Babylon Rising

The Watch Index is this area’s share of world news coverage, rebased so that its own 2024 average is 100. It is the same method central banks use for an uncertainty index: count the stories, divide by all stories, set a base year to 100. The bold line is the thirteen-week mean; the faint line behind it is every single week, unsmoothed. We show both because hiding the noise would flatter us.

100 is this watch area’s own 2024 average, so 200 means twice as much coverage as it had in 2024. It is not a score out of 100 and it is not a probability of anything.

The chart goes back to January 2024. The story list below starts 3 August 2026, the day we began keeping one. They are two different records and we will not blur them to look older.