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“Heated Rivalry,” a low-budget Canadian series that began streaming on HBO Max late last year, quickly made the leap from unexpected word-of-mouth success to full-blown cultural phenomenon. The show, which follows a pair of professional hockey players who fall for each other, has been name-checked by everyone from the N.H.L. commissioner to Zohran Mamdani; its two young leads, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, just served as Olympic torch-bearers. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz unpack “Heated Rivalry” ’s appeal, considering its embrace of earnestness and its place in a broader lineage of stories about gay love. The way the protagonists are forced to hide their relationship recalls dramas set in earlier eras, from E. M. Forster’s “Maurice” to Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”—but the function of the closet in art is ever-evolving. The hosts also discuss “Pillion,” a new film starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, which features parents who are supportive of their son’s gayness but in the dark about his life as a sub. “It’s interesting, these contemporary stories where gay relationships are, in the larger culture, totally accepted—and that there are sort of closets within closets,” Cunningham says. “There’s a deeper place that others cannot go.”

See Critics at Large live: the hosts will be discussing “Wuthering Heights” onstage at the 92nd Street Y on February 19th. Both in-person and streaming tickets are available. Buy now »

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Heated Rivalry” (2025–)
“Pillion” (2026)
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
Esther Perel’s response to “Heated Rivalry”
The novels of Sally Rooney
“The Delicious Anticipation–and, Yes, Release—of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Maurice,” by E. M. Forster
“Brokeback Mountain” (2005)
“The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith
“Carol” (2015)
“My Own Private Idaho” (1991)
“The Swimming-Pool Library,” by Alan Hollinghurst
“The Loves of My Life,” by Edmund White
“I Love L.A.” (2025–)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Sobriety has had few enemies as dedicated as the English novelist Kingsley Amis, who loved to drink and to write about every aspect of drinking, from the proper way to fix a Martini (very cold) to the best way to cure a hangover (“Go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane”). But even he knew that, sometimes, it is wise to take a break. “Earlier this year, I went off the booze for a few weeks, a purely voluntary move,” Amis wrote in one of his newspaper columns about drinking, which were collected, as “Everyday Drinking,” in 1983. The experience left him underwhelmed. The supposed benefits of teetotalling, he wrote in another column, were “a pathetic lie” sustained by scientific research that was “full of crap.” Soon enough, he was back to drinking his beloved Carlsberg beer and Macallan Scotch.

In the past forty years, society and science have been moving away from Amis’s point of view. The most obvious evidence of that trend is currently taking place in the form of a monthlong exercise in abstemiousness known as Dry January. What began, in 2011, as part of a British woman’s half-marathon training has turned into a global phenomenon. Statistics suggest that as many as a quarter of American adults partake.

It’s not just January, either. The popularity of the practice has paralleled a broader drying out. Last summer, a Gallup poll found that only fifty-four per cent of Americans drank, the lowest share in nearly a century. Young people were driving the shift, with another poll finding that sixty per cent of Gen Zers of drinking age chose to drink very little or not at all. Some observers have gone so far as to call this the age of neo-prohibitionism.

But the backlash to alcohol is now experiencing its own backlash. Thus the advent of Wet January, which is less a trend than a flag hoisted by Amis’s present-day counterparts. Perhaps it’s a savvy marketing campaign by the alcohol industry, but I haven’t found evidence of that. In a recent Substack post, the writer Liz Burling calculated that she had consumed seventeen bottles of wine in the first nine days of January. “It has been a fucking blast,” she concluded, in a presumable snub to all those scolds touting their sobriety journeys. The writer George Chesterton, meanwhile, published a column in the Telegraph with the headline “Dry January Bores Should Either Give Up (for Good) or Shut Up.”

Some of this backlash stems directly from the Trump Administration. Although Donald Trump ordered lockdowns and fast-tracked the development of COVID-19 vaccines, he came to demonize public health during his first term in office. Later, when the Biden Administration issued vaccine mandates, that fight was taken up by rising conservatives such as the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. Last year, Joseph Ladapo, whom DeSantis had appointed as Florida’s surgeon general in 2021, appeared to compare childhood vaccine schedules to medical experiments conducted by the Nazis in concentration camps.

Despite most experts’ avowed lack of a political agenda, social media and cable news gave public health a partisan valence that it was never meant to have. And, given that the public-health establishment has been advising against alcohol at least since Benjamin Rush published “An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Body and Mind,” in 1784, the effort to curb Americans’ drinking inevitably began to look like a progressive project.

“There’s a kind of risk aversion that you tend to associate with liberal politics,” Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia and Dartmouth, said, of abstaining from alcohol. In 2021, Slingerland published a history of drinking, appropriately titled “Drunk.” The public-health establishment “wants to do everything it can to reduce risk to zero and sees risk reduction as the primary goal, rather than community or enjoying life.”

Arguably, the relationship between progressivism and teetotalism was further cemented during the Biden Administration. In the waning days of Biden’s Presidency, Vivek H. Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, issued a twenty-two-page guidance that described a “causal relationship” between alcohol and seven types of cancer. The guidance called for warning labels on alcohol containers, similar to those on cigarette packs. Conservatives were inherently suspicious of the guidance, given that Murthy was also an advocate of COVID vaccines and gun control. (Murthy declined to comment for this article.) A headline in the National Review proclaimed “Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst.” (The magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., was fond of white wine with a splash of crème de cassis, an apéritif known as the Kir.)

After spending much of 2025 dismantling the U.S.’s public-health infrastructure, the Trump Administration ushered in Dry January 2026 with new dietary guidelines that eliminated the recommendation that men consume no more than two drinks per day, and that women keep to one. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued pithier advice about alcohol: “Don’t have it for breakfast.”

It surprised me, then, that, when I interviewed Oz, earlier this month, he approved of Dry January. He compared the practice to other types of hormetic shock—a low-dose exposure to something toxic or harmful that provides the body with a beneficial jolt—such as taking a cold plunge or fasting intermittently. “It’s taking you out of your comfort zone, if you’ve been drinking a little too much,” he said. “It reboots the system.”

Oz acknowledged that, “on a pure science basis,” the link between alcohol consumption and cancer made by Murthy was “accurate.” He clarified that, although his recommendations differed, they did not amount to an endorsement of drinking. “I would not tell someone to drink to be healthy,” he said.

Oz’s views on alcohol were shaped by a trip to the Italian island of Sardinia, where he watched “little old men” gather every day to drink small glasses of wine, sitting together for hours on end. “You can’t possibly get drunk on this stuff,” he told me. Nor was getting drunk the point. “The fact that it allows you to have a ritual that’s associated with social connection, that’s also going to relieve your stress, that, I think, is part of the benefit.”

Stress is a concept that plenty of people, particularly those on the political left, are familiar with right now. Though it’s tempting to frame Wet January as right-wing-coded, given the Trump Administration’s approach to alcohol guidance, the drumbeat of dispiriting news—Greenland, Minneapolis, take your pick—also has liberals reaching for the bottle right now. Earlier in January, Politico reported that Kaja Kallas, the vice-president of the European Commission, “privately told lawmakers the state of the world meant it might be a ‘good moment’ to start drinking.” Lucy M. McBride, an internist based in Washington, D.C., who writes a newsletter about medicine, told me, over e-mail, “I think the backlash to Dry January is a symptom of people’s general exhaustion (look at the world we live in!).”

McBride has mixed feelings about Dry January. It works for some people, she said, but it can also function as “a month-long hall pass where people avoid examining their actual relationship with alcohol.” She went on, “For many people, a better approach is year-round curiosity about alcohol, turning the focus from willpower testing to consciousness and intentionality about health.” Ideally, Dry January would be a jumping-off point for a conversation with your doctor about alcohol consumption more broadly. But, according to a 2023 study by the National Association of Community Health Centers, more than a hundred million Americans lack a primary-care physician—the kind of approachable practitioner who can go through alcohol’s dangers with a patient. “A lot of people throw up their hands. They just say, ‘Screw it,’ ” McBride told me.

As one might expect, the most compelling arguments against Dry January have nothing to do with politics. Much of the backlash centers on the performative quality of the undertaking—the fact that it has become something to post about on social media—and on the idea that so many people who brag about giving up alcohol continue to partake in other drugs. Tone Johansen, the owner of Sunny’s Bar, a tavern on the Brooklyn waterfront, said that she began noticing patrons requesting non-alcoholic drinks after the pandemic. “Everyone drank a little too much during COVID,” she said, an assertion supported by research. “When things opened back up again, it was a little bit of a sobering moment for people.”

Johansen was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household in Norway, and said she can’t help but find Dry January “a little judgey.” “It feels, like, ‘I’m going to punish myself,’ ” she told me. She also thought it was “hypocritical” that people tout their sobriety when they still use cannabis or microdose hallucinogens. I suspect Johansen would appreciate a recent skit posted to Instagram by the comedian Dan Carney, in which he boasts about how easy Dry January has been for him. “I feel bad for people who have to drink,” Carney says, as the camera shows him buying “a month’s worth” of cannabis gummies at a dispensary, then crack from a dealer.

Many U.S. states legalized cannabis, either medicinally or recreationally, around the time that Dry January took off. A narrative formed, best encapsulated by a 2022 headline in Wired—“The End of Alcohol.” Young people, in particular, are much more likely to use cannabis than they are to drink. They have also expressed the greatest enthusiasm for Dry January, according to polls.

Is it a bad thing to substitute one drug for another? “For an adult, there’s a lot of studies showing cannabis use is actually less harmful than alcohol,” Scott Galloway, a popular podcaster and business strategist, told me. Galloway is a happy user of both substances, and treats drinking as a pleasure best enjoyed in youth. “The risks to your twenty-five-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risk of social isolation,” he said. Conversely, cannabis appears to be especially deleterious to the cognitive and psychological well-being of young people.

“I don’t have anything against abstaining from substances for a while,” Galloway said. “That’s probably a good idea for all of us.” Still, the notion of Dry January bothered him. “My thesis is that anyone who actually needs Dry January probably has a problem.” Kingsley Amis would raise a glass to that. ♦

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The New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss why Republicans have been more successful than Democrats at building durable political coalitions. They talk about the difference between short-term mobilization and long-term organizing, why large-scale protests often fail to translate into lasting power, and how conservative groups have quietly built local infrastructure that may sustain the MAGA movement beyond Donald Trump’s Presidency. They also examine how the left’s efforts are impeded by debates over ideological purity, and whether a renewed focus on community-based organizing and pragmatic coalition-building could reshape progressive politics in the coming years.

This week’s reading:

“What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting,” by Charles Duhigg

“Witnessing Another Public Killing in Minneapolis,” by Vinson Cunningham

“Do Federal Officials Really Have ‘Absolute Immunity’?,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Battle for Minneapolis,” by Emily Witt

“The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center,” by Oren Peleg

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

For the cover of the February 9, 2026, issue, the artist Till Lauer evokes the recent killings of civilians by ICE agents in Minneapolis, where thousands have gathered in the streets to protest and grieve. “I personally care about the right to protest far more than about the right to bear arms,” Lauer said. “However, recent events show that we no longer can take any American liberty for granted—neither the First Amendment nor the Second.”

For more covers about politics, see below:

“Blowhard,” by David Plunkert

“Say Their Names,” by Kadir Nelson

“Back to the Future,” by Barry Blitt

Find Till Lauer’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

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