The Press Box - Farewell, Chris Cuomo. Plus: Can Recipes Be Plagiarized?

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Bryan and David react to the news that Chris Cuomo was fired by CNN and then discuss actions leading up to the decision and what this means for the organization (3:30). Later, they weigh in on the conversation presented by Priya Krishna’s New York Times article, “Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking," and talk about the concept of recipe plagiarism (25:27). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York sports talk host, John Dostrompsky gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yes. Last week was Spotify Wrapped Week. Oh, yeah. You know the week where Spotify tells you which pods you listen to the most and how much time you spent listening? Uh-huh. Well, at the risk of being sincere here in the cold open, it sure was fantastic to see all the people sending us notes telling us the press box was one of their favorite podcasts.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. In some cases, their favorite podcast. Isn't it weird that people are listening to us, full stop, and listening to us that much over the course of a year? Yes, I did not realize that we are related to that many people. I think that's their correct joke to be making friends that are indebted to us. I got an amazing one from a guy named Dennis Schwarz. I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly. He listens to us from Slovakia.

Really nice guy emails me from time to time. He gets a note from Spotify that says you spent so many minutes listening to the press box podcast. That's more than 96% of other listeners in Slovakia. Now, my question there is, wow, that's fantastic, but who is the 4% in Slovakia who is listening to us more? And can we meet them?

Yeah. Is there like a Slovakian podcast convention or something that we should be checking out right now? Can we make an appearance? Did an expat just like leave his phone on or something? He'll fall asleep and it was just going through the whole the whole file there.

I kind of want to know. If you're in Slovakia, please get in touch. Have you ever listened to the wrong podcast? Yes. Like you, I won't even mention it, but there was a party, there's a guy who I really like on Twitter,

and I just never listened to his podcast, but it's always there in his bio. And I had it committed to memory. And I like just pulled it up one time on my phone and listened to it for like 45 minutes before I was just like, this is not, I'm not sure this is the right. podcast because it was just three guys talking, right? I was just like, okay, like whatever.

Like this is a less funny here than he is online. And it was just the wrong podcast for the same title. I hope that we don't, we're not a victim people. There's not people in Slovakia that think this is like, you know, the press box is like someone else a more importance podcast. Yeah. I can't imagine they couldn't tell the differences between a couple of dudes talking. That sure doesn't describe podcasting. Coming up on our new show, a couple of dudes talking, David. Our long cable news segment national nightmare is over. CNN has fired Chris Cuomo. We say farewell in our own special way. Plus,

we know you can plagiarize news articles, but can you plagiarize a recipe? All that and more on the press box. A part of the Ringer, podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker and producer Erica Servantes here. David, the story broke late on Saturday afternoon. Chris Cuomo, who was the brother of former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, and occasionally plays a journalist on television, was fired by CNN. Your first reaction to the end of the Chris Cuomo era of American life. I was riding in the car with my family when it happened.

And so I was just like, oh, Chris Cuomo got fired to my wife. who, you know, is sort of like, I think we've talked about this before. Just a very like, like, like absent-minded Cuomo fan. Doesn't like the Cuomo political dynasty, but like when Andrew was doing all the COVID press briefings, she and all of her brothers and sisters were just like,

I recognize that guy, I like him. Like, he felt like, you know, just like some sort of authority figure that they grew up with that they just, you know, were very sympathetic to. And Chris Cuomo falls into that. He's different. He's more of like the cool, you know, younger brother sort of, you know, thing going on. So, but she likes them, does not care about them one way or the other, but has a natural affinity for them.

So I'm riding in the car with there, I'm like, oh, Chris Cuomo finally got fired. And I think I told her about the last, you know, what the last news story was about him using his connections to sort of dig up dirt on some of his brother's accusers. and she, natural affinity, factored in, was just like, oh, yeah, he's gone. He's got to go. Like, not even a moment's hesitation. And I say all of that to say, I think he finally, if he wasn't already there,

just crossed the threshold of someone who does not, the vast majority of viewers who are not ticking off journalistic ethics boxes on their score sheet, but finally just like, it goes without saying that a person will be, should be fired for what has gone down, right? Absolutely.

Absolutely. Because it was really quite amazing. So we've known since the spring that he was advising Andrew Cuomo as Andrew Cuomo dealt with allegations of sexual harassment. Then at the end of last month, we got these documents from the New York Attorney General that revealed that it went way beyond that. Chris Cuomo was contacting media people to find out about. other allegations that might be in the works against his brother.

Particularly worried about Ronan Farrow, which is a really weird side light to this whole story, he told a member of the governor's team that he had a, quote, lead on the identity of a woman who had accused the governor of misconduct. And he had also advised the governor on statements he was writing to respond to various parts of the scandal. What was so striking to me about that was, in addition to the, yeah, he's got to go, which I think we all reflexively feel. Chris Cuomo was doing journalistic type work,

following leads, running down stories, helping craft sentences and statements. But he was doing journalistic work on behalf of the people in power. Yeah. Now, I don't know how you would rank, you know, various journalistic sins, but it just seems extraordinarily horrible. to be using your craft not to serve the people who are watching you,

but to help the people you should be covering. Yeah. We talked about at the time, I think, somewhat tongue in cheek saying that, like, if you're MS, I mean, if you're CNN, you're probably, like, to the extent that you're unease, and it's before all the allegations, or not allegations, all this, the news came out about the degree to which he was. hubbing him. But you're like, you know, to the degree to which you're uncomfortable about whatever conflicts there are here between the two brothers, you're probably more animated by the, you know,

feeling of like, hey, Chris, can you just get your brother on the show? Like, you know, like, if you're talking every day, let's put a camera on, boost ratings, ethics be damned. Like, that's what like the kind of Craven point of view over there may have been, you know, one could imagine that. Um, but this is like, like, even if the calculus is totally crissue. raven, you just can't, like, you're, it's, it's, it's so far beyond the pale, you know, I mean, to be using all of your resources, to be using your seat, to be using your influence, specifically for the worst reasons possible, I mean, what else you, what else can you expect to happen here, you know, I mean, people who listen to the show know that I, I wasn't particularly

sympathetic to Chris Cuomo, but I tried to be sympathetic to him and just in the sense. sense that like I could imagine how one could get in this situation, right? I'm not trying to make the case for journalism. I'm trying to make the just the real life case of like how someone like Chris Cuomo may end up on a conference call, you know, as like the media savvy brother with all these other people and just whatever. That's how this, these are this robot family deals with stuff. But you just can't, I mean, there's like kind of accidentally being in an awkward situation

trying just in the service of the love of your family and then there's like all the lines you decide to cross in your of your own volition on your own time you know and it's it's just sort of galling absolutely and and i think what chris quomo wanted if you read his public statements at various points is to get us into this kind of false choice about the whole thing which is hey you know i was you know listen i made a mistake but i was helping my brother you know and it comes first And I saw people from Matt Iglesias to Liz Smith tweeting about this, about how, you know, it is somewhat understandable that you would help a family member out. The thing is, you don't have to host a primetime news show on cable television and also do this at the same time.

That's not the same thing at all. If he wanted to quit his show and say, look, my brother is, you know, going is, you know, political career is about to end. and I'm going to go, you know, be his advisor or whatever it is, that's one thing. But he was, he didn't, he actually didn't make a choice. He did both at the same time. Mm-hmm. He was going on and talking to people while he was doing all this. So, I mean, to me, that, the whole choice of like, oh, what would you do if you were in my case?

Well, you would make a choice probably. And again, that doesn't condone anything he did in this behavior, this, but he like, he didn't make a choice at all. he tried to have it both ways. Yeah, I mean, and the details of it, I think, are what really get me. I mean, I'd be a little bit more forgiving on that count, but it's the, it's the, I mean, it's one thing to be, to support your family, right? It's one thing to say, for your position to be, you know, I love, I love my brother,

no matter what he's done. And it's another thing to take the, the completely blindered and like, like, malicious position of like, I'm going to hunt down dirt on the accusers, right? I mean, I don't mean to make light of it to say that, like, if there are multiple people make incredible accusations against your brother who is a, who is the governor of the state of New York, journalists or no, it's probably incumbent upon you before you do anything that hurts anybody else to say, you know what, he might have done it, you know, and construct your actions going forward around that possibility is to be using his seat and to be using his trade and be

using everything else to I mean in that sort of active ways that's that's what's just unforgivable to me. So CNN now says that after the New York Attorney General's report and after their own investigation that they had cause to fire Chris Cuomo, then as the New York Times reported on Saturday, a lawyer, Deborah Katz, brought to CNN what the New York Times called an allegation of sexual misconduct. I'm quoting here made by a former junior colleague at another network, an allegation that Cuomo, for the record, denies. But that also happens there. And then at that point, CNN says, we saw, quote, no reason to delay taking. But was that the additional information or whatever that they cited in the original press release?

like the additional things have come to light or something to that effect? I don't, I'm not quite sure what they meant by that. Okay. But those both things are happening at the same time. People should, people should understand there. But it does seem like, I mean, listen, the legal, you know, the extrication of oneself or one's company from a contractual agreement, I think sort of clouds the issue here, right?

Because CNN is going to be out there saying, and Chris Cuomo, for that matter, are all their statements going forward are going to be about whatever lawsuit or, you know, negotiation ensues to figure out whatever compensation is owed to the man, right? So there's nothing that's going to, no part of the conversation coming from the parties that actually matter is going to be particular, is going to be at all interesting going. I mean, I'd be interesting, but it's not really going to be based in the same reality as the rest of us, right? Because they're all just going to be equivocating and trying to figure out how they can get

or get the most money or keep from giving the most money, which is sort of sad. But I think that we should, you know, set the, I mean, sad in the sense that, like, we're not going to get any real information from either of them. But yeah, I mean, but we can, but it's, we should still set that aside. And whatever either party says going forward, I think we know enough to know that, that Chris Cuomo, I mean, that fire in Chris Cuomo is 100% morally ethically, whatever, whatever a gauge you want to use is justified.

Did you see Cuomo's statement on Saturday? No, read it to me. I'm not sure if I did. I just want to point you to one phrase here. This is not how I want my time at CNN to end, but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother. So let me now say, as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo primetime. And the work we did is CNN's number one show in the most competitive time slot.

So on this occasion, we're talking about. are ratings. Yeah. I would like you to come back to the television ratings that I was able to generate for CNN. Yeah. After I have been let go from the network because of these circumstances. Okay. Cuomo prime time and the work we did is CNN's number one show,

also getting the full trademarked name of the television show in there. I would not have picked that as the name if you would like giving me some options, I don't think. The other statement I'd like you to scrutinize is from CNN President Jeff Zucker, who of course has been Cuomo's defender through all of this. I mean, one thing to note about all this, David, is that Chris Cuomo was not suspended when he was first revealed as a political advisor to Andrew Cuomo in the spring. He was only suspended this last week when the Attorney General's report came out. There had been no punishment levied at all.

for him over this whole period. Here's what Jeff Zucker, according to the Washington Post, Jeremy Barr says today, quote, I fully understand that this has been a very unfortunate distraction for this organization. A distraction

for this organization. Now, does that not remind you of the sports writers who, when the player is accused of something horrible off the field or there's some kind of issue, it says, you know, this cannot be a distraction to this team's

road to the Super Bowl or the World Series. Distraction is just absolutely the wrong word to use here. But it does say, I mean, it does show you what the stakes are, right? Because there is not a moral or ethical quandary at the heart of this for Jeff Zucker. It's about the ratings

that Chris Cuomo mentioned in his farewell letter. That's so awful. That's so awful. You know, I mean, it's, when the distraction becomes more significant than the rate, or when the distraction such as it is affects the ratings or portends to affect advertising dollars or the ratings of other shows or, you know, however you want to, you know, roll it out, that's what matters. And that's how we got here.

Yeah. That's why Chris Cuomo has been on the air all these months. And by the way, I think that's how we got here. If we want to track back a little bit to the beginning of the pandemic when Chris was interviewing Andrew on the air. And remember there was a kind of, you know, some people said, I don't think this is the right thing to do. I think if you put Andrew Cuomo on the air, he should be interviewed by Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, or a journalist who can do a fully journalistic interview of this important

public official during the pandemic. But to me, what that set out was there are two sets of rules at CNN. There was a set of rules that everybody has to abide by. And then there's a set of rules for the Cuomo brothers. And clearly, Chris Cuomo was operating this entire time under the idea that he had a different set of rules when he was dealing with his brother than he would have for any other story he was covering on the network. Well, that's 100% true, but I don't think, I mean, it doesn't have to be as sort of siloed off a situation, an example for it to have the sort of the same power, right? I mean, it's like he's a wealthy famous person prior to being on the network, right? I mean, certainly he has, regardless of what leeway Jeff Zucker has verbally given him, if any, Chris Cuomo is certainly in a much more comfortable seat than everybody else around him or than most of the other people around him.

Oh, he has a lot of power. Yeah, I mean, and it's just like, I mean, like, listen, I mean, I mean, one would assume that, you know, Jenna Bush is probably a lot more comfortable with doing whatever she's doing, on the Today Show, I hope I'm getting this right, then Hodo or wherever is sitting next to her because- Not imputing anything to Jenna Bush here, but I'm saying if she got fired, the downsides, I mean, what's it's, we're not, it's not as big of a deal, you know, and she's probably, it probably be harder to get her fired. Okay, to your point, you remember the term that was kind of in vogue in the 80s and 90s, you don't hear so much anymore, anchor monster? Oh, yeah, I haven't heard

that in forever, yeah. And it was often used for like somebody who was really cruel to producers behind the scenes or interns or associate producers, somebody who was using the power of being on television. And then it just kind of turned them behind the scenes and negotiations or just day to day into this. You know, it really just messed up their personality. To me, it strikes me is that Chris Cuomo is like anchor monster circuit 2021. It may not be in that exact way, but it's none of this applies to me. Like, I am going to go do all this stuff.

and I don't have to answer to anybody. That's it. I mean, it's a different kind of thing, but it's the same idea, right? Is that you're so powerful, and as you say, you have this power that you walk into the network with,

different from somebody who's making their name in television, that you just can do whatever you want. That's what it is to me. A lot of people, by the way, sent us the Fox News headline that said, quote, CNN's embattled, Jeffrey Tubin joins coverage of Chris, Cuomo? Oh, man.

Yeah. Just a little embattled. Fox used to make their, used to traffic pretty, pretty successfully in rehabbing media figures like Chris Cuomo. Do you think there's a future for him there? Oh, man. You don't think Chris Cuomo, Fox prime time?

Almost no way. Cable news is weird, man. I could imagine a lot of things. All right, David, time for the overword 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. All right. Send your nominees to add the press box by where they were always gratefully received. I know this was across your radar, David. Last week, the Oklahoma City Thunder lost to the Memphis Grizzlies by 73 points.

Yes. 152.79. Biggest win in NBA history. It was an overworked Twitter joke to call the losers Oklahoma shitty. We would have also accepted Oklahoma City blunder. You wanted to strain yourself a little more. Yeah, I don't think you really need a specific incident to go with the Oklahoma shitty joke. It's always funny to me.

Thanks to the fight doctor for that one. Last week, David, we all got scared, or at least a very hedged, hypothetical kind of scared about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write this morning. I'm feeling sorry for all the parents who named their kid, Amacron. Thanks to Ryland Aldridge. By the way,

one of the nice things about having Dan Diamond on the pot on Friday, Ace reporter over at the Washington Post was learning to say the words, Amacron, Omicron, or whatever David Nye said last week. Amicron. Yeah. Amicron.

I'm just trying to. trying to remember what I said in Greek class, guys. It's been a long time. I think I even made fun of it that it was not the name of a transformer who was partnering up with Megatron. That turns out to be a bad overworked Twitter joke too. Yeah. And then we pronounced it like it was the name of a transform. News from the great state of Texas, David. Beto O'Rourke is in for the 2022 race for Texas governor. But long-rumored candidate Matthew McConaughey says running

is a quote, a path that I'm choosing not to take at this moment. It's an overword Twitter joke to write. It'd be a lot cooler if you did. Thanks to Mark Mascalino. Can we just stop? Can we like, can there be just some sort of like minor but like, you know, significant, like shameful penalty for celebrities that use potential, potential office runs just as a platform to publicize a new book or movie?

Connecticut? We just make that not okay. That's right, because he was talking about this when he had the memoir, didn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And the rock did his whole, I'm not going to run for president thing. Most recently when his new show came out, it's all just, it's just. Yeah, there was some guy who did that for like 20 years, teased running for president over and over. Rich New York real estate guy, can't remember his name. Got a lot, made a lot of hay off that, too. Whatever happened to that guy. Yeah, well, maybe that's a good case for it. It becomes a self-fulful.

fulfilling prophecy that we could do without. But anyway, this week's runaway winner, David, the term wild is overused in sports Twitter a lot. But there really was a wild 48 hours span last week. When Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley left the Sooners for USC and Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly left for LSU. I don't see defections like that much. Kelly met with his fighting Irish players to tell him he was leaving

and the meeting reportedly lasted only two minutes. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, oh, so Brian Kelly pulled an Irish exit. Thanks to Garrett McCloskey and Ben. And I have to tell you this, did you see the Brian Kelly Southern accent? No, no, you were talking about it. I haven't seen it.

So Brian Kelly from Notre Dame goes down to LSU. He is introduced at an LSU basketball game. This often happens, right? Let's just get the coach on the court, give him a microphone, the new football coach is over here. And he starts speaking in the southern accent that no one had ever heard. Drew Mintog pointed us to the tweet.

Brian Kelly hasn't even been the SEC three days and he's starting to sound like the American Dream Dusty Rhodes. Wasn't this a complaint of Hillary Clinton when she was on the campaign trail from the right, like that she would just sort of get Southern when she was down south? It's easy, right? It's very tempting to just kind of put on that Southern accent when you're down there. You and I probably do. do it after a couple of beers. I don't know that. But see, you and I went the other way.

No, no, but see, you and I had traces of southern or Texas accents. I think we still do. I mean, we still do. But I feel when we got to New York, we kind of did that thing where you kind of subconsciously start to lose it. Yeah. Because no one around you was talking like that. And you're right. We'd have two or three beers and people would be like, you sound different. You're just like, yeah, you're just like, suddenly have spurs on your boots. Yeah, it's a, it's a real thing. Yeah, you and I sound like Will Rogers after a couple of beers. I love it. Anyway, if you sounded like David and Brian after a couple of beers in the Lower East Side, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right, in the notebook dump, David, I want to talk to you about this fascinating story you sent me from the New York Times by Priya Krishna. Oh, yeah. Which has become a big issue in journalism because 90% of all journalism right now is food writing. Let's just be honest here. Krishna's article, David, is about the concept of recipe plagiarism. Right. Or maybe recipe ownership.

Now, we know you can't plagiarize a news article. You can't plagiarize a book. But Krishna brings up this idea. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That made it sound like you can't, that it's impossible to plagiarize an news article, which is sort of. You are not allowed. You are not, you are, the journalism podcast will talk about you. if you plagiarize a book or a news article.

But it's very interesting with recipes. This as Krishna points out, a recipe, even if it's original, is kind of a more of a list of steps for doing something. Instructions, yeah. Yeah, more than it is original pros. And she talks to some copyright experts and a lawyer says the law views a recipe merely as a factual list of ingredients and basic steps rather than as creative expression. But people have started complaining because they come up with a recipe and then they open a book or a magazine and the same recipe or something very suspiciously similar is

appearing elsewhere. And they're taking, they're asking a very good question is why do they get to copy this? Yeah. And why isn't this my original work? Well, okay. So there's a couple of things. One, I mean, this whole conversation is enthralling. And everything that you said is exactly right.

I think that the article did a good job of at least implying the stakes here in a way that seems like it should be a little bit clear, right? We're talking at first and foremost about a book. It's not just can you copyright a recipe because I think it would be reasonable for the common person to shrug their shoulders at like the inherent copyright issues of me, of your. your mom sending you an iPhone photo of her corn casserole recipe for Thanksgiving time, right? I mean, that's kind of neither here and we're there. Everyone could agree. But if you're monetizing it and not just monetizing it and we're not just talking about, oh, here's like a New York Times article where it's like we went to this restaurant and

got and we're giving you their recipe for, of their famous soup. With permission. Sure. With permission. I mean, it's not, I mean, it's, you pay for the newspaper. But it's, but that's still different from. I am publishing a book called My Favorite Soups that I make, and I'm including recipes that are taken from other places.

That starts to raise one's eyebrow, right? Then there's another instance in the book, I mean, in the article about a cupcake design, and I'm going to miss all of the details here, except that it was a, they were cupcakes made to look like corn on the cob, that this one shop had sort of, that was their trademark. And then it subsequently appeared on the cover of some, you know, glossy magazine without crediting them. Obviously, it was styled and ref- it wasn't their, it wasn't a cupcake from their shop, but it used everything that they used to make it look like.

And it wasn't conventional cupcake toppings, and it's certainly not a conventional idea. And this is, I think, what sort of gets to, which makes my alarm bells go off, maybe more so in the average recipe. This isn't a list of things. This is a creative decision that these people made to decorate the thing that's just a list of things. Right? So it's like, I can't copyright a canvas, but if I make a painting, it's mine, right? I mean, no one, you can't just rip it off. And the specifics here are pretty amazing. A vanilla cupcake decorated with yellow cream and white jelly beans arranged to mimic corn kernels, a faux butter slice made from a yellow fruit chew and black and white sugars to imitate salt and pepper. Yeah. Pretty specific. So it's, I mean, it's really intriguing. I don't know, I don't know what you do. I don't, I mean, it does seem. sort of on a very basic level, like, especially in the sort of world of IP that we live in

right now, that if you create a recipe from scratch that doesn't already exist, then that should kind of be yours, right? I mean, that you should at least have some ability to prevent others from profiting off of it. But it's hard to imagine to what, like, how many, recipes, it's like if there were no songs that were copyrighted until right now, could you really write a song that was totally underevative that was like completely that didn't reference anything that came before? And so if everything is referencing something that came before and you're riffing off of it, and there were some sort of like royalty system for cookbooks, I mean for cookbooks and recipes

and everything else, which is the only place that my mind goes that makes even a little bit of sense, then what, are we going to have just like some sort of Alan Lomax figure who's out there collecting all of the royalties for everything that was cooked before 195 or something? And just like, I mean, it's, I don't, it's, it's kind, it's just really hard to fathom what the remedy would be if the, if the, you know, the law, even if the law viewed it differently. So, so the, that, that's where we get, and it gets really hard. I'm, I'm just want to just put one other one. So you mentioned the very elaborate recipe that clearly just appears somewhere else as being something we can agree in his bed.

Here's another one from the article. In October, the publisher of the cookbook McCann by the prominent British chef Elizabeth Haig pulled the book out of circulation citing rights issues. The author Sharon Wee had noticed the McCann about the cuisine of Ms. Haig's native Singapore contained recipes and stories nearly identical to the ones in her own 2012 cookbook. Ms. Haig even replicated some of Ms. Wees' personal recollections in much the same language.

So there you're stepping into famous chefs, you know, having recipes that are very close to less famous chefs, which we can also agree is a really bad thing. But isn't that all, isn't that exactly? I'm sorry, go and finish. Well, I was just because he also brings up backs of cultural appropriation, which have a long history in the genre, right? Right.

You made that. I'm going to go take that and put that in my cookbook or in, make that my recipe. And we can see the issues there. Sure. I mean, I can extrapolate the issue with that book in terms of its, you know, the publisher pulling it from the market and whatever legal issues were there. Probably had more to do with the anecdotes, the personal memoir aspect, the more traditional,

the more traditional, traditionally problematic types of, borrowing or whatever you want to call it, then the recipes, because as we've discussed, recipes, which sort of seem like the Wild West. Now, that sort of makes the point, though, right?

That, like, this whole genre is just so rife for appropriation that somebody thought that it was okay, not just to take the recipes, but to take whole pieces because who's going to care? I mean, I don't know if that was the specific calculus,

but kind of seems like it must have been. And, yeah, I mean, there is going to be a lot of appropriation. I mean, listen, we all have cookbooks. We've all enjoyed cookbooks that were best of style things of like from like different countries or states or whatever, you know? I mean, I have I have cookbooks sitting semi-ironically on my shelf that are just like the low country cookbook that I just like picked up off a out of a, you know, vintage store out of

an antique store in the South Carolina somewhere. And like that there's no implication that that's one person's genius, right? I mean, that's a collection of recipes from a culture. But this is something different, right? I mean, there should be, just because you can hand wave away a portion of the genre, doesn't mean that the rest should just be, that the entire field should just be inherently like an instant forfeiture of rights to just, to create, right? So we're saying there should be, there should be some leeway for very basic things.

Like, I don't know, just let's say basic. If you and I ever picked up a recipe to look at and actually make, we would be looking for basic recipe X. That's what you and I would be Googling because that's about as far as our abilities go. So let's say, let's just take one, my favorite dessert, carrot cake.

Is it, are we granting that there's going to be lots of borrowing and copying and just basic carrot cake recipes? Shredded carrots, sugar, you know, those kinds of things that there is going to be a lot of similarity between everybody's setting out to make a basic carrot cake?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's sort of part of the process, right? Because it's, if it's, presumably if you wanted to make something, I don't know. I was going to say if you wanted to make something that was in its own,

that was its own thing, you could call it something different. You could call it, you know, Brian cake or whatever. And no, I'm not sure how many people would go for that. But then you would lose the, you would presumably lose a lot of the traffic,

the interest of people who want a spinoff, your own take on carrot cake, right? If it was Brian's version of carrot cake, who knows if you copyright that? No, the whole thing's really sticky, no pun intended. No, and I'm just, I'm just sort of wondering aloud here because there's a whole, there are lots of very elaborate, very specific recipes, right, that we could identify with certain people. But then there's this whole other genre of like, here is the easiest way to make X. Oh, yeah. And are we just kind of saying that those are basically generic? Here's how to scramble eggs. Here's how to make an easy cornbread muffin.

Here's how to do whatever. That those are going to be pretty much the same and they're so basic and inherent in cooking that we couldn't ever trace them back really if we wanted to. And so that's just going to be kind of out there. That's what I'm asking. It's like where is the line, where do you sort of draw the line of what's a recipe

that basically is in the creative commons and a recipe that is tricked out enough that we're like, okay, that belongs to David. And you can't just put that in your cookbook without David's permission. Yeah, and there has to be some distinction there. You, and when we were emailing about this before we came on, you brought up the example of joke books,

which I thought was kind of interesting because... Like a kid's joke book, yeah. Yeah, we're not talking about like a Dave Barry collection or something. Yes, I mean, yeah, the, yes, like a list of jokes, like a hundred, like, though it's not a hundred. It's always like 50,000 jokes or like, you know, 50,000 puns that will make your eyes roll out of your head, you know, whatever. Um, it's a, that's an interesting one too because we, I've, I, I've actually picked one of those

out. I picked up a, a mad magazine joke collection that from decades passed at a, at a, um, antique store on my last road trip with my family and handed it back to the 13 year old and was just like, check it out. And he started reading and like, it was just so old time. It was like from the 20s. Like a lot of them, which weren't formatted as jokes, they were just sort of like, like, like, witty remembrances or you know it was really bad but no one i don't think would be under the presumption that any of that was like or that much of or all of it certainly not all of that was original to the publication it's more of just like a collection of of you know absorbed knowledge yes yes and that and that reminded me not of all recipes but of just like the how to

scramble an egg that there would be just kind of this baseline. The other thing I was thinking about was interesting was, you know, whenever we had to talk about it, can you, is in Hollywood, you know, whenever there's like a really good movie, somebody comes forward and says, you know, I actually wrote that movie and submitted a script and mailed you a script and then you made a movie that was like that. And Hollywood has this whole principle where they say, okay, if there's a spy movie, there will always be a scene in the spy movie where the spy's own government turns on it. Mm-hmm. So if your, if your script had that and the born identity had that, you don't get to sue,

you can't win a lawsuit against the born identity. Right. Because we just think all spy movies will have certain scenes in them. Like that doesn't, that, that's just so, so maybe there's some version of that with recipes where you say that, like, we're going to, we're going to acknowledge that every carrot cake recipe is going to have shredded carrots and sugar and a couple of other things. And it's what you do on top of that. that is the original material. That is the original material.

I also thought it was really interesting. They said in the article that so many cookbooks now include lots and lots of big essays in them. And this also sort of mitigates this problem a little bit because when you write an essay, that is very clearly yours. So you're saying, I'm going to hear, I'm going to have all my recipes in here, but I'm also going to have essays. I'm going to have memoir. I'm going to have personal material in this cookbook. You mean it creates value for the book? book outside of the just the recipe, the recitation of the recipe is what you're saying.

That and it's, and it becomes very clearly yours, right? But if it's, but, but that's also sort of the argument for like, like the newspaper article argument, right? It's just like, this is, you know, this is the Empire Diner's favorite, like famous apple pie recipe. Like, and you, there's an article about it and then there's a recipe at the end, right? That's, that's magazine article, newspaper article. Sure.

It's, I don't, I mean, I think that it's, that. the recipe sort of becomes secondary in that case, right? I mean, it's just telling you how someone cooks it. It doesn't mean they don't have rights to it, but I don't think that, like, I don't know, it's just, it's so very, it's very confusing. But I do think that there's such a value in the chef or the restaurant or the writer that to some extent,

it's easier to overlook the central issue, right? Because, you know, if you're a famous chef and you have your favorite, your famous takes on these, no one can really steal it, or they're not going to effectively see it. steal them, right? You're still going to sell enough books that who cares? They're not going to, whoever steals them isn't dinting your market share. But that, and that goes for the essays, too. But there's so many of these books that are like wonderful personal essays that you want to read,

but then the recipe they give you at the end is not, is not particularly proprietary even by their own, by, by, in their own understanding. So, I don't know. I mean, I think, like, I would, I, I'm, I think the essays are great. That's why I read these things, you know, that way, but that's what makes me hungry. But it is, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, the whole issue is just so weird. There's a couple of other attempts at rules. I'll read this real quick before we go from, uh, Christian's article. As a student at LeCordon Blue cooking school in Paris, author Clancy Miller was taught she had to change six elements of a recipe before it could be considered a new one. Kind of an interesting test. No, that sounds, that sounds like my 13 year old trying to understand

what he's allowed to plagiarize, right? It's like, well, yeah, I cut and paste at that paragraph from Wikipedia, but I rearrange those two sentences and change seven words. Couple of synonyms, yeah. This is a better idea. In Jubilee, a 2019 cookbook about African American Food Ways, the author Tony Tipton Martin explicitly tells readers to adapt the recipes and includes historical versions of those recipes in the margins attributed to the authors so readers can understand how each dish evolved. So instead of just saying, hear recipe, you can be like, you know, almost have footnotes talking

about how this recipe evolved and giving credit to people. That's actually a really, really cool idea. A couple more things for you, David. We did a segment the other day about how book reviewers say books aren't great without actually coming out and saying they aren't great. You know, they use this whole sort of list of words. Well, the London Times has a literary editor named Robbie Millen who passed along a very similar handy guide to publishers blurbs. Oh, I love this. I know exactly. I was just thinking about this. Tell me about it.

Because a publisher has maybe a book by a famous author. They know it's not the author's best work, but they have to put a word or blurb on the cover and the press materials. Here are some of them. Accomplished. That means underwhelming, Millen writes. Fingers crossed, the next novel will be better. Yeah. High concept.

That means implausible plot. Ignore the clunking prose. a sharp-eyed or fearless look at humanity means no likable characters the author is a sociopath the writer at the top of their game means they're past it old about to be dropped that is totally true

because whenever you see the past prime novel I feel the press materials always say it reveals he or she is still at the top of their game and they're almost never at the top of their game If they have like truly another classic, you would never actually write that. No. And then master storyteller. This is my favorite.

Master storyteller. It means writes the same novel every year too successful to be edited. Yes. My favorite one that actually comes from like blurbs from other writers you always see on the back of the book, you know, or like doing the pre-press promo. And it's always someone that, you know, it's often friends, right? It's often compatriots who are sort of obligated to give you some nice words. when they're not, when they're not just, just effusive, they're almost implicitly bad, but you can start

reading into them. And there's one, there's one trope that I love where, where the blurber will say, like, for years, I've been waiting for a book like this. And then just ends or, and now it exists. You know, but without actually saying anything specific, for years, I've been waiting for, you know, for years I've been waiting for, you know, for years I've been waiting for a countercultural history of the Civil War. Finally, Brian Curtis has written it. Just like, just a hard exit. And that's it. No, yeah, no, uh, just pointing to the existence of the book.

It's just amazing. It's just a great, great move. Uh, Bob Dole died yesterday, David. Former Senate majority leader, former presidential candidate in 1996. He was 98 years old. Did you notice anything about the Bob Dole obituaries we've been reading? I don't think anybody thought he was already dead, but one, but like it was almost, you could tell all the obituaries had been in the can for a long time, right?

I mean, he was, this was a man who was, who it, I mean, this is the first presidential election that I was cognizant of in any significant way. I'm sure is it was that the same for you? Yeah, maybe a little bit of 92, like in it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember like watching my parents watching election night in 92. But yeah, I mean, but this is the, the, the first. in the fall of 96. Yeah. So we were,

we were locked in. I mean, in a lot of ways, Dole was sort of like the er John McCain, and they have a lot of kind of superficial similarities or,

or, I mean, that we could go into. But I think in a very general way, both of them were covered by the media as this sort of like straight talker political,

like platonic ideal of a politician, or at least it was a, of a conservative politician. And I, I think that the coverage was always felt a little bit incongruous to a lot of the audience, right? Because it was sort of like a stated, it was like a presumption of political altruism or something that never quite jibed with their public persona. Part of that is because when you reach a sort of level of natural promin, it's not just talking as a majority leader, but when you're

running for president, you end up sacrificing a lot of your morals, your ideals, and also just sort of the personality aspects that made you sort of well known to the media that cover. you most closely. And so you can talk about John McCain as this sort of like middle of the road, you know, like I'll do whatever's good for my country sort of guy. And then he's, you know, his running mate Sarah Palin and he's doing whatever it takes to get covered fondingly on Fox. It doesn't match up, right? And Bob Dole, well, Bob Dole's primary campaign certainly wasn't that, I mean, he was running the risk of losing out to people on the far, right? Right. I mean, he was too middle of the road. He was getting attacked from both sides of his party.

But then he, you know, he brought on Jack Kempas' running mate. He was pretty, he seemed to be pretty cavalier when it came to tax breaks and some, um, some, you know, moral conservative issues. I don't know. I mean, it just, it just, he was, he seemed like a, like a moral beacon in a lot of ways. And certainly in his, in the later acts of his life, he was, he was, he felt like he was trying to like suddenly, subtly pull the, the party back from the, you know, from the, you know, from the cusp on the right, I mean, from the left or from the center. But I don't know. It just seems like

he just seems like he was like he's, listen, I'm sure justifiably lauded. I'm sure he was a great guy. It just seems like the preconception, it seems like the obituary sort of baked in from the moment that I was aware of the man. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure that there was much I was going to read that was going to surprise me. Yeah, he was, it's interesting because he was, he also quit the Senate in the 96th during the 96 campaign. And at the time that was seen as like a big, you know, a show of how seriously he was. Here's this Washington guy, Bob Dole. And he's going to leave the Senate while he's running for president.

This shows I'm serious about this. I'm not just going to run and lose and then go back and do another 20 years. But it's amazing. That was 1996. I mean, Bob Dole just hasn't been in office for a really long time. He probably could have gone back to the Senate and gotten elected several more times. Sure. That was really interesting to me.

But Bob Dole. David, also on a quick update here for the headline rule of three. Oh, yes. Listeners will know that this is where every publication on Earth now, for some reason, it has three examples and then a colon, and then they tell you what the article is about. So you, along with listeners, Lee and Cam McFarlane sent me this one, horse troughs, hot tubs, and hashtags, baptism, is getting wild.

Really good one. And then we got this one from Nathan Ford. And maybe we can start this game right now. But Nathan Ford says, what you should do is you guys should give each other the three examples and then try to guess what the article is actually about. So here's the one he said from the Washington Post. Death threats, mock hangings and a used condom. Would you have been able to guess that the article was about? Wait for it.

Anti-vaxxers target Australian politicians. No. And you see why they did the headline rule of three, because that's a lot more, the first part is a lot more interesting than the second part. But isn't that a bad headline? I mean, it's one thing to be like,

you're saying they're cheating by doing the rule of three. It's making it, it's trying to make it way more interesting, right? Because if I said, David, did you know that there are anti-vaxers that are really mad at Australian politicians? You'd be like, okay. But if I go death threats, mock hangings, and a used condom, you're like, hey, well, whoa, whoa, what?

What's going on? Presumly, the used condom didn't exist in a vacuum. The used condom was, it might have eventually been in a vacuum. But it was, you know, it's a used condom that was left on somebody's porch. I don't know. It just feels like there's a lot of, there's enough information that's left out there that I, I'm complaining too much. Speaking of headlines, it's time for David Schumaker. Guess is the strain pun headline.

Yeah. Last Monday's headline about shortages at IKEA was desperately seeking shoe rack. Still laughing at that one. Today's headline comes from Brian Cogsall, David. It's from those clever wits over at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Oh, fantastic. Remember the big UN climate change conference last month? It was in Glasgow, Scotland.

Sure. and the center offers us a mixed review of the conference, but one that tends a little bit toward the optimistic side. What was the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, strained pun headline? Optim, I mean, I'm just going to, is it like something like gas half full or like, you're in the neighborhood?

Optimistic, Sunnyside, um, glass half full of the, I think I'm not, don't forget the location of the conference. Glasgow, Glassgo, not Glasgow half full. Glassgo half full is the answer.

David thought that was too stupid to be the answer, but you have the strain pun headline, it's right where you want to be. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production magic by Erica Servantes back this Friday with another interview, and then Monday. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.