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Joe Rogan, Hasan Piker, and the Art of the Hang
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. But Rogan quickly proved adept at t…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
Critics at Large Live: The Right to Get It Wrong
In 1939, reviewing the beloved M-G-M classic “The Wizard of Oz” for The New Yorker, the critic Russell Maloney declared that the film held “no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.” The use…
Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago
Our Modern Glut of Choice
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…
Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago
How “The Pitt” Diagnoses America's Ills
“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 …
Published on 6 months ago
In “Severance,” the Gothic Double Lives On
“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”).…
Published on 6 months, 1 week ago
The Staying Power of the “S.N.L.” Machine
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 fr…
Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago
How Romantasy Seduces Its Readers
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 …
Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago
David Lynch’s Unsolvable Puzzles
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 …
Published on 7 months ago
The Splendor of Nature, Now Streaming
In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough…
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
The New Western Gold Rush
Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the era. In the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” John Wa…
Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago