I’ve always been excited by space,” says Ian Allen, who photographed our cover story on Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin. Allen has shot several NASA landmarks in his career, but he’d never witnessed a rocket launch. “It was definitely fascinating. I didn’t realize how quickly the thing comes down and lands,” he says. His fellow spectators were also memorable. “It’s a crazy world they live in,” adds Allen, who, like Bezos, lives in the Seattle area. “The director Peter Berg was there, as was a 50-person film crew, and the crowd included an astronaut and a famous pilot.”
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When she began covering the 2016 presidential election for WIRED, Emma Grey Ellis dove into the internet’s darkest corners to report on the fake news and conspiracy theories that were shaping the news cycle. “It became clear what a big deal misinformation was, not just in the campaign but in modern-day internet culture,” she says. “So that topic became my primary beat.” Ellis has since investigated everything from deepfake tech to QAnon. Ultimately “all conspiracy theories are a template,” she says. “Each generation isn’t coming up with its own. Either somebody’s dead or somebody’s not dead.”
An experienced cook and restaurant reviewer, Joe Ray worked in France for revered (and feared) food critic François Simon. But as a kitchen gear writer for wired, he’s interested in more than just what the pros think of a new gastronomical gadget. “I like to think about if my mom or my sister—very capable home cooks—could get use out of something. They have a much lower BS threshold,” says Ray, who’s based in Seattle and recently coauthored Sea and Smoke: Flavors from the Untamed Pacific Northwest with chef Blaine Wetzel.
Politics is a marketing problem, says Antonio García Martínez. He should know. Before becoming a writer, García Martínez worked on ad targeting for Facebook. After penning his best-selling memoir, Chaos Monkeys, and leaving the tech world, he became a regular contributor at wired. In early August he learned that the consumer targeting techniques he once wielded for the social media giant were being adopted by Democrats as a tool to reach unregistered voters. “It’s not a big technical leap,” García Martínez says. “The novel thing is it’s being used in a small congressional race during a hotly contested midterm season.” On page 44, he follows the creators of a new voter registration app to see if their technology can help turn Texas blue.
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