three good reads

strike news, a book club, a beautiful letter

arts

An insightful, capacious letter of advice to a father and guitarist in his 50s

labor

Subscribe to Strikegeist for Hollywood labor news coverage and daily digests on the WGA strike.

But [extended talks] don’t mean an actors’ strike won’t happen. If negotiations still break down by the end of the day on July 12, then we could be in for another work stoppage on top of the WGA strike that’s been in play since May 2. Recall: SAG-AFTRA’s voting membership authorized a strike with nearly 98 percent backing it (i.e. nearly 65,000 members). That’s a powerful card to have on the table.

And for more context, if you haven’t yet, read this report on the state of the industry.

media

Speaking of Hollywood, LA fiction writer Mona Simpson leads an interactive summer reading series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one of the college reads that hooked me on novels for life.

I often think the quality of a writer can be measured by the intensity of their minor characters. George Eliot, we have seen, complicates Forster’s theory; she doesn’t really write flat characters.