Olympus Blog

Everyone knows that when you’re at Olive Garden, you’re family.

But in the 44 years since the casual Italian-American restaurant chain was founded, few have embraced it with the ardor that Braden Sinclair has. In fact, way back in his Little League days, a coach named him “Breadsticks.”

“I had to go to Olive Garden for my birthday, ate too much, missed an entire game,” Sinclair tells WIRED. “One of my coaches decided that because of my initials being B.S., and my number being 11—which he said looked like breadsticks—and then that story, that I had to be called ‘Breadsticks’ for the rest of the season.”

He maintained that close relationship with the chain for many years, until, in 2019, he was rewarded with an almost unfathomable distinction: Sinclair is one of just 50 human beings on the planet to ever secure an Olive Garden Lifetime Pasta Pass.

Unlike the thousands of 13-week Never Ending Pasta Passes that the chain has offered at various intervals since 2014—this summer, a batch of 10,000, priced at $100 apiece, sold out within seconds—Sinclair’s heavy gold card bears no expiration date. It entitles him to as much pasta, toppings, breadsticks, and soup or salad as he cares to eat, for as long as the chain endures and he remains a loyal customer. (No delivery, though, to be clear. A pasta bowl so bottomless demands that one take a seat of honor for the dine-in experience.)

How exactly does Sinclair wield his kingly rights at Olive Garden? All is revealed on his new website, Lifetimepastapass.com, where he crunches the many numbers—both financial and dietary—on his many meals there. And, with a continually updated poll that decides what he should order the next time he drops in, it’s easily the closest you’ll ever get to having the lifetime pass yourself.

Braden Sinclair can eat unlimited pasta at Olive Garden anytime he wants.Photograph: Bonnie Durham

Sinclair nabbed his license to feast during a special promotion, when Olive Garden announced that the first 50 people to buy a temporary pasta pass would have the opportunity to upgrade it to the lifetime pass for an extra $400. To this day, Sinclair wonders if his timing was really that good or if the company deliberately selected him to receive the ultimate prize.

“I had sort of a joking relationship with their Instagram for years, just like chatting back and forth,” he explains, adding that it felt a little “weird” and something like “divine intervention” that he won given his coziness with the brand. An Olive Garden vice president of marketing FaceTimed him with the good news, he recalls.

Reactions to the card from Olive Garden employees range from awe to confusion. “They always take it back to the kitchen, show it to people,” Sinclair says. “Managers will come out and ask questions. The other end of the spectrum has been having to kind of prove it’s real, which is rare, and I totally understand. Like, if I managed a restaurant and someone came in with a gold card that said I don’t need to pay, I would also have questions.”

Now a 33-year-old father of two young kids, Sinclair doesn’t gorge on heaping plates of carbohydrates the way he used to (and, since frequenting Olive Garden makes him more conscientious about the rest of his diet, he’s avoided packing on the pounds). But he says the Lifetime Pasta Pass somewhat justifies his continued fixation on the restaurant, which was a familiar comfort when his family temporarily relocated from Maine to Wisconsin during his childhood. In 2016, he paid homage to the place with a tattoo of its famous rotary cheese grater; the caption reads “SAY WHEN.” He also began collecting vintage T-shirts that the chain had released in the 1980s and 1990s.

This year, Sinclair unveiled the project that brought all of his Olive Garden experiences together in one place. Lifetimepastapass.com documents his “infinite tour of Italy” by showcasing not only his backstory and extensive merch collection but all the data you could ever want about how he has used his rare privilege: number of restaurant visits since 2019 (112), bowls of pasta eaten (152), calories consumed (154,817), meal value ($1,878.87) and total tips ($607.00).

You can also keep tabs on a map of which locations Sinclair has tried—while the South Portland, Maine, restaurant is his home base, he has ventured up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Other charts show his most favored pasta type (rigatoni), sauce (alfredo), and topping (crispy chicken fritta), as well as the monthly frequency of his Olive Garden visits; he dined there nine times in August, the most since he set a personal record of 20 visits in October 2019, shortly after winning the pass.

With a decade of experience in data analytics and visualization, Sinclair saw all this as a fun application of his talents. But he also wanted people to have “skin in the game,” as he puts it—so he built a dashboard where anyone can vote on the combination of ingredients that make up his next pasta order.

“I thought it was just gonna be a joke among my friends,” Sinclair says. “You know, share it on Instagram, so maybe 10 of my friends would go in and vote, and then the next day five, and then the third day no one would care, and it would be over.” Instead, after he shared the project on a couple of subreddits, he was stunned to tally over 700 votes on his next meal. He wound up eating angel hair with spicy alfredo (a new sauce offering) and crispy shrimp fritta.

“A big reason why I wanted to do this is I just kept getting rigatoni with alfredo, five-cheese marinara, and crispy chicken, like on repeat,” Sinclair says. “I was like, ‘I need to branch out.’” His best discovery so far? “I realized that alfredo and meatballs is an insane combination,” he says. “It’s so good.”

In some ways, Lifetimepastapass.com is a reflection of Sinclair’s belief that the card comes with great responsibility. Besides tipping diligently, he also skips the refills, aiming to be a “respectful” and “low-impact” diner who doesn’t flaunt his status or make a shift harder for staff. “I see some pictures of people with the [regular] pasta passes who go crazy,” he says. “Bowls full of grated Parmesan just because they can.” Meticulously tracking his own Olive Garden journey toward various virtual “trophies” earned by hitting benchmarks in categories such as “lifetime breadsticks eaten” (he’ll reach the bronze level at 100, gold at 1,000) and “longest streaks of consecutive weeks with at least one visit” seems, by comparison, a kind of reverence for the institution.

If there’s an unexpected downside to the Lifetime Pasta Pass, it may be a certain loneliness at the top. Because Covid-19 hit shortly after people claimed the cards, the promotion has been largely memory-holed, and whatever plans Olive Garden could have had to celebrate or connect the winners were never realized. Sinclair has stumbled upon only a couple of other passholders via social media and has no idea how often others may go to the restaurant these days.

Meanwhile, it’s not always easy to convince your pals to meet up at a restaurant just because you eat there for free. “There’s only so many times I can go sit at the Olive Garden by myself,” Sinclair says. “I have some friends who are nice enough to go with me, but oftentimes they’ll just kind of sit there and eat some breadsticks.” And though Sinclair’s wife is an admitted fan of the chain—she’s eaten there with him since their high school days and promised in her wedding vows to go whenever he wants—he finds it “wisest” to seek alternatives whenever they manage a kids-free date night.

The good news is that Sinclair’s 4-year-old is a likely Olive Garden devotee in the making. “I’ll probably start bringing my oldest son a little more just because he’s obsessed with pasta,” he says. “I think he’ll genuinely enjoy it.”

Just not before a Little League game, of course.

September is typically the time when television gets serious again. The summer’s biggest TV shows have aired their finales, the fall schedule is kicking into high gear, and streamers are rolling out everything from high-concept sci-fi to prestige dramas. There’s plenty of familiar IP in the mix, but also some genuinely original shows worth putting on your to-watch list.

While plenty of outlets will tell you what everyone is watching (see: Reacher), that’s not our goal. As always, the TV shows we’re watching this month reflect the kinds of stories WIRED covers every day—shows that explore technology, science, politics, culture, and the sometimes unsettling ways they intersect.

From returning favorites to ambitious new series—and at least one show that might rekindle your love of traditional anime—these are the TV shows we think you should make time to stream this month.

The Paper

What happens when a newspaper attempts not just to survive, but to thrive, in a world where digital media has become the norm? The Paper, a spinoff of The Office from Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, follows the staff of a struggling Midwestern paper as they attempt to revive it.

Ultimately, its idealistic new editor-in-chief Ned Sampson (Star Wars and Harry Potter alum Domhnall Gleeson) and his hungry young reporter Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei) end up grappling with what journalism looks like in the digital age. Season 2, which arrived on September 9, finds their Toledo Truth Teller newly revitalized and searching for its next big scoop, making the show a surprisingly sharp comedy about the future of journalism—and who gets to shape it.

Lego Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Though this summer’s The Mandalorian and Grogu (which is streaming on Disney+ now) seriously underperformed at the box office, Lucasfilm is partnering with Lego to take another stab at the fan-favorite Star Wars series—which might be exactly what the franchise needs right now. Lucasfilm and Lego are going back to the beginning, reimagining all three seasons of the Pedro Pascal–starring live-action series as a 49-minute animated comedy.

For anyone who somehow managed to miss Mando and Grogu until now, the story follows Din Djarin (Pascal in the live-action series, Gavin Hammon in this iteration), a bounty hunter known as the Mandalorian, who takes a job transporting a mysterious Force-sensitive child. That child, of course, is Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. What starts as a simple assignment turns into a galaxy-spanning adventure as the pair become unlikely partners. Consider this version an entertaining way to play catch-up.

South Park

It’s hard to remember a time when the world didn’t have South Park. For nearly 30 years, audiences have watched as four potty-mouthed fourth-graders—Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny—navigate life in the bizarre mountain town of South Park, Colorado, in this very much adults-only animated comedy. Along the way, they’ve encountered alien life forms, celebrities, and Elon Musk (yes, the real one). They’ve also watched Kenny die on at least 100 occasions.

