Category: BUYSEMPERFI

While an ebook subscription might sound ideal, you should take some time to consider the pros and cons of each one. These digital reading services are often billed as the equivalent of Netflix or Spotify for books, and there are similarities, but ebook subscriptions also have some unexpected restrictions.

Content: All ebook subscription services offer limited libraries of ebooks. (This is where the Netflix comparison is useful.) They may boast more than a million titles, but that total doesn’t necessarily include any works by your favorite authors; none of the services we tested had a single title by Cormac McCarthy, for example, though some had audiobooks of his works.

The big five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) dominate the bestseller charts in the US but have had limited dealings with ebook subscription services so far. Current best-seller lists are not well represented, and the modest list of mainstream hits that appears mostly comprises older titles. Whatever service you are considering, we advise browsing the available library of ebooks and audiobooks before you commit.

Reading Habits: If you only read one or two books a month, you might be better off buying popular titles, recommendations from trusted friends, or works by your favorite authors. That way, you get to choose the best ebooks and keep them. With ebook subscriptions, you lose access the moment you stop subscribing, and the library of available books can change at any time without notice.

Voracious readers who are happy to try new and unfamiliar authors will likely get the most value from ebook subscriptions. But while these services are typically described as unlimited, they often do have hidden limits. This is where they differ from services like Spotify and Netflix. With Scribd, for example, the available library is reduced when you hit opaque limits.

Support: Make sure the devices you like to read on are supported. Most ebook subscription services offer apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, at a minimum. Languages, accessibility, and extra features like search vary, so do your research to make sure the app supports your needs. Sadly, many ebook readers, like Kindles, are not compatible with ebook subscription services other than their manufacturer’s offering. 

Audiobooks: Unlike ebook subscription services, some audiobook services offer a monthly credit system that allows you to buy audiobooks you can keep, even if you stop subscribing. Others offer apparently unlimited access to a streaming library, but there are often hidden limits that narrow your choice for that month after you’ve listened to an audiobook or two. Consider also the maximum bitrate for audio streams, as this differs from service to service and can impact the quality of your audiobook.

Cookbook authors have a few options. They could write a regionally specific cookbook or a mass-market one starring ingredients that grow sustainably in lots of places (as One did). Or they could write a cookbook that samples vast biodiversity at some cost to sourceability—that’s the approach the UN cookbook took.

“There are many cookbooks that could … have 90 percent of the recipes be part of your staple at home,” Cruz said. “But that serves a different purpose.” The UN cookbook is instead “almost a launching point into everyone’s own culinary exploration and everyone’s own culinary journey.”

That exploratory emphasis—embodied not just in the recipes but in accompanying carbon and nutrition calculations and in principles that offer starting points rather than answers—puts it at one end of the spectrum in the balance these authors strike between nuance and approachability, science and art. As Cruz put it, “What we wanted to create was sort of a textbook in disguise.”

One, on the other hand, was always meant to make people pull out a cutting board. Jones includes no small measure of environmental nuance—she tucks articles on issues like soil health and ethical sourcing between her recipe chapters—but her recipes themselves don’t ask the cook to do anything other than make weeknight meals with supermarket ingredients. “I could have foraged for sea buckthorn and written a chapter on sea asparagus,” she laughs, “and I would love for everyone to be foraging. But that’s not the reality … I wanted to write a sustainable cookbook, but I also wanted to write a cookbook filled with recipes people could make.”

No matter the topic, writing a cookbook is a big undertaking. Authors develop 100 or more recipes, typically handing them off to recipe testers in batches to poke, prod, and polish to infallibility. And while roughly 20 million cookbooks are sold in the US each year, the field is ever more crowded, so it’s harder to stand out.

For now, the climate cookbooks shelf is tiny, and it’s hard to know which titles readers might be most tempted to pick up—let alone which, if any, might actually create meaningful shifts in what and how we eat.

“People buy cookbooks for myriad reasons,” wrote Matt Sartwell, the managing partner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, in an email to Grist. “But if there is anything that people will pay for—recipes and information being free and abundant on the internet—it’s a clear point of view and the promise that an author has given a subject very serious thought.”

One: Pot, Pan, Planet is Jones’ best-selling cookbook to date, despite the fact that leaning into sustainability “felt like a bit of a risk,” she said.

