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

At first, I agreed with the critical consensus that the show is mindless entertainment, superficial and vacuous—RINGARDE. But I am now sincerely, even zealously convinced that, in my initial reaction of smug self-satisfaction, I was lured into an ambush, my response anticipated and rebutted: not in Emily’s trite soliloquy, but in Emily’s portrayal of Emily’s self-deception. For it is not just that I need her; I am her.

Most disturbingly familiar, however, is the subterranean mining operation that runs beneath Emily’s whole life, a constant alertness for usable material. Likewise, I cannot read a book, contemplate a painting, or even watch Emily without updating my mental inventory of raw material for future interpretation.

We first meet her as she finishes her daily jog, arrested by the congratulations of a mechanical voice: “eighteen seconds faster than yesterday.” Nothing is real unless it can be measured. And so the body must be tamed.

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.

The function of criticism is and has always been to complicate our sense of beauty. Good criticism of music we love—or, occasionally, really hate—increases the dimensions and therefore the volume of feeling. It exercises that part of ourselves which responds to art, making it stronger.

The correction to critics’ failure to take pop music seriously is known as poptimism: the belief that pop music is just as worthy of critical consideration as genres like rock, rap or, god forbid, jazz. In my opinion, this correction was basically good. It’s fun and interesting to think seriously about music that is meant to be heard on the radio or danced to in clubs, the same way it is fun and interesting to think about crime novels or graphic design. For the critic, maybe more than for anyone else, it is important to remember that while a lot of great stuff is not popular, popular stuff can be great, too.

every good idea has a dumber version of itself on the internet. The dumb version of poptimism is the belief that anything sufficiently popular must be good. This idea is supported by certain structural forces, particularly the ability, through digitization, to count streams, pageviews, clicks, and other metrics so exactly that every artist and the music they release can be assigned a numerical value representing their popularity relative to everything else. The answer to the question “What do people like?” is right there on a chart, down to the ones digit, conclusively proving that, for example, Drake (74,706,786,894 lead streams) is more popular than The Weeknd (56,220,309,818 lead streams) on Spotify.

The question “What is good?” remains a matter of disagreement, but in the face of such precise numbers, how could you argue that the Weeknd was better? You would have to appeal to subjective aesthetic assessments (e.g. Drake’s combination of brand-checking and self-pity recreates neurasthenic consumer culture without transcending it) or socioeconomic context (e.g. Drake is a former child actor who raps about street life for listeners who want to romanticize black poverty without hearing from anyone actually affected by it, plus he’s Canadian) in a way that would ultimately just be your opinion. And who needs one jerk’s opinion when democracy is right there in the numbers?

This attitude is how you get criticism like “Why Normal Music Reviews No Longer Make Sense for Taylor Swift,” which cites streaming data (The Tortured Poets Department’s 314.5 million release-day streams versus Cowboy Carter’s 76.6 million) to argue that Swift is better understood not as a singer-songwriter but as an area of brand activity, along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars. “The tepid music reviews often miss the fact that ‘music’ is something that Swift stopped selling long ago,” New Yorker contributor Sinéad O’Sullivan writes. “Instead, she has spent two decades building the foundation of a fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives across eleven blockbuster installments. She is not creating standalone albums but, rather, a musical franchise.”

The fact that most cognitively normal adults regard these bands as children’s music is what makes their fan bases not just ticket-buyers but subcultures.

The power of the antagonist-subculture dynamic was realized by major record labels in the early 1990s, when the most popular music in America was called “alternative.”

For the person who is not into music—the person who just happens to be rapturously committed to the artists whose music you hear everywhere whether you want to or not, whose new albums are like iPhone releases and whose shows are like Disneyland—the critic is a foil.

In the past, I’ve only seen coverage of Edits focus on four things:How this is a popular form of content that is only being created more and moreHow those who create Edits have the ability to make clips take on an entirely new meaning and provoke strong emotions in viewers How they’re geared towards TV, film, and music – as that’s the realm of culture this form of media originated And lastly, the debate around Edits in terms of copyright and/or other infringementsBut today, we’re covering how the power of TikTok Edits is far greater than just those observations. Because as this person stated, “You can convince people of anything if you put it in a TikTok with a catchy sound.”

Edits now play an integral role in how people get introduced to topics and how they continue to keep up with them. While Edits have had various evolutions, in their current form, they can be defined as “compilation videos, typically set to music, that convey a narrative about a person, place, thing, or cultural topic.”

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero

a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle.

we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)

To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.

Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one.

What better way to show how good your taste is in movies than to talk about how much you didn't like that popular movie that everyone seems to be like? What better way to show that you have good taste in music than ripping on top 40 hits?The more toxic version of this is finding people who like something you think is lame and telling them why what they like is actually bad. "Oh, you liked this thing? Here's why it's actually bad. You're welcome." The goal, I guess, is to make that person actually go, "you're right, I thought I got joy out of this, but maybe I shouldn't have."As I've gotten older, the more I've recognized that when it comes to art especially, there's upside to enjoying something, and very little upside to disliking something. My "credibility" doesn't hang on me liking the right things. What I really want is to enjoy as many things as possible because that means I'll spend more of my time being happy.That's not to say that I think everything is good. I go into everything wanting to enjoy myself, but sometimes I just don't, and that's okay. My movie review thread is full of films that I just didn't enjoy. Sure, it's more fun to write negative reviews, but I'm still bummed that I didn't have a good experience, and I'm jealous of people who did enjoy their time.

Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic: Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.

I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.

I will always love being at the movies: the tense anticipation in a darkening theater, the rapt attention and gasping surprise as a the story unfolds, and the tingly silence that follows the final shot, right before the cheers — and the arguments — start.

Torres, who is thirty-three, is more attuned to the visual world than most comedians. His imagination is a comic synesthesia, assigning anthropomorphic traits to colors, objects, and design flaws.

There once was a chandelier at the Metropolitan Opera who thought that the audience was applauding just for him. The chandelier fell in love with one of the janitors, a man named Rocco, and wanted only Rocco to change his bulbs. Rocco returned the chandelier’s love, but when his boss found out about the affair he was fired. Late one night, Rocco broke into the Met and stole the chandelier. They settled into Rocco’s apartment, blissful in their union, the chandelier’s light blazing through the window onto the street below.This peculiar romance is not from a magical-realist novel or a quarantine fever dream. It’s an idea for a digital short that Julio Torres pitched again and again at “Saturday Night Live,” where he worked as a writer from 2016 to 2019.

In Torres’s HBO special, “My Favorite Shapes,” which was released in 2019, Torres sits on a dreamlike pastel set, and, as small items come out on a conveyor belt, he narrates their inner thoughts. A pink rectangle with a chipped corner is “having a really bad day.” An oval is prone to gazing at its reflection, “wishing he were a circle.” The conceit sounds twee, but Torres’s delivery has the matter-of-factness of a child describing the secret lives of his toys

Tita told me, in Spanish. The family shares an aesthetic language, influenced by the Memphis design movement of the eighties, which favors bold colors and cutout shapes;

He refuses to use credit cards (“I just don’t like games”) and, for a time, shut down his bank account. “At that point, I had, like, forty dollars,” he said.

Finally, he spied a brocade with a blue-and-green watercolor pattern. He pulled the bolt from the shelf and felt the cloth between his fingers. “A floral that’s not a floral!” he said. “It does exist.”

Tita loved science fiction and Brazilian telenovelas, which often feature fantastical story lines. Torres half-remembered one about a man in a dungeon whose lover is reincarnated as the moon.

Unhappy with Mattel’s premade Dream Houses, he enlisted his mother to make customized homes out of cardboard. “I wanted circular windows and for the doors to open a certain way, so she made them per my specifications, setting me on this lifelong journey of being, like, ‘If it doesn’t exist, I have to create it,’ ” he said. (At “Saturday Night Live,” he channelled his Barbie obsession into a recurring sketch in which interns at Mattel write captions for Barbie’s Instagram account.) His parents encouraged his nontraditional interests. “It gave him the power to be different against the world,” his sister said.

When Torres was eleven, his grandfather died, leaving crippling debts, which his father inherited. His mother’s store went out of business, and the family had to move to a farmhouse where Tita had been brought up, on the outskirts of the city. Torres was prone to allergies and developed a respiratory condition. He hated the outdoors. And he no longer had his mother’s seamstresses at his beck and call.

