I've always been a pop culture hound, from consuming 1970s cartoons and sitcoms, amidst the rise of the blockbuster film, ie. Star Wars, to my career as an English teacher where I taught Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice as the original rom-com and introduced Henry Thoreau through the music and ethos of punk rock. So, to be alive in 2025, you might think I'd be as happy as a pig in slop amidst the constant saturation of popular culture. But I do wonder whether it's all just too much these days.
What is popular? And what is culture? And what is pop culture in a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century?
Jocelyn Novek, writing for the Associate Press takes a look back at the year 2025 and ponders "a ring for Taylor, an ill-timed kiss-cam, and something called 6-7":
Dictionaries define things. It’s their job. So when dictionary.com pronounced “6-7” as their 2025 word of the year, you’d think they would have, well, defined it. But no. “We’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” they told us of this year’s “linguistic time capsule.”
But that’s just how pop culture works, isn’t it? Who’s to explain why parents alone in their cars were suddenly singing “up up up” from that “KPop Demon Hunters?” song? Or why, in the Venn diagram of pop culture and zoology, it was the capybara that emerged victorious and beloved? Goodbye, Moo Deng. You’re adorable, but so 2024.
Despite our new obsessions, though, some things remained constant — by which we mean Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, of course. It seems like every year gets bigger for Swift. But in 2025, she put a bow — or ring — on it with Travis Kelce, announcing “your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” As for Beyoncé, the musical goddess finally won that best album Grammy she long deserved — and, on tour, introduced a new force: her daughter, Blue Ivy.
So from the inexplicable to the familiar, here’s our annual, highly selective journey down pop culture memory lane:
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