Harper Lee Writes on Reading [*]
Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and almost nothing else, has published again, according to a brief notice in today's New York Times. That's good news, though Lee's latest work is characterized by the Times as "a letter" for O magazine, so I'm not sure it counts.

Backlash?
Rebecca Dana's piece in the latest edition of the New York Observer, "The Cooper Enigma: Anderson's A Star, But Numbers Stink," is surprisingly snide.

She overly parses the ratings numbers ("Mr. Cooper’s total audience climbed . . . to 636,000 [then] slipped to 632,000," which marks an imperceptible difference of 0.6 percent!), disparages his appearance ("Mr. Cooper himself, for all his vaunted good looks, is aesthetically ill-suited to television. The silver hair and piercing blue eyes make him all light and no contrast, a human green screen."), and serves up a host of snarky asides ("Mr. Cooper . . . is a harder worker than Stavros Niarchos or the Hilton sisters -- but Mike Wallace and Morley Safer didn’t model Ralph Lauren when they were kids, either." Either?)

Are we seeing the start of the backlash?

[* Note: Additional items may be posted to "Political Notes" after initial publication but only on the day of publication, excluding post-publication addenda. Such items, when posted, are designated by an asterisk.]

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