Our Collective Obsession with True Crime
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the past several years, true crime’s hold on the culture has tightened into a vice grip, with new titles flooding podcast charts and streaming platforms on a daily basis. This week on Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz take stock of the phenomenon, first by speaking with fans of the genre to understand its appeal. Then, onstage at the 2024 Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, they continue the discussion with The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, whose books “Empire of Pain” and “Say Nothing” are exemplars of the form. The panel considers Keefe’s recent piece, “The Oligarch’s Son,” which illuminates the journalistic challenges of reporting on sordid events—not least the difficulty of managing the emotions and expectations of victims’ families. As its appeal has skyrocketed, true crime has come under greater scrutiny. The most successful entries bypass lurid details and shed light on the society in which these transgressions occur. But “the price you have to pay in sociology, in anthropology, in enriching our understanding of something beyond the crime itself—it’s fairly high,” Keefe says. “You have to remember that this is a real story about real people. They’re alive. They’re out there.”
This episode was recorded on May 4, 2024 at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle, Washington.
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“UK True Crime Podcast”
“My Favorite Murder”
“Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Paradise Lost,” by John Milton
“A Loaded Gun,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“The Oligarch’s Son,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker)
“Capote” (2005)
“In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote (The New Yorker)
“The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” (2015, 2024)
“Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders,” by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi
“Law & Order” (1990–)
“Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (2022)
“The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story” (2016)
“O.J.: Made in America” (2016)
“Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery,” by Robert Kolker
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Over on this side, the big white ivy and we'll scoot out of the way to give you downtown Seattle. |
| 0:05.1 | The great big black building is Columbia Center. It's the tallest in the state of Washington, and you can tell because every other building and the whole town is shorter. We're going to find ourselves all the way up here at the top like so, and the doors pop wide open like this. Here we are now. Enjoy. Here we are. We're at the space needle. |
| 0:22.8 | I still don't know what it is, but I'm hoping to Enjoy. We're at the space needle. |
| 0:22.8 | I still don't know what it is, but I'm hoping to find out. |
| 0:27.3 | Okay, so we are now at the top of the space needle on the observation deck. |
| 0:35.6 | It's drizzling slightly. |
| 0:39.8 | It's quite thrilling. We're getting, |
| 0:48.6 | if you walk around, you get a 360 view of the beautiful city of Seattle. Windy, lovely, |
| 0:56.0 | cranes visible, a huge cruise ship visible from far away. And then beyond it, like on every side, |
| 0:59.0 | I mean, this is, I guess, the famous thing about the city. |
| 1:01.0 | There's just mountains everywhere. |
| 1:03.0 | You know, we are up here on the space needle |
| 1:07.0 | in the footsteps of grunge. |
| 1:09.0 | And, you know, I've never, I haven't felt this alive in a long time. |
| 1:15.4 | Oh, to see what Kurt Cobain saw. |
| 1:21.2 | Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. |
| 1:28.4 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 1:29.6 | I'm Nomi Fry. |
| 1:30.5 | And I'm Alex Schwartz. |
| 1:32.0 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. |
| 1:36.8 | Or, more apropos for today, how did we get here? |
| 1:41.5 | Yes, my friends were in Seattle for the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival. |
... |
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