Like Stories of Old

Tom van der Linden is Dutch. He makes video essays in English, about cinema, about the questions that cinema asks about what it means to be alive. He uploads perhaps four or five times a year. Each video takes around an hour of your time and leaves you altered in ways that are difficult to explain at dinner parties. Like Stories of Old is, by any rigorous application of the magazine’s own standards, one of the finest channels on the platform — and also a channel that this magazine should have reviewed six issues ago.

We didn’t. That oversight says more about us than about the channel, and we’re acknowledging it here.

What Like Stories of Old does is take a film — sometimes famous, sometimes not — and use it as a lens for examining a specific philosophical problem. Not “here is what this film is about” but “here is what this film forces us to confront about longing, or identity, or the stories we tell ourselves to keep moving.” The approach sounds academic and functions as something considerably closer to therapy — if therapy involved sustained analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky and careful argument about the nature of nostalgia.

Van der Linden’s voice is the channel’s instrument. Measured, precise, occasionally devastating in its quietness. He does not perform emotion; he pursues it through argument, and the viewer arrives at the feeling by following the thinking rather than being told what to feel. This is a rarer technique than it sounds. Most essay channels know how to tell you a film is sad. Like Stories of Old makes you understand why the sadness is specifically yours.

Like Stories of Old is proof that the best English-language video essayist currently working is not English — and that this should make us rethink what we mean when we talk about the YouTube voice.

The consistency problem is real and must be noted: four videos a year is not a channel, it is an event. Subscribers who discovered Like Stories of Old in a particularly vulnerable moment and have been waiting eighteen months for the follow-up will know the particular texture of this frustration. The argument that quality justifies the gap is true — and also is the argument that every creator who has ever disappeared makes. Viewers are allowed to want more, even from the excellent.

The community is smaller and quieter than the subscriber count suggests, which is appropriate: these are people who came for meditation, not discussion. The comment sections run long and thoughtful, with the occasional surprising reach — van der Linden’s essay on the fear of missing out has been cited in academic papers, shared in philosophy seminars, and apparently played at a funeral. This is a reach that transcends the platform’s usual metrics, and the channel’s X-Factor score reflects it.