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A Number Of Surprising Importance
The number 26, which gets back-burnered compared to numbers with neater divisibility, is an essential digit. And you’re gonna be hearing all about it in 2026.
“For obvious reasons, tₒ shall be called ‘doomsday,’ since it is on that date, t = tₒ, that N goes to infinity and that the clever population annihilates itself.”
— A passage from “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” an article published by Heinz von Foerster in 1960. Unlike most predictions about the end of the world, von Foerster, considered a key early figure in cybernetics, made his prediction in Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (He and his colleagues also developed an equation for it, which one guesses his doomsday-predicting peers did not.) One silver lining, per von Foerster? We have control over the outcome. “Since today man’s environment becomes less and less influenced by ‘natural forces’ and is more and more defined by social forces determined by man, he himself can take control over his fate in this matter, as well as he has done in almost all areas of life where the activity of the individual has influenced his own kind,” he writes. Optimistic stuff.
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Try as we might, this joke will never get old. (
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Oh good, another year of AI ruining wall calendars for everyone
Last year, you might remember that there was a real AI infusion in the year’s wall calendars, which made me do something unexpected: Ban Etsy calendars from my annual review of wall calendars.
In the 12 months since, the AI has gotten more realistic, and it’s infused even deeper in the calendars, some of which now appear on Amazon. And some of them are straight ripoffs—check out this semi-NSFW “Extremely Accurate Birds” calendar, which has cake for weeks and was created by an artist, and compare it to this “Various Actions” calendar, by a no-name manufacturer. If you’re looking for birds with big human-like butts, you will need to be more discerning to ensure that you’re getting something drawn by a human and not Midjourney.
A few highlights for 2026:
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Space Cats: There is a strong overlap between modern cat wall calendars and late-’90s No Limit album covers, and this wall calendar definitely found the delta. (Also I hate to inform you of this, but it’s possible to get the wrong Space Cats calendar, because there’s another one. And a third. And a fourth. Collect ’em all, I guess!)
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A Punbelievable Year: “The things you say/your lame dad jokes just give you away/the things you say/they’re punbelievable.”
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2026 9 To 5 Bigfoot Calendar: I’m in the wrong line of business. I should be throwing the most insane visual ideas to Sora and Nano Banana and hoping that those lead me to create the next calendar of Bigfoot working a regular job like the rest of us. Word of warning: One of the images features Bigfoot wearing a leotard and leading an aerobics class, which should be a deterrent, but if you were thinking about buying this, probably isn’t.
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Mud, 12-Month Calendar: Finally, a kind of wall calendar too hard for Gemini to realistically recreate in five minutes. However, you could probably recreate this on a rainy day with an all-wheel-drive vehicle if you so desired. If calendars are a way of selling a fantasy, a break from normal life, this mud-themed wall calendar ain’t doing it.
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Aspire 2026 wall calendar: It seems like such a great way to make money. Hop on BrainyQuote, grab the best quotes, put some flowers behind it, and boom! Revenue. But as I noted in a 2022 piece on quotes, quotation cites like BrainyQuote go out of their way to obfuscate the sources of their quotes. Which means that these quotes could be real, or they could be made up. Wonder if the Aspire folks thought to add any Kurt Cobain quotes to this one.
Overall, the slop is seeping into the wall calendar this year, just like your Uncle Walter’s Facebook feed. I really need to get on building that wall calendar I’m too much of a coward to make.
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26
The number of Oscars personally won by Walt Disney, 22 of which were in competition and four were honorary. (And one of which was an unusual bespoke Oscar with one giant statue and seven small ones, which was of course won for Snow White & The Seven Dwarves.) That makes him the individual with the most Oscars in Academy Award history, a record likely to be unbroken. (Show-off.)
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Five reasons 2026 will be better than 2025
- Your tortillas (at least in California) are getting healthier. A new law in California requires that corn masa flour, and products based on corn masa, include added folic acid—something already required by the FDA in other types of flour. The result is that corn tortillas, a staple food of Mexican cuisine, are going to be healthier for infants in particular.
