Andrea Long Chu was once one of Brittany's favorite Sex and the City bloggers, and she's now a Pulitzer-winning critic. Andrea lends her critical eye to everything from the TV show Yellowstone to the work of Sally Rooney to pro-Palestinian protests and free speech. And she does it with wit, style, and fearlessness. Brittany chats with Andrea about her new book, Authority - a collection of some of Andrea's best work, along with two new essays. They discuss why art is a "fossil record" of desire, what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. for a blog that was about watching episodes of Sex and the City?
Oh my God. Yes, I did. That was a long time ago. Yeah. Oh my God.
I loved it. I loved it. That's Andrea Long Chu. Once one of my favorite Sex and the City bloggers, now a Pulitzer Prize winning critic. And you know what? I wasn't surprised by the news of her win in 2023. She lends her critical eye to everything from the TV show Yellowstone to the work of Sally Rooney to pro-Palestinian protests and free speech. And she does it with wit, style, and fearlessness.
Like, if you've ever read Andrea Longchu, you know she is eviscerating people in some of these pages. Andrea is here today because some of her best writing has been collected into a book called Authority. It's a lot of her published essays and two new ones. In this book and our conversation, she has given me so many new ways to look at art, from highbrow literature to lowbrow TV.
But she also asks, what kind of authority do critics have? And do we need to rethink what criticism should do for us? All right, here's my conversation with Andrea. Let's get critical. To get right into it, you say art can exist for art's sake, but criticism has a job to do.
And in one of your essays, you write that the job of criticism is to give art context rather than art providing the context for itself. I'm really interested in how you do that job. I know that you do a pretty exhaustive deep dive into your subjects. You know, that for book reviews, you read the book you're reviewing and pretty much
everything else that the author has written plus all their interviews about their work. So how do you look past what people might say about their own writing to understand what they're really saying with their writing?
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