Our Modern Glut of Choice

10:41Vinson Cunningham:that is odd but this is the thing even choosing to continue with your unmodified face or body is now a choice. It's a choice.

10:49Naomi Fry:It's a choice. It's like a choice that has like ideological baggage with it.

10:54Vinson Cunningham:Can I give you a more basic one? Of course. Grocery shopping. Yes. Olive oils. Hmm. Which one to select? Cottage cheeses. There are quite a few. Breads. Don't even get me started with the breads. Breads.

11:05Naomi Fry:Oh, my God. So many breads.

11:06Vinson Cunningham:And then, and I say this, and you know, like everyone else, I'm talking about how annoying this is, but if I don't have my special choice there, I'm very frustrated.

11:13Alexandra Schwartz:Nobody wants the one.

11:15Naomi Fry:Fashion. Totally. And I just read this article, I believe it was on the cut, about micro trends and how there's too many trends, right? That the mob wife aesthetic, the clean girl aesthetic, the, you know, just like the rocker chick aesthetic. And these things cycle so, so swiftly in and out that the article was making the point that like enough with this glut, enough with this glut. Can we just choose our style and stick with it? Like, why do I suddenly have to like slick my hair back and wear like doorknocker earrings and a fur coat? because, like, Instagram or TikTok has decided that now we're dressing like, you know, Michelle Pfeiffer and married to the mob circa, like, late 80s, you know?

12:02All right, so here's what I want to know.

12:04Vinson Cunningham:Does this feel like a recent thing to you? Because some of the things we're talking about have been with us for a while, but I do think there is a sense that all of this choosiness in modern life has sped up. So is this recent? What do you guys think? I think that it has accelerated drastically alongside certain technological advancements.

12:30Alexandra Schwartz:I mean, the advent of streaming is, you know, you go from you can you can see what Blockbuster has to perhaps you could see any movie in the history of movie making. You could go to your local. I mean, the saddest one for me is having grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and gone to the Tower Records at Lincoln Center like like it was a church. Or now you can go on Spotify. And again, what in the whole history of music making? Would you like art song today or yesterday's new hip hop? Just getting on the train and deciding what to listen to, as I often do, can take half the subway ride.

13:08Alexandra Schwartz:So I think technology has advanced it. But fundamentally, at least in my childhood, this has been the underwriting presented as a good. What we're describing is the American dream. Yeah.

13:22Naomi Fry:I mean, I remember, you know, going to get a little bit personal here. As you guys know, and probably a lot of listeners know, I didn't I didn't I mostly did not grow up in the States. I grew up in Israel and I would come to the States starting in the 80s because of my dad's job intermittently. And Israel, I mean, much can be said about Israel. But in terms of kind of like the economic system in the 80s, the American idea of choice and capitalism certainly hadn't reached Israel. And so the glut was kept at bay. Let's put it this way. Whether it was cultural products, where it was like actually physical products, like I went to the school in my neighborhood, there wasn't a choice about that.

14:10You know, all of these things that when I would go to America would be very different.

14:16Naomi Fry:You know, I mean, even just the ability to pick up fast food. Like the first McDonald's opened in Israel, I think, and I think it was like 1992, maybe. And so, you know, that's kind of crazy if you think about it. And so for me coming to America in the 80s, that was what America was about. It was like, oh, my God, I can actually go to the store, go to the mall, the mall, which we didn't have in Israel when I was growing up, the mall, so many stores, so many department stores, stores within stores, being able to you know there's more than one type of thing you know you can choose a sweater from this brand or from that brand you know it was just like tv the channels yeah you know i mean good god it was like revelatory you know and so of course i think vincent what you're saying about the kind of the advent of technology the apps you know the streaming the the phone even the you know the advent of the iPhone.

15:21Naomi Fry:That's something that made a big difference, I think, in the acceleration of this whole, you know, phenomenon. But essentially, America was always choice.

15:36Vinson Cunningham:Yes, we're sitting around here knocking a proliferation of choice. But at the same time, would you rather choose to have a king ruling you? Let's talk about history. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Choose to stick around.

16:02Alexandra Schwartz:Before we get back to the conversation, listeners, it's that time again. We're working on another I Need a Critic episode. We've come to really love this series because it gives us a chance to hear from you.

16:15Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah. You all know the drill at this point. But for anyone who doesn't, don't fear. All you have to do is record a voice memo on your phone with a specific cultural question that we can help you with. Maybe you're looking for the perfect book to read after you just had a baby and you have no attention span or time. Maybe you want to know whether book clubs are actually helpful. Maybe you want an example in media, the movies, what have you, of an actually happy relationship.

16:40Naomi Fry:I mean, who can tell really what you come up with? And we can't wait to find out. You've got questions. We've got answers. Hit us up. Send your voice memos, as always, to themailatnewyorker.com with the subject line critics. And now back to the episode.

17:02Vinson Cunningham:We've been talking about the glut of choice in modern life, the sense that everywhere you look, you have so many options to choose from and a kind of overwhelm, a choice overwhelm with all of these selections that we have to make just to get through the day. So I wanted us to dig into a new book that gets at this exact topic, and it's called The Age of Choice, A History of Freedom in Modern Life. It's by Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. I am just going to spoil it for a sec. I love this book.

17:35Alexandra Schwartz:It's a good book.

17:36Vinson Cunningham:I really think this is a great book. I'm so into this book. Rosenfeld's a really good writer. She's a very good writer. So someone, give me the argument that she lays out in the book.

17:47Alexandra Schwartz:In many ways, through lots of wonderful examples, sort of anecdotal, technological, sweepingly historical, it actually makes a pretty simple argument, which is simply that choice was not always the sort of hallmark definition of freedom. That these were not sort of these ideas did not come into being at the exact same time. And that the fact that we now in much of the world equate almost choice and freedom is in fact a historical development. That it was not always, as she says, a doxa, D-O-X-A, an underlying, taken-for-granted ideology. It came into being and that this coming into being has certain consequences.

18:39Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, do you want to just give us a little bit of a sense of when it did come into being?

18:42Alexandra Schwartz:Well, what I like about the age of choice is that it is not totally dogmatic about causes. It does not say here is the beginning of choice as freedom. She does, though, start us in a really beguiling and sort of interesting place with a. . . Are you going to talk about Mr. Cock? I'm going to talk about Christopher Cock.

19:03Naomi Fry:Mr. Cock! It's Mr. Cock. It's Mr. Cock! The unfortunately named Mr. Cock.

19:08Alexandra Schwartz:Yes, who did not invent the auction, but did, in sort of updating the auction, making it sexier and cooler to his London audiences between the 1720s and the 1740s, did sort of invent shopping.

19:26Vinson Cunningham:Yes, yeah.

19:26Alexandra Schwartz:So he had an auction house that, first of all, was delimited in space, only certain, as he said, choice items could appear there. And so Rosenfeld has fun distinguishing choice as we know it, you know, selecting among many options. But also the secondary and a little bit more archaic definition of choice, meaning high value within a certain larger sort of gallery of choices. I brought you only the choice items and you can choose among this choice group. And he put out pamphlets, books of what's there, when you can come and look at the items before the auction and kind of brings this ethic of perusal before choice.

20:14Alexandra Schwartz:What we call shopping, which ends in the mall, as Nomi was talking about, really invents this activity. The fact that shopping could be invented is just like a thrilling notion.

20:27Naomi Fry:I could really kind of like, I could feel it like wetting my appetite, which is crazy. Did you wish that you could pay a visit to Mr. Cox Warehouse? Yes. Of course, me too. Yes, because I love it. It really reminded me of me like even going to a junk shop. I love junk. I love going to like an antique store that's like really junky and being like, oh, my God, what is this disgusting thing? But maybe I like it. You know, it's just like that that thing that Rosenfeld pinpoints is, you know, and she makes also the larger point, I think, in the in the book that women, the category of woman has often been overlooked as a defining animating element in this rise of choice as as a kind of like marker of individual freedom.

21:20Naomi Fry:Right. Through, for one, things like shopping. You know, she talks about Jane Austen and how, you know, the kind of like activity of choosing between muslins, which is, again, something I love. Like I just love, you know, I I love to choose between muslins. Yeah. I love to choose between muslins. Calicos. Calicos. And I love to read about choosing between muslins. It's just like so there's something so pleasurable about it. And Rosenfeld makes the argument that this is something that was absolutely imperative to the kind of rise of the new individual, the new free individual, you know, based on that individual's choices in the marketplace.

21:59Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, you guys are getting at so much of what is really interesting about the story. We're talking about the consumer element of the story and there are other elements, which I want to bring in in a second. But, right, this idea that suddenly you have marketing. You have these two sides of an exchange. You have the creation at the same time of the shopper and of the seller. No longer are you just going to the dry goods store and saying, I need, you know, three bales of cotton or whatever. I guess it wouldn't be bales. Three reams. I don't know what the relevant unit was. And bartering or maybe taking something on credit or the guy goes to the back to see what he has.

22:33Vinson Cunningham:No, now these beautiful things are laid out for you to see. And suddenly your taste comes into it. The idea that people even have taste, that you can distinguish yourself. in a certain way, while, of course, many other people are distinguishing themselves in exactly the same way by getting similar things. But again, she's talking about a kind of glut of options that are there from the beginning of this really heightened period of commercial activity in England in the late 18th century, basically, which only continues with colonialism and access to more goods from elsewhere. One thing I thought was really interesting that I didn't know about before, which Rosenfeld returns to a lot, is this idea of the choice of Hercules.

23:15Vinson Cunningham:Had you guys come across that before?

23:17Alexandra Schwartz:No. I could recognize it in literature, literary tropes, but she explains it in a way that is so paradigm-shifting, sort of.

23:28Vinson Cunningham:The choice of Hercules is this ancient Greek parable about Hercules being offered a choice between vice and virtue and really becomes a motif increasingly in popular culture, according to Rosenfeld, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The choice is obviously supposed to be towards the path of virtue. Which choice will you make? And something that I thought was really interesting that's connected to this that Rosenfeld goes into is the history of choice in religion and in Christianity specifically. There does come to be this idea in post-Reformation Europe that actually people should be able to choose among competing religious practices and conclude which is the right one and which is the best one.

24:13Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. What Rosenfeld does so well is give the age of choice and its acceleration certain partners. One is Protestantism. The other, to Nomi's point, is a certain kind of woman who is adjacent to privilege, who has certain advantages, but is constrained in her choices. And finally, this is what I love about this book, the form of the novel is brought in. She calls the novel the art form par excellence of the age of choice. That the crises of choice that characterize the novel, who to marry, who to love, what to buy, where to live, that these are artistic renderings of a whole sort of change of epoch.

25:02Naomi Fry:But she doesn't present this notion of freedom, individual freedom equated with choice as totally unproblematic. Right. To the contrary. To the contrary. Certainly not.

25:17Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. By revealing that this and this is really maybe the deeper argument by revealing that this is not natural, that this idea that choice equals freedom is not just an idea descended from the heavens or whatever. She can therefore look at certain contemporary phenomena talking about maybe the framing of abortion rights as choice as opposed to something like justice. You know what I mean? The current framing of certain areas of our current life can therefore be re-problematized. We can say this is not the only way to talk about these issues.

25:55Naomi Fry:Right. Yeah. Specifically with abortion, she, from my understanding, would like to see it as a kind of more essential right rather than just a kind of like, oh, I can, you know, I can choose just like I choose Calico. This should be kind of a more essential right that doesn't depend on kind of like the whims, say, of the market or the whims of the consumer, which I thought was really interesting. And she also kind of brings up this idea of like what we call choice feminism, you know, the kind of like, oh, yeah, I can I can choose feminism is about being able to like, oh, I want to be like whatever it is.

26:38Naomi Fry:Like I want to be like an Instagram influencer who is, you know, objectifies herself, you know, and that is what it means to me to be kind of like an untethered, free individual. Right. Like, is that kind of like an essential thing? You know, is that necessarily justice? You know, if we use kind of like a more essential term to kind of like making choices.

27:02Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. And with this ideology, she points out, comes the rhetoric, too, of personal responsibility. The way we understand not just social behavior, as in choice feminism, but social outcomes. If you are poor, is it perhaps because you made bad choices? Absolutely. So the language of economic redistribution, whether to or not a kind of punitive libertarianism hinges on this, again, this doxa, this bedrock belief that everything has to do, even the outcomes in our lives have to do with choices. And because we are such free, unfettered individuals, it therefore becomes sort of not our responsibility to sort of, as she talks a lot about, choice, choice, choice makes it harder and harder to really figure in your mind what it means to act collectively for the benefit of the whole.

27:57Naomi Fry:Absolutely. And, you know, it makes me think again about your health care example where it's like, oh, I have all of these choices. Yeah, but even the choices you have under the system are given to you because you have managed to achieve a certain status in society, a certain standard of living. You know, as we know, health care is not something, you know, universal and freely given just because you are a person. So even getting to the point where you can make a choice is a political thing.

28:35Vinson Cunningham:Well, that's why I think this tension, which is in Rosenfeld's book, but it's also just in the nature of choice making in general is so interesting, which is the tension between choice as an individual process by which we make decisions about our own lives from the very banal, like what you're going to wear on a given day, to the huge, like what health care your kid is going to have or where they're going to go to school or whatever it might be. But also choice is a collective phenomenon. Like we are all sitting in a country right now that came about as a result of the idea of people choosing their own form of government.

29:09Vinson Cunningham:That's no small thing. And we can poke as many holes in that as we should about who is entitled to choose. But, you know, reading Rosenfeld got me thinking about the Federalist Papers. And I went back to the Federalist Papers. Beautiful. There you were, going Hamilton mode. Yeah, I was going Hamilton mode. I was just, you know, and Madison, please don't forget him. Madison. And John Jay, you know, got to just cite the trio there. And I was having a little glance at Federalist No. 1. And you get right there. it has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country by their conduct and example to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

29:59Vinson Cunningham:And that is so interesting to me, the idea just at its most basic level that choice is itself a revolution and that its alternatives are accident and force. Like, if you hear those things as a choice, which of course is what they're cannily doing in Federalist One, presented to you today, who among us is not choosing choice? As Charlotte York says on Sex and the City, as of course Vincent Cunningham, well-known watcher of Sex and the City, knows, I choose my choice.

30:26Alexandra Schwartz:Yes.

30:30Vinson Cunningham:It feels today like the choices are endless, but do we actually have access to as many options as we think we do? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

30:57Vinson Cunningham:So we've been talking about the really interesting history of choice, even becoming a thing to contend with in modern life, and how choice eventually comes to me more and more conflated with the idea of freedom, that the more choices you have, the more you are able to exercise your freedom to choose between them. And what I'm wondering is, do we actually have as much choice as we think we do? Because I'm not seeing always such great choices. It's the same thing as what you were saying, Nomi, about, you know, this seems like a trivial example, but I do think it can stand in for a lot of different examples in modern life.

31:33Vinson Cunningham:the Netflix slop. Yeah. The just kind of unwatchable, uninteresting, seemingly algorithmically fashioned, not even really intended to be paid attention to

31:45Naomi Fry:stuff.

31:47Vinson Cunningham:Okay, great. I can choose between many, many, many of these options, but when I am presented with that choice, the act of choosing itself just feels very impoverished.

31:59Alexandra Schwartz:One of the to return briefly to Rosenfeld, one of her most sort of paradoxical and interesting arguments is that sometimes a big proliferation of choice is there precisely to mask deeper disparities of choice. You know how somebody says, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu kind of thing? Sometimes choice comes into play when someone else is being chosen, not doing the choosing. So she, at the same time as she shows the innovation of the posters of Mr. Cock, she shows how similar they are to the posters for slave auctions, you know, choice individuals that you can buy, chattel. And so, so often the language of choice is precisely about force.

32:46Alexandra Schwartz:Force is underneath the seeming choice.

32:49Naomi Fry:Yeah. And I think another point or another aspect of like maybe we don't have as much choice or as free choice as we think we do is you know the classic example of like the different algorithmic bubbles that we live in right I mean x nay twitter is is you know a case in point um where you know it used to be when it was still Twitter that all you would see was your kind of like your kinfolk, you know, all saying kind of like pretty similar things. Right. Then Elon came in. Now I'm getting now I see a lot of like sort of Nazi adjacent stuff. You know, I mean, it's not funny, but I'm like, oh, wow, this is, you know, I thought I had free.

33:40Naomi Fry:I thought I was like surfing merrily along. I mean, I didn't really, But that is kind of like the illusion you work under. And now I'm like, oh, now the choice looks totally different. In both cases, these things were decided not by myself, but by someone else, by a mechanism outside of myself. So that seemingly free choice to click on whatever tweet or, you know, and like engage with it as one will is, in fact, totally predetermined. And it's kind of that's pretty dark, I guess. Yeah. It kind of brought it home to me.

34:21Vinson Cunningham:I guess I just feel that there is a way in which choosing and being required to choose so often is itself something that has been chosen for us. I'm thinking of an article I recently read in the New York Times about people who were confronting their own self-diagnosed, basically, shopaholicism, shopaholism. People who felt that they were unable to stop making purchases online because they were presented with so many options all the time. They were getting the alerts from the brands that they had signed up for to get the discount code. Stuff that is really, really rote and basic in our society.

34:58Vinson Cunningham:We all know what it is to be bombarded by the, you know, get 15 percent off on whatever today. And going on Amazon or going on any of these, which, you know, I find it ironic. I'm sure I'm not the only one that Amazon is itself the choice, this huge megastore, which seemingly presents all these different options. It's just this one monolith that we're purportedly choosing. But are we really? There it is. And everyone is drawn to it like a magnet. But I was reading this article because there was that boycott. Did you guys look into this at all the other week? It sort of seemed to hit various social media feeds.

35:37Naomi Fry:Sort of anecdotally, there was like a kind of a cute cartoon type thing where it was like they would know Amazon.

35:44Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it was a boycott that was called for, I think, February 28th to not shop at Amazon or other big box stores. The idea, right, was to have an economic blackout. Show them our power if we choose not to choose. Yes. I bring it up because it seems to have created for certain people an awareness around how much of their choosing was really involuntary. And how much just going through the day has meant deciding you need something, deciding you want that. I'm thinking about want and need a lot lately because my two-year-old confuses the words. So, you know, I need green grapes is a phrase that's often.

36:21Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. And it's like you do feel you need them. But I guess part of the point is as one grows older, you're supposed to be able to distinguish between those things. And yet a society with a glut of choice doesn't want you to, I guess is where I'm coming out on this. Doesn't want you to distinguish between want and need.

36:35Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. And, you know, speaking of the how technology accelerates and sort of inflects this ethos of choice. The new technology makes it so that you kind of sort of do need to at least interact with the field of choice. You have to eat. It's just a question of therefore mechanisms that we build in. And now where all of these choices are presented on the very same interface, the phone, where you kind of do all of your other urgent functions, it has sort of twin want and need in this way where you kind of – they become increasingly hard to parse.

37:20Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, Nomi, you were talking about how Mr. Cock, the originator of shopping, the auctioneer with flair, ends at the mall. Well, no. Mr. Cock ends on our phones. We all have Mr. Cock in our pockets.

37:33Alexandra Schwartz:Don't we ever.

37:34Vinson Cunningham:I'm so sorry. Some of us more than others.

37:38Alexandra Schwartz:If he's reaching the pocket, it's a crisis. But go ahead.

37:42Vinson Cunningham:I was committed to bringing up Mr. Cock as many times as possible in this episode as I humanly can. I love commerce and the pleasure of commerce, by which I mean just walking down a street, popping in, popping out, browsing, speaking to someone. And yeah, I understand why people, including me, shop on Amazon. Of course, I get it. Absolutely. But I do think there's a kind of human impoverishment in the world of choice being moved to the digital realm, just like there is with many other kinds of human activity. You know, do I wish that I was browsing my muslins in person? Yeah.

38:23Naomi Fry:I mean, this all brings to mind for me the pandemic, the early pandemic, when, as all of us may recall, you know, we couldn't really – we barely left our houses. Certainly everything was closed. All the stores were closed. Bookstores were closed. and we would walk around the neighborhood in Bed-Stuy and people, you know, would put out books as they often do. And usually like when you pass that sort of, I always look because I love junk. I love the tactility of things left behind. This was like super jackpot. I would be like, oh my God, which book can we choose to take home and read? The stores are closed.

39:09Naomi Fry:And I kind of, I can't say I missed this. It was awful, obviously, But there is something about that, Alex, to your point, where I'm just like, okay, the choice, the funnel was, you know, the funnel was funneling. There wasn't that much to choose from. And in some ways, not to, again, romanticize a really bad time, but it made one more grateful for what you could kind of discover.

39:37Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, before you were describing a kind of choice burnout.

39:41Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

39:41Vinson Cunningham:I don't want to choose. You choose for me. There's just too much stuff, too many things to have to select from. Scarcity can make choice seem more precious.

40:23Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Sure. But also as the member of a society, like a kind of during the pandemic, part of this was your choices were limited by a certain kind of maybe it was a return a little bit to the Hercules choice. It was, yes, I can be I can order something and make somebody else leave their house and do all these things for me and live like a prince and be an asshole. Or I can get up and go to the grocery store that the that the conception of the self had widened just a little bit. But, you know, do I make my neighbor sick? Do I not? Do I expose someone else to outdoors? Do I not? The self as being not just a site of individual choice, this very bracketed notion of liberty, but also as like someone who can in a way help his or her neighbors, you know, and this being an important function of selfhood.

41:20Alexandra Schwartz:When all you do is choose, choose, choose, self, self, self, what you end up is by yourself. What it is is loneliness. And so it's like about putting yourself with people, again, seems to be one of the perhaps like salves for what is being described here.

41:38Vinson Cunningham:Amen. As George Costanza said, we live in a society and now you've heard it from Vincent Cunningham too.

41:43Alexandra Schwartz:We ought to.

41:44Vinson Cunningham:We ought to. Yeah, we ought to make choices that are for the greater good, such as vaccinating one's children against measles, dare I say. Definitely. Yeah. Well, I have one last question for my fellow critics, and it is this. What recommendations do you have for taking a break from choice, if you have any?

42:03Naomi Fry:These are tiny, small things. Of course. Lately, the Criterion Channel, which is, of course, another kind of organ of choice, right? One of the many apps that we have. Although a well-curated one. A well-curated one, to be sure. But they've started doing this thing called 24-7, where you just, much like an old-time TV or single-channel television, you click it, and then you just end up on whatever it is they're giving you. You don't need to choose anything. And they don't tell you what it is, even. You can like check online, but it doesn't even say, you know, in a little box like this is this or that movie.

42:49Naomi Fry:You know, we've been occasionally, you know, going to that and being like, let's see what they give us. Oh, my God. It's a movie with John Moreau from like 1961 that I've never watched. And I wouldn't have chosen probably had it been given to me in the lineup of choices. And that's kind of that's kind of nice. Yeah.

43:13Vinson Cunningham:Beautiful. I love it. Well, one aspect, one area in which I deal with choice a lot, both good and bad, is cooking. What am I going to cook? Oh, my God, I can't believe I need to eat again. I can't believe my child needs to eat again. But I will say, you know, I've often liked the whole CSA model, community-sustained agriculture, where you just sign up for a farm share and you get a box of vegetables and you don't know what's going to be in that box, and there they are. Lately, I've joined a fish share. Fish here? Yes. Oh, my God. It's run by the fish store Mermaid Garden in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

43:49Naomi Fry:Mermaid Garden.

43:50Vinson Cunningham:And I don't know what the fish is going to be from week to week. I find out on the Friday before I pick it up on the Saturday. And I trust the choosers, the fish curators.

44:00Alexandra Schwartz:Would you call these curators also mongers? They're mongers. Fish mongers?

44:03Vinson Cunningham:Oh, they're mongers.

44:04Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, God.

44:05Vinson Cunningham:They're mongering. They're curating. They're choosing. and I say just tell me what I'm cooking and I will show up and I will get my fish and I will cook it.

44:14Naomi Fry:Gosh, I love that. I love that. Going little house on the prairie mode. Bless a monger.

44:19Alexandra Schwartz:Get yourself a monger.

44:20Vinson Cunningham:Vincent?

44:21Alexandra Schwartz:Maybe in line with all we've just said about, you know, encounter, accident. You know what's a good way not to make choices? Is take a walk. I don't mean to be all touch grass about it, but whim enters the conversation once again. You don't have to decide a route. you go, you come back.

44:39Naomi Fry:Something that really helps is if you know that you're going to pass some windows that have cats in them.

44:43Alexandra Schwartz:I see. Cats.

44:45Naomi Fry:Just watching. Cat shopping. Window cat shopping. Window cat shopping.

44:55Alexandra Schwartz:This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby and Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music, and our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics. See you soon.