TR.BIZ: 4.28.2026
From shooter conspiracies to Spotify's most streamed, 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 the psychosis of liberal conspiracy theories, checking in on a cute newsletter, wondering about the state of streetwear, and overthinking Meghan Trainor.
🏛️ Politicultural: Liberal conspiracy psychosis
The White House Correspondents Dinner’s shooting has thrown many (mainly on the left) into a frenzy, sending an otherwise rational group into a tailspin of disbelief that is entering mania. This comes from the math-not-mathing around the situation: as noted on Sunday, this includes the ballroom talking points, the “Cole Allen” madness, the unbriefed Melania, the Karoline Leavitt gaffe, etc., which has expanded into spiraling theories, disappointment in the media, and enlivening the dead scientist debate. What’s making this worse is that so many emerging stories seem to reinforce doubt here: Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin emphasized Trump’s composed composure; the Washington Post explored at length the lack of security at the event; New York’s Errol Louis recounted his experience, noting the reactions to the shooting “felt too rehearsed and too passive.” If the truth is the truth, the media and discussions of said truth are feeling squishy, which is aiding our psychosis. But why are we spiraling? It might be because we’ve been yelling for a decade and no one seems to be listening: Cole Allen’s supposed mania is ours too, as the system (political, economic, etc.) continues to fail us. “The only question is if anyone will ask why increasingly normal people feel the political system is so unresponsive to their concerns that they resort to violence,” Ken Klippenstein concluded in a piece about how the shooter was far off the FBI’s radar. “What makes the forced consensus so jarring is how wildly disconnected it is from the actual public conversation,” Tad Stoermer noted on TikTok, highlighting how the Democrats hyping political violence which is at deep odds with what real people think, that the right seized on the security of the ballroom while most people questioned what they saw. “Legitimate resistance is treasonous even before it begins,” he noted of the Democrats’ cowardice, “it traps the non-establishment opposition in a perpetual defensive crouch.” This whole situation is hitting three major trends going wild right now —
First, as we discussed roughly two weeks ago, the pressure on people is reaching a fever pitch where violence against the powerful is being enacted because no one is empowering the people. Violence becomes the answer when your needs go too long ignored.
Second, from Trend Report: Trend Report™: assassinations are en vogue, which we know trends around Trump but he is a tastemaker here, from taking out Maduro to killing Ali Khamenei. This fits into a tapestry that also includes Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk, all the big and small ways literally shooting down people in power is being used to “make change" when no change is given. FT did a great deep dive on assassinationcore at the end of March.
Third, also from Trend Report: Trend Report™: we’re at a time in culture where life is a fan fiction, that conspiracies become true and false (Epstein, aliens, etc.) due to so many players in our culture being based in the blurring of what’s true and false (AI, Trump, etc.). You gaslight people enough and they do indeed go crazy from the stories they tell themselves. “Times are weird,” I wrote in the Q1 Report: Report™, “it’s becoming more and more obvious that truth is no longer the salve but that living in a fictive fantasy of conspiracies, theories, hopes, and ideas instead of concrete fact is much more interesting…Hence why things like Polymarket and Kalshi and other prediction markets are thriving: they play not on truth but on trying to divine ‘what’s next.’”
Strange times, strange measures, etc. but know this is clearly not the end of such behavior for both audience and actors in this play. This is the “new normal” until people can live normally once more.
💥 Soft Powers: Capsule’s young Brit cool
This entry made in partnership with Capsule. Learn more here.
If you’re reading this, you likely subscribed because you needed a like-minded shepherd to help guide you through our very noisy world. Or, at least that’s what I hear again and again from readers around the world, which is an honorable distinction to have and that I take great pride in. But: I know my limitations, in that I can only speak to my lil experience from my lil part of the world. This is why there’s a growing category of similar writers and efforts that are siblings and children of efforts like this, hence the appeal of general culture spaces like shit you should care about and culturework along with specific, local versions like NYC’s Crumbs of NYC and Paris’ Franchement. It’s a great feeling knowing that, no matter who you are, someone out there organizing our tmi state into something legible. Cheers to that! I wanted to share a particularly cute entry into this canon that feels very much like the younger British sister of this very effort: Capsule, a Zillennial fashion and culture newsletter born of Holly Beddingfield’s looking to create a space to share what’s been of interest in her world. To better understand the importance of this trend of for-us-by-us internet spaces, Holly and I had a brief chat on the subject to better understand how she got started and how this helps make space for young women online.
What’s the importance of spaces for young women online?
There is a romantic ideal of us all just connecting IRL or only reading books and physical magazines. And that sounds gorgeous but it’s just not realistic - we grew up with the internet and it will remain a part of most of our lives. But I really believe we deserve high-quality content. I call myself a Zillennial, sitting in the awkward middle between Millennials and Gen Z, and I grew up reading blog-like publications like Man Repeller, Broadly, and The Pool. By the time I actually reached adulthood, they had disappeared, and the pivot to TikTok and short-form video in 2020 really felt like it left something behind. Young women want to hear from relatable people, be guided by a sister-type figure, and consume genuinely thoughtful content. That’s what I try to do with Capsule - I write with my actual friends in mind, and am very aware of making the screen time worthwhile. Many people say Capsule has helped them spend less time on social media, which I love. The newsletter has four sections: Open Tabs (a personal essay or cultural commentary), News (the stories you missed this week), Hot + Not (a cool guest shares their ins and outs), and Add to Queue (recs to read/watch/listen). It’s designed to give people the best bits of the internet without the endless scroll.How is pop culture a prism with which young women see the world?
Pop culture matters because it’s one of the best ways to learn about our own values. When we are discussing a pattern in celebrity relationships, we understand our own feelings without having to put ourselves on the line. When we observe a cultural trend, we can be more intentional about the behaviours we want to bring into the world. If we didn’t have pop culture I think we’d go insane, because we’d talk about our own lives far too much. Pop culture connects us to each other and the world, and in a weird way, helps us stay present. I find reading and writing about this stuff to be strangely calming: it means I’m not spiraling about things beyond my control, and I’m actually using my brain.
Subscribe to Capsule here — and I highly recommend their Instagram too, which has been having a bit of a moment.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider: What’s the most streamed music ever?
Late last week Spotify dropped a few lists reflecting the most streamed audio items in honor of their 20th birthday. The results are unsurprising (Taylor Swift as most streamed artist of all time, Bad Bunny having the most streamed album, Joe Rogan as most streamed podcast) but also deeply shocking. First — which I tell people all the time — is that The Weeknd is one of our biggest generational acts: he’s the fourth most streamed artist; he has the second, fifth, and twentieth most streamed album, the artist with the most appearances in the top twenty; and he had the most streamed song of all time (“Blinding Lights”) along with having the fourth most streamed (“Starboy”). He may be cringe, but he is huge and trying in a landscape of boring normie mainstream music: he is our male Lady Gaga. Regionalism clearly is thriving given the appearances of Bad Bunny and Karol G, but it is most pronounced in podcasts as Gemischtes Hack (?) is the second most-listened podcast followed by appearances by Fest & Flauschig (??), Relatos de la Noche (???), and Não Inviabilize (????). The catch? The regions are limited to Europe and the Americas. Both the popular podcasts and audiobooks reveal the grip of the grim as true crime and “scary” stories rule (Crime Junkie, My Favorite Murder, Killer Stories, Lights Out, The Boyfriend). The influence of social media is everywhere, from both A Court of Thorns and Roses and Iron Flame being most read in audiobooks along with the repeated presence of the clip-able sounds from someone like Billie Eilish. Also? All of these lists emphasize the sublime basicness of most people. Bad Bunny and The Weeknd? Cool and interesting, sure. But Taylor? Ed Sheeran? Bieber? Arctic Monkeys? Drake? I’m falling asleep as I write this. We are a fascinating bunch, aren’t we?
👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Is this the end of streetwear?
