While Jessie Buckley was making history at the Golden Globes on Sunday for Hamnet, another show dominated the awards. Adolescence, the four-part Netflix crime drama, swept four awards including Best Limited Series. The show is about a family dealing with their son being accused of murdering a classmate.

Writer Jack Thorne said some people think it’s about why we should be afraid of young people, but it’s actually about ‘the filth and the debris we’ve left in their way.’ Ouch.

Which brings us to Jonathan Haidt, the NYU psychologist who wrote The Anxious Generation, and who appeared on the New York Times Hard Fork podcast this week. Haidt claims to have overwhelming new evidence that social media is causing harm to children at scale. Depression and anxiety rates among teens have skyrocketed since 2010, with Gen Z hit hardest.

What’s different about Haidt’s argument now is he’s no longer just talking about social comparison. He’s saying the entire online environment is dangerous, full of what he calls ‘fish hooks’ dangling in front of kids, from sexual harassment to bullying, hardcore pornography, gambling, and sextortion.

When pushed on who’s to blame, Haidt says it’s not the parents or teachers. They’re caught in ‘collective action traps,’ where everyone knows something is wrong but no individual can solve it.

The companies bear the primary responsibility. And the only way out is collective action, which means states need to stand up to corporations and regulate these platforms.

Ireland can play a special role with many of these companies based here, and we’re starting to see this movement across the Western world.

In the meantime, while society figures it out, my kids won’t be getting their own phones any time soon.

Greenland in the spotlight

I’ve flown over Greenland dozens of times on trips to the States, and as a nervous flyer I’m constantly checking that inflight map to see how far we are from the nearest airport.

On the last flight I was listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast about the Viking settlements there, how they arrived in the 10th century and eventually just disappeared.

It felt like a place of old history, a weird ice-bound lump relevant only as a dot on a flight path between Dublin and New York.

But Greenland’s suddenly very real again. Trump announced he’s slapping 10% tariffs on eight European countries because Denmark won’t hand over a territory with 57,000 people who have no interest in becoming American.

Also, he’s sad because he didn’t get a prize for his relentless peacekeeping and humanitarian work. Bless his orange heart.

European leaders are calling it blackmail, mostly because it is, and France is pushing for the EU to activate the Anti-Coercion Instrument, a trade bazooka that could restrict American companies’ access to the European market.

Economists warn a full-blown trade war could erase most European earnings growth in 2026, potentially triggering an economic ice age, which could be tricky for us.

Met Éireann is warning that low pressure systems will sweep across Ireland this week. At least those will pass in a few days. The economic ones settling over that vast expanse I’m always nervously tracking might be here considerably longer.

The hope is that someone will start rattling something shiny over on the other side of the room and toddler Donald will get distracted and just forget about it.

And that, my dear people, is where we are at in global politics in the year of our Lord twenty, twenty six.

The hunger games

An American architect was on Liveline this week defending his board game about the Famine. Kevin McPartland spent eight years developing ‘The Great Hunger’, where players compete as tenant farmers trying to survive the 1840s. I’m not joking. He said that he ‘does not expect a single Irish person to buy this game’ because ‘Irish people are not the target audience.’

McPartland says he’s trying to educate Americans who know nothing about An Gorta Mór. His angle is that the Famine shows what happens when a ruling class is out of touch with the people they’re ruling, making decisions that are harmful but profitable. ‘If you don’t know your history you are doomed to repeat it,’ he said, ‘and I see this going on in America right now.’ The project has raised $17,789 on Kickstarter. At least they’re not giving it to the IRA.

Personally, I reckon he’s on to something. If you ask me, the Civil War, The Anglo Crisis of 2008 and Saipan are all there for the taking.

Cowboys

Finally, an Austrian cow named Veronika has become the first bovine documented using tools. The 13-year-old Swiss Brown picks up deck brushes with her tongue; scientists say this kind of flexible, multi-purpose tool use has only been seen in humans and chimpanzees before.

The researchers reckon cows aren’t stupid, we just never gave them the chance to show us otherwise before. And I bet Veronika has compelling opinions on Mercosur too.