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1 week ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Download a transcript. Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. For nearly as long as we’ve been waging war, we’ve sought ways to chronicle it. “Warfare,” a new movie co-directed by the filmmaker Alex Garland and the former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, takes an unorthodox approach, recreating a disastrous real-life mission in Iraq according to Mendoza’s own memories and those of the soldiers who fought alongside him.
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3 weeks ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. Gossip, an essential human pastime, is full of contradictions. It has the potential to be as destructive to its subjects as it is titillating to its practitioners; it can protect against very real threats, as in the case of certain pre-#MeToo whisper networks, or tip over into the realm of conspiracy.
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4 weeks ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. The first episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” released in 2009, consisted mostly of its host smoking weed, cracking jokes, and futzing with technical equipment.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Download a transcript. Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. For many of us, daily life is defined by a near-constant stream of decisions, from what to buy on Amazon to what to watch on Netflix. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider how we came to see endless selection as a fundamental right.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. “The Pitt,” which recently began streaming on Max, spans a single shift in the life of a doctor at an underfunded Pittsburgh hospital, where, in the course of fifteen gruelling hours, he and his team struggle to keep up with a seemingly endless succession of patients.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. “Severance” is an office drama with a twist: the central characters have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves (“innies,” in the parlance of the show) from their home selves (“outies”). The Apple TV+ series is just the latest cultural offering to explore how the modern world asks us to compartmentalize our lives in increasingly drastic ways.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. The first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which aired in October of 1975, was a loose, scrappy affair. The sketches were experimental, almost absurdist, and the program was peppered with standup from the host, George Carlin, who freely addressed the hot-button issues of the day.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. A few years back, novels classed as “romantasy”—a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”—might have seemed destined to attract only niche appeal. But since the pandemic, the genre has proved nothing short of a phenomenon. Sarah J.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | With Vinson Cunningham |Naomi Fry |Alexandra Schwartz
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque and the mundane have influenced a generation of artists in his wake. Lynch conjured surreal, sometimes hellish dreamscapes populated by strange figures and supernatural forces lurking beneath wholesome American idylls.
