PLUS: More of WIRED's best longreads from this week.
| As an editor—and as a plain-old reader—I treasure stories that take me into a world I never thought I'd be interested in. We have a stellar example of that genre this week on Backchannel, where contributing editor Brendon Koerner takes a deep dive into the physics of bowling-ball design. He profiles Maurice "Mo" Pinel, whose experiments reshaping the inner cores of bowling balls revolutionized the sport in the 1990s. Pinel figured out that weirdly shaped cores—some look like Y-wing fighters from Star Wars, others like squashed lemons attached to pancakes—can have a major impact on the curving trajectory of a shot, allowing a bowler to whack the sweet spot more consistently and cleanly. Pinel's story is fascinating in itself, rolling from his early years as a drag racer to his later era as a legendary, and decidedly cranky, evangelist of applied materials science and engineering. He even had a nemesis. Who knew? Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED | |
