Why Lin-Manuel Miranda is my latest crush

The Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning Lin-Manuel Miranda makes me smile whenever I see anything he says or Tweets. That he is wicked talented goes without saying. What I absolutely adore in him is his epic joie de vivre and love for all of humanity. If you doubt what I'm saying, check out the wedding surprise he concocted for his wife. It's apparent that his talent for performance was a gift handed down from father to son.

His treatise on the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out at the University of Pennsylvania was one of the best of all commencement speeches in 2016. 

But it was this that I read in the New York Times By the Book feature back in May that really cemented him in my esteem. 

"I am most in awe of novelists, who move lights, scenery, and act out all of the parts in your mind for you. My kind of writing requires collaboration with others to truly ignite. But I think of Dickens, or Cervantes, or Marquez, or Morrison, and I can describe to you the worlds they paint and inhabit. To engender empathy and create a world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic."