Justin Tranter, a 45-year-old musician who has co-written smash hits by Chappell Roan and Justin Bieber, was annoyed. Social media, in Tranter’s view, had been overrun by music listeners (especially gay ones) acting a little too opinionated.
“What do we have to do to stop my fellow homosexuals from thinking that they are music critics just because they’re gay and have a phone?” Tranter asked on TikTok earlier this year. “You know nothing about a song. You know nothing about this industry. Just be a fan.”
The video—which Tranter later took down—seemed like yet another sign that the art of reviewing the arts was in a strange state. This year has been grim for criticism: The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.
A wave of recent essays has laid out the concerning implications of these developments. Social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played. With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.
And yet demand for cultural commentary seems as high as it’s ever been. TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of. The music critic Anthony Fantano’s YouTube following (3.05 million) dwarfs Rolling Stone’s print subscription base (414,000 as of 2023). Even national politics now revolves around topics that would have been the provenance of cultural essayists: how to interpret a jeans ad, how to curate a museum.
As Tranter’s video reflected, the very platforms that are stealing eyes away from newspapers and magazines have created a new class of self-styled critics. With this transition, the definition of the profession is in flux. The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. Recently, I’ve been reaching out to critics—new and old—to find out what those rules are. For better and for worse, the adage “Everyone’s a critic” no longer seems like an exaggeration.
One person who felt attacked by Tranter’s complaint was a former marketing professional living in Singapore who goes by the handle Swiftologist. The 28-year-old, whose real name is Zach Hourihane, has coiffed waves of hair and a winkingly imperious way of speaking; he’s amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers since he began making YouTube videos, TikToks, and podcast episodes dissecting pop music about five years ago. He is that most modern species of music consumer: a Swiftie. And, as he argued in TikTok and YouTube responses to Tranter, he’s a real critic.
I watched those videos skeptically. As a writer who’s heard from more than a few outraged Taylor Swift stans over the years, I know how hostile to honesty that online fan tribes can be. But I was surprised to see Hourihane make a series of assertions that traditional critics would agree with.
Hourihane explained that critics matter because “they’re not dependent on labels or PR access to celebrities or artists”; he could have been paraphrasing the movie reviewer Pauline Kael’s observation that “the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” When he pointed out that no set qualifications exist to be a critic, he was echoing the literary critic R. P. Blackmur’s 1935 argument that the job is “the formal discourse of an amateur.” When Hourihane said that he criticizes because he cares, I thought of what the music critic Jon Caramanica has said on the Times’ music podcast, Popcast: “Criticism is an act of love.”
Indeed, Hourihane’s work does have a critical bite—just rendered in pop-fan slang. In one video, he called Swift’s new album cover “chopped” (ugly) as he shared a broader theory about Swift’s shaky taste in visuals. His measured review of Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend built analysis out of sharp comparisons and contrasts. He praised Carpenter’s wittiness while noting that she “is not the universal songwriter. She’s not good at finding new ways to say things that have been felt before.”
Hourihane told me that he originally aspired to be a writer, not a YouTuber. He used to report for a news outlet in Singapore, and he said the written word afforded more “runway” to chew on an idea than video does. But much of his output includes meandering livestreams and “reaction” content, in which he records himself gasping and giggling as he listens to music in real time. He’d prefer, he said, to focus on thoughtful, prepared analysis. But audiences love reaction videos—his expression of horror at the sex puns on Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl earned millions of TikTok views. On social media, “if you make content for you and what you like, you’re doing it wrong,” he told me. “You need to make content for what people want to see.”
What’s surprising to me is that his audience of Swift diehards wants to be challenged sometimes. “People are really sick of the idea that if you have any sort of negative thing to say about an artist, it means that you hate them,” he said. The Swifties, in his view, are fundamentally just like anyone else: “Naturally we’re curious, we’re argumentative, we’re investigative thinkers. The algorithms don’t necessarily complement that, but I think people do want this even if they don’t realize it.”
In some ways, he’s doing an essential service for this cultural moment: piercing groupthink from the inside. In one video where he labeled Swift “the landfill queen” for wastefully pumping out merchandise, he lit into the “bootlickers” experiencing “Swiftie-brain-rot disease.” A commenter confessed to previously being one such bootlicker. “Zach, I appreciate you and all the work you put into this channel and keeping me grounded,” the commenter wrote. “Please keep it up, the girls need help.”
Critics now also have to cultivate their own fans. By steadily building a following over the years, Karsten Runquist, a 27-year-old aspiring director with an affable and unassuming demeanor, has become, by some measures, one of today’s most prominent movie reviewers. He’s the most popular user of Letterboxd, a site where people rank and review movies with their friends. On YouTube, he has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and earns a living through advertising income.
Runquist winced when we got to talking about how he defines a hobby that has become his job. “It feels disrespectful to call myself a critic,” he said over videochat. He barely passed English in high school, and when he began uploading movie analyses to YouTube back in 2017, he had not even seen any Paul Thomas Anderson films. He’s succeeded by evolving, in public, from newbie cinephile to expert—a journey he’s tracked by cataloging more than 2,000 movies on Letterboxd.
Letterboxd has broadly been credited with nurturing a new generation of movie buffs. Its 17 million users log the movies they watch and, if they want, attach a star rating or a write-up. It’s akin to online forums such as Goodreads (for books), Rate Your Music (albums and songs), and Beli (restaurants). These sites cut against the stereotypical image of a critic as an expert dispensing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like a Roman emperor. Instead, criticism comes to feel just like bantering at a bar.
Runquist’s Letterboxd posts tend to amount to a few jokey words. His most “liked” review is of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he gave four stars: “easily one of the top 5 movies about taxes” (the movie is partly set in an audit bureau). Though other reviews are slightly more involved, they all share a quippy, stream-of-consciousness, all-lowercase style representing “the first thing that comes to mind.”
Many of Runquist’s Letterboxd followers found him through YouTube, where his output includes both reviews and stuntlike projects (“I Watched 50+ Monkey Movies, Here’s What I Learned”). He’d initially been inspired by pioneering video channels such as Every Frame a Painting, which made carefully edited, thoroughly researched deep dives into the art of moviemaking. But as on Letterboxd, Runquist’s YouTube videos are conversational and shaggy. “I don’t think I take myself as seriously as a lot of other critics on YouTube,” he said. “I try not to act like I know more than my viewers.”
The performance of humility is a big part of what’s drawn people to him—but it also can undermine his authority. In a recent video, he panned the new Superman, saying, “There’s nothing that annoys me more than a movie for babies acting like it’s an edgy movie for adults.” Angry comments flooded in from superhero fans; more than 1,000 followers unsubscribed. A day later, Runquist posted another video apologizing for being “mean-spirited.” In the future, he told me, “maybe I will take into consideration the stan culture a bit more and go about things a bit lighter. Which is fine.”
This admission seemed sad—critics are supposed to take pride in withstanding disagreement. But when I watched his mea culpa, I felt some sympathy. Runquist regretted not what he said but how he said it—after all, he’d basically labeled the movie’s audience a bunch of babies. “I stand by my take obviously, but I think it was very much a learning experience of knowing you got to read the room as far as how you speak about things,” he told me. Experience might have saved him from this episode. But so might an editor.
Outside the realm of pop idols and superheroes, some young commentators are still performing the classic critical duty of digging into the obscure and underrated. A 28-year-old New Yorker named Margeaux Labat has built a brand for herself with calmly narrated TikTok videos, Instagram posts, and online-radio episodes directing her followers down eclectic wormholes—to yacht rock, post-punk, ambient music, and so on. Other critics have portrayed her as exemplary of the profession; the art-pop singer Caroline Polachek publicly raved that she’s “the future of music journalism.” But when we met up for coffee in Manhattan, I realized that the question of how to classify her job was more complex than it seemed.
Labat told me she thinks of herself as more of an “educational resource” than a critic. In 2019, she began posting written and filmed reviews of new albums on Instagram. With time, she moved from reviews to listlike recommendation videos laden with music-writer lingo—microgenres, fussy adjectives, esoteric references. Martyna Basta’s Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering was “like this foggy, ambiguous dream that you can’t stop thinking about”; she said Sluice’s Radial Gate “is on the more polished and intimate end of the alt-country spectrum, but if you’re into Appalachian folk and slowcore, you’ll love this.” Eventually, she began to focus more on interviews with artists, including celebrities such as Charli XCX and FKA Twigs.
Labat quit a job on the video team at Pitchfork last year, realizing that she could make a full-time living on her own. She accepts offers from music festivals to fly to them and make content; she’s done a number of overt promotions for brands, such as a video of British-music recommendations sponsored by Burberry. And sometimes, record labels offer to pay her to interview particular artists. She told me she says yes only if she really likes the music she’s spotlighting. “I’m prioritizing my integrity when it comes to my content,” she said. “What I choose to present to my audience is of the utmost importance. I don’t care how much money you’re throwing at me.”
As we talked, it became clear that Labat would prefer it if she didn’t have to think like an entrepreneur. She’s mulled starting a newsletter or listening club. But that would mean putting more effort into emphasizing herself, as a personality, rather than emphasizing what she really cares about: music. “I never really see my social media as a way of building connection or forming community with people,” she said. “It’s just purely a means of self-expression for me.”
I asked whether she always disclosed her sponsorships so that audiences know who is paying her. “Um … it depends,” she said. “I can’t really think of the last time I did a paid interview that was outside of a festival context.”
At any traditional news organization, a journalist who accepts payment from a subject without telling the audience would be fired. But as essentially solo operators, content creators don’t get to maintain a strict fire wall between their business and editorial departments. Some of Runquist’s viewers once balked at him giving a sponsored shout-out to a movie; he’s been more careful with what money he accepts since then. Hourihane said that he has turned down a number of labels’ offers to pay him to endorse an artist without disclosing the deal. That he’d reject such deals testifies to an often-forgotten truth about the internet: When so many influencers’ influence is plainly bought and paid for, audiences come to crave voices that seem independent.
After my conversation with Labat, her manager said in an email that about 5 percent of her interviews have been paid. The manager wrote, “We would rather not give examples of which artists have paid and which have not, we just don’t want to bring their names into this piece without their approval.” She added, “We truly do not have all the answers on how to make this a long lasting and sustainable career. It’s a grey area, where press and marketing start morphing into the other.”
All of the commentators I spoke with are doing interesting work, and I could fill this article with many more examples of strong criticism outside traditional media. Even so, the more time I spent browsing new platforms, the more disillusioned I felt. For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency. On Substack, I waded through lots of unedited disquisitions seemingly written during caffeine benders.
So I went to visit an institution: Pitchfork. In 2024, obituaries were being written for the 29-year-old music publication because its parent company, Condé Nast, announced that it was laying off staff and moving the site under the management of GQ. The funeral, which I participated in, was premature. Music fans remain obsessed with how the site rates their favorites, and artists have Pitchfork on their mind too. Recently, the rapper Offset reposted a forged screenshot claiming that he’d gotten the site’s coveted Best New Music distinction.
Pitchfork’s new editorial chief is Mano Sundaresan, a 28-year-old former NPR producer known for running the music blog No Bells. Under his reign, the site’s coverage has delved deeper into super-online rap and hyperpop. “I’ve been thinking less about just Gen Z as a unit and more just like, okay, these are the Gen Z people who are actually still interested in reading—and I think we can increase that number,” he told me as we sat in Condé Nast’s cafeteria in One World Trade Center.
The broad fear when Pitchfork was subsumed into GQ was that a glossy fashion magazine’s coziness with the entertainment industry would be at odds with a music-reviewing site’s prerogative to trash bad albums. Thus far, though, Pitchfork hardly seems defanged. This year, a columnist called the pop singer Benson Boone “horrible, just godawful.” An album by the metal sensations Sleep Token received a 2.3 out of 10 and was deemed “sanitized pop-rap with all the sexed-up verve of Droopy the dog.” The flair with which these opinions were expressed made them into objects of discussion on TikTok and X. Clearly, music criticism can still go viral—which is one way to get people reading it.
Another way, Sundaresan said, is by making the site feel more “human” and less like a faceless institution. He wants what all of the young critics I spoke with have: a personal connection with their audience, rooted in the intimacy of social media. To that end, the site has continued pushing into video, including monthly clips that put critics on camera to talk about their favorite albums.
But, Sundaresan said, “the written word is still the most important way of thinking about music.” It has the potential for more “nuance and clarity” than a video does. Moreover, he said, “when you are trying to do music criticism as a YouTuber, you’re a YouTuber.” Performing for an audience means “you have to change the way you speak.”
None of the new critics I spoke with would likely disagree with that. Runquist has been studying written reviews; “You get better at film criticism by reading it, not watching videos,” he said. Hourihane complained about having to dumb down his content for people who don’t read: “It really does seem like people are genuinely getting stupider.” Labat was annoyed that she had to build a brand and be “at the mercy of the algorithm.” The shared ambivalence of all of these critics was telling. Successful though they all are, each of them feels constricted and compromised by their distribution platforms.
That’s not exactly a new issue, Michael Phillips, the longtime Chicago Tribune film reviewer who’d recently taken a buyout, reminded me.
For four decades—during which he also worked as a theater critic at a number of other papers—Phillips had four words pinned above his keyboard: be specific, be brave. The motto, he told me, reminded him of the point of his job. “The great ongoing challenge of critical writing,” he said, “is to chase the biggest, most complicated, and potentially most provocative ideas that a film, or a play, or book, or any work of art brings up.” Deadlines, however, can all too easily lure critics to hack out “generalities and bullshit”—and “that’s heartbreaking when that happens.”
Today’s new critics are trying to resist their own versions of those pressures. They clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it—and their audiences want the same, despite how easy it is to scroll away, engage shallowly, and let the market make one’s choices. But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved. The problem the profession faces is material, not spiritual. Culture still craves good criticism—someone just has to pay for it.
I expected that Phillips would seem a little glum when we spoke, a week after he’d taken his buyout. He said he was concerned that the winnowing of traditional-media critics was not a great sign for the country. “These times right now, in 2025, are just crying out for a diversity of strong voices to make sense of where we’re going,” Phillips told me.
But for the most part, he sounded buoyant. He talked with gratitude about the “ridiculous good luck” he’d had in a career path that “no longer exists.” And he was excited for what was next. That day, he had to catch a flight to attend the Venice Film Festival. He’d still be reviewing movies—but for a podcast, Filmspotting. “We can’t look back forever,” he said. “It’s too hard on the neck.”