In the latest installment of the Critics at Large advice series, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz answer listeners’ questions about a range of conundrums. Some seek to immerse themselves in fictional worlds; others look for help with their own creative practices. Plus, the actor Morgan Spector (best known as Mr. Russell on “The Gilded Age”) calls in to ask the critics about poetry. “As always after we do this kind of show, my faith in humankind is restored,” Fry says. “Our listeners want to connect—they want to grow. They’re looking to pass through life not just on autopilot but to look to culture for meaning.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Ethan Hawke: Give yourself permission to be creative” (TED)
The poetry of Diane Seuss
“Lilacs,” by Rainer Diana Hamilton
“The Wire” (2002-8)
“The Americans” (2013-18)
“Billy Joel: And So It Goes” (2025)
“The Good Wife” (2009-16)
“30 Rock” (2006-13)
“How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s,” by Sam Knight (The New Yorker)
“Lupin” (2021—)
“The First Wives Club” (1996)
“A Quick Killing in Art,” by Phoebe Hoban
“Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” by Sam Graham-Felsen (the New York Times Magazine)
Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter’s “Man of the Year”
“The Archers” (1951—)
“How to Cook a Wolf,” by M. F. K. Fisher
“Home Cooking,” by Laurie Colwin
“Fresh Air with Terry Gross”
“What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“Wild Thing,” by Sue Prideaux
“Mr. Turner” (2014)
“Topsy-Turvy” (1999)
“The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing,” by Adam Moss
Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Watch Me Work”

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

Scrutiny of the figure of the “trad wife” has hit a fever pitch. These influencers’ accounts feature kempt, feminine women embracing hyper-traditional roles in marriage and home-making—and, in doing so, garnering millions of followers. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss standout practitioners of the “trad” life style, including Nara Smith, who makes cereal and toothpaste from scratch, and Hannah Neeleman, who, posting under the handle @ballerinafarm, presents a life caring for eight children in rural Utah as a bucolic fantasy. The hosts also discuss “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a reality-television show on Hulu about a group of Mormon influencers engulfed in scandal, whose notions of female empowerment read as a quaint reversal of the trad-wife trend. A common defense of a life style that some would call regressive is that it’s a personal choice, devoid of political meaning. But this gloss is complicated by societal changes such as the erosion of women’s rights in America and skyrocketing child-care costs. “In American society, the way choice works has everything to do with child-care options, financial options,” Schwartz says. “When you talk about the idea of choice, are we just talking about false choices?” 

This episode originally aired on Sept. 5, 2024. 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

@ballerinafarm
@gwenthemilkmaid
@naraazizasmith
“How Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith Made Viral Internet Fame From Scratch,” by Carrie Battan (GQ)
“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (2024–)
@esteecwilliams
“Mad Men” (2007-15)
The Little House on the Prairie series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
“Wilder Women,” by Judith Thurman (The New Yorker)
“Meet the Queen of the “Trad Wives” (and Her Eight Children),” by Megan Agnew (The Times of London) 

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

Over the course of his three-decade career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has dramatized the nineteen-seventies porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), the Californian oil boom (“There Will Be Blood”), and a mid-century London fashion house (“Phantom Thread”). Now he’s trained his gaze on present-day America. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss Anderson’s latest: the sprawling, surprisingly political blockbuster “One Battle After Another.” They contextualize the new work within his œuvre—and debate what his portrayal of militant left-wing activists and the white-supremacist right has to say about the state of the nation. “I think our present reality has far outstripped most depictions of it,” Schwartz says. “Slipping it into this kind of caper—is that delivering us to somewhere that gets people to think or to look or to feel?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“One Battle After Another” (2025)
“Vineland,” by Thomas Pynchon
“Inherent Vice” (2014)
“Boogie Nights” (1997)
“The Master” (2012)
“Punch-Drunk Love” (2002)
“There Will Be Blood” (2007)
“Phantom Thread” (2017)
“ ‘Eddington’ and the American Berserk” (The New Yorker)
Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not be Televised”

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

In contemporary cookbooks—and in the burgeoning realm of online cooking content—there’s often a life style on display alongside the recipes. Samin Nosrat is a fixture of this landscape, and her new book, “Good Things,” aims to pick up where her mega-best-seller “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” left off, giving people a new framework for feeding themselves and loved ones. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz share their personal experiences making dishes from “Good Things.” Then, New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner joins them to explain the state of home cooking today, from the rise of culinary influencers and the New York Times Cooking app to the aspirational dimension of what’s on offer. “Not only is cooking supposed to be part of a life, but, specifically, it can be a part of the life of the mind,” Cunningham says. “Your choices in the kitchen can be deeply connected to your desires outside of the kitchen.”

Read, watch, and cook with the critics:

“Tender at the Bone,” by Ruth Reichl
“Heartburn,” by Nora Ephron
“Good Things,” by Samin Nosrat
“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” by Samin Nosrat
“The Joylessness of Cooking,” by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker)
“All-Consuming,” by Ruby Tandoh
@wishbonekitchen
“Jerusalem,” by Yotam Ottolenghi
“Ottolenghi Simple,” by Yotam Ottolenghi
“Dining In,” by Alison Roman
“Nothing Fancy,” by Alison Roman
“Alison Roman Cooks Thanksgiving in a (Very) Small Kitchen” (The New York Times)
“Let’s Party,” by Dan Pelosi
“How to Cook Everything,” by Mark Bittman
“Serial Monogamy,” by Nora Ephron (The New Yorker)

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

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 we’re still drawn to depictions of reporters onscreen. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss two recent entries into the genre: “The Paper,” a workplace comedy from Greg Daniels and Michael Koman set at a failing local newspaper, and “The Lowdown,” a crime noir from Sterlin Harjo about a freelancer and self-styled “truthstorian.” They compare these new works with earlier examples to illuminate how the practice—and perception—of journalism has changed. In classics such as “All the President’s Men,” Fry notes, “The airing of the facts via the news, via this character of the journalist, makes us feel like it’s gonna be O.K. Like, the truth is out!” Today, she says, “I’m not sure we treat newsmaking the same way.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Paper” (2025–)
“The Lowdown” (2025–)
“All the President’s Men” (1976)
“The China Syndrome” (1979)
“Citizen Kane” (1941)
“The Gilded Age” (2022–)
“The Office” (2005–13)
“‘The Paper’ Is Old News,” by Inkoo Kang (The New Yorker)
Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter
“Spotlight” (2015)
“Succession” (2018–23)
“My Undesirable Friends” (2025)
404 Media

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

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 of New York City’s mayoral race—will be allowed to operate in the U.S. The decision was the culmination of a broader trend: since 2018, some thirty-nine states have legalized sports betting, and the rise of online gambling has made the practice a part of daily life. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider how platforms like Polymarket and DraftKings have changed our relationship to what we’re wagering on. They also examine the way games of chance have been depicted in literature and film—and our enduring susceptibility, in art and otherwise, to the promise of a hot streak. “Gambling is a way for the individual to test themselves,” Schwartz says. “It comes back to this fundamental question everyone has about themselves, which is: do I got it, or don’t I?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Shayne Coplan’s Big Bet Is Paying Off,” by Jen Wieczner (New York Magazine)
“Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse,” by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker)
“Daniel Deronda,” by George Eliot
“The Noble Hustle,” by Colson Whitehead
“Rounders” (1998)
“War and Peace,” by Leo Tolstoy
“The Sopranos” (1999–2007)
“Uncut Gems” (2019)
“The Big Short” (2015)
“To Catch a Thief” (1955)
“Casino Royale” (2006)

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

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 only just becoming a must-have accessory. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz join the trend and unbox their very own Labubu before diving into the history of such fads. They draw a distinction between collecting and speculating, from the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip mania through to the eBay-fuelled Beanie Baby craze of the nineteen-nineties and the far more recent rise and fall of non-fungible tokens. And they attempt to understand why this slightly unsettling children’s toy is now inspiring such intense reactions. “People were flooding my D.M.s, like, ‘This thing is the end of culture,’ ” Schwartz says. “This thing is not the end of culture. It’s a point on a line.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Monsters,” by Kasing Lung
“Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak
“What the Labubu Obsession Says About Us,” by Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
“A Dubai Chocolate Theory of the Internet” (“Search Engine”)
“IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu,” by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker)
“Little House on the Prairie,” by Laura Ingalls Wilder
“Toy Story” (1995)

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

In the early days of the Hollywood studio system, producers exerted far greater creative control than any individual director. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, a group of young French critics issued a cri du coeur that gave rise to the figure of the auteur: visionary filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson. In the final installment of this year’s Critics at Large interview series, Vinson Cunningham talks with fellow staff writer Richard Brody about the origins of auteur theory, and about the lengths to which directors have gone for artistic freedom in the decades since. They take Spike Lee’s body of work as a case study, considering his new movie “Highest 2 Lowest” and how his filmmaking sensibility reflects his singular view of the world. “Style is a funny thing in movies,” Brody says. “If it’s any good, it’s not inseparable from substance. It is substance.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The 400 Blows” (1959)
“Breathless” (1960)
“Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” by Andrew Sarris (Film Culture)
“Circles and Squares,” by Pauline Kael (Film Quarterly)
“Martin Scorsese on Making ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ ” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
“Spike Lee Comes Home,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“Da Sweet Blood of Jesus” (2014)
“Red Hook Summer” (2012)
“A Great Film Reveals Itself in Five Minutes,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“Highest 2 Lowest” (2025)
“ ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Marks a Conservative Pivot for Spike Lee,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“Do the Right Thing” (1989)

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

Nineteenth-century Americans regarded Paris as a libertine paradise: a smorgasbord of food and fashion, of night life and sex. Today, the pull toward France endures, though the precise nature of its appeal has shifted. On the second in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes, Alexandra Schwartz talks with the staff writer Lauren Collins about her work as The New Yorker’s woman on the ground in France and the long lineage of Francophilic Americans—from Edith Wharton to James Baldwin and, yes, even “Emily.” The two consider how French femininity has been marketed to American women and how modern influencers transmit an incomplete picture of Paris. “Yes, it’s romantic, and, yes, it’s picturesque, but it’s also a big, loud, dirty, profane, complicated city that evolves and changes like everywhere else,” Collins says. “There’s a lot of misbegotten essentializing that happens when Americans start talking about France.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Ces restaurants qui gonflent l’addition des touristes américains,” by Mathieu Hennequin (Le Parisien)
“Can Emmanuel Macron Stem the Populist Tide?,” by Lauren Collins (The New Yorker)
“The Unlikely Rise of French Tacos,” by Lauren Collins (The New Yorker)
“Dearest Edith,” by Janet Flanner (The New Yorker)
“The Custom of the Country,” by Edith Wharton
“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” by James Baldwin
“Giovanni’s Room,” by James Baldwin
“The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” by James Baldwin (The New York Times)
“Emily in Paris” (2020–)
“Sex and the City” (1998–2004)
“French Women Don’t Get Fat,” by Mireille Guiliano
“Bringing Up Bébé,” by Pamela Druckerman

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

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 compelling enough to make him the front-runner to lead the largest city in America. On the first in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes, Naomi Fry talks with her fellow staff writer Eric Lach about the surprising protagonist of this year’s mayoral race. Together, they contextualize Mamdani’s persona within a long history of New York characters, from Batman to Bill de Blasio, and consider the hold these narratives have on observers within the city and beyond. “The history of New York City mayors is not a litany of successes and heroes. It’s mostly fuck-ups and rogues,” Lach says. “Often, it’s this tug-of-war between the machine and the reformer.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

Zohran Mamdani’s “Uganda Miss Me! (But I’ll Be Back Soon)”
“Gangs of New York” (2002)
“The Gangs of New York,” by Herbert Asbury
“Low Life,” by Lucy Sante
“Serpico” (1973)
“The Dark Knight” (2008)

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