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Lawsuits, man. Elon Musk’s Boring Company has abandoned its plans to dig a tunnel under the west side of Los Angeles after it and the city settled a lawsuit brought by two area neighborhood groups who opposed the scheme. The project, announced last spring, had entailed building a 2.7-mile test tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard, adjacent to the crowded 405 freeway, under public property.

For many, the year 2018 has held precious few highlights. There’s Gritty, sure, but what else? Climate change rages. Politics divides. It’s bleak. Into that breach steps Spotify, which on Tuesday continued its now annual tradition of finding some levity among its users’ listening habits. The Spotify Wrapped campaign, in which ubiquitous billboards highlight unusual or unexpected stats from the company's user base, enters its third year with a few adjustments.

You recycle. You keep your showers short. Maybe you even drive an electric car, powered by the solar panels on your roof. In other words, you do what you can to reduce your carbon footprint and protect the environment for everyone. But you’re hopping a flight this week to chow down in Turkey Town, and your math says that one action could undo all your other good deeds.

What many people call airports, you like know as that one huge queue. From curb to gate, zig zagging between retractable barriers, from one pinch point to the next—in industry parlance, this is your travel ribbon, flowing, or jamming, through the terminal. Check in, bag drop, security, the coffee shop, the lounge, the boarding gate, the halting march down the aisle.

I recently took a trip to Berlin that sharpened my view of America. It turned out that the blandly named conference I'd been invited to—something about digital markets—was actually a giant collective hand-wringing about the state of German politics.

The air fryer, like some of the more superfluous appliances in my house, was a Black Friday purchase. It arrived on our doorstep on a chilly December evening, part of the parade of questionable decisions that my roommates and I had made on the internet: an egg boiler shaped like a hen, t-shirts I didn’t need.

Drones have arrived in US airspace, and now they are multiplying. By 2022, 700,000 of the little unmanned aircraft could be exploring American skies, according to the FAA, delivering packages, monitoring traffic, inspecting bridges, and filling other yet to be discovered niches. To do that work, every last one will need electricity to spin its rotors and run its sensors. Most will get it from batteries they take with them to work. Some might pull from the grid directly, using tethers.

Early on in Mortal Engines, the forthcoming movie based on Philip Reeve's book, a small Bavarian population gets consumed by the moving metropolis of "London." (The movie, like the book, is set in a future where roving "predator cities" ingest smaller towns for their resources.) As its citizens are forced to resettle in their new home, voices on loudspeakers tell them where to go and what to do.

It’s time once again to turn on The Monitor, WIRED’s roundup of the latest in the world of culture, from casting to big streaming deals to box-office news.

For a man who works in fashion, Michael Preysman thinks an awful lot about the world's oceans. He thinks about the stuff that runs off and pollutes the coastlines, the plastics that slide down the drains and choke fish. When he founded Everlane, the minimalist clothing brand that promises "radical transparency," Preysman didn't just want to make cashmere sweaters and wide-leg pants that would constitute the a certain kind of Silicon Valley uniform.