Rabbit Holes: Six video essays to fall into, sorted by how much of your life you’re willing to give up

You’ve finished the thing you were watching. You don’t want to start a series. You want someone clever to talk at you for a while about something you didn’t know you cared about: the history of the corset, why every girl on your feed now has the same slicked-back bun, what actually happened to the it-girl.

That’s what video essays are for. They are the internet’s answer to a really good magazine feature: researched, opinionated, occasionally three hours long. Below are six, each a different flavour, each requiring a different amount of commitment. Pick according to your stamina.

FOR WHEN YOU WANT TO FEEL WELL-DRESSED

Mina Le

Watch: let’s talk about the rise of ‘-core’ and ‘girl’ aesthetics

Time: about 25 minutes

Mina Le is the reason a lot of us can now clock a silhouette by decade. She started her channel in 2020, unemployed and stuck at her mum’s house in Maryland, with a video arguing that Atonement was robbed at the Oscars for costume design. Millions of subscribers later, she’s still doing essentially that: taking something you scrolled past: a microtrend, a Disney princess gown, a Shein haul, and tracing it back a hundred years until it turns out to mean something.

Her scripts are written out in full and researched properly, often from the New York Public Library, which you can feel in the finished thing. But it never tips into lecture. There are memes. There are sound effects. She likes clothes, obviously and unapologetically, which is rarer in fashion criticism than it should be.

Watch if you liked: The Devil Wears Prada, but you’ve since developed opinions.

Then try: ModernGurlz, for costume design in film and television.

FOR WHEN SOMETHING ONLINE HAS BEEN BOTHERING YOU

Tiffany Ferguson

Watch: The Wedding Industrial Complex

Time: about half an hour

Tiffany’s Internet Analysis series does something quietly useful: it takes a phenomenon you’ve absorbed without ever questioning: family vloggers, van life, fast fashion, the entire apparatus of the modern wedding, and calmly explains why it is like that.

She’s a media studies graduate and it shows in the structure, but her real gift is tone. She isn’t sneering at anyone. She lands consistently on overconsumption and romanticisation as the culprits, and, crucially, she always gets round to what could be done differently. You come away with vocabulary rather than despair.

Watch if you liked: any group chat that started with “is it just me or…”

Then try: Alice Cappelle, for the more political, French-inflected version of the same instinct.

FOR WHEN YOU’RE IN YOUR FLEABAG ERA

Shanspeare

Watch: Femcel Feminism and Transgressive Girlhood

Time: 40 minutes-ish

What do we actually mean when we say we’re in our Fleabag era? Shanspeare pulls the phrase apart, and by the end you’re somewhere much more interesting than where you started, a real critique of what contemporary feminism does with women’s misery.

She’s explicit about wanting her work to be accessible; she’s said that academia was anything but, for most of her life, and that this is why she makes her videos fun and digestible. So you get theory delivered with jokes and detours, and it goes down easily without going down soft. Her essay on our obsession with beauty as a form of surveillance is the one you’ll be texting to three separate people afterwards.

Watch if you liked: the feeling of finishing a novel that saw straight through you.

Then try: Jordan Theresa’s Why Are There No More ‘It’ Girls, a lighter way in.

FOR THE FOURTH REWATCH

Broey Deschanel

Watch: Who’s Afraid of Carrie Bradshaw

Time: 30–40 minutes

For the girl who has watched Sex and the City through twice for comfort and once more for research, and has now started having Thoughts. Broey treats rom-coms and reality television with exactly the seriousness usually reserved for arthouse cinema, and the joke is that they hold up to it. Her essay on Love Island as a study in surveillance is genuinely unsettling once you’ve clocked it.

Watch if you liked: arguing about a television show at 1am with someone who has also seen it four times.

FOR WHEN YOU MISS BEING TWELVE

Izzzyzzz

Watch: her Cool Math Games retrospective

Time: 30–45 minutes

The old internet, exhumed. Dead websites, flash games, forums that imploded in 2009, children’s virtual worlds that no longer exist. It’s the very specific pleasure of remembering something you didn’t know you’d forgotten, and Izzy is affectionate rather than smug about all of it,  the Cool Math Games video is basically a love letter to a site that somehow survived.

Watch if you liked: finding your old MSN display names.

Then try: Sarah Z, for fandom history and Tumblr-era catastrophes.

FOR AN ENTIRE SUNDAY

Jenny Nicholson

Watch: The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy

Time: An hour but you will watch more of her for hours.

Clear the day. Jenny goes somewhere strange, a failed theme park in Utah, a Star Wars hotel that cost thousands a night, and returns with some of the funniest and most thorough reporting anywhere on the internet. She dresses up. She commits. Two of her videos have been nominated for Hugo Awards, which tells you this is not merely a girl talking to a camera, though it is also that.

Don’t think of this as a video. Think of it as an event: dressing gown, something to eat, phone face down.

Watch if you liked: a really long magazine feature about something you’d never heard of.

Then try: Lindsay Ellis’s back catalogue, now largely over on Nebula.