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Put bluntly, picking the best movies of 2023 was tough. The double-whammy of Barbie and Oppenheimer gave the box office a long-overdue, post-Covid-19 jolt, only to be followed by a pair of months-long strikes in Hollywood that shut down production on nearly all the films in the works for 2024 and beyond. Even now, with the strikes over, the industry is scratching its head at what happened and what’s to come.

Still, amidst all the noise, 2023 provided a wealth of quietly beautiful films. Even as Hollywood fretted over the possibility of artificial intelligence upending filmmaking and giving writing and acting gigs to bots, it’s impossible to watch the movies on this list and not feel such a possibility is faintly ridiculous. This year’s best releases were full of so much ambition and emotional intelligence it’s hard to argue that the value of human input in filmmaking is heading toward obsolescence. Packed with highly accomplished debuts from younger directors, and full of brilliant ideas, the best movies of 2023 were compelled by art’s old chestnut: humans struggling to understand their place in the world.

Killers of the Flower Moon

In 2017, David Grann published Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a true-crime yarn set in 1920s Oklahoma, a period when members of the Osage Nation were being killed for their oil money. Grann’s central character, Mollie Burkhart, was an Osage woman desperate to understand the deaths in her family; a twist reveals that her beloved husband, Ernest, is complicit. Martin Scorsese made a bold decision while adapting Grann’s work: He removed the whodunit aspect, instead letting the audience see exactly how Ernest came to menace his wife, anchoring the movie in the dim-witted villain’s perspective. It shouldn’t work, but in zeroing in on Ernest (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), Scorsese creates an almost unbearably harrowing portrait of all-American evil. A feel-bad masterpiece.

Anatomy of a Fall

Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a successful writer married to Samuel (Samuel Theis), a failed writer. When Samuel is found dead outside their home one snowy day, Sandra quickly goes from grieving widow to prime suspect and is forced to reveal the most intimate details of her complicated marriage, including the resentment she had toward her husband for an incident that left their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Ultimately, it’s Daniel who serves as the final word in what happened on that tragic day—and what will happen to his mother. This twisty, impeccably acted courtroom drama won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was a hit when it was released in its native France in August, but it made just a modest art-house splash in the US. But its success in the earliest days of the awards season—including accolades from the European Film Awards, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, and the Gotham Awards, as well as four Golden Globe nominations—indicates that splash will have a ripple effect.

Oppenheimer

It would be remiss not to include Oppenheimer, which divided the WIRED office and the internet. Some saw it as misogynist and shallow; some saw it as a blockbuster auteur’s return to form. Whatever your opinion, director Christopher Nolan took an esoteric biography about a scientist trying to get security clearance and turned it into more than $950 million at the box office.

Showing Up

Kelly Reichhardt and Michelle Williams—the indie world’s Scorsese and DiCaprio—collaborate here for the fourth time, and the result is a deeply layered and subtly poignant gem. We follow Lizzy (Williams), a doggedly persistent artist, as she preps for an upcoming show. Her artistic endeavor, small clay women molded into evocative poses, is obstructed by family, work, and life in general. Showing Up captures the universally recognizable seesaw between the anxiety that life is slipping through your fingers, happening to you, and the joy—evidenced in moments of Lizzy’s contented sculpting—that things are going just as they should.

Barbie

Perhaps no one expected a film based on Mattel’s iconic doll to become a feminist lightning rod, but here we are. What made director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which she wrote with her partner Noah Baumbach, such a cultural flashpoint is that it walks such a fine line. It is both so progressive it had conservatives lighting dolls on fire and also not feminist enough. For those in the middle, though, it was a washed-in-pink sendup of patriarchy full of Indigo Girls sing-alongs and Zack Snyder jabs that really took hold. It also took home nearly $1.5 billion at the box office and started talk of a Mattel Cinematic Universe. Welcome to the Mojo Dojo Casa House, I guess.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Raven Jackson’s directorial debut is a feast for the senses. Over the span of 92 minutes, the award-winning poet and photographer channels her artistic talents to create this breathtakingly shot recounting of one Mississippi woman’s life, from the seemingly mundane (adolescent adventures) to the moments you never forget (the death of a loved one). Though Jackson is spare with her dialog, the result is a lyrical movie that is reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s earliest work. The film—which was produced by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins—was a hit at Sundance earlier this year and was named one of 2023’s best indie films by the National Board of Review, but it managed to stay firmly under the radar during its brief theatrical run in November.

