Critics at Large | The New Yorker

In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough down the path of his life’s work: exposing viewers to our planet’s most miraculous creatures and landscapes from the comfort of their living rooms. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace Attenborough’s filmography from “Zoo Quest” to his newest program, “Mammals,” a six-part series on BBC America narrated by the now- ninety-eight-year-old presenter. In the seventy years since “Zoo Quest” first aired, the genre it helped create has had to reckon with the effects of the climate crisis—and to figure out how to address such hot-button issues onscreen. By highlighting conservation efforts that have been successful, the best of these programs affirm our continued agency in the planet’s future. “One thing I got from ‘Mammals’ was not pure doom,” Schwartz says. “There are some options here. We have choices to make.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Mammals” (2024)
“Zoo Quest” (1954-63)
“Are We Changing Planet Earth?” (2006)
“The Snow Leopard,” by Peter Matthiessen
“My Octopus Teacher” (2020)
“Life on Our Planet” (2023)
“I Like to Get High at Night and Think About Whales,” by Samantha Irby
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Reality television has generally got a bad rap, but Emily Nussbaum—who received a Pulitzer Prize, in 2016, for her work as The New Yorker’s TV critic—sees that the genre has its own history and craft. Nussbaum’s new book “Cue the Sun!” is a history of reality TV, and roughly half the book covers the era before “Survivor,” which is often considered the starting point of the genre. She picks three formative examples from the Before Time to discuss with David Remnick: “Candid Camera,” “An American Family,” and “Cops.” She’s not trying to get you to like reality TV, but rather, she says, “I'm trying to get you to understand it.” 

There’s arguably no better time for falling down a cultural rabbit hole than the languid, transitory summer months. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the season allows us to foster a particular relationship with a work of art—whether it’s the soundtrack to a summer fling or a book that helps make sense of a new locale. Listeners divulge the texts that have consumed them over the years, and the hosts share their own formative obsessions, recalling how Brandy’s 1998 album, “Never Say Never,” defined a first experience at camp, and how a love of Jim Morrison’s music resulted in a teen-age pilgrimage to see his grave in Paris. But how do we square our past obsessions with our tastes and identities today? “Whatever we quote, whatever we make reference to, on so many levels is who we are,” Cunningham says. “It seems, to me, so precious.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Heathers” (1988)
“Pump Up the Volume” (1990)
The poetry of Sergei Yesenin
The poetry of Alexander Pushkin
GoldenEye 007 (1997)
“Elvis” (2022)
“Jailhouse Rock” (1957)
“Pride & Prejudice” (2005)
The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante
“Ramble On,” by Led Zeppelin
“Never Say Never,” by Brandy
“The Boy Is Mine,” by Brandy and Monica
“The End,” by The Doors
“The Last Waltz” (1978)
“The Witches of Eastwick,” by John Updike
“Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand
“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” (2003)
“Postcards from the Edge” (1990)
“Rent” (1996)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In recent years, as our culture has embraced therapy more widely, depictions of the practice have proliferated on screen. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the archetype from the silent, scribbling analysts of Woody Allen’s œuvre and the iconic Dr. Melfi of “The Sopranos” to newer portrayals in shows such as “Shrinking,” on Apple TV+, and Showtime’s “Couples Therapy,” now in its fourth season. The star of “Couples Therapy” is Orna Guralnik, whose sessions with real-life couples show how these tools can lead to breakthroughs—or, in some cases, enable bad behavior. Since the series débuted, mental-health awareness has only grown, and the rise of therapists on social media has put psychoanalytic language and constructs into the hands of a much broader audience. Is the therapy boom making us better? “There’s a way in which jargon or concepts when boiled down can be used to categorize both ourselves and others,” says Schwartz. “Maybe what I’m asking for is a reinvigoration of the idea of therapy—not to close down meaning, but to open up meaning.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Sopranos” (1999-2007)
“Couples Therapy” (2019-)
“The Therapist Remaking Our Love Lives on TV,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“The Rise of Therapy-Speak,” by Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
“Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” (1995-2002)
“The Critic” (1994-95)
“Annie Hall” (1977)
“The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” by Parul Seghal (The New Yorker)
“Shrinking” (2023-)
“Ted Lasso” (2020-23)
The Cut’s Overanalyzed series
“21 Ways to Break Up with Your Therapist,” by Alyssa Shelasky (The Cut)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

It’s a confusing time to travel. Tourism is projected to hit record-breaking levels this year, and its toll on the culture and ecosystems of popular vacation spots is increasingly hard to ignore. Social media pushes hoards to places unable to withstand the traffic, while the rise of “last-chance” travel—the rush to see melting glaciers or deteriorating coral reefs before they’re gone forever—has turned the precarity of these destinations into a selling point. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz explore the question of why we travel. They trace the rich history of travel narratives, from the memoirs of Marco Polo and nineteenth-century accounts of the Grand Tour to shows like Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” and HBO’s “The White Lotus.” Why are we compelled to pack a bag and set off, given the growing number of reasons not to do so? “One thing that’s really important for me as a traveller is the experience of being foreign,” Schwartz says. “I’m starting to realize that there are places I may never go, and this has actually made other people’s accounts of them, in the deeper sense, more important.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The New Tourist,” by Paige McClanahan

The “Lonely Planet” guidebooks

“The Travels of Marco Polo,” by Rustichello da Pisa

“Of Travel,” by Francis Bacon

“The Innocents Abroad,” by Mark Twain

“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Travels through France and Italy,” by Tobias Smollett

“Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” (2013-18)

“The White Lotus” (2021—)

“Conan O’Brien Must Go” (2024)

“It Just Got Easier to Visit a Vanishing Glacier. Is That a Good Thing?,” by Paige McClanahan (The New York Times)

“The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere,” by Ed Caesar (The New Yorker)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

“Hit Man,” a new film directed by Richard Linklater, is not, in fact, about a hit man. The movie follows Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a mild-mannered philosophy professor who assists law enforcement in sting operations by posing as a contract killer—and playing on the expectations stoked by Hollywood. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the history of the archetype, from the 1942 noir “This Gun for Hire” to Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and the “John Wick” franchise, and explore why audiences have so enthusiastically embraced a figure that, contrary to the media’s depiction, is basically nonexistent in real life. “It’s a fantasy of what would happen if our rage was optimized, much like our sleep and our work day and our workouts,” says Fry. “And if it comes with a side of wearing a suit that looks great—even better.”

