Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days
Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel has 400 million subscribers. In this profile Mark O’Connell tries to grasp the scale of Donaldson’s role in modern popular culture:
“I don’t intend to make a case here that you should start appreciatively watching Donaldson’s videos. I don’t intend to make a case for MrBeast as art – although I reserve the right to talk about it as though it were. I’m not even going to try to convince you that these videos are even necessarily good, whatever that might mean. But I do feel quite strongly that Donaldson is some type of genius – a prodigy of a form that, as degraded as it is, deserves to be taken seriously as one of the signature artefacts of our time.”
Anthropologist Anand Pandian has spent much of the last decade travelling across the United States trying to make sense of why is it so polarised. In this fascinating essay he explored what he learned about what it takes to connect across difference.
