Critics at Large | The New Yorker Podcast
1) Why Football Matters
Someone looking to understand America might do well to study the nation’s embrace of football. N.F.L. games regularly outperform anything else on television, and, in 2025, some hundred and twenty-seve...Show More
2) Do We Need Saints?
In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a new film directed by Mona Fastvold, Amanda Seyfried plays the founder and leader of the Shaker movement—a woman believed by her followers to be the second coming of Ch...Show More
3) Our Romance with Jane Austen
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 ro...Show More
4) The Year of the Broken Mirror
Many of this year’s most talked-about releases were, in some sense, diagnostic: from Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” films offered up assessments of the ...Show More
5) “Wake Up Dead Man” and the Whodunnit Renaissance
We all know the formula: it begins with a dead body, and quickly introduces a motley crew of outlandish characters, each with a motive for murder. The whodunnit genre has been a cultural fixture since...Show More
6) Does “Hamlet” Need a Backstory?
Since it was penned more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has been in production nearly continuously, and has been adapted in many ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson ...Show More
7) After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?
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, Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and ...Show More
8) In “Pluribus,” Utopia Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Vince Gilligan’s new show, “Pluribus,” opens with an unconventional apocalypse. A benevolent alien hive mind descends on Earth, commandeering the bodies of all but a handful of people who appear to be...Show More
9) The Guilty Pleasure of the Heist
On October 19th, a group of masked men broke into the Louvre in broad daylight and made off with some of France’s crown jewels. Suspects are now in custody, but the online fervor is still going strong...Show More
10) Critics at Large Live: Padma Lakshmi’s Expansive Taste
Padma Lakshmi is unquestionably a woman of taste. As a host of the beloved food-competition series “Top Chef” and the star of the culinary docuseries “Taste the Nation,” she’s spent nearly two decades...Show More