Start here · Essential guide
What Separates a Lasting Trend From a Passing Fad
Learn the qualitative signs that tend to separate durable change from short bursts of attention, and why no single sign settles the question on its own.
Evidence and Method
Fads, Hype and Trend Lifecycles
How trends rise, spread and fade, and how attention distorts the picture.
Diffusion of Innovations and How Ideas Spread Through Groups
An introduction to the classic adoption curve, its five adopter groups, and the ways real-world spread often departs from the tidy bell-shaped picture.
How Media Coverage Amplifies Small Shifts
See how repeated coverage can make a minor change look like a major movement, and why a sense of momentum can come from reporting rather than behaviour.
How to Spot a Manufactured Trend
A set of practical questions for judging whether a trend grew organically or was pushed by marketing and coordinated posting, with honest limits on what can be known.
Network Effects and Tipping Points
Why some trends accelerate once enough people take part, how network effects and thresholds work, and why the moment of acceleration is so hard to predict.
Nostalgia Cycles and Why Old Styles Return
Why styles, sounds and designs from past decades tend to come back, what the so-called twenty-year rule does and does not capture, and what returns say about memory.
The Hype Cycle Model and Its Limits
What the popular hype cycle model says, which parts of it ring true, and why it works better as a story about expectations than as a law that predicts outcomes.
The Trend Piece Format and Its Built-In Biases
How the standard newspaper and magazine trend article is built, why it favours vivid anecdotes and a neat narrative, and how readers can read one more critically.
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