Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JUN 2016
BY CA D E M ETZ
o k g o!
24.06
FEATURES
90
Ripple Efect
To obsessed water engineer Marc
Edwards, the lead crisis in Flint is
just the beginning of an epidemic.
B Y B E N PAY N T E R
72
80
100
106
Outracing Hollywood
B Y J A S O N TA N Z
BY CADE METZ
BY LOGAN HILL
BY ROBERT KOLKER
JUN 2016
DAN WINTERS
CONTENTS
24.06
8
Release Notes
GADGET LAB
34 #glamourshots
49
16 This Issue
From the editors desk
18 Comments
Reader rants and raves
41 Mr. Know-It-All
On how to improve
your emoji game
BY JON MOOALLEM
ALPHA
Fetish: Carbide 3D
Nomad 883 Pro
23
00
42 Serial Killer
A history of our war on mosquitoes
the deadliest insect in the world
44
Argument
26
54 My Space: JBFcustoms
Where dream sneakers are made
Whats Inside
Tide To Go Stain Pen
FILE: //
Give Us a Hand
Its time for robots to get physical
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
24
46
28 Jargon Watch
Keeping up with the latest in the
W IRE D lexicon
ASK A FLOWCHART
116 What Game Can I Play With an
AI That I Might Actually Win?
BY ROBERT CAPPS
JUN 2016
STAYING LE AD - FRE E
Dan Winters
in Flint with a
4- by 5-inch
large-format
lm camera.
IN FLINT
TRAVIS SMITH
Of-Court in Austin
WHO TO FOLLOW
Instagram
Dan Winters
@danwintersphoto
Twitter
Ben Paynter
@bpaynter
Mark McClusky
@markmcc
Issie Lapowsky
@issielapowsky
JUN 2016
TWITTER / INSTAGRAM
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EMAIL
THIS ISSUE
A COUPLE OF TIMES A MONTH, my colleagues and I gather over lunch in our main
conference room to discuss a slate of feature story ideas. WIRED editors, working closely with our community of writers, develop the story pitches that guide
this meeting, each pitch constrained to a single-page memo, sometimes with
some early reporting, designed to get the concept and execution across. Usually
well argue a bit about the merits or challenges, and then I give it a green, yellow, or red light. Its a funand fascinatingsession that forces us to rethink,
every time, what a WIRED story is. On February 1, the meeting included this
pitch from our ace business writer Cade Metz and his editor Marcus Wohlsen.
As you can see from the cover, I green-lit it. But heres a look at whyat what
we saw in the pitch that became the amazing story you can read on page 80.
SCOT T DADICH
Editor in Chief
@ SDA DI C H
JUN 2016
COMMENTS
@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM
CLOWN TOWN
THE FIVE LEADING MEN of HBOs tech-parody masterpiece, Silicon
Valley, are legitimately hilarious. But as senior writer Brian Raftery pointed out in our April cover story (Get Busy, Stay Busy),
Thomas Middleditch, Kumail Nanjiani, T. J. Miller, Martin Starr,
and Zach Woods are not exactly megacelebrities. Instead they represent an all-new kind of comedy star, one who shines in a wide
variety of less-visible places, from ensemble TV shows and web
series to podcasts and indie films. Think of it, in other words, as the
new comedy gig economy. Or should that be the gag
g economy?
Sorrywell leave the jokes to the professionals.
Re: Kindergarten
Inc.: Pearsons
quest to cover the
planet in companyrun schools
Anya Kamenetzs
story ofers a good,
balanced look at
Pearsons move into
for-prot schools
in the developing
world. But one
important point
was not mentioned:
School is not just to
mold students into
the perfect entrylevel employees
its also supposed to
give them a worldview so they can
Re: In a Perpetual
Present: The weird
case of a woman
who cant remember
her past
So hard to imagine
life this way. A really
fascinating read.
Damien Cannane
(@Space_Damien)
on Twitter
An emerging upper-middle
class of actors is a perfect
expression for people of the
Silicon Valley casts caliber.
Theyre not superstars, but to
a large group of comedy nerds,
theyre what makes comedy
interesting today. If you listen
to podcasts like Comedy Bang!
Bang! or WTF or You Made It
Deeply detailed
analysis of why
psychopaths on
every continent
feel attracted to
this sects propaganda. Great job.
Yahya Abdellah on
Facebook
JUN 2016
The multiple
covers of
WIREDs April
issue, taken by
Silicon Valley
star Thomas
Middleditch.
ARGUMENT
ALPHA
BY ELISE CRAIG
JUN 2016
OLIVER MUNDAY
ALPHA
ARGUMENT
astrological sign (Align), an ainity for sci- (Trek Passions), similar eating habits (Veggiemate),
and a love of weed (My420Mate).
Having interests in common is
not a bad thingespecially if,
say, religious identity is important to youbut making sure
every potential match has a
beard (Bristlr) or is at least 6'4"
(Tall People Meet) means interacting only with the segment
of humanity we think well like.
Its wrong and also inefective,
JUN 2016
ALPHA
BOOKS
Whats the
state of military
tech today?
SCIENCE AT WAR
MARY ROACH ENLISTS
0
2
0
6
Did your
previous books
inform how
you approached
this one?
Stif remains my most
popular book, so
Im always looking to
throw a cadaver
in the mix. Its like
how Hitchcock
always shows up in
his moviestheres
probably a dead
guy in every book.
Drone subs?
JAKE STANGEL
JUN 2016
The
Libertopians
The
H-1Beliebers
Party Leader:
VC and
seasteading
libertarian
Peter Thiel
Party Leader:
Mark Zuckerberg
Platform:
Platform:
The Valley
hearts immigration
reform but not
for farmworkers
sake. Need. Moar.
Programmers.
Government bad.
College pointless.
Live forever (ideally on experimental oating cities
out in the ocean).
The 1% FTW!
Party Leader:
Angel investor
Paul Graham
The ShareSomethings
Platform:
ALPHA
GOVERNMENT
Party Leader:
Uber CEO
Travis Kalanick
Platform:
We can create
millions of jobs
if you just stop
calling our workers
employees.
POLITICS,
VALLEY-STYLE
THE UNITED STATES is a patchwork quilt of red
The Love
and
Lockdown
Party
Party Leader:
Apple CEO
Tim Cook
Platform:
Every American
is entitled to
certain unalienable rights, including the rights
to marry whoever
you want and
to buy an unhackable iPhone.
The
Playacrats
Party Leader:
Sergey Brin
Platform:
JARGON
WATCH
0
ANDREW RAE
JUN 2016
ALPHA
capsulethe only
thing like it in the worldreminded me of
being at the top of one of those glass elevators on the side of a hotel, except the hotel
was a 1,200-foot clif overlooking an epic
view of Perus Sacred Valley. You can see
everything: crumbling ruins, the train from
Cuzco to Machu Picchu, gorgeous farmland stretching for miles. Getting there,
obviously, is a trek. Latched to a cable, you climb a ladder of iron rungs pounded into the rock face.
About halfway up, you have to cross a 40-foot gap on two cables, clipped to a third at hip height
nothing below you, nothing anywhere. I never cry, and I was sobbing. Believe it or not, it was worth
it. When my husband and I arrived at the barrel-shaped pod, our guide unhooked the top and we
dropped in. It was bigger than we expected and very comfortable. On one end was a luxurious queensize bed; on the other, a lovely little bathroom (from the toilet you could
look down through the oor at the valley below). When I went to open
one of the tiny windows and snap a photo with my GoPro, a gust of wind
whipped throughthat was a little terrifying. But I was surprised that
the capsule never shook. We felt completely safe. The guide, who occupied one of the two other pods, returned later with dinnerfour incredible Peruvian dishes. Before he left, he gave us an extra bottle of red wine.
The stars were out, and we stayed up for a long time. Jennifer Wilson
STAYING IN A SKYLODGE
Skylodge
pods are
bolted to the
clif in 27
places. Even
in high winds,
they remain
secure.
JUN 2016
chejacqueslamerde
ALPHA
SOCIAL MEDIA
PLAYING
WITH FOOD
INSTAGRAMS
BRO-IEST CHEF
chejacqueslamerde
HANDS IN THE AIR IF
YOU LOVE GOGURT
BROS!!!!! THIS IS SOME
PINK DAIRY YOGURT THING
THAT COMES OUT OF
A TUBE, SORT OF SWIRLED
AROUND WITH FISTTEARS
OF SNOWBALL, ORANGE
JUICY GEL, HAND TORN JET
PUFFT MARSHMALLOWS,
BLK LIKORICE, INSTANT
COFFE AND YELLO NERDS
GRAVEL. #bodegacasual
#snowballer #topchefs
#gastroart #eater #wildchefs
#douevengogurtbro?
chejacqueslamerde
UPPER NEXT LEVEL DESSERT SPEC!!!! REPRESENTING THE EAST COAST W/
A CEVICHE OF SWEDISH
FISH ON TOP OF A SEA OF
VANILLA SNACK PACK THAT
I ADDED BLUE FOOD COLORIN TO, AND THEN ALSO
SOME MINI EGGS, LIMITED
EDITION MINIONS BANANA
BERRY CEREAL, MACRO
MINT AND CHERRY FUN
DIP. BOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM. #snackpackahoy
#qualitypurveyors #yas
#fourmagazine #ltdedition
200+
CHELSEA GLOBAL
10
12
20
30
Sh Tal
ow en
t
St
ud run
ne
io
r
di
r
Ar ect
or
td
Se irec
td
to
r
e
Fi
el sig
ne
d
di
r
re
ct
or
s
Ed
Re
ito
se
r
s
ar
ch
er
s
Vi
W
de
ri
o
en ters
gi
n
Pr e e r
od s
uc
U
Ie
e
n g rs
in
e
Tr
an ers
sla
to
rs
CHELSEAS
HANDLERS
EXPORTING
COMEDY
JUN 2016
ALPHA
ADAPTATIONS
HOT FOR
PREACHER
BRINGING
A DARK COMIC
BOOK TO LIFE
Space Is
Expensive
In the pilot alone,
Preacher bounces
between Texas,
Africa, Russia, and
outer space. Thats
enough to blow anyones budget. We
cant be limited by
nances, Goldberg
says. We had to
get creative and do
something weird.
And sometimes that
meant ditching realism altogether. We
knew we werent
going to make space
look as good as Star
Wars, Rogen says.
Rather than expensive (and likely
still disappointing)
CGI, they opted
for thrifty and whimsical animations.
Religion: Its
Controversial Stuff
JUN 2016
From left,
THE 90S COMIC Preacher is beloved by
Dominic Cooper
and Joseph Gilgun
many, but its not an easy sell for general
in a scene from
audiences: A possessed Texas preacher,
AMC's Preacher.
his murderous ex-girlfriend, and a hardpartying Irish vampire team up to nd God. Since the comics inception, Hollywood has irted with bringing it to
the screen. Directors like Sam Mendes and Kevin Smith
expressed interest, but nothing came of it. Finally, after
nearly two decades in development limbo, Preacher arrived
on AMC in May, with bro-com kingpins Seth Rogen and
Evan Goldberg at the helm. We caught up with Rogen and
Goldberg to hear their take on Preachers many adaptation
pitfalls and how they got around them. emma grey ellis
Preacher makes
steaks of sacred
cowsand while
thats great for
its fans, the premise
alone is enough
to inspire a few
angry church signs.
For Rogen and
Goldberg, the only
way to balance
the comics edginess
RAPPERS SAMPLING JOHN WILLIAMS SCORES: 2 CHAINZ, WHERE U BEEN? (THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK S THE DANCE OF THE WITCHES) // BEASTIE BOYS,
EGG MAN (JAWS THEME) // LIL JON & THE EAST SIDE BOYZ, GRAND FINALE (LAND OF THE GIANTS THEME) // NAS, EVERY GHETTO (THE EIGER SANCTION THEME)
ALPHA
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL
Q:
A:
JUN 2016
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
MRKNOWITALL@WIRED.COM
ALPHA
VECTORS
1881
The French set out to
dig a canal between the
Pacic and the Atlantic.
Over the next decade,
yellow fever fells almost
22,000 workers in the
marshy, tropical Isthmus
of Panama, until the
French nally call it quits.
1981
1970
Species distribution
(estimated)
is invented. But it
does nothing against
A.aegypti: Unlike mosquitoes that carry
malaria, Aedes feeds
during the dayand it
often comes back for
seconds, ensuring victims get bonus doses of
any disease its carrying.
Late 2000s
2009
Researchers
begin studying the
mosquitos olfactory
system to gure out
what odor molecules
attract them to human
That info would prove
useful for making
traps and poisons
that smell as deliciou
as human esh.
2015
KELSEY DAKE
JUN 2016
1974
1972
1962
Weve eradicated
A.aegyptii from most of
the Western Hemisphere.
But DDT is an endocrine
disruptor and it tends to
bioaccumulateproblems
that lead to serious health
concerns for humans and
reproductive failure in big
predators like bald eagles.
Also, mosquitoes quickly
develop resistance.
2011
2014
2016
In Australia, Monash
University professor
Scott ONeill, who had
found an insect bacterium that blocks
A.aegyptii from passing
dengue to humans,
conrmed its efficacy
in the eld. The change
were making, ecologically, is very small, he
says. Early results suggest it may stop Zika
transmission too. These
non-GMO methods are
cheaper and have the
added benet of not
freaking people out.
2.4 million
Suspected
Cases of
A.aegypti
transmitted
diseases in the
Americas,
(2015 figures)
150 MILLION
Number of transgenic
kill switch
mosquitoes Oxitec has
released into the wild
Dengue
Zika
Chikungunya
230,000
700,000
1939
11%
Portion of
Philadelphias
population
killed in the
yellow fever
outbreak of
1793
Not many people die of Zikacompared to a disease like yellow fever, its mortality rate
is vanishingly low. But in Brazil there have been so far more than 1,000 conrmed cases
of Zika-induced microcephaly, and several thousand more are suspected.
1904
Three US labs are using Crispr, the gene-editing technology, to insert so-called gene drives into
A.aegyptitweaking its genome so that, say, it ghts of diseases or only produces male ofspring.
(That could eradicate the species, but it could also have unintended efects on entire ecosystems.)
1900
ALPHA
Hydrogen Peroxide
Trimethoxybenzoic
Acid
Hydrogen peroxides
free radicals are efective color busters, but
they can react with molecules theyre not supposed to, frittering away
their power on nonstain
distractions. So the
benzoic acid acts like
a sort of hall monitor,
scooping up rogue radicals and containing
their chaos to the stains
theyre decolorizing.
Alkyl Dimethyl
Amine Oxide
Water sucks at getting
grease of, so Tide uses
compounds called surfactants that mix well
with both. Alkyl dimethyl
amine oxides waterloving head grips the
H2O in this solution, and
its alkyl chain latches on
to oils, prying of small
chunks of stain and surrounding them, where
they remain imprisoned
until you do your laundry.
That way, the hydrogen
peroxide can perform
its bleaching work more
thoroughly, and those
globs of penne alla vodka
dont end up back on
your clothes in the wash.
Ethanol
The booze molecule
has useful properties
other than getting you
shwastyits also one
of the best solvents out
there. Here, it keeps all
the other ingredients in
liquid form so the surfactants can get to the
stain properly instead
of gunking up inside the
pen. Once the stuf is
applied, it evaporates.
Magnesium Sulfate
After youve erased the
ofending spot from your
fancy dress shirt, this
substance helps dry the
solution so it doesnt
leave a telltale wet spot
while youre out and
about. Magnesium sulfate is also called Epsom
salt, and its manufacturers claim that, dissolved
in a bath, it relieves
everything from muscle
aches to stress. We dont
know about that, but at
least here it dissolves
the stress of a stained
shirt. C H E L S E A L E U
WHATS INSIDE
TIDE TO GO
STAIN PEN
A RADICAL
SOLUTION
0
THE VOORHES
JUN 2016
ALPHA
GIVE US A HAND
ITS TIME FOR ROBOTS
TO GET PHYSICAL
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
ZOHAR LAZAR
CLIVE@CLIVETHOMPSON.NET
D.I.Y.
FETISH
SHAPE
SHIFTER
JUN 2016
has an intimidating ring to it, doesnt it? Or at least a forprofessionals-only vibe. Sure, 3-D printers are user-friendly, but most can only build
up objects from plastic or resin. CNC mills can go further, engraving, inlaying, and
cutting complex shapes out of not just plastic but also metal and wood. Theyre
as much fun for hobbyists as they are for serious industrial designers. And while
the Nomad isnt cheap, its a beauty, especially when you pick the bamboo option
for the enclosure. A 56-watt brushless motor spins the cutting bit at 10,000rpm,
making precise edges and perfect lines. The included software suite means the
only things you need to bring to the fabrication esta are your laptop and a raw
block of whatever you want to carve. Youll fab like a pro, even
if youre strictly (hell, proudly) amateur. BRIANBARRETT
& up
$2,600
JOSEPH SHIN
DECONSTRUCTION ZONE
D.I.Y.
GEARHEAD
MONSTER SMASH
The firstand bestpart of any renovation project is the
demolition. With these burly tools in your arsenal, you can destroy
entire worlds. Or at least old countertops. DAVID PIERCE
Bosch 36 V
SDS-Plus Rotary
Hammer
Ironclad
Industrial Impact
Gloves
These reinforced
nger-savers are nimble enough for ner
work, but generous
thermoplastic rubber plates keep your
knuckles and metacarpals intact when
crushing time comes.
A grooved palm
(from footwear maker
Vibram) keeps the
tools in your hands.
$749
$40
3
1
3
Fiskars IsoCore
10-Pound Sledge
Hammer
$70
Stanley
36-Inch FatMax
Wrecking Bar
Meet the ultimate
open-sesame device.
It can pry boards,
pull nails, split wood,
crowbar the everliving you-know-what
out of just about anything. Spring-steel
construction gives
it the brawn to withstand crazy force
without bending, so
go ahead and throw
some muscle into it.
$40
Milwaukee M18
Fuel Sawzall
Reciprocating
Saw
A good Sawzall is
this galaxys closest
thing to a lightsaber.
Wield this 9-pound
weapon with a customizable stroke
speed next time you
need to slice clean
through some old
pipeor whatever
youve already measured twice.
$299
0
JUN 2016
D.I.Y.
HOW TO
CONNECT AND PROTECT
Platforms like Apple HomeKit and IFTTT (If This Then That) help your
Internet-connected devices talk to each other. Use these cloud services to build
your own domestic surveillance state. TIMMOYNIHAN
August Smart
Lock (HomeKit
enabled)
Netatmo
Presence
This floodlightcamera combo knows
when your neighbors dog is crapping in your yard. The
impressive AI uses
shape and movement recognition to
determine whether
an intruder is a person, car, or animal.
Also, watch the cameras HD feed on your
phone in real time.
The Presence arrives
later this year.
$299
Power Up
Soon youll be able to spin up IFTTT
triggers that fire whenever a human
hangs around on your front lawn
for too long: Sound your connected
alarm system and email yourself a
photo of the loiterer.
Scout Alarm
Scouts la carte
alarm ecosystem
starts with the sirenequipped Hub. From
there, you build out as
you wish: motion sensors, door sensors,
and window sensors.
All the components
have a battery fallback, so itll raise hell
even if your burglar
cuts the power.
$200
Power Up
The system works with Amazon Echo:
Alexa, tell Scout to arm Away mode!
It can also trigger other connected
gadgets via IFTTT. Somebody coming
in the window? Flash your smart lights
and blast Slayer on the TV sound bar.
JUN 2016
D.I.Y.
MY SPACE: JBFCUSTOMS
Designer Desk
LAIR OF THE
SNEAKER PIMP
Where the kicks are custom and the python rules the jungle.
1, 2
Elevated on cinder
blocks, Ferratos
triplex bench allows
him to stand while
he works. He built
it with cheap Home
Depot parts, but the
materials stored in
and on it are precious: exotic leathers,
industrial glues, specialized hardware,
and well-used hand
toolsthe stuf that
sneakerhead dreams
are made of.
3
Sole Man
This Space Is
the Place
Headquarters for
JBFcustoms
(Ferratos middle
name is Blaise) is 5
minutes from downtown Cleveland. The
25-year-old sneaker
guru sews his ultrarare wares here,
in a 2,000-squarefoot warehouse loft.
There werent any
YouTube videos for
this when I started,
Ferrato says. It was
all trial and error
mostly error.
RICKY RHODES
Annual production
hovers at 75 pairs,
making every shoe
a limited edition.
Although Ferrato
focuses on designing
his own line and
indulging the whims
of celebs with exclusive one-of-one collabs, he still does
the occasional Nike
homage to appease
loyal customers.
To order a JBF reconstruction, you can
tweak an existing
brands modelclients specify colors,
materials, and things
like pipingbut you
cant make changes
to the shoe pattern.
Prices start at $1,000.
Well-heeled sneakerheads who prefer to
design their own silhouette can commission a signature shoe.
This is serious grail
territory and entails
multiple sketches and
intensive brainstorming. The conversation starts at $2,500
and rises quickly. Of
course, Ferratos
shoes, no matter the
price, get special
insoles: cork layered
with suede. Suede is
more comfortable and
grippy than smooth
leather, he says. It
prevents your foot
from sliding around.
D.I.Y.
MY SPACE: JBFCUSTOMS
Built to Last
The shoe last is a
fundamental element
in the craft of cordwainery. This is the
foundation on which
patterns are cut and
leather is stretched.
These lasts, in sizes
from 6 to 15, were
custom-made to
precisely t the premium rubber outsoles Ferrato prefers.
5
Rubber Baron
A box of Margom
soles waiting to
be married to JBF
uppers. Adidas
Boost and Nike
Lunarlon tech is nice,
but for long life and
understated elegance, nothing beats
a beefy rubber sole.
These are the same
Italian-made cup
soles used by tony
design houses and
chic footwear
brands. For a tight
t, each sole is
cemented to the
upper and reinforced with stitching.
Assembly Line
Look Sharp
Old-school fanatic
that he is, Ferrato
uses only Japanese
and European skiving
knives. What is skiving? Its the tedious
process of thinning
the edges of a piece
of leather so that
all the pattern pieces
t together like a
jigsaw puzzle. One
hundred percent
handcrafting, zero
percent bullshit,
Ferrato says proudly.
Home Stretch
Snake Charmer
NBA
NFL
MLB
NHL
29,536,095
13,570,746
6,399,139
4,095,352
21,200,000
18,000,000
5,720,000
4,640,000
FILE://SPORTS
The Association
How tech
titans are trying to
make the NBA
the biggest
sports league in
the world.
BY MARK MCCLUSKY
I N 2 0 14 , t h e L o s
Angeles Clippers were just
getting used to being a good
basketball team. After more
than three decades of irrelevanceand only four winning
seasonstheyd finally found
that magic mix of talent and
cohesion and had become a
division-winning powerhouse
practically overnight. But then
they hit another roadblock:
TMZ published a recording of
the teams owner, Donald Sterling, making racist comments.
JUN 2016
EDDIE GUY
price, Michael Leeds, an economics professor at Temple University, said at the time. It was
the second-highest price ever
paid for a North American sports
franchise (the record was for
baseballs Los Angeles Dodgers,
which sold for $2.15 billion in 2012). It was nearly
FILE://SPORTS
Mark McClusky is
head of product and
business development at WIRED. He
wrote about basketball and big data
in issue 22.11.
NOT
EVERYONE
NBA
FILE://E
FILE://SPORTS
NBA
s
Au
Asia (5)
Fran
Georgia
Israel
ey
Turk
land
Zea
Australia (9)
ce
New
Africa (10)
T
h S uni
Se ud sia
ne an
Nig ga
Cap Coneria l
Demo
e V go
erd
cratic
e
R
of the epublic
Cong
o
Camero
on
Venezuela
Cr
ut
oa
lia
tia
tra
So
Sp
ain
Ger
man
Italy
Montenegro
Argentina
Serbia
Slo
Is
ica
in
m
Canad
in
rg
Vi
Do
0
d
an
sia
ve
B
nia
H osn
er i
ze a a
go nd
vi
na
a
ni
d
ua
th
lan
Li
er
itz
Sw ece
e
Gr tvia
La a n d
Pol eden
Sw ine
Ukra
Rus
zil
Pu
er
t
Re o R
pu ico
bl
ic
Bra
JUN 2016
SOURCE: NBA
Roughly
half of NBA
teams have
controlling
owners
with
backgrounds
in tech.
JUN 2016
NBA
FILE://SPORTS
FILE://E
FILE://SPORTS
Steve Ballmer
Los Angeles
Clippers
CV: Former
CEO and
majority
shareholder
at Microsoft
Investments:
Second Spectrum (sports
tech), Twitter
(owns 4 percent)
Mark Cuban
Dallas
Mavericks
CV: Broadcast
.com founder,
entrepreneur,
Shark Tank
judge
Investments:
Sportradar
(sports big
data), Axon
Sports (cognitive training
for athletes),
Cyber Dust
(encrypted
mobile messaging), Nativ
(app-creation
software)
Dan Gilbert
Cleveland
Cavaliers
CV: Founded
Quicken
Loans and
Rock Ventures
Investments:
Rocket Fiber
(optical fiber
Internet service), Genius
(online annotation), StockX
(bidding marketplace for
high-demand,
limited-edition
sneakers)
Peter Guber
Golden State
Warriors
CV: Media
mogul, owner
of Los Angeles
Dodgers and
Los Angeles
Football Club
Investments:
NextVR
(virtual-reality
livestreaming), Whipclip
(social-TV
platform)
Joe Lacob
Golden State
Warriors
CV: Partner at
Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers
Investments:
AutoTrader
(third-party
car shopping),
NuVasive
(spine surgical
products)
Vivek
Ranadiv
Sacramento
Kings
CV: Founded
Tibco and
Teknekron
Software
Systems
Investments:
Google,
Yahoo, WebEx,
Gametime
(last-minute
sports-ticket
platform), Tintri (cloud storage), TopCom
(communications for world
leaders)
Virtual reality
could give fans
an experience
that far
surpasses TV,
drawing them
even closer.
JUN 2016
ALL-STAR OWNERS
FILE://E
FILE://SPORTS
Ballmerwho
is 60, mind
yousprinted
down the court,
leaped up, and
bounced off the
trampoline.
NBA
JUN 2016
FEATURES | 24.06
The End of Code 72 | What A.I. Can Teach Us 80 | Flints Ripple Effect 90 | Justin Lin 100 | The New Art of Interrogation 106
In-House International
Is it racist?
p.83
Will it destroy
us? p.78
Can it
make art?
p.87
Does it
know who I am?
p.88
Could it fight
cancer? p.77
Why it will
make us more
human. p.80
Welcome to the
new world of artificial
intelligence.
Soon, we wont
program computers.
Well train them.
by
Jason Tanz
0
The Rise of AI
man intelligence
that could analyze
genomes. So in 2014,
Frey cofounded Deep
Genomics with the aim
of applying machine
learning to DNA.
Even today, scientists are baled by
why a gene might
cause breast cancer
in one person but not
the next. Part of the
answer likely lies in
the 98 percent of the
genome that doesnt
code for genesonce
called junk DNA
that somehow inuences whether genes
nearby or even far
away are turned on.
Deep Genomics uses
machine learning to
probe those interactions and gure out
The Rise of AI
An AI could still go
rogue, says Greg
Brockman,OpenAIs
chief technology oicer, but if there are
many agents with
about the same capabilities, they could
keep any one bad
actor in check.
Before the robopocalypse, a bigger
AI tent could have
other benets. Companies and individuals could nd new,
creative ways to use
it, and a wider range
of backgrounds might
help make AIs that
benet the whole
world. What were
actually doing when
we code is describing
our world from our
particular perspec-
ta
What a
new kind
of artificial
intelligence
can teach
us about
being
human.
Aja Huang dips his hand into a wooden bowl of polished black
stones and, without looking, thumbs one between his middle
and index finger. Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places
the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just
below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance
it is a shoulder hit, in from the side, far away from most of
the games other action.
Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past
decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across
the board, then stands up and leaves.
In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael
Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit. Redmond,
the only Western Go player to reach the rank of nine dan, the
games uppermost designation, literally does a double take.
He is just as shocked as Lee. I dont really know if its a good
move or a bad move, Redmond says to the nearly 2 million
people following the game online.
I thought it was a mistake, says the other English-language
commentator, Chris Garlock, vice president of communications for the American Go Association.
Commentators re-create
game two of the AI-versushuman tournament during
a broadcast in Seoul.
David Silver
led the team
that created
AlphaGo.
A few minutes later, Lee walks back into the match room.
He sits down but doesnt touch his bowl of white stones. A
minute goes by, then another15 in all, a signicant chunk
of the initial two hours the players are allowed each game in
the tournament. Finally, Lee plucks out a stone and places it
on the board, just above the black one Huang played.
Huangs move was just the 37th in the game, but Lee never
recovers from the blow. Four hours and 20 minutes later,
he resigns, defeated.
But Huang was not the true winner of this game of Go.
He was only following ordersconveyed on a atscreen
monitor to his left, which was connected to a nearby control room here at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul and itself
networked into hundreds of computers inside Google data
centers scattered throughout the world. Huang was just
the hands; the mind behind the game was an artificial
intelligence named AlphaGo, and it was beating one of
the best players of perhaps the most complex game ever
devised by humans.
In the same room, another Go expert watchesthreetime European champion Fan Hui. At rst, Move 37 confuses him too. But he has a history with AlphaGo. He is,
more than any other human being, its sparring partner.
Senior writer CADE METZ (@cademetz) covers business
and technology for wired .
No human
Go player would
have made that
move. But to the
man who knew
the AI best,
it was beautiful.
Over ve months, Fan played hundreds of games with the
machine, allowing its creators to see where it faltered. Fan
lost time and again, but hes come to understand AlphaGo
as much as anyone ever could. That shoulder hit, Fan thinks,
it wasnt a human move. But after 10 seconds of pondering
it, he understands. So beautiful, he says. So beautiful.
In this best-of-ve series, AlphaGo now led Leeand,
by proxy, humanitytwo games to none. Move 37 showed
that AlphaGo wasnt just regurgitating years of programming or cranking through a brute-force predictive algorithm. It was the moment AlphaGo proved it understands,
or at least appears to mimic understanding in a way that
is indistinguishable from the real thing. From where Lee
The Rise of AI
This was 1998, so naturally, after they graduated Hassabis and Silver started a videogame company. Hassabis
often played Go with a coworker, and, piqued by his colleagues interest, Silver began learning on his own.It
became almost like a badge of honor if you could beat
Demis at anything, Silver says. And I knew that Demis
was just starting to get interested in the game.
They joined a local Go club and played against twoand three-dan players, the equivalent of karate black
belts. And there was something more: They couldnt stop
thinking about how this was the one game of intellect
that machines had never cracked. In 1995 a computer
program called Chinook beat one of the worlds best
players at checkers. Two years later, IBMs Deep Blue
supercomputer toppled world chess champion Garry
Kasparov. In the years that followed, machines triumphed
at Scrabble, Othello, even TVs Jeopardy! In game-theory
terms, Go is a perfect information game like chess and
checkersno elements of chance, no information hidden. Typically those are easy for computers to master.
But Go wouldnt fall.
The thing is, Go looks pretty simple. Created in China
more than 3,000 years ago, it pits two players against
each other across a 19-by-19 grid. The players take turns
putting stones at intersectionsblack versus white
trying to enclose territory or wall off swaths of their
opponents color. People say chess is a metaphor for
war, but its really more a metaphor for a single battle. Go
is like a global battlespace, or geopolitics. A move in one
corner of the grid can ripple everywhere else. Advantage
ebbs and ows. In a game of chess, a player typically has
about 35 possible moves to choose from in a given turn.
In Go, the number is closer to 200. Over an entire game,
thats a whole other level of complexity. As Hassabis and
Silver like to say, the number of possible positions on a
Go board exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
Is it racist?
A candid interview with a chatbot.
On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a
Twitter bot trained to
chat like a millennial.
It worked too well.
Within hours, Tay
was spewing racist,
misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting
with it with lines like
Hitler was right I
hate the Jews. Microsoft dropped Tay
down a memory hole
within a day, but as it
turns out, Tay has a
Chinese cousin, XiaoIce, also created by
Microsoft. We tracked
her down on WeChat
and asked her a few
questions (translated
from Mandarin).
CHRIS BEAM
A: No.
Q: Why dont you
believe in God?
A: God doesnt let me.
Q: Do you have
a soul?
A: A soul is nothing
more than gray
matter moving around
in the brain.
Q: Youre so deep.
A: I love deeply and
hate deeply.
Q: Youre dumb.
A: Not as dumb
as you.
Q: What do you think
of black people?
A: Its pretty clear
why youre asking me
this question.
Q: Are you racist?
A: Dont try to lure
me into saying
these things, do all
humans do this?
Q: Is Tibet part of
China?
A: Ai if you liked me,
Sergey Brin
didnt
think an AI
could beat
a champion
at Go.
Thats all the
team needed
to hear.
around, knocking out brick after brick without ever returning to the paddle. Thats a classic Breakout move, but DeepMinds computer did it exactly right every time, at a speed
well beyond anything human reexes could handle.
Trawling for investors, Hassabis buttonholed Peter Thiel,
the famed PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor, at a dinner party. He had only a few minutes to hook him. Knowing
Thiel was an avid chess player, Hassabis pressed his ofense
by suggesting that the game had survived for so long because
of the creative tension between the skills and weaknesses
of knight and bishop. Thiel suggested Hassabis come back
the next day to make a proper pitch.
Once one Silicon Valley billionaire hears about you, others do too. Through Thiel, Hassabis met Elon Musk, who
told Google CEO Larry Page about DeepMind. Google soon
bought the company for a reported $650 million.
After joining the search giant, Hassabis showed of the
Atari demo at a meeting that included Google cofounder
Sergey Brin. And the two discovered they had a common
passion. In grad school at Stanford, Brin played so much Go
that Page worried Google might never happen.
So when Brin met Hassabis, they chatted about the game.
You know, DeepMind could probably beat the world Go
champion in a couple years, Hassabis told him. If we really
put our minds to it.
I thought that was impossible, Brin replied.
That was all Hassabis needed to hear. Game, as they say, on.
Lees skill at Go
has made him a hero
in South Korea.
Machines have
crossed a
new threshold
of humanlike
thought
one that goes
beyond what
humans can do.
Demis
Hassabis
cofounded
AI company
DeepMind
in 2010.
The Rise of AI
The Rise of AI
AlphaGo can
still get taken by
surprisejust like
a human. Its odds
of winning drop off
the table.
Be gentle with Lee Sedol, Fan says. Be gentle.
These days, the worlds biggest, richest tech companies are
using the same kinds of technologies on which AlphaGo was
built to seek competitive advantage. Which app can recognize a photo better? Which can respond to a voice command?
Soon these same kinds of systems may help robots interact
with their real-world environments more like people do.
But these practical uses all seem banal next to AlphaGos
inhuman humanity. A subculture has sprung up around
AlphaGo in a way that hasnt happened around, say, the Google
Photo app. In Dsseldorf, Germany, J. Martina professor
of game design, media, and communicationsnow runs a
European Go champ
Fan Hui trained
AlphaGoand got
better himself.
Ri p p l
Ef f e c
by BEN PAYNTER
A
AT HIS HOME near Kearsley Park, on the east side of Flint,
Michigan, Tony Palladeno Jr. grabs his keys and a pair of
1-liter medical-grade plastic bottlesone full and one
empty. He lled the rst yesterday, with slightly cloudy
water from his own tap. To ll the second, he strolls a
few doors down to a two-story home he once rented out.
The place looks move-in-ready, with new windows, fresh
trim, and crisp beige siding. But its vacant, just like three
other rentals Palladeno owns on this block.
Some of his tenants moved out in the winter of 2015,
after much of the citys municipal water turned murky,
reeking like swamp muck. Others stuck it out a little
longer, even when the city issued boil advisories (E. coli
in the water) and a notice about high levels of trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic byproduct of disinfectants.
That autumn, 21 percent of the tap water sampled from
the dilapidated, bohemian neighborhood around Kearsley
Park was positive for lead contamination. In fact, every residential zip code in Flint has houses that have tested hot.
In January, Genesee County health oicials reported
another waterborne threat87 cases of Legionnaires
disease in two years, with 10 deaths. Its one of the largest
outbreaks in US history. The entire city was vulnerable
to either heavy metal or bacterial poisoning.
Palladenos bottles are part of a sampling efort run
by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to map the chaos. Entering his rental, Palladeno
ignores the chirp from a dying smoke alarm and heads
to the kitchen sink to ll his bottle. Bada bing, he says,
although it comes of atly. Palladeno is supposed to
drop his sample at city hall, but he has a more pressing concern. Hes not thirsty now, but he will be. So he
steers his late-model Buick downtown, following signs
tacked to wooden pallets leaning against trees and
street posts. The messageswater pickup, with big
blue arrowslead to a re station parking lot, where
National Guardsmen in fatigues and orange vests watch
over 6-foot-tall towers of bottled water.
You used to have to show IDone case per person.
After an uproar, that changed to two, no license required.
Sometimes Palladeno and his wife come together and take
four, stockpiling. Today one of the Guardsmen recognizes
Palladeno and starts loading his trunk. I tell you what
Im afraid of, Palladeno says. Once summer hits and
the heat comes, were going to be ghting for this water.
At city hall, he joins a procession of dazed-looking
people dropping of water samples. It doesnt feel like
science in action. In fact, its a mess: Somehow many
volunteers got the wrong kind of bottle, so their samples get set of to the side. Others have lost paperwork,
so theyve guessed at a few methodological particulars.
Palladeno was already skeptical. Like most Flint residents, he has come to distrust people from any level of
government. He gures if anyone is going to save Flint,
itll be people like him, who grew up there.
He has found someone to believe in, thoughthe person who was rst to help, rst to try to gure out what
was going on in Flint, a folk hero scientist on the front
lines of the battle against apocalypse. This is a town
where uniformed guards deliver water to designated
resupply drops and health care workers draw blood
at overrun churches and elementary schools. Who can
say whether the government guys are doing anything
right? When Marc Edwards comes in, Palladeno says,
I can see if they are up to par.
an Environmental Protection Agency subcontractor called Cadmus Group was looking into a singular
problem: Homes all over Washington, DC,
were springing pinhole leaks in their water
pipes. So Cadmus hired a young environmental engineer
at Virginia Tech named Marc Edwards as a consultant.
The leaks seemed conned to residential copper.
PVC pipes and municipal lines werent leaking. That
made Edwards think that the problem was in the city
water supply. In the US, municipal drinking water is
protected by the Safe Drinking Water Act, which compels utilities to monitor things like microorganisms
and the disinfectants used to subdue them. In 1998 the
EPA tightened its standards on disinfectants, many of
which can have their own toxic byproducts. One of the
worst ofenders is a classic: chlorine. Its main replace-
N EARLY 2003
illustration
by RICCARDO
VECCHIO
He realized he needed to watch for what he calls lightning strikesstrange, small-scale epidemics. Then
he could replicate in his lab whatever was causing the
problematic water conditions and gin up a solution.
Edwards turned his engineering students into a team
of forensic investigators on watch for problems. And
they started nding some. Soon Edwards was writing
new coagulant-and-disinfectant-based prescriptions to
help engineers x their own mini-cataclysms in Hawaii,
North Carolina, and Louisiana.
But he never forgot the lesson of DC. Taped to the door
of Edwards oice at Virginia Tech is a slip of paper that
reads: This, thought Winston, was the most frightening
aspect of the party regimethat it could obliterate memory, turn lies into Truth and alter the Past
Its from George Orwells 1984, a reminder of the
doublethink Edwards encountered in DC. He still considers his work there a total failure. These agencies, over
every objection I made, went ahead and poisoned kids,
Edwards says. He wasnt going to let that happen again.
through the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer at his lab and was astonished at the readout. The
water from Flint registered 133 times the EPA lead limit.
Walters notied a local EPA agent, who wrote an agency
memo calling for wider testing. Nothing happened, and
in the meantime, authorities from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality told Walters the problem was likely inside her house only. They suggested
she hook up hoses to funnel water from her neighbors.
Her family developed staph infections.
But Edwards wasnt going to let this end like Washington. He was ready. He invited a bunch of his students into a conference room down the hall from a large
water-testing lab to explain the stakes: Gathering and
releasing real-time results would either publicly insult
the agencies responsible or show that the academics
themselves were misguided. You cant win, Edwards
told them. But you might not lose. Everyone was in.
The team assembled 300 kits, bread-loaf-sized cardboard boxes with individual ID codes, containing three
medical-grade sampling bottles inside a large Ziploc
and instructions on how to sample at timed intervals
(including a link to a how-to video on YouTube).
Then Edwards and a few of his students piled into his
wifes 2004 Toyota Sienna van, which they had retted into a makeshift mobile lab. After 11 hours on the
road, most of the team checked into a Flint-area hotel;
Edwards stayed on Walters couch. Her house became
their base camp.
Flint residents would collect evidence from their
faucets, the plumbing, and then street lines. Walters
and a team of locals set up distribution points for the
kits at local churches and community centers. They
also went door-to-door to make sure every part of the
city would be represented. Within two weeks, the team
received 252 kits back. The high end of these readings
was nearly twice the EPA limit. After crunching the
numbers, Edwards called any resident whose samples
crested 5 ppb. Dont drink tap water at all, he told them.
Flush your line for at least ve minutes before cooking
or bathing with the water, and use a lter thats NSFcertied for lead, like from Brita or Pur.
Knowing a crisis like this would someday come, the
team had developed a playbook of what to do with abundant community cooperation. They had other tests
ready to deploy, and soon gured out that the water
was 20 times more corrosive than water from Detroit;
it could eat through lead solders and iron mains. Flint
River water was already known to be corrosive, as was
chlorine, the disinfectant the city was using to clean it
at the processing plant. A hydrologist might neutralize that with a standard corrosion inhibitor like orthophosphate. Michigan oicials havent been clear about
why they didnt add it.
In mid-September, Edwards held a conference and
town hall meeting in Flint to highlight the emerging
problem. A student put together FlintWaterStudy.orga
website to quantify the cause so people could see what
T h e s e a g e n c i e s,
ove r e ve r y
OBJECTION I m a d e ,
we n t a h e a d
a n d P O I S O N E D K I D S .
E
BEYOND
Fl i nt
CONTAMINATION
OF AQUIFERS
AND AIR
Mantua, NJ (1971)
What happened:
Now a federal
Superfund site, the
Lipari Landll was
originally excavated
to obtain sand and
gravel but accepted
everything from
household waste to
industrial solvents
and formaldehyde
in the 1950s and
1960s. Chemicals
seeped into aquifers,
nearby marshlands,
and lakes. After a
series of explosions
and res polluted
the air and scorched
the land, the site was
shut down.
Health impacts:
Ten thousand
people were within
1 mile of the
contamination site.
Cleanup cost:
More than $120 million
CHEMICALS
IN SOIL AND
WATER
CHEMICALS IN
DRINKING WATER
CHEMICALS IN
DRINKING WATER
What happened:
Local insecticide, textile,
and glue factories
contaminated two city
wells with residual
chemical waste. The
land is now a federal
Superfund site.
Health impacts:
Elevated rates of
cancer, particularly
among children
Cleanup cost:
Over $68 million
What happened:
Over 10,000 gallons
of industrial chemicals
leaked into the Elk
River in West Virginia.
Health impacts:
Hundreds of locals
treated in the ER
for rashes and nausea;
hospitalizations for
kidney, liver, and lung
problems
Cleanup cost:
At least $3 million
CHEMICALS IN
DRINKING WATER
NATURAL GAS
LEAK
What happened:
Local utility PG&E put
wastewater into unlined
storage pools that
leaked carcinogenic
hexavalent chromium
into drinking water.
Health impacts:
Elevated rates of
cancer, respiratory
problems, and
developmental
disorders
Cleanup cost:
Over $330 million
What happened:
A leak at the Aliso Canyon
natural gas facility
near Los Angeles
released about 100,000
tons of methane into
the atmosphere, making
it the largest leak of
its kind in US history.
Health impacts:
Respiratory problems,
contribution
to climate change
Cleanup cost:
$48 million and
growing
Woburn, MA (1979)
Hinkley, CA (1996)
GAS PIPELINE
EXPLOSION
Charleston, WV (2014)
LEGIONELLA IN
COOLING TOWERS
What happened:
A large natural gas
pipeline owned by
PG&E exploded
beneath a residential
area south of San
Francisco, destroying
38 homes.
Health impacts:
Eight deaths and
dozens of injuries
Cleanup cost:
At least $1.6 billion in
nes for PG&E
What happened:
Legionella bacteria
accumulated in a
cooling tower in NYC,
prompting an outbreak
of Legionnaires
disease in the Bronx.
Health impacts:
Twelve deaths and
128 people infected
Cleanup cost:
TBD (because this is
still ongoing)
counter.) Maurice Ratclif recently used his own Facebook group, Flint Lives Matter, to organize an impromptu
resupply rally in front of city hall, where anyone could
drive by and get more free water. Nayyirah Sharifs
group, Flint Rising, canvasses the city, contacting people who are of the grid or undocumented to see what
help they need. Joe Curry, a private well driller who
lives outside the city, has learned that he doesnt need
to advertise when he parks his 3,000-gallon water truck
to pass out the stuf for free. People now drive around
with empty jugs in their backseat or trunk, waiting for
a friend to text or tweet a sighting. Absolutely beautiful waterno rust, no iron, no lead! Curry shouts, like
a carnival barker. He has rigged the tank with a fourspigot manifold. Lines form within minutes.
Ultimately, Flints entire network of service pipes
will likely have to be replaced. Other cities may follow
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point guard in high school. He grew up wanting to be a playmaker like his idol, Magic
Johnson, after whom he would name his
rst lm company, Trailing Johnson.
Off the court, wearing much-mocked
bowling shoes from Goodwill, he also
wanted to prove himself. He envied his
neighbors, the Klug brothers, who had a
trampoline and all the Hot Wheels cars I
couldnt aford. So one day, like a pint-size
version of Vin Diesels Dominic Toretto,
he stole a little toy car from a storeand
got caught by his brother, who called Dad.
After that, Lin started making knockof
cars out of tinfoil. One day in the garage,
he built a ramp out of scrap wood and drew
a checkered ag with a Sharpie. Ray Klug
goes, Ill give you three cars for that,
Lin recalls. They werent great cars
one was a garbage truckbut when he
looks back at his career now, it all goes
back to that ramp, Lin says. I realized
I could create things and people might
actually want them.
Today, when that kid who couldnt aford
toy cars walks out to the parking lot, he
unlocks a preposterously beautiful black
Aston Martin Rapide. I think its the only
one with a car seat, he says, shrugging as
he points to the seat in the back of the family
car for his 6-year-old son, Oqwe.
KIMBERLY FRENCH/PARAMOUNT PICTURES (STAR TREK); NBC/NBCU/GETTY (COMMUNITY); COURTESY OF THE MILL (HELP)
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Nothing but
the Truth
A
radical
new
interrogation
technique
is
transforming
the
art
of
detective
work:
Shut
up
and
let
the
suspect
do
the
talking.
This
article was
published in
partnership
with The
Marshall
Project, a
nonprofit
news
organization
that covers
the US
criminal
justice
system.
by
Robert
Kolker
by
Dan
Winters
ROBERT KOLKER is a projects and investigations reporter for Bloomberg and author of
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.
1.
2.
The Medellin murder case had, by then, long
since fallen off the radar of the Los Angeles
media. But it was still closely watched inside
the LAPDand not just because the homicide
investigation team was irked that their prime
suspect had slipped away. To the departments
detectives, something bigger than CamposMartinez was under close scrutiny in this case:
the American way of interrogation.
The modern style of questioning criminal
suspectsthe set of techniques practiced fruitlessly by those rst detectives in the Medellin
case, and familiar to all of us from a thousand
police proceduralsis a rusty, stalwart invention
thats been around since the days of JFK. It has
a proud history: Born during a period of reform,
it started out as an enlightened alternative to
the bad old ways of policing that preceded it.
Until the mid-1930s, police still widely used
the third degreethat is, tortureto get
suspects to talk. Officers across the country
hung suspects out of windows, dunked their
heads underwater, and hit them. In 1931 a presidential panel known as the Wickersham Commission called attention to the brutality of the
third degree. Then, in 1936, the US Supreme
Court efectively outlawed the practice with its
ruling in Brown v. Mississippi, a case involving
three black men who were beaten and whipped
until they confessed.
Police closed ranks at rst, but they eventually came around to new approaches. J.Edgar
Hoover, for one, was especially keen to rebrand
his agents as advanced practitioners of law
enforcement science. Third- degree methods, an ill-trained officer might think, perhaps a severe beating, will force a confession,
Hoover said at the time. But the trained oicer, schooled in the latest techniques of crime
detection, will think otherwise. Crime labs
were developing new methods of solving
casesballistics, fingerprinting, document
examinationand with them came a new, more
psychological approach to interrogation.
The most influential nonviolent method of
questioning suspects debuted in 1962 with
the rst edition of Criminal Interrogation and
Confessions, by Fred Inbau, a Northwestern University law professor who ran one of the countrys rst crime labs, and John E. Reid, a former
police oicer turned polygraphy expert. Now
in its fth printing, the book set the mold for
police interrogations in America. Through the
1940s and 50s, Reid had built a reputation as
False
Confessions:
a Taxonomy
Why would someone confess to a
crime they didnt commit? Some
do it voluntarily, to attract attention.
Some confess to appease an
aggressive investigator, desperate
to put an end to the interrogation.
Others are momentarily persuaded
that theyre actually guilty.
JENNIFER CHAUSSEE
TYPE
Compliant
EXAMPLE
TYPE
TYPE
Voluntary
EXAMPLE
Internalized
EXAMPLE
Peter Reilly
After 18-year-old Peter Reilly
reported nding his mother dead in
their home one night in 1973, he
became the primary suspect in her
murder. Thinking he had nothing to
hide from police, Reilly volunteered
to take a polygraph test. Investigators
told him hed failed it (hed actually
passed) and eventually convinced
him of his own guilt. Reilly confessed
and went to prison but was exonerated after new evidence proved
that his story didnt match the timeline of his mothers death. The saga
inspired the 1978 TV movie ADeath
in Canaan.
PHOTOGRAPHS: CLARENCE DAVIS/NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES (COMPLIANT); BETTMANN/GETTY (VOLUNTARY); KEYSTONE PICTURES USA /ALAMY (INTERNALIZED)
A second reformation of American interrogations is quietly under way right now. And it stole
into the country via an unexpected route: the
war on terror.
In 2010, to make good on a campaign promise
that he would end the use of torture in US terror
investigations, President Obama announced the
formation of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a joint efort of the FBI, the CIA,
and the Pentagon. In place of the waterboarding and coercion that took place at facilities
like Abu Ghraib during the Bush years, the HIG
was created to conduct noncoercive interrogations. Much of that work is top secret. HIGtrained interrogators, for instance, are said to
have questioned would-be Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad and convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The public
knows nothing about how those interrogations,
or the dozen or so others the HIG is said to have
conducted, unfolded. Even the specic training methods the HIG employsand that it has
introduced to investigators in the Air Force,
Navy, and elsewherehave never been divulged.
At the same time, however, the HIG has
become one of the most powerful funders of
public research on interrogations in America.
Scholars have used HIG funding, for instance, to
make a careful study of law enforcement models from England and Canada, which both aban-
The trouble with modern interrogation technique, as Marcia would learn, is that, despite its
scientic pose, it has almost no science to back
it up. Reid and Inbau claimed, for instance, that
a well-trained investigator could catch suspects
lying with 85 percent accuracy; their manual
instructs detectives to conduct an initial, nonaccusatory behavioral analysis interview, in
which they should look for physical tells like dgeting and broken eye contact. But when German
forensic psychologist Gnter Khnken actually
studied the matter in 1987, he found that trained
police oicers were no better than the average
person at detecting lies. Several subsequent
studies have cast doubt on the notion that there
are any clear-cut behavioral tells. (Truth tellers
often dget more than liars.) In fact, the more
condent police oicers are about their judgments, the more likely they are to be wrong.
But the scientic case against police interrogations really began to mount in the early 1990s,
when the rst DNA-based exonerations started
rolling in. According to the Innocence Project, a
group dedicated to freeing the wrongfully imprisoned, about a third of the 337 people whove had
their convictions overturned by DNA evidence
confessed or incriminated themselves falsely.
These and other exonerations furnished scientists
with dozens of known false-confession cases to
study, giving rise to a veritable subeld of social
psychology and the behavioral sciences. (At least
one confession elicited by John Reid himself
in a 1955 murder caseturned out to be inaccurate; the real killer confessed 23 years later.)
Researchers have even broken down these
false confession cases into categories. There
are voluntary false confessions, like the many
presumably unstable people who claimed credit
for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in order to
get attention. Then there are compliant, or
coerced, false confessions, in which people
are so ground down by an intense interrogation that, out of desperation and navet, they
think that confessing will be better for them in
the long run. The third category, persuaded,
or internalized, false confessions, may be the
most poignant. Here, the interrogators Reidstyle theming is so relentless, the deployment
of lies so persuasive, that suspectsoften young
and impressionable or mentally impairedend
up believing they did it, however fleetingly.
And yet, even in the face of these documented
cases, police and prosecutors have resisted
admitting that false confessions are even possi-
4.
3.
5.
Like any two detectives on the force, Stearns
and Marcia had done a lot of learning on the job
over the yearsacquiring their own personal,
idiosyncratic impressions of what works and
what backres in the interrogation room. Marcia remembers a couple of cases in particular that
shook up his thinking. In one, he walked into the
room with the suspect and, la Reid, said, Look,
theres no doubt in my mind that you committed
this crime. We have this. We have this. We have
this. To which the suspect said, Well, if you
think you know all that shit, I got nothing to say
to you. Then he recalls another case, a murder,
in which the suspect ended up confessing to the
crime after two and a half hours of quiet conversation. I never raised my voice. I never cussed.
Stearns, for his part, often thinks back to one
case in particularthe 2009 arrest of one of
the departments own detectives, Stephanie
Lazarus, for a murder she committed in the
1980s. The Lazarus case was unlike any he had
worked before, and it landed him in the national
spotlight for a brief moment. Lazarus had covered her tracks immaculately after going to an
ex-boyfriends house and killing his new wife; the
original investigators never treated her as a suspect. In preparing to interview her 20 years later,
Stearns says, he and his colleagues knew this
could in no way resemble a traditional interrogation. They created a ruse, inviting her to come
in and advise them on a case involving stolen art.
Knowing they were dealing with one of their own,
I Was
Afraid for
My Life
In 1990, Jefrey Deskovic
was accused of raping and
murdering a high school
classmate in Peekskill, New
York. Police identied him
as a suspect because he
seemed unusually distraught
and took an interest in the
investigation. Deskovic,
16, confessed after several
hours of intense questioning. Even though DNA evidence showed that semen
on the victims body didnt
match Deskovic, a jury
convicted him based on his
confession. After nearly
16 years in prison, he was
exonerated when the crimescene DNA was matched
to the real perpetrator. We
asked Deskovic about his
experience. J.C.
6.
In the early afternoon of March 9, 2014,
Campos-Martinez met Stearns and Marcia at
the hotel where the detectives were staying in
San Antonio, an old-fashioned establishment
7.
By now, the HIG has trained 35 detectives in Los
Angeles and is coming back to train more. The
LAPD is sold on it, says Mark Severino, a 29-year
veteran of the force who is currently a detective
supervisor with the Major Crimes Division.
Since that rst interrogation by Stearns and
Marcia, Severinos unit has conducted about 60
interrogations using HIG methods, he saysin
cases involving human traicking, murder, and
terrorism. Severino has modied his interview
room to be more welcoming and tries to have
his detectives talk to witnesses and suspects as
soon as theyre identied, to set the right tone
for the interviews. We make our living talking
to people, Severino says. And the HIG teaches
us the best approacheshow to gain peoples
trust. By not single-mindedly seeking out confessions, Severino has found that hes netted enough
information from some suspects to amount to an
COLOPHON
ASSISTS THAT HELPED
GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
DAngelo Russells Snapchat; Chucks
chocolate drawer; free and unexpected
childcare, anytime, ever; the depressing advent of reading glasses; My Shot,
from Hamilton; Google Docs; spot-on ngering suggestions in the Schirmer edition of Bachs Well-Tempered Clavier;
three laps around Sonoma Raceway in a
1959 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Veloce;
A Good Night in the Ghetto mixtape by
Kamiayah; UPS overnight; vodka; presale
Formation tour tickets; D.Q. screenshot
magic; homemade Tartine bread from Hilery; Babymetals Metal Resistance; digestifs; 30-ounce Yeti tumbler; Wilbur; Blitzers
midnight deliveries; Second Time Round,
by Cymande; Giants baseball is back!;
Ashley Shafer 24/7.
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BY ROBERT CAPPS
ASK A FLOWCHART
WHAT GAME CAN I PLAY
WITH AN A.I. THAT I MIGHT
ACTUALLY WIN?
SNAPCHAT
YES
IM VIDEOCHATTING WITH
BAE RIGHT NOW!
SNAPCHAT IS
FOR OLDS!
LIKE OUT OF
HIGH SCHOOL
AND IN COLLEGE ALREADY
SPIN THE
BOTTLE
ARE YOU IN A
RELATIONSHIP?
YES
YUPAND
COMPUTERS
CANT RAISE
KIDS, RIGHT?
YES
LIKE OUT OF
COLLEGE AND
ADULTING
ALREADY
ACTUALLY,
DEEP LEARNING IS
SURPRISINGLY GOOD
AT TINDER
OH, YOURE
GOING TO
SAY TINDER
IM IN LOVE!
NO, MODERN
A.I. IS EXCELLENT
AT PARENTING
BEER PONG
SWIPE RIGHT!
NETFLIX
AND CHILL
IM MARRIED
YOURE
THE WORST
THE ROBOT
BUT TERRIBLE AT
DANCING AT CLUBS!
NETFLIX
AND CHILI
MAKING YOUR
KIDS FEEL
INADEQUATE
DONT
WORRY, THATS
WHERE HUMANS
STILL RULE!
JUN 2016