It’s a line that’s echoing across the algorithms and news feeds everywhere — the opening salvo on rising media sensation Kareem Rahma’s viral — and now Emmy-nominated — show “SubwayTakes,” which offers viewers a playfully Socratic dive into the shallow end of the day’s controversies.
The show first debuted in 2023, and has since gone on to rack up more than 750 million views on YouTube. With a microphone clipped to a MetroCard, Rahma brings man-on-the-street style interviews to the New York subway system, where guests of all walks of life defend one deeply held opinion about anything.
For example, in Episode 175, Rahma wonders whether having a dog make you interesting? (He doesn’t think so.) Or should couples, in addition to having their own names, also have a “joint name.” (Rahma agrees, offering “Brangelina,” the portmanteau for Hollywood actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, as a successful example.)
Beneath the show’s simple premise lies an unwritten set of rules for what makes a “take” work, which is that it has to balance just enough controversy with an authentic insight about everyday life to be persuasive, said Steve Granelli, a teaching professor of communications studies at Northeastern University.
The art of the take
When takes — brief, often provocative opinions — lean into the controversy, they become “hot takes,” Granelli said.
Though the “hot take” has been around a while, developments in social media communication, opinion journalism and the attention economy has helped to usher it in as perhaps the “rhetorical form of our time,” said John Wihbey, professor of media and technology at Northeastern and director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab.
In addition to its roots in opinion journalism, Granelli noted that the popularization of “take culture” can be traced to sports radio in the 1990s and early 2000s. Long before social media, sports radio host Jim Rome turned “hot” sports opinions into appointment listening, where callers raced to deliver the day’s most memorable take rather than engage in prolonged conversation.
“It almost became an inside joke among his audience,” Granelli said. “His callers didn’t call in to have conversations; they called in to deliver takes.”
Take culture has since fashioned a foothold in sports and entertainment culture — but also political culture too, unsurprisingly. Political correspondent and CNN anchor Abby Phillip’s show “NewsNight with Abby Phillip” is built around rapid-fire takes on political issues that often results in “highly clippable content,” Granelli said. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith has likewise parlayed the take into a multimillion-dollar media career and widely watched show “ESPN First Take.”
But what makes for a particularly good take?
One element is concision. Media writ large has been trending toward compression for some decades, with many experts documenting the ways fragmented attention and digital platforms have produced an entertainment landscape optimized for shorter, more easily shared content, Wihbey said.
Authenticity matters too, Wihbey said — a concept that often attaches to content creators and media personalities.
It’s a point that Granelli also underscored. The hot take has to be something that the person “genuinely believes,” infused with the right amount of provocation — and capable of being logically justified.
“The biggest criticism you can make of a hot take is that it feels manufactured,” he said. “That it doesn’t feel genuine or authentic.”
The tone and character of a take can also vary widely: from the comic to the uncanny to the outright reactionary. Comedian and actor Hasan Minhaj argued on SubwayTakes that adults should be permanently exempt from public birthday sing-alongs; New York Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier claimed that money can, in fact, buy happiness; recently, influencer and internet personality Christian Joseph, known as “The Rizzler,” proudly declared that peanut butter is overrated.
Sometimes, too, a good take is simple that which hides in plain sight.
“It’s sort of like something that has been there the whole time but is only just now framed” and presented in a pithy package, Wihbey said. That money can buy happiness would be one such framing, for instance, or that peanut butter sucks.
Whether such takes are good or bad is for the viewer to decide. Part of the appeal of the show, Granelli said, is the opportunity to generate a take on anything rather than something specific. The effect, he said, is democratizing, improvisational and conversational.
“You can assume everybody has one about something,” he said. “What I love about the SubwayTakes approach is that it cuts straight to the point, so you’re immediately going to hear something you’ll either agree with or disagree with.”
