transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
[01:52] This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz.

Speaker 4:
[01:56] I'm Naomi Fry.

Speaker 5:
[01:58] I'm Vinson Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now, and how we got here. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:
[02:07] Doing good.

Speaker 4:
[02:08] Doing well. Doing well.

Speaker 5:
[02:09] You know who else is doing well? Our listeners, who are always, whenever we get an e-mail, 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. Louis, thank you, Louis, wrote in suggesting that we do an episode about the return of earnestness. 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?

Speaker 3:
[02:53] Well, I have been riveted by the Artemis II mission.

Speaker 6:
[02:58] And lift off the crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon.

Speaker 3:
[03:04] The mission itself, but also the astronauts and their feedback about what they saw and felt in deep outer space.

Speaker 7:
[03:11] The four of us have looked at this in our entire lives and the way we are responding to what we are seeing out the window, it's just like we're a bunch of little kids up here, just we cannot get enough of this.

Speaker 3:
[03:21] 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.

Speaker 4:
[03:32] I mean, talking about space, Project Hail Mary, the recent movie starring Ryan Gosling has been shattering box office records.

Speaker 8:
[03:43] So, I met an alien. He's a genius engineer.

Speaker 9:
[03:47] And if I can't understand what he's saying, he puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain.

Speaker 8:
[03:51] And you know what? I don't mind it.

Speaker 4:
[03:55] The great success of this movie suggests to me that there is a kind of a hunger for a sincere story about connection and hope.

Speaker 5:
[04:06] Also, like I should say, we've spoken about this show on this show before, but The Pit. She's seizing.

Speaker 8:
[04:13] Okay, showtime.

Speaker 10:
[04:14] We need to get this baby out right now.

Speaker 11:
[04:17] I am fully capable of handling.

Speaker 7:
[04:18] No, you are not fully capable and you know it.

Speaker 5:
[04:21] Oh yeah, absolutely. The Pit is so earnest about the necessity for saving lives, doctors' jobs, how hard they are and how hard they work at them.

Speaker 3:
[04:32] There's Love on the Spectrum, which just came out with its fourth season earlier this month, hugely popular dating show.

Speaker 5:
[04:39] What does love mean to you?

Speaker 8:
[04:40] Oh, love means that you and the other person understand each other.

Speaker 12:
[04:46] We'll be like a fairy tale.

Speaker 3:
[04:47] Rife with earnestness, unlike so many dating shows where there are obstacles and there are jealousy and the whole hope is to inflame competition. And here, 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.

Speaker 4:
[05:02] The ice skater, Alyssa Liu, just brought home the gold in the Olympics.

Speaker 10:
[05:06] It is like she's just playing on the ice, not even performing anymore. The joy, the passion.

Speaker 4:
[05:14] The effervescence, the belief in oneself, the wanting to show up and do your best. People really responding to that.

Speaker 5:
[05:24] Yeah, it's all there. And so today, we're delving into this new wave of earnestness. We're going to 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?

Speaker 3:
[06:28] Well, I mentioned the Artemis II mission before, and I want to 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 three-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, you know, all for let's colonize Mars, all that lunacy nonsense.

Speaker 5:
[07:00] Multi-planetary existence?

Speaker 3:
[07:02] Exactly. Just 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 they say the same thing. There were recordings that were made while they were still on Artemis II, 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.

Speaker 13:
[07:53] A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked.

Speaker 3:
[08:08] 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.

Speaker 13:
[08:27] 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. And Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.

Speaker 3:
[08:54] 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.

Speaker 4:
[09:05] Yeah, no, it's true. It's moving.

Speaker 14:
[09:07] It's earnest.

Speaker 4:
[09:08] Yeah. And I was, you know, as I was watching this press conference, Alex, that you're referring to, I was thinking a couple of 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' rocket that sent up his fiancee, now wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Katy Perry, Gayle King, a number of other women. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[09:52] Just to think about it brings shame.

Speaker 4:
[09:53] Yeah. They went up for 11 minutes, of course, at great private cost. The impetus was supposedly like, I remember Katy Perry saying, we're going to put the ass back in astronaut because they're like hot ladies going up. We're going to glam up for this mission, etc. It was kind of fashioned as a kind of like woman empowerment thing, but it was roundly mocked because it was for not. Like it was for this multi-billionaire sending up his wife and some of her rich friends to get a little taste of space tourism, and what are we learning? What are we saying even? It's like, if you're a billionaire, you will be able to go to space for 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 you mentioned a couple minutes ago, which I have to admit I did not see, but I watched some clips and I've 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 inner species 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? Oh, yeah. Where he's a crack smoking public middle school teacher?

Speaker 3:
[12:01] It's not a pretty picture.

Speaker 4:
[12:02] It is not a pretty picture. 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 kind of a very dark picture. And so thinking about him as this like teacher come astronaut who is setting out to save the world, really for me was like, we're trying to say something different here.

Speaker 5:
[12:43] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[12:44] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[12:45] 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 if we were going to 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. These kinds of things are resurgent.

Speaker 4:
[13:23] The earth is flat.

Speaker 5:
[13:24] The earth is flat. I think these things have been kind of on the upswing recently. 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 back side of the moon are just so beautiful and so majestic that I think that there's also a kind of bursting of mythologies that real earnestness, real seriousness of purpose can kind of illuminate, 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, Naomi, are there other things beyond Artemis that have been really tickling your earnestness bone?

Speaker 3:
[14:08] I am really interested in the success of a show like Love on the Spectrum.

Speaker 12:
[14:12] This series follows people on the autism spectrum.

Speaker 2:
[14:15] Hi, everybody.

Speaker 12:
[14:16] As they navigate the confusing world of relationships.

Speaker 14:
[14:20] I just need to work on responding before reacting.

Speaker 4:
[14:22] Like what if he's not the one?

Speaker 12:
[14:23] And dating. Hello.

Speaker 15:
[14:25] Hi. What if he gives me a wedding ring?

Speaker 8:
[14:27] Staying in front of this church made me think.

Speaker 3:
[14:33] My go-to is not dating shows. This is not an area that I'm particularly into. I'm not a 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.

Speaker 4:
[15:24] 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.

Speaker 5:
[15:56] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[15:57] 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 going to cry every second. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3:
[16:18] It was too raw.

Speaker 5:
[16:19] 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. It's just the straightforward yearning that occurs in the show and sort of that it displaces onto its audience toward its characters. I think, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[16:47] Yeah, we've talked about it. We could talk about it endlessly. I could. Everyone else would leave the room. Heated Rivalry was- We'll leave you alone with your thoughts. Yes. Leave me alone with the listeners and my thoughts. Heated Rivalry was a mass catharsis event. I think we can see that clearly now in the blooming light of April, that in the depths of January, everybody needed to have this enormous catharsis. And yes, we've all talked about the yearning, but it was more than the yearning, it was about connection. And it was about a sense of connection being possible. And everyone's losing their minds, and everyone's crying, and everyone's filming each other crying to post it on Instagram. Mass catharsis event. Earnestness, there it is.

Speaker 5:
[17:29] When we're back, two new books that are examples of this trend in action. We're discussing Ben Lerner's novel, Transcription and Famesick, The New Memoir by Lena Dunham. Don't go away.

Speaker 12:
[17:52] Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex and Money, the show from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. Many of us have something going on behind closed doors, like a listener we called Elizabeth, who told us she's a hoarder.

Speaker 16:
[18:07] I see mess beyond probably what most people think of when they think of mess.

Speaker 12:
[18:14] We'll work through it all together on Death, Sex and Money. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 5:
[20:07] Before we move on, I think it might be salutary to stop and maybe make some definitions.

Speaker 3:
[20:13] Oh, I love that.

Speaker 5:
[20:14] But what's earnestness? What are we talking about?

Speaker 3:
[20:17] Oh, what a good question. Yes, we're talking about earnestness being back, but I just want to acknowledge as we do that, that I do think it's a small reaction to the overwhelming sense that the people running things are cynics, liars and shit posters, both literal and figurative, and that everything is being done for profit, ironized to the point where there is no actual baseline of truth, and this earnestness is in a response to that, to the dominant culture. So I think what we're seeing in this earnestness mode, some of these things we've talked about and more that we'll keep talking about, is an attempt to not succumb, I think, to some of that, and to try to get at the truth and not to just coat over it or go along with it or concede to it with cynicism. Saccharin is something else. Saccharin is everything is great, never fully dressed without a smile, here we go. Saccharin is lies, telling lies. And so it actually is kind of the opposite of earnestness.

Speaker 5:
[21:22] There might be opposites, that's right.

Speaker 3:
[21:24] Yeah, 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.

Speaker 4:
[21:36] I think there's a lot of, when you were just talking, Alex, and you were talking about like, everything is great, Saccharin, 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 disnification.

Speaker 5:
[22:02] Have a Coca-Cola.

Speaker 4:
[22:03] And have a Coke. Just think about kind of the relentless kind of techno-positivism of like, we're all going to be connected. Twitter will, it's like you can, you can have a free exchange of ideas.

Speaker 3:
[22:18] Right, Facebook, we're going to connect the whole world.

Speaker 4:
[22:20] We're going to connect the whole world. You know, what could be more earnest than the professed goals of all of these hugely influential companies that have cropped up in the 2000s? Reconnecting now with the idea of earnestness is different than, say, a moment like the Obama era or something, because we already know where some of these things have gone before. Like the evil places, if not evil, and certainly self-interested places that these promises have taken us before.

Speaker 3:
[23:00] Well, I have a question, Vinson, 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.

Speaker 5:
[23:28] Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[23:29] 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?

Speaker 5:
[23:43] 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. 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 Beyoncé's Lemonade. Just things that are tough and strong, but really just forthright. That seems to be speaking to a culture in the balance and trying to push toward the light. I would say the moment of earnestness before that was early Bush era, weirdly Iraq War era, when you think about Tweed.

Speaker 4:
[24:54] Early W Bush?

Speaker 5:
[24:56] W Bush. You think about 03, 04, 05, when you have bands like Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service. All these college-age Tweed for me.

Speaker 3:
[25:09] Like the Garden State soundtrack?

Speaker 5:
[25:11] The Garden State. This moment that was like, very...

Speaker 4:
[25:15] New slang.

Speaker 5:
[25:18] And that seemed to me almost like a dissociating response. The world is so bad and strange.

Speaker 4:
[25:25] When I hear the shins, I start sobbing now. You put on the shins and were we ever so fucking young?

Speaker 5:
[25:35] That's it.

Speaker 3:
[25:35] But I love that idea that it's total dissociation from reality.

Speaker 5:
[25:39] It was like post 9-11, no one really knows what to do with the political picture. And so it's like, we're going to retreat to urban enclaves as a milieu and make either like uplifting or kind of sweetly sad songs and films, right? I think when you look at that art as a response to, especially political conditions, there's a lot to start to think about about now. So let's turn to two new releases in the literary world. We could start with Famesick, the new memoir by Lena Dunham. Naomi, would you like to do a synopsis of that text?

Speaker 4:
[26:17] 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 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.

Speaker 5:
[28:27] 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 horrid separates. And I laughed at that because it's the kind of like exercise and 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.

Speaker 3:
[29:20] Do you guys think that earnestness is at odds with humor? We've been circling this question a bit. Like Vinson, 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.

Speaker 5:
[29:38] Yes, it's at odds with a certain kind of humor. And I think that Dunham will always, you could always see that there was a truth beneath her comedy, that there was a kind of relationship to reality and actually that it was trying to figure something out, especially in that first season of Girls, which I think is really brilliant. But at the same time, I think the structure of her joking has always been a kind of like three cardamom 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.

Speaker 3:
[30:16] It's a deflection.

Speaker 5:
[30:17] This kind of really intricately woven act of deflection and displacement, et cetera. And so it's interesting. I think earnestness can coexist with comedy, but precisely the kind of comedy that she brought to the fore, I think is incompatible with the kind of earnestness that we're talking about. And so it's like she has to learn how to make a new kind of joke, which I do think happens in this text sometimes. And it's really interesting. And this is a concept that connects Famesick 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'm going 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?

Speaker 3:
[31:21] 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 him-like figure. That person started out in his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, as a young aspiring poet who was in Madrid in an arts fellowship and had a very callow way of operating in the world. And Transcription may not literally be about the same character, though basically it is. But it's about that kind of person who's now in his mid-40s and at the start of the book is going to record an interview with a mentor, a big, important mentor figure for him in what is understood to be probably the last interview this person is going to give. He's doing it for a literary magazine. He's nervous about it. And right before the interview, he drops his phone, which is also his recording device, in water that's accumulated in his hotel sink and breaks his phone. And rather than come clean about this, for some reason, when he goes to the house of Thomas, his mentor, he goes along with the charade that he is recording and everything's fine. After some attempts at deflecting and saying, let's really start this tomorrow and this is just a pre-interview, the conversation begins and we get that conversation, which of course, as the reader knows, cannot be literally transcribed from what happened. It's a fiction on a fiction. Then in the middle of the book, there is an interlude that takes place in Spain with people who knew Thomas. 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 eight or nine and has stopped eating. 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, we see him go through this trajectory of growing up in all the books. That person has 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. 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 as an idea of his past, because he's going back to the site of his past in college, all of these things. This guy is very sincere in a way that the earlier characters were not, 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?

Speaker 4:
[34:21] To me, the way I felt, I mean, I really liked it. I think the first part, which has this conversation, untapped conversation with the older mentor, it could be read as if there was a little bit of fun to add with this kind of like type of person, right? Oh, for sure. It's like, okay, here you go on another kind of like anecdote about-

Speaker 5:
[34:48] Brilliant rant.

Speaker 4:
[34:49] A brilliant rant that has, you know, that even though 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 fact checker in the odds at Us Weekly, there was something called the bazometer 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. Ernest-o-meter.

Speaker 5:
[36:12] 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.

Speaker 4:
[36:20] Mm-hmm, because it ends with COVID, right? Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[36:26] 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, it's called, which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. All of a sudden, this family that can afford, as Max says, grass-fed beef, all these other things, don't eat this, don't eat that. 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.

Speaker 4:
[37:14] To watch unboxing videos, right, on YouTube.

Speaker 5:
[37:16] 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. Irony, cynicism, these are ways of saying, I'm different than that. No, I'm not like that. No, thank you. That's cool, but it's actually not for me. Ways of kind of ironizing ourselves into a corner. And all of a sudden, things like death, illness, children, of certainly, these are topics about which it's hard to be as ironic as we might otherwise be. It breaks that down.

Speaker 3:
[38:01] It's a big old, big hearted book. And that may be a reason that people are responding to it.

Speaker 5:
[38:10] Why is this earnestness coming through so strongly right now? Critics at Large from The New Yorker will be right back.

Speaker 14:
[38:24] Hi, everyone, I'm Suzy Weiss, and I've noticed there's just simply not enough podcasts in the world, so I'm launching my own. Let's go. Let's go, baby. Second Thought is a weekly show about pop culture, the stuff everyone's been binging, arguing about, obsessing over. Here's the thing about Heated Library, I mean, even the most devoted Swifties, I think we can agree, not our best work. We'll be hosting thoughtful conversations with culture's most important figures. Talk about genius. Talk about generational talent. Coming to Headphones Near You on April 17th with a first guess you won't want to miss, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 5:
[39:34] So we've been talking about a new earnestness, and really for me, the big question here is, why is this earnestness coming through so strongly right now? One aspect of this is maybe a sort of generational thing. You see a lot of think pieces about quote unquote millennial cringe, this idea that old ways of earnestness are coming back around. Does this strike you? Earnestness versus cynicism, earnestness versus whatever its opposites might be, does that strike you as a generational thing?

Speaker 3:
[40:03] Can I just be a millennial cringe and ask what the hell is millennial cringe? What is that? Does it mean that we're so lame, running around being our lame selves and no one can take it anymore?

Speaker 5:
[40:13] Millennial cringe means your parents were boomers and they led you to believe that there was a real future for yourself. You were super ambitious in the workplace. You got married in a barn and there were mason jars present and very fuzzy lighting, and you were into avocado toast and went to brunch and thought that the world was going to be just like it was for your parents. That's millennial cringe.

Speaker 4:
[40:34] Can I say something from a Gen X perspective as the Gen Xer in the room? Young Gen Xer in the room.

Speaker 5:
[40:40] It's not just young people. Gen X thinks that this is about us too.

Speaker 11:
[40:42] I remember.

Speaker 3:
[40:44] Take us back.

Speaker 4:
[40:45] I remember. I recall.

Speaker 3:
[40:46] What do you remember, grandmother?

Speaker 4:
[40:48] I recall. 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.

Speaker 3:
[41:05] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[41:06] Okay? They think they're like, the whole concept of selling out, for instance, which for me was like, oh my God, I'm gonna make these people, and they're gonna give away their, you know, in the credit 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.

Speaker 3:
[41:47] 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.

Speaker 4:
[41:54] Well, of course. You are spiritually perhaps a Gen Xer.

Speaker 3:
[41:57] Perhaps that's it. Perhaps that's it. Okay, thank you for clarifying. All right, okay, I'm getting it. So the Broadstokes narrative is, off you march to Facebook, to Google, to wherever, to McKinsey, that was a huge thing also, to McKinsey.

Speaker 4:
[42:10] Yes, to, I'll be a consultant, remember?

Speaker 3:
[42:13] 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? Yes. Okay.

Speaker 5:
[42:21] 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.

Speaker 4:
[42:33] Yes.

Speaker 5:
[42:33] They're coming around to millennial cringe and therefore re-engaging perhaps with earnestness.

Speaker 4:
[42:38] 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 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 about this term to climb cringe mountain, okay, which is basically because this younger generation has grown up in public basically, like everything is retained forever. There has been a kind of confusion about how can I be myself, you know, what if I'm anything I'm doing is cringe because everybody is going to see it. And from what I understand, grandma, there is a kind of like reversal of that. Like I think like Bowen Yang, you used to be on SNL, was talking about how like being on SNL is like climbing cringe mountain every week. It's like everybody sees your like most embarrassing missteps. In public. And this is the way people are living now. And so they might as well embrace it. Like I, there's another phrase that people always say, I'm cringe, but I am free. Like, embrace it. You're a person. Everybody makes mistakes.

Speaker 5:
[44:19] 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 it can also be a direct response to illness. Like, both of the texts that we talked about. But Famesick, 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.

Speaker 3:
[45:38] You know, it's interesting to think about this as like a generational divide issue, because a lot of what I hear talking about how the Gen Z is responding to millennials, et cetera, I just feel like everyone goes through that in their own way. You go through being a young person who rages at the people above you. And you feel pure of heart and angry of purpose. And then you go on and become enmeshed in the same system for better or for worse and look around you like, what is the world? What have we done? As the people below you 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.

Speaker 4:
[46:28] I know why it's happening.

Speaker 3:
[46:29] Yeah, we know why it's happening. So I was reading Amos & Boris.

Speaker 4:
[46:32] Oh my God.

Speaker 3:
[46:33] The other day.

Speaker 4:
[46:34] William Steig.

Speaker 3:
[46:36] William Steig, I'm going to send it to you.

Speaker 4:
[46:37] So there is a mouse and there is a whale.

Speaker 3:
[46:41] The mouse is Amos, the whale is Boris.

Speaker 5:
[46:43] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[46:44] 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 the older people and older people see youth, and it has to do with reading this book about the fragility and interdependence of life, which I guess is the theme I keep coming back to in this episode, to your three-year-old child who's 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, cannot access it, should not be able to access it, and I'm choking up as my kid's like, can we watch TV? Like, it's true, it is.

Speaker 5:
[47:37] Like, you don't understand. I totally know exactly what you mean. And I think, you know, I take what you say about the cyclical nature of the relationship between children and adults. But I do think that certain moods set in as responses to all kinds of stimuli that make this, this eternal fact, the fragile nature of our existence here, more or less sort of in stark relief. I was thinking on this 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 struggled to reckon with the 20th century, the onset of industrial power, all these things that his, that their education, their sort of colonial and provincial kind of Brahmin education did not prepare them for. There are these total fussy esthetes who all of a sudden, nothing in the culture corresponds to how they were raised to be. They're just people without a home. 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 sometimes I cry at a children's book, and it is precisely because, oh man, these things that I took as just bedrock when I was a child, suddenly seem to be totally in question. And I do think there's something special about the nature of our lives today that brings all these things into question. And I think it's something about handing something over to our children, which again, every generation must do. But at a moment when there's all these tectonics beneath us that we don't understand, these moments of radical uncertainty where it seems harder and therefore more scary to pass the baton, which is why 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.

Speaker 3:
[49:59] So I think one thing I'm hearing you say that I think is really important is that earnestness in this way is not an offshoot of complacency, it's kind of the opposite of complacency. Yes. Like I think what's repulsive about a certain kind of earnestness is when it's in bed with complacency. That's disgusting. Like nothing is worse than that. And I think that's what we were trying to get at before, the sense of everything is great, everything will be fine. I'm going to wear my corporate fleece to Facebook headquarters and go ahead connecting the world, like, 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, László Krasznahorkai. And for anyone listening, I really recommend taking six minutes, going to YouTube and just watching the speech, which is in English.

Speaker 9:
[51:05] I give my thanks to my friend, Joschka Palnyk, who told me on the second stair of the water slide pool in 1960, how babies are made. And under the grievous weight of this revelation, I wanted to die. I give my thanks to Franz Kafka, whose novel, Der Schloss.

Speaker 3:
[51:32] It's really funny speech. It's hilarious. It's very cute. Yeah. And it's sincere because of this way of just embracing the world by at a very heightened moment in life, offering thanks to things that have contributed. And I reposted it on my Instagram and said something about, we must embrace the world. And I thought to myself, what an earnest fuck I am. This is disgusting and I should be ashamed of myself. But I did it.

Speaker 4:
[52:01] No.

Speaker 3:
[52:02] But I did it.

Speaker 5:
[52:02] No, don't be ashamed.

Speaker 3:
[52:03] Don't do it every day.

Speaker 5:
[52:04] We're right to do it.

Speaker 4:
[52:05] You are cringe and you are free.

Speaker 3:
[52:07] I'm cringe and I am free.

Speaker 4:
[52:08] We are cringe and we are free.

Speaker 5:
[52:18] This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is a mix by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from James Yost with music by Alexis Quadrato. Also, shout out to another one of our engineers, Pran Bandy, who just got married. Congratulations, Pran.

Speaker 4:
[52:41] Mazel tov.

Speaker 5:
[52:42] You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com/critics.

Speaker 11:
[52:59] 2025 was a great year for TV, movies, and music, and we are highlighting the best of the best, including K-pop demon hunters, sinners, and severance. We're talking about our favorite moments of the year, including some of the best pop culture you might have missed. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.