Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

I wish more people asked about the crew. I wish more people asked about the designers, about the head of departments, about the cinematography, because when I think of the show, I think of you and those people. MYHA’LA: Yeah. LAWTEY: They’re entirely intrinsic to the show. Whatever people take in as an end product is built by them. We have the blessing and the curse of being the face of that, but it takes a village. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have some pretty special villages over the last five years. Mirna was one of those. We spoke about the hair at the start. I want to make sure that my hair doesn’t take away from her work. She was very much on top of my hair, but I said, “Is it okay if I just do it before I come in?” Just because I think there are very few opportunities to feel autonomy as an actor.

The sense of control that you have over what you’re doing often feels quite disconnected and sparse. To have the chance to try to claim some of that can make a real difference to your level of confidence in your work. Because ultimately, you’re going to give everything you have and then it will be taken away from you and made into something that is beyond your control. I heard this quote from this interview with Donald Sutherland recently where he was talking about Marlon Brando, who he knew very well, and he said, “I think it must be very trying when you’re that good and that exquisite, you put your body, yourself, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces, and create a character different from the character that you thought you were giving them. And you have to accept that. And if you accept that, then it’s an adult vocation.”

On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.

That enthusiasm proved contagious. You don’t need to care about the difference between 2.76:1 and 1.90:1 to feel it in your bones when the screen widens during the film’s climactic siege, and you sure as hell don’t need to care about it in order to appreciate a director making so earnest an appeal to our attention at a time when most studio movies feel like they were made with the same casual indifference that audiences have been conditioned to watch them.

While Coogler’s first original project was always going to command a certain amount of hype, the decision to lead with its importance to him galvanized people around the notion that “Sinners” was more than just another movie they could watch at home in three weeks (rave reviews from basically every critic in the country didn’t hurt either).

Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaged across state lines to the closest theater capable of projecting 15-Perf IMAX 70mm film — in order to see early screenings of the first original blockbuster from a gifted filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to put a strong personal stamp on increasingly generic Hollywood franchises. At that very same time, halfway around the world, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni took the stage at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Chiba, Japan to announce that the next chapter of cinema’s most iconic saga would be directed by a filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to be friends with Ryan Reynolds. Related Stories ‘Sinners’ Took a Nice Bite Out of a Random Tuesday at the Box Office Ryan Coogler Thanks Over 40 ‘Cinematic Influences’ Who Inspired ‘Sinners,’ Including Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Brian De Palma The movie business has always been held aloft by the tension between genuine pop artistry and mass-produced slop, two separate but hopelessly entwined ambitions that have proven even harder to balance than the Force. While both have their value, those values are in a constant state of flux, and they can only be determined with any real accuracy by measuring the difference between them. Seldom has that difference ever seemed more dramatic than it did at the fateful moment when “Sinners” mania overlapped with the reveal of “Star Wars: Starfighter.”  On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness. While “Sinners” was offering one audience something they had never seen before, “Star Wars: Starfighter” was pitching a different audience a movie so generic and familiar that even its title sounds like it’s repeating itself.  Of course, “Sinners” has the advantage of being a finished product that people have seen and loved, whereas “Star Wars: Starfighter” is still just a graphic designed to rile up the fanbase and appease whatever portion of Disney shareholders have already forgotten the great “Lightyear” debacle of 2022. (Just to be clear, this isn’t Starfighter the ship. This is the origin story of the human Starfighter that the ship is based on.) And, while anything’s possible, I’m not suggesting that Coogler’s movie will ultimately outgross the first “Star Wars” feature that promises to pick up from the saga where “Episode IX” left off.  All the same, the enthusiasm gap between these two projects — the reality of one, and the promise of another — has been tellingly immense. So far as the national water cooler is concerned, “Sinners” has ousted the Chicken Jockey as the biggest film story of the year, and stoked the rare kind of excitement that leads to $8.6 million Tuesdays and people scalping IMAX tickets on eBay. It’s also cemented Coogler’s status as a brand unto himself, and proved that Warner Bros. doesn’t have to sell its soul to “A Minecraft Movie” in order to stave off financial ruin. Conversely, there may not be a single person on Earth who’s more optimistic about the future of the galaxy far, far away now that a significant portion of its fate has been entrusted to the director of “The Adam Project.” The serendipitous timing of these announcements was a bit on the nose. You couldn’t have scripted a better way of confirming the reality that studios have been trying to prevent ever since they offered mid-budget movies as a blood sacrifice at the altar of mega-tentpole franchises: Mediocrity is losing its grip on the public imagination. (Cookie-cutter as “A Minecraft Movie” might have been in the end, I maintain that getting the “Napoleon Dynamite” guy to adapt a plotless video game about blocks was less of a slam-dunk than it seems, and the Chicken Jockey phenomenon speaks to a degree of novelty that was missing from recent short-fallers like “Captain America: Brave New World.”)  ‘Free Guy’Fox/Disney I trust that Levy is a nice guy, and I suppose it’s possible that the sheer gravity of “Star Wars” might inspire the “Free Guy” auteur to up his game (I’d entertain the argument that both “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are the best movies their respective directors have ever made), but I’m not the only one who finds Disney’s lack of faith in its signature IP disturbing, and I struggle to imagine that it will work out well for them. Levy’s hiring only seems to deepen the s

