This week, as YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s review/eulogy for the shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel started making the rounds, I was curious. I’d of course heard about the “immersive experience” officially called Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, and here was someone who’d actually experienced the, um, experience. But then I saw the video’s running time – four hours and five minutes! – and I closed the tab faster than I do whenever the algorithm wants to show me some dumbass trying to pick up a cobra.

Who has the kind of time, I wondered, to sit around and watch YouTube for half the damn workday? In this, the era of TikTok? And Reels? And in what is, we have all been repeatedly assured, a time of shrinking attention spans?

In the case of Nicholson’s Starcruiser video, millions and millions of people have the time, it turns out. And she’s not alone: Over the past few years, you may have noticed YouTube suggesting videos to you so long they make Lawrence of Arabia seem downright punchy.

In my feed, most of these take the form of disquietingly deep – and often critical – dives into various aspects of nerdy pop culture. “That internet D&D show we all used to love sucks now, and here’s three hours worth of proof!” “That new movie that everyone loves sucks, and here’s 63 reasons why!” “Here’s a recap of that series no one but you and me is watching, and the 43 glaring errors in continuity it overlooked!”

It’s not hard to understand why this is happening. Nerds gonna nerd, after all. We love what we love, and we’re prepared to corner you at a party, maybe over by the onion dip, and talk to you (OK: at you) about our every concern with it. At considerable length. (Why, yes, we do notice you gazing imploringly over our shoulders for someone, anyone, to rescue you; we just don’t care, because the really interesting thing about Buffy Season 4 that most people overlook is …..) And of course the YouTube monetization model prizes every precious minute it gets to spend with those delicious eyeballs of yours. Passion + Profit-Seeking is a powerful motivator; these videos will keep coming.

Or, if you truly believe in the marketplace of ideas, maybe they won’t. After all, most of these long-haul grievance videos aren’t worth anywhere near the time commitment they demand, and spending so many hours watching such sustained negativity leaves you feeling coated in a kind of psychic grime, a residue of greasy cynicism. I should note that Nicholson’s Starcruiser video is a glaring exception – she’s passionate, yes, but admirably clear-eyed about that passion. She makes her points (her many, many, many points) with equanimity and humor, and she’s got the literal receipts. She’s also quick to praise those aspects of the experience worth praising, and smartly drills down on the question of value-for-money.

But there’s no denying that a shift is happening. TikTok itself – that online smithy wherein memes get forged and hammered – is launching longer videos, and Mr. Beast, arguably the quintessential YouTuber, recently started pumping out longer videos based, he says, on viewer demand.

Now, me? I’m so old I remember thinking a 13-minute music video was downright audacious. And I’ll admit, I didn’t actually watch the Starcruiser video, I listened to it while driving to and from the city for a movie screening. But I do watch several actual-play D&D YouTube shows, which sometimes stretch past the four-hour mark. And back in the early aughts I’d happily sink endless hours into reading smart, well-written TV recaps that might as well have been novellas. Is there any substantive difference?

But I choose to be heartened by the rise of long-form video. Or more specifically: By the willingness of people to watch a single video for hours on end. It suggests that quality of work continues to matter – you do, after all, still have to earn all those extra minutes of our attention. And in a culture so quick to blame a raft of societal ills on shrinking attention spans, it offers a surprising and intriguing counter-narrative to the experts who cite audience data to dictate precisely how long a YouTube video, or a web article, or a podcast episode “should” be.

Turns out the answer isn’t quantitative, but qualitative – not precise length, but personal value.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

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Lucas Marquardt

Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I went looking for a few lines that could attempt to represent the whole of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s work. I don’t think I succeeded because her poems are so full and touch on so much – from the natural world to very personal longing. But I think this gets close:

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?

This is a line from the poem Dead Stars and I love it because here you see her acknowledge the hard stuff of living, but it’s embedded in perseverance and optimism.

“What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?” I read that and I’m like, “Yes Ada. I’m all in. Let’s at least try, right?” She is urging us to keep going and it’s not a prescription from on high, she’s right here with us reaching for another day.

Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy, and I love that space.

Writing from that space is one thing — talking from there is quite another, which is why I was moved when Ada used one of the questions in our game to talk about something incredibly personal. And in her story you’ll hear echoes of that same line of poetry: “What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?”

I spoke to Ada just before the publication of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems she edited and introduced, featuring the work of Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown and more.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What’s a smell that brings back a vivid memory for you?

Ada Limón: My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side made dueling types of fudge. My grandfather’s was a hard sort of old-fashioned kind of fudge and my grandmother’s was a soft fudge like See’s Candy.

My favorite thing was to go into their walk-in cupboard, and they would have all of their Tupperware full of their different kinds of fudge for guests and things. And you could smell it. You couldn’t reach it, unfortunately, but you could smell it.

Rachel Martin: Did you spend a lot of time with them growing up?

Limón: I did, yes. And my grandmother just died last August and she’s been on my mind a lot. So I think that she’s with me in my heart.

Martin: Was she a lover of poetry?

Limón: She did like poetry, although she was very confused that not all my poems rhymed. I told her that some of them do. And when my grandfather passed away, she asked me to write a poem for him and I made it rhyme.

Question 2: When’s the last time you forgave yourself for something?

Limón: This morning. I’ve been traveling a lot and it’s been beautiful. And this morning I was doing yoga, which I try to do every morning, and I was just very stiff. I felt like I hadn’t been moving as much as I should and I was very hard on myself. And then I told myself, “You were doing amazing things. You were doing other things that mattered and it’s OK.”

I think it’s very important because early on I thought all of self care was really more self punishing.

Martin: What does that mean?

Limón: Oh, I just felt like if I miss a day of working out, or if I feast too much and enjoy too much, I’ll have to go into…

Martin: Deprivation mode.

Limón:. Yes, exactly. And I just don’t do that anymore. I think that’s been really healthy for me because I feel like you spend a lot of your twenties and thirties, at least for me, trying to do everything right. And the nice thing about being in my mid-to-late forties is that I forgive myself all the time. I have to.

Question 3: Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?

Limón: I think that I knew that we weren’t going to be able to conceive a child before we decided to give up on fertility treatments. I think I knew that. And I think it actually helped me to make some decisions to not move forward with any more of the treatments.

It felt like my body knew something and it was able to offer me another option and another future. And it felt like, OK, now what else is possible? Because I think as women in our culture, the only possibility oftentimes offered to us is motherhood.

Martin: That’s right.

Limón: I felt very bound by that and letting that go was really freeing. And I love my life and I love being child-free. And I think that premonition offered that.

Martin: Did you have a specific dream, or was it just a knowing in your bones?

Limón: I was floating in the Chesapeake Bay and I just had this moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?” And it felt really powerful. What if it didn’t belong to anyone else? And it was just mine.

Martin: We never talk about it that way.

Limón: I had never felt it that way. All I wanted was to carry something in me — a baby, a child. And then it was so freeing. And I got out of the ocean, I remember thinking, “That was beautiful.” Like, what if I’m enough? What if just my body, what if these boundaries and these borders of my skin touching the water, was enough?