This week I was listening to an episode of one of my fave conspiracy debunking pods, QAA. It’s been running for years now, but in the early days of QAnon it was a really invaluable resource for diving deep into what was going on on the fringes of the American right, something that’s unfortunately now in all of our faces.

This particular episode was about the famous account of a psych study called “When Prophecy Fails”, published in 1956. I’ve referred to this study several times when I’ve been thinking and writing about online conspiracy thinking in fandom and other spaces. In 1954, a Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her small circle of followers that flying saucers would arrive to carry them to safety before the waters rose. The aliens didn’t come and the flood didn’t happen. Three psychologists from the University of Minnesota had embedded themselves in the group to watch what happened next, and what they reported was that the believers doubled down. Faced with total disconfirmation, the group didn't dissolve in embarrassment. They started proselytising harder than ever, rationalising the failure as proof that their faith had saved the world.

This account helped launch a really influential concept in social science, which you’ve definitely heard of: cognitive dissonance. The idea that true believers, confronted with evidence that destroys their worldview, will not update — they will dig in deeper. The only problem is that it didn't happen.

Happy New Harry Album Day! Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally has dropped. No hot takes until I’ve spent three to five days listening to it on repeat.

Yesterday, I listened to Harry’s interview with Zane Lowe. This long-form interview is something Harry does as part of every album cycle. Lowe has been dubbed “pop’s unofficial therapist” since being hired by Apple Music, specialising in empathetic deep dives into not only an artist’s album, but also their creative process. But yesterday, I was struck again by the fact that after listening to the pair of them talk for an hour, I’d learned absolutely nothing.

It’s a bit of running joke in Harry’s fandom that he’s so media-trained you will never learn anything about him, even in the steady spotlight of promoting a new album. Even here, where Lowe asks about Liam Payne’s death for the first time, all we learn is that losing his friend has caused him to want to “live life to the fullest”. Okay, hallmark card.

Like many people, I just finished watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. It was a good, self-contained little series, and even if you’re still burnt out on the Game of Thrones universe, you’ll enjoy it. I assume they’ll go on to make more and more until we hate it, but just watch season one and move on with your life. Interestingly, I think there’s something appealing about Ser Duncan as an example of “connected masculinity” but I need to chew on that more.

Anyway, this isn’t about that. One of the things that caught my eye was this story about Game of Thrones fans and Breaking Bad fans “warring online”. The context:

First, we need to talk a little about IMDb ratings. These are powered by users adding star ratings for TV episodes and movies they've watched, providing a number out of 10. These are collated into an overall score, prominently displayed on the IMDb page for the particular show or movie. Most people probably don't even look at it, but for some people, it's a point of pride.

This week I’ve been thinking about the demise of twitter, and what has risen up in its place over on X The Everything App. Normally, I just keep calling the platform “twitter”, both because X is a stupid name and because most people who aren’t chronically online don’t even really know its called X now. Also because why do anything Elon Musk tells you to do.

But for a time, twitter was one of my favourite places online. I joined in March 2007, just a year after the platform was founded. For whatever reason there was a vibrant group of people from Aotearoa using it in those early years. I remember giving a presentation to my fellow partners at my law firm about why we should set up a branded twitter account in 2009. I remember showing them the photo of the Miracle on the Hudson tweet and trying to explain why this was how information would move now.

For many years, twitter was an unrivalled source of access and information. It didn’t matter what topic I was interested in, I could find and follow experts and activists and academics and commentators and journalists. I could ask them questions. It was incredible.

Last year when we were talking about context collapse and the fourth wall, I spent a bit of time explaining fanvids. Then later we talked about fan edits, where fans recut movies or shows themselves to reflect a different story they wanted to tell. This week I want to talk about their gen z offspring, confusingly also called fan edits.

Fan edits, the way tiktok and insta users are deploying the term, are like fanvids of old — compilations of clips to tell a story, about a show or a central character or pairing — set to music. Here’s one about The Summer I Turned Pretty:

We’re a day late this week because it was Waitangi Day in Aotearoa, our national day.

On Thursday, I went to Laneway. Amazing day, incredible weather, Chappell Roan rules. One of the recurring conversations all day before Role Model took the stage was, “who’s going to be Sally?”.

Let’s back up quickly for some context.

This year I'm still wrestling with what it means to find new and interesting ideas online when we have to wade through so much slop. Curating the Curators is a series of interviews with my favourite online wranglers and sharers.

Lucy Blakiston has been running her gen z media empire Shit You Should Care About for six years now, and still manages to wow me every day with her ability to collect, distil and share complex ideas. We chat all the time, but I wanted to talk to her specifically about curation, trust, platform incentives, and how to give people the news without giving them the blues.

How would you define something that we should care about in 2027? What makes the cut?

This week tickets for Harry Styles’ upcoming Together Together tour went on sale and for the millionth time in the nine years of his solo career I found myself in the trenches of the ticket wars.

If you’re fortunate enough to not stan a stupidly popular musical artist, or, idk, don’t want to go the Superbowl or the Olympics, you might have managed to make it through life without considering Ticketmaster your actual nemesis. I am very old, so I still remember being able to queue up for tickets in the street that were sold in record stores (Big Day Out) or calling to buy them on an actual phone (Michael Jackson). Now, the whole thing is a landmine of competing presales, insane prices, false scarcity, scalpers and bots.

Though it’s far from a new idea, there seems to be a fresh wave of articles going around at the moment about digital detoxing in its various forms. It might be the January of it all (new year, new you), but it predates that a bit. It’s the idea that we’re giving up streaming for vinyl or cassettes or mp3s, that we’re bricking our phones or switching to dumbphones or making our phones greyscale to reduce our dependence on them. It’s buying up old dvds or bluerays. It’s rawdogging flights (can imagine literally nothing worse).

And look, it’s a completely natural, healthy, human reaction when the world is as much of a dumpster fire as it is right now to want to tune out and do something (anything) else.

But I actually think that there’s a distinction here that’s worth exploring, that’s less between offline and online (or physical and digital) and more between queue and feed.

One of my longest-running subscriptions probably is to Web Curios, a lovingly-tended weekly digest of weird, wonderful and deeply interesting links curated by Matt Muir. He also co-runs the Tiny Awards, which we’ve discussed a bunch here. I was lucky enough to meet up with Matt in person last year, and he agreed to chat before Christmas for this series.

Tell me how Web Curios started.

I was working at a now-defunct PR agency called Hill and Knowlton, part of WPP, back in 2010. We were forever telling clients it was incredibly important to “make content”, and so it was decided that we should also be making content, and I asked if I could write about things that might actually be useful to people working in marketing on the internet.

Hello 2026 and welcome to a bunch of new readers, I’m so delighted to have you here. Last year, I found I’d get a little influx of new fandom and pop-culture readers after I wrote something in that arena, who then unsubbed when I wrote about the future of the internet, and a bump of technology readers who unsubbed when I wrote about Taylor Swift. All I can say to that is: why not both dot gif. Here’s my plan for this year. I will be no more consistent! I’m always thinking about culture AND technology AND gay hockey players AND surveillance capitalism AND astronauts AND the independent web AND Harry Styles. So, more of all of that.

While Heated Rivalry has consumed everyone’s brains over the break, there was another massive television moment that played out with the fifth and final season of Stranger Things airing. I watched it with my godkids who were obsessed with the show, and I loved the soundtrack, and then I more or less moved on in my head.

But within days, my fyp was filling up with a very familiar-feeling set of posts. Some fans of the show were doing close reads of the final episode and claiming that there was more to the story than the happy-ending epilogue that had been presented. I’ll try and write the rest of this post without overt spoilers, but if you’re holding off learning anything at all about how this show ends, skip to the “more good stuff” section below.

I was going to take a week off but then Heated Rivalry finished and my brain was too full of thoughts.

If you’re an extremely online person (and it’s hard to imagine you’re not if you’re subbed to this email) you won’t have been able to escape hearing about the Canadian smash-hit tv romance about two closeted professional hockey players. Let’s catch everyone else up real quick. Heated Rivalry is a six-part show made for the Canadian streamer Crave. It’s based on a novel by Rachel Reid, part of a series of interconnected m/m novels called Game Changers, all set in the world of North American major league hockey. The book was written back in 2019, but has come back to prominence recently, due to the rise in popularity of romance fiction in general and sports romance in particular. Though don’t get me started on whoever has decided romance novels now all need cartoon covers(!)

Jacob Tierney, an actor and director who you might know from the very funny Canadian comedy Letterkenny, read the book during covid and decided to adapt it for tv.

It’s now been almost a full year since I started writing this email to you regularly (wild that I’ve kept it up tbh). But rather than boring everyone with some bs year-in-review listicle, I thought I’d catalogue my current obsessions: the topics and questions that kept resurfacing all year in conversations, drafts, and DMs, long after I thought I was done with them. These are the ideas I kept circling and the questions I’m dragging with me into 2026.

#001 Neighbourhoods online

What would being online look like if we could hang out in small, intentional groups?

I started this year by saying that I wanted to focus on the good internet, and that permeated pretty much everything I read, thought about and shared. Out of that came this strong conviction that (if we’re using place-based metaphors) the first phase of the internet had us living in kooky little villages, the second phase of the internet has forced us to coexist in gross, unliveable mega-cities, and the next phase of the internet needs to be about neighbourhoods.

This is the second in my series of interviews with people who I've been following this year who are engaged in discovery and curation. Sari Azout is the founder of Sublime, an app that lets you save and connect things you find online, and discover related ideas. As you know, I’ve been obsessed this year with digital gardens, how we explore, and how we share our journeys — and Sublime is such an interesting take on that.

For readers who don’t know you yet, can you introduce yourself and talk a bit about what you’re building with Sublime and The Sublime newsletter?

It's taken me a lifetime to get here, but Sublime is where all of my deeply held beliefs coalesce into one piece of software.

I want to talk this week about some backlash to Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, but this isn’t a newsletter about Swifties, it’s about digital manipulation so hang in here with me.

When Taylor’s new album dropped, the main discourse was that it was a flop even her diehard fans couldn’t defend. It has a song on it about her boyfriend’s dick. Max Martin couldn’t save it.

I’m not here to defend Showgirl. It’s been a grower of an album for me — and I will unapologetically belt out Fate of Ophelia and Opalite in the car, but it’s never overtaking my love for 1989. It also doesn’t matter, Tay’s doing just fine:

Throughout this year I’ve been thinking more and more about what discovery looks like in a post-search era. One of the most interesting things, for me, about the rise of newsletters is that we’re back to an era reminiscent of Justin’s Links from the Underground.

We’re relying on human curators again, who do the active work of exploration and sharing what they find. So, I’ve decided to talk to a bunch of my favourite newsletter writers and wranglers about their journeys, the work of curation, and what it means for the future of the web. I’ll send these out on Tuesdays, so you can expect your usual LEGO update on Fridays.

I’m really excited that Cates agreed to go first!

Yesterday Spotify Wrapped dropped, and with it a new round of engagement bait as they included your “listening age”. Dunc getting a listening age of 55 prompted a full ten minutes of outrage in our team. I’m apparently 19.

Even as we complain that the Wrapped concept is washed, there’s still something we love about getting this glimpse into our own behaviour. We know it’s marketing, based entirely on storing data about us, but we still share and talk about the results.

This got me thinking about the kinds of online tracking we find fun and the kinds we find creepy. I’m nowhere near the privacy advocate I should be, because I understand all the horrors of surveillance capitalism, and yet I’m lazy and love convenience so when my AirNZ app detects I’m in the lounge and offers me my last coffee order to place again, I’m delighted. I know that I’m in a position of privilege where I can care a little less about being tracked, even if I shouldn’t.

Look, I’ll confess, I’ve never been a General Admission girlie. I can understand the thrill of being as close as possible to your fave, but when I go to a concert I like to be able to go to the bar, or the bathroom, and come back to my spot. I say now that it’s because I’m old, but I’ve pretty much always been that way. I think the last time I really tried to get to the front of a concert was Michael Jackson’s History tour, which shows just how old I am. If I buy GA tickets for a smaller venue, I’m at the back dancing by the sound desk, wine safely in hand.

But I get it — for some fans, being “at barricade” (i.e. pressed as close to the stage as it’s possible to be) is the pinnacle of a live concert experience. And to secure that spot, you need to be first in line.

Over the years when I’ve talked about fans I’ve always made sure to point out that it’s not just teen girls who like to queue. Sneakerheads do it. Apple fanboys do it (or did it, before the queue moved online).

OK we’re a day late this week because jet lag knocked me on my ass, but I’m old, so that’s what happens now.

While travelling I’ve been thinking about two loosely-connected stories about sports fans. Last week Sky Sports in the UK launched a new TikTok channel called Halo, described as (I kid you not) the “lil sis” of Sky Sports. Within three days, after a post that plastered “How the matcha + hot girl walk hits” in pink font over Erling Haaland sprinting towards goal, they’d wiped almost everything, posted an apology, and shut the whole thing down. Halo lived fast, died young, and leaves behind a very pink corpse.

Now the episode has become LinkedIn chum, with marketing “experts” trying to outpost each other moralising about what went wrong. You don’t need me to tell you the obvious bits. Womens’ sport is at its most watched right now. The WNBA delivered 54m unique viewers last season. You can see why the Linkedinfluencers love talking about this.

Well, I made it to London but my suitcase did not. Between trips to Uniqlo to buy pajamas and underwear, I did manage to make my Order an Object appointment at the V&A East Storehouse.

I’ve written about the Storehouse before, but when I was here a couple of months ago I didn’t book my appointment in time, so my objects have been sitting in my cart waiting for the next opportunity. The size of the collection is SO overwhelming that when you sit down to try and pick five things to see up close, it’s impossible to work out where to even start. My friend Carl gave me invaluable advice, saying you need to pick a theme for yourself and then choose your objects to fit the theme, so naturally I chose fandom.

First up, this is a souvenir brooch that was made for the play The Blue Bird, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in December 1909, and was apparently a smash hit.