This is The Guardian.

Hi, my name's David Wolfe and I'm the editor of the Guardian Longreed.

Over the summer, we'll be picking a few of our favourite pieces of the year so far

and giving you a bit of background information about them. So this week I've picked the Mozart

of the Attention Economy, Why Mr Beast is the world's biggest YouTube star by Mark O'Connell.

One nice thing about being an editor is you can use the job to sometimes secretly fill holes in your own knowledge.

And in this case, for some reason, I found that the YouTube algorithm was always serving me up videos from this guy, Mr. Beast.

I knew who Mr. Beast was. He's the world's biggest YouTube content creator, and I knew that he was occasionally a controversial figure, but beyond that

I didn't know much about him and I never watched the videos that were constantly on my feed.

But it kept nagging at me. Why is this guy so popular? Why do all his videos have so many

views? And what does his popularity mean? So I ended up contacting one of my favorite writers, Mark O'Connell, to see if he wanted to answer

these questions.

He replied to say that he did.

I've never knowingly sat down and watched any of his stuff, he wrote, but having an 11-year-old

son means I'm peripherally aware of his importance in what I suppose we must call the culture.

But in some sense, I just associate him with the problem of my own aging and inexorable slide into death. As it turned out, the piece didn't really end up focusing on Mark's own inexorable slide into death,

but like everything he writes, it's an incredibly smart and funny essay,

which in a weird way makes me feel like I understand the world in 2025 much better than I did before I read it.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

The Mozart of the Attention Economy.

Why Mr Beast is the world's biggest YouTube star,

...