Passages

Filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), are living a comfortable life in Paris, though possibly too comfortable. At the wrap party for his latest film, Tomas meets a young woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and the two begin an intense affair, creating a complex love triangle. Though Tomas and Martin split, they continually find themselves coming back together. The film is a painfully human exploration of the complexities of love, with impeccable performances all around—most notably from Rogowski, who has landed on some critics’ lists as a possible Oscar contender.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

In 2018, when Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse hit theaters, it changed perception about what Spider-Man movies, and animated films, could be. No longer led by Peter Parker, a kid from Queens who gets bit by a radioactive spider, it was led by Miles Morales, a kid from Brooklyn who met a similar fate in another part of the multiverse. Across the Spider-Verse continues Miles’ story and his quest to be his own kind of hero and save the multiverse, and his timeline, from a terrible fate. Fun, heartbreaking, and a thrill to watch, it’s one of the best Spider-Man movies ever and is so beautifully animated it’s breathtaking.

May December

Never before in the history of cinema has the phrase “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” felt so ominous or so perfect. The latest from director Todd Haynes (Carol) centers on Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to shadow Gracie, the woman she’s about to play in an upcoming film. Loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, Gracie is a middle-aged woman married to a younger man whom she first met when he was 13 and she was in her thirties. Their twins are about to graduate high school, and during the week before the ceremony that Elizabeth spends with the family all sorts of complex and unsettling details emerge—some of the most unnerving about Elizabeth herself. Wicked and chilling, right down to its score, May December is full of surprises and two impeccable performances from Portman and Moore.

Asteroid City

With its pastel hues, A-list ensemble cast, and a plot that’s like going for a meandering stroll with someone who tells long, pointless stories, Asteroid City is—depending on your viewpoint—either quintessentially Wes Anderson or unbearably Wes Anderson. On the surface, it’s about an alien spaceship landing in a retro-futurist version of small-town America. But it’s layered and intricate: a movie about a documentary about a play, with Jason Schwartzman as war photographer Augie Steenbeck (and the actor playing him), and Scarlett Johansson as Hollywood star Midge Campbell (and the actor playing her). The overall effect is like some fine work of French patisserie—a macaron, maybe: sweet, pretty, gone.

Earth Mama

Director Savanah Leaf’s latest centers on Gia, a 24-year-old mother and recovering addict caught up in San Francisco’s foster care system. Gia has two kids she can see only sporadically; she is pregnant with a third. She must decide whether agreeing to adoption will help her case of increasing contact with her other two. Leaf’s achievement is to capture the inhumane pressure that leads people to act self-destructively. The viewer feels that pressure throughout and faces no choice but to understand what Gia must do.

Bottoms

Horny teen-sex comedies have been around for at least a half-century—which makes director Emma Seligman’s reinvention of the genre all the more impressive. In Bottoms, queer pals PJ (Rachel Sennott, who cowrote the script with Seligman) and Josie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) decide to start a fight club at their high school as part of an elaborate scheme to hook up with hot cheerleaders. What the teens don’t count on is the plan actually working and that the best course of action is to try to undo the revolution they ignite. Real-life friends Sennott and Edebiri are an onscreen duo to be reckoned with and get a huge assist from retired running back Marshawn Lynch, who gets to spread his wings as a comedic actor (after his hilarious performance in an episode of Netflix’s Murderville).

