Innehållsförteckning för November/December 2025 från WIRED

JUST OFF THE Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel’s rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. It’s 11:37 pm on a hot July night in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when our heads all swivel in the same direction. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume glowing bright, about 12 miles due north up the Banana River. The “Iron Man” riff starts to blast. It’s fun for the couple dozen of us there. When we hear the thud of the sonic boom, most everyone lets out some kind of hoot. But for Elon Musk, it’s just another Tuesday. This is SpaceX’s 95th launch of the year, one nearly every other day. That’s more liftoffs than the rest of the world gets into…

CINDY BI IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TELLING ME THIS STORY. First, there’s the confidentiality clause. When Bi, a venture capitalist who claims to have invested in a dozen unicorns, hired a surrogate to carry her only male embryo in 2023, both parties agreed to keep the details private and away from the media. Then there’s the restraining order against Bi, followed by a court-ordered agreement saying she would not so much as mention the “surrogate” involved in Baby Leon’s stillbirth. Finally, there are social norms to consider when publicly attacking the woman who says she almost died carrying your child. Still, Bi is talking to me. She sends me a nearly 3,000-item folder filled with legal filings; reports to professional organizations, insurance companies, employers, and the police; emails with…

IT’S BEEN ONE year since Donald Trump took back the White House. Much has changed in the United States: The White House’s Rose Garden has been paved over, and the Oval Office is covered in gold. As I write this, National Guard soldiers are swarming Washington, DC. In Southern California, meanwhile, ICE cops disguised as construction workers are nabbing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots. Crypto is now king in this country, especially if you’re the president or one of his sons, who are amassing millions or billions from, in my view, some of the most corrupt financial schemes imaginable. If you read WIRED, you know. You can feel our democracy shortcircuiting, with every AI-generated edgelord meme posted on official government accounts. One of the most visible changes of…

I IN THE PREDAWN hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Grifths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn’t on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. As thunder rolled toward the anchored vessel, Griffiths set the video to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and posted it to Instagram. It was 3:55 am. In the video, the Bayesian’s aluminum mast, one of the tallest in the world, is briefly visible against…

ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly. Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called “highlevel” because they work sort of like human language, written in commands and idioms that might fit in at a poetry slam. Generally speaking, a piece of software like a compiler transforms this into what the machine really reads: blocks of 1s and 0s (or maybe hex) that tell actual transistors how to…

FOR DECADES, MARK Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him. But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I have fired Meta as a client.” This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGAfriendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America…

DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND term has ushered in a new era in American politics. It’s brasher, crueler, more direct, more super online, and certainly more dystopian. Democrats and sometimes even Republicans have struggled to compete with Trump’s monopoly on the attention market. But the leaders of both parties are only mortal—yes, even Trump—and they’re not going to be around forever. A new generation of political talent is muscling its way onto the scene, armed with new ways of connecting with the masses and original visions of the country they want to live in. Here are the candidates, the influencers, and the insiders on both the left and the right that we think you’ll keep hearing from, and why. You might just remember when you spotted a future president in this edition…