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Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re just a week into the new year now, and a lot has already happened. But what does the rest of 2026 have in store for us?
There’s a major midterm election. How do you think it’ll go? Also, 2025 was the year we wondered what tariffs would do to our finances — and whether what we were seeing in our social feeds was real or AI-generated. So do you think we’ll push back?
Our three guests this hour have put their predictions for 2026 on paper, and we want to hear yours. Coming out of 2025, what do you think — or hope, or maybe worry — will happen this year?
The number is 866-733-6786. The email address is forum@kqed.org. You can also find us on Discord, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum.
Joining us is Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor of Future Perfect, a section of Vox that covers how to make the future better and has, for seven years, put out a forecast of major events in the year to come. Izzie, welcome to Forum.
Izzie Ramirez: Hey, all. Glad to be here.
Mina Kim: Glad to have you. Also with us, Emma Goldberg, who covers political subcultures and “the way we live now” for the Style section at The New York Times. Emma, glad to have you.
Emma Goldberg: Thank you so much for having me on.
Mina Kim: Michelle Singletary is also with us, The Washington Post’s personal finance columnist. She writes the nationally syndicated column The Color of Money. Michelle, welcome back.
Michelle Singletary: Oh, thank you for having me again.
Mina Kim: Let me start with you, Michelle. What’s one prediction of yours for 2026?
Michelle Singletary: Everything’s going to cost more. Oh yeah. I mean, cars, housing, food — I think a lot of retailers and businesses held back a little from passing on costs from tariffs to consumers. I think in 2026, they’re going to be forced to charge more for the things people want.
Mina Kim: Yeah. But one of the things you also thought was that we’d be doing a better job playing defense this year. What makes you think that?
Michelle Singletary: Well, I think once people’s bank accounts get more pressured, they’re forced to make better decisions and cut back. They’re going to be looking at what they can afford, how to make their money stretch longer.
And hopefully, a lot of the peer pressure that comes along with trying to spend to please people will be abated — because people just won’t have the money.
Mina Kim: Yeah. All right. Emma, let me go to you. What’s your prediction for our lives in 2026?
Emma Goldberg: First of all, I completely agree with Michelle’s. I feel like I’m already experiencing that just a couple days into the new year.
My prediction — which I wrote about in a recent New York Times roundup of predictions for 2026 — is that we’re going to start to see people find ways of combating “slop” in their own lives.
Midway through last year, I wrote about how it felt like we were swimming in this sea of slop — whether that’s being online and confronted by AI-generated images, videos, and text, all of this content that has a kind of taint of unreality to it.
Then there’s slop food — like the slop bowl for lunch — and slop clothing hauls. There’s this temptation, especially when things cost more, as Michelle was saying, to order a lot of fast fashion. You can get a $3 T-shirt, and then you end up with more and more stuff.
So I think in the new year, people are going to be looking for ways to mount a kind of war on slop — holding onto things that feel more authentic, more human-generated, and not in infinite supply.
Mina Kim: Yeah. I think I get AI slop and fast-fashion slop. Can you say a little bit more about the slop food bowl — what that is and why that’s considered slop?
Emma Goldberg: Yeah. This is something I started noticing when I was covering return-to-office battles and the future of work.
When people haul themselves to the office, they’re often tempted to find a lunch that’s quick. Even if it’s a little expensive, it feels like a treat. So there’s Cava, Sweetgreen, Chopt — all these places that assemble a slop bowl full of chopped vegetables, tofu, and other ingredients.
But it has this feeling of not being cooked by human hands, or with care. It’s like it’s coming in this mushy, infinite supply. It almost sounds like slop when it hits your plate.
Mina Kim: Right — optimized to give people what they think they want, but not necessarily something that feels tailored to their needs. So how do you think we’ll push back on slop if it was such a big part of 2025?
Emma Goldberg: I think people — especially creatives — are going to think a lot about signs of the human touch.
We’ve already seen writing about how to identify AI-generated content — the famously overused em dash, for example. I think people will look for ways to make art, writing, or videos that show imperfection.
There’s a Japanese concept, wabi-sabi — the beauty of imperfection. Little signs of messiness that show a human was wrestling with making something, rather than a totally sleek, polished AI product.
Mina Kim: Though, Izzie, even if there’s a pushback, one of Vox’s predictions was that an entirely AI-generated pop song would top the Billboard charts.
Izzie Ramirez: Yeah. That prediction came from my boss, Bryan Walsh.
In music production, we’re already seeing a lot of AI polishing — mixing, mastering, remixes. One that went viral at the end of 2025 was an AI choral version of “The Thong Song” by Sisqó. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t realize it was AI at first.
This prediction is more specific — that the melody, lyrics, and production would all be AI-generated, and that it would still top the charts.
Mina Kim: Well, I also want to get your personal prediction, since that one was your boss’s. What’s yours for 2026?
Izzie Ramirez: Oh my God — this is embarrassing — but I’m hoping Jacob Elordi wins Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the creature in Frankenstein.
It’s a really empathetic portrayal of a character that’s often misunderstood in film. It’s much truer to the book. I thought he was just “Mr. The Kissing Booth,” and I did not know he had that in him.
Mina Kim: Even with that hope, the Vox predictions were mostly pretty grim — about democracy and a possible recession. What did they forecast about the health of U.S. democracy in 2026?
Izzie Ramirez: Bleak is the correct word. One prediction was that the U.S. will fall in rankings of liberal democracy, though it will remain an electoral democracy in name.
At the same time, there were predictions that Democrats would take back at least one house of Congress. So there’s a lot of tension between who’s in power and what people want their lives to be.
We try to make our predictions testable and verifiable within the year. I hope that democracy prediction is wrong — but given everything going on, probably not.
Mina Kim: When you say “everything going on,” do you mean things like the administration’s actions in Venezuela or its response to the ICE shooting?
One Vox writer put the probability of democratic decline at 60 percent — but I wonder if that’s gone up. There was even speculation online that midterm elections could be undermined, though that wasn’t actually one of Vox’s predictions.
Izzie Ramirez: Right. Barring some kind of hard-to-pull election tampering, Zach Beecham did say he still expects elections to happen. There are a lot of checks in the system — though you never know.
Mina Kim: He also put a 95 percent probability on Democrats taking at least one house of Congress, citing the historical trend of presidents’ parties losing midterms, Trump’s unpopularity, and Democratic performance in 2025.
Do you think affordability and immigration will play a big role in the midterms?
Izzie Ramirez: Absolutely. People vote based on what they see in their personal lives. Economic pressures were a huge factor in recent elections.
Mina Kim: And as we just heard from Michelle, it doesn’t look like things are getting cheaper in 2026.
We’ll have more with my guests — Izzie Ramirez, Emma Goldberg, and Michelle Singletary — right after the break.
Stay with us. This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.
