How better to kick off the Halloween season than to stream a new adaptation of an old Stephen King story, from the folks behind The Conjuring and It. Lewis Pullman stars as Ben Mears, a writer who returns to his Maine hometown in search of inspiration, only to discover that the humble burg has a vexing vampire problem. With Alfre Woodard, Makenzie Leigh, and Bill Camp. Thursday, Oct. 3, Max.

Robert Caro still can’t get over his first book’s enduring success, said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. When the one time newspaper reporter was writing The Power Broker, a project that consumed seven years, even he doubted its prospects. “I must have heard a hundred times, nobody’s going to read a book about Robert Moses,” he says. “And I really did believe what people said.” But 50 years after its publication, Caro’s 1,286-page Pulitzer Prize winner about a previously little-known New York City urban planner is arguably more popular than ever. Sales this year have topped 40,000. The first several episodes of a podcast about the book have scored 4 million downloads. And a museum exhibition about Caro’s first masterwork opened last month, shortly before a Times critic called the book “the nearest thing we have to a consensus Great American Biography.” 

For Caro, visiting the New York Historical Society’s exhibition feels bittersweet. “Writing The Power Broker was not a happy process,” he says. His book advance ran out quickly and, to keep the project rolling, he and his wife sold their home and moved into a Bronx apartment. Caro also fought bitterly with his editor over everything from punctuation choices to major cuts, and it still pains him that some of his best writing was lost in the 350,000 words excised. Moses hated the book. “He said it was filled with hundreds of careless mistakes,” Caro says. “I said, ‘Name one.’” Today, with the book securely established as a consummate portrait of power’s misuse, Caro recently agreed to the release of an eBook version, hoping to extend the book’s reach. “You don’t want just one generation to know those things,” he says.

The songwriter who penned hits for the Eagles

JD Souther helped shape the Southern California country rock sound of the 1970s. Part of a group of singer-songwriters who lived, partied, and wrote together in the Hollywood Hills, the low-key Texan wrote or co-wrote songs recorded by his onetime girlfriend Linda Ronstadt (“Faithless Love”), Bonnie Raitt (“Run Like a Thief”), and James Taylor (“Her Town Too,” recorded as a duet with Souther). He was best known, though, for co-writing some of the biggest hits by the Eagles—to whom he was so closely tied he appeared on the back of their 1973 album Desperado—including “The Best of My Love,” “Victim of Love,” and “New Kid in Town.” Souther’s own recordings met with no such success, but he said he didn’t covet fame. “People would say to me, ‘Doesn’t it piss you off that the Eagles have these big hits off your songs?’” he said in 2019. “I would usually start saying, ‘Would you like to see the checks?’” 

John David Souther grew up “immersed in music,” in Amarillo, Texas, said The Washington Post. His father was a former big-band singer who ran a music store, and while working there Souther learned the violin, clarinet, piano, and drums. He briefly attended college, but left to perform with a band that relocated to Los Angeles. There he fell in with future Eagle Glenn Frey, said The Telegraph (U.K.). The pair haunted the Troubadour—a “dark and smoky” nightclub Souther called his “university”—and started the short-lived band Longbranch Pennywhistle. They “amassed a loyal following” and recorded a 1969 album before Frey moved on to form the Eagles. 

Souther scored a No. 7 hit with “You’re Only Lonely” in 1979, said Variety. But after a 1984 album whiffed, he took a long hiatus, longing to “step off the hamster wheel.” In 1989, he launched an “unexpected career as an actor,” appearing in five episodes of the TV series Thirtysomething; small film roles and a recurring role as a veteran music producer on ABC’s Nashville followed. In 2008, he “finally returned to making records” with the jazzy If the World Was You and two more albums. He reflected with gratitude on his early career and the cauldron of creativity he’d found in Los Angeles. “The common denominator is that we were all hungry at the same time,” he said in 2011. “We tried to write songs that we felt would last a long time.”