Pablo Torre Finds Out - Share & Bezos & Tell with Ezra Edelman and David Remnick

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

What does the death of The Washington Post sports section mean for the future of sports, journalism and propaganda? Was "Melania" a movie — or crypto? And how does LeBron guarantee his story now? Plus: Tony Kornheiser, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nuke LaLoosh, New Yorker clickbait, Carmelite nuns, the glue of commonality... and the uselessness of despair.Further content:• "Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight" (David Remnick)• "The Crackin', Shakin', Breakin' Sounds" (Nat Hentoff, 1964)• "A Day with the Duke" (Whitney Balliett, 1970)• Subscribe to "The New Yorker Radio Hour"• Read "King of the World"• Watch "O.J.: Made in America"Previously on PTFO:• The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman (Finally) Speaks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. By the way, Pablo, you're going to be fucking getting me in trouble with the entire universe because I can't fucking help myself. Right after this ad. This is quite zippy. I've got such a shit studio because we only first started, you know, having this good sense to do it on YouTube recently, and it's really primitive.

I don't think the New Yorker would approve of the color scheme here. I love it. By the way, the other thing, David, like, you ask why, what we're doing, you already know what we're doing. But I basically said yes, if there were someone that I would be interested in doing this with and would give me necessary cover because he's a pain in the fucking ass. And so I'm like, if there's a real journalist who still, like, does things and I'm like, okay. The journalist and conscience of my show has arrived to degrade me and to approve of David Remnick. Well, I think that's called being off to a good start. Yeah.

Could you introduce David for those who are not familiar with David, Ezra? And I'll have you, David, do the same, and take the burden off of me as the host. David Remnick, his eminence, is the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, one of the crown jewels of American media, who I will also say is one of the clearest writers of prose we have in American letters. Thank you. Tony Kornheiser says something about you, by the way, that I want to share. At this I got to hear. He says, We don't do Ezra?

Well, we'll do Ezra in a second. Oh, I'm fine with that. We'll do Ezra in a second. Cornheiser says about you, David, that you're the only person he knows who has gotten smarter as he got older. Tony's gotten dumber? Well, I'm not here to draw. Isn't that what age is all about?

That you just did. But he says you are ever voracious in terms of finding stuff out and thinking clearly and producing. Oh, that's nice to hear. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you, by the way, has Tony gotten more crotchety as an older person? He, and I say this with love, he is precisely the same. In other words, so Ezra Adelman is the maker of the single greatest,

to head as it's called sports documentary, because that undersells it one of the great documentaries ever about O.J. Simpson and another documentary, too, that I'm looking forward to seeing and God willing. Oh, he hasn't happened. He hasn't got an entree into this. Well, we discussed it. What Pablo, have we met? You think I'm just like giving this shit out on the streets?

You called him his eminence. I'm like, when does Remnant get to see the thing? By the way, we're in a public forum. We're not allowed to show this. That's why I said that. So I was in the sports department of the Washington Post. There was once such a thing. Jeff Bezos killed it this week.

I guess we're going to discuss that. And Tony Kornhizer had come from the New York Times. He was also in the style section for a while, where I was as a boy in the 80s. But he was a sports writer above all. And the same Long Island Jewish kid, wise-ass Seinfeld era, but he's older than Jerry Seinfeld, I think. He was much the same. Much the same.

Larry David before Larry David. Totally. Totally. I would say Larry David is a ray of sunshine compared to Tony. sometimes. But you would know better. Well, like, the fact that I remember, like, one line from a real sports piece I did on PTI, which, again, I reminded David of when I saw that David, again, his eminence, very busy.

Little, like, 28-year-old producer at HBO writes him an email and he gets on the phone with me to talk about, like, Tony and Mike on background, which was just incredibly, like, I mean, I appreciated it to no end. And by the way, Kornheiser and Wilbon, those two guys, that thing they do on television, that was just what they did all day.

And eventually they got paid for it. In other words, if you're a sports writer, almost all your activities at night, the games are at night, why we came into the office, I have no idea, other than to bullshit around, right?

Michael's exactly my age, which is to say he's 67 years old. And so this black kid from, Chicago, we were very young at the time, and Tony, who seemed much older, but, you know, he was in his 30s, there was just a sweetness to their relationship and a, you know, a kind of ribbing, funny tension and texture to it that somehow, I don't even know how they invented PTI, that it came to be. Well, that's a story for a different day.