Zone of Interest

This is Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited return to film following 2013’s critically-beloved Under the Skin. Here he takes on an Everest: the Holocaust. This story is based on the novel by Martin Amis, who passed away this year, and follows Rudolf Höss and his family as they live an idyllic life on the edge of Auschwitz. In the tradition of films like Shoah, Glazer never quite looks the horror in the eye. There are merely visions of smoke and barbed wire, and a deeply unsettling chorus of muffled screaming. Much of the most starkly vicious moments come from the script: At one point, Höss cannot concentrate at a party; he is too busy sizing up how the high ceilings would make it challenging to gas the guests.

Talk to Me

The first feature of Australian YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou is an intelligent, brilliantly realized, nasty little shock of a horror film. The central threat is an embalmed severed hand, which, when you hold it and say the film’s title, lets you converse with the dead. The kids treat it like a designer drug, filming their hallucinatory freak-outs on their phones. If that makes it sound like there’s a lot that could go wrong, be sure—it all does.

The Boy and the Heron

After years of brilliant films, Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli landed at the top of the North American box office with The Boy and the Heron. Reportedly the final film from studio cofunder Hayao Miyazaki, it brought in $12.8 million in its opening weekend, a first for an original anime film. It’s deserved. Telling the story of a boy, struggling to cope with his mother’s death, who meets a heron who shows him a magical world, it’s everything fans have come to expect from Ghibli. Lush, gut-wrenching, and full of just the right balance of fantasy and reality, it’s classic Miyazaki.

Kate Knibbs, Amit Katwala, and Angela Watercutter contributed to this guide.

The early 1970s were the real heyday of beef in the US. It was the era of stroganoff, stews, and casseroles, steak lunches and 60-cent hamburgers. It was also the beginning of a long decline for the all-American meat. In 1975, Americans on average ate close to 90 pounds of beef each year. That has now dipped to around 57 pounds, and chicken has assumed beef’s place as the most-consumed meat in the US.

Falling appetite for beef is good news for the environment. Beef produces 10 times the greenhouse gas emissions of poultry or pig meat and between 20 and 60 times more than many plant-based forms of protein. But to really work out where beef consumption might be headed, you need to look at who exactly is really into eating cows, and that’s where things get interesting.

Earlier this year a study from Tulane University in New Orleans found that a relatively small number of Americans are responsible for the lion’s share of beef consumption—and those eaters tend to skew older and male. But the beef industry isn’t content with the narrowing demographics of its customers—it has its eyes on creating a whole new generation of beef-eating stalwarts.

Diego Rose is the director of Tulane University’s nutrition program and one of the authors of the paper examining beef habits in the US. The research took data from a nationwide study conducted from 2015 through 2018 that asked adult Americans to recall which foods they had eaten in the previous 24 hours. The authors defined anyone who ate more than 4 ounces of beef a day—a little more than a single cooked hamburger—as a high consumer of beef, since US dietary guidelines recommend that adults eat no more than 4 ounces of meat, poultry, and eggs per day.

Over half of the survey respondents had eaten beef in the previous 24 hours, but what surprised Rose was just how few people were responsible for most of the beef consumption. According to his data, just 12 percent of people surveyed accounted for half of the total beef consumed. People who ate a lot of beef were more likely to be male and aged 50 to 65—roughly correlating with the baby boomer generation.

Today’s high consumers of beef likely grew up in the golden era of beef in the US, before rising prices and health fears associated with red meat made beef a less central part of the diet. “In general your dietary habits are inelastic,” says Rose. From around the age of young adulthood people tend to stick to foods they already know they like. People aged 66 or older were also less likely to be high consumers of beef—something that Rose says may be due to people cutting down due to advice from doctors. “My hunch is that life catches up with them,” he says.

When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.

So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there’s a lot of fossil fuels.”

By switching to a climate-conscious bank, you could reduce those emissions by about 75 percent, the study found. In fact, if you moved $8,000 dollars—the median balance for US customers—the reduction in your indirect emissions would be twice that of the direct emissions you’d avoid if you switched to a vegetarian diet.

Put another way: You as an individual have a carbon footprint—by driving a car, eating meat, running a gas furnace instead of a heat pump—but your money also has a carbon footprint. Banking, then, is an underappreciated yet powerful avenue for climate action on a mass scale. “Not just voting every four years, or not just skipping the hamburger, but also where my money sits, that’s really important,” says Foley.

Just as you can borrow money from a bank, so too do fossil fuel companies and the companies that support that industry—think of building pipelines and other infrastructure. “Even if it’s not building new pipelines, for a fossil fuel company to be doing just its regular operations—whether that’s maintaining the network of gas stations that it owns, or maintaining existing pipelines, or paying its employees—it’s going to need funding for that,” says Paddy McCully, senior analyst at Reclaim Finance, an NGO focused on climate action.

A fossil fuel company’s need for those loans varies from year to year, given the fluctuating prices of those fuels. That’s where you, the consumer, comes in. “The money that an individual puts into their bank account makes it possible for the bank to then lend money to fossil fuel companies,” says Richard Brooks, climate finance director at Stand.earth, an environmental and climate justice advocacy group. “If you look at the top 10 banks in North America, each of them lends out between $20 billion and $40 billion to fossil fuel companies every year.”

The US Department of Justice has got mail: A coalition of more than a dozen tech advocacy groups wrote to the agency today calling on it to launch an investigation into allegedly anticompetitive behavior by Apple.

The letter says that Apple’s recent blocking of Beeper, which reverse engineered iMessage to allow compatibility with Android phones, is another example of Apple “abusing its power to stifle competition and protect its famed ‘walled garden.’” It was sent by the Tech Oversight Project, which campaigns for tougher tech regulation.

A second letter was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday by Demand Progress, which works on internet-related civil liberties, asking it to launch its own Apple probe. More than a dozen other progressive advocacy groups cosigned the two letters, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Economic Liberties Project, and Fight for the Future.

The Department of Justice has been reported to be investigating Apple over antitrust concerns since at least 2020. Tech Oversight Project’s letter to the DOJ urged it to accelerate that work and file an antitrust suit against Apple, pointing to what it called a “long, ongoing history of anticompetitive behavior, including favoring its own products on its devices, unfair policies for third-party apps and control of the App Store marketplace, and using its dominance to crush smaller competitors.” Bloomberg reported earlier in December that an EU antitrust investigation could make an enforcement decision against Apple over its control of the app store in early 2024.

The letter to the DOJ also cited the recent shutdown of Beeper Mini and prior complaints by Tile, maker of a tracking device, that its product’s functionality was affected by Apple when the iPhone maker launched its own AirTag trackers.

In its own letter, Demand Progress, which claims more than a million members, appealed to Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Amy Klobuchar, chair of that group’s subcommittee on antitrust, to call for a public hearing and investigation into Apple’s practices, including its strategy of keeping iMessage exclusive to its own devices.

“Apple is attempting to squash efforts to streamline messaging between Apple and Android devices,” the letter reads. It cites accusations that by making messages from people without iPhones appear in green bubbles, Apple exploits peer pressure, especially on teenagers, to advance its own interests. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Pile On

The Apple-Beeper episode has triggered new pressure on Apple to loosen its tight control of its services. On December 17, four US senators wrote to the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s antitrust division, Jonathan Kanter, calling for the department to investigate whether Apple potentially violated antitrust laws when it cut off some of Beeper’s functionality between Android messages and iMessage.

Beeper, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup, launched its Beeper Mini app on December 5 to bridge the gap between SMS messaging on Android phones and Apple’s iMessage protocol on iPhones. The app runs on Android phones and costs $2 per month.

In a minivan with the rear seats ripped out, John is chasing one of his 250 electric scooters down a California highway. He finds it 10 miles away, hiding in a bush—a run-and-dump tactic that he says thieves use to test whether anyone will come after them before they take a scooter home. John, not his real name, always gives chase, because his livelihood depends on it. “If I come in too soft, then they say, ‘Oh, this guy, he’s a pussy. I could kick his ass.’ So I have to be a little aggressive,” says John, who is well past the age where it’s safe to fist-fight. He spends the next hour hunting down other scooters from his fleet that have been knocked over or need recharging.

John is a contractor for scooter rental company Bird Global and looks after all the scooters in a particular area in return for a cut of rental fees paid by riders. Fleet managers, as they are called, are technically their own bosses, but John spends his days at the beck and call of the company’s app. Bird requires him to maintain several productivity scores that, to John, feel nonnegotiable. Each scooter lit up in red in the fleet manager app knocks his score down. That warning can signal that a scooter has been stolen, fallen over due to sloppy parking or vandalism, or simply sat idle for too long—situations largely outside of John’s control.

For Bird to offer convenient rides at the tap of an app, John and other fleet managers must handle the grinding logistics of scattering scooters around cites. It takes street smarts, plenty of guts, hours of driving, and sometimes strongly implied threats of violence. If more than 10 percent of his fleet turns red, John can get chewed out by a Bird manager, and he has been told he could lose some scooters for breach of contract.

Bird became the largest micromobility company in North America this fall after purchasing competitor Spin. It was once valued at more than $2 billion and seemed to epitomize a shiny future of clean urban transport. But ridership slumped during the pandemic—and so did Bird’s shares after its 2021 stock market debut. In late 2022, after a series of business setbacks, the company warned investors that it could go bankrupt. It was booted from the New York Stock Exchange in September of this year for failing to consistently maintain a market cap of $15 million. As the company scrambled to survive, it has squeezed its fleet managers harder. On December 20, their situation became more uncertain when Bird announced it was filing for bankruptcy.

The years leading up to that moment have been tough for many Bird fleet managers. More than a dozen current or former fleet managers in the US, who like John asked for anonymity, fearing retaliation from Bird, described their unstable and sometimes punishing relationships with the company. They made personal and monetary sacrifices for Bird while, as contractors, having little power over their working conditions. And as Bird’s business struggled, fleet managers were presented with updated contracts that John and others say have cut their income by about half.

The situation for some fleet managers has become desperate. One in the Pacific Northwest said he had only slept eight hours on a recent weekend and that he and his two employees have all been in separate car accidents on the job. Three other fleet managers say they have sometimes carried guns when on the street with Bird scooters, because brandishing a weapon can feel useful when facing off scooter thieves or vandals. Several former West Coast fleet managers carried Tasers while on the job.

WIRED sent a list of questions to Bird based on interviews with fleet managers, but company spokesperson Adam Davis declined to address most of them. He said that Bird was ending the fleet manager program in some cities—apparently cutting the contractors loose and replacing them with staff or new contractors who handle more scooters and are paid less. In a statement sent to WIRED before the bankruptcy announcement, Michael Washinushi, Bird’s interim CEO, said the company got new management and ownership this year that was trying to “reset” how the company does business. “Through the course of the year, management has improved operations while being laser focused on providing a safe and enjoyable experience for our riders and an improved relationship with our partners, including our fleet managers,” Washinushi said.

“Stupid Money”

Bird grew fast. The company was founded in September 2017 with just 10 scooters in Santa Monica, California. Nine months later it had raised more than $300 million in funding at a valuation of about $2 billion. As city dwellers flirted with the fun and novelty of being able to hop on an electric ride, investors embraced the idea that scooters could upend urban transport by replacing cars.

Part of Bird’s model was to outsource the challenging logistics of leaving scooters propped up in public places for anyone to rent, steal, or abuse. In the company’s early days, it invited people to become freelance “chargers” who got paid for finding and recharging scooters low on battery, and it used freelance mechanics for repairs, paying out on a per-scooter basis. The company started hiring salaried mechanics in some cities to repair scooters in early 2019.

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Got a Tip?

Are you a current or former employee of Bird? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the author of this article on amydmartyn@protonmail.com. WIRED protects the confidentiality of its sources.

