In Memoriam

We at Harper’s Magazine are saddened by the death of our former managing editor and contributor Robert K. Manoff (1944–2024). Along with Lewis H. Lapham and others, Manoff oversaw the redesign of the magazine that debuted in March 1984. He will be deeply missed.

The Shows Must Go On

Daniel Bessner’s article “The Life and Death of Hollywood” [Report, May] does a remarkable job illustrating how the weakening of antitrust laws paved the way for the existential threat facing Hollywood writers today. His commentary on the impotence of studios’ diversity initiatives gets at the heart of the problem: there is a wide disparity between those who decide what gets made and the audience of largely working-class people whose time and attention decision-makers rely on for profit. Though efforts to increase racial and gender diversity in writers’ rooms have been a huge step forward, studios have failed to address the tremendous opportunity deficit facing working-class writers.

I moved to Los Angeles at twenty-three with five hundred dollars and a JanSport backpack stuffed with scripts. I rode a clunky bicycle twice a week from Koreatown to Brentwood and back—a roughly twenty-five-mile commute—to work an unpaid internship doing script coverage for a literary manager on my days off from the grocery store. I lived in a hostel and shared a room with seven others—at one point there were twenty-four residents and one bathroom. The few friends I made gave me well-meaning advice: move to the Westside, get a haircut, take out a credit card. One lived in a Culver City apartment that cost two thousand dollars a month and worked in the mail room of a talent agency making minimum wage. Another went months without work seeking production-assistant jobs. They drove nice cars and looked the part, thanks to their generational wealth, and they moved up ladders: this is how it’s done in L.A.

The risk aversion that guides executives and investors has yielded a complex calculus intended to relentlessly capture viewers’ attention. But stories are not math—and people, regardless of their education, can smell bullshit. I’ve made my peace with the imminent death of television writing as a stable career; for me, it never felt possible to begin with. But though I have little faith in the studio system, I do believe that the medium of the moving image is too powerful, the desire for honest storytelling too innate, for there not to be a third act to this story.

Brett Felty
New Orleans

Campaign Tolerance

The boys on the bus were bored, if not entitled. This is the unflattering portrait of the press corps memorialized in the excellent reporting of Kyle Paoletta, who observes how coverage of the Republican presidential primaries amounted to little more than the story of “The Race for Second Place” [Letter from the Campaign Trail, May].

It’s true: Donald Trump did not regain his grasp of the GOP so much as tighten his grip. Many in the press who had written him off in 2016 suddenly insisted—with total confidence, and not without a little fatalism—that he would inevitably be the Republican nominee in 2024. Accurate in their assessment, they were wrong in their attitude. The newsman is not, and can never be, a prognosticator; leave that to the weatherman. Our job is to cover the immediate past in full, living color, whether the contest is a barn burner or a rout.

This time it was the latter—and still a hell of a story. Access wasn’t great. Personalities were muted. Scoops with a real shelf life were hard to find. But the tragedy of each also-ran still merited rigorous coverage. Ron DeSantis fell apart first, then Nikki Haley followed suit. Their collective failure illustrates a simple truth: the right never wanted an alternative. Trumpism without Trump was a workable theory until it came undone in snowy Iowa and New Hampshire. Democracy happens at specific times and in very real places; good reporters know this. For all their faults, the boys on the bus whom Timothy Crouse profiled a half-century ago knew this, too. After all, their lot in life, the big assignment back in 1972, was to cover a landslide.

Philip Wegmann
Washington

Après-ski

Having skied at Big Sky and lived in the Bozeman area since 1997, I’ve witnessed firsthand the changes that Nick Bowlin chronicles in “Slippery Slope” [Letter from Big Sky, May]. The reach of Lone Mountain Land Company and CrossHarbor Capital Partners extends even beyond Big Sky: Gallatin Gateway, the first “town” you hit while driving from Big Sky to Bozeman, is also becoming a company town for Lone Mountain.

Lone Mountain converted the historic Gallatin Gateway Inn to rental housing before purchasing it in 2020. It did the same with a subdivision whose hundreds of lots originally slated for single-family homes became cheaply built, high-density prefab units for rent only. The employees and workers who want to build a life here cannot find anything close to affordable, even with inflated wages. They are at the mercy of ever-rising rents and the town’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in another decade or two, when people with regular salaries (the median in Gallatin County is currently about $60,000), such as teachers and police officers, can no longer afford to live here. My own exit is in the planning stages, and I know others in the same boat. If I didn’t love skiing at Big Sky so much, I would have left a decade ago.

Erik Diehl
Gallatin Gateway, Mont.

Class Dismissed

In the Harper’s Forum on policing [“Crime and Punishment,” April], Tracey L. Meares claims that there are no white communities with concentrated poverty in the United States. While this may be true by the formal definition that Meares provides (“a census tract in which 40 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line”), there are in fact a number of predominantly white areas well within range of this measure. Eastern Kentucky, for instance, is very white, and very poor; McCreary County is 92 percent white, with a 35 percent poverty rate.

It’s disappointing that none of the participants pushed back on Meares’s claim, since the question she was responding to was: Does poverty matter in questions of police oppression, or is race the overwhelming factor? What could have prompted a discussion about the importance of class in the United States was instead brushed aside. I would encourage Meares to visit McCreary County—a leading casualty of the opioid epidemic—and ask its residents how the police treat them. It’s worth pursuing the question: Do they feel the same sense of police oppression that other poor communities do?

James Blackburn-Lynch
Lexington, Ky.

Correction

“The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner [Report, May] incorrectly stated that roughly 1,700 AMC Networks employees were laid off in late 2022. In fact, roughly 200 employees were laid off. We regret the error.