- A bunch more stuff is hitting the public domain. Books from Langston Hughes and William Faulkner are now public domain in the United States. Meanwhile, outside the U.S., works from a number of figures who died in 1955—most notably Albert Einstein and Charlie Parker—are also getting the public domain treatment, per the Public Domain Review.
- Peace out, tiny shampoo bottles. One key part of business travel is the tiny toiletries that come in every single hotel room ever. But that’s starting to change, especially in Illinois, considered one of the hubs of event travel. A law banning tiny shampoo bottles in the state’s hotels took effect this week. (They join Washington, New York, and California.) You can’t take the bottles home, but the dispensers are more environmentally friendly anyway.
- Utah’s ID checks are about to get even tougher. I’ve only been to Utah once, and when I went, I remember getting a lot of grief for leaving my ID in my hotel room and then attempting to order a beer somewhere. The state, known for having a lot of teetotalers, is further tightening its grip, requiring 100% ID checks and adding a big red “no alcohol sale” message on the drivers’ licenses of people with extreme DUI convictions. (Oh yeah, if you want to be banned from buying alcohol, you can just ask for an ID with that restriction. Nothing like a little state-sponsored self-control.)
- We’re finally getting a little closer to the moon. After taking a multi-decade break from moon travel, NASA is sending astronauts within shouting distance of it for the first crewed mission in more than 50 years. The Artemis II mission, expected to launch as soon as next month, will have astronauts getting close to the moon, but not landing on it. But if all goes well, future landings might be in the cards.
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The state of our Tedium in 2026 is defined by our loss
We lose people every year, but something about 2025 made those losses feel more visual and visceral than usual.
Two of the most high-profile news stories of 2025 involved murders of public figures—one in an assassination, two others by a family member. Political violence crept up, and it was painful whether or not their politics were your politics. A governor nearly had his mansion burned down while he was inside of it. And the flare-ups of the current political moment certainly feel like they’re not going away just because we changed the page on the calendar.
But I think there’s something a bit less dramatic and a bit more matter-of-fact going on. We are about 40 years from the peak of the monoculture, before television had yet to split into hundreds of cable channels, before computers and smartphones let us find our own tribes and self-select around our very specific hobbies.
And because of that distance, the truth is that we’re going to lose more important people in quick succession, whether we like it or not.
I was reminded of this when I was looking back at my coverage earlier this year for our year-end pieces. I had almost forgotten that we lost Biff Wiff, the oddball character actor that became a late-in-life favorite of I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, at the beginning of the year. (To be fair, there was an absolute avalanche of news around that time.)
But I was also reminded of this in a more visceral way. I was in a store, shopping for hiking boots (hoping to take part in a first-day hike), when I got an email informing me that Stewart Cheifet had just died. This hit me harder than most.
For those not familiar, Cheifet is one of the most important journalists in the history of technology, because of two important things he did: First, he created and hosted Computer Chronicles, a nationally syndicated television show highlighting important technology trends. (It was on PBS, the natural home for such a show.) And second, once the show ended, he went out of his way to ensure that the show got properly archived, working closely with the Internet Archive to solve that problem.
He essentially gave many formative technology trends some of their only television exposure. (As I noted in a February 2025 piece about technology, Cheifet gave the topic of my story, ACCESS.bus, some of the only video-based coverage around.) But is also reflected the sheer challenge of the monoculture at this time. When he started around 1983, we were many years away from having a network like TechTV or G4. (Linus Tech Tips? Hah, Linus Sebastian wasn’t even born yet.) For most viewers, if you cared about computers and wanted to watch a show about it, this was it.
And by taking the time to archive it, he essentially created the window through which so much of our understanding of tech history flows. Like it or not, we live in a visual medium. As great as it is to have a John C. Dvorak column or a 6,000-word feature about a tech concept, having Cheifet talk about that same concept on a screen is a lot more impactful to digital culture.
When Cheifet’s obit was posted on Hacker News on Wednesday, some people described falling asleep to marathons of Cheifet’s old videos (many of which were done with Gary Kildall, himself a stone-cold tech legend). He represented the bridge between the monoculture of tech and the microculture of tech we have now.
I will be the first to admit that Cheifet won’t hit the radar for the average person, but he is more important than he seems. The work he was doing was extremely uncommon then, but is everywhere now. Every major media outlet that presents tech in video form owes him a mountain of praise.
We are going to see more losses like his in the years ahead, and they’re going to come from a moment where these figures were dominant in culture in a way that your favorite creator could never think of. Sure, it’s just how time goes, but I think they’re going to hit harder because the people we lose are likely going to be those you watched on TV every week for 20 years, not some faded figure from another time.
The loss of Rob Reiner underlines this. He died a mere four months after creating a long-awaited sequel to his first film, This Is Spinal Tap. People pointed out that, while his recent films have struggled to make quite the same impact, his early work has numerous quotable moments that have become cultural touchstones. Someone with a similar skill set, starting today, would struggle to reach the same heights, and not even for artistic reasons. When we live in a world of 1,000 true fans, it’s hard for one person to so effectively dominate the culture.
This year represents a decade since 2016, when we saw many extremely influential musicians die in a single year. We lost David Bowie, and Prince, and George Michael, and Leonard Cohen. (That’s only the tip of the iceberg, by the way.) We may be due for a similar tipping-point year like that. Our heroes of the TV monoculture era aren’t going to be with us forever.
Recently, I wrote a piece about losing a friend, and as I get older, I’m sure more of those pieces will come, and they will hurt every time. Loss is not a new thing in my life, but there’s cultural loss and personal loss. I feel like we’re a point where the cultural loss will feel personal.
And yes, it will be hard. But remember the impact it had on us.
Fe
The atomic symbol for iron, the 26th element of the Periodic Table. It’s one of many elements, but one of the most important ones. After all, iron gave us steel, and is key to the human body’s function via its bloodstream. (Also, it’s found in the sun, which is not nothing.) It highlights how the number 26, even as it takes a backseat to other numbers, is everywhere.
Going back to our intro, which talked about 1099s, here’s a fun quirk involving the number 26 and the year 2026.
See, many companies tend to pay people on a biweekly basis—which, since there are 52 weeks in a year, means that you’re generally getting paid 26 times per year. But here’s the fun, ironic thing: Because of a quirk of the payroll system, people will actually get 27 payments in 2026, not 26.
It’s an issue that happens once every 11 years or so, which means the last time it happened was in 2015. Sounds kind of silly, but it’s surprisingly a fraught issue.
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See, it puts employers in a catch-22: They could pay slightly less money over those 27 payments and hope it doesn’t run afoul of labor law. (Or that their employees don’t notice.) Or they could simply make the extra payment, temporarily increasing their salary by a couple thousand dollars just to keep things consistent.
As Mike Fussell of the Employment Law Worldview blog writes, this is going to cause a problem for some companies that might find themselves running into legal issues or added costs, depending on how they handle this shift:
Additionally, employers should ensure any decreases in exempt salaried employees’ biweekly wage payments do not reduce the employees’ weekly salary below the salary threshold necessary to claim an exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act—currently $684/week—or similar state wage laws (some of which have even higher weekly salary thresholds). A failure to meet such weekly salary thresholds could result in an employee losing their exempt status, making them eligible for overtime pay.
If you ask me, paying the checks on time and correctly is a better move than changing the pay structure. (Or, you could do what some companies do instead—pay each month on the 15th and last day of the month, losing the every-other-Friday cadence but ensuring you’re not overpaying once every 11 years.)
But I think this odd numerical quirk of the 2026 calendar year points to the tension that the year inherently has. It’s an odd middle year, one that doesn’t draw a ton of attention to itself most of the time. (Barring the fact that, well, it’s the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026, as the country’s symbolic vape shop, the Washington Monument, pointed out this week.)
For the sake of everyone, I hope it’s the year when you get an unexpected extra check.
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