Tess McNulty at Public Books:
First, watch this very brief video. Or, if you prefer, read this description: For five seconds, an adult man, dressed up as the boy-wizard Harry Potter, appears to fly through the air on a broomstick, while twinkly music plays (a parodic riff on the Potterverse theme). Next, he exposes the ostensible mechanism behind his illusion: a contraption (concealed beneath his midsection) involving a mirror, a prosthetic leg, and a longboard. Finally, he engages with his cameraman in a verbal, slapstick squabble over who owns the longboard. “Come back here!” the cameraman yells, while the faux-wizard rolls away.
The sequence, at only 18 seconds long, is almost vanishingly slight. Yet it has done anything but escape notice. According to multiple sources, “Zach King’s Magic Ride”—as it is sometimes called—which was first posted to TikTok on December 9, 2019, is currently the “Most Viewed TikTok of all Time.” That makes it, arguably, one of the most visible new aesthetic creations in the contemporary world.
More here.