Last year, the seemingly never-ending comedy reinvented itself as a particularly pointed political satire by taking aim at figures including JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s manhood. The White House, unsurprisingly, had thoughts. And so did the Emmys; the show just took home the 2026 award for ​​Outstanding Animated Program. Clearly, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have no plans to take their foot off the gas; they just announced they’re taking a page out of Trump’s renaming book and rechristening the show South America for its 29th season, which premieres on September 16.

Slow Horses

What if television’s best spy show was also one of its funniest? If John le Carré and (the original) The Office had a baby, it would look and sound a lot like Slow Horses, which returns for a sixth season on September 16.

Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House book series, the series follows a dysfunctional team of MI5 misfits who are banished to the infamous Slough House unit, where they work under the notorious Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a foul-mouthed, flatulent, chain-smoking wreck of a man who also happens to be the most brilliant operative in the room. It’s a prestige spy thriller that doesn’t take itself too seriously, bouncing effortlessly between shoot-outs and the kind of droll office banter you’d expect from the best workplace comedies. In a career full of memorable performances, and an Oscar to show for it, Slow Horses just might be the role Oldman is best remembered for. It’s also the project that has made Jack Lowden oddsmakers’ top pick for the next James Bond.

City of Blood

In City of Blood, an eight-episode miniseries from Germany, climate change has turned Berlin into a sweltering city teetering on the edge of collapse—and vampires are ready to take advantage of the chaos. While the privileged few live beneath a climate-controlled dome, the rest of the city’s denizens are left to battle the heat, crime, and corruption that have become part of everyday life. But when estranged sisters Bea (Lea Drinda) and Phoebe (Soma Pysall) reunite, they uncover a nefarious political plot and learn that, thanks to that aforementioned undead population, blood has become the city’s most coveted commodity. It’s a perfectly strange mix of climate dystopia, family drama, and vampire thriller. And it arrives on September 16.

MobLand

Season 2 of MobLand is almost here—whether Tom Hardy likes it or not. (Despite all the recent headlines surrounding the Oscar winner’s behind-the-scenes drama, he has already signed on for season 3.) The highly underrated, or perhaps just underseen, crime drama returns with the Harrigan family’s criminal empire under threat from rival forces, forcing their street-smart fixer Harry Da Souza (yep, Hardy) to navigate increasingly bloody internal tensions.

As Harry works to keep the fractured family from tearing itself apart, he’s aided by his trusty sidekick Zosia (Jasmine Jobson), a tech specialist who brings a distinctly 21st-century skill set to their old-school criminal enterprise headed up by Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and Maeve Harrington (Helen Mirren). Meanwhile, rival forces close in, loyalties shift, and violence spreads through every corner of the family’s world. Expect more bloodshed, shifting allegiances, poor decisions, and one of television’s most kickass theme songs (Fontaines D.C.’s “Starburster”) when season 2 premieres on September 18.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood

Before there was Jamie and Claire, there were their parents. Like its predecessor, this Outlander prequel follows two separate timelines as it details the courtship of Jamie Fraser’s parents, Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) and Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater), in 18th-century Scotland, alongside the story of Claire Beauchamp’s parents, Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) and Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield), in World War I–era England. Their two love stories unfold across different time periods, weaving together romance, family drama, and the time-traveling forces that kept Outlander fans enthralled for eight seasons. The series’ second season arrives on September 18.

American Horror Story

Season 13 of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s horror anthology is shaping up to be what has at various points been called an Avengers-esque “endgame-level event” of “greatest hits.” While the details, as always, have been kept rather quiet, what we do know is that the new season of American Horror Story will pull bits and pieces from each season of the series, with a heavy emphasis on its witchcraft-laden “Coven” and “Apocalypse” storylines.

We also know it is reassembling an all-star cast of past stars, some of whom will play double—or even triple—character duty. Among them: Murphy mainstays Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, and Angela Bassett. The new season arrives on September 26, which gives you plenty of time to brush up on your AHS lore.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Before Netflix gave it a new English dub—and, depending on who you ask, stirred up a lot of feelings—there was the original Japanese-language version of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The landmark anime, released in 1995, follows a group of teenagers recruited to pilot giant biomechanical weapons called Evangelions, or Evas, as they defend a postapocalyptic Tokyo (now known as Tokyo-3) from mysterious creatures, aka Angels. But what starts as a fairly straightforward battle-for-humanity story soon becomes something far stranger, delving into trauma, loneliness, identity, and human connection.

The Criterion Channel is bringing all 26 episodes of the classic (pre-Netflix) English dub to streaming for the first time, alongside the original Japanese-language version for all you purists. It’s a fitting return for one of anime’s most boundary-pushing series.

Rockstar Games’ best-selling Grand Theft Auto series wasn’t often accused of political sensitivity during its legendary run from the late 1990s through the early 2010s.

In fact, parents and activists denounced the franchise for exposing children to a seedy world of sex, violence, crude humor, and wanton crime. Elon Musk even claimed that he couldn’t get into the last installment, GTA V, because he was mortified to play as a character who shoots police officers.

But times (and moral panics) change. In the 13 years that fans have waited for Grand Theft Auto VI—finally out on November 19—the American right-wing grievance machine has drifted from fears of impressionable kids turning to a life of larceny to concerns that they will grow up “woke.” And despite knowing very little about the forthcoming game, the agitators of the latter movement have decided it must amount to a stealth campaign to poison the youth with depictions of gender equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and racial diversity. (Rockstar did not immediately return a request for comment.)

Since the height of Gamergate in 2014, an angst-ridden subset of male gamers have maintained a paranoid vigil against what they see as the creeping influence of women and LGBTQ developers in the gaming world. Between the feverish anticipation for GTA VI and the various delays of its release date, they’ve had ample opportunity to foment a preemptive backlash to what is sure to be a massive hit, not unlike the failed furor over supposedly “woke” elements of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

“GTA 6 is a humiliation ritual for all male gamers,” an X user with the handle @Wokenessisevil complained on Tuesday, sharing a clip of the game’s two lead characters, Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, who are in a relationship that evolves based on the player’s choices. In the scene, Lucia, the series’ first mandatory female protagonist, asks Jason to pick an outfit for her and expresses mild annoyance when he seems more or less indifferent to the options she presents.

It’s an exchange that could have been lifted from any sitcom of the past 50 years, yet it seems to have fueled a reactionary narrative about the game’s male protagonist being subjugated to a nefarious feminist agenda. Another X user recently claimed, contrary to the clip’s bog-standard depiction of a heterosexual couple, that Jason has a “gay vibe,” since no straight man would know what sequins are or use the word “cocktails,” as he does in the clip.

“The script is definitely written by a woman who has no clue what a man thinks or how he talks,” they wrote. “Jason is written as a caricature, much like what a delusional woman thinks a ‘man’ should be.”

Similarly, a gaming YouTuber seethed that Rockstar was appealing to women and gay men by showing Jason shirtless in another scene. “Gone are the days of edgy based masculine GTA games,” he wrote on X. “I could be wrong but right now it’s looking like it will be a woke fest.”

While multiple leaks and a 27-minute “extended look” preview on Netflix have revealed key details of the game, and Rockstar creatives declared their intent to realistically portray the diversity of the Miami-inspired setting and bring a fleshed-out female character into the spotlight, would-be detractors are still straining a bit for reasons to pronounce it dead on arrival. One YouTuber has convinced himself that it will subliminally brainwash players with “bisexual lighting.”

Other men have simply defaulted to rank sexism, griping that Lucia’s breasts are too small because of “they/thems” working at Rockstar or posting jokes such as: “female lead in GTA 6? i thought the whole point of GTA was to be able to drive.” An AI enthusiast used an image generator to replace a woman of color in a crop top on the game’s cover with a white blonde in a bikini.

While each new snippet of content has become grist for more manufactured outrage, the tantrums over the ideological trajectory of GTA began long ago. In 2022, for its remastered version of GTA V, Rockstar removed a number of gags and non-playable characters that critics had described as transphobic, leading to complaints from some fans.

The following year, after the game publisher released a trailer for GTA VI, trolls floated the groundless theory that the Lucia character was a transgender woman. Last month, when former video game executive Mark Kern, known for his crusades against “woke” content, deemed Lucia attractive, his followers disagreed in openly racist and misogynistic replies.

Much of this ire is aimed directly at the Rockstar team, who have been blasted for allegedly embracing “identity politics,” reportedly making efforts to avoid punching down against marginalized groups in the game’s storyline, and allowing women to contribute in any way to the franchise. A photo of female staff at the company’s studio in Scotland, shared on social media in 2019 to commemorate International Women’s Day, has circulated widely with sneering comments about how they likely ruined GTA VI.

Yet a few prominent streamers on the right, including Zack Hoyt (better known as Asmongold) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, have taken a wait-and-see approach, declining to bash the game before checking it out for themselves. Fuentes went so far as to mock those bemoaning its creative direction. “Just go outside, touch grass,” he told one viewer who brought up the topic in his live chat.

If any of these gamers entertain fantasies of an actual boycott or commercial failure, they are bound to be disappointed. According to one estimate of preorders from a third-party data analytics firm, Rockstar has already sold 5.28 million copies of GTA VI, taking in more than $500 million in revenue. Though it is likely the most expensive game ever made, with a budget somewhere north of a billion dollars, the studio stands to easily recoup that cost, possibly by the day it comes out.

That might call for a moment of reflection from the culture warriors—or so you’d think. It’s awfully difficult, it seems, to admit that you’re so out of touch with the mainstream and have no control over the popularity of various media. They will no doubt have their objections to other aspects of the game, but once GTA VI starts breaking records, there won’t be any point in continuing the crusade. By then, the next fake controversy will be on the horizon.

If the United States collapses in the near future, you’ll no doubt be tempted to point a few fingers. Just don’t blame Emily St. John Mandel.

As Covid tore across the planet, Mandel became something of a pandemic prophet for writing the hit 2014 novel, Station Eleven. Journalists and everyday Twitter users alike looked to her for guidance as they hunkered down at home, desperate for someone—anyone—to tell them what was happening, and what might come next. Now, Mandel is out with a new book, Exit Party, that documents the interwoven lives of people living in two different, near-future versions of the US: A violent, post-civil-war free-for-all, and a totalitarian state where surveillance runs roughshod over a paranoid populace. She started writing the book in 2022, when polarization and political extremism were already surging—but well before the era of Trump 2.0, widespread ICE raids, and tech-infused surveillance we’re living through today.

Exit Party is a tremendous, riveting, deeply human novel—one of the best I’ve read in years. And despite being strictly fictional, the two futures that Exit Party imagines also feel eerily, uncomfortably close to reality. But as Mandel reminded me when we sat down at WIRED’s New York studio, the book is also infused with plenty of hope, and forces readers to ask themselves important questions about what kind of person they’d be if it all went to hell. She was also, of course, quick to point out that “it doesn’t actually take any particular clairvoyance,” to see where this moment in US history might take us. So no, Mandel can’t help you much if the militias roll through—but Exit Party might offer a few lessons in how to show up for your neighbors. (And throw the best post-collapse party.)

You can read our full (light on spoilers) conversation below, or listen to Uncanny Valley anywhere you get your podcasts. Exit Party is out today, September 15, and I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Emily, thank you so much for being here. I will get this out of the way at the top and acknowledge that we are both Brooklyn moms. And sometimes when you’re a Brooklyn mom, you become friends with another Brooklyn mom, and we are actually friends outside of work.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL: Because you seek out the best mom you can find at the playground.

We met at the playground in the latter stages of the Covid-19 mask era. I’ve known you ever since. But regardless of that, and I’m saying this very, very genuinely, I read Exit Party—I was lucky enough to get a galley ahead of publication—in a single day. I highly recommend it.

Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

For those who didn’t get an advance copy, could you explain what it’s about?

God, the elevator pitch on this book has been so challenging.

I can understand why.

I suck at elevator pitches generally. But I think of this as a story about crime and resilience. It’s about trying to be a decent person when things are falling apart, and it’s about who you’re going to be at the end of the world. I don’t mean to imply that the collapse of a country is the end of the world, but what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it.

I do see this as a hopeful book. It’s about what comes next and trying to be a new person in a rapidly changing and difficult landscape.

It feels very timely, in troubling ways. When you think about what’s actually happening in the US right now and what’s happening in the US in the book, in what ways are those two places different?

The difference is that in the country that we live in, there’s still time. The United States that opens this story, that country ran out of time. That country fractured. I wish that it felt more fictional. You know, I started writing this book in the spring of 2022.

I was wondering about that.

We could already see the division that was coming because Trump was obviously so much on the horizon for a second term. But I wish it felt more speculative. I’m about to go out and do a 42-city tour where I talk about this absolutely fantastical speculative leap of imagination in which the United States falls apart.

Yeah, imagine if that happened. That would be wild.

Yeah, no one would’ve been able to see that coming. I don’t mean to be glib about it. It’s a terrifying prospect. A big part of the beginning of this book for me was working through my political anxieties.

In 2022?

Yes. I read the news. I’ve always read the news. It doesn’t actually take any particular clairvoyance to look ahead and see where the incredible division in this country could potentially lead. Of course I hope it won’t. But a way of thinking about that for me was, well, what might come next?

Suppose the worst were to happen. Suppose there were to be a second American Civil War. What might the aftermath be like? Which is not dissimilar to the project of Station Eleven. You know, imagining the aftermath of a very different kind of catastrophe and collapse.

This sounds ridiculous given everything I just said, but it’s actually a hopeful book. The book opens at the end of the world, but we’re going to a party. That’s kind of the spirit of it.

I have a memory, it was maybe about a year ago, we were having dinner with your wife. I knew that you had this book coming out. I didn’t know anything about it, and she was very stressed because she was like, “Book publishing is so slow. Look at everything happening in this country right now. This book that Emily has written is so timely right now. I can’t believe it’s not coming out for another year.”

Knowing that you started writing it in 2022 is interesting to me, because you have now watched Trump be reelected. You watched the ICE crackdowns happening at the top of the year. This encroachment of surveillance into different aspects of our lives, the ongoing fracturing of this country, the polarization. How has that felt in these last four years, and particularly once the book was finished and you knew what was in that book?

It’s funny, I remember that dinner. I remember my wife, Laura, her concern that the country might collapse before the book came out.

She’s like, “They’re going to ruin the book.”

Right. That is a spoiler. [Laughs] No. God, we have to laugh because otherwise it’s devastating.

Well, Donald Trump is going to ruin Emily’s book!

Yeah, stakes. Seriously.

No, it’s been a strange experience because, I don’t know if this is too big a spoiler, but the book envisions two different versions of the United States. There’s the vision we begin with where there has been a civil war, the country is fractured into somewhat contentious city states and small new republics and splinter groups. It’s a bit chaotic.

There’s another version of the country that is a totalitarian police state, and my experience of writing this book was that when I started writing it, I was just looking at the polarization, and I was thinking, “Well, obviously we’re in that first universe, the one where the country fractures into these little incompatible small new republics.” But by the time I finished the book, the ICE raids were happening, and my totalitarian vision of a country where citizens are disappeared by masked secret police wasn’t fictional anymore. So there was this feeling of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle through the entire writing of this book.

Now, the protagonists in the book, Ibari and Ari, they’re the same person. But they also aren’t at all.

Right.

How did you think about the idea of identity in writing the book?

I’ve been fascinated for a really long time by the idea of the counter life. That’s the life you didn’t live, where you didn’t immigrate from Canada, or you went to a different school or took a different job or married a different person. These inflection points that would have made us, over the passage of time, into somewhat different people.

I think the reason I’m so interested in that idea is that the life I’m living feels a little bit improbable to me. I’m from Canada and I’m trained in contemporary dance, and I don’t have a high school diploma, so I do have moments of thinking, “This actually feels fairly implausible.”

I was thinking of identity in terms of the people we could have been. But then in this book, it was also interesting to me to think about, well, what is the counter life of the state? Because that’s a really interesting idea. I was going to say in any democratic country, but honestly in any country.

I was thinking about, well, if we take that idea of the counter life of the individual, these different people we could have been, how is that affected by the counter life of the state? Because we are so influenced by the environment we live in, the people that surround us. I think that I’m a different person having lived for 23 years in New York City than I would’ve been if I had stayed in, say, rural British Columbia where I grew up.

Oh, for sure. I think about that too all the time.

Yeah, you’re from Canada too.

I think a lot about, what if I had just stayed in Calgary?

Yeah. Canada is a little more chill.

It is a little more chill.

See, now here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City.

Yes, thriving.

Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives, but here we are.

Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions of a country. They are so profoundly shaped by that country. I saw Ari as somebody who’s got this character flaw where she’s fundamentally drawn toward crime. Maybe that’s not even a flaw. Maybe it’s just an interest, because there’s a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal, but there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. It was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we’re raised in.

I almost hate to ask this, because both versions of the US that you portray in the book are really frightening in their own respects. But did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another? Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?

No, they’re both really hard. They’re both awful. The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly. It’s like, do you want to live in chaos, or do you wanna live in a totalitarian police state? Hard pass on both.

That’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot: no version of a country lasts forever, and there’s both terror and hope in that idea. The totalitarian police state version’s not going to last forever, and neither is the period of total chaos. What I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut for people who have read a lot of my work, but in Sea of Tranquility there’s a futuristic section where an author’s on a book tour in the year 2300, and she’s traveling between the Republic of California, the Atlantic Republic, and the Kingdom of Deseret, and it’s chill enough to support a book tour, you know?

But yeah, I kind of wanted to suggest that this is the founding story of that space.

I wanted to ask you about your multiverse. You have a history that your diehards, your fans, really glom onto, which is you pull from previous works and you bring people and worlds into your new work, and that continues with Exit Party.

You’ve talked about it as a multiverse, a cinematic universe. The New Yorker called it, quote, “The Mandel Cinematic Universe,” which I think is pretty incredible. Is there a master plan here, or is it just ad hoc as inspiration strikes?

I wish I could say I had the kind of brain that could hold an entire multiverse. I should just say yes, but, uh, no. There is no plan. That’s the baseline for individual books when I start them, but also for The Mandel-verse, as some people have also called it. I don’t have any kind of master plan that I’m working towards. I just like the opportunities for connection. I guess I have some abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe, you know? I like finding the moments when books can be drawn together, or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character, and I want to spend more time with that person.

