Catch up on the most important updates from this week.

A pop-up notification has alerted the messaging app's users to a practice that's been in place since 2016.

We have a glut of streaming options. But if recent events show us anything, it’s that live TV news is far from obsolete.

The first season of the Star Wars series was good. But in the second, the visuals and writing make the jump to lightspeed.

Plus: Dorsey in the Trump administration's early days, how to define privacy, and chaos in the Capitol.

This week, we analyze how the social media platforms reacted to the events of January 6. We also offer our preview of what to expect next week at CES.

Founder Ken Williams opens up about his new book, video game design in the late 80s—and his regrets about selling the company.

A bill would require firms to disclose when they use software to assess candidates, and vendors would have to ensure that their tech doesn’t discriminate.

Wednesday’s riot in Washington was the result of conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment, and online extremism—and it could start a movement.

The show must go on.

The discovery of more contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2 in the US sparks a push for a long-overdue national genomic surveillance network.

DC rioters used DLive to stream from the Capitol to thousands of people on Wednesday—and to get donations from them too.

Wednesday's insurrection could have exposed congressional data and devices in ways that have yet to be appreciated.

The pro-Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol livestreamed their actions. As social media platforms scramble to remove dangerous content, what will become of all that footage?

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have spent years fomenting and enabling yesterday’s violence at the Capitol. Policymakers need to do something about it.

Pundits and platforms have spent years mislabeling and underestimating threats to democracy. It led to the mob.

By freezing the president’s accounts, social media platforms finally drew a line. It only took a violent insurrection in the Capitol to get them there.

I'm only 30, and already feeling like I owe it to society to keep up.

A new model estimates that by 2100, cities across the world could warm as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius. It’s a deadly consequence of the heat-island effect.

Choosing just the right thing to listen is tricky. Here's how to navigate your options and set the mood.

From Marvel hopefuls to mind-bending dramas, here are all the series you'll need to keep an eye on this year.

Employees admitted to using stolen passwords and URL guessing to access confidential data.

This electric scooter offers a stable ride at a relatively affordable price, though its bulky design isn’t the best for apartment-dwelling city slickers.

Academics often research minority communities in the hope of helping them. But too much time under the microscope can cause its own harms.

Jason Furman, a top economic adviser to President Obama, says good ideas come from everywhere—but Trump has dissuaded tech workers from coming to the US.

The self-driving vehicles smashed, burned, flipped, and tipped. But the ambitious race through the Mojave launched an industry.

Immunization against Covid-19 is not going perfectly, but at least it's going. Let's give credit where it's due.

WikiLeaks successor DDoSecrets has amassed a controversial new collection of corporate secrets and is sharing them in the name of transparency.

This month’s focus is on Zhang Zhan, who had been posting reports from Wuhan since early February. She was arrested in May.

From Dune to Black Widow, a ton of films got delayed due to Covid-19. Here are the ones WIRED is hoping to see, whether at home or (finally) in a theater.

The software helped create an amateur internet. It’s a far cry from the glossy, corporate one we know now.

Kick over this robot and it’ll quickly right itself—not because someone told it how, but because it taught itself to overcome the embarrassment.

If your budget is tight, this Android smartphone is a smart buy.

Candidates and organizers are flocking to the platform, with the hope of reaching voters who would normally be disengaged.

In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.

Christopher Nolan's latest has lots of mind-bending action scenes, but not much character development.

The ruling is based not on whether the WikiLeaks founder violated the Espionage Act, but on the implications of subjecting him to the US carceral state.

Changes proposed by the Wikimedia Foundation to diversify its community of editors raise existential questions for the online encyclopedia.

About 200 million women in the country are illiterate. But voice memo and image-sharing apps make it easier to connect, communicate, and run businesses.

Researchers slap a living antenna on a drone to give the machine an insanely keen sense of smell. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the “Smellicopter.”

Over the past two years, astronomers have rewritten the history of our galaxy.

An inexpensive, so-simple-it-hurts pan has come to rule our food writer's kitchen.

Director Guy Moshe talks about the ambitious scale and preternatural timeliness of his new sci-fi film.

John Snow showed that London's cholera outbreak arose from bad water, not the moral failings of the poor. His legacy can help tackle new problems like Covid-19.

WIRED asked the writers of five of our favorite 2020 titles what it was like to release a book during Covid-19.

And some Instagram resources to shore up your mental health, if therapy isn't an option right now.

Dungeons & Dragons has spent the past few months pushing a new era of diversity and inclusions, but it’s still got a lot of work to do.

Monks stared at skulls to ponder the inevitability of death. We stare at our phones.

Sorry, folks: Thanks to Covid, next year won’t be much more fun than this one, at least until enough vaccines arrive.

The situation has made clear that the field needs to change. Here’s where to start, according to a current and a former Googler.