With all arrivals into the UK soon needing to show a negative test result, yet more pressure will be placed on the struggling Test to Release quarantine scheme
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It s been a year for glumly refreshing live blogs and breaking news websites. But we have managed to get some reading done too. Here, our writers and editors have picked out our favourite books released in 2020 across the broad range of areas that WIRED covers.
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener
In this memoir,
New Yorker tech correspondent Anna Wiener recounts her experiences as a millennial diving into San Francisco’s tech startup scene. Disillusioned with her job in publishing, Wiener moves from New York to Silicon Valley, with its promises of building a better future for all – and a more exciting present for those in its club. The book follows her experiences working for multiple startups, with skewering descriptions of a sector that, while ahead technologically, seems in other ways to be wildly out of touch. Covering issues such as sexism, surveillance and San Francisco’s homeless crisis, it reveals a world that hides a pit of moral quandaries beneath its shi
At the end of
A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge flings open the windows of his darkened home, yelling to a boy passing by to purchase a prize turkey “twice the size of tiny Tim” to gift to his long-suffering employee Bob Cratchit and his family. In just a few sentences, Charles Dickens’ iconic tale helped to push the exotic turkey – which in Victorian times was far too expensive for an average family – to permanently replace the humble goose as the fashionable fowl of choice for Christmas lunch.
Only this holiday, most tables won’t be groaning under the weight of a humongous bird, child-size or otherwise. Thanks to the pandemic restrictions imposed this year, most people’s Christmases have been downsized, and so have their appetites: 2020 is officially the year of the tiny turkey.
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Jonathan Worsfold’s portable toilet kingdom stretches as far as the eye can see: neat rows of 1,700 grey, blue and cream cubicles, all containing a porcelain throne. Like many other people in the portable toilet industry, he got into it because of a family connection.
Worsfold took over Kent-based Four Jays from his father John, who started it as an agricultural contracting company 62 years ago, armed with grand plans and a pair of hedge cutters. After attending a trade show, he discovered porta potties and the rest is history. For 30-odd years, Worsfold and his wife Sarah have grown the family business one flush at a time.