In July, The New York Times Style Magazine commissioned an email correspondence between old friends and longtime pen pals Jonathan Safran Foer and Natalie Portman. Many of us were amused by these emails, which were full of pretentious musings on memory and freedom and the nature of Jewish melancholy (“an ex-boyfriend of mine used to call me ‘Moscow,’” wrote Natalie. “Because he said I was always looking out the window sadly, like “Moscow,’’ like some Russian novel or Chekhov play”).
But Natalie isn’t sweating it. “It’s like, I guess you caught me! I’m a nerd!” she told the AP with a laugh.
“It was clearly for an interview,” she continued. “I can understand that it would seem funny if those were our normal ‘hey Jonathan, what’s going on’ emails, which is not the case at all … It’s not what we write on a Tuesday afternoon. Obviously.”
And so the question remains: What do Natalie and Jonathan write to each other on a Tuesday afternoon? Natalie, if you would like to share that correspondence, the Cut is all ears.
