The New York Times hosted a high-production-value videocast about whether it’s good Marxist praxis to shoplift from Whole Foods. As infotainment, it’s brilliant. As a statement about where things are at in the culture, it is, as David Polansky has noted, grim.

Before the who and the elusive why, the what-and-where: Three telegenic, well-dressed 30-somethings sit in a spacious, well-lit room, a SoHo loft or close approximation, with exposed brick and breezy white curtains and a chic, nicely proportioned rug. Just a smidge of tasteful furniture. They look like they could be at a retreat of some kind, or on a prestige-TV show about group therapy.

The host is Nadja Spiegelman of the Times, daughter of Art of Maus fame and Françoise Mouly, comic book publisher and longtime art editor of the New Yorker. So we have a Jewish angle and, if we want to be that way about it, a nepo baby angle, though Spiegelman is accomplished in her own right. As with a previous video in this format about the fate of wokeness, she has her finger on the pulse both of provocative topics and of the types of guest selection where someone otherwise rolling their eyes at the topic itself might nevertheless click.

This time around, one of the guests is Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer, bestselling author, and literary influencer. She had, as you may recall, disappointed fans who saw her as an ally in the fight to free Palestine when she did some Airbnb sponcon, this despite the company being a no-go one for the BDS purists. Indeed, even her appearance in that very conversation has gotten her called out for insufficient commitment to the Palestinian cause. She had pledged not to contribute to the opinion section until it changed its tune in various ways on this issue, yet there she is.

The other is media personality Hasan Piker, nephew of Cenk Uygur of the news network The Young Turks, where he began his own career. From between the lines, from here and there, I get that he too is an influencer. But I am 42 years old, am not running for political office, and therefore do not need to know what a Twitch streamer is. By the time my kids are old enough for me to need to figure out such things on their behalf, it’ll be something else that’s all the rage, so I can sit this one out.

Piker’s broader significance appears to be that he represents the anti-Israel youths who must be pandered to, either by Democrats if it’s about winning elections or staid newspapers if it’s about getting a new generation of subscribers. Best as I can tell, going by the hazy screw-the-man on exhibit in this interview, Piker is part of the wave of what Arno Rosenfeld of the Forward described as “squishy populism, which calls for rooting out a malevolent subset of the ruling class [that] has........

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