Zeros

Back To The Future  Three stabbings on two continents, teen mobs reclaiming the streets, and a war with Iran nobody seems to have time to process. Have we been here before? If you have been watching the news this week with the vague, unsettled feeling that you fell asleep in 2001 and woke up somewhere much older, you are not imagining it. Three stabbings in three days. Teen mobs are overwhelming city centers. A military confrontation with Iran. The decade has a familiar rhythm, and not a comfortable one. Start with Texas . Today a Collin County jury convicted Karmelo Anthony , 19, of murder in the 2025 stabbing death of Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in Frisco. Both teenagers were 17 at the time. The case drew enormous national attention — not primarily because of the stabbing itself but because of the racial dimension that social media forced onto it , fairly or not. The jury deliberated roughly three hours and sentenced Anthony to 35 years. Two families...

Music & Mockery:  Iran Made a Dis Track and I Feel Bad for Everyone The visuals are solid. The production is fine. And yet, I am somehow embarrassed on behalf of two countries simultaneously. Iran has been making music videos about Donald Trump . AI-generated, gangster-rap-inflected , Lego -populated music videos with tombstones and dripping blood and the word LOSER in capital letters as if they discovered the caps lock key at the same time they discovered Ableton . And here is my honest reaction: I am embarrassed . Not for Iran. Not exactly for Trump. For the whole situation , the way you're embarrassed when two people you know get into an argument at a wedding and they are both wrong but you can't leave because the car keys are in one of their pockets. The videos showed up in the American press mainly because Iran's embassy shared them on social media. Left to their own momentum, most would have dissolved quietly into the algorithm like a Jell-O salad ...

Iran Installs a Tollbooth at the Throat of the World's Oil Trade — and It Only Takes Bitcoin There is something almost elegant about it. After weeks of war , missile fire, and tankers sitting at anchor in the Persian Gulf with nowhere to go, Iran's solution to reopening the Strait of Hormuz was not a diplomatic handshake or a carefully worded joint communiqué. It was a payment portal. Iran has announced that ships wishing to pass through the strait during the ceasefire period will be required to pay the digital currency equivalent of $1 per barrel of oil aboard — and they will have only seconds to complete the transaction.  As Hamid Hosseini of Iran's Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters' Union explained to the Financial Times , once Iranian authorities complete their assessment of a vessel's cargo, ships are given a brief window to pay in Bitcoin — specifically chosen because it cannot be easily traced or confiscated under sanctions. ...