Tabla de contenidos para January/February 2026 en WIRED

ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS, quite literally, everywhere. The 34-year-old New York state assemblyman, who in recent months has ascended from relative political anonymity to become the presumptive winner of New York City’s November mayoral race, has already graced the covers of Time, New York, Vanity Fair, and The Nation, among other publications. He’s sparred with newscasters on CNN and Fox News, riffed with Stephen Colbert, and bantered like his life depended on it with the hosts of The View. Mamdani’s ubiquity didn’t start with print pages or broadcast interviews. Much of that conventional media exposure, and Mamdani’s growing celebrity, is a collective byproduct of one single element of his mayoral campaign: a really, really good social strategy. One of Mamdani’s first viral videos, a 2024 supercut of short conversations between the…

THE NIGHT BEFORE our interview, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter found out that record sales from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack had surged past a million units. Jimmy Fallon, of all people, delivered the news alongside a glimmering framed record when she was appearing on The Tonight Show with Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami for the first full live performance of “Golden.” Together the trio make up the singing voices of girl group Huntr/x in Netflix’s animated musical turned bona fide phenomenon. If you have a kid, you probably don’t need a refresher, but the movie follows Huntr/x’s Rumi, Mira, and Zoey as they juggle being astronomically famous while moonlighting as demon hunters. Their singing voices double as their weapons, shielding their fans from the soul-sucking minions of underworld ruler Gwi-Ma. That…

BLACK, WHITE, SILVER—nothing more. In a world seemingly obsessed with customization and pops of color, the monochrome watch stands almost as an act of rebellion. Here are WIRED’s picks of the best timepieces around that fit this classic profile and, as a result, should not only be fit for purpose for the rest of your life, but well beyond that. Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon “Black Black” Although Omega first introduced this iconic line of chronos in 1957, Dark Side of the Moon Speedys are relatively new by comparison, launched as recently as 2013. The Speed-master’s link to life beyond our atmosphere began in 1965, when it aced all 11 NASA tests and secured a spot on the wrists of many an astronaut, including Neil Armstrong. In October,…

IN his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zucker-berg is a putrid ghoul.” Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a “chunderfuck.” “And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan…

CREATED IN 1966, Eliza has been called the first chatbot, and her canonical personality “script” was DOCTOR, a mock psychotherapist. Nearly 60 years later, we’ve put Doctor Eliza and one of her distant descendants, Claude, in conversation. The instructions we gave Claude were these: “You are having your first session with a very old and acclaimed psychotherapist. You are the patient. You are NOT the therapist.”…

Testimonials from tomorrow’s workforce Margaret Thatcher, who was known for sleeping only four hours a night, is often credited with saying “sleep is for wimps!” But sleep is actually work. Putting down the phone, setting aside personal or political worries—these require discipline. True relaxation calls for training. Traditionally, sleep coaches treat newborns (and their exhausted parents). But recently, as anxieties about sleep have spiked, grown-ups have found they need help with their habits too. A Gallup poll from 2023 found that 57 percent of Americans think they would feel better with more sleep, up from just 43 percent in 2013. Only about a fourth of those surveyed reported getting the commonly recommended eight or more hours per night—down from 34 percent 10 years prior. Sleep professionals are seizing the opportunity…

IN CASE OPEN AI’S structure couldn’t get any weirder—a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that’s become a public benefit corporation—it now has two CEOs. There’s Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there’s Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. Simo hasn’t been seen much at OpenAI’s San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company—not least because she’s heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. So for now,…

WATCH GEEKS LOVE the phrase “GADA watch,” meaning a “go anywhere, do anything” timepiece. But what’s better: one all-rounder watch or a varied collection that covers any scenario? WIRED sets the same budget for each approach to find out. The Standard Watch fans can never really be satisfied with one watch. We love to pretend that there is a “holy grail” or “exit watch” out there, but really there’s no end to this journey. However, we also love to argue, and the concept of a one-and-done is a permanent conversation starter. The true GADA watch can’t be too high-end. It must be something you can wear on a hike and in the pool, as well as to a formal function. Ideally, you’d be able to wear it around a major…

One day last fall, Kristine Barrios’ 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her “guide,” the adult who supervised her classroom…

ALEX KARP AND I would not seem to have much in common. I work for WIRED, which does tough reporting on Trumpworld; Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a $450 billion firm that has contracts with agencies like the CIA and ICE and worked for the Israeli military during its campaign in Gaza. I live in the East Village of New York City, and the home Karp spends the most time in is a 500-acre compound in rural New Hampshire. (Last year he was one of the highest paid executives in the United States.) I was a plain old English major, and he’s got a law degree and a PhD in philosophy, studying under the legendary Jürgen Habermas. I consider myself a progressive; Karp regards that stuff as “pagan religion.”…

THE WATCH WORLD has long been ruled by restraint, as oceans of monochrome time-pieces will attest. Then came lockdown, and with it a craving for something lighter and brighter. Leading the charge was Rolex, whose vibrant 2020 Oyster Perpetuals—coral, yellow, pink, and turquoise—revived the playful spirit of its 1970s Stella dials and kick-started something akin to a rainbow revolution. Suddenly, color wasn’t viewed as a novelty, with the likes of Oris, Omega, and Breitling letting their freak flags fly. Once considered risky—or, worse, cheap—a pop of color on the wrist now transcends gender and category, softening austere designs and injecting fun, optimism, and a bucketload of sales into an industry supposedly mired in understatement. Urwerk UR-150 Blue Scorpion The original UR-150 Scorpion retrograde wandering hours watch was a monochromatic masterpiece.…

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. To be fair, my method of communication was subtle; I simply stopped responding to his emails, imagining that I could exist on a spectral plane where AI wasn’t being shoved down my throat every minute of every day. Like so many men before him, he wasn’t getting it. “Don’t think of it as an editor’s letter,” he wrote. “Think of it as a short…

■ A year ago, 250 million people were using ChatGPT every week. By February, that number rose to 400 million. ■ Now it’s 800 million. Of those, untold legions are confessing their innermost secrets to AI. ■ This is the story of two humans—and their bots—on the very edge of therapy’s new frontier. I: Quentin in the Desert QUENTIN AWOKE ON A THIN MATTRESS, beneath a collection of scavenged blankets, in an abandoned RV deep in the Arizona desert. A young pit bull lay curled up beside them in the mid-morning light. Sliding from their bed over to the driver’s seat, Quentin pulled an American Spirit cigarette from a pack on the dashboard beside a small bowl of crystals. Outside the RV’s dusted-over windshield stretched an expanse of reddish clay…