The Surge
Four thousand percent, and then some
Yelp's 2026 trend data puts a hard number on a quiet boom.
Searches on Yelp for mahjong clubs rose 4,467 percent year over year, with searches for mahjong lessons up 819 percent, a figure named in Yelp's top trends of 2026 and carried into a WBUR Here & Now segment on April 29.
The segment, hosted by Indira Lakshmanan with Nicole Wong, was syndicated across a long list of NPR affiliates the same day, which is its own kind of evidence. A number like this does not travel that far unless newsrooms have noticed the rooms filling up.
Prim's reading is simple. The world is not inventing this game. It is noticing it. The calm at the table was always there.