The Press Box - Last Dance Wrap-up, Ronan Farrow and Ben Smith, and Lawrence Wright on Fact and Fiction

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

As The Last Dance came to an end this weekend, Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss its impact and what this means for ESPN (1:30). They then break down the Ronan Farrow and Ben Smith situation and give their thoughts (27:58). They are then joined by journalist and writer Lawrence Wright to discuss his new book The End of October and how it relates to our current pandemic (39:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker guesses the strained-pun headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. The Ringer is launching a new podcast from the guys who brought you a Cespitous family barbecue called Baseball Barbecue. Hosted by Jake Mintz and Jordan Schusterman, they're bringing you the good, the bad, and the utterly bizarre corners of the baseball world and everything that makes it special. Throughout the off season, they'll dive into the rabbit hole on some of their favorite fascinations, from the home run derby to baseball brawls and much more. Once the season returns, they'll break down the latest MLB news and developments. You can subscribe to baseball barbecue on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. This is a press box.

And on today's agenda, David, we will touch on a media matchup for our times, Ben Smith of the New York Times, challenging the reporting of the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow. And speaking of the New Yorker, our Monday interview is with the great Lawrence Wright, who has just published a novel about a worldwide pandemic. Where does that sound familiar? Why did a nonfiction master turn to fiction? Plus, David guesses the strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But David, let's start with some final thoughts on ESPN's Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, which stopped its amazing five-week run as a content machine on Sunday night. The first question, what are we, meaning the collective sports media going to talk about now

that we don't have two new hours in the last dance to satisfy us every Sunday night. It's a really good question. This is of all of the kind of monocultural high points of the coronavirus period. This was the one that we definitely saw coming. I mean, obviously it was announced

that they were rushing it out post, I mean, following the, you know, beginning of the quarantines and whatnot. But as soon as they announced it was like a heavyweight championship fight, right? Like the entire world it felt like was looking forward to this thing happening. You knew the date. You knew what the result was going to be.

Even if not, you didn't know who was going to win. You knew exactly what kind of attention it would get and how we would respond with what tones and gravity in our voices. It doesn't seem like there's anything on the agenda that could possibly fill up, take up this much oxygen. Although there will be something. I just don't know what, you know, nothing's really been announced except like, you know, we've got the return of UFC.

That just happened. Didn't seem like that's going to take its place. I'm not exactly sure. Yeah, NASCAR, yeah. I mean, there's, you know, sports are going to start coming back. I mean, we're already talking about the NBA. I honestly think the biggest game in town is the ongoing conversation that we had last week about how basketball and football are going to make it happen.

One funny thing I noticed last night at 11 o'clock Eastern when the 10th episode ended was people thanking ESPN. And these are journalists, not just Michael, Jordan basketball fans. People thanking ESPN for showing us this. I mean, ESPN is in a place in the sports universe and has been for a decade, two decades now where it's kind of like the New York Times where people talk about it, usually when they're throwing bricks at it. Yeah.

And talking about how much it sucks or Monday night football sucks or whatever it is. And on a smaller note, I just, I don't know that people are going to be as happy with ESPN as they are right now for showing this thing during the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, that's really perceptive. We've talked about ESPN on this podcast, probably more than anything, absent our president.

And I don't remember a positive conversation or a conversation that was based in somebody's positive, you know, like an upbeat opinion about the network. You know how great ESPN is? Let us discuss. Like, that hasn't happened. Yeah, well, we probably, yeah, they probably would have, you know, yank this off if we'd been doing that kind of thing just because it would be listening. But we just, we do need like a life affirming podcast on the network. We should look into that. Anyway, I do think that there's, you're, you're absolutely right. This is a huge moment for ESPN. And, you know, absent some incredible change of heart that by the entire universe at the same time coming out of this thing, this might be like the last moment of where we're just. just all like just hugging each other and and thanking a media company for putting something out

at exactly the right time. But I know that these media companies, I mean, I've heard stories from other sources, you know, places like Netflix that, you know, one year, somebody will be pitching something and they'll just say, what our audience really wants is eight to ten episode series. And then they'll, you know, a year later they go in and go in the same data. Like, what our audience really wants is no more than four episodes. Four is the absolute most, you know, And I wonder how much that sort of thinking, and certainly the coronavirus is a little bit like of an, you know, it exists outside of the algorithm

or at least it did at the beginning. But I wonder how much of how much kind of big think like that went into deciding this was going to be the link that it was to come out when it was. It did sort of seem at the beginning like it was more expansive than it was maybe initially envisioned as being. But you got to the end and you're seeing all this other, all these other shows, all this other stuff

that are squeezing out of it. And you're like, I wonder if they had known how big it was going to be if this wouldn't have just been 30 episodes, you know, if they wouldn't, I mean, instead of, instead of the art, instead of the art, instead of the art, instead of the format, jumping around timelines and stuff, why not just put it, just maximize it, put it in as many, you have it to be, last as many minutes as possible during this time, you know? You're right. And who tunes out, right, at this point, you know? Yeah. And by the way, I had doubts about 10. You know, I think, I think when this started, you and I were kind of saying, like,

Who's going to be here in episode eight? You know, it's going to start really strong. Everybody's going to be locked in. But by, you know, by episode eight, are people really going to hang with this thing, knowing how this story ends? And they really did. A couple takes I want to hit you with.

This one is from our old pal, Zach Lowe, made a really good point, I thought, on his ESPN podcast about Michael Jordan's self-marketing when it comes to the last dance. Listen to this. Speaking of which, I think Michael, before the release of the documentary, coming out and saying, in a rare public statement saying,

I think some people are going to come away from this documentary not liking me as much. I think that was an ingenious bit of marketing by Michael. Because it primed audiences to expect salacious behind-the-scenes stuff where what really is the case is, everybody who cares already knows that Michael gambled a lot, already knows that he punched Will Purdue and he punched Steve, and he was very hard on his teammates. And that has all been melded into the image of this is how you get Michael Jordan.

This is how you get the greatest basketball player and the greatest winner in the history of the sport. Because he is like this, because he is more competitive than anyone else can relate to. It's all the gambling, the harshness to his teammates, all of this stuff that Michael sort of prime the audience is, oh, you're not going to like this. It's already been all blended together in the, image of what he is and it's an image that I think people like. So I think him coming out and saying that was a really smart bit of marketing and and nothing more because I think everybody, it's all part of Michael. This is something that I was wondering the entire way through, which is

at what point does, there's, I guess there's, there's two impulses here that I can't quite figure out where they meet. One is anybody as wealthy and successful and wealthy and wealthy as Michael Jordan is probably largely oblivious to what to the negative things people say about him. Right? And so that, I mean, no, no, most people who, most people who have reached that level of life are probably, well, no, okay, okay. But I do think there's an element to Michael Jordan himself, and especially, and if we're

going to go in broad strokes, that whole competitiveness where he probably, the whole, the, the locker room bulletin board aspect of his personality, where he wants to know exactly what shit people are talking about him because that's what's going to motivate him to get out of bed tomorrow. And I wonder if he said people aren't going to like what they hear because he's maybe a little bit oblivious to the fact that people know a lot about him and know that, you know, the dirty details and so much as they were conveyed in this documentary at all. And I wonder how much is, again, is him just being really wily and stirring the pot like Zach was, you know, implying. He's a good self-marketer. So I think Zach is right on some level. I also,

think he hasn't talked a lot. And, you know, some of this stuff was fairly raw the way he's talking about competitors or his own teammates even at times. So maybe there was some genuine worry of people who know me from Nike commercials mostly are kind of like now highlights that run once in a while on TV will think of me differently. Here, here's what amazes me about the Michael Jordan is an asshole thing. Whenever there is a great team or a great dynasty or great player.

what was their flaw in the moment gets subsumed into the legend within like 10 or 20 years? We saw this happen with the 1990s Dallas Cowboys straight up. I once mentioned this to Michael Irvin, who is the Michael of my life. And I said, you know, back in the 90s,

everybody said about the Cowboys, well, they're a great team, but they party like crazy. And they have all this off the field junk. later the legend became oh the cowboys were a great team and they partied off the field right that was that just became part of why people liked the cowboys in retrospect it's the same thing with michael jordan people say he's a great player and he was an asshole right these two things him being an asshole and him being great player were inextricable and that has become part of the michael jordan legend to me just as much as

anything else. Well, I mean, I think it's interesting because there are a lot of people who are learning about Michael Jordan for the first time. I mean, that's what we keep hearing about this, right? We hear about players, today's players learning some of this stuff for the first time. And I think to a lot of people, yeah, the competitiveness is baked in. But even though today's generation, the youngest viewers of this or whatever you want to say, didn't grow up in a world with Be Like Mike commercials, I think to some people, whether or not

the competitiveness, the gambling is baked in, I certainly don't think it takes center stage. I feel like Michael Jordan, in so much as people, don't even know all that much about him now as sort of on this sort of godly plateau that even the America's team Dallas Cowboys have not reached, you know, or never reached. And I think that it's easy to kind of under,

it's easy to underplay in your own mind, something like the gambling or the punching the teammates or whatever, you think, how could that be, that couldn't, that couldn't be someone of Michael Jordan's stature doing that. But that's a long way of saying, I don't know. I mean, it's true that it's baked in. When you and I talk about Michael Jordan, all of that shit comes pre-packaged together.

And it makes a lot of narrative sense pre-packaged together. And this is, by the way, one of the things I loved about the whole last dance experience over the last month is all the takes we had in the 90s, those of us who were around for the regular version of all these events, everybody just, everybody just had again. Everybody's like, you know, Scotty Pippin was also a great player. You know, he was also one of the, but yeah, I do remember that from 1993 or Michael Jordan's, you know, being an asshole is inextricable from what drove Michael Jordan to be the best player of all time. Yes, I do remember that from 1991. But like this, so one of one thing that this

dog does, it's a license just to kind of have all those takes and explore them all again, don't you think? It's really interesting. And I, I keep thinking about this because I would love for somebody to go and do like a breakdown of the take ecosystem in 1995, right? And which is to say not the stuff that necessarily appears in the paper, although there's some of that. But the way that there's like, yeah, the sports calmness affect your uncle who affects the guy sitting next to him at the bar, you know, I mean, it's because there wasn't, there weren't the big, you know, first take type shows that were sort of leading to take argument.

There wasn't Twitter that was going out there to the world, you know, with like retweets and everything else. But I bet the ecosystem is weirdly very similar to what we have today, just maybe a little bit of a smaller scale version. But it does end up the same. And that's what's really incredible, is that, like, I'm not, none of the facts of this documentary, or let's say very few of the facts were novel to me, right?

I mean, this is all stuff that you and I have heard before. Mm-hmm. I'm sure that in some ways the storytelling, be it from the director side, Michael Jordan side, anybody, ESPN side, is influenced by the so-called takes that you and I grew up with. But it's interesting just on its own that like the facts weren't going to change, but that all this time has passed and yet the takes are the same, right? That the responses to the facts are the same as they were then.

And it feels and it felt novel. It felt interesting at the time. It felt interesting in 1994 to say, Scotty Pippin actually might be one of the best five players in the league. And even if you'd heard it, it felt good to say it, right? Even if you read that in the paper, it felt good to say to your friend. And now it feels just as good to say this fresh, even though the facts never changed over the intervening period. Totally.

And by the way, that is one of the tricks is probably too strong a word, but one of the things about doing sports documentaries about things that are kind of vintage like this is just running those takes again. you know, there's so many, whenever there's been like a 30 for 30 that I've, that I lived at the time. Like I didn't live Bo Jackson in that intimacy at the time, but I lived like the SMU scandal. I'm amazed at how it's just like that stuff that was so at your fingers has just this totally new life when you repeat it, right? It's not like a historian looking back to this. I'm going to reinterpret Michael Jordan for a new generation. I'm going to, I'm going to have a totally, it's basically just bringing that stuff out and seeing how it holds up. again, which is what you're saying, I think, you know, and allowing people to enjoy it a second time, right? Live to take again for the first time. Listen, I mean, there is no, like, you know,

making people, giving people something that they remember even dimly in a beautiful package, retelling it for the history books and for generations to come is a beautiful endeavor. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to do. There's not, you don't, there's no implicit slight in talking about that. There's a lot of information in this. And listen, we downplay, I think everybody talking about this documentary, downplays the visual, which is weird because in a documentary form, that's a huge percentage of what you're dealing with, right? If this were just a book stating the facts, it would be reasonable in the New York Times Review to be like, well, not a lot of new information here, but it was really well written, right? But like, the visual component of this is really

significant. And the fact that they were the first people to show this footage, that there was just sitting in the library for so long, and we can talk about how they got it and whatever else, who had to sign off on it. But that's like uncovering the Dead Sea Scrolls. You know, I mean, there's a huge component of newness to this, regardless of whether or not the takes or the backstory is new. And that is something that'll, I mean, that's really significant. This documentary is done. It was also, the package start to finish was really, really well done to cover the space and time that they did in the kind of helter-skelter storytelling style they used and have it still all sort of make a thematic sense. I thought it was really, really impressive. Speaking to takes, here's one I saw

about The Last Dance on Twitter. I am enjoying every minute, every second of this documentary. This stuff is incredibly fun. I'm getting my own pieces out of this. You're a journalist. I'm loving this. but there are moments in this documentary when I feel the filmmakers are giving Michael Jordan the last word. Yeah. And kind of prioritizing MJ's viewpoint over something like truth, which might be a little messier. Here's the way I square this. The way to think of the last dance is as Michael Jordan's memoirs. That's how I think of this.

Michael Jordan has not written a proper sports memoir and he may never do one. but if you've ever read those books, the texture of them is very, very similar to the last dance. Yeah. In the sense that somebody of Michael Jordan's stature would partner up with a great writer or great filmmaker in this case,

that a lot of it would be about settling old scores with Isaiah Thomas, right, with Brian Russell in those most recent episodes with Gary Payton, that it would be more about Michael Jordan's perspective than anything else, right? that would be the energizing part of it and it would also be the limiting part of it because we weren't going to go too far beyond what Michael Jordan thought of a particular moment

that elements like gambling and his father's murder would be addressed. Michael Jordan would absolutely address those kind of things in a memoir. And that the overwhelming voice of the documentary would be Michael's own voice, right? Because one of the striking things about this, they interviewed everybody. I don't think I'm being too harsh here when I say, I don't remember a ton of the material, any quotes that were told, or let's say that many quotes

that were so penetrating from people other than Michael Jordan. This was Michael's story, right? And he, his voice, he was given the big quotes here. So to me, that's how I think of this. Michael Jordan's memoir. What do you make of that?

I'm trying to think if there's any other examples. I mean, the non, setting aside for a moment, the players, the coaches, the people that are actually actively involved in the NBA, You know, if we're just talking about journalists and writers and stuff like that, they were basically, I mean, part of their role was sort of teeing up the takes, teeing up the, you know, playing segue, you know, I mean, being human segues from one thing to another. And that's documentary's work. I mean, I don't think there's, I mean, that's, you know, but there, but there wasn't a lot of like, there were no holy shit moments in anything that David Aldridge said, although David Aldridge was incredibly incisive at times. then you go to the other side of it though and it's like well

Phil Jackson was really really close you know tight-lipped the whole way through Scottie Scottie Pippen strikingly so yes Pippin was well I mean without getting too deep into the pun very defensive it felt like it seemed like he was spending the whole time he spent the whole time sort of like prepping for his you know defensive matchup against the time he sat out three quarters of it or two turns of a season you know and he was and the rest of it was all just sort of like he was really, it felt like he was just sort of

apprehensive that if he said too much then they would use that opportunity to get him to say some shit, you know? And so he was just very kind of, you know, tight-lipped. There were some interesting moments from Horace Grant, from BJ Armstrong, from Steve Kerr, but they were just sort of, you know,

they were fleeting. They weren't huge characters in the show. And then obviously, like, Jerry Krause wasn't there. He would have been a really interesting interview, but, you know, he's not around to be interviewed. And Reinsdorf was, Reinsdorf was impressively frank at times, but again, there was nothing revelatory

that came out of his mouth, which is, you know, I'm just going to the checklist here. There's a million voices I left out, but you're right. And Michael Jordan was the reason why we were there, you know? And certainly he had a huge hand, editorial hand in deciding what the final cut was, but it felt like we were getting,

what even the, you know, relatively little that you got out of him. was more than you probably could have expected. You know, maybe I'm biased by the fact that he was wearing shorts and a t-shirt for half the interview. So you're just sort of like, you're just like, well, you're not going to show up and bullshit. I mean, if you're going to bullshit, you're going to wear a suit, right? But it's, but it did feel like he was kind of off, you know, he was, he had his guard down,

which is, you know, impressive. One more thing before we leave this topic is the question of what we think about Michael Jordan after watching this or how this change. our opinion of him. Joel Anderson's got a whole piece about this at Slate. I wanted to leave, tee you up with this with a really fun piece of audio from Dan Patrick. ESPN's Dan Patrick, formerly of ESPN. He said this on Chicago's McNeil and Parkins radio show. Patrick was a guy who went to interview Michael Jordan after he won the title. That was one of the things he loved to do. And here he's talking about interviewing MJ after the Bulls had won what turned out to be their last championship in 1998. Audio is a little scratchy,

but listen to this. He's sitting off on my right, and he's ready to come on right after that. And that's when we went to commercial break. We had already gotten done. I said, you know, Michael, thank you. Let's come back to the Sports Center. And he got up, and he's two feet in front of me. And I said, it's this shame, shame you're retiring.

And that's when he turned around. He goes, why? I said, man, I'd like a piece of you. And he goes, stand up. I go, I got my suit and tie on. We're in commercial break. I got to come back interview, Phil. Stand up.

I stand up. How the bleep would you guard? And that's when I put my forearm out like they used to where they would guard you with their forearm and their side. And he goes, I would bleak the bleep deep bleep out of you. And he walked out the door. He just turned and walked out the door. And I went and sat down and Phil goes, do you see what I dealt with? And I went, oh, my God.

And then like 30 seconds later, and welcome back to Sports Center. here in Salt Lake is the I'm with me, I'm like going, oh my God, if people only saw that on camera, he had just won a title.

And he turned to me as if I was Isaiah Thomas. Like he was like, oh, you want a piece of me? And I was like, oh my gosh. Well, I mean,

you said it to the top. I mean, earlier on, the creative drive, the competitiveness, it's all inextricable from Michael Jordan. And that's,

at the end of the, the day, it's those sorts of memories, I think, will end up being maybe what we remember more than the content of the documentary. Certainly there were some questions that were answered, right? The, the flu game sort of redefined there at the end. The pizza game, yeah. And the pizza game. But yeah, I mean, I think that it was, I think there was a lot of sort of validation, especially for those of us that have paid a lot of attention to Michael Jordan over the years. And what I mean from that is kind of what Joel Anderson was writing about, that this is the Michael Jordan we expected. It was actually kind of a better version of Michael Jordan than the Michael Jordan we

expected. And I say, I think I said that in one of our first conversations about it. I wasn't expecting him to be like off as rocker. But for someone who's been so quiet, so, so, so relatively, you know, absent from the public eye for so long, he was really, really lucid. You know, I mean, like, we would make a lot of we, I say we, the very general we, the we in the Twitterverse, you know, gave Kobe Bryant a lot of shit in his post-playing career, good nature. for all the different endeavors he was doing, right? And people would say, well, you know, he's got such a good mind. He's got such a, he's so well-spoken.

He wants to do so many different things. You know, it's shocking that someone like Michael Jordan, who you, it's easy to forget how much he, I mean, how he was, he was everything as well, even off the court, and that he's been so reclusive, again, relatively speaking, that you almost forget who he was. But he is exactly who you thought he was. All right, David, let us 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 senior nominees to at the press box pod David a tweet that's sure to excite the film snobs among us director Michael Mann wants to make his heat prequel novel into a film

we just booked a theme week at the ringer I mean it's already it's already done it was an overwork Twitter joke to write, if this isn't called pre-heat, then what is the point of anything? David, did you happen to see the Defense Department official on Friday presenting Donald Trump with the official flag for Space Force? Yes, unfortunately. Very Star Trek looking flag given to Trump in the Oval. Trump's quote was, already from what I'm hearing and based on reports, we are now the leader in space,

which is really really a top 20 people are saying Donald Trump vote. Based on what I'm hearing, we are now the leader in space. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, plant that Space Force flag in Uranus, thanks to Marv P. Kind of cheap, but we'll accept it here. That's fine. And finally, David, a report from NBA insider Chris Haynes, the NBA will no longer use Spalding as its official game ball,

starting with the 21-22 season, it will only be using Wilson balls. It was an overwork Twitter joke to reference this clip from Castaway. Wilson, where are you? Castaway's kind of had a good run as a meme, don't you think? For a movie, I don't really hear people talk about as a movie all that much longer. Yeah, I was trying, I suggested watching that just the other day. separate. I had no idea that NBA was changing its ball provider. It popped up on one of the

whatever platform and I was like, oh, you know, maybe the kid, maybe the 11 year old will like that. And yeah, then my wife was just like, I refuse to watch that movie. Nothing happens in that movie. It's just like, oh, but the, and I realize what was going through my head was just like, oh, yeah, it's the memes. That's pretty much it. If you made us remember the pre-digital career of Robert Zemeckis, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. David, we're going to talk about Ben Smith and Ronan Farrow, but first, here's a trailer for the new podcast, Wind of Change, with host Patrick Radden-Keefe. Hi, I'm Patrick Radden-Keefe, a reporter at The New Yorker magazine. On my new podcast, Wind of Change, I investigate a rumor I haven't been

able to shake since I first heard it years ago. It came from someone inside the CIA, and the story was that the agency had written one of the best-selling rock songs of all time, a song that changed the world. So that was the tip that started me on this story and it only got crazier from there. Listen to Wind of Change, a new original series from Pineapple Street Studios, Crooked Media, and Spotify. All right, David, in the notebook, Dom, big story published Sunday night. I wonder if you and I were the only ones who were reading that story on our phones while watching the last dance. What a sad media nerd Venn diagram that is. It is uncomfortable how well you know me. All right. Ben Smith, newish,

media columnist at the New York Times, wrote a piece, the thesis of which is some aspects of his, that is, Ronan Farrow's work, made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn't at times fly a little too close to the sun. So you see what he's staking out here. Not everything Ronan Farrow writes is wrong. He specifically goes out of his way to say he's not a fabulous, but there are parts of this reporting, he says, that are worth pushing at. A couple of examples. In one of the, acts of sexual assault that Pharaoh reported on involving Harvey Weinstein, Smith questions the corroboration offered by a friend of the woman who Weinstein allegedly assaulted. Another example, in his book Catch and Kill, Pharaoh has a woman who says she was assaulted by Matt Lauer,

run away and tell a producer whom she was dating what had happened. Okay. Pharaoh Smith reports never called the producer to see if that was true. And the man when contacted says he doesn't remember that encounter happening. So the point Smith is making is not to exonerate Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer, but it's to say that Pharaoh in his reckoning is omitting or glossing over details to give his narratives a kind of smoothness that they might not otherwise have, right? He uses the example of sometimes when you read about this in newspapers, there are those really clunky graphs in the middle that said,

despite the efforts of the paper to corroborate this with friends and acquaintances, we couldn't do it or we could or the person we reached out to could remember this particular aspect, right? But not this particular aspect. What did you make of that piece? Man, this is a tough one. I'm sympathetic to, I'm sympathetic to the case. Right. And I don't, and I think that.

Ben Smith's case. Ben Smith's case. And I think that, I mean, and I think that flying too close to the sun is a, you know, is a very florid, very, you know, metaphorical, but understandable, accusation that is weirdly kind of more meaningful than a lot of the details that he, you know, meets out here. I don't know. I'm not going to take, I'm not going to take issue with any of the specific.

details, although it's worth noting that Michael O of the New Yorker has taken issue with a lot of the facts in this piece and tweeted about it. But I mean, went through it kind of line by line. But I guess I guess I just, I feel like I can't like my reaction of this is more of an emotional one than a factual one or than a fact-based one. Because I feel like on the one hand, the flying too close to the sun thing sounds a whole. whole lot like that what people say, what journalists will say about any successful journalist or like any journalist who got, any journalist who like, you know, wrote the book that

became a bestseller, you know? I mean, that's, that's just sort of the way that you talk about a certain style of writer that's often. Shadenfreude is the native language of every journalist. Yeah. He or she is successful. I can't wait till he or she takes a fall. That is, That is a universal language outside of the Spence Smith piece. Please, anyway, continue. And I think that that's right. And the other side is, and again, this is not an intellectual thing. I know that this is going to, you know, this is going to feel like acid on the skin of the journalistic ethicists out there.

But those paragraphs that he was like faulting Pharaoh for not including are probably the least read paragraphs in the entire newspaper, right? as soon as you start sort of like, like, you know, handway or explaining the, the flaws in the case, or, you know, giving the minor explanations of background sourcing and everything like that, I don't, it's important. Yes, it's important. Uh, I don't, I would almost, I mean, I guess, I, yeah, whatever. I, I grew up on, you know, in cold blood, you know, I didn't, I'm not trying to get too bogged down in the details here. So I'm sympathetic to the style, even if the accusations are correct, the Pharaoh style. But, you know, obviously there's more at stake here. And, you know, the purity of the piece, the rightness of the piece can certainly be called into question.

The entire, even though obviously there's none of the big issues are being questioned here, I guess the worry is that if a minor thing is wrong, it will throw the whole thing into question. I'm just not, I didn't come away from this Ben Smith piece feeling the need to light up any torches and get out the pitch forks. I don't know. I mean, am I taking it too lightly? Well, a couple of things. I think one is the point you're making, right, is the one that Ben is pushing on where he says, Right, yeah. It might be more fun. And again, if there is some part of everybody that wants to see Harvey Weinstein, I'm sure there is brought to justice, to read this in a smooth. more cinematic form than in, you know, a newspaper piece with those clunky paragraphs you're

talking about. But Ben saying that when you, when you go to that smoothness of style, you do leave out things that are important, that, you know, even those of us who would maybe rather read something in New Yorker style should probably know, right? You know, that's one thing. the other thing I think he's getting at, which is, which he goes, I think Smith goes out of his way to say is, I'm not saying that Harvey Weinstein is innocent. I'm not saying that Matt Lauer is innocent and all this stuff. We're just saying that when you have reporting like this, it is probably worse somebody, especially somebody smart like Ben Smith pushing at it, right? And seeing, you know, what, you know, what it's built on, what it's based on. Because, you know, if you're going to take all, if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to, if If you're going to take that victory lap and those book sales, you know, you're going to have to take some scrutiny too. I thought a weakness, if anything, of Smith's piece was that he tries to tie Pharaoh to what he calls resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump. The point being, I think that if you have a piece that essentially makes an accusation against a person who people perceive as an enemy, people are willing to sort of accept it and whatever. I don't really think you need a think piece attached to this kind of piece.

I think just the pushing on Pharaoh's reporting and challenging it at times. I think it's probably enough. I think that just sort of weakens it because it turns into a, and by the way, if you look at Twitter, the reaction to a piece like this is an absolute mess because it becomes all about the New York, it becomes about what abouting the New York Times and it was Pharaoh investigating the New York Times. And this is their preliminary first shot, which is not how the New York Times works. I'm pretty confident in saying. But those are my first two thoughts.

The other one, I'll steal this from Matt Iglesias on Twitter is there really is a different bar that you have to clear to get something in the New Yorker than to get something in a book. Oh, yeah. And a couple of these examples come out of catch and kill. In fact, the other one, Smith mentioned, which I forgot to mention a minute ago, is this idea that there was this NBC, Harvey Weinstein kind of thing to keep it out of the paper to keep it out of NBC where Ron and Farrow used to work. and that Harvey was threatening to expose Matt Lauer. It was an NBC star at the time, the pages inquired, etc., which he says Smith doesn't have nailed down. It is a good reminder that what you read in a book

has almost certainly not been subjected to the same kind of rigorous standards as something you would read in the New Yorker. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've talked about this before. You know, the book publishing fact-checking process is a lot less, demanding. And the New Yorkers is, you know, notoriously demanding,

notoriously precise. So, I mean, it does, it is a significant blurring of the lines to take his writing in the New Yorker and the writing of his book as one thing. Although, again, that sort of blurring of the lines

is sort of what he's accusing Ronan Farrow of, right, to sort of take two distinct things and smoothing it out. for the smoothing the edges for the public's consumption. But I think that he also does the reverse in this piece, which is that, I mean, I'm talking about Ben Smith, which is that he just so good, goes into such detail and with such a level of qualification

that so many times, that it's hard to really, like, draw a straight line through his accusations outside of the, you know, the deck at the top of the piece. And I think it's sort of, I mean, I think you're right. He does, it is healthy for him to be pushing back. But I do think, it's not as powerful a statement as it could have been.

And maybe that's because he was over-reliant on the norms that he's defending, but it wasn't, or maybe it's because he didn't have a lot there. I don't know, what do you think? Well, I think the bigger takeaway is this. Almost every piece of reporting that has ever been filed by anyone, even ones that we now consider in the, you know, pantheon of great scoops, there's a private debate about it within journalism. about how real it was, about whether every detail was nailed down.

Like, if you ask any journalist about any famous thing that they were contemporary to, they will call it into question. And I'm not saying that it's bullshit, but every fact of it. I remember Ben Bradley when there was that biography of him now several years ago, you know, they found papers where he was kind of wondering aloud about Woodward and Bernstein's reporting, which is obviously held up, right? And he's, and he's not saying, That was bullshit, but he's just wondering about parts of it, right?

And journalism isn't about 100% certainty. And with the Weinstein stuff, I think it'll, it sort of convinces all of us, man, these people went and got the story. Because guess what? They did. Right? They did. They really did get the story. But that doesn't mean there's not a debate amongst their peers at their publications,

outside their publications about various aspects of it. And I think what Smith is bringing. and he's a former editor of BuzzFeed, so it was his job to edit stories like this. But what he's doing is kind of bringing that into light. And again, I think it's a little bit hard for non-journalists to kind of even understand that process

because it's either, they see this as either Ronan Farrow is right or Ronan Farrow was wrong, right? I see lots of right-wing people saying, aha, Ronan Farrow, aha, they got him, you know? That's not, that's obvious not the case. That's also not what Ben Smith is saying. But there are shadings to this stuff in journal

journalism, even with great scoops and great pieces like that. Anyway, that's my takeaway. We reserve the right to say more about this as we learn more. David, we're doing a Monday interview here on the press box. And this week's is a big one. New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright. People know him from his Scientology book going clear from the looming tower. His book about Al Qaeda and 9-11.

If you're like David and I, that is a huge journalism nerd, you can take a deep cut and go with saints and sinners, his collection about religious figures or his memoir in the new world. Last summer, in what must be considered a Ruthian called shot, Lawrence Wright finished a book about a pandemic, but he wrote the end of October not as a nonfiction book, but as a novel. Right and I talked about that and his theory of donkeys in nonfiction writing. Larry, you're well known for sweeping nonfiction books like Going Clear and the Looming Tower, but you've created a pretty good-sized pile of fiction along the way as well, a novel about Manuel Noriega, screenplay for the 1998 movie The Siege,

number of stage plays, and now the end of October. So I guess my first question is, what itched is writing fiction scratch for you that nonfiction doesn't? That's an interesting question, because I love both forms. But and honestly, I feel that they're similar. At least they are for me and that, you know, research is at the bottom of both my fiction and my nonfiction. I like to work with reality. But there are stories that you could tell better in one form than another.

And also, I like experimenting. I like trying to stretch myself. So, you know, writing a novel, I'm going to. I'm sure many of my followers think it was a stretch given that I've devoted most of my career to journalism, but I like trying out new forums and seeing what I can do. On a writing level, on a day-to-day putting words on the page level, how does it feel like a stretch for you? Well, I've always felt that I'm more interested in what's real than what's imagined.

And yet, if you, you know, like with the end of October, what was intriguing to me is that I could find out how things would really happen if I wrote about a pandemic. You know, by interviewing experts and doing all the research that I would do for a New Yorker story or a nonfiction book, and then invent a story that would gloss over the tales about the science and the architecture of the medicine that I would. was trying to learn. This book comes out of a conversation with the director Ridley Scott who knows something about apocalyptic scenarios. What happened with that? Well, Ridley decided not to make the script. And I don't blame him. I had not solved the problem of the story. And I hadn't done the researches in the way that I should have done it. You know, I put it aside for years, but I never lost the interest in, the idea was really arresting to me. It would never completely leave my mind. So when I decided to pick it up again, I thought I'd do it as a novel, not feel that I needed

to make it particularly cinematic, you know, create a, do the research, find out from experts how this would naturally unfold and let it happen in the novel. And so I'm really grateful that Ridley didn't make it as a movie, although now he's a movie. he's reattached himself as director, so we'll see what happens. And the original assignment from him was write me a screenplay about how an apocalypse could happen on planet Earth? He had read Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, post-apocalyptic, you know, father and son wandering through the ruins of civilization. And his question to me was, well, what the

fuck happened? It was, you know, it's not explained in Cormac's book. So I decided that, you know, a pandemic would probably be, you know, what the fuck happened. That was my solution to the question that he posed to me. And did you consider nuclear weapons and global warming and all the other things we've seen movies come out of in terms of an apocalyptic scenario? Oh, sure. Although global warming wasn't quite as much on our minds then. But a nuclear war seemed to be like the default thing to go to.