Which is to say: Films that connected with audiences because they dared to emphasize an idiosyncratic creative vision over the safety of selling people on something they’d already seen before.

“I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” White said. “I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”

“By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral, he didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to go to sessions. He would always look at me with this contemptuous smirk on his face like he thought I was a chimp or something … he’s definitely making a big deal out of a creative difference.”

“They’re criticizing the show in certain ways and they’re meaner in certain ways [now that the show is popular],” White said. “I’m used to being this underdog indie writer that people are championing. Certain things will hurt my feelings or I’ll feel misunderstood. The mean ones have gotten meaner. It’s like they don’t like me. I guess I need to either avoid that stuff or get tougher, because it does bum me out.”

Some of the finale gripes that bothered White the most were — for instance — complaints that the surviving characters should be getting interviewed by Thai police after the tragic resort murders in the last episode. “Little logic police — really, you can’t enjoy the vibe and the emotional arcs because you’re so caught up in the — this isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows? Constant literal police?”

In fact, White says he’s about to hit the road again to get out of Los Angeles and clear his head. “I’m going to Colombia today just to get the hell out of here,” he said. “I’ve never been there. I don’t think [season four is] going to South America, but I’ve never been there. Maybe one day. I just got to get out of L.A. I’m scrolling on my phone and reading shit about the show and this is not the finish line that I want.”

ROCKWELL I pitched Mike some ideas, and we read it through, and he was on board with the take I had on this guy. We wanted to make him feel possibly ex-military, super masculine and kind of nonchalant, which worked in contrast to Mike’s writing in the scene.

And the incest thing, it’s really more about someone who is trying to connect with his brother and his sister through the things they value. Saxon is all about getting off, and Piper is renouncing the materialistic.

MONAGHAN The three of us originally just referred to them as “the ladies.” People have taken to referring to them as “the toxic trio,” but Mike’s original inspiration for us was “the big blonde blob” — this group of women that moves together and sort of sounds alike and looks alike. Interchangeable. Once the season starts to progress, you start to see them individuate from each other. WHITE I knew I didn’t want to do, “Here’s the short dumpy one, here’s the pretty one …” I wanted them all to be variations on the same idea when they show up. I’d been on a vacation where there were these three women who I couldn’t even tell apart until one would peel off and you’d hear the other two talking [about her].

GOGGINS The very first conversation he and I had was me asking, like, “How does Rick move through the world? Where has he been? How does he dress?” Mike said, “I don’t know.” I go, “Well, I do know.” And he said, “OK, let’s do that.”

COON Mike will do this thing where he scream-laughs at the monitor if he thinks you’re funny. We’re actors, so as soon as you know that’s happening, you become obsessed by it. “He didn’t do the scream-laugh! It’s not funny! I’m not as funny as this person!” You just spiral.

Question 2: What does age teach you about love? Shannon: Oh my God. Oh, dear. Martin: Oh no. Is that a good "oh my God" or a bad one? Shannon: No, it just moved me. They're very linked obviously. I think when you're young, love can be very self-serving. You want love from other people. You want to have love. It's something you want for yourself because it feels, you know, wonderful to feel like you're loved. And then as you get older, you realize that it's probably ultimately more important to love others regardless of what you get in return. It becomes hopefully less transactional and more just a state of being, you know? Which is — can be hard to accept. It's actually kind of going back to that place that I was at when I was younger, where I was, you know, OK being alone — but with a new, with more, I don't know, more wisdom, some sort of wisdom that I've accrued along the way, hopefully.

