You guys, I am in love with Emily Nussbaum, the television critic for the New Yorker. I have a crush the size and scope of which is not fathomable to me since I do not even know what she looks like, but I know I want to live with her so I can have her giant brilliant brain within reach all the time. She is so smart I feel smarter just READING stuff she writes, can you imagine what a year (oh, or more!) of living with her would do for me? I'd be an unstoppable force; I would lift Don Draper with my personal mind and throw him out the damn window already.
No, listen! We'd get up in the morning and drink coffee (or tea! if Emily likes tea!) and then settle in to watch something and I'd be totally silent and attentive and try super hard to think of all the smart things that Emily would say and then afterwards I'd turn and for once keep my mouth shut and listen to her unspool all the meanings for me, tease out the rewards that come from paying attention to things that are deliberate from the questions that arise when those things are apparently unplanned. For lunch we'd take a picnic basket away from the TV and sit in a park somewhere and nod wryly at each other about feminism and false nostalgia, creativity in the 21st century, everything.
Then we'd go home and sit at our respective computers and she'd drop brilliance out into her next review and I'd edit some medical papers or whatever. I'd restrain myself from offering to edit for her, even just to be her first reader, because the New Yorker editor is still my job crush, and you should only have one crush at a time or it gets confusing.
It's been a while since I've had a crush on a writer, really -- usually I'm pretty good at understanding that beautiful sentences don't make beautiful souls (and/or the reverse, I guess). But ohhhh she's always just so great, and she's been on fire lately, and her break-down of Fargo in the June 23rd issue is exactly why I just need her and her brilliance to be in my life. "How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it?" THIS. And her True Detective review a while ago, also. The way she has of looking at entertainment, at television, as a reflection and a projection, as intent and accident, as diversion and focus... sigh.
I'm actually just happy having her in the world, for as long as she keeps writing. But boy, I could use a lot more of her in my brainspace, and a lot less of brilliant serial killer misogynist stuff. And I say that as someone who likes television so much that I used to say goodnight to the TV set. But like good television, her writing transcends what it's set out to do, and I'm just so grateful to have her, if not in my life, at least in my mailbox, almost every week.
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