“Will you be using my story as a foil to reveal one of the doctor’s flaws, or is this a regular E.R.?”
Cartoon by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
2026-04-17 00:06:01
2026-04-16 19:06:02
Minutes into Second Stage’s scorching, spectacular revival of Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” (at the Hayes), an audience member groaned loudly, in pleasure and shock. Ten minutes later, someone else muttered, “Oh, my God.” There were waves of guffaws and, also, supportive finger-snapping. Comedy is about chemistry, but it felt like something more cathartic was in the air, in response to Gionfriddo’s savage corkscrew of a sex farce, which spirals around a blind date gone very, very wrong. First staged in 2008, it’s evolved into a hot-pepper challenge, a way to steel-man your illusions about love.
The play opens in a pitch-dark, three-star-hotel room, a step down for a bereaved family that has lost its patriarch and, as important, its promised inheritance. Suzanna (Lauren Patten), a moody, black-clad psychology grad student with a “Gashlycrumb Tinies” cuteness, is curled on the bed, watching a true-crime show. “It soothes me and I need it. Don’t judge me,” she tells Max (Alden Ehrenreich), the brusque finance guy who has paid for both her room and her mother’s room. Max turns out to be Suzanna’s brother, kind of—his position in the family is unstable and gets only unstabler. What is clear is their intense bond, the brash intimacy of people addicted to repartee and raised by liars. Max offers Suzanna some tough-love advice, and, by the end of the scene, the stakes, as they say in TV, have been raised.
The story speeds up from there: suddenly, Suzanna is married to Andrew (Patrick Ball), a nice guy who cries at pornography, with whom she lives in a two-star apartment in Providence, Rhode Island. When the newlyweds decide to set Max up with Andrew’s co-worker Becky (Madeline Brewer, all pinwheel eyes and fawn legs), she turns up overdressed and clearly nervous. “Wow, you look like a birthday cake,” Max says. Rattled, she asks for guidance from Suzanna. “Inasmuch as you can, don’t show him any weakness,” Suzanna tells her.
Gionfriddo is something of an expert on true crime, having taken the playwright’s path to survival—a steady gig writing for “Law & Order.” But in her stage plays, including “Rapture, Blister, Burn” and “Can You Forgive Her?,” she’s established herself as an authority on the more covert violence of feminine perversity, with a refreshing frankness about how easily weakness and strength can masquerade as each other. Her dialogue, which is dense with bleak, Wildean zingers, has, on the surface, a LaBute-ian, Mamet-y sting, the exfoliating bite of a Jacobean satire of social hypocrisy; a few dynamics reminded me of some of the more romantic scenes on the HBO show “Succession.” “Love is a happy by-product of use,” Max insists. Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Linda Emond), decrees, “No one respects a woman who forgives infidelity.” There are rolling debates about the nature of morality: “Does pornography make you cry?” Max asks, skeptically. “No, but it should and I wish it did,” Suzanna shoots back.
Still, what distinguishes Gionfriddo is not her ear for cruelty but her ability to see beyond it, and to shift the prism of audience sympathy, in tiny increments. This tension is intensified by Trip Cullman’s precise staging, which is smartly paced, down to the indie-sleaze anthems, such as “Zero,” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that mark each set change. The costumes, by Kaye Voyce, are almost alarmingly on target, from Becky’s try-hard dress to Andrew’s fuzzy orange cardigan. Once in a while, black flats compress the space, framing a single character’s face, bathed in a bleaching white light, as if their vulnerabilities were being scanned by an MRI. Even David Zinn’s set includes a punch line: the cramped quarters feel minimalist, but they pay off in the second act, with a sudden revelation about the way some people get to live.
The cast is terrific, particularly Brewer, whose Becky, an ancestor of Thackeray’s social climber, reminded me of the Ben Folds song “Fragile,” about an emotional terrorist full of excuses: “It’s, like, ‘Crash, boom, oops . . . did I break that, too?’ ” Emond, as Suzanna’s hypercritical mother, puts an Olympic-level spin on her withering observations. Ball, that hot doctor on “The Pitt,” nails the way decency can conceal secret trapdoors; Patten, as Suzanna, captures the flop sweat of a woman falling, bit by bit, below her own moral standards.
But the engine driving the production is Ehrenreich’s magnetic performance as Max, the sort of character who, in many other stories and lots of nineteen-eighties sex comedies, would be the villain. With his subdued growl, rat-a-tat standup-comic delivery, and air of couched melancholy, Ehrenreich lends a peculiar moral weight to Max, a master puppeteer tangled up in his own strings. He’s a caustic know-it-all, but, the more we learn about him, the more defensible, and even ethical, his Realpolitik becomes. However callous his words are, he radiates turbulent emotion: whenever someone steps close to him, a Geiger counter starts crackling, as if intimacy itself had a half-life.
There’s a wonderful moment early in the play when Ehrenreich is left alone onstage, with a look of such ragged disorientation and abandonment, of little-boy distress, that it lingers, later, even when Max is at his most cutting, when he seems to be doing “American Psycho” cosplay. It’s the quality that distinguishes Gionfriddo’s play from a brittle farce—its willingness to recognize failed love as something bigger than a player losing a game, an oceanic force roiling beneath the script’s surface nastiness. After laughing my head off all evening, there was a moment, just before the night ended, when my eyes teared up. That, too, felt like the real thing.
Across the street from “Becky Shaw,” there’s another audience going crazy with joy, at “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (at the Broadhurst), a delirious revival grounded in what may be the greatest dramaturgical insight in musical-comedy history. The material its creators are messing with is, of course, “Cats,” the much mocked British mega-musical that dominated Broadway from 1982 through the turn of the century, infuriating haters of Andrew Lloyd Webber, theatrical bombast, and narrative incoherence. Based, pretty bizarrely, on some light verse by T. S. Eliot, the original production, with its treacly pop-rock score, was set inside a junk yard full of touchy-feely showoffs in kitten ears, competing to reach the Heaviside Layer, a celestial MacGuffin. It made tons of money and no sense.
Two decades later, in 2019, the I.P. flared back up again, like shingles. That January, the show sparked a pair of rude TV satires, first, on the musical-mad series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” where vagina metaphors alternate with wisecracks about “Cats” ruining Broadway, and then, two weeks later, on the sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” with a hilarious plot in which the thirsty actor Titus Andromedon crashes the production as the made-up cat Frumbumbly. Backstage, he realizes that he’s cracked the show’s secret code: the entire thing is and always has been pure, improvised nonsense—and anyone who can babble convincingly enough can join the ensemble. That December, a hideous movie adaptation seemed to confirm that view of “Cats,” by congealing any lingering charm beneath layers of “digital fur technology.”
And then, in a miraculous turn, “Cats” scored one more life, downtown. The 2024 revival at PAC NYC, which was co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, was grounded in a genius, faintly psychedelic insight: that Eliot’s 1939 doggerel was much more logically set in the modern-day Black-ballroom scene, the fragile, shimmering world of queer outsiders captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” The reframe worked like a set of corrective lenses, sharpening sentimental mush into something with meaning and claws. “Cats” was, after all, a story about flamboyant street creatures who adopt new names and alter egos, shape-shifters whose hyperbolic personae at once reflected and satirized the straight world. Queering “Cats” was the inverse of appropriation: the camp version was the authentic one.
Moving this delicate variant to Broadway posed a risk. In midtown, the show’s exuberance could have dimmed, as it did for “Titaníque,” the Céline Dion pastiche, a charming goof that feels too slight for its new venue, right across Forty-fourth Street, at the St. James. “Jellicle Ball,” in contrast, confidently fills its space, starting with its lovely, simple opening image, of a d.j. pulling a Diana Ross album out of a plastic crate—a memento mori of the eighties—and holding it up to the knowing crowd. Everything old feels new again, down to the iconic yellow-eyed logo, displayed up on a catwalk lined with TV screens, in which the static cat-eye pupils first wriggle, then reveal themselves as slinky, silhouetted dancers.
From then on, the show never stops moving, with dizzy, propulsive choreography by Omari Wiles, of the House of NiNa Oricci, and Arturo Lyons, of the House of Miyake-Mugler, and epic, decade-spanning couture by Qween Jean. On a runway, dancers duckwalk and spin, stick their hands in the air and wiggle their fingers, then drop into splits and shoot their legs into the air like exclamation marks. Every body and every gender gets a turn, from the silky-haired, pipe-cleaner-limbed, jaw-droppingly limber Robert (Silk) Mason, as Magical Mister Mistoffelees, to Nora Schell, as the strutting, bodacious Bustopher Jones, to a magisterial eighty-year-old André De Shields, as Old Deuteronomy. Not every number landed—that old warhorse (warcat?) “Memory” lacked the requisite grit and sorrow—but perfection felt beside the point, in a performance that was designed to celebrate resilience, against all odds.
TV shows such as “Pose” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” had clearly primed the crowd to read the room, and to hush, with respect, during the lovely homage to ballroom and queer icons that opens the second act. They roared, later on, offering up the wildest cheers for the ballroom legend Junior LaBeija, who had been observing the proceedings from the proscenium, skeptically, through neon-green eyeshadow and thick, spidery lashes. When LaBeija, as Gus the Theatre Cat, finally strolled onstage to revisit his glory days, waggling his long, polished claws, a younger Gus (Jonathan Burke) appeared, like a mirror dancing toward him. It was a beautiful suggestion of the show’s open-armed sensibility, a way of lovingly glorifying both the past and the present, and, fingers crossed, the future . . . now and forever. ♦
2026-04-16 19:06:02
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In 2019, marriage rates in the United States hit their lowest point in a hundred and forty years. They still haven’t rebounded. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider how recent cultural offerings mirror this increasing dissatisfaction with matrimony. They discuss the new season of the Netflix anthology show “Beef,” which centers on two couples locked in a feud that gradually exposes the cracks in each relationship, and the A24 film “The Drama,” about a wedding that goes off the rails in spectacular fashion. They also consider real-life examples, including Lindy West’s recent memoir, “Adult Braces,” which has sparked a flurry of discourse about polyamory and open marriages. As such alternative ways of organizing our love lives enter the mainstream, the narrative around one of our oldest institutions is shifting, too. “I think we’re in a place where we’re trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice, rather than an obvious obligation,” Schwartz says. “It’s a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to, hoping that the fiction becomes true.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Beef” (2023-)
“The White Lotus” (2021-)
“The Drama” (2026)
“Strangers,” by Belle Burden
“A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” by Gisèle Pelicot
“Madame Bovary,” by Gustave Flaubert
“Parallel Lives,” by Phyllis Rose
“Adult Braces,” by Lindy West
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
2026-04-16 08:06:01
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The New Yorker staff writer Molly Fischer joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s first hundred days as mayor of New York. They talk about how Mamdani has carried his highly disciplined, media-forward messaging style into office—and how his governing style combines practical city management with a focus on visible and public-facing execution. They also explore the status of his core initiatives, including universal child care and other affordability measures, whether he has scaled back or recalibrated some campaign promises, and how he has navigated relationships with figures such as Governor Kathy Hochul and President Donald Trump as he tries to harness his political momentum into durable results.
This week’s reading:
“Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City,” by Molly Fischer
“ ‘The Peace President’ Gets Belligerent with Iran and the Pope,” by Robin Wright
“What Brought Down Eric Swalwell,” by Jon Allsop
“TMZ Gets Political,” by Paul Mejía
“The Hungarian Election Shows That Even Strongmen Can Lose,” by Andrew Marantz
“The Extremes of Israeli Public Opinion,” by Isaac Chotiner
Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.
2026-04-16 04:06:02
“Billionaireism,” as defined by the writer and internet critic Cory Doctorow, describes “both the pathology that affects you when you are so wealthy that you’re effectively above consequences and above moral consideration for others, and the pathologies that having a society dominated by such people inflicts on the rest of us.” (One such pathology is the rapid decline in quality of digital platforms which Doctorow has termed “enshittification,” and which was the subject of a book he published last year.) A while ago, Doctorow joined us to talk about some books that illuminate different facets of living in a highly unequal society where the richest measure their wealth in billions. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
This is an extraordinary book by a woman who served as a government-relations executive at Facebook, working directly under Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, and Mark Zuckerberg—the company’s three big beasts. Wynn-Williams enters her role very enthusiastic about Facebook’s possibilities, but she soon becomes disenchanted. Many of those reasons are obvious, but there is also a lot in this book that has not previously been revealed. She describes instances of horrible sexual harassment and personal cruelty, like when, in a performance review, she was chastised for being “unresponsive” during a period when she was in a coma.
The ways in which the people Wynn-Williams worked with are shown to be “careless” evolve throughout the book. At the beginning, they seem more like people who unthinkingly flick cigarette butts out of the window when it’s been a dry summer. They’re careless in a reckless way. But, by the end, when Facebook has become structurally important to many governments—and much of the book is about how Kaplan sets out to accomplish this, in part through embedding with the Trump campaign—her co-workers become careless in the sense of just not giving a fuck about social duties or morality. It’s a Leona Helmsley, “Taxes are for the little people” variety of carelessness.
by Bridget Read
This is a book about the history of pyramid schemes, and specifically about a form of pyramid scheme known as “multi-level marketing,” or M.L.M. In the schemes, people are recruited to become salespeople for companies that sell their products directly to consumers, and then, when they fail to sell—because the products are not very good—the salespeople buy the inventory themselves to meet quotas. The M.L.M. world is also filled with people offering seminars on how to sell, preying on people who have already been scammed.
The connection between this stuff and billionaireism is that, first of all, the people at the top are very rich. They make a lot of money by basically lying about how they make money. And, second of all, the institutional support for policies that make billionaireism possible was in many ways created and financed by the M.L.M. industry. The Heritage Foundation, which laid the groundwork for so many laws that help make oligarchy possible, was bankrolled by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos (Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law), the founders of Amway—a consumer packaged-goods M.L.M. company—when Amway was on the verge of being crushed by F.T.C. regulations. Read’s book is a great explanatory account of the industry, connecting big, nebulous ideas like neoliberalism to actual concrete things.
by Adam Becker
Becker, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, is a wonderful science communicator. This book repudiates the nonsense that we hear from people suffering from what we might call terminal billionaireism, about things that we can do with computers and rocket ships that are—if you know anything about the subjects—really dumb. He runs through a gamut of billionaire beliefs, from the colonization of Mars to uploading human minds into computers to A.I. waking up and turning us all into paper clips. He devastates a lot of the foundations for these arguments—the problem with the Mars idea, for example, is that there’s no magnetic field around its atmosphere, the soil is poisonous, and, ultimately, even if you were to detonate every nuclear bomb on Earth, this would still be a better place for us to live. He also shows how self-serving these ideas are. Elon Musk’s boosterism about Mars was part and parcel of him getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government in space contracts.
This is less heavy than the other books—it’s definitely popular science. But it’s popular science with teeth. Becker interviews people from other disciplines—mathematicians, neuroscientists—and the result is a book that does a great job of showing how deluded, stupid, or in bad faith many of these billionaires’ claims are, and of providing a powerful antidote to hype. As Becker points out, a lot of these futurist ideas supported by billionaires—space travel, unfettered A.I. development, carbon sequestration, and the like—they’re just ways to get around decarbonization, and to avoid having to put together a muscular climate agenda where states intervene in markets to prevent them from rendering the only planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe uninhabitable.
