Every fact, sourced.

Number-one and top-five chart positions come from the official national charts of the country you choose during onboarding, licensed directly from the chart authority. Magazine adds the chart story — how many weeks the song spent at #1. Thirty-second previews come from Apple Music and Spotify under their respective developer agreements.

Local weather for your city on each day comes from national meteorological office archives, supplemented by NOAA and ECMWF historical data sets. Coverage starts in 1950 for most major cities.

Box-office #1 by week and the surrounding films come from licensed national film archives, including studio release records and weekly box-office data. Magazine adds the rest of the films in cinemas that week.

Major TV events — series finales, premieres, awards, milestone episodes — come from licensed broadcaster archives and curated national TV records. Magazine adds the full TV landscape for that week.

A founder-curated database of small specific details from each year — the kind of moment that places you back in a time. Hand-built. AI rephrases for voice, never invents.

A query layer over the cultural-moments database that surfaces nearby events at a date offset — "three weeks ago", "two weeks from now". Magazine returns both look-back and look-forward together.

Aesthetic textures from each year — the small atmospheric details that aren't news, aren't a chart, just are. Drawn from the same founder-curated database, with longer-form versions for Magazine.

The reflective paragraph at the bottom of each Sunday card is composed by our editorial team from the week's data — top songs, top movie, the strongest cultural moments, the weather range — drawing on a curated bibliography of cultural histories. It is never about you personally, and never generated end-to-end by AI. AI tools assist with research and first drafts; an editor signs each Sunday off.

We make mistakes. If you spot one, write to info@northernlights.solutions with the date, the country, and the field that looks wrong. We correct the record and credit you, by initials, in the next monthly notes.