Popular Mechanics January 2018

HOW YOUR WO RLD WORKS

NOW

YEAR Stay Warm with the Newest

SCIENCE FICTION

That Will Keep You Up at Night

MOUNTAIN GEAR PAGE ��

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NEW STYLES   AND  A ND G R E AT F IT S 

T HE ISSUE IS SUE S T AR ART T S HERE. A STUNNI NG NEW WORK OF FICTIO N BY ACCLAIMED NOVELIST SMITH HENDERSON, THIS I S A STORY OF ALTERNATE REALITIE S, ARTIFICIA L INTELLIGENCE , MARTIAN COLONIES, FAMILY, TECH NOLOG Y, CLI MATOLOGY, FEAR, LOVE, AN D THE FATE OF HUMAN BEI NGS ON EAR TH. WE PRESENT 

 runs from under her her right nostril and then Rhea topples over at the market, clutching a bunch of tulips. She never rises. My wife is gone.. Just like that. gone that.¶ ¶ I travel for work so I shouldn’t be home for this, but I am.  As soo oon n as I ju jum mp off th thee ru runn nnin ing g bo boar ard d at th thee dep epo ot, I feel ev eveery ey eyee as aska kan nce ce.. Olympia is a small village, v illage, everyone knows everyone, word travels travels fast. ¶ I am taken to see her at the doctor’s house. He can’t answer my questions, doesn’t have the equipment to see. It’s It’s not like like the old days when there were hospitals and expertise. Now we must look out for one another. We grow gardens. We share a watermill. We run on solar. The village has roadlights but we don’t run them much much because there there are no wolves or outlaws, outlaws, and lights only draw swarms of insects. ¶ I leave the doctor in a dense daze. The villagers adored Rhea, and and they come condoling condoling as I pass by the the longhouses, longhouses, the commons in the square on my way to the school. ¶ The name Olympia is immodest. The  villa  vil lage ge sit itss on th thee Ar Arct ctiic shore of wha hatt us used ed to be Ala Alasska, nea earr wha hatt wa wass once Prudhoe Bay, but the geography is changed from the last paper maps when this was the center of the world. When it was unbearable everywhere else. Now the Arctic is a warm body body,, full full of jellyfish and black chokeweed. chokeweed. Our days are long and hot and then warm and short. But it rains and the soil is rich. The  villa  vil lage ge hol olds ds so som me si six x hun undr dred ed so soul ulss. Les Lesss one no now w. In In th thee pre reffec ectur turee th theere are dozens of villages like this. We trade, but keep our distance. We survive on dispersion now. All bad news is local. A sinkhole, a flu, a fire, a bad crop.  A woman falling falling over in a market. market.  A LINE OF BLOOD

CONTINUED

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DECEMBER _ ����

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TINY SATELLITES

They’re the size of grapefruits—and they’re making data collection quicker and more comprehensive. �D PRINTING

A technology in progress finds a perfect fit in schools.

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LIFE AT THE MALL

The death of malls has been greatly exaggerated, but they are not what they once were. We went to find out what’s going on. By Tom Chiarella

MERCURY RACING SB� �.�: Do you need

a ���-hp engine?

THE LIFE

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Popular Mechanics Fiction: “Olympia”

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PM Everywhere

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The Hyperloop: FAQs

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Maker City: Indianapolis

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How to Cut Your Own Hair

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Things Come Apart: Coffeemaker

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Ask Roy

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Homemade Sauces to Give as Gifts

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The Very Very Basics of Car Care

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Huckberry Gift Guide

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Road Tested

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Project: Make a Dish from Concrete

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Shop Notes

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Sharpening

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Popular Mechanics for Kids: Ball Toss

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Great Unknowns

Colorado snowcat drivers.

BEST TECH OF THE YEAR

Concrete speakers, Beats that are finally worth your money, nine different smartphones, and more. Including Cuphead: Your new favorite game.

HARLEY GRICE AND THE GREAT VERMONT TARGET SHOOT

With deliberation, precision, and a cow’s horn full of black powder, these men and women trek through the woods of Vermont, testing their marksmanship the old-fashioned way. By James Lynch

TOOL TEST

Welders.

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How’s your Christmas shopping going? Not great? Yeah, we thought so. That’s why this year we partnered with online men’s shop Huckberry  to bring you a curated selection of Popular Mechanics– approved clothes, bags, and outdoor gear just in time for the holidays. Check out our favorite items on page ��, then head over to huckberry.com/popmech to purchase. Returns are free—but we have a feeling that won’t be necessary. INSTAGRAM @popularmechanics

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On the Most Useful Podcast Ever, technology editor Alex George goes head to head with Dan Ackerman, senior editor at consumer technology site CNET. What’s the best tech item of the year? What shouldn’t you bother buying? Hear their useful opinions—which we hope will come in the form of a heated debate, possibly fisticuffs— on the Most Useful Podcast Ever, available on Apple Podcasts.

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One day soon, we’ve been told over the last decade or so,

PURPOSE. “With every technology, you have the hype cycle, and

neered new types of digital-fabrication materials and whose  work is the subject of an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York through January. “People are kind of like, ‘Okay, so? What can we do with it? Was it real or was it just hype?’”  Well, for someithasn’t been just hype.Laarmanuses �D printing to create functional, usable furniture called micro structures. SpaceX has a dedicated �D printing zone at its plant in Hawthorne, California. GE’s Brilliant Factory aims to use �D printing to transform large-scale manufacturing. But where is �D printing for the rest of us?

@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _ ����

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�D printers build objects by layering a thin filament. Most machines use a thermoplastic, like what Legos are made from, but some can print wood and metal.

The book is ��� pages long. On each page, color photographs and diagrams illustrate clear instructions presented in large type beneath easy-to-read headlines: DESIGN. RESIZE AND DUPLICATE. BUILD THE TALLEST BUILDING. PRINT, TEST, AND ITERATE! The book is written for teachers and students, and each of the nine projects in the book begins with a Lesson Summary. Such as: “Students will be asked to create a vehicle. . . to carry ��� mL of water from the starting line, around a track and to the finish line. Students should aim to spill as little water as possible while speeding around the track.” The book is called the MakerBotEducators Guidebook. And it reflects the new direction the consumer �D-printing industry is taking. In September, the day before its release, employees were smiling about it at the Brooklyn headquarters of MakerBot, the company that pioneered desktop �D printing less than a decade ago—the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic,  which came in kit form, was introduced in ����. It seems simple today, when compared to their most current model, the Replicator�, on which, with a little help, a ten-year-old could open the box and be printing in less than �� minutes. That book, that machine, and that kid are the future of �D printing.

she started offering mini-classes during students’ advisory time. It was such a hit

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that Jackson Sanborn and her principal applied for, and won, a foundation grant to buy a FlashForge—a “super-crazy-easy out-of-the-boxprinter touse.”Theschool also hired a new IT director over the summer, who brought a MakerBot Replicator II and a bit of experience. “My goal is for the kids to work toward a project with a real-life application,” says Jackson Sanborn. “A problem that we can create a fix for.” This year, one high school student  will printa gimbal camera mount to film projects for his acting class.

its mission. “There’s still a consumer market, it’s just that it’s a smaller market. It’s these ultra-creatives or the ultra-technical. So the needs we were actually trying to fulfill in the consumer market weren’t really there—and yet the needs were there in education,” he says. Dremel has since set out to provide schools with a premium product and easy customer service. “You don’t want to put a product in the school that is not easy to use, because the teachers aren’t experts in �D printers. And the product

 Atthe WorldMaker FaireinNew York, in September, the �D Printing Village showcased dozens of machines meant for the educational market. Booth after booth, many of them surrounded by kids. There was a booth by a company that sells �D printers that work off a smartphone. A high school girl sat behind a booth at the end of a row fiddling with a printer she had hacked so that two extruders could  work simultaneously. Dremel, the hand-tool manufacturer, started selling its Idea Builder �D printers in ����. At that time, the �D-printer-in-every-pot hype was still high. Now, Dremel president John Kavanagh says the company has recalibrated

really should be reliable and safe. The teachers don’t have time to try to call remote customer service.” For companies like MakerBot and Dremel, the problem on the educational front is that several companies are marketing basic, low-price printers to schools. They have lower capability (smaller, slower, fussier), but the price is alluring for school budgets. So instead of buying one Dremel Idea Builder for ��,���, a school might buy four printers by XYZ Printing for ���� each. “We’re often shocked at how quickly it seems to be—I hate to say it—a race to the bottom on price. To get these higher volumes and unit sales, the overall value of those in the

� D � P R I N T E D L E T T E R S C O U R T E S Y O F M A K E R D E P O T , T OT O W A , N E W J E R S E Y .

A

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business isn’t that high,” says Kavanagh.  And yet in some communities, basic  works. Ron Smith teaches welding and engineering at Nestucca Junior/Senior High School in Cloverdale, Oregon. His �D printer? An Afinia H���, a nowdiscontinued desktop model he’s had since ����. At the end of the year, each student gets to design his or her own keepsake, something small that they want  just for themselves. “These are some of the tools I can use to get kids interested, to go on to college and learn more about stuff like this,” he says. “Around here, if  you don’towna dairy, if you don’twork in tourism—we’re on the coast—then you  work for pretty much minimum wage. There’s no industry. We have a cheese factory in Tillamook, which is �� miles away. So I’ve done a really, really good job of trying to stay up with technology and get my kids interested in stuff like that. To show them it’s a big world out there, go out there and make your mark, that type of thing.”

and community building designed to let creators create with fewer technological barriers. The centerpiece is the Experimental Extruder. An extruder is the device on a printer that absorbs whatever material is being used to print—usually plastic filament—then heats it so that it can be extruded onto the printer’s work surface (called the build plate), and casts it in solid form again. More advanced printers have experimented with other materials besides plastic—wood, metal, stone—but those materials tend to clog and wear out normal extruders. The new one from MakerBot promises to handle a variety of exotic and composite materials—cork, wood, copper, brass—printable  within a temperature range of ��� and ��� degrees Celsius. “We know printing in non-typical materials—anything that isn’t PLA or ABS plastics—is much harder to do and requires some trial and error, something our competitors are happy to leave out when they list their ‘material compatibility,’” says Snider. “We’re going

back to the book. The book is about the future. “The revolution didn’t happen overnight the way commentators and the media predicted, so now a good amount of skepticism and cynicism has set in,” says Josh Snider, public relations manager at MakerBot. “There’s still a widespread understanding that the technology will mature and have its place in a number of industries, but the general public still only sees �D printing as a curiosity and a ‘revolution pending’ status.” But you know who’s not skeptical? Kids. The kids who learn the nine projects in the  MakerBot Edu cators Guidebook will grow up thinking—grow up knowing—that printing works in a lot of ways and for a lot of things. And that it is their technology. In October, MakerBot announced the creation of MakerBot Labs, an initiative that includes new software, hardware,

cially if you’re a seventh-grade teacher  with a room full of kids staring at you. But that’s what happens. �D printing is not really printing at all. It’s manufacturing. It’s making. And that’s a messy business. Today’s most-used printers make it easy without making it simple. They help get you to a place where you can fail, and that’s what makes us create. Messy is where we are now. The revolution is messy everywhere. It is messy at SpaceX and it is messy at GE. And it is messy at schools where kids are learning to use a new generation printer to make keepsakes and gimbal mounts and small water-carrying robots so that— in another ten years—they can work at SpaceX, and GE, and companies that don’t even exist yet, using materials that no one has imagined, to make breakthroughs nobody has dreamed of. —Additional reporting by  Eleanor Hildebrandt 

F

E

WHICH BRINGS US

G

H

A Few Educational Printers of Note

A. MakerBot Replicator+; B. Prusa i� MK�; C. FlashForge Dreamer; D. Dremel �D�� Idea Builder; E. Ultimaker �; F. Type A Machines Series � Pro; G. �Doodler Create; H. XYZ Printing da Vinci Color.

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DECEMBER _ ����

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

“Bye, bye, frequent heartburn.” BECKY LONDON, ACTUAL PRILOSEC OTC USER

1

#

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DOCTOR  RECOMMENDED FOR 10 STRAIGHT YEARS AND IT’S STILL RECOMMENDED TODAY 

ONE PILL EACH MORNING. 24 HOURS. ZERO HEARTBURN*

*It’s possible while taking Prilosec OTC. Use as directed for 14 days to treat frequent heartburn. May take 1-4 days MVY M\SS LffLJ[ † AlphaImpactRx ProVoiceTM Survey, Jan 2006 - Mar 2016. © Procter & Gamble, Inc., 2017

THE HYPERLOOP: FAQ  It’s been four years since Elon Musk shared his vision for transcending ships, trains, cars, and planes. Will the hyperloop ever be more than a vision? BY KEVIN DUPZYK IN AUGUST ����,

disappointed by the highspeed-rail system being built through the center of California, Elon Musk released a white paper called Hyperloop Alpha, describing a system of pod-cars shooting through vacuum tubes at nearly ��� mph. The paper ended with a plea for “the community” to work on an “open source transportation concept”—he was too busy, he said, to work on it himself. Here are the key questions that have arisen since. Has anyone taken up Musk’s challenge to develop hyperloop technologies? Yes—initially, two main companies, one called Hyperloop Technologies and another called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). The former, now called Hyperloop One (H�), boasts a flashy venture-capitalist cofounder and more than $��� million in funding. The latter has taken “open source” to heart and is more like a very well-organized

consortium of engineers from around the world. Was Hyperloop One cofounded by a guy legally named Brogan BamBrogan? Yes. Although BamBrogan left and earlier this year formed his own company, Arrivo, one of a handful of other small startups working on the hyperloop. And a variety of academic teams are working on pod-car prototypes, spurred by a series of competitions hosted by Musk at SpaceX HQ. So Musk isn’t totally leaving this up to “the community”? No. SpaceX built a threequarter-mile-long track, and has hosted two competitions (a third is scheduled for summer ����), rewarding things like design, safety, and speed. At the second competition, the winning team hit ��� mph. Are there other test tracks? A Dutch company born from Musk’s first competition built a ��-meter-long test track in Europe. While the SpaceX track is only six feet in diameter, its track

is full-size—it can handle tests with cars big enough to carry passengers. And H� has the full-size DevLoop, a ���-meter test track outside Las Vegas. It hit ��� mph in a test in July. It sounds like the technology is coming along. It is. A team from NASA examined the feasibility of the hyperloop, purely from a technological standpoint, and found it doable. Everyone agrees the technology itself isn’t the challenge. Then what’s the challenge? There are two: cost and land acquisition. Musk’s original paper said hyperloop would be cheaper than existing high-speed-transit options, but at this point, with the technology still in development, there’s no consensus on the validity of his estimates. There is consensus on the second challenge: It’s incredibly difficult to acquire land on this scale in the U.S. For this reason, many companies are exploring projects in other countries. One of the more promising startups, TransPod, is based in Canada; H� has a deal with the government of Dubai;

and HTT with South Korea. It’s entirely possible we’ll see a working hyperloop abroad before we get one in the U.S. At least we’ve got Musk. It’s too bad he’s staying so hands-off. About that. In July, Musk tweeted he’d gotten “verbal govt approval” to build a hyperloop underneath the Atlantic seaboard with the help of his tunneling outfit, The Boring Company. Why did he get back in? The most interesting of many possible reasons: Creating a near-vacuum inside a tube is challenging and costly in Earth’s atmosphere, but on Mars atmosphere is negligible. The hyperloop could be the public transit system of Musk’s Red Planet colony .

In other words, we might see a working hyperloop on Mars before the U.S.? Possible, but unlikely: SpaceX is currently planning its first, unmanned mission to Mars in ����—probably a long shot—and that’s also about when most hyperloop startups are targeting for their first operable line. Hyperloop One’s DevLoop, in Nevada, is the most advanced test track to date.

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POPULARMECHANICS.COM

 When the U.S. Air Force was born out of the  Army Air Corps just after World War II, the country was experiencing tremendous ad vances in science, medicine, and military technology. In honor of its ��th anniversary, SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE HEATHER WILSON shares five noteworthy technologies, developed to enable and protect servicemen and -women, that now improve the lives of civilians. 1. The satellite constellation behind the Global Positioning System,  which the Air Force manages, enables everything from synchronized bank transactions to smartphones. 2. Commercial airliners cruising at ��,��� feet would be inconceivable  withoutpressurized airplane cabins, which debuted with the XC-�� in ���� at Wright Field in Ohio. 3. Drones—we call them remotely piloted aircraft—have fundamentally changed warfare, providing “eyes in the sky” over hostile territory, ��/�. Now they aid civilian efforts in mapping, agriculture, and disaster recovery. 4. Research into advanced composites that made aircraft stronger and lighter began during World War I at McCook Field in Ohio. Today materials like carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers and ceramic composites have found their way into commercial airliners and earthbound equipment like car chassis, bicycles, and tennis rackets. 5. The Air Force introduced the first fly-by-wirefighter, the F-��, in ����. The same technology that gave that jet its unprecedented maneuverability has improved the reliability, performance, and safety of commercial airliners and “drive by wire” automobiles.

FIVE THINGS THE AIR FORCE INVENTED

THE PER FECT GIFT, IN A T UBE

NEVER LOSE AN I have a gift for losing small mechanical parts. I’ve dropped screws so successfully, it’s as if they departed for another dimension—a place in which exists an infinitely large cloud of small metal parts, circling slowly through eternity. That’s why I now use a magnetic parts tray for everything short of making a sandwich.  With my Craftsman tray (���), I hold woodworking screws, small parts for hand planes, finishing nails, lamp nipples, bolts, and studs. The tray is a blessing for appliance repair because it can hold parts in a vertical or upside-down position. — Roy Berendsohn

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Christmas trees are ringed by flat sweater boxes and punctuated by gift-card-size boxes, making a wrapped tube stand out like a spinning UFO in this landscape of rectangles. And more than an eye-catching silhouette, the Underground Meats Gift Tube (���) is a multi-tube—tubes within a tube—packed with summer sausage and salamis. To giftees, it’s a tube of mystery. Starting knuckles-deep, they reach into this model of a fourdimension sausage until they’re up to their armpit with a spread of tubed meats complemented by chutney, pickles (practically tubes), a wedge of cheese, candied pecans, and chocolate squares. Wisconsin’s Underground Meats—slogan: Buy Curious—buys heritage breed pigs and cows and does its own butchering, grinding, curing, and packing (in tubes).

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

May your holiday wishes come true.

makersmark.com WE MAKE OUR BOURBON CARE FULLY. PLEASE ENJOY IT THAT WAY.

Maker’s Mark® Bourbon Wh isky, 45% Alc./Vol. ©2017 Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. Loretto, KY

Planet’s Dove satellites are ejected from the ISS’s spring-loaded CubeSat deployer, which shoots satellites into orbit.

of wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear threats, it isn’t hard to see the  value in being able to surveil the Earthwith daily—or even more frequent—updates. But traditional satellites, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, have orbits that mean they may not see the same target for a week or more. So an Earth-imaging company called Planet, in San Francisco, is doing something different. In the past  year, it has sent nearly ��� satellites into space, including a record �� at once from India on Valentine’s Day. That should be unthinkable, but Planet is using CubeSats, an emerging type of small satellite made possible by the miniaturization of electronics and sensors, like those in smartphones, that are creating new possibilities to use AFTER A SUMMER

Small spacecraft, shaped by the forces that shrunk your cellphone, are changing the way we observe space and understand our home. BY BOBAK FERDOWSI

space technology for social and economic purposes. CubeSats are based on a one-unit (�U) standard cube the size of a grapefruit—�� centimeters in all dimensions, and weighing up to �.�� kilograms. (Planet’s Dove satellites are called �U CubeSats because they have one longer side of �� cm.) They can fly as extra payload on an existing mission, taking up the space left over on a rocket after, say, SpaceX’s resupply for the International Space Station has been loaded up. And organizations with less funding than SpaceX can use them: Universities are able to develop, build, and l aunch �U CubeSats for less than ����,���. Much like smartphones have collectively changed the way we communicate and interact, CubeSats have demonstrated that constellations of small satellites provide services not easily achieved with traditional spacecraft. As Mike Safyan, senior director of launch and ground station networks at Planet, says, “Once those large net works of small sensors are deployed, the scope of coverage and timeliness of data collected can be greater than any single, large satellite mission.” CubeSats are also relatively disposable, so it’s possible to learn from flight experience and

quickly make design changes. Planet’s ��-CubeSat flock was its ��th generation, and allowed it to achieve its goal of daily imaging of most of Earth. CubeSats also serve as proving grounds for new technologies: In ���� the Planetary Society, a nonprofit founded by Carl Sagan and led by Bill Nye, will launch the LightSail � mission to validate novel propulsion, using a solar sail to alter a CubeSat’s orbit. Upcoming NASA CubeSat missions will quali fy a variety of electronics for use in commercial missions—and deep space. Soon CubeSats will venture beyond Earth’s orbit. Lunar Flashlight, launching in ����, will circle the moon and peer into its shadowed craters. Traveling millions of kilometers alongside NASA’s InSight mission to Mars in ���� will be a pair of experimental CubeSats called MarCO. They’ll separate from the lander prior to touchdown to augment the lander’s data. Going forward, it’s likely we’ll see CubeSats fly alongside other interplanetary missions, hitching rides to try inventive new technologies, often on missions of opportunity. Though small and modest, in their way CubeSats are the perfect expression of the ingenuity and adaptability that drive our ventures further and further from home.

