Critics at Large | The New Yorker

In the original “The Devil Wears Prada,” a hapless Andrea Sachs stumbles into the office of Miranda Priestly, the exacting editor of Runway magazine and a titan of the fashion world. The film, released in 2006, was adapted from a novel by the former Vogue staffer Lauren Weisberger, and it spun the glamour of the industry into a crowd-pleasing confection for the big screen. Two decades later, the atmosphere of its sequel is darker. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the reality-inflected elements of the new film, which finds Priestly and her team chasing clicks and catering to the whims of billionaires who might solve Runway’s financial woes. The question of billionaire influence was also present at this year’s Met Gala. The event’s lead sponsors were the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who reportedly donated ten million dollars to become honorary co-chairs. Attendees paid a hundred thousand dollars just to get in the door. Why, the hosts ask, does the gala still matter to the average fashion enthusiast? “It’s the one time where, divorced from utility and other reasons, it’s O.K. to just look at fashion,” Cunningham says. “I tend to defend our opportunities to just look at things that provoke pleasure.” 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
The 2026 Met Gala
“The Devil Wears Prada” (2006)
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” (2026)
“Guys Are Wearing Slutty Little Reading Glasses Now” (GQ)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker which explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

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“Michael”—a new film, directed by Antoine Fuqua, charting Michael Jackson’s rise to fame—just had the best opening weekend in the history of bio-pics, proving that audiences are still eager to celebrate the King of Pop. The movie also ends, pointedly, before the first in a series of allegations of child sexual abuse that have tainted Jackson’s reputation ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and their fellow staff writer Kelefa Sanneh consider how the unprecedented highs and horrific lows of Jackson’s life and career have made him a prism for modern ideas about stardom and power. Sanneh’s recent Profile of Fuqua details the Jackson estate’s involvement in the production, which resulted in a sanitized portrait of a deeply complex figure. Other works have assessed Jackson’s legacy more critically: the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” lays out, in granular detail, the claims of two of Jackson’s accusers. “It’s just such a dissonance, seeing these two texts in such close proximity,” Fry says. “The thing with ‘Michael’ is, it doesn’t separate the art from the artist. It separates the artist from the wrongdoing entirely.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Michael” (2026)
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous”
“The Action-Film Director Who’s Taking On Michael Jackson,” by Kelefa Sanneh (The New Yorker)
“Quiet on Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV” (2024)
“I’m Glad My Mom Died,” by Jennette McCurdy
“On Michael Jackson,” by Margo Jefferson
“Leaving Neverland” (2019)
Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall”
“Justin Bieber, Pop Music’s Fallen Angel, Rises Again at Coachella,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker which explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

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Cynicism is widely considered a defining quality of our conspiracy-addled, irony-poisoned age. But audiences and creatives alike now seem ready to cast it aside in favor of an attitude that’s long been out of style: earnestness. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace this trend from the outer-space buddy comedy “Project Hail Mary” to the real-life Artemis II mission, whose crew has spoken movingly about Earth as a “lifeboat” in the middle of a vast, mysterious universe. The hosts also consider two buzzy new books—Lena Dunham’s “Famesick,” and “Transcription,” by Ben Lerner—which find their authors turning to earnestness in midlife, after precocious beginnings. In this era of political, economic, and environmental precarity, younger generations, too, have come to celebrate big feelings, rather than living in fear of seeming cringe. “We’ve just seen too much awful stuff, and it's impossible to ironize,” Cunningham says. “The only sane response to that is to kind of sober up and say, ‘All right, what resources do humans still have?’ ”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Project Hail Mary” (2026)
“The Pitt” (2025-)
“Love on the Spectrum” (2022-)
“Heated Rivalry” (2025-)
“Famesick,” by Lena Dunham
“Girls” (2012-17)
“Transcription,” by Ben Lerner
“Climbing Cringe Mountain With Gen Z” (The New York Times)
“Amos & Boris,” by William Steig
László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize lecture
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker which explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

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In 2019, marriage rates in the United States hit their lowest point in a hundred and forty years. They still haven’t rebounded. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider how recent cultural offerings mirror this increasing dissatisfaction with matrimony. They discuss the new season of the Netflix anthology show “Beef,” which centers on two couples locked in a feud that gradually exposes the cracks in each relationship, and the A24 film “The Drama,” about a wedding that goes off the rails in spectacular fashion. They also consider real-life examples, including Lindy West’s recent memoir, “Adult Braces,” which has sparked a flurry of discourse about polyamory and open marriages. As such alternative ways of organizing our love lives enter the mainstream, the narrative around one of our oldest institutions is shifting, too. “I think we’re in a place where we’re trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice, rather than an obvious obligation,” Schwartz says. “It’s a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to, hoping that the fiction becomes true.” 
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Beef” (2023-)
“The White Lotus” (2021-)
“The Drama” (2026)
“Strangers,” by Belle Burden
“A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” by Gisèle Pelicot
“Madame Bovary,” by Gustave Flaubert
“Parallel Lives,” by Phyllis Rose
“Adult Braces,” by Lindy West
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker which explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last fall, a group of masked men broke into the Louvre in broad daylight and made off with some of France’s crown jewels. The stunt swiftly became an online phenomenon. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the sordid satisfaction of watching a heist play out, both onscreen and off. They dive into the debacle at the Louvre, along with a range of fictional depictions, from the fantasy of hyper-competence in “Ocean’s Eleven” to the theft that goes woefully awry in Kelly Reichardt’s  “The Mastermind.” Part of the fun, it seems, lies in rooting for those who identify and exploit the blind spots of an institution. “Someone else, just like me, is seeing that everybody is an idiot. But, unlike me, they’re able to best those people in charge,” Fry says. “It’s an alternative morality—a morality of wits.”
This episode originally aired on November 13, 2025.
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Mastermind” (2025)
“Ocean’s Eleven” (2001)
Stella Webb’s impression of “the Louvre heist Creative Director”
Jake Schroeder’s “Ballad for the Louvre”
“Showing Up” (2022)
“The Italian Job” (1969)
“How to Beat the High Cost of Living” (1980)
“Drive” (2011)
“Le Cercle Rouge” (1970)
“This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist” (2021)
“Good Time” (2017)
“George Santos and the Art of the Scam” (The New Yorker)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker which explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices