Why Earnestness is Everywhere

15:51Vinson Cunningham:interested in the success of a show like love on the spectrum this series follows people on the autism spectrum. Hi, everybody. As they navigate the confusing world of relationships. I just need to work on responding before reacting. Like, what if he's not the one? And dating. Hello. Hi. What if he gives me a wedding ring? Staying in front of this church made me think I'm...

16:16Vinson Cunningham:My go-to is not dating shows. This is not an area that I'm particularly into. I'm not a bachelor, bachelorette person at all. And I think my antipathy towards it has to do with just a sense of how awful it is to put this particular experience under a microscope for the entertainment of millions. And then here enters a show like Love on the Spectrum, which by all accounts, this show is a total delight. And people love it. And I think the reason people love it is the earnestness of the subjects who are not in there to play a game or to launch a TV empire for themselves or to become a household personality that they can then further try to benefit from or profit off of in some way.

16:59Vinson Cunningham:But who are there to do the thing. Yeah. And the reaction this has gotten from audiences, I find very moving. It's almost too moving for me. And I really liked it. You know, when you think about dating shows, right, there is a boatload of cynicism and a lot of like, are you here for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons? And often it's for the wrong reasons. It's for fame. It's for money. It's to become an influencer, you know. And so there's a lot of cynicism specifically around that place of romance and love. And so something like Love on the Spectrum is quite different, quite refreshing.

17:39Alexandra Schwartz:but it's just you know watching people being vulnerable truly vulnerable where I'm looking at these people who are open in a way that's inspiring in certain senses but is also yeah very very vulnerable you know I was like I'm gonna cry every second you know what I mean it was too raw speaking of love and its portrayals on television we've already talked about this show, but you can't really pass over heated rivalry as a sort of site of a font of sort of earnest reaction among TV fans over the past couple of months. Just the yearning. The straightforward yearning that occurs in the show and sort of that it displaces onto its audience toward its characters.

18:29Alexandra Schwartz:I think. Yeah. Yeah.

18:30Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. We've talked about it. We could talk about it endlessly. I could. Everyone else would leave the room. Heated rivalry was— We'll leave you alone with your thoughts. Yes, leave me alone with the listeners and my thoughts. Heated rivalry was a mass catharsis event. I think we can see that clearly now in the blooming light of April, that in the depths of January, everybody needed to have this enormous catharsis. And yes, we've all talked about the yearning, but it was more than the yearning. It was about connection. And it was about a sense of connection being possible. And everyone's losing their minds, and everyone's crying, and everyone's filming each other crying to post it on Instagram.

19:05Vinson Cunningham:mass catharsis event. Earnestness, there it is.

19:12Alexandra Schwartz:When we're back, two new books that are examples of this trend in action. We're discussing Ben Lerner's novel Transcription and Fame Sick, the new memoir by Lena Dunham. Don't go away.

19:41Alexandra Schwartz:Before we move on, I think it might be salutary to stop and maybe make some definitions.

19:47Vinson Cunningham:Oh, I love that.

19:48Alexandra Schwartz:But what's earnestness? What are we talking about?

19:51Vinson Cunningham:Oh, what a good question. Yes, we're talking about earnestness being back. But I just want to acknowledge as we do that, that I do think it's a small reaction to the overwhelming sense that the people running things are cynics. liars and shit posters, both literal and figurative, and that everything is being done for profit, ironized to the point where there is no actual baseline of truth. And this earnestness is in a response to that, to the dominant culture. So I think what we're seeing in this earnestness mode, some of these things we've talked about and more that we'll keep talking about, is an attempt to not succumb, I think, to some of that and to try to get at the truth and not to just coat over it or go along with it or concede to it with cynicism.

20:43Vinson Cunningham:Saccharin is something else. Saccharin is everything is great. Never fully dressed without a smile. Here we go. Saccharin is lies. Telling lies. And so it actually is kind of the opposite of earnestness. There might be opposites.

20:57Alexandra Schwartz:That's right. Yeah.

20:58Vinson Cunningham:I think it kind of is. I think it's about relentless positivity. And I don't think earnestness needs to be about relentless positivity. But I think it is about trying to be clear about priorities for what matters. I think there's a lot of when you were just talking, Alex, and you were talking about like everything is great, Sakharin, let's, you know, smile and have a great time. It made me think about kind of the hijacking of sincerity by the corporation. The idea that let's all smile and be together, the kind of Disneyfication.

