My phone pinged seventeen times during dinner last night. I’ve now reached that stage of parenthood where I feel I’m drowning in WhatsApp groups.
There’s the two school class groups, the basketball group, the freecycling school exchange group, the Internet safety committee group, the 37 birthday party planning groups, the ‘kids who went to the same creche five years ago but we still feel obligated to invite each other to things’ group.
And that’s before I start on all my work groups: ‘The Boys’ from college group, the MAMIL (middle aged men in Lycra) cycling group…you’d be flat out.
The notification anxiety is real, folks. I live in perpetual fear of posting the wrong video to the wrong group. It feels like it is only a matter of time before digital disaster strikes!
But just when I was feeling bad about my WhatsApp management skills, the Trump administration has made me feel infinitely better. It turns out the geniuses running America’s national security apparatus accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine to their top-secret Signal chat about bombing Yemen.
And not just any chat – we’re talking about VP JD Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, Defence Secretary Hegseth and Intelligence Director Gabbard all casually discussing military strike details before they happened, like they were planning a fishing weekend in Kinvara.
‘Sorry, wrong number! isn’t a great excuse when you’re discussing war plans. When he was confronted, Trump deployed his trademark accountability: ‘I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic.’ Watch out folks, West Cork could be flanked by the Gulf Of America yet.
The White House is now blaming an ‘inadvertent number’ for the breach, which is like saying the Titanic encountered an ‘inadvertent iceberg.’ Meanwhile, Defence Secretary Hegseth is furiously claiming that the editor ‘peddles in garbage’, apparently forgetting that the real bin-fire was adding a journalist to your classified war chat.
So next time you accidentally reply-all with ‘This bloody meeting could’ve been an email’ to the entire company, remember, at least you didn’t leak military operations to a national magazine. The bar for digital incompetence has been raised to glorious new heights.
How many years has Trump been back in office again, can someone remind me?
‘We shall tell you the truth’
For the first time since 1942, the Voice of America (VOA) has been silenced. Trump has put 1,300 VOA staff on leave and shut down Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia alongside it.
The broadcaster that survived Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and countless dictators over eight decades has finally met its match in the Blubberbutt-in-Chief. ‘We shall tell you the truth’, was VOA’s promise when it first aired just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. For generations, it beamed facts into places where truth was at a premium.
Now, dictators worldwide are doing celebratory polkas as America’s voice for democracy falls silent. This feels like more than a budget cut; it’s an abandonment of principles and further MAGA trolling of the established order.
But who needs truthful broadcasting when you’ve got Truth Social, eh?
Heavy hangs the head
Belfast rappers Kneecap brought an unusual guest on stage for their St Patrick’s weekend show in Melbourne, the decapitated bronze head of King George V, which had been missing since vandals removed it from a statue last June. ‘Some madman dropped by with a huge King George’s head so he could hear a few tunes!’ they posted on Instagram.
They’re good craic in all fairness. The royal noggin had briefly surfaced in January being barbecued in a video before disappearing again, until its recent concert cameo.
After giving His Majesty a taste of their republican anthems, the lads whisked the head away with the message: ‘Remember, every colony can fall’.
It’s either brilliant anti-imperialist performance art or a particularly creative way to get deported from Australia.
Time to talk to our children
Have ye seen Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ yet? This four-part series, conceived by its star Stephen Graham, centres on a family thrown into crisis when their 13-year-old son Jamie is accused of a horrific act of violence against a female classmate.
It’s a harrowing but essential watch that explores how online radicalisation is capturing vulnerable young men. It absolutely floored me. The one-shot filming technique never lets you escape the suffocating reality, and newcomer Owen Cooper’s phenomenal performance as Jamie is an absolute revelation.
But what makes it truly unsettling is how it subtly exposes the ‘manosphere’, that online world where self-proclaimed alpha males offer troubled boys a toxic vision of masculinity.
Growing up in West Cork in the 80s and 90s, our masculine anxieties played out awkwardly in school, at rugby club discos or GAA pitches, but there was no social media algorithm amplifying our insecurities with poisonous solutions, and we didn’t have access to 24-hour hardcore pornography machines.
As parents, we teach our kids the safe cross code but rarely how to navigate the digital wilderness. ‘Adolescence’ is a wake-up call that while we’re checking homework and GAA schedules, we might be missing what’s really happening behind those closed bedroom doors.
The first thing I did the morning after I saw it was sit with my son and talked to him and listened. We all need to do it more.
