podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Every Thursday on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish explores the animating forces of this extraordinary American political moment. It’s not about the horse race, it’s about the larger cultural ideas driving the conversation: the role of online influencers on the electorate, the intersection of pop culture and politics, and discussions with primary voices and thinkers who are shaping the political conversation.
The Year in Pop Culture: AI, Gay Hockey, and Rage Bait
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Dec 11, 2025
What was this year in pop culture like? A scrappy Canadian gay hockey romance becomes the internet’s obsession while big-budget, star-packed shows are dwindling. AI rage-bait memes (some from government accounts) keep hijacking the national conversation. These are just some of the pop culture moments that defined 2025. Audie and New York Magazine staff writer Rebecca Alter break it down.
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This episode was produced by Madeleine Thompson.
Senior Producer: Matt Martinez
Technical Director: Dan Dzula
Executive Producer: Steve Lickteig
Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:01
I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the Assignment. And I really wanted to do an episode looking back at the big pop culture moments, but honestly, those are getting weirder and like harder to pin down. So we're gonna follow Oxford Dictionary's lead. They just declared the word of 2025 to be rage bait.
Rebecca Alter
00:00:22
Outrage will always bring people together and even if it brings people together in fighting and disagreement, it has everyone like tuning into the conversation.
Audie Cornish
00:00:33
That's Rebecca Alter, a culture writer for New York Magazine. She covers movies, TV, comedy, and according to her bio, celebrities behaving oddly, which let's be honest is basically the norm.
Timothée Chalamet
00:00:45
When I think "Marty Supreme," what happened at the New York Film Festival, right? We can't let this movie down.
Katy Perry
00:00:51
You are officially an astronaut. Thank you so much. How do you feel? I feel super connected to love.
FKA Twigs
00:00:58
Where are the great thinkers now? I feel like throughout history there's always been thinkers. Now we're like regurgitators.
Audie Cornish
00:01:07
So Rebecca Alter is joining me today to look back on this year of the highbrow, the lowbrow, the brilliant, the despicable, and everything in between. Stay with us. Alright, so, first of all, I need you to introduce yourself and like your job. Like, what is it when your family and your parents' friends ask what you do? What do you say?
Rebecca Alter
00:01:34
I say I'm a staff writer at New York Magazine and my parents' friends mishear that and think that that means the New Yorker.
Audie Cornish
00:01:42
Fair.
Rebecca Alter
00:01:43
Which it's not because specifically I'm mostly at Vulture covering pop culture stuff, celebrity news, T V, movies, comedy, etc.
Audie Cornish
00:01:57
Etc. Well, this is a show about the et cetera. So welcome to the Assignment.
Rebecca Alter
00:02:01
Thank you for having me.
Audie Cornish
00:02:03
So you and I both like talking about pop culture, but I've been thinking a lot about in a way, there's no monoculture. There's not one thing we all are kind of paying attention to, guaranteed. And so is there pop culture anymore? Like what's popular?
Rebecca Alter
00:02:21
That's yeah, I think about this a lot in the context of pop stars, where someone I love is someone like Zara Larrson, where I'm like, she's doing pop, but I don't think she's popular.
Audie Cornish
00:02:32
Yeah, I have no idea who that is. And I love music.
Rebecca Alter
00:02:36
She's Swedish.
Audie Cornish
00:02:36
No, it's not that. But in the past it would be like there's a world of blogs that are kind of gonna coalesce around somebody and we're all gonna talk about it. But I don't think there's anything we're all gonna talk about unless it's really extreme.
Rebecca Alter
00:02:49
'Right. And even up until the past few years ago, even, I think pre-Musk takeover of Twitter, there'd be a discussion in the zeitgeist that would be going on online that felt like sort of the main storyline of the day, right?
Audie Cornish
00:03:04
People would call this the discourse.
