6 Culture Trends Worth Watching: James Bond, Christopher Nolan's Hype Machine, Music's Loudness War, and More

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading. Given the strong response to this format, I’ll be publishing it weekly for the foreseeable future.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: A James Bond drought, the end of music’s “loudness war,” the importance of opening day box office, the Falklands War revisited, a college for livestreamers, and generational adoption of closed captions.
• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.
• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Rotten Tomatoes scores to Big Mac prices to Spotify song composition attributes.

Trend 1: A James Bond Drought

James Bond is alive and well, despite the character’s absence from cinemas and the fact that we don’t even know who the next James Bond will be.

The latest installment of the 007 franchise is currently slated for 2028, which would make for a 7-year gap between that project and 2021’s No Time to Die—the longest Bond-related movie drought since the franchise’s introduction in 1963.

If you’re a bona fide Bond-head, don’t fret. Progress is being made. In June of last year, Denis Villeneuve—the filmmaker behind the Dune films, Sicario, and Arrival—was announced as the franchise’s new director.

Next in line: the world needs a new Bond. Prediction markets currently favor Callum Turner, a talented actor who is perhaps most famous for being married to Dua Lipa.

After all this time, it’s shocking that there is no consensus frontrunner for Bond succession, yet my hot take is that this is actually an asset for the franchise.

The past two decades have seen a deluge of films oriented around…