Culture

Almost no one hits it big in music. The odds are so bad it’s criminal. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay were having that rare golden moment when everything clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was fiddling with the drum machine and …

Kate’s real-life therapist is not a fan of her ChatGPT use. “She’s like, ‘Kate, promise me you’ll never do that again. The last thing that you need is like more tools to analyze at your fingertips. What you need is to sit with your discomfort, feel it, recognize why you …

When you’re talking about this new ecosystem of applications, is the idea that you’re the CEO of all of this, or just Bluesky? I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social. We have built out the protocol, and we maintain the Bluesky app, but the protocol is going to take …

At WIRED, we’ve had a long-running obsession with rogues. This is, after all, a publication that was founded in the early ’90s, born of a desire to champion the subversive, disruptive advent of the internet—and the hackers, hustlers, and blue-sky lunatics consumed by the possibilities of a digitized and interconnected …

On Friday, Epic Games announced Darth Vader would be returning to Fortnite as an in-game boss—but this time, players would be able to chat with him through conversational AI. “Ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire … or you know, a good strat for the …

A mod for The Sims 4 that removed LGBT and Black nonplayable characters (NPCs) from the game and automatically changed them to “straight” and “white,” respectively, has reappeared in spite of EA’s attempts to shut it down. WIRED has found dozens of similar racist, homophobic, and antisemitic mods for other …

As the birthplace of prestige TV shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, HBO—and, by extension, Max (aka the streamer formerly known as HBO Max, and soon to be known as that again)—is best known for its impressive lineup of original series. The network has also been upping the ante with feature-length content …

Manisha Krishnan: I feel like I won the Pornhub Awards this year because in talking to so many stars about censorship, I found out that one of them calls his thingy a meat missile in order to avoid social media censorship. So I feel like that was a good little …

A confession: This dispatch will not be coming to you from one of the long-devout Martha Wells faithful. I’m a convert, a curious reader who turned to Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series after reading my colleague Meghan Herbst’s fantastic 2024 profile of the author, which left me questioning who would …

It may not have the shine it once did, but Max (previously HBO Max) is still home to some of the best TV shows of the past 25 years, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones and The Leftovers. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the “it’s not TV” cable network or …