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I’m so excited to see you this weekend! It’s been way too long. What’s that? Oh, yeah, totally. Of course you can bring your husband along.

I actually love when your husband joins us. Sure, it was just going to be the two of us, but now it’s going to be the three of us, by which I mean that it’ll be the two of you, plus me. Which is great, because you and I did all the logistical planning, and now your husband gets to benefit from our efforts while also adding his belated two cents about how “we should have gone to that new steak place” and “we can’t stay out too late because of work tomorrow.” Which is such a good point, even though we’re meeting at noon.

No, really, making small talk with your life partner is a wonderful way for me to practice my conversational skills. It’s fun when he goes on and on about his boring and seemingly evil corporate job, which I can’t comment on, of course, because then you two will get into a fight about it later and blame me. Seriously, it’s electrifying how many third rails exist whenever he’s around, such as politics, or any subject that doesn’t revolve around him. And when he’s being condescending about some of our favorite topics, such as “The Real Housewives,” it’s exciting to feel like it’s our job to steer the conversation back to his interests.

I also love the way he never asks me any questions, as if he’s playing a one-man improv game in which he can only communicate through declarative statements.

Honestly, I was hoping to be vulnerable and discuss some difficult personal stuff with you, but you know what? That can wait. It’s not like it took us five months to find this time to meet up. What’s a few more hundred days to receive the support I could really use right now? Or I guess I could open up with your husband sitting there, while he half-listens and checks e-mail on his phone. I’m thrilled to have my private life be fodder for your gossip on the drive home. And this way we can forgo the illusion that you’re not repeating what I share to your spouse anyway, and I can experience firsthand his dismissive and belittling takes on my life choices.

I’m not trying to be rude, but doesn’t your husband have friends he could spend time with while we hang out? Oh, he never makes his own plans? Really? Cool, cool. Well, then, let me just say that it’s genuinely an honor to help solve the male-loneliness epidemic, one husband at a time. I feel privileged to be a part of the solution by letting your spouse cosplay friendship for an afternoon. Really, I should be expressing my gratitude to you and your husband for letting me be a part of the change I wish to see.

In fact, I will express my gratitude. At the end of the hang, I’ll be sure to thank the two of you for the lovely outing. I might even say, “We should do this again some time!,” owing to my people-pleasing tendencies, which I’ll spend the next few weeks working through in therapy. I love leaving a get-together with my dear friend feeling vaguely extraneous and heartwrenchingly nostalgic for a time in our lives when including partners in absolutely every activity wasn’t the norm.

But yes! Definitely bring him along. I can’t wait. ♦

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Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz celebrate the one-hundredth episode of Critics at Large with a special installment of the podcast’s advice series. Together, they counsel callers on everything from turning non-readers into bibliophiles to the art of curating the ideal road-trip playlist. They’re joined by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who shares some cultural dilemmas of his own. Finally, the hosts turn the tables and ask for guidance from their listeners.

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

Billie Holiday’s “Body and Soul”
Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”
Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”
The music of Laufey
“I Regret Almost Everything,” by Keith McNally
“The Palm House,” by Gwendoline Riley
“Task” (2025-)
“Die, My Love” (2025)
“Carol” (2015)
“The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith
“Surface Matters,” by Naomi Fry (The New Republic)
Geese’s “Getting Killed”
“What Went Wrong”
Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy
“The Ambassadors,” by Henry James
“Marty Supreme” (2025)
“Why Football Matters” (The New Yorker)

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

On a recent January evening, throngs of Iranian protesters filed up wide boulevards spanning the northeastern city of Mashhad. Within hours, the highways and footbridges were packed with people, including young children trailing their mothers and grandparents. Most wore masks and dark clothing. As the crowds thickened, police tried to disperse the swell of people with tear gas. Around 8 P.M., internet service was cut, and, soon after, security forces started shooting into the demonstrations.

Some of the protesters crawled to escape the gunfire. Others bled to death on sidewalks or on the backs of strangers who had tried to carry them to safety. But the government forces kept firing into the crush of demonstrators.

The massacre in Mashhad unfolded on January 8th, after Iranians across the country went out to protest the regime—the culmination of a movement that had convulsed the country for nearly two weeks, following the collapse of the economy. Under the cover of a nationwide internet blackout, security forces used lethal weapons to target demonstrators from rooftops, bridges, and building complexes. Only now, more than a week later, have details corroborating the scope of the carnage begun to emerge. The mass killing continued over the next two nights, according to five Iranians with whom I spoke, who witnessed the violence and who shared videos with me. “For three nights, the streets of my home town turned into a killing field,” one demonstrator, whom I will refer to as M., told me. M. went out each evening to help recover the wounded and the dead. “The death was incomprehensible,” he said. Corpses were piled in parks and hospitals throughout Mashhad. Some of the injured were treated by protesters in alleyways, or by doctors operating from makeshift clinics in their homes.

One pediatrician, who was on duty at a children’s hospital on January 9th, told me that her staff transported more than a hundred and fifty corpses from their emergency ward to one of the city’s main cemeteries, Behesht-e Reza, that night. At least thirty of the dead were under the age of eighteen. “I saw an eight-year-old child who was shot in the chest,” she told me, over the phone. “This regime has no sense of humanity.” Families have been forced to pay fees for their relatives’ remains. Many could not reclaim them unless they signed fake death certificates confirming that their loved ones had been murdered by violent protesters or had died of natural causes.

The accounts from Mashhad, Iran’s second-most populous city, are a small window into one of the most lethal government actions the Iranian regime has taken in recent history. The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said this past Saturday that thousands had been killed in the unrest. This is likely a fraction of the actual death toll, which has been obscured by the internet blackout.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has verified more than forty-five hundred deaths, including over seven hundred in Mashhad. Witnesses, including one emergency doctor, who spoke with the Center for Human Rights in Iran, estimate that the death toll in Mashhad could exceed more than two thousand.

Some protesters, like M., have broken through the digital shutdown using Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-internet service, which is banned in Iran. Security agents have been going door to door, raiding homes to confiscate satellite dishes and arresting anyone who is using the service. Authorities have warned that citizens caught using Starlink could be sent to prison for up to two years. Iran’s attorney general has said that all “rioters” will be considered “enemies of God,” a charge that could lead to their execution. “Let them find me,” M. told me. “I could have been killed a hundred times during these past few days. There are too many dead. The world should know what has happened here.”

Several months ago, M. was sitting in a prison cell while security forces searched his home after the government alleged that he was a foreign spy. It was days after Israel started attacking Iran, in June, and the Iranian authorities had ordered a manhunt for suspected infiltrators. At least twenty-one thousand were arrested, including M., who believes he was targeted for publishing anti-government posts on social media. He was released, but the experience hardened his rage for the regime. “They only know how to govern with fear,” he said.

His resentment carried him into the streets of Mashhad to join the protests, which reached a fever pitch, days later, after Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-based son of the former Shah, posted a video that urged Iranians to join anti-government demonstrations in cities across the country on Thursday and Friday. They were emboldened further by President Donald Trump, who wrote on Truth Social that the United States would come to their “rescue” if protesters were killed. “People lost their fear,” M. told me. “They all left their homes to fight for a new future—and they were slaughtered for it.”

M. and his friends provided me with videos, which have been verified and support key parts of the narrative put forward by witnesses. The clips have been altered to protect the identities of those depicted. The interview with M. has been edited for length and clarity.

I will try my best to tell you what happened. My wife is scared every hour at night. She goes and checks the windows to make sure no one is there. She doesn’t want me to talk to you, but they have killed so many people, and I need to do this.

It all started because of crazy inflation. The craziest inflation in our life. First we saw online that people in the biggest bazaar in Tehran had started protesting. I saw Trump talking about Iran, and he said that if the government shoots the protesters the U.S. is going to shoot back. We believed him. Trump is a man of his word. Also, online, everyone was sharing a video post from Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, encouraging us to protest.

Suddenly, everyone lost their fear. Before that day, no one had the courage to post Instagram Stories about the protests, because they knew that they would go to jail. But, this time, it was like everyone was supporting Pahlavi. They reposted his video, putting him in their stories. There was this feeling: “We’re gonna make it this time.” That was how we felt that day. Everyone was writing on social media—“just get to a street. Walking is not a crime.” Then many other people across the country started filling the streets in every big city.

I couldn’t believe what I saw on Thursday. It started as a normal day. The government shut down the internet at 7 P.M., one hour before the Thursday protests began. I decided to go out, but I didn’t bring my phone, because the government can follow people.

At 8 P.M., my wife and I walked twenty minutes to Vakilabad Highway. Each second, we saw more people gathering. Then we got to the crossroads, one of the biggest, most famous crossroads in our town. We saw thousands of people coming from all directions. It was really crazy. Everyone was chanting against the government.

A few minutes later, we heard the first gunshots. It was rubber bullets. We saw some people with blood on their faces. People started throwing stones at the police, but the security forces were too far away. The police started using tear gas and sound bombs, but we were too many people. Everyone was screaming, “Don’t go back. Stay. We can defeat them.”

Nearby is this bridge called Haft Tir Highway, and a police station. The riot police took off on motorcycles, with people chasing them, running at them. We get to the police station and we stay there and start protesting.

My wife says, “I’m going home.” Her right foot is broken and she has a cast on it, so I gave her the keys.

We were in front of the police station, on the ground over the bridge. We were watching the police station—who is there, who’s not there. We saw an officer open a wooden box and take out a gun.

The bridge was full of demonstrators. The officer started using the gun, firing straight into us, at our faces and backs. So many people were getting shot. So many of them were screaming. Two people got shot next to me, but I managed to get on the ground and crawl down from the bridge.

When the shooting paused, we went back to the bridge to check on the people who were shot. One of them was shot in the leg. Another was shot in the chest. A group of us helped to bring them out and carry them for about two hundred metres, to a small clinic on the same street. One was screaming, the one shot in his leg. The other man was passed out, not dead, but he wouldn’t move at all.

When we arrived at the clinic, it was total chaos. Ten people were on the floor screaming in pain and waiting for help, but the nurses were attending to other people in worse conditions. There were only two doctors and five nurses. You could see bloody handprints on the walls.

There was a young woman in one of the rooms who had died. I was worried that it might be my wife. That was the hardest moment of the night, but I looked at her feet and I didn’t see my wife’s shoes.

After helping those two men to the clinic, I decided to walk home to check on my wife. When I got home, I saw that she wasn’t there, so I went back out to find her.

I walked down every street, looking for her all the way back to the police station. Then I went back to the clinic thinking she might have been injured. But I still couldn’t find her.

Soon after, I saw someone carrying a man I saw shot earlier. He told me that the man would die if we didn’t get him to the larger hospital nearby. So I carried him myself to a waiting car.

When we arrived at the emergency room, someone told me to put him down on an open bed. The only bed available was dirty and bloody, but it was empty. The nurse came and said, “He’s already dead,” and closed his eyes.

I continued searching for my wife there, too. Two officers started to question me. I had a mask on, and I was covered in blood from the people I was helping.

They asked me, “Where did you find this dead body? Why are you wearing a mask? And why are you covered in blood?” A doctor who was nearby helped me get away. He got very angry at the officers and said, “Why are you bothering him? He just saved someone. Why are you doing these things to your people?” I ran out of the hospital.

I started to make my way back home. A dead city on fire. It was like a civil war. I saw people running, running and screaming. I saw police shooting tear gas. I heard guns. I ran and I got home.

My wife opened the door. I saw that she was covered in blood, and I was scared that she got shot, but thanks to God she was just helping people. She hugged me, and she started crying. She explained to me what she had experienced. She was helping the protesters who were getting shot near the police station. Doctors had opened up their home and were helping people.

On Friday and Saturday, we made sure that we were prepared this time. My wife and I went to a drugstore. We bought stuff for helping people if they got injured, like bandages, and things to clean gunshot wounds. My wife said, “Bring your phone today, to record.”

We saw many more people than Thursday. We saw kids, young girls, old men. It was like every person was out. I even saw one man who lost one of his legs, who was in a wheelchair, and a woman who was pushing him, protesting.

