turd of a year
On the definitive word and mood of the year as expressed through a very timely expression whilst interrogating consumer culture as culture.
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🌴 See you soon, Los Angeles! I’m headed to CA this week and will be hosting a few events in late December and early January: read about them and RSVP here. Then…I’m headed to NYC!!
🇬🇧 A quick British-ish thing: I’m up for a SXSW London talk on the creator economy, which voting is open for! Vote here, if you want to join me next year for a culture game to better understand the current state of creators.
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 featured (my BCN neighbor!!) Ainhoa Marzol, who chatted with Ben Dietz and I about the Facebook Group comeback, body changes in your thirties, and Gen X stepping into their culturally parental era. Listen on Spotify and YouTube!
Architects of AI: TIME’s Person of the Year
FT Person of the Year: Jensen Huang
“Disney making a $1B investment in OpenAI”
Who’s surprised? Know that such “awards” are only so complimentary, instead reflecting the state “of power” while often acknowledging criticisms. But, this doesn’t excuse bad things like Trump blocking states from restricting AI via executive order (which will further enable a literal toxic cheeseburger soup). ENOUGH!!
White House Slams Sabrina Carpenter
“Thank you, SZA”
“everyone is 12 now”
“everyone is twelve”
“Newsom responds to Nicki”
A more masochistic me would write about how dumb this is, but I’ll bundle this up in the “reality show” and “rage bait” convos: the government acting like Jordan Firstman is the most pick-me and culturally vampiric shit. That we keep falling into these attention traps? The definition of insanity. All this makes something like the “font scandal” seem so tame.
Miami’s first Dem mayor in 30 years
Dems notch gains in state-level election
Indiana GOP Vote Down Gerrymander
Let this as fuel your pro-democracy engine! See also: the Bulgarian corruption correction.
First time this century, child deaths will rise
Sudan Attacks on Kindergarten, Hospital Kill 114
Hundreds quarantined in SC as measles spreads
Terrible time to be a kid: as the first story explores, the cause is unknown but is likely tied to global health/aid cuts. The second and third items illustrate this, as the second is true evil tied to the ongoing civil war and the third expresses the global downtrend of vaccinations.
Layoff announcements top 1.1M
The most since 2020, potentially rivalling 2008 numbers too.
Religious trends among young Americans
This “Young people are religious!” story isn’t what you think it is, as people are becoming religious — but not as much as people becoming not religious. Fascinating! Keep the party going and read about how dogs are replacing kids in Japan. Take that, viral complaining mom on TikTok!
Warnings rise for U.S. of severe flu strain
UK hospitals facing ‘worst case scenario’
Catalonia reintroduces mandatory face masks
Not to worry you but, if you’re not vaccinated for this year’s flu, good luck to you. It’s having a mega awful moment in the UK, Canada, Japan, Spain, etc. Get that vitamin c regimen going! And stay home if you are feeling sick!!
2025 will be remembered as the year of poop from ass. We will think back on 2025 and go, “Shit from butt.” In the yearbook of our lives, when our AI assistants present a throwback image from now, we will encounter one long brown streak greasing over the image. And we will laugh! Oh we will laugh, because this was a simpler but complicated time that we will have moved beyond, a time counted in poo covered stress nuggets that we hoarded and counted all year, building a glorious pile of excrement that we passed back and forth over twelve months, a non-stop cultural enema, a fecal transplant of one bad thing after another. And how we loved it! How we obsessed over being covered in this ass chocolate whilst refusing to bathe. We hated it, technically — but was it not a scatalogical obsession? You bet your ass it was.
The words of the year (“rage bait,” “6-7,” “slop,” “parasocial,” “glut,” “fatigue”) reflect a techno-induced mania and, while my intellectual mind says the word of the year is “dehumanized,” my monkey brain says we can go one further with this year’s word: shit. Poop. Fart! Doo doo. Logs. Wee wee poo poo dookie butter brownie pudding dump: that was the year. Not just because of the news, but because trends were repeatedly shitsessed — “SDIYBT,” “Things me and my boyfriend have stuck up our butts,” “Take a picture with your ass out,” “Calzolzini Cacadini” and “Pañalini Caquini” — along with various breakout stars of the number two variety, like the Afraid To Fart woman and Hally, the certified pooper and Tiara “Can you spell diarrhoea?” Skye. “If I eat your ass crack, no sloppy Joe in the back,” Cupcakke rapped in October, yielding the viral “Monday, eat my ass; Tuesday, eat my ass” and so on, eating ass every day except Sunday, the day when one must fast from ass. While protein had a breakout year, it birthed this fibrous now: we became so constipated with thoughts, ideas, and edible content this year. 2025 saw the last hurrah of tech loneliness and digital ennui as we realized we need to start taking a communal, cultural laxative. Continuing the 2020s trend of maintaining your colon health, we’re hopefully entering an era of being more regular, for the better health of our hearts and minds — and the better health of the planet’s heart and mind.
