The Press Box - 25 for 25: The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie on the Future of the Opinion Columnist

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Hello, media consumers! This week, Bryan and Joel are joined by Jamelle Bouie, opinion columnist at the New York Times, to discuss a number of timely media topics before backtracking and talking through Bouie’s career, writing an opinion column in this era of the internet, the relationship between his TikTok and his journalistic work, and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel D. Anderson Guest: Jamelle Bouie Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you hear the word Seattle Supersonics, what comes to mind? Maybe it's Sean Kemp, The Rain Man, or Gary Payton, the glove, or maybe an image of a tall and skinny 19-year-old rookie, Kevin Duran. For fans in Seattle, it's something else. It's tragedy. It's theft. An iconic team with an incredible fan base that packed its bags and shipped off for Oklahoma City. From Spotify and The Ringer, I'm Jordan Ritter-Con.

And in my podcast, Sonic Boom, I talk to players, politicians, owners, and fans about how Seattle lost the Sonics. You can listen to it on the Book of Basketball feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. You've got Brian Curtis. You've got Joel Anderson. You've got producer Bobby Wagner.

Joel, we have a very special 25 for 25 podcasts coming up today. Yeah, man. I'm excited. I think people are going to really enjoy this conversation. Before you get started, though, you know, I got something for you. I know you listened to me in fans' conversation. I did. I really enjoyed it, by the way.

I was driving to the Grand Canyon. Yeah. And it was the only time in the trip I didn't have kids. So I felt like I could actually put that on in the car without headphones. Yeah. It probably was appropriate that you waited a little bit. But I'm going to ask, what are your top strip club cities? I'm just joking.

I'm not going to stuff. I'm not going to. Okay. I do that. I do that was coming. I'm joking. I'm joking. Unless you're going to rank them.

I got a better question for you. A far more appropriate question for this podcast. Let's go forward. Are you a horse racing person? I like going to the racetrack. I don't, you know. If you're from Texas, you know about the dogs. You've been to a dog track?

I've been to a dog track. I've been to one in Tijuana as well. Really? That was kind of an experience. Yeah. I follow. horse racing when it happens. I'm not like a, you know, huge fan of it or anything, but I follow, yeah. I'm going to make the case that for the next month, you and I should be horse racing people.

Okay. Because one of the favorites, in fact, the favorite for next month's Kentucky Derby is a horse named, wait for it, journalism. And what? That's it? Journalism. Journalism. That's the name. The name of the horse is journalism. That's great. I love it. I learned about this from an alert listener named A.J. Mead. Okay.

And I feel you and I at this moment need to adopt journalism as the official racehorse of the press box podcast because God knows journalism, SmallJ, needs a W. Yeah, man. Do I need to buy a hat or get into pimento cheese or anything? No, I think you're okay. We're going to follow journalism from afar. Okay, okay. Cool. We're going to do updates on every single episode of this podcast. I'm serious about that.

All right. I'll give you some vital stats to get us started. Journalism, the horse, is trained by Michael McCarthy. That is not the front office sports media reporter. That is the horse trainer, Michael McCarthy. Journalism is a little over three years old. Okay. Two starts this year, including at last weekend, San Anita Derby, and journalism won both.

Wow, he really is a winner. Okay. Journalism has earned $480,000 this year. Nice. More than any person practicing journalism has earned this year. And let me tell you something. There's some great lines from the stories about journalism and the races. Journalism runs in.

For instance, these are all real folks. The major standout of the day was journalism. Here's another one. Journalism dazzles. Love it. And this was my favorite. Journalism overcomes Trump. to prevail.

Oh, my God, if only. Yeah, but okay, I like that. This is what we need. What is horse racing trouble? Well, you got out on the course, you weren't, the race was not going so well. You can tell I'm a real horse race expert here, but then journalism prevailed. That was at the San Anita Derby. That sounds right.

That's probably how they announced it, too, I bet. And Joel, if nothing else, this is free advertising for our profession. Because journalism wears, and I'm pretty sure I have this term right, a saddlecloth bearing the J word. And if you think of the old Richard Petty NASCAR STP, what could be better advertising than watching television being like, aha, journalism, yes, this is what the 21st century needs more of. I was going to say, like with a CJR ought to get a little imprint on that or something? You know?

Indeed, maybe the press box too. Maybe we can have a NASCAR style sponsorship. How much money do you think we would take to get us on that little saddlecloth? that's a great question. Do they have ads on saddlecloths? Man, I'm looking closely here. So we're not horse racing guys. Yeah, Joel and I will be learning more about horse racing as we learn about journalism.

I also love this line from the LA Times. Journalism, he's a special horse from whom it's believed has not yet run his best race. Okay. That's a lot of potential, you know, a lot of optimism. That's, that's, journalism, horse, and the rest of us could all use some of that. We're behind you, journalism. We are behind you here at the press box. All right, for our next, which is to say third edition of 25 for 25,

here is New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie. So in the name of full disclosure, I should tell our listeners that I'm good friends with our esteemed guests for today's edition of 25 for 25. I went to his lovely wedding in Charlottesville in 2016. We've been members of various group chats for the past 15 years, so on and so forth. So look, I still have lots. to learn about him in his career, and I hope y'all are interested in hearing about his path

into journalism and where he thinks this business, and even America, is headed now. Let's just go back to taste, though. I first came across his blog, the United States of Jamaica in 2008. I saw him smile a little bit there. That's for the old heads right there. That's very embarrassing. Yeah, the United States of Jamaica. That's right.

At that point, he hadn't even graduated from the University of Virginia. which he would do the following year with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political and social thought and government. But his clarity, his powerful intelligence, his wisdom, it really shone through the noise and the clutter of the blogosphere. And it was really hard for me to believe that he was only 22 years old. And I remember telling him then, and pretty much every year afterward, that he was the smartest person I had ever met at that age. Now, I stopped doing that like when he became fully grown up.

He has like his own wife and kids now. So I don't need to do that anymore. But I still largely believe that's true with a few caveats. And I assumed he'd take those talents, go to law school, and go make a shitload of money at one of those white shoe law firms in D.C. But no, in a move that had me questioning that of four-mentioned intelligence, he started a writing career. Fellowships got him started at the American Prospect and the Nation magazines. He became a staff writer at the Daily Beast in 2013. And a year later, he was at Slate, where he was the chief political correspondent.

later replaced him as the black guy Slate back when Slate had black guys, you know, the old DEI days, whatever. But anyway, it can only be one. That can only be one. But even then, it seemed inevitable that he'd eventually get a column at the New York Times. And that's exactly what happened in 2019. He's been writing for them ever since. I'm talking about Jamel Bowie, of course. There's a lot more to Jamel than the New York Times. He's a political analyst for CBS News. He co-hosts the unclear and present danger podcast, which explores the political thriller films of the 1990s. He's previously reviewed cereal for serious eats. He's an accomplished photographer once hosting an exhibit on the towns of Oklahoma founded by free blacks who migrated West following

emancipation. He lives weights. He's a dandy. He's a really gifted cook. Jamel, can you please leave something else for the rest of us? And welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Joel. And thank you for the nice words. Of course, of course, more to come. Let me just get started here then. So you write a lot in your Times column about how the news of the day speaks to historical events. So what corners of history does Donald Trump's second term remind you of so far? That is a great question. Different aspects of his second term remind me of different things. And so, you know, one thing I've alluded to, or I think I mentioned in the column, is how much his crusade against DEI is reminiscent of, Woodrow Wilson's effort to resegregate the federal government during his terms in office.

But I think to move away from like national politics, so much of the Trump administration was just like it's open corruption, it's sort of disdain for expertise, it's aggressive use of the violent parts of the state. It just reminds me of sort of like, you know, reactionary southern governments, you know, going back to. the 19th century, but even up into the present, right? Like places where the state really only exist to either incarcerate people or like funnel money to rich people. And that any other benefits that may accrue to ordinary people are almost incidental. Jamel, of all the things that Trump has done so far, doge, tariffs, deportation slash disappearances, that's obviously a partial list. What worries you the most? I mean, the deportations slash disaffirmations. I mean, the deportations slash disappearances are really unsettling, you know?

The administration is snatching people off the streets. Often, most of them with no actual criminal record. That's almost besides the point. Snatching them off of the streets and then whisking them away to a foreign gulag. And then when courts say, you got to bring these people back, the administration says, well, they're in a foreign gulag now, so we can't reach the due process no longer applies. And if that's, I mean, to be perfectly frank, if that's the thing that's allowed to stand, right,

if they can do that to people who, yeah, they aren't citizens, they may not be legal residents. But under the Constitution, they're so entitled to due process. But if that is allowed to stand for them, then, like, effectively none of us have any protection from due process since what's anyone to say, you know, you get picked up off the street. and they're like, we think you are a member of a Venezuelan gang, and you're like, no, I have my passport, I'm an American citizen. And they take your passport and say, we think you're a member of a Venezueling gang. I mean, like, at that point, the only thing that distinguishes you from an undocumented person is that the state hasn't really gone after you yet.

And so that's what worries me the most because it is genuinely frightening. It's like a nightmarish thing to think about being. just like shipped off with no real possibility of recourse. Just as a quick follow-up, I mean, is it worrisome too that, like, I mean, there's polling that shows that that is not exactly as unpopular as you would think, you know, according to some of the polls that are taken. Like, you know, I think something like 40% of the people, like, don't have a problem with how he's handling immigration.

Like, is that as worrisome as Trump actually, you know, enacting that sort of measure through his executive orders? Yeah, I have a hard time trying to, like, parsing those polls because, you know, most people don't pay close attention, right? Like the people paying close attention to these renditions, really, not really deportations, these renditions to El Salvador, are people who are involved in politics or closely following politics or involved in immigration and whatnot. Your typical person, all they see is a headline here or there, a TikTok video, you know, maybe, maybe a post on X or whatever social media network they're on about a deportation. And it's really aggressive, right? Like the administration's trying to create content around their deportation efforts.

And so just the sheer aggression of the imagery and the loudness with which the White House speaks, I think convinces a lot of people that, A, Trump is carrying through his promise. and B, that there's nothing, there's nothing, this is just a law being applied, and there's nothing worrisome happening. I think that will, I think that will likely begin to change. The case of the Marilyn Barber, who is in this prison, has maybe, you might say, broken containment a bit, and really does, I think, disturb people who encounter it. But on the main, you know, for the last half decade,

there's been no one in American politics who's been pushing against the really draconian anti-immigration, pro-deportation rhetoric of Trump and his allies, like Democrats have 100% conceded to it. And so I'm also just not that surprise at the public, which takes many of its cues from political elites. has also taken a very hardline stance to these sorts of things. You wrote a recent column about Donald Trump and tariffs. So now that most of these tariffs have been paused, maybe temporarily paused,

why did Trump like tariffs? Yeah. Well, it's worth saying that, you know, we're still tariff-wise in a different place than the status quo a couple days ago. There are now these like 10% universal tariffs and 125% tariffs on goods from China, which is like, you know, ruinous to a lot of people in this country. I say nothing able to happen in the prices. But why do I think he's doing it? I mean, okay, so here's the thing. If you ask Donald Trump what a tariff is, not like what he thinks, what's the policy,

just like, can you give me the definition of a tariff? What Donald Trump is almost certainly likely to tell you is that it's a fee that the other country is paying, which is not true. A tariff is a tax paid by the importer, not the exporter. If you ask him what a trade deficit is, he'll likely talk about it like it's a balance in an account. Like if you overdrew your checking account, you have like a deficit. He'll talk about the trade deficit in that way. But that's not true either, right? Like I go to the grocery store every week and I give like Wagmans a bunch of money for food.

I don't have a trade deficit with Wagman's. I've exchanged money for goods. You get something of value when you exchange the cash, and the same goes for importation and exportation. Which is to say that, like, I don't think Trump's affinity for tariffs has, like, anything to do with public policy as people generally understand it. It's not like a considered idea. He's been obsessed with tariffs since the 1980s when there was kind of a broad national panic over the fact that, like, Japan was exporting goods to the United States and large quantities, and we were buying lots of them. and in his sort of nationalistic frame of mind

this is like a threat this was to him the threat to the country and I think he perceives trade in those terms now and when I wrote in that column and what I've said in other other kind of venues

is that Trump is a guy who just like doesn't believe in a human interaction that has a positive sum right like the thing about trade kind of the magic thing about trade is that it benefits everyone you know

like, just to go back to Japan, Japan makes hondas, we buy hondas. In return, we get the thing that we like, if they get money, and maybe they invested in American companies that produce things that the Japanese like and vice versa, and we all benefit. But Trump doesn't believe in that kind of exchange. He thinks that in any given situation, any given interaction, there is a winner and a loser, and that he must always be on top. He must always be the winner. And I think that the tariffs are just like an expression of that

because he doesn't believe in positive sum interactions. He doesn't believe a trade to be mutually beneficial. In his view, if someone is buying things, if we are buying things from someone else, if we are buying t-shirts from Bangladesh, if we're buying wine from France, and they're not buying t-shirts from us or wine from us, then we're getting ripped off.

And so we have to impose penalties on them to force them to buy those things from us. It's very silly. I wouldn't even say it's a child-type thinking. I have children and white children do not have that kind of negative some worldview. They understand that people can benefit from things mutually. It's a strange and ultimately destructive worldview.

It's not conducive to prosperity to believe that the only way that you can be on top is if someone else is necessarily on the bottom. Can I just go follow up on that real quick because I saw you, Jamel, talking on TikTok the other day, about the nostalgia for the 1950s manufacturing job. I feel like we grew up with that nostalgia from boomer parents, from movies, from at least one Billy Joel video that had a lot of dancing in it. where in American culture now is 50s manufacturing nostalgia located? I think it's located in our politics. I think it's, I mean, okay, so I'll say one of the odd things, I'm on TikTok a lot, I watch these things, and people talk about this stuff a lot.

It's not hard to find videos and people saying, you know, my grandfather could raise a family on his, like, factory job or whatever. And then you think, okay, they're saying this in 2025. And so if they, they'll say they're 25. So their parents had them in 2000. Also the parents are 25. So they're like maybe talking about 1975 when like American manufacturing began its decline, right? Like when deindustrialization was starting and rapidly gaining steam.

And so this is sort of like it's like nostalgia twice removed. It's not really, it doesn't really have any relationship to the real thing. It's partly a product of pop culture. It's partly a product of advertising. see ads from like the 60s and 70s and they imagine that that was how life was like for people, which is strange. Like if a, like, can you imagine 100 years from now someone seeing like an advertisement for Cheerios from like 2022?