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In March 2020, Bird ridership plummeted as Covid lockdowns shut cities down. Bird fired 406 office-based workers over a two-minute Zoom call. Company filings later showed that rides dropped by more than 50 percent in 2020. It was around this time, during the spring and summer of 2020, when people who had been freelancing as chargers say they started getting surprise messages from Bird. They were pitched an exciting new opportunity that involved getting their own fleet of scooters and a cut of the money from every ride taken.

The new fleet manager gig combined the duties of charging, repairing, and storing scooters—just about every aspect of the scooter operation other than the app that people tapped to find a ride. Some of the job’s responsibilities could be tragic—several fleet managers recall picking up scooters from accident scenes. Participants had to start their own companies to get scooters from Bird, agreeing to make “equipment payments” that were taken out of their ride payouts each week until the scooters were paid off. After that, a fleet manager would be entitled to 81 percent of the net revenue from each ride, though contracts show the title of the scooter would always remain with Bird.

On TikTok, dozens of influencers talked up the Bird fleet manager program as a “side hustle” that anyone, even a teenager, could do with up to $1,500 in projected weekly earnings. Fleet managers who joined the program when it launched by April 2020 describe it as almost addictive. “So much money, that it was actually pretty stupid,” says a former fleet manager in San Diego, who quickly built a thriving business. He recalls seeing gross sales in the high six figures for his fleet’s first year, and earning close to $100,000 out of that in profits, after Bird’s fees and his own expenses such as van purchases and warehouse rentals. “It was a lot of low-income people that the program was employing when a lot of these other businesses didn’t even look at us,” says another former fleet manager in San Diego.

Photograph: Amazon

Magnetic tiles are one of the most amazing little inventions for toddlers. It takes a while before littles are coordinated enough to put Legos together or a lot of building toys, but they tend to pick up these snap-together tiles at a much earlier age—and get very creative! This Picasso set is perfect for filling out your collection so you can smash giant buildings like Godzilla—or build something totally calm and serene if you have that lovely kind of child. We intermingle Picasso Tiles with standard Magna-Tiles and haven’t had any issues. They also don’t seem to crack or break easily, so they should last through multiple children. —Jeffrey Van Camp

Lalo 13-15 Month

Photograph: Lalo

There’s a lot to keep in mind when you’re shopping for baby toys. You’re looking for something that can stimulate their little forming mind—and for it to be age appropriate, which can be difficult to discern with those first two years. Enter Lalo’s toy boxes, which come with multiple toys designed for three month age ranges, so you can easily pick one for the age the baby is or will be when they receive it. It comes with a little booklet on how to use it both in the intended age window and afterwards. My son just turned 16 months, but he still loves most of the items from the 13-15 month kit – especially the drum. —Nena Farrell

Photograph: Amazon

This was the trending toy in my daughter’s second-grade class last year. Almost everyone had one or wanted one. This pen is simple and safe enough for even a second-grader to use and fit easily in my daughter’s tiny hands. Just charge the pen via a USB-C connection, feed the colored threads through the pen, and watch your child magically create little 3D flowers and kitten to leave all over your house. I would also suggest shelling out for a storage case, or maybe an empty shoebox, because it’s been a year and I’m still finding loose little colored filaments in very strange places. —Adrienne So

Photograph: Amazon

I’ve lost count of the number of Baby Yodas I have in this house—my daughter has a water bottle entirely covered in Baby Yoda stickers—but this simple plush seems to be the one that gets the most action. It’s small enough for a kid to play with next to Barbies or stuff in a backpack but big enough to cuddle or engage in conflicts with other stuffies. —Martin Cizmar

Photograph: Amazon

However many animals Noah had on that Arc is about as many squishmallows and squishmallow-styled round stuffies we have in my house. This dog (not technically a squishmallow and made by the OurHonor brand) is next in line as a surprise this Christmas. I also highly recommend Target’s line of Pokemon plushes, especially Bulbasaur, which you can have extra fun with by introducing him using your imitation of the guttural voice he has in the original TV series. —Martin Cizmar

Photograph: Amazon

When this set first popped up at my toddler’s grandparents house when he could barely walk. I thought it might be a good day of fun. That was at least two years ago, and he’s used it constantly ever since, along with other littles! Some weeks dusting was the hot item, other times the littles would sweep and mop up a storm. (A pretend spray bottle and squeegee are also a fun addition, just leave the actual water outside.) The pieces are made from real wood and still look close to new after a lot of abuse. The house isn’t dust free yet, but we’re working on it! —Jeffrey Van Camp

Toys to Avoid

Photograph: Amazon

I don’t recommend this trending toy, despite its many positive reviews. There are a lot of ways to help your kid pretend to vacuum, but this one is a bit complex for its own good. It looks neat, and Casdon Toys advertises it as a working vacuum, but it only sucks tiny items up through a half-inch hole on the bottom (barely). Anything an uncoordinated toddler is able to suck then has to fit in a tiny spoon-sized bin that you’ll have to empty frequently yourself because it takes finger coordination. You’ll also need 4 C batteries (not included) and some replacements handy. There are two switches, one to turn on the suction, and another to swirl some beads so it looks vacuumy.

After a bit of initial interest, this toy tends to sit around my house. It doesn’t stand up on its own, so we regularly have to prop it up if it gets disturbed. My advice: buy an actual, decent little handheld vacuum. They might have a lot more fun actually sucking up the dirt on your floors and in your couch cushions, and they might help a little, too. —Jeffrey Van Camp

The man charged with administering Arizona’s elections isn’t concerned about the state’s ability to securely hold elections. But he’s going to have to persuade millions of other people to feel the same way.

Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was elected Arizona’s secretary of state in 2022. A lawyer who previously worked as a prosecutor in Colorado and Arizona, and served as the Maricopa County Recorder before taking office, Fontes must now take on the role of convincing the state’s voters that its elections are legitimate.

Arizona is possibly the market leader in ridiculous election conspiracies and deniers. After former president Donald Trump falsely claimed fraud following the 2020 election, a sham audit to investigate claims of election fraud was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Arizona state Senate. Cyber Ninjas falsely claimed that 300 dead people voted; the firm shut down after refusing to release public records to comply with a court order.

In 2022, Arizona election workers faced violent threats, and Trump used technical glitches to stoke fear about the legitimacy of election results. Kari Lake, a prominent election denier who received Trump’s endorsement for governor, refused to concede after losing the election, and made multiple attempts to get the courts to overturn the result. (Lake is now running for Senate.)

Fontes already has his hands full in the lead-up to the 2024 election. In November, two Republican Arizona county officials, Peggy Judd and Terry Crosby, were indicted by the Arizona attorney general on felony charges of conspiracy and interference with an election officer. The charges stemmed from their alleged efforts to delay the certification of votes in the 2022 general election, citing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. (An attorney for Crosby told Reuters there was no crime and that his client will be vindicated. Judd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In an interview with WIRED, Fontes spoke about his plans to protect election workers in 2024, his thoughts on generative AI and deepfakes, and what he thinks of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk’s knowledge of Arizona’s elections.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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WIRED: What is keeping you up at night?

Fontes: Well, the most critical things that are keeping me up at night don’t have anything to do with the technology. It has to do with a lot of the unknowns out there. Human error being blown up by election denialists, by social media.

If you are planning to buy your donkey meat on Amazon this Christmas, you may have to look elsewhere. The world’s largest online retailer says it has stopped selling edible donkey in California, WIRED has learned.

Amazon’s new policy kicked in after months of negotiations with the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting horses. In February, the center filed a legal complaint alleging that Amazon’s sale and distribution of products that contain ejiao—an ingredient made with donkey skin that’s popular in health supplements—violates a California animal-welfare law called the Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act.

Horsemeat, the center argues, includes donkeys.

As part of a settlement to that complaint, Amazon has agreed to stop selling products that contain ejiao in California. According to court documents, Amazon denies any wrongdoing and disputes the center’s allegations. But in an interview with WIRED, Corey Page, an attorney with the law firm Evans & Page who represented the center in the lawsuit, speculates that “Amazon doesn’t settle cases it thinks it can win.”

