This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten per cent of that at the box office. And what was Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump but a fiasco of the highest order? On this episode of Critics at Large, recorded live at Condé Nast’s offices at One World Trade Center, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz pronounce 2024 “the year of the flop,” and draw on a range of recent examples—from the Yankees’ disappointing performance at the World Series to Katy Perry’s near-universally mocked music video for “Woman’s World”—to anatomize the phenomenon. What are the constituent parts of a flop, and what might these missteps reveal about the relationship between audiences and public figures today? The hosts also consider the surprising upsides to such categorical failures. “In some ways, always succeeding for an artist is a problem . . . because I think you retain fear,” Schwartz says. “If you can get through it, there really can be something on the other side.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

HBO’s “Industry” (2020–)
The 2024 World Series
The 2024 Election
“Megalopolis” (2024)
“Woman’s World,” by Katy Perry
“ ‘Woman’s World’ Track Review,” by Shaad D’Souza (Pitchfork)
“Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and the Unstable Hierarchy of Pop” (The New Yorker)
“Tarot, Tech, and Our Age of Magical Thinking” (The New Yorker)
“Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef” (The New Yorker)
“Am I Racist?” (2024)
“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1” (2024)
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Madame Web” (2024)
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fugees
“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville
“NYC Prep” (2009)
“Princesses: Long Island” (2013)

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

The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and far between. Meanwhile, one of the biggest films of the season is Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and lengthy) adaptation of “Wicked,” the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West that first premièred on the Great White Way nearly twenty years ago—and has been a smash hit ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss why “Wicked” is resonating with audiences in 2024. They consider it alongside other recent movie musicals, such as “Emilia Pérez,” which centers on the transgender leader of a Mexican cartel, and Todd Phillips’s follow-up to “Joker,” the confounding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Then they step back to trace the evolution of the musical, from the first shows to marry song and story in the nineteen-twenties to the seventies-era innovations of figures like Stephen Sondheim. Amid the massive commercial, technological, and aesthetic shifts of the last century, how has the form changed, and why has it endured? “People who don’t like musicals will often criticize their artificiality,” Schwartz says. “Some things in life are so heightened . . . yet they’re part of the real. Why not put them to music and have singing be part of it?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Wicked” (2024)
“The Animals That Made It All Worth It,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Ben Shapiro Reviews ‘Wicked’ ”
“Frozen” (2013)
“Emilia Pérez” (2024)
“Joker: Folie à Deux” (2024)
“ ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn),” by Manohla Dargis (the New York Times)
“Hair” (1979)
“The Sound of Music” (1965)
“Anything Goes” (1934)
“Show Boat” (1927)
“Oklahoma” (1943)
“Mean Girls” (2017)
“Hamilton” (2015)
“Wicked” (2003)
“A Strange Loop” (2019)
“Teeth” (2024)
“Kimberly Akimbo” (2021)

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

Artists owe a great debt to ancient Rome. Over the years, it’s provided a backdrop for countless films and novels, each of which has put forward its own vision of the Empire and what it stood for. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the latest entry in that canon, Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” which has drawn massive audiences and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. The hosts also consider other texts that use the same setting, from the religious epic “Ben-Hur” to Sondheim’s farcical sword-and-sandal parody, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Recently, figures from across the political spectrum have leapt to lay claim to antiquity, even as new translations of Homer have underscored how little we really understand about these civilizations. “Make ancient Rome strange again. Take away the analogies,” Schwartz says. “Maybe that’s the appeal of the classics: to try to keep returning and understanding, even as we can’t help holding them up as a mirror.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Gladiator II” (2024)
“I, Claudius” (1976)
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966)
“The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)
“Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979)
“Cleopatra” (1963)
“Spartacus” (1960)
“Ben-Hur” (1959)
“Gladiator” (2000)
“The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama
“I, Claudius,” by Robert Graves
“I Hate to Say This, But Men Deserve Better Than Gladiator II,” by Alison Wilmore (Vulture)
“On Creating a Usable Past,” by Van Wyck Brook (The Dial)
Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad

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

In her new FX docuseries “Social Studies,” the artist and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield delves into the post-pandemic lives—and phones—of a group of L.A. teens. Screen recordings of the kids’ social-media use reveal how these platforms have reshaped their experience of the world in alarming ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show paints a vivid, empathetic portrait of modern adolescence while also tapping into the long tradition of fretting about what the youths of the day are up to. The hosts consider moral panics throughout history, from the 1971 book “Go Ask Alice,” which was first marketed as the true story of a drug-addicted girl’s downfall in a bid to scare kids straight, to the hand-wringing that surrounded trends like rock and roll and the postwar comic-book craze. Anxieties around social-media use, by contrast, are warranted. Mounting research shows how screen time correlates with spikes in depression, loneliness, and suicide among teens. It’s a problem that has come to define all our lives, not just those of the youth. “This whole crust of society—people joining trade unions and other kinds of things, lodges and guilds, having hobbies,” Cunningham says, “that layer of society is shrinking. And parallel to our crusade against the ills of social media is, how do we rebuild that sector of society?” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Social Studies” (2024)
“Into the Phones of Teens,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Generation Wealth” (2018)
Marilyn Manson
“Reviving Ophelia,” by Mary Pipher
“Go Ask Alice,” by Beatrice Sparks
“Forrest Gump” (1994)
“The Rules of Attraction,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“Less Than Zero,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Seduction of the Innocent,” by Fredric Wertham
“Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?,” by Andrew Solomon (The New Yorker)
“The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt
“Bowling Alone,” by Robert D. Putnam

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

One of the most fundamental features of art is its ability to meet us during times of distress. In the early days of the pandemic, many people turned to comfort reads and beloved films as a form of escapism; more recently, in the wake of the election, shows such as “The Great British Bake Off” have been offered up on group chats as a balm. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider the value—and limits—of seeking solace in culture. Comfort art has flourished in recent years, as evidenced by the rise of genres such as“romantasy” and the “cozy thriller.” But where is the line between using art as a salve and tuning out at a moment when politics demands our engagement? “One of the purposes of the comfort we seek is to sustain us,” Schwartz says. “That’s what we all are going to need: sustenance to move forward.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Crown” (2016-2023)
“Sesame Street” (1969-)
“The Great British Bake Off” (2010-)
“In Tumultuous Times, Readers Turn to ‘Healing Fiction,’ ” by Alexandra Alter (The New York Times)
Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” (1950-2000)
“Uncut Gems” (2019)
“Somebody Somewhere” (2022-)
“3 Terrific Specials to Distract You from the News,” by Jason Zinoman (The New York Times)
“Tom Papa: Home Free” (2024)
“America, Don’t Succumb to Escapism,” by Kristen Ghodsee (The New Republic)
“Candide,” by Voltaire
Beth Stern’s Instagram
“Janet Planet” (2023)
Marvin Gaye’s “What's Going On”
Donny Hathaway’s “Extension of a Man”

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

Since the comedian Julio Torres came to America from El Salvador, more than a decade ago, his fantastical style has made him a singular presence in the entertainment landscape. An early stint writing for “Saturday Night Live” yielded some of the show’s weirdest and most memorable sketches; soon after that, Torres’s work on the HBO series “Los Espookys,” which he co-wrote and starred in, cemented his status as a beloved odd-child of the comedy scene. In his most recent work, he’s applied his dreamy sensibility to very real bureaucratic nightmares. “Problemista,” his first feature film, draws on Torres’s own Kafkaesque experience navigating the U.S. immigration system; in his new HBO show, “Fantasmas,” the protagonist considers whether to acquire a document called a “proof of existence,” without which everyday tasks like renting an apartment are rendered impossible. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, the hosts of Critics at Large talk with Torres about his creative influences, and about using abstraction to put our most impenetrable systems into tangible terms. “Life today is so riddled with these man-made labyrinths that are life-or-death … there’s something very lonely about it,” Torres says. “These flourishes are there in service of the humanity.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Problemista” (2023)
“Fantasmas” (2024-)
“Los Espookys” (2019-22)
“I Want to Be a Vase,” by Julio Torres
“My Favorite Shapes” (2019)
“Saturday Night Live” (1975-)
“Julio Torres’s ‘Fantasmas’ Finds Truth in Fantasy,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996)
“Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (2003)
“The Substance” (2024)

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

The art of advice-giving, championed over the years by such figures as Ann Landers and Cheryl Strayed, has lately undergone a transformation. As traditional columns have continued to proliferate, social-media platforms have created new venues for those seeking—and doling out—counsel, from the users of the popular subreddit “Am I the Asshole” to the countless “experts” who peddle their takes on Instagram and TikTok. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz try their hands at the trade, advising listeners on a variety of cultural conundrums. The hosts trace the form from early examples such as Advice for Living, the short-lived column written by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the late nineteen-fifties, through to the Internet age. The genre has long functioned as a forum for parsing the ethics of the era, and its enduring appeal might be explained by our inherent curiosity about the way others live. “There is a sort of plurality of approaches to life itself, which means that we are all passing into and out of other people’s moral universes,” Cunningham says. “I think it causes more trouble—causes more questions.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Witch Elm,” by Tana French

“Crime and Punishment,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen

“Intermezzo,” by Sally Rooney

“The Guest,” by Emma Cline

“I’m a Fan,” by Sheena Patel

“My Husband,” by Maud Ventura

“The Anthropologists,” by Ayşegül Savaş

“Small Rain,” by Garth Greenwell

“Brightness Falls,” by Jay McInerney

Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy

William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

“Ghost World,” by Dan Clowes

The Ethicist (The New York Times)

Dear Sugar (The Rumpus)

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Lisa Frankenstein” (2024)

“The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James

“Carrie,” by Stephen King

“Little Labors,” by Rivka Galchen

“Matrescence,” by Lucy Jones

“The Mother Artist,” by Catherine Ricketts

“Acts of Creation,” by Hettie Judah

r/AmItheAsshole

Advice for Living (Ebony Magazine)

New episodes drop every Thursda… Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“The Apprentice,” a new film directed by Ali Abbasi, depicts the rise of a young Donald Trump under the wing of the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn. The film is, in many ways, an origin story for a man who has overtaken contemporary politics. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the movie and other works that explore Trump’s and Cohn’s psychologies, from duelling family memoirs to documentaries. The sheer number of such texts raises the question: Why are we so interested in the backstories of people who have done wrong, and what do we stand to gain (or lose) by humanizing them? “Do we want to see our villains, our absolute villains—people who have caused much harm to the world—as weak little boys who’ve undergone trauma and have had their reasons for becoming the monsters they later turn into?” Fry asks. “Or do we not?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Apprentice” (2024)
“Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir,” by Mary Trump
“All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” by Fred C. Trump III
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” (2019)
“Roy Cohn and the Making of a Winner-Take-All America,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Angels in America” (2003)
“Joker” (2019)
“Wicked” (2024)
“Ratched” (2020)
“Elephant” (2003)
“Cruella” (2021)
“The Sopranos” (1991-2007)
“Mad Men” (2007-15)
The “Harry Potter” novels, by J. K. Rowling
“Paradise Lost,” by John Milton
“Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” by Ina Garten

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

In “The Substance,” a darkly satirical horror movie directed by Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore plays an aging Hollywood actress who strikes a tech-infused Faustian bargain to unleash a younger, “more perfect” version of herself. Gruesome side effects ensue. Fargeat’s film plays on the fact that female aging is often seen as its own brand of horror—and that we’ve devised increasingly extreme methods of combating it. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss “The Substance” and “A Different Man,” another new release that questions our culture’s obsession with perfecting our physical forms. In recent years, the smorgasbord of products and procedures promising to enhance our bodies and preserve our youth has only grown; social media has us looking at ourselves more than ever before. No wonder, then, that horror as a genre has been increasingly preoccupied with our uneasy relationship to our own exteriors. “We are embodied. It is a struggle. It is beautiful. It’s something to wrestle with forever. Just as you think that you’ve caught up to your current embodiment, something changes,” Schwartz says. “And so how do we make our peace with it?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“A Clockwork Orange” (1971)
“The Substance” (2024)
“A Different Man” (2024)
“Psycho” (1960)
“The Ren & Stimpy Show” (1991-96)
“The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison
“Passing,” by Nella Larsen
“The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale
“Titane” (2021)
“The Age of Instagram Face,” by Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)

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

From classic eighties films like “Wall Street” to Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel “American Psycho,” the world of finance has long provided a seductive backdrop for meditations on wealth and power. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the many portrayals of this élite realm, and how its image has evolved over time. Where earlier texts glorified Wall Street types as roguish heroes, the Great Recession ushered in more critical fare, seeking to explain the inner workings of a system that benefitted the few at the expense of the many. In 2024, as TikTokkers and personal essayists search for “a man in finance,” things seem to be shifting again. HBO’s “Industry,” now in its third season, depicts a cadre of young investment bankers clawing their way to the top of a soulless meritocracy—and may even engender some sympathy for the new finance bro. Why are audiences and creators alike so easily seduced by these stories even after the disillusionment of the Occupy Wall Street era? “We're talking about something—money—that is fun, and that we all on some level do want,” Cunningham says. “It’s always going to make us feel.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Industry” (2020—)

“Wall Street” (1987)

“You don’t have to look for a ‘man in finance.’ He’s everywhere,” by Rachel Tashjian (The Washington Post)

Joel Sternfeld’s “Summer Interns, Wall Street, New York”

“American Psycho” (2000)

“American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010)

“The Big Short” (2015)

“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)

“Margin Call” (2011)

“The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” by Grazie Sophia Christie (The Cut)

“My Year of Finance Boys,” by Daniel Lefferts (The Paris Review)

“Ways and Means,” by Daniel Lefferts

“Custom of the Country,” by Edith Wharton

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

Almost immediately after the publication of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” in 2018, Rooney-mania hit a fever pitch. Her work struck a cord among a generation of readers who responded to evocative descriptions of young people’s lives and relationships. Before long, Rooney had—somewhat reluctantly—been dubbed “the first great millennial author.” On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss “Intermezzo,” Rooney’s hotly anticipated fourth novel, which explores the dynamic between two brothers grieving the death of their father. The book is a sadder, more mature read than Rooney’s fans may have come to expect, but it retains her characteristic flair for making consciousness itself into a bingeable experience. “That is the great achievement of the realist novel for me,” Fry says. “The fact that Rooney is making this enjoyable for a new generation—amazing. Maybe it’s a conservative impulse, but there’s something reassuring for me about that.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Conversations with Friends,” by Sally Rooney
“Normal People,” by Sally Rooney
“Beautiful World, Where Are You,” by Sally Rooney
“Intermezzo,” by Sally Rooney
“Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden
William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
“Normal Novels,” by Becca Rothfeld (The Point)
“The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen
“My Struggle,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Neapolitan novels, by Elena Ferrante
“Sally Rooney on the Hell of Fame,” by Emma Brockes (The Guardian)
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce
The Harry Potter novels, by J. K. Rowling
“Why Bother?” by Jonathan Franzen (Harper’s Magazine)
“Middlemarch,” by George Eliot
“Daniel Deronda,” by George Eliot

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