The Soft Power of BTS

14:29Alexandra Schwartz:Was it sexier for you as well, Alex, than you anticipated? Well, I've been on a bit of a journey with this album, with Ari Rang, because before it was released, I had no idea that rap was a big thing for BTS. So I turned on this album and was very surprised to hear Body to Body. And I was like, oh, the rapping, where's my like sweet harmonies? Where's my like high floaty voice? How interesting. So I paused the album. We had screeners to this Netflix documentary, BTS The Return, which is a new release that's part of the whole album drop package. and because it shows the making of the album and creates the smallest modicum of drama around whether they're going to evolve as artists, whether they're going to reach this new maturity, and then the biggest theme of all, that they're going to really foreground Korean culture with the name Arirang for their album title that makes reference to this Korean, beloved Korean folks on Arirang.

15:30Suddenly I was like, oh, it has a narrative? Okay. that made it much more enjoyable for me, I think, than if I was just doing the music. And in that, I understand the bigger BTS project, which is, of course, not at all just about the tracks. It is about BTS as people and BTS and their journey and their gelling as a group and where they're going. I was, I kind of, I get what the bigger narrative is doing for it. Vincent, I want to hear what, let's get deeper into the album. I want to hear what your thoughts are.

15:59Alexandra Schwartz:Very curious. So it's interesting to, pop music is always where you go to see which sounds are still alive, what's still happening, and what from your personal history is still touching people. So we've talked a lot about Body to Body. Can I play the first couple strains of it? Please.

16:21Naomi Fry:I'm now thirsty to hear it. It's been too many seconds since your last hit. Yeah, it's been like an hour since I last listened.

16:43Alexandra Schwartz:So it's got these kitchen sink, almost almost go-go like sort of almost ambient drums. It sounds like it'd be played on a washboard and on a, you know, on pots and pans. it's got these for me very weekend like minor key wow bottom and of course it's sampling this this arirang song which for me it really is resonant right these guys who i agree their absence as we understand it is purely nationalistic in character purely connected to the state and all of a sudden a patriotic song and this is how they come back as people who have through what any young man of their age would have gone through, totally connected to the spirit of their country.

17:26Alexandra Schwartz:And here they come with this. And then the song does just explode into a, to me, very close facsimile of a pop song that I really like. Nelly Furtado's Promiscuous Girl.

17:38Naomi Fry:Oh, the Timbaland produced. It sounds like Timbaland.

17:54Alexandra Schwartz:You hear the bop.

17:56Naomi Fry:There you go. You already know. There you go.

17:59Alexandra Schwartz:So like that's good for me to know that the mid-2000s.

18:03Naomi Fry:Oh, yeah.

18:05Alexandra Schwartz:Timbaland. Oh, yeah. Bop, like that is still important to pop music. And all through this, I was listening for that. There are these haunting drums that sound like they were recorded in a big warehouse as one of the signature sounds of this album, which reminds me of recent Justin Bieber, his collaborations with the genius producer and singer Dijon. There's a lot just kind of swimming back and forth in this music. And I think it's interesting. A lot of people have said this. It's kind of split into two halves, the album. And I think swim is when it really turns on for me. Body to body notwithstanding.

18:45Alexandra Schwartz:Swim as we've talked about. I also like the song Normal. Do you guys remember this one?

18:49Naomi Fry:Yeah.

18:53Naomi Fry:I love this.

19:06Alexandra Schwartz:Moody, hard drums. Right. Vocals cutting through. I was like, this is when the album turned on for me. I was like, yeah, sing it. Yeah. It's not an album I'm going to listen to over and over, but I was like, I get how if I grew up with this group, this album would sound kind of like a breakthrough to me.

19:27Alexandra Schwartz:In a minute, we delve even deeper into the world of K-pop. Critics at Large from The New Yorker will be right back.

19:38Thank you.

20:08Chomanadi, British Vogue's head of editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

20:38building, challenging, and reshaping the future? Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Who is going to win control of Congress this November? And what is it going to mean for the final two years of Donald Trump's disruptive presidency? I'm Susan Glasser.

21:07Naomi Fry:I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. We host the Washington Roundtable on the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. We're following what key races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall. We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to the Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

21:39Alexandra Schwartz:All right, so we've been talking about Adi Dong, the new album by the boys, BTS. Another part of the release cycle for the album is a new Netflix documentary about the group. It's called BTS, The Return, and there was also a live stream concert also on Netflix. Did you guys catch one or either of those? I saw the doc. I've got thoughts. What did you guys see and what did you think?

22:03Naomi Fry:I found it very interesting. Like I found the documentary BTS to Return interesting in how it kind of like follows and doesn't follow the kind of conventional narrative of kind of a behind the scenes like making of an album documentary. Or just even not necessarily just making of an album but just like what it means to be in a band and kind of like let us glimpse behind the curtain. You know, there's a scene where they like all watch like, you know, old videos of them like in, you know, they started in 2013. Some of them were still teenagers. And they're like, they say, oh, you know, do you mean like you're a full man now?

22:48Naomi Fry:Look at you're a baby now or, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, they're all sharing this house in L.A. and while they're recording the album and they like go to the beach together, they're horsing around, they're like jumping in the pool, you know, they're doing all of this stuff. You see them in the studio like wearing like sweatsuits and, you know, not all dressed up like in their like, you know, best and so on. But there is something about it that feels like entirely abstract, you know, often K-pop stars from what I've read, you know, towards this episode. and just from watching this and kind of like, yeah, reading a little bit around it, are encouraged if not to full-on take a vow of chastity than to not reveal, you know, romantic relationships they might be having, etc.

23:37Naomi Fry:Now, these guys are like now in their early 30s, most of them, early to mid-30s. And yet there is this complete kind of disconnect from what it means to be a man in the world, you know? And so the romance part of it is just one part. It can also be family. It can also be friendships outside of the circle. Anything outside of the bubble of the BTS group and the making of this album. Those are kind of the broad strokes and it remains broad strokes.

24:08Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

24:09Naomi Fry:I want to know what you thought, Vincent. I mean, this documentary is psychotically boring.

24:15Alexandra Schwartz:Thank you. Nothing happens in it. The only interesting things are, number one, the extent to which they are open about the fact that this is a really kind of focus group process. And there are people who are not musicians coming into their studio and imposing prerogatives and demands on them. It should be global. Here's an idea about what the theme should be. And twice in the film, there is a nod to the fans. At the very beginning, they're out on the beach, and one of them is doing a sort of selfie-ish video. And we see cut to the voices of the fans being typed into some sort of—it's clear that they're live streaming.

24:59Alexandra Schwartz:It might be an Instagram Live. It might be something else like that. Similarly— My king.

25:06Naomi Fry:So cute. We love you. Yeah.

25:09Alexandra Schwartz:Later on, there's another moment where that happens. So, okay, we are getting this sort of intrusion from the outside, this sense of being watched. Some updates about, you know, some videos of them going away for their military service or coming back. But it is unbelievable the extent to which this hour-long documentary, nothing happens and nobody says anything beyond this is going to be hard. I hope it goes well. And that's it. It is like psychotically still and turgid and nothing happens and nobody says anything. Unreal. May I build on that? Yes. Okay. So I actually think that the total boringness of it is fascinating.

25:54I agree. Because the first thing that I understood while I watched this Dulles Dirt documentary was that some people, and by some I mean probably millions of them, are going to lap this thing up. They're going to go to this and they're going to study every single angle of everyone's face. They're going to try to see, oh, what was he eating? What video game is he playing in his downtime? because that whole culture of obsession is very, very much a part of pop culture in general and certainly of BTS. I learned a really interesting thing from our dear colleague and collaborator Alex Barish's piece about Chairman Bang who created BTS and created the label.

26:41This is a fantastic piece that I really recommend to everyone listening who wants to know more about this. It's called The K-Pop King and it was published in October of 2024. The whole thing about Chairman Bang is that he wanted BTS to have this more authentic communication with fans. They ran their own Twitter account. They were allowed to communicate with people. They were not kept in total isolation. That said, they were still supposed to be figures upon whom you could project every fantasy, which is the heart of this. So you see them, much like with the album itself, striking this note between vulnerability, a kind of calculated vulnerability.

27:14There's a lot of talk in the movie about how anxious they are that the songs won't come together. And that they won't pull this off. It also really prepped me to watch the Netflix live streamed concert. After every few songs, the group would pause and speak directly to the audience. And again, perform that kind of vulnerability.

27:41One said, I worried a lot before standing here. Seeing you all makes me so grateful and happy. And then another one said, hello, Army. Talking to you all right now, like, this makes me so choked up and grateful. Like, it was a real performance of this kind of emotion of nervousness, but relief upon return. There's a lot of that. And then I was listening more closely to the lyrics also. And the love expressed in these songs is for the fans, the BTS ARMY, and the relationship with ARMY. I just want to throw one other thing into the pot before I, you know, before I mic drop. Another BTS reference.

28:22Okay. Which is, speaking of these videos, I was watching the video for Swim, all these videos, and everybody in the comments is part of BTS Army, the huge fan base, showing up to try to make the videos go to a billion views, two billion views. And they're all working. They're working hard. They're ants at the ant farm. They're like, we got this, fam. Remember, don't keep streaming Swim. Don't do it on a loop because they're going to know. They're not going to count those views. Let's try to, you know, at the same time make Dynamite rack up more views and then come back. And so all of it is everyone cheering each other on in the views.

28:55And, yeah, I'm like, okay, am I ARMY now? Let me get this more views before I, like, have to tap my head and remember I'm frankly not ARMY.

29:05Naomi Fry:But it's a kind of triangulation, right? Right. In a way, being part of the army with with BTS as the you know, it's like they're talking. These people are talking to each other in the comments, essentially. And they're saying like like me and you are going to like promote him. I mean, not him, them. Yeah. There is something there's a kind of like relationality there as well. You know, I'm reading the Judy Blume biography now and there's a thing. The new biography by Mark Oppenheimer? By Mark Oppenheimer, yes, which I'm enjoying very much. And there's a thing about how Judy and her friend, when they were like in ninth grade or something, were dating the same boy.

29:50Naomi Fry:And they weren't jealous of each other. They would compare notes. They would be like, how many times did he kiss you on the date? How many times did he kiss you? You know, what was it like? Like, you know, they were kind of like relating to each other through this like, you know, this third thing of this guy who was like important. But like there was something about the creating of a community which was just as important like among, in this case, among the fans, among the army. it feels like Alex what you were saying about like army kind of talking in the comments and kind of like and saying oh he's so cute he's so beautiful you know but there is something a little

30:33Alexandra Schwartz:defanged about it it's interesting because if you think about previous manias or youth related manias um the sort of mid-century twins of like the beetles on one hand and the motown machine on the other and how those accompanied what now I guess sociologists call the invention of the teenager that there was a whole developmental area that needed to be defined you know all of a sudden there's there are labor laws and we can't treat children like adults and all of a sudden your teenage years had to be something had to have some content and some shape and some kind of um an arc a story to tell and music on the one hand and image making on the other think of like the jackson five think of um the early beatles um image had had a role to play and i think bts against the backdrop of that history is interesting to me because one of these new terms is called emerging adulthood and it's been sort of tracked neurologically where it's like the late teens up until almost your 30s is this new category of you know you're you might still there you might live you might live in a you might live in a big city and be sort of nominally independent but you're still there's still a kind of you know really identity creation finding a place in society is happening and it's really this is where it's so interesting to me that bts is the result of let's face it like a government the south korean government saying, we're going to invest in this in the way that, you know, old America invested in Hollywood and invest in K-pop and in this music and in the creation of these groups.

32:25Alexandra Schwartz:It's almost saying, if you were the most cynical read of it, it could be, no, we need to model this developmental bridge for a whole society. We're worried that the safe passage between childhood and adulthood is again imperiled. And so we need to we need to get some models in there for this.

32:44Naomi Fry:Make it safe.

32:45Alexandra Schwartz:And so that's why that's why it's so interesting to me, this whole thing of like this emphasis on anxiety and worry. Are we OK? And, you know, what if we almost like in the true patient analyst mode, we created a projecting screen? These kind of weirdly neutral, kind of almost bland figures onto which you could project your struggle to emerge into adulthood. and these guys are going to ferry you through their music, but also through their appearance in a certain way into this new phase of your life. Totally. That's so, Vincent, I think that is so interesting as a take. And I love it, I'm going with you, but there's one aspect that you didn't touch on of both the current K-pop moment and also the mid-century moment in the creation of the teenager, which is, of course, as a commercial proposition.

33:38Of course.

34:08I guess because they went to concerts together, they understood, they were in community together. No, no, no, no, no, no. What about all the crazy conspiracy theories? What about Paul is dead? What about John Lennon getting assassinated in front of the Dakota in 1980? What about the super, super dark sides of fandom that came out there? And of course, the most stark difference, I would say, well before John Lennon's death, between BTS's reaction to its fandom and the Beatles' reaction to its fandom is that the fandom changed the Beatles. They changed the music. They changed the way the music was made.

34:42They pushed the Beatles into the studio. They stopped touring in 65. Exactly. They did not want to perform live. They were done with it. And they went into the studio and they went on a very, very different individual journey as artists and emerged at the end of the 60s utterly different than they had gone in at the beginning of the 60s. And that is one of the most fascinating like progressions from childhood to adulthood that I think we have on record, watching what happened between the Moptop era and 1970 when Let It Be comes out and the band breaks up. And what was interesting to me about some of the stuff we've been watching around BTS, and Vincent, you touched on this before, was how calculated this sense of evolution needs to be.

35:25They keep saying in the documentary, we want to show that we're more mature. We want to show a new side of ourselves. We want to express this musically, but also they really can't risk doing something that would be alienating. So this fan service thing, I did find myself watching them up on that stage thinking, are they going to be doing this at 45, at 50? Can they evolve past the boy band element? And what happens when inevitably they must?

35:58Alexandra Schwartz:in a minute how the korean wave swept the culture critics at large from the new yorker will be right back

36:17hi i'm nicole phelps global fashion news and features director at vogue and co-host of the Run Through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Belotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mao, head of editorial content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's head of editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

36:57I'm Jazzy Sefcek. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes.

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38:06Naomi Fry:I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. We host the Washington Roundtable on the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. We're following what key races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall. We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

38:39Alexandra Schwartz:It's hard to talk about BTS as we have been doing without this concept of the Korean wave. Many Korean cultural products have started to dominate the global landscape, whether you're talking about, as Nomi earlier did, skin care and beauty products. Plastic surgery. Whether you're talking about, yeah, plastic surgery or, I mean, food was a big one. The best part, by the way, of that documentary that we all didn't like that much, when they eat food, man, does it look good. And man, does it look like something that any one of my friends, Korean or not today, would lust after and go get. And it just seems to me so interesting to have culture play such an obvious and traceable role in the rising visibility of a nation and its culture.

39:33Naomi Fry:It's really interesting. I was thinking about it in comparison to, you know, myself coming from not America to America and living in America, but also experiencing it from that distance and kind of like lusting over it because of its, you know, this combination of like strangeness. It was in the culture I was born in, but also increasingly something becoming increasingly familiar because of its kind of cultural products, which were omnipresent and starting to understand how this might be happening with Korea now. And certainly if you're a younger person, if you're like a 12-year-old who has Instagram and listens to music and watches Netflix and all of that, you might think, oh, this is where I want to be.

40:28Naomi Fry:Like this is something like I want to learn Korean. I want to go there to visit. The idea of kind of like a suddenly ascendant cultural primacy and wanting to be part, I think, of kind of a winning team, right? Especially, I think, because in America, everything is fucking collapsing. And you feel like it's just like we are losers now, you know, like, I mean, America is, of course, still like an incredibly powerful world power. But like everything is collapsing. And then you see this like, again, I've never been to Korea. I don't know actually what it's like to be there on the ground. But seemingly things are working.

41:10Naomi Fry:It seems orderly and clean. You know, like.

41:15Alexandra Schwartz:The government supports the arts.

41:16Naomi Fry:The government supports the arts. It's like, oh, I would like to. I'm literally amazed to hear you say this. Like, I think this is just a sign. I'm sorry to interrupt. But I'm astonished and amazed because to me it is such a sign of how well the soft power is working that you're saying that. No, of course. No, no, no, no. No, I know. I'm not like. No, no, I'm not saying you don't. I came up with this myself. with no investment from the Korean government. I'm not saying that. I'm just thinking this myself with no connection to anything. No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying, no, that's not what I mean.

41:49I mean, it's just like the logical expansion that you're doing, which makes total sense about like, it seems orderly. We live in a mess and our own society is collapsing. And it's like, the former president was sentenced to life in prison last month in South Korea. I'm ventriloquizing. No, but I'm not coming at you at all. No, me like saying like, I can't believe it. I'm just saying like, they did well. They did well because when your president tries and fails to impose martial law and then goes to prison for life and we're all here jamming to BTS and being like, let's visit. I want to get bat mitzvahed again to go to Seoul, frankly.

42:26Like it's working wonders. It's working wonders. It also makes me think about like there is so much pressure on these guys. There is an enormous amount of pressure. There is national pride pressure. There's an enormous amount of economic pressure. We were just this morning, as we were prepping the show, sent this headline that the agency behind BTS, their shares have dropped because the comeback show's turnout fell short. They have a huge power that you feel the weight of this on their shoulders. And so to balance that kind of economic and cultural weight is very fascinating. And that's what I saw in the live show.

43:06I saw these guys coming out there and saying, we want to show you a new side of ourselves, but also let's check in with you. How are you doing? And that's when I saw when they had female singers singing Arirang behind them, dressed in traditional Korean clothing. There was a real national pride moment. And I sitting in New York City with no personal connection to South Korea, I'm tearing up. I'm like, oh, the culture, you know, it's like the authenticity of it, the strains of the folk ballad. And so that's just it's there's a lot. There's a lot on these guys shoulders.

43:42Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Wow. Am I army? I don't know. But I might be starting to be army for them. I mean, speaking of what's on the shoulders, I know that you guys were sharing a reading of K-pop demon hunters that has a lot to do with this kind of. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This fan induced pressure. Yeah, and K-pop Demon Hunters, which I watched over the weekend, turned, by the way, to look at my husband who had sort of grudgingly decided to sit for this. Man, was he enthralled.

44:09Naomi Fry:Was he really? Oh, was. I watched alone. There was refusal in my house to participate. Living and breathing it. Wow. Living and breathing it, loving it, running around singing all the songs. I'm watching him have a huge emotional reaction to this. But there's this constant underbeat, which I found very sinister in the movie, where every time this trio, this pop star trio is about to take a break, they immediately decide they want to go back to work. They just can't not work. And there are plot mechanisms for it, but the underlying thing is for the fans. We're doing it for the fans. And I'm thinking about figures like Elvis, Britney Spears, for whom that pressure, among other things, but the pressure to perform for the fans, to be someone for the fans, to also stay the same forever, I think, in both of those cases.

44:58Elvis, speaking of the army, you know, Elvis goes into the army, comes back changed, physically changes a lot. Brittany, of course, like forced into this really sexualized role as a young teen and not really allowed to grow out of it in the public eye. Like for the fans can be very, very damaging way to live your life.

45:21Naomi Fry:There's a really interesting thing happening now with Chapel Rhone. I'm sure you guys have seen where she's constantly chafing against the expectation that she will be present for her fans. Like when she's out and about, you know, like the paparazzi are taking pictures of her. She's coming out of a car on her way to a restaurant or like whatever. And she turns her camera on them and is like, don't, you know, I'm a person. I'm a person. You're like treating me like an animal. So it's a whole she's like incredibly annoying. Like she is absolutely like insufferable to me in her kind of like refusal to contend with the fact that, yeah, she is a very, very successful, very famous woman now.

46:05Naomi Fry:And people are going to notice her when she goes outside. You know, people are going to take her picture probably. You know, she's a public figure like. But, but at the same time, yes, it is a whole lot of pressure. Like it is a nightmare. Like when you are a very, very successful, famous person, you're kind of like in a fishbowl of surveillance and attention. And that has broken many over the years.

46:31Alexandra Schwartz:And the being broken is the part that is inefficient for capital. And it's interesting because, of course, you know, as we've mentioned, part of the conceit of the whole group was we're going to give our fans a lot of access through Twitter, through videos, et cetera, through all this content. And on some way, yeah, maybe it's you could imagine it as propaganda for the South Korean state. You could imagine it as a way to circumscribe an emerging adulthood as we have. But also it can be thought of as in organizing the previously messy thing that is hugely huge pop celebrity. It's saying, no, we're going to bring in the uncertainty of the pop star into our understanding.

47:16Alexandra Schwartz:We're going to present that as a product as well. And on some level, therefore, tame the last remaining big problem with this kind of star, which is they burn out. They get angry and everybody sees past the facade for various reasons. We're going to, you know, by making that part of the show, we can sort of more efficiently, tamely present this show and keep it going for longer.

47:41Naomi Fry:It's like a vaccine, right? So you inject a little bit of the poison.

47:45Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

47:45Naomi Fry:So it's like, oh, we're going to say like, oh, we feel stressed. Oh, we're not sure how we're going to do this. We don't want to disappoint, et cetera. But, of course, there's a whole – there must be – we're talking about people. There must be a whole other level of mess. Of course.

47:59Alexandra Schwartz:We've talked about these suicides. Yeah, exactly. Right. The suicides in the industry. And especially there was a very famous case of Jong-un, who's a man from a different K-pop group. But I'm thinking particularly of Sully and Guhara, two women who dealt with crazy misogynistic abuse, just fan abuse. So, yeah, scary stuff when reality meets these fantasy ideals. And a lot about this, like, again, going back to our beloved Alex Barish's piece about Sherman Bang, a lot of it reminded me of the news cycle that we have now around AI companions. and people like these AI companions becoming increasingly realistic, increasingly visually realistic.

48:50You can kind of FaceTime with one or chat with one. You can constantly be texting with one. And of course, the BTS stars are not that at all. They're not going to, you can't FaceTime them and sum them up. But there is enough out there that you almost can. You can go to a lot of the cultural output and kind of, even as I was prepping for the show, I was amazed at how many tabs I had open just, oh, I'm just brushing my teeth, watching the concert, and I'm putting on my clothes, and I'm watching a press conference they gave, and I'm watching the documentary. And there is an element of AI companionship, I think, by sanding down some of the rougher edges of what it means to be an individual.

49:28Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, well, you can pay the DM musicians. I mean, I think you get an auto reply. On Weverse, right? On the app Weverse. On Weverse, right. So there's a whole app for doing this. So there's like this. It's like the final frontier, whether either the corporation or the state or whatever, the managing interest can can step into that. And this is something we've talked about all the time. Celebrities don't need to go talk to journalists anymore. They can do it by Instagram. This sort of further privatization even of this sort of mediatory, what we call parasociality, if that can be monetized and organized, it really is the final frontier of the pop star.

50:10Alexandra Schwartz:And I think this is kind of a new technology. This band is not just, you know, they're not just the exemplary form of something. They are a development of it in a way that is, yes, unnerving, but also really interesting. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. and it all just brings us back to the music.

50:32Naomi Fry:Yeah, and it's a very intimate thing to listen to someone whisper in your ear or a croon in your ear, whatever, rap in your ear.

50:38Alexandra Schwartz:I just wanna laugh. La-la-la-la-la-la-la.

50:42Naomi Fry:Swim, swim.

50:44Alexandra Schwartz:Waterfall and all of your skin. Swim, swim.

50:49Naomi Fry:I could spend a lifetime watching you. Swim, swim.

50:56Alexandra Schwartz:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy, with music by Alexis Quadrado. We'll be back in your feeds next week, and in the meantime, you can always find our episodes at newyorker.com slash critics.

51:34Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Runthrough Podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Belotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mal, head of editorial content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's head of editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

52:16Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy-brand with it. Right, we take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

52:44Naomi Fry:We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

52:47Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture. Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

52:52Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry. From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights. Great expectations to Desperate Housewives.

53:02Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun. It's Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

53:07Naomi Fry:Every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Who is going to win control of Congress this November? and what is it going to mean for the final two years of Donald Trump's disruptive presidency. I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. We host the Washington Roundtable on the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. We're following what key races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall. We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to the Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

53:46Thanks for the best of all!