Patti Harrison Had Dreams of a Tech Utopia. The comedian sat down with WIRED to talk about social media, AI, and getting laughs for impersonating Boston Dynamics' robot dogs. Patti Harrison, like every great comic, knows how to use her face. If you've seen her stealing scenes in TV shows like Tim Robinson's or Hulu's, you know that she often starts out a bit demure, or pouty, before walking audiences into the deep end. It's that quality in Harrison's work that WIRED borrowed for our own rather unhinged cover concept. Harrison plays five (well, actually six) of the current masters of the universe--Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos (with Lauren Sánchez Bezos by his side). Combining her farcical sensibilities with our commentary on the man-heavy leader ship of Silicon Valley worked perfectly--and she was happy to lampoon the people behind the platforms she used to enjoy. We caught up with Harrison in London, where she had just finished a sold-out run of her show,, and a week of performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. KATIE DRUMMOND: When we were putting together our WIRED Women cover, we knew we had to put the best possible woman on it. You immediately came to mind, and I can't stress enough how much you nailed the assignment. I want to argue with a bunch of it. I was coming in today like, oh, I guess I didn't really check to see what the interview was about.

What Do We Need From Our Homes Right Now? The global editorial directors of WIRED and Architectural Digest on teaming up to help you understand how we live today, and what comes next. There's no place like home--even if it keeps changing. After all, the places where we reside in 2026 look remarkably different than they did even a few decades ago: the style and decor, the technology and appliances, and even the way houses are insured and protected from natural disasters. The external forces shaping our day-to-day lives today, in turn, will inform what makes a home desirable--and safe--decades from now.

One icy morning in February, nearly 200 people gathered in a church in downtown Richmond, Va. Most had awakened before dawn and driven in from across the state. There were Republicans and Democrats from rural farms and D.C. exurbs. They shared one goal: to fight back against AI development in a region with the largest concentration of data centers in the world. "Aren't you tired of being ignored by both parties, and having your quality of life and your environment absolutely destroyed by corporate greed?" state senator Danica Roem said, to a standing ovation. The activists--wearing homemade shirts with slogans like Boondoggle: Data Center in Botetourt County--marched to the state capitol and spent the day testifying to lawmakers about their fears over data centers' impacts on electricity, water, noise pollution, and more. Some lawmakers pledged to help: "You're getting a sh-t deal," state delegate John McAuliff told activists. The phrase captured many people's feelings toward the AI industry as a whole. Not much unites Americans these days.

The Worst Thing About AI Is That People Can't Shut Up About It A plea from WIRED's top boss: Say less. I tried to get out of this assignment so many times, in so many different ways. Not every package needs an editor's letter, I told them. I was very busy recording a new podcast, getting ready to speak at a tech conference, eating and sleeping, parenting, doodling, revising my to-do list, retying my shoelaces. I was doing my best, I tried to convey to my editor.

Onion CEO Ben Collins Hasn't Given Up on Print--or Buying Infowars A year after relaunching The Onion as a newspaper, Collins visits to talk about why "going into something and not ruining it is bravery." Ben Collins made a big bet. A year ago, just a few months after he'd been named CEO of The Onion, he relaunched its print edition. Once a favorite on university campuses, The Onion hadn't published a physical issue since 2013 . Common wisdom said that readership, and advertising dollars, just weren't there for newspapers. But Collins, a fan of the satirical paper since childhood, thought "that's dumb." Readers celebrated The Onion's relaunch and the ability to read all of its bitingly funny headlines on a single broadsheet. Collins wouldn't give exact numbers on how many people are currently subscribed to the print edition but did say they should be enough to keep its writers' room humming (a few weeks after we taped this episode, the Wall Street Journal reported that The Onion now boasts more than 53,000 paying subscribers). On this episode of, I spoke with Collins about his hopes for The Onion, the future of journalism, and his Balatro addiction. KATIE DRUMMOND: Do you have a recent favorite Onion headline? Can I look it up for you? "Ghislaine Maxwell Can't Help but Notice Interview Room Covered in Plastic Sheeting." The staff churns out like 15 a day that are great. I sit there, and I still don't know how they do it. When I say they throw away eight or nine of the best sentences I would ever write every day, I mean that sincerely.

Kurt'CyberGuy' Knutsson joins'Fox & Friends' to warn about a disturbing new scam where criminals use AI to clone the voices of loved ones and trick victims into sending money. Charges have been filed against an Oklahoma woman who is being accused of laundering nearly 1.5 million in funds obtained through online romance scams, targeting elderly women. Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that Christine Joan Echohawk, 53, was arrested Monday, and is accused of laundering money from out-of-state victims between Sept. 30, 2024, and Dec. 26, 2024. Officials said that all the victims were women between the ages of 64 and 79. The victims believed they were sending money to a male subject whom they thought they were in an online relationship with, according to a news release from Drummond's office.

Big changes could be coming to Airbnb next year. In a conversation at WIRED's Big Interview even in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company's cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hopes that, in 2025, "people say'that was one of the biggest reinventions of a company in recent memory.'" Though Chesky kept details scant, he did say that the company hopes to reimagine its Experiences section, which he says consumers really like but that he doesn't think has caught on as much as it could. The move seems to be an extension of Chesky's belief in the value of physical experiences and physical community, which he still thinks trump most digital experiences, even in the age of AI. In an effort to prove that, even two years into the AI revolution, fundamentally very little has been changed for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on their phone home screens and think how much any of them have been substantially changed by generative AI.

If you've spent any time playing Dead Island 2, chances are you've noticed the game's progressive damage system. The Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, or FLESH, as developer Dambuster Studios call it, is a procedural tool that makes dismembering, melting, or burning zombies look more realistic, as signs of trauma correspond to the attacks you perform, visibly chewing through skin, muscle, organs, and bone. Of course, Dead Island 2 applies all this gore to schlocky, slapstick effect. But FLESH may make you wonder how such gruesome detail might translate to games with more serious themes. Questions around violence in games have a long history, spanning tabloid moral panics to concerted academic research.

Players as young as 13 are being exposed to gambling like behaviours through video game'loot boxes', researchers say. Experts are calling on regulators to impose greater controls on the boxes which give players random digital rewards, with similar tactics to a casino. These include weapons or costumes that can be acquired through gameplay or by spending real cash. Gamers favour them because they give a competitive advantage or power and some also have the potential to be sold on for money. Young players are being exposed to gambling-like behaviours through video game'loot boxes', researchers say.

To present a sharp criticism of the approach known as universal planning, I begin by giving a precise definition of it. The key idea in this work is that an agent is working to achieve some goal and that to determine what to do next in the pursuit of this goal, the agent finds its current situation in a large table that prescribes the correct action to take. Of course, the action suggested by the table might simply be, "Think about your current situation and decide what to do next." This method is, in many ways, representative of the conventional approach to planning; however, what distinguishes universal plans from conventional plans is that the action suggested by a universal plan is always a primitive one that the agent can execute immediately (Agre and Chapman 1987; Drummond 1988; Kaelbling 1988; Nilsson 1989; Rosenschein and Kaelbling 1986; Schoppers 1987). Several authors have recently suggested that a possible approach to planning in uncertain domains is to analyze all possible situations beforehand and then store information about what to do in each.