What's New
What's New is a WIRED podcast that explores the intersection of technology and culture. Each episode offers in-depth coverage of how digital tools, science, and media reshape everyday life. The show helps listeners make sense of a world in constant transformation. It is produced by WIRED.
Episodes
From The Big Story: The Internet Runs on Cats and Porn. It’s About to Get Cattier and Pornier
Listen to more of The Big Story here: http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop
Soon, hundreds of new top-level domains, including .meow and .fart, could be added to the internet. WIRED goes inside the backroom shenanigans of ICANN, the organization at the helm.
Written by Pete Millspaugh. Originally published on October 6th, 2026.
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From The Big Story: Billions Registered
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Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin’ corporate name as your own internet address.
Written by Joshua Quittner. Originally published on October 1st, 1994.
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From The Big Story: Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
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Our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
Written by Bill Joy. Originally published on April 1st, 2000.
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From The Big Story: Choke Points
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Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family.
Lost Lives.
How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.
Written by Lama Rabah, Sabrina Slipchenko, Charles Boutaud, Firas Tawil and Elena DeBre. Originally published on September 30th 2026.
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From The Big Story: How a Research Blog Took on Big Surveillance in China—and Won
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Digging through manuals for security cameras, a group of gearheads found sinister details and ignited a new battle in the US-China tech war.
Written by Amos Zeeberg. Originally published on April 4th, 2023.
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From The Big Story: Greetings From Burning Man!
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Dispatches from the New American Holiday: Writer Bruce Sterling takes the kids to the Temporary Autonomous Zone, where survival is a personal choice.
Written by Bruce Sterling. Originally published in WIRED on November 1st, 1996.
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From The Big Story: She's 28, Loves God and Her Family, and Might Be the Reason You Can't Have Kids
No IVF. No surrogacy. No polygenic tests. Emma Waters is leading a national fight against fertility tech—with her hot husband’s permission, of course.For more of the most ambitious, future-defining stories from our favorite human writers, subscribe to The Big Story newsletter: https://www.wired.com/newsletter/the-big-story
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From The Big Story: Sayaka Murata Inhabits a Planet of Her Own
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The novelist makes the Earthly rituals of sex, marriage, childbirth—and all of human life—appear delightfully outlandish.
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Open Source AI Has Founders—and the FTC—Buzzing
DC went to YC to talk OS.
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Bitcoin Bros Go Wild for Donald Trump
At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Trump told crypto enthusiasts exactly what they want to hear.
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Polluted Lakes Are Being Cleansed Using Floating Wetlands Made of Trash
Platforms combining plants and recycled garbage could offer a cut-price solution for reviving polluted bodies of water.
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At The Olympics, AI Is Watching You
A controversial new surveillance system in Paris foreshadows a future where there are too many CCTV cameras for humans to physically watch.
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Here's What Happens When You Give People Free Money (They Get Poorer)
OpenResearch released the first results of the most comprehensive study on giving unrestricted cash grants to impoverished Americans. Researchers say it will flame both sides of the debate over welfare.
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RealPage Says Rental Pricing Tech Is Misunderstood, but Landlords Aren’t So Sure
The software company has pushed back hard against claims that its algorithms helped make rent in the US too damn high. Property owners and managers aren't entirely convinced.
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Waymo Is Suing People Who Allegedly Smashed and Slashed Its Robotaxis
The Alphabet-owned driverless car service is getting aggressive against alleged vandals after a series of violent incidents in San Francisco.
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J.D. Vance Left His Venmo Public. Here’s What It Shows
The Republican VP nominee's Venmo network reveals connections ranging from the architects of Project 2025 to enemies of Donald Trump—and the populist's close ties to the very elites he rails against.
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Spotify, Stop Trying to Become a Social Media App
The music streaming service has added a comment function under podcasts. Who is it for, anyway?
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Paris Mayor Defies Poo Threats to Swim in Seine, and Prove a Point
French politicians’ pledge to make swimming possible in the iconic river is a way to ward off criticism about the cost of the clean up operation.
