The videos of TikToks can easily reach billions. But because the app won’t share what’s popular, we don’t know just what the world is watching.
Tess McNulty
Tess McNulty is an assistant professor of digital humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a book project about major genres of viral content. Her writing has appeared, most recently, in New Literary History, Harper’s, and The Point. 
Mission Impossible
The university has been changing, to be sure. But has the proportion of students who want to devote themselves to acts of humanistic creativity?
Physical Books, Digital Lives
“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media ...
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Ask the average critic, professor, or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man—Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace—than a woman—Tillman, Winterson, Lessing. Ask them ...