On paper, a thirty-three-year-old socialist would seem an unlikely contender for mayor of New York City. But Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proved compelling enough to make him the front-runner to lead the largest city in America. On the first in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes, Naomi Fry talks with her fellow staff writer Eric Lach about the surprising protagonist of this year’s mayoral race. Together, they contextualize Mamdani’s persona within a long history of New York characters, from Batman to Bill de Blasio, and consider the hold these narratives have on observers within the city and beyond. “The history of New York City mayors is not a litany of successes and heroes. It’s mostly fuck-ups and rogues,” Lach says. “Often, it’s this tug-of-war between the machine and the reformer.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

Zohran Mamdani’s “Uganda Miss Me! (But I’ll Be Back Soon)”
“Gangs of New York” (2002)
“The Gangs of New York,” by Herbert Asbury
“Low Life,” by Lucy Sante
“Serpico” (1973)
“The Dark Knight” (2008)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Two weeks ago, when Paramount cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” insiders in Hollywood and Washington alike deemed the move suspicious: Colbert had just called his parent company’s payout to Trump a “big fat bribe” on air. Paramount, for its part, claims that the decision was purely financial—Colbert’s show is losing forty million dollars a year. But both the political and economic explanations reveal how the landscape of late night has changed since Johnny Carson’s day. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider Colbert’s body of work and the state of the genre more generally, from the so-called late-night wars of the nineties through to the modern challenge of making comedy in a country where nothing feels funny anymore. “Late-night hosting is an art, but it’s also business. So, if your job is to get as many eyeballs on you as is humanly possible, what do you do?” Schwartz says. “It’s not easy to have fun with the news, as it is. And if you are having fun with it, something may very well be wrong.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Strangers with Candy” (1999–2000)
“The Daily Show” (1996–)
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” (2015–26)
“The Staying Power of the ‘S.N.L.’ Machine” (The New Yorker)
“Lessons from ‘Sesame Street’ ” (The New Yorker)
“The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” (1962–92)
“David Letterman’s Revolutionary Comedy,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“The Colbert Rapport,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“Carpool Karaoke” (2017–23)
“What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“After Midnight” (2024–25)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Ari Aster’s wildly divisive new movie “Eddington” drops audiences back into the chaos of May, 2020: a moment when the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, the rise in conspiracy theories, and political strife shattered something in our society. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz situate “Eddington” in the lineage of “the indigenous American berserk,” a phrase coined by Philip Roth in his 1997 novel “American Pastoral.” They consider an array of works that have tried to depict moments of social rupture throughout the country’s history—and debate whether the exercise is ultimately a futile one. “I think when you’re dealing with the realm of the American berserk, the big risk is getting the bends,” Schwartz says. “You're trying to describe a warping. So how do you not get warped in the process?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Eddington” (2025)
“Writing American Fiction,” by Philip Roth (Commentary)
“Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” by Tom Wolfe (Harper’s)
“American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth
“Natural Born Killers” (1994)
“Benito Cereno,” by Herman Melville
“The Bonfire of the Vanities,” by Tom Wolfe
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse” (1991)
“War Movies: What Are They Good For?” (The New Yorker)
“Sorry to Bother You” (2018)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.