Death, love, and the solace of a million motorcycle parts

PLUS: One man's search for life-saving DNA, and how a lack of transparency undermines pandemic policies. View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions 11.22.20 In his poignant, personal essay "Death, Love, and the Solace of a Million Motorcycle Parts," writer Kenneth R. Rosen weaves his experience racing and building motorcycles into a story about coping with the death of a family member, seeking to engineer his way through sorrow the way he is able to engineer his way through a throttle assembly. Death and estrangement are messy in a way that a mechanical object is not, and Rosen felt comfort in the surety of inanimate objects. "Logic worked like the printed circuit board inside a motorcycle's electronic control unit, all leads connecting where they should, the world a mess of signals dictating our behavior," he writes. "When I rebuilt the bike and pressed the ignition, the fuel pump wound, starter motor clicked, the engine cranked to life and told me I had gotten everything right." Relationships, alas, are not so simple, but as a writer, Rosen is willing to take his readers on a delicate journey through his loneliness, even as he struggles to plan his family's future. "If I can be vulnerable and invite people into that feeling of desolation, there's a comfort in that," he says. "We all yearn for our lives to be different in our own way. Why should we suffer that as a defeat and why alone?" He takes the reader from a cold tool-strewn basement to a near-death experience on a Florida highway to a moment of bright realization and maybe redemption with language that's raw and beautiful in equal measure. Sarah Fallon | Deputy Editor, WIRED   BACKCHANNEL Death, Love, and the Solace of a Million Motorcycle Parts BY KENNETH R. ROSEN To cope with the uncertainty and sadness around my mother-in-law's death, I set about building a four-cylinder superbike.   BACKCHANNEL One Man's Search for the DNA Data That Could Save His Life BY SARAH ELIZABETH RICHARDS The genetic correlations that could help Bryce Olson find a drug that works against his cancer are a scattered mess. Why don't we have a better system for analyzing this kind of information?   IDEAS A Lack of Transparency Is Undermining Pandemic Policy BY ROXANNE KHAMSI Official guidance seems handed down from on high, rather than based on studies. That will make it harder to beat Covid-19.   NATIONAL AFFAIRS This GOP Lawmaker Denounced QAnon—and Fears for His Party BY GILAD EDELMAN "There's a lot larger percentage in the Republican Party who believe there's a deep state coup or cabal than people might think."   IDEAS Are Covid Patients Gasping 'It Isn't Real' As They Die? BY DAVID ZWEIG An ER nurse's anecdote of deranged denialism went viral. But when the media caught wind of the story, reporters didn't do their jobs.   SPONSORED CONTENT Diverse Communication in a Remote World: Real Talk by RingCentral Daisy Auger-Dominguez, the Chief People Officer of VICE Media, joins us for a raw discussion on the challenges of establishing equality and diversity in the age of remote work. GET WIRED Get 1 year of WIRED access for less than $1 a month. Tech news and analysis you won't find anywhere else. Subscribe now.     This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or manage your newsletter subscriptions