Zeros

I owe you an apology. A real one, not one of those half-hearted, “sorry I missed your call,” messages you send three days later, when the moment has clearly passed . Because somehow— against all logic , all algorithms, all push notifications— I have been late to the latest Madonna comeback . Yes, that Madonna . Again . And before you roll your eyes and say, “She never left,” let me be clear : this is one of those comebacks where she reminds you she never needed to leave in the first place. What took me so long? I wish I had a good excuse. I could blame the endless scroll, the way new music gets swallowed whole by the feed within hours . I could say I was waiting for the right moment to sit down and absorb it properly, like a fine wine or a classic album , from back when we actually played albums all the way through. But the truth is simpler and a little embarrassing: she was already everywhere, and I somehow muted myself. Because while I was over here catching up on yes...

There’s a certain kind of noise in the digital currency space that sounds authoritative, until you actually think about it . It usually shows up as neat, binary advice— buy this, dump that —paired with comparisons that fall apart the second you examine what these assets actually do. If you’re serious about understanding the market, you have to push past that surface-level framing . Let’s start with XRP . Treating it like a bargain-bin pickup just because of a relatively low unit price misses the point entirely. The price per coin is one of the least meaningful metrics for digital assets. XRP’s value proposition centers on facilitating payment settlement and liquidity for cross-border transactions . It’s designed to move money quickly and cheaply between institutions. Whether it’s $0.50 or $3.50 doesn’t inherently make it cheap or expensive without considering supply, adoption, and utility. Thinking otherwise is like judging a company solely by its share price , instead of...

There are many ways to measure success in America: chart positions, streaming numbers, the ability to get a table without a reservation . And then there’s the quieter metric—claiming credit for things you had absolutely nothing to do with. In that category, the mafia may be having a moment. Recent headlines tell us that John Gotti’s grandson managed to swipe about $1 million in COVID relief funds, which is less a heist and more a nostalgic tribute act. While the rest of us were baking sourdough and figuring out how to unmute ourselves on video calls, someone out there was apparently thinking, “You know what this crisis needs? A callback.” And like any good comeback tour, it doesn’t stop with one hit. If you listen closely— preferably in a dimly lit back room with a plate of something marinara —you can almost hear the broader claim being made: that the mafia, yes, that mafia, had a hand in the whole pandemic situation . Not just the relief funds. The whole thing. It’s a ...

Money Is Not Made Up A short history of why value was never invented by feelings, and what that means for digital assets today. There is a strain of thought in digital currency circles — earnest, sometimes feverish — that money is fundamentally a social construct, a collective hallucination , worth exactly whatever the next person agrees it is worth. The logic tends to go: fiat is fake, gold is arbitrary, and therefore anything can be money if enough people believe in it hard enough . This reasoning gets things approximately backwards. Value is not an agreement. It is a description of usefulness. A brief tour through the history of exchange makes this clear. The Word Salary Is Not a Coincidence The Latin root of the word salary is salarium . The prevailing etymology holds that Roman soldiers received salt as part of their compensation, or were paid wages specifically intended for the purchase of salt . Whether the literal payment was always in salt cakes is debated by hi...

A Talent Interrupted D4vd's arrest on suspicion of murder closes the door on what might have been an extraordinary career — and opens a far graver conversation. If you are not among the younger generation that lives on TikTok , the name D4vd — pronounced simply David — likely reached you this week through the worst possible headline. David Anthony Burke, 21, was arrested Thursday by the Los Angeles Police Department on suspicion of murdering Celeste Rivas Hernandez , a 14-year-old girl from Lake Elsinore, California , whose decomposed and dismembered remains were discovered in September 2025 in the front trunk of a Tesla registered in Burke's name. He is being held without bail . A family has been waiting for justice since their daughter was reported missing in 2024. That is where this story begins and ends — with Celeste . But because Burke was, until this unraveled, a genuinely remarkable young artist in the making , his story offers a quieter grief alongside t...

Just Do It… and Then Sell It: Nike Exits the NFT Business Nike announced in late 2024 that it would shut down RTFKT , the virtual sneaker studio it acquired at the peak of the NFT boom in 2021 . Then, quietly — almost apologetically — the company completed the sale of RTFKT to an undisclosed buyer on December 17, 2025, with barely a whisper of detail . No buyer name. No sale price. Just a brief statement calling it, "a new chapter for the company and its community." Which raises an obvious question: what chapter are we actually in? If collectors had hoped for a triumphant handoff, they got a ghostly exit . RTFKT's own website still makes no mention of new ownership. RTFKT (pronounced artifact ) was a genuine darling of the digital asset collectibles world . At its peak, the studio collaborated with artists to release virtual sneakers that sold for thousands of dollars, issuing NFTs with blockchain-verifiable provenance . It gave Nike a foothold in Web3 cul...