She has a hunch about why it has been popular. “People want to try and make a difference,” she said. “I think it felt comforting for people to have a book full of recipes that it felt OK to eat.”

“It is true that I am considered an expert on dog coat color,” Sheila Schmutz, an emeritus professor of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. “At least in terms of genetics.” I sent Schmutz, who has published multiple papers about the coats of dogs and cattle, a selection of photos of Bobi taken in 1999, 2016, and 2022, and asked her whether the photos appeared to be of the same dog.

Schmutz wasn’t sure. In a few photos Bobi’s fur appeared to be red, while in another it looked like he had a brown coat. Brown and red coats, Schmutz assured me, are two very different colors. “I had my husband look at the photo set too and he agrees that we can understand why people don’t think it’s the same dog in all the photos, but it’s not absolutely clear to us,” she wrote. “Wish this were more clearcut …” she signed off her email.

For certainty, I would have to look elsewhere, and so I turned to Karen Becker, a veterinarian and author of The Forever Dog: Surprising New Science to Help Your Canine Companion Live Younger, Healthier, and Longer. In several articles, Becker was credited as the person who broke the news of Bobi’s death, in a post on her Facebook page. I sent Becker a message through her website and waited for a response.

Becker, it turned out, was away lecturing, but I did get a response from her administrative assistant, Dana Adams, who was not impressed with the Guardian article casting doubt on Bobi’s longevity. “So much is incorrect,” Adams wrote. “Bobi never ate raw food, he only ate homemade cooked food, he’s a mutt not a purebred, and the lobby organization waited until the poor little guy’s cremation day to raise questions to Guinness about additional testing.”

Wait—what? A lobby organization? It was true that the GWR article about Bobi, and lots of the subsequent press coverage, had picked up on the detail that Bobi only ate “human food,” a factor that Bobi’s owner, Leonel Costa, cited as a reason for his dog’s unusual longevity. (Costa did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.) But Adams’ reference to a lobby organization seemed to be suggesting that there were dark forces behind these doubts. I pressed her for more details.

“Well, those of us in the pet space know it never goes well when you threaten a multi-billion dollar empire,” Adams wrote to me. “The Guardian article made it clear this is about the concerns vets have if people do what Leonel did and feed a home-cooked diet … Bobi directly threatens this entire industry.” Attached was a screenshot of the world’s top 10 pet food manufacturers, as ranked by petfoodindustry.com. Topping the list were Mars Petcare Inc., Nestlé Purina PetCare, and Hill’s Pet Nutrition.

Another reason for the trial’s failure could be that exenatide is much less potent than its newer cousin semaglutide, better known as Ozempic. Now that Ozempic is everywhere, anecdotal evidence is mounting that these drugs reduce cravings not just for food, but for online shopping, smoking, nail-biting, and alcohol.

Now, the first empirical evidence to support the idea that drugs like Ozempic could be an effective treatment for AUD is beginning to appear. This week, a new paper published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry strengthened the case. The paper relayed a series of case studies: six patients who had been prescribed semaglutide for weight loss, but who also qualified for having AUD. All six of the participants displayed significantly reduced symptoms of AUD—even those who had achieved minimal weight loss.

This small study is only the beginning. The authors are also running a clinical trial in Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking at semaglutide to treat AUD; a sister study is being conducted in Baltimore, Maryland. It’ll be at least a year and a half before those trials have publishable data, so this case series was done in order to set the table for the clinical trial data, say study authors Kyle Simmons, professor of pharmacology and physiology at Oklahoma State University, and Jesse Richards, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma. (Richards receives payment from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, who make GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs, to speak at conferences.)

While scientists aren’t certain how these drugs work to dampen alcohol cravings, it’s suspected to work on the same pathways that produce a shrunken appetite. A thirst for booze is thought to be driven by the rewarding properties that alcohol produces, delivered by a bump of dopamine released in the brain. Over time, that dopamine flurry reinforces a want for alcohol.

GLP-1 receptors are found dotted around the body, including in the brain structures that control our reward pathways. These receptors control the release of the hormone GLP-1, which has a multitude of roles to play in the body, including how we respond to alcohol.

What drugs like semaglutide, which mimic the actions of GLP-1, seem to do is lower the amount of the substance required—like food or alcohol—to feel satiated. Richards says some patients report going to an event where they’d normally expect to drink a lot, like a sports game or a fishing trip, “and instead of drinking their normal amount, they would drink one drink, and then kind of get bored and forget about it,” he says.

I loved the original Withings ScanWatch (8/10, WIRED recommends). It was a refined, elegant, health- and fitness-focused hybrid smartwatch with impressive stamina. The ScanWatch 2 retains everything that made the original so compelling and adds some subtle improvements, most notably temperature tracking, but this comes with an unpalatable price hike.

Unlike your average smartwatch, the Withings ScanWatch 2 makes do with a tiny screen; offers limited notifications; and quietly tracks your activity, health, and sleep. It can pass for a regular watch, with real hands, and it lasts up to a month between charges. It has been an easy and comfortable companion for the past couple of months.

Withings has added value with the temperature tracking and a redesigned charger, but the promised overnight heart rate variability (HRV) tracking is not available yet, and I can’t test the new menstrual cycle tracking. The companion Health Mate app has gone through several changes recently, largely to accommodate an optional subscription, but I don’t think it’s worth your time.

Timeless Classic

Photograph: Withings

The classy design of the Withings ScanWatch 2 is one of its main selling points. This hybrid smartwatch combines physical hands and a traditional watch face with chiseled or beveled lugs. The single rotating crown doubles as a button to bring the tiny OLED screen to life. Sapphire glass and stainless steel ensure durability, and the water resistance is 5ATM, so you can wear the ScanWatch 2 in the shower or pool.

I tested the larger 42-mm version with the black face and a black fluoroelastomer wrist band. You can opt for a white face and leather or metal link band, if you prefer. The smaller 38-mm model comes in more varieties, including dark blue or beige with a gold-tinted casing. The fluoroelastomer band is very comfortable, and the ScanWatch 2 is lighter than the original, so I have been wearing it 24/7. It took me a couple of days to get used to wearing it overnight.

The circle on the top half of the watch face houses the tiny grayscale OLED display, which is just over half an inch and always appears sharp and legible. You can turn it on by pressing the crown or toggle the raise-to-wake setting in the companion app. It displays the time and date by default, but you can turn the crown to cycle through heart rate, skin temperature, steps taken, and distance covered, or to record workouts, take an ECG or SpO2 measurement, trigger a breathing exercise, or dip into settings.

When you get notifications from your phone, they come through ticker tape style, so it can take quite a while to read a long message, but it is enough to decide whether you need to slip the phone from your pocket. There is no support for apps, payments, calls, music controls, or any other features you’ll typically find in smartwatches.

Turning It Up

The new headline feature is the TempTech24/7 module. It can track your baseline body temperature and alert you to changes. Unusual spikes in temperature could indicate impending illness, and warnings about your temperature getting too high can help you avoid heat exhaustion if you live in a hotter climate. Temperature variation could potentially enhance the accuracy of sleep and activity tracking too.

I was excited to try the temperature tracking and particularly interested in the idea of preemptive warnings about illness. It has warned me about elevated temperature twice and suggested I check for symptoms, but both times I was already feeling unwell. Once you have been wearing it for a while, the ScanWatch 2 establishes your baseline, and you can see your temperature variance above and below on a chart. Compared with the Ultrahuman Ring Air (7/10, WIRED Recommends), the ScanWatch 2 consistently measures my temperature as slightly higher.

Searching for the best mattress online is a waking nightmare, and picking the wrong one can literally cause bad dreams or kill your back. It doesn’t help that the online market is flooded with options or that there are more dedicated mattress review sites than stars in the sky.

A few years ago, we started this guide by filling a room with dozens of beds from top mattress-in-a-box companies and spent several days examining, reclining, and even jumping on each of them. We’ve since upgraded our process. Testers now spend weeks or months sleeping on each mattress in their homes; we’ve only included mattresses WIRED reviewers have spent at least a week sleeping on. These are our favorites.

Be sure to read our other sleep guides, including the Best Mattresses for Side Sleepers, Best Organic Mattresses, Best Bed Sheets, Best Bed Frames, and Best Sleep Trackers.

Updated November 2023: We’ve added the Bear Elite, Saatva Classic, and Sealy Cocoon, plus added two even cheaper mattresses for tight budgets.

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How To Pick A Mattress

You’ll spend a third of your life on a mattress, which means picking the right one is important. Start with your preferred sleeping position and how much support you need. Here are a few tips.

Firm or soft? Generally, heavier people and back or stomach sleepers will do better with firmer mattresses, while lighter people and side sleepers enjoy softer mattresses. Temperature is also an issue: Softer mattresses sleep warmer since your body is sinking into a layer of fabric and foam. Keep in mind that all mattresses have a break-in period, and the way the mattress feels on your first night won’t be how it feels after a week or two.

Hybrid or foam? The next big question is whether you want a foam mattress or a hybrid model that layers foam with built-in springs. We tend to recommend hybrids because they are more stable and supportive, and they usually stay cooler. Hybrids are often slightly pricier.

What size do you need? The prices below are based on the queen size, but almost all mattresses come in the standard sizes of Twin, Twin XL, Full, Queen, King, and California King. You’ll want to buy a mattress based on the size of your bed frame.

Set up. Most of these mattresses are delivered in a box, vacuum-sealed, and rolled up. Some are pretty heavy—up to 150 pounds—so be sure you have someone to help you. After you unroll your bed-in-a-box mattress and cut the vacuum bag open, it’ll immediately begin to inflate, so unbox it on your bed frame or near it. We have a helpful guide on how to set up the mattress you bought online with more tips. The mattresses are usually ready to go in a few hours, but most manufacturers recommend giving them two days to reach their normal state.

Buy it on sale. Mattresses go on sale often. If you see one at full price, there’s a strong chance you can save hundreds of dollars by waiting for the next big sale event (every few months).

What if you don’t like it? Most of the mattresses we have tested and recommend have at least a 100-night testing period and a 10-year warranty. You may want to look at the company’s policy as you may be on the hook for a nominal return fee.

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The civil case is separate from the federal criminal trial in the district, led by special counsel and former acting US attorney Jack Smith, which concerns not only Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, but allegations that he unlawfully retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Earlier this week, former vice president Mike Pence reportedly told the special counsel that Trump’s advisors—“crank” attorneys, as Pence put it—pushed the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. The case is set to go to trial this March.

The siege began shortly after Trump delivered a 75-minute speech at a park south of the White House known as the Ellipse. A House select committee investigating the riot last year said that Trump was aware the attack on the Capitol was underway as he arrived at the White House roughly 15 minutes after the speech. Witnesses, including a former DC police sergeant, claimed at the time that Trump had been swept away by US Secret Service agents trying to prevent him from joining the march.

Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, later testified that during the attack, Trump requested a list of phone numbers belonging to US senators on the Hill, whom he reportedly contacted in an attempt to stop the results of the 2020 election from being certified. The calls were not recorded on the presidential call log. During this time, Trump supporters were engaged with police and had begun forcing them back onto the Capitol lawn, throwing bottles and dousing several offices with chemical spray.

The attack lasted approximately two hours and resulted in five deaths, including that of a Capitol police officer. The rioters, who broke windows, ransacked lawmakers’ offices, and stole documents and electronics, reportedly caused more than $2 million in damages to the 222-year-old building.

Two Capitol police officers, James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, are seeking $75,000 in compensatory damages (as well as unspecified punitive damages) for injuries they say they sustained in the attack. In a court filing, Blassingame, an officer of 19 years, says he was struck in the face, head, and up and down his body by Trump supporters during the attempt to breach the Capitol building. Hemby, a former Marine, suffered “cuts and abrasions” to his face and hands. Neither officer could be immediately reached for comment.

At the onset of the suit, the plaintiff lawmakers included Democrats Eric Swalwell, Stephen Cohen, Bonnie Coleman, Veronica Escobar, Pramila Jayapal, Henry C. Johnson, Marcia Kaptur, Barbara Lee, Jerrold Nadler, and Maxine Walters. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and current mayor of Los Angeles, has also joined the suit. The lawmakers, including Bass, either did not respond or declined to comment.

Bennie Thompson, the congressman from Mississippi, says he was no longer party to the case on appeal, but welcomed the court’s decision. “Donald Trump should not be able to use the Presidency to shirk accountability for what he did to cause the insurrection on January 6th,” he tells WIRED.

An attorney for Trump, Jesse Binnall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

American politics is a circus. In the arena of Washington DC, law-making and law-breaking is a fanatical kind of entertainment. Republicans have thrived on a diet of chaos since the rise of former president Donald Trump, turning the performance of democracy into primetime viewing. “The reality of it is, it’s all theater,” Rep. George Santos of New York said during a press conference on the steps of the US Capitol Thursday as he faced expulsion from Congress.

Soaking in the carnival of media attention that has stalked him since arriving in DC in 2022, Santos, who was this week, as a solo act, taking one last stand, was predictably unmuzzled in the hours leading up to the vote that would decide his political future. “It’s theater for the cameras, it’s theater for the microphones,” he said, referring to the playhouse of American bureaucracy and, ironically, himself. “It’s theater for the American people at the expense of the American people.”

Santos in a short time had fashioned himself into one of the most fascinating carnival barkers of recent memory. By Friday he was out of a job.

As cameras rolled and online chatter swirled across social media about his alleged scams, there was nowhere for Santos to hide. Not that he wanted to, of course. In a Spaces conversation hosted on X, Santos was hellbent on exposing his congressional associates— “felons galore,” he colored them—for their alleged crimes. “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re gonna screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people,” he said. The spotlight was his alone, as was the intense scrutiny that came with it.

In October, a report filed by the House Ethics Committee claimed that Santos had overstepped his authority as a member of Congress, accusing him on multiple counts of financial fraud and criminal activity. Ever the congressional diva, the ethics report determined that Santos—among other misdeeds that already included charges of wire fraud and conspiracy—used campaign funds on botox, the porn-subsription site OnlyFans, and Ferragamos, a luxury Italian shoe brand (select pairs sell for more than $2,000). True to form, Santos said the report was “littered in hyperbole.”

Equal parts enigma and attraction, Santos courted controversy from the beginning of his tenure as US representative. There was an uncanny cadence to his personal testimony: nothing was exactly as he told it. Even now, in the dim light of his scandalous incumbency, the question of “Who is George Santos?” remains unclear. Santos’ air of mystery, but also deep fascination, is owed to his own innate flair for invention, which both feeds into the eccentrism of American politics and mirrors the conceited, but no less savory, surrealism of reality TV that we obsess over. Who doesn’t love a surprising plot twist and a riveting character arc?

Kyle Newman, director of the cult classic Fanboys, recently coauthored the book Lore and Legends: A Visual Celebration of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game. The book chronicles the astounding success of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset, which launched in 2014.

“This book explores D&D being nearly extinct in the early 2010s, up to now, where you’ve got 50 to 60 million people playing the game and it’s a household name again,” Newman says in Episode 555 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So how did they go from 2 to 3 million people playing the game to 60?”

The D&D revival is due to a confluence of factors, including ’80s nostalgia, the rise of geek culture, and digital technology. “You’ve got D&D on all types of television shows—Community, Big Bang Theory,” Newman says. “There’s actual play, the Critical Role explosion, which contributed. There’s a tremendous ruleset that contributed to it. There’s the ease with which one can learn how to play D&D. You can go online to YouTube and learn how to play, and suddenly this game that seemed so complicated or taboo, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just people getting together and telling a story and having fun.’”

An increasing number of celebrities have also declared their love for D&D, including Dwayne Johnson, Steven Colbert, and Drew Barrymore. Newman plays in a star-studded D&D campaign run by True Blood actor Joe Manganiello. “We were a few sessions in and then Tom Morello joined the group,” Newman says, “and then a few more sessions in and Dan Weiss joined—cocreator of Game of Thrones—and then Dave Benioff joined. The Big Show—the WWE wrestler—would fly in from Florida. Vince Vaughn joined the team. It was a very fun and boisterous group of people.”

Newman and Manganiello are also hard at work on an official D&D documentary, which is slated for release in 2024. “Next year’s the 50th anniversary, and the game is as vibrant and relevant as ever,” Newman says. “It took a family of people, a legacy of people, a lineage, to understand the tradition and continue it. So that’s what we really get into. You understand that this is a game not just made by one man, and it’s survived because of the people who play it and the people who love it.”

Listen to the complete interview with Kyle Newman in Episode 555 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Kyle Newman on The Hollow:

[Writer Hans Rodionoff and producer Mason Novick] called me up one Sunday morning and said, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “Oh, flying home tomorrow,” and they’re like, “No you’re not. Meet us at Starbucks.” So I go to the Starbucks on Sunday morning, and they’re like, “We need you to come to set. Our director has quit. The movie’s fully financed. We need someone to take over and shoot the movie. Let’s go.” And I was like, “I need to read it.” And they’re like, “No, no, we’re going to set now.” And sure enough, outside the door a white van was parked, waiting to take me to set.

