The Press Box - Jack Dorsey’s Twitter Exit, the Omicron Variant, and More

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Bryan and David break down news that Twitter CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey has resigned. They discuss how Dorsey handled past incidents of misinformation circulating on Twitter, where Twitter ranks next to competitor Facebook, and how this news could affect the media landscape (4:48). Then, they weigh in on the rapidly evolving news about the new coronavirus variant, omicron, and talk through how it’s being reported (21:26). 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

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David, what's on your mind today? Well, as you probably know, as you definitely know, because we have a segment about it coming up. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has announced that he's moving on from the company. What? Yeah, well, you know, it's big news in the technology and media and just planet Earth landscape today.

I was looking around online to see if I had missed any takes, any analysis of the situation. So I just Googled Jack Dorsey, and I didn't really find anything I hadn't read, but I did find some interesting questions that people have been typing into their Google search engine. And so I thought it might be a good opportunity for another edition of Ask Google. Or ask what Google's asking.

Ask what Google's asking. That's what we should call this. Most underrated bit on the show, by the way. So, of course, I'm just searching him by his name. And you might think that the questions that people are asking would start with, why did Jack Dorsey quit? Now, that is a top question, but it's not number one. number one is does Jack Dorsey eat meat

so as we go through the analysis of this we're going to talk about this as a media angle and how it affects politics and everything else you might be forgiven if you're living out there and the rest of the world and you're just more interested in Jack Dorsey's eating habits than you are what he means to the culture

so does Jack Dorsey eat meat This is according in 2020 according to he does he eats one really big meal a day. This is this is the big thing. Why did Jack Dorsey quit? Okay. Next question. Why does Jack Dorsey eat one meal a day? Okay.

It helps him feel focused. Good follow up. Yeah. Is Dorsey of Twitter married? No. Is Jack, but there's, you know, lots of information on that if you want it. Is Jack Dorsey tall? Yeah.

These are more in the standard celebrity type questions. Yeah, well, 511, according to Twitter. So I'm not quite sure if they answer that question. What is the Silicon Valley diet? Would you, it's apparently the big thing is dopamine fasting, which you can Google if you're interested. Does Jack Dorsey have a nose ring? Mm-hmm.

You used to. I feel if you're asking that, you kind of know the answer, but okay. Yeah. What is Twitter's net worth, which I'm not really sure is a properly formed question so we can skip it? Here's a good one. Related to the previous ones, what do tech bros drink?

Ooh. I'm not sure this is the answer that anyone was looking for, but the top Google search result is an article about Soylent. Once the beverage of Tech Bros. And also once the beverage of choice of former press box partner, Chris Almeida.

I will never let him live that era down. Is eating once every 24 hours healthy? Is intermittent fasting a biohack? Is eating one meal? day a good way to lose weight. How long does Jack Dorsey fast? Does Jack Dorsey have an Instagram? What time does Jack Dorsey sleep? This is a good one. Does fasting have side effects? Does fasting release dopamine? What can you do on a dopamine fast? How is the septum pierced? Ooh. Does Jack Dorsey have a beard? I'm winding up now. Does Jack Dorsey have a beard?

Again, if you're asking, I sort of think. What is with Jack Dorsey's beard? the next question. That is, I'm not quite sure that Google could even answer that one. And finally, how does Jack Dorsey make money? Which I guess we can get into when we actually start the show. Turns out a lot of investors in Twitter had the same question. Coming up on today's show, we talk more about the resignation of Jack Dorsey. We mark an interesting moment in media time when publications are pondering how to report on the Omicron

variant of the coronavirus, plus the overword Twitter joke, media piss test, and more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Rigger here, along with producer Erica

Cervantes. David, two nights ago, the aforementioned Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, tweeted, I love Twitter. That was a tweet. It got semi-racioed. FYI, as you might expect.

And then today, David, Jack Dorsey self-ratioed. He announced he's resigning. He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal, Twitter's chief technology officer. Dorsey's exit, the New York Times notes, marks a significant shift, great newspaper term there,

at the company, which has navigated years of pressure from investors who thought it did not make enough money and criticism from Washington, particularly Republican lawmakers who complain Twitter has helped stifle conservative voices in social media. That would be Donald Trump and his allies. Where do we start other than the beard, nose ring,

and what he drinks stuff with Jack Dorsey? That's a great question. I mean, I think the thing that's most interesting to me is, and I texted you to this effect this morning, is this is a really interesting subject for a media podcast to take on, just sort of like Jack Dorsey leaving Twitter and Twitter more broadly, because it's not precisely a media story,

but it's also sort of the biggest media story. And we could probably spend an hour talking about whether or to what degree this is a media story. But it does feel like regardless of how you want to categorize it, Twitter has sort of played this sort of proxy role as the question of what media is going to be for the rest of our lives, right? certainly there is the sort of legal or governmental issue of what constitutes a publisher and what

and the free speech aspects that spin off from that. And I think just in general, to what degree social media is media. You know, I mean, it's obviously, you know, the word is in there and it's tied up in the same category. But we can talk on and on about how we and others. you know, read tweets instead of reading articles or, you know, read reaction tweets instead of reading the articles they're based on or whatever.

But at some point, that actually becomes the media story, right? I mean, that's it. It's not just about, oh, we're not doing media right. It's, this is how media is being done. And, you know, Jack Dorsey is synonymous with Twitter. And certainly the company will change in his absence. And it's almost impossible to project. I'm sure close Twitter watchers will,

have takes, but it's hard to project. But whatever happens is going to be significant for the way we do media going forward. Yeah, I think it'd be easier probably to try to figure out what of social media isn't media at this point in history. I was thinking about that over the weekend during the college football coaching carousel. Because not only do we follow the news breaks on Twitter for all these people that work for actual publications. You know, they're doing all the work on Twitter. There's this thing where, okay, a coach has left to school. I need to get in front of a camera and tweet out two minutes of me just talking about this as quickly as possible. That is my currency right now. It doesn't really matter

if I have anything to say or if I'm just rehashing everything you already know from Twitter, this must be a Twitter product. So yeah, I think the answer to your question is it will affect everything that we do, even beyond the fact that people like you and me are spending our entire days there. Dorsey's interesting because he's one of these tech CEOs, the Times Notes, who basically is the company. Zuckerberg like we think Twitter, Jack Dorsey, as a kind of single thing a lot of the time. There's some hilarity involved in this as the Times notes, quote, the decision to remove

Mr. Trump's account was made by one of Mr. Dorsey's lieutenants. Mr. Dorsey was working on a private island in French Polynesia when it happened, adding to the concern that he was not fully engaged with his company. The Times goes on to the concerns that Mr. Dorsey's attention was divided between the two companies he led. The other one is Square, by the way. The firm believed that Twitter had followed behind social media rivals and increasing its stock price and adding innovative new products. I want to throw this one at you, too.

unscientific survey among people we know or at least know from social media. What is more reviled or what do people hate themselves for being on more? Facebook or Twitter? I don't, first of all, I just want to take a step backwards. I don't want to accuse Jack Dorsey of any indiscretion, but working from a private Polynesian island has the same ring as hiking on the Appalachian Trail to me. Maybe that's too far back of a reference. but it just seems like it's impossible.

I guess that's what having billions of dollars does for you, that when you say something that sounds so infeasible, people assume it to be true if you're as rich as Jack Dorsey is. But remember when we were kids and Marlon Brando was living on the private island? Yes. That was the thing. So do we think Jack Dorsey just kind of continued the kind of person who's out there not paying attention to the world in their private island?

Do you think he rehabilitated Private Island as like the fantasy that people want? well i mean certainly in this day and age private islands need a lot of help so um whatever jack dorsey's doing i guess is probably a positive uh to answer your question the facebook versus twitter self-loathing issue um it's a tough call i think that frankly i think that people probably outwardly loat like like in so much as like they expend their energy in their discontent. I think they loathe Twitter more than Facebook. And we're talking about our, us and people like us, the people that we know in our general generation.

I think people probably loathe Twitter more, but are more given up, I mean, have sort of given up in terms of like its necessity, you know, giving themselves over to it in terms of its necessity. Facebook is, it's dismissed with, a little bit less severity, but it's also really easy just to, like, not be on Facebook or to be on Facebook and not check it frequently, you know, whatever, it's to sort of ignore Facebook if, if you are so inclined. Um, you know, but just in, in the media world, you know, there's not,

there's obviously a lot of traction for Instagram accounts and, and TikTok and, you know, whatever else, but like, you know, Twitter is the land of links and quips. I mean, it's, it's, it's, indispensable to the media world. Brian Phillips is one of the few people I know who has semi-quit Twitter. Our pal, like I just looked and he hasn't tweeted since last spring. There's a lot of like, I'm not going to be on Twitter very much anymore. And then you see the person like a couple of days later. And I had a memorable one with a sports television person who says,

I don't do any of that Twitter stuff. And they had actually followed me on Twitter somewhat before we had that conversation where they were telling me they're not on Twitter, which is very, very funny. You see a lot of people who are who announced are taking a break from Twitter. People do take breaks. I mean, I'm kind of on a semi-permanent break, but people will kind of say, I got to get, I got to write my book or I just need to take a mental health break or whatever. And they take a week off or two weeks off or go on a vacation and say, I'm vacationing.

I'm just going to not check Twitter while I'm gone. But you also see a number of people who do that and sort of find an important reason to jump back on, taking a quick, taking a quick break from my break to let you know. Hiatus from my Twitter hiatus. Brian Curtis's piece is really worth reading or taking a quick break from my great break to launch into a 15-part Twitter thread about a subject that I feel uniquely positioned to discuss.

I don't really know how you unplug the bat phone and then still realize it's ringing, but people seem to do that quite a bit. You know, but Twitter's, but that's just part of Twitter. It's like it's compulsive. It's what people take those with Jack Doris and others do those dopamine.

fast to get away from, right? It's a, it's, it's, it's, why we log on. I don't mean that in an inherently positive way. And for journalists, I think it's really rewired our minds. I mean, you and I are not heavy users of the medium at all, but there are moments when you see a news story, you see something happen. And you're like, I have, I have the thought on this, right? I have the take on this. I have the joke on this. I can, I, and you just, and I'm just racing around, where's my phone? Because I have to do this. And again, your mileage may vary. There are certain people who are like, I've got a 19 part series I'd like to share on this. Or I, I am going to tweet millions of times today. But even for people like us, who I think fancy ourselves is not being on Twitter all the

the time, it has rewired our brains to a certain extent. It really has. And by the way, the hiatus thing. the people that are on hiatus, do they not do the kind of shame scroll through Twitter when they're lying in bed trying to go to sleep? Have they turned that off to? I know they may not be tweeting, but are they not just going like, you know, just killing the 45 minutes right before you go to sleep on Twitter? I couldn't answer for each and every one of those people. I mean, I guess if you're spending a ton of your life tweeting, I can understand the call

to quit, you know, or to take a fake. from that, but it kind of seems to me that you're not really logging off unless you're actually logging off. The York Times did a rundown of the Trump Dorsey or Trump Dorsey Lieutenant while Dorsey was on a private island adventures. If you remember, Trump's tweets were for a time labeled misinformation. So the president of the United States was tweeting something, making some kind of statement, and Twitter was coming on saying the president.

is not telling the truth. This is not real. Then we were upgraded to Trump getting kicked off Twitter after January 6th. That then launched this whole or sort of put in overdrive, this whole effort to have conservative Twitter, like Parlor, which I saw referenced a couple of times on Twitter of all places today. And did you see this? Conservatives are now sort of semi-praising Dorsey and now being mad on Twitter

about his successor Paragag Agarwal partly because of one of his old tweets? What do they say? Well, to the first part of your question, yes. I have noticed immediate, you know, overwhelming, not overwhelming in the sense of like really vocally, but widespread concern about what Twitter will be post Jack Dorsey in the conservative parts of Twitter, yes.

Yeah, it's just a story. And again, I was just reading this before we got on today. it's kind of an amazing Twitter story. So first of all, it's an old tweet resurfaced something you and I've seen happen a million times. And the particular tweet was not Parag Agrawal's thoughts. It was him quoting a daily show segment he had just seen. But now it can be pulled out of Twitter time, taken out of context, or removed from context,

whatever you want to say it, used against. tip. This is the CEO of Twitter. This is incredible. I mean, this is like Julia Alexander tweeted. The new CEO of Twitter will unfortunately spend today seeing how awful Twitter can be. Yeah, I mean, it's, uh, somehow I don't think he's going to mind

too much. But I, but yeah, I mean, it's, uh, Twitter's a, it's a interesting political space. And I think that's part of why it's hard to define and also why it's hard to wrap our heads around, wrap our, you know, hands around, but also just why it's sort of important to the way we live now. Twitter is one of the few spaces where everybody feels criminally underserved, right? I mean, and in some ways, it's a sort of microcosm of our culture because of that, right?

Like, everybody's, like, there's a lot of, no matter where you are politically, you sort of feel a grievance towards the status quo, and everybody is, that's how people relate to Twitter a lot of the time. So let's count the ways you feel underserved. You're mad because you feel misinformation or the other side's point of view is getting more of an airing on Twitter than it should. That goes both ways.

How about the recent one where you feel that your follower count went down? Twitter is taking away too many of your followers? I don't think that's recent. I mean, I don't know if there's been a recent tournament, but that's been going on since I feel like the earliest days of Twitter. And for me, it was at least especially in the early days, you were always telling on yourself, right?

You're always just like, I just lost 5,000 followers overnight. There's something wrong with Twitter, and it was, you know, and it turned out very quickly that it was like, oh, no, everybody was getting their fake followers taken away. Like all the bots, the bots were just being eliminated. And, you know, like I said, everybody's telling on themselves. So I just learned that I don't even pay attention. And if followers disappear, I like to not know.

And if I did, I certainly would not be whining about it in front of everybody who might be able to know, tell me that it's just Russian eggs that are following me. breaking my Twitter hiatus to say that I've just lost 5,000 Twitter followers. But I wasn't counting. Two more things for you. And then we'll move on here. The New York Times.

And again, these people under amazing pressure to do work, David, on deadline that you and I don't have to do in quite the same way. But I love the newspaper terms you use when somebody like Jack Dorsey steps down. If we were on a ringer podcast, you'd just be like, this is a big effing deal, folks. This is a big effing deal, but can't write that in the New York Times. So I appreciated the term significant shift, which I mentioned earlier. And also here's another great one, critical changing of the guard. Oh, that's great.

A critical changing of the guard at Twitter. David, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. See, they pull you back in where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send nominees to at the, the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

I would like to put here an honorary nomination to any joke about what Jack Dorsey is doing next, like becoming the new head football coach of the University of Oklahoma or LSU. Right. Or who is replacing him. I saw Peppa Pig among others. Not sure why that was even a joke. We would have also accepted even the CEO of Twitter is quitting Twitter.

Thanks to Jan. combo piano and Michael Avery for those. A story here from the AP, David, NASA, has launched a spacecraft on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. I would simply send an oil drilling crew featuring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.

Thanks to our friend Chad Orzel for that one. And this week's runaway winner off another story from the AP, quoting here, a jury found white nationalist leaders liable for $25 million in damages for the violent 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. Those white nationalist leaders, David, are going to have to pay $25 million. It was an overword Twitter joke to call the white nationalist leaders a very fined people. Oh, that's a good overworked. Trump said, yeah.

Thanks to Matt Thornton. If you properly made fun of Trump's words, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, time for the notebook, David. And I don't know about you, but I think it was Saturday morning. I'm lying in bed. I'm telling myself, don't read Twitter, Brian. Just get up and go about your day.

Do some work. Don't get sucked into this thing. But I read Twitter. I read a tweet from our friend Dan Diamond, and it led me to a Washington Post story about the coronavirus. Right. Yeah.

Specifically, it is the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Omicron David is not the new transformer who's going to team up with Megatron to take over the planet. This is the deadly variant of the coronavirus. But how deadly? is the question. Right. We don't know the answer to that yet.

And so I don't have a ton to say here other than should we put down a marker at this moment where you have lots of journalists doing fantastic work to try to help us understand what this variant is. But the answer is we don't know everything about it right now. Right. So it becomes this whole. exercise in how do we report on it without scaring the crap out of everybody or the opposite problem underselling what's going to happen here? Yes, that is the question. I mean,

there's also, I mean, weaving in and out of that is the sort of lessons learned from reporting on the Delta variant. I mean, and just, you know, COVID-19 in general. It's been a very interesting thing to watch. I feel like I was sort of dimly aware of the Omicron variant for several days before I mentioned it out loud to my wife and she hadn't seen it yet. And then I realized I was like, I must have just seen an article that, you know,

speculative article and internalized it in a weird way because it really hadn't caught on to that extent. Now it has, obviously. You talk about this weekend. I mean, I think in the past, over the past year and a half, I might have done the most self-awarely, you know, unsafe thing. I've done since the beginning of COVID-19, which is to take, to go to the mall on Saturday

because I wanted to go before the, you know, before they got shut down again, which is exactly how shit gets spread and I know it, but, you know, whatever. My baby got a picture with Santa Claus. But yeah, I mean, it's... This is going to be marked, by the way, you know, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for future historians, right? But I do, but I think that that sort of, and I'll be fully forthright about it,

because I do feel like that's sort of the way that we're addressing these things. I mean, on the one hand, I feel like everybody has a better grasp on the sort of bare minimum, right? And that doesn't mean that everybody is doing what they should be doing, but I feel like on some level,

the fear factor has a lower floor. Is that the right way to say? it because we all know that like if you wash your hands and wear a mask and be somewhat self-aware or self-conscious, then you can do a lot to avoid, you know, a lot of the problems that'll pop up. Also, there's a lot of, obviously a lot of people are vaccinated, including people down to five years of age, which is fantastic. Let's get the rest of everybody vaccinated soon who want to do it. even if they don't, maybe. But yeah, I mean, we understand that there's, I mean,

we have a kind of a better grasp of like the low-level risk or the risk of transmission. We don't really know to get back to the original point and what the degree of this new variant is going to be, how dangerous it is compared to the original and obviously into the Delta variant. But I think that we saw enough tragedy through the Delta variant to make,

this a serious conversation, you know, make this like something to really be worried about. And you saw that through, well, I mean, we haven't seen this sort of like uncertainty at the highest levels of government. I think since the various early days of COVID, the very earliest days of COVID-19, right? We're like at the exact same moment that Tony Fauci saying, we shouldn't have a travel ban, we, you know, Biden announces a travel ban. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's these sorts of, those sorts of like, you know, cross wires are going to be a part of, sort of situation like this, but that was a pretty extreme example.

But I think that, again, to bring it back full circle, we know how bad it can be, and so we have a frame of reference to the previous stuff. I mean, it could always be worse, but I think it's not just the actual effects of the disease. And I'm sorry, this is a long-winded way of getting here, but it's the, it's the, it's not just I know what the Delta variant was like that we're dealing with.

It's, I know what a, what a shelter-room place Christmas is like. And that's what's on the horizon. And so I think that there's a lot of sort of, you know, emotional baggage that comes with any of this, but particularly this time of year. I know what a shelter in place Christmas is like. And I know, I know, you know, what hope that we can resume something like normal life at some time in the near future. I know what that disappearing again looks like, right? Every subsequent, every subsequent bit of, you know, every subsequent bit of bad news or potential bad news is worse, just because it's farther down the line.

So David Leonhardt, in his very helpful New York Times morning newsletter, talks about this today. It's actually talks about how there's two questions with the new variant, whether the variant leads to faster transmission of the COVID virus and whether it causes more severe illness among infected people. Those are actually separate things, right? More contagious, more severe illness. And he breaks it apart and talks about,

how, in fact, with the Alpha and Delta variants, they were more contagious. But the second part of it was, as far as we know, the second part, he says, has largely not been born out. With both Alpha and Delta, the percentage of COVID cases that led to hospitalization or death held fairly steady. He says also, unfortunately, Omicron seems likely to be more contagious than Delta, including among vaccinated people. Fortunately, the evidence so far does not indicate that Omicron is causing more severe illness again. That's very, very early evidence. But you're pulling those things apart. Also like this, our friend Charlie Worsall and his newly rebranded, his newly relocated newsletter in the Atlantic says this. So here we are stuck in a super

weird moment where we know a thing is happening, but we don't know exactly what that thing is. we're living in an information vacuum. It's a bit like hearing news of a tropical depression out on the ocean that has all the makings of turning into a vicious landbound hurricane. The conditions are right for that eventuality, but even advanced modeling can only tell us so much in the early days. Ultimately, we have to wait for nature. And he talks about how tough it is for public health officials,

and I'd say journalists are probably in this same boat too. There are very few good ways for most of us to engage. engage during these kinds of information vacuum events. After a good 19 months of this news, I'll admit to feeling frustrated as health and science professionals shared genuinely whirring information while in the same breath, preaching calm and patience. I feel for them, as most are trying to thread an impossible needle, prepare people for potentially terrible news while also conveying uncertainty.

The tropical depression part, I think, was dead on, right? Because, I mean, how many times we have a really terrible hurricane or tropical storm doing lots of damage? And, you know, there will be some sort of snarky people seeing the people who, you know, all the tragedy that unfolds and say, well, we knew this was coming. Why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take cover? Why didn't you get out of the state? Why didn't you, whatever? And it's because, yeah, it's, it's, it's too vague.

It's just too uncertain. It's the information vacuum. I know what this could be, but that doesn't have, you know, the hypothetical doesn't have any real bearing on my life, you know. And that is the sort of way that we're all sort of, or a lot of us, I think, are relating to what's going on right now. A couple more for you before we get out of here today. This is from listener Jason McAllister, who I believe was watching a lot of football over Thanksgiving. I don't know who else to complain to. So the press box perhaps can address this.

any freshmen playing in a big college football game is talented, and we don't need that adjective every time a freshman is mentioned. So true, you're listening to a college football game, the talented freshman so-and-so. Yeah. You can let us know when there's an exception, right? You can be like, that's freshman receiver Brian Curtis. His dad is good friends with the coach.

Like, you know, let us know when it's not talent that's brought him there. It's kind of like saying the huge offensive tackle or right, the big offensive lineman. He's large. Yeah. If it was a tiny offensive lineman, that would be news. Anyway, I thought that was really good. Our friend Chris Olson, David, has some media piss test news. This is where we catalog how many times things out in America are on steroids or I guess out in the world too.

Chris Olson has a few examples here to combat the new Omicron variant. Brits are embarking on a vaccine boost. rollout on steroids. He also has an artificial... No, you can't do a vaccine booster. I understand it's rollout on steroids, but it's one word away from a vaccine booster on steroids, which presumably has a very specific meaning

outside of the... Yeah. If you were actually injecting something into people... You should not be just messing around with steroids references. Yeah, we perhaps need a new metaphor on there. Yeah. A vaccine booster rollout on steroids.

You wouldn't hold up a needle like a cartoon needle and be just like, this is the heroin of vaccines. You're going to love it. You know, no one's going to take that. Also from Chris, this artificial intelligence digital assistant who is Alexa on steroids. So we had regular Alexa and now we have Alexa on steroids. And finally, a new healthy food oriented grocery store is. is a Whole Foods on steroids. I'm so perplexed.

Whole Foods is not healthy enough. I mean, I guess there's always extremes. Right. And putting it on steroids is kind of what Whole Foods doesn't want. We're not injecting things into the produce and into the meat. Just again, just work a little harder on the metaphors, everybody. Media Piss test. Stephen Sondheim, David,

passed away over Thanksgiving. I saw this tweet from the New York Times is Michael Paulson. Last Sunday, I went to Connecticut to interview Stephen Sondheim at his country house. It turned out to be his last major interview. Now, I'm interested to read this story. Did we know it needed to be

his last major interview and also major is an interesting word in there? So there were more interviews, I guess? Is that the idea? Yeah. Minor interviews. The podcast count as major or minor. Does it depend on the length of the interview?

If you do a quick 10-minute hit. So I'm just wondering how you really define such things. I don't really have a point here, but I don't know why that just stuck out to me. Steven Sondheim's an interesting one. I mean, I feel like we could read a bunch of these and do and do the whole episode on just how he's been covered. He kind of hits right at that netherworld between... the icons of our, of, you know, earlier generations and, like, you know, people that our generation is sort of knows by name and reputation, but not intimately, you know? I mean, he's had a big

place in our generation's life for someone that, like, I don't, I didn't know what he looked like until the other day, right? Um, but he's not, I don't know. It's, it's, you know, he's an icon, but he's like, he's like the sort of person who like, he's an, he's an incredibly important person but no one's claiming that they're the target for Stephen Sondheim's importance. I guess there are. There's lots of Sondheim fans out there.

I don't know. There were more than I thought. Yeah. Not more Sondheim fans I thought because he's... Fans of his songs. The people that were just very, very moved over the weekend.

I would just say the Twitter outpouring was even bigger than I imagine. Mm-hmm. Among all ages. It was pretty incredible. David, you're interested in all things Charlotte, North Carolina.

Oh, yeah. Well, our friend Lake Kelling sent over the sports page front from today's Charlotte Observer after Cam Newton and the Panthers lost the game. And the headline was camped compete. Not can't compete. Camt compete. First of all, this is absolutely great. Love it to death. But I think that I'm really hung up on just a sort of.

like the newsroom, like, dicta when it comes to this sort of thing. It seems like if you're going to be able, and I've seen plenty of Cam Newton, Charlotte Observer, from, you know, headlines in my life. I don't, I feel like I should know the answer to this. But it's like if you're going to let Cam, like if you're going to let Can, or for that reason, Kant or whatever else,

be an acceptable headline pun for Cam, or Cam to, I don't even know how to line up that sentence. but if you're allowed to do this, it's sort of beggars belief that there would ever be a headline that didn't use Cam as in place of can or can't, right? Right. Camped count him out.

Yeah. Can't buy me love. Camped keep him down, you know? Yeah. Camp to keep him on the bench. Yeah. I think I cam, I think I cam, you know, whatever. There's lots of, you could,

there's like an endless supply of these things. That's a good one. Yeah, I don't, do you think the, The Charlotte Observer says, okay, we've done our one a year. Maybe so. Maybe anything with a camped is just you get one. When he resigned with the team, that noise you heard was not all of the Panthers fans in Charlotte, North Carolina, rejoicing in his homecoming. It was just the Charlotte Observer newsroom that was just like, we get one more pun out of this.

I'd like to headline this segment, notes on camped. All right. Speaking of which, it's time for David Schuemaker guesses, the strange. pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about a new memoir from Will Smith was the fresh prince of Bell Letra. Pretty amazing. It sounds better this week than it did last week when I was trying in vain to figure it up. I feel that's often the case. Yeah. They age like a fine wine. Today's headline comes from our friend Jason McGinsey, David. It's from the economist.

It's an article about these pandemic shortages we're all dealing with. specifically in this case at IKEA. The subhead is why IKEA shelves are bare. I'm going to spot you a couple of words here. Shoe rack. Shoe rack. What was the economist's strain pun headline? I can't find a shoe rack, but I want one.

I really want one. I am searching for that shoe rack. for shoe waiting for you're on the right track a movie title you know looking I want it I am

I am plaintively plaintively searching for that shoe rack waiting for maybe Madonna and I are doing it together sorry what did Madonna do desperately seeking shoe rack

desperately seeking seeking shoe rack. Oh my gosh. That's terrible. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis production. Magic by Erica Cervantes. Got another Friday press box coming up this Friday.

And Shoemaker and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.