Derek Thompson put a list of ideas together for things to look forward to or watch for in 2026. Here are some:
- Everything is TV
- Anti AI populism
- Housing costs
Category: Pop Culture
Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people
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26 ideas for 2026
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Child deaths to increase this year
Due to USAID cuts, childhood deaths will increase this year.
Global deaths among children under five are forecast to rise this year for the first time this millennium, largely as a result of falling foreign aid.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted that 4.8 million children would die this year, up from 4.6 million last year. Declining humanitarian assistance is a major part of the reason why child deaths have fallen 50% since 2000.
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To praise Gen X
Amanda Fortini dives deep into the cultural relevance of Generation X. It’s lasting impacts to music, movies, books permeate the pop culture landscape.
Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture.
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TV creative trees
In sports, coaching trees are when assistants of preeminent coaches become good coaches, or well-known as well. What if we applied similar thinking to TV show runners and writers? The Ringer drafts a lists of shows whose writers or producers went onto create other successful shows.
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Dataguessr
Dataguessr is a clever, little web game where are you need to put a set of facts in the correct order. Mostly, the topics tend to relate to populations in certain countries. What makes it challenging is the margins between items are slim, like splitting hairs
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What it’s like being a popstar
Charli XCX candidly writes about what it’s like being a popstar.
Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing, especially when you’re around old friends of family members who have known you since before you could talk. The discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become. As a British person the longer you stay in LA the more you lose touch with the realities of certain things, but that’s why being a pop star can also be seriously humbling too, especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless. In ways being a pop star makes me think about the person I used to be compared to the person I am now. How is that person different? Or is she still the same?
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100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond.
The Monrovians’ game against the KKK might have been set in motion by an open invitation that the Black team had announced in the Wichita Eagle three weeks earlier, saying they were “open for games with any team in Kansas,” according to a 2008 story by the Society of American Baseball Research.
The game, which took place 11 years before Jesse Owens would shatter the myth of white supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, provided a less-noticed dent, with the Monrovians winning, 10-8.
There was little coverage of it in the press. “Monrovians Beat K.K.K.,” ran the headline in the Wichita Eagle, in a story that was just two sentences long: “The Wichita Monrovians won from the K.K.K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”