TINY SATELLITES EXPLORE ��

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U E R F R VICE? Let’s put the brakes on believing random reviews and self-proclaimed car experts. Whether in print, online, on mobile or video, magazine brands fuel our obsession for expertly conducted test drives and authoritative safety news. With content that’s trusted and an audience more likely to purchase a new vehicle, you get more mileage out of magazine media. #BelieveMagMedia | BelieveMagMedia.com

 BY FRANCINE MAROUK IAN

 As the site of the first railroad union station in the world—where lines connect, enabling train transfers within the same building—Indianapolis  was the Midwestern migration gateway. By ����, one in five newcomers came from a German-speaking region, bringing cultural craftsmanship with them, including cabinetmaking and veneer. Over time, regional  workers used hardwood from the state’s �� tree varieties to produce iconic furniture styles including Old Hickory and Amish, as well as the Hoosier Cabinet, a kitchen cupboard and work counter popular through the ����s. Today, these makers continue to create furniture the homegrown way.

THE MA KER S BRYAN YORK AND JUSTIN BERG THEIR COMPANY BROTHERS FURNITURE DESIGN

Making something out of nothing is a gratifying change of pace from our job as professional firefighters, and that’s what drew us to woodworking. On the fire ground, every

firefighter has a very specific responsibility to get the job done, and we use similar tactics in running our operation, splitting responsibilities based on our strengths. Our build process is old-school—no CAD, software, or official sketches. Many projects are frankensteined from several inspirations. Every wood we use, from poplar to walnut, is from trees grown and cut in Indiana. Being able to keep our product local from start to finish creates the full circle that our clients appreciate.

THE M AKE R BRIAN PRESNELL HIS CO MPAN Y

INDY URBAN HARDWOOD

My mission is to keep damaged city trees from becoming mulch by preserving the hardwood, which I do by on-site milling with a Wood-Mizer LT��, a portable sawmill invented in Indianap-

olis—you could say urban milling is an Indy thing. With the emerald ash borer beetle infestation we’ve lost an uncontrollable number of trees in this region, but I try to envision a second life for the wood. Maybe it’s my background in museum work, or

because my grandmother never wasted anything—a true maker, before that was a label. When I bond with customers over tree loss, I promise it’s the beginning of a yard-to-table movement: Give me your tree and I’ll bring you back a table.

HE RECOMME NDS

THEY RECOMME ND

EAT THI S

TOU R THI S

Everything on the brunch menu at Milktooth. Their bacon is like a little steak, the lamb burger is get-out-of-here good.

 Area makers on First Fridays at Circle City Industrial Complex, in the Schwitzer building, a historic auto plant.

��

DECEMBER _ ����

SEE THIS BUILDING

DRINK HERE

The Scottish Rite Cathedral. The craftsmanship in the architecture and interior woodworking is unseen today.

Slippery Noodle Inn, Indiana’s oldest continually operated bar in the same building— an “if the walls could talk” kind of place. Plus, live blues.

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

Every other Friday, be entertained and enlightened by the editors of your favorite magazine. Hosts Jacqueline Detwiler and Kevin Dupzyk explore ideas, products, hacks, tricks, projects, and techniques that are guaranteed to make your life easier. (Jacqueline is a neuroscientist! Kevin is a great guy!) The Most Useful Podcast Ever is an entirely original, ��-minute, biweekly audio program that’s perfect to listen to while doing yardwork, driving, washing dishes, running,  jogging, walking . . . HERE’S HOW TO GET IT:

SUBSCRIBE

Go to the iTunes store or popularmechanics. com/podcast

Subscribe to The Most Useful Podcast Ever

Get automatic downloads every time a new episode airs

Enjoy

Learn everything from lawn-care secrets to the best way to hang a TV to the proper way to sear a steak. Also: On one episode, for reasons we now forget, Jacqueline and Kevin had an on-air push-up contest. (She won.)

�

�

�

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FIG. A

FIG. B

FIG. C

FIG. D

SIDES AND

I moistened my hair with a spray bottle, then dragged the corner of the comb from my right eyebrow to my crown to create a lengthwise part. After clipping the hair above the part out of the way,  you attack your hair in quadrants [Fig. A]. Sides first, then back, then top. For a longer cut, you use your fingers to hold the hair off your head, and cut anything that sticks out with scissors [Fig. B]. I chose BACK

CU T YOUR OWN HAIR Self-sufficiency, meet vanity. BY ALEXANDER GEORGE

cut my own hair a few times before, both to save cash and to learn a useful skill. The results were always bad enough that the barber I would finally visit usually asked, unprompted, “Did you do this yourself?” This time, instead of relying on YouTube, I got help from Mike Martinez, a stylist and instructor at Cutler Salon in New York. I’D TRIED TO

ful teeth.

��

DECEMBER _ ����

SCISSORS

CLIPPERS

Martinez suggests an ambidextrous model, so you can switch hands.

Philips OneBlade or Remington Haircut and Beard Trimmer.

the easier way: Slide a comb up through  your hair, then run clippers over the comb. Move toward the back of your head in sections about the  width of a bookmark, slightly overlapping to be sure you’re cutting to the same length. Working backward in the mirror was hard, but after a few tries I figured it out. If you keep some length between the comb and your scalp, you can avoid accidental divots, like the two I gave myself. The back of my head, surprisingly,  was the easiest part. I went completely by feel. Where my hair felt too long, I placed the comb using my fingers as my guide, and ran the clippers across it [Fig. C]. Finally, I’d tug down on each ear and cover it with my palm while using the clippers or scissors. Since hair creeping over my ears is the first point at which I look scraggly, I plan to use that particular technique from now on to buy time between professional cuts.

Martinez suggested a different method for the top of my head: With my thumb and forefinger I twisted locks of hair into spirals [Fig. D]. Cut at a slight angle, just above where you’re holding your hair. This gives your cut texture, rather than having the uniform length of Astro Turf. Halfway through, I swapped my ��� scissors for Martinez’s ���� Japanese-made shears. They were so much smoother. They were also so sharp that while trying to trim the top, I cut my knuckles and had to tape them up.  At this point, about a half hour in, I got the hang of it. I started enjoying the visible before and after, a similar satisfaction  you get from building something. The taper from the top to the sides will take more practice, but the fact that the final result didn’t look post-lobotomy made me proud. TOP

HAIR

BAND�

like a long bird beak.

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

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OFFICIAL GOLD COINS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DISASSEMB LY REPORT

TECHNIVORM MOCCAMASTER KBG 741 AO MODEL:

PRODUCED:

AMERONGEN, NETHERLANDS NOTES:

TIME TO DISASSEMBLE:

43 MINUTES, 23 SECONDS

One of the undersung pleasures of our growing

before the rest of us cared. Before anyone had any idea  what a third-wave coffee shop was (first wave � Folgers,

a coffeemaker that got water hot enough and dispersed

is still many coffee snobs’ brewer of choice.

 THE WATER

Coffee begins as water in the reservoir (��). Ideally, it starts as cold  water—not because of thermodynamics, but because of taste: Hot  water has likely had some downtime in the tank of a water heater, which means it’s a little old and a little flat.  When the coffeemaker is turned on, the water-heating element (��), a copper coil, begins to heat up. Water goes down the rubber drain tube (�)and into the heating element.  When it reaches the boiling point of ��� degrees Fahrenheit, boiling action carries it up the glass watertransfer tube (��). At the same time, that causes the water level in the reservoir to fall, and as it falls, a float (��)falls with it. When the float reaches the bottom of the reservoir, it deactivates a switch (��), turning off the heating element.

��

DECEMBER _ ����

THE COFFEE

By the time water reaches the top of the transfer tube, it has cooled to the optimal brewing temperature range of ��� to ��� degrees. It flows into the nine-hole outlet arm (�), which aligns with the opening in the brew basket lid (�) so that water drips into the coffee grounds waiting in the brew basket (�). Because it’s boiling action that forces the water into the outlet arm, the water pulses out of the holes—it’s not the continuous stream a pump would create. That allows the coffee time to “bloom” just like it does when you order a pourover from the barista at your local coffeehouse. The brew basket’s cone shape creates a large surface area at the top for water to infiltrate while keeping water among the grounds for longer before it drips out the narrow bottom.

 THE CARAFE

Coffee exiting the brew basket lands in the glass carafe (�) waiting below. The carafe lid (�) funnels it through the destratification tube (�), which ensures that new coffee enters the carafe at the bottom. Different compounds are extracted from the coffee grounds after different amounts of time in water, so the first coffee that drips out is usually stronger than the last; the destratification tube ensures an even mix. The carafe sits on the hot plate (�), which contains the hot-plate element (�), a separate heating element that holds the coffee between ��� and ��� degrees. The temperature is chosen with the hot-plate hi/lo switch (��). The hotter option is for people who like to put cold cream in their coffee, and the cooler option is for brave souls who take theirs black. —Kevin Dupzyk

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

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@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _ ����

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POPULAR MECHAN ICS’ SENIOR HO ME EDITOR SOLVES YOUR MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS. BY ROY BEREN DSOHN [email protected] @askroypm

My LED Christmas lights flicker, especially the ones outside. What can I do to stop this? TODD E., MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA

Older inexpensive LED Christmas lights  flicker. There isn’t anything I’m aware of that you can do about that, other than replace them. Newer and higher-quality LED lights have a flickerfree circuitry and rectifier that converts alternating current to direct current. This causes the flicker to shift to a speed that’s too fast to be seen. Although they don’t have the warm glow of old-school incandescents, these new LED lights are nearly unbreakable, use as much as �� percent less electricity, and are rated for ��,��� hours of operation. They even come in the retro candle shape.

We get strong winter winds that produce a mysterious thumping noise I can’t track down. Everything seems secure. I’m stumped. ED C., MANITOWOC, WISCONSIN

��

Mystery noises can be maddeningly difficult to track down. They’re almost as bad in a house as they are in a car. Begin on the side of the house that the wind strikes. Look at the sliding doors (if there are any) and objects stored outside that might rock against the house such as a gas grill, loose siding or aluminum trim, a light fixture, an old aluminum awning, or a loose shutter. Also consider that what you’re hearing may not be something loose but a corner that catches the wind. I had a basement window blow in recently when

DECEMBER _ ����

a violent downdraft got caught between the backyard fence, the rear wall of the house, and a bunch of stuff that I had stored outside that wasn’t in its usual location. Check if you’ve created a wind pocket. Finally, repeat the procedure on the downwind side of the house. The suction produced on this side can be quite powerful. If nothing obvious turns up, you’ll need to hire a roofer to look for a loose vent cap on the roof or a piece of flashing that’s moving and transmitting the noise down through a rafter and into the attic.

Every winter, snow and ice storms tend to knock out our power—and my pellet stove. What’s better backup, a battery or a generator? HENRY B., HAZLETON, PENNSYLVANIA

My advice would be to use both. The auger, convection fan, and exhaust blower on your stove all require power. Fortunately, their power draw is not so great that they can’t be run on a properly engineered battery backup. Notice I said properly engineered. Don’t cobble this together yourself. Plug your stove into a product such as the Surefire Stove Sentry (about $���), and the moment the power goes out, the Sentry switches over to a ��-volt marine battery that can last up to � hours. A battery bank can provide as much as �� hours of operation. Both should buy you plenty of time to get the generator up and running. When it comes to that generator, have an electrician install a proper transfer switch that connects the generator to the circuit on which the pellet stove is operating. Whatever you do, don’t use a down-and-dirty doubleended power cord from the generator plugged into an electrical outlet by the pellet stove, for example. Known as backfeeding, this can electrocute somebody or cause an electrical fire. Burning down your house is always an inefficient way to stay warm.

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Publication Title: Popular Mechanics Publication Number: 0530-3900 Filing Date: October 1, 2017 Issue Frequency: Monthly; except combined Dec/Jan and Jul/Aug Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 Annual Subscription Rate: $24.00 Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Contact: Ellie Festger, 212-649-2816. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Cameron Connors, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; Editor: Ryan D’Agostino, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; Managing Editor: Helene Rubinstein, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Owner: Hearst Communications, Inc.: Registered office: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; Stockholders of Hearst Communications, Inc. are: Hearst Holdings, Inc.: Registered office: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; CDS Global, Inc.: Registered office: 1901 Bell Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50315. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. Tax Status: Not applicable Publication Title: Popular Mechanics Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: September 2017 Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: a. Total Number of Copies: 1,254,017 b. Paid Circulation 1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 784,383 2. Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: N/A 3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 31,976 4. Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: N/A c. Total Paid Distribution: 816,358 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 1. Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 337,897 2. Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: N/A 3. Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: N/A 4. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail: 8,364 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 346,261 f. Total Distribution: 1,162,619 g. Copies not Distributed: 91,397 h. Total: 1,254,016 i. Percent Paid: 70.22%

 Diamond Hone® Knife Sharpener Model 15XV

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© 2017 EdgeCraft Corporation, Avondale, PA 

No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: a. Total Number of Copies: 1,251,400 b. Paid Circulation 1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 791,004 2. Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: N/A 3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 27,000 4. Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: N/A c. Total Paid Distribution: 818,004 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 1. Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 340,796 2. Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: N/A 3. Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: N/A 4. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail: 5,190 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 345,986 f. Total Distribution: 1,163,990 g. Copies not Distributed: 87,411 h. Total: 1,251,401 i. Percent Paid: 70.28%

FloorLiner ™

16. Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: a. Paid Electronic Copies: 45,207 b. Total Paid Print Copies + Paid Electronic Copies: 861,565 c. Total Print Distribution + Paid Electronic Copies: 1,207,826 d. Percent Paid: 71.33% No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: a. Paid Electronic Copies: 43,100 b. Total Paid Print Copies + Paid Electronic Copies: 861,104 c. Total Print Distribution + Paid Electronic Copies: 1,207,090 d. Percent Paid: 71.34% I certify that 50% of all my distributed copies (Electronic and Print) are paid above a nominal price. 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed in the December 2017 issue of this publication. 18. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Cameron Connors, Publisher. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be su bject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

Made in USA

 WeatherTech.com · 800-441-6287

For US Customers WeatherTech.com ©2017 MacNeil IP LLC

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The DIY Gift for People Who Eat THREE TASTY SAUCES, THREE REUSABLE CANISTERS. DONE. R E C I P E S B Y R A Y M O N D C H E N , chef and owner, The Inn at West View Farm, Dorset, Vermont

 You could get a lot of holiday shopping done using the gift guide that starts on page ��. For everyone else on your list, make this: a trio of easy condiments packed with flavor, developed for Popular Mechanics by Raymond Chen, a star chef in Vermont by way of New York. (Eat and stay at his inn whenever you’re any where close.) The recipes below make enough to give a set of three to four of your friends and/or loved ones. Sriracha Vermont Maple Mustard We developed this recipe to use with a kimchi pulled pork egg roll as a riff on Chinese takeout egg rolls with spicy mustard. In the kitchen, we smear buns with the mustard and make sandwiches with any leftover pulled pork. MAKES � ½ CUPS

□ � cups Dijon mustard □ ½ cup sriracha □ ¼ cup toasted sesame oil □ ¾ cup Vermont maple syrup □ � tsp fresh minced ginger □ � tsp salt

 D  O  H  T  E  M  H  C  A   R E  O  F  E  P  I  C nts  E e   R di 

 re    wl. ing   k  s  n bo i i i   h   r  W   t l e   n   h  t  te u a  toge ge   r  y.  r fri   e e   R  eliv d 

Spicy Peanut Sauce Classic Chinese dish with cold noodles or chicken salad, and the richness of the sauce is a great complement to otherwise ho-hum meat dishes.

Gochujang Barbecue Sauce  I love the depth of flavor and unique texture of  gochujang. It makes for a resilient barbecue sauce that stands up to stronger   flavors that can result from  grilling or smoking.

MAKES � ¼ TO � ½ CUPS

□ �½ cups creamy peanut butter □ � cup unseasoned rice vinegar □ ½ cup light brown sugar □ ¾ cup soy sauce (We use Pearl River Bridge—light, thinner and slightly sweeter. Not to be confused with low-sodium.) □ ¼ to ½ cup water, depending on desired consistency □ � Tbsp toasted sesame oil □ � Tbsp chili garlic sauce □ � Tbsp minced ginger

MAKES � ¼ CUPS

□ �¼ cup gochujang (hotpepper paste available at southeast-Asian markets or at yummybazaar.com) □ ½ cup plus � Tbsp ketchup □ �½ cups light brown sugar □ ½ cup soy sauce □ ¼ cup plus � Tbsp unseasoned rice-wine vinegar □ ¼ cup plus � Tbsp toasted sesame oil □ � Tbsp minced garlic

 P o r k o ke d  P u l l e d  m  S  s  i c a n  h  c  P o p u la r  Me o nd Che n  Reci pe b y Ra y m black p coarse ground cu �   t, l sa er sh � cup ko a ted garlic. Rub: Combine d ¼ cup granul an a,  t ¼ inch ik pr pa p rimmed  to abou   t t a  f pepper, ½ cu ,  lb �   t ou bu t t, ab � boneless pork er Smoke in a smok �. b. ru dep th  tops. he   t h t i  ded:  ver  the bu t t  w s. (Recommen ur ho �½ �. Liberall y co or f s   to a t ��� degree �. Prehea t o ven   ) d. oo   w e or charcoal grill pl ap as ting pan le, hickor y, and and place in a ro a blend o f map l oi   f in   t   t bu p  Wra shreds ven un til mea t o  ��� degrees.  �. in sh ni Fi . er t g  time as ps  wa   jus t  final cookin along  wi th � cu Ad s. ur ho �½ o ther easil y, abou t an one hour. lo w  to res t  for Al  �. .   y ar ss ce ne �

THE CARD

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sauces.

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POPULARMECHANICS.COM

FOR COMBUSTION�ENGINE VEHICLES, OLD AND NEW.

C A N Y O U F I X I T YO U R S E L F ?

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��

The interior has developed a rattle.

Your garage smells like maple syrup.

White exhaust smoke.

High-pitched squeal from under the hood .

Wheel squeak that goes away when you brake.

The steering wheel is vibrating.

The battery you just replaced is dead. Again.

A pothole or general wear has shaken parts loose.

There’s a leak somewhere in your coolant system.

Coolant is entering the combustion chambers.

The serpentine belt, which drives every important engine part, is slipping.

The wear bars on your wornout brake pads are making themselves heard.

One of your wheels is out of balance. The question is why.

A bad charging system means it’s time for a new alternator.

Yes. Remove the culprit panel and apply Dynamat adhesive sound-deadening material. It’ll add mass, changing the resonant frequency, stopping the rattle.

Maybe. See if it’s coming from a place you can fix yourself (i.e., a nice, accessible hose). Otherwise, as long as the leak isn’t too ferocious, drive to the mechanic.

No. This is caused by a blown head gasket, which is as bad as engine problems get. Call AAA. And possibly start shopping for a new car.

Yes. You can put a new belt on yourself, usually by loosening one component, either a tensioner or the alternator.

Yes. New brake pads are an easy fix, but you’ll need a few tools. Most crucial: jack stands. Don’t trust your roadside jack to support the car when it’s up for longer than a tire change.

Maybe. If it’s winter, you might have snow or ice inside a wheel, which is easy to knock out. If a weight fell off a rim, go to a tire shop and get the wheel rebalanced.

Maybe. Beware busted knuckles and the effort required for safe disposal. This is a cheap (and faster) fix for a mechanic.

DECEMBER _ ����

Abridged.  

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

A GU ID E TO IDIOT LIGHTS RE A C CAR S

H T  Y  M

BLOW OUT THE CARBON

CHECK ENGINE Ever been in a cab with a permanently lit check-engine light? It still ran, right? Indeed, the check-engine light isn’t typically going to indicate an ailment that’ll strand you. However, it might pertain to a bad signal from an oxygen sensor or some component of the emissions system. That means you will fail your next inspection. Visit a garage, or check the code yourself with an OBD scan tool.

COOLING SYSTEM Does your car have a temperature gauge? Consult that to find out just how hot is hot—a little bit too hot, you can still drive it to wherever you need to go. But if the needle’s pegged to the letter H (or if you just don’t know), shut it down. If you’re desperate to get to where you’re going, turn your heater on full blast. You might be sweaty, but that’s a little less heat in the cooling system.

TRACTION CONTROL If this light is flashing intermittently, you’re overcoming the available traction and you might want to back off the gas. Conversely, sometimes you want wheelspin (like if you’re stuck in snow or sand, or entering the burnout box at your local drag strip). In that case, manually disable the system and bring on the squiggles.

Hypothesis: Redlining your engine occasionally helps eject carbon buildup. Fact: The idea is based on an engine design that hasn’t been used in a century. After explaining this, Thomas Douglas from the Guild of Automotive Restorers says to just let your car get up to operating temperature (usually between ��� and ��� degrees Fahrenheit, which you can hit after just a few minutes of driving) before turning it off. Otherwise, soot that never gets burned off can build up. DO A COOLANT FLUSH

Hypothesis: You’re changing your oil .. .may as well change your coolant, too. Just because. Fact: “If your car’s less than ten years old, it was probably filled from the factory with coolant that’s formulated to last ���,��� miles,” says Colin Dilley, vice president of technology for Prestone. That said, coolant is important, because if your car starts running hot, then the oil has lower viscosity and doesn’t lubricate the engine as well. So a creeping engine temperature gauge is your signal to get a flush. USE THE TOUCHLESS CAR WASH

OIL PRESSURE If this light goes on, pull over immediately and shut off your engine. You don’t want to mess around with this one. Oil starvation foretells imminent engine seizure, which is disastrous at speed. Get a tow truck.

@PopularMechanics

LOW TIRE PRESSURE Pay attention. Most tire-pressuremonitoring systems aren’t actually measuring pressure—they’re measuring speed at each tire. So if one doesn’t match the other three, the light comes on. Solution: Add air and look for nails.

BATTERY  Get thee to a safe spot to call roadside assistance because time is running out. If it’s lit before you start your car, find some jumper cables. Your voltage has probably dipped too low to crank the starter.

Hypothesis: Modern automatic car washes won’t hurt your exterior. Fact: Never mind the unsupervised self-serve bubble brush that might’ve  just been used to clean mud off of Grave Digger. Even the fancy automatic washes have their problems. “A lot of car washes use recycled water,” says Stephen Mosca, owner of South County Hand Car Wash in Rhode Island. “Sometimes their towns require it, and they have filters. The problem is salt: Once there’s salt in the water, you can’t filter it out. So you could be washing your car in salt water.”

DECEMBER _ ����

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This year we’ve partnered with Huckberry, an online retailer we love, to find the best technical gear and clothing for anyone on your list. To buy any of the gifts you see here, go to huckberry.com/popmech.

Gifts for the �

SELF�SUFFICIENT MAN �. Taylor Stitch Yosemite shirt, $��� Heavy-duty flannel. Soft and tough. �. Peak Design Everyday backpack, $���  A ��-liter pack with fully customizable inner compartments. �. Goal Zero rechargeable lantern, $�� Charge it up with the sun or the hand crank.  You can also use it to top off your phone battery.

�. XTRATUF deck boots, $�� Slip on for grip and  waterproof protection in any situation. �. Hestra deerskin gloves, $��� The wool keeps you  warm. The leather keeps you protected. �. LifeStraw, $��  Weighs only � ounces and filters more than ��� gallons of water.

�. Navy SEAL aluminum wallet, $�� Protects your credit cards with RFID-blocking material. Ten percent of proceeds go to the Navy SEAL Foundation. �. Huckberry x Lum-Tec GMT watch, $��� Durable, easy to read in any weather, and limited to only ��.

��

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�. Arcade Guide belt, $�� Holds up your pants. Looks good. Washable. ��. Compact EDC kit, $�� Cut, measure, and clip, all with your key chain. ��. Leatherman pocket knife, $��  A knife and a bottlecap opener that comes with a ��-year  warranty.

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��. Tenkara mini sawtooth package, $��� Everything you need to fish, including a �-foot fly-fishing rod that collapses to �� inches.

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GIFT GUIDE ���� Huckberry’s catalog is almost as much a great magazine as it is a place to buy clothes. It has a special feature called The Rundown in which they ask notable people to share their stories—and the stories behind some of their favorite gear. This year, Huckberry was kind enough to consider me notable. Here are a few of my answers, along with some more great gifts.

Most Surreal Moment as Editor in Chief 

I met Tim Cook at the Oscars. Popular Mechanics had sponsored the Scientific and Technical Oscars, so I was fortunate enough to attend the main event, too. Anyway, he told me he loves Popular Mechanics. Then Lady Gaga  walked by.

Editor in Chief 

Holiday Travel Tip

Favorite Holiday Tradition

Old paperbacks. I’m not good at reading books electronically, so I carry pocket-size editions of classic books— stuff I should have read by this point in my life. They actually fit in your pocket, so they’re easy to pull out on the train or plane or (in my earlier days) bus station, and you don’t use up  your battery.

I make this hors d’oeuvre called rumaki. I think it’s from the ’��s. You  wrap a piece of bacon around a water chestnut and a piece of chicken liver that’s been marinated in soy sauce and ginger and some other stuff, and broil it until the bacon is just crispy. It’s the greatest party food of all time. But you can’t tell people what’s in it. They just have to eat it.

Gift I’m Giving

The MMX Vancouver Marshmallow Crossbow will be going to a few very lucky people on my list. It shoots marshmallows up to �� feet. And not those little tiny marshmallows. The big campfire ones. I don’t know why anyone  wouldn’t want one of these.

Ryan D’Agostino

Project on My Bucket List

 We have a little cabin (you might call it a shed) that I want to turn into a painting studio for my wife, who’s an art therapist and a gifted painter. Solar panels,  woodstove, a little deck out front so she can work outside.

Gift I Want

The Raden A�� Carry-On suitcase looks like a fine piece of luggage and I’ve been eyeing one. I do a lot of quick business trips and I never check a bag. I think I could fit everything I need in there.

Marshmallow Crossbow

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Best Part of My Job

Learning from people who have mastered a skill, who have lived interesting lives, and who have things to say. Favorite Huckberry Purchase

Easy: The Flint and Tinder ��-Year Hoodie. I didn’t know cotton could be that soft. You just don’t want to take it off. I would say I wear it more days than not in any given year. On the other days, my wife wears it. Raden A�� Carry-On

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I’m Most Productive When.. .

The sun is shining, I’m out in the barn, my sons are within earshot, and the shop radio is playing the kind of classic rock that you can only listen to while puttering around the yard. Journey, Badfinger, Joe Walsh. Heart. Old Van Halen. You know the station. Book That Changed My Behavior

One Man’s Meat, the collection of E.B.  White’s essays about Maine farm life in Harper’s Magazine. It made me better at my job because it taught me that every sentence can, and should, be perfect. Splurge Booze Purchase

I love Jefferson’s Ocean. Jefferson’s is a great bourbon producer in Kentucky, and they age these barrels at sea. It’s smooth and has a deep, rich flavor,  which they attribute to the movement of the ship and the salt air. Who knows? It’s fantastic. Craziest Project Submission I’ve Seen at Popular Mechanics

One of our editors is currently trying to build a trebuchet, using an authentic all-wood design from the Middle Ages. I think he might do it. If he does, we’ll publish it. Album I’m Listening To

 America, Location ��, by Dispatch. Full disclosure: I was their first manager, ��  years ago. They’ve come a long way since then, and on this new one, every song is a story you want to hear again.

Flint and Tinder ��-Year Hoodie

���

LIFE

AT THE

M ALL �� DECEMBER

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Malls were the great social and economic experiment of the second half of the twentieth century. Their death has been greatly exaggerated, but they’re not what they once were. We went to find out what’s going on in there. BY TOM CHIARELL A

O U T S I D E T H E M A L L ,  three boys sat on the

sidewalk in front of P.F. Chang’s, in the shadow of a giant horse statue, looking at YOU ARE their phones. One of them had his feet up on HERE his skateboard like it was an ottoman. Nearby, a telephone contractor held a clipboard up, blocking the sun, scanning the roofline. A woman drinking a Cool Lime Refresher from a massive plastic Starbucks cup stood in a slender blade of shade created by an eight-foot-high sundial, also looking at her phone. Two parking valets wore identical sunglasses. They stared at the horizon. From the mall doors, two  women, fingers dangling Lord & Taylor bags, emerged into the sunlight, looking like an artist’s rendering of the verb to shop. I asked the boys what they were doing at the mal l. “We’re allowed to be here,” one of them said, glancing up at me as if arguing with the sky. The other two did not give me a sniff. “His mom is picking us up,” the first one said. He wore a T-shirt that read TEE SHIRT in iron-on letters. “We’re allowed to sit here if  we’re just getting picked up, right?” I told him I didn’t know. He muttered at me. All three of them did. The woman by the sundial sipped her drink and smiled. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I just work here.” The sundial told me it was right about noon. I went in to the mall.  Why? Why does anyone go to the mall these days? It’s a valid

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Peter van Agtmael photographed the MyZeil mall, Frankfurt, Germany, in ����. See more in “Malls of the World,” starting on the next page.

question. Have they not outlived their use? I went to see what lie is let in them. People opine about malls being dead. Maybe they are. But here’s this one, still at �� percent occupancy and employing thirty-eight hundred people. Nine million visitors a year. So, technically alive.  Anyway I hadn’t been in a while, and I  wondered what goes on in there. I wondered i they had changed. The mall in question is Eastview Mall, in Victor, New York, a suburb o Rochester, my hometown. It’s big, as these things go (�.� million square eet), and old, in depreciation terms—orty-six years since its making (and it’s been expanded several times). It’s populated with the usual suspects o reta il lie: Macy’s, Sears, JCPenney, Victoria’s Secret, L.L. Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lids, Aeropostale, Banana Republic, the Apple Store, Forever ��, The Walking Company, Nail Studio, Nail Studio �. It has a large detached theater complex and a ood court that’s jaunty when it’s ull and semi-tragic when devoid o customers. Banners o new ood oerings—garlic knots, lobster mac n’ cheese—hang like  wanted posters in Carson City. There’s a carousel, improbably manned by a living ticket taker, doling tickets to ride or one dollar. And there are restaurants o unusual size: Chang’s, Champps, Biaggi’s, Bonefish Grill. So, not the mall. Not the best mall. Not the first. Or the biggest. Just a mall.  in a mall. I’ve always liked saying that, because or me it is more than an expression o my aimless youth. Many people—generations, really—might lay claim to growing up in, even to gaining selfood under, the indifferent lighting o an American mall. That’s air. What I should really say is: I grew up with a mall. My ather built a mall. He worked on its design, supervised its construction, and then stayed on to manage it or orty years. Midtown Plaza, America’s first enclosed urban mall, right there in downtown Rochester, designed by Victor Gruen, the man some have since nicknamed the Mall Maker. Gruen, an  Austrian transplant, athered dozens GREW UP

I

@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _   ����

��

MALLS OF THE WORLD For as long as there have been malls, there have been great photographers chronicling life inside.

Santa Monica Place, Santa Monica, California, ����. Photograph by Eli Reed.

of American malls in the ����s and ’��s. They were expansive—he loaded their interiors with art and ornament. Clocks, fountains, gardens. He incorporated music in their creation, and included mahogany and redwood in the construction of interior walls. He cared. He fronted the stores inside his malls with window displays he’d perfected while designing storefronts in Depression-era Europe. These were his proving ground. His windows, my dad once told me, made people  want to buy. Gruen’s exterior designs were unremarkable, workmanlike, even ugly. For Victor Gruen the work of malls went on inside them. In his design, malls were a piece of the puzzle that constitutes human community. In his hands, malls were meant to double as gathering spots, meeting points, celebration locations, performance spaces, even demonstration areas. He believed the social function of malls might one day surpass their economic importance. My dad worked five and a half days a week for four decades in Midtown Plaza, a salient acolyte of Gruen,  with whom he worked only a few years. He wanted that place tied into the lives of everyone in the city. We stayed loyal to that city. He and my mother refused to drift to the suburbs because of that link. My brothers and I thought of ourselves as city kids. We sneered at the very idea of ranch houses and cul-de-sacs. We spent our weekends in Midtown, worked our holidays in Midtown, watched jazz shows in the Midtown Tower restaurant, concerts on the floor of the mall, bought our clothes only in Midtown’s anchor department stores— McCurdy’s and Forman’s, avoiding the third local department store in town, Sibley’s, which sat across Main Street from Midtown. Sibley’s. Bah. My brothers and I painted the cement pillars in Midtown’s garage, changed fluorescent bulbs in its utility tunnels, carried buckets of hot pitch like hod carriers across the roof of Midtown. At night, my family talked about the stores, the tenants, the trends in retail, and later the slow decay of the ailing city around the mall. In ����, the property was sold to a California developer who bilked my dad out of a year’s pay and let the whole enterprise go to seed. In ����, the year my oldest son graduated high school, Midtown’s closing was announced. ��

  DECEMBER _   ����

Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ����. Photograph by A. Abbas.

 A year later, my father died. I was fifty the year they tore the mall, his mall, down. TARTING AT DAWN, I came to Eastview every day

for four days, all day. If you’ve seen the sunrise at a suburban mall, then you know there is nothing to it. There is no middle ground, no gentle introduction of daylight at a mall. The sun barely rises, and the switch of the day is suddenly flicked. Bam. Get inside. And buy. The employees arrive in small bursts, aprons thrown over their shoulders, lugging boxes, smoking one final grit, entering through unmarked doors, a key in a scratchy cylinder or a code tapped out on a keypad. Entering the mall, accompanied by no one at all, they look a little grim. Defeated. Except the Apple Store staff, who in every age and gender identification look like happy, hungover sophomores galumphing off to MALL FACTS their favorite studio art class. ���� was Sitting in the mall parking lot in the early the first year morning, you can expect some scrutiny. Espesince the cially at �:�� a.m. When you get cruised by ����s that security, show them your coffee; everybody not one new understands a raised Styrofoam cup in the quismall was built in the U.S. ling light of morning. I havecoffee!  That gesture speaks. I’m like everyone else, it says. I’m just waiting to get into the mall.

S

HEN YOU PULL  open the glass doors of a mall,

they draw a suck of air from the interior. It always smells of perfume or shoes. Mall air. Eastview might not be your mall, but it may as well be. There are ��� retail spaces, and those thirty-eight hundred people are employed there in one way or another. It has �.� million feet of leasable interior space, which classifies it as a super-regional mall. The East view components—the enclosed common space, the shared  walkways, benches, fountains, terrazzo, the storefronts, the food court—are surely similar to, if not the same as, your mall. If you haven’t been to a mall in twenty years, many things haven’t changed all that much. Curly fries. Big pretzels. You

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Park Place Mall, Tucson, Arizona, ����. Photograph by Susan Meiselas.

ION Orchard, Singapore, ����. Photograph by Ian Berry.

Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota, ����. Photograph by Martin Parr.

still get offered samples of teriyaki chicken. Still not bad. At performance review of a barista, an older guy. “You are mostly Eastview, there’s still a Spencer’s Gifts, been there since the upbeat,” he was told. “And upbeat is good, right? Really good. opening in ����. In the walkways, young people hold clipEssential. But it’s too clear to the customers that frozen drinks boards, looking to sign you up. For something. Anything. They aren’t your strength. Are they? I think you show that in your offer gift cards, discounts. Key chains. You still navface. Use that upbeat energy when you use the igate a mall by looking up to see which department blender. Use your face to smile.” The old barista store is ahead of you. At the end of one walkway agreed to try. His supervisor was pleased. “And or another, on the apron of any of the department don’t lean against the counter, okay?” stores in question, you still run into local fashion The principle of most malls was once to keep MALL FACTS shows, radio broadcasts, fundraisers for the local people moving and looking, to expose them archiOverall U.S. retail travel teams. tecturally to constant opportunities to buy. This sales were up �.�% from the previous Other parts have changed fundamentally. Cellis not the case anymore. Not at Eastview, anyway. year in April ����. phones drive entire businesses. Candles, too. And The urgency of movement is missing. The reaMore than ��% of tea. Tea is big at the mall. There’s the valet parking. soning now seems to be: If people sit, they won’t purchases are But the biggest change? The mall is not crowded. leave. I saw more than eighty people sitting on still made in Eastview has its quirks. The walkways are unithe couches by themselves, mostly checking their physical stores. formly roofed with glass, providing a weirdly phones. At least two of these admitted to me they straight-down sunlit illumination. You can always  were ordering from Amazon after having priced see the sky. A little bit of it anyway. In ���� manan item in the mall. A woman named Anne, from agement installed a fireplace, laid in area rugs, set nearby Canandaigua, talked to me about shopping up a giant hearth outside Von Maur. And throughout the mall, online from the mall, after pricing at the mall. She had to, her amongst the smartphone-accessory kiosks and the jewelryhusband had COPD, a heart ailment. She retires in twentyrepair places, homey stations are set up like small sitt ing three weeks. Even small savings meant a lot to her. “Money is rooms—leather chairs, table lamps, comfy couches. This is money,” she said. the American mall inviting you to treat it like a place to stay, “It is what it is,” her friend echoed. She would not give me not just to shop. To dwell there. her name, but she lived in Ogden. Not that nearby. People come to read in the cozy chairs. Families sit to argue. “What does that  mean?” Anne said. Old men in golf shirts doze off. On that first morning, I found The second woman stammered. “It’s like what you said. three women doing sudoku. A club, they said, that met there Money matters. It’s not a crime. It’s not illegal to shop online on Fridays and Saturdays. Natalie started it, they said. She here, is it?”  wasn’tthere today. Gallstones. They urged me to sit. Nice chair. “I’m not even using the Wi-Fi,” Anne said, a little  Apparently, a lot of people in the area get gallstones. They feel desperately. there is ample evidence of that, and begin ticking off the gall Ask a stranger about  the mall when at the mall, there is an stone victims they know. Even I knew one of them, the mother inevitable discomfort regarding the purpose of the place and its of a woman I knew in college. “See?” one of them marveled. “A rules. Is it a public space, or not? Who decides the rules? Who mall is a small world.” enforces them? What is shopping anymore, when you can buy Sales reps hold impromptu meetings in the chairs, which  what you want anywhere you are? Like theboys with the skateamplifies the sense that commerce is alive and well in Vicboard, she assumed I was some sort of mall cop. I reassured her. tor, New York. “This way we don’t have to meet in a bar, where “I know that I’m supposed to buy things here,” Anne said. someone always orders carbs, or drink wine,” a mattress “I’ve been coming in here since I was a kid. It’s a mall. I know  wholesalertold me. Later, in thechairs, I eavesdropped on the that’s what they want. Buying.”

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DECEMBER _   ����

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West End City Center, Budapest, Hungary, ����. Photograph by Stuart Franklin.

The Galleria , Houston, Texas, ����. Photograph by Jérôme Sessini.