And they're like, yeah, all Americans lived in big, spacious, you know, light-filled homes with like their multiracial children. Like that's, no, that's like not, that's not how anything worked. in the same way, advertisements from the 50s and 60s or whatever did not reflect real life. But there's like this second order of nostalgia. And it's like people are confusing. There's this concept in Marx called a commodity fetish. And it refers to people mistaking.

So like products, commodities. are the product of relations between people. Production is a relation between people. And it's sort of like it's abstracting, it's like attributing value to the thing itself, like inherent in the thing, and forgetting the value of the thing is a product,

comes out of the relationship that produced it. It comes out of the labor that produced it. It comes out of the exchange between people's that produce it. The thing itself does not necessarily have any inherent value except that with which we attach to it. And it's, you call it a fetish, right, because you're

fetishizing the object. You're thinking of the object as being the real thing and forgetting about the relationships that produce it. And something something that was happening with manufacturing and like that kind of thing. People look at

the manufacturing job and they say, well, that job produced all this prosperity. But the job didn't produce the prosperity. The job which just happened to be the kind of widely available jobs there were at the time for a variety of reasons. What produced the prosperity was a whole array of policies, a whole way of organizing our political economy, which aren't tied to manufacturing. You can have good union jobs that are service sector. you can have high wages that come out of the service sector.

And in fact, a McDonald's worker in California making $18 or $19 an hour is making more money than a factory worker in Alabama, making $15 or $16 an hour, right? Like the job, you shouldn't fetish the job. You need to think about the relationships and the policies and such that wrap around the job, that actually. produce the thing that people want. And that's what's getting missed here. Bill Ackman and some of these other rich guys in the Trump circle, you know,

they've kind of become, certainly this go around since the campaign started up again and everything else. They've become his social media surrogates. And Ackman himself has had an interesting week, right? What do you think about these dudes and the role that they're playing in this administration. Why do you think they're there and what do you think Trump gets out of having these guys in that orbit?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think they're dummies, but that's, I mean, that's like my real fight. It's like I don't think they're particularly smart people. Apparently, you know, Ackman has, like,

$8 billion. I guess that doesn't really buy you a brain. So I think there's a couple of things going on here. I mean, first is that like these rich guys see Trump is acting in their interest. They see Trump that the rich guy is going to do things for them, help them make money. I think there's something weird and psychological happening here, which is that like, despite having all this money, despite being, you know, unbelievably wealthy, they still seem to need to exist under some kind of hierarchy.

And, like, Trump is, like, the top guy. And so they want to be close to the top guy in the same way that in like a bad, you know, 80s high school movie, there are a bunch of, of like hangar-ons with the bully, I think it's the same basic dynamic. They're going to be close to the guy who has the power, who seems to be able to bully and dominate others. And I think a part of this just reflects, and this is especially true for a guy like Bill Ackman,

or it seems to be true. I don't know the man. I'm just observing. They have just media diets. They live in information worlds that feed just like the most reactionary idea is possible into their brains. And so they develop this distorted sense of what the world is like. Last year, Ackman was losing his mind about like woke taking over or whatnot.

And that to me is like just a product of being on X or being on whatever platform you're on and just being exposed to, again, like right-wing reactionary content and a steady stream. But I think if I'm going to wait, like, put forth three things. I'm going to say it's like 60%, 70%, just like rich guy interests, and like 30 to 40% the rest of the stuff. Which you shouldn't discount, but on some level, like a bunch of, you know, billionaires allying with the billionaire who promises to give money the billionaires isn't isn't a big shock.

I'm going to ask you this as a follow-up, because I know that if I don't, there's going to be, you know, like, chattering in the background about, oh, you know, you didn't push back. So you feel comfortable calling these people dummies. You know what I mean? And I know, I feel like that is a source of frustration for you in recent time. Like, this is an ongoing thing for you. Like you say, these people are dumb.

These people are dumb. Do you really think that? Do you really think that or do you think that these are people that? And what makes you feel so comfortable as to say it, because I think there was a time, right, that people were a little bit more close to the vest and making that sort of a determination, right? And immediate. So, like, what gives you the confidence to say that about these guys and not that maybe they've figured out some sort of end around society? That they're just like, well, look, we're going to reset the labor market in this country, make everybody serves.

This is the means to that end, whatever. What gives you that confidence? What gives me that confidence? So first of all, I mean, I guess it's the same answer to the same. You have like a bit of a two-part question, but it's like the same answer to both. The reason I think these guys are dummies is that they seem to have no awareness of the actual conditions that produce their wealth and prosperity. They seem to think that Bill Ackman seems to think that he's a billionaire because he's a uniquely brilliant person. But Bill Ackman's a billionaire because he happened to be born.

First of all, I think, believe he was born into some wealth in prosperity. So we had that going for him. More broadly, he exists in a stable democratic society that privileges market relations that in the time he was born and it was organized around the creation and growth of financial capital that used its geopolitical might to create a free-flowing movement of goods and capital throughout the world that has a tax system that privileges, the accumulation of capital over labor income in that whose currency is the world's reserve currency, offering another set of benefits. And the whole world is basically okay with this because of the political stability of the

United States. And so if you were smart, you might recognize that however aggrieved you might feel about, people using pronouns or wanting universal health care, that on the main, what you should want out of the political system is continued stability and a continued status quo that provides the things that actually facilitated your wealth. Your wealth is a policy choice. We made a policy choice to allow for the creation of large and possibly large fortunes. And you can lose that wealth as well.

through policy choices. And so if I, you know, this is where I get saying these people are dummies, if I'm looking at a presidential candidate who is constantly making noise about destroying existing global trade relations, and then I say to myself, I don't really think he's going to do it.

And besides, he doesn't like blue-haired at Starbucks baristas too. So that's what I really care, but I hate those woke baristas. I'm going to vote for him to stick it to the wokes I don't like, I would be a dummy, right? Like, that's a stupid thing to do. And I don't think that these people have any particular serious plan to transform the American economy.

I think they are narrowly thinking this guy will make us rich, but seem to have not paid attention to a single thing that he said or that he says or just. have not noticed anything about his character or the character of the people around him. And to my mind, if, and these things weren't subtle, right? Like, it's not, it's not, this isn't, you're not like, it's that really a really cognitive load to figure their stuff out. Last year, in fact, I will say, last year, after Trump got elected, I was like saying, on the internet, if you have major durable goods purchases to make and the parts are probably going to be sourced from China, you should buy them now.

if you have the money to do it, the space in your budget, just go ahead and replace laptops and phones or refrigerators or what have you because we're going to get tariffs. Like, that wasn't, I'm not clairvoyant, right? I'm not Nostradamus, Negro Damos. I'm just like a guy paid attention to what the incoming president said. And I just, like, what I say these guys are dummies. That's sort of what I mean.

that like if you are so blinkered by whatever like cultural resentments you have, that you are going to vote for the guy who's going to bring a flamethrower to the institutions and systems that are the reason you are wealthy, that facilitated your wealth, then that's stupid. That's, that's, I don't know what I don't know how else to describe that. Jamel, I want to ask you a little bit about Trump and the media because Joel and I have been talking about Trump's contempt for reporters. and also his second term effort to replace mainstream reporters with, say, reporters who would ask, Vladimir Zelensky, why aren't you wearing a suit, sir, as you sit here in the Oval Office? Do those actions suggest any historical parallels to you? Either the immediate historical parallels are just like other authoritarian regimes throughout the world. It's like a very classically authoritarian thing to do to have favorable press.

my newsroom colleague Peter Baker wrote last month I believe that this was all very reminiscent of the first years of Putin's time in power I'm trying to think of a similar situation in American history and one's not coming to me even in the Jim Crow regimes of the South

they were like obviously friendly friendly press to put it put it lightly. But less friendly press could also report freely, especially if they were white. If they were not white, they had to maintain their distance some. But it wasn't the same kind of dynamic.

So I think this is, I mean, one thing I try to make clear in my, whenever I utilize history in my work, is that like I do not believe in one-to-one comparison. I don't think history repeats itself. I do think that the past is the past. It's over. It doesn't come back.

And that the things we do when we look to the past is less about finding direct comparisons or mining material to make predictions. But to say, groups of Americans experience situations, ask themselves questions. similar to the ones that we experienced and the questions that we ask. They were faced with circumstances, similar to the kinds of circumstances that we faced. They were subject to broad social and historical forces that are similar to the ones that we are confronted by. How do they respond to that? And out of their response, or their lack of response, what can we learn as we attempt to respond to something similar? So I'm not sure if there's like a direct comparison point in the American past to the president's attempt to create favorable coverage for himself.

But I can't say that Americans in the past have experienced and have faced authorities that are just hostile to the truth and hostile to rights like freedom of the press and freedom of speech. and those Americans responded by looking for whatever way possible it was to tell the truth and to expose people who were hostile to it. You know, there's obviously been a lot of talk about the White House Correspondents Dinner, right? And, you know, they were going to have Amber Ruffin, this MC there, and they removed her in that role. So I'm just sort of curious about, like, what do you, I mean, think of the White House Correspondents' dinner itself as like an event. What do you think they should do? And would you ever attend?

I don't even know. Have you ever been to one of those? I've never been to one of those. And the Times doesn't send people to them. I think it's weird. I don't know. I think it's weird. Like to, first, even before kind of the celebrity started showing up over the last

decade or so, like the last 12, 13 years, I thought it was like a strange thing to kind to kind of be almost buddy, buddy with these people, these powerful people. people that you're covering. But the attachment of celebrity to it, the fact that it's become like this, you know, or people call nerd prom or whatever, I don't, it makes me uncomfortable. I don't, I'm not the biggest fan of that. I think there ought to be some real distance between reporters and the people they cover. And yeah, I don't know. I don't have like, I don't have like strong feelings. It's just, it's always struck me as sort of a thing that seems more, like, if you wanted to make the case that the American political press was like incestuous and actually uninterested in sort of like challenging power in a real way, like that's, that's exhibit A.

That's exhibit A for the case. Last one about current events, Jeff Bezos came out in February and said the Washington Post's opinion section would write in defensive. quote, personal liberties and free markets. It would not be publishing dissenting opinions on those two subjects. What do you make of the idea of writing for a section with those kind of strictures? I wouldn't do it. I mean, first of all, that's, it would be one thing if Bezos, which is still a problem, but one thing if Bezos had said, the editorial board has to take this perspective.

Because the editorial board is supposed to, it does reflect the view of the paper. But like the rest of the section, people put up whatever views they want out there, which would make sense because, like, as you guys know, op-ed is opposite of the editorial. That's the whole point that these reviews are not necessarily going to be in line with that of the editorial board's perspective.

But a kind of like blanket, everyone must write from this perspective, which it's not clear what this even means. And I mean, I think most people interpreted as basically sort of a way to say that like you have to be, you can't be openly Trump hostile or like super Trump hostile. Even as we're seeing now, right, like Trump isn't particularly a fan of free markets, right? Like our personal liberties. So it's unclear exactly what this even means. But for my part, like I'm not going to like, especially for a place like the Washington Post opinion page.

which is, this isn't like an ideologically driven institution. It's supposed to be more of a, you know, a quote-unquote objective. You know, I mean, just like a traditional newspaper. And you're writing for the editorial page, the idea that you would be, that there would be a stricture like that in pose, a vague one that seems to be targeted the particular ideological views, not others. I think it's just unacceptable. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, if I were working, if I were working for the post,

I would have like quit my job. If Bezos wants like an ideologically driven publication, there are plenty of those out there. I used to work for the American prospect, right? Like the American prospect, yeah, we do have a lie. Like we're pro-labor, we're progressive. And so, you know, we probably wouldn't run a piece that was like MAGA. But that's what you're getting when you buy a copy of the American prospect

or you open up the webpage. But that's not, the post is not mission driven in that way. It's not supposed to be. Yeah, very, very disappointing. And like on a business, on the level of business, Bayes' interventions of this sort have like just driven subscribers away. Like it's harmed the paper. It's harmed paper's ability to make money.

And so I find it, I won't say I find it strange, but I do find it very short-sighted. Jamirle, let's pivot a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about your career and sort of the future of the opinion columnist. And I did mention at the top here, the United States of Jamaica. So, you know, you were steeped into blogosphere. You know, at the time, the blogosphere was a really active and humming part of the media ecosystem. So how did that help prepare you to become a professional writer?

And what, if anything, do you miss about those days? I mean, the big thing that I think everyone who participated in the blogosphere back thing got out of that, It was just that it both helped you figure out and then selected for in terms of like audience, like just people with really strong voices and have been kind of like a strong, a strong voice, strong point of view. And that has certainly really benefited me as a writer. I wish that something like that still existed for the simple reason that because people were writing, people were writing, you know, short or even long pieces and they were engaging with

each other and back and forth. It was sort of, you had some of the thing you get on social media take it on, on X or Blue Sky or whatnot, like back and forth with people, strangers doing back and forth, but it was always, you know, most of the time, these were extended conversations. people could make more sophisticated arguments that just wasn't attempt to do gotchas or to perform for an audience necessarily. And that also is like cultivating good habits, cultivating good ways of thinking

and good approaches to that kind of political writing. And I wish that there was something like that for younger writers, I think one of the things I'm just dismayed by is if you are a younger person who has an ambition of getting in the political writing, there just aren't very many avenues for it. There aren't very many places where you can just make mistakes to kind of figure out exactly what you even want to do, what you're trying to say, or many places to kind of learn how to crash an argument, how to do real research, had to do real reporting,

how to bring that stuff to bear on opinion or argumentative journalism. The blog show was kind of like that place, and now that it's pretty much gone, there isn't really like that anything like that anymore.

Even, you know, I'm most familiar with the landscape on kind of like the liberal left, but like if you look at the political right where there's a lot of money sloshing around where if you're a young, ambitious person who's like a pretty decent writer, it's not all that hard to get like a column place or a piece place in a newspaper or a magazine.

Like even they aren't training people, right? Right. And sort of been a lot, like I often find myself reading, you know, it comes across my way, some piece from some, you know, 23-year-old conservative. And I read it and I'm like, this person is like exposed in a way that like does not do the many favors. Like, setting aside my disagreements, I don't think you should throw people out to the wolves like this,

especially when they're young. And there's just, there's no place for low stakes figuring out of what kind of writer you want to be and what you want to do. And that's, I mean, that's like, I think it's broadly true of the social internet these days. Like, there are very few places

just for low, things being low stakes. You throw a random video out there on TikTok and there's like a decent, a non-trivial chance that it turns into like an issue. And you become, you become content for people in a way that's just not, it's not great. I want to ask you about the mechanics of being a Times columnist and file these

questions under things I've always wanted to know. Do you get to pick your own topics for your columns? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I've never, I've been at the Times six years this year. and at no point has anyone said you have to write about this. Occasionally for like packages, you know,

we're going to do a thing on the occasion of some event. It would be like, can you contribute to the package about this particular subject? But I've never had, I've never been assigned anything. So yeah, the columnists get almost like total freedom to write

whatever they want to write for good or ill, obviously. All right, that's number one. on number two, and speaking of fraught things on the internet, headlines, do you get to write your own column headlines? No, no, not at all. You know, this is one of those things where I think you could probably have some input if you

wanted to, but I don't want any. I mean, this is, I kind of like being able to say, I got nothing to do with it. It's out of my hands. Obviously, I mean, I think, I think, when I think about my relationship with my editor and the editor, other editors I work with, like, they're not. going to put a headline on my stuff that isn't accurate to what I'm writing. It may emphasize one element to another, but it doesn't do violence to the thing I actually put on the page. But the thing about headline writing, it's its own art, right?

Like you're trying to attract readers. You're trying to take you game SEO. So I have no particular expertise in that. And I just kind of leave it to the people who do. how much editing do you get on a typical column? I think, so my understanding of relate, like, how this works, because, like, there's not, like, a uniform thing with the calmness. It's the whole, it's really strange. It's like, it's not David Brooks has been a columnist since I was in high school, right? Like, Tom Friedman has been a columnist since I'm pretty sure I was in middle school.

Before David Brooks. Right, right, right. So, you know, so in Maury and Dow, likewise, has been, I mean, been at the time since I would, you know, since I've been alive and has been a calmness for a very long time as well. So you have, you have this cohort of people who've been there for decades and they've gone through different regimes within the times, different, different bosses. You know, they have, they, they are institutions in themselves. Then you have those of us who are like relatively recent, new even, comparatively new and are operating under like a different sort of environment. And that just means,

I think things work differently for each columnist. If you were to ask Friedman what his process is like with his editor, it's going to be very different than if you asked Brett Stevens, who showed up, I think, in like 2018, maybe before that 2017, and then versus me. For my part, I like a really intensive edit. I'm not particularly precious about the words. I'm precious about the idea.

I want the idea to shine through, but the words themselves, I'm happy to cut or add whatever is necessary to strengthen the idea. And so my editor happily obliges and gives me intensive edits. And we work through them and kind of a very collaborative process. He sends me his edit back, but I'm still texting him and asking him things. I'm sort of sometimes if I disagree with a suggestion, we'll talk about it.

But it's a very collaborative process. And then I have a fact checker who also, you know, I feel like this has maybe not be intuitive to people outside of media, but like you can disagree about a fact. You can disagree about the interpretation of a fact, especially when I'm doing history stuff. Like I have my set of interpretations about certain sorts of facts. The fact checker may have hers and we'll have to maybe hash it out,

discuss it. So for me, it's a very hands-on and collaborative editing process. Did you get to pick your editor at all? How did that work? And Brian can talk a little bit about that here too. Sort of at the ringer, you get assigned somebody, but then it's like, all right, who do you work well with? What topics, you know, there's some sort of alignment with. And I'm imagining that's a really important relationship to have.

So how did it work for you? It's something similar. I was assigned an editor. Although, you know, my, with the columnist and hiring columns, especially, it's, It's a big thing. These jobs are, they're few and far between. They don't really add new columnists. We've recently lost a columnist.

I think there may be, we've lost two. Those aren't like open jobs that now will replace people. We just may never replace those. It just may shrink the pool a bit. And so it's the process of hiring a columnist is like kind of a big thing, which means, like I bring that up to say that sometimes, and this is my case, you know,

you'll have a senior editor who's like, listen, I think we should hire Jamel and I would like to work with him once we hire him if he takes the job. Like I want to work specifically with him. And so there's like a senior editor who's like, I want to work with Jamel. And so he was assigned to me.

And we do get along very well and have like a very productive relationship. And that's who that's who my editor is. In other cases, writers might say, or a columnist might get there and say, well, I've heard about this person. I'd like to work with them. Or I've been working with this person for a few months. I'm not sure it's working out. Can we figure something out? So it's a little flexible, but generally is assigned.

And usually the assignment is based off of the kind of columnist that the person is. So, you know, my stuff is like really heavily rooted in history and in political science and political theory. And so my editor is someone who is a guy who reads a lot of history in political science and political theory, who's familiar with the sources. And so sort of is operating on a similar wave wave. And he edits the other columnists that are also writing along those lines, or at least some of them. And then there are different editors who do different things. they have a difference of the columnist they work with. I want to ask you about the future of the opinion columnist job,

because you've defined this job in a way that's maybe a tad different from some of your predecessors, even the people you just mentioned. You have more than 250,000 followers on TikTok now. What led you to TikTok? Well, what led me to TikTok is, well, first, my wife was like on it and scrolling through it, and I just sort of curious.

And so I started an account just to scroll through. And eventually, you know, I build up an algorithm that's kind of heavily political and link lots of people offering political commentary. And I just began to get kind of frustrated with how bad a lot of it was. And how, I mean, the actual, if I'm going to be precise about my, this source of my frustration, the thing I'm frustrated by it was like the simultaneous, like, shallowness and then like confidence. Like people would make these broad claims that just weren't either weren't true. or just like we're not particularly sophisticated.

They may even lead you to know less than you did going in. And I kind of figured a short point that like I think I could like provide some value here. Like I think I could provide political commentary,

social commentary, social commentary that was like a little deeper, a little more nuance and not sort of soaked in the kind of like breaking news or like panic kind of affect that I think is very popular on TikTok that is much more of a kind of about this is what's going on.

Here's why it matters. Here's some important context. So, and so forth. So that's what got me started. I'm sort of, like, still somewhat surprised that it's been as successful as it is.

I was not, it didn't, it's not like anticipate this to become a thing. And one funny aspect of it is that there are, there are people who follow me on TikTok who have, like, no idea that I've been a journalist for 15 years. or that I write for the New York Times.

Like, it's just sort of not, you know, to them, I'm just like some guy who I guess they agree with. And that's very funny to me. I have just kind of a more of a technical question because I, you know, there's a part of me that's like, man, I wouldn't mind having a little TikTok account, talking into a camera or whatever. So how did you get good at like the actual mechanics of it?

Like the graphics, the pictures, you know, all the other stuff, the images that run across. Like, are you enlisting, you getting help to do that, or is that just the kind of stuff you picked up? That's more just the kind of stuff I picked up. You know, I'm all whenever I'm actually like looking at TikTok video and sort of seeing what people, other people are doing in terms of sort of like the kinds of things you're adding to keep people engaged.

And, you know, you mentioned Joel that I do have photography. I do. I, you know, if it's digital photography, I'm like editing photos. But like for a while, back where I lived in D.C., I spent a lot of time in just like a traditional dark room doing, developing, and then dark room printing and all that stuff. We're just like a heavily hands-on process. And they've always liked the process of editing images and stuff of kind of multimedia, producing multimedia. One of my first jobs out of college, in fact, was like doing that kind of stuff for some archives.

And so I just sort of figured if I'm going to do this. And of course, if I want to reference something, I kind of want to show people the reference. I want to say, here's where this is coming from, which is also saying, here's where you can find it. Here's how you can double check me and make sure that I'm not making this up. And that's just sort of evolved. Like sometimes now, if I have the time to do it, if I like make a reference, to something in a video. I'll put a clip to that reference,

family guy style as a bit of like a joke or an aside. But yeah, that's just stuff I picked up that I think kind of makes videos more engaging. Although recently I've been very lazy. And so they've just been very like, okay, I'm sitting here. And here's a quick thought. I kind of go, it's like a pendulum.

Sometimes I'm like, I want to do a lot of things that are heavily produced. Sometimes I'm like, I don't feel like that anymore. I want to rephrase Joel's question slightly because I think there's a lot of middle-aged journalists, and I'm looking all around the Zoom here who want to speak to that audience, but do not want to come off like middle-aged journalists who are thirsty for the approval of the youngs. What is the trick to not looking like that? Yeah, so I think the trick to it, I think that if you approach these sorts of platforms with the

aim of sort of like, I'm going to do lots of like heavily produced things, and I'm going to try to make it seem like hip and cool or whatever, that will come off as like kind of cringe. I actually think that if you just sort of like embrace the fact that like, yeah, I'm middle age. Like this is, this is, this isn't something not for me, but I'm still, you know, I'm interested in stuff and still want to talk about it and just like do so sort of like as honestly and authentically as you can manage. I think that actually is what works.

I think there is a deep desire for authenticity from the things. that people consume. Oftentimes, authenticity is like a constructive thing, right? Like, it's not, you know, what does it even mean?

But it seems to me just people want people who seem like actual human beings and not like they're trying to sell something or trying to, you know, generate engagement. I think that if you're just like on,

trying to earnestly share things that you know and that you care about and that you think other people might like to know and that you think other people might care about, that is what works. and that's been my approach. Like, I cannot pretend to be anybody than who I am. Like, I'm just, I'm a guy who likes to read a lot of books, and I like to wear ties.

So that's, that's my TikTok. I know from personal experience that the New York Times cares a lot about its social media policies, right? And there's been a lot of debate over, you know, crafting that. and figuring out, like, what is the, you know, the best set of rules for the people that work there. How have you had to operate in that environment? Have you ever, like, I mean, you know, you kind of went viral. I mean, you go viral all the time, but, like, Little Pigman. You referred to the vice president, J.D. Vance, as a little pig man, and it was like this TikTok riff,

and a guy, a follower made a song, and you guys can find it out there. And I'm just sort of curious here, like, how did that job with the New York Times? Like, do you ever get, you know, I used to get when I was at BuzzFeed, I would get an email from my boss to say, your tweet, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, do you get that kind of stuff. Yes, I do. But it's so when it comes, it's like, it's funny because it reflects the, the way that I think the institution is trying to navigate social media.

Like, journalists have been on like Twitter, like text based social media for years and are very familiar with it. And that's like kind of what they pay the most. attention to. And so I'm more likely to get like a your tweet or your post thing about something I put on blue sky or back in the day Twitter than anything I've ever put on TikTok. With TikTok, they just seem to leave me alone and they're just like Jamel is doing his thing. And it works. And so we're just like not going to bother him about it, even if I'm sure I have broken some time social media rules being on TikTok, but they just don't, they leave it alone. But, like, you know, if I criticize a colleague's column, even like obliquely, I will 100% get a note in my inbox or phone call. What's the last how that happened? Two weeks ago. Wow.

And it wasn't even, I mean, it wasn't even that, it wasn't even that serious. But like, it's, it comes up. And I'll say there's like internal debate. amongst, you know, this isn't giving way too much. Like some of the columnists think that we should be less precious about the whole no criticizing each other thing. And some really want to hold to that. I'm one that like, we got to be less precious about this.

Like, part of this is just the circumstances. Like the Times is the most prominent newspaper in the United States. Like the columnists are among the most prominent commentators in the United States. And it's a little weird if some of us are, making controversial claims that are relevant to politics for there to be a blanket prohibition on like addressing that. It feels like you should be able to respond to stuff. You don't want to make the page just like us fighting with each other, but also the

kind of no one can directly criticize strikes me as a little sort of like, okay, well, you know, it feels dishonest. Like if I'm, if I disagree with one of my colleagues, it feels dishonest if I have to go search for some other person who said something similar to him and disagree with that person. And the person I actually want to disagree with is my colleague. But that also just might be my own inclination towards like being a little aggressive and being a little, you know, willing to fight. A couple of quick ones for you here before we get to the patented Joel.

Anderson Lightning Round. The column I mentioned about Trump and tariffs had 1,500 reader comments. I'm sure you get emails. And then there's social media. What reader comments do you actually read? If someone emails me, I almost certainly read that. I do not look at reader comments on the page. I refuse to. And if a social media comment comes my way, I'll probably read it and counter and maybe respond to it. But if someone emails me, which is like another level of effort, you know, I'm 100% going to read it. And if it's like a, if it's like whether agreement or disagreement, if it's like a well-reasoned email and like the person has a question or, you know, wants additional thoughts from me, I will respond to them via email. Let me ask another one too about the few since we're talking

about the future of the column. The 800 to 1,000 word opinion column in this world of TikTok and social media and everything happening fast and a generation we're told that might like to read less than our generation or perhaps goes there later right than a video or something like that. What do you think going forward the usefulness of that format is going to be? So here's the thing. I still think there's use in the column as a format, but not not the column as just like a place for someone to like give a take. I think there's something to be said for yeah.

like if you just want to hear someone give a take, like you can just hear them talk for two minutes. Like that's, you know, whatever. A column that is simply someone discussing, you know, they went to,

this is, this is not a reference to any of my, any of my current colleagues. This is not oblique, an oblique reference or not an oblique reference. But if it's like, I would,

if essentially a columns, like I went to like a cocktail party over the weekend and talk to some of my peers about this thing and we all agree that it's a problem. I'm going to give you my thoughts. I think that's useless. And I think there's a lot to say for just go listen to someone, you know, talk in a two-minute vertical video or like on a podcast. But the column as a place to do sort of like actual thinking over a long period of time. The thing about being a columnist is that you are cultivating a relationship with readers over time, right? Like people have been reading Brooks for 20 years.

People have been reading me for six years, and it's a relationship that you build and you cultivate. And that is an opportunity to, in my view, to sort of think about the column in different ways. Okay, this is a long-running conversation. It's a long-running relationship. So I can build on and elaborate on ideas over time. I can utilize the space to bring in references,

bring in, you know, from my part of historians, thinkers and whatnot, and sort of introduce their ideas and try to build on them over time. And that, I think, is still very valuable. I am also not sure that, like, it's important to be so wedded to the length. I know my typical column these days, like, clocks in, like, in the 1,500 to 1,500-word range, more towards being a little essay than a column. And that's because I want to provide readers with like references. Like I'm, I, this comes from this book.

This comes from this thinker. I want to elaborate on a set of ideas. And not simply just like mention them. And I think that relating back to this notion of the column is like a long running conversation, a relationship, thinking of an individual piece as being sort of like more, less commentary and more like in-depth thinking about a topic is something that's still really valuable to reader.

So I think there's a place for the format, for the mid-length essay format. But I do think that it needs to be maybe like unbounded from its traditional conception as like a place for people just like give you takes. Like takes, I don't think are particularly useful. But insights, you know, again, thinking out loud about hard questions, that's still. useful in doing it through writing, that's still, I think, very, very useful. You know, actually, Brian, now that you're back,

we need to get some music for the Lightning Round, man. Like, it's having some sort of game show music. You know, our new producer, Bobby, you might want to get on that, man. We need to come up with some, a game show sound for the Lightning Round. Welcome to The Lightning Round, a Jill Anderson special.

Jamel, what do you think you'd be doing if you weren't a writer? realistically, probably a lawyer. Yeah, I'd probably just be a lawyer. Man, that was a boring answer, man. Damn, come on, Jamel. I know boring answer. I mean, okay, if you asked, what would I would, like, what would 22-year-old Jamel have likely done going to law school?

What would 37-year-old Jamel be doing if, like, you could do anything? I think I would like to work in kitchens. I think I'd like to be a chef. Really? Okay. Yeah. Have you thought about running for political office at all? I know you were on some sort of zoning board in your hometown.

I have. I mean, of course I have. I think about it. I think of, you know, I follow Virginia politics very closely. I have my own ideas about how if I were running for statewide office, here's how I would approach a campaign. I can think about that stuff. Or if I were, my district is like too red.

I would never, I could never win it like a house seat. But like I could probably run a campaign for House of Delegate to state Senate and like maybe be successful. And I've thought about what that would look like. But current agreement with my wife is that like there's no running for political office. And I'd have to give up my job. And I don't have like give up my job money, you know. Don't quit your job and run for governor. I'll tell you that.

So what were you? What were your high school extracurricular activities? In high school, I did, I mean, I did, this is going to be no surprise anyone. I did debate. I did the United Nations. I did a quiz bowl, basically sort of like, you know, I mean, quiz bowl. Yeah, that's, that's what it is. Lots of student government stuff.

And I did like recreational sports. I didn't play out any school teams, but just. sort of like, you know, recreational flag football or whatever. Which times columnists are you closest to away from work? That's a good question. I talked to Lydia Polgreen a lot. I consider her a good friend. Tressy Cotton, I consider a good friend.

I know Ezra Klein from sort of like the world of D.C. liberal journalism. We don't chat a ton, but like we get along well. And then I know Michelle Goldberg from Slate from back in the day. Is there a Times columnist group chat or Slack channel where you all could communicate with each other? Like, I mean, you know, I mean, like Pamela Paul probably got, you know, you remove her from the list. It's like an NBA team. It's like when you get traded, they take you off the list. But do you have anything like that?

No, we don't. Really? No. Okay. That was just to get the Pamela Paul line in there. I can't be honest. Kind of, yeah, to be honest. No, no comment on my former colleague.

Which isn't itself a comment. What famous person has responded to your column and left you starstruck? J.J. Abrams. Really? Whoa. Yeah. Really? What was the column about?

I don't even remember, but J.J. Abrams, it was last summer during the crazy stuff with Biden dropping out and everything. And I was like writing and doing videos. and J.J. Abrams, like, set me an email. And I was like, is this the actual J.J. Abrams? And then, like, I did a little. And I was like, yeah, this is the actual J.J. Abrams. So that would be my answer. Did he say he wanted to write a column that was kind of an homage to your column,

but it would come out 20 or 30 years later? No, he did not. I feel like the only other, like, I know, I know that President Obama reads my column sometimes. but I'm not star-struck by that in the same way. You know? Your parents are, though, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My parents think it's really cool.

My grandfather-in-law and he was... J.J. Abrams, that you're less star-struck by Obama. Well, it makes sense, though, right? It's, because, like, it's like, you know, I covered Obama, right? Sort of, like, it's not that, like, Obama, I don't think Obama was, like, super interesting. It's just, like, I, there's no... no, if we played six degrees of separation, there's no path that gets me to JJ Abrams, you know?

Fair enough. But there's a path that gets me like in a couple steps to Barack Obama. It's just like, it's that kind of thing. It's like, you know, if I see a senator, I'm not, you know, it's like, okay, that's cool, but, you know, but once I saw Kevin Bacon and like an Austin hotel gym and I was like, holy shit, it's Kevin Bacon. You know? Who or what do you loathe most?

immediate today? Or what do I loathe most in media today? I'm not going to like name any names. I, I, I, it's not even, it's in honestly, I mean, to be, to be seriously and honest, it's not even about personalities. It's just sort of like an orientation towards things. And it's just sort of like collapsing everything to like an inside baseball argument over like language or propriety or what have you, right?

It's like taking, you know, we're experiencing a, you know, ferocious effort on part of the reactionary right to reshape American society. And rather than like take that on its own terms, should understand it on its own terms, should understand these people on their own terms. Like what do they want? What are they trying to do? What is, what are they, what are they, drawing from intellectually, politically.

Instead of doing that, you'll find commentators who just turn it back towards their own hobby horses about cultural things they don't like, oh, well, it's a backlash to wokeness. And it's like, that's lazy. And also, to my mind, it's just like it's an abuse of the privilege you have to be a professional writer. Like, we have, if you have space in a major national publication, that is space to really explore things in like a deep way.

And it's an opportunity to bring real resources to bear on like major questions. And so like, why not do that instead of endlessly making everything about basically sort of like online beefs about like, you know, again, like cultural things you don't like, cultural formations you don't like about language you don't like. I once chastised someone for obsessing over the use of Latin X, not because I'm like some big defender of the term Latin X, but because I'm like, who cares? Right. Like, first of all, if you're trying to like understand something like why are Latino voters moving to Republicans,

there are like actual material explanations you can look to that may do a lot more to explain it. You know, the rise of Latino evangelicalism might be a bit more important to the story than someone using an obscure, like, you know, term. But then also, like, put your head out of your ass. Like, the world doesn't revolve around your language conflicts. And so that's the thing I loathe. Like, that sort of parochialism.

I know your real answer. You're just not going to say it. I mean, I kind of gave my real answer. You did. You just follow up on social media. My real answer is like an example of the thing I just described. Fair enough. What's your favorite cereal?

Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Damn. You went right off the dung with that one. This is the ringer. I'm not a movie guy, but I got to ask you a movie question because I think that's just kind of good good. Of course. Understood here.

What superhero movie or something of that genre speaks the most To our present day circumstances. To our present day circumstances, I was just talking about it on blue sky last night. I would say Sam Ramey's Spider-Man 2 from 2004. What I mean here is not in that the movie has anything to do with our particular political situation, but it's a movie about sort of like the cost of heroism and sacrifice

and what it means to be for other people, to be for other people, to commit yourself to other people. And I think it's a movie that if you take it on that wavelength, actually does have a lot to give to our present situation. Because I do think we're living at a time where the notion that you could be selflessly committed to improving other people's lives, to building a better world is under assault from people.

people from ideas that hold that everything is pure self-interest and that everyone is out for themselves. So Ramey Spider-Man, too, which is also just a good movie in the time, right? I was going to say, Alfred Molina's Doc Ock. I'm there. It was amazing. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, so that Spider-Man too? Is that the one where Spider-Man is upside-down kissing Kirsten Dunst? Is that the same one? That's the first, that's the first Ramey Spider-Man. But yeah, the same. to foe, not Alfred Molina. Oh, okay.

