The Press Box - Cormac McCarthy’s Muse, How to Trick an NFL Insider, and Why People Are Tuning Out the News

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

It's time for a weekend 'Press Box,' where David and Bryan take a look at some interesting news regarding famous author Cormac McCarthy, the latest headlines from around the NFL, and the possible overconsumption of the news. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David? Yes. Can we start by talking about Cormick McCarthy's Muse? Oh, sure. Let's do it. Because we know who Cormick McCarthy's Muse is now. Mm-hmm. Thanks to a large and lush story in Vanity Fair. There you go, him.

By Vincenzo Barney. And let me tell you something. The fun started right away with the headline. Cormick McCarthy's... secret muse breaks her silence after half a century, colon, quote, I loved him. He was my safety. Oh, just leaving it wide open for me there? Well, I guess I come at this from a sort of particular point of view in that I found, it's not unusual, I guess, that you and I have these conversations where we say we were first alerted to some phenomenon

by the reactions on Twitter. But this is probably the first time where I think I was alerted to a big journalism story by the very narrow pocket of Cornyn McCarthy Lit-Crit Twitter. I just started reading a tweet and I was like, what on earth is this in response to? And I was like, oh, wait, and somehow I read it and thinking this was just an action.

actual like Twitter reply about a fact that was well known that I hadn't known. And then finally, I piece together that this was what it was. This is a brand new, you know, vanity fair piece. That's the sort of direct story of a muse. I really don't. I mean, there's terminology here is going to get really problematic. It's a woman. Is it a weird word just to start off with? Well, yeah, I mean, and also there's this questions of like consent and legality and stuff here and they're in the early stages of the relationship. So yeah, I don't. I mean, it's all going to be a big problem. But Court McCarthy had a apparently had a relationship with this woman from the, from, you know, since she had been a teenager and he was in his 40s. And but they'd stayed in touch throughout the remainder of his life to some pretty significant degree. Augusta Britt is the woman's name. now she's now 64 and I think for our purposes it bears mentioned that the author's name which you mentioned um uh Vincenzo Barney goes by Nick may do Brian do you mind if I call him Nick please uh Nick Barney wrote this just incredibly long incredibly personal uh I mean is it

he has a deep and long relationship with the subject that started from when he reviewed McCarthy's last two novels on Substack, and she responded, and they struck up a relationship that is now involved. What he now says is tens of thousands of hours together. Can we just stop there? Because there are a lot of interesting ways to get a story, especially a story that is sought after, at least among members of the... Cormick McCarthy lit crit corner of Twitter.

But in this case, he reviewed the late McCarthy novels on his substack and Augusta Britt, the woman in question, left a comment on the review and talked to McCormick McCarthy, who was still living at the time, about the comment she left on the review. Yes. These things all happened. And then Nick, as you insist on calling him, And Augusta Britt strike up this kind of correspondence. He winds up moving to Tucson, where she lives, embedding for nine months with her and then producing this piece telling the world, here's who this woman is.

Here are her feelings about Corment McCarthy. Here are the particular thing she inspired in the McCarthy Uvra. Yeah. That is not a typical way one gets a big story. no not at all and especially a story I mean you say a big story this is a story that a number of writers

had apparently been pursuing for some time and Britt had been disinclined to to have her story out there at least under the terms that had been presented before apparently she just felt more comfortable with with Nick's telling of it

presumably because of her comfort with them and also because, you know, McCarthy is no longer with us. Yes. Although he apparently, go ahead and say it, he apparently had encouraged her to tell her story while he was alive. It did. So we learned in this story that Augusta Britt and Corbyn McCarthy met at a hotel pool. She was 16 years old.

She had a difficult childhood. It was in foster care. So she was abused during that period. She says she recognized him from a book jacket. She knew who he was, even though he was not anything like a famous novelist at that point in his career. I saw some disputes on Corment McCarthy Twitter about whether his photo had actually appeared on the book jacket for Sutry, his novel that apparently she recognized him from. Put that aside for a moment. They start this relationship.

And the details, we've got to say, David, this piece are absolutely mind-blowing. he's sending her books, including Sister Carey and a book by Sartra. He begins leaving her money, according to the author, by putting it between the third and fourth Wall Street Journal in Denny's on Miracle Mile. That's a quote from the story. So this is in Tucson. He's going to Denny's. He finds apparently very well stocked with the journal, good for the journal back then,

and he's putting the money between the third and fourth copy of the journal, and that's how she's going to get it. Well stocked, but apparently that's not very well trafficked, if you can always count on the third copy being untouched. How many do you think of a given day at Denny's? Yeah, that's a good question. We're actually being purchased, maybe just thumb through. They later go on this big trip to Mexico together. The author tells us when Kormick was, McCarthy was researching Blood Meridian. they have a relationship, which you alluded to.

He sends her love letters. They stay in touch for the rest of his life. She also influences or inspires characters in many of his novels, according to this piece. And I cannot do chapter and verse here. I defer to you. But this starts with from the very beginning later. she has a kitten whose name is John Grady Cole. John Grady Cole becomes a character in all the pretty horses.

Also, all the pretty horses is the name of a lullaby that he says that she'd sing to her kitten. And of course becomes the title of the novel. There's a character that has the same horse breeds that she does in the movie the counselor that Cory McCarthy wrote. This is a very, very deep literary relationship. Mm-hmm. in addition to being an actual relationship. Now, you told me you came in when you saw the reaction to this.

So what stage of the reaction? Was this when people were casting aspersions and going after the piece because it was poorly written? Is it that stage of the reckoning? I saw that happening in real time, yeah. You know, it's a difficult, it's a difficult subject matter. It's an incredibly difficult piece, no matter who the writer is. I think there were a lot of people who justifiably took exception to, well, I mean, the piece did couch their relationship. I mean, did point out the problematic nature of their relationship.

I think that there were a lot of people who, again, maybe justifiably would have preferred that that be, you know, in bold in the headline, right? I mean, that the story B, Corrin McCarthy had an improper relationship, although, again, hard to imagine this piece getting published under those terms, no matter what the editorial side had demanded. And we should say he asked her about this numerous times and prints her answers to the question of what she made of the relationship numerous times. I think that there are a lot of people who were taking exception to that aspect of the story and sort of taking it out on the writing. that's what I was feeling at the time. I mean, as a purely literary exercise, you know, I didn't actually, I didn't hate the way it was written.

A lot of people thought it was being derivative, deliberately derivative of McCarthy. I didn't see that. I just, but it did remind me of, I mean, there was obviously some influence, I guess. He later said if he was copying anybody, it was Martin Amos. That was hilarious. He told that to Slate.

He goes, no, I wasn't doing McCarthy. I was doing Amos. This guy's, by the way, it sounds like an amazing, just character on his own. That interview was Slate. He was very self-deprecating about his literary style. Yeah. Such as it is. Yeah.

I mean, again, I would, I, listen, we're all used to this. this sort of style. When we think of like the traditional modern magazine style, we are thinking of, well, Vanity Fair, we're thinking of the New Yorker. We're thinking of New York Magazine on the more sort of, sort of edited into the spectrum. Yeah.

And I think there's a lot of stuff that's just because it's the age of the internet, and we do read much more quickly and maybe don't read everything and just sort of absorb through Twitter pictures of text and stuff. stuff like that, you might be forgiven for not realizing that most journalism is not like that. But with the exception of those few sort of like luminary editorial departments aside, man, I would rather read something like this than something out of most magazines, you know, nine times out of ten. Just someone trying, someone actually like making an effort to live in a line, a paragraph, a page.

someone actually like trying something, you know? And, you know, it's normal. It's par for the course, I think, for whatever, our discourse to lean towards, don't try anything because you're going to get torn down, you know, like people are going to make fun of you. But I do think it was, like, exacerbated by the subject matter here. And I think that there was probably a perception that he was treating what was very serious subject matter in a sort of flip way by trying to like do a bit while while he was putting the

information across. I didn't hate the style of piece either. I'm going to be completely honest. I think if you'd had the tightly edited New York Magazine, New Yorker version of the story, that could have also been good, perhaps even better because this would have been just communicated in a different way. But when I read this piece and I saw, and again, I came in almost after the reaction when we were in the J. Kang counter reaction part of the news cycle where it was like, why are we picking on this guy? Maybe that activated my counterintuitive instincts. But I read it and I was like, you know what? That read like a Vanity Fair profile of old to me. Yeah. I like I saw, you know, I think it was maybe in the preface of the slate interview where it's like this is, you know,

this piece, you know, we haven't read something like this since the new journalism of the 70s. I'm like, did you read Golden Age Vanity Fair? Do you ever read Kevin Sessams? Yeah. And the thing is, at the end of those profiles, it'd be like, wow, I learned what an afternoon with Andy McDowell is like. In this one, we got a lot of genuine information imperfectly rendered as it may be. Yeah, I mean, I do think that in Coremick McCarthy's letters and love letters that have never been seen before. All these experience. You're talking about that era of Vanity Fair. I mean, I do think we've seen that even in the modern era in in you know magazines like like gq or you know even esquire in the early 2000s where it's it felt like especially for the the the highest profile

writers there is a inverse corollary between or correlation between the seriousness of the subject matter and the degree to which they could fuck around you know and do their own thing or the amount of new information they are communicating in the piece yes like i spent an hour and had lunch with a celebrity. And so I've just got to just writer my way around this thing. Yeah. To make it palatable. So there's a lot of Frank Sinatra's having colds out there. But when it comes to actual like, you know, reportage, you see very little of that kind of, that kind of flare. I did see people I was tweeting about this earlier today and people were like, no, no, no, it wasn't the writing. People were reacting to why are we reading news like this,

information like this in the form of a glossy magazine profile. Like we've gotten to a point in history where that is just a very jarring vehicle to experience for a lot of people. So, you know, they're just reading this thing and just being like, I don't understand what this form of writing is necessarily. Yeah. I don't know how much to put on that. No, I mean, I think there's some truth to that.

I mean, I think a lot of the sort of, I feel like there's a piece of the fake news argument that sort of washed over even the liberal side of the spectrum. A lot of people are just like, my journalism is not giving me what I need. But a lot of the time people are engaging in news and just, well, this is a long, drawn-out argument that I don't need to get into. But part of me wonders if, like, even if every, Even if there were 20 pieces like this a year, the way that we engage with most of this,

I think the fact that it happened on the weekend that people actually had to engage with the Vanity Fair piece and were not engaging in blog retellings of the information, right? I think a lot of people engage, when they think about how they're supposed to be receiving the news,

they're talking about the newser that's written about it or the mediate retelling of the story, of the juicy bits of the piece and not actually having to engage with the piece itself. So I was going to make my statement coherent, if there were 20 pieces like this a year, I'm not sure that everyone would get this sort of complaint. You know, I think that people just think,

you tend to engage in different ways and they engage with this one. The mediated retelling of the piece, that's the literary style that I seek. when I go looking for a piece of journalism. That's the poetry that I want in my life. So we talked about his treatment of the relationship in the story. Maybe he could have tried to sort of contextualize that a bit more,

though he did get her opinion at some length about it. I don't know about you. I would have loved to have heard a quote or two from a McCarthy scholar telling me just how likely all these claims of influence are on various characters in his literary works. Just so I would have felt better about it, I think, as a reader, being like, okay, are we acknowledging that this is definitely the person who inspired this character and that character? He did talk to McCarthy's son, John.

There were some unfortunate errors in the piece. He's got the date of McCarthy's death wrong, which just seems like a very fundamental thing to get right in a story like this. Also, Tucson was sort of referred to glancingly as a border town. Tucson's an hour from the border. Not not a border town. Little things like that, but I'm with you. I read that.

And, you know, I might have looked at like those descriptions of the way it rains in the Arizona desert and been like, I just don't know that this is totally necessary for my enjoyment of this. But, you know, when he was trying, when he was, when he was going forward in terms of like describing her relationship to him and her, her relationship to his fiction, I was like, I'm fine with this. I'm fine with crawling up to the high dive for sentences like this. Yeah.

And again, maybe that's just where we came in on a very, very interesting and very talked about piece of journalism. I mean, and listen, as we segue out of this. it's worth pointing out that like this was a story like we said people have been chasing for a long time it was it was um you know past its conception or conception phase when it found its way to vanity fair through um the writers one of the writers uh writing professors um and you know i think at some point there would be a very interesting ticot of like how this thing came to be published in the form that it was because even if you were in love with the pros,

and I don't, you know, I met Radica Jones a time or two, would not claim to be, have any insight into her, but this wouldn't necessarily be what I would assume to be like her favorite thing in the world, as Edd and Chief of Vanity Fair,

but even if you were in love with it, you got to imagine that there would be some questions asked about whether this was the way to do it, and to what degree this kind of came as a packaged deal, like, you know, like not just a package, deal, not just this is, you know, the subject and the writer come together, but like, what I'm turning in is the finished product period or you don't get it. Like, those sorts of things are interesting, right? But they're sort of, but I mean, it's for what, for our conversation.

So it'll be, you know, my, I mean, we, we know the people, Vanity Fair is, is, is an incredible operation, but Roderickie Jones is an incredible editor, right? So like, this is, I'm, I'm not, I don't think that there's any, I'm not questioning that there's any, that there's any, problem there. I'm actually like that that does more to sort of buoy my appreciation of the piece maybe artificially than than anything else. Do we think this guy was kidding when he told Slate, my original draft had no quotation marks? Well, I've turned in some drafts without quotation marks in my time. It's usually due to a faulty keyboard or something. But you ever done that? You ever turned in something where you're like, I'm really going for it here. No, I haven't. Have you ever done

They're different. No, no, not quotation marks. What's, can you, do you, I won't even ask you which one it was, but can you think of the piece where you were most just like, oh, I'm going for it here? Like this, I'm doing a thing. There have been some of those, but I feel like that's usually because I didn't have enough time or I was like, I had screwed around and waited until the end. Didn't have the time to talk yourself out of it.

And that's, well, that's when you play hero ball. Yeah. And you're like, I have one night to write this story that I should have five nights to write or three nights to write. So, like, I'm going, you know? like I'm just putting up shots here and some of them are going to go in and some of them are going to land in the 18th row.

That to me, that to me is what for me inspires that kind of writing. Not like I'm going for it, baby. It's like I have only this much time so my necessity have to go for it. That's, yeah, yeah, it's true. And I feel like when I've done that sort of thing, it always comes back just like unremarked upon

with just very standard edits that just normalize it. And you're like, oh, no, no, no. please be harder on this opening paragraph because it is potentially not good. Yeah. Or I'm just going to send this straight to the desk and let Craig Gaines be the bad guy here. You know, like it just, yeah. Craig Gaines wouldn't let some of those metaphors about rain and Arizona get by. Let me tell you something.

He's a watchdog. All right, David, coming up on the podcast, How to Fool an NFL Insider, some sound from a very fun weekend of football, 50 wild and wacky years. with columnist George F. Will and a potluck Thanksgiving feast from our favorite departments, including only in journalism. All that and much more on the press box.

A part of the rear podcast network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Steve Allman, who is sitting in for Brian here with you. I flew to Fort Worth this morning, David. Yeah. With my family. To the DFW airport, I assume.

To the DFDAB. Wait, what does Fort Worth have an airport? Well, there's a small one, but nobody's flying in there, though that you're flying private, which we assuredly were not this morning. Did have extra legroom on American. That was a nice touch. I come home, David, and I flip on the Cowboys Commanders game.

And the Cowboys, who are just distinctly horrible this year, are probably up seven points. Yeah. There are 33 seconds left in the game. Yeah. And the commanders have the ball at their own 14-yard line. So it is Jaden Daniels throw it up and pray time. We will let Fox's Joe Davis and Greg Olson tell you what happened next.

To play in these styles, now they can just unleash you to quarterback. Half a minute, no time out. Daniels throws down the sideline for Terry McLeod. Six yards. They dropped 11 guys in coverage. If they just tackle him in bounds, the game is over. Did you laugh just a little like I did when Greg Olson said, oh my gosh? Yes.

There was a slight hesitation before gosh. Yeah. So I have to admit that I wasn't watching the game. And I listened to this clip. I saw this highlight. And when I heard lightning strikes twice in Washington, my brain had some weird Mandela effect moment where I thought that that was a reference to like a Revolutionary War moment or something, you know? Just like, oh, yes, the famous lightning striking,

uh, yeah, anyway. Great call all around, including the gosh. Um, what a big moment that was. And that was the end of the game, right? Almost. Set you up for that one. Because it's Cowboys by one. Commanders, David, just have to make an extra point.

Tie game. It had already been a weird special teams game. There'd been a mixed, missed extra point already from the commanders, a kick return for a touchdown, a kick out of bounds. Here's Joe and Craig on how that final extra point went. And by the way, David, after this happens, after the commanders blow the game tying extra point, they have to have an onside kick, right? This is our last, last, last ditch chance to win the game. The obligatory onside kick, yeah. And that onside kick was retouched.

turned for a touchdown by the Cowboys. One of the most insane last couple minutes of a game I've ever seen. Elsewhere in the football world, I've got confident losing coach for you. Confident losing coach? Confident losing coach. The big college game this weekend was Indiana versus Ohio State. Oh, yeah. Indiana, amazing story, 10 and 0, number five in the country.

You're going to play big old bad Ohio State. Well, they got their butts kicked. 38 to 15. But there's a 12-team playoff. And after the game, someone asked Hoosier's head coach, Kurt Zignetti, should I, you, make the playoff? Is that a serious question? I'm not even going to answer that one.

The answer's so obvious. The funny part of this is, not only does he say the answer is so obvious, he winks and nods at the reporter, like nods vigorously, like, uh-huh, uh-huh. We should make the playoff. Yeah. We should definitely make the playoff. Was it a weekend? It wasn't a week in a nod like, hey, thanks for teaming me up for that canned back and forth that we had drawn up before the press conference.

It might have been. It felt more like a here's just for you and me, confidential to you, Mr. I. U.B. writer. We got this. I've also got exulting local announcer for you. Oh, okay. Let me introduce you to Andy Burchum, who is the play-by-play announcer for the Auburn Tigers. Auburn had a huge win Saturday night in quadruple overtime over Texas A&M. Here is Andy Burchum's call of the play that won it for the Tigers.

The snap, they flip it back to Reed, rolling to his right throws to the end. It's dropped. It's dropped. Auburn wins. Auburn wins. Auburn wins. 43, 41. Four overtimes.

Auburn wins. I can't help but laugh and smile with just a. Supreme Joy, whenever I hear a call like that. Did he, like, go into the kitchen at some point during that call? Did it get really tinny for you to? No, I think Steve was just making sure we could come back on the other end of the sound. Oh, okay. No offense to the Auburn Radio Network or Leerfield Communications.

That was just on our end. He was doing the, they had the camera in the press box, David, so we could see Andy Burchum doing the both arms up. final call the game as religious experience, which is what we usually focus on, but did you hear the color guy just completely step on the call before he was able to get it out of his mouth? Yeah, like it just, well, he's caught up in the moment, but sure, yes.

So when we talk about local announcers, we always talk about the passion and it's us and it's we and it's them and all the just wonderful homerism flowing forth. But to me, it's always like four guys. talking at once. You're like, I may not be the play-by-play guy, but I saw something on the field and I'm going to say it right now. Yeah. This may be the, you know, final playoff of a four-overtime game.

I'm not going to leave it to this guy. I'm just going to talk. I know it doesn't work because, you know, you got to have your lead announced team and you got to pay them $25 million a piece or whatever. But don't we seem to love? the local announcers way more than the big, than like the national teams. The national teams are better at their jobs by enlarge than anything else. But man, like

it's college football. It's international football, soccer. You know, it's like we got our like local broadcaster and they're just, he's been doing this since he was like 15 and now he's 90 and he's just like screaming, you know, from his walker at the top of his lungs. Like this is, it's, there's just something.

so like, I don't know, there's just so much personality to it. There's just so much connection to it that it really, it's just a totally different viewing experience. And I know that you can like opt into your local announce team feeds if you have NBA season pass or whatever, you know, all these different, there's different ways you can listen to it. But man, it's, there is just something kind of great about it that I wonder if they'd be able to capture. Do we like it as announcing or do we like it like as a little Christmas ornament on Twitter? Do we like it like, you know, whenever there's like a funny headline on a newspaper front page and we're like, oh my God, this is amazing. I am not subscribing to this newspaper, nor am I ever going to read an article in it.

But here you go. Yeah. Do we like it like that? Maybe. But I do think that there's something really like intrinsically cool about like having a rooting interest in the box, right? You know, sometimes it'll be somebody who played for, you know, a former player of the team. Tony Romo's in there with for a Cowboys game or like whatever. And there's a little bit of a wink, wink about, you know, like, you know, you have a,

you might have a rooting interest in this. Sure. Wouldn't it be better football was just like pro wrestling where they just had like, you know, the play-by-play guy picks one team and the color guy picks the other team and they just are going at it the whole time and just screaming at each other, you know, just just put just in your face. to the other guy whenever a touchdown has scored.

So we've done that right with like in the tournament they'll have like here's the local feed. Yeah. We have the gym Nance later Ion Eagle feed

but then we've also got the local feed if you want to hear what University of Wisconsin centric radio sounds like. Yeah. With the pictures from the national broadcast

what if we had a heel feed? That's it. I mean who would we who would we cast to do that? Like who could be the Jesse the body of Ventura There's rumors that Jesse's coming back for Saturday Night's main event.

Yeah, but that is wrestling. That is where he belongs, right? Like, what would we do for football? Yeah, I mean, like, you know. Because you have to know a lot about football. Skip's looking for work right now. Oh, okay. You got an idea.

He would be the pro-caboy's guys. Colin Coward has sort of turned face or just sort of gone mainstream over the years, but he could certainly do, you know, he knows how to play that role. He would absolutely be so good at this. You would understand the assignment. Immediately. Yeah. Just like make fun of the losers.

Make fun with this one team. It'd be so great. And also just changes mind when something wasn't right. Just like, I never said that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just think about how much fun they get out with like instant replay with bad referee calls. If you're in there just like just screaming at the referees from the announcement, I guess the NFL wouldn't like that very much.

But they'd have to just go along with it. It would be such good stuff. As a one-off, we need the heel announcer. feed. Free idea for Amazon, Netflix. Why don't we do it on Christmas Day when the entire nation is paying attention? No, it either. Just put them on. Let him go. Noddy, not nice. The heel announcer feed. I can't wait for Ian Eagle to turn to his heel color analyst and be like, would you stop? How to fool an NFL insider, David. Oh. We talk a lot about insiders and insiderdom.

Well, this week we learned that an insider got pranked, fooled, misled. The insider in question is NFL network's Ian Rappaport. And the person who pulled the prank is former Tennessee Titans head coach Mike Malarkey. Not sure I could give you a ton about Mike Malarkey or his career other than that the fact that he was the Tennessee Titans head coach once upon a time. Well, Mike Malarkey was on the action sports. Jacksonville podcast and he came clean about the sins he committed against Ian Rappaport back in 2018. The best thing I did there at the end, which I can now talk about, was when I got called in that Monday morning after the New England game, I knew they were going to fire me. So Sunday night,

I called Ian Rappaport and I said, hey, I don't know if you know this, but I'm going to break it to you it. But I'm getting a new contract in the morning. And he reported it. It was all over the country. I was getting a contract in the morning, knowing that I was going to get fired. But I just wanted to see the faces on the owner and the GM who was out to get me. And I'm pretty sure I got him for a minute or two. There's so much there, including something I didn't know that the T and Rappaport was silent. Yeah, are we saying it wrong?

Or is he saying it wrong? I'm pretty sure he's saying it wrong. Yeah, lots to unpack there. You and I know that powerful people lie to journalists all the time. They don't care what we do. They don't care about the sanctity of getting things right and journalism and all that stuff. It's pretty wild that an NFL head coach would not only mislead a reporter, but pick up the phone to do it just so he could screw with the owner and GM who are about to fire him.

just seems so bizarre. Like, it's hilarious, admittedly. It is, yes. If you're not the reporter, it's pretty hilarious. But, like, what is the, I'm so confused. I have so many questions about, like, their relationship. They already have, like, a phone call relationship. Like, hey, you just wanted to tip you off.

We're going to sign so-and-so to a minimum deal as our third string running back. You know, just wanted to be, have you to have the first dibs on that one. Like, what is the, what would be the relationship? Because if not, and he's calling you, he's like, yeah, I just wanted to put that out there. It's like, isn't that your agent's job? Like, isn't that, wouldn't that be literally a million other people that would give you that?

We could imagine maybe Ian Rappaport or Rappapur had texted Mike Malarkey. It was just like, hey, just checking in, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I don't know that for a fact, but that would seemingly. Here's, by the way, Rappaport reacting to the news that he had been misled. Everyone said Mike Malarkey's a good guy. He always was to me. I liked him, though it was very respectable.

That is not cool. That's not funny. I was a younger reporter then, and the amount of online hate and ridicule I got because Mike Malarkey thought it would be funny to get back at his old boss. It was not fun. So I don't have much to say.

I don't blame Mike Malarkey, but I want to. And that was not cool and that was not funny. And we should treat truth better than that. Think it's okay to blame Mike Malarkey in this instance? I don't know who else you'd blame. Yeah. Blame yourself for not getting a second source from the tightness.

That's what I was going to say. Like, isn't there, I mean, that's sort of the thing. I mean, it's not cool. If we're, if we're adjudicating this on the cool spectrum, uh, I agree that it was not cool, but like, that's a plausible deniability on malarkey's part, right? He's just like, hey, you could have checked it out. He could have said that. You could have not believed me when I was an embattled head coach in the NFL.

By the way, one of our Keebler elves sent me Rappaport's tweet. This is from January 14th, 2018, sources, colon, the Titans have offered Mike Malarkey an extension in the wake of their playoff run. He's staying. Now, I would like to know who the second source on the story was. Yeah, I think that's more of a problem. Because Mike Malarkey was not telling the truth, but then who. who confirmed a story that turned out not to be true.

Source is a little bit of a term of art, but also has, you know, as the man said, we should treat truth better than that. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, why are people like you and me avoiding the news? But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod on Twitter or Blue Sky. We're in your entries. God, that just, that just screwed me up saying blue sky there, dude. I just lost the train of thought. I never butcher that line. Look at that. Blue sky's messing with everybody.

It's messing with your head. They are always, always gratefully received. Among the many Donald Trump nominees, David, is a familiar Senate campaign loser from your part of the country. Dr. Mimitt Oz. Oh, yeah. Has been nominated to be administrator of the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, we're not in Kansas anymore. Did your mind like mine go to Tom Frank rather than The Wizard of Oz? Yeah. When you're talking about Trump nominees and Democratic failure. Well, if it did, congrats.

You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. A bunch of quick ones in the notebook done for you. First of all, I was traveling today. Can we do Brian's travel tips? Yeah, please. break out once a year. I know I've said this before on the podcast, but if you're an adult and you are traveling on an airplane with a backpack, first of all, what's up? What's wrong? Why? Why the backpack? I don't think you said this before because I would have been remembered being offended by this.

This is directed to David, all the other backpack wearers out there. If you are traveling on a plane and you are wearing a backpack and you stand up at the end of the flight and put your backpack on, I just want you to know that you are now like a foot and a half bigger than you were before. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So if you're doing like quick turns and all this stuff, like you, you are wearing like a jetpack on your back. Yes. Well, people in New York, people in New York know this, right?

If you spend some time on the New York subway system, I think you're familiar with this fact. You're a little bit more conscientious about stuff. If you're amongst people, the move is to put it on your chest. you have a backpack. Like you're carrying a baby? Yeah, exactly. Anytime you're on the subway, that's what I would do. Because otherwise you're just bonking people left and right.

You know, you turn to like change your hand. You just, you hear a noise and all of a sudden you smack the lady in the face who sitting in front of you. You got to be careful about that. You got to be careful about that. There's a lot of spinning around and bonging going on in airplanes. People watch out. Brian's travel tip number two.

Look, this is the time of year where everybody's sick. I've been dealing with some stuff over the last couple weeks, not feeling great a lot of the time. If you get on an airplane and you have a sniffle, you know, like here, give me a good one of those when you sit down. And then you do it exactly 15 seconds later. And let's say this is the beginning of a, I don't know, a cross-country flight. You're just going to need to do something about this. You're going to need to blow your nose. You're going to need to take some medicine.

you're going to do something. You cannot be a sniffler every 10 seconds for a cross-country flight. Do you know how freaking annoying that is? Yeah, I mean, listen, I think we've all been in this position. And while I agree with you, I think that the anxiety, the tension comes, because it's like if I blow my nose, if I do something about it, as you say, then I'm acknowledging that this is a problem. And then suddenly it's like everyone around me has to then formally acknowledge, Am I writing with someone with COVID? Am I writing with,

am I about to catch the flu? Like, what's going on here? There's whooping cough out in the world. I'm not totally sure what the symptoms are there. There's a feeling that, like, you can get away with a sniffle on an airplane, like you can get away with, like, farting, right? That you could just sort of, like,

maybe no one heard the sniffle and getting my handkerchief out or whatever the taking care of it that you would approve of is going to draw more attention to this than the sniffling at. itself. That's a great point. I guess I would say to that, feel free to go to the bathroom and have a nice little blow of the nose in private. Yeah, I agree. Nobody has to know. And the other thing is sometimes when I've been in that place where it's a little weird, you know, and you're worried about being

the sniffler. The sniffler turns out to be you. Sometimes you just let it run and just dab your nose, right? Yeah, that's the right move. I don't, like, I understand we're all, there's a lot of sickness going around. If you want to wear a mask, that's cool, whatever you want to do. But you just can't sniffle three or four times a minute for an entire flight. That just drives people, aka me, just completely insane. Oh, is this a personal story? I'm just kidding. Yeah.

And I was, dude, I had sniffler surround sound. I had one on each side. I was on the aisle, and the person across the aisle was also a sniffler. And then the person in the middle seat next to me. Oh. Get out of his sniffler. This is David's travel tips. If you find yourself on a plane with Brian Curtis, sniffle away.

Just fake sniffle. Drive him insane. Who was the movie, the New York City indie movie theater movie goer that you wrote about one time? The crinkler. Oh, the crinkler, right? Not the sniffler. Oh, my God.

And sitting there with like a Dwayne Reed bag, just crinkling it the whole time. I'm like, shut up. But then he was a character, right? He was everywhere. Yes. I have like canine-like hearing. I can hear everything.

Shut up. Anything that ends with an L.E. Brian's on to. I'm on to it. I read an interesting story in the Washington Post by Allahe Azadi about the people who are all good with the news for a while. Azadi writes among the 74.5 million people who did vote for her, that is Kamala Harris. Some now treat the news like a plague for the sake of sanity and self-preservation. They're turning it off and tuning out.

No more push alerts, no more news podcasts, no more cable broadcasts. How much news are you allowing yourself to? consume post-election, at least political news? I mean, I'm not watching cable news at all. Well, that's not. I wouldn't say at all. Sometimes, you know, I turn on the TV and it's, yeah, it's on, you know. I went to my mom's house.

You know, Nicole Wallace is her functional roommate, so there's a lot of that going on over there. but uh but but almost but i mean close to zero for cable news i think i find myself reading more um from the new york times and the washington post from the wall street journal not more maybe not more than the in the rump to the election but more than usual and i'm not turning off in PR if i'm in the car but i would say that but certainly my uh But I feel like my overall consumption is pretty far, is reduced from what it had been by a lot. What about you? Yeah, a little bit.

I've been a little bit of a tune-out. And I got to say by like Trump controversial nominee number eight, that might have actually been Lyndon McMahon. I was kind of like, I need to follow this. It's important I follow this. Not only for my job, but as a citizen. But I was like, man, I am a little tired of news right now. Yeah, I mean, I think part of the problem is with the, you know, the nominees and everything, it's, there's, there's too much news cycle to completely avoid it. But, you know, there's also just, like, there's just so much junk, you know, there's still like, and, I mean, you still just see so many headlines when you're on social media or however you consume sort of a broader scope of news that are just like,

people posting about Trump's, not posting, writing articles about how strong is Trump's mandate? And like what is like whether or not the, whether or not the whatever nomination, you know, doomed his presidency. Like what I, it's just like, it just trying to read so much into it. And I think that's what gets me about cable news,

especially, you know, MSNBC and all the channels right now, is that it's just like we're trying to make a whole, whole lot of news over trying to find a whole lot of kind of purpose behind something that we just can't really suss out at this point, you know? Yeah, that's a think piece. That's not news. Like, what's the answer to that question? I do think it highlights, too, that even for people that are, that love news, that are news junkies, and I think that describes 99.9% of the people to listen to this podcast, whether it's news about sports, politics, whatever it is. There are very few people in this world where it's just like an absolute, inviolable, everyday good.

You know, people tune out for a while. People take days off and weeks off and sometimes months off, which is bad news for people in the journalism industry. Because they're like, no, no, keep that subscription going all year long. But that's just what, like, that's just a human reaction, right? especially in the media world, we live it. We are not beholden to a newspaper or, you know, nightly news on television. You're just like, I just don't, I just opt out.

I'm out for a while. And that doesn't mean I'm out forever. And I'm, you know, it's not, not even necessarily has to do with Trump or whatever it is. I'm just taking a break. No, I mean, I've said this, I've made this comparison a million times before. It's not like just the candidate lost, but there was just so much hype. You know, there was just so much, not hype, there was just so much intensity. leading up to it that is now this is your offseason a little bit, you know? I mean,

and even in terms of the candidate, it's, you know, again, said this before, but like, when your team gets eliminated from the playoffs, some people that are, that are, that are, go all in on the finger pointing and the postmorphs and stuff. I just change the chat. Like, I do not read a single thing for the next two weeks about what went wrong. I'm, I'm with you, and I saw somebody tweet that the other day, it said, when my team loses, I don't listen to the postgame show. Yeah. And I think there's some of that there among, Democrats and liberals. By the way, Joel, I don't know if you heard this on Thursday podcast, he was not necessarily on board with us not talking about cable news anymore.

Oh, why? Well, he just, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't ready. He wanted to be consulted, mostly. Okay. Well, he gets a full vote, but, but I said I think everybody should get a veto, not just a vote, but a veto. Like, I'm out. No, and I don't do this. But I said he could also say, I don't believe in this. You do this on your Monday podcast. But then you still have to watch. That's true. By the way, Joel also nominated Shannon Sharp for Media Person of the Year.

Prestages Award given out by the Press Box. That's a great nomination. Do we get Shannon Sharp to accept a Media Person of the Year award? We might be able to. And he might really be it. I don't know what to do with this, but I learned from the Washington Post this week

also that George Will has been writing a twice-weekly column for 50 years. My God. They're doing a special section, 50 years. Can you imagine toting the rock twice a week and back in the day for that old Sunday Newsweek column twice

a week for 50 years? No. Newsweek column is how I got to know George Will. I think most of us did. We weren't reading the Washington Post as kids. No. I'm like, there's that guy on TV. Honestly, God, I thought you were going to tell me, when you started

this bit, I thought you were going to say George Will has been dead for a decade and they've just been republishing old columns. like Charles Schultz peanut strips. How dare you, sir? No, no, no, no. It was family circuit. Wait, which one was it?

They kept running after he passed away? Was it peanuts? Peanuts is still in my paper when I get the L.A. Times on Sunday, and it is the lead cartoon. It is not in the paper. It is leading off, which may say something about cartoons these days. It certainly does. George Will is still with us. He's not even quitting his job, David.

We're just celebrating a 50-year anniversary of writing a column. My goodness. Using big words that we were given in our SAT course and said, look at this man. This man uses word you should know to ace your standardized tests. That really happened. Only in journalism, David, these are words you often see in print, but never hear in human speech.

Alert listener Tom Condardo gives us helmed, as in coached or managed. Terry Francona helmed a Red Sox squad. Also, there's a lot of that in the Hollywood trades. directors helm their films. That, by the way, is even worse than the managerial use of the word. Basil Hamden gives it's venerable.

Noro Donald is going to leave the CBS Evening News, the venerable program in January. That's the only use of it, though. Old news shows. Yeah, or old news people, right? Like I told you, when they start calling Brian, say veteran journalist Brian Curtis, that's when I want you to take me

to the old media critics home. It's over, baby. veteran journalist. And Bog Ben here, I love this one. He says, only in journalism citing on the CBS football

ticker, Steelers out slung Ravens for the win. He said, I didn't know that out sling had a past tense. Yeah, apparently does.

Outslung. We got a little media piss test here. You've been reading about Trump's Department of governmental efficiency, run by Elon Musk

and Vivek Ramaswami. One of the applicants tells the New York Magazine, tells New York Magazine, excuse me, Elon Vivek and I are the American dream on steroids. Thanks to Elijah for that. Ramoswami, like some conservatives, is very into the bureaucratic cuts undertaken by Argentinian president, Javier Malay. Ramoswamy tweeted, a reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government, Malay-style cuts on steroids. Thanks to Chase Kitty. And finally, Colin Mine of the Hill gives us this one. when Matt Gates was the nominee for Attorney General, remember that news cycle?

There was talk about the difficulty of... Did we not have a show during that news cycle, or do we just avoid... Just allied that last week? Were we doing news avoidance? Maybe so. I think it might have cut... Dates, but... Yeah.

I think he would drew right before the Thursday. I can't remember. Somehow we missed it. Anyway, Senator John Corner of Texas said the confirmation hearing would be like Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh on steroids. Thanks to Colin for that one. All right, it's time for a feature that needs no chemical enhancement whatsoever. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline.

Yeah. Monday's headline about museums that are focusing on the science of smell was exhale through the gift shop. Today's headline comes to us from Rattie, our good friend Rattie. It's from the good old New York Post, David. You saw the story that the Giants bench starting quarterback Daniel Johnson, Jones. And then they cut him. Now, I want you to think about DJ's nickname as you ponder.

What was the New York Post's strained pun headline? What is Dan? I have no idea with Daniel Jones nickname. You call yourself a ringer employee and you don't know the nickname Danny Dimes. Oh, okay, Danny Dimes. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll cut that from the show.

Don't worry. Danny Dimes. what is it? He's gone. So long. No more dimes. Is it time? Is it something with times?

No, it's actually just dimes. He is out. We have put him down. We have put him away. March of dimes? Oh my God. What's it called? That might be a little.

That might not have been on the New York Post. Dime list. I said this should be so obvious. He was in our hand and we let him fall to the ground. Tost it down. Flipped a dime. No, we just, we let it go. Oh, dropped a dime.

Dropping a dime. Yeah, that dropping a dime is the answer. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Productions magic by Steve Allman. Thank you very much, Steve. Wait, so dropping a dime. Yeah, dropping eight dimes is a little awkward in retrospect.

But that's already like not, I mean, that's a separate, Is that even a pun? It's like a separate sports reference that they've co-opted for this. How dare you on Thanksgiving question the sanctity of the strain I'm not questioning you. I'm just questioning the headline. Like, what you say,

I guess it's people know what that is. Yeah, that's fine. New York Post editors, please get in touch with David Shoemaker, who has some issues he'd like to discuss with you about your dropping a dime's headline. Production Magic by Steve Allman. We're going to go on Thanksgiving vacation, my friend.

Have a little time with the family. some of us are going to go watch the miserable Cowboys against the miserable Giants on Thursday. You're going to be there in person? I'm going to be there in person. I'm going to keep the streak alive. It's a valuable moment with my 11-year-old son Owen where I'm like, this is a game we don't necessarily want to go to.

We should probably go to to keep the streak alive because we go together to Cowboys game on Thanksgiving every year. Yeah. But we can leave at halftime. We don't have to stay. Tommy DeVito versus Cooper Rush. Dude, we can. This is,

Okay, but let's go. Also, the tickets we own are worthless, so we can't sell them. So let's go. Let's have a good time. We'll eat a little bit, watch a little bit of football. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. It's incredible.

Kids love going to stadiums. Maybe not for three and a half hours, but, you know, kids love going to stadium. Indeed. Coming up Wednesday, we do have one special feature here. Chris Myers, Fox announcer, former ESPN Sports Center, and up close post has a new bookout. I went out and interviewed him in Los Angeles about his life. his career covering events like the earthquake series and the bombing of the 1996 Olympics. Chris Myers, a big interview coming up Wednesday.

Shoemaker, I will see you on Monday, and we will have more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great Thanksgiving. Was that directed at me? If so, happy Thanksgiving to you, too. If not, happy Thanksgiving to all our listeners. We'll see you here on Monday.