Rebecca Alter
00:03:06
'Yeah. Yeah. Twitter used to have main characters not that long ago. And we've really strayed from that. So it is hard to pin down what counts as pop culture when people are so stratified, but it's also what makes it so exciting when things do break through, because that bar is that much greater. Whereas on the flip side though, sometimes I feel like stuff is being flattened, like no one will watch something unless it's on Netflix. It's a challenge and it's sort of an alchemy where you're not always sure what the thing is that's gonna break through. Like right now, yeah, you could go to Apple TV where their shows are populated with A-list, like true movie stars or something. But the thing that's broken through right now is a Canadian, a gay romance hockey sort of smut series imported from Canada, starring zero famous people. And that's somehow the one thing that everyone's talking about, you know, this month. It's such a roll of the dice, I feel like for- look, that's what "The Studio" was about this year, is how do you- How do you ride these waves.
Audie Cornish
00:04:15
'It makes me think when we talk about how hard it is to break through. I think something that for me has caught my eye is Timothée Chalamet's very chaotic press tour for his film "Marty Supreme, "which is supposed to be about ping pong in the 50s, made by one of the Safdie brothers. And yet I have seen him doing, he's kind of the king of this era of chaotic media. He'll do a look-alike contest, he'll be beatboxing, he'll be faking a meta Zoom of himself coming up with ideas for the film. It's like by any algorithm necessary, I think is the way that this young A-lister is figuring out how to crack pop culture.
Rebecca Alter
00:05:03
Yeah, he's one of those people who's like a savant at this where it flows through him and part of it is have you seen his old videos from when he was like thirteen and he would review Xbox controllers?
Audie Cornish
00:05:15
'Yes. He was born for- he's a native. He's a digital native theater kid chaos agent.
Rebecca Alter
00:05:22
He really has the knack. And I'm very excited about "Marty Supreme." I saw a cutout of him at an AMC yesterday.
Audie Cornish
00:05:27
Are you? Or has he just been successful? Are you truly Rebecca interested in this film?
Rebecca Alter
00:05:33
No, suddenly I care about hockey and ping pong.
Audie Cornish
00:05:38
'Exactly. Exactly. It's just interesting because there were so many A-list stars who weren't able. Like their press tours didn't do much. People talked a lot about Jennifer Lawrence, for example, who in a past era was cool girl, right? Who was sort of funny and authentic and all the things you say, and now people are sort of saying these things about him. But in a way, he seems to have a better understanding of the new media landscape, which is deep, profound fragmentation. He absolutely gets that not everyone will see the last weird thing he did. Yeah. Also, you keep calling him Timmy. You are Timmy-pilled.
Rebecca Alter
00:06:15
'I am. I'm Club Chalamet-pilled.
Audie Cornish
00:06:18
I I don't mean to go on and on about this. I think I was just trying to figure out how do you punch through, what makes something pop culture.
Rebecca Alter
00:06:25
'Let's- well a lot of the time the stuff that punches through, especially as someone who has to write about pop culture, ends up being the tried and true stuff is always gonna be like lurid scandals, feuds, divorces. It's gonna be Kris Jenner has a new face, and that's very exciting. I guess when I say scandal, I mean outrage. Outrage will always bring people together. And even if it brings people together in fighting and disagreement, it has everyone like tuning into the conversation. And and they people, creators have figured this out algorithmically. On Rachel Sennott's new show, "I Love LA," I was watching this episode, which is great by the way, on HBO, where they're at a party at Elijah Wood's house, and one of the characters is meeting this influencer, and the influencer has this control room with like dozens of phones set up where she's planning these TikToks, like refining them to the second based on the saturation of the color of their clothing, like when the music sample starts, like all of these things, just to algorithmically refine these clips. And it was very dystopian. It was very-
Audie Cornish
00:07:36
'It was. And so this show is about this. It's one of these kind of young people in a city type thing, right? Coming of age and it's LA. And I actually am really intrigued by the show and enjoy watching it because it has a basic structure, which is they encounter a scenario that they think is gonna be great. We're meeting an influencer we want to impress. We're going to Elijah Woods' house, and then halfway through the episode, it becomes this fun house mirror for the culture now. Like, oh, that influencer is basically a psycho who's gonna make you try six different costumes and say the same sentence 100 times and then open a closet to their smartphone farm where their bots are driving their- it's like a constant thing where you reach through what is now the culture of now and the pop culture of now through that looking glass.
