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As satirical news outlet The Onion continued to wage a legal battle to acquire the assets of Infowars out of bankruptcy this summer, it launched a streaming program that spoofed the brand and its bellowing conspiracist ringleader, Alex Jones. Comedian Tim Heidecker took the reins of the operation, adopting Jones’ guttural and paranoid bluster as he investigated, among other unconfirmed reports, whether Jones himself had exploded in his car after eating too much Whataburger. But Heidecker wasn’t about to stop there in his quest to transform the Infowars brand into a gonzo comedy network along the lines of Adult Swim. Now he’s taking aim at another high-profile target: Joe Rogan, the bro podcaster whose rambling, misinformed conversations with everyone from Vice President JD Vance to [checks notes] Yakov Smirnoff have somehow kept his long-running series, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” at the top of the charts for years. Heidecker’s companion show, “The Tim Heidecker Podcast,” premieres at 8 pm ET on Thursday, October 1, and WIRED can exclusively reveal that the debut episode includes lots of complaining about pronouns, wildly dumb speculation around AI, and plugs for a supplement called “Crab Salts” that makes your “head hurt” and causes you to shout. A representative for Rogan did not immediately return a request for comment.

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This week, President Donald Trump issued a new “morally binding” AI accord after a lunch meeting with tech executives, which basically says the AI labs are going to regulate themselves. We get into how a non-binding accord will affect AI safety. Subscribe to or follow "Uncanny Valley" wherever you get your podcasts. #UncannyValley #AILab

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See what it’s like to travel in the occupied West Bank, for the nearly 3.5 million Palestinians who live there. Our interactive is grounded in 18 months of reporting and analysis: over 2 billion GPS pings, hundreds of thousands of Telegram messages, the exact location of over 800 movement obstacles and checkpoints, and a poll of hundreds of Palestinians across the West Bank. Brought to you by WIRED, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the Palestine Reporting Lab, Lighthouse Reports and Evident Media.

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Going rogue. Breaking containment. Misalignment. P(doom). As the industry booms, an entirely new vernacular has emerged in the debates over how consequential artificial intelligence really is. Within that new parlance, two phrases have become focal points: stochastic parrots and existential risk. And at the center of those is one prominent AI researcher who has never stood down from a fight, Timnit Gebru. Gebru came into the public eye several years ago after sparring with Google over a research paper she coauthored that called out biases in the company’s AI, saying that LLMs basically parroted their training data and risked perpetuating biased viewpoints. The contested paper resulted in Gebru’s departure from the company, and led her to found an institute that investigates harms perpetuated by technology and supports the creation of unbiased tech tools. She has also authored a new book, “Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist,” expected to ship early next year. More recently, Gebru has spoken out against a faction of the industry that believes AI is so powerful it could destroy humanity. In turn, some members of that community, including an Anthropic cofounder, have alleged that Gebru’s earlier research about stochastic parrots is no longer relevant, and that AI does have the ability to “think” or reason. The AI debate is no longer just about the technology itself, but about ideological groups and strategic narratives, and Gebru believes these narratives are a “harmful distraction” from the real issues with AI. Subscribe to or follow "Uncanny Valley" wherever you get your podcasts. #UncannyValley #TheBigInterview

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One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity. Subscribe to or follow "Uncanny Valley" wherever you get your podcasts. #UncannyValley #TheBigInterview

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HCA Healthcare, the largest hospital chain in the US, turned to Palantir to streamline scheduling, but nurses say the new software is causing errors, burnout, and frustration.

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Since 2023, Israel’s fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has accelerated. The West Bank has, for the nearly 3.5 million Palestinians who live there, ceased to exist as a contiguous territory. According to the most recent UN data, at least 925 fixed and temporary checkpoints, metal gates, roadblocks, and earth mounds divide the West Bank. This fracturing has torn families apart, stifled the economy, and impeded access to essential services such as hospitals and schools. The result is that Palestinians in the West Bank are living in an ever-shrinking, ever-more-fragmented world—a situation one expert calls unprecedented, and one that the legal adviser to the Israeli military reportedly cautioned may violate basic rights and the principles of international law. Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, or their closure times. On the ground, Google Maps is practically useless for Palestinians; it is blind to the checkpoints and tries to route them onto roads reserved for Israeli-plated cars. Instead, citizens have developed their own ad hoc networks to inform each other of closures. As far as we know, no organization has used that network—combined with new datasets and on-the-ground reporting—to measure what this does to daily life. Over 18 months, WIRED, @Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), @Evident and Palestine Reporting Lab investigated the system that has carved the West Bank into cantons and measured what it cost people to move through it.

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Ben Mueller’s assignment for his journalism class was to tell a news story—any news story—in the form of an extended Instagram slideshow. What happened next turned a California student newspaper into a free-speech flash point.

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The replica watch industry is in its “super clone” era. Following tips from murky internet forums, we bought three budget fakes that were good enough to pass as real—but ultimately disposable.

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WIRED’s Reece Rogers requested a copy of his data from the McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicted he’d never stop being a customer.

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Meta’s new personal assistant, Muse, has become a viral hit, with millions downloading the AI agent, connecting it to bank accounts, messages, or health data, and allowing it to complete tasks for them. But as Muse takes off among consumers, data from inside the app is providing insight into how it organizes and presents information to users. For more like this, subscribe to “Kernel Panic,” a new weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the world of privacy and digital security.

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Introducing the full-blue sapphire MRG-D5000, a crazy G-Shock from Casio that costs more than a Patek Philippe or Porsche Macan. Would you buy one?