6 Culture Trends Worth Watching: Netflix's Cable Addiction, Latin Music, Anime, and More

A data-driven look at YouTube's love of Latin music, a Dunesday box-office showdown, WNBA viewership, anime's global dominance, and Greek mythology going viral—plus recommended reads and datasets.

Welcome back 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!

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In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: anime’s global dominance, the Netflix afterlife phenomenon, Latin music’s outsized presence on YouTube, a Dunesday box-office showdown, the WNBA’s remarkable resurgence, and ancient Greece’s return to the mainstream (following a 3,000-year hiatus).

• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from music genre popularity to Nobel Prize winners to IMDb data dumps.

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Trend 1: Anime’s Global Domination

The seventh-highest-grossing movie of 2025 was an anime film called Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle, which earned nearly $800 million worldwide. The astounding commercial success of Demon Slayer marked another mainstream moment for anime (though does something really qualify as a “moment” if that art form increasingly is the mainstream?).

This past week, Demon Slayer finally arrived on streaming, becoming available to all Crunchyroll subscribers, and quickly emerged as one of the most heavily reviewed films online.

And if that last sentence reads like absolute gibberish to you—especially the word Crunchyroll—then prepare to learn about a cultural phenomenon hiding in plain sight.

The past twenty years have seen anime embraced across the globe. Despite the industry’s commercial stagnation within Japan, the format has flourished abroad, growing from $2.5B in sales in 2009 to $14.3B in 2024.

Anime has become a pillar of global youth culture, with more than 42% of Gen Z Americans watching anime adaptations weekly.

One of the biggest drivers of this phenomenon is also its greatest beneficiary: a Sony-owned anime streaming service called Crunchyroll, which grew its subscribership from 5M in 2021 to 21M in 2026.

That’s 16 million paying subscribers added in 5 years, which is greater than the telecast audience of the Grammys, or the population of Belgium.

Trend 2: The Netflix Afterlife Phenomenon

If you check the Nielsen Top 10 charts right now, you’ll find that a 2010s cable TV series called The Last Ship is one of the most widely consumed shows on streaming.

This series had a fairly unremarkable run on cable television, debuting to mixed reviews and experiencing declining viewership with each successive season as cord-cutting customers abandoned linear television for Hulu and HBO Max.

So why is The Last Ship back in the cultural conversation? Presently, this once-obscure show is trending for two reasons:

1. The series boasts a full catalog of 56 episodes, each running 45 minutes.

2. All 56 episodes of this show were added to Netflix this past June.

The Last Ship is the latest entry in a rapidly expanding canon of dormant TV shows briefly resurrected by Netflix, joining a cohort of programs headlined by Suits, Animal Kingdom, and Dexter.

Given the continued existence of this Netflix-specific phenomenon, my hot take is this: there is a cohort of streaming subscribers who value volume above all else. These consumers have grown accustomed to binge-watching, and do not discriminate against cable TV programming or shows that predate the very existence of streaming.

If I were running an entertainment consulting business, my go-to advice would be: produce several seasons of an obscure cable television show, end that series, wait a few years, and then license it to Netflix.

Trend 3: YouTube Loves Latin Music

Two weeks ago, I launched a new dashboard to track the topics most frequently mentioned on YouTube, much akin to Google Trends. Before building the data pipeline, I made my best guess on the pop stars and movies that would top my rankings. Would Michael Jackson see the most mentions? What about Taylor Swift? Surely her music videos exist in a constant state of mass consumption.

Yet when my query finally loaded, I was left with an absolute head-scratcher.