Why Earnestness is Everywhere

Summary

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Critics at Large | The New Yorker

"Why Earnestness is Everywhere"

Date: April 23, 2026
Hosts: Alex Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham, Nomi Fry

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Episode Overview

This episode digs into the cultural resurgence of earnestness—sincerity, directness, and heartfelt vulnerability—across contemporary art, entertainment, and daily life. Prompted by a listener’s email, the hosts explore how a lack of irony and the embrace of real feeling appear everywhere from blockbuster movies to everyday news, analyzing what has changed in society and why so many are craving this new wave of honesty. Two new books—Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, and Ben Lerner’s novel, Transcription—illustrate the trend, anchoring a lively, thoughtful discussion.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Rise of Earnestness: Examples in Culture

[01:52–05:07]

• Listener Prompt: The genesis of the conversation comes from listener Lewis, who noticed a wave of earnestness in the culture.

  "He was basically making the case that earnestness, sincerity, a lack of irony... is what's resonating in our culture right now." —Vincent Cunningham [01:55]

• Artemis 2 Mission:

  • Alex Schwartz is captivated by the astronauts' awe and emotional responses, remarking on their childlike wonder and heartfelt reflections about humanity and Earth.

    “The way we are responding to what we were seeing out the window, it’s just like we’re a bunch of little kids up here.” —Artemis 2 astronaut (quoted by the hosts) [02:54]

  • The mission’s message: Earth’s fragility and the interconnectedness of all life are recurring themes ("Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe..." [07:04]).

• Project Hail Mary:

  • The film’s success (starring Ryan Gosling) suggests a “hunger for a sincere story about connection and hope.” —Nomi Fry [03:37]
  • Gosling's character as a middle school science teacher reinforces a theme of humble service and belief in the next generation.

• “Love on the Spectrum”:

  • This dating show stands out for its lack of artifice and “rife with earnestness,” differing from other reality dating TV focused on competition and drama.

    “It’s just about trying to find a connection and expressing yourself as you are.” —Alex Schwartz [04:24]

• Alyssa Liu at the Olympics:

  • Her expressive, joyful skating and unselfconscious passion are described as resonating deeply with audiences.

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Contrasting Earnestness vs. Cynicism

[06:11–15:07]

• Differences in Space Missions:

  • Compare NASA’s earnest Artemis 2 mission to the “embarrassment” of elite Blue Origin space tourism (Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez), which was criticized as frivolous and self-serving [09:36].
  • Old-school, government-run missions garner praise for their humility and sense of shared purpose.

• Shifting Portrayals of Service:

  • Ryan Gosling’s evolving roles (from troubled teacher in "Half Nelson" [11:44] to a selfless astronaut in "Project Hail Mary") mirror broader trends—moving from cynicism to sincere, altruistic narratives.

• Space Travel as a Battleground:

  • Vincent notes that space exploration has long been a “great theater of conspiracy thinking,” referencing flat-earther and moon-landing deniers [13:07]. The new earnest approach undercuts those narratives.

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Defining Earnestness

[19:13–22:06]

• Difference from Saccharine:

  • Alex: “Saccharine is lies telling lies... earnestness is about trying to be clear about priorities for what matters.” [20:31]
  • Nomi: Contrasts “hijacking of sincerity by the corporation,” as with the “Disneyfication” or branding of positivity [20:42].

• Earnestness as Counterculture:

  • The current embrace of earnestness is seen as a reaction to “cynics, liars, and shitposters”—an antidote to a culture obsessed with profit and performative irony [19:24].

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Historical Cycles of Earnestness & Cynicism

[22:06–24:44]

• Obama Era:

  • Past waves of earnestness (e.g., Obama’s election, "Beyoncé’s Lemonade") were rooted in hope after difficult times, suggesting that earnestness cycles arise in response to hardship.

• Early 2000s “Twee” Culture:

  • The early 2000s (Death Cab for Cutie, “Garden State”) marked another era of “dissociation”—using sweetness and nostalgia to cope with post-9/11 unease [24:24].

