the caption. The loss of one of the industry's most high-profile gigs represents a chance to do all of those things. Here's hoping he doesn't sleep on it.

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