21:36Alexandra Schwartz:Have a Coca-Cola. And have a Coke. Just think about kind of the relentless kind of techno positivism of like, we're all going to be connected. Twitter will. It's like you can you can have a free exchange of ideas. Right. Facebook, we're going to connect the whole world. We're going to connect the whole world. You know, what could be more earnest than the professed goals of all of these hugely influential companies that have cropped up in the 2000s? reconnecting now with the idea of earnestness is different than, say, a moment like the Obama era or something, because we already know where some of these things have gone before.

22:23Like the evil places, if not evil, then certainly self-interested places that these promises have taken us before.

22:33Vinson Cunningham:Well, I have a question. Vincent, I have a question for you, because I do think when we think about earnestness, these things probably operate in cycles. We're, for us, in this room, because of our ages, and I think for a lot of people, the last real moment of this was the early Obama years. And you, as someone who both worked in the Obama milieu and also have famously written a novel dealing with the kind of called Great Expectations, just in case anyone doesn't know that. Thank you. dealing with some of the cynical underbelly of that time. How do you think about those years now, and how do you see them in comparison to what we're going through?

23:13Vinson Cunningham:Was that a spot of earnestness, or was that something different?

23:16Alexandra Schwartz:I think it was, and I think earnestness can take many different shapes, because it seems to me that earnestness is always a response. And I guess this is part of the technical nature of it. It seems to me that in the Obama era, there had been a really tough time in American public life before that. And here we are, a symptom of perhaps a better time, a phenomenon that was theretofore unprecedented in American history, the spectacle of a black president. So this might lead to many other great things. We saw a lot of cultural items all the way to the end of that cycle. you had these great expressions of, you know, really ardent emotion.

24:01Alexandra Schwartz:In 2016, at the end of that era, you see, like, Beyonce's Lemonade. Like, just things that are, you know, tough and strong, but really just forthright. That seems to be speaking to a culture in the balance and trying to push toward the light. I would say the last, the moment of earnestness before that was early Bush era. Weirdly, Iraq War era when you think about like twee. Early W. Bush? W. Bush. You think about like 03, 04, 05 when you have bands like Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service. Oh, this is my sort of college age twee for me.

24:43Vinson Cunningham:Like the Garden State soundtrack?

24:45Alexandra Schwartz:Garden State. You know, this moment that was like, you know, very. Yeah. Yeah. And that was that seemed to me almost like a dissociating response. Like the world is so bad and strange. When I hear the shins, I start sobbing now. Like you put on the shins. I'm like, were we ever so fucking young? That's it. Yeah. But I love that idea that it's total dissociation from reality. It was like post 9-11, no one really knows what to do with the political picture. And so it's like we're going to retreat to urban enclaves as a milieu and make either like uplifting or kind of sweetly sad songs and films.

25:29Alexandra Schwartz:Right. I think, you know, when you look at that as art as a response to especially political conditions, there's a lot to start to think about about now. So let's turn to two new releases in the literary world. We could start with Famesick, the new memoir by Lena Dunham. Nomi, would you like to do a synopsis of that text? Yes. So this is a memoir, and it traces her life from when she started working as a filmmaker, made Tiny Furniture and then was almost immediately picked up by HBO to create the series Girls that then ran for six seasons. She was 25, I believe, when the first season of Girls came out, so extremely young, and immediately became kind of a media sensation.

26:30and the book kind of traces her arc as she becomes very famous, very fast, very rich. And then as kind of her life basically collapses because of this like hyper focus on her as this figure that's supposed to represent the millennial woman. She also develops a lot of illnesses. She has endometriosis. She has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a lot of comorbidities. As she becomes kind of like the busier, the more famous, the more influential she becomes, she becomes sicker. And the book basically talks about this period in quite, you know, candid detail, I would say. It's a total page turner for me. I was very interested reading it.

27:26You know, one of the interesting things about it is that I think Girls was in a lot of ways a comedy. It was very comedic and it treated its protagonists. Sometimes it's kind of like the butt of jokes. and there is something about the tone in which this book is written, which I would say is quite earnest and maybe different than what we have come to expect from Lena Dunham in the earlier part of her career, at least, the kind of the part of her career that made her name initially.