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Two Portraits of Earnest Literature

Lena Dunham: Famesick

[25:19–28:44]

• Memoir Summary:

  • Tracks Dunham’s rapid rise to fame at a young age (creator of “Girls,” health struggles, becoming a lightning rod for her generation).
  • Marked by a new, unguarded sincerity—“the tone... is quite earnest and maybe different than what we have come to expect from Lena Dunham” —Nomi Fry [25:23].

• Jokes as Deflection:

  • Dunham’s writing formerly used constant humor to deflect pain (“a kind of three-card mani where it hides the pain…” —Vincent [28:44]), but the memoir’s lack of such jokes signals a mood shift toward direct self-exposure.

Ben Lerner: Transcription

[30:27–37:07]

• Novel Summary:

  • Focuses on a writer in middle age, grappling with the meaning of legacy, family, and candor as he interviews a dying mentor—yet fails to record the conversation.
  • Simpler, more open writing style than Lerner’s previous metafiction; the themes of illness, familial love, and mortality evoke deep emotional resonance.

• Memorable Points:

  • The “Ernest-O-Meter”: Nomi jokes about measuring the book’s emotional sincerity.
  • “The closer you get to issues of life and death... it gets much closer to the bone... By the end of it, I was crying.” —Nomi Fry [35:16–35:28]

• Earnestness as Human Universality:

  • “One way to define earnestness might be, you know, it’s the quality that reinforces our sameness with other people. Irony... are ways of saying, ‘No, I’m different than that.’” —Vincent Cunningham [36:22]

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Is Earnestness Generational?

[37:56–44:11]

• Millennial Cringe & Gen Z:

  • “Millennial cringe means your parents were boomers and they led you to believe there was a real future for yourself... you were into avocado toast.” —Vincent Cunningham [38:46]
  • Gen Z’s initial disdain is evolving: “Now that the world has turned out to be bad... Gen Z is trying to be like, okay, so what’s left?” —Nomi Fry [41:12]
  • “I’m cringe, but I am free.” (Popular Gen Z meme/ethos) —referenced by Nomi Fry [42:52]

• Cycles and Passages:

  • Alex notes everyone goes through their own generational revolt, eventually becoming the establishment for the next wave—a universal cycle [44:11].

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Vulnerability, Parenting, & the Power of Connection

[45:01–48:43]

• Children’s Books as Earnest Texts:

  • Alex shares being moved while reading William Steig’s Amos and Boris to her child, reflecting on the book's emotional power and the themes of vulnerability and interdependence [45:08].

• Parenthood and Transmissibility:

  • Vincent connects modern anxiety to middle age and the existential challenge of passing on values in “unfathomable” times.

    “There are these special moments where, hey, civilization is not a guarantee... 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.” —Vincent Cunningham [47:06]

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Earnestness as a Response to Turbulent Times

[48:33–49:38]

• Earnestness ≠ Complacency:
  • “Earnestness in this way is not an offshoot of complacency. It’s kind of the opposite of complacency.” —Alex Schwartz [48:33]
  • Earnestness is best when it acknowledges challenge and danger, not when it’s a veneer for the status quo.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “You are cringe and you are free.” —Nomi Fry [50:38]
• “Mass catharsis event. Earnestness. There it is.” —Alex Schwartz, describing the TV show “Heated Rivalry” [17:12]
• “The joke is the picking up of the cup, and there’s no pain under it... It’s a deflection.” —Vincent Cunningham on Lena Dunham’s humor style [28:44]
• “I posted it on my Instagram and said something about, ‘We must embrace the world.’ And I thought to myself, what an earnest fuck I am.” —Alex Schwartz, on sharing Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai’s speech [50:08]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 01:52: Intro: Why earnestness is the episode’s focus
• 02:36–05:07: First round of cultural examples (Artemis 2, Project Hail Mary, TV, sports)
• 06:11–11:44: Deep dive on Artemis 2’s meaning, contrast with Blue Origin
• 13:07: Space travel as theater of conspiracy, resurgence of sincerity
• 15:07: “Love on the Spectrum” as pure earnestness in reality TV
• 19:13–22:06: Defining earnestness, contrast with saccharine & corporate “sincerity”
• 22:06–24:44: Earnestness in recent history: Obama era, 2000s “twee” culture
• 25:19–28:44: Lena Dunham’s Famesick and the tone shift to heartfelt honesty
• 30:27–37:07: Ben Lerner’s Transcription, parenthood, and emotional openness
• 37:56–44:11: Earnestness as generational response; “millennial cringe,” Gen Z’s embrace of vulnerability
• 45:01–48:43: Earnestness through parenthood, vulnerability, and children’s media
• 48:33–49:38: Distinguishing real earnestness from complacency

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Conclusion

The episode traces earnestness from viral pop culture to new literature, historical swings, and the everyday experience of vulnerability in parenting, arguing that sincerity is not naïve or regressive but a much-needed social resource. It’s both an antidote to widespread cynicism and a way of acknowledging our shared fragility and need for meaning. The hosts leave listeners with a sense of hope and an invitation to risk being earnest, even at the cost of cringing a little.

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“You are cringe and you are free.” —Nomi Fry [50:38]

Transcript

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[Alex Schwartz]

This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz.

[Nomi Fry]

I'm Nomi Fry.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How you doing?

[Alex Schwartz]

Doing good.

[Nomi Fry]

Doing well, Doing well.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know who else is doing well? Our listeners, who are always, whenever we get an email, it's like they're just throwing 100 mile an hour fastballs. That's a baseball reference. It's spring, everybody. But today's episode. There you go. Today's episode idea came to us from a listener, Lewis. Thank you. Lewis wrote in suggesting that we do an episode about the return of earnestness. And I mean, it just rang a bell with all of us. He was basically making the case that earnestness, sincerity, a lack of irony, whatever you want to call it, is what's resonating in our culture right now. And once we started thinking about this idea, we started noticing it everywhere. I mean, what are some examples of this?

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I have been riveted by the Artemis 2 mission and lift off the

[Vincent Cunningham]

crew of Artemis 2.

[Alex Schwartz]

Now bound for the moon, the mission itself, but also the astronauts and their feedback about what they saw and felt in deep outer space.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The four of us have looked at this moon our entire lives, and the way we are responding to what we were seeing out the window, it's just like we're a bunch of little kids up here. Just. We cannot get enough of this.

[Alex Schwartz]

That is rife with earnestness. They have reflections about the state of humanity, Earth, our interconnectedness. That would be the first place my mind went.

[Nomi Fry]

I mean, talking about space. Project Hail Mary, the recent movie starring Ryan Gosling that has been shattering box office records.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So I met an alien. He's a genius engineer, and if I can't understand what he's saying, he puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain. And you know what? I don't mind it.

[Nomi Fry]

The great success of this movie suggests to me that there is kind of a hunger for a sincere story about connection and hope.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Also, like I should say, we've spoken about this show on this show before, but the pit.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, she's seizing. Okay, showtime.

[Vincent Cunningham]

We need to get this baby out right now.

[Alex Schwartz]

I am fully capable of handling it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

No, you are not fully capable, and you know it. Which is just like, absolutely so earnest about the necessity for saving lives, doctor's jobs, how hard they are, and how hard they work at them.

[Alex Schwartz]

There's love on the Spectrum, which just came out with its fourth season earlier this month. Hugely popular dating show.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What does love mean to you? Oh.

[Nomi Fry]

Oh.

[Alex Schwartz]

Love means that you and the other person understand each other. It'll be like a fairy tale rife with earnestness. Unlike so many dating shows, where there are obstacles and there's jealousy, and the whole hope is to inflame competition. And here it's. It's just about trying to find a connection and expressing yourself as you are. And audiences love this and really have been embracing it.

