what is 2025?? an early recap of the year 👀

Thanks to the monthly Trend Report Live™ event, we have some soft data about what subjects and themes have defined the year — and you can participate in the next event this Sunday!

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Since February, I’ve been inviting friends, readers, and those generally interested in online and offline culture over to

Bobby Aaron Solomon

and my apartment for a monthly culture review. It’s called Trend Report Live™ and I wanted to take a moment to talk about it — as the next one is online and this Sunday 👀

I describe it as a game show where, as a group, we work together to build a time capsule of this moment by figuring out how important and popular items are, by mapping them on a matrix of those two metrics. We map fifteen items — five news, five pop culture, five memes — that take the tried and true weekly newsletter format and applies it to the month. Each item is debated, less about the subject itself and more as an impartial analysis, to make the case for it being very important (It will be in history books!) or not-that important (It’s akin to a TikTok trend!), more popular (Your mom and grandma know about it!) or less popular (Only industry insiders know about it!). Our assessment is neither good nor bad but just is: anywhere on the TRL matrix is valid as it is a means to help us process these times, to understand how these little moments may fit in the whole of history. At the end of the night, each of us vote on our top three happenings of the month — and the three items with the most votes are the most memorable items for the month.

Sounds fun, right? The last iteration had nearly thirty people present to debate the night away — and this Sunday, August 3 at 7P CEST / 6P GMT / 1PM EST / 10A PST, will be the first online version of the event. The time is literally inconvenient for everyone, sure, but we’ll have a good time: grab a tea or glass of wine and join in on the fun! You can RSVP here.

Another thing that has come with six months of reviewing culture is a few learnings, a detangling of themes and cycles of 2025 that we can use to study and analyze the past to get to the future. Month after month, trends rise and fall, building upon each other to create what we call the present. I wanted to share some key takeaways that have emerged, as I think they could help you all understand these times too.

To get to the learnings, we have to take a look at what we mapped each month: below are the presentations I made for each month, which were the basis for each event. Each presentation offers a deep dive of each subject which, after light debating, resulted in the winners, which we have listed below (some of which include wild cards, a la items that the group felt we missed but defined the month). Note that each presentation has presenter notes with more information on each subject and that there is both an American and EU bias — but I try to break out of them, to capture the whole of the world in 15 bites. Let’s dive in!

→ February TRL

• The subjects were: for news, DeepSeek, Trump’s international politics, “Make Europe Great Again,” “Gulf of America,” Majorana 1; for culture, Karla Sofía Gascon’s Twitter drama, Kendrick at the Super Bowl, the return (and memes) from Severance, “Abracadabra,” Ne Zha 2; for sillies, Luigi Mangione Valentine’s, “Republican makeup,” “the Queen of Pakistan,” “reheating nachos,” Shakira ripping off Beyoncé.

• Winners? DeepSeek, Trump’s international politics, and Severance.

→ March TRL

• The subjects were: for news, Zelensky at the Oval Office, Pope Francis’ near death, Israel breaking the ceasefire, measles, democracy protests in Turkey; for culture, Donatella and Demna and Jonathan Anderson leaving, Anora’s Oscars sweep, White Lotus, Bad Bunny for Calvin Klein, the Snow White remake; for sillies, JD Vance memes, “when the chile is tea,” AI Studio Ghibli, Lufy the dog, Ashton Hall’s morning routine.

• Winners? Zelensky at the Oval Office and AI Studio Ghibli — along with wild card Adolescence.