Hear and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Hear
Enroll to obtain our weekly cultural-recommendations e-newsletter.
The phrase “poisonous masculinity,” deployed advert nauseum over the previous decade, now borders on cliché, however the truth that males are in some type of disaster feels past dispute. Statistics on boys’ prospects are bleak, displaying falling commencement charges, diminished employment alternatives, and dismal mental-health outcomes. In the meantime, the manosphere has fanned the flames of those discontents. The query of what’s to be finished is extra urgent than ever. On this episode of Critics at Massive, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz contemplate a brand new wave of texts that goals to diagnose males’s ills, and to supply a path ahead. The boys in these works fall, broadly, into two lanes: the broken, typically violent varieties who’re entrance and middle in such sequence as Richard Gadd’s “Half Man,” and the softer, extra emotionally attuned protagonists of exhibits like “Heated Rivalry” and “DTF St. Louis.” However this tidy schematic falls aside in actual life—and, as looksmaxxers have taught us, obsessing over fashions of manhood might solely compound the issue. “Normally, if I’m fascinated by being a person, it’s in a self-reproving or self-indicting means that isn’t useful to the scenario,” Cunningham says. “If you’re asking methods to be a person, typically the actual reply is simply methods to be an individual.”
Learn, watch, and hear with the critics:
“Half Man” (2026)
“Magnolia” (1999)
“Combat Membership” (1999)
“Heated Rivalry” (2025—)
“‘Heated Rivalry,’ ‘Pillion,’ and the New Drama of the Closet” (The New Yorker)
“Adolescence” (2025)
“DTF St. Louis” (2026)
“The New Masculinity of ‘DTF St. Louis,’ ” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“Lord of the Flies” (2026)
“Lord of the Flies,” by William Golding
“Can Ranging from Scratch Save ‘Vanderpump Guidelines’?” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
Clavicular’s look on “Impaulsive”
“Why So Many Guys Are Obsessive about Testosterone,” by Azeen Ghorayshi (The New York Instances)
“Louis Theroux: Contained in the Manosphere” (2026)
“The Pitt” (2025—)