He and his sister won scholarships to attend a private high school in San Salvador, where their rich classmates were picked up by servants. “I got picked up by my dad, whose car was older than I am,” he said. “Oh, my God, the noise the car made, pulling up to this castle.”

His second time applying to the New School, he got a significant scholarship, and in 2009 he moved to Manhattan, with enough money to live there for two years. “They wanted a translation of my transcripts, because they were in Spanish, so I translated them myself and I embellished a bunch of courses,” he said. “And then I sheepishly put it in front of the admissions officer, and she was, like, ‘Oh, my God, why didn’t you say you took all these courses when you applied?’ And she takes out her calculator and says, ‘You’re a junior, not a freshman.’ And I’m, like, ‘Ooh, I guess I am.’ ”

he found a job as an art archivist for the estate of the late painter John Heliker. He worked in a windowless vault in Newark, cataloguing Heliker’s papers. “I glamorized the optics of that job,” he said. “Solitude has never really been a problem for me. I liked how weird and difficult it was.”

Working at the coat check one day, he recalled, “I overheard this elderly rich woman tell this other elderly rich woman, ‘Oh, remind me to send you that article on how good standing is for you.’ That was the moment where I realized that New Yorker cartoons were based on a reality.”

Torres was a peculiar presence in the comedy scene, which is riddled with dudes in flannel shirts complaining about their girlfriends. He usually read non sequiturs from a notebook, with a flat affect. “He would always say ‘Hi’ before he started,” Einbinder said. “And then, at the end, he would always say, ‘So unless anyone has any questions . . .’ ”

In order to apply to stay in the country as a comedian, he had to pay more than five thousand dollars in legal and filing fees. His new friends in the comedy world, including Chris Gethard, Jo Firestone, and Newman, made a YouTube video called “Legalize Julio,” and the money was raised in an hour. His new visa classified him as an “alien of extraordinary ability.”

“I’ve seen so many corporations—HBO included—talk about how now it’s time to ‘elevate Black voices,’ and that got me thinking about the Hollywood fairy tale that representation equals change,” he said. “For a while, I have felt like a pawn in this hollow representation game. Because what the hell does Disney’s ‘Coco’ do for Mexican children? Bob Iger gets richer. That’s the climax. And then I’m researching the C.E.O.s of these media conglomerates, and they’re predictably the mushiest white faces you can think of. You see who is reaping the benefits of all the ‘woke’ content that me and my peers produce, and it’s just these kings. These monarchs.” He let out a cynical laugh. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

Torres was hired at “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, as the show was feeling pressure to diversify. He had applied for a writing job and been rejected, but then was asked to audition as a cast member. “Instead of showing a wide array of characters that I could play, I just stood there and did my standup, with glitter on my face,” he recalled. He was brought on initially as a guest writer. Torres managed to float above the show’s nerve-racking backstage culture. “It’s the tradition to wear a suit on Saturdays,” Jeremy Beiler told me. “On Julio’s first Saturday show, he showed up in a sparkly silver jacket. I was just, like, ‘Oh, that’s another way to do it.’ ”

Torres is clear-eyed about his success. “I’m certainly not bringing in the big bucks for HBO,” he told me. “It feels like ‘Game of Thrones’ is a rich student, and I’m the scholarship kid.”

One by one, he summoned an all-star roster of guest performers. First up was the comedian Nick Kroll, who was lounging in front of a roaring fireplace. Torres gave lessons in “hand acting,” instructing him to act out scenarios using only his hands, such as dropping a knife after committing a murder: “But you didn’t plan for the murder—it sort of just happened.” Kroll tried it, using a pen. “One thing I found missing from your knife-dropping was regret,” Torres said, then tilted his own camera toward his hands and acted the scene with quivering fingers.

Fred Armisen played a similar game with letters of the alphabet. “I have very strong feelings about Q,” Torres proclaimed. “To me, Q is misplaced in the alphabet. Q should be all the way in the back with the avant-garde X-Y-Z.” He imagined Q performing early in the evening at a rock club, between the more mainstream letters P and R. “Q is doing noise music, and people are, like, Whoa.”