“It is what it is,” the other woman said.  Anne pinched an eye at her. “I hate that expression, Barb.” Then she looked at me. “Oh, don’t use her name, right? She doesn’t want you to use her name.” “I’m just saying there’s more to the world than the mall,” Barb said. “You can’t ignore the rest of the world when you’re at the mall. It doesn’t just disappear because you’re in here. So it’s fair to check prices online.” Anne agreed with that much. “What are you going to call me?” Barb said, as I stood to leave the comfy chairs.  What would you like? I asked. “How about Barbara?” Anne said. Barb sniffed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But just plain Barb, I think.”

admitted they don’t shop when they walk. Several said they actually worked hard not to.  And Victor Gruen wept. “In a lot of ways, the walkers are the best regulars, mostly because they show up. But they aren’t shoppers,” says a woman behind the fragrance counter at Macy’s. Do people really shop anymore? In the old-fashioned way, of letting your eyes fall on  what you might want? “People shop with a purpose now,” she says. “It’s not so much shopping as entertainment.” She has  worked at Eastview for twenty-two years. Her station is just inside the entrance. As we talk she takes a long look at the thinly peopled visual line to another anchor store in the distance, Sears. “I used to think the days I could see through to the Sears sign  were really slow. Now thecrowdsare so thinthat I’m surprised  when I don’t see it,” she says. She puts the blame on online shopping. “The UPS guy told me he’ll drop nine packages off HERE ARE PEOPLE  who only walk the mall. They arrive early, wait in pairs for the doors at a house in the morning, and by afternoon he’s getting called back to return eight of them. That’s how people are shopping to open. Some of them begin walking before the doors open, back and forth now. It’s not social, it doesn’t involve interaction in front of the doors like sentries.  with people,” she says. They dress for it in their way. They  Walta Leake, a nineteen-year-old sales assoare not particularly old, or out of ciate at the Sprint store, is standing outside the shape. But they are uniformly quiet. They wear store in his khakis, looking for some interaction. MALL FACTS shoes that don’t cluck against the floor tiles, don’t He wants to sell me a new cellphone plan. He just ��% of Americans over echo or drag. They roll their feet, heel-toe, heel-toe. needs five minutes to do it. He’s a part-time stu�� have worked Their earbuds stay tucked in their earports. They dent, a mall enthusiast. “When I was a kid, I found at a shopping  wear patches of neon, or Buffalo Bills T-shirts. all my new stuff at the mall,” he says. He raps his center at Track suits, shorts, leggings, T-shirts from upstate finger against the air in front of him three times. some point  wineries, from ancient community fundraisers. “It was new, new, new.” It’s hard to imagine that in their lives. But the truth is, the world dresses like mall walkin the few years since Leake was a kid things could ers now, not the other way around. So it is difficult have changed that much. “Oh yeah. Very, very to tell who’s who. different,” he says. “The kids do come to the mall  Why walk the mall? I ask. Why not walk in a now, but they move around. You’ll find them near park? Or along the Erie Canal? Uniformly, the walkers cite clothes. Just looking. They may not be buying here, but they are the weather in Rochester, splendid in the summer, punishing here, you know? But they keep this place alive.” in fall, winter, and spring. Others are pragmatic. “No dogs, no  At the cellphone repair place, the owner, Manpreet Singh, dog poop.” Anxious. “The mall is protected,” the leader of one thirty-one, says, “This business is online, but that does not work small walking group tells me. “There are cameras and secu well for what I do here. Here I have to convince people. I’m not rity.” Or existential. “Everything about it is familiar. There’s selling a brand. I make two to three thousand transactions a nothing to look at after awhile, so I move faster.” Or competmonth. That’s all. That’s all me, standing here, explaining, itive. “Walkers actually come from other malls to walk here. taking phones apart, defining what damage can and cannot be They just walk fast because we do.” Every walker I talked to undone. I have to be here. Someone [continued on page ���]

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  DECEMBER _   ����

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BACK IN ����, a Corvette cost ���,��� and the ZR-� option added another

 WHY CHEVY NEEDS THIS NATURALLY ASPIRATED,  WISCONSIN�BUILT V��. BY EZRA DYER

��

DECEMBER _ ����

���,���. What that bought you, mostly, was the most fearsome engine ever bolted into an American car. Instead of the pushrod, two-valve heads used in the standard Corvette engine (and every other Corvette engine before and since), the ZR-� had a �.�-liter V-� with quad overhead cams and four  valves per cylinder. This allowed it to rev high and breathe deeply, spinning out ��� horsepower back when a Ferrari ��� TS made only ���. A friend  who was reviewing cars at the time managed to wreck a ZR-� so violently that the car broke in half. “When the GM people showed up,” he said, “they only cared about the half with the engine.” That engine, dubbed LT�, wasn’t built by GM. It was built by Mercury Marine. And when the ZR-� went out of production in ����, Mercury went back to making boat engines and GM went back to using pushrods. Ah, but  what if? What if GM kept developing the LT�, eschewing the current Cor vette Z��’s supercharger for high-revving, naturallyaspirated power? Well,

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� Things We Like About Naturally Aspirated Engines

�. A smooth power climb, to prevent spinning the tires when exiting a corner. �. No lag, because there’s no external device delivering boost. �. Better sound. No supercharger howling at the intake, no turbo muffling the exhaust.

 we have an answer. It’s called the Mercury Racing to upshift but the SB� is just getting started on a SB� �.�, and you can buy it for ���,���. manic surge toward its �,���-rpm redline. You’ve The key design element is the heads: four-cam, got to will yourself to hang in there for the last ��-valve, just like the original ZR-�. By combin- couple thousand rpm, as your ears tell you to shift ing airflow with big-bore displacement, the SB� but your eyes on the tach tell you you’re not there achieves impressive numbers: ��� horsepower  yet. I’ve never driven an original Corvette ZR-�, at �,��� rpm. That’s ��� more but I’d imagine it’s more like horsepower than the current this, frenetic and linear, than Z��, without a supercharger. the current Z��’s sledgeham With the SB�’s four-valve-permer delivery of supercharged cylinder heads, the engine torque. This is the alternate  It’s not belching flows a lot of air and thus can be reality where GM and Mercury   flames or tailored for a sort of split personality—livable at idle and still threatening explosive at high rpm. to keep the throttle down. to stall or To find out just how explosive, I strapped into Mercury Racdisplaying the ing’s test mule, a ratty Ultima sort of untoward GTR, on a runway at Fond du Lac airport in Wisconsin, down the behavior you road from Mercury’s headquarmight expect ters. Mercury chose the Ultima, a midengine kit car from Engto accompany land, as a testbed because it’s engines are going to forced ��� horsepower. lightweight and uses a steel tube induction, turbos and superframe designed to accommochargers that make more date engines making as much power with smaller, comparas �,��� horsepower. atively fuel-efficient engines. The SB� fires up with a lumpy idle, the staccato These days, natural aspiration is an indulgence, and lope of a race engine awaiting its orders. But it’s not the SB� represents a chance to experience it in its belching flames or threatening to stall or displaying highest form—American flavor, bolted into whatthe sort of untoward behavior you might expect to ever hot rod or track car you care to put it in. A new accompany ��� horsepower. Indeed, the ���� ���- Corvette would be appropriate, but I’d like to drop hp Corvette Grand Sport that I drove the same day an SB� in a ���� Chevy C�� short-bed. Or better sounded more ragged at idle.  yet, an old Donzi ��. I don’t know if it’s occurred to The engine’s specialness, though, is evident Mercury, but one of these could make for a pretty in motion. At �,��� rpm, the Corvette is ready fast boat.

I test-drove the engine in an Ultima GTR, a midengine, rearwheel-drive British kit car.

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DECEMBER _ ����

A camshaft is a cylinder with little protrusions that, as the cam rotates, press on levers that open valves to let air in or out of the combustion chamber. In a pushrod engine, a single cam pushes rods to activate the valves—hence, you know, pushrods.

PUSHRODS vs.

OVERHEAD CAMS

In overhead-cam engines, the cams are above the cylinders, often acting directly on the valves. This setup makes it much easier to have more than two valves per cylinder, which means more airflow and thus more power and tuning flexibility.

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drive. There’s a fat, square-bottomed steering wheel and aluminum paddle shifters mounted on the steering column, a setup more than a little reminiscent of Ferrari’s. If you need further confirmation of the Stel vio’s intentions, it has a lightweight carbon-fiber driveshaft to help the engine feel even more responsive. Now, to give a ���,��� car a carbon driveshaft, you have to pinch money somewhere else, and that somewhere is probably the interior. Which isn’t bad, but the materials are a little plain compared to the inside of an Audi Q� or a Benz GLC. If that bothers you, the Ti Lusso package dresses things up with leather and wood finery for ��,���—very reasonable in the world of European option packages. If Alfa can stay off the reliability naughty lists, the Stelvio looks like bargain Italian fun.

FIVE�WORD REVIEWS

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DECEMBER _ ����

Only prob lem with Stelvio Pass: It’s no secret. Go at dawn on a weekday to ge t the hairp ins to yourself.

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A tall Golf. That’s good.

Remember boxy wagons? Us neither.

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Get the

���� Chevrolet Traverse Three-row, ninespeed, useful. The Chevy Traverse is a triumph of rationality. Compared to its SUV sibling, the Tahoe, the eight-passenger Traverse is roomier inside, �,��� pounds lighter, gets better gas mileage, and is less expensive. It’s probably a little bit quicker, too—we clocked a front-wheel-drive Traverse’s zero-to-�� run at �.� seconds, but it feels even stronger than that, thanks to the nine-speed transmission’s tight lower gear ratios. The Tahoe’s main advantage: It can tow

four-cylinder Camrys. But the Traverse–Tahoe dichotomy is a stark lesson in the advantages of crossovers versus body-on-frame SUVs. The new Traverse drives like a big sedan, because that’s essentially what it is. And while its former identical twin, the GMC Acadia, shrunk in its redesign, the Traverse got even bigger. Yet on a long drive, I saw fuel economy creep over �� mpg. The Chevy’s ���-hp V-�, kin to the Camaro engine, can really stretch a gallon when you’re loafing in ninth gear. Again: so pragmatic. But if you’re worried that a Traverse would starve your id, remember that there’s an even more sensible solution to your eight-passenger needs. And you haven’t fully committed to family-hauling logic until you’ve got sliding doors.

The Countryman has the odd distinction of being the biggest Mini ever. But that’s not like being the tastiest rice cake or most optimistic Cleveland Browns fan. This is actually a spacious car, with a wheelbase that’s slightly longer than a Honda CR-V’s. You can put your friends in the

backseat and when you get where you’re going, they’ll still be your friends. Weighing more than �,��� pounds, the All� is a husky lad. Thus, even in Cooper S form—turbocharged �.�-liter, ��� horsepower—it lacks the feisty exuberance of a twodoor Cooper S hardtop. But you can get it with a six-speed manual transmission, and that alone marks the Countryman as a more engaging drive than you’ll

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KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY, 50% ALC./VOL. ©2017 KNOB CREEK DISTILLERY, CLERMONT, KY.

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OUNTAI NO LINES, NO TRAFFIC, NO DISTRACTIONS FROM THE POWDER. Photographs by M AT T K I E D A I S C H

@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _ ����

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Snowcat driver Corrie Steinau builds her own roads to navigate Monarch Mountain’s backcountry. Previous page: Snowcat director Aaron Peyrouse skis the Hydrant run off Waterdog Ridge.

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he sunrise drive up U.S. �� to Mon-

arch Mountain is a gray haze of flying snow, paced for us by a blaze-orange snowplow. It’s a slow chug up toward the Continental Divide, but we’ve come for one of the last pure ski areas—no spas or luxury hotels, no snowmaking or lift lines. A former Works Progress  Administration project, Monarch’s chairlifts are mostly two-seaters, and the lodge’s biggest concession to comfort is the two bars running Colorado taps. The mountain’s goal, instead of growth, is making its cotton-stuffing soft powder accessible to those passionate enough to reach its quiet notch in south central Colorado.  Anyone wearing Monarch’s reasonably priced (���) lift ticket can hike into the ���-acre Mirkwood backcountry, but we’ve come for a snowcat tour. Riding in the back of the alpine hybrid of a tank and a church bus, skipatroller-turned-snowcat-director

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DECEMBER _ ����

 Aaron Peyrouse will lead us through an additional �,��� acres of untouched bowls, glades, and chutes.  After a safety briefing where we receive beacons and avalanche airbags,  we take a lift to Monarch’s northern peak (elevation ��,��� feet) and  join our snowcat. The driver, Corrie Steinau, is going into her ninth season of tours and unfazed by the impossible  visibility as snow continues to fall and more powder whips over the ridgeline. “It’s like driving in a ping-pong ball,” she says, explaining that her only guide is the bamboo poles she’s stuck every few yards on either side of her trails. “They’re my best friends out here.” Peyrouse starts us on an open bowl  where each of our group of ten enjoys fresh tracks. It’s as steep as skiing gets before you’d call it a cliff—Monarch has those too—and carving through the dry, thigh-deep powder is an alternating rhythm of weightless floating

and fleeting control accompanied by a giddy rush of endorphins. Soon we kick out of our skis, clamber into the back of the snowcat, and let Steinau ferry us to the top of another untouched trail. Riding with us, Peyrouse explains it’s the quality of snow and uncommonly steep terrain that drew him to Monarch.  We skim half-buried trees, burst through drifts, and slowly work our legs into a Gore-Tex-wrapped pudding. By midafternoon we’ve put in six hours of skiing that (in our minds) would make great GoPro highlights, and retreat to the Sidewinder Saloon. Over a beer, Peyrouse shares the other reasons he hasn’t looked back since moving from Denver in ����. “It’s a small-town vibe where everybody still looks out for everybody,” he says. After a long sip he adds, “You don’t get here by accident, this is a place people seek out.” —Matt Allyn

FOR A SHOPPABLE LIST OF ALL THE STUFF O UR SUBJECTS ARE W EARING, SEE PAGE ��.

Jeremy Valett (left) leads the snowcat shop. His team repairs cracked and broken metal tracks and maintains the drivetrains.

“The cliff  zone is our most extreme terrain. Every run includes mandatory air time, as much as a ��-foot drop. Standing at the top, you can’t see anything below, you go in blind.” —Aaron Peyrouse

DECEMBER _ ����

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Fjällräven Women’s Keb Fleece Hoodie ���� Reinforced shoulders for a backpack

RAEN Kettner Sunglasses ���� Dress up any après

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Women’s Keb Eco-Shell Trousers ���� Threelayer, waterproof protection

TREW Women’s Wander Jacket ���� Packable allweather shell

lenses

minimalist shell

Mountain Khakis Original Mountain Pants ��� Triple-stitched organic cotton

Hanwag Grunten Boots ���� Leather lining and Vibram sole

Hanwag Alaska GTX Boots ���� Gore-Tex lining and memory insole

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Copper Kettle Bavarian Helles ��� Refreshing, yet interesting

Filson Alaskan Guide Shirt ���� Wind-resistant flannel

Ridge Shell Jacket ���� Built to breathe in the backcountry

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Helly Hansen Elevate Shell Pants ���� Stay warm and dry in deep powder

Fjällräven Helags Cap ��� Waxed poly-cotton resists water and wind

���� Huge vents, all-mountain versatility

BCA Float �� Pack ���� Patrol-size pack with avalanche airbag

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DECEMBER _ ����

TREW TREWth Bib ���� Ready for chest-high snow

Gloves ���� Soft cowhide with foam insulation

 

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der Hoody ����

Ski Poles ��� Bamboo shafts and cork grips

Pret Cynic X Helmet ���� MIPS liner reduces brain-injury risk

Fjällräven Bergtagen Trousers ���� Tough, pliable, and water resistant

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

THE NEW VE NTRIX JACKE T RELEASES EXCESS BODY HEAT SO YOU CAN PE RFORM  A T Y O U R B E S T.

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AFTER A YEAR OF SWAPPING SIM CARDS, DOWNLOADING SOFTWARE UPDATES, CANVASSING VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND PRODUCT DESIGNERS, AND ENGAGING IN PETTY DEBATES ON REDDIT AND TWITTER, WE REALIZED: ALL THE BEST NEW THINGS ARE ACTUALLY . . . OLD. BUT LIKE WHATEVER SPIDER-MAN REBOOT IS OUT BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, WE KNOW THAT IT’S OKAY TO BORROW GOOD ID EAS FROM THE PAST.

DECEMBER ����

WHAT I’M INTO

Te Switch By DANNY BROWN Nintendo Switch

$���

- Attribute some of the Switch’s appeal to its namesake trick— you can carry it around and play anywhere, or detach the controllers and play it on a big TV. That flexibility makes it appealing to frequent flyers. Among those spotted with Switches: musicians Ben Folds and Ariana Grande, wrestler John Cena, and rapper Danny Brown (see right). For us, it comes down to the familiar names in the game library, which, thankfully, developers didn’t carelessly exploit. The latest Zelda, Mario Kart, and Sonic are all fantastic experiences that just happen to have nostalgia appeal. It all combines into a device so fun that it could push anyone claiming to have outgrown video games to reverse his or her stance.

Rapper

When you travel so much, hotel rooms start to feel like  jail cells. I used to have to lug around two laptops to game. It was a headache. Now, I just hook the Switch up to the hotel TV and play Street Fighter like I did back in sixth grade. It makes me feel a little bit at home. And on the plane, I play ��-minute quarters on NBA �K, so that’s a ��-minute game. Three games, and I’m in L.A.

The Future Will Be Hand-Drawn The newest thing in gaming is actually really old. If you haven’t played Cuphead yet,

here’s what will happen the first time  you do: While battling a malevolent potato the size of a minivan, you will become so distracted by the extraordinary detail of the watercolor pastoralia behind it—the subtle rotation of a tire swing in the wind, the word Acme stenciled on a bag of fertilizer—that your avatar, a personified latte mug with a ridiculous barbershop-striped straw sticking out of it, will get hit in the face by one of the realistically textured dirt balls the potato spews continuously, and the words YOU DIED!  will flash across the screen like a title card in a Charlie Chaplin film. This will happen to you because it happens to Chris Charla, director of Microsoft’sIndependentDeveloper program, all the time, and he’s been playing Cuphead for years. “Even now, I’ll find myself so entranced by some beautiful animation that all of a sudden the ‘Oops, you died’ screen will pop up,” he says. Cuphead is so distractingly beautiful because it is the first video game to employ the same cel animation techniques that studios from the ����s used to make those trippy, strangely macabre cartoons in which devils and cats and mice caper to great jazz tracks. Canadian brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer drew every frame of the game by hand,

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DECEMBER _ ����

painting the backgrounds in watercolor and then arranging everything into a fever dream of gameplay over the course of four years. The result is a ludicrous romp through carnival rides and old tattoos that—among the hyperrealistic first-person shooter games that are the normal output of the gaming industry these

So how did they do it? When  you play a game like Cuphead, the computer refreshes successive images of “sprites” (characters) over a background (which is also refreshing) to create the illusion in response to commands from right direction on the keypad, the computer knows, okay, every tenth of a second, change the background frame and also

Charla. The Moldenhauers had to create movement sequences for every character, then draw frame after frame of the characters making every motion. “On average it might take �� minutes to draw a frame, and then that frame has to be inked, and that takes five or six minutes,” says Chad. “I think there are close to ��,��� total frames.”

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

That’s ��,��� drawings of Cuphead jumping, crouching, and running. Of an hourglass dancing and a war-hardened pig with an eye patch talking and a mermaid with a dead octopus for hair squeezing beta fish out of . . . a giant sea bass? Of an angry cupcake mansion spewing airborne waffles and rolling peppermints and jellybean soldiers, and then, crawling zombie-like toward Cuphead on candy pink hands. Honestly, if you saw all the Moldenhauers’ Cuphead drawings tacked up in a friend’s kitchen, you might offer said friend the number of a psychological professional. “There’s a reason no one has attempted this before: It’s nuts,” says Jarred Goro, director of North American licensing for King Features, the company that owns classic cartoons including Betty Boop and Popeye. King found Cuphead so exciting that it partnered with the brothers to create merchandise. (King Features is owned by Hearst, which also owns Popular Mechanics.) “If we’d known it was this much  work, I think it would have scared us away,” says Chad. But it didn’t,

@PopularMechanics

and teaser videos of the animation the brothers posted online in ���� generated so much excitement that a scout from Microsoft’s developers program, the one run by Charla, contacted them to offer help with the programming that would turn Cuphead into a game playable on Xbox and Windows ��. The game has been in the news almost constantly ever since— beginning with “When will they finally release it?” speculation and eventually moving on, when gaming  journalists kept failing disastrously at Cuphead demonstrations, to a nou veau gamergate about whether videogame journalists are good enough at playing to do their jobs. Oh yeah, that’s one other thing you should know about Cuphead: It’s hard. When Kate Upton and Conan O’Brien took an advance shot at it in July, O’Brien died almost immediately. “Everyone who’s played the game has the response we wanted: It’s the kind of game you want to keep playing over and over and over. Even if you lose,” says Chad. Which is good, because that’s what’s going to happen. The first time. — Jacqueline Detwiler

SHORTCUTS FOR GAMEMAKERS “In the olden days, like �� years ago, if you wanted to make a game, you needed to have a pretty deep technical background,” says Chris Charla, director of Microsoft’s I.D. at Xbox program. “But in the last ten years, there’s been more and more middleware—third-party tools and technology that enable creators to make video games.” Here are three you can use to create your dream game. GAMEMAKER  A

drag-and-drop, learn-to-code-as-you-go-style creative engine, this will help you create �D games like Cuphead. This �D/�D engine, based primarily in C# or JavaScript, comes with tons of tutorials, as well as a particle system for making flames, clouds, and sparks. UNITY

This C++-based �D/�D program is centered around forums and has a visual scripting option for code-free planning. UNREAL ENGINE

DECEMBER _ ����

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 Your New Desktop

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Typing on a keyboard and using a mouse to drag files into folders goes back to the mid-’��s. In the decades since, plenty of tech companies have attempted more efficient methods of human–computer interaction. But this year was an affirmation of either the brilliance or stubbornness of WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer). We’d complain about the lack of progress if these things weren’t so pleasant to use.

