The announcement of Kamala Harris’s Presidential run has set off one of the most pronounced vibe shifts in recent memory. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz make sense of the torrent of memes; the “unholy, immediate alliance” between the Harris campaign and the British pop artist Charli XCX’s album “BRAT”; and the endless comparisons to Armando Iannucci’s political satire “Veep.” This chaotic but mostly cheerful embrace of Harris’s candidacy stands in contrast to the national mood even a few days prior, when a pervasive sense of doom was dominant. How might we reconcile this moment of boosterism with the very real, long-term reasons for despair? “It’s really no use being a fan, because you tie yourself to something you have no control over,” Cunningham says. “Recenter your ideas of the future in things that you can feel and touch. I think that that is the imaginative problem of our time, especially when it comes to doom or not doom.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Dirty Dancing” (1987)
“BRAT,” by Charli XCX
“Veep” (2012-19)
“I Created ‘Veep.’ The Real-Life Version Isn’t So Funny,” by Armando Iannucci (The New York Times)
“Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times,” by Todd May
“The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been,” by Rebecca Traister (New York Magazine)
“Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It,” by Rivka Galchen (The New Yorker)

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The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift

Critics at Large | The New Yorker