KPFK 11/14: Writers on Strike

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What’s really at stake in the writers’ strike? HOWARD RODMAN explains the issues (hint: when Viacom fired its president Tom Freston in 2006, he received $60 million in severance pay — more than all of the DVD money paid to WGA members that year). We’ll also talk about how the writers can win. Howard is a board member of the Writers Guild of America, West, and a professor of screenwriting at USC; his screen adaptation of Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and opens in 2008.
WATCH the hilarious “Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty”

BenazirAlso: BENAZIR BUTTO AND PAKISTAN’S FUTURE: AMY WILENTZ talked with the opposition leader just before she returned to Pakistan, where she called on Pervez Musharraf to resign and was placed under house arrest. Amy teaches literary journalism at UC Irvine; she has written about Butto for the Huffington Post, and her profile of Butto appeared in More magazine.

Plus: one Iraq story: in March, 20 people were killed in the bombing of Baghdad’s Mutanabbi Street market—bookseller’s row, the embodiment of the city’s venerable intellectual history. The ALOUD series at the downtown LA Public Library will hold a “Memorial Reading for Mutanabbi Street” Mon, Nov 19, 7 PM – we’ll speak with Beau Beausoleil, Sholeh Wolpé, and Louise Steinman, curator of the ALOUD series and organizer of the LA Mutanabbi program—she was profiled in the LA Times on Sunday.

More stuff to read: my new piece in The Nation about Clarence Thomas.

KPFK elections update: the voting deadline has been extended to Dec. 9. Please support the slate endorsed by the Committee to Strengthen KPFK: www.candidateslate.org