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WHAT I’M INTO

LG Gram ($��� and up)

Samsung DeX

$���

Smartphones are more powerful than most of us need them to be and, this year especially, can cost more than a laptop. So it makes sense that Samsung would create this dock that turns a Samsung S� or Note�, keyboard, mouse, and TV or monitor into a full-fledged computer in which apps like Outlook, Google Docs, and YouTube fill the screen. Video editors and other power users need not apply, but even for them, the DeX points to a near future when we can use our overkill phones beyond the confines of taps and swipes.

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DECEMBER _ ����

Logitech Craft wireless keyboard $���

Twist that knob on the upper left to go between Chrome browser tabs, push it down to play/pause Spotify— whatever you want it to do within the range of compatible apps. Or, do like we do and just use it to turn down your music when a coworker or significant other needs your ears. Besides having the most satisfying keys this side of a mechanical keyboard, the Craft will make you remember why the volume knob always beats a touchscreen slider.

Volta V

$�,��� and up

The prettiest all-in-one computer since the original iMac, the Volta is specced out with liquid cooling and processor and graphics cards options specifically meant for hardcore PC gamers. Meaning, this walnut and bamboo box will handle any task you throw at it. The design pairs well with the newest Call of Duty game, WWII.

C

By LINUS

SEBASTIAN The internet’s resident tech explainer and the name behind Linus Tech Tips

I love the new iPad Pro, but all I use it for is watching videos. If I’m doing something serious, it’s the laptop, my LG Gram. When I’m traveling, it weighs so little that it makes no difference if I have it in my bag. And maybe this is a PC guy’s way of thinking, but it’s better than a tablet in every possible way. It’s faster, the screen is bigger, it’s got a keyboard, and the battery is not far off. That thing will do nine to �� hours. As someone who’s not a brand loyalist, who looks at every product individually, I only care about what it’s like to use. That’s why I use the LG.

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

D

Master & Dynamic MA��� speaker $�,���

To answer your first question: �� pounds. Second: No, the concrete body isn’t  just a novelty. The material dampens like wood, and the resulting sound is of the quality you’d expect for this price. It streams via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but also has auxiliary and optical outlets for record players and theater systems.

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Beats Studio�

$���

Looks like what Dr. Dre would’ve worn while producing Straight Outta Compton (the ���� record, not the movie), except with Bluetooth and noise cancellation that adapts as you go from the coffee shop to the sidewalk. We’ve dismissed previous Beats products as marketing compensating for a bad sound-quality-per-dollar ratio. The Studio�s changed our minds. The only gripe: If the battery’s dead, the wired connection doesn’t work at all.

Antique (Looking) Sound

Mighty music player $��

This year, Apple stopped making the iPod Shuffle and Nano. For those who miss using a dedicated music device, there’s the Mighty, which holds more than �,��� songs from Spotify. Good news for joggers, because these big phones are annoying to carry in an armband.

Audio is one of the few places where technology hasn’t outsmarted basic ergonomics or the laws of physics. Yes, Bluetooth earbuds are convenient. But for serious listening, tiny pieces of plastic can’t replace audio hardware with real buttons and enough size to produce big sound.

F

WHAT I’M INTO

ME-Geithain speakers

A normal high-end speaker system will have a low driver powering all the low sub—kick drum, bass guitar. The mid driver is for the (Price upon request, vocal-type stuff, and the tweeter gets the high hats, sibilance, all starting around $�,���) that. Geithain took another approach: It took all three drivers and litBy WAYNE SERMON erally stacked them on top of each other. Somehow, the waves don’t Lead guitar, Imagine Dragons cancel each other out. I don’t know how they did the math on that, but the result is incredible. It’s such a focused and concentric sound. And the bass is cardioid, meaning, it’s being pushed right to you, so you’re not getting all these unwanted frequencies that are being combed and masked. For musicians, for people who have to do this kind of stuff for a living , it’s pretty exciting. And these guys, Geithain, are the only ones I know of that do it.

@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _   ����

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High-Tech Pencils Got an unreasonable romantic attachment to pen on

iPad Pro ��.� inch

$���

We, too, chortled at the $��� Apple Pencil when it came out two years ago. But then the Notes app and others like

WHAT I’M INTO

Plex ($� a month) By GARY

Samsung Galaxy Note� $���

Only when you use the pen tucked into the bottom right of the Note� do you realize how clunky and imprecise your fingers are. Use it for precision photo edits, or send animated drawings instead of texts—they will still show up as GIFs if the recipient is on an iPhone. The most useful: Pop out the stylus and the phone will automatically open to a note-taking app.

DELL’ABATE Executive producer, The Howard Stern Show 

A

reMarkable tablet $��� with stylus

In theory, it’s a simple combination of two existing technologies. Take the E Ink display you’d find on an Amazon Kindle, and add a stylus. Boom. Futuristic note taking you can read in sunlight. But getting E Ink to respond quickly enough to follow a pen is difficult. If you’ve ever turned a page on a Kindle, you see the screen flash as it rearranges the little black and white capsules into new text. Any latency would make writing feel unnatural. But reMarkable figured it out and they won’t tell us how—at least not until the patents are finalized. However they did it, the reMarkable is the closest gadget to digital paper yet.

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I have tons and tons of movies I’ve ripped from DVDs that I keep on my Drobo, a big external hard drive. The Plex app finds those files, and then I can watch all my movies on my iPad Pro. It’s like a personal Netflix. The videos always work on whatever device I use, and I can even download them for when I’m on the plane. It means that when I travel, I have a much, much bigger selection of movies than if I just sat down and pulled them off the hard drive before I left. Because, listen, if I asked what you want to eat the day after tomorrow, you’d get there and say, “Ehhh.. .that’s not exactly what I want.” It’s the same thing when you pick movies.

The Popular Mechanics Smartphone Guide, ���� Edition We asked Mar ues Brownl ee, YouTube’s biggest tech enthusiast, to help us sort through everything that came out this year. Nokia ���� This one’s for anyone who just wants the real essentials—phone calls, texts, and a battery that lasts forever. It uses such old technology that it was a challenge to get an old-style SIM card that would work with it. When we finally turned it on, it only did five or six things. But the fact that it all works perfectly is pretty cool. ($��)

Essential Phone Someone who buys this has to want to try something different. It’s designed by the person who created the original Android operating system, and it’s got some weird quirks—no bezels, it’s made of ceramic, and it has these add-ons like a ��� camera that is actually really fun. As long as you don’t mind the price, it’s solid. ($���)

HTC U�� All the stuff you expect from a flagship phone, like a nice display, build quality, and this good-looking reflective back. But the squeeze thing—where you press the sides to turn on Google Assistant or the camera or whatever—that’s also for a person willing to try something new. ($���)

Samsung S� This is the complete enthusiast’s phone, the one I recommend to people looking to buy an Android phone right now. The only complaint is that you need a special app to remap the side button that opens the Samsung voice assistant, Bixby. ($��� and up)

iPhone X The most beautiful iPhone ever. It looks like you would need big hands to use it, but it’s really only a �.�-inch screen, similar to the smaller iPhones. Either way, if you’re an Apple enthusiast, this is the way to go. Expect that Apple will be pushing accessories and making sure things work well on it. ($���) @PopularMechanics

Red Hydrogen One It’s hard to say right now because it’s still not out, but from what I’ve seen demonstrated, this is a device for a cinematographer. It’s for someone who already has a daily phone and wants another device with imaging capability. For sure, this phone is concentrated on the camera. ($�,���)

features. There’s a squeeze control like the HTC, an OLED display, and one of the best cameras out there. So along with Google Lens augmented reality, you’ll get really good photos. ($��� and up)

OnePlus � I used this for a long time off-camera because it was

of the year. Just a great, fast, do-it-all performer. If you’re okay with the big front bezels and a front fingerprint sensor—which you actually still have on phones like the iPhone �— you’re getting a really good deal. ($���) LG V�� Excellent display, great camera, wireless charging, waterproof, and a fingerprint reader where it’s actually reachable. It also has a special audio converter behind the headphone jack, making it one of the only phones still catering to audio enthusiasts. ($���)

WHAT I’M INTO

Apple Watch Series � By JOHNATHAN WENDEL Retired professional gamer better known as Fatal�ty

Being able to take phone c alls and texts right from your wrist— that’s the future. And with App le Pay, you don’t have to carry around a wallet in your back pocket and sit awkwardly all day. I’m so tired of carrying around things, especially with how big phones are lately. When I want to go out to socialize, to have an easy state of mind, I don’t want to worry about losing my phone. I want to walk out with just my watch.

DECMEBER _ ����

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THIS STORY IS  C O N T I N U E D F R O M P AG E �  

 an empty room off the gymnasium where I will tell the kids. A little room where the teachers make paper. Bottles of dye glow in the sunshine by the window. Jay is just happy to see me, but Ruby’s eye is sharp. Sometimes she looks at me like Rhea does— did —and I feel her searching my heart. My thirteen-yearold daughter knows there’s more to all of this. Secrets. “What is it?” she asks. “Jay get down from him.” “Don’t tell your brother what to do. Both of you sit.” “Where’s Mom?” “Sit please.” “Where’s Mom?” “Ruby, she’s gone.” I can’t even see Jay—Ruby’s stare stings, I’m not going to hold myself together—but I know Jay is motionless, inert. Like this might pass over us if we remain still. “Gone where,” she demands. “She died, Roob.” The words fall out like that, just like she fell. Like that. THE

JANITOR

OPENS

awfully good. When their mother was a baby, you expected to live only as long as the biosphere, all dreams were pegged to the ecocide. The entire biota was a husk. All the megafauna. .. gone. All the amphibians. All the flying, swimming, and creeping things reduced, more clever. Tiny silver dace in the streams. Little black ravens. Everything diminished or extinct, save the roaches, flies, and rats. Rhea spent a childhood huddled like the rest of humanity on the Arctic shore,  watching for rockets screaming over the  water. Until every gov-corp was punched out and soldiers sat on their haunches in the sand, palms up like tired apes. Methane poured from the holes in the soil, pilgrims dead where they fell. Forest fires under black thunderheads that paid out no rain. The middle latitudes were quaking hells. Hurricanes the size of continents. Humanity’s menopause, the Climacteric. But we’d thrown up the Transoms. The Transoms saved us.

W O N ’ T E A T,  won’t do her chores. We have pinto beans, raspberries, potatoes, and lentils, and she loves all those things but she won’t eat. “I need you to eat.” “I’m too sad to eat.” She is direct, in command of her feelings. I would tell her there were times  when all her mother had to eat was beetlemeal, times she ate nits. But of course I can’t. “ I  need you to eat. A father is nourished by the sight of his child eating. It heals me.” She rolls her eyes and leaves the table. RU BY

 turns out to dirge. They place Rhea on a bier and send her down the river to slip out to sea. Ruby stands in the water, her fists at her side. Jay wails.  When we get home, our bed is decorated in flowers. As is the tradition. THE

ENTIRE

VILLAGE

—and I am someone who thinks only of the scheme of things—Ruby and Jay have it IN

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DECEMBER _ ����

THE

 

SCHEME

OF

THINGS

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

FICTION

“Smell that?” I ask Jay. There are apple blossoms on the breeze, a storm maybe too. “It’s gonna rain,” he says. “I have to get back soon.” I surprise myself blurting it out. But I can’t stand to tell the both of them at once. He won’t look at me directly. When he  was little, he’d just cry as I was leaving and follow me out the front door hugging my leg. But now he’s eleven and his hair is cut short and there is a small man in him. “I hate this,” he says, setting his dish in the sink and joining his sister in their bedroom. “Pack your stuff,” I call out. K N E W W H O I W A S when we married. That I would be gone so much was the quaint least of it. I never hid anything from her. But the truth is, toward the end, we’d grown raw from our worries, our fights. Moments stand out.  And what if something happens to me  Marc? What then?   Nothing’s gonna happen. You won’t be here for them.  Nothing will happen. This isn’t even real to you. You know that’s not true. This is everything to me. She used to call me angel. But as time  went on, she’d look across the table at me like I was some kind of monster. SHE

ing exactly ��.���� percent of the sun’s energy into space, it cost us the Northern Lights. But now Grandma Anna sips tea and Grandpa Lee something stronger on the front porch under undulating  waves of color and shape. I make Ruby wait. I have to say some things. She drops two heavy canvas bags. She insisted on taking her mother’s things. “I don’t want to live here.” “Jay. You two can’t live alone. I’ll be back, but I have to go now.” “The Transoms,” Ruby mutters. “They’re important,” I say. “Tell us why.” “Really?” “Tell us.” “Fine. A long time ago, this part of the world was entirely covered in ice.  And the ice was bright and shined the sun’s light and heat back into space. And it kept the world just right for us and all the animals.” “Tell the real—” “Let me finish. When the ice melted, the whole planet heated up. It got too hot to live anywhere but up here at the top. So we built the Transoms, to send some of the sunshine back.” Ruby points at the sky. “But they’re not doing anything!” She’s right. They haven’t been deployed for decades now. “I maintain them.” “Maybe some other guy could do that.” “Obviously someone could do that, Jay!” “Ruby! Look, it’s...you don’t know everything.” “Because you won’t tell us everything,” she says, hefting her mother’s things and heading to the house.

 Do you tell her that when you bend back your wrist, four tendons rise thick as cello strings, and if you play a bit, you engage the Exit Protocol and disappear from Olympia? Is that where you start? Do you tell them that Rhea would  watch you leave this way? Until she stopped. Do you say the music didn’t quit for hours? That it just rained in her ears as she fixed dinner? That she hummed along with it as she put everyone to bed? That when she laid herself down it crawled into her head again and wormed around and she did not sleep? WHER E

I

DO YOU

COME

TO

IN

BEGIN?

BED.

 My real bed. In

the real world. I have an officer’s bunk in the Hive. Outfitted with a nodal interface, a pri vate bath. I’m on the top floor, not far from the officers’ mess, but mostly I use my hot plate. Which explains why it smells like neetles in red sauce in here. Our diet consists of neetles and the like, because bugs and fungus grow best underground. I have a window, elevation one meter. The view is lacking. Most days a gray churn of some thousandmile front of grit. On clear days, I have the privilege of the blasted rock surface, the hiss of wind. Sometimes there’s a lavender glow of the sun. Once in awhile rain. But mostly just a churning murk. Here, in the real world, the Transoms are fully deployed. Sometimes the Transomists return  with a half-mad refugee. They only  work as far south as Fairbanks, so the last guy they brought in—goggled and swaddled in ragged sleeves of cloth— claimed to hail from Denver. I’ve been

the Irvings’ front gate. Down the horizon we can make out three Transoms, their miles-wide bases  winnowing up to thin spires that disappear into the aurora borealis. When the shrouds were deployed and refractWE

STOP

OUTSIDE

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DECEMBER _ ����

��

FICTION stops. Everyone groans at the delay and the lights going out. It’s Little Sister. A software gremlin, playing games. The Transomists in their surface gear flick on their dome-lights. Dr. Ivanov sidles up next to me in our brief captivity. Wondering how to start in on me. Finds it. “This train, eh?” “It’ll reboot in a minute.” “How are you doing Marc?” I look like hell. “I’m fine.” “You come see me.” But instead I’m seeing Rhea. I see Jay and Ruby. I let the tears fall. The Transomists are talking about me within the shared privacy of their helmet comms. “What is it Marc?”  What it is is I’m an orphan. Never belonged to anyone, the subterra-formers, the engineers or post-military and all their kin who populate the Hive.  What it is is I don’tbelong here. “If someone dropped dead,” I say, “and the only sign of anything wrong  was a nosebleed, what would you say caused it?” “No one’s been to the infirmary, Marc. I’m not understanding. Who died?” Just then, the light flickers on, the train lurches. “Nobody,” I say. I know I seem insane. Probably I am. THE

underground in the safe confines of the Hive my entire life, so I sat hours listening to him. He saw ostriches running against curtains of lightning. He  watched storms devouring horizons in grim minutes. I’d tell Rhea how harrowing it is here.  What a burden that put on her.  I don’t just have to worry about the kids and Olympia and what could hap pen, she said once. I have to pray for  your whole world too.

TECHN ICALLY, I’M

A TRAN SOMI ST

too, but I don’t work in the field. I run scenarios on the Quarantined OS. I cook Earths, spend years proving what won’t  work. Drone fleets. Satellites. Even the Transoms looked like a dead end at first. Here’s a shocker: adjusting a planet’s thermostat is tricky. Effects cascade decades after causes, feedback loops last generations, variables exist on a glacial time frame. Cool too fast and plunge into an ice age. Cool too slow and we go extinct. Then Olympia. That sliver of hope, the best-case scenario, the proper deployment of the Transoms. I seeded one of the test redundancies with a sentience kernel. Strictly speaking it’s against regs, but then I’m not supposed to have these node plates behind my ears either. A lot of what I can do is basically illegal. Not that anyone but me has the time to mess around with this stuff.  Anyway, I’m old enough to be Rhea’s great-grandfather: Olympia is the future. What could be. Rhea knew this. Rhea knew everything, she knew what she wasn’t. She knew she was software. She knew her world was an outcome, a  version of many versions. She also knew that we’d fallen in love. I don’t know that  we’d do it over. It hurts too much.

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DECEMBER _ ����

TRAIN

LURCHES,

S H E N . O U R L E A D E R . Long iron hair,  yet the spry gait of some extinct animal. A winking wise smile. They wanted her to lead the colonists on Mars, but she stayed. She’s an orphan too, but the Transomists adore her, her high wide laughter at lunch. She is a blue sky. She spends hours in the launch bays where the teams board the mechanicals out to build the Transoms. She breathes the unfiltered air, its gales and vapors. Shen is our last chance, hers is the last will,

 

our last shot. She lifts herself from the chair overlooking the Helm as thirty-five of the smartest people alive—to ever live— labor to salvage a livable atmosphere, and comes to my station. She regards the twelve fully cooked manifestations arrayed before her, floating, globes slowly spinning on the deck. I’ve made thirteen working scenarios out of. .. tens of thousands? Only thirteen manifestations reabsorbing the carbon fast enough, the Transoms dialed in just so. “Where’s the other one?” She means Olympia. I dig the simcell out of my pocket and toss it to her. A cylinder the size of her pinkie from tip to first knuckle. She holds it up in the light. Millions of DNA strands of data, data that comprise my kids, their dead mother, their grandmother and grandfather, friends,  village, prefecture, their continent, night sky, every grass blade and last consciousness, every stray daydream. The grand scheme of all things. Shen runs her thumb up and down the simcell’s shiny glass surface. Within me, a taut cord of fear twangs at all of Olympia in Shen’s hand. “This is the good one?” “They’re all good. But yes, that’s Olympia. Temps dropping quick and steady to within three degrees of the Holocene.” She has a funny look on her face. “How quick?” “About seventy-five years.” It’s worry, this look. Never seen it on her before. “What’s wrong?” “Get everything important in here onto paper,” she says, tossing me the simcell. “Like paper paper?” “We’re going analog.” THE

MELTING

PERMAFROST

unlocked the old germs, anthrax and plague. Little Sister was like that too, hidden. She’s Russian in origin. An old  war virus. She preceded the adoption of the GOS, and still wormed her way into every operating system running on the global language. She was designed to disrupt infrastructure, needle the

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grids, coded comms, simple telemetry programs, you name it. She used to just infect a system, leave a few pockmarks, and disappear. But for the last hundred  years her hit-and-runs are perfect havoc.  We’ve tried patches and cul de sacs.  We’ve put A.I. on her tail, only to have it return gibbering, broken, and incoherent. Every countermeasure she thwarts. For cancer we have nanotherapeutics. Gene therapy gives us a century of life. An orphan like me can build a world full of sentient beings who don’t know they aren’t real. But Little Sister... we cannot wipe out. colony is not a new world. It’s the Transom. In the violent electric churn of the atmosphere, satellites were useless for signaling our brethren. But the Tether Station—that old Chinese super-tower  winnowing upward into a single graphene line affixed to an outpost in the heavens—could  catch the data dumps from Mars. But more than that, Tether Station gave Shen the idea that we could shield the Earth if we just built enough of them. A network of towers holding the graphene weave overhead like a great sail or tarp. Simple. Almost elegant. Shen brings up an image of the colony on the big board. White domes, square depots, and the launchpad deep in the  Valles Marineris of Mars. “The Musk Habitats are dark,” she says. “No activity whatsoever. No damage. No movement for fifteen days. Just this.”  A line like a finger trail through sand. Miles and miles through the massive valley. The line terminating at the  vehicle itself, we can just make it out, a rover mechanical, whoever in it, simply running away. Nothing we can do. We haven’t fired a rocket in twenty years. For several minutes we absorb this. That we’re all that’s left. “Little Sister,” I say. Everyone is looking at me when the lights come up. “Marc’s right,” Shen says. “They had significant attacks the last few weeks.  We sent the latest security packet, but near as we can tell Little Sister had already chaperoned the neural net. The imagery is consistent with massive airOUR

DEBT

TO

THE

MARTIAN

IVANOV

lock breaches. You can see here the  windows are coated from within with ice.” This is why I’m not supposed to use the nodal interface. Why there’s no sentience kernels or A.I. or Olympias. You don’t know what Little Sister will do. Shen sits on the edge of the stage. She holds her head. For a long time. When she gathers herself, when she wipes her eyes, there is a severity to her face, a new calm. We are rapt. “Little Sister is a life-form at this point. A hostile. Fortunately, we’ve put resources into more definitive solutions. The AGORA team has completed the new OS. We were hoping to have fresh hardware ready, but now we don’t have a choice. We have to shut down the GOS immediately.” A murmur crests, Shen carries on. “We’ve already got teams working on new boards for core systems—the scrubbers, power, water— but in twelve hours, the GOS will power down on every system. Mechanicals  will be grounded. Comms will be down. Transit. For a time. We’ll have core systems up ASAP. In the meantime, the bee farms and food production, every GOS function in the entire Hive system in the  world. .. goes down.” Including my manifestations. Olympia. “Look,” she says. “It’s just gonna be...different. We’ll use candles. We  will have power, but that will be for the air first and then each basic system. Our main goal remains the completion of the Transoms. The good news is they’re designed to survive us—no GOS, just servos, power, and those wonderful graphene foils that even now are sheltering us. Our work on them is nearly done. Let’s finish. Let’s make it.”  A subdued hum sweeps the room. Lieutenants fanning out to direct each team on how to collect their data, what to cull, what to keep. I can feel Shen  watching me, I have the simcell in my sweaty palm, in my pocket, I’m out the door, there’s nowhere to run, but I bolt.