28:01Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, to the point where I kind of started, I found myself taking notes when she made jokes because usually even in her prose writing, it is very kind of joke heavy and it really isn't happening here that thing there are parts that are funny in a kind of maybe heartwarming or contextual way but no straight up jokes here's something that really caught my eye she's talking about getting the first big check for riding the pilot of girls and she says it wasn't just the money which was life changing and would allow me not only to start a life outside the family home but buy some incredibly horrid separates And I laughed at that because it's the kind of like exercise and misdirection that kind of characterizes her best jokes.

28:44Alexandra Schwartz:But also I went paging back to be like, oh, wow, this is the first joke and I don't know how long. And that difference in texture really struck me.

28:54Vinson Cunningham:Do you guys think that earnestness is at odds with humor? We've been circling this question a bit. Like, Vincent, you were underlining the jokes because they seemed out of sorts. My instinct is to say, no, it's not, but also maybe it's at odds with the kind of humor that's trying to indicate that something isn't as serious as it is.

29:12Alexandra Schwartz:Yes. It's at odds with a certain kind of humor. And I think that Dunham will always—you could always see that there was a truth beneath her comedy, that there was a kind of relationship to reality, and actually that it was trying to figure something out, especially in that first season of Girls, which I think is really brilliant. But at the same time, I think the structure of her joking has always been a kind of like three card money where it hides the pain and the joke is the picking up of the cup and there's no pain under it. You know, like, you know, it's in there somewhere. But every time you say, no, it's right there.

29:47Alexandra Schwartz:There's the cup. And all of a sudden, nope, sorry. It's a deflection. This kind of really intricately woven act of deflection and displacement, et cetera. And so it's interesting. I think earnestness can coexist with comedy, but precisely the kind of comedy that she brought to the fore, I think is incompatible with the kind of earnestness that we're talking about. And so it's like she has to learn how to make a new kind of joke, which I do think happens in this text sometimes. And it's really interesting. And this is a concept that connects fame-sick with the next thing that we'll talk about, which is the book is precisely this flitting between here's how I became famous and here's how I became sick.

30:26Alexandra Schwartz:and in that way it is a kind of diagnostic text is the way. It's like looking at things and showing maybe where symptoms began. And that to me seems to be hovering over and kind of simmering beneath. Also, the next thing I want to talk about, which is Transcription, the new novel, the new kind of short but to me quite potent novel Transcription by Ben Lerner. Could you offer a synopsis of Transcription, Alex?

30:55Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. So Transcription is Ben Lerner's fourth novel, and in each of his novels, he's had a protagonist who sometimes is named Adam, who is basically a hymn-like figure. That person started out in his first novel leaving the Atocha Station as a young aspiring poet who was in Madrid in an arts fellowship and had a very callow way of operating in the world. And transcription may not literally be about the same character, though basically it is, but it's about that kind of person who's now in his mid-40s and at the start of the book is going to record an interview with a mentor, a big, important mentor figure for him in what is understood to be probably the last interview this person is going to give.

31:41Vinson Cunningham:He's doing it for a literary magazine. He's nervous about it. And right before the interview, he drops his phone, which is also his recording device, in water that's accumulated in his hotel sink and breaks his phone. And rather than come clean about this, for some reason, when he goes to the house of Thomas, his mentor, he goes along with the charade that he is recording and everything's fine. After some attempts at deflecting and saying, let's really start this tomorrow and this is just a pre-interview, the conversation begins and we get that conversation, which, of course, as the reader knows, cannot be literally transcribed from what happened.

32:19Vinson Cunningham:It's a fiction on a fiction. Then in the middle of the book, there is an interlude that takes place in Spain with people who knew Thomas. And the final section of the book is a long conversation that he has with Thomas's son who describes huge difficulties that he's having with his daughter who's about eight or nine and has stopped eating. So that's what transcription is. To me, what's so distinctive about it is this narrator figure who's appeared in the Ben Lerner novels goes through, we see him go through this trajectory of growing up in all the books. That person has kind of gone through the callow stage of young adulthood and the shooting for sincerity stage of early mid-adulthood.

33:04Vinson Cunningham:And has shown us this glibness of being a teenage boy trying to impress everybody and lying to everybody essentially at the same time in his third book. And so here we get that person who's a dad. Like, this character has his own child who's going through issues. And he has to be the stable figure who provides some kind of, you know, baseline for this child in distress. And he's also trying to engage in these relationships with his wife, with his self, an idea of his past because he's going back to the site of his past in college, all of these things. This guy is very sincere in a way that the earlier characters were not.

33:43Vinson Cunningham:And the writing is much simpler, I think, especially than the last couple of books that Ben Lerner has written. So I'd love to know what you guys thought about the book. Did you read it? Did you enjoy it? Did you sense these themes as well? To me, the way I felt, I mean, I really liked it. I think the first part, which has this conversation, untaped conversation with the older mentor, it could be read as if there was a little bit of fun had with this kind of like type of person, right? Oh, for sure. Type of like, it's like, okay, here you go on another kind of like anecdote about.

34:22Alexandra Schwartz:Brilliant rant. A brilliant rant that has, you know, that even though is obviously much respect is paid to this figure, he's not a charlatan. And yet there is he's a figure who is distant in a lot of ways from life. And I think as the book goes along and, you know, passes through the kind of middle section of Spain that you described, Alex, and then ends up with the great man's son, it gets much closer to the bone. And, you know, the problems this son had with his father and his detachment and the death of his mother, that was never really discussed and the kind of solitariness that he ended up growing up in.

35:06and by the end of it I was like I was like crying you know what I mean like by the end of it I was like okay this is really kind of like meaningful on the levels of like life and death you know but just if if we're talking about like when I worked as a as a fact checker in the aughts at Us Weekly there was something called the basometer that we had to check which was like how many bees it's like how buzzy is this thing you know and so the ernestometer

35:45Alexandra Schwartz:yeah that's so true and i think you know what you said at the end there was so lovely and so true is that the closer you get to issues of life and death because it ends with covid right and yeah yeah and the and the impending death of the the father crises with children Thomas the mentor's son who in this text plays as a kind of double of the narrator in certain ways the narrator's daughter is refusing to go to school Max's daughter is refusing to eat she's diagnosed with ARFID which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder all of a sudden this family that can afford as Max says grass fed beef all these other things don't eat this, don't eat that.

36:33Alexandra Schwartz:Suddenly, at a doctor's urging, they just stock their home with candy. They resort to letting the little girl use her tablet because it turns out that helps her eat. To watch unboxing videos, right? Yeah, that's right. It's like coming down to a kind of mean or a sort of median human experience that sort of declasses the family in a certain way. one way to define earnestness might be you know it's the quality that reinforces our sameness with other people you know irony cynicism these are ways of saying no I'm different than that nope I'm not like that no thank you that's cool but it's actually not for me ways of kind of ironizing ourself into a corner and all of a sudden things like death illness children certainly these are topics about which it's hard to be as ironic as we might otherwise be.

37:31Alexandra Schwartz:It breaks that down.

37:34Vinson Cunningham:It's a big old, big hearted book. And that may be a reason that people are responding to it.

37:44Alexandra Schwartz:Why is this earnestness coming through so strongly right now? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

38:05Alexandra Schwartz:So, we've been talking about a new earnestness, and really for me, the big question here is, why is this earnestness coming through so strongly right now? One aspect of this is maybe a sort of generational thing. You see a lot of think pieces about, quote-unquote, millennial cringe, this idea that old ways of earnestness are coming back around. Does this strike you? Earnestness versus cynicism, earnestness versus whatever its opposites might be. Does that strike you as a generational thing?

38:34Vinson Cunningham:Okay, can I just be millennial cringe and ask what the hell is millennial cringe? What is that? Does it mean that we're so lame, running around being our lame selves, and no one can take it anymore?

38:44Alexandra Schwartz:Millennial cringe means your parents were boomers and they led you to believe that there was a real future for yourself. You were super ambitious in the workplace. You got married in a barn and there were mason jars present and very fuzzy lighting. And you were into avocado toast and went to brunch and thought that the world was going to be just like it was for your parents. That's millennial cringe. Can I say something from a Gen X perspective as the Gen Xer in the room? Young Gen Xer in the room. It's not just young people. Gen X thinks of this about us too. Yes, I remember. Okay. Take us back.

