Glamour 
 
 There’s a lot of talk in media these days about “pivoting to video,” the corporate-jargon catchphrase for what happens when a digital media organization lays off a bunch of journalists because it decides video is the future of web content and/or cheaper than paying writers. Glamour and parent company Condé Nast are no strangers to the attendant dilemma of figuring out how to adapt a business model that once worked well for print publications to a digital-first marketplace. In its latest salvo in the war for clicks, eyeballs, and engagement, Glamour appears to have skipped pivoting to video and invented a new tactic: pivoting to performance art. Now that longtime editor Cindi Leive is out the door, why aspire to be a fashion magazine when you can be a Marina Ambramović installation instead? 
 
 The magazine posted a video to its website on Wednesday of Gigi Hadid staring into the camera for four minutes. If you’re thinking that surely there’s more to the video than that, let me stop you right there: There’s not. It is just Gigi, looking straight ahead, sometimes blinking and smiling, for a full four minutes. (And if you don’t know who Gigi Hadid is, in brief: She’s a model, member of Taylor Swift’s #squad, older sister to Bella “If Homeboy Comes Through in These …” Hadid, and a member of the Extended Kardashian Universe.) 
 
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 Glamour touted the video as “weirdly mesmerizing,” adding that it slowed it down to heighten the eerie quality. “People should be putting this on their giant TVs during holiday parties instead of fireplace b-roll,” said Lauren Lumsden, executive producer at the magazine, in a statement. While I would love to attend a holiday party where a video of Gigi Hadid, or indeed any member of the Hadid family, plays in the background on an endless loop, I can’t echo the magazine’s contention that the video inspires any relaxing feelings or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The blog post that accompanies the video calls Gigi Hadid a “staring champ,” but she doesn’t strike me as particularly talented at staring. For one thing, she blinks a bunch, so she’s not going to win any staring contests. There’s not much to read into her blank expression, though the woozy mood music playing over the video fills in some emotion. There’s not even a wind machine to change up how her hair is falling. The most exciting part of the video is a little over halfway through, when you think she’s going to open her mouth. She doesn’t. Classic fake-out. (Spoiler: At three minutes in, she really does open it, though! Nice!) I can name about 50 celebrities I would rather watch stare at the camera for four minutes, and in each of those cases, I would rather still watch the celebrity actually do something. Sorry, hypothetical Oscar Isaac video: We’re going to need some dialogue. 
 
 The Gigi video is probably the result of some enterprising video editor pulling the footage out from a photo shoot and turning it into an inside joke among staffers, but it’s just as fun to imagine that the editors at Glamour were so devoid of ideas that they asked Hadid to sit there and do nothing for a while on camera. It’s a good representation of how clueless many magazines are about how to produce good videos for the web and how equally baffled they are by nontraditional stars like Hadid, who, though a model, has become stratospherically famous for “doing nothing,” and therefore need not—and perhaps cannot—entertain audiences with more conventional talents and charms. This is how backward our world is, now: A video of a Hadid doing nothing makes a weird sort of sense. Of course! Brilliant! ||||| I'm sure you remember having staring contests with your friends as a kid. For whatever reason, our nine-year-old selves thought it was great fun to lock eyes with other kids for long stretches of time and just sit there. Silently. The first person to break eye contact lost the game, which meant it was so tempting to look in every other direction. What if you missed something major while staring at that weird kid from your science class? Like an ice cream truck? Or a new episode of SpongeBob SquarePants ? Or Santa Claus coming to your house IRL and hand-delivering your presents? All these thoughts ran through your mind during staring contests, but you stuck to your guns and emerged victorious. (Unless you were me, of course. I lost staring contests every time.) 
 
 Gigi Hadid , on the other hand, is a staring champ. She is a top model after all; "smizing" is kind of a requirement for the gig. If you don't believe me, though, behold this video of Hadid literally staring into a camera for four consecutive minutes. It'll shake your fourth grade self to the core. Hadid truly is the queen of eye contact. 
 
 And she's also one of Glamour 's 2017 Women of the Year ; she joins an impressive class that includes Nicole Kidman, Solange Knowles, Patty Jenkins, and Maxine Waters. Be sure to watch the live stream of the Women of the Year Summit, which takes place on November 13, to learn more. 
 
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 Gigi Hadid Just Revealed What's in Her New Maybelline Collection ||||| I just took a brief hallucination break with a colleague. We stepped into a supply closet, dimmed the lights, sat down, and watched one another’s faces morph into those of lionesses. I cried the whole time. Then we went back to work. 
 
 We were testing out a theory, reported in IFL Science, that staring into someone’s eyes for ten minutes can have LSD-like hallucinogenic effects, and found that, whoa: Indeed it can. 
 
 Giovanni Caputo, a researcher at the University of Urbino in Italy, paired up 20 people, had them stare into one another’s eyes in a dimly lit room for ten minutes, and reported on the results in Psychiatry Research. Caputo’s subjects reported some pretty strange effects, including out-of-body experiences and seeing monsters or dead people. 
 
 So when my co-worker Lauren Brown arrived this morning, I asked her: “Can I look into your eyes for ten minutes?” 
 
 “I thought you’d never ask,” she laughed. 
 
 I set about approximating the conditions of Caputo’s study, which was a bit like creating a make-out room for a game of “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” only in my workplace. 
 
 I dragged two chairs into a large closet and with a small desk lamp behind some boxes as the only source of light, made the room dim enough that I couldn’t perceive color, but was still able to discern details a few feet away from me. I put my phone on airplane mode and brought in Lauren. We sat down and set the timer. 
 