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Collateral” (2004)
“Pulp Fiction” (1994)
“No Country for Old Men” (2007)
“Hit Man” (2024)
“Dazed and Confused” (1993)
“Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story,” by Jessie McKinley (The New York Times)
“This Gun for Hire” (1942)
“Le Samouraï” (1967)
“The Killer” (2023)
“Aggro Dr1ft” (2024)
“John Wick” (2014)
“Barry” (2018-23)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

In recent years, in the realms of self-improvement literature, Instagram influencers, and wellness gurus, an idea has taken hold: that in a non-stop world, the act of slowing down offers a path to better living. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the rise of “slowness culture”—from Carl Honoré’s 2004 manifesto to pandemic-era trends of mass resignations and so-called quiet quitting. The hosts discuss the work of Jenny Odell, whose books “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” frame reclaiming one’s time as a life-style choice with radical roots and revolutionary political potential. But how much does an individual’s commitment to leisure pay off on the level of the collective? Is too much being laid at the feet of slowness? “For me, it’s about reclaiming an aspect of humanness, just the experience of not having to make the most with everything we have all the time,” Schwartz says. “There can be a degree of self-defeating critique where you say, ‘Oh, well, this is only accessible to the privileged few.’ And I think the better framing is, how can more people access that kind of sitting with humanness?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed)
“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell
“Improving Ourselves to Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” by Carl Honoré
“The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture,” by Jenny Odell
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” by Kohei Saito

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

 
This episode originally aired on January 11, 2024.

From John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer” to Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” our culture has long grappled with what it means to enter middle age. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine depictions of that tipping point—and of the crises that often come with it. In the mid-twentieth century (and, depending on your reading of Dante and Balzac, long before that), the phenomenon was largely the purview of men, but massive societal shifts, beginning with the women’s rights movement, have yielded a new archetype. The hosts discuss how novels like Miranda July’s “All Fours” and Dana Spiotta’s “Wayward” have updated the genre for the modern age. “I think the crisis of midlife,” Schwartz says, “is just the crisis of life, period. You invent it for yourself.”

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Miranda July Turns the Lights On,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“All Fours,” by Miranda July
“Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005)
“Inferno,” by Dante Alighieri
“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf
“Cousin Bette,” by Honoré de Balzac
“The Swimmer,” by John Cheever (The New Yorker)
“The Swimmer” (1968)
“The Women’s Room,” by Marilyn French
“Wifey,” by Judy Blume
“This Isn’t What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed to Look Like,” by Jessica Grose (The New York Times)
“Wayward,” by Dana Spiotta
“Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Eat, Pray, Love” (2010)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

The rap superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been on a collision course for a decade, trading periodic diss tracks to assert their superiority—but earlier this month the long-simmering beef erupted into a showdown that said as much about the artists as it did about the art. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine how the back-and-forth devolved from a litigation of craft into a series of ad-hominem attacks alleging everything from cultural appropriation to pedophilia. They discuss the way rivalries function in the creative world, fuelling new work and compelling audiences to pay closer attention to it than ever before. The hosts also consider other feuds of note, from a nineteenth-century debate over Shakespearean actors that ended in violence to the writer Renata Adler’s blistering takedown of the film critic Pauline Kael in The New York Review of Books. Why do so many of these schisms revolve around fundamental questions of authenticity and belonging? And, once they start to spiral, is there any going back? “Conflict can be productive emotionally and also artistically,” Schwartz says. “But this is not a place that we can permanently reside.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“DAMN.,” by Kendrick Lamar
“To Pimp a Butterfly,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Control,” by Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica
“First Person Shooter,” by Drake featuring J. Cole
“Like That,” by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar
“Push Ups,” by Drake
“Taylor Made Freestyle,” by Drake
“Back to Back,” by Drake
“euphoria,” by Kendrick Lamar
“6:16 in LA,” by Kendrick Lamar
“meet the grahams,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar
“THE HEART PART 6,” by Drake
“Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“The Perils of Pauline,” by Renata Adler (The New York Review of Books)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the past several years, true crime’s hold on the culture has tightened into a vice grip, with new titles flooding podcast charts and streaming platforms on a daily basis. This week on Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz take stock of the phenomenon, first by speaking with fans of the genre to understand its appeal. Then, onstage at the 2024 Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, they continue the discussion with The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, whose books “Empire of Pain” and “Say Nothing” are exemplars of the form. The panel considers Keefe’s recent piece, “The Oligarch’s Son,” which illuminates the journalistic challenges of reporting on sordid events—not least the difficulty of managing the emotions and expectations of victims’ families. As its appeal has skyrocketed, true crime has come under greater scrutiny. The most successful entries bypass lurid details and shed light on the society in which these transgressions occur. But “the price you have to pay in sociology, in anthropology, in enriching our understanding of something beyond the crime itself—it’s fairly high,” Keefe says. “You have to remember that this is a real story about real people. They’re alive. They’re out there.”

 
This episode was recorded on May 4, 2024 at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle, Washington.