You know, when you act, you create these little societies or civilizations to create some piece of art. And then you finish and they disappear. And it's kind of like the rhythm of my life. And there's certain relationships that carry on through those. Or people that you work with on multiple occasions. But for the most part, you get very accustomed to things not being stable or things changing.

I hate the embarrassment that people in this country have around art. I hate the word “pretentious”, especially. I am not against skepticism, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s one thing to criticise pretension when it serves to hide a lack of substance, but we have long since lost the plot about what the word “pretentious” even means. It has become a cudgel, a pernicious rejection of the idea that art should “mean” anything at all beyond entertainment. This kneejerk anti-intellectualism that manifests most often among the “let people enjoy things” crowd, who take gleeful pride in their ignorance and condescension towards any art that aims to broaden horizons or break rules. People who treat art like customer service, like an artist is a DJ you’ve hired for a wedding to only take requests.

They are simply lovers who experience a passing connection. Their search for something deeper (which eventually takes them on an ayahuasca trip overseen by a shaman played by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville) is thwarted by what the director calls the “asynchronous” nature of their dynamic.

How loud was the conversation back then over authentic casting? “It was never even discussed,” Craig says, looking askance. Guadagnino is equally dismissive: “Sexuality is not one thing. Is it five things, is it seven? There is no such thing as ‘the gay’.” Craig has another thought: “Sexuality is a very modern idea,” he says. “People’s sexuality, or whatever they desire, is as individual as a fingerprint.”

Does sharing a vocation reduce the chances of being asynchronous? “No, it enhances them because film-makers are radical narcissists who just want to do their own thing. It’s a disaster.”

Guadagnino goes into splutter mode again. “I would never put myself on the same shelf as Daniel. Come on, he’s an icon! I’m a grey, balding Italian-Algerian director who’s made some movies. I’m boring.” Craig leans forward: “So am I. Let’s say I wasn’t famous, and I was a free agent. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. Those moments are magic. I think of moments like that from my life and, my God, they’re electrifying. Whereas if you’re out on the prowl, that’s really sad. And look, Lee sort of was on the prowl. But he wasn’t looking for what he found with Allerton. That’s what I’m interested in capturing as an artist. The moment where you go, ‘Oh fuck!’”

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

“Facts. The reason why I blew up so fast is because I’m white, thin, privileged, and live in New York City,” she says, pointing out that her own content performed worse when she was living in North Carolina because there was nothing there to glamorize. She also shared how she worked to grow her account by making tons of different videos, privating the ones that didn’t perform, and replicating the ones that did until she nailed what TikTok wanted from her.  But “what TikTok wants” is still the most influential part of that, and as long as that’s still someone who looks like Victoria, there’s not one trick that can change it.

Last fall, while reporting Esquire’s “Future of Books” predictions, I asked industry insiders about trends they’d noticed in recent years. Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book. And for you, a reader interested in great fiction, the fallout from this challenging climate can limit your access to exciting new voices in fiction. Unless you diligently shop at independent bookstores where booksellers highlight different types of books, you might only ever encounter the big, splashy debuts that publishers, book clubs, social-media algorithms, and big-box retailers have determined you should see.

BookTok—er, TikTok—is still considered the au courant emergent platform, but unlike Instagram and Twitter before it, publishers can’t figure out how to game the algorithm. “It’s a wonderful tool, but it’s an uncontrollable one,” Lucas says. As opposed to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, on which authors can actively post to establish a following, the runaway hits of BookTok (see: The Song of Achilles) grew from influencer videos.

These days, “in order to get exposure, you have to make the kinds of content that the platform is prioritizing in a given moment,” Chayka says. On Instagram, that means posting videos. Gone are the days of the tastefully cluttered tableaux of notebooks, pens, and coffee mugs near a book jacket; front-facing videos are currently capturing the most eyeballs. “A nonfiction author at least has the subject matter to talk about,” Chayka says. (Many nonfiction writers now create bite-size videos distilling the ideas of their books, with the goal of becoming thought leaders.) But instead of talking about their books, novelists share unboxing videos when they receive their advance copies, or lifestyle videos about their writing routines, neither of which convey their voice on the page. Making this “content” takes time away from writing, Chayka says: “You’re glamorizing your writer’s residency; you’re not talking about the work itself necessarily.”