[Nomi Fry]

The ice skater Alyssa Liu just brought home the gold in the Olympics. It is like she's just playing on the ice, not even performing anymore. The joy, the passion, you know, the effervescence, the belief in oneself, the wanting to show up and do your best. You know, people really responding to that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, it's all there. And so today, we're delving into this new wave of earnestness. We're gonna sketch out where and how it's showing up in our world right now, in part by looking at two new books that, for us, at least fit into this theme. Lena Dunham's new memoir, Famesick, and a Novel by the writer Ben Lerner that came out earlier this month. It's called Transcription. And maybe the big obvious question for us is what was maybe the era of cynicism that we're coming out of? And why now are we so ready to wear our hearts on our sleeves? So that's today on critics at large, why earnestness is everywhere. Okay, so we got this case going. Earnestness has become a dominant attitude in art right now and maybe also in our daily lives. I don't know, let's figure it out. What's one recent example that solidified this idea for you?

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I mentioned the Artemis 2 mission before and I wanna just put it up top because first of all, remarkable, extraordinary, four human beings traveled around the moon, returned back, saw things that have never been seen before, went farther than any human beings have ever been before. And I was following the mission. My 3 year old son is very interested in space, so therefore I am also interested in space. No one will be surprised that I am not all for let's colonize Mars,

[Vincent Cunningham]

all of that lunacy nonsense, multi planetary existence.

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly. For me, it's all about Earth. And so what this mission brought back is how precious it is to live on Earth. I'm always saying to my son, you know, we are so lucky to be part of life on Earth. And these four astronauts come back and

[Nomi Fry]

they say the same thing, right?

[Alex Schwartz]

There were recordings that were made while they were still on Artemis 2. But I'm thinking in particular of a press conference that the four of them gave when they came back at the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston. And first of all, they're also visibly moved by what they've been through. They're so visibly moved by their connection to one another, it's just, it's very earnest, it's very sincere. But particularly Christina Cook's part of the press conference where she talks about what it means to be a crew. A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And I, a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. Nothing could be more earnest than this speech. The kind of thing you might hear before an eighth grade basketball game at which your team is about to be brutally beaten, but which you need to go into with the force of the Spartan army. But she's saying this about their mission and then she applies it out to being about life on Earth. So when we saw tiny Earth people, asked our crew what impressions we had, and honestly what struck me wasn't necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was Just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe. There's nothing out there that these guys saw. And if there is, it's very far away. It's all about this spinning ball that all of us share. It's true.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah. No, it's true.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's moving, Earnest.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah. And I was, you know, as I was watching this press conference, Alex, that you're referring to, I was thinking a couple things. First of all, I was thinking how hopeful I felt that this was not to be jingoistic, but this was a NASA mission. It was about the government advancing science and research. But it made me think about exactly a year ago was the Blue Origin mission, Jeff Bezos's rocket that sent up his fiance, now wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, and Katy Perry, Gayle King, a number of other women.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

And just to think about it brings shame.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah. And that was. They went up for 11 minutes, of course, at great, you know, private cost. You know, the impetus was supposedly like, we're gonna. I remember Katy Perry saying, we're gonna put the ass back in astronaut because they're like, hot ladies. Very nice going up. We're gonna glam up for this mission, et cetera. And it was kind of fashioned as a kind of like, we woman empowerment thing, but it was roundly mocked because it was for. Not like it was for, you know, like this, you know, multi billionaire sending up his. His wife and some of her rich friends to sort of like, get a little taste of space tourism. And like, what. What are we learning? What are we saying even, right? It's like, oh, if you're a billionaire, you will be able to go to space for. For like a pleasure cruise, I guess. That's pretty much it, I think. And so put in conversation with that. I was like, wow, this is old school. Like, I'm feeling refreshed, I'm feeling reinvigorated, like we're not all dead yet, you know? And you mentioned, you know, they're like, it's like an eighth grade team. This brings me to Project Hail Mary, which mentioned a couple minutes ago, which I have to admit I did not see, but I watched some clips and I read several reviews. It's curious to me that in the movie, I believe Ryan Gosling, who goes out to space to save Earth and with the help of kind of like an interspecies buddy comedy, it's been called, with this, like, friendly alien, is a middle school science teacher and this idea of, like, service, right? This idea of kind of like teaching the children. There is Hope for the Next Generation. And that made me think, sorry, I'm going on about a movie that came out exactly 20 years ago with Ryan Gosling in which he plays a middle school teacher, Half Nelson. Do you remember that movie?

[Nicole Phelps]

Oh, yeah.

[Nomi Fry]

Where he's a crack smoking public middle school teacher.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's not a pretty picture.

[Nomi Fry]

It is not a pretty picture. It's a good. It's a great movie. It's a great movie and he's great in it. But this is not. That was not, you know, deep in the Bush years. W. Bush, Not a pretty picture. Collapsing public schools. You know, he has this, like, relationship, this friendship with one of his middle school students, a girl who ends up dealing drugs and dealing him drugs. You know, it's. It's kind of a very dark picture. And so thinking about him as this, like, teacher, calm astronaut who was setting out to save the world, really, for me, was like, we're trying to say something different here. Yeah, yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think space travel is specifically interesting in this regard because, okay, if we were to start to name some characteristics of the bad mood that the culture has been in, and I don't think we're saying that that's all the way over, but unfortunately, if we were gonna name some of the characteristics, one would be conspiracism, sort of grand theories of malarkey and subterfuge by the government. And space travel specifically has always been a great theater of conspiracy thinking. We never been to the moon. You know, these kinds of things are resurgent.

[Nomi Fry]

And I think the Earth is flat.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The Earth is flat. I think these things have been kind of on the upswing recently. And so to see it happen again, to see the sort of undeniable imagery of actual space travel, some of the photographs of Earth from the backside of the moon are just so beautiful and so majestic that I think that there's also a kind of bursting of mythologies that maybe real earnestness, real seriousness of purpose can kind of illuminate. It can kind of change our minds about things that we are being artfully or fancifully back and forth or ironic about. But to your point, Nomi, are there other things beyond Artemis that have been really tickling your earnestness Bone?

[Alex Schwartz]

I am really interested in the success of a show like Love on the Spectrum.

[Nomi Fry]

This series follows people on the autism spectrum.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hi, everybody.

[Alex Schwartz]

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?

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[Alex Schwartz]

Hi.

[Nomi Fry]

What if he gives me a wedding ring?

[Alex Schwartz]

Staying in front of this church made me think. 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, but who are there to do the thing. And the reaction this has gotten from audiences, I find very moving.

[Nomi Fry]

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. Yeah, 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?

[Alex Schwartz]

It was too raw.

[Vincent Cunningham]

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, I think.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've talked about it. We could talk about it endlessly. I could. Everyone else would leave the room. Heated Rivalry was.

[Nomi Fry]

Well, leave you alone.

[Alex Schwartz]

Thank you.

[Nomi Fry]

Leave me alone.

[Alex Schwartz]

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. Mass catharsis Event Earnestness There it is

[Vincent Cunningham]

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, the new memoir by Lena Dunham. Don't go away.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV and awards lovers. And just because the Oscars are done for now, that doesn't mean we are. Join us every week for coverage of the biggest stories in Hollywood, interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more. Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Vincent Cunningham]

Before we move on, I think it might be salutary to stop and maybe make some definitions.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, I love that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

But what's earnestness? What are we talking about?

[Alex Schwartz]

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 shitposters, but 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. Saccharine is something else. Saccharine is everything is great. Never fully dressed without a smile. Here we go. Saccharine is lies telling lies. And so it actually is kind of the opposite of all of this.

[Vincent Cunningham]

They might be opposites.

[Nicole Phelps]

That's right.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

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.

[Nomi Fry]

I think there's a lot of. When you were just talking, Alex, and you were talking about like, everything is great saccharine, 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 Disney fication, have a Coca Cola and have a Coke. Just think about kind of the relentless kind of techno positivism of like, we're all gonna be connected. Twitter will. It's like you can have a free exchange of ideas.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right. Facebook. We're gonna connect the whole world.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes, we're gonna 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, like the evil places. If not evil, then certainly self interested places that these promises have taken us before.

