Today’s didn’t. Here’s what actually mattered today:
A peace deal pushed with tweets, a generation losing its grip on truth, and a crypto heist planned in Minecraft chatrooms ended with Lamborghinis and duct tape.
Somewhere between the algorithms, the conspiracies, and the dollar signs, the lines between fiction and reality blurred — and then vanished.
I chase these stories not just for the shock, but for what they reveal underneath:
The internet isn’t just shaping the world anymore. It is the world.
Fatih Taskiran
In this issue:
Asia
"Vladimir, STOP!"
Internet Culture
Doomed by the Feed
Cryptocurrency
Catch Me If You Crypto
Beyond the Core
Get Rid of That Song
Asia
"Vladimir, STOP!"
It's the deadliest attack on Kyiv in nearly a year, killing at least 12 people and injuring over 90. Trump responded with a dramatic Truth Social post calling on Putin to "STOP!"—only to later suggest Russia had already made a "big concession" by not taking the whole country.
Zelensky cut short his trip to South Africa to return home and rally allies, but Trump's peace push seems to rely heavily on Ukraine—it could include recognising Russia's control over Crimea. We're entering a dangerous new phase in this war, where diplomacy could prove more costly than missiles due to the mixed signals.
It began with a $243 million crypto heist. Then came the yachts, the Lamborghinis, and a $500K bar tab. Eventually, rivals kidnapped one suspect, another caught in the Maldives wearing a $500,000 watch, and a third turned out to be the actual son of a Connecticut couple who got duct-taped.
A Minecraft server, a masked vigilante named ZachXBT, and an FBI raid later, most of the money is still missing. Welcome to the Com: the internet’s darkest, richest boy band — now doing federal time.
They scroll endlessly, swipe instinctively, and double-tap faster than they blink. But when it comes to spotting fake news? Gen Z is flunking the test. In a Stanford study, only three out of 3,446 high schoolers identified a viral video as Russian propaganda.
Why? The toxic cycle of algorithm-driven echo chambers, distrust of institutions, and comment sections as "fact-checking." From beef fat as skincare to geo-engineered hurricanes, this is more than just TikTok weirdness — it’s a systemic media literacy failure that risks reshaping not just a generation, but democracy itself. And yes, this is exactly why The Core exists.
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