I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz and we are critics at large, a podcast from The New Yorker.

Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.

That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether.

And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.

We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno.

You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so-called disappearance, and from that we moved into right-wing conspiracy theories.

Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles.

You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere, advice columns, advice giving,

and we kind of want to look at why.

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In the early months of 1979, Bill Sheperley, a photo specialist out of the FBI's Boston office,

was sent into the city's North End with a simple mission.

Get a camera on their target, 98 Prince Street.

It was a typical old neighborhood, so anything we tried to do,

we would be picked up pretty darn quick.

The North End is our little Italy, the place to go for a canoli,

a plate of fried calamari.

But in 1979, it was not the dressed-up tourist attraction. It is today.

Yeah, well, this area over here is different, a lot of the areas, you know. It's very, very closely knit.

Then it was an isolated and insular place, surrounded by water, and cut off from the rest of

...