In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

Wyoming could attract billions in data center investment as states debate artificial intelligence infrastructure costs. Property tax relief for homeowners is a key potential benefit.

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InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That'll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there's been a concerted effort to reduce the US's reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

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A Teen Girl's Death Is Prompting Calls to Ban Choking in Porn Despite the many health risks, sexual strangulation has become popular among young people--with some experts blaming adult content for normalizing it. An Australian teenage girl's death, suspected to be preceded by consensual "choking" during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn . This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren't aware of just how dangerous the trend is. Sexual strangulation or "choking" during sex, as it's referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular--especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death.

Want to Get Off Your Phone? "I think that's been the most helpful thing," says the ESPN journalist. "So there you go, Zoomers. There's a reason to have children." I just got it replaced because I cracked the screen with my car. I was resting it on the roof and it slid down as I was opening the trunk, and it was a real crime scene. When you bring a cracked phone to an Apple store, you know that they've seen everything, but you still feel deeply ashamed.

You're viewing the US edition You can switch to the UK or AU homepage at any time using this menu. Trump makes extraordinary promise to give EVERY American adult $5,000 'dividend'... but only if the Republicans win the midterms Fox News host Bret Baier is left stunned as AI whistleblower sounds urgent alarm on'most dangerous technology humanity has ever created'... before offering sole hope for preventing the end of civilization Melania Trump's team breaks silence on her husband's devoted'human printer' aide Natalie Harp I can't get what Lindsay Clancy's lawyer said about her husband Patrick out of my head... reading between the lines, it's so clear what he meant: KENNEDY The King has slapped down Harry and Meghan... but this is the biggest revelation from his public letter. The King's letter slapping down Harry and Meghan exposes an unforeseen weakness... and one word in particular could tell us everything about what's coming next: ROBERT JOBSON NFL fans divided over Black National ...

Before reentering our atmosphere, the telescopes onboard NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have been restarted to take their last observations. After 21 years in space, NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will soon return to our atmosphere. NASA has carried out some notable rescue missions over the past few years, including bringing home the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station last year. More recently, the agency sent up a probe in hopes of saving the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a satellite first launched in 2004 that began falling out of our planet's orbit. The plan was for robotic arms on the probe, known as LINK, to grab onto the aging satellite and--with a powerful set of thrusters--drag the observatory back into position.