#pop-culture-trivia

#pop-culture-trivia

The classic cartoon franchise is getting a high-budget live-action remake, and it plays exactly by the Marvel rulebook. The trailer is focused on the central story of Adam Glenn, the lost prince of Eternia, forced to live in hiding on Earth.

I'm still buzzing from it, man. I am. I must have gone with a friend. I don't remember, because I was so high... I think it was at Roseland.

Over the years, there have been Populists, Progressives, Farmer-Laborers, Unionists, Constitutional Unionists, Unconditional Unionists, Know-Nothings, Nullifiers, Readjusters, and more. My favorite party with a presence in the chamber is the Silver Party, founded to support a platform of bimetallism, or backing the country's money with silver as well as gold.

The lyrics have a rather annoying quality to them, similar to the way that other songs like "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, "Fireflies" by Owl City or even "Friday" by Rebecca Black did in their time - songs that gained rapid popularity and, just as quickly, sparked rapid backlash from many due to overexposure to them.

Beleaguered Louvre president Laurence des Cars quits after a historic heist under her watch. The next morning, a new leader is announced. It's Christophe Leribault from the Palace of Versailles, a true museum animal who ran a few during his career.

Physical media sales, DVDs especially, are experiencing a new burst of popularity. After a decade of freefall, enthusiasm among Gen Z halved a 20 percent sales decline in 2024 to just 9 percent in 2025. Stores have noticed. The Times' Karla Gachet spoke with staff at cultural hubs like Cinefile and Vidiots to discover why 2026 is already shaping up to be their biggest year, with the latter renting a surprising 1,000 DVDs a week.

Love it or hate it, Wizards of the Coast has leaned hard into its Universes Beyond subset of Magic: The Gathering cards as a way to collaborate with all manner of brands and IP, including Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Marvel's Spider-Man, and soon, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This TMNT-themed set is an expansive release hitting card shops on March 6, and it includes the usual gamut of play and collector boosters, a Commander deck, chase cards, and more.

And by "Who-dom," I don't mean the Seussian variety but the taxonomy coined by 's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: the vast, sub-stratospheric tier of celebrity occupied by figures whose fame is intensely meaningful to some and virtually nonexistent to everyone else. Whos are defined in opposition to Thems, the indisputable celebrities known to most except those living under a rock or who willingly reject the very notion of pop culture,

Memes have become the clearest and most direct language of digital culture: condensed fragments of reality that synthesize the complexity of the present and circulate at the same speed as a society surrendered to hyperstimulation. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the endless templates of X, Instagram, or TikTok, memes have evolved from simple ephemeral jokes to veritable systems for decoding the world, semiotic capsules that allow us to process the political, the social, and the intimate.

Lady Gaga, Blackpink singer Jisoo and comic Trevor Noah are among the celebrities revealing their all-time favourite Pokémon as part of the Japanese media franchise's 30th birthday celebrations. In a minute-long advert that played during last night's (8 February) Super Bowl 60, singing sensation Lady Gaga declared that, unsurprisingly, her favourite Pokémon is fellow singing sensation, Jigglypuff. "She has a 12 octave vocal range," Gaga explained, adding: "Jigglypuff is my favourite." Gaga was then joined by the cutesy pink creature for a brief duet, in which the pair sang the Pokémon's name in unison. "She uses her voice to protect herself," Gaga added.

You won't find this in Cortina d'Ampezzo over the next few weeks, but for several decades of the Olympics' history, the contest awarded medals not just for sport but for art too. In the Summer Games from 1912 to 1948, musicians, painters, and plenty of other aesthetes went brain-to-brain in events such as lyric poetry and chamber music. "Town planning" was even contested one year under the umbrella of the architecture competition.

There was something undeniably weird about 2016. Not weird in the charming, "remember Vine?" sense, but weird in the way history feels right before it tips over. It marked a slow descent into collective unease, beginning with the surreal recapture of El Chapo, winding through celebrity deaths and the mainstreaming of one particular cartoon frog, and finally cratering with the presidential election of reality TV star Donald Trump. At the time, many outlets openly wondered whether 2016 was the worst year ever.