Emily Nussbaum

Emily Nussbaum

@emilynussbaum.bsky.social

Theater critic for The New Yorker, Approval Matrix Creatrix

145,884 Followers 483 Following 3,652 Posts Joined Apr 2023
2 hours ago

Eminence Front followed by Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing is a solid double header as bar music

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11 hours ago
Preview
Two Playwrights Tackle Father Figures Clare Barron’s “You Got Older” is a rare play about a good dad. Wallace Shawn’s “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is defiantly tender about a sleazy one.

My double review of Clare Barron’s You Got Older and Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days, two wildly contrasting Dad plays, each of them chewy, moving & excellent: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

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14 hours ago
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13 hours ago
Halfway through the season, Mr. Garrison's Trump appeared as a standup comic. As the crowd chants "Douche! Douche!
Douche!" he struts onstage with a microphone, as cocky as Dane Cook. "So I'm standing in line at the airport, waitin' in security because of all the freakin' Muslims," he begins, and then, when his fans hoot in joy, he tries for something nastier. "And the T.S.A. security people all look like black thugs from the inner city, and I'm thinking, Oh, good, you're gonna protect us?" When racist jokes get only bigger laughs, he switches to gags about sticking his fingers into women's butts and their "clams." Finally, some white women walk out. "Where did I lose you, honey?" he taunts them from the stage. "You've been O.K. with the 'Fuck 'Em All to Death' and all the Mexican and Muslim shit, but fingers in the ass did it for you.
Cool. Just wanted to see where your line was."

The piece also reminded me of how South Park— itself a big part of the edgy-nihilism, feminism-scorning wave!— managed to nail this particular phenomenon. (This is from my 2017 piece How Jokes Won the Election www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...:

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14 hours ago

Someone in NYC should do interviews with middle-school kids who take the subway to and from school every day, to see if they have any advice for Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy who can't seem to go a single day without pissing himself in fear over them.

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14 hours ago

That’s the thing! There’s a wild, colorful tradition of this brand of “edgy.” Ariana Huffington first came on the scene when she published a splashy anti-feminist book when she was still in college… there are so many variations on this story! Back to popular female anti-suffragists

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14 hours ago

This is a good & infuriating piece about a putrid phenomenon — one intensified by all the punditry of the last decade that rolled its eyes at feminist analysis. There’s ALWAYS been a living available to women who vibed as “not like other girls,” in every decade, especially in the media

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20 hours ago

oh fuck off

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16 hours ago
Preview
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

Mindblowing & brainfeeding article about how AI has changed coding by the fabulous @clivethompson.bsky.social, who worked his ass off interviewing more than 70 people in the industry. Contains the word “panjandrums”:
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

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19 hours ago

"Questions are flying, ever since the start of Sepharax the Cruel’s Thousand-Year Blood Reign. Whether it’s the Pit of Souls or the Child Reapers, there’s a lot to be worried about. But most of all? The price at the pump."

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1 day ago

I think it had some of the same origin: the people ON the show were always talking about how smart they were, therefore the show itself had to be exceptionally smart

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1 day ago

This is not the same kind of interaction but the amount of otherwise lovely people I’ve met on college campuses who have tried to bond with me by assuming that I’d agree that The Newsroom was one of the best shows ever on television and that Americans were just too dumb to understand it is HIGH

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1 day ago
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Guys, this is Senator @chrismurphyct.bsky.social. You need to read it all. He's CONFIRMING what many of us already suspected about this war.

I can tell you Trump is 100% lying trying to make out like the US is wrapping it up.

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1 day ago

as someone who monitors right wing media, its under discussed right now but i can tell you conservatives are absolutely terrified of the way talarico is using religious messaging against them

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1 day ago

GOD BLESS YOU, social media for the win

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1 day ago

Right? My eyes nearly popped out of my head

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1 day ago

Haha, yes. According to Ross, he wrote a bunch of songs, including "Empty Town," "Something Up My Sleeve," "Save It, Pretty Poppa, Save It For Me"... & a song about Ross called "Thank You For Being The Girl You Are," which he copyrighted under the pseudonym David Hope. SOMEONE PLEASE FIND IT

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1 day ago

so when he knew her, she was writing proto-Goldberg bits based on hotel gossip. He was into show tunes and wanted to be a songwriter! She married an older British chemist who had visited the hotel, but now I'm imagining an alternate history in which Shawn & Berg stayed together & wrote Bway musicals

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1 day ago

The story makes sense— the hotel Berg's Dad ran had a clientele of people just like Shawn's family, middle-class Jews from Chicago. But it's so funny to imagine the two of them hanging out... In her teens, she was running the theater program at the hotel, doing skits for guests

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1 day ago
Preview
The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom Gertrude Berg’s “The Goldbergs” was a bold, beloved portrait of a Jewish family. Then the blacklist obliterated her legacy.

(For the children who do not know, Berg was the OG TV showrunner—she created the very first family sitcom, The Goldbergs: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...)

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1 day ago

Sooo, I read Lillian Ross' memoir Here But Not Here this week and stumbled upon a detail that felt designed *specifically* for me: when TNY editor-in-chief William Shawn was in his teens, his family visited the Catskills and he had a summer romance with GERTRUDE BERG

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1 day ago
Preview
7 behind-the-scenes stories from Amazing Race’s first season The Amazing Race took off 25 years ago this week, and I have some amazing behind-the-scenes stories for you!

The Amazing Race took off 25 years ago this week, and I have some amazing behind-the-scenes stories for you! #AmazingRace #RealityTV

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1 day ago

👇🏻

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1 day ago

I wavered between the two, but my recent piece about the TV blacklist knocked me back to the 40s

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1 day ago

Let's expand this please

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1 day ago

I already lived through young people being wrongly nostalgic about NY in the 80s, must I live through them being wrongly nostalgic (or at least, nostalgic about the wrong things) about NY in the 90s! Go back in time to being correctly nostalgic about NY in the 1970s and 1940s, like me!

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1 day ago
Preview
Matt Berry Should Go Full Matt Berry for the Oscars Today, the Academy announced its final lineup of presenters alongside one truly earth-shattering revelation: Comedian, actor, musician, and vocal maestro Matt Berry will be this year’s announcer.

Today, the Academy announced its final lineup of presenters alongside one truly earth-shattering revelation: Comedian, actor, musician, and vocal maestro Matt Berry will be this year’s announcer.

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1 day ago

Another tough day for team “there’s no point in complaining about AI, just accept it.”

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1 day ago

💔

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1 day ago

That’s beautiful!

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