Jim Harrison—the author of twenty-one works of fiction, as well as screenplays and books of poetry—died on Saturday at age seventy-eight. He was perhaps best known as the author of Legends of the Fall (1979), which was adapted into a movie, and for his notorious appetites. The Times obituary takes note of his penchant for guns (shooting rattlesnakes in his yard), company (he hung out with Jack Nicholson, John Huston, Bill Murray, et. al), alcohol, and food (he once ate 144 oysters in a single sitting).
Sources say that Gawker paid the Conde Nast executive who was outed on the site last summer a “tidy undisclosed sum” to avoid another lawsuit.
Novelists Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Paul Murray, and others reflect on the Easter Rising in Ireland on its one-hundredth anniversary.
Novelist and memoirist Gary Shteyngart recalls sitting next to his hero Garry Shandling (who died last week) on a plane ride to Hawaii.
David Axelrod, the political strategist and author of the memoir Believer, discusses his new podcast, The Axe Files. “What I don’t want to do is to be like a Sunday show. I’m not denigrating what the Sunday guys do, but my goal isn’t to spend 40 minutes trying to wrestle with guests to make news. I’m trying to have a deeper conversation about them and the world as they see it. If they commit an act of news, then we will share it with people.”
Nicholas Kristof argues that Donald Trump’s rise as a presidential candidate was caused not just by resentful Republican voters but also by the media. “Although many of us journalists have derided Trump, the truth is that he generally outsmarted us,” Kristof says. “He manipulated television by offering outrageous statements that drew ever more cameras—without facing enough skeptical follow-up questions.”
Mark Singer’s long profile of Donald Trump may be two decades old, but it is growing increasingly relevant.