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Tiny Texas Village Seeks Billion-Dollar Bitcoin Miner to Pave Potholes, Scare Dogs Away
In a roundabout bid to win public opinion (and a juicy tax abatement,) Riot Platforms is preparing for its prized bitcoin mine to be annexed by a miniscule village in rural Texas.
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Pressure Grows in Congress to Treat Crypto Investigator Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed in Nigeria, as a Hostage
A new resolution echoes what 16 members of Congress have already said to the White House: It must do more to free one of the most storied crypto-focused federal agents in history.
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How Watermelon Cupcakes Kicked Off an Internal Storm at Meta
Arab and Muslim workers at Meta allege that its response to the crisis in Gaza is one-sided and out of hand. “It makes me sick that I work for this company,” says one employee.
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Apple to Allow Rivals to Access ‘Tap and Go’ Technology
In the latest iOS overhaul prompted by European Union rules, the smartphone maker will give third-party developers access to its payment technology.
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Epic Games Lashes Out at Apple Over App Store Rejection
Fortnite creator Epic Games says Apple rejected its App Store rival for being too similar to its own—a move it deemed “arbitrary, obstructive,” and in violation of EU rules.
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What Will Plants Be Like on Alien Worlds?
Scientists know enough about exoplanets to speculate about how simple plants might arise on them. But don't count on them being green.
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How Labour Can Fix the UK’s Tech Industry
The new government could bring about a renaissance in UK tech and bolster the country’s precarious post-Brexit startup pipeline. That’s if politics don’t get in the way.
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After a 10 Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned
Former customers of bankrupt crypto exchange Mt. Gox are preparing to be reunited with their lost bitcoin—and it's a $9bn windfall.
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Hurricane Beryl Isn’t a Freak Storm—It’s the Exact Nightmare Meteorologists Predicted
A hot ocean provides the energy hurricanes need to grow—and can limit the cooling that happens in their wake, making it likelier that the storms that follow will be powerful ones.
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Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Cuts Dozens of Jobs
Upside Foods is slashing staff, citing legislative, regulatory, and funding headwinds.
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Meta's Pay for Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU
In the latest big tech reprimand, European Commission officials say the tech giant must offer another option for EU users to opt out of targeted advertising.
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French AI Startups Felt Unstoppable. Then Came the Election
With polls suggesting voters are about to swing toward the far right or hard left, the AI industry is starting to freak out.
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OpenAI Wants AI to Help Humans Train AI
Having humans rate a language model’s outputs produced clever chatbots. OpenAI says adding AI to the loop could help make them even smarter and more reliable.
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Air So Polluted It Can Kill Isn’t Being Taken Seriously Enough
Toxic air kills over half a million children every year, yet only once has air pollution been listed as a cause of death on a death certificate.
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The Julian Assange Saga Is Finally Over
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to one count of espionage in US court on Wednesday, ending a years-long legal battle between the US government and a controversial publisher.
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Post-Pandemic Recovery Isn’t Guaranteed
The aftermath of a disaster like Covid can be divided into roughly three stages: the honeymoon, the slump, and the uptick. The aim is always to build back better—but in some cases that never happens.
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Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
Earlier this week, WIRED published a story about the AI-powered search startup Perplexity, which Forbes has accused of plagiarism.
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Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable—but You’re Eating Them Wrong
The humble potato is a miraculous vegetable, but Americans are eating less of them than ever before and have ditched fresh potatoes for frozen. Is it time to rebrand the spud?
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STEM Students Refuse to Work at Google and Amazon Over Project Nimbus
Students and young workers from more than 120 universities have pledged to refuse work at Google and Amazon until the Israeli contract is dropped.
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Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing
Extreme weather threatens the investment value of many properties, but financing for climate mitigation efforts are only just getting going.
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AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think
Companies aren’t replacing workers with AI yet. But they are sacrificing thousands of jobs in the race to further innovation in the technology.
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I Spent a Week Eating Discarded Restaurant Food. But Was It Really Going to Waste?