Kyle Newman on D&D characters:

These characters—Van Richten and Tasha and Xanathar and Mordenkainen and Acererak—they weren’t invented for 5th Edition. These are people that were in their lexicon of villains and heroes that are cover stars again, and they’re finding new ways to make them relevant for a modern audience. So if you’ve never played it, it’s exciting and you get into it and learn about the characters, but if you have played it, then you know that Xanathar is not a character that was invented for Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. He’s a character that has been around for a long time.

Kyle Newman on Heroes Feast Flavors of the Multiverse:

There’s exquisite photography and food styling, but on top of that there’s photography that captures these places, that isn’t about food, and trying to bring to life places like Shadowfell or the planet Krynn. We got to shoot at a northern California vineyard that has a medieval castle on its property, with its own dungeon and everything. … A lot of the book is not just about the food, but it’s about the lore and the traditions surrounding the people and the food. So it is a cookbook, but it’s also a sourcebook of sorts for the cultures and settings.

Kyle Newman on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves:

The quality of the movie was incredible. You look at Rotten Tomatoes, critically it’s loved. Everyone who saw the movie really enjoyed it. I think it was just that the studio made a mistake releasing the movie. They pushed it a month and backed it right up to Super Mario Bros., which was the biggest movie of the year until Barbie. … All of the things that were in the control of the filmmakers went well. They made a good movie and people liked the movie. Was it marketed correctly? Was it released at the right time? That’s out of their hands, and that shouldn’t be a determinant in if you make a sequel or not.

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“Our Mars Jacket has a 3D-printed vomit pocket with a bright orange sick bag,” company cofounder Steve Tidball stated earlier this year. “You might call it provocative, but for us, it isn’t—it’s experimental.” Vollebak is a niche brand, however, and marketing a postapocalyptic future as somehow desirable is far from mainstream.

Where Are the Copycats?

Perhaps the number of design copycats will be the best test of whether Musk is on to something and that he’ll confound his critics and make billions from his head-turning pickup. But in the four years since its launch, not a single automaker has made a Cybertruck clone.

They could all be wrong, of course, and, once again, Musk will laugh all the way to the bank, but Tesla’s disruptive genius was all about the drivetrain, not the silhouette.

Now Tesla needs an injection of newness. Its current four-vehicle offering is long in the tooth. The Model Y crossover is three years old, while the Model 3 sedan dates back to 2017, which is dangerously antediluvian in the car world.

“Right now, the EV to own is a [Porsche] Taycan or a Mercedes EQS. 100 percent,” automotive consultant Eric Noble of the CARLAB told Forbes. “There’s no cachet in a Tesla among the wealthy.”

S&P Global Mobility has reported on Tesla’s shrinking dominance in the US EV market. “Given that consumer choice and consumer interest in EVs are growing, Tesla’s ability to retain a dominant market share will be challenged going forward,” S&P’s report concluded.

“Musk is a polarizing figure with many fans, but a growing number of people are disillusioned with him,” says AutoPacific’s Kim.

“Some liberals, who had been a lot of the early adopters of Tesla cars, have sworn not to buy another,” says UCLA Anderson’s Sorenson. “Interestingly, however, his appeal to conservatives—not the usual buyers of EVs—has grown. That might actually help sales of the Cybertruck, since conservatives more frequently buy pickups and SUVs.”

“Conservatives are not buying gas-powered vehicles just to irritate liberals,” stresses Boston University’s Simcoe. “All kinds of people buy these vehicles because they are useful, and as electric trucks—including Cybertruck—start providing better performance at competitive prices, we will see adoption among all demographics.”

Dialing Down Eco Attitude

Before becoming CEO, Musk introduced his vision for Tesla in a 2006 manifesto: clean the air, starting with pricey premium models and later shifting to affordable family cars. Seventeen years later, that affordable family car is still to appear—it’s believed to be imminent, but then Tesla’s pie-crust promises always are—and the Cybertruck is now the company’s flagship. Gone are the references to environmental benefits.

“Progressives and environmentalists are unlikely to be lining up for the Cybertruck,” states Gartner’s Ramsey. “On top of its gargantuan size and weight, it is not all that useful as a truck. This is a status symbol and attention getter.”