Predictions are a mug's game, and trendcasting is odious. As 2023 draws to a close and the new year roars up at us, we are here to do some of both. What will 2024 bring? What headlines can we expect to see? What new fashions will we embrace, and what old habits will we leave behind? What will be hot, what not, and whatnot?
As savvy advertisers know, Hell Gate is one of the top online destinations for cool young consumers resistant to conventional marketing, and as such we're uniquely positioned to examine their data exhaust and make definitive, empirically grounded prognostications. Here's some of what we see coming down the pike in the new year:
- Bill de Blasio will open a bar that caters to people exploring alternative lifestyles.
- George Santos will get his own show and it will absolutely destroy Ziwe in the ratings.
- In 2024, the youth are going to be bad: Lazy, soft, miseducated, unworthy of preceding generations.
- In: Gerontocracy.
- Out: $30,000 private spaghetti.
- In: $20 Dinner.
- Out: Intelligence.
- In: Artifice.
- Out: Comparing your unsuccessful judicial nominee to Martin Luther King, Jr.
- In: Giving the Buffalo Bills another $1 billion to win the Super Bowl.
- Pants are gonna get huge. They will make JNCOs look like skinny jeans. They will have a full wire-frame bustle structure, people won’t fit through subway doors anymore, and the built environment will totally change to accommodate them. People wearing old, regular pants will be laughed at, taunted, and refused service.
- Alternately, pants might get smaller.
- Out: Pants.
- In: Tents.
- Knicks in four.
- The NYPD's share of the City budget will increase.
- After years of planning and deliberation, overcoming multiple lawsuits and political oddsmakers, the nation's largest congestion pricing initiative will be unveiled with great fanfare, and will immediately be undermined by pieces of tape and fake leaves, and the nation's most lavishly funded police force will be powerless to intervene.
- Kissinger: Not dead after all, turns out.
- In: the SPHERE.
- Out: Management
- In: Worker-owners.
- Out: Lou Reed. Enough. Find another covert narcissist to model yourselves after.
- In: Brian Wilson.
- Out: cocaine.
- In: whippits.
- Out: Clandestino. The intersection of Canal and Division grasses over, deer and gamefowl grazing as the neighborhood returns to nature.
- Out: Being employed.
- In: food parties where everyone gets a little sample of a bunch of different versions of the same food.
- Out: the Catskills. Too expensive, not cool, boring, like the worst parts of Brooklyn.
- In: the Poconos. Not too expensive, cool.
- Out: New York.
- In: New Jersey.
- Out: Respite.
- In: Chthonic perturbation.
- Out: houseplants. We all learned our lesson during COVID.
- Out: Fake dive bars.
- Out: Putting "ENM" in your dating app profiles.
- In: Cheating.
- Trump: Elected president...
- UNLESS: the Democratic party nominates a perfectly imperfect candidate with working-class origins, a pragmatic philosophy, credibility on public safety issues, and experience leading the kind of city where on any given day, anything can happen.
