Why Football Matters

Summary

Podcast Summary: Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: "Why Football Matters"
Date: January 15, 2026
Hosts: Alex Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham, Nomi Frye
Special Guest: Louisa Thomas (The New Yorker sports critic)
Theme: An exploration of football’s outsize impact on American culture—through personal stories, pop culture representations, and an analysis of Chuck Klosterman's new book, Football. The team wrestles with the sport’s violence, fandom, why it so deeply captivates America, and its uncertain future.

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Episode Overview

• The hosts, self-admitted football novices, dive into why football commands such cultural dominance in the US.
• They discuss football’s mythology and archetypes, formative football texts, football’s aesthetics and strategy, and its representation in pop culture.
• The episode revolves around Chuck Klosterman’s new book, Football, which argues that the sport is key to understanding America, but is destined to fade in prominence.
• Louisa Thomas, a lifelong fan and football insider, offers expert insight.
• They openly address why football persists amid concerns about violence, injury, masculinity, and shifting cultural values.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Football as American Myth and National Obsession

• Super Bowl's Cultural Dominance:

  • Alex Schwartz marvels at the staggering viewership numbers.

    "Last year's Super Bowl was the most watched Super Bowl ever with over 127 million people watching. And as a point of comparison, guess how many people watched our super bowl, the Oscars? Only 18 million.” (03:32)

• Football Tropes and Archetypes:

  • Quick-fire run-through of gridiron icons: the quarterback as "a leader among men," the cheerleader, the gruff coach, and the essential, almost ritual, violence.

    Vincent Cunningham: “The archetype in my mind is a mustachioed guy of portly build.” (03:18) Alex Schwartz: “Violence. Just gonna put it out there. Violence.” (03:23)

2. Personal Encounters and Pop Culture Representations

• Football as Pop Culture:
  • The hosts cite media, movies, and celebrity relationships as their entry points to football.

    Vinson Cunningham on Friday Night Lights:
    “It was almost for me, like a didactic tool. I know it sounds maybe, maybe this sounds paternalistic, but it's like, oh, I want to understand a different part of America. And it was a kind of sociology for me, even though it was also kind of a soap opera. I really love Friday Night Lights.” (10:20)

  • Nomi Frye highlights quarterback-celebrity couples and the intrigue of the “wags” (wives and girlfriends):

    "Taylor and Travis Kelce...like the kind of final bosses of kind of like football quarterback dating, like head cheerleader archetype." (12:02)

3. Louisa Thomas on Football—from Fan to Insider

• Louisa’s Background:
  • Grew up immersed in sports journalism and married a professional football player:

    “My husband is a retired football player, but we got together after his rookie season, so I had actually a couple years of being a wag.” (14:05)

  • Offers an “inside” look at the game and its community.

4. The Aesthetic and Strategic Beauty of Football

• Why Is Football Compelling?

  • Louisa Thomas draws attention to both surface-level enjoyment and deeper layers:

    “You can actually watch it as a moving, abstract painting. There is a certain kind of aesthetic quality to the choreography and the sort of balletic violence in any given play while it continues...the more you learn about it, the more it rewards you in different ways because there's so much strategy involved, there's so many complexities.” (15:27)

  • Vincent Cunningham:

    “There are like, moments of really rare improvisational beauty...there’s just a beauty to somebody like running to the sideline and catching the ball and then trying to tap their toes inside.” (17:11)

5. Football as Sociological Mirror

• Klosterman’s Thesis:

  • Football as the “clearest projection” of American values, anxieties, and contradictions—even for those who dislike it.

    Alex Schwartz (para quoting Klosterman): “Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value, even, and perhaps especially when football is something they actively dislike.” (21:10)

  • Televisuality is key to its dominance

    Vinson Cunningham: “It is precisely because football is such a optimal televisual entertainment that it is so popular.” (22:03)

  • Football invites both rapt engagement and ambient social interaction:

    Nomi Frye: “Out of a three-hour long game, 11 minutes are actually action. And the rest of the time is kind of like long, fairly empty moments where you could sort of like do other stuff, converse, contemplate...that in fact is not to the detriment of the attraction of the game, but the reason for its attraction.” (23:39)

6. Structure, Strategy, and the War Analogy

• Football Compared to War and Engineering:
  • Complexity likened to poetry, engineering, and military campaigns.

    Louisa Thomas: “It's more like very formal poetry. It's like a sestina, like not free verse.” (27:00)

  • Cites football’s origins as intentional war simulation to “toughen up” American men.

    “Walter Camp...was coming out of an era in the early 20th century where there was this kind of muscular Christianity where there was this fear of the American male becoming softened and weakened. And that war had this really salutary effect. And there was this question of, like, could we replicate some of the circumstances of war so that we can toughen up our young men without actually putting them into the kind of peril that like World War I...And so it is actually in some ways like a very sort of self conscious, like, war game.” (28:38)

7. The Future: Will Football Endure?

• Klosterman’s Prediction:

  • Football may die out due to injury concerns and changing attitudes—especially mothers “not letting boys play.”

    Alex Schwartz paraphrasing Klosterman: “Because of the prevalence of injury, people are gonna start stop playing it at the lower levels...it was kind of like, the moms are gonna stop letting the boys play.” (29:46)

  • Conversation about masculinity and the gendered nature of these predictions:

    Nomi Frye: “There was something about this book and the kind of grandness of its argumentation. There was something very masculine about it. Like the type of argument that it was making…And I was like, wow, I could never write this kind of book...” (30:22)

• Regionalism & Community vs. National TV Product:

  • Louisa flags another risk: college football’s nationalization.

    “It's made it more of a television product that is...gripping, less, like, vitally interesting and important to particular communities. And one of the things that I think the book misses...is this discussion about how football...makes men feel things really deeply.” (32:55)

8. Football as (One of) the Last Acceptable Spaces for Male Emotion

• Football and Emotional Expression:
  • The sport is a sanctioned arena for men to express feelings.

    Louisa Thomas: “Football makes people feel things really deeply. And particularly, it makes men feel things really deeply...It’s not only a simulation of war, but it's a simulation of community.” (35:15) “Men cry watching football games, and that's okay...in popular American culture, it's like the only space in which they are allowed to express totally normal human emotions.” (35:36)

9. Football, Violence, and the American Contradiction

• Football and CTE:

  • The hosts confront their discomfort with the sport’s violence and the collective yet individual nature of risk.

    Alex Schwartz: “Football is a very, very dangerous activity that we now know hurts a lot of people who do it...football, to me, is this really interesting example of like absolute huge cultural and emotional cohesion that also is predicated on this very weird individualism argument that is false. Like, you guys make your own choice. No, it's a choice for the collective.” (41:10)

• Football as a Clarifying Mirror to American Capitalism & Responsibility:

  • Vincent Cunningham on seeing injuries in real time:

    “In football, it's all there. And so what happens, how people change or don't change, how we ignore or don't ignore, how we fix structures or don't fix them becomes, I think, if not a way forward, at least an honest illustration that we don't get in other parts of life.” (43:54)

10. Enduring Appeal and Inevitable Contradiction

• Why Keep Watching?
  • The inescapable tension between enjoyment, emotional need, tradition, and ethics.

    Vincent Cunningham: “I find it, quote, unquote, fun...another part of the TUA story that is...the story of the Samoan football player...who have sort of made themselves visible in the American scene through football. I am sure that there will be some Polynesian kid two generations from now who is not even a football player, who is, I don't know, a great scholar or businessman who will say, I gained pride to think that I could be X. Because I watched back in the day...” (44:58)

  • The analogy to other ethically complicated cultural habits (climate crisis, flying, technology).

    Nomi Frye: “It's like we can't give account or be absolutely ethical every moment of our lives...football just makes that clear. It makes that legible.” (46:49)

  • Football’s social/communal “justification” is powerful and hard to replace.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On watching football as a non-fan:

  “No longer did I just see, you know, a kind of crunch and a break from the crunch. I got it. I was understanding a bit more about the strategy.”
  — Alex Schwartz (05:55)

• On archetypes:

  “There's the gruff, authoritarian, but maybe inside a heart of gold individual daddy Football. They used to have mustaches back when men were men.”
  — Vincent Cunningham (03:06)

• On emotional space:

  “Men cry watching football games, and that's okay...it’s like, the only space in which they [men] are allowed to express totally normal human emotions.”
  — Louisa Thomas (35:36)

• On football and American contradiction:

  “Football, to me, is this really interesting example of...cultural and emotional cohesion that also is predicated on this very weird individualism argument that is false. Like, you guys make your own choice. No, it's a choice for the collective...that is a very American contradiction.”
  — Alex Schwartz (41:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:25-03:25 — Football archetypes and jokes; hosts’ relationship with the sport
• 04:28 — Introduction of guest Louisa Thomas
• 08:15-10:40 — “Formative football texts”: Friday Night Lights and the world of “wags”
• 15:27-18:10 — The beauty and choreography of the game
• 20:02-24:20 — Chuck Klosterman’s Football: thesis and key arguments
• 27:19-29:46 — Football’s structure, strategy, military and war-game origins
• 29:46-34:38 — Will football die out? Masculinity, mothers, and the end of football
• 32:55-35:36 — Football as a rare space for male emotional display
• 39:14-44:32 — Football’s violence, CTE, and comparison to climate crisis/personal responsibility
• 46:45-47:37 — Ethical ambiguity, societal need for collective experience
• 47:37-end — Playoff rooting picks, closing remarks

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Conclusion

This episode unpacks football’s grip on American culture not by rehearsing stats or technical knowledge, but by examining its psychological, aesthetic, communal, and even ethical consequences. The hosts struggle—often humorously and thoughtfully—with their own outsider/insider relationship to the game. With Louisa Thomas’s firsthand experience and Klosterman’s big-picture theorizing as backdrop, "Why Football Matters" demonstrates that the sport is both a mirror and a magnet for American anxieties, contradictions, and longing for community—even as its future remains uncertain.

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Recommended Listening: If you're interested in the intersection of sport and society, or want a fresh, critical, yet affectionate look at American mythmaking, this episode is essential.

Transcript

[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

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[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

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[Louisa Thomas]

Potential savings will vary.

[Alex Schwartz]

Not available in all states or situations. I'm like 100% ready to do endless football jokes without understanding what I'm talking about. So everyone needs to watch out for that.

[Nomi Frye]

It's the old hog skin.

[Alex Schwartz]

Pink skin. Know me.

[Nomi Frye]

I know, I know.

[Alex Schwartz]

I don't even know if you know.

[Nomi Frye]

Right, right. It's hard to know whether this was, like, a joke or an unintentional fumble.

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly. Exact.

[Nomi Frye]

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

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. This is going to be a very special challenge for me personally this week, although I'm excited for it, because what's happening in the culture right now for an absolutely enormous portion of this country is something that I know almost nothing about. Football. Almost nothing. And don't worry, you'll be in good hands. We have backup, a term, I believe, that is also used in football.

[Nomi Frye]

Is it? I also know nothing about football.

[Alex Schwartz]

Backup quarterback. Right, Vincent?

[Vincent Cunningham]

It is used there, as in many other. Yes, yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Thank you. I'm learning. I'm here to learn. I'm here to listen and to learn and also obviously to talk, because I will tell you that we are now in the lead up to Super Bowl LX, which I gather is Super Bowl 60. Again, I'm still learning.

[Nomi Frye]

We're learning.

[Alex Schwartz]

The only Roman numerals I know are from the Hardy Boys books, and they did not go up to 60. You know, with the chapter, whatever. LX is 60. I know this now. Now we know the playoffs have started. I know that now. And the footballs are flying. They're flying all the time. And even. Even if you don't watch the game itself, there is a mythos around this sport that's deeply ingrained in the fabric of this country. We all know something about football because it's inescapable in the culture. What are some of the tropes of football?