Food app Too Good To Go promises to cut waste by directing hungry bargain hunters to leftover restaurant food. But the week we spent living off the app had me wondering if Too Good To Go is too good to be true.
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From the Archives: Scientists Have Finally Found the Origins of a Mysterious Asteroid
Astronomers show how a 50-meter space rock orbiting near Earth isn’t a typical asteroid: It probably blasted off the moon millions of years ago.
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Apple Proved That AI Is a Feature, Not a Product
Other tech companies want to sell you chatbots. Apple’s demos show the value of seeing the AI as an integrated, holistic experience rather than a stand-alone app or device.
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US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren't Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets
Susan Rice, who helped the White House broker an AI safety agreement with OpenAI and other tech companies, says she's worried China will steal American AI secrets.
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From the Archives: The ‘Green’ Future of Furniture Is a Sofa Stuffed With Seaweed
Foam rubber—like the filling inside your couch—produces an enormous amount of CO2. A Norwegian company called Agoprene thinks seaweed could be the solution.
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An AI Cartoon May Interview You For Your Next Job
As if trying to land a new gig isn't demoralizing enough, job seekers are meeting with characters powered by generative AI who are capable of meeting with infinite candidates to judge their skills.
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The Snowflake Attack May Be Turning Into One of the Largest Data Breaches Ever
The number of alleged hacks targeting the customers of cloud storage firm Snowflake appears to be snowballing into one of the biggest data breaches of all time.
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The Case for MDMA's Approval Is Riddled With Problems
The FDA is considering approving MDMA alongside psychotherapy as a treatment for PTSD. But evidence of the drug’s effectiveness isn’t clear cut.
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From the Archives: Energy Drinks Are Out of Control
Highly caffeinated drinks have become a cultural staple. But following a death allegedly related to Panera Bread’s Charged Lemonade, has our collective obsession with energy drinks become unsafe?
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From the Archives: Here Come the Glow-in-the-Dark Houseplants
Startup Light Bio has created a bioluminescent petunia using mushroom genes and plans to start shipping the plants next spring.
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From the Archives: What Will Plants Be Like on Alien Worlds?
Scientists know enough about exoplanets to speculate about how simple plants might arise on them. But don't count on them being green.
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Marc Andreessen Called Online Safety Teams an Enemy. He Still Wants Walled Gardens for His Kid
Investor Marc Andreessen called tech ethics and safety teams “the enemy” in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year. Today he clarified he’s in favor of online guardrails for his 9-year-old son.
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From the Archives: A Medieval French Skeleton Is Rewriting the History of Syphilis
We're bringing an extra episode from our show Science, Spoken.
Christopher Columbus was blamed for bringing syphilis to Europe. New DNA evidence suggests it was already there. Maybe both stories are true.
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An American Company Enabled a North Korean Scam That Raised Money for WMDs
Wyoming’s secretary of state has proposed ways of “preventing fraud and abuse of corporate filings by commercial registered agents” in the aftermath of the scheme’s exposure.
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AI Is Your Coworker Now. Can You Trust It?
Generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are becoming part of everyday business life. But they come with privacy and security considerations you should know about.
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The Ticketmaster Data Breach May Be Just the Beginning
Data breaches at Ticketmaster and financial services company Santander have been linked to attacks against cloud provider Snowflake. Researchers fear more breaches will soon be uncovered.
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Google's AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That's How AI Works
Google rushed out fixes after its AI search feature made errors that went viral. Fundamental limitations of generative AI mean that it will still screw up sometimes.
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What Ever Happened to the Tiny House Movement?
We're bringing an extra episode from our show Business, Spoken.
Tiny houses started as a minimalist revolution. They ended up as an Instagram aesthetic.
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DART Showed How to Smash an Asteroid. So Where Did the Space Shrapnel Go?
2022’s NASA mission proved it was possible to knock an incoming near-Earth object off course. But that creates debris—which might also be a threat.
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'Largest Botnet Ever’ Tied to Billions in Stolen Covid-19 Relief Funds
The US says a Chinese national operated the “911 S5” botnet, which included computers worldwide and was used to file hundreds of thousands of fraudulent Covid claims and distribute CSAM, among other crimes.
