TR.BIZ: 11.18.2025
From Stranger Things haters to a new Spongebob song, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re exploring trend predictions from Yelp, tech and Hollywood’s ongoing tiffs, and if Marjorie Taylor Greene’s non-MAGA move matters.
🚨 REMINDERS 🚨
Two upcoming (Free!!) events happening to share, for any aspiring writers or those hoping to hone their craft.
🌈 Happening November 22 at 10AM PST / 1PM EST / 7PM CEST, Rax Ishida Will will be talking queer narratives and translating identity into writing: RSVP here!
📖 Happening December 3 at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond: RSVP here!
👀 Trend Watchers: Next year in food and home
We discussed this a week ago, but we’re entering the sweet time of year where everyone drops their year-in-reviews — and their upcoming year forecasts. An interesting one popped up in my inbox that seems to be one of the first in the incoming wave: Yelp’s 2026 Trend Forecast, which is broken into the domains of food and drink along with home and living. Let’s break these down, to see if we can get a buzzword Bingo as we await further forecasts.
For the food and drink world, “bold flavors, global influences, and creative new twists on familiar foods” is the lede. While matcha is obviously mentioned given its breakout year, it suggests an obvious sequel that continues the boba-to-matcha pipeline: black sesame, which is by no means new but its novelty in look and flavor is a great flag. Another item of interest is a rise in Indian foods and flavors, which seems to echo the breakouts in American-Indian pop culture figures (Lara from Katseye, obvi, but moreso Zohran Mamdani and Kash Patel and Usha Vance, all illustrating that AAPI culture is to the 2020s as Latin culture was to the 2010s) which collides into global food being seen as the “new buffet,” a la: Korean barbecue and dim sum and sushi. As you can tell — and despite politics — the melting pot continues to bubble, especially as we approach baked goods given Sweden’s princess cake moment continuing and the rise in Mexican bakeries. This is also the third year we continue with green as the trending food color.
For the domain of home and living, some fascinating but unsurprising subjects are emerging in that the vintage (grandma hobbies, clawfoot tubs) and the hyperwell (“wellness rooms,” “hot athletics”) continue their dominance as a few reclamatory acts emerge to punch at the screen. Communal screening is the most interesting, which brings the Summer I Turned Pretty watch party trend to the fore, showing that “appointment viewing” is a new sporting activity — and that the era of lonesome, endless binging is over. You alone on your phone is such loser shit! And we’re all realizing that. See also: the appeal of mahjong (I bought tiles a few months back! And Hillary Duff shouted it out yesterday!), “inclusive” golfing, and twists on group dancing, from line dancing to Kpop dance classes. Two obviouses that I can’t believe we’re still talking about: cosmic culture like witches and astrology are leaking from online to off as is the normalizing of hair treatments and various cosmetic therapies (red light, Letybo, NAD+). We wanna go out! But we’re still a bit self-interested. We’re almost out of the woods, folks!
The other “forecasts” I’m awaiting are Pinterest Predicts and Google Year In Search, which both do an excellent job of telling us the story of the present so we can conceptualize the future. Thoughts? More of the same, with a twist, is how I see it. Dig into the reports here and here.
👁️🗨️ Listen In: Does aging affect our information experiences?
“I am probably witnessing a much wider swath of stuff now than I did before and yet that wider swath of stuff seems flatter to me than ever in the past,” Ben Dietz observed on the latest HIP REPLACEMENT in reflecting on generational views of the internet, specifically in being named as a “witness” to this history in the new W. David Marx book Blank Space. “Is that a function of my age — and relative infirmity, mentally speaking — or is it the fact that truly everything has — because the aperture has gotten so wide — the height of the peaks have decreased?” It was an interesting question, which was something I hadn’t considered. Then again, that very much represents how differently generations experience information. “Given my age and coming of age with such technologies, to me it feels like it has grown up with me,” I said. “As I keep learning things and aging, so does technology. They’re also opening up and aging and becoming more wide, as I am…I don’t think that’s an uncommon experience for most Millennials.” How do you experience information as you age? How does that relate to technology? A curious thought. Catch the rest of the conversation here.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, I: A pre-Stranger Things temp check
My expectations about the new Stranger Things is quite low, less because I care about the series but more that the vibes have been off from the start. This once beloved and abuzzed show has fallen into Netflix’s cursed cage, where shit takes too long to come out that a generation ages and turns on them — or they’re given too much of a good thing and spoiled to the point of dissent. The recent “Eh.” of Wednesday and Squid Game suggest this along with the news that the Kpop Demon Hunters sequel isn’t coming until 2029. That’s why my ears have been perked around conversations surrounding this final season of an era (If not generation!) defining show. It’s not looking good, going beyond the “cast is so old” ruminations and Noah Schnapp’s zionism reruns that has tainted the water of a former teen audience. See this viral clip of Eleven running around and “preparing” for a fight, which people rightfully ripped apart for being over-edited and generally quite laughable. Teases of the show are generally being received with non-enthusiasm, as nostalgia for what was emerges among general meme parodying. It’s true that the haters may be louder than the lovers but one post from early October put the whole gambit into perspective: in response to the show’s creators claiming the finale is “emotional, inevitable, and right,” a viral Tweet predicted “eleven holds her arms out gets a nosebleed screams and the villain disintegrates.” Ouch. The first four episodes drop next week.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, II: Disney vs tech and vice versa
It’s been a bit since we’ve examined technology and Hollywood’s overlap because it’s a nearly flat circle. But, a few interesting thoughts are coming out of its death rattle, mostly via Disney —