2026-04-16 04:06:02
In 2016, the D.C. newspaper The Hill crowned Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, the “Snapchat king of Congress.” Not only was he adept at using the app—which allows users to share ephemeral photos—to communicate directly with his constituents, but Swalwell had also set himself up as a tutor, of sorts, to his colleagues. (“I tell the members, just trust me,” he said. “In a year, we’re all going to be there anyway.”) Snapchat would, in fact, be superseded as the political-comms fad du jour, but Democratic hand-wringing about the Party’s visibility in a fragmented attention economy has never gone out of style, and Swalwell has often been seen as an exemplar of how to be everywhere, all at once. (Even before he became the Snapchat king, he inspired the Twitter trend Swalwelling, or the practice of photographing your feet as you step onto a plane.) Last November, when Swalwell entered the race for governor of California, Politico wrote that his candidacy would test the power of a “national profile constructed through cable news hits, Trump bashing and social media saturation.” He has since posted TikToks channelling an array of memes: playing “six seven” with his daughter, lip-synching to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” doing the “Beez in the Trap” routine with a teen-age content creator. Last week, the Times reported on Democrats’ burgeoning use of the F-word on X, and found Swalwell to be a prolific adopter.
Shortly before that story appeared, Swalwell felt compelled to respond to a less welcome form of online attention: a growing drumbeat of rumors that he had behaved inappropriately with women, including members of his staff. Swalwell’s campaign—which claimed that the accusations were being pushed by rivals working hand in glove with “MAGA conspiracy theorists”—clearly viewed staying silent as untenable. “We know how the new media ecosystem works,” one adviser said. “We know how misinformation spreads.” Some of the posts hinted at forthcoming news coverage, the prospect of which apparently spooked donors and supporters, and on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published stories on allegations of sexual misconduct made by a total of four women, one of whom said that Swalwell had raped her. Swalwell reportedly sent the women graphic messages and images via Snapchat. “There was Eric the Snapchatting guy,” a former employee of Swalwell’s told CNN, “and then there was Eric my boss.”
In a video posted to Instagram, Swalwell admitted to errors of judgment but called the claims of sexual assault “flat false” and promised to “fight them with everything that I have.” On Sunday, however, he suspended his gubernatorial campaign; the following day, amid speculation that he might imminently face a vote on his expulsion from Congress, he said that he would give up his House seat, too. On Tuesday, another woman came forward with a rape allegation. Soon afterward, his resignation took effect. (He continues to deny the reports of misconduct and assault.)
In some ways, this miserable tale is as old as time. In others, it looks like a parable of our modern media environment, with its cacophony of voices, old and new, all clamoring for attention. If Swalwell lived by this clamor—making himself heard everywhere, from CNN to buzzy podcasts—his career now appears to have died by it, too. (Not that we should yet rule out Swalwell one day trying to start a podcast of his own.) It’s often said that the new voices in this ecosystem are rendering the old irrelevant, and it’s certainly true that legacy media is in secular decline. I’ve long thought, however, that the relationship is symbiotic: the old guard increasingly needs the new to draw eyeballs to its reporting, and the new needs to talk about said reporting since it doesn’t do much laborious fact-gathering of its own. When it comes to the Swalwell story, this dynamic seems to have become particularly intertwined.
According to a detailed time line published by Politico, that story began when Arielle Fodor, an education content creator known as Mrs. Frazzled, posted positively about Swalwell’s nascent gubernatorial bid, only for several people to reach out, alleging, among other things, that he had slept with an intern. Fodor and another prominent online personality, Cheyenne Hunt, a former Democratic congressional candidate, took the lead in posting about the rumors that Swalwell eventually responded to. At the same time, behind the scenes, they brought together his accusers and steered them in the direction of CNN, which had the institutional heft—and, most important, high-powered media lawyers—that they lacked. (Hunt told Politico that her and Fodor’s crusade should not be seen as “a green light to creators who think that they should be breaking sensitive news.”)
In the end, it took a time-honored brand of journalism to actually bring Swalwell down, even if influencers rolled the pitch. Viewed narrowly, the latter’s role might even be seen as a version of the reporter-source relationship. But that isn’t quite right, either. As Hunt has put it, she and Fodor developed the sort of “parasocial relationships that get built on social media”—itself a form of reporting—to win the trust of Swalwell’s alleged victims. And, as Politico noted, political operatives have been left wondering whether their initial online salvos against Swalwell reflect a “new normal.” Already, political campaigns had been navigating their own awkward symbiosis—or, perhaps, a less reciprocated relationship—with content creators, courting them for their huge audiences (see again: “Beez in the Trap,” Swalwell, 2025) while remaining wary of their loose editorial standards and primary incentive to chase clout. Earlier this year, a TikToker in Texas claimed that James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for Senate, had privately described Colin Allred, an opponent who had dropped out of the primary, as a “mediocre Black man.” Talarico denied attacking Allred on the basis of race. He won his primary anyway, but not before the controversy blew up—both on social media and in the traditional mainstream press.
The modern attention economy, of course, has been blamed, including by me, for offering the scandal-plagued an out from critical scrutiny by allowing them to sidestep mainstream-media gatekeepers and make their case to a public that is atomized, polarized, and distracted. President Donald Trump is the foremost avatar of this trend: since the beginning of his political career, he has flooded old and new media alike with such a constant churn of outrage that typically career-ending infamies—including multiple claims of sexual assault (which he denies)—have more or less bounced off. But many big names have indeed been disgraced in the Trump era, despite their attempts to use the rhythms of the attention economy to rebound: Andrew Cuomo, after resigning as governor of New York, started a podcast, then ran for mayor; George Santos, the Republican congressman exposed as a serial liar, used his notoriety as a springboard to meme-ification. Cuomo’s podcast and mayoral bid flopped. Santos went to prison, even if Trump ultimately let him out. (You can still book him on Cameo.)
Swalwell’s downfall might even show that, if old-school journalism can still mete out consequences for bad behavior, new media can sometimes accelerate this process, rather than dilute it. Expulsions from the House are rare—there have only ever been six, the latest of which saw Santos kicked out, in 2023—but, as of the beginning of this week, it looked plausible that Swalwell would soon join their number, and that three other lawmakers might, too: the Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (accused of financial fraud) and the Republicans Tony Gonzales (sexual misconduct) and Cory Mills (both). Their expulsions were never guaranteed; two-thirds of their colleagues would have to consent, which is a high bar, and leaders in both parties reportedly remain leery of removing elected representatives without first affording rigorous due process. (Even the expulsion of Santos was controversial, since he hadn’t yet been convicted of a crime, but he had at least been put on blast by the House Committee on Ethics, which recently declared the guilt of Cherfilus-McCormick but wasn’t done weighing in on the other cases.) There was also an unseemly whiff of insider partisan horse-trading here—two Democrats for two Republicans—in a razor-close chamber. But the mere consideration of such extreme punishment seemed to reflect another dynamic of this moment, itself very much downstream of the modern media environment: an increasingly sulfurous anti-establishment energy, and the incentive for denizens of that establishment to be seen taking it seriously.
Cherfilus-McCormick and Mills have denied any wrongdoing, and appear safe—if only for this week. Gonzales said, on the same day as Swalwell, that he would resign. The seeds of Gonzales’s departure were sowed by a local paper, the San Antonio Express-News, which reported on an alleged sexual relationship with an aide who later died after setting herself on fire. (He was subsequently accused of inappropriate conduct toward a second employee.) Gonzales initially denied any affair; after texts surfaced disproving this and showing apparently coercive behavior, he went on “The Joe Pags Show,” a right-wing talk vehicle, and acknowledged a lapse in judgment, though he vehemently distanced himself from his aide’s death. “You cannot hate the media enough,” Gonzales said. “There’s a reason why I’m coming on your show. There’s a reason why I reached out to you, and this alternative way of getting real information out. This was all a very coördinated attack toward me.” This clapback didn’t work for Gonzales—even before announcing his resignation, he had dropped his reëlection bid. That left the G.O.P. lane open to Gonzales’s primary opponent, Brandon Herrera. He might be better known as the AK Guy, his moniker on YouTube, where he came to fame posting about guns. ♦