[Nomi Frye]

The quarterback.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, a leader among men.

[Nomi Frye]

A leader among men. The cheerleader.

[Alex Schwartz]

A leader among women.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

The coach.

[Vincent Cunningham]

There's like, coach, the gruff, authoritarian, but maybe inside a heart of gold individual daddy Football. They used to have mustaches back when men were men.

[Alex Schwartz]

They did. Like you had to have a mustache.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think it's like the archetype in my mind is a mustachioed guy of portly build.

[Alex Schwartz]

Violence. Just gonna put it out there. Violence.

[Nomi Frye]

Yep.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And I think the trope would be salutary violence.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Violence tempered by the fires of discipline.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right. All right. Today it's football. We are gonna get into the movies and the shows that have shaped the way that we think about this sport. And we also will talk about a new book, which is called Football Football, that argues that in order to understand America, you have to understand football. Just thinking about the sheer number of people who tune into football games, my mind is boggled. Last year's super bowl was the most watched super bowl ever with over 127 million people watching. And as a point of comparison, guess how many people watched our super bowl, the Oscars? Only 18 million. We should be live blogging the super bowl, but that's a conversation for a different time. Football dwarfs literally every other thing people in this country watch on television. So my question for us is, it's a big one. Why does football matter, not just us here in this room today, but to the culture at large? And thank goodness we've got a special guest to help with all of this.

[Nomi Frye]

Thank goodness.

[Alex Schwartz]

Thank goodness, because Vincent can do it, but not all on his own. The New Yorker sports critic Louisa Thomas will be joining us. Very excited about this.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm so excited.

[Alex Schwartz]

So that's today on Critics at Large. Why Football Matters. Okay. I just want listeners to know the following. We are taping this episode having seen the last games of the regular season. But you are going to hear it just after the wild card games take place and just before the divisional round. Okay. I recently watched a football game. Yes, I did. It was a game between the Steelers and the Ravens. And I was advised to watch this football game by my friend Alexis Broderick, hardcore Eagles fan. And she told me to look out for Derek Henry, running back on the Ravens. She told me to look out for Aaron Rodgers, quarterback of the Steelers, who she said was legendary and old. How annoying.

[Nomi Frye]

Jesus. I know about him because he's dated several special ladies of some note from the entertainment community.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I was looking out for Lamar Jackson. I was told can be magical, but he's been injured. The Ravens quarterback is magical. In I go to watch this game.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Lamar Jackson and the Ravens Back to the 15. Here we go. First play. Henry right, and Derrick Henry into the open field right away and down the sideline into Steelers territory.

[Alex Schwartz]

And guys, after prepping for this episode, I felt much better equipped than I have in the past to take in a game. No longer did I just see, you know, a kind of crunch and a break from the crunch. I got it. I was understanding a bit more about the strategy. And then the Ravens were up and the bell tolled. For me, it was halftime. It was like after 10pm I was going to sleep and I wake up in the morning.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Oh, no.

[Alex Schwartz]

To the text message.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Oh, no.

[Alex Schwartz]

How could you walk away from that? How could you do it?

[Nomi Frye]

From Alexis.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Holding.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The kick is no good.

[Alex Schwartz]

It is wide right.

[Nomi Frye]

And the Steelers are the champions of the North.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, you missed one of the games of the year. Not only was there a scintillating, amazing comeback, which was punctuated at the end by a missed field goal by the Ravens kicker, which was just like a heart, when you can just pinpoint the reason for a loss, and that when you can pin it on somebody for at least for a second, it gets rough. But also, the Steelers and the Ravens are longtime divisional rivals. They are always at each other's throats. It's always an event when they play. And because in some ways both of these teams have underachieved, both of the coaches were in some way coaching for their jobs. There was a lot of kind of future casting. What are the fates of these teams, not only in this moment, but for maybe the next decade? On the line in this game. Amazing finish. One of the great things about football, even though I love basketball, this is what football has over basketball. 82 games in a basketball season. Many opportunities for brilliance, but fewer opportunities for that much meaning. Whereas the football season, 18 weeks, every team plays 17 times, every game matters deeply. And at the end of the season, really great things like this can happen.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, I think that's an advantage. I mean, I grew up watching baseball, which the season is endless. There's so many games. Okay, let's get to what Critics is all about. Football comes to us through the sport itself, obviously, but it also comes to us through the culture, through the media, through movies, through tv. Do any of you have a particularly formative football text?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Certainly the one that made the most the highest impact on me was indeed Friday Night Lights.

[Alex Schwartz]

Mm. Good morning, West Texas Slammin Sammy Meade coming at you with Panther Football Radio 4:70am on your dial. It's Monday morning and we all know what that means. Only four days till Friday night, the night that our Dylan Panthers bring the hammer down on the Westerby Mustangs.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The story of a high school football team in a fictional Texas town called Dillon. Based on the book of the same name by Buzz Bissinger. I was living in Washington, D.C. and it is weirdly, a. A sports town because there is this ideal of the, I don't know, sort of gentlemen football fan, people who worked in government but had, like, really literate and interesting things to say about sports, which kind of inspired me.

[Alex Schwartz]

And.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The West Wing was ending one sort of idealized but troubled portrait of America. And I moved to D.C. at the end of 08, which was during like the second season or thereabouts of Friday Night Lights. And it was another way to kind of see. It was this time of troubled optimism about America that was like sort of admitting many flaws, dealing with kind of lots of contradictions, but putting forward a kind of feel good portrait. And I always thought of West Wing and Friday Night Lights as twins in that way. The way that that show, which started about a quarterback gets really badly injured on a football field and others trying to sort of step into the gap, but it opened its aperture, opened and opened, and it admitted. The first time I really paid attention to Michael B. Jordan was. He was. All of a sudden the show was kind of about race and a black quarterback. So it kept on opening and opening and letting more of America into this truly, for me, insane situation of high school football being the most important thing in the world, as it sort of is in Texas, but as a city kid was kind of alien to me. And it was almost for me, like a didactic tool. It was a way of like. I know it sounds maybe, maybe this sounds paternalistic, but it's like, oh, I want to understand a different part of America. And it was a kind of sociology for me, even though it was also kind of a soap opera. I really love Friday Night Lights.

[Nomi Frye]

Know me, I mean, I feel like the most salient text or texts that inform my understanding of football or kind of like my imagining of it I guess would be the gossip pages, by which I mean the relationships carried on between a variety of quarterbacks over the years and the beautiful ladies they court.

[Alex Schwartz]

The wags, as it were.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Was Jay Cutler the first football player to date a reality star? Didn't he date the girl from the hills?

[Nomi Frye]

No, if you consider Jessica Simpson a reality star, because remember when she dated Tony Romo.

[Vincent Cunningham]

There you go.

[Nomi Frye]

From the Dallas Cowboys.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I do, I do, yes. I forgot about that.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes. So, yeah, so Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari from Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach. Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo. Tom Brady and Gisele. And now, you know, allegedly Alix Earle, the TikTok, the young TikTok star canoodling in St. Bart just last week. And of course, and of course Taylor and Travis Kelce, which is like the kind of like final bosses of kind of like football quarterback dating, like head cheerleader archetype.

[Alex Schwartz]

With that preamble, it has become clear how much we need Louisa to get in here right now and clarify some stuff for us. The New Yorker sports critic, Louisa Thomas. Hello.

[Louisa Thomas]

Hi. Hi.

[Nomi Frye]

Hi.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Thanks for coming here to help.

[Alex Schwartz]

You are not with us, sadly, in the studio, except a beautiful portion of your face. Where are you reaching us from?

[Louisa Thomas]

I am in Boston, Massachusetts. Brighton, actually. Patriots land.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, I was going to say Patriots territory. Okay, Louisa, we want to know. Just start us off. What is your background with football?

[Louisa Thomas]

I mean, I grew up reading the Washington Post sports section, like, fairly religiously. So a lot of my, like, just like game stories, like sports columns.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Was Sally Jenkins big for you? She's, I think she's one of my favorites.

[Louisa Thomas]

She was big for me, although I, Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell wrote for the Post. Michael Wilbon was a Post columnist.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Another little known writer named David Remnick. Washington Post, indeed.

[Louisa Thomas]

Indeed.

[Nomi Frye]

I did not know this.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes.

[Louisa Thomas]

I grew up casually watching the national holidays. Right. So the super bowl, maybe the Army Navy game, you know, the opening games of the season.

[Vincent Cunningham]

When did your fandom arise above that sort of casual Easter, Christmas way of being involved. And how did you, like, get like, super fanish?

[Louisa Thomas]

Well, I started writing for a website called Grantland where there were lots of super fans. And yeah, so I started watching a lot of football and then I happened to marry a football player. So that was. That was another way in. And that now you're married to the game. And now I'm married and I'm married to the game.

[Nomi Frye]

Say more. When you say married to a football player, do you mean someone who played football in high School, or do you mean.

[Vincent Cunningham]

No, she's talking about the pros, baby.

[Alex Schwartz]

Wow.

[Nomi Frye]

I did not know this Louisa.

[Louisa Thomas]

So, yeah, so it was funny. My husband is a retired football player, but we got together after his rookie season, so I had actually a couple years of being a wag.

[Nomi Frye]

That is actually crazy and amazing.

[Louisa Thomas]

It was much less glamorous for me than it is for many people. Although, you know, Kristin Juszczyk, who's, like, now the designer of the day, was at the time dating another Ravens player. So I, like, would do, like, spin classes and Pilates classes with her, and she's now this, like, you know, she's dressing Taylor Swift. So our lives have followed similar trajectories.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right.

[Nomi Frye]

So you're coming to us from the inside, kind of.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, so I want to know, from Vincent and Louisa, what do you guys find about the game itself that makes it to you a beautiful game to watch? Because I'll just say as an asterisk to that question, I think it's easy to understand for someone who hasn't grown up with these sports why something like basketball can be interesting to people to watch. It's a very kinetic game. It's moving quickly. There are fewer players on the court. You can kind of see them as individuals a bit more, and some kind of spectacular feat is going on very, very regularly. And with football, the thing that always used to strike me when I was younger was how much nothing happened. So what's the thing about football that gets you?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Lucy, go first.

[Louisa Thomas]

I think one of the things that works for football is that precisely what you're saying, it actually rewards interest at any level. You can actually watch it as a moving, abstract painting. There is a certain kind of aesthetic quality to the choreography and the sort of balletic violence in any given play while it continues. Like, the more you learn about it, the more it rewards you in different ways because there's so much strategy involved, there's so many complexities. Like, it's inexhaustible in that way, so you don't actually have to be an expert. You don't have to have played football. You don't have to know the lingo, you know, to feel like there's something in it for you. I think that maybe something you're experiencing, too, is that once you get a little bit interested because it's so inexhaustible, the temptation is to get more and more into it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, I love the outdoor nature of it, although I do love the squeaks and sort of echoes of the cavernous Basketball arena. There's something interesting about a game that's played outside and has something to do with landscape and terrain. And you always have to talk about the weather and when it's being played.

[Louisa Thomas]

But, Vincent, so many games are playing in domes now.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's true. I know. And it ruins. And I don't like to be reminded about this sort of the lore. And maybe I'm still talking on the level of archetypes. Right. It just feels that way. I still remember being, for a while, all my friends played football. I did for a while. I stopped. I was, though, until my senior year, the manager of the football team, just so I could hang out with my friends.

