Right at the beginning of the concert, after she’d only played a few songs, she told me to remember. “I wrote these songs about my life,” she said, “and maybe that’s how you think about them, but after tonight I hope you’ll think about us, and the memories we’ve made in Paris tonight.” And then, right at the end, she returned to the same theme. “We’ve had the most unforgettable time in Paris,” she said. “Thank you for one of the most magical, memorable experiences.” She performs the exact same show four times a week. Each week there’s a different arena in a different country, and all those arenas are exactly the same. I don’t think that night was particularly magical or unforgettable for her. She was giving us our orders. She was trying to give those orders in a way that made it sound like she and I were somehow friends, but it was still a command. Remember me, she was saying. Enthrone me in your memory. This is the most important night of your life, because you got to see me. But just under the surface, I felt something sad in there. Don’t let me vanish, she was saying. Let me live a little longer inside your mind. Don’t let me fade.

Taylor Swift had released a new album, The Tortured Poets Department. That album was supposed to be a kind of victory lap. At the end of 2023, Taylor Swift had been omnipresent and unimpeachable; she was Time’s person of the year, and had also—as far as I can tell—somehow become the first woman to single-handedly win the Super Bowl.

And the album did well. The Tortured Poets Society broke Spotify’s record for the most album streams in a single day: three hundred and eighty million. Still, somehow, that wasn’t enough. Something had broken. The world at large looked at her offering—and shrugged. Everything’s still there, the arenas, the huge crowds, but noontime is passed and the shadows are just starting, almost imperceptibly, to lengthen.

Like June, he believed Taylor Swift should run for president; unlike June, he was incredibly serious about this. “In maybe ten years I would love to see her go into politics,” he said. “I genuinely, genuinely would love that. She’s the only one who can unify America. Look—she’s progressive, she believes in women’s rights, but she’s also white, she even started as a country star. I just came here from California. You don’t know what it’s like over there. The country’s so divided, everyone has so much hatred for each other. I really worry they’ll start killing each other soon. It’s apocalyptic in America. Only Taylor can bring them together.” Alex believed that Taylor Swift was the most significant literary figure of our time. “In fifty years,” he said, “all her lyrics will be taught in literature classes in college.” He’d been a fan of hers for well over a decade, but he’d started really getting into her music after dabbling in the online culture of obsessive Swifties who pore over her lyrics to untangle the complex web of allusions and coded references they believe is hidden inside. “Her words, her genius, everything springs out of there,” he said. “It’s like having the Q text.” He was referring to a hypothesized collection of Jesus’s sayings, now lost, that’s believed to have been the source material for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

There, lit up in the darkness, was the tiny human figure of tiny Taylor Swift. She looked like the spinning ballerina in a music box. It felt insane that so many hundreds of thousands of people should be packed in here to stare in rapture at something so small. I tried crouching down a little, so I could see what the show would be like for someone less gangly than myself. Instantly, the tiny doll disappeared beneath a thicket of heads. None of these people, I realized, were actually looking at Taylor Swift

Paris is the glittering image of everything America is not. America is ugly; Paris is beautiful. America is practical; Paris is sensuous. America is shallow; Paris is sophisticated. In America, what matters is money; in Paris, what matters is style. America had barely even founded its new utopian republic, derived from the austere principles of liberty and reason, before Ben Franklin crossed the Atlantic to settle in feudal, monarchical Paris.

When I stepped outside in the morning, though, I found that every other car on the street was an old Citroën 2CV, puttering around with a tour guide in the front and two grinning Americans in the back. There were Americans in all the cafés, saying things like “Doesn’t Paris have such an indefinable je ne sais quoi?” The worst spectacle was outside Shakespeare and Company, the venerable English-language bookshop on the Left Bank, where there was a line stretching out the door and almost to the river. A line of American women all exactly the same age as me, patiently waiting their turn to browse through the same books they could get at their local Barnes & Noble.

Thanks to a dispute with her former record label, she’s currently re-recording and re-releasing her entire back catalog. You can listen to split-audio comparisons of the original tracks and the new versions on YouTube. They’re exactly the same. Taylor Swift is a Taylor Swift tribute act.

Taylor Swift is supposed to be so popular because her music expresses a universal experience, or at least universal among white Millennial-or-younger women in developed countries. The caricature of Taylor Swift is that all her songs are about exes and breakups, and from what I heard in Paris that caricature is pretty much accurate. She talks a lot about being alone in an apartment, drinking wine on a sofa covered in cat hair. Her music is about bitterness and heartbreak, feeling vengeful, feeling unjustly victimized by the consequences of your own actions, wallowing in your own pettiness and self-delusions and regret. This isn’t a bad thing! There’s this totemic figure hovering around in our culture, the crazy ex-girlfriend, and if art is how we give structure to life maybe it’s good to have someone out there who can give that figure an articulate voice. Unfortunately, Taylor Swift is simply not that voice.

Specifically, I recognized the same lifeless clichéd therapy-speak that’s swirling around everywhere. The woman is a walking Instagram infographic. She says things like “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman,” or “I cut off my nose just to spite my face, then I hate my reflection for years and years,” or “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” or “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, strategy sets the scene for the tale.” If people are finding any emotional resonance in this stuff, it’s because they’ve already been trained to think about themselves and their inner lives in the same clinical, bloodless register of traumas and disorders.

For the serious fans, her songs are more like crossword puzzles: the point is to untangle them, extract the hidden meanings inside every line, and use all these clues to work out exactly which one of her ex-boyfriends she’s shit-talking here. This is the game Alex had been getting into. Recently, the New Yorker gave over a few column inches to Sinéad O’Sullivan—formerly of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness—to explain how it works. O’Sullivan picks up on a line from Taylor Swift’s recent song “imgonnagetyouback,” in which she says that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” These sound, she admits, like bad lyrics. “Even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: ‘whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life.’” But in fact, the fans have decided that this is a reference to “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975, in which the lead singer, Matty Healy—who is supposed to have dated Taylor Swift for a few weeks in 2023—mentions having a bike. O’Sullivan continues: the lack of spaces in the song’s title is a reference to her earlier hit “Blank Space,” and in the video for that song she smashes up a car. Meanwhile, if you write the song’s title in a circle, the letters k and im are right next to each other, which looks like a jab at Kim Kardashian, another of Taylor Swift’s enemies. An endlessly looping circle is an ouroboros, the ouroboros is a snake; Kim Kardashian once disparagingly called Taylor a snake. See how the pieces fit together? It’s impossible, O’Sullivan concludes, to judge Taylor Swift’s work according to the standards of ordinary art; what she’s doing is so much more. Everything that seems clunky or cliché is actually part of a “fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives.”

When she insisted in one song that “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” a lot of people were no longer willing to indulge the fantasy that this person—the world’s default pop singer, the audio equivalent of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, or sliced white bread—was actually some kind of Batman villain. You were not raised in an asylum! Your father is a Merrill Lynch asset manager, and when you got your first record deal he bought a three-percent stake in the label.

The Great Replacement is real, but it’s not Arabs or Africans. It’s Americans coming to Paris to see Taylor Swift.

Americans visit a different Paris. They built this city as a dream and a negative of their own society

she performed forty-six songs with all their accompanying dances, running up and down the stage maybe two hundred times, and going through sixteen nearly seamless costume changes. By the end, her face was as flawless and unflustered as it had been at the beginning. There were, admittedly, a few strands of hair sweatily plastered to her forehead. But that was it. The really amazing thing, though, was how minutely choreographed every second of the performance was. Every line in every song had some particular motion associated with it: sticking up one hand, or twirling her hair, or throwing back her head so we could see the lizard-like gulp down her very slightly shiny neck. Later, I checked the routines I’d seen against the 2023 concert film of the Eras Tour. They were exactly the same: every glance, every twitch. Maybe if you filmed her whole performance again you could line up the periods between each time she blinks

In their quest for social change, givers like Arnold are reluctant to support “causes”; they want to “solve problems—big ones,” as Callahan puts it. But, in Arnold’s case, lessons had to be learned along the way. His early forays into philanthropy, including an effort to reform public pensions, were scorned, with critics noting that Enron’s collapse had resulted in the loss of billions of dollars in pension funds.

Moskovitz and Tuna weren’t keen to embrace traditional development organizations, which they are inclined to view as lethargic and bureaucratic. For them, grant making is akin to venture-capital investing: they want to act decisively and disrupt traditional models and structures. They have contributed $32 million to a group called Give Directly, which is not interested in vaccinating children, digging wells, building toilets, and creating schools. Rather, it gives cash handouts to the poor, who are free to spend the money as they wish. Callahan is skeptical of the ideology guiding Moskovitz and Tuna—who favor Silicon Valley mantras such as “empower individuals over institutions”—but he knows they are too influential to ignore. The couple will give away hundreds of millions of dollars every year. They are not yet thirty-five years old.

There are growing concerns about the influence and reach of the superwealthy: “Philanthropy is becoming a much stronger power center,” Callahan says, “and, in some areas, is set to surpass government in its ability to shape society’s agenda.” The state has retreated; the givers have advanced.

in many U.S. cities, elected officials are overwhelmed by debt obligations, and as a result have precious little money to spend on parks, museums, and other public services. The givers have no such constraints. In Boston, the Barr Foundation has done much to shape the city’s arts, culture, and political milieu. In Houston, Richard Kinder is helping to forge a massive network of urban trails. In Detroit, the Kresge Foundation is contributing funds for a new light-rail system. In New York, the Leon Levy Foundation has helped to revitalize a pair of Brooklyn landmarks, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. These are worthy endeavors, but Callahan is right to express concern about a fundamental shift of power from a “hollowed-out public sector” to elite private givers who are not fully accountable and operate in dark corners.