AND

H ER

ASSISTANTS

 work in longhand, writing down every diagnosis in the sick bay. The chronic conditions, supplemental information, dosages. Ivanov shakes out her wrist. The brute inefficiencies of our fingers. “Slow down, Katya,” I say. “You’ll get a cramp.” There is a Russian nesting doll on her desk. Small plants. Candles of bees wax from her friend who maintains the hives. Ivanov has a lot of friends. The security chief, the officer’s chef. The couple who maintain the zoo of thirteen dogs and two old chimps. She is telling me about the dogs and little puppies as I pull apart the nesting doll, remove the inner doll, and so on until I have a row of them before me. I think of Ruby and Jay. I can’t put the dolls back together fast enough. “Okay Marc,” she says. “What is going on?” I laugh a snotty laugh. Wipe my face. “I’m cracking up.” “Talk.” I tell her everything. From the start. How Shen tasked me to figure out all the different Transom contingencies,  what was possible, ideal, likely. How much cooling we could achieve, how fast. A system that needed to perform for decades. In an environment clogged  with space debris and tormented by storms. Every contingency. What if the Transoms failed. What if they locked shut. What if they worked. I gamed it all out, decades, millennia. I cooked worlds. I tell her how I paid a visit. “I banged out an avatar protocol, self-installed a pair of interface nodes behind my ears. And.. .I just walked into a village there. Fresh air. Apples. Sand. I sat on their shores. In the sunshine. I climbed trees.” “Marc, you know that is—” “I installed a sentience kernel,” I say. “I don’t know what that means.” “I made people. A world of people.  Who didn’t know they were software.” “Marc—” “I fell in love with someone. Her name is Rhea. We had children. I have...children.” She shakes her head. Stands. “This is. .. ” she says. “She died. Rhea died. That noseCONTINUED ON PAGE �� 

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DECEMBER _ ����

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Standing behind one of the orangetipped stakes that mark each station’s firing line, Joe Church fires a gun he made himself.

ONCE A YEAR, a retired dairy farmer rigs up an elaborate target course on his ���-acre patch of woods and invites friends and family to shoot their way through it using ��th-century-style muzzleloaders. S   

 By JAMES LYNCH

O  

M  

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D Y   W 

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 D N O B O

in the gravel driveway staring at the foot-thick log, fifteen inches across, propped on its side in the yard. It’s maybe thirty feet away, and its ringed face is covered  with soft, rotten scars left by lead balls fired by primitive guns. The man who built this particular target—the man  whose gravel we’re standing on, the man who invited us all here today—somehow attached an axe blade (no handle), cutting edge toward us, to the center of the face of the log. He’s driven two nails into the face, one on either side of the blade, and he’s hung orange clay pigeons on the nails, rusty after all these years, so that if a person were to fire a rifle and the bullet were to strike the blade dead on, the blade’s edge would bisect the bullet, sending each half flying into one of the dangling clay pigeons, shattering them.  We stand there, still as mounted trophies, only the shuffling of feet beneath craning necks, amplified by the gravel, cutting into the quiet. Men and women in a variety of leather, Under Armour, and canvas, dirt and grass from the Vermont morning across the tops of our boots. The overcast gray threatens rain.  Atthe frontofthe crowd, twomen. Shoulder to shoulder, one’s rough flannel next to the other’s flowing and tasseled tunic. Powder horns, bullets, and primers hang around their necks, necessities when shooting muzzleloading blackpowder rifles, technology outdated by a century and a half.

L

  S   S  E  O

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 Ph ot og ra ph s by MATT KIEDAISCH

These men, Gary Perkins and Eric Bye, both local guys,  work through the measured preparation of their guns, finishing with the definitive rap of the ramrod. They look at each other, then to the axe blade. Perkins packs away his normal cheer someplace deep within him and shrinks his  world to thatsharp metaledge. Hesteps past Bye,raises the rifle to his cheek, stoic, eyes clear as they look down the iron sights of the gun, lining up the small bead between the arms of the V inches from his nose. The crowd’s silence peaks, momentarily exciting the gravel. The entirety of this competition—the year’s bragging rights—depends on the bullet he packed spinning down the rifling of the barrel, flying true, and splitting in half on the edge of the blade. This is Paul Bunyan stuff. Billy the Kid, man. It seems fine in those tall tales, but now? This can’t be ����, right? A bunch of teachers and electricians and laborers out here in the yard on a Saturday afternoon? With pizza later? And yet, something about those tales comes through, the exceptional skill, the dogged hard work, the pride. Insurmountable challenges and those bold enough to face them, confident enough to conquer them. They’re stories of our national identity, stories we aspire to. So when you happen to own a rifle and your friend sets up an impossible course every year and invites  you to cometry your hand... well,you come. Perkinsshoots. Muffled thunder of burning gunpowder, the boom of a rocketing bullet, the cloud of smoke obscuring the gun, its tip as steady as if it rested upon a fence post. The crowd stares into the smoke, waiting for it to blow away, looking for the orange clays.

IFTY PEOPLE STAND

 Pa ge

��

Some targets are isolated; others make you shoot in full view of everybody. Opposite: Grice loads his rifle beside his daughter Heather Carnevale.

On the outskirts of Middlebury, Vermont, I knocked on the door of Harley Grice’s white farmhouse, hands buried in my pockets, half hoping he wouldn’t answer.  When a friend of mine, the college librarian, told me she was shooting black-powder rifles, I asked her to teach me. She said something about not being able to get out of work, and she gave me Harley’s address. He was expecting me. I stood there in his kitchen, cabinets painted with apple trees growing hearts, intimidated by the whitebearded, enormous-boot-wearing octogenarian who skipped small talk. But a few minutes in, his smile rearranged the wrink les beneath his thick glasses, and a chuckle puffed out of his chest. Then he put a gun in my hands. Harley’s the type of man you could imagine breaking the West, or gracing the back of a quarter, his life the pride of an entire state. He worked the dairy farm he grew up on for more than five decades.  When he feels restless, he drives his camper out to the Rockies. On any given morning he’ll wake up, read his Bible, and split enough wood for the week before I’ve pulled the blanket over my eyes. He keeps a room decorated in honor of his late wife, Marilyn, keeps his daughters close, and befriends most all he meets, even clueless kids from the local college. Every year for the past five years, NE YEAR BEFORE.

Harley picks a day and invites all his friends, some he went to Middlebury Union High School with in the early ’��s, some he met the  week before, to his house for a black-powder rifle shoot: eighteen stations, eighteen handmade targets, spread over the ��� acres of his farm. Every man, and a handful of women, shooting for themselves, recording hits and misses—X’s and O’s—on crumpled paper  with an inevitablydull pencil.Someyearshemakesagebrackets, or men’s and women’s. But the ���� shoot would be different: Only the top six shooters of the day would be recognized. After eight months  without practice, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be one of them. Harley had spent weeks welding and experimenting with new targets, covering them all with neon orange spray paint that lingered in patches across his lawn. He prepared guns for those who couldn’t bring them, passing hours in his basement beside his overflowing gun rack, naked lightbulb shining down on his thick fingers running cleaning patches through already pristine barrels, counting out bullets, filling a fleet of powder horns. He cleaned the bedrooms on the second floor of his house for those, like me, who would be coming from afar: Boston, Canada, the edges of the Vermont border.

HE BRINGS THE RIFLE OFF HIS SHOULDER, THEN SLOWLY UP AGAIN. THE CROWD IS QUIET. HE SHOOTS.  PING.

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 A stack of sheets, towels, and a fresh bar of soap greet every guest. I had graduated college by this point, and would be traveling back to Vermont for the shoot. On the last mile of my three-hundred-mile trip, I practiced the slow finger pull of a trigger above my steering  wheel. Imagining shots near his swamp, or over the corner of his pond, hoping to avoid flinching or some other embarrassment. The  windowsofthe house Harleybuilt withMarilynfromplans ina magazine cast shadows of light across the graded dirt of Halpin Road.  Atthe diningroom tablewith hisdaughter, son-in-law, and two year-old grandson, Harley turned toward the opening door. Behind him, dozens of eyes looked out from the living room, the largest from an elk with a six-foot-wide rack. With a grin, he got up from the kitchen table and moved toward the door with the eighty-one year-old shuffle-jog-step he does when he moves quickly. Massive hands and broad shoulders wrapped me in a tight bear hug. “James is here!” IFLES CROW THE DAWN,  a few early guests get-

ting ready for the day. By mid-morning, they gather across the street at Harley’s daughter Penny Curler’s house and rest their guns on the beds of trucks, handmade wooden racks, and boot toes to shake hands, slap-hug, meet new folks, and catch up. Ernie Malzac, a friend of Harley’s from elementary school, drove from a few doors down in his CR-V. It’s the same truck he and Harley used to pull a deer out of the woods last winter. A friend from the street over arrives with a muzzleloading pistol wedged between his chest and the immobile sleeve of a sling from a recent

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roofing mishap. Eric Piccioni gets out of his camper and introduces himself to the others with an earnest grin and plumb-line nose, his wife beside him. They met Harley a few months SHOOTING before at a shoot close to the Cana A RO U N D A dian border, and came all the way from Lacrombe, Quebec, just for the CORNER  invitational. Joe Church, white beard beneath �. Weld a steel bracket to a two-foot his top hat with two halves of a playpiece of �-inch steel ing card he shot tucked into its band, pipe. Fix it horizontally drove in fifty miles this morning. to a tree or post. Gary Perkins, eyes disappearing into smile lines behind small glasses, �. Spray-paint the end emerges from his FJ Cruiser. It’s only of the pipe that faces the shooter. Attach a moment before someone asks him a piece of steel, at about the goats he’s raising. In three least ¼ inch thick, to  years they’ll be trained to carry deer the other end at a out of the woods on hunting trips. But ��-degree angle.  whentheywereinfants hehadto wake up every three hours to feed them, says �. Hang a painted target perpendicular to it was worse than raising a kid. the angled steel.  About half the crowd dresses as if they bought their pants with their �. Shoot through muzzleloaders. Bowler hats, blanket the pipe, so the bulcoats, various articles of handmade let deflects off the clothing and repurposed material. angled steel and hits the target. “You don’t go out and buy, you make do until you can make better,” one of them tells me, recounting the recycled purse he once carried bullets in. These are the descendants of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, living an older, non-disposable way of life. John Curler, one of Harley’s sons-in-law, fires a small cannon to grab the crowd’s attention. Harley steps up front, says hello to his friends, and offers a prayer: “Lord thank you so much for this day. For the sunshine that is about to appear. We ask you, Father, for safety in the day and good fellowship. We ask it all in Jesus’s name, Amen.” The collective exhales an “Amen,” gives final well wishes, and splits into groups of six to eight that head for stations throughout the woods. The goal is to hit the target at all eighteen. Throughout the morning, they’ll pat another group on the back for its successes, maybe, and they’ll give helpful tips when they can. But here’s the thing: They’ve got scorecards in their pockets, and they remember who won last year, and the year before. S THAT A  propane tank?”

“It is. I sure hope it’s empty.” The targets are cobbled together from bits and pieces scavenged from the farm. An old spring, an ancient plow, thin strips of steel, bowling pins, golf balls, metal daisies, swinging chains, a bent pipe that bounces bullets around a corner, and, in this case, a swinging propane tank. Overtly aware of our mortality, and hoping the invitational doesn’t turn into a memorial, we begin to load our guns. Rather than simply inserting a bullet into the breach, muzzle-

DECEMBER _ ����

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Steve Alford adds powder to the pan of his rifle, an older matchlock style, which uses a burning rope to light the gunpowder.

loading is a multistep process. Its success, and your safety, depends on an exact order that Harley hammers into the head of new shooters with the mantra: “Powder, Patch, Ball.” It isn’t easy. You wear the tools around your neck. First down the barrel, fifty grains, about a spoonful, of black powder poured from a hollowed-out cow’s horn. Then a greased cotton patch with a bullet, slightly smaller than a marble, pushing into it. A wooden-ball starter, a palm-size sphere  witha dowel stickingout,pushesthema few inchesdownthe barrel, a ramrodfinishesthejob.Eachshooter’smotionsarechoreographed— two taps here, an extra push there. Consistency is accuracy. These steps, the necessity for precision, are what draw many of them. They grew up shooting and hunting with modern rifles, but muzzleloaders are different. It’s like driving stick, or listening to vinyl. When you have to work with the tool, be involved with every step of its success, you feel a deeper connection. Each shot, absent modern aids or scopes, must be perfect. There is no second chance at a fleeing buck. They all have stories, and trophies, of the single bullet that took down the deer, elk, or bear. I step up to my eighth station of the day, boot touching an orange stake, the official shooting line. I raise the gun to my shoulder. The long octagonal barrel dances about, my left arm struggling to calm it. My sheet has more X’s than I expected by this point, and I can feel the jury of real Vermonters, real men, behind me, looking out to the target for even a glancing hit. Mind on my scorecard, I pull the trigger slowly, the hammer snaps, the explosion obscuring sight and sound, a swift shove into my shoulder. Miss. “Low and to the left,” the men behind me say as I draw the gun off my shoulder. A guy named Tom McElhaney walks over, asking about the carved deer antler I used to measure out powder. I hand it to him. “I’m borrowing it from Harley,” I say. He takes it in his hands, turns it over, and nods faintly. “I think I made it for him...ten years ago? Yep, right there, that’s where I repaired it when a piece of the carving fell off.” He

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DECEMBER _ ����

 

hands it to me and wanders back to another conversation. People talk about gear, new guns, leather bags, handmade tools. I ask Joe Church, playing card still perched in his hat, about his gun. “I make all my guns. This one is the first I ever made. I make maybe two or three a year.” Ralph, next to him: “I made my gun, too, close to forty years ago.” Brian, a feather sticking out of his floppy leather hat: “Me too, I’ve built nine.” I felt shabby in my synthetic jacket, my clothes conspicuously clean and untorn, tags attached, phone bulging from my chinos. More than any desire to hit a target, I want to live up to these men and women covered in things that hadn’t existed until they realized they needed them. To build, to make, to not rely on the store’s medium rack. At least to have the confidence to try.  Another member of the groupshoots at the propane tank. Dead center, it bangs from tree to tree, an enormous dent in its front. “I guess it’s empty.” The next group put a hole in its side, and the tank spun about like a deflating balloon, propane hissing from its side. the winner misses only one target. Perfection seems attainable. At that level, the challenge isn’t hitting targets, but rather not missing them. After each shot, it’s either the ring of flattening lead or a muffled curse. As groups pass the same call goes out, “How you guys doing, anyone perfect?” No one checks their cards, they already know. “No. No. Nope.”  Anyone could take the lead.  As the number of stations dwindles, some participants stop and reach into leather satchels for cleaning patches and solvents to clear the residue of burnt powder from their barrel. They do this half to avoid any malfunction in these crucial last stations, and half to calm the mind. The day’s chatter quiets. Everyone wants to finish strong. The last thing you want in your head as you look down the barrel at a target is the image of dirt jumping up beside the last one you missed. Three left, two left. Passing groups silently nod, not wanting to  jinx their friends, not wanting to jinx themselves. One station left. OME YEARS,

for the racks of guns and strong smell of gunpowder, it could be a church picnic. Slices of pizza, from the one parlor in town, float through the air on paper plates clutched in storytelling hands. People talk. Many lean over Perkins’s shoulder, bedamning their missing readers, squinting down the length of his arm at photos of goats. John moseys to the front of the crowd again, cannonless, and,  yelling a fewtimes, gets their attention. Next to him sits a stack of trophies, wooden discs Harley cut from a decades-old fence post, hand-painted with the optimistic script of a ����s advertisement. The participants get their first looks, and a few remark how handsome they are. Each of us silently decides what will have to come off the mantel, replaced by this new prize. Looking at the stacks of crumpled paper in his hands, sloppy X’s and O’s, John begins to read off the winners. A mix of camaraderie and competition, the men and women cheer for their friends, but wait for their own names. The successful make their way to the front trying to hide sheepish grins, beards more effective than F IT WEREN’T

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MUZZLELOADER force of will. The stack shrinks, brows furrow, the crowd laments missed targets and remarks on the trophy bearer’s great shots. John pauses, two discs remaining, and looks at the papers again. With only two misses each, Gary Perkins and Eric Bye tied for first. There will have to be a shoot-off. The axe.

 ACT IO NS

his shoulder, makes an adjustment, slowly brings it up again.  Ping. Orange rushes off one side of the stump. Its opposite sits unbroken. The bullet deflected off one side of the axe. The crowd surrounds the two men. They are already recounting the incredible shots, a story they won’t tire in retelling. Bye walks over to Perkins, smiling, congratulating him. John walks over to both and hands them their trophies. Arms around each other, they smile genuine smiles into a camera. The crowd buzzes as it spreads back across the yard. There is more shooting, and more eating, and more camaraderie, but soon the crowd will disperse, back to their trucks to clean guns and head home. Before they do, they’ll make their way over to Harley, the patriarch, and thank him. He’ll hug them, step back, and shake their hand, looking into their eyes with an iridescent shine in his own. Not letting go of the grip, he’ll carefully choose each word, passing them through a constant smile, and make plans to see them again, next week, in a few months, next year. To shoot, to say hello. The prayer for fellowship is answered. Even if the sun never did break through the clouds. Only a few pizza munchers remain in the yard. Perkins puts down his award, picks up his gun. There’s a third bullet already loaded—preparation in case Bye had forced another round. Standing alone now, absent the forward-leaning crowd, Perkins raises the muzzle of his gun, and aims it squarely, slowly, at the axe blade. He steadies himself, his body motionless for a quiet second. He pulls the trigger. Clang.

The most common actions for muzzleloaders are flintlocks and percussion locks. Flintlocks use flint and a steel frizzen to spark gunpowder. Percussion locks hammer small exploding caps.