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“UK True Crime Podcast”
“My Favorite Murder”
“Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Paradise Lost,” by John Milton
“A Loaded Gun,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“The Oligarch’s Son,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“Capote” (2005)
“In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote (The New Yorker)
“The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” (2015, 2024)
“Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders,” by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi
“Law & Order” (1990–)
“Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (2022)
“The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story” (2016)
“O.J.: Made in America” (2016)
“Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery,” by Robert Kolker

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

From “Raging Bull” to “A League of Their Own,” films about athletes have commanded the attention of even the most sports-skeptical viewers. The pleasure of watching the protagonist undergo a test of body and spirit, proving their worth to society and to themselves—often with a training montage thrown in for good measure—is undeniable. Luca Guadagnino’s steamy new tennis film, “Challengers,” applies this formula in a different context, mining familiar themes like rivalry and camaraderie for their erotic potential. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how recent entries like “Challengers” and last year’s Zac Efron-led wrestling drama, “The Iron Claw,” reflect a more contemporary view of masculinity than their predecessors do. The hosts also assemble their “hall of fame” of sports films, including Spike Lee’s “He Got Game,” the nineties classic “Cool Runnings,” and the rom-com “Love & Basketball.” They argue that the genre, at its best, offers auteurs the chance to embrace their instincts. “For our most stylish filmmakers, I would just lay down the gauntlet. If you want to express to us your personal vision, do a sports movie,” Cunningham says. “Because we’ll know what you care about: visually, sensually—we will know.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Challengers” (2024)
“The Iron Claw” (2023)
“Rocky IV” (1985)
“Black Swan” (2010)
“A League of Their Own” (1992)
“Cool Runnings” (1993)
“Raging Bull” (1980)
“He Got Game” (1998)
“Love & Basketball” (2000)
“A League of Their Own” (2022—)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

“Civil War,” Alex Garland’s divisive new action flick, borrows iconography—and actual footage—from the America of today as set dressing for a hypothetical, fractured future. Though we know that the President is in his third term, and that Texas and California have formed an unlikely alliance against him, very little is said about the politics that brought us to this point. Garland’s true interest lies not with the cause of the carnage but with the journalists compelled to document it. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz debate whether the film glamorizes violence, or whether it’s an indictment of the way audiences have become inured to it through repeated exposure. The hosts consider Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” which assesses the impact of the craft, and “War Is Beautiful,” a compendium that explores how photojournalists have historically aestheticized and glorified unthinkable acts. From the video of George Floyd’s killing to photos of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian refugee found lying dead on a Turkish beach, images of atrocities have galvanized movements and commanded international attention. But what does it mean to bear witness in the age of social media, with daily, appalling updates from conflict zones at our fingertips? “I think all of us are struggling with what to make of this complete overabundance,” Schwartz says. “On the other hand, we’re certainly aware of horror. It’s impossible to ignore.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Civil War” (2024)
“Ex Machina” (2014)
“Natural Born Killers” (1994)
“The Doom Generation” (1995)
“War Is Beautiful,” by David Shields
“On Photography,” by Susan Sontag
“Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” (2017)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Since the turn of the millennium, HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has slyly satirized the ins and outs of social interaction. The series—which follows a fictionalized version of its creator and star, Larry David, as he gets into petty disputes with anyone and everyone who crosses his path—aired its last episode on Sunday, marking the end of a twelve-season run. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the show’s “weirdly moving” conclusion as well as its over-all legacy. Then they consider other notable TV endings: some divisive (“Sex and the City”), some critically acclaimed (“Succession”), some infamously rage-inspiring (“Game of Thrones”). What are the moral and narrative stakes of a finale, and why do we subject these episodes—which represent only a tiny fraction of the work as a whole—to such crushing analytic pressure? “This idea of an ending ruining the show is alien to me,” Cunningham says. “I won’t contest that endings are different—distinct. Are they better? I don’t know.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” (2000-24)

“Seinfeld” (1989-98)

“Sex and the City” (1998-2004)

“Succession” (2018-23)

“The Hills” (2006-10)

“Game of Thrones” (2011-19)

“Breaking Bad” (2008-13) 

“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott

In her 1955 novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Patricia Highsmith introduced readers to the figure of Tom Ripley, an antihero who covets the good life, and achieves it—by stealing it from someone else. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the long tail of Highsmith’s work, which has been revived in adaptations like René Clément’s 1960 classic, “Purple Noon”; the definitive 1999 film starring Matt Damon and Jude Law; and a new Netflix series, “Ripley,” which casts its protagonist as a lonely middle-aged con man. In all three versions, Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy acquaintance of Ripley’s, becomes his obsession and eventually his victim. The story resonates today in part because we’re all in the habit of observing—and coveting—the life styles of the rich and famous. Social media gives users endless opportunities to study how others live, such as the places they go, the meals they consume, and the objects they possess. “One of the reasons that the character of Ripley is forever sympathetic is the yearning and striving to be something other than himself, following an example that’s set out to him,” Fry says. “For him, it’s someone like Dickie. For us, it might be someone online.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith
“The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999)
“Purple Noon” (1960)
“Ripley” (2024)
“Saltburn” (2023)
“The White Lotus” (2021—)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

News of Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis arrived after months of speculation regarding the royal’s whereabouts. Had the Princess of Wales, who had not been seen in public since Christmas Day, absconded to a faraway hideout? Was trouble at home—an affair, perhaps—keeping her out of the public eye? What truths hid behind the obviously doctored family photograph? #WhereisKateMiddleton trended as the online world offered up a set of elaborate hypotheses increasingly untethered from reality. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how a particular brand of “fan fiction” has enveloped the Royal Family, and how, like the #FreeBritney movement, the episode illustrates how conspiracy thinking has become a regular facet of online life. The hosts discuss “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay by the historian Richard Hofstadter, from 1964, that traces conspiratorial thought across history, as well as Naomi Klein’s 2023 book “Doppelganger.” How, then, should we navigate a world in which it’s more and more difficult to separate fact from fiction? Some antidotes may lie in the fictions themselves. “The rest of us who are not as conspiratorial in bent could spend more time looking at those conspiracies,” Cunningham says. “To understand what a troubling number of our fellows believe is a kind of tonic action.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Don’t Blame ‘Stupid People on the Internet’ for Palace’s Princess Kate Lies,” by Will Bunch (the Philadelphia Inquirer)
“Doppelganger,” by Naomi Klein
“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter (Harper’s Magazine)
“The Parallax View” (1974)
“Cutter’s Way” (1981)
“Reddit’s I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story,” by Kevin Roose (the New York Times)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Science fiction has historically been considered a niche genre, one in which far-flung scenarios play out on distant planets. Today, though, such plots are at the center of our media landscape. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz anatomize the appeal of recent entries, from Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” movies to Netflix’s new adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem,” the best-selling novel by Liu Cixin. The hosts are joined by Josh Rothman, an editor and writer at The New Yorker, who makes the case for science fiction as an extension of the realist novel, tracing the way films like “The Matrix” and “Contagion” have shed new light on modern life. The boundaries between science fiction and reality are increasingly blurred: tech founders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have cited classic sci-fi texts as inspiration, and terms like “red-pilling” have found their way into our political vernacular. “I find the future that we’re all moving into to be quite scary and sort of unthinkable,” Rothman says. “Science fiction is the literary genre that addresses this problem. It helps make the future into something you can imagine.”

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Dune: Part Two” (2024)
“3 Body Problem” (2024)
“The Martian Chronicles,” by Ray Bradbury
“Dune” (2021)
“Dune,” by Frank Herbert
“Star Trek” (1966-1969)
“2001: A Space Odyssey,” by Arthur C. Clarke
“Dune” (1984)
“Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?” by Joshua Rothman (The New Yorker)
“The Matrix” (1999)
“Contagion” (2011)
“The Future,” by Naomi Alderman
“Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” by Evan Osnos (The New Yorker)
“The Three-Body Problem,” by Liu Cixin
“Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds,” by Jiayang Fan (The New Yorker)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

For centuries, the bildungsroman, or novel of education, has offered a window into a formative period of life—and, by extension, into the historical moment in which it’s set. Vinson Cunningham sent the draft of “Great Expectations,” a book loosely based on his experience on Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign, to publishers on January 6, 2021. Shortly after he hit Send, he watched rioters break into the Capitol building. “For me, it was, like, cycle complete,” he says. The age of optimism ushered in by Obama was over. “We are off to another thing.” Cunningham’s novel is part of a tradition that stretches back to the eighteen-hundreds: coming-of-age plots that chart their protagonists’ entry into adulthood. On this episode of Critics at Large, Cunningham and his fellow staff writers, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz, discuss how “Great Expectations” fits in the genre as a whole. They consider it alongside classic texts, like Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel “Sentimental Education,” and other, more recent entries, such as Carrie Sun’s 2024 memoir, “Private Equity,” and reflect on what such stories have to say about power, disillusionment, and our shifting relationships to institutions. “I think, if the bildungsroman has any new valence today, it is that the antagonist is not parents, it’s not religion, it’s not upbringing—these personal facets that you usually have to escape to come of age,” Cunningham says. “It’s the superstructure. It’s finance with a capital ‘F.’ It’s government with a capital ‘G.’ ” 

The office has long been a fixture in pop culture—but, in 2024, amid the rise of remote work and the resurgence of organized labor, the way we relate to our jobs is in flux. The stories we tell about them are changing, too. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss Adelle Waldman’s new novel “Help Wanted,” which delves into the lives of retail workers at a big-box store in upstate New York. They’re joined by The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman, who lays out the trajectory of the office novel, from tales of postwar alienation to Gen X meditations on selling out and millennial accounts of the gig economy. Then, the hosts consider how this shift is showing up across other mediums. Though some white-collar employees can now comfortably work from home, the office remains an object of fascination. “The workplace is within us,” says Fry. “There will always be shit-talking about co-workers, about bosses—the materials for narrative will always be there.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Working Girl” (1988)

“Office Space” (1999)

“The West Wing” (1999-2006)

“Help Wanted,” by Adelle Waldman

“The Pale King,” by David Foster Wallace

“Personal Days,” by Ed Park

“Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris

“The New Me,” by Halle Butler

“The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” by Adelle Waldman

“The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair

“Severance,” by Ling Ma

“Temporary,” by Hilary Leichter

“Severance” (2022—)

“The Vanity Fair Diaries” (2017)

“Doubt: A Parable,” by John Patrick Shanley

Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”

“Mad Men” (2007-15)

“Industry” (2020—)

“Norma Rae” (1979)

“30 Rock” (2006-13)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The campaign for an Oscar is just that: a campaign. In the weeks and months leading up to the ninety-sixth Academy Awards, actors and directors have been hard at work reminding voters and the public alike of their worthiness, P.R. agencies have churned out “for your consideration” ads, and studios have poured millions of dollars into efforts to help their films emerge victorious on Hollywood’s biggest night. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the state of the race, from the front-runners to the snubs and the season’s unlikely “villain.” The hosts are joined by The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman, the author of “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” who describes how Harvey Weinstein permanently changed the landscape in the nineties by treating campaigns as “guerrilla warfare.” Today, much of the process happens behind closed doors. If the game is rigged, why do we care about the outcome? “Even though we know that there is a mechanism behind these things, a glow does attach itself to people who win,” Cunningham says. “We are still very much suckers for the glamour of merit.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” by Michael Schulman

“Oppenheimer” (2023)

“Barbie” (2023)

“May December” (2023)

“Poor Things” (2023)

“The Zone of Interest” (2023)

“Nyad” (2023)

“Maestro” (2023)

“Shakespeare in Love” (1998)

“Saving Private Ryan” (1998)

“Can You Really Want an Oscar Too Much?” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)

“Anatomy of a Fall” (2023)

“Titanic” (1997)

“Ferrari” (2023)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

At this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Usher Raymond sang through decades of hits while twirling on roller skates, making a case for himself as one of the great R. & B. artists of our time. The performance illuminates a key aspect of modern pop stardom: the fashioning of one’s legacy in real time. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how musicians’ images take shape independent of their music. They consider “Bob Marley: One Love,” a new bio-pic made with the support of the Marley estate that deliberately smooths the rough edges of the singer’s life. Today’s performers take a more active role in their own reputation management, using high-profile appearances to stake a claim or reinforce their persona. At this year’s Grammy Awards, the question of legacy came to the fore when Jay-Z took issue with the fact that his wife, Beyoncé, has never won the coveted Album of the Year award. But the most indelible moments from the ceremony involved songs from decades prior—a reminder that the music itself is often more enduring than any formal accolade. “Rather than legacy in corporate terms or in institutional terms,” says Fry, there’s also “the legacy of the heart.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Bob Marley: One Love” (2024)

“Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell, as performed at the 2024 Grammys 

“If I Ain't Got You” by Alicia Keys

Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman

Twins react to “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins

“Walk the Line” (2005)

“You Make Me Wanna . . .” by Usher

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

As much as contemporary audiences relish a happily ever after, some of the greatest romances of all time are ones that have turned out badly. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider stories of “wretched love”—love that’s star-crossed, unfulfilled, or somehow doomed by the taboos of the day. First, they react to listeners’ favorite examples, from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” to “The Notebook” to the Joni Mitchell song “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” Then, the hosts discuss their own picks: the poet Frank Bidart’s collection “Desire”; James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room”; and “A Girl’s Story,” by the Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux. Why do we—and centuries’ worth of artists—gravitate toward tales of thwarted desire? Perhaps it’s because these moments unlock something that stays with us long after the sting of heartbreak has faded. “When you widen the lens, life goes on,” Schwartz says. Nevertheless, “there is a need for all of us to return to that moment because that was part of what made you who you were.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Annie Ernaux Turns Memory Into Art,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

“Conversations with Friends,” by Sally Rooney

“Desire,” by Frank Bidart

“Eugene Onegin” (1879)

“Giovanni’s Room,” by James Baldwin

“A Girl’s Story,” by Annie Ernaux

“Sense and Sensibility,” by Jane Austen

“Sense and Sensibility” (1995)

“Sylvia,” by Leonard Michaels

Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

“The Notebook” (2004)

“Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë

“Wuthering Heights” (1939)

Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

If some of us have managed to avoid mean girls in life, we’ve had no such luck in art. The “mean girl”—a picture of idealized femininity who usually heads up a like-minded clique—has appeared in films like “Clueless,” “Heathers,” and, of course, the 2004 classic “Mean Girls,” written by Tina Fey. Recently, the mean girl has received a makeover. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss texts that have breathed new life into the trope, beginning with Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” which dramatizes the schism between the writer Truman Capote and the group of New York City socialites he called his “swans.” The hosts trace the figure of the mean girl through culture, from the character of Regina George—who returns in the 2024 movie-musical reboot of “Mean Girls,” albeit a little less mean than before—to the cast of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” Today, the archetype is ripe for projection, appropriation, and maybe even for sympathy. “The hope and the fear looking at these mean girls is imagining how great their lives must be,” Fry says. “But I think concurrently we would be happy to learn that, in fact, it’s lonely at the top.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Allure of the Mean Friend,” on “This American Life”
“Carrie” (1976)
“Daniel Deronda,” by George Eliot
“Euphoria” (2019—)
“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” (2024)
“Gossip Girl” (2007-2012)
“Heathers” (1988)
“La Côte Basque, 1965,” by Truman Capote (Esquire)
“Mean Girls” (2004)
“Mean Girls” (2024)
“101 Dalmatians” (1961)
“The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” (2020—)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The wives and daughters of Dubai’s ruler live in unbelievable luxury. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed’s family keep trying to run away? The New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake joins In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran to tell the story of the royal women who risked everything to flee the brutality of one of the world’s most powerful men. In four episodes, drawing on thousands of pages of secret correspondence and never-before-heard audio recordings, “The Runaway Princesses” takes listeners behind palace walls, revealing a story of astonishing courage and cruelty.

“The Runaway Princesses” is a four-part narrative series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. To keep listening, follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts or via this link https://link.chtbl.com/itd_f

Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special, “The Dreamer,” has drawn criticism for its targeting of trans and disabled people–the latest in a string of controversies, and of increasingly self-referential sets. His and other standup comics’ growing fixation with cancel culture raises a pressing question: What is the role of the comic today? In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace how comedians have positioned themselves in relation to their audiences over time, from the proto-standup acts of the vaudeville era to the political humor of the legendary George Carlin, who paved the way for the success of Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show.” Where Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are doubling down in the face of backlash, comedians like Jacqueline Novak and John Mulaney are finding new ways to expose societal fault lines in order to bring the crowd to a place of cohesion. But in the era of the culture wars, do we want to be challenged, or affirmed? “Whatever comedy is now, needs willing and predetermined audiences—people that are there to pay attention to a certain kind of thing,” Cunningham says. “If what we want is a kind of shattering of whatever mythologies surround us, maybe it’s not the best for that.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer” (2023)
“Ricky Gervais: Armageddon” (2023)
“Chappelle’s Show” (2003-06)
“Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees” (2024)
“Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars,” by Kliph Nesteroff
“I Love Lucy” (1951-57)
“George Carlin’s American Dream” (2022)
“The Daily Show” (1996-)
“Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work,” by Jesse David Fox
“John Mulaney: Baby J” (2023)
“The Anxious Precision of Jacqueline Novak’s Comedy,” by Carrie Battan (The New Yorker) “Jenny Slate: Stage Fright” (2019) “Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker” (1999)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz turn their attention to the art—and purpose—of criticism itself. First, they revisit the work of Joan Acocella, a legendary practitioner of the craft who wrote for The New Yorker until her death, at age seventy-eight, earlier this month, applying her distinctive humor and evocative style to such diverse subjects as Mikhail Baryshnikov, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer, and the Wife of Bath, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Then the hosts reflect on their own formative influences and the role a critic can play in the life of a reader. The rise of apps like Goodreads and Letterboxd has proved to be a double-edged sword, democratizing criticism while also playing into the more toxic elements of fandom. In an era of “critical populism,” what do the professionals have to offer? “Criticism is often considered a kind of gatekeeping,” Schwartz says. “It really also can be the opposite. It can be a giving of access. And that to me dignifies the whole endeavor.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Thank Goodness for Joan Acocella,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

“The Soloist,” by Joan Acocella (The New Yorker)

“The Marrying Kind,” by Joan Acocella (The New Yorker)

“Art as Technique,” by Viktor Shklovsky

“Black Talk on the Move,” by Darryl Pinckney (The New York Review of Books)

“Busted in New York and Other Essays,” by Darryl Pinckney

“One Reason Theatre Is in Crisis: The Slow Death of Criticism,” by Jason Zinoman (American Theatre)

“Let’s Rescue Book Lovers from this Online Hellscape,” by Maris Kreizman (The New York Times)

“‘The O.C.’: Land of The Brooding Teen,” by Tom Shales (The Washington Post)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In recent years, in the realms of self-improvement literature, Instagram influencers, and wellness gurus, an idea has taken hold: that in a non-stop world, the act of slowing down offers a path to better living. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the rise of “slowness culture”—from Carl Honoré’s 2004 manifesto to pandemic-era trends of mass resignations and so-called quiet quitting. The hosts discuss the work of Jenny Odell, whose books “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” frame reclaiming one’s time as a life-style choice with radical roots and revolutionary political potential. But how much does an individual’s commitment to leisure pay off on the level of the collective? Is too much being laid at the feet of slowness? “For me, it’s about reclaiming an aspect of humanness, just the experience of not having to make the most with everything we have all the time,” Schwartz says. “There can be a degree of self-defeating critique where you say, ‘Oh, well, this is only accessible to the privileged few.’ And I think the better framing is, how can more people access that kind of sitting with humanness?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed)
“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell
“Improving Ourselves to Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” by Carl Honoré
“The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture,” by Jenny Odell
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” by … Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hollywood’s obsession with stories about creative types has resulted in familiar tropes—namely that of the tortured artist, whose fanatical devotion to his craft makes him an enigma to those around him—and story formulae like the bio-pic, which runs through the beats of its subject’s career like a Wikipedia entry. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how some of the year’s buzziest films subvert our expectations of art about artists. “Maestro” is “a fantasia on Leonard Bernstein themes” that focusses on the toll that the legendary composer’s charisma exacts on those around him. “May December,” directed by Todd Haynes, is “a dark satire on certain tendencies in method acting.” And Cord Jefferson’s début feature, “American Fiction,” pairs a critique of the publishing industry’s hollow nods toward “diversity” with a quiet family drama. The hosts also consider other, more deliberately unglamorous depictions, such as that found in Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up.” The movie, which follows a sculptor struggling to make ends meet, raises the question of a much rarer archetype. “It seems to me a figure that can take more plumbing,” Cunningham says. “I want to see what that new figure, the everyday artist, can unfold to us about what it means to have a life in art.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Adaptation” (2002)
“American Fiction” (2023)
“A Conversation with My Father,” by Grace Paley
“Just Kids,” by Patti Smith
“Maestro” (2023)
“May December” (2023)
“My Struggle,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard
“New York Stories” (1989)
“Showing Up” (2023)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

After six decades as an icon in country music, it’s hard to imagine Dolly Parton had anything to prove.  But when she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 2022, she admitted to feeling uneasy.  A result of that feeling is “Rockstar,” the 77-year-old’s first foray into rock music.  “I wanted the rock people to be proud of me, let’s put it that way,” Parton tells the contributor Emily Lordi. “I wanted them to say, ‘Did you hear Dolly’s rock album? Man, she killed it.’ ” For this album, which is largely comprised of covers of classic rock songs like “Freebird” along with originals like the title track, Parton channeled the likes of Joan Jett and Melissa Etheridge (who also both appear on the album).  She didn’t want to make a countryfied rock album, but even at a full roar, her voice is unmistakable Dolly. “It’s a voice you know when you hear it, whether you like it or not,” Parton says. The artist is known for avoiding comment on political subjects, but she describes the volatile state of the culture in her song “World on Fire.” “The only way I know how to fight back is to write songs to say how I feel,” Parton says. “It’s just me trying to throw some light on some dark subjects these days.”

In the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie, a literal doll, leaves the comforts of Barbieland and ventures into real-world Los Angeles, where she discovers the myriad difficulties of modern womanhood. This arc from cosseted naïveté to feminist awakening is a narrative throughline that connects some of the biggest cultural products of the year. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how 2023 became “the year of the doll,” tracing the trope from “Barbie” to Yorgos Lanthimos’s film “Poor Things,” whose protagonist finds self-determination through sexual agency, and beyond. In Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” a teen-age Priscilla Beaulieu lives under the thumb of Elvis at Graceland before finally breaking free, while in Emma Cline’s novel “The Guest,” the doll figure must fend for herself after the trappings of luxury fall away, revealing the precarity of her circumstances. The hosts explore how ideas about whiteness, beauty, and women’s bodily autonomy inform these works, and how the shock of political backsliding might explain why these stories struck a chord with audiences. “Most of us believed that the work of Roe v. Wade was done,” Cunningham says. “If that is a message that we could all grasp—that a step forward is not a permanent thing—I think that would be a positive thing.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Barbie” (2023)
“M3GAN” (2023)
“Poor Things” (2023)
“Priscilla” (2023)
“The Guest,” by Emma Cline
“The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In the weeks since George Santos was expelled from Congress, his story has been funnelled straight into the entertainment pipeline, from a memorable sketch on “Saturday Night Live” and reports of a film in the works at HBO to his own exploits on Cameo, where he’s charging five hundred dollars apiece for personalized video messages. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz assess why Santos’s story resonates with audiences, and the enduring appeal of the scammer narrative, from Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man” to Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man.” Scammers embody—and exploit—a central tenet of the American Dream: the promise of a brighter future awaiting those audacious enough to reach for it. But their stories can also expose the weaknesses at the heart of our institutions. Why, then, do we keep coming back for more? “The level of enjoyment that we gain from these depictions of scams doesn’t mean that the critique isn’t there,” Fry says. “It’s almost like we as audiences are also begging, ‘Please make this fun for us.’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Every Day’s a Holiday” (1937)
“Inventing Anna” (2022)
“Telemarketers” (2023)
“The Confidence-Man,” by Herman Melville
“The Dropout” (2022)
“The Fabulist,” by Mark Chiusano
“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (2019)
“The Music Man” (1957)
“The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946)
The “Simpsons” episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” (1993)
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
“Trafficked With Mariana van Zeller” (2020 – present)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for works like “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” and “Spirited Away,” which received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, in 2002, he is considered by some to be the first true auteur of children’s entertainment. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the themes that have emerged across Miyazaki’s œuvre, from bittersweet depictions of late childhood to meditations on the attractions and dangers of technology. Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” is a semi-autobiographical story in which a young boy grieving his mother embarks on a quest through a magical realm as the Second World War rages in reality. The Japanese title, “How Do You Live?,” reveals the philosophical underpinnings of what may well be the filmmaker’s final work. “Wherever you are—whether it seems to be peaceful, whether things are scary—there’s something happening somewhere,” Cunningham says. “And you have to learn this as a child. There’s pain somewhere. And you have to learn how to live your life along multiple tracks.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989)