39:17I recall. What do you remember, grandmother? I recall. like I don't know early 2010s right being a young Gen Xer and thinking wow millennials really I'm not talking about you specifically but just as a culture believe in the system oh okay okay they think they're like you know the the whole concept of selling out for instance which for me was like, oh my God, like these people, and they're, they're gonna, you know, they, they, they're gonna give away their, you know, Indy cred to the system. I was like, oh, millennials see no problem with that because they think the system is gonna reward them.

39:57That if they do the right thing, make the right moves, things will be okay. And they can, they can have avocado toast forever. Okay. And like cash out. And there was an earnestness, I think to saying like, oh, I'm going to work at Facebook and they're going to take care of me until I die.

40:18Vinson Cunningham:Maybe my problem in understanding this is because I never worked at Facebook and all of that seemed like utter bullshit to me. Well, of course, start. Well, of course, you are spiritually perhaps a Gen X. Perhaps that's it. Perhaps that's it. OK, thank you for clarifying. All right. OK, I'm getting it. So the broad strokes narrative is off you march to Facebook, to Google, to wherever, to McKinsey. That was a huge thing. Also to McKinsey. Yes. to... I'll be a consultant, remember? And what could be more earnest than that? I'll fix systems and I'll connect the universe. Is that the portrait I'm getting?

40:51Vinson Cunningham:Yes. Okay.

40:52Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, and so it's interesting, like, that all sounds in a certain way like a bad thing, but Gen Z, we were talking about an article that recently appeared in the New York Times. Yes. They're coming around to millennial cringe and therefore reengaging, perhaps, with earnestness. Yes. So I think there is a sense Gen Z is like my daughter, who is Gen Z, Gen Alpha cusp, is always like millennials. It's like the most embarrassing thing. But now that the world has turned out to be bad in a variety of ways that weren't predicted by the millennial generation, Gen Z is trying to be like, OK, so what's left?

41:33How can we like live beyond this apocalypse or kind of like approach the current conditions on the ground while retaining our humanity, perhaps? So I think one thing you were referring to this article in The Times from late 2025, Vincent, that was about this term to climb cringe mountain. Okay. Which is basically because this younger generation has grown up in public, basically. Like everything is retained forever. There has been a kind of confusion about how can I be myself? You know, what if I'm anything I'm doing is cringe? because everybody's going to see it. And from what I understand, grandma, again, there is a kind of like reversal of that.

42:23Like, I think like Bowen Yang, you used to be on SNL, was talking about how like being on SNL is like climbing Cringe Mountain every week. It's like everybody sees your like most embarrassing missteps in public. And this is the way people are living now. And so they might as well embrace it. Like I, there's another phrase that people always say, I'm cringe, but I am free. Like, embrace it. You're a person. Everybody makes mistakes.

42:50Alexandra Schwartz:What you said is so true, Nomi, and it highlights maybe an aspect of this current wave that might be, I don't know, might be true, which to me it seems like, yeah, you could have earnestness as we talked about as like, you know, a response to hints of green shoots of hope. It could be a kind of avoidance, but it can also be a direct response to illness. Like both of the texts that we talked about, Fame Sick, it's right there in the title, and it's about her bodily sickness, transcription, there's all kinds of illness happening. Here, it's almost like everybody in our culture, we've just seen too much awful stuff, and it's impossible to ironize.

43:36Alexandra Schwartz:And I think there is a widespread sort of diagnostic glance at the culture and seeing something truly ill in it, And the only sane response to that is to kind of sober up and say, all right, what resources do humans still have? You know, this thing about not being cringe, showing oneself, risking earnestness is all about I have to reach into the bag of sort of human resourcefulness and see what's there and what responses we have, what antibodies, I guess, there are to this illness that everybody can see.

44:09Vinson Cunningham:You know, it's interesting to think about this as like a generational divide issue because a lot of what I hear talking about how the Gen Z is responding to millennials, et cetera, I just feel like everyone goes through that in their own way. You go through being a young person who rages at the people above you and you feel pure of heart and angry of purpose. And then you go on and become enmeshed in the same system for better or for worse and look around you like, what is the world? What have we done? As the people below you were like raising their pitchforks at you being like, you did this. How dare you?

44:40Vinson Cunningham:So that is part of just the cycle of living with the consequences of the world that we're in. Can I just share a moment? Can I share a braided moment? You know when you find yourself reading a children's book and just crying as you're reading it? And you're like, why is this happening? Oh, I know why it's happening. Yeah, we know why it's happening. So I was reading Amos and Boris the other day. William Stieg. William Stieg, I'm going to send it to you. So there is a mouse and there is a whale. The mouse is Amos, the whale is Boris. Wow. And the mouse goes on a little voyage on the rodent, his ship that he builds himself, only to fall off the side of the rodent.

45:22Vinson Cunningham:off goes the rodent and along comes boris a whale who saves the mouse and years later the mouse is able to do a good service for boris in return i'm bringing this up this william steig book is not a new phenomenon but i think it just has to do with we're talking about the generations and how youth see older people and older people see youth and it has to do with reading this book about the fragility and interdependence of life which i guess is the theme i keep coming back to in this episode to your three-year-old child who's like eating french toast and is about to ask for something ridiculous and has like no sense of the enormity of what Boris and Amos have just been through like cannot access it should not be able to access it and I'm like choking up as you know

46:06Alexandra Schwartz:my kid's like can we watch TV like it's like you don't understand I totally know exactly what you mean and i think you know i i take what you say about you know the cyclical nature of the relationship between children and adults but i do think that certain moods set in as responses to all kinds of stimuli that make this this eternal fact the fragile nature of our existence here more or less sort of in stark relief. I was thinking on this one about the education of Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of the second American president, John Adams. And it's about him and his generation's struggle to reckon with the 20th century, the onset of industrial power, all these things that their education, Their sort of colonial and provincial kind of Brahmin education did not prepare them for it.

47:10Alexandra Schwartz:They're these total fussy aesthetes who all of a sudden nothing in the culture corresponds to how they were raised to be. They're just people without a home, you know? And I do think there are these special moments where, hey, civilization is not a guarantee. the bonds that we build with other people are yes part of our nature whatever you call our nature but also are conditioned by politics and the social life and all these other things and you know sometimes i cry at a children's book and it is precisely because oh man these things that i took as just bedrock when i was a child suddenly seem to be totally in question and i do think there's something special about the nature of our lives today that brings all these things into question and i think it's it's something about handing something over to our children which again every generation must do but at a moment when there's all these tectonics beneath us that we don't understand these moments of radical uncertainty where it just it seems harder and therefore more scary to pass the baton which is why you know middle age is a part of what we're talking about yeah it's like okay yeah something is there's a turning of the of the dial which There always must be, but I'm doing it under circumstances that are unfathomable to me, and I'm so scared for you.

48:31Vinson Cunningham:So I think one thing I'm hearing you say that I think is really important is that earnestness in this way is not an offshoot of complacency. It's kind of the opposite of complacency. Yes. Like, I think what's repulsive about a certain kind of earnestness is when it's in bed with complacency. That's disgusting. Like, nothing is worse than that. And I think that's what we were trying to get at before, the sense of everything is great. Everything will be fine. I'm going to wear my corporate fleece to Facebook headquarters and go ahead connecting the world, like, you know, revolting. Whereas earnestness about dealing with the challenges but also the merits of existence in the face of threats to that existence is a worthwhile project.

49:09Vinson Cunningham:What you're saying reminds me of something that I want to enter into our little, like, treasure trunk of earnest texts that we have, ones that are worthwhile and enjoyable, which was the recent speech by the Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Laszlo Krasnohorkai. And for anyone listening, I really recommend taking six minutes, going to YouTube, and just watching the speech, which is in English. I give my thanks to my friend Joschka Palnik, who told me on the second stair of the water slide pool in 1960 how babies are made. And under the grievous weight of this revelation, I wanted to die. I give my thanks to Franz Kafka, whose novel Der Schloss...

50:03Vinson Cunningham:It's a really funny speech. It's hilarious. It's very cute. Yeah. And it's sincere because of this way of just embracing the world by, at a very heightened moment in life, offering thanks to things that have contributed. And I reposted it on my Instagram and said something about we must embrace the world. And I thought to myself, what an earnest fuck I am. You know, this is disgusting. And I should be ashamed of myself. But I did it. No. But I did it. Don't be ashamed. You were right to do it. Don't do it every day. You were right to do it. You are cringe and you are free. I'm cringe and I am free.

50:40We are cringe and we are free.

50:49Alexandra 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 James Yost with music by Alexis Quadrado. Also, shout out to another one of our engineers, Pran Bandy, who just got married. Congratulations, Pran. Mazel tov. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com slash critics.