Tabla de contenidos para September/October 2025 en WIRED

FOR DECADES, ALLIES of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US. But right about now—as these infrastructures start to mirror the platforms of American Big Tech in a particularly grotesque way—they’re probably wishing they hadn’t. Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start of making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But as users and advertisers get locked in by network efects, collective action problems, and high switching costs, the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing users, then vendors, even as the platform fills with…

YES OR NO: Do you have any idea what “wellness” is? Depending on where you live and which online rabbit holes you’ve tripped into, your answer to that question—and your actual definition of wellness—may vary widely. And yet, we’re in a moment where wellness is the holy grail du jour, sometimes at the expense of our actual health. There’s the softer version of wellness, one characterized by some combination of smoothie consumption and aspirational TikTok videos. Then there are the more hard-line (and health hazardous) variations involving everything from (basically) bleach drinking to parasite cleanses to “wellness farms” designed to wean you off antidepressants. Regardless of which wellness doctrine you ascribe to, one thing is clear: The business of wellness, now worth, by one estimate, more than $6.3 trillion worldwide,…

GEAR HEALTH Ozlo Sleepbuds These tiny earbuds help you fall—and stay—asleep by blocking external noise with a range of soothing tones. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Bose launched the originals in 2018 but canned the tech in 2023. Ex-engineers N.B. Patil, Charles Taylor, and Brian Mulcahey didn’t want to give up their dream, so they bought the trademark and reengineered the buds to include biometric sensing technology to monitor your movement and respiration, and added sensors for light, sound, and temperature to the charging case for a better overview of your sleep and environment. $349 Smile Makers Orgasms aren’t just fun—they reportedly also reduce stress, improve sleep, and boost your mood. Smile Makers offers a range of bright and unthreatening toys to tickle all the good bits. The…

A new drug usually starts with a tragedy. Peter Ray knows that. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop. She didn’t feel well. Doctors in Cape Town diagnosed her with cancer. Ray remembers going to her radiation treatments with her, the hospital rooms, the colostomy bags. She loved the beach, loved to walk along the line where the water met the land. But it got harder for her to go. Sometimes she…

WHEN DONALD TRUMP moved back into the White House, the United States was years into its Cancer Moonshot, a multibillion-dollar Democratic effort to halve cancer deaths by 2047. There was a kind of stalemate: New cases of the disease were emerging about as often as before; deaths were ticking steadily lower; the US Food and Drug Administration was approving new treatments, if not quite as quickly as anyone wanted. But the taps of federal funding were open as never before, from the Department of Defense to the Environmental Protection Agency to the largest funder of cancer research in the world, the National Institutes of Health. But then Trump decided that American science research was, somehow, too woke. He paused NIH grant-making for more than two months, holding up an estimated…

Insect Herbalism Parasites are a top concern for animals and have inspired waves of evolutionary creativity. Some parasite-infected sea slugs shed their entire bodies, then regenerate from the head. But more common is what de Roode calls “animal medication.” Animals are considered to medicate when they eat or apply an external substance that they normally wouldn’t and it helps them “by preventing or clearing infection or reducing disease symptoms,” he says. Over the past few decades, more studies have focused on animal medication in a particular group: insects. When woolly bear caterpillars are infected with fly maggots, they begin eating more alkaloid-heavy, parasite-killing plants with no nutritional value. Research has shown that infection changes the caterpillars’ buds so that the bitter plants “taste really good,” de Roode says, perhaps like…

Summer. For teens not at work, it’s hot, it’s boring, and it’s an ideal time to close the door and spend about every waking moment watching, playing, texting, streaming—anything but talking—on the phone. With almost half of teenagers in the US saying they’re online almost constantly, the adults in their lives are growing more desperate to drag them off. Families are establishing screen-free zones in their homes, states are banning phones in schools, and a new kind of summer camp has emerged: digital detox camps, which can cost around $2,000 a week, and promise to wean attendees off screens by going cold turkey for the summer. WIRED spoke to the founder and director of one such organization. Taking a cue from your average summer camp, the program forces kids to…

AT FIRST, THE two bowls of fruit on Bryan Johnson’s kitchen island look perfect. They’re brimming with plump kiwis, hardy avocados, and ripened bananas. These are the food of the gods, I figure, for a man who aspires to live like one. But then I look closer. A lone orange, its skin flecked with mold, sits adjacent to two lemons, both almost entirely consumed by a layer of white fuzz. Something, it seems, is rotten in the estate of Johnson. That estate, it’s worth noting, is a predictable one. Johnson’s home in Venice, California, is the angular, concretefloored template of a dwelling you’d assume is owned by a man. Specifically a man who worked in tech, made his millions, and subsequently embarked on a midlife, post-wealth search for purpose. All…

DOES YOUR FACE look puffy in the morning? Could the quality of your sleep be improved? Are you inexplicably feeling a little off? Join the club. But don’t worry: The wellness industry probably has your fix—and you won’t need to step foot in a doctor’s offce. Big Wellness’ solution might not come cheap. People spend $6.3 trillion a year on wellness products, according to the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute. Nearly a third of that comes from the US alone, which spends more than the next five countries combined. For Americans, wellness isn’t just big business anymore. It’s practically national policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has pledged to loosen government regulation on food supplements and raw milk, among other products. One of his top aides…

After my birth, my mother became allergic to the world. That’s the only way I knew how to put it. So many things could set her off: new carpeting, air fresheners, plastic off-gassing, diesel. Perfumes were among the worst offenders. On top of that, she developed terrible food allergies. The sound of her sniffing became the chorus of my childhood. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. I’d peek into her darkened room and see her face pinched in discomfort. Her joints ached, her head swam. Doctors suggested that maybe she was depressed or anxious. “Well, you’d be anxious too if you couldn’t lick an envelope, couldn’t pick up your daughter in a car,” she’d reply. She tried allergists, got nowhere. Finally, she found her way to holistic health,…