Why the sudden fascination with tensors?

I've noticed lately that a lot of people are developing tensor equivalents of many methods (tensor factorization, tensor kernels, tensors for topic modeling, etc) I'm wondering, why is the world suddenly fascinated with tensors? Are there recent papers/ standard results that are particularly surprising, that brought about this? Is it computationally a lot cheaper than previously suspected? I'm not being glib, I sincerely am interested, and if there are any pointers to papers about this, I'd love to read them.