This pile of shit points to another though: the phrase “poop from ass” and “shit from butt” and all the many iterations thereof, all of which has lined the toilet bowl of these times which is why it’s the best summation of the year’s mood. “Butt announces he will posthumously reward Poop with Fart,” someone observed of Trump honoring Charlie Kirk. “Ass has announced that hole will release a shit before the end of 2026,” someone recapped Elon Musk’s AI games news. “Butt’s new album ‘poop,’” it was said of bbno$’s album drop. “Butt announces shit,” the creator Ranboo declared of Disney introducing AI content. While this idea is technically not new, 2025 saw such phrases smeared along our cultural hallways all year, to express the myriad intersectional awfulness of this time. Ridiculous and juvenile? Sure. But direct and accurate? Definitely. As the year ends, it’s unsurprising the expression emerges from the wastewater to reflect bowels in movement. “shit has been named poop of the year by ass,” Bald Ann Dowd declared of the “Architects of AI” in TIME. “Poop to invest 1,000,000,000 farts into Ass,” David McNamee reframed Disney’s $1B OpenAI investment.
2025 was the year of the snake, a time of conflict and change: a great shedding. Essentially? Shit from ass. As we look into the future, to the year of the horse, there will undoubtedly be more doo being stirred and it is our job to always flush the toilet of culture. If the bowl continues to become a cesspool…whose fault is that? Ours. Yours and mine together! But also the tech executives and presidents: this is a collective waste management issue. We have to “Damn bitch, you live like this?” ourselves clean, holding each other accountable to our better, un-shit stained selves. Grab some strong but gentle soap as we enter our power bottom era — and take better care of our collective hole.
Kristen Stewart Wants to Blow Up
The must read interview of the week, as Kristen burns down so many antiquated Hollywood ideas. She perfectly skewers the “brilliant” male actor archetype and the hyper-commercialism of film. Would love to queen out with her. (Another Times actorly slam dunk? The Paul Kooiker photo story. I mean…the Wunmi Mosaku images? HELLO???)
Can Cruising Survive Influencers?
Some things are sacred, as we find with this story of the queer cultural staple of cruising colliding with young people needing to share everything as tech monetizes another human activity.
What I saw at Harvard surprised me.
This opinion piece by a red state governor who was “wowed” by woke kids at Harvard is interesting in that it captures the painfully simplistic right wing view of the left. The comments section is great.
How monogamous are humans?
Did Black Death flow from volcano?
Two interesting (And fun?) science stories, from humans being strangely monogamous to the surprising tie between the Black Death, climate shifts, and volcanic activity.
Man dies of rabies after kidney transplant
Thrilling new fear unlocked.
Man suffers a stroke after energy drinks
Below Deck star reveals ‘vape poisoning’
Cruise passenger died, served 33 drinks
An unfortunate apocalyptic horsemen trio of modern indulgences and gluttony.
The Best Electronic Tracks of 2000-25
The Best Electronic Records of 2000-25
The Best Electronic Mixes of 2000-25
I’m biased, yes, but this was my favorite end of year and early 21st century feature of 2025. Easily! Not only does it feature a grab bag of fab musical writing guests (Philip Sherburne! Sam Valenti IV! Tone Glow!) and people I’ve interviewed in the past (Loidis/Huerco S.! DJ Sprinkles!), it made me…surprisingly emotional? It was a lot to see 25 years of the music that defined my life put into one place, presenting both a context and a history. It’s very special! Very electronic nerd, etc., but I loved it.
It’s 2030 and 80ºF out despite it being the week before Christmas. For three months you’ve been trying sell the $2K Marty Supreme jacket you bought five years ago for $500 but have reduced the cost to $400, $200, $100. You need that money to buy snacks — but also you want the new North West tooth necklace that says “TUNG TUNG” because she’s starring in the Netflix-WB Italian Brainrot movie and just announced this merch. You’d use a pay later account but you’re banned from all of them due to delinquency (plus you’re not 18 yet). You split the pantry of a one bedroom apartment with your brother, moving in with another family because JD Vance and Peter Thiel passed an executive order allowing cities to pay landlords to knock down unrented apartments in the city to make more room for in-city data centers. You’re sleepy because the Labubus you keep into a shirt and use for a pillow have become flat and the popcorn buckets from the Skibidi Toilet and Minecraft 3 and the Poppy Playtime movies that you used to make a bed frame are starting to crack after warping after a two week stretch of 115ºF days in September. Your brother stole your Bearista so now you’re drinking water with your hands since you don’t want to be seen with a Stanley Cup and you haven’t had a chance to steal someone’s McDonald’s Gulper. You hope — You dream! — you’ll win one of Mr. Beast’s Neuralink giveaways so you can become a Linker, less because of what it does but so you can get an official branded N tattoo below your ear. If your brother’s in a good mood, he’ll finally try to give you the tattoo with a hot pen. If he isn’t? You’ll continue wearing the broken Meta Glasses as a joke, to pretend to be chopped.
Obviously I’m fantasizing, exaggerating such a scenario even if many details will be real: there is a Skibidi movie in the works and North West wears a lot of tooth jewelry and the past ten years have been the hottest on record. I don’t need to draw your attention to specific details but I will: all that stuff. What stupidly materialistic times we’re in! None of this is to peacock wealth as the optics of the rich and the poor have collapsed but instead expresses how the trend cycle has moved beyond anything vibe-based or earned through living and culture (See the early 2025 “death of trends” conversation.) and into a shorthand of possibility: Gen Z and Gen A shifting the concept of “status symbols” from high-cost items like watches, tech, cars, and the like and into common things like a Bearista, Crocs, Rhode phone case, Trader Joe’s bags, etc. means everything life is now a pay-to-play accumulation of trend-based accessories, your life a constant creation of trash to signal culture instead of being involved in culture. This is less “their fault” and more the logical conclusion of our pressing easy buttons for the past decade, overnight shipping and binge watching defanging people to the point of their being too lazy and too illiterate to understand they’ve been conned into living an unremarkable, disposable life. “In a time when affordability is driving the political conversation…it isn’t a flex anymore to splurge on a designer bag,” Vox’s Kyndall Cunningham wrote recently. “Status can be earned by getting your hands on something rare, even if it only costs 30 bucks.” True, yes, but whether a $500 Coach bag or an $89 Pink Palm Puff hoodie or $250 Marty Supreme windbreakers or a $65 North Face quarter zip, these are less things worn and loved and used and more brandmaxxing by literal and adult middle schoolers name dropping their way to meaning. Ralph Lauren Christmas, anyone? Better yet: a Trump Gold Card? Cue TikTok Shop slopping UGC creators building identities not only upon consumption but by being human ads for products built to never last.
Such is what happens when life is designed to be difficult and no one can afford their future: everything cheapens, the “you are not rich” conversation multiplied by the “too much stuff” conversation. After five years of this — of post-2010s and Covid-fueled online shopping and TikTok enabled hyper-trends — this is the era of everything being “aesthetic” versus meaningful, that something can look good for a day and disappear and that’s okay because of the momentary dopamine high: easy come, easy go, swipe the literal object away because nothing else in life matters beyond this moment. To survive, we’ve taken up gambling instead of personal development, investing in time-bound souvenirs, goods to last a season (Labubu! Stanley Cup! Sunset lamps! Whatever “cool” shit Charli is selling!), making life a cycle of digital trends yielding irl waste. A new Beanie Baby every month! A different Furby every other week! Everything is fast fashion, as you amass items not because they’ll help you or better your future or capture a memory but because we don’t take this “stuff” — or this world or each other — seriously enough to consider anything beyond this ephemeral moment. Waste making as meaning.
This is by design though: we can be mad at some young white girl for not realizing cotton comes from plants but know that the point of modern, western, global north industry is to divorce you from such realizing that. When you don’t realize that cotton is a plant requiring labor to procure, that this act is based in centuries of enslavement and colonialism, you never stop to think something like clothing has a real human-based cost. You never realize polyester is plastic that will outlive us all. That is by design, to keep you and I and most people reading this within the center of a shopping horseshoe, encouraged to consume without thought as to not connect an over-stuffed closet with clothes suffocating villages and seashores and deserts in Kenya and Ghana and Chile. You’re not supposed to know that every iPhone you purchase is tied to deadly cobalt mines in the Congo, just like you’re supposed to think about every disposable vape settling a chemical fire in distant environments (while dismantling you from the inside out). Tech — especially AI — banks on our collective consent because the industry must colonize us because it is a new expression of classic colonialism, consuming our labor and time and creativity and environments before us too: such proof is everywhere, from Karen Hao’s connecting AI global exploitation to Palantir’s AI used by states to catch and kill to cities like Memphis being destroyed so Elon Musk can have a robot that makes sick burns and big tittied avatars.
Intellectually, we all know. But our comforts and our complacencies and our petty desires to signal cool instead of being cool suffocate our higher selves, not only for the individual but for the collective. I was telling colleagues this week that the future isn’t about ease for more but the quieter deaths of an even more unfathomable number, that the convenient pleasures of these times require more people to die in places you’ve never heard of, in places you will never see. The globally unaesthetic, the internationally untrendy, the universally unappealing are those whose lives are being equated to another popcorn bucket, another shirt, another scene where a person has six fingers. Forget the enslaved worker in China, disregard the dying child in Zambia: shop their life away as you shop away yours. Countries build invisible jails to kneecap entire continental economies from thriving, disabling people from leaving whilst blocking the locking ones from immigrating. That way, those on the top of the planet can feel better about themselves, smug in their discourses of what’s “in” and what’s “out,” as those in financial stratosphere above them plot to get rid of them too.
“happy £85 Grinch to all”
“The Grinch was a”
“The Grinch was 53”
“how this week feels”
“5 Dubai Chocolate”
“Rigatoni Rita”
“Look at Garfield”
“Oh holy night”
“Idk man”
“Somebody call Mrs. Claus”
Some of the great riches of holiday content from the week.
“tank top and pushup bra”
This image of Sydney Sweeney posing as a “tough” boxer is definitely a perfect encapsulation of the performative now.
“a beautiful grandma”
Love how aging turns all genders into one: grandma.
“first public venue”
“why we log in”
This week in “Famous People Tour Saudi Arabia,” a subject I don’t want to have to write about again but I know I’ll have to.
“Can we zoom out?”
“would have been seen as fortunate”
“The laborers would use this technology”
A brutal series on modern work culture as if from the future, entering the TikTok genre of brilliant corporate satirists.
“a certain genre of white man”
STOP SENDING ME THIS TWEET!!!!! I did start wearing pants during winter. (Occasionally.)
“Midnight Sun”
The only Zara Larsson cover you’ll need to see this week. And if you love that? You’ll love this.
“deeply demonic video”
Obsessed with this Gerber cooking video that is so deranged that…I’ve watched it four or five times daily. Thankfully, there are more videos from the same account if you want more insanity (and the comments on the original video are so good).
And, finally, the internet dog I coveted most this week.
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Thank you for this work of observation and synthesis! The depth and consistency of your cultural reading is incredibly valuable, and your writing has become a real resource for me, both personally and professionally.
The collective emotional portrait of 2025 you describe, this sense of saturation and inability to properly digest the constant flow of content, really resonated. The conclusion you draw (about the need to re-educate ourselves in how we consume) feels essential. The dystopian projection that follows acts like a magnifying mirror... it starkly exposes how self-destructive the path becomes when we remain driven by consumption, signals, and short-term dopamine.
Reading these pieces triggered a genuine moment of clarity for me. They helped me put words to sensations that had been hovering in the background, and to better understand my own personal tensions within this broader system.
I truly hope these reflections reach a wide audience, and that they help spark awareness (and eventually resistance!) to the systemic traps we’re currently caught in.
This article comes at the perfect time, and you've totally captured the messy vibe of the year. Do you think well see more states push back against federal AI mandates next year?