Wiki News Live
Today:
Five Stories That Aren’t What They Seem
NEWS | 17 November 2025
The kayaker who went missing—and stayed missing for so long that rescue teams were at a loss. The seemingly perfect man who conned women—and was brought to justice by his own victims. Today, sit back and explore five gripping reads that aren’t what they seem. The Perfect Man Who Wasn’tBy Rachel MonroeFor years, he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American historyThe childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history The unbelievable tale of Jesus’s wife: A hotly contested, supposedly ancient manuscript suggests Christ was married.

Top Stories:
Why Can’t I Just Watch Sports on Television?
NEWS | 17 November 2025
Fans have been making flow charts and doing frantic back-of-the-napkin math in an effort to figure out just how many streaming services they’ll need. In many ways, sports are more accessible than ever: They’re on at all hours, shown on countless channels and streaming services, and broken down into bite-size highlights on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube. But for devoted fans trying to watch their team actually play all season, the landscape has never been trickier to navigate. In one survey, half of Americans said that the glut of streaming services has made it harder to find what they’re looking for. It shouldn’t take a handful of streaming services, many hundreds of dollars, and a color-coded spreadsheet to be a fan.

World:
RFK Jr.’s Cheer Squad Is Getting Restless
NEWS | 17 November 2025
“If it’s in the hands of the CDC, you’ll never get the answers you need,” he told the crowd. Steve Kirsch, a former tech executive turned anti-vaccine activist, told me at the conference that he texts directly with the health secretary. After getting vaccinated against COVID, Kirsch became convinced that the shot was unsafe and began campaigning against it. Kirsch told me he recently sent Kennedy some data from the Czech Republic that he believes prove that COVID shots increase mortality rates. “Kennedy’s taking baby steps, and that’s a big problem,” Kirsch told me.

Current Events:
We’re Thinking About Young Adulthood All Wrong
NEWS | 17 November 2025
Still, the idea that young adults ought to be at peak happiness is tough to shake, a cliché passed down by older people who know better. Nevertheless, young adults have long been more likely than older adults to struggle with their mental health—at least since I saw my first client, in 1999. Young adults were more likely to point to the struggle to balance schoolwork with personal, financial, and familial duties. Telling young adults that if they’d just put down their phone, that’d solve things, or that something’s wrong with them if they’re not happy, only adds to their concerns. This message matters because young adults who have hope for the future are less likely to feel anxious and depressed.

News Flash:
The Nick Fuentes Spiral
NEWS | 17 November 2025
On Wednesday, I texted Nick Fuentes about being the center of an existential crisis in American conservatism. Fuentes is not the origin of prejudices metastasizing on the right, nor is he the end point. Today, many popular figures among young conservatives espouse some level of ethno-nationalist ideology. Recently leaked chats from Young Republican leaders suggest the same. Carlson offered Fuentes his largest audience yet, but the door has been cracking open for Fuentes for years.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 17 November 2025
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Latest:
America Is Taking the Train
NEWS | 17 November 2025
“The sweetest people run the train,” she posted on X, alongside a video of the autumnal landscape rushing by. Read: There is no good way to travel anywhere in AmericaNot everyone will be able to take a train instead of flying, obviously. Last year, 1.2 million people traveled by train for Thanksgiving, a pitiable number relative to the roughly 18 million who flew. Even when that kind of flight isn’t canceled outright, a delay of something like two hours can tilt the math and make taking a train more logical. Amtrak train cars are in many cases decades old, and the railroad is currently short on equipment, which leads to cancellations—followed, sometimes, by seemingly random un-cancellations.

Breaking:
Michael Wolff’s Unsatisfying Explanation for Cozying Up to Epstein
NEWS | 17 November 2025
Many reporters take offense at this depiction of their trade as shamelessly exploitative, but Michael Wolff seems to take inspiration from it. In the emails, Wolff appears to be positioning himself less as a reporter than as a media adviser to Epstein. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote to Epstein about Trump in December 2015. Wolff rightly criticizes others for their warm relationships with Epstein, but the messages reveal his own coziness with him. His Epstein reporting didn’t get the traction he’d hoped it would, and his closeness with Epstein tarnishes his own standing.

