A Flaneur in the Cloud - December 9, 2023

In the last year, YouTube has become the place to watch really smart people with advanced degrees hold forth on science. The top science channels got hundreds of millions of views with their zippy explanations of dark matter and the periodic table. “Education” videos on YouTube now get twice as many views as “Pets & Animals” videos, according to the company. Science nerds are officially beating out the cat playing a piano, that old juggernaut of online video. | Vsauce, the top YouTube science show, averages 20 million viewers a month—something in the range of NBC’s Sunday Night Football audience. Minute Physics, Crash Course, SciShow and The Brain Scoop are a few of the several shows producing fun, compelling science videos. Even Bill Nye the Science Guy, who hosted an Emmy Award-winning show on PBS in the nineties, has made guest appearances on online shows like ASAP Science. | The migration of Nye and these other pop scientists to YouTube has happened within the past two to three years. Kevin Allocca, the head of Culture & Trends at the company, says there have been a few big science moments where millions of viewers went to YouTube to see viral videos: the rover landing on Mars, the Red Bull “Stratos” jump from space, and the Russian Meteor. | At the same time, the trends group within YouTube was seeing the steady rise of these science shows that were regularly producing original content. “As viewers, we’ve come to understand we’re interested in this kind of stuff,” says Allocca, “And people have been getting really good at feeding it to us.”

This year, the famous Saks Fifth Avenue windows have been designed by the Science Project, and they allow those passersby to actually participate in a virtual snowfall. | Jeremy Bergstein is managing partner and head of strategy for the Science Project. He joins The Takeaway to discuss the ways new technologies are being incorporated into the age-old tradition of holiday window displays.

One street at a time, Flaneur digs into human stories at the local level. But don’t expect to find the tales online. Though the print-only magazine flirts with global and local media, it shies from a big online presence. Where can you snag a bottle of handmade fragrance from a third-generation perfumer, buy a bouquet of fake flowers for your sweetheart, then round out the night at a pub to pet a spider? Welcome to Kant Street in Berlin. It’s the first street showcased in a new artistic and literary magazine, “Flaneur.” | In each issue of Flaneur, the patchwork of feature articles, illustrations and photo-narratives has one common denominator: they paint a portrait of one specific street in one specific city. Published in English by a group of young Berliners, Flaneur magazine seeks to push the boundaries of what print can be, while shunning social media as much as possible. | “It’s a fragmented literary perspective,” said Fabian Saul, 27, who edits the magazine with Grashina Grabelmann, 25. “It’s interdisciplinary: we work with writers, musicians, illustrators.” | Although the first issue’s 1,000 copies sold out in five weeks, the publication is still trying to figure out how to become a sustainable business. At the moment neither the core team, nor the contributing artists are paid for their collaboration on Flaneur. The editors have other jobs: Saul is a musician and a soundtrack composer, and Grabelmann, on top of being a freelance journalist, waits tables in a Berlin café.