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True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.

For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?

We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about 80 kilometers north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.

“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.

My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my mid-twenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.

“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”

“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”

“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.

“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”

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.

This will seem a bit obvious­—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—­but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.

At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-­and-­coming academic with a tenure-­track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.

Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: It was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—­if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.

But in every version of reality I had an absolutely clean record, no subversion or other crimes of any kind, which had qualified me for a permit to live in an attractive neighborhood close to downtown. My parents and I walked out of the train station and up the hill together, and as an exercise in gratitude I tried to see Central Avenue through their eyes: the double row of palm trees, the century-­old restored movie theater, the candy-­colored awnings above the shops, an overall impression of having been unmoored from time and history sometime around 1965.

“I feel like I’m in a time capsule,” my mother said, and then quickly, “In a good way, I mean. It’s nice here.”

“It is nice,” I said. I­ really did like it here, for the most part. In Fillmore, as in most backwaters without a significant history of subversion, the State operated with a fairly light touch: identity cards, neighborhood permits, and facial recognition technology, like everywhere, but none of the random interrogations and drone surveillance that one might expect in larger cities.

My father took a nap on my couch while my mother and I went for a walk. We took a circuitous route that led us back through downtown. As we turned back onto Central Avenue, my attention was diverted by a scene playing out farther up the block and across the street. A black van had pulled up in front of the florist’s. The shop had been open an hour earlier, but now a crew had gone to work on it: The sign had been painted over, and two men were carting armloads of flowers into the van. The owners—­a couple in their sixties whom I’d been surveilling for some time—­were standing nearby, seemingly in shock. A second van pulled up, and the couple were led inside. They didn’t resist.

In a moment, the two vans were gone, and with them all trace of the business and the business’s owners. The shop was locked and blank now, no merchandise, no signs, the erasure complete. I knew, because I’d reported on this couple to my supervising officer, that they’d criticized the State on social media. They might be sent to prison, or to a black site, but I thought it more likely that they’d be sent to a work camp servicing the massive agricultural operations in the valley, a decade or so of picking strawberries or kale in the sun and sleeping in locked dormitories. People were rarely able to return to their previous life after that. I didn’t expect to see them again.

“This weather’s perfect,” my mother said.

Dinner that night was at a metal table I’d purchased for my backyard grove, as I thought of it: two ancient orange trees and a lemon tree that together formed a canopy. This was my favorite place in the world, and the main reason why I’d bought the house.

“Ibari,” my mother said, “I brought something for you from home.”

Home, for them, was Ohio, where they’d moved from New York when I’d left for the academy. I’d never lived there, and hearing the place called home was obscurely irritating. My mother had brought an ancient canvas tote bag to the table—could this possibly be the same one she’d used for grocery shopping in my childhood in New York?—and from it she pulled a battered old notebook, on which TRUE DILIGENCE and associated curlicues took up the entire front cover.

“Good lord,” I said. “Where did you find that?”

“I was cleaning out the storage unit,” she said, “and thought you might like to have it. What does the phrase mean?”

“True diligence?” I was going for lightness. I felt I’d succeeded. “Just a phrase I liked when I was a little kid. I think I must have seen it on TV or read it in a book somewhere.” If asked, I could have cited the book title, the author, and possibly the page number. Why was I lying about it? Because lying was my job. I pushed this thought down.

“I opened it up,” she said, “before I knew what it was. You should’ve been a detective.”

“Why,” I said, “what’s in it?” She was passing it across the table. I opened it, and for a moment didn’t understand what I was looking at. A timetable? No, the times of day when the neighbor at the apartment building across the street entered or left the building, except it was all only between 4 pm and 6 pm, because that was the time when I was sitting at my desk by the window doing homework, between school and dinner. He came and went a lot during that period, which I’d apparently found suspicious. The heading was straightforward: Times when Andy Commidy (sp?) enters or leaves home, with separate columns for enters and leaves. His schedule was remarkably consistent. I’d started the notebook after my friend across the street had disappeared, I remembered now. I was 7. But all these years later, I couldn’t remember my friend’s name.

“Wow,” I said, “I’d forgotten what a weird kid I was.”

“You should’ve been a detective,” she said again. Could she possibly know? It wasn’t possible, I told myself, but on the other hand, how did I know my mother wasn’t Service too? One of the more exhausting aspects of life in a surveillance state is that anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.

“I like the academic life,” I said. “It’s peaceful.”

