6 Culture Trends: Elizabeth Holmes, Bad Bunny, the BBC, and More

Welcome 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: Elizabeth Holmes’ cultural endurance, the Oscar race, the decline of theatrical documentaries, the BBC’s fading reach, Latin music’s post-Super Bowl slump, and The Cat in the Hat’s bizarre AI-fueled resurgence.
• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.
• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Bob Ross paintings to Reddit activity.

Trend 1: Elizabeth Holmes

The following sentence is an alphabet soup of topics bound to stoke intense fascination in pretty much any human being: Nathan Fielder secretly co-directed a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes’ last 34 days before she was sent to prison. Wowza! Consider my ticket purchased.

Fielder’s documentary, titled You Can See Everything, dropped an extremely unnerving trailer this past week and immediately saw Holmes’ Wikipedia page trend among the site’s Top 100 entries, a feat the disgraced CEO has accomplished in 8 of the last 11 years.

I legitimately thought that popular culture had moved past Holmes’ story. After all the books, podcasts, and shows, I assumed this topic had lost its grip on the zeitgeist.

And then Nathan Fielder came along, tackling a story he was seemingly born to tell.

You Can See Everything is slated for October 16th of this year and would make Holmes one of the most heavily chronicled cultural figures in television and film over the past decade, trailing the likes of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Epstein, and O.J. Simpson—which could be considered “elite company” amongst delinquents.

The world now has high hopes for a theatrically released documentary, which may be the first (and last) time I write this sentence.

Trend 2: The Best Picture Race Heats Up

It’s fall film festival season, a time when studios debut their presumptive Best Picture nominees and when the degenerates who gamble on the Oscars refine their betting strategy.

One of my scorching hot takes is that betting markets will benefit the film industry as the world rediscovers the Academy Awards by way of gambling. If you think this is a “bad take,” I hardly blame you. But the monetary investment in movies’ biggest night is growing exponentially, with prediction markets projected to see $400M in bets for the 2027 ceremony, up from just $4M in 2024.

And who is this year’s favorite (thus far)? The most vanilla pick possible: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which became the frontrunner following its release.

Personally, I think the Oscar race would benefit from ambiguity to better capture the hearts and wallets of its newest viewers—gamblers and finance bros.

Trend 3: The (Alleged) Decline of Documentary Film

Multiple friends have asked me to use my industry connections to gain access to an advance screening of the Nathan Fielder–Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Unfortunately, my ability to fulfill this request is greatly complicated by the fact that I am not a well-connected person. Believe it or not, chartmakers do not sit atop Hollywood’s pecking order.

The sheer magnitude of interest in a theatrically released documentary got me thinking about the state of nonfiction storytelling:

1. When was the last time a documentary was this hotly anticipated?
2. At a macro level, what is the state of documentary film in 2026?