Who is emily nussbaum

A must-read for everyone obsessed with the relationship between politics and American culture… [It] asks us to do more than just read, but invites us to think.

Emily Nussbaum is the perfect critic—smart, engaging, funny, generous, and insightful. Download Emily Nussbaum's press kit here. Praise for I Like to Watch A must-read for everyone obsessed with the relationship between politics and American culture… [It] asks us to do more than just read, but invites us to think. A lava lamp. Across from the flat screen, a couch, and curled on that couch, Bella, her chihuahua-dachshund mix. So nothing fancy, and itself an answer to her question — why would anyone want to watch TV with Emily Nussbaum?

But more importantly, Nussbaum, as a critic, feels familiar, as uncertain and exhausted and angered and obsessed by TV as the rest of us. She has become a must-read critic at a time when the role of culture critics at media institutions is in doubt, tied in perception if not practice to top-down yays and nays, airless word-of-God judgments that look increasingly antiquated in a social-media age. Only that few critics make as strong an argument for the importance of ambivalence, or simply that ambition looks differently on television: She rejects the idea that TV needs literary gravitas or cinematic scale.

TiVo, for instance. People state their tastes reflexively now, but TiVo used to decide who you were. Like many writers, Nussbaum in person is an extension of her work, casually noting her likes Tina Fey, reality TV , her dislikes product integration, Jimmy Fallon , funny and caustic and rambling, with the brisk conversational manner of a Twitter feed, only generous. She meets you with a smiling rush of words, and as the chat goes on, she does not slow.

We met at the neighborhood bar where she tends to write, seated in a dark-wooden booth so carved with graffiti that nothing is quite legible anymore. Then we walked to her house, where she lives with her two sons and husband, tech writer Clive Thompson. She lifted her laptop and took notes, then closed the lid, then opened it a moment later and continued. Nussbaum says she gets asked if she always wanted to be a TV critic.

You could write seriously about theater, books. But whenever TV was smart and thoughtful, the achievement was always couched, as good as a film , as smart as a novel. She grew up in Scarsdale, N. She attended graduate school New York University for poetry, planning to get a Ph. It was this beautiful and ambitious feminist myth about sex and mortality — it was trying to do large things, too.

Even as she studying Victorian literature and freelancing, she was posting anonymously on the early, influential TV forum Television Without Pity, known for its snark and obsessive recapping and conversations that went on for months.

Sarah D. That was the motivation. When we say that some object in the world, some piece of art, should be taken seriously, we mean something similar: understanding this, taking it seriously, might change your life. Put some skin in the game — or pay attention to how you already do.

Criticism is a way of taking things seriously. And second: at that time, many people amassed fortunes and donated them to universities so that universities could produce people who seriously considered questions of criticism and aesthetics with serious institutions at their back.

And third, inevitably: most of the people who made those seriousness-producing fortunes were white and very few of them were women. Here is Virginia Woolf:. If only Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated the use of their own sex…we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions…Only, if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been — that was the snag in the argument — no Mary.

What, I asked, did Mary think of that? Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children — no human being could stand it.

Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned.

It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own. Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange. That long quotation is the most important one I know about the weird intermixing of seriousness, attention, resources, and gender.

But of course, as Woolf knew, that institution has resources because of the personal experiences of people: because of women who nursed their babies at home, and in doing so did not make universities into places that paid much serious attention — aesthetic, medical, economic, or otherwise — to what it was like to be a woman, for example, nursing a baby. In the circular logic by which a piece of art becomes serious because a serious critic attends to it, and a critic becomes serious by tending to serious art, the institutions that exist to back the currency always already are predisposed to both privilege and conceal their privileging of the men who founded those institutions.

So what are the topics that become aesthetically serious? The answer to that changes over time, but some answers for the current moment might be: the Civil War, mob violence, Bob Dylan, and the number of times Pete Buttigieg bless has managed to read Ulysses. And this means that women can be serious to the extent that they are somber and oppressed, rather than fantastical, joyful, or alive. I vacillate between wanting to argue that we should take seemingly frivolous things — Twilight , shopping, girlhood, Sex and the City , shoes — seriously, and wondering if the better strategy is to take them something else; if there would be a way to turn our attention, care, and intelligence towards these things that would not be pitting them against dudehood in all its many pernicious splendors.

So what might be another way, besides seriousness?