TR.BIZ: 2.24.2026
From Alysa Liu’s culture wins to Tyra Banks’ Millennial curse, 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 chatting spas as event venues, Alysa Liu’s culture war win, a non-laptop I like, and two food trends to tap into.
💥 Soft Powers: Alysa Liu supremacy
As predicted, the winner of the Olympic’s culture games was figure skater Alysa Liu, who went from her momentum being throttled by JD Vance to becoming the first American woman to win figure skating’s top prize in 24 years. Also? She did so while looking extremely cool, ushering in big woke feelings as memes and fan edits swirl of her piercings and hairstyles signaling a shift in political temperature. The weekend saw her take a love of PinkPantheress to main, flying fans stateside with a performance of the PinkPantheress / Zara Larsson song (which Zara reacted to with glee). People (Women.) are crushing on her big time as an aerial image of her spinning has hit meme status and she sends a Donna Summer song back to the charts: she is the Olympic moment, the only major breakout in a landscape of quiet mania. Prepare to see her making the very obvious talk show circuit but also being the face of many a logical brand (L’Oreal? Gap?) but also many a non-obvious brand (Youth to the People? Miu Miu?). Will she become a Gen Z defining athlete in the way Gus Kenworthy became a gay defining athlete? Or will she fade into the non-memory of these unmemorable games?
👀 Trend Watchers: In the spa we all fam
A few weeks back I wrote about “events that do too much” like wrestling speed dating and dodgeball open mics, all activities that eventize multi-tasking and overstimulation. It’s interesting! But embedded in there was another trend that has been brewing for some months (Years?) now that I would tie to the popularity of Wi Spa in LA and the Turkish baths in NYC: the sauna-as-event space. Stories about this have been percolating for weeks — Vanity Fair covering the “sauna wars,” Inc. citing investment in these “happy hour alternatives,” the Times positioning them as solutions for loneliness — which ties into the drips and drops of true cultural actions like Substack’s wet literary reading and the Othership social club, two efforts raising to raise this bar. Cut to this past week when electronic artist horsegiirL threw a listening party for her latest project at a sauna whilst celebrating our fire horse year. In the spa wars, NYC has taken a decided lead with this thanks to Othership’s growing influence as they offered the venue for the aforementioned music happening. This is very likely a place to “invest” given the wellness boom, but also because this is a feel-good, literal clean teen thing to do during not-great times. See you at the spa, I guess!
📲 Tech Talk: No laptops at the bar
KRF NOTE: This is a ~sponsored~ entry, made in partnership with Lenovo. Learn more about advertising here.
After spending a month and a half between Los Angeles and New York, I’m about to embark on another series of trips in March and April, to Paris and maybe Madrid or London, both for work with some fun peppered in. An issue that keeps popping up in previous travels that I’m already trying to figure out is how to: 1.) minimize literal carry-ons as myriad baggage restrictions on flights prevent over-packing while 2.) disabling having too many bulky things as I do my best to look cute in a cosmopolitan city. It’s a delicate balance! And with a dog added to this? Forget it. An item I’m eager to swap out is my laptop, which can be such a drag during my outings — but I found an obvious in-between that wasn’t my easily-brain-dead phone: a tablet, ideally one that can enable some focus time in the slim windows I can open. I’ve been getting from the Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus, which is cute and slim and does something that my laptop doesn’t do: enable monotasking, as much of my work involves juggling tabs whilst researching, which is great until it isn’t, when I actually have to start the writing process and need non-distractions as I lock in. (Granted…If I need to dip back into the primordial cultural goo of social media? It can do that too, etc.) That makes the running around of it all much cuter — and adaptable — as this is very much a modern issue that lots of us working creatives deal with (a la: one five Americans are working whilst out-and-about). Plus? I’m trying really hard this year not to be a homebody, which isn’t a problem I have but is encouragement to get out and be more mobile, making such devices key (and, yes, laptops can do this — but sometimes I need something more discreet as to not look like some lost office worker when I’m trying to read and write while at the bar, which the Yoga Tab’s versatility helps me minimize). Learn more about this device and creative adaptability here.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Tyra Banks, Millennial chungus
