Mid- year Review

 Seven months into 2026, a mid-year recap of pop culture, glamour, the internet, and the ongoing soap opera of social media. No cap.

January: 2026 became 2016

The year opened on the nostalgia train. Suddenly, we were back in the era of the aesthetic VEVO music video. Everyone was dusting off their 2016 photos and setting them to whatever audio was doing the rounds. Millennials in their thirties absolutely ran that trend — the Outfit of the Day (OOTD) posts were genuinely cool. I did not feel the same urge to post my 2016 pictures, as I was just a middle schooler back then and not in my cool pics era.

However, I get the appeal. 2016 looks easy from here. That's the trick of it: the past is infinitely replayable and the present just keeps coming at you. Hold onto that, because it doesn't leave for the rest of the year.

February: an Olympics with a soundtrack

The Winter Olympics arrived, and with them the year's first real crossover moment- PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson's "Stateside" took off on the back of gold medallist Alysa Liu's routine. The Winter Games don't usually pull this kind of attention, and thus Liu’s lesson felt bigger than sport: put the thing you actually enjoy into the thing you do, people can always tell. Watching the song travel as far as the medal is a very 2026 detail.

March: the fruit took over

By March, my feed was almost entirely Strawbraritta, Bananitta and the rest of the AI fruit cinematic universe. Nobody can explain why fruit became short-form media's chosen genre, and yet there we all were, watching part six, then part seven. It was slop. I watched every episode.

If January was nostalgia and February was joy, March was the internet showing us what the present actually looks like; infinite, ai-generated, seven parts deep. No wonder we wanted 2016 back.

April: Bieberchella

Justin Bieber at Coachella, and a hard swing back into the good stuff. He played his old YouTube videos before performing the songs live — which is to say he ran the exact 2016 nostalgia play the rest of us had been running since January. Turns out we weren't doing it alone. Bieber was in the group chat.

May: the Met Gala, gloriously unwearable

May was Met Gala month, and once again I was floored by garments that could never survive a lecture theatre or an office. I suppose that's the point of them. Still, imagine the crossover. Imagine turning up to a 9am dressed as an hourglass, the whole room watching the sand run out on however much lecture is left. Mesmerising. Impractical. Correct.

June: the World Cup humbled me

 My first World Cup as someone actually paying attention, I learned the legends' names just in time to watch them leave. Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, Messi — all of them exiting the sport, leaving only Jamal still standing. I know he's a great player. I'd also been told these were the men who win things, and then they did not win the thing, which is a lot to process when you are still working out what a false nine is. I'm told this is normal and that I shouldn't take it personally. Give me four years and I'll come back fluent in stats.

July: love, actually

 The seventh month turned sentimental. Olivia Rodrigo's new album, Taylor Swift's wedding at Madison Square Garden — love back in the middle of the mainstream. What struck me was the contrast. Taylor's day stayed hers: no paparazzi, no leaks. Meanwhile the Russian couple at the Empire State Building went global on purpose, carrying a message worth repeating:

"When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace."

This is where seven months of scrolling leaves me, weirdly hopeful. Maybe the brain rot isn't the end of us. Maybe we get to keep the magic of 2016 and the tech of 2026 in the same hand. It's only been six or seven months, after all. Plenty left to see before we sit down to draft the 2027 resolutions.