Who

Popcorn predicts cultural trends for corporate clients at her cultish, 30-year-old company, BrainReserve.

Backstory

Born Faith Plotkin in Shanghai to an army family, the future Ms. Popcorn moved to New York when she was five and says she originally planned to pursue a law career. She ended up taking night-school copywriting classes instead and worked in the ad business until 1974, when she founded her own company, BrainReserve. As for her transformation from Plotkin to Popcorn, she says it was a friend who originally gave her the nickname. She liked it so much, she made the change official.

Of note

Popcorn's company forecasts cultural trends for the likes of American Express, Fisher-Price and McDonald's.Her predictions can come off as spot-on (she predicted porn would start appearing on cell phones and GPS chips would be used to track missing kids), or completely loony. One of her more bizarre suggestions: that "mechanized hugging booths" will replace pay-phones in cities as part of a cultural trend toward more physical contact. She's also said that 1950s slang will make a big comeback (since political and economic turmoil is going to make us yearn for simpler times) and that advances in genetics will allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA so their dogs and cats resemble them.

On the job

BrainReserve is an unusual place to work, to say the least. "BrainJam" is a regular meeting at which employees discuss their ideas; participants are instructed to "speak only in headlines" and not make any negative comments. BrainReserve employees are also expected to follow a strict dress code. Called a "brand look" in Popcornese, acceptable clothing colors are black, navy, grey, "summer white" and khaki, with special allowances made for occasional pinstripes or check prints. BrainReservists are also expected to wear the company's signature pin, which features a design of a ringed planet and stars. The color of the pin changes annually.

In print

Popcorn's written five books, the most recent of which was 2001's Dictionary of the Future, which she co-authored with advertising guru Adam Hanft.

Personal

Popcorn has never been married. (She says she nearly tied the knot either five or eight times—she can't remember exactly—but never ended up sealing the deal.) She has one child, a daughter she adopted from China whom she renamed her Georgica Sawn Pond Rose Petal Qi Xin. (Yes, that's her name. Her mom calls her G.G.) She attempted to have G.G.'s birthdate officially changed, so that the baby would be a Taurus, just like Popcorn, but abandoned the effort when the legal red tape proved to be too much of a hassle. (Apparently, you can't just stroll into a government office and arbitrarily change your birthday.) Popcorn and Georgica Sawn Pond Rose Petal Qi Xin live on the top two floors of the Upper East Side townhouse where BrainReserve is located.