“My Neighbor Totoro” (1988)

“Old Enough!” (1991-present)

“Princess Mononoke” (1997)

“Spirited Away” (2001)

“The Boy and the Heron” (2023)

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis (1950)

“The Moomins series” by Tove Jansson (1945-70)

“The Wind Rises” (2013)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

From Merchant Ivory’s classic adaptations of E. M. Forster novels to the BBC’s beloved rendition of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the greatest period dramas are the ones that succeed in translating the emotional experience of another era for a modern audience. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss their personal favorites—namely Greta Gerwig’s take on “Little Women” and Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” which chronicles the star-crossed love affair between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne—and how the genre is changing. Often, the pleasure of these stories lies in their rigorous depictions of the mores and customs of the past. But recent hit series, including “Dickinson,” “Bridgerton,” and “The Great,” have adopted a marked ahistoricism, evident in the dialogue, soundtracks, and the treatments of race and sexuality. The hosts consider how “The Buccaneers,” on Apple TV+, departs from the Edith Wharton novel on which it’s based by skipping over the sociopolitical details that form the backbone of Wharton’s story. Do contemporary flourishes accentuate the appeal of the genre, or dilute it? “The strangeness of the past is precisely what makes it amazing when we find out that it is relatable to us,” Cunningham says. “If you make everything relatable, you’ve eliminated the thrill of discovery.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“A Room with a View” (1985)

“Bridgerton” (2020-22)

“Bright Star” (2009)

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000)

“Dickinson” (2019-21)

“Hamlet” (2000)

“Howards End” (film, 1992; miniseries, 2017)

“Little Women” (2019)

“Mansfield Park,” by Jane Austen (film, 1999)

“Marie Antoinette” (2006)

“Memoirs of a Geisha,” by Arthur Golden (film, 2005)

“Napoleon” (2023)

“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen (miniseries, 1995; film, 2005)

“The Buccaneers,” by Edith Wharton (series, 2023)

“The Custom of the Country,” by Edith Wharton

“The Great” (series, 2020-23)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Samantha Irby’s latest essay collection, “Quietly Hostile,” cemented her place as one of the great professionally funny people working today. Her books and her writing for such TV shows as “Shrill” and “Tuca & Bertie” are distinguished by a no-holds-barred, raunchy, often scatological brand of humor and a willingness to poke fun at just about anything—including herself. In a live taping of Critics at Large at this year’s New Yorker Festival, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz sat down with Irby to unpack her approach. They discussed humor as a coping mechanism; her work on the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That . . .,” and the ensuing backlash; and how the Internet has transformed the comedy landscape. “What people enjoy is so varied,” Irby says. “The future is you finding very specific things that delight you, and having them readily available.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Reality television is all about artifice, and contestants on “The Bachelor” often seem more interested in becoming influencers than in finding a spouse—but “The Golden Bachelor,” a new spinoff starring a seventy-two-year-old widower named Gerry, has been hailed for its surprising sincerity. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show eschews—and, at times, reinforces—the tropes that have polarized viewers of the ABC franchise, and what a genre known for its phoniness can reveal about actual human emotions and experiences. The hosts consider other depictions of sex and romance at this stage of life, including Philip Roth’s memorable rendering of an older man’s libido in “The Dying Animal” and HBO’s “And Just Like That . . . ,” a rare look at older women’s erotic prospects. Then, they take a step back to examine how series like “The Bachelor” have shaped our conception of love stories writ large. “The Golden Bachelor” ’s insistence on the vitality of its contestants can feel like a step forward, but what does it mean that the show is so fixated on what Schwartz calls “a second teen-agerdom”? “The boomers set a model for what it is to be young that persists for all the generations that have followed,” she says. “Now here they are again, saying, ‘We’re here; yes, we’re older; and we want to get old in our own way.’ ”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In the years since the pandemic began, the experience of dining out has been utterly transformed. Coveted tables now disappear seconds after they’re released, and influencers dictate what’s in demand—or even what’s on the menu. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz make sense of our new culinary landscape. The hosts are joined by Hannah Goldfield, who covers restaurants and food culture for The New Yorker. Together, they consider how TikTok is changing the way we eat, and how the rise of Resy has introduced a sense of scarcity and competition into the reservation game. Then, the critics discuss “Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros,” a new Frederick Wiseman documentary about a Michelin-starred French restaurant that offers a very different, behind-the-scenes view of the labor and creativity that goes into fine dining. These examples raise the question of how to balance art with the experience that informs and surrounds it. One answer is found in venues that sidestep the hype, and that remind us of why we dine out in the first place. “I don’t need to feel this grand drama of struggle and triumph,” Schwartz says. “I simply want to feel welcomed.”

