South Korean drama of a fictional kind as Netflix winds up the Squid Game hype machine in Paris

With it all kicking off this week in [insert country here], with war crimes allowed to continue unabated elsewhere and with oppression seemingly only intensifying under the world’s most authoritarian regimes, it comes as a relief to confirm that these pink-suited troops on the Champs-Élysées are players in a promotional event for series two of Squid Game and, no, martial law has not been declared in France.
As viewers of Netflix’s most-watched original drama will know, the masked humans are “guards” and the green-tracksuited ones are players, hundreds of whom participated in a mass game of Red Light, Green Light on the streets of Paris.
Some 50,000 people applied to take part in this non-deadly version of the game seen in the 2021 South Korean survival thriller, boding well for levels of interest in the dystopian “K-drama” ahead of its return to Netflix for a second series on December 26th.
Rather than brutally dispatching the losers, Young-hee, the terrifying animatronic doll from the show, rewarded the winners with tickets to a preview screening. She is now in line to be France’s next prime minster.
1,200
Life expectancy studies in the data set on which the AI behind “longevity app” Death Clock has been trained. The developers claim they will give users “the cold, hard truth” about their lifespan, then advise them how to “cheat death” for a little longer. Download at your own risk. Subscribe at your peril.
53 million
Participants in the studies underpinning the app, which uses information about diet, exercise, stress levels and sleep patterns to predict your date of death. It then offers a countdown – with minutes and seconds – until the big day.
125,000
Times that the Death Clock app has been downloaded since July, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. (Note: We have business media service Bloomberg to thank for highlighting this delightful new Death Clock trend.)
It may not be worth spending too much time getting to know Intel’s interim co-chief executives, who were announced on Monday as the chip maker’s chief financial officer, David Zinsner; and its executive vice-president, Michelle Johnston Holthaus. The Intel board is reportedly breaking with tradition and searching outside the company for a permanent replacement for Pat Gelsinger, who was forced to retire last weekend after three years of expensive but unconvincing turnaround efforts.
Names in the frame include Marvell Technology head Matt Murphy, former Cadence Design Systems boss Lip-Bu Tan and former Intel finance boss Stacy Smith. The role of Intel’s would-be saviour, however, is unlikely to be super-covetable right now to most of those with the necessary technical background and leadership experience. Intel is the worst performer on the Dow Jones this year – or at least it was until it was ousted from the index last month by rival Nvidia, aka the second-most-valuable company in the world. All of this suggests that Zinsner and products chief Johnston Holthaus probably shouldn’t book any holidays any time soon.
Now that all the dictionaries have diligently gone through their lists and settled on their words of the year, here’s a quick cheat sheet for either impressing the Gen-Zers in your midst, or embarrassing yourself in their presence.
1. Demure: Dictionary.com looked to the late 14th century for inspiration for its chosen word. Demure, traditionally meaning modest, reserved or coy, has had a makeover in 2024, courtesy of TikToker Jools Lebron’s viral deployment of the phrase “very demure, very mindful” in her cosmetics videos. It now means something closer to refined.
2. Manifest: Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year was looked up almost 130,000 times on its website, as lots of people wondered what so many pop singers and sports stars were on about when they claimed to have “manifested” their amazing successes for themselves.
3. Brat: The lexicographers at Collins dictionary were still in summer mode when they went for “brat”, channelling the Charli XCX album of the same name and falling for the wheeze that a brat is someone “characterised by a confident, independent and hedonistic attitude”. Not very demure.
4. Enshittification: Getting into the real heart of the era now thanks to Macquairie Dictionary, which plumped for “enshittification”, coined back in 2022 by author Cory Doctorow to describe the process by which products or services, especially online ones, inevitably seem to get worse over time.
5. Brain rot: After a public vote, the Oxford word of the year was declared to be, er, two words: “brain rot”, meaning the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” as a result of consuming too much trivial, unchallenging material, particularly online. There must be a gif for this?