A quick glance at what’s trending turned into a deep breath and a click on Elif Shafak.
Trends are funny – they’re half news, half group chat energy. You can almost feel the collective ‘Wait, what?’ through the screen.
What I saw people linking to
- ‘Is there any value in writing a story in a time of chaos?’: novelist Elif Shafak on her creative crisis (The Guardian)
- ELIF SHAFAK turns the tables on Gustave Flaubert for an inventive biofiction (Buzz Magazine)
I didn’t expect The Guardian to be the one that clarified it, but ‘‘Is there any value in writing a story in a time of chaos?’: novelist Elif Shafak on her creative crisis’ did exactly that.
Seeing those headlines helped me understand why Elif Shafak is trending today ‘ it’s not just random curiosity; it’s people trying to piece together the same moment from different angles.
I caught myself doing that thing where you start with one search’ then suddenly you’ve got twelve tabs open and you’re deep in a rabbit hole you didn’t mean to enter.
If you want to peek at the trend card yourself, here’s the source link I started from: https://trends.google.com/trending/rss?geo=GB
What I’m trying to do (for my own sanity) is split the topic into three quick questions:
- What is it? (the plain-English version)
- Why do people care right now? (the ‘what just happened?’ angle)
- What does it say about the moment? (the vibe check)
Even without perfect answers, that little framework usually gets me from ‘huh?’ to ‘okay, I get it.’
That’s my take on Elif Shafak – messy, curious, and probably missing a few angles. But that’s what a personal blog is for.
Posted: Sunday, 18 October 2026
And yes, I know: tomorrow we’ll all be talking about something else. But today belongs (at least a little bit) to this topic, and that’s kind of fascinating in itself.