“Let's be clear: Sarah Silverman does not suck. Quite the contrary: From her early work on The Larry Sanders Show to her current TV series on Comedy Central, she is eye-meltingly funny. Her shtick demonstrates that she's a keen observer of all that sucks around us. On The Sarah Silverman Program, she plays a character (conveniently named "Sarah Silverman") who's abrasive, insensitive, even a bit dumb. And in her stand-up act, she delights in flouting social taboos — scatology, racism, misogyny. (Her most quoted joke: "I was raped by a doctor. Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.") Silverman's arch perspective on the world makes her the perfect pitch person for our explanations of why things don't work the way they should. Yet out of character, Silverman rejects cynicism. "A lot of comics have a kind of superstition," she told us. "They romanticize misery and think they need it to be funny. I don't thrive on that at all."

No misery? Does she not know how much things suck? She doesn't buy it. "I love technology. I'm all for it," Silverman says. "I watch my common-law stepdaughter iChatting with her boyfriend every night, and it's the fucking future happening now. It's amazing." Push her and she goes zen: "I would say the only things that truly suck are those things you cannot control," she says. "All other sucky shit can get unsucked just by changing your perspective a degree or two, or just doing something about it."

That kind of sunny optimism has no place in this issue. Luckily, she does have her moments of outrage. Like when idiots in her audience shoot low-quality video of her stand-up act and post it to YouTube. "I make a joke explaining why I'm asking them to stop, and then guess what," she says. "They keep shooting — usually with shit-eating grins on their faces, waiting for me to get mad or do something embarrassing. Those people suck. They suck balls."

Ah. There's the Sarah we love.”

Magazine Section
This year Wired is also up for an award in the Magazine Section category.

This category recognizes excellence of a regular section of a magazine, looking at its voice, originality, design and packaging. Wired is nominated for its front-of-the-book section called Start. Here are three short excerpts from the October issue. From “Flash and Awe”:

“Say you’re a SWAT cop about to rescue hostages, or a soldier trying to extract your buddies from a terrorist hideout. You can’t just charge in with guns blazing, so you throw the bad guys off with a nice stun grenade: It creates a deafening bang and a mighty flash without lethal shrapnel. Sounds great, but the force of the explosion can still injure the very people you’re trying to save. A couple of years ago, Sandia National Laboratories, which has been developing stun grenades for decades, found a solution to this problem—the fuel/air distraction device. Traditional “flash-bangs” work by igniting a mixture of aluminum and potassium perchlorate. Pull the pin and a few seconds later the cocktail explodes from inside its housing. But yank the pin on the new stunner and a gas starts combusting, which pushes out and ignites a cloud of powdered aluminum. The result is what you see on the test stand above: a blinding burst of light accompanied by a boom of up to 170 decibels—about as loud as a shotgun—but very little blast pressure. Sandia has licensed the device to Defense Technology (a subsidiary of arms maker BAE Systems), which hopes to bring it to market by year’s end. There’s never been a safer time to be held against your will.”

From “Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York”:

“Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.”

From “Bots We Love”:

“In January 2006, senior editor Robert Capps presented the 50 best robots ever. Can we make that 54? In the past two years, these upstarts have maneuvered their way into our geeky little hearts.

BigDog

Like all the best bots, it’s kind of creepy. Thanks to a $24 million injection from Darpa, this quadruped can carry a 340-pound load over rubble and ice, hop across crevices, and even regain its balance after a swift kick in the ass .

Robo-Rat

This little animat (part animal, part robot) drives with its “brain”—300,000 rat neurons sitting on a bed of electrodes. When sensors locate obstacles, the neurons beam instructions to the wheels via Bluetooth. Hard left! Hard left!

Jarvis and Dummy

It’s not really ideal for your tools to talk smack and blast you with foam. But Iron Man minus his ultra-amenable worker-bot and quick-witted AI assistant would be just another billionaire playboy in a power suit.”