The evening everyone watched

In a group of friends in Dubai, one clip has been the only subject for a week. It is in every conversation, every chat, every joke. Then someone mentions it to a cousin visiting from Alexandria, and the cousin has never heard of it.

From the inside, a moment like that feels like weather. It is everywhere because it is everywhere you look. Your friends are talking about it, your feed is full of it, the people you follow have opinions about it. It is very hard to believe that most people, even in the same city, are spending that week on something else entirely.

They are. Almost every wave we live through now is a pocket. A large and loud pocket sometimes, but a pocket.

That does not make it less real for the people in it. Being part of something that matters to the people around you is one of the good things in life, and it is often precious exactly because it is not universal. It is yours and theirs, not everyone's.

It was not always like this. A generation ago, a handful of singers were known in every home from Rabat to Muscat, whether people liked them or not. A big final emptied the streets of whole cities at the same moment, and the next day there was one conversation in every taxi.

Those shared evenings are unlikely to come back. There are too many screens, too many choices, too many small rooms each with its own thing playing. The tail keeps getting longer, and the middle keeps getting thinner.

For anyone trying to reach people, that changes the job. The crowd you can feel around you is not the crowd.

The whole street used to cheer at once. Now every window has its own noise.