TR.BIZ: 6.30.2026
From taste memes to heat waves, 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 this climate tipping point, the fashion at Vogue College, sports and arts overlapping, why everyone is going on vacation to Uzbekistan, and a shitty situation at a Noah Kahan show.
🏛️ Politicultural: Might this be the climate tipping point?
It is so hot in Europe right now, with deaths moving from the hundreds into the thousands, all as a similarly intense heat prepares to sweep the United States. Much of the debate about Europe’s situation has to do with personal sacrifice and air conditioning impact and pointing fingers elsewhere, which is a very myopic way of looking at a situation largely enacted by corporations, the extremely rich, and the global military industrial complex. Clearly, as we’ve experienced for most of our lives — and most dramatically this decade — climate change is the biggest villain, not that the planet or climate itself is the enemy but that the current climate situation is a distorted doppelganger of our former selves coming back to haunt us for not being more careful in the decades past. This year has seen brutal snow in the United States, heavy flooding in Indonesia, and catastrophic fires in Chile, which brings us to being a week into summer realizing that the highly warned about El Niño is going to impose rolling heat waves as such through late October (not to mention incoming hurricanes and floods). The question in all this, in our annual environmental amnesia, is if such prolonged mass heat sickness will force a climate breaking point. Paired with Hormuzian energy woes, the answer to all of this seems to connect the dots for us: the future requires actual and meaningful rethinking of energy and impact, positing a sustainability race once the AI race crashes (all of which was a big call out in the Q1 Trend Report: Trend Report™). It’s these exact shifts that have shielded the blow of this moment for countries like China and Spain, pushing for the emergence of “me-first energy” approaches that use renewable and clean energy as a means to control power yourself. This has already been a huge takeaway from this year, which is exacerbated by this air conditioning debate. This should calls into question the biggest evil elephant in this room: AI, whose water and energy demands are clearly negatively impacting our circumstances. “All these companies are raising all this money because energy is the real constraint here,” kyla scanlon noted at the start of the month, connecting the dots in ways few are willing to acknowledge. “AI is the most energy intensive technology ever built at scale,” she says. “The foundation of all these companies is energy. Right now energy is the thing that we’re least certain about.” When we think about anti-AI sentiment, it’s not just the people getting dumber and job-taking things: it’s that such technology is robbing us of our environments and climate security, another thing that will make our lives even more uncomfortable and unequal, which is furthering the pro-people push against the tech. This should empower efforts like the Paris Agreement, but we know it won’t given how ineffective the UN and COP are. This will, however, empower political movements like the current boogeyman of American politics: the Democratic Socialists, who have the Green New Deal as a part of its platform. This isn’t just a leftist thing as the right will certainly tap into this, as owning your own power feeds nationalism (as would “fixing the environment” so people stay in their place, thus curbing immigration). When we look at the intersection of the now of this month, this year, and this decade, all this makes sense. We’re moments away from climate and sustainability’s big moment, where it’s a race by businesses and political parties to “own” a vision that will come to pass. It shouldn’t have come to this but here we are.
💥 Soft Powers: Art, but make it sports
The JP Morgan exec who lost her job by stealing a Knicks trashcan is an lol story of the year — and it bore another breakout as a result: the Twitter account @ArtButSports, or ArtButMakeItSports. The account went nearly as viral as the original viral Complex Tweet for replying to connect an image of the basket stealing with a František Kupka painting. The connection was awe-inspiring, reminding of the human mind and human imagination, both in terms of the art made and the connections made (as the account has stood very down on their being pro-human). The account has gone on to make other recent big sports-art connections — the viral baseball dog and Edvard Munch, the viral Indiana player and Leonardo da Vinci, a WNBA fumble and László Moholy-Nagy — illustrating the intellectual joy of domains like art history and the practice of intersectional thinking. This is a moment that feels like something from 2012 Twitter brought to 2026: a purity, an intelligence, served up so simply. Talk about a winner.
📲 Tech Talk: They’re assassinating the Albanian AI leader