“This is a signal that if anyone is doing this, they are doing something illegal,” he says. “If a company like Amazon decides it needs to stop sending products and promoting products that violate California law, then all other retailers should do the same.”

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment or questions about its new donkey-meat policy.

According to the settlement, Amazon has agreed to “undertake reasonable best efforts” to implement “internal measures” that prevent the sale of products containing ejiao “so that such products will not be available for sale to California addresses.”

It’s unclear how effective that approach will be. A June 2020 investigation from The Markup found that Amazon failed to enforce its own list of banned items including bongs, pill presses, and gun parts. A major 2019 investigation by the Wall Street Journal similarly found thousands of unsafe and banned products for sale on the site. A CNBC report that same year revealed Amazon was shipping expired baby formula and other consumables. Also in 2019, WIRED found books on Amazon pushing potentially fatal “treatments” for autism.

To test the terms of the donkey-meat settlement, WIRED filled an Amazon shopping cart with 10 edible items containing donkey and tried to ship it to our San Francisco office. Amazon prevented our sale at checkout with a message that read, “Sorry, this item can’t be shipped to your selected address. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item from your order.” In February, we were able to purchase ejiao products and successfully ship them to a California address.

Amazon is not the only retailer that has limited its sale of donkey meat in recent years. In 2018, Walmart and eBay committed to drop ejiao products after pressure from animal rights advocates who claimed that the high demand led to the brutal treatment of donkeys. A 2019 report by an advocacy organization called the Donkey Sanctuary details how workers in Tanzania bludgeoned donkeys with hammers to meet their slaughter quotas.

If you didn’t know, or had never thought about, whether Amazon sells donkey meat, you likely aren’t alone. In February, WIRED found more than a dozen products on Amazon that contained donkey; some even claimed to be “herbal” on their bottle. They had names like Chinese Special Snack Seedless and Ass Hide Glue Lumps. “It’s not herbal,” a lifelong vegetarian who unknowingly ate donkey after purchasing a dietary supplement on Amazon told WIRED at the time. “It’s literally made with donkeys.”

Many people meet Dale Atkins for the first time on their worst days—ice climbers who are stranded and injured, skiers that have been swallowed by an avalanche. Atkins, a skilled mountaineer as well as a climatologist and former weather and avalanche forecaster, is one of the experts on Colorado’s Alpine Rescue Team that local sheriffs call to the rescue.

In some ways, planning for and executing those rescues is becoming more complicated because of climate change. Weather fueled by climate change can elevate hazards on the mountain, whether through weird winter rain, blizzards, droughts, or summer wildfires. Each extreme impacts the landscape with a potentially fatal danger. And faced with such unpredictability, experts can’t shake the fear that their work is shifting away from recreational rescues toward disaster response.

“We know that our summers are getting longer and drier and warmer—and our winters are getting shorter and drier and warmer, too.” says Atkins, who has been part of the Alpine Rescue Team for 50 years. “But what we’re also seeing is the amplitude of the storms. We’re seeing the extremes more often. For us in mountain rescue, it’s those big storms that can cause us a lot of hard work.”

Despite a recent string of unseasonably hot and dry years, last winter blanketed the western US and Canada with historic snowfall. Colorado officials reported that 5,813 total avalanches caught 122 people and killed 11, the second-most deaths since records began in 1951. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, predicts a warmer and drier year this winter into 2024.

That could be both a good thing and a bad thing. One of the most lethal hazards in a winter landscape might come as a surprise: rain. As average winter temperatures creep up, rain falls higher up the mountain, where snow normally falls. These “rain on snow” events occur more at the start of winter and early spring, according to Ty Brandt, a snow hydrometeorologist with the Scripps’ Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes. Climate change could bring more.

The quandary here runs deeper than slushy snow and warm ski days. In certain alpine conditions, rainfall percolates down the upper layers of snowpack, and can refreeze and trigger avalanches. Pinning down precisely when and why each happens is still an open question, Brandt says.