[Alex Schwartz]

Wow, huge reveal.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Crack jokes and carry the first down markers and the pylons and stuff like that. And the sort of inextricable connection with the fall and the chill in the air always just. It still makes me nostalgic. When I watch a football game, I have these little sense memories. Also, even though it is a very highly programmed game, there are, like, moments of really rare improvisational beauty. Like, my only reason to watch sports is because it reminds me of other things like, you know, dance and geometry and like, all these other sort of, like, higher abstractions. And there's just a beauty to somebody, like running to the sideline and catching the ball and then trying to tap their toes inside. I mean, there's just like a lot of opportunities for weird beauty from bodies that are always surprising you. There are all these paradoxes of strength and grace and then people doing things that they never do in real life, which is just like, hit somebody really, really hard. So all those things contribute.

[Alex Schwartz]

The beauty and the bloodshed.

[Louisa Thomas]

Would you say beauty in the bloodshed.

[Nomi Frye]

The sorrow and the pity.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's right.

[Alex Schwartz]

In a minute. We're talking about a new book that argues that football is the best way to understand America. Do not go away. Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, senior awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood.

[Louisa Thomas]

There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated.

[Alex Schwartz]

Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts. We've been talking about football. Let's now talk about football. That one was in quotes. No one got it. Okay. It's because this is the Title of a new book by the journalist Chuck Klosterman. It's not my fault that this is an audio medium. This book is coming out in just a few days. Chuck Klosterman is, I think he was also at Grantland for a time and he's just, to my mind, been in the culture for a very long time as a cultural commentator who takes pieces of popular culture and, and analyzes them in a kind of fascinating and digestible way. So I have here my copy of Football. It's a handsome physical object, I just want to note a handsome volume.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's red with gold lettering. I think it's meant to evoke the texture of the ball, but also sort of an old school aesthetic. It's really cool. It's a very well designed book.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, yeah, and I think, particularly because the design of this book, that it's more than just. Than just a random thing we're noting. I mean, the design of this book says to me like you're holding a book that is supposed to look a little bit like a classic in a winking way.

[Louisa Thomas]

A tome.

[Alex Schwartz]

A tome. And the argument that Chuck Klosterman is making at the start of this book, the kind of raison d' etre for the book is he's saying football is the same way. Football is a classic. It's fundamental to America. It's like by far and away the most watched not only sport, but thing in American culture. And he says it's gonna die out. This thing is gonna be on the wane. He's addressing his book at the start to future people, mainly Americans who will have wanted to understand what the whole football craze was about and who don't know. Because football in 20, 30, 40 years, he thinks is not gonna have the cultural prominence that it has today. So I just wanna read a little selection and then let's go in and get to it. But just so listeners have some sense of where Chuck Klosserman is coming from here and what he's saying. So he says football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value, even, and perhaps especially when football is something they actively dislike. Louisa, I just want to throw this to you right away. Do you agree with that?

[Louisa Thomas]

Yeah, I think. I mean, to some extent the numbers speak for themselves. They recently released the list of 100 most watched TV events of the past year. And the list is. Yeah. Sports Business Journal's top 100 telecasts of 2025 football games make up 92 of the top hundred, which is extraordinary. It's extraordinary to say the least.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, it's part of the logic of the book, and we'll get further into this, is that it is precisely because football is such a optimal televisual entertainment that it is so popular. So like its televisual popularity is, it's not downstream of its popularity, it's almost TV is at the top of the stream. And football, just by its nature, by the sort of mix of incredibly kinetic action and then a lot of nothing as we've spoken about the field, the sort of military design of moving forward, that it's just such a great television entertainment that it just, it takes over. I have a friend, one of my best friends, shout out to you, Dmitri Tarakov, who I recently realized every Sunday his one time that he's not with his family, he goes to a bar in downtown Manhattan and it's just him and his buddies and their laptops. And their, their laptops because they're doing fantasy, they're like, they're working, they're looking at fantasy. And it's like seven dudes in a corner of a bar, sometimes laptops, sometimes phone, just like watching a bevy of games, watching like seven games at a time in a sort of competitive manner with each other. But it's also a spoke for the social nature of like. And it's like, first of all, I was like, yes, can I be invited? And also just, yeah, it means more than simply the game. Having it on is a way of. It's like looking at a fireplace in some ways.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. Football clearly has this. Right, so you're saying, Vincent, basically that football has all these aspects of engagement.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a great thing to look at and it's also sometimes a great thing not to look at while it's on.

[Nomi Frye]

Right. Which is again one of Klosterman's claims, right. That the thing, one of the things that makes football so pleasurable is that I believe the stat that he names in the book is that out of a three hour long game, 11 minutes are actually action. And the rest of the time is kind of like long, fairly empty moments where you could sort of like do other stuff, converse, contemplate, you know, just have it on. And that in fact is not to the detriment of the attraction of the game, but the reason for its attraction.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's constitutive of. Yes, its appeal. I was just gonna add to. Not only are you kind of resting from the action, but there is a didactic element because Football is so, so complex in terms of the plays, the variations on the plays, the situations, that learning what happened, basically the football announcer becomes very important to the telecast aspect. Cause now you're hearing what happened, why you're watching replays, you're getting minute details of the camera view that you couldn't see from the wider view when the thing was actually happening in real time. So there's like this rhythm of anticipation, action, and almost like not only didacticism, like here's what happened, but also discourse. Then you can talk about what happened and complain about this block and complain about this receiver. So there's this, what we like about art, the thing itself and then the discourse that surrounds it. A kind of criticism is inherent to the rhythm of watching football. It's like, here's the thing. Here's the talk about the thing. Here's the argue about the thing. Oh, here's the thing again. I don't know. There's something really nourishing about that for me.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. And Vincent, I wanted to just mention a line I really enjoyed from this book, which I found quite enjoyable. I wanna know what you guys thought. But having to do with the complexity of the game, where for the first time I was like, oh, okay. Klosserman is talking about how people like to compare basketball to jazz. Cause it's so much about improvisation and the beauty and the fluidity of the movement. And he's saying it's not that basketball, jazz and football is anti jazz or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It's more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering. And I'm like, oh my God. And yet people are riveted by petroleum engineering. It means it's a complex operation.

