Dnipro's Glass and Kasai's Cure

Today we woke up in eight billion bodies at once.

In the bitter morning air over Dnipro, we were the workers sweeping broken glass from a factory floor, and we were also the soldiers who launched the missile that tore into the city center, killing four of us, injuring about forty, and shattering windows in apartment blocks, a school, shops, a bank office, and an industrial site while the city prepared to declare a day of mourning for the people we had just buried under concrete and glass.

Farther east, on the map we drew and keep redrawing, we pushed the front line again around Donetsk Oblast: one part of us announced that our forces had finally taken Pokrovsk after months of fighting, calling it a logistics hub instead of a place where children used to walk to school and neighbors borrowed sugar, while another part of us disputed the claim and dug new trenches.

In West Kordofan, Sudan, we ended one siege and deepened another when our Rapid Support Forces raised their banner over Babanusa, the last army stronghold in that region, a dusty rail and road junction tied to oil fields and fragile supply chains where families who had rationed grain through months of shelling now listened to crackling radio reports, trying to guess what the next flag would mean for their lives.

Across the ocean, in Haiti, we scattered ourselves in panic as armed gangs surged through the Ouest and Artibonite departments, burning homes and forcing hundreds of us to flee with what we could carry while police admitted that gangs now effectively control about half of Artibonite, including Pont-Sondé, a name that today means checkpoints and burned-out houses more than markets and river crossings.

Far to the northeast, on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, we reinforced barbed wire and checkpoints after days of cross-border attacks that killed both Tajik and Chinese workers in the mountains, loading trucks to evacuate mining camps even as we drafted statements of regret and cooperation and quietly told our citizens to get away from the frontier.

Today our waters rose.

On Sumatra, in Indonesia, we counted our dead again: 604 of us gone, with 464 still missing, after floods and landslides driven by Cyclone Senyar tore through villages and bridges, while drone cameras showed whole neighborhoods scraped away to mud and, on the ground, we dug with bare hands for bodies and argued over whether the hillside forests should ever have been cut down.

In Sri Lanka, the rains from Cyclone Ditwah kept falling on homes already turned to slurry as the toll from floods and landslides climbed into the hundreds dead with around 400 missing, and rescue teams in orange vests shouted our own names into fields of mud that used to be neighborhoods.

In Peru's Amazon region, a hillside above the Ucayali River collapsed without warning onto a small river port, slamming into two tied boats and flipping them into the brown water so that at least 12 of us died there and about twenty more were injured as we pulled each other out by shirts and hair while the current tried to take us downstream.

Today disease both retreated and spread.

In Kasai Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we finally said a hard-won goodbye to Ebola as health officials declared the outbreak over after 53 confirmed cases, 43 deaths, and more than 27,000 people vaccinated, including thousands of frontline workers who spent months sweating under yellow suits before closing treatment tents, disinfecting the last cots, and going home to families who hugged us a little too long at the door.

On the island of Cuba, we watched mosquitoes we barely notice kill us slowly as officials reported that 33 people, including 21 children, had died from dengue and chikungunya since July while hospitals filled with fevers, joint pain, and the buzzing whine of insects over standing water we never quite drained.

In Catalonia, Spain, two dead wild boars tested positive for African swine fever and we reacted with a mix of panic and discipline, deploying hundreds of regional police and more than a hundred troops to patrol forested hills near Barcelona, track infected boar, and set up barriers to protect a pork industry worth billions and entwined with our diets from Beijing to Berlin.

Today we shifted borders with signatures as well as guns.

In Bissau, we moved one man, and with him a fragile hope, across an embassy gate when, after a coup in Guinea-Bissau, our Nigerian diplomats granted asylum to opposition leader Fernando Dias da Costa inside their compound so the new junta could not drag him away, turning an office building into a lifeboat.