[Alex Schwartz]

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 where 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.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Thank you.

[Alex Schwartz]

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? Was that a spot of earnestness or was that something different?

[Vincent Cunningham]

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 cyclical 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. And we saw a lot of cultural items all the way to the end of that cycle. You had these great expressions of really ardent emotion in 2016, at the end of that era, you see Beyonce's lemonade. Just things that are.

[Nomi Fry]

God, I was just thinking of that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

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 moment of earnestness before that was early. Early Bush era, weirdly, Iraq War era. When, like, you think about, like, twee.

[Nomi Fry]

Early W. Bush.

[Vincent Cunningham]

W. Bush. You think about, like, 030405, when you have bands like Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service, all these. My sort of college age twee, for me,

[Alex Schwartz]

like the Garden State soundtrack, the

[Vincent Cunningham]

Garden Stage, you know, this moment that was like, you know, very.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And that was. That seemed to me almost like a dissociating response. Like, the world is so strange.

[Nomi Fry]

When I hear the shins, I start sobbing now. Like, you put on the shins? I'm like, were we ever so fucking young?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like, that's it. Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

But I love that idea that it's. Yeah, it's totally dissolution.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It was dissociation. It was like, post 9 11, no one really knows what to do with the political picture. And so it's like we're gonna retreat to urban enclaves as a milieu and make either, like, uplifting or kind of sweetly sad songs and films. 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 Fame, the new memoir by Lena Dunham Nomi.

[Nomi Fry]

Sure.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Would you like to do a synopsis of that text?

[Nomi Fry]

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. And 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 candid detail. I would say it's a total page turner for me. I was very interested reading it. 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 as 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.

[Vincent Cunningham]

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 writing 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 horror separates. And I laughed at that because it's a kind of like exercise in misdirection that kind of characterizes her best jokes. 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.

[Alex Schwartz]

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.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes, it's at odds with a certain kind of humor. And I think that Dunham While 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 mani, where it hides the pain. And the joke is the picking up of the cup and there's no pain under it. You know, it's in there somewhere, but every time you say no, it's right there, 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 were 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. 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?

[Alex Schwartz]

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 Atoja 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. He's doing it for a literary magazine. He. 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, then the conversation begins. And we get that conversation, which, of course, as the reader knows, cannot be literally transcribed from what happened. It's a fiction, nonfiction. 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 son, who describes huge difficulties that he's having with his daughter, who's about 8 or 9 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 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 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 these things. This guy is very sincere in a way that the earlier characters were not. 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?

[Nomi Fry]

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? Type of like. It's like, okay, here you go on another kind of, like, anecdote about brilliant rant or 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. And 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 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 buzz O meter that we had to check, which was like, how many bees? It's like, how buzzy is this thing? You know, and so the Ernest O Meter.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Ernest O Meter, 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.

[Nomi Fry]

Because it ends with COVID right? Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And the impending death of 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, you know, grass fed beef, all these other things, don't eat this, don't eat that. 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.

[Nomi Fry]

To watch unboxing videos. Right. On YouTube.

[Vincent Cunningham]

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. It breaks that down.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a big old, big hearted book, and that may be a reason that people are responding to it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Why is this earnestness coming through so strong? Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back.

[Alex Schwartz]

We are in uncharted territory.

[Nomi Fry]

Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Alex Schwartz]

I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense

[Vincent Cunningham]

of what's happening in this chaotic world.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I hope you'll join us for

[Vincent Cunningham]

the New Yorker Radio Hour. So we've been talking about a new earnestness. And really, for me, the big question here is what? 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?

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, can I just be Millennial Cringe and ask, what the hell is millennial cringe? What is that? Does it mean that we are so lame running around being our lame selves and no one can take it anymore?

[Vincent Cunningham]

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 gonna be just like it was for your parents. That's millennial cringe.

[Nomi Fry]

Can I please, can I say something from a Gen X perspective? As the Gen Xer in the room, young Gen Xers in the room.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's not just young people. Gen X thinks that this about us, too.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes, I remember.

[Alex Schwartz]

Take us back.

[Nomi Fry]

I remember. I recall.

[Alex Schwartz]

What do you remember, Grandmother?

[Nomi Fry]

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 whole concept of selling out, for instance, which for me was like, oh, my God. Like, these people. And they're gonna, you know, they're gonna give away their indi cred to the system. I was like, oh, millennials see no problem with that because they think the system is gonna reward them, that if they do the right thing, make the right moves, things will be okay and they can have avocado toast forever. Okay. And, like, cash out. And there was an earnestness, I think, to saying, like, oh, I'm gonna work at Facebook, and they're gonna take care of me until I die.

[Alex Schwartz]

Maybe my problem in understanding this is because I never worked at Facebook, and all of that seemed like utter bullshit to me from the start.

[Nomi Fry]

Well, of course you are spiritually, perhaps a Gen X.

[Alex Schwartz]

Perhaps that'. Perhaps that's it. Okay, thank you for clarifying. All right, okay, 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.

[Nomi Fry]

Also to McKinsey, to I'll be a consultant, remember?

[Alex Schwartz]

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?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay.

[Vincent Cunningham]

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.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

They're coming around to Millennial cringe and therefore re. Engaging perhaps with earnestness.

[Nomi Fry]

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, okay, so what's left? How 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, Vinson, that was 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 anything I'm doing is cringe because everybody's gonna see it and from what I understand, Grandma, again, there is a kind of, like, reversal of that. Like, I think, like, Bo and Yang, who 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.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What you said is so true, Naomi, 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. 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. And I think there is a widespread sort of diagnostic glance at the culture and seen 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.

[Alex Schwartz]

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 is the people below you are like, raising their pitchforks at you, being like, you did this. How dare you? 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 all the time?

[Nomi Fry]

Oh, I know. I know why it's happening.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, we know why it's happening. So I was reading Amos and Boris.

[Nomi Fry]

Oh, my God.

[Alex Schwartz]

The other day.

[Nomi Fry]

William Stagg.

[Alex Schwartz]

I don't think I know William Stagg. I'm gonna send it to you.

[Nomi Fry]

So there is a mouse and there is a whale.

[Alex Schwartz]

The mouse is Amos, the whale is Boris.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Wow.

[Alex Schwartz]

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. 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 this 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 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, my kid's like, get me on tv.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like, you don't understand. I totally know exactly what you mean. And I think, you know, 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 eternal fact, the fragile nature of our existence here, more or less sort of in stark relief. I was thinking on this wise, 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 generations 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. 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 seemed 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 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, at these moments of radical uncertainty where 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. It's like, okay, something is. There's a turning 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.

[Alex Schwartz]

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.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

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 gonna wear my corporate fleece to Facebook headquarters and go ahead. Connecting the world like, no, 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. What you're saying reminds me of something that I want to enter into our little 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 Krasnhorki. And for anyone listening, I really recommend taking six minutes, going to YouTube and just watching the speech, which is in English.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I give my thanks to my friend Joska Palnik, who told me on the second stair of the waterslide 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.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's really funny speech. It's hilarious.

[Nomi Fry]

It's very cute. Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

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.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You were right to do it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Don't do it every day.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You were right to do it.

[Nomi Fry]

You are cringe and you are free.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm cringe and I am free.

[Nomi Fry]

We are cringe and we are free.

[Vincent Cunningham]

This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is a mix by Mike Kutschman and we had engineering help today from James Yost with music by Alexis Cuadrado. Also, shout out to another one of our engineers, Pranbandy, who just got married. Congratulations, Pran.

[Nomi Fry]

Mazel tov.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You can listen to all of our episodes [e-mail] Critics.

[Nicole Phelps]

Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the global fashion news and features director and co host of Vogue's podcast the Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join head of editorial content at Vogue, Chloe Mal and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Cho Manati as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run through with Vogue New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Fry]

From prx.