 Dramatization of real events. (Quartz/Mia Mabanta) 
 
 Lauren has a fairly intense gaze that’s symmetrically framed by striking, full eyebrows. The moment we sat down in the dark, that was the first thing that struck me, and then the giggles, which she got too. After a few long seconds, we settled into our places. I watched the smile fade from Lauren’s face, and felt sucked into her eyes. The bottom of her face started to elongate, and the highlights on her cheeks started to look like some kind of war paint or tribal markings. It occurred to me that she looked like a Native American chieftain. 
 
 Then my phone fell off the camera bag it was sitting on, and smacked onto the floor. I broke our stare to pick it up and restart the timer. It had been about 30 seconds. We started again. 
 
 Now we settled more quickly, and again I felt totally sucked into Lauren’s eyes, and very calm. I’m not much of a meditator—my earnest attempt with Headspace was rather short-lived—but I quickly fell into what I would call a meditative state. Thoughts floated in and out of my brain, but I felt like I was observing them, more than actively thinking them, like: Oh, that’s interesting. Now I’m wondering whether Lauren engages in facial contouring. Her cheekbones look so bright. 
 
 Very early on, my left eye started to water. A tear filled it up and rolled down my cheek. I brushed it away, and then worried that may have distracted Lauren. Then another one came, and I just let it roll all the way down to my neck. Then my right eye started too. Was I forgetting to blink? I was blinking, but the tears didn’t stop. They didn’t feel like emotional tears, but more like the ones that stream down my face on windy winter days. 
 
 But then, wait a minute. Was Lauren crying? It looked like her eyes were welling up, and it seemed like the corners of her mouth turned down. I felt there was a lot of emotion behind her eyes, and I just kept staring into them. Lauren has survived breast cancer, and it occurred to me that this could be a space where intense thoughts could creep in. 
 
 A few minutes later, she giggled. 
 
 Lauren’s chieftain face never came back, but her nose and mouth started to disappear, and were soon replaced with the muzzle of a large cat, like a mountain lion. (Seriously.) The whites of her eyes looked bright in the darkness, still framed by her eyebrows. 
 
 The timer went off. 
 
 “That went really fast,” I said. 
 
 “That went so fast!” she agreed. 
 
 We turned on the lights and stayed in the closet for a debriefing. 
 
 “That was really fucking weird,” I said. She agreed. I asked if she noticed my eyes watering the whole time. She hadn’t. I told her I didn’t feel emotional at all, but the tears just wouldn’t stop. It made me think of the Marina Abramovic performance piece, The Artist is Present, in which many of participants cried when faced with the silent, sitting Abramovic. 
 
 I told Lauren it looked like she was welling up a couple of times. She said she wasn’t at all. “I think you were projecting,” she said. 
 
 Then she told me why she laughed halfway through our sitting. “You started to look like a weird little animal!” she said. 
 
 “YOU started to look like an animal!” I shrieked. “A lion!” 
 
 “You were a lion!” she yelled. “A lioness,” she corrected herself. 
 
 We continued our very scientific analysis this way (unlike the subjects of Caputo’s study, who answered questions on a five-point scale, presumably not shrieking in a closet). 
 
 Lauren also said my face faded into a black silhouette, surrounded by blue light—and that at one point, it occurred to her that my face, in the dark, looked like death. I tried not to take this personally. “But not like you were dead,” she said. 
 
 We emerged from the closet, and I looked at Caputo’s study in detail. Other subjects, it turned out, had reported seeing animals (30%) or the face of someone of a differing race (7%). A striking 75% said they saw the face of a monster. No one reported projecting emotions onto their staring partner, but that may be because Caputo didn’t ask. 
 
 Still, Lauren and my experience was probably more than a little different from those who participated in Caputo’s study—and not just because we were in a supply closet. We sat down as friends and colleagues who are comfortable with one another, not strangers. It made me think of The New York Times story (paywall) about falling in love with a stranger by answering personal questions while gazing into their eyes. 
 
 I wouldn’t say Lauren and I fell in love, but we did share something quite cool: A perception-shifting experience; a quiet space to sit with our thoughts, away from the internet; and a lot of laughs afterward. What’s more, it only took ten minutes, it was free, and we have no hangover to show for it. 
 
 I highly recommend finding a friend and a dark room, and taking ten minutes to try this out. Who knows what could happen?
– "Watching Gigi Hadid stare at you for four minutes is weirdly mesmerizing." That's the conclusion Glamour comes to, at least, upon the release of a video it produced that features Hadid. Staring, and occasionally blinking, in slow motion. For four minutes and nine seconds. And that's it (though she does laugh near the end, prompting one person to comment on YouTube, "3:53 melted my heart and make my eyes wet?"). At Slate, Heather Schwedel looks at where this fits in to the buzzy "pivot to video" that's underway in the media world, with more and more publications dumping journalists and shifting their resources to producing video. Her conclusion: "This is how backward our world is, now: A video of a Hadid doing nothing makes a weird sort of sense. Of course! Brilliant!" Schwedel speculates that this started out as an inside joke born from photo-shoot footage, but writes, "It’s just as fun to imagine that the editors at Glamour were so devoid of ideas that they asked Hadid to sit there and do nothing for a while on camera." And she sees the whole thing as reflective of "how clueless many magazines are about how to produce good videos for the web." But, she concedes, maybe this is a "step up," at least compared with the "glorified slideshows" that have become a popular approach to creating cheap videos. At Man Repeller, Amelia Diamond writes that she did get sucked in by the video, but the credit may not go to Hadid. "Could you have watched anyone for this long with the right song? I think maybe I could have. It’s strangely voyeuristic."