HEIR FRIENDS PUSH

the men to the front. They  wipe pizza grease off their fingers, soaked up by napkins, flannel shirts, and the legs of Carhartts, and pick up their guns. They stand next to each other, the careful measurement of powder interrupted as they laugh at shouted jokes and encouragements. Perkins steps up, Bye leans on his rifle. Perkins raises the barrel, looking down the sights beneath the brim of an olive-green baseball cap. Steady. He pulls the trigger. The ringing clang of metal hitting metal, shearing metal. The clays on either side shatter, and the silence of the crowd. Small pieces of orange skitter down the face of the stump. Perkins lowers his gun, and calmly steps to the side. Bye smiles at him, and steps to the line. A miss means he loses, a hit means they’ll both have to shoot again. He raises his gun, quiets himself. Perkins reloads, ready for Bye to make the shot. Clang. The skitter of two broken clays. The afternoon has turned into an exhibition. The cheering crowd forgets their missed shots, hang fires, faulty flints, itchy socks, and focuses on this bit of extraordinary in the afternoon. Perkins steps up to the line again. Clang. Two broken clays, wide eyes, open mouths. Perkins can’t help but smile. He steps to the side. His goats grow forty feet tall. Bye cheers with the rest of the crowd, then steps back up to the line and raises his gun. Steady, eyes focused—he pulls the rifle off

Marshall Curler, Grice’s grandson, uses a spotting scope to check the paint on a hit target (left), then runs back after repainting it.

@PopularMechanics

DECEMBER _ ����

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DIRECTIONS

 Mark Melonas

is the founder of Luke Works in Baltimore. He makes custom  furniture and sinks, often out of concrete.

Cut out two identical rectangles (or stars, hearts, or any other shape you want) of felt to the desired size with scissors. Measure the perimeter of one of the rectangles, then cut a �-inch strip of felt to that length. This will form the edge of your dish. 1

Sew the top and bottom pieces to the felt edge, and the ends of the felt edge together [Fig. A]. The heavier the thread you use (or the more times you go over your stitching), the more visible the stitches will be in your final product. 2

Cover your work surface with wax paper. Mix about � cup epoxy. Put on gloves and brush the epoxy onto the felt shape until the felt is fully saturated [Fig. B]. As the epoxy hardens, pull on the corners of your pattern to remove wrinkles and determine its final shape. Let the epoxy dry. 3

MAK E A CONCRET E DISH All you need is an afternoon and a little concrete to make a dish for your change and keys—in any shape you want. BY MARK MELONAS

MATERIALS

• craft-store felt • thread • wax paper • West System epoxy • ���-grit sandpaper • acrylic tile sealer • paste wax • � x �–foot piece of melamine or ¼-inch plastic • cardboard scraps • Smooth-On Mold Star �� Fast silicone • Rockite cement mix • pigment or paint

Use a light sandpaper to knock off any pilly fibers, then add a thin layer of paste wax to smooth the surface. 4

Put your hardened pattern on a disposable piece of melamine or ¼-inch plastic. Use the hot-glue gun to glue the dish to the plastic so it’s facing right-side up. Cut strips of cardboard so they are ½ inch taller than your pattern, then use them to form a barrier around the pattern. Hot glue them to the melamine and to each other to create a liquid-tight barrier. 5

Mix up the Mold Star and pour it slowly over the pattern until it’s to the top edges of the cardboard [Fig. C]. Let it cure, then remove the cardboard. 6

Pull the mold off of the pattern and flip it over so the open side is facing up. Mix the Rockite and pour it into the mold [Fig. D]. Shake and tap the mold to remove air bubbles. 7

If you want to add a little color, rub pigment or paint onto the surface and buff it off with a rag before sealing. When dry, remove the dish from the mold and seal with acrylic tile sealer or paste wax. 8

TOOLS

• scissors • sewing needle • small paintbrush • hot-glue gun • mixing containers • gloves

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DECEMBER _ ����

 

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

E A S Y W AY S TO DO HARD THINGS

Bolt

Hacksaw Locking pliers

Clever Fence for Cutting Bolts When using a hacksaw to cut a bolt, keep the cut aligned by threading a nut onto the bolt to the length of the desired cut and use it as a fence. If you find the hacksaw twists the nut out of position, a second nut will lock it in place. And if you don’t have a clamp to hold the bolt, try fixing it in a set of locking pliers.

READER NOTE

Old Records Become Flowerpots

Mixing and kneading by hand is crucial to producing airy bread or flaky biscuits. But cleanup is tricky: Soap and water are not effective, and dough down the sink causes clogs. So try what bakers do. Sprinkle extra flour on your hands and rub them together over a trash can. The extra flour dries the dough and friction rubs it free.

Maybe you don’t dig  the vinyl revival, or maybe your dad’s taste wasn’t so good, and you inherited worthless LPs. Try this suggestion from reader Herb Graham of Chiefland, Florida: Take a small ceramic flowerpot and put it upside down on the center rack of your oven. Put a record on top of it and turn the oven on to ��� degrees. As the vinyl heats up, it’ll soften and droop over the clay. At that point, take it out. When the record has cooled but is still malleable, shape it by hand into a shiny, undulating receptacle. It’ll shortly harden and be ready for planting (or anything else you need a psychedelic bowl for).

 A Knot to Know:  The Packer’s Knot Whether you’re rolling up a roast or tying up a gift, this is the knot with which to do it. It’s one of a class of knots , called butcher’s knots, that uses an adjustable knot to tighten against a parcel, then a second knot to hold fas t. Step �

Step �

Step �

Step �

Step �

   H    T    A    E    R    B    G    N    I    N    R    O    M

Pass the end of the rope around the item to be tied.

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Pass the end of the rope under the main length, then bring it behind itself. This gives you a loop with the main length running through it.

DECEMBER_ ����

Bring the end in front of the main rope, then come forward through the loop. These two steps should form a figure eight—in fact, what you’ve done so far is called a figure-eight knot.

 

Pull the figure eight tight. Then, holding it in one hand, use the other to pull on the main length of rope, tightening the wrap around your parcel.

Add the securing knot, called a half-hitch. Make a loop in the main length of rope, going toward the figure eight. Pass the end of the rope through the loop, then pull the main length to cinch it tight.

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

   Y    B    S    N    O    I    T    A    R    T    S    U    L    L    I

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Entry-Level Welders

I can divide my life into two distinct segments: the time before I owned a welder, and every day since. When I bought my first truck, a ��-year-old Tacoma with a rusty frame, my welder made it roadworthy. When I started my blacksmith business out of my grandparents’ garage, I used my welder to build a forge out of scrap metal. And  when  wh en a ne neigh ighbor bor ne needs edsa rail rail-ing fixed, it’s my welder he  wants  wan ts me to useto fix it it—u —usu su-ally for free. My great-grandfather was the first welder in my family. He started out running a  weldi  we lding ng sh shop op,, andlat later er,, du durring World War II, a school named Wicks Welding in Queens, New York. In his day  weldi  we lding ng re requi quire red d a co comp mplilicated setup of machines and gas tanks that looked like they belonged on the set of a bad sci-fi movie. While the usefulness of welders hasn’t changed a lot since then, the technology has. Now welders are accessible to anyone, regardless of skill, and you don’t have to break your back or the bank to use one.  Wee test  W tested ed eig eight ht of the bes bestt new entry-level welders. They can be plugged into a normal electrical outlet and run  without  with out any gas tanks usi using ng a process called flux-cored arc welding (see opposite). opposite).  And wh when en you you’’re read readyy to to buy buy some tanks, they can also be run as MIG welders. These These four were our favorites.

WHAT WE PU T

Wire-feed welders let you conquer the world of metal, whether you’re reattaching the feet to a fireplace grate or fixing the broken axle on a trailer tr ailer.. BY NICHOLAS WICKS

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DECEMBER _ ����

 

THEM THROUGH

We ran the welders at every power and wire-feed setting, then used them on multiple passes to join everything from ��-gauge to ¼-inch mild steel.

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

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A  /  Lincoln   Lincoln Electric ���

C  /  Hobart   Hobart Handler ���

LIKES: Using this machine

LIKES: Great welding

felt like welding with a paintbrush. It’s smooth, powerful, easy to use, and reasonably priced. You might be tempted to get Lincoln’s ���HD and save $���, but don’t. The ��� lets you work thicker materials, and can also be used for MIG welding. DISLIKES: Not as heavyduty as the Miller or Vulcan, so better left in the shop than taken to the job site.

arc, especially on thicker steel, combined with a useful EZ-Mode with automatic settings, means a consistently stress-free experience. More compact than the competition and a good price point. DISLIKES: Limited accessories, such as extra welding wire or gas gauges (for those looking to also run MIG) compared to the competition.

$524

$400

B  /  Vulcan  Vulcan MigMax ���

D  /  Millermatic   Millermatic ���

LIKES: Harbor Freight’s

LIKES: Great power and

new line stands against the best welders available. Sturdy construction, easy-to-use automatic settings, and a wide range of applications. DISLIKES: As a new product, there’s no history of performance.

a well-earned reputation for top performance makes Miller a sure bet. Heavy-duty and able to handle a wide range of projects. DISLIKES: Expensive, and set up more for MIG welding than flux.

$500

$799

@PopularMechanics

WHAT IS FLUX-CORED ARC WELDING?  Any wel welding ding con consis sists ts of melting base metals and then usually adding a filler material to join them. Think of it like a glue gun, but thousands of degrees hotter. In most cases, the metal is melted using an electrical arc, like in spark plugs. This arc is created by passing electricity from the tip, or electrode, of the welder to the metal you are working in order to melt the material and create the  weld.  we ld. Whe When n stee steell and and other metals are in a liquid state, however, they become very reactive to air and can become brittle and useless. Special shielding gases are usually needed to prevent this mixing from happening. In flux-cored arc welding, however, a shielding “flux” in the core of the  wire eva evapor porate atess duri during ng  weldin  we lding g to to auto automat maticall icallyy protect the weld.

BONUS REVIEW!

THE ALL-IN-ONE WELDER For more advanced welders, the Vulcan OmniPro ��� ($���) does flux-cored and MIG welding, along with stick electrode and tungsten electrode and filler rod (TIG). It’s versatile and powerful, and it works at ��� and ��� volts. To test it, we took it to JJ Cunningham & Sons in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Mike Cunningham ran the OmniPro with flux-cored wire and a variety of stick electrodes. His take: “Anybody can weld with this thing.” You use an LCD screen and dials to set the welding mode. I wondered if Mike had exaggerated the “anybody” part, so I tried my hand with a stick electrode, a first for me, and

The author at work. Simple equipment and a little experience enable you to put a razor-sharp edge on your knife.

The Right Way to Sharpen Kitchen Knives BY JOSH DONALD, OWNER OF BERNAL CUTLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

People have thewrong

ideas about knives. A knife doesn’t cut like a razor or a plane iron on the push stroke. It’s somewhat like a saw with teeth that cuts in a sliding motion as it’s

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DECEMBER _ ����

pushed or pulled. A properly sharpened knife is honed to a fine edge, yet has an appropriate roughness so that it has bite, or an ability to sink into the cut. Understanding the sub-

 

tleties of sharpening is  what we’ we’re re about about at BerBernal Cutlery, in the Mission District of San Francisco.  We’  W e’ve ve sharpe sharpened ned thou thou-sands of knives. We also sell knives and teach people

how to sharpen anything from a kitchen knife to a meat cleaver.  We’  W e’ve ve lear learned ned the there’ re’ss more to sharpening than a fine edge. Sharpening takes into account whether the

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

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   D    Y    L    L    O    M    Y    B    S    H    P    A    R    G    O    T    O    H    P

knife is Japanese or Western, its material (stainless or carbon steel), and how the knife is used (slicing meat or fish, chopping vegetables, paring). The user’s preferences must be considered. We also think sharpening is fun, and one of the best parts of my job is talking to the amateur and professional knife users that we serve.  We sharpen all our knives by wet grinding, typically finishing by hand on Japanese water stones (see right). How fine we hone the knife depends on the knife and sometimes the user’s preferences. To sharpen a knife, you need a basic but comprehensive set of water stones. In the Japanese grit numbering system, coarse stones are ��� to ��� grit, medium stones are ��� to �,��� grit, fine stones are �,��� to �,��� grit. These stones and a strop might cost as much as ����, but  you’ll get many years of use out of them, and there are inexpensive alternatives (see “Low-Cost Sharpening,” on the next page). I can’t tell you how to sharpen every type of knife because that would take an extensive chart to match each knife and steel alloy to the appropriate method. I can say that the best way to get a knife with a cutting action that pleases you is to experiment. Make notes to record what works and  what doesn’t.  Also, it’s important to understand that you don’t need to take a knife through all three grits every time  you sharpen. For an overhaul, you need all three grits, but for a tune-up, your knife many need just a few passes on the medium and Continued on page ��

@PopularMechanics

Move the knife straight down an imaginary center line, pulling the handle away from the stone as you go to hone both the straight and curved part of the edge.

U S I N G

J A P A N E S E

 W A T E R A water stone is an abrasive block that uses water as the cutting lubricant. Its stone particles wear away as you sharpen, exposing fresh, fast-cutting surfaces. To sharpen a stainless-steel Westernstyle kitchen knife, soak the s tone for a few minutes and place it on a non-slip utilit y mat (a $�� accessory available online). As you work, splash some water on the stone or use a small spray bottle to keep it lubri cated. And let the “mud,” which consists of stone particles and water, build up. It helps the stone work better. Hold the knife at an angle (the height of two quarters from the spine of the blade) so the bevel makes complete contact with the stone’s face, and draw the knife straight back and forth along the length of the stone, starting at the knife’s heel, slowly working up to the tip. Pull the handle away from the stone as you go. Be sure to travel along the center of the stone.

S T O N E S And use enough pressure so that the ends of your fingernails on the blade go white, but don’t press harder than that. It’s the motion, not the pressure, that does the work. Raise a burr with the first stone and then work up to a finer stone to remove those scratches, just like using sandpaper. The burr forms where two intersecting angles are formed in the honing process. To remove the burr, use a leather strop, one of rubberized cork or softwood with a polishing compound on its sur face. Lay the knife over the strop’s face and draw it backward. Two to four passes on each bevel are probably all you need. Hold the knife up to the light to check for a thin, bright line that indicates the burr’s presence. Strop again if needed. Rinse the knife and wipe it dry. Wash the stone and metal particles out of the non-slip mat. Then try the knife on some food.

DECEMBER _ ����

��

fine stones, and a couple of passes on the strop. Beware overly aggressive sharpening, and make sure to maintain or produce a thin tip geometry. The heavy hitter of coarse stones is the ���, and it removes metal in a hurry. If the knife is chipped or has lost a proper edge profile, you can bring it back to shape with this stone. But if you don’t do much repair work, skip this grit size. Instead, a ���-grit stone is better to begin the sharpening process. To sharpen a dull West-

ern stainless-steel knife take a few strokes on the ���grit stone, proceed to the ���- to �,���-, and finish  with a �,���- or a �,���-grit, then strop. If you have an ordinary carbon-steel (nonstainless) Western knife,  you can use up to an �,���grit stone to produce a finely honed edge with a pleasing cutting action. To sharpen Japanese stainless knives, start with a ���- to ���-grit stone, proceed to an ���- to �,���grit, and finish with a �,���-grit.

L O W � C O S T S H A R P E N I N G Suppose you’re cashstrapped and can’t afford a set of water stones. Take an �-inch piece of � x � and staple sandpaper to its

wide face. Use ���- to ���grit for coarse, ���-grit for medium, and ���-grit for fine. Strop on a pine block with honing paste.   —J.D.

Browning A� McLaren F1

shotgun

Best

OVERALL

Only �� McLaren F� road cars were built. Each came with a hardcover manual with immaculate pen-and-ink drawings that could serve to educate generations of technical artists on clarity and wit (example: A humanized crash dummy is used to show seating, exit, and entering positions). DISLIKES: None, but we wish McLaren would license the printing of these just so the rest of us who will never own an F� can enjoy its artistry.

Honoring the long history of this gun, the manufacturer didn’t skimp on its manual. The gun’s parts, assembly and disassembly operations, and basic gunsmithing are covered with plentiful labels, large red arrows, and high-resolution photos. DISLIKES: None.

GE electric range drills

If every manufacturer took its owner’s manuals as seriously as Bosch, the mechanical world would be a better place. Its illustrations are magazine worthy, and its instructions on drilling, driving, and hammer operation are clear. DISLIKES: None.

This is a no-frills manual for coil-top and radiant-top appliances. All use and care topics are covered. Included are bonus tips on cooking everything from a hamburger to a lobster tail. DISLIKES: Includes outdated topics, such as the danger of drying soggy newspapers in the oven.

Stanley 55 hand plane plex hand plane ever built. It cuts grooves, dadoes, and moldings, panels. In its �� pages, this manual affords a succinct view of the essentials with perspective views of hands holding it as a woodworker goes about its use. DISLIKES: If you buy a �� someday, expect a long learning curve because no manual can do it justice.

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DECEMBER _ ����

 

POPULARMECHANICS.COM

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DIFFICULTY 

EASY

Learn basic woodworking and drafting skills— and end up with a new favorite game.

REASONABLE

Time: � hour

HARD

Ages: �+

MATERIALS

DESIGNED BY JAMES SCHADEWALD

�

�-inch round-head wood screws ¼ sheet of �.�mm (approx. ¼ inch) lauan plywood ¼-inch x �-inch x �-foot poplar boards piece of � x � scrap, at least �� inches long balls (��⁄�-inch tennis, practice golf, or nerf-gun balls)

� HOW TO PLAY 

• Stand four feet from the board and bounce a ball into the holes. • The biggest holes are worth � point. Medium holes, �. Small holes, �. • Alternate turns with an opponent until one of you reaches ��.

� � �

TOOLS

• table saw and ��-tpi blade • miter saw • drill • �-, ��⁄�-, and �-inch holesaw bits • wood glue • tape measure • rafter square

DIRECTIONS

KI D

PA REN T

PA R ENT AND KID

Use a table saw with an ��-tpi blade to rip the plywood to �� inches wide, then crosscut it into two pieces. One piece, the target board, should be �� inches long. The other, the base, should be ��. 1

Cut five ��-inch-long 2 spacer strips from the �⁄�-inch poplar boards with a miter saw. Crosscut one piece of poplar to �� inches to create the stop board at the bottom of the game.  O U R B U I L D E R : Ten-year-old Joshua Toole from Pennsylvania.

��

DECEMBER _ ����

Mark the spacer-strip locations on the target board and the base using 3

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   N    I    P    L    A    C

   M    A    C    C    E    B    E    R    Y    B    S    H    P    A    R    G    O    T    O    H    P

THE PLANS

plywood target board

poplar spacer strips

wood screws

poplar stop board

a pencil, tape measure, and rafter square [Fig. A]. The space between each strip should be about ���⁄�� inches, but there’s no need to get fussy about placement. As long as you mark both boards with identical spacing, everything will line up.    K    C    E    S    T    E    R    E    G    R    O    E    G    Y    B    N    O    I    T    A    R    T    S    U    L    L    I

Clamp the target board to a piece of scrap wood for a cleaner cut. Use a drill and the holesaw to bore holes in the target board [Fig. B]. Use the same holesaw for each vertical segment of the board, making sure the holes are centered between the lines. Glue the spacer strips to the target board and let the glue dry for an hour. 4

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� x � leg

Apply a band of glue on top of each spacer strip [Fig. C] and press the backboard into position. Place a weighted object on the board to hold it down while the glue dries. 5

Glue the stop board to the bottom of the spacer strips and let the glue dry for �� minutes. 6

Use a miter saw to crosscut two � x � boards to �� inches, then to cut a ��-degree angle on the end of each piece to create the legs. 7

Attach the game board to the legs with the round-head wood screws [Fig. D]. 8

G I V E ! 

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CONTIN UED FROM PAGE ��

bleed. There was something wrong with her brain.” “Children?”  “They live with her parents.” “Her parents? My God. How long has this been going on?” “Thirteen years now.” “Marc. Thirteen years you’ve been going into this simula—?” “They’re real.” “They most certainly are not.” “They are. They experience the  world just like us, they have feelings and dreams.” “Do they know who you are? Who you really are?” “Rhea did.” She begins to put the nesting dolls back together, one inside the other. “This is very bad. For your mind. Your mind.” “I need your help.”  A clap of laughter escapes her. “I need to quarantine your system.” She slowly calculates what I intend. “Oh no.” “I’m not ready, Ivanov. All I need is a little bolt-hole for my family. I can’t chance it on my own machine. Besides,” I set the simcell next to the single Russian doll, “this is the manifestation that works. We might need it later, you never know.” She reaches into a bottom drawer and fetches out a clear bottle of vodka. She pours two. We drink as she studies me. “The orphan longs for home, yes?” She flicks the ovoid doll. “Even more so when there is no home. Even more when he is all alone.” The doll rollicks. “I’m not alone,” I say, “if I have your help.” She nods, sighs, and I get to work. Y O U G O I N , you can feel it in your teeth, they ring like tines and your real body wants to puke, and so I’m worried that Ivanov will watch me go under attached at the node plates, kecking and kicking. So I take some minutes to settle in. I lay in the tall breezegrass and hear a cricket. A single lone cricket. Trills and clicks. I hear a bird. Going  fee-chee fee-chee. I’ve never heard a songbird before. But that must be what it is. Maybe this is Rhea’s doing. She’d drawn it and in drawing it made it so. What is real anyway, but the execution of a wish, a story, a design.... I walk along the river and the air off the  water is cool. Except.. .the cool is not off WHEN

T E D  L I M I  O N !  I  E D I T 

the river, the cold rushes over the dunes from the ocean, the pole. The hairgrass dances in violence. It’s nearly cloudless. There could be ice out there. There is singing from the village. A throng gathering before the longhouse. My mood is too good to see it right. To recognize the dirge. To sense the loss. But then people grip my arm and set their faces in that way of saying they’re sorry, and I see the funeral. Several biers of dead, young sudden dead. I push to the front, frantic that among them are not Jay or Ruby or...no. The baker, a farmer, another  woman, a child. Their still faces.  A grieving mother bends over the child. She dabs the white sleeve of her mourning clothes on the child’s face, his nose. The hem comes away bright red. Blood.  What killed Rhea killed these people too. I sprint through the understory of bramble and the trail through the aspens, the golden leaves slapping my face. Over the Irvings’ fence, hollering as I run up to the back door. Anna opens it, Lee right behind her. “Where are the kids?” I squeeze out the  words, my lungs afire. “Inside.” “We have to...there are people...they died... in the village,” I gather my breath, slow down some. “And it...it’s the same thing that happened to Rhea. There was blood. Do you feel all okay? Are the kids feeling all right?”  Anna and Lee look at one another, then me. “We’re fine, Marc.” Lee has his hand on my chest. Jay and Ruby come out of their rooms and stand behind their grandmother in a shaft of sunlight from the window. How immaculate they are. Ruby holding a book, Jay reaching for his grandmother’s hand. Lee gently pushes me back. “Marc, let’s step outside.” “What’s that sound?” Jay asks his grandmother.  A high whine growing louder. And louder. Lee’s hand falls away. No cello. Exit Protocol just the same. “Stay away from the village!” I shout. Jay covers his ears, Ruby is running to me. “Don’t go to Olympia,” I say but no one can hear me, the whine has grown, we’re all squinting at the might of it.  And then I wink out.

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® F R E S H A G O N Y,  yanked out like that. My eyeballs ache as I make out the contours of the infirmary ceiling. I hear screaming, the screaming is me. And then I am done. The quiet hum of Ivanov’s deck. I see Shen. The radiant lines around her eyes, the severity of her thin lips. She rolls away on the doctor’s stool, the casters clattering like thunderclaps. “I’m sorry,” Ivanov says, removing my nodes. “She insisted on getting you out.” I sit. I nearly vomit. “Have fun?” Shen asks. “It’s a quarantined system.” “There’s only one way we’re going to beat Little Sister. It all goes dark.” “People are sick in there.” “No kidding. I wonder why that is,” Shen says. “No.” “It’s a highly evolved virus, Marc.” “No.” “Made to mimic and infect—” “No!” “This?” She holds up the simcell. “This is poisoned.” She drops the simcell on the floor, makes to step on it, but I’m on her before she can. She is a backward blur. Instruments clatter onto the floor. Then Ivanov is etween us. The simcell skitters against the wall. I crab over to it, grab it, and wedge myself into the corner. Shen shoves Ivanov away from her. “You’re endangering everything!” she shouts. “THIS IS REAL! That is NOWHERE!” I can see sparks in the noise she makes. The hasty exit from Olympia. My vision pins. I might pass out. “Give us the simcell,” Ivanov says. “I’ll swallow it,” I say. “Shut up,” she says. Ivanov sighs. Sits on her own exam table. Shen wipes her lip and pulls her jacket back down. Composure regained. I don’t move. I wonder if I even can swallow the simcell.  Andthen what, Marc?Figure it out later. “He’s been years in there, Shen,” Ivanov finally says. “So long. Let him say goodbye.” Shen looks at her watch. An antique Timex. You can hear the second hand tick. “You have about two hours.” A

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U N D E R T H E R A I N I can hear wails as I skirt the village in lamentations. All the lights are low and I pass by in the darkening of evening, the going tough in the mucked road. I trudge through the tall grass. The rain tings on the metal roof of

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the house. I let myself inside. Two hours. I call to them. No answer, only stillness. I call again.  A fire in the hearth. Don’t panic. I rush to Ruby’s room. Her mother’s things set out, arrayed here. Rhea’s pants and her slippers. Her shell comb. I call to Jay. I call to Ruby, my voice papery and worn. The village. They must be in the village. I told them not to go.  A flicker of light. Way out there. On the Transom. I have two hours only two hours. I run.  the ladder to the landing. Fifty rusted meters past  warning signs in Russian, Chinese, and English. Fifty meters, how many minutes, honestly I’m angry at them. They are huddled under the concrete awning on the observation deck. The sea plashes in the dark out there, the trees  whisper. The tower towers above us, disappears into the swirling dark. Jay turns. “Hey,” I say. “When were you gonna tell us?” Ruby asks. No questions. I yearn for Ruby to just let us be. “Tell you what, Ruby?” She slides something to my feet from under their blanket. A notebook. I crouch dripping to look. It’s Rhea’s. I turn the page to her scrawl, her naked thoughts. IT’S FIFTY

METERS

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.. .and I don’t tell him how scared I am because what would be the point? I can’t  go with him. I can’t see with my own eyes. What are we doing?  I flip through the pages, skimming my dead wife’s thoughts, her worries and anxieties.  I used to think it was great—to be loved by him. But now I see I can’t ever really have him. .. .sometimes I wish I didn’t know. It’s too much to know what you really are.  I look around and think about how he made all this. And then that it’s just an image. .. .cut myself and I feel it but I always feel like pain is just reflection.  I’ve married a god.. . ...and it’s awful.

��

DECEMBER _ ����

T H I S S I T U A T I O N you tell your children everything. That you live in two worlds. That theirs is the better one. The future one. You explain slow and try not to think about what’s going to happen. That’s how you spend your last moments with them. In courage. “Will you disappear again?” Jay asks. “No, I’m staying here, Jay. I’m never leaving.” This is a lie, but somehow you have to believe it. That you’ll fall asleep and wake up here. With them. “Really?” Ruby asks. “You’re not leaving?” “Really.” “Maybe Mom went to some other  world,” Jay says. “I think she did, Jay.” “Maybe we can go there. Maybe we can all be together?” he asks.  You believe it can’t be over. It just can’t be. “I’d like that Jay.” Ruby is buried in your arm. “What’s that?” It’s snow. You’ve heard of it but never seen it. “You made snow?” Jay asks. “And the trees and the sky and the ocean?” “That’s nothing,” you say. “You’re the best things I ever made.” IN

I AM LOOKING

at a single flame.

“Marc.” I am hearing a single voice. Ivanov. Her soft, kind smile. She says she’s sorry. So sorry. I touch the naked node plates. I make to stand, but fall back. My head swims. Unbalanced. “Marc, you’ve a nosebleed...” The salty tang. I touch my face. Red glistening fingertips in the candlelight.  A nosebleed. “This is how Rhea died,” I am saying. “Okay,” Ivanov says, her eyes shining, her jaw set. “Just sit.” I am dying. It doesn’t make sense, but I’m dying like Rhea. Little Sister is killing me. Three tries to sit up. Legs knock walking. I have to slide the door open manually, the thing groaning on its track and motor. I have to see by the light of candles and the cold glow of lithium lamps. The glass access panels and monitors and all the  vestiges of our digital hubs and nodes THE

INFIRMARY.

 

are dark like onyx plates in the walls. Ivanov’s not in her office. I take the simcell. I take the nesting doll. I walk several miles in our warren of tunnels. People sing. People play cards. The air is thick and it recalls my oldest memory, a crowded transport mechanical. Being passed forward, I must’ve been an infant. Anyone in the chain could’ve dropped me, but no one did. I find Ivanov in the launch bay, sitting on a loading dock. The lightning cracks and in the charged air her hair wavers up on an electric draft. So beautiful, like strands of tinsel. The Transoms dark towers of hope. It will be all right. I’ve felt the cold again. Ivanov hands me her bottle. “It was Little Sister,” I say. She nods in acknowledgment. “How did she manifest?” “A virus that went after host cells in  your brain. Core systems.” “How’d you get rid of her?” “Protease inhibitors. Nucleoside analogs. Then your body’s own interferon. Simple really.” “Where’s Shen?” “Out there,” Ivanov says pointing out to the cracked horizon. “Why?” “She went mad, Marc. We’re soft ware. This is all. ..” she flits her fingers in the air. Pours a drink. I take apart the nesting doll and line all thirteen of them before her. “This is us,” I say, picking up the penultimate one. A little ruddy-faced thing the size of a thimble. “And this is Olympia,” I say picking up the smallest doll. “I know. You’re quite the god.” “A god who needs a doctor.” L E A D I V A N O V U P the rusty ladder, snow falling in thin helixes all around us. I’m home. Not Olympia, per se, but  way out here. This far from base reality, the haywire way that things go—Rhea’s death, the narrow and fragile window of our moment in all the cold eons, even Little Sister ravening to survive—make a kind of sense now. Spinning down and playing out. Scenario. Version. Manifestation. Story, program, prayer. No author, no creator. No orphan either.  Which is the blessing, for there is much left to do, and it will take all of us, dream and dreamer. I

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has to sell.” He knows it’s not the same for the stores around him. “Malls in this country, it feels like two to three more years. We stay on a year-to-year contract because of that,” he says. He looks around, sanguine. He says he’ll shift his business model when the time comes. He doesn’t blame the internet: “At the end of the day, people still want a deal.”  At the end of his career, after returning to Europe, Gruen came to despise the malls he’d built in the suburban U.S. I called John Fayko, a retired architect who worked with my father in the field office for construction on Midtown Plaza, and asked about Gruen. “He was a very elegant guy,” Fayko said. “He used a cigarette holder, wore bow ties. He kept his overcoat draped on his shoulders like a cape. He was impressive. Convincing.” And his model for malls? “Great ideas, sure. Great design principles for what a mall might be. In the abstract. But he didn’t anticipate people  would go there for reasons other than shopping. Like, no reason at all.” Fayko speaks plaintively, without derision for the cliché of the American mall. “Over time, as malls got better they became a place for people to hang out and spend time instead of money. The people walking the mall, the teenagers hanging out, people killing time—they see the mall as a public space. They feel it’s theirs. But they aren’t buying. They don’t pay the rent.” AT MO ST ENTRAN CES  to Eastview (and

there are nineteen) there are no benches, no trash cans, no ashtrays, and no shade. They don’t want you out there. But sometimes you have to see the sky without looking through a glass ceiling. One afternoon I stepped out at �:�� p.m. There was a young woman sitting on her butt, right on the cement, about forty yards from the doors. Kethry Bruce, t wenty-four, from Rochester. She had an impressive,  vaguely purple Mohawk, wore a short skirt, and kept her tattooed arms wrapped around her knees. “I’m not smoking,” she said as I approached. Again: the mall cop thing. (I need a new haircut.) I told her what I was doing. She raised an eyebrow and stared at the distant L.L. Bean. “I moved here from New York City,” she said. “I’d never been in a mall until I got here.” I told her I grew up in a mall. She ignored me. “I hate malls. I like smaller businesses, handmade stuff. You can’t get that here. Not really. And...well, look at it.” She nodded at the parking lot, stretching hundreds of yards toward the theater complex, a vast surface of bone-colored asphalt surround-

�� �

DECEMBER _ ����

ing the entirety. There were about forty cars dappled across it, and a gray-blue summer storm in the distance. “I’ve never bought anything here.” I asked why she was there at all. “I style hair,” she said. “I like the place I’m working. I like the people. And this is where they are.” She felt like a stock character: the disaffected punk philosopher on a smoke break. “I think people need a hub,” she said. “I know people come here for that. But, people are sheep, too. They go where they get herded.” in a mall and you start to notice the subdermal layer of the place. The cracks in the f loor joints. The too-shiny, too-purple tiles from the late ’��s. Dust in the skylights. Chipped grout. Unpolished floors. I walked down every utility hallway, tried to open every access door. No one approached me, no one stopped me. I followed standpipes and examined HVAC panels. I walked with purpose, unlike the shoppers, so that concerned employees might think I belonged there. My only conclusion? Eastview, at least what I could see behind the curtain, is absurdly clean. Like hospital clean. In the mall itself, many storefronts were covered, framed out and covered in Sheetrock, plywood, or Homasote, painted in the inevitable ceiling white. Signifying vacancy. My dad hated the sight of a boarded store. “Dress it up all you want,” he said to me once. “But it’s still boarded windows. It stinks of decay.”  And yet nearly fou r thousand people  workingin ���retailspaces hasto indicate a bottom-lineeconomichealth.I countedfourteen vacancies. Management later asserted there weren’t that many. “Some of the spaces  you’re tal king about are already rented.  We’re at �� percent occupancy right now,” Eastview general manager Mike Kauffman told me. “That’s � percent above the industry average.” He acknowledged that online shopping takes a toll, but he pointed out that only � percent of all retail business is done online. The rest is still brick and mortar. “Eight percent doesn’t seem all that bad,” he says. It depends on your margin, I point out. “We simply believe that there’s still time for people to reinvent the retail model, to mesh online and in-person price points,” he says. But he’s murmuring a little, and I can tell he has to state and restate some version of this optimism every day. How long will this last? I ask finally. He thinks for a while and says, “The infrastructure is sound. CusSPEND ENO UGH TIME

tomers are still here. I think you’ll still come to this mall in the middle of this century.” EARLIE R THAT DAY,  I sat at the bar in a

mall restaurant called Biaggi’s, alone, save for the bartender, who visited me every so often from her station at another bar, deeper in the guts of the place. I ordered chicken parm and beans and greens, my dad’s favorite soup. My father and I used to eat every Saturday at the Top of the Plaza, which sat fourteen stories above the Broad Street entrance to Midtown. You could see the whole complex from there. The mall, with its distinct clearstory, the original department stores between which the mall spanned. Once I asked my father at lunch, high above a snowy Rochester: When do you think you’ll retire? He was fift y-one then, and he told me he never thought about it. Then he said, “I guess I think when I’m seventy-six, I’ll still be coming into work here. The mall will be standing, so I guess I think I’ll have someplace to go every day.” It made perfect sense to me then. It was far enough away, yet the end was so much nearer that he never lived to see it. The bartender brought me my soup. My dad’s soup. Then she asked if I was going to  watch the eclipse.I lookedupatthe television, and saw the silhouette of the moon against the sun, broadcast from the west. I’d forgotten. I walked outside, to that huge sundial and the statues of Chinese horses. No one  was looking up just then. The sun was still too bright for even a glance. When I looked in the mall, through the glass doors, I could see a crowd gathered there, looking up through the glass ceiling. I went into the mall once more. One person had eclipse glasses. The others were shading their eyes, trying to catch a little bit of it. The guy with the glasses  was describing the eclipse to the rest of the crowd. More people pressed in, because they  wanted to hear. “It looks likea large animal, and hot steel,” he said. Eventually one very tall woman said, “I can see it!” And a me-too guy said, “I think the glass here cuts down on the sunlight.” People looked up, and murmured. I couldn’t see anything. “You’re saying they planned on it when they built the mall?” someone asked. “I’m saying the mall is a good place to be, right here and right now,” the tall woman said. Nobody argued. People laughed. People crowded in around each other, trying for a look at whatever the mall would allow them to see.

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p. 6 Huckberry; pp. 9, 10, 12 letters: Jeffrey Westbrook; p. 10 Getty Images, Maker Faire; p. 14 Hyperloop One; p. 16 drone: Getty; p. 18 NASA; p. 20 food: Kelly Jordan; cathedral: Getty; p. 22 tools: iStock; p. 28 Allyson Torrisi; pp. 36–39  Huckberry; pp. 53–56 styling: Emily Soong Choi; p. 58 Allyson Torrisi; pp. 61, 64–67 What I’m Into: Getty;

products: Allyson Torrisi and Ben Goldstein; Brownlee: Nicholas Calcott; p. 82 Allyson Torrisi; p. 104 album: Alamy; snow: Getty. POPULAR MECHANICS (ISSN 0032-4558)

is published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August, 10 times a year, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 U.S.A. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance. ©2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Popular Mechanics is a registered trademark of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at N.Y., N.Y., and additional entry post offices. Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012499. CANADA BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Printed in U.S.A. EDITORIAL & ADVERTISING OFFICES: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019-3797 SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES: Popular Mechanics will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate carrier within 4 to 6 weeks. >>> Subscription prices: United States and possessions: $24.00 for one year. Canada and all other countries: $40.00 for one year. >>> Should you have any problem with your subscription, please visit service.popularmechanics.com or write to Customer Service Department, Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Please enclose your mailing label when writing to us or renewing your subscription. >>> Popular Mechanics is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or art. None will be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. MAILING LISTS: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies who sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such offers via postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to Popular Mechanics, Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. You can also visit http://hearst.ed4.net/profile/  login.cfm to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by email. AS A SERVICE TO READERS, Popular Mechanics publishes newsworthy products, techniques, and scientific and technological developments. Because of possible variance in the quality and condition of materials and workmanship, Popular Mechanics cannot assume responsibility for proper application of techniques or proper and safe functioning of manufactured products or reader-built projects resulting from information published in this magazine.

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BIG QUESTIONS. ANSWERS YOU CAN’T F IND ON T H E I N T E R N E T.

 What are the odds of having a white Christmas  when the song was written?

The world hasn’t perfected a grilledcheese ATM, nor do we own a pygmy zebra named Octavius. Suffice it to say, then, that one out of three seems pretty darn good to us. That �� percent comes courtesy of Ethan Gutmann, a hydrologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in ever-atmospheric Boulder, Colorado. In assisting us, Gutmann had his work cut out for him, as weather data is collected at thousands of stations scattered across the United States, not all of which measure the same things. In short, old weather records are an i mperfect, fragmentary morass, and a bit of a pain to sift through and compile. Undaunted, Gutmann was kind enough to review data from about �,��� weather stations—skipping places like Miami and San Diego—to analyze snow depth from December �� to �� (our “white-Christmas window”) between the ����s and ����s, then compare it to the same span from ���� to ����. Putting aside the customary array of caveats, qualifications, and nerdy-scientist niggles, what he discovered, more or less, was that the chance of a

back in Bing’s prime. Why’s that? “Almost certainly anthropogenic global warming,” Gutmann says. (Those preparing for the SAT should know that anthropogenic  means “caused by man.”) Really, though? Global warming? What about all those monster storms in recent years—the ones hyperventilating news channels refer to by such scientific names as “Snowmageddon!” “Snowpocalypse!” and “Snowfrickinwayyouregoingtoworktomorrow”? Turns out that as the winter months warm up, we might actually see more snow. “The largest snowfalls occur when the temperatures are just below freezing, around �� to �� degrees Fahrenheit,” says Gutmann’s NCAR colleague Kevin Trenberth. As temperatures drop, the atmosphere holds less water, meaning that, ironically, it can be “too cold to snow.” Warmer air means more moisture, which means more snow per storm—generally those heavy flakes that drag down tree branches and power lines, adding to the sense of wrack and ruin. If you’ve followed this far, you not only deserve to have one of your dreams come true, you’re also probably wondering how a white Christmas is �� percent less likely when big snowstorms are more likely. Great question.  While rising temperatures produce more snowfall per storm, they also cause that snow to melt much faster than it might have in the ����s. So while you may enjoy a white Pearl Harbor Day (December �) or a white International Migrants Day (December ��)—and, hey, who doesn’t?—that doesn’t mean your Christmas will be snowy. We may as well sing along with Bing and hope for the best (while reducing our carbon footprints, of course).

Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email [email protected].

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