iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gremliny Nussboo

@emilynussbaum.bsky.social

197K followers 519 following 4.7K posts

Theater critic for The New Yorker, author of “I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through The TV Revolution” and “Cue The Sun: The Invention of Reality TV”

Posts Replies Media

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Nothing but respect for MY Digger

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Super-excited to see Bob Kolker talk about his new book!

The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Here’s a different TikTok reaction to that song, a rewrite I really liked, making the themes more vulnerable!

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Ha! This post helped me realize which Ms. cover was being parodied in the 1976 women’s humor anthology Titters…

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

🚨I’ll be talking to Ethan Hawke at The New Yorker Festival! festival.newyorker.com/event-detail...

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Noted

Bears are unreliable and difficult to train, and there is no historical evidence of live bears ever having been used in Elizabethan era theater. 27]

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Admirably malignant trickery, anonymous caption writer!

Amazon Prime listing for the movie Requiem for a Dream with the caption “Brooklynites want to better their lives.”

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Joke TV trailer for Ben McKenzie’s anti-crypto film

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I also have low confidence in this voicemail transcription

Like one kind of thing, it will be reacting, gas on that, turtle, and you mind if I'm acute. If you, you know, relic when I'm so standard. who sp wine just into our trusty support representative.

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Party favors

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Marnie on Girls

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Horrifyingly, this is the first thing that flashed into my head:

Makeshift noose on January 6

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Small copper with larger one

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Screaming Knicks fan and dude climbing street sign

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Dialogue about a world without shrimp—or a world with nothing but shrimp—from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

That last part is key: There are no signs (yet) that Weiss or Ellison want to turn CBS
News into another Fox News. And by all accounts, Bilton isn't a political hack with a far-right agenda (even if he has plenty of' experience writing about right-leaning tech executives with mixed reviews for his efforts). But assuming he survives into the fall, Bilton doesn't have to be a lackey for Trump and MAGA in order to damage the credibility and journalistic sanctity of 60
Minutes. Simply being 30 percent less aggressive on Trump than it was during Simon's run, or giving right-wing ideas and powerful tech corporations a more friendly platform, would do the trick.

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Great analysis by @tvmojoe.bsky.social: www.vulture.com/article/60-m...

And that leads back to the other theory about why Weiss has acted in such a seemingly reckless manner with regard to
60 Minutes (and CBS News in general): It's all about playing nice with the Trump administration as Ellison's Paramount looks to close on its acquisition of Warner Bros.
Discovery. "We can't ignore what's taking place there right now," former CNN anchor Jim Acosta - who knows something himself about being thrown to the wolves to appease the White House - told his fellow legacy-media refugee MacFarlane Tuesday during a podcast conversation. "It seems to me that the Ellisons, along with Bari Weiss
- this is an ideological project that they're on. This is not a journalism project. This was what a lot of people were worried about, that this network was going to be turned into basically a propaganda arm of the administration — and if not a full-blown propaganda arm, a news organization that pulls its punches when it comes to covering people in power right now."

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Andy Bouchard from Evil

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Julianna Margolis standing by her husband in The Good Wife, which I upsettingly can’t watch anymore because it’s on CBS

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Galinda in her bubble

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

[P] quote with a fictional band that is not spinal tap

Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Band

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Not looking forward to the sequel of Looper

Musk and Altman

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Best adaption of The Odyssey, wrong answers only

Broad City North Brother Island episode

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Quick question who the f are these guys

Weird militaristic or possibly supernatural creatures in the background of Trump’s stupid I Am Dr Jesus meme

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

I am obsessed with this clip and have watched it multiple times

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Unfortunately this is all his tweet reminded me of

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Happy Passover! 🍷🍷🍷🍷This is how we handle things now that our kids are in college

Hey guys, we hid the Afikomen, whoever comes home this summer and finds it get a prize

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Just stumbled over this beautiful Molly Haskell review, which felt oddly relevant to so much of the modrin discoursssse

"I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can" and the Jill Clayburgh backlash
By Molly Haskell, Vogue, May 1982
I'm a fan of Jill Clayburgh and her graceful, klutzy, three-quarter liberated heroines. A ballerina manquée myself, I first fell in love with her as Erica, in that scene in "An Unmarried Woman" in which she is dancing around the bedroom, wearing high socks, bikini pants, and a T-shirt, to the music of "Swan Lake," blissfully unaware that her magic carpet is about to come crashing to earth. And there was the final scene in which Erica makes her way through SoHo, carrying and being carried by the huge canvas bequeathed her by her departing lover. Her shaky odyssey was a perfect metaphor for the situation of the "new woman," disoriented, yet gallantly trying to pull all the pieces together. With that sense of strength under fragility, Clayburgh comes closest of any actress to defining the reality of most women of my generation, caught as we are between 'eighties feminism and 'fifties conservatism.
In "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," she once again plays a woman in extremis-a television producer who breaks a Valium habit that has escalated to sixty milligrams a day, only to experience a psychotic withdrawal when she unwisely tries to quit cold-turkey. There's a beautiful final scene that might almost serve as a sequel to "An Unmarried Woman." Having lifted herself out of madness, Clayburgh's Barbara Gordon has come back to CBS to recut the documentary on the dying woman poet (Geraldine Page) who has been both friend and adversary to her. The documentary ends, as the film ends, with

Clayburgh running along the beach in obedience to the express desire of the dying woman. It is as if the older woman's spirit and approval had entered her body, and she is summoning strength from the depths of the older woman's soul.
It is a marvelously triumphant image, and yet like other Clayburgh scenes it has a light, almost offhand quality. Because she has a flair for dealing with painful subjects glancingly, never begging for sympathy, Clayburgh is often taken more lightly than she deserves. How else can one explain the Jill Clayburgh backlash? Audiences will stand in line to see Sally Field's moist-eyed, cuddly-feminine, true-blue working woman heroine and turn a cold shoulder to the classy, assertive Clayburgh variant.
People complained of "An Unmarried Woman" that anyone who could afford an apartment overlooking the East River didn't deserve audience sympathy. Or
—an alternative complaint-she didn't appear to suffer enough. And most unforgivable: there was Mr.
Super-Right, in the form of Alan Bates, waiting in the wings to rescue her from loneliness, and she had the nerve to turn him down.
In "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," there is no Mr.
Super-Right. If anything, Nicol Williamson as Barbara's lover is Mr. Super-Wrong. Otherwise, some of the same old criticisms will no doubt be leveled at the new movie, but not by me. Jill Clayburgh doesn't suffer as extensively as Barbara Gordon, the Emmy Award-winning producer who detailed in her book every step in her ordeal: her imprisonment by her lover, her victimization by doctors the most interesting aspect of her book, and softened

considerably in the film), her institutionalization.
But such lurid descents into hell, whether via madness, gambling, alcohol, or some other addiction, are too unrelieved and too predictable to make interesting drama.
The filmmakers-screenwriter David Rabe (Clayburgh's playwright husband) and director Jack
Hofsiss (also from the theater via the stage production of "The Elephant Man")—have lightened the tone and shifted the emphasis from the heroine's Freudian past to her workaholic present. Rabe relocates Clayburgh's Barbara as a career woman caught up in her own success, a tense over-achiever who has shaved her ideals almost imperceptibly to fit the values and time slots of television.
In a journey of self-discovery that is often as funny as it is horrifying, Clayburgh projects too much resiliency to remain down for long, and the filmmakers are correct in allowing her natural pluckiness to come through. When she strikes back verbally at the therapist (beautifully portrayed by Dianne Wiest), it is less as a patient than as an equal.
And the book's terrifying scene of madness à deux-in which an infantile Barbara becomes her lover's prisoner-alters to the extent that one almost feels pity for Nicol Williamson. (Williamson, oddly cast as the lover, turns the book's diabolical madman into an English eccentric.)
Geraldine Page, clinging to dignity and truth through various stages of dying, is magnificent as the character who becomes the heroine's conscience.
Their extraordinary relationship, complex, taut,

is the heart of the film. It is like a richly expanded version of the Maureen Stapleton-Diane Keaton relationship in "Reds," in which a proud, egocentric, established intellectual older woman rebuffs, ignores, needles, and at last embraces a younger woman who has finally earned her respect. If Clayburgh and Page don't come up for at least Academy Award nominations for their roles in "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," there is no justice in Oscarland.

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Abolish Ice Butterfly

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Slideshow image from Baby of the Year sketch in So I Think You Should Leave

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

In a conference call in late January, the official, Aakash Singh, laid out the department's basis for prosecuting demonstrators: National Security
Presidential Memo 7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September.
It expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include not only violent crimes like assault, but also relatively minor ones, like revealing the personal details of agents or getting in the way of immigration enforcement.
Mr. Singh said that "coordinators" in U.S. attorneys' offices responsible for charging protesters under NSPM-7 should be
"hounding" federal agents to make cases, according to people familiar with his remarks. He also suggested that the department wanted headlines along with indictments, promising that officials in Washington would be "blasting out" prosecutors' work.
"Go big," Mr. Singh said, "and go loud."

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

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...:

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."

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

As far as I’m concerned, the most important part of this piece is the celebration of the wonderful Selina Alko’s picture book about Judy Blume! Go Selina!

Picture of Selina Alko

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he'll win the whole thing 'fore he enters the ring
There's no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land And if you fall it won't matter, cuz you'll know that you're right

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

The magic light

Blanche Dubois

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

60 Up

Birthday mojito selfie

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...

"You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible., GIlroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. "How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don't think it's prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism."
Fascism is a word that Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from saying during the earlier promotional phases of Andor's spring 2025 release.

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Eight months later, after it became clear that the North Koreans had hacked Sony, and after the studio had lost its
relationships with many of its most important stars-including Will Smith, Adam Sandler and Angelina Jolie-I spoke to President Obama about the whole
incident. Unsurprisingly, he asked the right question: "What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course that was a mistake."
The mistake? My decision to greenlight a project on the fly.

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Oh no

I made one last attempt to understand how Parikh feels about working inside the system. He turned back to television.
"Did you ever watch 'Parks and Recreation'?" Parikh asked.
"Ron Swanson was my hero, not because he just loved steak, and bacon, and everything else, but because I was a government contractor," Parikh explained.
"Now, I am temporarily with the government. Right? Working for the government, but hating them every bit.
Right? That guy's my hero."

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

This made me weepy

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Rabbitholed into the Wiki for the musical Seesaw, seems like this tactic would work again!

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Whiskey Friday

Whiskey and Bryan Dunn

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

N is for Neville who died of ennui

Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

@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."