Analyzing Trends

This fall, two randomized trials of AI tutors pointed in opposite directions. Maryland undergraduates who were offered a tutor in their course finished with lower grades, while secondary students in England who revised with a tutor scored higher. Both results are real, and both come with details a headline drops: the Maryland tutor gave direct explanations by default, and only about one in seven s...

Cultural research has more signal than structure, and the loudest signal usually sets the story. Knolling, the studio habit of squaring every tool on one surface so each can be seen at once, gives analysts a way to slow that stream down. Laid flat, signals show what they share and what is missing. Charles Sanders Peirce, a mathematician and logician, treated meaning as a relation that shows up in...

Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence would now be called super intelligence, saying the word artificial makes AI sound fake. The word artificial describes where the technology came from, and the word super describes where it ranks. We trace the adjective's history from Gulf War smart bombs to smartphones and smart homes, and look at what happens when a machine bor...

Cultural change shows up in the words people use long before it shows up in sales figures or policy. People describe a new experience to each other, try out phrases, and argue over what to call it. Reading those words closely shows what people are starting to tell apart, and what they still leave unsaid. Anaïs Nin knew this from the inside. As a girl learning English in New York, she decided that...

Lately it feels like every organization has built a bigger pair of binoculars. There are dashboards for everything, weekly drops of “emerging signals,” and now AI sitting on top of it all, stitching neat summaries of what is supposed to be happening next. But in the rooms where decisions get made, the conversations still stall in the same place: everyone can point to the spike, nobody agrees on wh...

When Prada draped the Chelsea Hotel in silver and cleared Katz’s tables for a dance floor this June, the filmmaker it hired to design the takeover described the project as satellites invading Manhattan. The experience economy has morphed into an invasion economy, in which a brand re‑skins mythologized addresses, broadcasts the takeover, and lifts off five days later.

Hollywood still talks about “discoveries,” even as the hard work now happens in public, long before anyone calls it a film. Worlds are tested in comment sections, passed around as memes, and adjusted in the small edits that keep a clip in people’s feeds for one more loop. By the time a feature arrives, it is one more format a world moves through, not its origin. If you only look at the finished mo...

Most of what passes as “trend” right now is really about how we route memory. Feeds and platforms teach us to click what we already recognize, so nostalgia quietly becomes a default strategy. It feels safe, but if every brand keeps raiding its own archive, the past stops feeling special and starts feeling like inventory. The next phase of brand work has to focus less on throwbacks and more on cont...

California’s SB 343 “Truth in Recycling” law is interesting partly because it exposes how much the recycling symbol was never really about recycling. The chasing arrows became a civic ritual of the post-recession urban era: rinse the jar, sort the cardboard, participate in the system. In many cities, the blue bin became a quiet social signal tied to sustainability, institutional trust, and the bel...

Brands used to assume that if the numbers added up, the story would fall into place. The cases of Gucci, Nike, and Temu show the opposite is now true. Each looked structurally sound on paper, yet their business models began to erode as soon as culture stopped believing the myths that made those models feel legitimate. Heritage no longer guarantees authority, scale no longer guarantees centrality,...

Physical spaces are not neutral settings. Our offices, kitchens, parks, malls, movie theaters, and classrooms, all tell us who belongs, what behavior is expected. They are narrative systems, not just built environments. Every layout, threshold, queue, sign, fixture, and seat rehearses a version of the future. This is one of the central arguments of our new book Story Systems and Cultural Research....

Most of what we call “looking ahead” is really a mirror turned back on ourselves. Companies hire experts, build models, deploy AI to forecast markets and manage risk, but beneath the charts sit unspoken stories about who matters, who is expendable, and what “progress” is supposed to look like. In a time of conspiratorial thinking, wounded publics, and machine generated predictions, those stories h...

We are living through a moment when “it was just a joke” has become a default way of speaking about serious things, from AI and product launches to corporate apologies and national policy. The old figure of the jester, who once used humor to tell hard truths to power, has been inverted: power now borrows the jester’s stance to float disruptive ideas, test public tolerance, and retreat into irony w...

The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty, burnout, quiet cracking, but these are not abstract signals buried beneath events. They appear in work chats, neighborhood group texts, mutual-aid spreadsheets, and the steady accumulation of small adaptations. In that kind o...

Loneliness today is less a simple lack of company than a breakdown in shared meaning about what it means to be connected. Individuals move through days saturated with notifications, group chats, and parasocial ties yet feel unseen, because contact no longer guarantees recognition or obligation. Publicly, the experience is translated into shorthand complaints about busyness, missing “third places,”...

The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty, burnout, quiet cracking, but these are not abstract signals buried beneath events. They appear in work chats, neighborhood group texts, mutual-aid spreadsheets, and the steady accumulation of small adaptations. In that kind o...

Some of the most telling cultural warning signs do not look important at first. They arrive as spectacle, strange subcultures, compulsive self-performance, borrowed symbols, or people clearly pushing themselves too far. Then they get waved off as fringe behavior, filed under internet weirdness, or reduced to one damaged person making bad choices. But these moments are often not random at all. They...

“Machines scale knowledge; humans preserve wisdom. Intelligence, therefore, is not automation but awareness: the capacity to reflect, adapt, and ethically co-create new systems of understanding.” - Story Systems and Cultural Research (Routledge) A lot of the conversation around AI still feels too narrow to me. We keep treating disruption as if it is mainly about tools getting better or jobs gettin...

Many AI tools look impressive in a chat window, but that fluency often hides how fragile they are once their outputs drive real decisions. When you move from conversational demos to production systems, it becomes clear that what seemed like intelligence was often narrative performance, polished language without clear evidence or causal steps behind it. The core argument is that trust comes from st...

That gap between technical planning and lived stories is where crises go sideways. Leaders may think in terms of deterrence curves, transition pathways, or risk matrices, but publics respond inside narratives about who is being sacrificed, who is being heard, and whose reality still counts. When institutions treat scenarios as sterile forecasts instead of disciplined stories that expose the assump...

There is a difference between encountering an image and looking at one. Most people, most of the time, do the former. A photograph arrives already wrapped in headlines, reactions, and forwarded commentary, and interpretation moves faster than observation ever gets a chance to. For cultural researchers and foresight practitioners, that gap is not just a media literacy problem. It is a methodologica...

When a code like bro culture comes under pressure, it tends to get louder before it gets smaller. The pattern is well documented: when a certain version of manhood feels like it is losing ground, it tends to exaggerate itself rather than adapt. We should expect the same from the bro. As younger audiences ask for vulnerability and connection instead of the man who never cracks, the people most inve...

In creative work today the question has shifted. It is no longer “Do we have enough ideas?” but “What are humans for, now that ideas are cheap?” AI can draft credible copy, sketch campaign concepts, and outline product features in seconds. In response, organisations are doubling down on visible rituals of creativity: workshops, “human-only” ideation sprints, and whiteboards thick with words like “...

On the photobooth’s 100th anniversary, its compact grammar of a fixed frame and timed shutter within a curtained chamber still teaches how machines choreograph behavior. Narrative intelligence decodes that language, turning affordances into hypotheses designers can test in the wild. If we want identity systems that permit verification without erasing improvisation, we must read these grammars and...

Younger generations find rites of passage unfulfilling because public life has thinned, connection is often performed, and identity work has shifted into private rehearsal that turns anxiety into a shared code. By framing culture as a living story system, we can see where meaning is forming and design credible thresholds for belonging and responsibility. The result is clearer direction in ambiguou...