Critics at Large | The New Yorker

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 des...

19 Sep 202451min

The writer Carl Sandburg, in his 1926 biography of Abraham Lincoln, made a provocative claim—that the President’s relationship with the Kentucky state representative Joshua Speed held “streaks of lave...

12 Sep 202446min

This summer, scrutiny of the figure of the “trad wife” hit a fever pitch. These influencers’ accounts feature kempt, feminine women embracing hyper-traditional roles in marriage and home-making—and, i...

5 Sep 202447min

Until recently, tarot, astrology, and spiritualism—practices often shorthanded simply as woo-woo—were the stuff of dusty psychic parlors and seventies nostalgia. But today, mysticism has permeated mai...

29 Aug 202450min

Cities have always been romanticized, but few of them have embraced—or actively engineered—their reputations as thoroughly as Las Vegas. On the second in a series of Critics at Large interview episode...

22 Aug 202447min

“ ‘BRAT’ summer”—so named for the Charli XCX album that’s become the soundtrack of Kamala Harris’s Presidential run—has given pop fans much to discuss, from Charli’s own flirtation with mainstream sta...

15 Aug 202450min

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....

8 Aug 202455min

The announcement of Kamala Harris’s Presidential run has set off one of the most pronounced vibe shifts in recent memory. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexand...

1 Aug 202448min