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Why Some Animals Thrive in Cities
Why does some wildlife thrive in the city? Figuring this out is the first step to boosting urban biodiversity. And that's good for everyone.
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From Science, Spoken: Why Antidepressants Take So Long to Work
We're bringing an extra episode from our show Science, Spoken.
A clinical trial reveals the first evidence of how the brain restructures physically in the first month on SSRIs—and the link between neuroplasticity and depression.
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Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms
The US military aims to maintain its dominance by building autonomous attack drones that collaborate with humans and overwhelm defenses in swarms.
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What’s Up With These Crazy Northern Lights?
Solar winds at a million miles an hour and freaky magnetic turbulence are sparking some of the best light shows in centuries.
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Most US TikTok Creators Don’t Think a Ban Will Happen
The Chinese-owned app is in serious trouble in Washington, but a survey of US creators suggests TikTok’s influencer economy is carrying on with business as usual.
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What Scarlett Johansson v. OpenAI Could Look Like in Court
If Scarlett Johansson pursues legal action against OpenAI for giving ChatGPT a voice she calls “eerily similar to mine,” she might claim the company breached her right to publicity.
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Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare
We're bringing you a special episode from our Business, Spoken show. Check it out wherever you're listening.
Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 people in the past two years. Competition for the jobs that remain is getting more and more desperate.
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Crypto Astrologers See Price Moves in the Stars
They predict the ups and downs of Bitcoin based on planetary movements, and their super-secretive clientele listens.
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The End of ‘iPhone’
Ken Segall is the reason so many Apple products start with “i.” Now he says it’s time to drop the prefix entirely.
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A Huge Scam Targeting Kids With Roblox and Fortnite ‘Offers’ Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight
We wanted to bring you one of our favorite stories from 2023: The wide-ranging scams, often disguised as game promotions, can all be linked back to one network.
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Prepare to Get Manipulated by Emotionally Expressive Chatbots
The emotional mimicry of OpenAI’s new version of ChatGPT could lead AI assistants in some strange—even dangerous—directions.
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These Electric School Buses Are on Their Way to Save the Grid
Loaded with ever more renewables, the grid will need to store a whole lot of energy. Enter: a new kind of magic school bus—one that can both charge and give power back.
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Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2 Billion of Crypto
Alexey Pertsev, cofounder of the crypto-anonymizing tool, has been sentenced to over five years behind bars.
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Generative AI Doesn’t Make Hardware Less Hard
Wearable AI gadgets from Rabbit and Humane were panned by reviewers, including at WIRED. Their face-plants show that it’s still tough to compete with big tech in the age of ChatGPT.
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Elon Musk's Neuralink Had a Brain Implant Setback. It May Come Down to Design
Neuralink experienced a mechanical issue with its first human brain-computer interface implant. Its novel design may make it more prone to failure.
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How Not to Get Brain-Eating Worms and Mercury Poisoning
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had both a brain parasite and mercury poisoning at the same time. Just how rare is each condition?
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OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn
OpenAI released draft guidelines for how it wants the AI technology inside ChatGPT to behave—and revealed that it’s exploring how to ‘responsibly’ generate explicit content.
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OpenAI Offers an Olive Branch to Artists Wary of Feeding AI Algorithms
ChatGPT developer OpenAI says that artists and other content owners will be able to request that their work be excluded from use in AI development. Many details of the scheme remain unclear.
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No One Knows How Far Bird Flu Has Spread
With little incentive for US farmers to test their cattle, and many undocumented laborers on dairy farms, the full scale of the outbreak is unclear.
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The US Government Is Asking Big Tech to Promise Better Cybersecurity
The Biden administration is asking tech companies to sign a pledge, obtained by WIRED, to improve their digital security, including reduced default password use and improved vulnerability disclosures.
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The White House Has a New Master Plan to Stop Worst-Case Scenarios
President Joe Biden will update the directives to protect US critical infrastructure against major threats, from cyberattacks to terrorism to climate change.
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