Abigail Nussbaum
LG&M
Contact Abigail
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Abigail:
Oscars 2023: Final Thoughts – Lawyers, Guns & Money
Seven weeks ago I quite proudly announced that I had watched half of the films nominated for best picture before the nominations were revealed, which was probably a record for me. And then, having made such a great start, I basically forgot all about the Oscars. I watched the three best picture nominees I had been planning to catch up on (sorry, Top Gun: Maverick and The Fabelmans), but as for… → Read More
Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin – Lawyers, Guns & Money
I’ve been waiting a while for Strange Horizons to run my review of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel Telluria, published last year by NYRB Classics with a translation by Max Lawton. I wasn’t familiar with Sorokin, a Russian writer who began his career poking at the foibles of the Soviet Union, and has continued to do the same with Putin’s Russia, before picking up this book. But the premise… → Read More
The Books I’m Looking Forward to in 2023 – Lawyers, Guns & Money
I feel a bit silly writing this post this year. A few weeks ago I sat down and made a list of the 2022 books (and a few from late 2021) that I wanted to get to before the new year properly got going. A bit of deck-clearing before turning my attention to a new slate of reading possibilities. Some Hugo-eligible work before the nominations open. At least some of the selections for the upcoming… → Read More
Oscars 2023: Preliminary Thoughts – Lawyers, Guns & Money
I’ve seen five of the ten movies nominated for best picture this year, which is a pretty high ratio for me. Overall I’d say it’s an eclectic list but hardly an unassailable one. The absence of films like Decision to Leave, RRR, The Woman King, Nope and others is glaring. I will probably catch up with a few more of the nominees in the coming weeks—I was already interested in All Quiet on the… → Read More
My Favorite Films of 2022 – Lawyers, Guns & Money
2022 is in the rearview mirror, but before we leave it behind entirely, I thought I’d do a bit more listmaking. I deliberately titled this post “favorite” rather than “best”. Movies fall into a strange middle ground for me. Unlike books or TV, I don’t watch so many of them, or so varied a range, to feel like I can make strong pronouncements on the state of the field. Unlike games, I watch too… → Read More
Thoughts on a Glass Onion – Lawyers, Guns & Money
By now I hope you’ve all had the opportunity to watch Rian Johnson’s sequel to his 2019 blockbuster Knives Out, either in movie theaters at the end of November, or on Netflix in the last few days. Glass Onion is, to my mind, even better than its predecessor. Much as I enjoyed Knives Out, I felt that once it had introduced the many and diversely annoying descendants of bestselling mystery author… → Read More
Best TV of 2022 – Lawyers, Guns & Money
2022 was a weird TV year. On the business side of things, the wheels seem to be coming off the bus of the streaming boom. Everyone is suddenly figuring out that churning out an endless stream of expensive, star-studded content just to keep people paying their subscription dollars (and now with more services than ever vying for those dollars) is not a sustainable model. First off was Netflix,… → Read More
The Games of 2022 – Lawyers, Guns & Money
I didn’t have a great game-playing year in 2022. My patience seemed limited, and a lot of games were begun and then discarded for reasons, I suspect, that had more to do with me than with them. I seem to be looking for something instantly engrossing, when of course the whole point of this medium is often the period of bewilderment as you learn not only the game’s premise and mechanics, but the… → Read More
Rings of Power Roundtable at Strange Horizons – Lawyers, Guns & Money
As everyone knows by now, this year’s battle of the unnecessary IP prequels created solely as cannon-fodder in the streaming wars was won handily by Andor. So handily, in fact, that the other two contenders have mostly dropped out of the fannish conversation. In the case of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, this is all to the good. Rarely have I seen such a tremendous outlay of… → Read More
Slip Through Your Fingers: Thoughts on Andor – Lawyers, Guns & Money
[This post was originally published yesterday on my blog.] Look, I was not expecting this. Two years and more than a dozen shows into the Disney+ experiment, I think we’ve all developed a decent enough sense of what to expect from the television incarnations of the two biggest entertainment franchises on the planet. And for the most part, these shows have been fine. Some fun moments. Some actors… → Read More
“It is a Mathematical Certainty” – Lawyers, Guns & Money
Still from Titanic, dir. James Cameron, 1997. Alternate title: the future of Twitter. Remember that scene in Titanic, shortly after the ship hits the iceberg, where the officers and owners come to its designer Thomas Andrews, played by Victor Garber, to figure out what they can do about their current situation? And he explains that there’s nothing to be done. Too many compartments have been… → Read More
The Many Endings of Saul Goodman
We talk a lot about endings in the Golden Age of Television, expecting them to imbue meaning into stories that have relied for their effect on ambiguity. That Gum You Like: Scattered Thoughts on Twin Peaks: The Return, September 20, 2017 Talking about “good” and “bad” endings feels like another way of addressing the whole … → Read More
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman
[This post is reprinted from my blog, but I thought given the community of comics fans on this blog—most of whom are more knowledgeable on the history of the field than I am—there would be interest in this book and my thoughts on it, if only to boggle at an outsider’s perspective. In particular, I’d … → Read More
The Occasional Pleasure of a Harsh Takedown
I know I have a reputation as a harsh critic, but the truth is that I don’t go out of my way to write scathing reviews. Life is too short to spend it watching or reading something that you hate, much less expending energy on spelling out why it should be hated. I’d much rather … → Read More
Quick Film Rec: Fire Island
The conversation about the parlous state of the romantic comedy has been going on for so long that it has consumed not only buckets of virtual ink, but the real-world variety too. At this stage, it might be time to admit that the genre’s heyday in the 80s and 90s was more of a blip … → Read More
Love, Death, Robots, but no Women
Vacuumslayer has previously spoken about her fondness for the Netflix anthology series Love, Death + Robots. I’m a bit more of a skeptic. The concept is a great one: a series of animated shorts, in a variety of styles, telling science fiction stories, many based on previously published short fiction. It’s a great fusion of … → Read More
A Political History of the Future: Severance
There’s an adage that crops up a lot in science fiction circles: a dystopia is a future or alternate world in which things that are happening right now happen to white people. It’s reductive, and not a little bit mean, but there’s a lot of truth to it. I’ve been thinking recently that we should … → Read More
Oscars 2022 - Lawyers, Guns & Money
In a few hours, we will reach the end of an Oscars season that has been occupied primarily with the question of how to get people to care about the Oscars. And with a whole host of misguided schemes aimed at achieving that goal. It’s how we’ve gotten an Oscars ceremony that can’t spare an … → Read More
Maus, and the Search for a Friendly Holocaust
I’m starting to accept that the long list of things I said I’d write about after getting settled in my new apartment is going to become a list of things I never got around to writing about. Better, perhaps, to focus on newer projects. But one thing that I really regret not having the time … → Read More
The Books I'm Looking Forward to in 2022
I feel a bit weird making this list right now. I’ve spent the last two and a half months preparing for and executing a move, and as a result my capacity to process the written word (much less produce it) has dropped to nothing. I think I’ve read maybe four books since December. Plus, I’ve … → Read More