In recent years, as our culture has embraced therapy more widely, depictions of the practice have proliferated on screen. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the archetype from the silent, scribbling analysts of Woody Allen’s œuvre and the iconic Dr. Melfi of “The Sopranos” to newer portrayals in shows such as “Shrinking,” on Apple TV+, and Showtime’s “Couples Therapy,” now in its fourth season. The star of “Couples Therapy” is Orna Guralnik, whose sessions with real-life couples show how these tools can lead to breakthroughs—or, in some cases, enable bad behavior. Since the series débuted, mental-health awareness has only grown, and the rise of therapists on social media has put psychoanalytic language and constructs into the hands of a much broader audience. Is the therapy boom making us better? “There’s a way in which jargon or concepts when boiled down can be used to categorize both ourselves and others,” says Schwartz. “Maybe what I’m asking for is a reinvigoration of the idea of therapy—not to close down meaning, but to open up meaning.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Sopranos” (1999-2007)
“Couples Therapy” (2019-)
“The Therapist Remaking Our Love Lives on TV,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“The Rise of Therapy-Speak,” by Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
“Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” (1995-2002)
“The Critic” (1994-95)
“Annie Hall” (1977)
“The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” by Parul Seghal (The New Yorker)
“Shrinking” (2023-)
“Ted Lasso” (2020-23)
The Cut’s Overanalyzed series
“21 Ways to Break Up with Your Therapist,” by Alyssa Shelasky (The Cut)

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.”

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. 

“Hit Man,” a new film directed by Richard Linklater, is not, in fact, about a hit man. The movie follows Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a mild-mannered philosophy professor who assists law enforcement in sting operations by posing as a contract killer—and playing on the expectations stoked by Hollywood. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the history of the archetype, from the 1942 noir “This Gun for Hire” to Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and the “John Wick” franchise, and explore why audiences have so enthusiastically embraced a figure that, contrary to the media’s depiction, is basically nonexistent in real life. “It’s a fantasy of what would happen if our rage was optimized, much like our sleep and our work day and our workouts,” says Fry. “And if it comes with a side of wearing a suit that looks great—even better.”

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Collateral” (2004)
“Pulp Fiction” (1994)
“No Country for Old Men” (2007)
“Hit Man” (2024)
“Dazed and Confused” (1993)
“Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story,” by Jessie McKinley (The New York Times)
“This Gun for Hire” (1942)
“Le Samouraï” (1967)
“The Killer” (2023)
“Aggro Dr1ft” (2024)
“John Wick” (2014)
“Barry” (2018-23)

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

In recent years, in the realms of self-improvement literature, Instagram influencers, and wellness gurus, an idea has taken hold: that in a non-stop world, the act of slowing down offers a path to better living. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the rise of “slowness culture”—from Carl Honoré’s 2004 manifesto to pandemic-era trends of mass resignations and so-called quiet quitting. The hosts discuss the work of Jenny Odell, whose books “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” frame reclaiming one’s time as a life-style choice with radical roots and revolutionary political potential. But how much does an individual’s commitment to leisure pay off on the level of the collective? Is too much being laid at the feet of slowness? “For me, it’s about reclaiming an aspect of humanness, just the experience of not having to make the most with everything we have all the time,” Schwartz says. “There can be a degree of self-defeating critique where you say, ‘Oh, well, this is only accessible to the privileged few.’ And I think the better framing is, how can more people access that kind of sitting with humanness?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed)
“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell
“Improving Ourselves to Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” by Carl Honoré
“The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture,” by Jenny Odell
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” by Kohei Saito

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

 
This episode originally aired on January 11, 2024.

From John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer” to Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” our culture has long grappled with what it means to enter middle age. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine depictions of that tipping point—and of the crises that often come with it. In the mid-twentieth century (and, depending on your reading of Dante and Balzac, long before that), the phenomenon was largely the purview of men, but massive societal shifts, beginning with the women’s rights movement, have yielded a new archetype. The hosts discuss how novels like Miranda July’s “All Fours” and Dana Spiotta’s “Wayward” have updated the genre for the modern age. “I think the crisis of midlife,” Schwartz says, “is just the crisis of life, period. You invent it for yourself.”

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Miranda July Turns the Lights On,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“All Fours,” by Miranda July
“Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005)
“Inferno,” by Dante Alighieri
“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf
“Cousin Bette,” by Honoré de Balzac
“The Swimmer,” by John Cheever (The New Yorker)
“The Swimmer” (1968)
“The Women’s Room,” by Marilyn French
“Wifey,” by Judy Blume
“This Isn’t What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed to Look Like,” by Jessica Grose (The New York Times)
“Wayward,” by Dana Spiotta
“Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Eat, Pray, Love” (2010)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

The rap superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been on a collision course for a decade, trading periodic diss tracks to assert their superiority—but earlier this month the long-simmering beef erupted into a showdown that said as much about the artists as it did about the art. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine how the back-and-forth devolved from a litigation of craft into a series of ad-hominem attacks alleging everything from cultural appropriation to pedophilia. They discuss the way rivalries function in the creative world, fuelling new work and compelling audiences to pay closer attention to it than ever before. The hosts also consider other feuds of note, from a nineteenth-century debate over Shakespearean actors that ended in violence to the writer Renata Adler’s blistering takedown of the film critic Pauline Kael in The New York Review of Books. Why do so many of these schisms revolve around fundamental questions of authenticity and belonging? And, once they start to spiral, is there any going back? “Conflict can be productive emotionally and also artistically,” Schwartz says. “But this is not a place that we can permanently reside.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“DAMN.,” by Kendrick Lamar
“To Pimp a Butterfly,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Control,” by Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica
“First Person Shooter,” by Drake featuring J. Cole
“Like That,” by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar
“Push Ups,” by Drake
“Taylor Made Freestyle,” by Drake
“Back to Back,” by Drake
“euphoria,” by Kendrick Lamar
“6:16 in LA,” by Kendrick Lamar
“meet the grahams,” by Kendrick Lamar
“Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar
“THE HEART PART 6,” by Drake
“Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“The Perils of Pauline,” by Renata Adler (The New York Review of Books)

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

Over the past several years, true crime’s hold on the culture has tightened into a vice grip, with new titles flooding podcast charts and streaming platforms on a daily basis. This week on Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz take stock of the phenomenon, first by speaking with fans of the genre to understand its appeal. Then, onstage at the 2024 Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, they continue the discussion with The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, whose books “Empire of Pain” and “Say Nothing” are exemplars of the form. The panel considers Keefe’s recent piece, “The Oligarch’s Son,” which illuminates the journalistic challenges of reporting on sordid events—not least the difficulty of managing the emotions and expectations of victims’ families. As its appeal has skyrocketed, true crime has come under greater scrutiny. The most successful entries bypass lurid details and shed light on the society in which these transgressions occur. But “the price you have to pay in sociology, in anthropology, in enriching our understanding of something beyond the crime itself—it’s fairly high,” Keefe says. “You have to remember that this is a real story about real people. They’re alive. They’re out there.”

 
This episode was recorded on May 4, 2024 at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle, Washington.

 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“UK True Crime Podcast”
“My Favorite Murder”
“Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Paradise Lost,” by John Milton
“A Loaded Gun,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“The Oligarch’s Son,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“Capote” (2005)
“In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote (The New Yorker)
“The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” (2015, 2024)
“Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders,” by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi
“Law & Order” (1990–)
“Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (2022)
“The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story” (2016)
“O.J.: Made in America” (2016)
“Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery,” by Robert Kolker

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

From “Raging Bull” to “A League of Their Own,” films about athletes have commanded the attention of even the most sports-skeptical viewers. The pleasure of watching the protagonist undergo a test of body and spirit, proving their worth to society and to themselves—often with a training montage thrown in for good measure—is undeniable. Luca Guadagnino’s steamy new tennis film, “Challengers,” applies this formula in a different context, mining familiar themes like rivalry and camaraderie for their erotic potential. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how recent entries like “Challengers” and last year’s Zac Efron-led wrestling drama, “The Iron Claw,” reflect a more contemporary view of masculinity than their predecessors do. The hosts also assemble their “hall of fame” of sports films, including Spike Lee’s “He Got Game,” the nineties classic “Cool Runnings,” and the rom-com “Love & Basketball.” They argue that the genre, at its best, offers auteurs the chance to embrace their instincts. “For our most stylish filmmakers, I would just lay down the gauntlet. If you want to express to us your personal vision, do a sports movie,” Cunningham says. “Because we’ll know what you care about: visually, sensually—we will know.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Challengers” (2024)
“The Iron Claw” (2023)
“Rocky IV” (1985)
“Black Swan” (2010)
“A League of Their Own” (1992)
“Cool Runnings” (1993)
“Raging Bull” (1980)
“He Got Game” (1998)
“Love & Basketball” (2000)
“A League of Their Own” (2022—)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. 

“Civil War,” Alex Garland’s divisive new action flick, borrows iconography—and actual footage—from the America of today as set dressing for a hypothetical, fractured future. Though we know that the President is in his third term, and that Texas and California have formed an unlikely alliance against him, very little is said about the politics that brought us to this point. Garland’s true interest lies not with the cause of the carnage but with the journalists compelled to document it. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz debate whether the film glamorizes violence, or whether it’s an indictment of the way audiences have become inured to it through repeated exposure. The hosts consider Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” which assesses the impact of the craft, and “War Is Beautiful,” a compendium that explores how photojournalists have historically aestheticized and glorified unthinkable acts. From the video of George Floyd’s killing to photos of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian refugee found lying dead on a Turkish beach, images of atrocities have galvanized movements and commanded international attention. But what does it mean to bear witness in the age of social media, with daily, appalling updates from conflict zones at our fingertips? “I think all of us are struggling with what to make of this complete overabundance,” Schwartz says. “On the other hand, we’re certainly aware of horror. It’s impossible to ignore.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Civil War” (2024)
“Ex Machina” (2014)
“Natural Born Killers” (1994)
“The Doom Generation” (1995)
“War Is Beautiful,” by David Shields
“On Photography,” by Susan Sontag
“Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” (2017)

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

Since the turn of the millennium, HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has slyly satirized the ins and outs of social interaction. The series—which follows a fictionalized version of its creator and star, Larry David, as he gets into petty disputes with anyone and everyone who crosses his path—aired its last episode on Sunday, marking the end of a twelve-season run. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the show’s “weirdly moving” conclusion as well as its over-all legacy. Then they consider other notable TV endings: some divisive (“Sex and the City”), some critically acclaimed (“Succession”), some infamously rage-inspiring (“Game of Thrones”). What are the moral and narrative stakes of a finale, and why do we subject these episodes—which represent only a tiny fraction of the work as a whole—to such crushing analytic pressure? “This idea of an ending ruining the show is alien to me,” Cunningham says. “I won’t contest that endings are different—distinct. Are they better? I don’t know.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” (2000-24)

“Seinfeld” (1989-98)

“Sex and the City” (1998-2004)

“Succession” (2018-23)

“The Hills” (2006-10)

“Game of Thrones” (2011-19)

“Breaking Bad” (2008-13) 

“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott

In her 1955 novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Patricia Highsmith introduced readers to the figure of Tom Ripley, an antihero who covets the good life, and achieves it—by stealing it from someone else. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the long tail of Highsmith’s work, which has been revived in adaptations like René Clément’s 1960 classic, “Purple Noon”; the definitive 1999 film starring Matt Damon and Jude Law; and a new Netflix series, “Ripley,” which casts its protagonist as a lonely middle-aged con man. In all three versions, Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy acquaintance of Ripley’s, becomes his obsession and eventually his victim. The story resonates today in part because we’re all in the habit of observing—and coveting—the life styles of the rich and famous. Social media gives users endless opportunities to study how others live, such as the places they go, the meals they consume, and the objects they possess. “One of the reasons that the character of Ripley is forever sympathetic is the yearning and striving to be something other than himself, following an example that’s set out to him,” Fry says. “For him, it’s someone like Dickie. For us, it might be someone online.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith
“The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999)
“Purple Noon” (1960)
“Ripley” (2024)
“Saltburn” (2023)
“The White Lotus” (2021—)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.