John Cheever

John Cheever/photo: Stathis Orphanos

John McCain outdrew Barack Obama's acceptance speech by about half a million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. An estimated 38.9 million people watched McCain's speech, compared with 38.4 million for Obama—and 37.2 million for McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin. (George Bush in 2004 is a mere footnote, at 27.5 million.) Obama (and Palin) may demand a recount—or, at least, credit the season-opening NFL game on NBC, which, the Hollywood Reporter notes, brought the networks' convention coverage 13.6 million viewers. All of which goes to show that if you want to draw a big crowd, football is the key: whether it's a speech at Mile-High Stadium, a Hail Mary of a VP pick, or simply putting on a postgame show. And you wonder why political reporters use so many football metaphors. Now on to the playoffs! [Update: TV Decoder notes that, if you add in PBS—2.7 million for McCain, 3.5 million for Obama—you get roughly a tie, give or take. Oh dear God, it's the Democratic primary all over again. We demand the PBS delegation be seated!] [Update 2: As commenter CMR reminds me, BET and TV One also carried Obama's speech, further complicating matters. But I don't have the breakdown of how many watched either individual network. Also, they use the caucus system.]

This is a bit off topic, but at Time I write about the occasional book unrelated to art or architecture and this is one I raised my hand to do. I’m a major lifelong fan of Cheever’s, so I wanted to do whatever I could to get his name back into the conversation.

At the time of his death in 1982 Cheever was so famous that it seemed impossible that he would ever be anything else. That combination in his work of the troubled and the transcendant, it was enormously powerful. But one thing Blake Bailey tells us in his very-readable-despite-being-over-700-pages new biography is that Cheever has gone into relative eclipse. Even the wonderful Collected Stories, which were once more common than the Gideon Bible, apparently sell only a few thousands copies a year now. If you don’t have your copy, get one.