Emily Nussbaum
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emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Emily Nussbaum
@emilynussbaum.bsky.social
130K followers 480 following 3.3K posts
Theater critic for The New Yorker, Approval Matrix Creatrix
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emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Whiskey Friday
Whiskey and Bryan Dunn
January 17, 2026 at 2:50 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
N is for Neville who died of ennui
January 10, 2026 at 5:48 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
@michellegoldberg.bsky.social on Renee Nicole Good: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/o...
In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they'd like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a "self-proclaimed poet" - she's the winner of a prestigious poetry award - "with pronouns in her bio." The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an "AWFUL," or "Affluent White Female Urban Liberal." It's entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That's essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she "rammed" a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times. Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, "I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys." In another, he said, "Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao."
January 8, 2026 at 9:48 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
This literally goes back to 2011! It’s one of his repeated motifs, like “racehorse theory” eugenics
January 5, 2026 at 5:08 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
The Stranger Things finale was smartly paced & emotionally effective
Norman Rockwell painting where the guy is right and everybody else is wrong
January 1, 2026 at 5:53 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
We were trying to count down the New Year’s in Mexico City by watching the Chicago live feed and instead the screen froze on this poor dude’s face. Is he the spirit of 2026??
Frozen live feed from the Chicago New York countdown
January 1, 2026 at 6:04 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Brushes at Museo del Objeto del Objeto
December 28, 2025 at 5:08 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
This wonderful @michaelschulman.bsky.social piece about puzzles & Sondheim is stuffed with funny, sticky details: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Sondheim had begun designing board games in his teens. He sent an idea to Parker Brothers and then considered suing when the company put out a game-Park and Shop-that he thought copied his. When he was twenty-three, he created a board game alternately called Stardom or Camp, in which players compete to succeed in Hollywood by sleeping their way to the top-the winner beds Norma Desmond-while affixing colored sequins to their faces. (The game was uncovered intact after his death, as his belongings were being prepared for auction.) Another, known as the Game of Hal Prince, or Producer, gamified the business of Broadway, with points allotted for good reviews and wild cards that ribbed Sondheim's contemporaries. (Jerome Robbins abandons the show to see his therapist.) Sondheim also collected antique
December 27, 2025 at 2:44 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Merry Christmas!!
Timothy Olyphant in Go, a Christmas movie
December 25, 2025 at 4:03 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Final night of Hannukah candles
December 22, 2025 at 5:07 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true
THIS is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I'm not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn't care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There's nothing he would die for - not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He's not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, "the common man"" veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn't care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he's not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn't - in a more secular key - even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel's hand. Doesn't even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn't live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he's very ugly and barely mammalian. Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods? Also are there other people, living or dead, like him?
December 16, 2025 at 4:21 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
First night of Hanukkah candles on the 🕎
December 14, 2025 at 11:17 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
You will be visited by three spirits
Geoffrey, Darren and Richard from Slings and Arrows
December 9, 2025 at 5:01 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
He got on and it turned out to be this special subway nostalgia scenario with people dressed in old-fashioned outfits & retro ads!
Old-fashioned subway train with man in a hat
December 7, 2025 at 4:35 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
My son was on the train platform and noticed this and decided to wait for the train
Festive subway sign reading “New York Transit Museum Holiday train”
December 7, 2025 at 4:33 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Refreshingly clear language from the NYT
Trump Administration Live Updates: President Calls Somalis 'Garbage' in Anti-Immigrant Tirade Somali immigrants: President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, calling them "garbage" he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration. Even for Mr. Trump - who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries - his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it came as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.
December 3, 2025 at 12:36 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Current mood
The Mind-Body Problem cartoon by Roz Chast
November 25, 2025 at 7:10 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
I am very into Ariana Grande, but I just realized what her current eyebrow situation reminds me of
Image of controversial Pilates ad woman with worried eyebrows
November 25, 2025 at 7:05 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
I'm just a great composer
And not a violent man
But I lost my composure
And I shot Ferdinand
Crying "it's well and kosher
to say you don't understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland"
His last words were
We don't know anything
His fading words were
We don't know anything
I'm just a great composer And not a violent man But I lost my composure And I shot Ferdinand Crying "it's well and kosher to say you don't understand but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland" His last words were We don't know anything His fading words were We don't know anything
November 23, 2025 at 5:22 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Heartbreaking story
November 11, 2025 at 5:53 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
s2.r29static.com/bin/entry/71...
Midsummer shot of woman crying surrounded by other women
November 3, 2025 at 3:15 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
November 2, 2025 at 4:19 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Baseball flipping me out
November 2, 2025 at 3:21 AM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
People kvetch about the chaos-inducing serial comma, but you can also do a lot with a colon! Beware, biographers!!
NYPost headline reading “Prince Andrew had a network of staff, pals to ‘arrange girls’ for sex – and he had a type: biographer”
October 24, 2025 at 4:47 PM
emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Keeps getting bigger
Big crowd at Northfield No Kings
October 18, 2025 at 5:55 PM