“Anything you did here would seem peaceful, I’d think,” my father said. “Nice little town.”

“Well, Ibari,” my mother said, and raised her wineglass. “It looks like you’ve found a quiet life in a beautiful place.”

“Here’s to that,” my father said, and I smiled and joined them in sipping wine. Why did that comment bother me so much? She’d meant it kindly. Soon enough they returned to Ohio, and I settled back into the rhythms of my life. I was good at my work, both in Service and at the college. My students seemed to like me well enough, and I enjoyed teaching them. My Service work involved surveillance on a handful of local people, adults much older than me, who’d attended the last pro-democracy demonstrations a decade earlier.

It was easy work, observing their activities, listening to their mind-numbingly boring phone calls, meeting regularly with their next-door neighbors, friends, and colleagues. In my cover life, I liked my colleagues at the college. My home was beautiful. The dating pool was small, but I maximized it by dating both women and men. I collected a few local friends and enjoyed their company.

But in the years that followed my parents’ first visit, my mother’s comment—a quiet life in a beautiful place—stayed with me in a way I didn’t understand. It was like a splinter I could ignore for months at a time. Occasionally, in unexpected moments, I was struck by an uneasy sense that I was living the wrong life, or conducting my life in the same way I checked items off my grocery lists, or doing the wrong thing, or in stasis.

Sometime around my 40th birthday, while my friend Nico was visiting, I broke my glasses. I was picking oranges in the backyard when it happened. I’d taken the glasses off for only a moment, to wipe sweat from my face, but managed to drop them. I stepped back, looking at the ground in the dim greenish light under the orange tree, and heard a quiet snap under my shoe. The nose bridge was broken.

“You got a backup pair?” Nico asked, from the lounge chair. She’d been reading a book.

“In my office at the college,” I said.

“Do you have tape?”

“Probably. Keep reading, I’ve got this.” But all I seemed to have in the house, tape-­wise, was a reflective silver tape that my cousin Anton had left behind on a recent visit, when he’d come for a few days with his 4-­year-­old twins, who were forever immersed in complicated art projects. The tape was very narrow but surprisingly strong. I carefully wound it around the broken section, then the right lens popped out, so I added more tape on the right. The glasses felt secure when I put them on, but the overall look was insane. I was staring in the mirror when the doorbell rang.

“Nice repair job, Ibari,” the UPS driver said. He came around often enough that we were on a first-­name basis. In those days I did a lot of online shopping.

“Thank you. I just stepped on them.”

“Happens to the best of us,” he said, and raised his device close to my face. “Voice?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said reflexively, and waited, with the driver, for the signature of my voice and the image of my face to match with my address in the UPS system, so that the driver could leave the small package he held, which I thought was probably my new toothbrush. Instead, his device emitted a sharp warning beep.

“Seems like there’s a problem with the face scan,” the driver said.

“Let’s try that again.” He raised the device.

“My voice is my passcode.” The beep came again.

“Try again without the glasses?”

“My glasses have never been a problem,” I said, but took them off anyway. “You’re sure you can’t just leave the package?”

“Without ID verification?” The driver grinned. “I didn’t know you did stand-up. OK, take three?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said, with the glasses in my hand, and this time the machine produced a melodic chime.

“There you go,” the driver said. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

I thanked him, and brought the little package in. I felt very strange. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, just for a second, and I’d seen the machinery hidden behind it. I’d never ­ really thought about facial recognition systems before, because they were everywhere and always had been, my face recorded and uploaded to a central database several times a day since earliest memory. The question was whether the glasses could thwart any facial recognition software, or if it was just a faulty UPS scanner. I returned to the backyard with a feeling of carrying a dangerous secret. I wanted to test my glasses again.

“Nico,” I said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe get some iced tea downtown?”

Nico smiled. “Your poor glasses,” she said. “Yes, iced tea sounds perfect.”

We walked slowly, in the direction of iced tea. It was a hot day, but the solar fans in the business district created a gentle breeze. There was a man walking a block or so ahead of us. One of the former pro-democracy agitators whom I’d been surveilling. I’d studied him so carefully that I’d have known him anywhere.

“When do you need to be back in LA?” I asked.

“I thought I’d take the 4 o’clock train.” It was still only late morning. As we entered the tea shop, a discreet scanner embedded in the door frame flashed white—Face not found—­but confirmation didn’t come until I reached the front of the line, ordered an iced tea, and stared directly into the screen to pay with credit.

“I’m sorry,” the barista said, and swiveled the screen so I could read the message: Facial recognition error. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.”

“Oh,” I said, “no problem, let’s do fingerprints.” I pressed my right index finger to the screen, and a moment later a green check mark appeared. Nico was studying the muffins.

“I think these glasses are throwing off the scanners,” I said.

Nico went still for just a second, and shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible. She was still looking at the baked goods.

“The muffins here look good,” she said, as if I’d said nothing.

This was when I understood: My friend was Service. I had no doubt that she was who she said she was, which is to say an associate professor in the physics department at UCLA, but also she was something else. It shouldn’t be disappointing, I told myself. A lot of people were Service. I was Service. The barista could be Service. Anyone around you, at any given moment, could be observing and reporting. But was she reporting on me? We were quiet on the walk back to the house. The iced tea tasted like cardboard.

“I’ve never reported on you,” Nico said, when we were close to my house. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her, and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d waited until our backs were to the downtown camera array.

“OK.” I felt vastly relieved. I knew that rationally there was no reason to believe her, but all my life I’ve had a sense of intuition, and I felt very strongly that she was telling the truth. And then, because she was my closest friend and she’d taken the risk first: “I’ve never reported on you either,” I said.

She didn’t stop walking, but I heard a slight intake of breath.

“You know,” she said, again very softly, “I think it doesn’t take that much to become a ghost.”

“You’re probably right.” I appreciated the warning. Ghost was slang for a person who ran afoul of the State. A ghost is undesirable. A ghost lives in the shadows. A ghost is not entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law, or a social security number, bank account, credit, or entry into most spaces, because does a ghost even really entirely exist?

Excerpted from the book Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel. Copyright © 2026 by Emily St. John Mandel. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

An Australian teenage girl’s death, suspected to be preceded by consensual “choking” during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn.

This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren’t aware of just how dangerous the trend is.

Sexual strangulation or “choking” during sex, as it’s referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular—especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death. Some researchers argue that porn is to blame for that normalization, but members of the adult industry say that banning depictions of choking won’t stop this kind of content from flourishing or serve as the kind of sex education and media literacy the public sorely needs.

“With the misinformation that’s out there, especially online, many people do think that maybe at lighter pressures they might be ‘safe,’ and that’s not the case,” says Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers on sexual strangulation. Herbenick cautions that applying sustained pressure to the front and sides of the throat—via your hands, an object, or otherwise—can lead to blood clots and stroke, tears in the carotid arteries, vision impairment, and cumulative brain injuries.

“It’s these things that we wouldn’t even notice,” she says. “Those tiny, incremental changes in your vision, or your brain, or so on.”

Or, in the most extreme cases, death. Pressing on the front of the throat can lead to airway collapse, Herbenick says. Two weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl in Sydney passed out after authorities believe she was strangled by her equally young partner during sex. She died after being taken to a local hospital in critical condition, and the investigation is ongoing. It’s unknown what her exact injuries were.

The Australian Social Services Minister has since said the government is “very seriously” looking at efforts to ban pornographic depictions of choking in sex, in line with the country’s recently passed age-verification laws that ban social media for children under the age of 16. But critics of these social media bans say they don’t actually work and make it harder for teens to access news and information they need, including sex education around the dangers of choking and strangulation.

The data regarding rates of young people choking and being choked during sex can appear staggering. In Herbenick’s 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 college students in the US, 58 percent of women had been choked during sex and a quarter had been first choked by age 17. Researchers in Australia similarly found rates of around half of people aged 18 to 35 engaging in the practice. Herbenick found that women are usually the ones being choked by men during heterosexual sex and that sexual and gender minorities are also more likely to be choked during sex.

“There are other people who say ‘I asked them to choke me or I said it was OK, but then they really pushed past my limits or it was a lot harder than I expected, or I asked them to stop and they didn’t,’” Herbenick says. She also says that while some young men enjoy the act, others “tell us that they don’t want to be choking their partners, but they think they’re supposed to, or they get asked all the time.”

Most of the self-reported occurrences of sexual strangulation among US college students Herbenick surveyed were described as consensual, but when choking is nonconsensual, it can be even more dangerous. In fact, strangulation is one of the strongest predictors for murder in an abusive relationship.

