Scroll back through the last year, and the same words come up again and again. The top-trending terms of 2025, from artificial intelligence to Zohran Mamdani, shaped headlines across politics, conflict, technology and climate. As the year comes to a close, AJ Labs has compiled an A to Z list of names, places and issues that generated sustained interest throughout 2025, according to a loose analysis of our own most-viewed story tags and those that appeared in Google's most searched. Taken together, these terms are a patchwork of issues that are also likely to spill into 2026, from ongoing conflicts to a changing technosocial landscape not seen since the dawn of the internet. This is 2025 from A to Z, by the words that made the year.

WIRED spoke to seven Tesla Cybertruck owners about their most controversial purchase and why they're proud to drive it. Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US President Donald Trump's return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck . The blunt angles and steel doors look futuristic, for sure, but only if the future looks a lot like . Cybertruck owners see things differently. "To me, it's just a vehicle that I love," says Andrew Castillo, a stock trader from Los Angeles. "It has no political affiliations at all to me." They've arrived for a meetup organized by Michael Goldman, who runs the 53,000-person Facebook group Cybertruck Owners Only. Though suspicious of the media, they're eager to set the record straight about the car that they love.

On this episode of, we discuss OpenAI's new teen safety features, the right's retaliation against critics of the late Charlie Kirk, and more of the week's biggest stories. Charlie Kirk (R) shaking hands with US President Donald Trump as he speaks on stage at America Fest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. In today's episode, our host Zöe Schiffer is joined by WIRED's senior culture editor Manisha Krishnan to run through five of the best stories we published this week--from OpenAI implementing teen safety features to how human design is the new astrology. Zöe and Manisha also discuss the reverberating reactions to Charlie Kirk's death and why the work of many creators, from comic book artists to late night show hosts, is getting cancelled.

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. On a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to answer that impulse, directed as much to myself and my colleagues as it was to readers. I argued that regardless of the enormity of this event, one thing hadn't changed; the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through. Disruptive politicians, even destructive ones, may come and go--or refuse to go.

Next to some of the games console announcements of E3s past – such as Sony's $599 PlayStation 3, or the Wii U's confusing reveal, which left attendees wondering whether it actually was a new console – Microsoft's Project Scarlett announcement went pretty well. But the absence of a name for the thing, or a fancy box to look at, felt strange. Instead, we got a lot of tech specs and a video of the product team talking up the machine's capabilities. It's good to know a new console is coming, but what we really want to know is how much it will cost and what it can do. Developer CD Projekt Red had a weird E3.

Walt Disney World in Florida appears poised to launch the highest-profile commercial deployment of driverless passenger vehicles to date, testing a fleet of driverless shuttles that could cart passengers through parking lots and around its theme parks. According to sources with direct knowledge of Disney's plans, the company is in late-stage negotiation with at least two manufacturers of autonomous shuttles – Local Motors, based in Phoenix, and Navya, based in Paris. It's unclear whether contracts would go to both or just one of the companies. The sources, who asked not be identified to avoid offending Disney, said the company plans a pilot program later this year to transport employees in the electric-drive robot vehicles. If that goes well, they said, the shuttles would begin transporting park visitors sometime next year.

Wander around WIRED's San Francisco headquarters on any given day and you're likely to encounter quite a zoo: hoverboard-riding video shooters dodging begoggled editors who are testing beta VR hardware; one of our favorite TV makers coming in for a meeting; security writers debating the latest cyberwar skirmish around the corner from a conference call with the founder of the Valley's latest unicorn company; and dogs (10 of them, by my count). But this time of year, the always lively view from my desk takes on an especially electric feel as we train our focus on a new horizon. So to give you a sense of what we're gearing up to cover in 2016, I tapped the hive mind of writers and editors and pulled together a list of the big developments we expect to be following as the year unfolds. There's a lot to look forward to. Politics is all about message control, but Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, et al. have rewritten the messaging playbook.