Critics at Large | The New Yorker

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...

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...

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 b...

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 a...

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 o...

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...

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 C...

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 collecti...

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 nineteen...

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,’ ” Sc...

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 mytho...