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 artfully conveying—and critiquing—flavors and aromas for an audience. Before that, she was a fashion writer and model, cultivating her own sense of what’s worth wearing and seeing. And she isn’t done evolving: she’s recently begun performing standup comedy, an art form with a notoriously steep learning curve. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz talk with Lakshmi about the difference between discernment and pickiness, how travel has expanded her taste, and her approach to rendering judgement on TV. “I see my job as helping,” Lakshmi says. “I see my job as being the person in the kitchen who’s saying, ‘Does this need a little salt?’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Top Chef” (2006—)
“Taste the Nation” (2020-23)
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” (2009—)
“American Idol” (2002—)
“Project Runway” (2004—)
“Padma’s All American,” by Padma Lakshmi
“Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar,” by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker)
“Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (The New Yorker)
Dijon’s “Baby”
“Frankenstein” (2025)

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.

Horror movies are big business: this year, they’ve accounted for more ticket sales in the U.S. than comedies and dramas combined, bringing in over a billion dollars at the box office. And the phenomenon goes beyond a hunger for cheap thrills and slasher flicks; artists have been using horror to explore deep-seated communal and personal anxieties for centuries. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz, along with the New Yorker culture editor Alex Barasch, use three contemporary entries—“The Babadook,” “Saint Maud,” and “Weapons”—to illustrate the inventive filmmaking and sharp social commentary that have become hallmarks of modern horror. “In the past, the horror would be something external that’s disrupting a previously idyllic town or life. Now there's a lot more of: the bad thing has already happened to you,” Barasch says. “You already have a trauma at the beginning of the film—or even before the film begins—and then that is eating you from the inside, or trying to kill you, and you have to grapple with that.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Babadook” (2014)
“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
“Scream with Me,” by Eleanor Johnson
“Hereditary” (2018)
“The Substance” (2024)
“Saint Maud” (2020)
The “Saw” franchise (2004—)
“The Exorcist” (1973)
“The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” by Parul Sehgal (The New Yorker)
“Weapons” (2025)
“Barbarian” (2022)
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974)
“Get Out” (2017)
“Alien” (1979)
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
“Talk to Me” (2022)

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 that 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.

On August 7, 1985, five family members were shot dead in their English country manor, Whitehouse Farm. It looked like an open-and-shut case. But the New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake finds that almost nothing about this story is as it seems.

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