Jeff Wise – Jeff Wise

Mysterious Drone Swarms Won’t Always Be This Weird

This article originally ran on Saturday, December 14, 2024 in New York magazine.

“Is it frustrating to not have more answers on this?” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy mused on Wednesday, as his state buzzed with consternation over a weeks-long run of unexplained drone sightings. “Is it frustrating to not have a source for these things? Yes.”

The widespread agita is less about the danger these mysterious vehicles might pose than officials’ exasperating inability to figure out who’s operating them and why. It seems like the problem shouldn’t be that hard to solve. For decades the U.S. has maintained an elaborate air-defense system that can detect and intercept everything from supersonic bombers to ballistic missiles. So what’s so tough about a handful of buzzing, low altitude drones that for all we know might have come off the shelf at Best Buy?

It turns out that the problem is way harder than it seems like it should be, and the problem has been repeating for years with no obvious solution in sight. On the contrary, there’s every expectation that the problem could get considerably more widespread in years to come. Basically, if you think this is weird, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The first great drone-swarm mystery to capture the public imagination happened five years ago, when residents of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas began to report unidentified craft appearing overhead in large numbers at the start of 2020. Residents reported that drones were lighting up the sky “with Christmas lights” and “zipping around all over the place.” I visited the area and dropped in on Rick Bain, a retired power-plant operator who took me into his backyard and showed me where he’d seen a craft hovering for several minutes. “It was right over the house, about 300 or 400 feet up in the air, barely moving,” he told me. “Probably five or six feet across, definitely not big enough to be any kind of manned thing.” His account seemed sober and credible. But drone-swarm skeptics abounded. Vice headlined one report “Mass Panic: It’s Not Clear That Colorado’s Mystery Drones Even Exist.” The visitations stopped shortly before COVID hit, and suddenly everyone had something more obviously dangerous to worry about.

How Luigi Mangione Probably Gave Himself Away

This article originally ran on Tuesday, December 10, 2024 in New York magazine.

Former FBI agent Jerry Clark served six years on the Cincinnati division’s violent-crime fugitive task force and was later the lead investigator on the notorious “Pizza Bomber” murder case. Today, he’s a professor of criminology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the co-author of four books, including On the Lam: A History of Hunting Fugitives in America. We talked to him about the manhunt for Luigi Mangione, who allegedly fled from Manhattan after gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4.

How does law enforcement go about apprehending a fugitive?
You start out with, “What do we know happened?” Then you start to piece together how he got to the scene and where he went after he left, and you start searching for imagery. We call it canvassing. In the digital age, every business has a camera, every person has a camera in their pocket. So you’ll canvass and follow the trail of where the last known sighting was.

It takes hours and hours of painstaking police work to get those videos. They don’t just appear. You’ve got to go find them. I used to even look at people riding on the bus. If there’s a bus route near where the suspect was last seen, you find the bus driver who was working that shift and ask if they have any regular customers, then put out a note asking anybody that was riding this bus at this time to give you a call. It’s all just hard gruntwork.

And then you go through hours of footage. Once you have a clear image, you put it out over the media as quickly as possible to get the help of the public. You’re creating digital billboards so that everybody gets to see this face. Now you’ve got millions of investigators.

How Trump Will Change America This Time

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 6, 2024.

Those expecting a continuation of Donald Trump’s first term are in for a shock. Back then, he came to office with no experience governing and no understanding of the machinery through which he could implement his will. Over time, he learned and then spent the next four years stewing in resentment and plotting revenge. “In the first term, things were chaotic. Trump did not achieve most of his policy goals, and mostly the institutions survived. They took some damage, but mostly they held up reasonably well,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. “I think that is not going to be true for the second term.”

When he comes to power in January, he will have the benefit of a judiciary stocked with his own appointees, not least in the Supreme Court, which this summer decided a president has immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does in an official capacity. What’s more, Trump will be abetted by a unified Congress held by a party that is more compliant than before. “The checks will not be there,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of political science at Harvard and co-author of How Democracies Die. “This is going to be a much more authoritarian government.”

One of his first moves will be to carry out a massive purge of the officials who might stand in his way. Trump plans to reclassify some 50,000 civil servants so that he can fire them at will. He has already signaled that he intends to axe the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, whom Trump himself appointed in 2017 and who has a ten-year term set by Congress in order to insulate the bureau from partisan politics.

Trump’s power, though, will not be limitless.

The CEO Shooting Has Corporate America Panicking

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 6, 2024.

As soon as the manhunt for the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson got underway, the security and risk-consultancy firm Kroll started getting calls from its clients. As the the head of enterprise security risk management, Matthew Dumpert’s job is to protect executives and wealthy individuals from a wide variety of threats, including violence. I spoke to him the day after the attack about the public reaction to the vigilante-style killing and whether the shooting is a wake-up call for corporate America.

What have the calls been like since the shooting? What are your clients saying?
There’s been a real steady flow of phone calls, emails, and text messages from our clients wondering, “What does this mean? Is this a new evolution, or is this just an expansion of the existing threat environment? What do we need to do?” People are recognizing that in corporate America, life is very different than it was two days ago.

Why is it different?
A lot of executives’ eyes have been opened to the notion that even if you think you’re flying under the radar, there could be individuals or groups out there conspiring against you. To see this attack unfold in such a cold and clinical manner, it rocks the soul. It really captured how vulnerable we are as individuals.

How Trump Goes to Prison

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 29, 2024

Donald Trump is facing an extreme sliding-doors scenario on Election Day. If he wins, he would have the power to single-handedly scuttle the federal criminal cases against him, be immune from prosecution while in office, and, thanks to the Supreme Court, have broad immunity from prosecution once — if — he leaves. If he loses, though, he will face criminal penalties that could leave him in command of a 70-square-foot prison cell for most of the rest of his life.

“He will be facing serious legal jeopardy if he loses. He knows that,” says Bennett Gershman, a professor of constitutional law at Pace Law School who served for a decade as a New York prosecutor. “It’s probably on his mind every day. He faces four very, very serious cases, in one of which he has already been convicted as a felon. The others are easily convictable.”

The minute it becomes clear that Trump has lost the election, his legal team will be preparing for the fight of a lifetime to keep him out of prison. “This defendant will use every means at his disposal to delay the outcome and complicate the adjudication,” says Martin Horn, a professor of corrections at John Jay College and the executive director of the New York State Sentencing Commission. “Who knows what legal maneuvers are available to him?”

Here is a look at where the four cases against Trump stand and how they might play out.

Hurricane Milton Will Be Bad. The Next One Might Be Even Worse.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 9, 2024

The warnings began arriving by telegram. A fierce hurricane had just swung around the western tip of Cuba and was heading for Tampa, Florida. When it made landfall at Tarpon Springs on October 25, 1921, it was the storm of the century. Winds of 120 mph smashed steamships and toppled trees, and an 11-foot storm surge swept away buildings and destroyed crops. At least eight people were killed. “Tampa City of Ruins,” a local newspaper declared.

It’s been more than 100 years since a storm this fierce has hit Tampa, but given the climatic trends, storms that formerly registered as once-in-a-lifetime events are going to be happening a lot more frequently. Hurricane seasons are getting more intense, researchers say, and outlier storms are getting bigger. So while Milton is going to be the worst storm that anyone alive has ever seen in the area, it might not be the last of its scale to come around for a while.

Jill Trepanier, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University, has studied the kind of extreme storms that only appear every 30 years. She found that as waters have gotten warmer, the intensity of these storms has increased. “Thirty years ago, when we thought about what a typical 30-year event looked like in Tampa, it was a Category 3,” she says. “Now, it’s inching toward Category 4.”

The Flying Car is Finally Here. It’s Slightly Illegal

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 3, 2024

Most mornings, when the air lies still on the ridges of the North Cascades in central Washington State, Tim Lum climbs into his personal flying car, a 14-foot-long bean-shaped craft called a BlackFly, straps himself in, and sets the machine’s four rotor blades whirring. As the 61-year-old retired smoke jumper levitates into the crepuscular sky, the landscape opens up below him, the forest stretching along the ridge and the farmland sprawling across the valley floor below. The aircraft swings forward into horizontal flight, and Lum zips off, flowing along the contours of the land, taking in the scenery. “It’s stunning, very dramatic,” he tells me later. “Cliffs and trees and valleys.”

I’ve been writing paragraphs like this for decades for magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, imagining a time in the not-so-distant future when the long-awaited promise of flying cars — more officially known as electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles, or EVTOL — is finally made a reality. This time, though, the scene is not a flight of fancy. Lum is a real person, and he really does fly a personal flying machine, typically around five times a day.

If you have $190,000 on hand, you, too, could buy one — or, if your budget is more modest, you can book a rental ride in a different kind of electric flying vehicle for $249. At long last, the era of the flying car is here.

But there is a catch: The EVTOLs that are currently available are not, strictly speaking, legal. The entire fledgling industry, such as it is, exists in a kind of shadowland, where it’s unclear what exactly the rules are and what will happen if you break them. For the manufacturers, it’s a gamble, the kind of regulatory arbitrage that could allow them to jump ahead of more careful, rule-following competitors and become an industry-dominating colossus like Airbnb or Uber or could devolve into lawsuits and enforcement actions. “Move fast and break things” is the Silicon Valley way, but it’s very much the opposite of the safety-first mind-set of the rest of the aviation industry, where if things crash and burn, they do so literally — and the public and government are not quick to forgive.

The Real Goal of Israel’s Exploding-Pager Attack on Hezbollah

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

The Creepy Coincidences of the Billionaire Superyacht Sinking

This article originally ran in New York magazine on August 26, 2024

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics calledEverything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

Cabin Pressure

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on July 29, 2024.

For fans of private-jet travel, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news first: the industry is thriving, as a wave of high-net-worth individuals have discovered the pleasures of being able to fly when you want, where you want, and how you want, no matter the price. Sales of private jets are booming, and charter companies are lavishing clients with add-ons that range from private chefs and in-flight wellness exercises to meetings with a Tibetan lama.

The bad news: the entire industry faces imminent extinction thanks to regulatory pressure and political opposition amid global efforts to stem the climate crisis. “We have to push for a ban on private jets,” French climate activist Charlène Fleury told me. “This is the most polluting and the most unfair and the least necessary mode of transport.”