GOING SOUTH

Last week, a court order from Brazilian authorities forced a 72-hour nationwide blackout of the globally popular end-to-end encrypted messaging service WhatsApp. The good news is a judge overturned the ruling just one day into the shutdown, restoring the vital service to more than 100 million Brazilians. The bad news is that I have no audio to share of Brazilian judges repeatedly having to say the?word “WhatsApp.’’ Maybe next time.

NEW YORKE

If you heard a lot of ambient whimpering at the office early in the week, it's because Radiohead mysteriously started deleting its Web presence — tweets, Facebook posts, websites, everything — leading fans to fret over whether their favorite band was fading away forever. However, if you heard a lot of ambient whimpering at the office later in the week, it’s because the new Radiohead song came out.

CARPET BOMBS

The Met Gala! It happened! There were dresses and lots?of untouched hors?d’oeuvres. And unlike the dresses, this year’s theme, “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,’’ was rather loose. Model Karolina Kurkova wore a Marchesa smart-gown “designed’’ by an IBM cognitive computing system and threaded with LED lights that responded to the tone of Twitter chatter about the gala. Thus, the dress spent most of the evening sending bitchy texts to its friends about the Givenchy-for-Clearasil disaster Bey had on. (Gurl.)

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, someone first came up with the idea of translating popular cultural works into emoji, and it was a full-blown thing for what quickly seemed like way too long. Disney’s recent YouTube upload, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Told by Emoji,’’ threatens to be yet another stale reprise of the phenomenon (imagine!), but to my surprise it’s aggressively cute and actually entertaining. Much to learn, I still have.

MICHAEL ANDOR BRODEUR

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at michael.brodeur@globe.com.