“Energy tends to attach itself to wherever energy is already attached,” Lucas says. “Fewer debuts have a chance of really breaking through the noise in this climate, because all of the energy attaches itself to the ones that have made it past a certain obstacle.” In some cases, the energy starts building as early as when a project is first announced.

Because staff publicists at publishing houses must split their workload among several authors, there is an expectation that an author will now spend untold hours working as their book’s spokesperson.

The agent at the talent firm describes a “one strike and you’re out” mentality, with some authors getting dropped by their agents if their debut doesn’t sell well.

But one positive development amid this sense of precarity is the rise of the literary friendship. “On social media,” Isle McElroy wrote for this magazine in September, “writers are just as likely to hype their peers as they are to self-promote: linking where to buy books, posting photos of readings, and sharing passages from galleys.” There is now an all-ships-rise mentality among authors at every career stage, but particularly among first-time novelists. Now networks of writers are more important than ever.

When it was time to ask other writers for blurbs for The Volcano Daughters, Balibrera had friends who were excited to boost the book, but she could also rely on other writers who remembered her from Literati. “There was goodwill built up already,” Gibbs says.

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.

At Netflix, we have such a diverse population of shows in 183 countries around the world. We’re really trying to serve up lots of stories people haven’t heard before. When you go into our environment, you’re like, “Ooh, what is that?” You’re almost kind of afraid to touch it, because you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to waste my time.”That level of discovery is literally, I’m not bullshitting you, man, that’s the thing that keeps me up at night. How do I help figure out how to help people discover things, with enough evidence that they trust it? And when they click on it, they love it, and then they immediately ping their best friend, “Have you seen this documentary? It’s amazing.” And she tells her friends, and then that entire viral loop starts.

The discovery engine is very temporal. Member number 237308 could have been into [reality TV] because she or he just had a breakup. Now they just met somebody, so all of a sudden it shifts to rom-coms.Now that person that they met loves to travel. So [they might get into] travel documentaries. And now that person that they’re with, they may have a kid, so they might want more kids’ shows. So, it’s very dangerous for us to ever kind of say, “This is what you like. You have a cat. You must like cat documentaries.”

We don’t see each other, obviously, and I don’t want to social network on Netflix. But knowing other humans exist there is part of it.You answered the question absolutely perfectly. Not only because it’s your truth, but that’s what everyone says! That connection part. So another thing that goes back to your previous question, when you’re asking me what’s on my mind? It’s that. How do I help make sure that when you’re in that discovery loop, you still feel that you’re connected to others.I’m not trying to be the Goth kids on campus who are like, “I don’t care about what’s popular.” But I’m also not trying to be the super poppy kids who are always chasing trends. There’s something in between which is, “Oh, hey, I haven’t heard about that, and I kind of want to be up on it.”

I am looking forward to seeing what Apple does with this and then figuring out more, how are people going to use it? Then I think that we should have a real discussion about how Netflix does it.But to just port Netflix over? No. It’s got to make sure that it’s using the power of the system as much as humanly possible so that it’s really making that an immersive experience. I don’t want to put resources toward that right now.

The design team here at Netflix, we played a really big hand in how that worked because we had to design the back-end tool. What people don’t know about our team is 30% of our organization is actually designing and developing the software tools that we use to make the movies. We had to design a tool that allowed the teams to understand both what extra footage to shoot and how that might branch. When the Black Mirror team was trying to figure out how to make this narrative work, the software we provided really made that easier.

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.”

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020.

Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn.

Dentsu is one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, running accounts for Heineken, Hilton, Kraft Heinz, Microsoft, Subway, and other global corporations. In 2019, the firm began using digital technology to gather data that showed not only how many people attended to its ads but in what ways they did—information that could be applied to derive a quantitative unit of attention value.

There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.

“Human beings make the technologies—and they make them in the context of other human beings needing and wanting various things.” It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.

the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency