Welcome to the Monday Roundup!
The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.
Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.
Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!
In Today’s Roundup:
Original Data Stories: Sydney Sweeney’s unique celebrity, film festival standing ovations, the horror industry’s exploitation of Bambi and Winnie-the-Pooh, Dump-tember, a tax on football fandom, and Roblox’s staggering scale.
Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.
Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from chess games to candy bar rankings.
Trend 1: Sydney Sweeney
Another year, another Sydney Sweeney ad that sends the internet into a tizzy. This past week, a betting app called Novig launched a new marketing campaign featuring the Euphoria star in “near-total undress.” Reactions to the ad have varied widely (to say the least), but the most notable backlash has come from female athletes, who argue that the advertisement hypersexualizes women’s sports.
Much like Sweeney’s 2025 American Eagle “jeans” ad, the new campaign has the actress trending across the interwebs. In fact, since 2022, Sydney Sweeney’s Wikipedia page has seen the second-most traffic of any actor, with her Euphoria co-star Zendaya topping the list.
Upon further inspection, the actress generated more search interest from her Saturday Night Live appearance and controversial ad campaigns than from any movie or television show she has headlined.
Sydney Sweeney’s celebrity could best be described as recursive: she is increasingly famous for being famous, with the attention surrounding her advertisements and public appearances overshadowing her art.
Trend 2: Film Festival Standing Ovations
There will likely be no shortage of discussion and debate surrounding the documentary NAZA over the coming months. If you’re wondering why I’m walking on eggshells when it comes to this film, it’s for a simple reason: it’s about the actions of the Israeli army over the last few years, and it will be extremely polarizing throughout its inevitable awards run. You will see no fewer than five think pieces about this movie before the end of the year, so I’ll focus on an extremely trivial matter instead: film festival standing ovations.
Two weeks ago, NAZA received a 24.5-minute standing ovation following its premiere, the longest such ovation ever recorded at a film festival.
Regardless of movie quality or subject matter, these standing ovations have gone too far (or perhaps, more literally, too long). Since the pandemic, the annual tally of films earning an ovation of four minutes or longer at the Cannes Film Festival has increased considerably, with 20 movies achieving this feat in 2025.
I can’t remember the last time I stood still for ten minutes without being at an airport. While many of the films garnering lengthy standing ovations are worthy of praise, my hot take is that these ovations, and the media circus surrounding them, trivialize the art they’re meant to reward. We’re likely in the midst of a standing-ovation bubble, a strange outgrowth of post-pandemic film culture, and years from now psychologists will study this highly specific phenomenon.
Trend 3: Public Domain Exploitation
Sometimes I’m hard-pressed for pop culture topics to cover, and I think, “Maybe today is the day I run out of ideas.” Then I’ll read about an absurd entertainment trend that reminds me this newsletter could exist for 100 more years (at minimum), because people do the darndest things.
For proof of this phenomenon, look no further than the following three films, all released in the last few months:
Pinocchio Unstrung
Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned
Betty’s Revenge (as in Betty Boop).
All three are horror films built around beloved intellectual property that recently entered the public domain, joining a rapidly growing canon of movies that make up one of the strangest pop culture trends I’ve ever covered.