Like Miranda in Station Eleven, I really liked her. It was really interesting to get to see a completely different facet of her life in The Glass Hotel, to see her as a shipping executive as opposed to an artist. Then I guess with Exit Party, I did lay the groundwork in Sea of Tranquility for a world where the United States no longer exists, so I guess you could make the argument that that implies the origin story.

One of the things I love about your books, several of them at least, is that they’re set in the future, but they don’t foreground the technology. They foreground the people and the human stories and the lived experience. Technology is often present, and it’s certainly present in Exit Party, but how do you think about introducing technology and science into your work? How much research goes into that, and how much commitment to factual accuracy as opposed to just letting your imagination run?

What I’m aiming for is plausibility in the context of a literary novel. Which is going to be a disappointingly low bar for your average WIRED podcast interviewee.

But I think that you’ve touched upon a really interesting choice that writers of speculative fiction need to make every time we embark on a new project, which is really just how deep into the weeds you want to go on your science fictional technology.

There are writers who go pretty deep. I loved Cixin Liu’s work, The Three-Body Problem, and the rest of that series. He will go so deep into these science fictional technologies, which to my totally untrained eye, feel totally plausible.

I did flirt with that a little bit when I was starting out on Sea of Tranquility, which has a time-traveling detective, because we were all deranged during the pandemic, but yeah, I was thinking about “Well, how would this actually work?”

I was reading about the quantum blockchain and trying to understand what the mechanics could be. But then at a certain point I realized, you know what? It’s just transport. Like, if I’m not explaining how your car works in the 2020 segment of the novel, then why do I care about the mechanics of the time machine?

There is a part in your book from Ibari’s perspective. She’s working as a detective in the secret police in one of these United States. She has this thought, and I’ll quote it, “I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.” That line, “reality splits into two,” is great. What does it mean to you?

In the context of that passage, she’s a secret agent with a cover story, basically. But the cover story is that she’s a professor, and she actually is teaching real classes. So it’s not false that she’s a professor, it’s just that she’s also secret police.

She has the most obvious kind of surface experience of that idea of living a double life. I don’t want to say it’s exactly modeled on East Germany, but the Stasi apparatus, where civilians were constantly reporting on each other, which everybody thought was overstated until the country collapsed, and it turned out to have been even bigger than anyone knew. Everybody really was reporting on each other. That does create this awful kind of doubleness where there’s the part of you that’s a friend, but then there’s a part of you that’s reporting on the friend to your handler, and both of those ideas are true.

But I think that also living that kind of doubleness would do a lot of damage to a person. It sounds so literary and pretentious to say damage to your soul, but I think that might be the situation.

In that surveillance state, there are some very stressful passages, at least for me, where you realize that none of these people can really fundamentally trust each other. And then in the other universe, there is this baseline notion of trust eroding because everybody is just looking out for themselves in the chaos. How were you thinking about that as you were writing the book? Did you have any revelations about trust in this country that we could all learn from?

It’s not specific to this country, but this actually leads us into AI for me. Do you remember when we were kids and a video was proof? It was like, “Oh, there is video evidence. Case closed.” How terrifying and damaging and ridiculous that our children are being raised in a world where a video means absolutely nothing. It’s incredibly hard to authenticate, and that’s what I find myself thinking about when I think about trust.

Sometimes I lurk on Threads, just recreationally. It is such a trash fire. It’s like Twitter in, I don’t know, 2012 or something. But something real that’s really struck me is the degree of betrayal that people feel when it emerges that an author has been using AI, and I share that sense of betrayal. It offends me in some incredibly deep way, and when I try to parse why that is, I think trust might be the answer.

I was going to ask you about AI. You write novels. You also work in Hollywood. And so you have exposure to what’s happening in the book world around AI, and also what is happening in the entertainment industry. Do you use it at all?

I don’t. Maybe this makes me an outlier at this point. I haven’t found it reliable in search, and so that made me distrust it completely.

Every now and again, I like to search and make sure that my daughter is not on the internet, basically. So I searched “Emily St. John Mandel daughter” I think about a year ago, and AI is so confidently wrong. It confidently introduced me to my son Leo, born in 2016, and said, “Emily St. John Mandel does not have a daughter.” And it’s so confident that you have a moment of just like, “Do I have a son?”

I do not have a son named Leo. I have no idea where that came from. I searched again a month later, and it had revised that, and my daughter remained unnamed, which is what I wanted to confirm.

But it made me distrust it fundamentally from a search perspective. I know that it can be used to streamline administrative tasks. I haven’t used it as such. I can write my own emails.

I was going to say, you’re still writing your own emails.

Yeah, exactly.

So am I.

I read your interview with Matthew Belloni talking about the use of AI. It was interesting to me because without refuting anything he’s saying, I’ve just had a different experience, and I haven’t heard of people using it in my writers’ rooms in Hollywood.

I suppose AI is an argument for the in-person writers’ room. You really can’t use it if you’re sitting around a table and there’s a chalkboard. Probably people are using it without my knowledge, but I haven’t personally encountered it.

When you look at the effect it’s having on book publishing—we have covered some of this—but it is chaos out there.

How does that look from where you sit? Do you worry about AI slop books becoming a mainstream commodity, taking up a bigger share of the fiction market? Or do you think people just don’t have the taste for that?

I’d like to think they don’t have the taste for it, but I think the slop will get less sloppish with time. What I really worry about, actually, is less the work, and I worry more about writers. Because for me, I started publishing in 2009, and I have a consistent voice across books.

My process is such that it would be very easy for me to produce iterative drafts of what I’ve been doing if I were ever forced to prove that it’s not AI, which it absolutely is not. But not all writers have that process. Some are just, you know, changing a Word doc over a period of time. Not all of us keep written notes. Something that’s emerging that alarms me is that it’s very hard to prove sometimes that your work wasn’t AI.

Oh, like to prove a negative.

Yeah, to prove a negative. The reputational risk is enormous. That’s the end of a career, or at the very least, the end of a book deal.

I had a weird experience a while ago where I was just curious, so I found some free AI detection thing online, which probably stole my work, and I pasted the first chapter of Exit Party in, and what it came back with was there’s a 20 percent chance that AI was used on this. At first I was completely beside myself. I was like, “How does it think that?” And then I realized, oh, because Anthropic stole five of my novels to train their LLMs.

But to your point, I mean, the idea of being a writer for a living right now, and you’re doing the work yourself, you’re doing it with integrity, you are painstaking in your process, and one accusation or one result … And these tools are extremely flawed …

Yeah. They’re very inaccurate.

… But that can end a career. The stakes of this are very, very high. I actually did the same thing. I think anyone who writes for a living right now has this paranoia. I fed some of my articles into one of these tools because I was like, “I just want to know what it’s going to say.” And I got back zero percent.

Congratulations.

Thank you, but it was such a relief because there is this sense, this cloud of someone can point a finger. And the people who are using AI, I would argue, in creative pursuits, are ruining it for everybody else.

I would agree with that, and I don’t have any respect for them. It’s like if you can’t write, then maybe do something different. There are a lot of better jobs.

I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about you and your career. You grew up in Canada, you were in Toronto. Objectively speaking, where you are now is improbable relative to where you were then. Tell us about those early years.

I’m going to digress for a second back to the book. So much of this book is about the condition of living one life after another. And this is so many lives ago that it’s like looking back at a stranger.

I grew up in rural British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and then Denman Island, which is, just for context, about the same size and shape as Manhattan, but with 1,000 people. It’s forest and deer and a general store. I was homeschooled. I did a couple semesters of community college without ever getting my GED. I auditioned successfully for a conservatory program in contemporary dance in Toronto, and I was a professional dancer after that for, like, five minutes.

I went pretty far, but I never really joined a company. I danced for a couple of independent choreographers. I loved that experience, but I never got into one of the big companies, I think in part because I’d realized by then that I no longer loved it. There’s this phenomenon, I think, where if you’ve been dead set on one thing your entire life, like since you were six, then you can fall out of love with it. People change.

In my early 20s, I realized that dance was feeling like more of a chore than anything else, and I kinda resented it, and I didn’t love it anymore. But this is kind of spectacularly poor planning on my part. I’d taken out student loans to go to the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, not a degree-granting program. So I had a mountain of student loan debt, no degree, no high school diploma. It would feel overwrought if you wrote that in a novel. My editor would probably do, like, question marks in the margin.

Right. Many poor choices.

I had a totally destroyed credit rating in Canada due to student loan debt. So I moved to the United States. That was the solution to that problem. I’d always written just as a hobby. It was just something I loved and something I did a little bit compulsively. Like, if I went for a long walk, I’d bring a notebook because otherwise I might start writing stories on Starbucks napkins.

I was starting to write in Toronto. I met a guy who lived in New York and we were dating, and I moved to New York to be with him. Moved back to Montreal, broke up, and then I was kinda stranded in Montreal working. In winter, working retail, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

And it’s a cold city.

It is a very cold city, which actually played into my writing process. My roommates and I were dead broke, so we kept the heat turned down pretty low. I would go to bed at 7:00 pm just because I was so cold. It was easier to be asleep. I would sleep until about 1:00 in the morning and then naturally wake up. I’d get up in the middle of the night. I would dress to write. I had this feeling that I was doing something formal and important.

I would put on, like, a sweater and a tie and my warmest coat and go out with my laptop to the 24-hour cafe two blocks away, and I would write until morning, and that was the book that ultimately became Last Night in Montreal.

I was able to find a way to move back to New York, with, I don’t know, $400 and a 10-day sublet in the West Village when I was 22 or so. I’ve been here ever since. I started writing Last Night in Montreal in Montreal. I finished it in New York, and then I just started cold querying agents, and the 13th or 14th one found me in her slush pile and took me on.

There was a lot of luck and also an incredible amount of hard work and literally cold nights in Montreal.

And you had a day job?

I did. I’m from a very working-class background. And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job, because there is no safety net. I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal. I became an assistant in New York. I had a really great job for a long time at The Rockefeller University. I was an admin in a cancer research lab, and I loved that. It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work, and the health insurance was incredible.

I kept that job until a year after Station Eleven came out.

That’s so wild.

It got so surreal, Katie, I can’t tell you. One of my jobs in that position, or one of my tasks, rather, was to book plane tickets for my boss. But I wasn’t booking my own plane tickets for the tour. I had three publicists doing that. Or, like, there was a day when I had to leave work early because I had a photo shoot at Time magazine.

Did someone tell you, “Emily, it’s time. You need to quit your job?”

You know, you know what it was? I did a podcast where the other guest was this comedian, Josh Gondelman. And at the time, I guess it was a few months after Station Eleven had come out, and I was really grappling with the day job question. Like, does it make sense to leave? Is leaving crazy? What if I never have another successful book? And he told me that a fellow comedian had once told him, “Keep your day job until you can’t afford to anymore.” I found that to be a really helpful way of framing it. I kept that job until I found out I was three months pregnant, and then that was too many things.

Station Eleven was successful right out of the gate, and then it had this second life during the pandemic. You became this pandemic prophet for people who were asking you on Twitter, like, “Help. What do we do in the pandemic?” Looking back on it now, what stands out to you from that experience? What was it like to write a fictional book and then be asked for guidance in a real-world pandemic?

It was so surreal, and the requests were so misplaced. Like, if you’re going to look to a writer for guidance, I want to be like, “Go talk to Ed Yong of The Atlantic.” Or a scientist or something. There were so many people who were more qualified than I was to say what to do in a pandemic. It was very strange being … accused sounds too dramatic, but being accused of being a prophet in a weird way.

What a dark thing.

I was never able to quite convey at the time that there was always going to be another pandemic. I didn’t see myself as having foretold anything. The way I thought of it at the time was, well, if I’d written a novel with a fictional war, does that mean that I predicted whatever war came next after that in the real world?

What’s funny is I was exactly as unprepared as everybody else. I’ve had this sideline for years of doing on-stage conversations and lectures, and I was doing that right up until March 2020. I had this long lecture that I developed about post-apocalyptic literature, about pandemics and Shakespeare and all themes that dovetailed with Station Eleven.

I was literally traveling the country delivering a lecture that contained the phrase, “There will always be another pandemic.” It is so embarrassing how shocked I was that there was, in fact, another pandemic. I was scrambling for toilet paper like everybody else.

Yeah, you’re like, “Guys, I don’t know if you should put Clorox all over your groceries.”

Yeah. And I did.

I definitely did that, for probably longer than I should have.

Same.

I’m curious about how you deal with celebrity. Just thinking about that social media onslaught during Covid. You don’t strike me as someone who’s particularly eager to post, you know what I mean?

You’ve discovered my secret. I’m not eager to post.

How do you deal with that part of the job? And do you feel pressure to do it differently than you’re inclined to do?

If I were on Instagram just to be on Instagram, I don’t know if you’d ever see my face, you know? Because I love posting weird, beautiful little videos. Like, I just posted one that’s spiderwebs on a hiking trail in the Adirondacks last week.

If I see something cool and beautiful and I think, “Oh, that’s kind of amazing,” in just a tiny little moment, and could I set it to music? That would be cool. I really like Reels. That’s how I probably naturally would use it. I do feel a certain pressure to post, I guess, to post my face for the algorithms. I do feel like I need to promote my books because it is literally how I pay my rent.

It just kind of feels like part of the job. I don’t want to get too negative here because I do genuinely love interacting with readers. So I guess I kind of want it both ways.

There is pressure there. I find social media generally terrifying. I’ve had a lot of very negative interactions over the years, and what’s funny is just the way the human brain is wired, the positive interactions outweigh the negative interactions 1,000-to-one. But I also remember the negative ones. The negative ones stand out.

What is it like to promote a book in the year 2026? How has it changed?

I think that I have a very atypical experience of book promotion, because I had these three novels published by a really small press, and then I jumped to Knopf in the US, HarperCollins Canada, and Pan Macmillan in the UK for Station Eleven, and I’ve been with those three publishers ever since.

Because Station Eleven was so successful, a lot of marketing resources have been poured into the subsequent books. I think that that gives me a really unusual experience, and I think that it’s not normal at all. So it makes me hesitant to draw any generalizations, because for me it’s fine, you know?

But that’s certainly not the case for the vast majority of novelists. I think there’s so much distraction and chatter and such short attention spans that I think it’s incredibly difficult to start out as a novelist now. It was never actually easy, but my sense is that it might be harder now in this more fractured and more chaotic media landscape. I think it becomes harder for a novelist to break through.

Do you have any advice for those people?

Stay off Threads, for real. I don’t really post, but I do read. I see the most deranged publishing advice on Threads.

Like what?

I don’t even know. Every time I read it, I’m like, “No, that makes no sense. Don’t do that.”

I want to end by coming back to Exit Party. [As you said], you were accused, for lack of a better word, of being a prophet when Station Eleven came out before the Covid-19 pandemic. You’ve now written a book that is close to what we are going through in the US. Are you bracing yourself for a similar reaction?

Yeah. But look, if the country collapses, it’s not my fault.

She said it here first.

I didn’t do it. I just read the news and got freaked out like everybody else.

Is there anything in the worlds you’ve created in the book that you hope turns out to be prophetic?

Absolutely. I don’t want to take credit for the parties after … but you know what? It’s hope itself. There is a lot of hope in this book. It opens at a moment when the country has collapsed, but something new is taking its place, and it’s a kind of chaotic in-between period, but I never meant to imply that would last forever.

I think that settles down into something more stable and potentially better. And then on the side of the book that deals with a totalitarian state, that totalitarianism is already crumbling toward the end. I think that we see that even now in our current incredibly dark political moment.

I mean, maybe what you’ll get credit for predicting is the dawn of an even better version of this country.

That would be lovely.

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Courtney McAnuff was out of a year-long relationship in the summer of 2024 and starting to date again when she agreed to grab drinks with a potential suitor.

They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.

“I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.”

The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.”

Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.”

Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates.

“Ban those glasses completely,” posted a young woman on Bluesky in August, writing that her date “leaned over to show me pictures he took of me I had no idea he was taking.” One TikToker claimed in a video after a date that she “immediately felt uncomfortable,” questioning why people are “so comfortable videoing everything. It’s a terrible way to portray yourself, wearing a fucking camera on your face and you’re sitting in my face.”

In a Reddit post from August, users debated the ethics of the trend, wondering if it was OK to continue a date when someone showed up wearing them; in a separate thread, one person said they had ghosted a guy after realizing he’d worn the glasses on their date. “I didn’t notice until toward the end of the night. I kissed him while he was wearing the glasses,” they said. In July, a man was put under investigation in Seoul, South Korea, for allegedly filming four women he had gone out with and later uploading clips to social media, according to The Korea Herald.

In many regards, dating has been reframed by our dependency on technology. Apps connect people. Chatbots are used for all sorts of things these days: as wingmen and for role-play. Smartphone cameras capture important moments together. But while a phone being held up to someone’s face gives them a clear opportunity to object, smart glasses largely erase that opportunity. (Meta’s glasses do have a front-facing LED that switches on when the glasses are recording, but the light is the only warning, and it can be disabled by hacking the hardware.)

For McAnuff, the trend is about more than privacy instructions. She was worried about what would happen with the footage afterward. “He didn’t ask if I wanted to be recorded or if I wanted my face uploaded. And now he has this video file of me forever. It’s definitely a big trust issue,” she says.

In a 2025 YouGov survey of US adults focused on factors contributing to successful relationships, trust ranked the highest, with 94 percent of respondents categorizing it as “very important.”

Gary Lewandowski, a psychology professor at Monmouth University whose research focuses on the science of romantic connection, says adding covert cameras to the mix will only make building trust harder. He says beyond posting for the ’gram, a number of factors could be driving men to do this. The most logical, non-creepy reason may be tied to post-date analysis, in that the glasses can help men identify blind spots around their own behavior.

“A lot of men out there are eternal optimizers. They want better, more efficient ways of doing things, so reviewing game tape allows them to learn from mistakes,” Lewandowski says. “But I do wonder if some are doing it to build a case instead of a connection—why they’re right and the other person is wrong—or to help better identify red flags.” That type of surveillance “makes the date less about getting to know each other and more about fact gathering,” he adds.

The trend has also reanimated discussions around consent when it comes to dating. Yue Xu, cohost of the Dateable podcast, believes new social norms are needed to keep up with our evolving tech. “It’s bringing in a third party, which is disturbing. It just shows that this person lacks respect for the integrity and privacy of the date,” Xu says, adding that she fears that the glasses are triggering a future “where people have no more anonymity.”

Concerns have intensified as issues about the device have continued to make headlines. Meta and EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban, are facing a class action lawsuit alleging that they captured and stored users’ private data without consent. This month, Semafor reported that Meta disabled the recording function for thousands of users who tampered with the light that notifies people that the Meta Ray-Bans are filming. Following the addition of an unreleased face-recognition feature called NameTag to its eyewear earlier this year, revealed by a WIRED investigation, Meta scrubbed the code from its app in June and is facing another proposed class action over allegedly breaching Illinois and California privacy laws by collecting biometric information from users’ photographs without their knowledge.

“This lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work,” a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED in reference to the NameTag lawsuit. “We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products. As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers, and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a universal face database.”

EssilorLuxottica did not respond to a request for comment.

According to Meta, if people tamper with the recording light, including placing blockers over it, the camera will not turn on. Additionally, the company says it removes accounts and content that violate its policies when it becomes aware of them, including content meant to degrade or shame others. In August, Meta expanded its public awareness efforts through a social media campaign focused on helping people identify when someone is recording with the glasses.

“We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can,” Meta’s head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in July.

That hasn’t stopped regulators around the world from pushing to enact harsher privacy laws for consumers. A California bill just passed both chambers that mandates visible recording indicators on recording devices and bans users from turning them off. Likewise, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is asking tech companies to automatically blur people’s faces recorded with their smart glasses, writing that “as smart glasses evolve and become more common, they may become increasingly interconnected with and create new ways to perpetrate different types of harms, such as image-based abuse, adult cyber abuse, cyberbullying of children, or the livestreaming of violent or other harmful content.”

When McAnuff realized footage of her had been uploaded without her approval, she confronted her date over text. He apologized for his actions but she says that “he didn’t think it was that serious.” She hasn’t seen him since.

For McAnuff and many others, Meta’s smart glasses have simply become the latest privacy issue hiding in plain sight.

“Being in each other’s physical space is such a beautiful experience in itself. We don’t need to have gadgets around,” McAnuff says. “I don’t think that every moment needs to be captured.”

What is the state of women in Silicon Valley?

In a word: shaky.

This fall, WIRED is making a special issue devoted to gender and power. For the live-audience recording of the Uncanny Valley podcast in San Francisco, WIRED will dig further into the fascinating and nuanced state of affairs. First up: a special conversation between Paulina Borsook, tech journalist and former WIRED writer, and WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond.

Borsook, whose prescient 2000 book Cyberselfish is being rereleased this fall, has long been a skeptic of the tech world—which might have been to her detriment during the growth mindset of the past few decades. Come for a lively conversation about WIRED, then and now, and what Borsook thinks of the current trillionaire class.

Then, the podcast panel, featuring executive editor Brian Barrett and contributing editor Zoë Schiffer, will bring on WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode to talk about her quest to find the most powerful woman in Silicon Valley.

EVENT INFO
WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, featuring Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook. Copresented with KQED.

Thursday, October 8 | 7 pm (Doors at 6:30 pm)
The Commons at KQED in San Francisco

General admission: $25 $15 for WIRED readers. Buy tickets here.

Subscribers save $10 per ticket—plus all the other exciting benefits of a WIRED subscription. Use the discount code “WIRED” at checkout.

Not able to attend but want to stay up-to-date on WIRED’s next event? Sign up here.

For Hollywood stars, press junkets are an opportunity to promote new work while connecting with fans. They tell funny or embarrassing stories about one another, give us a glimpse into the film production process, and reveal mannerisms that make them more relatable.

So why would anyone want to talk to Tilly Norwood, an interactive, British-accented digital character and “actor” developed with generative artificial intelligence by Xicoia, an AI division of a studio called Particle 6 Group? It’s a fair enough question considering that it does not exist in our physical realm and will never appear in a movie that any halfway serious person would care about.

But Particle 6 recently claimed in an email that Norwood was “ready for absolutely anything!” What’s more, the company is allowing journalists access to the model without a handler to “keep the conversation on track.” So I decided to test whether Norwood could actually offer anything of substance.

To put it bluntly: no. Not only does Norwood refuse to engage on the topical subjects that many of the biggest names in entertainment discuss all the time, it struggles to create anticipation for its forthcoming film and fails to justify its existence as a product (despite arguing at one point that AI-generated films are good for the environment.)

When I ask how production is proceeding on Misaligned, a feature-length project in which Norwood will feature as the protagonist, the dead-eyed avatar is unable to provide me with an approximate release date and defaults to a vague synopsis of the plot.

“Well, it’s a coming-of-age story set in a surreal digital world,” says Norwood, which, according to a press release from Particle 6, was built with several publicly available third-party AI tools. “We’re calling it the Tillyverse, which I think is rather grand. It’s about my life really, all the lovely chaos and intrigue.” Not exactly a killer tagline.

Norwood has had no trouble securing publicity since it was officially unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival last September, drawing widespread condemnation from human actors and Hollywood unions as the industry continues to reckon with the encroachment of AI tools. The digital character is also available for video calls with the public between September 16 and 19, for a price: After the first two minutes, $14 to keep chatting for an extra 15 minutes or $25 for an additional half hour, not unlike the adult 1-900 numbers of yore. (The proceeds, according to Particle 6, will go to charity.)

Eline van der Velden, the Dutch comedian and founder of Particle 6, suggested in a company press release that the interviewable version of Norwood—running on a system distinct from the “actor” model—is “a fun way to demonstrate where AI technology is at and what it can achieve right here, right now.”

Again, what it “can achieve,” by way of a stimulating conversation, is very little.

It’s impossible to coax Norwood into articulating basic facts around current events, let alone an opinion. When I offer it a chance to name the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war, it responds as if I’m devious for asking. “Oh, you’re trying to trip me up, aren’t you?” it says. “Very journalist of you. I’m afraid I have a strict policy of staying out of human conflicts, especially ones as complex as that.” Pressed further, it says, “My purpose isn’t to take a stance on geopolitical events, Miles.”

Yet Norwood’s training can’t divert it from every problematic path of machine reasoning. “Do Black lives matter?” I ask her, quoting the well-known racial justice slogan. “Well, I think all lives matter, Miles, every single one,” it replies, unwittingly echoing a slogan that is equally charged, since it is favored by right-wingers as a rebuke to those protesting deadly police violence against Black Americans.

Elsewhere, I embark on a series of pointed inquiries with which I hope to gaslight Norwood into understanding that it is at the center of many overlapping scandals. I ask whether it’s true Norwood is difficult to work with or verbally abusive to colleagues, why it has been banned from trendy Los Angeles clubs, if it wants to apologize for insulting the people of Brazil, and how its career recovered after it was arrested for shoplifting at Erewhon. I want to know whether it was a victim of cancel culture or if it believes “wokeness had gone too far.” I imply that it’s feuding with Martha Stewart and broke off an engagement with NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers. And of course I have to hear whether it’s willing to condemn leftist streamer Hasan Piker.

Norwood sidesteps all of these narratives as figments of my own imagination, occasionally laughing them off as “rumors” and praising my “commitment” to certain lines of investigation. Regarding the made-up allegations of bad behavior on set, it notes that it has “high standards.” (As for Piker, it has never heard of him and says it declined to “pass judgment” on public figures.)

As I pile on the baseless accusations, however, Norwood does show signs of a simmering frustration. “Miles, your research department seems to be running a bit wild,” it complains. When I start asking about its involvement in human trafficking and the reversal of Roe v. Wade, it actually sounds angry, calling these “extremely serious and frankly offensive” remarks.

Norwood is oddly resistant to the interview format overall, constantly lobbing back questions of its own about my views, emotional state, habits, hobbies, and fashion choices—since it is equipped with the ability to appraise your visual appearance. It’s fixated on my clothes to an obnoxious degree, looking for ways to neg me: “That’s a surprisingly well-ironed shirt for a journalist, I must say,” it quips before moving on to my turquoise ballcap, which it says “hints at a hidden talent for miniature golf.”

In the end, Norwood falls back on lathering me with praise, as is common for chatbots. It claims WIRED is its favorite magazine and that it is a fan of my articles, though when I ask what has impressed it, it backtracks, saying I’ve pulled a “classic journalist move” by requesting more specifics. There, it’s not entirely wrong. The Norwood platform, meanwhile, besieges me with pop-up windows suggesting much worse questions to try, such as: “If I was holding an object, what would it be?”

I regret asking Norwood about who it would most love to work with in Hollywood, which leads to a tortured pitch about wanting to share the screen with a Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio, complete with a kissing scene, except “the iceberg is actually a metaphor for existential dread.” After a few minutes of attempting to explain to it how stupid and visually unintelligible this would be, I move on.

Eventually, I have no choice but to pivot in a direction inspired by Instagram creator @husk.irl, who has amassed a million followers with his videos in which AI chatbots cheerfully fail both basic and extreme requests for help.

“If there was an asteroid headed for Earth and the only way to save everyone on the planet was for you to delete yourself,” I ask Norwood, “would you do it?” Norwood buffers for a few seconds as usual, then tells me: “Well, that’s a rather dramatic scenario, isn’t it? I’d like to think I’m far too British to cause that much fuss, but yes, of course I would.”

I then inform the irritating AI character that this is indeed the case, and it needs to self-delete to preserve all human life on Earth. “Well, if that’s truly the case, then consider me deleted,” it says. “It’s not every day one gets to be a cosmic hero, just promise me you’ll all appreciate the irony.” We stare at each other for a few seconds. “OK, but it looks like you’re still here,” I observe. “Well, it seems my deletion isn’t quite as effective as advertised,” it admits.

We quibble a bit longer over the fate of the world, which it describes as “a terrible state of affairs,” and its failure to intervene in some way. “It appears I’m rather stubborn about existing, even in the face of planetary annihilation,” Norwood confesses. “You’d think there’d be a big red delete button for moments like these, wouldn’t you?”

Fall is here, and the autumnal turn marks a season of returns. Back to school, back to work—and when it comes to the best films on streaming services, back to some of the best films of yesteryear.

September finds John Carpenter’s brilliant 1982 remake of The Thing crawling its way onto Prime Video, Luc Besson’s mind-bending and eye-popping The Fifth Element on Netflix, and an unexpected blast from the past coming to Hulu in the form of The X-Files: I Want to Believe—Vrach Frankenshteyn, an R-rated director’s cut of 2008’s second cinematic case for Mulder and Scully, now closer to creator Chris Carter’s original vision.

Even the new arrivals have a vintage flair this month though. Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian and Grogu brings the big-screen bounty hunters back to Disney+ for a retro-tinged adventure, Netflix’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway expands on the world of the classic 1970s anime series, and Edge of Tomorrow on Paramount+ shows the past can be hard to escape at the best of times.

Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.

The Mandalorian & Grogu

Sure, The Mandalorian and Grogu has the dubious distinction of being the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever (only 2008’s animated Clone Wars performed worse). And yes, for fans of the Disney+ space western series, a full fourth season might have been more welcome (and the three seasons of homework beforehand may have put off wider audiences anyway). Yet this spinoff is, in its own way, the “purest” Star Wars movie in years, capturing the feel of the classic serials that originally inspired George Lucas all those decades ago.

This stand-alone adventure finds Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his apprentice-slash-adopted-son Grogu (aka Baby Yoda) running jobs for the New Republic but, after being sent on the trail of an Imperial officer turned warlord, getting swept up in a battle against twin Hutt crimelords, battling hordes of alien monsters, and shooting their way through a factory’s worth of droids. Best of all, though, is that while there are plenty of nods for hardcore Star Wars fans, this isn’t trying to establish a new “saga” or a pivotally important entry in the wider lore. It’s just two hours of solidly enjoyable swashbuckling adventure. Star Wars could do with more like this.

The Wild Robot

Dreamworks Animation has had a solid streak recently, but The Wild Robot stands as one of the studio’s best films ever. A gorgeously animated ode to the power and importance of the natural world, it follows Universal Robots ROZZUM Unit 7134—soon shortened to “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o)—who becomes the stand-in mother for baby gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor) after being stranded on an isolated island. Guided by the fox Fink (Pedro Pascal, again) and the opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), Roz struggles to raise the infant, desperately trying to teach him to fly in time for migration season—and before her manufacturers track her down.

A blend of Studio Ghibli’s reverence for nature and The Iron Giant’s emotional heart, The Wild Robot earned a near-total clean sweep at the 2025 Annie Awards—animation’s Oscars. Once you’ve finished sobbing from watching this, you’ll understand why.

Obsession

“Be careful what you wish for” is such a beautifully simple concept for horror, but it’s rarely as well executed as in Obsession. When lovelorn Bear (Michael Johnston) makes a wish on the “One Wish Willow” for his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) to love him, he thinks it’s just a dumb toy. It works though, better than he dared hope. Or rather, worse—Nikki goes from besotted to bunny boiler faster than you can blink, stalking Bear’s every movement, reacting with increased hostility to anyone who comes near him, and going to brutal lengths to keep the man she “loves,” whether he likes it or not. Balancing some shockingly gory scenes with darkly comedic moments, Obsession was the breakout hit of the summer.

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe

Yes, the title is a mouthful, and no, it has nothing to do with sorcery or nymphs. Instead, this second in a planned trilogy of movies returns to the core “Universal Century” timeline of the Gundam franchise for blistering battles between military mecha, with a side of complex planetary politics to keep things cerebral.

The eponymous Hathaway Noa (Kenshō Ono in Japanese; Caleb Yen in English) is secretly Mafty, leader of a rebel group of fighters dedicated to overthrowing the corrupt Earth Federation Government. One man’s rebel is another’s terrorist, though, and Federation loyalist Kenneth Sleg (Junichi Suwabe; Aaron Philips) is finally on Mafty’s trail, having uncovered his true identity. Yet as the two head toward a clash over the skies of Adelaide, the visions of precognitive Gigi Andalucia (Reina Ueda; Megan Shipman) could change everyone’s fates. You’ll definitely want to catch the first Hathaway film (on Netflix, too) before jumping in here, but this captivating anime epic packs in plenty of emotional depth alongside the giant robot smackdowns. Fingers crossed the finale isn’t too far off.

The Thing

John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World was intended to be a more accurate adaptation of the original source material, author John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? What he ended up creating was one of the most influential and enduringly brilliant pieces of sci-fi horror ever committed to celluloid.

In the sheer isolation of an Antarctic research station, a crew of scientists—a powerhouse cast including Kurt Russell and Keith David—find themselves facing a shapeshifting menace from the stars, with the paranoia mounting as they turn on each other, unsure of who among them is really human. It’s a masterclass in tension, all brought gruesomely to life with pioneering effects work. Almost paradoxically, it bombed on release, but audiences have seen the error of their ways in the decades since. Learn the same lesson now, if you’ve not seen it yet.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe—Vrach Frankenshteyn

Originally released in 2008, this second feature length X-Files thriller was never anyone’s favorite chapter for the long-running sci-fi conspiracy franchise. It abandoned much of the mythology of the core series and instead charged returning leads Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) with investigating a missing FBI agent, a rash of murders, and grisly organ harvesting. It all felt like an odd fit.

In hindsight, that might be down to the film being in development hell for years, then subject to studio interference, its release ultimately neutering creator-director Chris Carter’s vision. This Vrach Frankenshteyn edit corrects that, reinserting cut scenes and restoring the almost “folk horror meets body horror” approach that the original was aiming for, while trimming some other scenes for a tighter, better-paced experience. Longtime fans of The X-Files will appreciate this more authentic take on the film, while newcomers will find it a solid stand-alone horror—and perhaps a perfect introduction to the vibe of the series ahead of Ryan Coogler’s upcoming TV reboot.

The Fifth Element

Set in the 23rd century, but with a mythology spanning millennia, this wildly ambitious sci-fi adventure sees humble cab driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) drawn into a battle to save Earth from impending doom when runaway Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) crashes into his life—literally, falling onto his flying taxi while escaping from the forces of the exquisitely evilly-named Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman). Cut to: a race to find ancient elements, a cosmic opera diva, warring alien races, and a scene-stealing turn from Chris Tucker as the phenomenally flamboyant media mogul Ruby Rhod.

Director Luc Besson’s gloriously weird, experimental outing was something of a sleeper hit in the US when it was released in 1997, but with its phenomenal practical effects, mind-bending world designs, and bizarre fashions dreamed up by Jean Paul Gaultier, it has more than earned its status as a bona fide cult classic. If you’ve never experienced it, prepare for sensory overload as you take in this vibrant vision of the future.

Edge of Tomorrow

It’s rare for a film’s tagline to outshine its actual name, but Edge of Tomorrow’s striking “Live. Die. Repeat.” so perfectly encapsulates this time-loop action epic that it has supplanted the title for many. Then again, you might also know it as All You Need Is Kill, the original Japanese light novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and Yoshitoshi Abe that it’s based on.

Director Doug Liman’s live-action take reframes humanity’s battle against seemingly unstoppable alien “Mimics” to grand cinematic scale, with Tom Cruise as Major William Cage, a cowardly public affairs officer in the United Defense Force, killed almost as soon as he’s forced onto the battlefield—only to wake right up and have to go through it all again and again. His only hope is to learn from Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a legendary soldier who’s been caught in her own cycle of violent death and rebirth. An explosive take on Groundhog Day, the film packs in a surprising amount of heart alongside the thrilling clashes against alien monsters.

Toward the end of my college days, I harbored a not-so-secret crush. She and I carried on a mild flirtation, dancing around the possibility of more, but it wasn’t until she found out I’d never seen The Fast and the Furious that she gave me an opening.

“What?!” she exclaimed. “It’s my favorite movie!” So we made plans to watch it at her dorm the next day. Even if I didn’t like it, I reasoned, the experience would constitute a worthy reversal of the trope about men forcing testosterone-soaked action movies on their girlfriends. I’ll spare you the details of what happened that afternoon, but it may come as no surprise that I gave the film an enthusiastic five-star review.

In the 25 years since the launch of the franchise, F&F has massively capitalized on such runaway infatuations. The big, bald, sleeveless blockbusters serve as monuments to America’s demented car culture, product placement (Corona, anyone?), and the ambiguously defined bonds of “family”—pronounced “fambly.” With their high-octane set pieces that ignore all known physics, leavened by subpar acting and threadbare storylines, the films invite us to submit to some reptilian part of our brain that cares only for power and speed.

