How to find the best video essays
Haya Kaylani curates video essay recommendations in her newsletter “The Deep Dive.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Can you tell I’m starting to think about making video essays? —Kate
Take one quick look at what’s trending on YouTube, and you can easily lose faith in humanity. As I write this, it’s all Grimace shakes and people either giving or spending thousands of dollars for different viral stunts.
But underneath all that, a genre of creators is playing a long game. Video essays might seem totally incompatible with today’s internet of fast short-form content and flashy clickbait. But inexplicably, hours-long videos on topics ranging from modern femininity to the history of Disney’s FastPass system consistently receive millions of views. The genre is becoming so popular that people like Haya Kaylani have emerged to help viewers sort through it.
Kaylani writes The Deep Dive, a newsletter in which she curates five video essay recommendations every week, although I discovered her on TikTok, where her videos highlighting recent stand-out essays have received millions of views of their own.
Kaylani worked in the PR industry for six years, but after she lost her job in a round of layoffs, she was inspired to try something new. She had been a longtime consumer of video essays, but no one in her IRL friend group was interested in them.
“They weren't anything that I could talk about with my friends or the people in my life,” she says over Zoom. “But every time I would watch these videos, I noticed that they would have hundreds of thousands of views, if not millions. So it was this feeling of like, ‘Okay, they're out there. People are watching these.’”
The Deep Dive has since gained over 6,500 subscribers since it launched in February of this year, and another nearly 57,000 follow it on TikTok. In this interview for paid subscribers, Kaylani and I talk about the video essay explosion, how TikTok is (ironically) boosting long-form content, and where people should get started if they, too, want to become video essay obsessives.
What’s the appeal of a video essay versus a written essay?