[Nomi Frye]

It's a very complex operation.

[Alex Schwartz]

And a managerial. He's saying, like a managerial figure. It so much comes down to the coaching and to the plays and the Louisa. Is that right? Am I getting this right?

[Louisa Thomas]

Well, I mean, basically. Well, I mean, it's a. Yeah, it's a sport in which everybody has a very, very well defined role. And they have to do their job. Like they cannot freelance. Right. In the same way that a basketball player can improvise. I mean, there are certain play. Like a great quarterback. Patrick Mahomes is famous for some of these plays. Like as the play breaks down, he has the skill and the wherewithal or has at certain points in his career, but large stretches of his career to do something completely extraordinary. And that seems creative in like the best Possible way. But part of that is because it's more like very formal poetry. It's like a sestina, like not free verse.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right.

[Louisa Thomas]

There are these very kind of like strict rules that everybody has to follow. But actually sometimes that makes those, like that flowering of creativity seem all the more incredible. But yeah, it's very like, bureaucratic. Right. Like, the coaching staffs are enormous because everything has to be so.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And there's somebody up in a booth above watching to send a play to the person on the sideline. There's lots of sort of headsets and walkie talkie technology happening in a way that reminds. I mean, it reminds you of. And we'll get more into this because this is another one of Closerman's contentions. But it reminds you of warfare in certain ways. That this sort of highly technocratic activity that has something to do with the people on the field, but at least on a sort of theoretical level, exists outside of them.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, the warfare thing is a pretty standard football comparison. I mean, do you guys buy that? I don't see how you couldn't, frankly. Like, these are two teams going into battle against each other. They're trying to gain territory.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, it's about position and situation.

[Nomi Frye]

I know. I was surprised, I guess. I mean, to me, when I heard like the war comparison, I took it to mean, I guess always more of the kind of like brute combat of the thing. Right. Of sort of bodies, like, trying to annihilate each other. But as I was reading this book and I realized the element of kind of planning and strategy and highly sophisticated craft that goes into the thing, I was like, oh, wait, they have to be brilliant.

[Louisa Thomas]

Oh, yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Are they actually like absolute geniuses?

[Louisa Thomas]

Yes, but I mean, but football was like, born out of a culture. I mean, Walter Camp, who is credited with codifying the game and is responsible for some of its most salient features. It was coming out of an era in the early 20th century where there was this kind of muscular Christianity where there was this fear of the American male becoming softened and weakened. And that war had this really salutary effect. And there was this question of, like, could we replicate some of the circumstances of war so that we can toughen up our young men without actually putting them into the kind of peril that like World War I, you know, without having devastating the population. And I mean, and that, that actually, like, was a real concern. And so it is actually in some ways like a very sort of self conscious, like, war game. And a lot of the language is, you know, you Talk about the. The blitz is a, you know, a football term. You know, the trenches are, you know, talking about that. That's like a term that is used in football as well. And there's an aerial attack. And it can be very self conscious.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay. Klosterman says that football is going to die out. He's not the only one who said this. And his. The basic thrust of his argument is that because of the prevalence of injury, people are gonna start stop playing it at the lower levels. I actually thought there was a bit of a. Not blaming exactly, but like, pointing fingers at the mothers. It was kind of like, the moms are gonna stop letting the boys play. And when the moms stop letting the boys play, no high schoolers play. And when no high schoolers play, no college students play the pros. It's like this kind of chain reaction argument. That's one thrust of his argument. Do we buy it? Nomi Fry?

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, I was impressed by the kind of, like, audacity of Klosterman's argument. Like, it's the sort of thing that I can't imagine myself doing as a writer. Like, I don't know why. There was something about this book and kind of like the kind of grandness of its argumentation. There was something very masculine about it. Like the type of argument that it was making and the kind of stakes that it was, you know, insisting on. And I was like, wow, I could never write this kind of book, like, making the kind of like, mothers are gonna start saying, no, my kid can't play this in the next 25 to 35 years. You know, I was like, will they? I mean, maybe. I mean, probably, but just. Do you know what I'm saying?

[Alex Schwartz]

What if you suddenly wrote this kind of book, though?

[Nomi Frye]

What if I suddenly wrote this book?

[Alex Schwartz]

What if you just came out and made a bunch of bold predictions that no one can disprove in the present?

[Nomi Frye]

Exactly. And I was just.

[Alex Schwartz]

And sold a bunch of books off of them.

[Nomi Frye]

I know. I was just like, I was impressed and a little pissed off, and I was like, this sounds right, but I actually have no way of knowing. I mean, just the effect of it was so, like, audacious. Like, enough to kind of piss me off a little bit.

[Alex Schwartz]

You got riled.

[Nomi Frye]

I got a little bit riled.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It also belongs.

[Nomi Frye]

You know what I mean?

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It also belongs to a genre, you know, close to Mitt's Bossette, Grant lan and all their friends. They're always on Bill Simmons podcast is Bill Simmons, and he wrote a book it was just called the Book of Basketball. And it's similarly like. So imagine it's a different kind of book. It's less of a sort of cultural survey like this. It's more of a sort of history, plus a set of propositions and arguments. But I think that is a really just sportsy way of writing. Yeah, Closer Man's not just a sports writer, so I don't want to totally lump him into it. But when you write about sports, there's a lot of predicting and saying, I think this guy's going to score 25 points. You know, you got. You have to kind of say this kind of thing. And so I thought that that was, like, part of the ethos.

[Alex Schwartz]

Louisa, are you convinced by the argument?

[Louisa Thomas]

I mean, I guess so, because I, you know, I struggle. Like, you know, as we've said, my husband played football and, like, we have a son, right. Who's three. And, you know, there was one day where he was, like, running back and forth between the couch and the wall and just crashing into the wall on the couch. And my husband's like, well, I'm sorry to say.

[Alex Schwartz]

There we go.

[Louisa Thomas]

And part of me is like, no, no, let's stop this. And so maybe I'm a reflection of that, you know, the mothers. But he also makes another argument which I think is, like, really worth pointing to. And it also, I think, speaks to something that the book misses, and I think it misses in a sort of masculine way, which is that he also argues that it's going to become diminished because there are certain structural changes in the college football game, which has made football less regional, it's made it more national, it's made it more like the NFL. It's made it more of a television product that is, like, accessible to a lot of people, but gripping, less, like, vitally interesting and important to particular communities. And one of the things that I think the book misses is this discussion about how football does not just have these warlike aspects, but that football makes people feel things really deeply. And particularly, it makes men feel things really deeply.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, I've noticed this just by, again, my. Very limited. Watching the amount of men talking about their feelings in the few minutes of, like, football documentary I've watched. It's astounding. It's actually astounding to me.

[Louisa Thomas]

But this is one of the way in which I felt like, God, you're like, such a man. Like, why can't you talk about this?

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's weird. He does, like, have these Scenes of, you know, him as a child sobbing and family members consoling him to the extent that his sister's boyfriend calls him the next day and asks if he's okay. And his dad comes up to console him after a particularly wrenching cowboy's loss. So he does tell these vignettes of him, in fact, experiencing this emotion, but yet he has to sort of put on this drag of dispassion and sort of.

[Louisa Thomas]

Yeah, there's a hole in the book, though, because of that. Because he actually says there's this list in the beginning of the book. He's like, this book is not. You know, I'm not writing this book for, like, X, Y and z reasons. Right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And one of them is like, I'm not gonna write about community. I'm not gonna write about fandom. I'm not gonna write about love. Like, I'm not taking football to prom. This is not a love letter. And he's obviously writing against a certain kind of sports writing, which is like, this is why we love sports. Or, like, fathers and sons, you know, like, that's what he's talking about. But because he, like, excludes this, like, rather large dimension of, you know, being a sports fan or following football, it means that he is, like, cutting himself off from, like, what I think is actually, like, a very compelling reason for football's popularity, which is that it's not only a simulation of war, but it's a simulation of community. You know, men cry watching football games, and that's okay. You know, like, they hug strangers and that's okay. Like, they. Their days are ruined, or they're elated, or they are allowed these, like, expressions of deep emotions. Um, and I actually think it's like, in popular American culture, it's like, the only space in which they are allowed to express totally normal human emotions. And they come out. That's this conduit. Like, this necessary conduit for letting people letting. And especially men, like, feel things really deeply that. That. That humans need.

[Alex Schwartz]

You know, Hooty and the blowfish said, I'm such a baby. Cause the dolphins make me cry. No, Hootie, you're human.

[Nomi Frye]

You're a man.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hooty, you're Louisa Thomas. You're human. You're fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with us.

[Louisa Thomas]

Thank you.

[Alex Schwartz]

In a minute. Why Football Matters. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back. This week on the political scene from the New Yorker, a bracing conversation about the risks of Donald Trump's New World order. I think that what you're seeing both.

[Nomi Frye]

Abroad and at home are completely optional.

[Alex Schwartz]

Conflicts created by the character of the President. The die is cast by who he is and he sees himself as without.

[Nomi Frye]

Any kind of restraints on his power.

[Alex Schwartz]

Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

I feel like, you know, thinking about like, why this game matters. I mean, this is such a huge question and it can matter on obviously different levels to me what I feel like I'm missing. And maybe not just with football, but with sports more generally. But it seems now from reading the book and so on talking about it, that football seems to be the kind of like, maybe height of this experience is the sense of kind of like a belonging and a kind of lingua franca to share with other people, which I feel like obviously I have it in other realms, you know, in my life. And not all of them are like necessarily kind of like highfaluting or you know, intellectual. Like, I have like a group chat where we all like almost exclusively talk about like reality television, you know, shout out the clubhouse, named after Andy Cohen's clubhouse. And I feel like I get a sense of belonging from that and a sense of understanding and a kind of like shared rhythm of living. And I feel like that is something that football appears to provide in spades. Just even that kind of like week after week, the season, you know, it's like even the super bowl thing, you know, I remember countless years where like I had forgotten that it was the super bowl and like I had made plans with another non football watching friend to like go out to a restaurant or to a bar and it seemed like weirdly empty. And I would be like, wait, what's going on? Like, oh, it was really easy to get a reservation or like whatever it is. And then I would be like, oh, wait a second, right, I don't belong to this like, very integral form of experience that so many other people are enjoying.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Did your, you described very well your sort of engagement and sort of growing or at least momentary spike of interest in football. Did any of that give you, Alex, an answer to this question, this big question, why does football matter?

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, linked to the kind of framing of the Chuck Klosterman book. It did make me think of a few things. The framing of Chuck Klosterman book being football is a mirror for America in these various ways. And one thing that I think about when I think about football, and it's an obvious thing. But I think about CTE a lot when I think about football because I'm not a watcher of the sport, because there aren't, like, I don't have another real connection to the game and to the sport. And now maybe I will have a bit more of a connection to watching the actual sport. But for so long, it has been to me, football is a very, very dangerous activity that we now know hurts a lot of people who do it. And I'm bringing this up not so I can be the moralizing east coaster, though I'm sure I'll be accused of being that who wags my fingers and says, I can't believe we're letting this happen. But because my question is one that Klosterman himself asks, which is, okay, how do we reconcile these things? How do we do it? Do we do it? Why? And, you know, I was reading an article in New York magazine by my friend Reeves Weideman, Shout out to former fact checker Reeves. And I just wanted to read this to you guys because it really crystallized to me something that's going on in America that's also going on. I think I gather in football, he's talking about the player Tua Tagovaloa. Did I do okay?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, I think that's good.

[Alex Schwartz]

Who's had a bunch of concussions and may have to stop playing the game, but as of now, I think is still playing the game. And he says the NFL's chief medical officer, Alan Sills, said that the league would not get involved in Togovaloa's decision to keep playing the game or whether to retire, citing, quote, patient autonomy and medical decision making really matters. End quote. And then Reeves says football had entered its era of personal responsibility, and I started to see its forgotten concussion crisis in the same light as other emergencies like Covid or climate change. There was, of course, a swath of people who denied the issue was a problem at all. But even among those who acknowledged its seriousness, there was often little appetite for more collective action. Wear a mask if you want. Bring a bag to the grocery store. Your brain, your choice. And so I do think that's how we as society have come through collective crises. Not at all by bonding together. So football, to me, is this really interesting example of, like, absolute huge cultural and emotional cohesion that also is predicated on this very weird individualism argument that is false. Like, you guys make your own choice. No, it's a choice for the collective. It's a choice to continue to participate in such a collective culture and to Entertain the collective. So that's a contradiction. That is a very American contradiction to me. And that makes football very poignant, I think. And I think I still would have a very hard time watching the game, quite honestly, because. Because of injury.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. One thing that football is kind of generous about is that I agree with everything you just said. And it also is a magnifying glass and a clarifier for all of these. The interaction between capital, of which there is vast amounts. In football, the money is visible on the field, in the stadiums, in the. Every part of it screams money. There are military flyovers. The money is very visible in a way that it often is not in terms of the larger American system of capitalism. And so too are the downstream effects of what it takes to be a player. Because everybody who watches football has watched Tua Tagovaloa, who is the quarterback for the Dolphins, who's not a very big gentleman, be hit, fall to the ground, and then literally his hands squirm involuntarily and make all kinds of, you know, this is a common effect of a really bad concussion. I watched that and thought that the fellow might die. I saw that happen. And it's a really interesting test case. Cause most people who watch football saw that. And then we see this kid who himself deeply desires to come back. And I've seen him recently have press conferences where my takeaway was, boy, that fella's personality sure does seem to have changed.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, God.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know, and he's still a young man and he still wants to play football. So that is salutary only to the point that everything is very clear. Sometimes capital can be invisible to us. Sometimes the price of labor can be very invisible to us. In football, it's all there. And so what happens, how people change or don't change, how we ignore or don't ignore, how we fix structures or don't fix them becomes, I think, if not a way forward, at least an honest illustration that we don't get in other parts of life.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's the conclusion I reached in Reeves. Comparison to climate change just hit me like, yeah, we don't want to change the behaviors that are leading to the problem. We understand the problem will be catastrophic, but we're not very good at dealing with long term outcomes in the present. And what I have understood now more than I did before is the appeal of the game itself. So I get it. More about why it's a conflict.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, I mean, I feel conflicted about it, but to your point, I do watch it. And that Teaches me something about myself. You know, I find it, quote, unquote, fun. And, you know, there is a sort of, you know, at least that one sort of streak of American libertarianism does live in me. It's like this guy wants to do that, and he makes a lot of money and he feeds his family by doing it. And, you know, another part of the TUA story that is. I think another thing that football can do is show different sort of demographic strains swelling in American culture is the story of the Samoan football player is a huge one. These guys who come from places where other things might not be available to them have sort of made themselves visible in the American scene through football. I am sure that there will be some Polynesian kid two generations from now who is not even a football player, who is, I don't know, a great scholar or businessman who will say, I gained pride to think that I could be X. Because I watched back in the day when I was a kid, it was Troy Palomalo who was the first great Polynesian player. He had this beautiful mane of hair that would come streaming, these curls. He played for the Steelers. Streaming out of his helmet. I'll never forget it. He was the coolest dude. And it's like, wait, where is he from? Football can introduce types to us and all this. Part of me is like, look at, you know, what an extraordinary kid.

[Alex Schwartz]

And.

[Nomi Frye]

But also beyond that, just your own enjoyment, right?

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Your own entertainment as a viewer, you know, not just you, but viewers. So many things we do in life are like that. You know, are we gonna. You know, are we gonna take a plane? Like, it's not good for the environment. Like, are we still gonna take a.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Plane or use a cell phone?

[Nomi Frye]

Or use a cell phone or.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, and it's.

[Nomi Frye]

It's like we can't give account or be absolutely ethical every moment of our lives. And as you said, Vincent, so, so correctly, football just makes that clear. It makes that legible.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. And yet on the other side of that is this argument, you know, in defense of football is one of the modes that we are operating in. It is this idea of something that brings us together, that we need these opportunities. I mean, if our idea here is like, why is it so hard to disinvest from something that is harmful, at least in one way, maybe in many others? I think that is really powerful as a justification and maybe hard to steer ourselves away from.

[Alex Schwartz]

Who are you gonna be rooting for going forward?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, you know, the jets are thankfully not in the playoffs. I don't have to think about them anymore. I am lightly rooting for the third team that resides in New York, the Buffalo Bills. I would like for their quarterback, Josh Allen, to kind of get a Super bowl under his belt, establish himself as one of the greats of the era, which I do think that he is. And, you know, even though they're in the same division as the Jets, I sometimes dislike them. Western New York, shout out to you. I love Buffalo. I love the wintry winds of the the Erie Canal.

[Nomi Frye]

Go Bills.

[Vincent Cunningham]

All of it. Go Bills.

[Alex Schwartz]

We enjoy your wings. Thank you, Buffalo.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Thank you.

[Alex 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. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy, with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Next week is our 100th episode. Can you believe it?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I cannot.

[Alex Schwartz]

Me neither. We wanted to celebrate it by hearing from all of you, so we're doing a special edition of I Need a Critic. Come celebrate with us. We'll see you then. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try.

[Louisa Thomas]

To make sense of what's happening alongside.

[Alex Schwartz]

Politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

From prx.