In 2008 Stephen A. Schwarzman, another cofounder of Blackstone, gave $100 million to the New York Public Library at a moment when the Library was secretly undertaking a dubious real estate and construction scheme. For nearly a decade, the NYPL refused to reveal how Schwarzman’s money was being utilized. Only in recent months did the Library account for the gift’s use: the $100 million formed part of the endowment and will soon be used for new renovation projects.

Under an initiative backed by Broad and like-minded funders, L.A. could add hundreds of new charter schools in a decade. Broad is quick to refute allegations that he is overreaching: “I think everyone is getting heard,” he informed Callahan. “We’re getting heard, the philanthropists. The unions and administrators are getting heard. Overall, we’re creating debate.”

That may be so, but increasingly the debate is among people who already agree. The Givers makes a persuasive case that the superwealthy are expanding their influence at a moment when many Americans are bolting from civic and political life. The author, drawing on the scholarship of Theda Skocpol, evokes an earlier era when mass-membership organizations such as trade unions flourished, giving ordinary citizens a certain degree of influence vis-à-vis elite power structures. These days, he writes, “We’re fast moving toward a future where private funders, not elected officials and the citizens they answer to, choreograph more of public life.”

Of the top eighty American foundations, only twenty-six post detailed information about their current grant making on public databases. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, endowed by Warren’s wealth, “has no real website and the information available on its grant making through tax returns is always a few years out of date,” Callahan notes.

The Givers is alive to these and other contradictions in the philanthropic sector and poses thorny questions for elected officials and nonprofit leaders: why is a check to a right-wing think tank tax-deductible but a check to a conservative senator is not? Why are many large foundations spending a mere 5 percent of their assets each year when they can easily afford to spend more? Why do so many foundations exist in perpetuity, instead of “spending down” and closing their doors? Why is the sector so lightly regulated by government, particularly the IRS? Finally, what exactly is the public getting in exchange for colossal tax breaks granted for philanthropy, which mainly go to rich people?

The Givers, which went to press before Donald Trump was elected, concludes with a stark and prescient warning: the nonprofit sector should initiate its own reforms, before politicians do it with a heavier and more mischievous hand. “It’s not okay,” he warns, “to settle for a status quo in which the foundation world remains forever a black box.” His proposals for change—the creation of a new U.S. federal office of charitable affairs, a reevaluation of what should qualify for tax-exempt status, trustee boards that are more inclusive and transparent—are not likely to be embraced in Trump’s Washington, however.

Katz, writing after Trump’s victory, argued that Callahan has sidestepped the central issue: Our current dire political situation is the product of both traditional American anti-statism and a very different and deliberate assault on the state by plutocrats. We do not have so many billionaires, and thus mega-foundations, because we now have a larger and more adept entrepreneurial class, but because the structure of (mostly federal) economic policy has been captured by people of wealth, who have rewritten the laws to enable themselves to become extraordinarily rich…It seems to me that the new plutocrats are in fact the problem, and they are quite unlikely to be part of the solution, as Callahan contends.

My own wish is that Callahan had confronted, in a more pungent way, the structural features of the behemoth that looms before him: the grant-making model itself, upon which modern American philanthropy rests. Foundation leaders advocate transparency, inclusion, and equality, but they operate in a strikingly hierarchical manner. They are a cloistered elite.

Does this top-down model—in which grantees spend immense time and energy chasing cash—inhibit the growth of dues-paying organizations, which may be more vibrant and democratic than nonprofit organizations dominated by an aloof board of trustees and an executive director? Passages in The Givers suggest that Callahan has pondered these matters, but he stops short of a full critique.

There are now more than ninety thousand private foundations, whose assets total $700 billion. These foundations supply money to more than a million tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations. Some of these nonprofits are financially secure, but many chafe under immense anxiety as they await annual grants from their masters in the foundation suites.

Known as “retention editing” because of its unique ability to keep a user glued to their screen, this style features loud sound effects, fast cuts, flashing lights and zero pauses.

“It’s the Beastification of YouTube,” said Noah Kettle, co-founder of Moke Media Co., a video editing and social media monetization consultancy. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, built his reputation by creating hyper-engaging, fast-paced videos with frequent action on screen. That led smaller YouTubers and content creators to mimic his style.

