In Search of the Meaning of Life? Meet Me at the Monkey Bars.
The New York Times
Julian Shapiro-Barnum interviews kids for his social media sensation “Recess Therapy.”
Julian Shapiro-Barnum brims with creative energy, often scribbling ideas for new projects in his Moleskine the way others might add items to a shopping list. And though he graduated in 2021 from the B.F.A. acting program at Boston University, he said he’s never wanted fame.
“But I really like audiences,” he said at a cafe in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Though his energy levels belie it, he’s never had a cup of coffee; instead, he drank herbal tea.
“Recess Therapy,” which he created and hosts, has amassed more than a million Instagram followers since its start in 2021. In short video clips on that platform, and full-length YouTube episodes, he interviews New Yorkers aged 2 to 9 on topics ominous and frivolous: climate change, love, the economy, peeing your pants. The results are alternately — or sometimes simultaneously — profound, hysterical, saccharine, aphoristic, rhapsodic, loopy and unhinged, a kind of timeless-yet-woke Generation Alpha version of Charles Schulz’s “The Doctor Is In.”
