Emily Greenhouse on the Whole Self

Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: Emily Greenhouse, the editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books, has a vibrant compassionate mind and an appetite for everything: politics, economics, art, literature, music, fashion. Together with her staff, she produces one of the most intellectually rigorous magazines in the world. Emily has a boundless enthusiasm for big ideas and impactful reporting. As you’ll see in our convo, when she’s faced with a challenge, Emily’s attitude is not “no, I don’t think that’ll work” but “let’s find a way.” As one of her writers, I can testify that she is a dynamo—scrupulously fair-minded and dazzlingly ambitious, and that it’s a delight to try to keep up with her pace of thinking. We spoke at Wesleyan University, of which Emily is a beloved graduate, in the fall for the first in our series of conversations.

For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.

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Emily Greenhouse is the editor of the New York Review of Books. She is the former managing editor of The New Yorker.

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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre · Edited by Michele Moses · Music by Dani Lencioni · Art by
Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf