Top Stories in January: Backlash to the 10-Year Challenge

Plus: The myth of the lone genius founder, and 25 movies we can't wait to see this year.

It would be nice to say that 2019 started out so innocently, but with a historic shutdown, a polar vortex for the ages, and explosive allegations that President Trump directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, January 2019 could stand to hum a few bars of a certain Britney Spears song. But what captivated attention the world over was the "10-year-challenge," a cutesy meme where people posted current-day images of themselves next to 10-year-old snapshots. Users flooded social media with the before-and-after uploads, and everyone laughed at how different (or the same) things look. But was it as, ahem, innocent as it seemed? WIRED op-ed contributor Kate O'Neil explored the potentially more nefarious side of the meme, a good reminder that sometimes it's worth contemplating our guilty pleasures.

  • Ten year challenge may be tracing your facial features and collecting the data
    Alyssa Foote; Getty Images
    01

    Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right?

    Opinion: The 2009 vs. 2019 profile picture trend may or may not have been a data collection ruse to train its facial recognition algorithm. But we can't afford to blithely play along.

  • Jerod Harris/Getty Images
    02

    MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder

  • Photograph: Elinor Carucci
    03

    One Couple’s Tireless Crusade to Stop a Genetic Killer

    When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease, she and her husband, Eric Minikel, set out to find a cure.

  • Photo Illustration by WIRED staff; Getty Images
    04

    Trump Must Be a Russian Agent; the Alternative Is Too Awful

    We know a lot about the “what” of the Mueller probe’s findings. The crucial questions now focus on the “why.”

  • Photo Credit: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
    05

    The 25 Movies We Already Can’t Wait to See in 2019

    From M. Night Shyamalan to manga adaptations to Marvel endings (and beginnings), there's a lot to look forward to this year.

  • Casey Chin
    06

    Google Takes Its First Steps Toward Killing the URL

  • Peter Foley/Bloomberg/Getty Images
    07

    If Trump Told Cohen to Lie, Impeachment Is Coming

  • Video by Phuc Pham, animation by Casey Chin
    08

    Is Big Tech Merging With Big Brother? Kinda Looks Like It

    The all-seeing Amazon, Google, and Facebook have every incentive to help the national security state undermine privacy, free speech, and democracy. We’ve read this book before.

  • Phuc Pham
    09

    Hack Brief: An Astonishing 773 Million Records Exposed in Monster Breach

  • Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/SwRI
    10

    Finally, New Horizons' First Photos of Ultima Thule

    On the first day of the year, NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft captured an icy world 4 billion miles away. Here’s what the photos tell us about the fringes of our solar system.

Andrea Valdez is the editor of WIRED.com. Before arriving at WIRED in 2017, she worked at Texas Monthly for 10 years, first as a fact checker, then as a columnist, and, ultimately, as the editor of texasmonthly.com. She is the author of How to Be a Texan: The Manual. Valdez ... Read more
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