The Vice Media Union and the Writers Guild of America, East have agreed on a new contract, consilidating four previous contacts with the guild under one deal. The new agreement guarantees a minimum salary of $63,000 by 2024 and minimum annual raises of 3 percent. As the Hollywood Reporter writes, the contract also “offers a ‘retention bonus’ of $1,000 . . . eradicates NDAs regarding sexual harassment complaints; institutes anti-harassment and cybersecurity measures for employees . . . and offers certain employees flagged by the company’s security team safe housing or other security protections.”
For the New York Times, Michael Patrick Hearn writes about his former professor Alex Haley, author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, on the centenary of his birth. Before writing these books, Haley conducted interviews for Playboy, conducting the inaugural interview with Miles Davis, whose representative initially turned down Haley’s request for access. Haley joined the boxing gym Davis went to, where “one day Davis challenged him to spar and he accepted. From then on Davis was willing to discuss anything except his drug use.”
In 4Columns, Harmony Holiday remembers the influential writer and musician Greg Tate, who died last week. Holiday writes, “Tate had an anti-entitlement, anti-elitist spirit and leaned into the real world . . . attending the clubs and parties where the music was played rather than engaging as a remote voyeur.”
In the new episode of Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast, staff discuss the Democratic Socialists of America’s decision not to expel Congressman Jamal Bowman following his “yes” vote to fund Israel’s Iron Dome program. “Beyond the specific issue of how DSA should respond to Bowman’s divergence from the group’s line on Israel/Palestine, the controversy highlighted broader ideological and strategic questions: What’s the relationship between electoralism and the struggle for Palestinian rights?”
At the London Review of Books, Sarah Resnick reviews Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun. Kleeman’s narrator, Patrick, finds himself believing a conspiracy is underfoot in drought-addled Hollywood. “The novel makes it easy for the reader to become like Patrick,” Resnick writes, “a little paranoid, chasing the narrative like a detective, pinning clues to a Crazy Wall and mapping out connections with pieces of string.”