It’s important to distinguish between the different types of intimate partner strangulation: as a form of abuse, nonconsensual introduction of strangulation into what may have started as a consensual hookup, fully consensual choking, and fictional depictions of choking, like what is usually happening in legal pornography and television. But with the exception of staged or implied choking (like placing a hand over a partner’s neck without actually applying pressure), all of these kinds of strangulation carry major and even deadly health risks for the person on the receiving end.

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University whose work has contributed to pornography regulation in the UK for 20 years, says the amount of porn involving strangulation has risen over the past few decades and corresponds with an increase in children viewing strangulation content.

“If you ask young people, ‘Where do you get your ideas for sex or sexual activity?’ they say ‘porn.’ And you think, ‘Well, yeah, of course you do,’” McGlynn says. “I think its ubiquity in porn does mean that’s why we see large numbers of young people engaging in this practice consensually, because they think through scripts they’ve seen in mainstream porn that it’s normal, it’s expected.”

The UK’s recent ban on porn showing strangulation or suffocation falls under the country’s Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms, search engines, and other web services to proactively remove illegal material and employ controversial age-verification measures. According to McGlynn, the strangulation ban was adopted in April but hasn’t been implemented or enforced yet, meaning the government has yet to take action against any companies or individuals.

“The platforms aren’t going to act in and of themselves,” she says. “They’re only going to act if they think the regulator is going to take action against them.”

McGlynn believes that within a few years of the ban on strangulation in porn actually being enforced, a new generation of young people may grow up without seeing choking as a standard part of sex. It’s an optimistic view—one that isn’t shared by everyone.

Cherie DeVille, a well-known pornographic actress, points to the fallout from age-verification laws—requiring proof of age to access adult content—as an example of the futility of banning porn. Consumers can simply use VPNs to get around local laws and turn to the unregulated world of sexually explicit content, often hosted by foreign platforms that don’t comply with any of the laws that major companies are forced to obey.

DeVille, who was a physical therapist prior to entering the adult film industry, describes how talent liaisons assist in the negotiation of what is allowed in specific scenes before filming, including choking, which she says never involves putting actual pressure on the trachea.

Pornhub echoed its consent policy for performers in an email statement to WIRED, writing, “We can be confident that the acts that appear in our content are completely consensual, unlike other platforms that don’t have the same consent requirements.” Meanwhile, adult creators on OnlyFans are wary of posting anything involving choking after the service was forced to clamp down on most hardcore content in 2021 to avoid banks freezing payments. (OnlyFans didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether choking and sexual strangulation are technically banned on the platform.)

While Herbenick says that young men are more likely to learn about sexual strangulation from porn, young women are more likely to learn about it from memes, mainstream entertainment, or even erotic fanfiction about One Direction. HBO director Sam Levinson featured it in early episodes of Euphoria and The Idol. It was the opener to a chart-topping Jack Harlow song, where he crooned about choking a woman but not being a “killer.”

“Porn is an appealing boogeyman to say we can stop this by regulating this very specific type of speech, despite the fact that this is ubiquitous throughout culture,” says Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, which is the nonprofit trade association for the US adult industry. “The solution is education. The solution is to talk about consent rather than try and find a singular cause that, if you were able to censor it, will solve the problem.”

Herbenick agrees about education. She says one of the biggest cultural changes we need to make is for parents to talk to their kids and teenagers about the dangers of strangulation and the type of messaging they’re consuming about choking during sex—whether it’s in porn or the Billboard Hot 100.

Kate Tolo got her first period at 13—an experience she says left her lying prostrate on the floor, debilitated by cramps and breaking out into a full-body sweat.

When she told her dad why she was home from school early, she remembers him saying, “We don’t talk about that female stuff.” Then he walked away.

For most of her teenage years, that was how Tolo thought about her period—as something “you just didn’t talk about.” When she was in her early twenties and experienced extreme pain while defecating, sending her to the emergency room, a doctor suggested Tolo may have endometriosis, a chronic disease believed to affect an estimated 10 percent of women of reproductive age, according to WHO data.

Caused by an overgrowth of endometrium-like tissue (uterine lining), endometriosis is primarily characterized by extremely heavy and painful periods, as well as pelvic floor dysfunction, bowel issues, and dyspareunia (pain during sex). The doctor recommended Tolo have a laparoscopy, an invasive surgical procedure required to get an official diagnosis and remove endometriosis tissue. But she refused: “I wasn’t going to undergo an invasive surgical procedure, or cut myself open,” she says. “That just wasn’t an option for me.”

