Hey, I'm Candice Lim and you're listening to Icy Y-M-I. In case you missed it, Slate's Podcasts about Internet Culture.

And this was the week of Justin Timberlake attempting a comeback.

Jennifer Lopez producing a Bob the Builder movie at Mattel, will this be like her

like Hustler's redemption? And Dev Patel returning to the big screen because he is

starring in and directing his first film it's called Monkey Man. It's produced by

Jordan Peel and let me tell you something I will be sitting in a theater with a Coca-Cola I see on my left and

an AMC A-list Stubbs card on my right.

Because Dev Patel girlies, we're back.

So on today's episode, we're gonna talk about a phenomenon

you've seen and probably lived with

for your entire internet life and it's called

video essays. Now video essays are kind of the bread and butter of YouTube

along with like prank videos and babies named Charlie. These are anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 prank anything from why we keep retelling Persephone's story to an excruciatingly deep dive into the

avatar theme park to the failure of victorious. That video by the way is five and a half hours long. I am so

serious it is longer than the Irishman. But I think the video essays of today

tend to feel kind of academic.

You know, they're citing their sources, they're pulling up the J-store articles,

they are referencing other video essays. And to me, this feels like school this feels like being in a

lecture or Zoom school and I think that's what kind of intrigues me you know that

there's this hunger for brain food that simulates learning, but feeds it to you in

this more like approachable peer-to-peer way.

And so I want to know more about these video essays and why they're so prevalent and I'm going to do that today with Anisa Khalifa, the host of the broadside from W-U-N-C.

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