Critics at Large | The New Yorker The New Yorker

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 McClanahanThe “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 SaitoNew 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 KolkerNew episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.