Donaldson tweeted a plea to his fellow YouTubers to “get rid of the ultra fast paced/overstim era of content.” He said that in the past year, he has slowed his videos, focused more on storytelling, “let scenes breathe, yelled less” and focused on longer videos, all of which has resulted in even more views.

if content creators require fewer editing resources, it could alter the outside editing services that many content creators use.

Creating a retention edited video requires a lot of work. “Every clip in the video should be under two seconds,” said Dara Pesheva, a 17-year-old who works as a freelance video editor for social media content creators. “Every 1.3 to 1.5 seconds you have to have a new graphic or something moving, you have to [use] a lot of effects. For every image and every transition, you have to add a sound effect. You need flashing graphics, and you have to have subtitles in every video.”

TikTok has trained users to scroll away if they aren’t hooked within the first half-second, social media video editors said. This is why so many retention edited videos start with a loud bang or whoosh sound.

“People around my age can’t focus,” Pesheva said. “They have very short attention spans. They’re used to TikTok, and so editors have to adjust for Gen Z. They have to adjust to the fact that people can’t keep their attention on something for more than a second if it’s not entertaining.”

CapCut, the video editing platform owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, allows users to add catchy sounds and special effects to their videos with just a few taps. This has allowed anyone, even children, to create videos with tons of explosions, laser effects and animated text. Replicating those same effects on older video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere or After Effects could take hours and is far more complicated.

Connor Bibow, a freelance videographer in Georgia, said that it’s no surprise retention editing works so well on channels like MrBeast’s that cater to children, because the editing format is very similar to children’s cartoons. “It’s a lot of noises and bright colors,” he said.

Thavaseelen said he began leveraging retention editing after seeing MrBeast speak about it. “MrBeast is very open and transparent with his content, and he tells people what he said,” Thavaseelen said. “He tells people you have to optimize for retention. A lot of clips he puts on short form are retention edited.”

as MrBeast has cooled on the style, experts say that other creators are already beginning to follow. “There’s been a wave of creators who have now transitioned to just making hour-and-a-half videos with just them and a whiteboard,” Kettle said, “and they’re outperforming every single video that they’ve done that was optimized for attention.”

Cicero, the Syracuse University instructor, said that YouTube, like many art forms, has different styles that define different periods. Retention editing, he said, has defined the 2020 to 2024 era, but fatigue eventually sets in.“Early on, it was very easy to blow up and become a viral hit with [this type of editing], but now it’s a lot harder,” he said. “There are these waves of different trends in editing, or in fine art, or in music, where you have these different styles. Maybe retention editing is like the impressionist period for YouTube.”

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

“Come right off ‘Fury,’ right? I had the town in my hand — could’ve done anything, and I did do anything,” Ayer continued. “And [I] go on this journey with [‘Suicide Squad’]. And the same thing — authentic, truthful, let’s do all the rehearsal, let’s really get in each other’s souls. Let’s create this amazing, collaborative thing, right? And then ‘Deadpool’ opened, right? And they never tested ‘Batman v. Superman,’ so they were expecting a different result, and then they got hammered by all the critics. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re going to turn David Ayer’s dark, soulful movie into a fucking comedy now.’”

Oh ElonWell, look, if I were the newly hired chief executive officer of a social media company, and if the directors and shareholders who brought me in as CEO had told me that my main mission was to turn around the company’s precarious financial situation by improving our position with advertisers, and if I spent my first few weeks reassuring advertisers and rebuilding relationships and talking up our site’s unique audience and powerful engagement, and then one day my head of software engineering came to me and said “hey boss, too many people were too engaged with too many posts, so I had to limit everyone’s ability to view posts on our site, just FYI,” I would … probably … fire ... him?

I mean I suppose I might ask questions like “Is this because of some technological limitation on our system? Is it because you were monkeying with the code without understanding it? Is it because you tried to stop people from reading the site without logging in, 3 and messed up and stopped them from reading the site even when they logged in? Is it because you fired and demoralized too many engineers so no one was left to keep the systems running normally? Is it because you forgot to pay the cloud bills? Is it because deep down you don’t like it when people read posts on our site and you want to stop them, or you don’t like relying on ad revenue and want to sabotage my ability to sell ads?”

no matter what the answers are, this guy’s gotta go. If you are in charge of the software engineers at a social media site, and you make it so that people can’t read the site, that’s bad.

Over the past 10 days, [Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana] White said he, Mr. Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg — aided by advisers — have negotiated behind the scenes and are inching toward physical combat. While there are no guarantees a match will happen, the broad contours of an event are taking shape, said Mr. White and three people with knowledge of the discussions.People keep emailing to ask about, like, the fiduciary duties and securities-law disclosure issues here, but I’m gonna wait until they’re in the octagon before I worry about that stuff