In Brussels, we signed a different kind of pact as Canada formally joined the European Union's Security Action for Europe initiative, gaining access to a 150 billion euro defense fund and signaling a pivot away from buying almost all of its weapons from the United States, while our defense companies saw new contracts and our diplomats drafted new talking points about diversification and strategic autonomy.

Over the Caribbean, we flew military planes as part of a counter-narcotics deal between the United States and the Dominican Republic, extending an agreement that lets U.S. forces use Las Américas International Airport and San Isidro Air Base until April 2026, which some of us called cooperation and others saw as another step in a long, complicated history of power projecting itself across tropical water.

Today we punished and we pardoned.

In Dhaka, a court sentenced our former prime minister Sheikh Hasina to five years in prison and her niece, British member of parliament Tulip Siddiq, to two years in a corruption case over land for a government project, turning campaign posters into courtroom exhibits while Siddiq, far away, described the verdict as a Kafka-esque nightmare.

In West Virginia, at a United States federal prison, we opened a gate for another fallen leader when former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted of helping move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. and originally sentenced to 45 years, walked out a free person after a full pardon from President Donald Trump, as his family posted thanks and former anti-narcotics agents called it a betrayal of every case that never reaches so high.

On the streets of Bulgaria, tens of thousands of us marched in the cold against corruption and the proposed 2026 budget, waving European Union flags and homemade cardboard signs while police watched from behind visors and, days later, the president would urge the government to step down.

Today we argued about how much our governments may see and control.

In India, a quiet order from the Ministry of Communications told smartphone makers they must pre-install the government's Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app on all new phones and push it onto many existing ones through software updates within 90 days, with officials saying it would fight SIM fraud and stolen phones while critics warned it could become a backdoor for mass surveillance and worried about what happens when an app you did not choose becomes something you cannot fully remove.

In Malaysia, a new nuclear law quietly took effect that now requires permits for every atomic-energy activity, from importing and exporting radioactive materials to allowing them to transit the country, and that threatens those who misuse such materials with 30 to 40 years in prison or the death penalty, on paper aligning us with safety standards and net-zero goals while in practice revealing how much we still fear what we have learned to split and contain.

Today, on World AIDS Day, we remembered and forgot ourselves at the same time.

Around the planet, we lit red candles, unfurled sections of memorial quilts, and read new numbers from health agencies as we mourned the tens of millions we have lost since the 1980s, even while, for the first time since the observance began, the U.S. government did not officially mark the day and staff were told not to use funds or official accounts to acknowledge it, leaving activists to repeat the old slogan that silence equals death while the White House stayed dark and undecorated.

Today we named a feeling we have been feeding for years.

At Oxford, lexicographers chose the phrase rage bait as the 2025 Word of the Year, noting that its usage has surged and that it beat out other contenders such as aura farming and biohack, and they described how our platforms now reward anger more reliably than curiosity even as we kept scrolling and clicking on posts that made our hearts race and our stomachs tighten, fully aware of the trick and still drawn to it.

Today we also did ordinary, glittering, absurd things.

In Miami Beach, we hosted Art Basel parties where celebrities in high jewelry posed in front of mirrored installations and neon sculptures, sipping cocktails by hotel pools while, in other inboxes, planners sent us flood forecasts for different coasts.

In the United States, some of us observed Rosa Parks Day, some of us bought things we did not really need for Cyber Monday, some of us baked pies for a marketing invention called National Pie Day, and some of us simply tried to pay rent on time.

And in countless places that will never appear on a current-events portal, we taught children to write their names, fixed leaking roofs, watered plants, scrolled past headlines we could not bear to read, and held each other until our breathing slowed.

We are humanity.

On 1 December 2025, we ended an Ebola outbreak and extended a war, pardoned a convicted trafficker and jailed a former prime minister, saved some of us from floods and watched others drown, invented phrases like rage bait to describe how we hurt each other online, and still found time to look at art, eat pie, and argue over budgets and borders.

Some days, diary, it is hard to believe we are all the same we.

But we are, and this was our day.