Gideon Lichfield

In the microscopic spaces between its patented 18-karat gold alloy casing and its cutting-edge circuitry, the “Apple Watch Edition” contains a contradiction. Expensive jewellery and high-tech gadgets both serve as status symbols; but while a classic watch derives value from its age and timelessness, a tech item does so from its newness and timeliness, and these cannot coexist. You could see Apple’s luxury watch as a kind of existential joke—a timepiece (or at least a device masquerading as one) whose own worth is gradually destroyed by the very thing it was built to measure.

The Israeli prime minister starts talking to the US Congress at 10:45am US eastern time. One of the most long-awaited and controversial Congressional speeches of the last few years will also be one of the most predictable—Netanyahu will explain, as he has before, why there should be no nuclear deal with Iran—but lots of places are covering it with live updates. Here are some ways to follow it, depending on your political leaning:

“You guys,” a friend tweeted on Thursday, “today was what the Internet used to be like ALL THE TIME.”

Among the million-plus Ukrainians displaced by the fighting in the east are thousands of Jews and Muslims. Life is complicated for both groups. In a previous photo-essay, Misha Friedman documented the Jews of Dnipropetrovsk; in this one, he highlights the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim community who, like the Jews, have a long history of persecution in the region. Thousands have fled Crimea since Russia annexed it last year, and many have gone to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.

John Yates can breathe easy again. Today the US Supreme Court overturned his conviction (pdf) for destroying documents to hide evidence of a crime. The alleged crime: carrying undersized fish. The documents in question: the fish themselves.

Bob Simon had it. David Carr had it. Brian Williams lost it. And Jon Stewart mocked it.

Ukrainian authorities estimate that at least 30 people are dead so far after pro-Russian rebels launched a new attack on the strategic port city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian government says Russian troops are helping them; Russia says Ukraine started it, but there’s evidence that it’s has been pouring in troops and weapons (paywall) recently.

This post has been corrected.

The gunmen who killed 12 people in the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo are now dead after battles with police that claimed yet more innocent victims. The world stands in solidarity with France and its media, and rightly so. Nothing justifies answering the barbs of a cartoonist’s pen with the bullets of a Kalashnikov.

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, has raised the ire of Islamic militants before by publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammed and other Muslim leaders—its office was firebombed in 2011 after it ran a provocative issue supposedly guest-edited by the prophet.

It’s that time when media outlets publish their predictions for the year to come, and it’s looking like a grim year on many fronts. Oil prices will keep falling and bring turmoil to many places—one of them being Russia, which could respond by becoming even more belligerent. The euro will slide—and that’s only if the rise of leftist parties like Greece’s Syriza don’t lead to its breakup altogether. China’s economy is slowing again. Cybercrime (see Sony and a slew of other big corporations) has become seriously scary. So has the melting of the ice sheets. And the Middle East… well, we don’t need to tell you.

It’s that time when media outlets publish their predictions for the year to come, and it’s looking like a grim year on many fronts. Oil prices will keep falling and bring turmoil to many places—one of them being Russia, which could respond by becoming even more belligerent. The euro will slide—and that’s only if the rise of leftist parties like Greece’s Syriza don’t lead to its breakup altogether. China’s economy is slowing again. Cybercrime (see Sony and a slew of other big corporations) has become seriously scary. So has the melting of the ice sheets. And the Middle East… well, we don’t need to tell you.

Like its failed bid earlier in the week to get a United Nations security council resolution calling for a Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) application on New Year’s Eve to join the International Criminal Court (ICC)—along with 19 other international organizations and treaties—may not lead to much. It’s far from clear (paywall) that the court will try, let alone convict, any Israelis the PA attempts to drag before it, and besides, ICC membership is a double-edged sword—Israel could bring its own cases against the Palestinians, specifically Hamas.

Starbucks is introducing the “flat white” to its coffee menus across the US on Jan. 6, reports Eater. It’s a little surprising it took this long; the drink has been available for years in the UK and Australia, which both consume far less coffee per capita than the US. (It’s also a popular drink with New Zealanders, whose coffee consumption is on par with that of Americans.)

“Palestinians will outnumber Israeli Jews in 2016,” read the headline in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on Monday, Dec. 29. Rather conveniently, as the Palestinian Authority presents its latest bid for statehood to the UN security council, what Jewish Israelis call the “demographic problem”—the moment when they become a Jewish minority ruling over an Arab majority—is apparently just around the corner.

Like every other website in the last few days, we’ve published our best-of lists: Our best long reads, our most powerful essays, our most interesting “things.” Of course, we want you to read them all when you next have a spare couple of days. But they’re only a tiny—and not very representative—portion of what we publish every day. Reading them won’t necessarily tell you what Quartz is about. So what is Quartz about?

We have a word we use for stories made mainly of graphics or interactives: things. (Don’t ask us why; it’s just a, uh, thing.) The journalists who produce these stories, sometimes on their own and sometimes working with others, we call the “things team.” Our things have their own Twitter account, @quartzthings, and a (slightly stale) Tumblr too. We make things because we believe they sometimes tell stories better than words do. Here—in no particular order—are some of our best things from this past year.

British rock legend Joe Cocker has died, aged 70. His most famous performance was a rasping, aching cover of The Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends,” at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. It enjoyed a second, broader spell of fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the theme song of The Wonder Years, the hit TV show that defined coming-of-age for a generation of Americans:

Let’s get one thing clear: The two secret CIA documents published today by Wikileaks will not make you a clandestine officer.

On Saturday (Dec. 20), Facebook blocked access to an event page in Russia. The page calls for a demonstration on Jan. 15, the day that opposition activist Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg are due to be sentenced on what their supporters say are trumped-up embezzlement charges. The page (below), which had already attracted over 12,000 responses, is still online, but people in Russia can’t see it.

Cuba is already far from being the place it used to be. The once proudly tattered mansions of central Havana sport fresh paint jobs and modern fittings. Those magnificent old American gas guzzlers not reduced to rust or scrap have largely been turned into tourist limos. Air-conditioned buses speed travelers across the island, there are hotels that are neither exorbitant nor terrible, and the food is sometimes even described as “mind-blowing.”

There are funeral selfies. There are Ground Zero selfies. There are Auschwitz selfies. And yesterday, during the hostage crisis in downtown Sydney, there were Sydney selfies. People were predictably outraged.

Editor’s note: On Dec. 13, people marched in several large US cities to protest the killings by police of unarmed black men, provoked by the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City. Though race and policing are a very American issue right now, many at the march in New York City were foreigners or foreign-born residents. Photographer Misha Friedman, himself a Russian-born American, went there to speak to and photograph some of them and find out what made them take part.—Gideon Lichfield

This is a breaking story. We’ll update this post as new information comes in.