Rebecca Alter
00:08:28
Yeah. And you think about there have been surveys I've seen where, you know, they survey kids and sixty percent of them wanna grow up to be content creators or influencers. Like twenty percent of them I think wanna be like professional sports gamblers or something.
Audie Cornish
00:08:45
Sure. Another big trend of 2025, the sports betting scandal. Reviving past trends such as the five families in New York and bringing them back into the consciousness.
Rebecca Alter
00:09:01
'Yeah. This actually brings me back to a s- a big pop culture moment of this year, which is "South Park" became very relevant again.
Audie Cornish
00:09:09
Oh yeah.
Rebecca Alter
00:09:10
'For the first time in years people were talking about watching "South Park." Like I had to get a friend's Paramount+ login and start watching new episodes of "South Park" again, which I probably haven't done since middle school, because they did a whole episode about Polymarket. They did stuff about, you know, the Labubu craze. They did stuff about, you know, Kimmel, the whole brush up with Kimmel earlier this year.
Audie Cornish
00:09:34
They did stuff about the Trump administration.
Rebecca Alter
00:09:36
'Right. But the Trump administration frequently loves to wade into pop culture a a ton. Right? There was this recent scuffle with Sabrina Carpenter where ICE used a Sabrina Carpenter song in a recruitment ad. And she-.
Audie Cornish
00:09:55
Yeah, she went into the comments.
Rebecca Alter
00:09:57
Yeah, she did. And then the then suddenly something with official White House letterhead is like clapping back at Sabrina Carpenter with little references to her lyrics, right? They're talking like Swifties in this discourse. It's weird.
Audie Cornish
00:10:12
Yeah no, that's a good point. People have brought that up this year that, you know, the White House really has embraced meme culture.
Rebecca Alter
00:10:20
Totally.
Audie Cornish
00:10:21
Trump has always been savvy on social media, but every White House department and team has seen fit to post or repost AI generated images, jokes, always kind of punching down at various communities, but using a lot of pop culture references to do it.
Rebecca Alter
00:10:43
Yeah, the fact that one of the biggest trends in pop culture of the year, more in like the slop, Labubu, Dubai Chocolate category of pop culture, was the AI Miyazaki movie. The the Studio Ghibli image generator where you would upload a photo and they'd make it look like Studio Ghibli.
Audie Cornish
00:11:05
And for people who don't know, this is sort of like a Japanese animation and is a historic kind of like very well known studio, beautiful imagery.
Rebecca Alter
00:11:16
'Yeah, I do think it's just strange that all of our visual language from movies, television, art, et cetera, is now so easily able- and music, right with Sabrina- is now able to be immediately incorporated into these other machines and and systems. And it's something that you, you know, we've all been doing forever, you know, with meme culture and remix culture before that. It's nothing new, but I guess the ease of it now and that uncanny valley nature of the way it's able to simulate these things is very spooky.
Audie Cornish
00:11:56
We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, Rebecca Alter has some hopes for the culture in 2026. I want to talk about 2026. Australia just passed legislation that says little kids can't be on what social media?
Rebecca Alter
00:12:22
Yeah. Until they're 16?
Audie Cornish
00:12:23
It's a nationwide ban. Yeah. So I'm I'm wondering about other things you see ahead in 2026. I don't know if you have predictions, but what are you keeping an eye on pop culture wise?
Rebecca Alter
00:12:39
'Well, I think I could safely predict that we will quite probably not follow suit in Australia 'cause we've managed- they've managed to do it before with things like gun buybacks that we have failed to follow. But pop culture wise-
Audie Cornish
00:12:55
I guess because like the Oscars will be out, like the Golden Globes will be out. There's a Super Bowl coming up with Bad Bunny.
Rebecca Alter
00:13:00
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:13:01
The start of the year every year is really a time where some of these water cooler moments kick off because of these old school but still very relevant monoculture moments in the Super Bowl halftime show and the Oscars.
