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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.” 

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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.