Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Moo Deng. The baby pygmy hippo is barely two months old and already famous. So beloved on TikTok, Instagram, and X is Moo Deng that workers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo, the place in Thailand where she was born, are doing all they …
Read More »Watch Kamala Harris Take the WIRED Autocomplete Interview
In a wide-ranging WIRED Autocomplete Interview, Vice President Kamala Harris touched on everything from her debate with former president Donald Trump—which she found “quite enjoyable”—to her time as California’s attorney general to Taylor Swift’s endorsement. It’s a lively tour of Harris’ past and a preview of her plans for the …
Read More »Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI
For every high-profile internet mystery that seems very grave—the Serial podcast listeners who dug deep on the case of Adnan Syed, the sleuths who tried to figure out what happened to the “Mostly Harmless” hiker—there are an equal number of online fascinations that are just fun. The search for the …
Read More »The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think
Charli XCX said it, so it must be true: Brat Summer is over. In a tweet so echoey it got several news hits, the club rat/pop girl said goodbye to the season that may come to define her career—and America’s political future. It was September 2, 87 days after Charli …
Read More »NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose
National Novel Writing Month has long been known for its quirky, homegrown approach to creativity: Write a novel during the month of November! Just jot down 50,000 words while you’re knocking out holiday shopping and basting a turkey! But last Friday, the 25-year-old nonprofit, known as NaNoWriMo for short, shocked …
Read More »The Trademark Tug-of-War Over ‘Demure’ Shows a Massive Meme Power Shift
From the second the message popped up on X, it had a familiar ring. Jools Lebron, the TikTok creator who went viral just a few weeks ago for a post discussing “very demure, very mindful” work looks, was upset that, seemingly, someone had attempted to trademark her viral phrase. In …
Read More »The Australian Breaker Who Broke the Internet
Before some of them were taken down, the memes about Australian Olympic breaker Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, were all about poking fun. Videos of her flipping around or kangaroo hopping on the competition floor at the Paris Summer Games were accompanied by captions like “what my nephew does after telling …
Read More »A Russian Chess Player Allegedly Poisoned Her Opponent With Mercury
Russia is no stranger to unique poisonings. State agents have been known to use everything from polonium-laced tea to the deadly nerve agent "novichok" when making assassination attempts against both defectors in the UK and internal political rivals like Alexei Navalny. But a new "first" in the long history of …
Read More »How Camo Hats Became an Instant Meme
On Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate in her bid for US president, she commemorated it by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking him if he’d like to join her campaign. In the clip, he appears in …
Read More »Welcome to the Weird Era
Y’all are weird. In a matter of days, this has become the go-to response in internet discussion. As with all things online, it’s hard to pinpoint where weird started. It may have been Minnesota governor Tim Walz on MSNBC saying “[Republicans] come across as weird.” Or maybe it was the …
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