Wired

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 original “Backrooms” image; the Cicada 3301 puzzles. Many of them have been solved lately, including, this week, uncovering the identity of Celebrity Number Six.

A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator.

In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which operates a predictions market that allows users to bet on the outcome of various events, from the volume of recorded bird flu cases to the number of cars produced by Tesla. Kalshi filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a CFTC decision preventing it from offering bets on whether the Democratic or Republican party would control the two chambers of Congress.

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On Monday, Apple held one of its splashy media events. This one was used to show off its next round of iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watches. These are three of its biggest products, and all of the design tweaks feel very familiar to the current Apple universe. But Apple has also trotted out some new tricks, like sleep apnea detection in the Apple Watch and a new feature that instantly turns a pair of AirPods Pro into hearing aids. And of course, the company is also very keen to get consumers hyped up about the iPhone’s new Apple Intelligence features—even if those flashy AI tricks won’t start becoming available until next month.

Mark Cuban was confident he wouldn’t be recognized in Boston Common. This was early June, and it happened to be the day of the Boston Dyke March, billed as an “anti-capitalist intersectional gender liberation” event. Earlier that day, outside of his hotel, people had bum-rushed the billionaire, angling for an autograph or selfie. Basketball fans on the street lit up at the sight of him—the minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. But as we strolled the 50-acre stretch of green, considered the oldest public park in the US, Cuban the capitalist assured me that this anti-capitalist crowd couldn’t be less interested in him.

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WIRED’s Makena Kelly and Tim Marchman join Leah to discuss the memorable moments, the policies and, of course, the conspiracies that came up in Tuesday’s presidential debate.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

In the wake of a debate performance that has been widely panned as disastrous, former president Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to explain the evening away by posting conspiracies about a “rigged” event, deeply misogynistic attacks on vice president Kamala Harris, and wild claims about the vice president’s earrings.

Within minutes of the debate ending, a brand-new conspiracy emerged on X, focusing not on the content of what was said but on the earrings that Harris was wearing.

Apple has been ordered to pay €13 billion ($14.4 billion) of back taxes to the Irish state, in a court ruling that ended a decade-long fight between Europe and the big tech company.

In a judgment handed down on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) agreed with a European Commission ruling in 2016, which found that for a period of more than 20 years Apple enjoyed illegal tax advantages that constituted state aid from the Irish government.

It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their “spare time.” Astro Teller, the head of Google X, had agreed a few months earlier to bring all the robot people into the lab, affectionately referred to as the moonshot factory.

Lawfair, founded by the well-known litigator Adam Mortara, is a boutique right-wing firm currently engaged by the state of Tennessee to provide counsel on a contentious Supreme Court case that could affect the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have worked or done work for the firm is a project-based contract attorney named Christopher Roach. He no longer does so, after WIRED asked questions about his apparent ties—revealed exclusively in this story for the first time—to online accounts with a long history of posting white supremacist and antisemitic content.

Apple’s just-announced iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro will likely go down in the books as the “AI” iPhone, the one that’s supposed to power all kinds of new generative artificially intelligent features, and in a very Apple-y way. But some analysts are predicting that these new phones will catalyze an even more important phenomenon for Apple’s future: The start of an iPhone “supercycle.”

A “supercycle” is what it sounds like: an extended period of economic growth in a boom and bust cycle. In this instance the phrase is being applied to a specific commodity. And those who track the tech market closely believe—or want to believe—that that time has come for iPhone sales to heat up.