Steven Zeitchik, at The Hollywood Reporter, with the most interesting take I’ve read about Cory Booker’s marathon speech:

You may not have watched anything but the last hour, or few minutes, or even a second of the Democratic senator’s 25-hour, one-sitting (or standing) opus on YouTube or C-SPAN. Trust me then when I tell you the whole thing was the kind of spectacle that should be eligible for an Emmy, so subtle were its layers and so ambitious the performance.

On its face, Booker’s speech building an elaborate case against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk was pure political theater — if theater involved a prize for never relying on a chair, food or the bathroom. As he broke Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour, 18-minute mark for longest Senate-floor speech in history, the New Jersey lawmaker spoke from giant loose-leaf binders of facts and read anecdotes off index cards; he thanked the Parliamentarian and gave at least his vocal cords a break by deferring to extended questions (that were more of a comment) from other senators. Booker balanced rousing constitutional ideals with basic economic litmus tests, reappropriating Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate line of, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” as (fittingly for these lightning times), “Are you better off now than you were 71 days ago?”

But what Booker was doing was nothing less than creating a cinematic spectacle, a binge-worthy awards contender in which all 25 hours happened to drop at once. And while the consequences are deadly serious, the techniques came from some of our most popular entertainment. Focus on different through lines of Booker’s performance and you’d experience different arcs; come in at different moments and you’d infer different genres.