Things quickly became violent again. Five or six men carrying guns and tear gas started shooting at us. We fled into an alley and came across a young woman on the stairs in front of a home. She was shot in the face with metal pellets. She was in so much pain. We helped clean and bandaged her face. We asked her not to scream, because the forces would find us.

On Sunday, I said to my wife, “I’m going to check if anyone is out there protesting. If they are, I will tell you to come.” No one was there—it was only the police. I saw snipers on the bridge.

When we first entered the streets, there was hope that we could do something, and that Israel and the U.S. would help us. Now there is just death—so many dead. And the evidence of the killing is gone. The streets are clean. I cannot believe it. There are no bodies in the hospital. They are all at the cemeteries. They are only letting blood relatives check the bodies. Even if you find your family members’ corpses, you cannot give them a burial if you cannot pay. After you pay, you need to sign papers stating that it was a natural accident.

There are people here who still believe in this government. They are living on another planet. My brother did not go to the protests last week. I saw him recently and he did not believe what I told him about what I saw—until I showed him my videos. My own brother. People choose to be blind. I am losing hope. It feels darker than before.

Right now, everyone is being careful. I am checking my front door every hour. I feel like they could arrest me at any minute.

The government announced that people who have Starlink disks need to hand them over. If you keep it hidden, if you don’t report it and they discover it in your home, they will arrest you. The sentence is two years. But, if they discover that I am speaking to foreigners, they will execute me. I have no doubt about that.

Still, if I don’t speak about it, it will be as if it didn’t happen. ♦

In the new Ryan Murphy horror thriller “The Beauty,” a virus turns its hosts into perfect physical specimens overnight. Men wake up with rippling biceps, Hawaiian-roll abs, and the kind of jawline even other men notice. Women emerge youthful and thin (of course), with Disney-princess eyes and movie-star lips. A biotech C.E.O. named Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher) packages the pathogen as The Beauty, which he calls an “injectable Instagram filter”—though it doesn’t enhance one’s features so much as transform them entirely, rendering the infected unrecognizable to their friends and family. Another side effect: these supermodel selves can only survive for about two years, before a literal hotness causes them to spontaneously combust.

The series, on FX, is loosely based on a 2016 graphic novel of the same name by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, about an appearance-optimizing S.T.D. that people actually want to catch. “The Beauty” is as implausible as it is familiar in form—its protagonists are a pair of jet-setting F.B.I. agents tasked with investigating the mysterious deaths of models in Paris and Venice—but Murphy, with his co-creator Matt Hodgson, has retooled the premise for the Ozempic age, cannily distilling fresh societal anxieties around GLP-1 drugs. Among other concerns, the show plays with the notion that these treatments constitute a sort of shortcut: as the tagline has it, “One shot makes you hot.” The timeliness lends the first few episodes an unusual energy. Ozempic and its chief competitor, Mounjaro, are name-checked in multiple episodes; so are incels and Chads.

As that mélange suggests, the show arrives during a particularly confusing time for beauty discourse. Thanks in part to Ozempic, thin is back in, with once-plus-size celebrities sporting svelter physiques, and some already-slim stars now verging on gaunt. The drug itself has become a metonym for the increasing malleability of our appearances, which can be altered via operations, injections, or digital filters—all more normalized than ever before. (Murphy, who made his name in the early two-thousands with “Nip/Tuck,” a black comedy set at a plastic-surgery center, was perhaps ahead of the curve.) The regressive swing away from body positivity has been much discussed, but there’s no consensus on how to discuss it. Hollywood, which may be ceding its ability to set beauty standards to social media, has responded to the morass with lazy morality tales, like the 2024 movie “The Substance.” That same year, the cult classic “Death Becomes Her”—another story of eternal youth secured at a cost—was adapted for Broadway. Both films are winked at in “The Beauty,” which, like so many of Murphy’s shows, is pastiche held together by proud vulgarity and a sadistic streak.

Though GLP-1s have reportedly been tried by an eighth of the U.S. population, celebrities remain the face of the phenomenon. In the early days of the drugs’ rollout, a high price tag and a nationwide shortage made off-label A-list users a target of self-righteous mockery. “The Beauty” trades on this resentment. Meghan Trainor—a pop star who was best known for celebrating her curves, then received widespread backlash for trimming down—plays a character who’s thrown out of the window of a skyscraper. Virus-induced transformations are yet more gruesome, as bones crunch and skeletons contort for maximal discomfort. The show is built around the spectacle of punishing the excessively vain.

But “The Beauty” isn’t just an exercise in chastisement. It also explores another demographic interested in aggressive aesthetic interventions—young, alienated men. Their plight is embodied by an emotionally stunted incel named Jeremy (played first by Jaquel Spivey, then, once Beautified, by Jeremy Pope), who’s desperate for human connection. The pilot mines humor from his gullibility and cluelessness: to a plastic surgeon who sees him as an easy mark, Jeremy confesses, “I’m lost. I want to have a purpose. Do you think I should do standup?” The manosphere tends not to be considered in the same breath as Ozempic culture, but Jeremy bridges the gap while making a fascinating contrast to the Beauty’s other victims. Even as he’s pulled into the intrigue, he remains a poignantly impressionable figure, convinced that his newfound Chadness will give him a sense of meaning.

As the season progresses, demand for the Beauty grows beyond what its official provider can offer—something that’s already happened to Ozempic and Mounjaro, whose makers now compete with cheaper gray-market formulas. “The Beauty” is most engaging when it dramatizes the difference, showing the experience of an affluent client who has access to the sanctioned version versus what someone with fewer resources has to settle for. Kutcher gradually emerges as the season’s M.V.P., not least because of the believable blitheness with which Forst schemes to maximize his own profit—and brags about partying in Capri with “Jeff and Lauren.”

None of this quite hangs together, but it may not have to. “The Beauty” arrives on the heels of the Kim Kardashian vehicle “All’s Fair,” about a law firm led by flamboyant female divorce attorneys, which earned Ryan Murphy some of the worst reviews of his career. It proved enormously popular anyway, earning record viewership for Hulu, and has been renewed for a second season. (A hate-watch is still a watch.) The two shows share a latter-day Murphy impulse: to craft series with clipability in mind. That Meghan Trainor scene, which happens to take place in the Condé Nast cafeteria? I couldn’t wait to send a ten-second version to my media-industry friends as soon as the episode débuted.

Television has always relied on big, gasp-inducing moments, but Murphy crams them in even at the expense of narrative cohesion. “The Beauty” ’s eleven episodes feature dozens of named characters, and some, like Trainor’s, appear to exist solely to try to make a scene go viral. So it goes with Murphy’s knack for stunt casting, which largely pays off here, with Bella Hadid stomping down a runway as a model gone berserk and Isabella Rossellini swanning about as Forst’s scornful, gracefully ageing wife—a timeless Etruscan vase next to a can of Monster Energy. But, unlike the references to modern beauty and diet culture, which feel organically woven into the story, the guest-star appearances feel forced, as if TV, too, has to transform into something else to stay relevant.

That sense of diminishment is almost built into “The Beauty,” which is further compromised by the need to recast characters after they undergo the procedure. Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall, who play the law-enforcement partners leading the investigation, have a natural chemistry that’s promptly squandered when Hall’s character gets infected and turns into a younger, supposedly more attractive version of herself. (Hall is much missed for the rest of the season.) The pattern repeats itself with worse outcomes throughout, as seasoned actors are replaced by newcomers with none of their predecessors’ gravitas. Murphy’s desperate bid for attention has reduced him to this: a show that puts an expiration date on its own appeal. ♦

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The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the role that the church has played in sustaining protest movements—and whether effective political dissent in the United States is possible without involvement from religious institutions. They talk about how churches have historically provided moral authority, infrastructure, and community to movements for social change, why those qualities have been difficult to replicate in the age of social media and mass protest, and what is lost when dissent becomes sporadic or primarily digital. They also examine whether churches still have the widespread credibility and organizing capacity to anchor protest today, and what it would take for religious institutions to once again embrace a central place in modern political life.

This week’s reading:

“Can American Churches Lead a Protest Movement Under Trump?,” by Jay Caspian Kang

“Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News,” by Clare Malone

“An Unhappy Anniversary: Trump’s Year in Office,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Overlooked Deaths of the Attack on Venezuela,” by Oriana van Praag

“Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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

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