Trending:
Galaxy Brain: The Internet Is a Misery Machine
NEWS | 17 November 2025
And I don’t know that it does, but I don’t know that it doesn’t. And it’s like we’re all shadowboxing this idea of it, because we don’t know what anyone else is consuming. Like, that’s not who he is like; you know, that’s a character in some sense that he’s playing, too. I don’t know what America is, and I don’t know who these people are, ’cause I’ve never heard of that show. Warzel: I think that is actually—I think that’s the direction I wanna push everyone with.

This Just In:
A Great Author’s Ongoing Struggle
NEWS | 17 November 2025
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. For example: AI translation might accelerate the trend of fewer Americans learning second languages outside the home. To this list, I might add misfits like Nabokov, who, in wrestling with a new language, made it noticeably richer. The tale may seem like a classic misfit story about a boy who doesn’t fit in with his head-butting peers. But unlike many other literary outcasts, Ferdinand is never ashamed to be different; he remains peaceful in a violent world.

Today:
Photos of the Week: Dachshund Day, Flying Fish, Wānaka Tree
NEWS | 17 November 2025
Mario Tama / GettyIn an aerial view, motorists wait in line at a large-scale drive-through Thanksgiving meal event on November 8, 2025, in Altadena, California, to receive Thanksgiving food baskets near cleared lots where homes were destroyed in the Eaton Fire. The event aimed to support families from Altadena and Pasadena who were impacted by the fire and was hosted by Brotherhood Crusade and the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation.

Top Stories:
The President Who Cried Hoax
NEWS | 17 November 2025
The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren’t. “Trump says he will release the Epstein client list if elected,” the right-wing propagandist account Libs of TikTok wrote in September of 2024. Trump is now calling the whole thing a “hoax,” his favorite term to communicate to his supporters that they should ignore any evidence of potential Trump wrongdoing. As long as conservatives believed that the Epstein files would provide a pretext for persecuting “Democrat elites,” it was politically advantageous to speculate about who might be implicated or suggest that those people had Epstein killed. By contrast, the moment that documentation emerged of Trump’s associations with Epstein, his defenders started drawing fine distinctions between different kinds of child sexual abuse, just in case.

World:
Something Feels Different About the Economy
NEWS | 17 November 2025
“The numbers are so big, they are hard to comprehend,” Jeff Sommer recently wrote in The New York Times. Sommer was referring to the stock market, which has been on an outrageous tear, with the gains concentrated among a tiny number of unfathomably valuable companies. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation last month surpassed the first-ever $4 trillion valuation, which was also achieved by Nvidia, in July. That is exactly what linear graphs of the U.S. stock market look like right now, which suggests that we have achieved escape velocity and entered the vertical part of the curve. In just a few years, a $5 trillion valuation might sound as quaint as a $2,000 two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn does today.

Current Events:
Four Simple Questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene
NEWS | 17 November 2025
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s critics are starting to think they got her all wrong. Read: Marjorie Taylor Greene knows exactly what she’s doingOn the few occasions when she has been confronted with her past positions and incendiary assertions, Greene has deflected or pleaded ignorance. But long before Fuentes joined Carlson, Greene joined Fuentes. But it poses a question: Does Greene agree with either Fuentes or Carlson about Hitler, Black people, women, and the rest? “Everybody’s like, ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene has changed,’” she said of herself on The View.

News Flash:
Sympathy for a Handsome Devil
NEWS | 17 November 2025
It’s hard to know why anyone should feel a pang of understanding for Jay Kelly (played by George Clooney), but Baumbach relishes the challenge. Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s fourth movie in a row that will be released to Netflix, with a short theatrical release. His last work was a fascinating, flawed, staggeringly ambitious adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise; with Jay Kelly, he’s charting a gentler, more familiar path, in terms of plot and setting. And Jay gets to have a particularly luxe midlife crisis, fueled by the resources of a rich movie star. The final notes of Jay Kelly are played for pure sympathy, and it’s Baumbach’s biggest storytelling gamble.