Each autumn, the nations of the world send their representatives to New York to take stock of what humanity has made of itself — and in 2026, the verdict arriving with them is somber. Diplomats at the opening of the UN General Assembly reached, independently and repeatedly, for the same cluster of words: messy, troubled, unpredictable. That convergence of language, from people trained to choose words carefully, is itself a kind of signal — not of any single crisis, but of a world in which the crises have begun to compound one another, resisting the orderly responses that multilateral instituti