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- Homes, steep homes: The affordable housing bill can’t come soon enough for some Americans.
- Play the hits: Streaming audiences are obsessed with old movies and shows.
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America’s young would-be homebuyers can’t afford to wait much longer for the housing bill |
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he would send a long-awaited housing bill to President Trump today, as legislators look to push through the bipartisan-passed legislation that could perhaps help many Americans find home ownership that had been more out of reach than ever. Trump was scheduled to sign the bill last Wednesday but canceled the event, saying he wouldn’t sign the housing bill until Congress passes one of his top legislative priorities: a bill that would require voters to present a photo ID at the ballot box. (The bill will become whether Trump signs it or not.) As far as millions of people in the US are concerned, the housing legislation can’t really come soon enough, with the nation’s youngest would-be homebuyers locked out of the market by home prices that have soared far above the rate of their pay rises in recent years. |
The gap between home prices and wages for adults under-40 is the widest it has been in decades. In 2024, the average household headed by someone below the age of 40 brought in $100,900 a year, while that group contends with the $350,000 median home price in the US, according to data analyzed by Pew Research Center. At the same time, the cost of borrowing has swelled in recent years. Rates for the average 30-year fixed mortgage, the most common in the US, jumped in 2022 and have hovered between 6-7% since — the highest levels since about 2008. The struggles aren’t exactly lost on the wider population: Americans across generations generally recognize that owning a home is getting harder, as 87% of adults say that buying a home is harder for young adults today than it was for their parents’ generation, per Pew. |
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Hollywood may be having its best year since before the pandemic, but streaming audiences are still obsessed with old content |
Even though DC’s “Supergirl” marked another disappointing outing for the superhero genre that once reliably propped up the movie industry, Hollywood has still had a flying first half of 2026. In fact, some are now positing that we could see the best domestic box office year since before the pandemic, potentially crossing the $10 billion mark thanks to mega-hits like “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Michael,” and “Toy Story 5,” as well as a bumper second-half slate. Still, between the inconsistency in the superhero cinematic universe, the (slim) chance that we may have seen “peak sequel,” and the recent rise of indie horrors helmed by internet personalities, it seems to be getting a little more difficult for some movie bosses to know which of their films are guaranteed to get the people out and filling seats across 2026. Streaming execs, meanwhile, might have happened upon a much more straightforward, if less inspiring, formula: just keep plundering the back catalog. |
According to the recent and aptly-named “Retro Revival” report from entertainment industry analysts at Luminate, the “2026 is the new 2016” trend that dominated social media feeds earlier this year was perhaps more prescient than it seemed at the time, with that same sense of nostalgia seeping into everything from the music we listen to and the way we listen to it, to how adverts and branding look now. Unsurprisingly, the world of TV and movie streaming has not been immune to the backward-looking movement, as content from streamers’ back catalogs increasingly comes to dominate the hours that viewers are spending on the platforms. |
Across the first quarter of 2026, Luminate data shows that every major streaming platform it studied, with the clear exception of Netflix, keeps viewers hooked with older classics from its catalog, rather than fresh original content; Luminate highlighted the staying power of comfort TV like “Friends” and “Suits” as key retention drivers. Netflix, often an industry outlier, makes sense as the sole platform where original content even nearly matches up to catalog offerings: the company has spent big on licensing and original content, laying out $135 billion over the last 10 years while other platforms, in Ted Sarandos’ words, “pull back.” Zoom out though, and it becomes clear that even Netflix’s content, alongside its competitors’, has become a little less original compared to previous years. |
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- Adobe Analytics estimates that US shoppers spent over $26.4 billion across this year’s Amazon Prime Day event, up 9.3% from the same period last year.
- Scoot up: More than 10,000 Vespa mopeds and scooters descended on the streets of Rome on Saturday, as fans rode out to celebrate the iconic Italian brand’s 80th anniversary.
- Comcast shares rose as much as ~25% this morning after announcing it will split media names like Sky & NBCUniversal from its tech arm, forming 2 separate businesses.
- In 2024, there were almost 42,000 premature deaths owing to toxic vehicle emissions in the US, with ~5 Americans dying every hour because of exposure to the pollution, per a new study.
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