Then in early 2026, Tolo started developing a concierge health service with her boyfriend Bryan Johnson, the technologist-cum-multimillionaire-cum-biohacker known for his quest to become immortal via rigid self-optimization and wellness protocols. During a clinical intake, she shared her lifelong struggle with suspected endometriosis—and he became obsessed with finding a cure.

Since hard-launching their relationship last December, Johnson has positioned his girlfriend as “the female Bryan Johnson,” with Tolo adopting a rigorous self-tracking protocol to optimize her health. Using $2.6 million in funding from Immortals, the wellness company the two founded, Tolo is tracking more than 1,500 biomarkers from sources such as her blood, urine, and stool over the course of her menstrual cycle, via “an elaborately choreographed four-hour techno ballet of scratching, sniffing, spitting, scanning, stretching, gripping, vibrating, flexing, plucking, poking, pulling, peeing, and pooping,” as one recent Business Insider profile put it.

It’s a relatively new role for the 30-year-old Tolo, who worked in fashion marketing before becoming Johnson’s executive assistant and special projects director for Kernel, his neurotech company, in 2021.

Describing herself as an introvert, she says she was initially uneasy about becoming “the world’s most measured woman,” as Johnson put it in a video from last August. (He’s also declared her vagina’s microbiome to be in the “top 1 percent” of all vaginal ecosystems.) Prone to depression and anxiety, she had a panic attack on week two of the protocol, prompted by her internet going down while she was trying to conduct red-light therapy. “It’s a deeply uncomfortable experience for someone who doesn’t love a routine,” she concedes. “And so all of that pressure just really got to me.”

But to hear her tell it, it all serves a larger purpose.

“Even when every part of me, individually, is screaming ‘Make it stop,’ I can see myself pushing myself to the absolute limit of what is possible, mentally and also physically, in my body. Because I’m doing this for women,” she tells me.

One of Tolo’s primary interests is coming up with reliable diagnostic and treatment methods for endometriosis, a process that the couple has been documenting on their social channels. Though Tolo never underwent surgery and has never been officially diagnosed with endometriosis, so far the two claim they have diagnosed Tolo with the condition over the course of 42 days using noninvasive methods, such as a saliva and blood test and an endo-specific ultrasound. (A transvaginal ultrasound and an initial MRI originally came back clear.) Their next step is creating an organoid using cells from Tolo’s menstrual blood—“essentially, me in a petri dish,” as she explains it—to test various interventions, the results of which she will compare next to a more conventional biopsy.

For the past few months, Tolo has been collecting her menstrual blood in a cup and transferring it to a standing tube, repeating the process every few hours before shipping it off on ice in a Styrofoam container to be tested by a lab. (The couple will not reveal which lab they are partnered with, saying it prefers to remain anonymous: “The biotech world is sometimes a little bit more buttoned-up about how they go about things,” Tolo says.)

The blood collection process is grueling and laborious: “It’s like this race against the clock to get into the lab in time before the cells die,” she says. But she dreams of a world in which women would be able to collect their menstrual blood, then send it into a lab for testing in order to obtain an endometriosis diagnosis. “We want to confirm that women can do this without having minor surgery,” she says.

Endometriosis has historically been extremely difficult to diagnose, says Kristin Riley, the chief of minimally invasive gynecological surgery at Penn State Health. The disease can manifest itself in various ways, and the amount of endometriosis present in the reproductive organs does not necessarily correlate to the severity of the symptoms. And while physicians can make a clinical diagnosis based on patient self-reporting and ultrasound imaging, the “gold standard” for determining the presence of endometriosis is still surgery, says Riley. For this reason, it can take between five to 10 years to diagnose a case of endometriosis.

Over the past few years, the market has been flush with efforts to come up with simpler diagnostic tests. In the United Kingdom, for instance, Endotest, marketed as the world’s first commercially available saliva-based diagnostic test, was recently approved for temporary clinical use. The test examines biomarkers called microRNAs that may indicate the presence of endometriosis in a patient’s body. But though the test shows “promise,” Riley says, it’s unlikely it will be approved for mass distribution anytime soon in the United States, or that physicians will start using it in lieu of laparoscopy.

Physicians who treat endometriosis regularly are also skeptical that Tolo and Johnson’s methods will yield helpful results, given the extremely limited sample size. “There’s something to be gained from all different types of research, but before something can be adopted widely into practice, it has to be really well proven,” says Ilana Ressler, an ob-gyn at Illume Fertility in Connecticut. In order for Tolo’s project to be successful, the results “would have to be applicable to a general population, and not just one person.”

On social media and in our discussions, Johnson has framed his interest in curing endometriosis as purely a labor of love. “I’m desperately in love with Kate,” he says. “[I] want her to be happy and well, and it’s been so many years she’s had to live with all this pain, and I just want to help do this for her.”

Some of the couple’s efforts to highlight the struggles of living with endometriosis, such as an X post of Johnson standing between Tolo’s legs as she gets a vaginal ultrasound, have raised eyebrows for skirting the bounds of tastefulness. It’s a critique that bothers Johnson. “Why can’t we talk about these things openly?” he asks when I bring it up. “Why does this have to be so political? Why can’t this just be seen as a loving gesture?”

Tolo, however, whose background is in marketing, gets it. “From day one, I’ve seen my job as: How can I help the world understand Bryan and who he is?” she says. “I probably missed how important it was for me to be a part of that story from the beginning. [But] now, I think people understand the both of us better than they ever have.”

Tolo’s public quest to highlight a debilitating but poorly understood reproductive health issue, as well as Johnson’s fervent support, have translated into a positive shift in public perception, particularly toward Johnson himself. Since he started advocating for extreme anti-aging procedures, such as intergenerational blood plasma transfusions or penile rejuvenation injections, Johnson has long been derided as an out-of-touch Silicon Valley weirdo. Yet his quest to treat his girlfriend’s endometriosis, coupled with his obvious affection for Tolo (at multiple points during our conversation, he compares their relationship to that of Abigail and John Adams), have endeared him more to the public. “I’m so happy Bryan found his soulmate and proved true love exists,” reads one representative tweet.

True to form, Johnson has quantified how going public with his love for Tolo has contributed to this shift. “I built a couple of AI agents and I scraped all of the social commentary about me over the past five years,” he told me. A few years ago, he estimates, it was 80 percent negative; now, he says, it is “70 to 75 percent positive.”

Going public has also, undoubtedly, been a boon for Tolo’s profile: Since April 2026, when Johnson posted about Tolo’s vaginal microbiome, she has more than tripled her Instagram following, according to data from SocialBlade, a firm that tracks creators’ influence.

When I ask if the couple plans to funnel this surge of attention into, say, developing a product for their company, Immortals, which provides personalized health concierge services, Johnson and Tolo demur. But it’s worth noting that Immortals has forayed into women’s health and wellness products, including topical estradiol for postmenopausal women and tretinoin cream to combat the signs of aging. And since the approval of Endotest in the UK, there’s been increased interest in the burgeoning endometriosis diagnostic test industry, which a recent GlobalData report estimates will be worth $2.5 billion by 2034.

Tolo says that it’s simply too early to tell whether a menstrual blood diagnostic test is feasible, noting that it will take the couple at least another eight to 12 months to conclude all of their research. But she concedes that the ideal outcome would be bringing an endo diagnostic blood test to market. For the time being, however, she says, “our ultimate goal is to make as much as we can about female health public so we can spur the entire industry” to develop noninvasive diagnostic tests.

Among the other experiments Tolo is subjecting herself to are tracking her nighttime erections with a small device she calls a “techno tampon” and using a sauna to see how her menstrual cycle would be affected by extreme heat, with Tolo taking a temperature-tracking pill before trying to push her core temperature to a brutal 102.4 degrees.

After 25 minutes in the sauna, Tolo started feeling nauseous and having headaches. Johnson says he became concerned about her and encouraged her to step out, but she refused. “She’s very sincere when she says she’s doing this for women,” he says.

Tolo stays quiet. She’d just gotten an x-ray of her abdomen to ensure that the tracking pill hadn’t gotten lodged in her stomach, and she seems a little bit more depleted than she had in our past conversations.

I ask what it felt like to be in such an intense physical situation, and what was going through her mind. She answers almost immediately.

“I wasn’t getting out of there. There was no other option,” she says. “I felt sick at times. I didn’t know how reasonable or logical I was being, if I was losing my bearings, if I was going to pass out. But I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to do something on behalf of half the population.”

OK, I ask, but did it have to be her? Did Kate Tolo’s body have to become the most tracked female body in the world?

“I don’t know what other individual woman would have the time, the access, the level of privilege to be able to take this journey,” she says. “So I’m taking myself out of this and saying from a humanity perspective, in 2026, this is the right thing for this human in this body to do, in service of all the other women out there.”

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.”

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.

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.

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?”