And all I was going to say is there's one line in this piece that said after, because, as you know, Mike stays up late and watches games. It does. And Tony does. And we just have, like, Cornhizer walking out of his house at 5.30 in the morning and saying, and Cornhizer grumpily greets the dawn. I'm like, that's... But, like, okay, so we're here. I'm like, we're here because the fucking universe that is Jeff Bezos, who I guess is the universe these days,

killed the Washington Post Sports Section. And a lot more than that. He may have killed the Washington Post. I hope that's not the case. I mean, for me, as someone who... grew up literally learning to read, reading the Washington Post Sports Section as a kid. I grew up in D.C. in the 80s. This is a significant section amongst all sections in newspapers across America, even though we're also talking about the paper of Watergate and Ben Bradley and Catherine Graham.

This to me, it might as well. As far as I'm concerned, it is the death of the Washington Post. Well, I hope you're wrong, but I think the odds are with you. Help me understand why you actually think that. why this section and whatever else came with it, in your mind, means the writing's on the wall? Well, look, I'm not so naive to think that everything stays the same forever and ever and ever. I'm not so naive to think that people consume sports news the same way they did when I was in the sports section of the post in the early mid-80s. I know that. I see that, for example, I have one son who, you know, he's watching the game on TV. and on his lap is a laptop

and he's also got on his phone some insane, you know, one of those things where a fan is reacting in real time in Spanish to a Yankee game. So that wasn't happening in the early 80s, that kind of thing. Nevertheless, sports, especially locally,

is an enormous glue of community. And how do you not understand that is beyond me? To not understand that all the local ball teams or Georgetown and Maryland basketball, et cetera, to say nothing of high school sports is a glue of community, conversation, commonality in a world that's riven with conflict. And to not understand that is to not understand American life, much less Washington, D.C. The moment we're in in which sports is otherwise economically booming. Yeah. when few other things feel big anymore, right?

It's the last big tent in American life. And so the question is, why feel comfortable cutting back on that, which is not merely a civic local concern, but also just a concept that sports deserve accountability via journalism? Look, I don't want to bring us down straight into the gutter, but here's the thing. It's not just about sports. What happened with Jeff Bezos is that he bought the Washington Post,

for $250 million, which to him is chump change, half the price of his boat. Not kidding. $250 million. In fairness to him, it is a yacht. It's a nice boat, as they say. I'm sure it has two oars, not just the one. And what about the sister boat? That's the trail boat with the helipad.

You don't have that? I don't have that. You ought to get one. I have a second toilet. But this was a fun thing for him. And it was an item of prestige and no doubt power. to have the Washington Post, right? Okay, it's not as thick a paper in a sense as the New York Times.

You could argue that the Wall Street journalist is better in some ways on the center right or whatever. But it's the Washington Post. And he was a terrific owner, if somewhat absent and distant owner, through the first term of Trump. And then something happened. And the Trump bump started to go away. Losses started to accumulate. and Bezos didn't find that amusing and they tried to fix it as well they should.

You know, you want a business that doesn't lose money. I understand that. But to kill it, to cut huge portions of the newsroom, sports, huge dollops of the foreign desk, really the only thing that remains with any consistency is politics and national security. And to take the opinion section and say, no, you can't endorse Kamala Harris

that was they'd lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers as a business premise right the question of what are we and they decided we're going to service and this is what you're driving at that i want to get to a transactionality with the administration which as somebody who studies of course russia i've seen i've seen it too many times i mean this is not subtle it's not subtle and it's done because on some level for bezos who is otherwise by the way shaking hands with pete higseth at blue origin and financing a documentary that I want to talk about, at least because Ezra is here. But they do it because...

It's too bad. It's too late to qualify for this year's Oscar. I wouldn't have missed it. But it's obvious. It works on some level, Dave. It does work. Because he has blue origin, which requires government cooperation,

to go into space. And his main business, let's not forget, is Amazon. And as I was writing this little screed of mine on the New Yorker's website, I'd already written about the boat thing, and I picked up the journal just to take a 10-minute break, and there on page two was a very interesting article about how the Republican-led corporate tax bill

took Amazon's corporate tax bill from a $9 billion to $2 billion. That's a $7 billion saving. Would they have gotten that? if Bezos had not proved so pliable, cooperative, I leave that to you. So let's, okay, you're not inside Jeff Bezos's head. I'm not. You can be as cynical as, well, maybe not as cynical as me,

but you can be cynical like me. But like, did he not, I don't know if he used this phrase when he bought the Washington Post, but he basically, did he not acknowledge that it was a public trust? He, you know, he said all the right things in the beginning. And almost to a corny degree,

he was behind that motto, democracy dies in darkness, which people kind of giggled about a little bit. What did you think of that? It was in terms of sentiment, I can't disagree with it, but it's, you know, for marketing degree, it seemed a little gothic to me.

I would go maybe even Baroque. I hated it. And I think part of it is... Yeah, but what you hated is that it was corny. What you didn't hate was its sentiment, which is that without... democratic vitality, democracy diminishes and does. But the question becomes, how do you sell the premise of journalism and how do you market it?

And it's interesting to already reference all the president's men and spotlight, because those are two films that do an excellent job of making journalism feel cinematic and vital and necessary to democracy without being a bumper sticker you'd be embarrassed that your parents had on their car. Yeah. By the way, I'm going to push back in the sense that how deep can you go with your rights, roster of movies that Hollywood has made about journalism since you named two in the last 52 years. We need more. I would love... His gal Friday for certain.

But I think there is a challenge, and this brings us... We're going to jump around a bunch here, so forgive me, but the question of, like, Melania, the aforementioned film being labeled a documentary, right? It raises the question of what does journalism have, if not, the challenge and responsibility of defining its own terms. Melania is the polar opposite of what Ezra does. The polar opposite. First of all, it's a business transaction.

It is taking $40 million and giving it to the Trump family. It's no different than these transactions that you're seeing now in the crypto business in the Middle East to curry favor with and to solidify those relationships. It is corruption. It's corruption. You see the film, Pablo?

I haven't finished it. You've seen it, but not personally. You seriously? You went to the theater? No, no, no, no. Oh, I did. Oh, my God, you are. The first morning, Ezra, 10.30 in the morning, Times Square, Saturday.

Okay. Yeah. Is this? Reesing cold. I'm a journalist. What am I not going to see that film? I love this. You're yelling at me because I forked over 20 bucks or something?

Yeah. But, I mean, I know. I know you can expense it. that's fine. But like, um, oh, do,

do tell. You didn't see it? No. I want David Remnick's review of Melania. I cannot, not, not ever see that fucking movie.

You have to see it. Movie. How I envy you seeing it for the first time. First of all, I'll also admit that I also bought popcorn. And you get a bucket. It was a Melania bucket, you know,

with her image and, It's a movie Like it's Dune They gave out novelty buckets They didn't give them out my friend They sold them They sold them Give them out

You are so naive You're so young Oh no please keep going Keep going I'm on the edge of my seat The film The film Unaccountably begins

With the music Gimmie Shelter The Stone song And we're at Maralago And you're know who the filmmaker is, Brett Ratner. And I've said... I've seen his files.

Oh, yes. Oh, did you look him up in the Epstein files? Is he in the Epstein files? I don't have all day. He is. He appears. Yeah. Does he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the film, there's a lot of shots that give you a tight, begin with a tight focus on the First Lady's Christian Lubiton's, and then you slowly pan up. And, you know, like a Bond girl, you know, but Madame Chaucescu at the same time. It's really weird, and you go from one private conveyance to another. You go from Mar-a-Lago to the limo, to the plane where she's sitting all alone, to Washington, to New York. And all along, there are fittings for inaugural dresses and ballgowns and so on. If this is an exercise in humanizing, it didn't fully succeed.

But the frame is the 20 days leading up to the United States. That's right. And, you know, God forgive me, when he comes on the screen, things come alive a little bit. The capital H. Yes. When Trump comes, because he has a certain, as we know, presence. Well, okay, so did you go see that movie because of what you understood it to be already in that they paid $40 million and there's another $28 million in boy, if that's right for... I'm a journalist, I go to see it.

Right. Okay. Did you actually go with the hope, if not an expectation? that even if you understood what it was, as far as a farce as a documentary exercise, that you actually might learn something, even by what you're absorbing, about her. I try to keep hope alive, as Jesse once said.

What's my choice? Okay, no, but you actually thought that you might get some insight into this human based on what your... That didn't happen. And I don't think it was designed to do that. I want to read Ezra's mind for a second. Sure. Because the question of the labeling, the vocabulary that I was referring to, right? A documentary.

Melania is like an obvious call, but everything's a documentary now, much like everyone who has a microphone is a journalist. And I want to actually have you help limit the scope of what we're looking at. Well, but again, I mean, I don't know, I could give you, we could go into all different. Your true definition. No, but we can go in, oh, I don't know I'm going to answer your question, but we can go into like, we're sitting here doing a podcast. So the rise of podcasts in the universe, which was some sort of then, you know, offshoot of traditional journalism. And then you have people, you're a journalist and you do a real show where you like break real stories. You know that the prevailing model of podcasts is just people sitting around talking shit.

And yet that turns into this thing that people actually more readily absorb than articles in the newspaper. And it becomes this de facto thing. They're very aware of it. All this thing, all this stuff starts to get mixed up. So in the documentary, sense, you have these what we all know when we see it. Not, and by the way, not nature documentaries

with, you know, David Attenborough, if not Richard, I don't know rumor. One of the Attenborough is talking very, you know. David. David. Sorry, David. Anyway. And you have things that we all know what a documentary is when we see it, which is

rooted in journalism, rooted in the humanity of a subject. There is a sort of basic contract that exists where a filmmaker is making work. and it's journalistically and artfully driven. Some. Look, Lainey Riphantel is also a documentarian. But she's also a propagandist.

Yeah. They're all kinds. And, you know, we were talking before we came in here, the streaming services are filled with so-called sports documentaries that are hagiographic in the extreme. And they have journalistic elements interviews. Yes. And that's what's confusing.

But who's in charge? So I want to. This is the danger. And by the way, Pablo, you're going to be fucking getting me in trouble with the entire universe because I can't fucking help myself, which is like you don't know what's real anymore.

Well, this is the question. If you're reading an article in New York Times, you understand that there's standards and practices that go through. So I know I'm reading something that has been vetted and has been fact checked. Yeah, and that doesn't prevent us from making mistakes. Absolutely.

And then you have to paint a correction and all these things, but it's an earnest thing and you understand that there's a system in place. That's why these things are valuable properties in a, Well, but that's... Functioning society.

Now, to your point, you have streaming services, and I'm not going to hear to indict anyone specifically, but you have this glut of content. So now it's like, what's a documentary and what's content? And ostensibly, there's now films that exist where, oh, hey, David, I called you up and said, I would like to make a documentary on you. And you said, okay, that's cool. Talk to my agent.

And then you do a deal where you, like, decide that, like, because it's like you are, as I said, you are one of the great writers of pros in the history of American letters, and you go, and that's worth $3 million, and because I'm a better journalist than you, I'm going to also sort of ensure that... Let me complicate the conversation.

When I was a kid, I loved to watch something called NFL films. There were a variety of it. And they had this voice of God. John Fascenda. I can't even do his voice. The autumn wind is a raider. The autumn wind is a raider.

pillaging just for fun. He'll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he's conquered and won. Neither can Pablo. Three degrees below zero. Green Bay, Wisconsin. Since 1965, only one light has burned in the National Football League.

It has glowed constantly for the proud packers of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And there was no game played in sunlight. either it was mud in Cleveland or it was freezing cold in the ice bowl of Lambeau Field or whatever. It all amounted to stained glass in a sense. It was fantastic.

I could not have been happier as a 10-year-old boy watching this stuff. So I would contend that there's a tradition of this that's only now filling the pockets not just of the league, but the players who participate in it. When I was a sports writer in the early Stone Age, you could get pretty good access to Magic Johnson

and Larry Grumpy Larry Bird or whoever it was. Certainly the team I was covering. Can I tell you my little LeBron story? I was going to ask you, you've written the book of Muhammad Ali, you've been around the globe. That kind of stuff is near impossible now. What is, okay, it's near impossible, and I want to understand. Muhammad Ali talked to everybody all the time in a hospital room.

Everywhere in his bed and his hotel. But isn't it important, and I want you to keep going, but isn't it important to try to understand what is lost in that impossibility? It came to occur to the athletes themselves and their people that why are we doing this anymore? So here's how it now works. Through the good offices of a friend of mine, I was able to have dinner with LeBron James and Maverick Carter, his longtime friend. and business partner.

And they knew what I wanted. I wanted to do a real profile in the real sense. I brought this book that I'd written about Muhammad Ali. I presented it to LeBron, as if in a kind of holy reliquary. It was very strange. What year was this? Four years ago, either right before or right after the pandemic.

And he was lovely. It was really fun, and I thought I'm in like Flint. And it's not like I was asking, for the world. I wanted to come out to L.A., watch and play a whole bunch of games, and get some interview time and move around a little bit and talk to other people. A profile for the New Yorker. And it seemed like it was going to happen. Three days later, a representative for a nice guy in the PR realm,

comes to me and says, look, David, we can't do this. We can't do this. I say, why? This is a guy who has everything. He said, because if we want to get our message to our fans, this is how we spoke, we'll go on social media and say, you know, political message A, commercial message, B, comment on C, and it's done, and it's in our voice. It's done. And if we want to do a documentary, we'll do that thing.

And if we want to quote, and here was the killer thing that just my heart shattered. If we want to tell our story, we'll call so-and-so, you know, ghostwriter at the moment, and it will guarantee that we tell our story the way we want it told. What they don't want is the intermediary of a writer or a filmmaker of any independence. And that was the end of that. That's the word. Well, but that's the thing. So this is the same as we're talking about Bezos and Trump.

It's like, what happens when we're no longer in control? they don't need us. If the message can be sort of direct, if Trump can lean on the person who has money, or the five people in America that have money, and these people don't really care about journalistic standards or care about art, what we get are the subjects controlling what we as an audience get to read. Although what complicates it with Trump is that Trump talks to reporters more than any president in history. It's more press availabilities, and you get the feeling with like an analesand, psychoanalysis, that he says whatever is on his mind at a given moment and means it. Now, he may mean, mean an entirely different thing.

I mean, anybody with any sense at all would say, you know, that tweet, that video that I put up of the Obamas, which was just a stone-cold racist video, that he would say, you know, upon reflection, that was a bad idea. I didn't really have anything to do it, but he would have bull-h-h-s his way around, but be at least somewhat menschie about it. No, he was utterly honest about it. That's who he is. So it's kind of complicated.

That's fair. The question of independence, right, and control. So the reason I keep on turning to Ezra and badgering him is because the question becomes, what, in your view, as the gold standard of, and I don't even know how you feel about this, journalistic documentary filmmaking, what will you tolerate? Because the question is going to be compromised. It's not always, yes, or no, there are degrees that will be proposed.

Look, I'm, you know, I think about this, as you know, all the time because I feel like I exist way up in my tree by myself because I think there is a, you know, I was called naive last week by somebody because of like, well, I will leave all names out of this and all things. But it was just basically like not acknowledging that the universe that we live in now, which is like, yeah, athletes get paid to make movies. And so it's fine that you're principled, but like grow up a little bit. Like this is just the way, and I'm like, I'm sorry, what happened to journalism? And I'm sorry, what happened to actually having some level of independence between a subject and the filmmaker?

It changes the dynamic in terms of what gets done and how it gets done. And there's nothing that you could possibly say to me that's going to change that. Now, as a result, if we live in a universe now where I still like doing what I do, But the problem is every single person, and granted, you know, we talked a little bit when I saw you in the fall about when you're talking, you know, I don't want to reduce it to the notion of just like the celebrity profile. But anybody who has any level of power, money, fame, that as a result, they have some modicum of control. Well, look, I take Paul Thomas Anderson, a great filmmaker. We have always wanted to do a profile of Paul Thomas Anderson. What does that entail?

tales being around him, taking notes, not just interviewing him, but observing him at work, interacting with other people, and then the writer goes off and writes what he or she wants. Paul Thomas Anderson has always said, no, let me ask you this. Can you blame him? No. What's in it for him? No, that was the next part. I do not blame with these people where when you understand what has happened, if you came to me and said, hey, you want to make, I want to make a documentary about you. And I'll pay you $5 million. You can review the cuts.

And like, all these things, I'd be like, yeah, sure. Because by the way, I don't, and then maybe I'm, let's just say I'm empathetic, if not an outright hypocrite. Because like, the fuck if I'd be doing this. Seating complete control to a stranger to do something. But the problem is the contract is that they are getting something. They are getting, it's not me, but if it's Paul Thomas Anderson, for instance, if you're, if, if Paul Thomas Anderson, and wants to make a film about someone, you should be so honored. Look, we have a problem.

It's not just, it's hardly sports. It's pop music. Very often, the only real access, I'm not talking about, oh, you can ask six questions during the photo shoot, but real access, like Nat Hentoff writing about Bob Dylan in 1964, or I could name any number of other ones. You know, Whitney Balliatt hanging out with Duke Ellington or all kinds of things. Those things only exist now when people are in the very early ascent. You know, it's not uncommon to see good independent profile in the New Yorker or other places,

but usually on the ascent when they're coming up, which means that you have to have some sort of cultural radar to figure out who that is. If you're a bad bunny at this point, he needs a profile in the New Yorker I'll spare you the metaphor. So what ends up happening is that you write from a distance, you write a critic's piece, which can be interesting too, but it's a very different form.

The question, and I think I would have gone with, Jeff Bezos needs a third trail boat or something like that, maybe I'm just editing David Remnick as it talks. I think the question then becomes, what are we losing, right? So let's admit that all of us, I assume all of us, have been interviewed at some point,

and probably regretted participation or the lack of control. Every time I sit here. It might be happening right now, actually. But the question then becomes, what did we actually lose? And is there any going back, right? Because the thing I think about when I read your writing or watch your films, such as anyone is allowed legally to watch your films anymore, is how great it is when someone who's not the subject observes the subject

and gets to decide what's actually interesting. The subject is often not the best arbiter of what is interesting about them. And I feel like just that is such a remarkable loss. Well, I was just going to say truth. I mean, they're also not a great arbiter. Oh, it's a human transaction. You're 100% right.

This is also why we have fiction, by the way. We have fiction. because fiction can explore depths of human experience and thought and doubt and internal Mishigas in a way that a profile, even with the best sort of access, has a hard time doing. We're talking about the decline in standards of journalism. We're talking about the commercialization of everything in journalism. But it's also, to me, like, it's a continual, it's like the death of culture. I don't even, honestly, like, I don't even know what monoculture is.

So, like, you're talking about that. I'm like, but it feels like... Pro football. That's it. Okay. Just the Super Bowl, basically. But, like, it feels like culture. We're losing out on something where this sort of, what is discussed, how it's discussed.

I mean, this gets back, and I'm not going to... I do want to bathe in my nostalgia for a second about what the Washington Post Sports section was for a minute. Because, like, there is a worldview. And I'm not, like, such a... Now I'm turning into the sort of proverb. I'm like, oh, my parents. But, like, it's like... Shirley Povich was a person who wrote about race in America

and, like, actually educated people and took a stand about things when he saw something was wrong? Shirley Povich, the longtime editor of the Post for about a century, basically, and a writer, of course. I think he died when he was 114. I think he was Calvin Coolidge's caddy as a young man. And he was in best American women. people every year

Shirley told me that he was in Best American Women every year and on the question you know they'd write Has gender held you back in your chosen profession he was right?

No, it hasn't. So this is Shirley Popovich also the father of Bori friend of Pablo Torre finds out and Shirley Popovich. One of the great lines of sports journalism. Yes.

But there is a line that you quoted to me the other day about a piece he wrote. Bobby Mitchell integrated the end zone for the first time. about the notorious racist Washington Redskins of George Preston Marshall,

who were the last people to integrate the National Football League. And what do you say? Bobby Mitchell integrated the end zone for the Washington Redskins for the first time. Shirley Povich was essentially the Redsmith of the Washington Post. And I covered some fights with him. You know, I would be 25 years old sitting next to somebody who was well into his 80s at that point. And I was covering a Hagler fight. in Las Vegas

and how happy was I to be 26th and sitting at ringside and I don't know what it was, Hearns Hagler, something spectacular, maybe it was Sugar Ray Leonard. And the way in those days you quote-unquote wrote a fight story was backwards. You would just do maybe one or two rounds and then you would send your instantly written stuff to the desk

and then they would assemble the piece in the right order at the end you'd write what's called a flash lead and you would have written what's called B matter, you know, information that would be helpful at the bottom of the piece. So when the person gets the first edition the next morning, they're seeing who won the fight and at least a rough outline. And like an idiot, like an obnoxious, complit major from an unspeakable university, I saw the readback from Washington and I started bitching and moaning and bitching and moaning. And Shirley Provitch turned to me and he said, You know, David, an editor is only a mouse training to be a rat.

A line that reverberates in my head to this day. Boxing, which was also the thing that, by the way, almost famous is another film that has journalistic aspects to it. And the most that I felt like Cameron Crow in that movie was when I covered boxing for Sports Illustrated, when I was a reporter making, you know, no money. And I think about boxing now because we just... to talk about the transactionality of reporting. Boxers knew that access meant sales. I think they're the last ones that still do.

Just that instinct. Well, Mike Tyson, for all his really complex, disturbed, you know, character, he knew that too. They all do because they're on their own. They're lonely. and people that would come and hang out and watch them hit a bag for an hour and jump rope. Boxers even to this day seem to feel duty-bound to talk to reporters and be revealing of themselves. To be interesting. Not like Bull Durham.

I mean, all sports writers know that scene in Bull Durham where the older minor league player teaches the younger player how to say absolutely nothing in an interview. Write this down. We got to play him one day at a time. Got to play. It's pretty boring. Of course it's boring. That's the point. Write it down.

Which you see now done to a fairly well after every game, whether it's about God or, you know, that we were misunderstood and nobody believed in us, but here we are. All that stuff that people learn how to say. Yeah, it's like a little collection of them. Boxers don't talk about that kind of thing. They talk about their innermost souls. Oh, the sex they had last night.

Yeah. I'll talk about... Oh, you got lucky. I never heard that stuff. I mean, maybe, by the way, maybe I am like a dinosaur in the sense that I'm been... I am thinking about this because you're right. DC in the 80s was like an especially fertile, like, place and period. Sure.

You had, you know, the Redskins were great and John Thompson was there and the Hoyas were a thing. And there was like... But the idea that... Left to... Left to Brazil. Left to... The idea that you had a collection of writers in... Thomas Boswell and Tony

Cornheiser and Michael Wilbon and John Feinstein and Sally Jenkins eventually and Christine Brennan and Gary Palmerston. These are like very... David Aldrich came along. David Alton. It's like very like independent-minded people who also sort of expressed from whence they came in like

what their opinions were about the world through the lens of this thing. And it was very educational. And the glue to this and thank God he's still with us is George Solomon, who was the editor, the sports editor, who was a magnet for really young, talented people to come work from it. And he drove them crazy, and he drove them hard, and for a period of time, paid them really modestly. And yet you learned a tremendous amount. There's not a sports

writer that I know of who worked for George Solomon that doesn't absolutely love him. I don't think they'll object if I say. David Aldridge, who I, I know only slightly, and then obviously did basketball and TV, David Aldridge wrote a note the other day to George Solomon that was so full of love and appreciation and sadness about what's happened at the Post that, you know, I'm a 67-year-old guy. I was tears in my eyes about this. I just think what's been committed at the Washington Post is so unnecessary

and so heedless. and so disconnected. Again, I don't doubt that certain sections have to change and journalism has to take on technology and reach people in different, what do we now say, reach people where they are

and all those cliches. God knows it's happened at The New Yorker. When I started at The New Yorker, we published 12 things a week and a cover and gag cartoons, and that was it. And now it's, I don't know how many podcasts

and video and online every single day. The Atlantic was a sleepy monthly magazine. Now it's something quite, quite different. But these places have found a way to succeed. I don't think it's impossible for the Washington Post to do. So I hope, I hope and pray that this experience of criticism is, I have to think that Bezos is hearing it. I hope it reaches him because his obituary will not just say that he invented Amazon. If he keeps it up, he'll be the guy that trashed the Washington Post, and that's a misery.

So I'm reading this quote from Jeff Bezos, who finally spoke about everything that happened at your former newspaper, David. And he said, quote, The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity. Each and every day, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus. Well, the data would never have told you in the days when you couldn't really get the data in the way we can now,

that high school sports was of value because it was only a small number of people who were reading about such and such a high school, but they were reading it ardently. If I were to just publish the things that I knew would do well in terms of clicks, we would be a very different magazine. Very, very different.

I'm not stupid. I usually know what's going to quote-unquote do well. So what I can tell you as a kid who grew up there, what also the post did as far as covering local sports and covering high school sports and like every weekend you could pick up and you could see the box scores of all the football games of the basketball games

and what it meant as a kid who was an athlete in trying to sort of like see your name in the paper and really be covered like it's sort of in the same way that they are covering Georgetown and University of Maryland and the Redskins and the Bullets, you actually felt a part of this community and you were striving to make all met and you know that the paper determined

because they covered local sports. There's something that integrated all of us together in a way that, yeah, maybe I'm being quaint and naive. No, you're not. You're not. I mean, look, all kinds of things are aimed at a newspaper's destruction. You know, first it was, what was the service that came along? Craigslist. Craig's List came along, and that killed classified advertising.

Then Google and Facebook really made advertising and certainly display advertising. and certainly display advertising near impossible because they scooped up just about the entire advertising business. So scraps were left. Now, that's near impossible for a local newspaper to handle. But the New York Times, which, by the way, is owned by a vastly less wealthy family than Bezos. Vast the Solzburgers have only one thing.

They have the New York Times. But they're a newspaper family, and they've learned how to make it work. And they have certain advantages. There's no question. But they've made it work through, subscribers by adding games and food and all those things that people make fun of, but it widens the aperture so that you've entered New York Times world and you're doing the crossword puzzle and you're

reading about Donald Trump and you're reading, you know, opinion pages and then you're learning how to make, you know, cook a steak properly. That seems to me an institution that knows who it is, what it is for all it's false and all the rest, and learn to had a change so that it could survive. There was a time not so long ago that everybody figured, well, the Salzburgers, they can't sustain the New York Times. Carlos Slim is going to buy it, or Mike Bloomberg, who doesn't particularly like the New York Times, is going to buy it, and all would be lost. They made it work because they put the effort into it and they were connected to this thing. I don't see any sense that they're connected. This guy, Will Lewis,

seem to not particularly even like the enterprise. It's just wrong. It's wrong. But all of this is to say that what I love about your films and your magazine is that when I start it, when I open it up, when I press play, I have no idea what the fuck I'm about to get.

And so the question of data leading editorial judgment is an enemy of that. surprise and that discretion and that taste and that judgment, which is human. And so the case of this episode is not like we need to, and I would love it if we could cap internet speeds and make it so that we can't, you know, make everything available in your pocket, both the casinos as well as a sum total of human knowledge, which has been bad for business and human mental development. What I am saying, though, is that there's an opportunity selfishly, economically, to make

premium things. I'm not saying this is going to be everything. The question is, can you make some things worth paying for? And can you protect the people making it from the compromise that makes it like everything else? By the way, this might be not fair to ask you in a public forum. But where does your ethical standard sort of, you can be like, I went to see Melania because I'm a journalist. Yeah. Right?

So at the same time as a journalist, I would have seen it anyway. Fine. But where it is, where it is, do you get offended to a point where you go, well, Amazon then, who's owned by the person that just killed the Washington Post and is putting out this bullshit? You mean, and then I order my books on Amazon? And then you order your books on Amazon. So we're all hypocrites. We all.

But was there, is there a level to you might go like, I'm sorry, I just can't do this anymore? Like, they don't, they've lost credibility with me. Look, that's, you know, that's a question of life in about 6,000 different areas. But, you know, unless you're a Carmelite nun, unless you live in. entirely apart from modernity and look at the other not recently

maybe a year or two ago the magazine online asked a whole bunch of people what their favorite bookstores were and I decided to be honest because everybody's well three lives this is a wonderful little bookstore and the da da da da da I live in the west side

the best bookstore in the Upper West Side the one that has a lot of stuff is Barnes & Noble and I remember back in the day when Barnes and Noble was, you know, it was like the Nora Ephron movie. It was the bad guy that was closing all these Indies. Well, the Indies now are very rare. Some of them are, real estate prices are so high that they just can't carry much volume. And they're not all that good. I mean, I wish it were otherwise, but they're just not. So now Barnes & Noble, which used to be the Darth Vader of this,

you know, little universe, certainly where I live, is terrific. Wait, is that Barnes & Noble still there? like near 70 second in Broadway, the one that's like... Well, mine is an 82nd in Broadway. Oh, that's been there for, yeah. Yeah, it's been there a long time. I used to go into so many Barnes & Noble's and read the magazines and not pay for them. That's okay.

Go to the bathroom and, you know... That's okay. You know, it's like selling heroin in the playground. I was sooner-related paying. And what happened to them? It worked, David. It worked on me. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Barnes & Noble and the Virgin megastores. Oh, God. But you mentioned the Carmelite nuns. And I guess what... As one does. As one, as one must. Yeah. The thing that I love and respect, what?

What, what they... No, it just makes me... This is the thing. He's absolutely right, but you know me. I have a problem with my own fucking principles. Yeah, in purity. At the same time, it's like, it's then the normalization of shit that happens, where you then go, oh, the erosion of standards, that happens where you go, I accept, I submit that all this shit that gets put out.

I can't not consume it because that's what's there. And I'm like, no. And look, it is no excuse for terrible crimes to say, well, we're all fallen beings in this terrible world. There are limits. The thing that I love, though, about both of you guys and Carmelite nuns is that there are pangs of conscience. Yeah, but then you run the risk of self-celebration, which is itself a sin. So nobody loves reporters more than reporters. No question.

And that nobody has nostalgia for the press world more than people inside it. And so that's worth also being self-aware of. We've been spulunking our own navel for about an hour. Well, no, but I do genuinely, as someone who avowedly is too pure, and it's a constant existential discussion for me, it's like you have to evolve, evolve or die. Like, you know, and so as I'm listening to David and as I'm sitting here, I want to actually ask my question, like, where it's not as bad as I think,

where it's like it's actually okay with what does exist now in terms of the proliferation of options or the, there are more people who get to apply their craft because there isn't a monopoly and there are four people who, like, there is a network television and we get to see six shows. This is a bigger question. I mean, I think we're asking, about American life all the time. And I get this, I'm sure you do too in this rut of conversation all the time about despair and I can't look at the news and is it going to be okay as if some person who knows the news

two seconds before a civilian has an answer to all this. I think it is fair to say that life is never fantastic. and human beings struggle with innovation and new technologies all the time. You know, we have on our staff a guy named Bill McKibbon. Bill McKibbon was right about one big thing earlier than anybody else. Bill McKibbin brought to light the problem of climate change in the Panges of New York were at great length in the mid to late 80s. and yet Bill McKibben refuses despair,

which to me is the most useless emotion of all. And I think I'm not a New Testament guy, but I think it's called the Unforgivable sin. Bill McKibbon is, what's he writing about now, is about how the Chinese actually have climate change right, that the Chinese are building more solar panels than they know what to do with. So he has a measure of hope.

And I think that's worth remembering too, and it's also worth remembering that all of us at this table know that American life has been, in many ways, immensely worse. Immensely worse. So it's our job to investigate, complain, criticize, whine, all the rest. But I really do refuse the kind of despairing mode, because what good is that?

I think that's a better slogan than democracy dies in darkness. I refuse the despairing mode because what's the use in that? Yeah, that's fair. It doesn't really trip off the tongue in the way you'd want, though. Down with despair. Down with despair, perfect. Down with despair, colon, a podcast by Ezra Edelman. That would be up with despair?

Yeah, I think Ezra's mode on most days is going to be up with despair. Azra Adelman, David Romnick, thank you for circle jerking. I don't know, whatever this was. Please, some dignity. I don't have a job. Eustace Tilly. Well, what I would say is two things. Browning at me.

Thank you, Pablo, even though I don't like you asking me to be on your show. But more importantly, thank you, David, because I actually, as someone who is incredibly busy and a shit to do, that you would take the time to come here and do this. It was fun. It's great to see you again. Haven't seen each other in months. A pleasure. Thanks, Pablo.

Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Our studio engineering is by RG Systems, our sound design by Andrew Bursick and NGW Post, Digital Strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, and our theme song, as always, by John Bravo. We'll talk to you next time.