The celebrity memoir has long been a place for public figures to set the record straight on the story of their lives. By any measure, Britney Spears’s life, as detailed in her new book, “The Woman in Me,” is rich material. The pop star rose to fame in the early two-thousands, and, after enduring a series of mental-health crises, was placed in a conservatorship through which her father controlled almost every aspect of her day-to-day existence. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the “horror story” that emerges in the memoir as the teen-aged Spears is betrayed by everyone around her: a family intent on profiting off her talent; a young Justin Timberlake, who used his romance with Spears as a stepping stone for his own career; a ravenous media that both sexualized and shamed her. The hosts consider how “The Woman in Me” fits within the broader canon of celebrity memoirs, citing the producer Julia Phillips’s “burn-it-all-down” best-seller, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” and the late Matthew Perry’s 2022 meditation on his struggles with addiction, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Ultimately, these stories are just one facet of a broader narrative—and a kind of performance in their own right. “Once you submit to being a celebrity, your music, and how you appear in magazines, and what you produce as a memoir all contribute to this one big text,” Cunningham says. “It’s this grand synthesis, and, in the end, the text is Britney herself.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Throughout his career, Martin Scorsese has traced crime, greed, and corruption across American life. In his new film, he turns his gaze to the violence of whiteness. Set in nineteen-twenties Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” tells the story of a series of murders targeting the people of the Osage Nation, perpetrated by white settlers in pursuit of the community’s oil wealth. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the trajectory of Scorsese’s style, from the “whirling limbs” and “short, sharp cuts” of films like “Goodfellas” to the elegiac restraint of more recent works like “The Irishman.” They’re joined by The New Yorker’s David Grann, the author of the 2017 book that formed the basis for Scorsese’s film, who describes how he first came upon the story and how members of the Osage community became involved in—and responded to—the adaptation. Then the hosts consider the multilayered coda of the film, which raises increasingly pressing questions about representation and ownership. “Killers of the Flower Moon” recounts the atrocities committed against the Osage, but it’s also an indictment of racialized evil writ large. “The trauma of this experience of course belongs most intimately to the Osage people,” Cunningham says. “But the proclivities that gave rise to it, the sensibilities that survive in our culture today—that’s something that every person that has anything to do with the United States needs to engage with.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Throughout film history, heterosexual relationships have served as a battleground for questions of sex, power, and equality. From the 1949 screwball comedy “Adam’s Rib,” in which a husband and wife’s careers become a source of conflict, to the 1979 legal drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which reflected new cultural attitudes about divorce, fictional couples have long been tasked with working through the biggest social issues of the day. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, a different dynamic has emerged onscreen—one in which the woman holds the reins of the relationship. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss two new films in which traditional gender roles are flipped: Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and “Fair Play,” the début feature from the director Chloe Domont, now streaming on Netflix. The hosts consider the rise of the “good bad man”: a well-intentioned partner whose feminist politics collapse when real power is at stake. “This is a moment when people say they want equality, and they may even feel that they want equality,” Schwartz says. “But there is some kind of cultural consensus that men are not really able to do it, because they keep getting slammed in movies like this.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1963, a British spy writing under the pen name John le Carré published a novel that shot to the top of best-seller lists worldwide. After the success of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” le Carré became known as the king of the modern spy thriller, and his gritty, political books helped define the genre until his death, in 2020. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz dive deep into the le Carré œuvre, delighting in the “glorious confusion” of works like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “The Constant Gardener,” and “A Perfect Spy.” They also discuss le Carré’s life in light of two retrospectives out this month: “The Pigeon Tunnel,” an Errol Morris documentary on Apple TV+; and “The Secret Life of John le Carré,” an addendum to Adam Sisman’s definitive biography that exposes decades of affairs in which the novelist ran women like agents. With these details as a jumping-off point, the hosts explore the themes of intimacy and romance across the spy genre, including the Martini-soaked romps of Ian Fleming’s James Bond and the FX show “The Americans,” where romance functions as a metaphor for spycraft. “One question I’m asking is, Why are sex and love so much part of the archetype of the spy?” Schwartz says. “When you’re pretending and playing at being so many different things, love is usually one place where the truth must out.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Taylor Swift has long been the subject of adoration, scrutiny, and debate—but it wasn’t until this summer, as the Eras Tour filled football stadiums and TikTok feeds alike, that she achieved complete domination over popular culture. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz make sense of how Swift has managed to harness our collective attention in the midst of a fractured cultural landscape. They are joined by their fellow-critic Amanda Petrusich, who wrote about the Eras Tour earlier this year. “When she would address the crowd, it almost felt like I was getting hypnotized,” says Petrusich. She talks about what she calls Swift’s ‘you guys’ energy—the chatty, intimate tone Swift uses to address her fans. Together, the critics discuss the ins and outs of Swiftie fandom, the way that Swift herself savvily turns online censure into content, and whether the success of the Eras Tour—alongside recent maximalist collective events like Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour and Barbenheimer—marks a new golden age of the mainstream.

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Elon Musk’s presence in our lives is inescapable: his cars roam our streets, his satellites orbit our skies, and his purchase of X—formerly known as Twitter—has reshaped the social-media landscape. The staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss a recent biography of Musk, by Walter Isaacson, tracing the familiar archetype of the genius tech founder from the nineteenth-century robber baron to “Batman” ’s Bruce Wayne. The critics examine how, in recent years, the idea of the unimpeachable Silicon Valley founder has lost its sheen. Narratives such as the 2022 series “WeCrashed” tell the story of startup founders who make lofty promises, only to watch their empires crumble when those promises are shown to be empty. “It dovetails for me with the disillusionment of millennials,” Fry says, pointing to the dark mood that the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2016 election brought to the country. “There’s no longer this blind belief that the tech founder is a genius who should be wholly admired with no reservations.” 

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In the inaugural episode of The New Yorker’s new culture podcast, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz make sense of an emerging trend in the world of television: a new genre of cringe comedy that collapses the gap between reality and artifice in ways that make the viewer deeply uncomfortable. “As a shorthand, I’ve just simply started calling it ‘cringecore,’ ” Schwartz says, referring to shows such as Nathan Fielder’s “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” and the docuseries “How To with John Wilson.” What defines these projects, and what draws viewers to them? One theory: at a time when so many of our preferences, relationships, and experiences are mediated by algorithm, these shows reflect a deep skepticism of reality itself. “I feel that reality in our culture is like the last undiscovered tribe of the Amazon,” Schwartz says. “We’ll never make contact with it again.”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

On Critics at Large, a new weekly culture podcast from The New Yorker, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss current obsessions, classic texts, and trends that are emerging across books, film, television, pop culture, and more. The show will offer lively, surprising conversations about such topics as how comedy is evolving in the TikTok era, why Greek mythology is making a comeback, and what the great-man theory of history has to do with Elon Musk. Join The New Yorker’s critics for analysis of the cultural moment and behind-the-scenes insights into the publication’s reporting on the arts. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.