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.

Two weeks ago, when Paramount cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” insiders in Hollywood and Washington alike deemed the move suspicious: Colbert had just called his parent company’s payout to Trump a “big fat bribe” on air. Paramount, for its part, claims that the decision was purely financial—Colbert’s show is losing forty million dollars a year. But both the political and economic explanations reveal how the landscape of late night has changed since Johnny Carson’s day. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider Colbert’s body of work and the state of the genre more generally, from the so-called late-night wars of the nineties through to the modern challenge of making comedy in a country where nothing feels funny anymore. “Late-night hosting is an art, but it’s also business. So, if your job is to get as many eyeballs on you as is humanly possible, what do you do?” Schwartz says. “It’s not easy to have fun with the news, as it is. And if you are having fun with it, something may very well be wrong.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Strangers with Candy” (1999–2000)
“The Daily Show” (1996–)
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” (2015–26)
“The Staying Power of the ‘S.N.L.’ Machine” (The New Yorker)
“Lessons from ‘Sesame Street’ ” (The New Yorker)
“The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” (1962–92)
“David Letterman’s Revolutionary Comedy,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“The Colbert Rapport,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“Carpool Karaoke” (2017–23)
“What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“After Midnight” (2024–25)

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

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 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, the rise in conspiracy theories, and political strife shattered something in our society. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz situate “Eddington” in the lineage of “the indigenous American berserk,” a phrase coined by Philip Roth in his 1997 novel “American Pastoral.” They consider an array of works that have tried to depict moments of social rupture throughout the country’s history—and debate whether the exercise is ultimately a futile one. “I think when you’re dealing with the realm of the American berserk, the big risk is getting the bends,” Schwartz says. “You're trying to describe a warping. So how do you not get warped in the process?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Eddington” (2025)
“Writing American Fiction,” by Philip Roth (Commentary)
“Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” by Tom Wolfe (Harper’s)
“American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth
“Natural Born Killers” (1994)
“Benito Cereno,” by Herman Melville
“The Bonfire of the Vanities,” by Tom Wolfe
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse” (1991)
“War Movies: What Are They Good For?” (The New Yorker)
“Sorry to Bother You” (2018)

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

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 of the nineteen-forties or the “chick flicks” of the eighties and nineties. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss their all-time favorite rom-coms and two new projects marketed as contemporary successors to the greats: Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much.” Do these depictions of modern love—or at least the search for it—evoke the same breathless feeling as the classics do? “I wonder if the crisis in rom-coms has to do with a crisis in how adult women want to be or want to see themselves,” Schwartz says. “I think both of these projects are basically trying to speak to the fact that everyone's ideals are in question.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Sex, Love, and the State of the Rom-Com” (The New Yorker)

“Materialists” (2025)

“Too Much” (2025)

“Working Girl” (1988)

“You’ve Got Mail” (1998)

“When Harry Met Sally” (1989)

“Love & Basketball” (2000)

“The Best Man” (1999)

“Our Romance with Jane Austen” (The New Yorker)

“Girls” (2012-17)

“Adam’s Rib” (1949)

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.”

This episode originally aired on June 13, 2024. 

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.

The word “diva” comes from the world of opera, where divinely talented singers have enraptured audiences for centuries. But preternatural gifts often go hand in hand with bad behavior—as in the case of Patti LuPone, the blunt Broadway dame whose remarks about fellow-actresses in a recent New Yorker Profile quickly became a source of scandal. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and guest host Michael Schulman examine the figure of the diva, from Miss Piggy to Maria Callas, and consider whether our culture still rewards such  personalities. “I don’t think we’ll ever stop being drawn to larger-than-life characters with messy, larger-than-life personal lives,” Schulman says. “There is a line that people can cross—but it’s constantly shifting.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke,” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
“Patti LuPone Is Done with Broadway—and Almost Everything Else,” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
“The Politics of the Oscar Race” (The New Yorker)
“Evita” (1978)
“Gypsy” (1959)
“Company” (1970)
“How Maria Callas Lost her Voice,” by Will Crutchfield (The New Yorker)
“Liz & Dick” (2012)
“The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984)
“The Problem With Ryan Murphy’s Wannabe Divas,” by Logan Scherer (The Atlantic)
“Aretha Franklin’s American Soul,” by David Remnick (The New Yorker)
“Feud: Bette and Joan” (2017)

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

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, seven years after her older son Vincent died in the same way. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss Li’s book, which reads alternately like a work of philosophy, a piece of narrative criticism, and a devastating account of difficult facts. The hosts also consider other texts, from the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Tim Dlugos to a recent crop of standup-comedy specials about grief, and ask what such art can offer us in our current moment of turmoil. “Li is here as a kind of messenger, I think, to describe one of the farthest points of human experience,” Schwartz says. “This book is, in that way, sublime: words fail and fail and fail, but still they do something.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“Where Reasons End,” by Yiyun Li

“‘My Sadness Is Not a Burden’: Author Yiyun Li on the Suicide of Both Her Sons,” by Sophie McBain (the Guardian)

“The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion

“How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir,” by Molly Jong-Fast

John Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella”

“Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark” (2023)

“Sarah Silverman: PostMortem” (2025)

“Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special” (2024)

“Rachel Bloom Has a Funny Song About Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

@theaidsmemorial on Instagram

“G-9,” by Tim Dlugos 

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

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 death—her name is now synonymous with the period romance. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz choose their personal favorites from her œuvre—“Emma,” “Persuasion,” and “Mansfield Park”—and attempt to get to the heart of her appeal. Then they look at how Austen herself has been characterized by readers and critics. We know relatively little about Austen as a person, but that hasn’t stopped us from trying to understand her psyche. It’s a difficult task in part because of the double-edged quality to her writing: Austen, although renowned for her love stories, is also a keen satirist of the Regency society in which these relationships play out. “I think irony is so key, but also sincerity,” Schwartz says. “These books are about total realism and total fantasy meeting in a way that is endlessly alluring.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen

“Persuasion,” by Jane Austen
“Emma,” by Jane Austen
“Mansfield Park,” by Jane Austen

“Sense and Sensibility,” by Jane Austen

“Northanger Abbey,” by Jane Austen

“Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen” (The New Republic)
Emily Nussbaum on “Breaking Bad” and the “Bad Fan” (The New Yorker)
“How to Misread Jane Austen,” by Louis Menand (The New Yorker)

“Miss Austen” (2025—)

“Pride and Prejudice” (2005)

Scenes Through Time’s “Mr. Darcy Yearning for 10 Minutes” Supercut

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

“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s latest work, a ripped-from-the-headlines sendup of tech billionaires called “Mountainhead,” is arguably an extension of his over-all project: making the ultra-wealthy look fallible, unglamorous, and often flat-out amoral. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the new movie draws on the tech oligarchs we’ve come to know in real life, and consider the special place that the über-rich have held in the American imagination since the days of Edith Wharton and Upton Sinclair. How has the rise of such figures as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg changed our conception? And, as they’ve become more present in our daily lives—and more cartoonishly powerful—is it even possible to satirize them? “I think now that job is more important and also harder to do for artists,” says Schwartz, “simply because the culture is so enraptured with wealth."

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Mountainhead” (2025)

“Succession” (2018-23)

“Oil!,” by Upton Sinclair

“There Will Be Blood” (2007)

“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (1984-95)

“Three Faces of American Capitalism: Buffett, Musk, and Trump,” by John Cassidy (The New Yorker)

“Joe Rogan, Hasan Piker, and the Art of the Hang” (The New Yorker)

“On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama,” by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey (The New York Times)

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

 “Sesame Street,” which first aired on PBS in 1969, was born of a progressive idea: that children from all socioeconomic backgrounds should have access to free, high-quality, expressly educational entertainment. In the years since, the show has become essential viewing for generations of kids around the world. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider the program’s radical origins and the way it has evolved—for better or for worse—over the decades. What do the changes in “Sesame Street” ’s tone and content reveal about how parenting itself has changed? “The way that a children’s program proceeds does give us a hint as to the kinds of people that a society is producing,” Cunningham says. “And childhood is not the same as it was when we were kids.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Sesame Street” (1969–)
“Rechov Sumsum” (1983–)
“How We Got to Sesame Street,” by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker)
“Cookie, Oscar, Grover, Herry, Ernie, and Company,” by Renata Adler (The New Yorker)

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