Lifestyle
Curtis Sittenfeld Goes Home Again
There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s.
Curtis Sittenfeld, 49, heard about the incident when she was a girl and filed it away. Four decades later, the Great Butt Xeroxing makes an appearance in her new short story collection, “Show Don’t Tell.”
She mentioned it one day last week when she met up with her oldest childhood friend, Anne Morriss, in Cincinnati, where they had both grown up. Ms. Sittenfeld, who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters, was back in town while on tour for her latest book. Ms. Morriss, a leadership coach in Boston, was there to celebrate her mother’s 83rd birthday.
“It happened in my mother’s real estate office,” Ms. Morriss said. “I remember processing it with you. And you had questions!”
“It’s all I think about,” Ms. Sittenfeld replied.
Why did she do it? The mysteries of human behavior, along with the mortification that often follows an ill-considered act or remark, are of special interest to Ms. Sittenfeld, who made her name 20 years ago with her debut novel, “Prep.” She’s the patron saint of women who wish the floor would open and swallow them whole.
“People will have very different reactions to my writing,” she said. “People will be like, ‘I felt so frustrated by this character — they were so neurotic or cringey, and I wanted to reach into the story and shake their shoulders.’ Or people will be like, ‘I felt like you were inside my brain.’”
The two friends lined up behind a gaggle of schoolgirls at Graeter’s Ice Cream, a local favorite. They ordered cups of mocha chip (for Ms. Sittenfeld) and chocolate chip (for Ms. Morriss) and strolled to a park, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm day.
They sat on a bench and watched a group of middle-school-age girls in Uggs and leggings who were making a video of themselves doing a TikTok dance. The girls ran to their phones to watch the recording, deleted it, and did the dance again.
Ms. Sittenfeld, who was wearing New Balance sneakers and a blue heathered sweater, and Ms. Morriss, with her Hillary Clinton bob and silk scarf, didn’t look like they had inspired the haughty queen-bee characters in “Prep.” But Ms. Morriss insisted they had been “mean girls” back in middle school.
“Were we mean girls?” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Obviously, I am a little defensive, but in middle school I would say that we were popular more than mean.”
Then she pondered her statement, as though cross-examining her own recollections.
“Actually,” she continued, “I’m sure we were mean. I unearthed some diaries recently. I read them to my own children, and one of my kids was like, ‘You should write an essay called ‘Diary of a Bitchy Kid.’”
Cracking open another childhood trauma, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled a time in eighth grade when she and Ms. Morriss had stopped being friends for a while. The split occurred during what Ms. Sittenfeld described as her own “social downfall.”
It came about because she had committed the faux pas of skipping a friend’s slumber party. After that, she found herself exiled from her usual peer group and sitting with the student council boys at lunch. She eventually felt so isolated that she ended up leaving the Midwest for the Groton School, an elite boarding academy in Massachusetts that provided her with material for “Prep.”
“You were curious about the world in a way that the rest of us weren’t,” Ms. Morriss said.
Ms. Sittenfeld took a moment to consider this.
“Let’s be honest,” she said. “I do not think that I seemed brilliant as a child — and frankly, it’s not like I think I seem brilliant now. Sometimes I’ll encounter writers and they’re so smart, and they’ve read everything there is, and it’s almost like they have an inaccessible intelligence. I would not say that I have an inaccessible intelligence.”
‘The Messiness of Life’
In “Prep,” Ms. Sittenfeld focused on a girl who pinballs between a hunger to be noticed and a desire to disappear. In the eight books she has published since, she has mined the terrain of female self-consciousness and status anxiety across all life stages.
In “Show Don’t Tell,” the story that opens her new collection, she examines the unspoken rivalry between a pair of students, a woman and a man, at a top graduate writing program. When they meet up at a hotel bar nearly 20 years later, the woman is the author of five best-sellers and the man is the winner of prestigious literary prizes.
“He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions,” Ms. Sittenfeld writes. “I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery.”
But here’s the thing about American women recovering from knee surgery: They are shaping the country’s political, social and cultural debates. Pundits want to know why a majority of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. Documentaries tell cautionary tales of affluent women who fall down social media rabbit holes leading to wellness influencers promoting dubious health regimens. Ms. Sittenfeld chronicles this demographic from within, not as an impartial observer.
“I’m not an ornithologist — I’m a bird,” she said, quoting Saul Bellow. And she isn’t bothered by fancy male critics who might be inclined to dismiss the people and subject matter at the heart of her work. “If I have an opinion, I should write a 1,000-word essay,” she said. “If I want to explore the messiness of life, I should write fiction.”
For years her books have captured the concerns of a group that has lately become a cultural fixation, middle-aged women who wake up one day and realize their lives aren’t exactly what they’d planned. After reading “All Fours” by Miranda July or watching Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” some are having frank conversations about sex and marriage; others are simply spiraling.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s heroines seem to want more than they should while bumping up against the limiting forces of age or wilted ambition. She has explored such women in best-sellers and two works selected for Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Hollywood executives who optioned her books have suggested casting stars like Anne Hathaway and Naomi Watts.
Her two teenage daughters have made it clear that they’re not particularly impressed by her career. “They see me as kind of ridiculous,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “My 15-year-old will sometimes be like, ‘I can’t believe you write books, you seem so apart from the world.”
It helps that she lives in Minneapolis, where her husband teaches media studies, and which feels so distant from the hothouse worlds of Brooklyn and Hollywood. “Sometimes in interviews people will say to me, ‘Do you feel a lot of pressure in writing your next book?’ And I’ll think, Who would I feel pressure from?” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Nobody cares what I’m doing.”
Still, the older Ms. Sittenfeld gets, the clearer she feels about what she wants to do in her work.
“Are you watching ‘Somebody Somewhere’?” she asked Ms. Morriss, referring to the HBO show starring Bridget Everett as a woman who returns to her hometown in Kansas. There’s a moment in the show, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled, in which the main character and her petite sister are talking about “the pencil test.”
“You put a pencil under your breast, and if it falls out it means you have perky breasts,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Then Bridget Everett’s character takes a big salad dressing bottle and wedges it under her enormous boobs. That is the tone of the storytelling I want to do. It’s not the person with the pencil falling out, but the person with the salad dressing bottle staying under her boobs.”
She added, “Isn’t it so weird and undignified to be a person?”
‘So Authentic’
Shortly before 6 p.m., Ms. Sittenfeld stepped into the Mercantile Library, where she was scheduled to give a talk. The library’s executive director, John Faherty, greeted her with some praise for her new book, while noting that its depictions of marriage were a bit dark.
“I was going to call you up and say, ‘Are you OK?’” he said.
“That’s not a blurb for the paperback,” Ms. Sittenfeld replied.
She and Mr. Faherty had become close through various book talks at her hometown library over the years. “I did an event here in 2016 for ‘Eligible,’” she said, referring to her modern-day retelling of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which she set in Cincinnati. “John got everyone Skyline chili.”
“I was told you can do gender reveal parties at Skyline now,” she added, referring to the restaurant chain.
“Do they say ‘boy’ with a hot dog?” Mr. Faherty asked. “I’m afraid to ask what’s for a girl.”
“The absence of a hot dog?” Ms. Sittenfeld said with a laugh.
She grabbed her phone and opened a text from her 15-year-old daughter. “We watch ‘Severance’ as a family and she was like, ‘Can I watch it by myself?’” Ms. Sittenfeld said.
“Say no and she’ll watch it anyway,” Mr. Faherty suggested.
The thrum of voices was getting louder as the crowd assembled. Ms. Sittenfeld swapped her normal New Balance sneakers for what she called her “fancy sneakers,” which were almost identical but with blue floral decals. She went to the bathroom to apply makeup — “just a little foundation,” she said.
In the main room, Ms. Sittenfeld and Mr. Faherty sat perched in front of some 225 people, an audience that included Ms. Sittenfeld’s 77-year-old mother. Ms. Sittenfeld described the sorts of questions that come up in her new book: If you eat a cup of sauerkraut with a dollop of Thousand Island dressing for lunch every day and your spouse finds that disgusting, is it his fault or yours?
The audience tittered. An older woman in a lilac sweater buried her face in her hands, giggling. When Mr. Faherty seemed on the verge of giving away a plot point, a spoiler-averse audience member shouted, “We haven’t read the book yet!” In the front row, someone knocked over a cup of wine and then got on her hands and knees to mop it up.
When Ms. Sittenfeld wrapped up her talk, readers rushed forward to ask for selfies and autographs. In Ms. Sittenfeld’s books, her characters realize over and over again that there is no escaping the embarrassment of being alive; there’s only finding somebody who will respond tenderly or, at least, with a good-natured laugh. The ache of that recognition filled the room.
Readers toted copies of “Prep” and “American Wife” that looked as if they’d been through the washing machine. One declared she had driven three hours to get there; another boasted of a book club made up of Ms. Sittenfeld’s devoted fans.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s third grade teacher, Bobbie Kuhn, sitting in the second row, said of her former student: “She’s just as authentic as she was.”
It’s the type of compliment Ms. Sittenfeld is used to receiving.
“People will be like, ‘You’re so authentic,’ which probably means you’re saying something wrong,” she said, laughing. “It’s like somebody saying you’re brave. You’re kind of like — oh no!”
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
On a 75-mile cliff-hugging stretch of highway in California, traffic is way up, despite soaring gas prices. And locals expect the busiest summer in years.
The road is Highway 1 in Big Sur, which reopened in January after three years of repair and reconstruction following a pair of landslides. Drivers can once again embark on the state’s most famous road trip, covering the 100 miles between Cambria to the south and Carmel to the north without leaving the two-lane coastal highway. And they’re heading out in big numbers.
Caltrans estimates that as of May, Big Sur restaurant and retailer guest counts are up 40% from last year, and that northbound traffic at Ragged Point, the southern gateway to Big Sur, has risen 900% year-over-year.
People pose for photos near Bixby Bridge. Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking around the bridge.
Safety cones prevent parking along Coast Road near the Bixby Bridge.
“Take your time,” said Kirk Gafill, co-owner of the popular Nepenthe restaurant and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, offering advice to travelers. “You’re going to be sharing the road with a number of people.”
As travelers rediscover the road, the cost of driving has been shooting skyward. California’s average gas price ($6.11 per gallon as of May 26) is up 26% from the year before. In early April, rates hit $9.99 at the isolated gas station in the Big Sur community of Gorda.
For spring and summer travelers, these numbers would seem to pose a stark question: Stay home and save money, or head for the coast because the road is finally open and it’s still cheaper than flying?
So far, the latter answer is winning big.
Fog lingers off the coast of Highway 1.
“We are definitely seeing a huge uptick in our reservations,” said Megan Handy, assistant general manager at the upscale Treebones resort. She estimated that bookings are 30% or more ahead of last year, and rates are unchanged since then. But “it’s still not feeling super crowded, which is nice. Everything still feels kind of calm.”
But added traffic has raised some anxiety. On May 19, Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking at Bixby Bridge, one of the region’s top photo spots.
Over the years, the number of cars parking near the bridge — often illegally, sometimes impeding emergency vehicles — has risen. The proposed parking moratorium won’t take effect until the supervisors discuss it further.
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Busy as things are, several business owners pointed out that many international travelers have not yet returned — perhaps because most make their plans more than six months ahead, perhaps because of global politics, perhaps a little of each.
The biggest challenge for businesses during this resurgence? “Restaffing and retaining,” said Handy at Treetops.
At Nepenthe, Gafill said his business has seen a 45% boost in guest volume since the road’s reopening. Gafill said he would have expected a 35% pickup, “simply by virtue of reopening the highway.” The additional 10%, he said, might be “all that pent-up demand,” aided by “a very beautiful and very dry winter,” followed by a mild spring.
A lunch crowd dines at popular restaurant Nepenthe.
Another possible factor: Nobody can be sure how long the road will remain open.
To cope with the influx of people, Gafill said, “everybody is trying to recruit and retain their existing staff.”
At the Ragged Point Inn, where rates dropped as low as $149 nightly last fall, rates are back over $200 and staffers are suggesting that customers book at least six months ahead. The inn has reopened its snack bar for the first time since early 2023, and management is investing in capital upgrades and staging live music on weekends throughout the summer.
Business “is up over 100%,” said Diane Ramey, whose family owns the inn. “I know not all of our neighbors are having the same lift, but everybody is doing better.”
Traffic approaching Bixby Bridge.
A visitor poses in an oversized chair at Big Sur River Inn.
Even at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery above Lucia, the road’s reopening and coming summer season have made a difference. Bookings are up an estimated 30% at the hermitage, which rent rooms and cottages (for two nights or more) to visitors who agree to its requirement of silence.
Big Sur business owners advise visitors to travel on weekdays for less traffic and the best hotel rates, and to get on the road as early as possible.
Since its opening in 1937, the highway has been vulnerable to landslides and shifting ground, operating on a longstanding cycle of landslide, closure, repair, reopening and then another landslide, or sometimes a fire. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Big Sur coastline as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the western United States. The 2023-2026 closure was the longest in the highway’s history.
Over time, road crews have used increasingly sophisticated strategies. In the most recent efforts, Caltrans said, it used drones to help survey the slopes and remotely operated bulldozers and excavators to reduce risks to workers.
During the closure, no traffic was allowed on 6.8-mile span from just north of Lucia until about a mile south of the Esalen Institute. Drivers detoured inland by way of U.S. 101.
Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
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When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.
The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.
The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.
And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.
That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars
CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
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Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.
The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.
Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.
With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.
Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.
Notably, he has no experience in television news.
Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.
She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.
A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.
Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.
In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”
In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”
The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.
Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.
After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)
Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now
In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.
Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.
The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.
Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.
Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)
David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.
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Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.
The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.
But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.
When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.
David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.
Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.
The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.
The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.
As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.
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