Six Culture Trends: CDs, Dolly Parton, R-Rated Movies, and More

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

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: Dolly Parton as America’s most (quantifiably) beloved cultural figure, social media’s anti-AI-slop crackdown, an alleged CD revival, Netflix poaching YouTube creators, the R-rated movie renaissance, and the celebrity docuseries boom.
• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.
• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from NYC filming locations to global fishing activity.

Trend 1: Dolly Parton—America’s Most Beloved Cultural Figure

Americans love to disagree with one another, with this discord greatly magnified by a media apparatus that thrives on polemicism. Open [news site of your choosing] and you will find yet another topic on which Americans have differing opinions. This steady drumbeat of news coverage obscures the myriad issues Americans actually agree upon: Nerds Gummy Clusters, freedom, McDonald’s french fries, the awesomeness of the Super Bowl, and, of course, Dolly Parton. Americans have loved, and always will love, Dolly Parton, who passed away this past week at the age of 80.

Parton was a unique cultural hybrid in an American public sphere that favors political extremes, blending her humble beginnings, country credibility, bipartisan openness, and disarming self-awareness into a universally endearing persona. In fact, over the years, Parton frequently polled as America’s most beloved public figure.

Take, for example, YouGov’s March 2026 study of American polarization, which measured the partisan divide in how Democrats and Republicans view a wide range of celebrities and political figures. Parton was the survey’s most favorable figure by a large margin, with virtually no difference in partisan acclaim.

America is an incredibly diverse nation in a perpetual state of introspection, forever assessing the prospects of the Great American Experiment and debating what it means to be “an average American.” If I can be willfully reductive for a second: Dolly Parton may have been one of the few public figures to thoroughly understand these concepts and to use this boundless empathy for the betterment of others. This is all to say: RIP Dolly Parton, an American treasure.

Trend 2: Social Media’s AI-Slop Crackdown

The platform currently known as X announced a new “anti-AI-slop” policy, replacing its short-lived “Creator Revenue Sharing” program with an “Original Content Rewards” program. According to the announcement, the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter will rearchitect its payouts to favor creators who “personally write, film, design, or produce” their own content—which sounds nice on paper but difficult in practice.

X is the latest social media site to join the fight against AI slop, with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Substack also announcing changes to the way AI content is labeled and circulated across their sites.

Each platform has selected a different approach to AI content regulation, addressing the issue across three distinct domains:

1. Algorithmic recommendations: Will AI-detected media be deprioritized within a platform’s personalized recommendations and newsfeeds?
2. Payouts: Will payouts to AI-centric creators be penalized?
3. Labels: Will sloppy AI content and accounts be flagged within the application?

So far, all major social media sites have opted for labeling, while a handful of platforms have delved into algorithmic penalties and demonetization.

Two major winners have emerged from this enforcement wave. The first is “people who use the internet,” who can take in memes and music absent the threat of AI slop. The second is a startup called Pangram, which, to date, is the only AI detector that really works, making it the go-to partner for many of the aforementioned platforms.

In short, nature is healing—and by “nature” I mean social media.

Trend 3: Are CDs “So Back”?

Every year the world readies itself for the resurrection of the compact disc, and every year it never really happens.

Those who follow the music industry are subject to a steady drumbeat of media coverage surrounding the format’s viability. One such example: last week Olivia Rodrigo mounted a surprise CD release of her new single “Serena Joy,” selling a limited supply of 500 discs at a small store in Tustin, California.

If you’re skimming the headlines, you see “CDs” and “Olivia Rodrigo” in the same breath and think, “CDs must be cool again!” So, in the year 2026, are CDs “so over” or “so back”? Which is it?