Rebecca Alter
00:13:18
I think people really need anything that's galvanizing or hopeful. And I don't know if that's corny or not, but I actually think like some sort of like things to like get behind and celebrate would be nice. I don't know if that's lame and I don't know if that's probably an accurate prediction.
Audie Cornish
00:13:37
Or you you seem like you're embodying cringe right now, which generationally y'all don't like to feel sincerity.
Rebecca Alter
00:13:46
Yeah, it's it's it's it's weird to see the the cringe process running course through me in real time.
FKA Twigs
00:13:55
I don't mind and I love sincerity, but I could see you kinda like, I don't know if I should say this, but it would be nice if.
Rebecca Alter
00:14:02
It would be nice if. Or or just no more equating since like cringe gets associated with like some sort of like savviness or being in on things and therefore like intelligence or worldliness, and I think sincerity and certainly hope right now come across as very naive. So I would like for that, those associations to maybe, you know, I'd like to see some nice, smart, sincere content. It's gotta be out there somewhere, probably.
Audie Cornish
00:14:34
I want that. I love that.
Rebecca Alter
00:14:35
There's a new Spongebob movie coming out. SpongeBob is a very sincere man.
Audie Cornish
00:14:40
I like where you're looking.
Rebecca Alter
00:14:42
To go back to "Heated Rivalry," I love horny, sexy TV. Nothing wrong with things being horny and sexy.
Audie Cornish
00:14:50
Although for a time there was. So this is again one of those micro movements that's like the backlash to the backlash. For a time there people were saying, I don't want to see all this stuff. It's not like usually necessary to the plot. I don't want it. Now here we are by the end of the year, being like these gay hockey players are hot. We need more of this content. Like there's much more of an embrace of I guess I want to say healthy sex and like healthy depictions of relationships.
Rebecca Alter
00:15:19
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:15:20
I'm sort of fascinated at you choosing the word sincere, because that's a different from authentic.
Rebecca Alter
00:15:27
'Right. And authentic feels like a direct reaction to the AI and the slop, right? Because how do we verify that things are made by humans, but not in an authenticity fetish, like hipster way, just in like a live people way versus bot way. I'll also say there were I saw a number of really good comedies in movie theaters this year. I loved "One of Them Days" in January with Keke Palmer. And I loved- and SZA, such a good comedic actress. Who knew? And "The Naked Gun" reboot, I thought was hilarious and so dumb and so fun. And I do think with you know, this looming Netflix and now possibly or Paramount, like I wanna I want people to go laugh in movie theaters. I think talk about human experience being away from your phone, being out of the house, but but it's so low pressure because you're still like sitting on a comfy chair in the dark.
Audie Cornish
00:16:34
I like you explaining why movies are fun to me because it it is totally generational, like y'all don't want to go to the movies. That I understand. It's expensive.
Rebecca Alter
00:16:44
Yeah, authentic doesn't have to mean going to like a micro folk festival in the middle of the woods. I think it could mean going to a movie theater and watching "Zootopia 2," I guess, if it's if it's with your friends.
Audie Cornish
00:17:00
Yeah, that's probably why that film made half a billion globally in November, shocking the world.
Rebecca Alter
00:17:07
Yep.
Audie Cornish
00:17:08
Well, I wanna thank you for being on the show and talking about all this stuff with me because it's actually can be hard to untangle, you know, what what's popular, what's not, and kind of put your finger on the zeitgeye, so to speak, and and get a s get a sense of this stuff. I really like respect your work. I appreciate it.
Rebecca Alter
00:17:29
'I respect the way you're able to give it in the course of a conversation the- to to do the untangling, because I'm like, oh no, am I tangling us into a deeper tangle?
Audie Cornish
00:17:40
'No, no. It's hard to figure out. It's hard to figure out. Rebecca Alter is from New York Magazine's Vulture. You can check out all of their end-of-the-year coverage online. Rebecca, thanks so much for being with us.
Rebecca Alter
00:17:53
Thank you so much for having me.
Audie Cornish
00:17:56
That was Rebecca Alter from New York Magazine and Vulture, and we'll be back next week.