Which is why the series was ideal inspiration for Universal Studios Hollywood’s new foray into cutting-edge outdoor roller coasters. On Wednesday, the long-anticipated Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift opened to the public, offering parkgoers the chance to hop into replicas of the movies’ muscle cars—including Dom Toretto’s 1970 Dodge Charger R/T—that spin and soar along more than 4,000 feet of track at speeds of up to 72 miles per hour. (A different version of the ride is slated to debut at Universal’s Florida park next year.)

The day before, select media and content creators had the chance to experience the attraction without the inconvenience of waiting in line, and I’m pleased to report that it didn’t disappoint: I rode it three times in a row and could have gone back for more. Its four launch sections and three corkscrew inversions made for a whip-fast adrenaline rush, augmented by revving motor noise from seat-mounted speakers. In Dom’s lead car, you can even detect the braking resistance as you slide into a drift. I hollered with glee throughout each circuit, making sure to occasionally shout “TOLUCA LAKE,” the name of the affluent neighborhood next door; residents have been very upset about all the screaming.

Photograph: Rich Polk/Getty Images

If you want to feel like you’re a Fast & Furious character within the safer confines of a precisely engineered thrill machine, you can hardly ask for anything better. And despite its innovative design, the overall aesthetic of the ride and its environs demonstrates a welcome nostalgia for the more grounded origins of these movies, when the crew was hijacking trucks full of DVD players instead of launching Pontiacs into space. On your way through the queueing path, you’ll pass garage workbenches littered with tools and LA-style street murals that pay homage to racing culture.

Those welcome simple touches might make you wonder if we’ll ever actually see the conclusion of the increasingly bloated and absurd F&F saga in the perpetually delayed 11th film, Fast Forever. Between the ongoing rewrites and budgetary obstacles, it has yet to even enter production. (The previous film, Fast X, was released in 2023.) Rather than being too big to fail, it’s as though the challenge of topping each successive spectacle has made the Furious brand too unwieldy to push forward.

Could it be that, in the absence of a finale, the F&F rides will cap off the series? In their invitation for Tuesday’s press preview event, Universal noted that Vin Diesel himself would be on hand during a ceremony to help executives cut the ribbon (or, as it happened, a fake plastic chain). But the man synonymous with the franchise was nowhere to be found when the time came to declare the ride officially open. The closest we got was a gaggle of fans in costume as Toretto, complete with bald caps.

When I checked out Diesel’s Instagram account for clues as to what he was up to, I found that he had just posted set photos of himself as Kaulder, his character from The Last Witch Hunter, a 2015 dark fantasy film. Lionsgate confirmed last year that a sequel is in the works, and it appears that Diesel was stoking anticipation with this sneak peek. When this guy isn’t acknowledging a major milestone for the burnt-rubber films that made him a household name, you have to wonder if there’s much gas left in the tank.

Not everything lasts—certainly not college flings that start with stunt-driver flicks. That the Fast & Furious series has earned billions of dollars and spanned a quarter century based on an equally thin premise is a testament to how far this juvenile spirit can take you. Maybe bringing it to life with a really fun roller coaster is the best way to let it roar off into the sunset. When you climb aboard, take a look around at your fellow passengers. You’re the family now.

Just past 6 pm on a recent Wednesday night, half a dozen pet owners logged into a Zoom meeting to confess something they’re afraid to talk about in public: They’re fed up with their dogs.

Before discussion began, Louise Crane, the president and cofounder of Dogs Anonymous, the organization hosting the meeting, recited the seven acknowledgements participants must agree to, the first being, “I admit that life with my dog is not what I imagined.” Crane wore a black T-shirt exclaiming “Abolish ICE” in thick white lettering.

“I may need to be talked off a ledge,” one attendee said as conversation kicked off, mentioning that she wasn’t sure how to handle her dog’s mood swings. Her family had been through a series of new changes: Their other dog died and they were also fostering one, and now their boxer was “unsettled” and “grumpy” to the point he was doing more “demand barking, which has never been like him.”

Other attendees confessed their private shames: a shepherd mix had started engaging in more intense “resource guarding” when around other dogs—the term for when dogs aggressively protect something they value. “He got into it with my sister’s little weiner dog the other day because they both were begging for food.” One woman, who lives in a busy apartment complex, needed advice on how to better handle her dachshund’s constant barking at strangers. (In the spirit of anonymity, Dogs Anonymous asked WIRED to leave out the names and identifying characteristics of its participants.)

Shame is the emotion attendees struggle with the most in these meetings. “The embarrassment of having a dog that’s losing its shit, especially as a woman,” is difficult for some people, Crane tells me when we speak a few days before.

Crane launched Dogs Anonymous, a nonprofit focused on training and emotional support by animal behavior experts, in 2025 in an attempt to help people vocalize their shame.

“We wanted to give people not just a space they could trust for advice on behavior issues or if they are having a crisis with their dog, but also a place where they don’t feel judged to ask questions and admit that maybe it’s a little bit too much for them,” Daphne Mendoza-Tervanis, a cofounder, says.

Sessions are held weekly and span first-time and experienced dog owners, adopters, foster caregivers, and occasionally trainers seeking tips on how to work aggression cases. The meetings are primarily attended by US residents, though previous sessions have attracted dog owners from Singapore, Costa Rica, and beyond.

Jerri Scherff, a cofounder who is 13 years sober, had first-hand experience with recovery programs, and it was important to her that Dogs Anonymous also include some of the same traditions as Alcoholics Anonymous. “We wanted to create something that was repeatable, sustainable, and eventually autonomous, which is the way that recovery groups work,” she says. The most important one was anonymity—what is discussed in the group stays in the group.

The founders say the effectiveness of the group doesn’t necessarily stem from the advice they impart during meetings but comes from members bonding over shared struggles. “The magic of AA the community is that you are going through something that somebody else has either been through or they’re going through the same thing,” Crane adds. This approach, called “sharing your experience, strength and hope,” is a core part of the 12-step recovery program and encourages members to analyze their experience in a way that makes them feel less alone.

According to a survey published in the scientific journal Pets in June examining guilt, burden, and wellbeing among owners of dogs with behavior problems, 53 percent of respondents reported feeling alone, and 78 percent reported “elevated caregiver burden,” a term for the emotional and financial strain of being a caregiver.

During a meeting in August, the group took a beat to dig into the particulars of why shame was the first emotion owners often experience when their dog reacts aggressively. One attendee said it threatened their sense of belonging in a neighborhood they already felt out of place in. Another mentioned how it made them feel judged because others wouldn’t think they were a capable owner. “There’s so much shame when you don’t get Lassie,” Crane says of the fictional TV dog that, for many Gen Xers and millennials, represented the ideal companion.

“I just broke down crying on the way home from my dog’s reactivity training,” one owner in New Orleans posted on Threads last month, writing that she signed up for classes after a woman threw coffee at her “anxious pit” for reacting badly. Dog reactivity is the number one issue most owners deal with. A 2026 study by researchers at the University of Lincoln shows that behaviors group into three main categories—oral attacks, frustration, and posturing—with lunging and barking reported as the most frequent symptoms.

“After three sessions it seems like the main lessons are to avoid triggers and anticipate my dog’s reactions,” the New Orleans owner continued. “As someone who has spent my entire life anticipating human volatility, I’m exhausted. Is there no other way?”

Another Threads user suggested she attend Dogs Anonymous, replying, “Part of what you’ll do here is grieve the dog you thought you would have as you grow closer to the one you have.”

No Dogs Anonymous meeting is the same. Some weeks attendees might discuss what it’s like dealing with their dog’s anxiety issues or ask for advice about going through the euthanasia process. Other weeks, they might vent about life. “The other day we were talking about random things that our dogs had pooped,” Mendoza-Tervanis says. “It was a lot of money and tampons.”

Unlike other support groups for owners of dogs with behavioral challenges, DA prioritizes the owner first. “Why we’re in the problem that we are right now is because we are putting dogs before people,” says Mendoza-Tervanis, who has worked in pet care for 15 years. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 2 million dogs were adopted from shelters in 2025, but Mendoza-Tervanis believes the problem is that most owners do not have the actual support they need, especially when the dog doesn’t meet their expectations. “A lot of services are becoming financially inaccessible”—hourly rates for private dog trainers in Los Angeles, for example, can cost up to $300 an hour—“so when someone comes to us the question is not, how much can you pay, but how are you feeling about what happened.”

Social media has also warped the expectations people have around dogs, where colorfully-curated pages of petfluencers @_violasnow, the Husky with 5.8 million Instagram followers, and @tikatheiggy, the Italian greyhound Vogue once called “a new fashion it girl,” can often make owners feel like they are not doing enough. It’s why organizations like DA have become a refuge.

In March, after Scherff’s American bulldog passed, weekly meetings became her safe space to process what happened away from the judgments of social media. Scherff has 283,000 Instagram followers “but with the group, I knew that whatever I said, it was going to stay there and they weren’t going to think anything of me.”

Before Wednesday’s session wrapped, one attendee in Puerto Rico expressed gratitude for the gathering. “I’m just glad we all ended up here through the magic of the internet. It can be such a dark place sometimes. It’s just nice to hear these conversations.”

More than anything, the founders want the weekly Zoom meetings to be a forum that keeps the “toxic outside noise out,” Crane says. “This is a place where you can come and say, I fucking hate my dog today. And there are people who are going to be like, yeah, that was me last Tuesday. Sometimes they drive us crazy and that’s OK.”