Wired

While Netflix seemingly led the way for other streaming networks to create compelling original programming, Hulu actually beat them all to the punch. In 2011, a year before Netflix’s Lilyhammer and two years before the arrival of House of Cards, the burgeoning streamer premiered The Morning After, a pop-culture-focused news show that ran for 800 episodes over three years, plus A Day in the Life, a docuseries from the late Oscar-winner Morgan Spurlock.

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—@heardaniyell, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Dog focus group favorite flavor: human. —Jordan Tannenbaum, via email

Reprogramming their tongues enslaved them all. —Osman Salleh, via email

On Monday, former Fox News host and right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson released an interview with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk. At the 19-minute mark of the 108-minute-long interview, Carlson takes a break to talk about one of the show’s paid partners, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Carlson then goes on to describe something that sounds suspiciously like Project 2025, the Foundation’s highly controversial road map for a second Donald Trump presidency.

This summer, Google conspicuously paused its long-held plans to abolish third-party cookies in its Chrome browser after failing to please a mix of privacy campaigners, regulators, and advertisers. The backlash was immediate, with critics seeing the move as a disaster and admission of failure.

Soon after the announcement, an article in Digiday described how Google execs were now “in full-on damage control mode, trying to soothe everyone’s nerves, both publicly and behind the scenes.” Meanwhile, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the move “bad for your privacy and good for Google’s business.”

This week, Blizzard released Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, an expansion to the wildly popular fantasy action-role-playing game that tasks players with slaughtering masses of screeching demons and collecting the randomized gear that they leave behind.

Since coming out last year, Diablo IV has been a big success for Blizzard, earning more than $666 million (yes, really) in its first week. But before that release came years of fits and starts, including a predecessor that was perceived within Blizzard as an embarrassment and an iteration that was so drastically different, people began wondering if it was really still Diablo anymore.

The morning after Hurricane Helene pummeled the eastern seaboard of the US, Thomas Witherspoon inspected the damage to his western North Carolina home. The night before, he listened to the wind whip down trees and snap power lines along the two-mile access road connecting his family to their few neighbors in Buncombe County.

Like the tens of thousands of other North Carolina residents, the power to Witherspoon’s neighborhood was completely out. It was impossible to communicate with the house down the road, let alone anyone several miles away. Unable to send text messages or make phone calls, radio became the one form of communication left in rural North Carolina. After fixing what he could on his own property, Witherspoon, a lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, began distributing handheld radios to his neighbors.

A US judge has cleared the way for billions of dollars to be refunded to former customers of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

At a court hearing in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday, judge John Dorsey gave final approval to FTX’s reorganization plan, the terms of which had previously been put to creditors and voted through by a landslide.

“I think this is a model case for how to deal with a very complex Chapter 11 proceeding,” said Dorsey. “I applaud everyone involved in the negotiation process.”

Last week, Hurricane Helene spun north into western North Carolina causing catastrophic damage, particularly in the Asheville area and surrounding counties. Entire homes and businesses were flooded, some floating away in a horrific wave of debris.

In the midst of it all, some bird-watchers noticed something: People in some of the most heavily impacted areas were continuing to log sightings in the popular app eBird. As it happens, some of those areas—Buncombe and Henderson Counties in particular—have been birding hot spots for years. Less than a day after the storm passed, as many were still assessing the damage, birders were back to chronicling their finds.

Ambition is not a dirty word—especially if you’re Bertrand Piccard. The explorer, psychiatrist, and environmentalist aims to “promote sustainability through spectacular actions” to prove that a cleaner future is possible. During 2015 and 2016, he famously circumnavigated the globe in a solar-powered airplane, Solar Impulse, to show off the potential of renewables.

But even more ambitious was what he attempted after he landed. He tasked his foundation with demonstrating that environmental protection and economic profit can go hand in hand. The goal was to find 1,000 interventions that can protect the planet while also making money, shattering the argument that pursuing sustainability must come at a cost.

When investors poured $6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely unbothered by the latest drama, which recently saw the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, along with chief research officer Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research, abruptly quit.

And yet those three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key technical talent. Over the past few years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played crucial roles in developing the algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that helped make it the world leader in AI as well as a household name. Several other ex-OpenAI employees who spoke to WIRED said that an ongoing shift to a more commercial focus continues to be a source of friction.