Whenever I talk to my parents or older colleagues—or when I’m at dinner with my younger cousins, or catching up with friends who don’t spend much time online—we’ve never seen the same things. We’re not following the careers of the same actors, and we’re not excited for the same TV shows. Instead, we spend half our time explaining to each other what exactly we’re consuming.
So—why is Gwyneth Paltrow kissing Timothée Chalamet? (And who is he again?) Why is David Blaine kissing a snake? Wait, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son is an actor? And he’s kissing his on-screen brother? The other day I discussed Fergie with an older friend for five minutes before we realized that he was referring to the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, while I thought we were talking about Fergie the ex-Black Eyed Pea. There is so much culture—some of it is great, some is weird, most is horrible, but little of it seems to overlap.
My dear colleague Joe Nocera—born before personal computing, and possibly electricity—remembers a time when all Americans would sit down at the same time and watch Jay Leno, or David Letterman, or the 1987 stock market crash. But it’s the mid-2020s, and we’re lucky if we get one or two collective cultural moments a year between streaming platforms, newsletters, magazines, and various different social media apps.
The New York Times’ bestseller list speaks to one tribe, while the Amazon bestseller list speaks to another. Film critics speak for an elite while Rotten Tomatoes speak for the masses. What’s left of what we used to call the mainstream, like Late Night, or the Super Bowl halftime show or whatever’s on PBS, feels washed out—either because it’s become overly corporate or hopelessly politicized.
The posh way of saying this is: There is no monoculture left.
So how are you supposed to know what’s happening in the world—or at least, what’s worth paying attention to? That’s where I come in.