I'm Vincent Cunningham.

I'm Alex Schwartz.

And I'm Nomi Fry.

This is a special edition of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast.

It's an episode we're sharing from The New Yorkers Critics at Large,

a show where the three of us gather every week to make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.

We hope you enjoy it.

So, you guys, there comes a time in every critic's life, a very special time when that critic is obliged to consider what this year has been about.

And my friends, that time is now for us, the critics at large.

Yes. Let us join hands and decide what the year has been about.

Let us pray. Alex, would you like to do the honors?

Oh, I would indeed.

Well, as we three were sitting around discussing.

Shooting the shit.

Shooting the shit as we do on a regular basis, both on and off the air.

Crossing it back and forth.

Yeah, yeah.

And trying to come up with, you know, as Nomi says, this great critic's responsibility to take a chaotic mess of a year as every year inevitably is and come up with one dominant cultural through line, one narrative that will make sense of everything we've just experienced over these past 12 months.

We came up with the Year of the Doll.

That's right.

The Year of the Doll.

We have seen any number of cultural objects in which a cloistered woman often used as a plaything by another person

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