Yeah. See how close. Anyway. I didn't have a lot to pick up that one. That's going to be the note from the ringer staff, like the ones you get from the Time staff. Sorry, Joel, we're not allowed. A few Spider-Man movies here.

What political and news documentary would you like to see made? Political and News documentary. There is a great book, The Race Beat, about, coverage of the civil rights movement from like from black journalists in the 50s and 60s. And that to me is like ripe for a documentary, especially since some of those people are still alive, right? They're quite old, but some of them may still be alive and that's still a real opportunity for a documentary. The other thing I would want to make, now just what I would do is there's a great book that came out last year called Half American about the Black experience of the Second World War. that is phenomenal.

I think it's very well suited to the screen. What's your favorite city in America? My favorite city in America. I mean, I have so much fondness and love for Washington, D.C. I live there for almost a decade. I still go there all the time. I still have friends there. I love Washington.

I love D.C. to be more specific. But next to D.C., I have a real big soft spot for Philly. So my wife's family lives in Philly, and we visit not infrequently. And I just, I love the place. I love going there. Final question. What's your bench, bro? What's my bench?

Okay, so the most I've ever benched, like my all-time PR is 315. God damn, for real? Oh, wow. But I cannot do that anymore. Okay. That was like during the pandemic when sort of like there's one, like the gym I went to, there was like a 24 hour unmanned branch of it that you can just like go to whenever. And so I just was like, I was there a lot, especially in the evenings. These days, my, I haven't tried a PR, but my working weight for like, you know, three sets of five or four sets of five is like $2.45.

So I would say probably like I could probably like do 275, 280. Man, that's still. Pretty. That's robust. I didn't mean to sleep on your strength, but 315, man, you could have came out and played a UVA. They had some guys out there that are probably on pitching 315 right now. But the bench is like not, I don't actually like the bench.

Like it's not my, it's, I do it because you're like, okay, I got a, you know, roll-rounded. but deadlifts are my lift of choice. There we go. Let it not be said that we don't ask the tough questions here at the press box, including the deadlift of the New York Times columnist. He is Jamel Bowie, read him at the Times, watch him on TikTok, follow him on Blue Sky. He will read your comment if you email it to him.

We learned that today. Jamel, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thank you so much for having me. All right, Joel, is a new feature of our 25 or 25. I want to do a quick postgame show with you, that interview. Because there are a lot of things that stepped out to me, stood out to me, I should say. Yeah. How about Jamel's political ambitions? Yeah, man. I mean, it makes sense. If you know him, I know that he was on some sort of zoning board locally there and the city he

lives. I don't know if I have liberty to say what it is, but it's probably pretty obvious. But yeah, man, so I was like, you don't do that unless you kind of, you know what I mean? Like, you're civically minded and you got some idea about public service someday. right? Yeah. And were we talking about Nick Christoff when we were talking about running for governor and giving up your job? Was that our oblique reference there? Maybe or maybe not running for governor of Oregon. I don't know. How many columnists have done that over there? When we also talk about the sort of future of this job, I'm fascinated by Jamel on TikTok wearing ties, wearing an attractive assortment of jackets and a very cool hat, maybe a Reese's peanut butter cups hat, maybe a C-SPAN hat,

maybe a C-SPAN hat like he was wearing with us today, and a whole bunch of people following him there and not knowing that he is a journalist. That is crazy to me. Like, that I did not know. Because I don't know, I mean, I guess I'm not really on TikTok, but I don't understand how, I guess there is a way to come across this content

without knowing what he does, but it sort of speaks to sort of like a lack of curiosity. Because wouldn't you want to be like, well, who the hell is this guy? Or what is his qualifications to be saying this stuff to me? Totally. But again, that's kind of an old media way to think about it. Yeah.

And I think even now, you know, when we have our friends in media, they're like, how do I do brand extension here? Yeah. Okay, I've got my funny tweets. I got my funny skeets. Okay, now I'm going to take my thing and take it over to blue, take it over to TikTok someplace like that. But another way to think of it is there's this whole audience. It's like, wait, you're a journalist.

What do you do again? Yeah. I like you because you make me smarter because you talk about history because you talk about stuff that's happening that's going on. It's just a really fascinating way to think about it. Do you think it matters? It matters to the times that people know that he's at the times, but do you think it ultimately matters at the end of the day

if people know that he's at the times or not? Again, to me, it matters because I think of people in our business to some extent, not a huge extent, but to some extent deriving some of their credibility from the organization they work for. But again, that's a very old media way of thinking about stuff. I bet his opinions about the Washington Post's opinion, will get some attention?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I was thinking about that because it's easy to say that you're going to quit your job. I mean, and Jamel, fortunately for him, he has an audience that he can sort of take kind of wherever he goes, right? But that's just not the calculation. But the thing is, you won't get to be a New York Times columnist if you don't have that sort of a following anyway, right? But that's a different calculation for a lot of other people, of course. Two more things. I was so glad you followed up with him about dummies and actually interrogate.

navigating that word because his definition of it was really, really interesting. And then the last thing was something he said about blogging. When he talked about this low stakes way of figuring things out. I was thinking about that because there was a journalist at the final four, college journalist at the final four, who was doing some stuff on Twitter. And then we had some adult journalist coming in and being like, uh-oh, is this the way you're supposed to do things? And I'm like, you know what?

young journalists should have some space. And I say this is the guy who's always been like, how dare you do that, Mr. Reporter, or Ms. Reporter. But there has got to be some space. Yeah. Where you can figure things out without being subjected to that kind of scrutiny. Yeah. I just, I wonder if those days are gone.

It used to be you could write something that daily skiff or whatever or even, yeah, a young journalist could write something and it might affect them on their campus community, right? But nobody, you know, Fran Blanberry wasn't going to reach out to me and be like, why are you writing that, you know, that nonsense? Fram Blanberry, old school, Houston Chronicle and Houston Post columnist.

But now there's just no telling. Like college articles often get into, you know, my social media feed or whatever, right? Like there's not a lot of distinction a lot of the times. And so, yeah, it is kind of scary that there's no safety net for these kids, right? No, and I'm not even talking, yeah, just talking about cancelable things here. I'm talking about just being dumb, being bad at journalism, being bad at writing. Oh, man.

Which we both have been in the past and still are sometimes. Absolutely, absolutely. Hannibal Burris had this great bit where he read a student journalist article about his performance at the start of his show. And it was, I was like, damn, man, that's tough. But, yeah, man, you know, you're bad and then you get better, hopefully. And you hope there's more outlets for kids to do that. We're going to have Chris Ryan on this podcast about we can have talking about blogging, the past, present and future of blogging.

And I want to ask him about that, about a low-stakes way of figuring it out because I suspect that he benefited from that in his blogging days. All right, that is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. He's Joel Anderson. Prodactive Magic by Bobby Wagner, Shoemakers back here Monday. And then, Joel, I cannot wait to talk about the NFL draft. another subject with you next Thursday.

I look forward to it, man.