Critics at Large | The New Yorker
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Critics at Large | The New Yorker
Critics at Large is a weekly culture podcast from The New Yorker. Every Thursday, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss current obsessions, classic texts they’re revisiting with fresh eyes, and trends that are emerging across books, television, film, and more...
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How the Trad Wife Took Over
Scrutiny of the figure of the “trad wife” has hit a fever pitch. These influencers’ accounts feature kempt, feminine women embracing hyper-traditional...
One Paul Thomas Anderson Film After Another
Over the course of his three-decade career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has dramatized the nineteen-seventies porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), t...
What's Cooking?
In contemporary cookbooks—and in the burgeoning realm of online cooking content—there’s often a life style on display alongside the recipes. Samin Nos...
“The Paper,” “The Lowdown,” and the Drama of Journalism
In the past twenty years, more than a third of all American newspapers have shuttered; trust in media institutions is now at a historic low. And yet w...
Why We're All In on Gambling
Last week, it was announced that Polymarket—a site where you can bet on basically anything, from the likelihood of a government shutdown to the winner...
Our Fads, Ourselves
Though the character known as Labubu has been around for a decade, the toy version—around six inches tall, sporting bunny ears and a demonic grin—is o...
How to Watch a Movie
In the early days of the Hollywood studio system, producers exerted far greater creative control than any individual director. Then, in the mid-twenti...
Les Américains à Paris
Nineteenth-century Americans regarded Paris as a libertine paradise: a smorgasbord of food and fashion, of night life and sex. Today, the pull toward...
How Zohran Mamdani Became the Main Character of New York City
On paper, a thirty-three-year-old socialist would seem an unlikely contender for mayor of New York City. But Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proved compelli...
Late Night's Last Laugh
Two weeks ago, when Paramount cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” insiders in Hollywood and Washington alike deemed the move suspicious: C...
“Eddington” and the American Berserk
Ari Aster’s wildly divisive new movie “Eddington” drops audiences back into the chaos of May, 2020: a moment when the confluence of the COVID-19 pande...
“Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com
Audiences have been bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy for years, but the genre persists—albeit often in a different form from the screwballs...
Why We Travel
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 v...
The Diva Is Dead, Long Live the Diva
The word “diva” comes from the world of opera, where divinely talented singers have enraptured audiences for centuries. But preternatural gifts often...
Why We Turn Grief Into Art
Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” is a bracingly candid memoir of profound loss: one written in the wake of her son James’s death by suicide,...
Our Romance with Jane Austen
Though Jane Austen went largely unrecognized in her own lifetime—four of her six novels were published anonymously, and the other two only after her d...
“Mountainhead” and the Age of the Pathetic Billionaire
“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s latest work, a ripped-from-the-headlines sendup of tech billionaires called “Mountainhead,” is arguably an exte...
Lessons from “Sesame Street”
“Sesame Street,” which first aired on PBS in 1969, was born of a progressive idea: that children from all socioeconomic backgrounds should have acces...
The Season for Obsessions
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 Larg...
The Grand Spectacle of Pope Week
In the weeks since Pope Francis’s passing, the internet has been flooded by papal memes, election analysis, and even close readings of the newly appoi...
I Need a Critic: May 2025 Edition
In a new installment of the Critics at Large advice hotline, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz field calls from listeners on a vari...
How “Sinners” Revives the Vampire
The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is...
War Movies: What Are They Good For?
For nearly as long as we’ve been waging war, we’ve sought ways to chronicle it. “Warfare,” a new movie co-directed by the filmmaker Alex Garland and t...
“The Studio” Pokes Fun at Hollywood’s Existential Struggle
The tension between art and commerce is a tale as old as time, and perhaps the most dramatic clashes in recent history have played out in Hollywood. O...
Gossip, Then and Now
Gossip, an essential human pastime, is full of contradictions. It has the potential to be as destructive to its subjects as it is titillating to its p...
Joe Rogan, Hasan Piker, and the Art of the Hang
The first episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” released in 2009, consisted mostly of its host smoking weed, cracking jokes, and futzing with technic...
Critics at Large Live: The Right to Get It Wrong
In 1939, reviewing the beloved M-G-M classic “The Wizard of Oz” for The New Yorker, the critic Russell Maloney declared that the film held “no trace o...
Our Modern Glut of Choice
For many of us, daily life is defined by a near-constant stream of decisions, from what to buy on Amazon to what to watch on Netflix. On this episode...
How “The Pitt” Diagnoses America's Ills
“The Pitt,” which recently began streaming on Max, spans a single shift in the life of a doctor at an underfunded Pittsburgh hospital where, in the co...
In “Severance,” the Gothic Double Lives On
“Severance” is an office drama with a twist: the central characters have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves (“innies,” in the parlanc...
The Staying Power of the “S.N.L.” Machine
The first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which aired in October of 1975, was a loose, scrappy affair. The sketches were experimental, almost absurd...
How Romantasy Seduces Its Readers
A few years back, novels classed as “romantasy”—a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”—might have seemed destined to attract only niche appeal. But...
David Lynch’s Unsolvable Puzzles
David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque...
The Splendor of Nature, Now Streaming
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...
The New Western Gold Rush
Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties o...
The Elusive Promise of the First Person
The first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s...
Hayao Miyazaki’s Magical Realms
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...
Critics at Large Live: The Year of the Flop
This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty mil...
After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?
The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and...
The Modern-Day Fight for Ancient Rome
Artists owe a great debt to ancient Rome. Over the years, it’s provided a backdrop for countless films and novels, each of which has put forward its o...