At n+1, Annie Julia Wyman reflects on the timelessness of John Berger’s writing. “He was a monument, a world of his own,” she writes. “His thinking and his art—which are the same thing—address themselves at once to the past, the present, and the future.”
Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, have each signed deals with Flatiron Books. The reportedly $8 million deal includes two books from the former Vice President and a third that will be co-written with Jill Biden. Biden’s first book will be a memoir of the challenges he faced in his last year in the White House, including the death of his son Beau.
Megyn Kelly has finished negotiating her leave from Fox, and is now able to appear on NBC. Her new programs at the network will begin later this year.
After a New York Times article reported that Fox News has paid $13 million to settle multiple sexual harassment lawsuits on behalf of Bill O’Reilly, dozens of advertisers have dropped The O’Reilly Factor. Both the network and O’Reilly remain silent on the issue, and viewership has increased since the article first appeared last weekend. Donald Trump told the Times that he believes O’Reilly is a “good person” who should not have settled his lawsuits. Jim Rutenberg writes that even though the network pledged to change its ways after the Roger Ailes scandal last summer, most of the people responsible for hiding Ailes’s misbehavior are still on the payroll, and company culture has stayed the same. According to Rutenberg, the impact of this lack of change reaches far outside the newsroom. “The wildness that allegedly permeates Fox News’s office culture has extended to its reportage in ways that have at times helped President Trump create his famous alternative reality,” he writes.
Tonight, the Center for Fiction celebrates Grace Paley, whose work was recently collected in A Grace Paley Reader. Karen Olsson writes that our current political moment is the perfect time to read (or re-read) Paley’s stories and essays. “To remain open to what you don’t understand, to take a real interest in life, to put yourself on the line. She lived and wrote like that,” Olsson writes. “If today’s newspapers seem not always up to the task of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, this book did the trick.”