But I didn't think it was, well, for one thing, there are no heroes in it. You know, and one of the, it's hard to make heroes in our modern era, I think. But in the world of public health, I just found them everywhere. And so that really appealed to me. It gave me a world that readers don't know very much about. And that's always very intriguing to me to go into a world that I don't know very much about, but learn, you know, the lore, the history, the techniques. And I was really drawn to the world of public health. I've done some stories out of Center for Disease Control when I was a young reporter. And I always was very impressed by the people I met there.

In his review, the New York Times is Dwight Garner says that Lawrence Wright's writing gives off the joy. of competence. I love that phrase. I'm glad you repeated. I've forgotten that. How do you reach that level of competence for yourself where when you're, you know, in sort of investing research in a topic like that, you say, okay, I know what I'm talking about? Well, can you explain it? I mean, that's, you know, if you can't explain it to yourself and, you know, you can't explain it to the reader, then you have not done the amount of research that you need to. And also, you know, So there's a level of understanding where you may be able to talk about vaccines, for instance. But you can't elaborate on it.

And if you've really done your research, you understand what it's like and you understand the history of it. You understand, you know, the personalities that were involved in the past. And all of those things come together. it makes it more dramatic, well, let me put it this way. The more you understand, it's almost like painting a picture. It's like you have more color on your palate. You know, there's more to draw from, and that gives it more authority. It strikes me when you're writing this book and we should let listeners know you finish this last summer

before coronavirus was an idea or even a pandemic, an idea in our minds, was to convince readers that a huge chunk of the Earth's population could be killed off by a pandemic, even readers that remember Ebola and SARS and all these other things. How do you go about doing that? Well, my question to my experts was what would happen if the Spanish flu came back, something like the Spanish flu, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, which would be far more people in today's world. But, you know, there was no immunity.

You know, they marched across the globe at about the same pace that coronavirus is doing right now. And, you know, all of my experts had spent their careers expecting something like this. It wasn't, it was not a wild suggestion to them. And so, you know, they knew that there would be a pandemic. They just didn't know when. So you didn't have to push them to worst-case scenarios, those had already been flashing through their minds. Look, every year there were tabletop exercises at Johns Hopkins and places like that envisioning exactly scenarios like the one that I'm proposing. You know, these were the ones that were all in the government briefing books that were handed off to the Trump administration.

The Trump administration did one of its own. I don't know why they weren't paying attention, but that, you know, that the president would say, and nobody expected this. You know, everybody who works in public health has to expect something like this will happen. Your screenplay The Siege, which you wrote before 9-11, considered the idea of Islamic terrorism coming to New York and how would society react to that.

With that and this book, in both cases, you said, I wasn't trying to be a profit. That was not my goal. Were you trying to warn people? Is that fair to say with those two works? Yes, it's certainly fair to say because once I started doing the research and, you know, I went into the world of counterterrorism, you know, talking to people in the FBI and in the intelligence community, they were all sure. They were worried that terrorism would come to the United States. It was crazy to think that it wouldn't. And so the movie reflected their anxiety. And just as, you know, when I got into the world of the epidemiology, They all expected that, you know, the world would have to encounter another massive pandemic. I think one of the really scary things about reading this novel are the number of small details,

which turned out to be true, shortage of ventilators, politicians insisting the pandemic was just the flu, something we've heard in various forms, even a worry about people going to church on Easter Sunday, which was one of Donald Trump's early goals in this. what is it like for you as a writer to watch those fictional details which you'd set down become a reality? Well, I have to admit that I do keep score on myself a little bit because there are things that I got right, you know, the vice president being put in charge and stuff like that, the low number in Russia, for instance, for a while, kind of a red herring in the novel. And there were things I got wrong. I mean, I did not take into account the solidarity of people to voluntarily stay indoors for months.

You know, that, you know, that had a great personal sacrifice. I think that's a real tribute. But the way in which the government has behaved is probably even worse than the one that I described in the novel. Which is something, because it's not exactly a competent government in the novel either. No, it's not. But the thing you didn't foresee, perhaps, as you said, is like, this is very in the novel without spoiling too much, American society, if not all of human society, descends pretty quickly

into every man for himself. Yeah. And war and thieving and looting and stuff like that. So the ability of Americans, and obviously we're not quite on Congoli level, congoli level threat at this moment. But what surprised you is our ability to follow the rules and follow the prescriptions such as they are? Yeah, but that's all fraying now. You know, I don't know how much longer. You know, for instance, if we have a second wave, the exhaustion that people feel already from, you know, this spell of quarantine is going to make it much more difficult. There are things that we rely on that make our experience easier than it wasn't a novel. For instance, the food supply has not been interrupted.

Well, you know, there's problem with meat and so on. But still, you know, the fact that people can get nice. meat, I mean, get food. That lowers the level of panic. The fact that they can still get money out of the bank, you know, there are certain things that are running pretty well, subtract those things, and the world changes quite a lot. I want to ask you about a few details you got into the book. There's a scene where we see a mass slaughter of turkeys in the book. The reader learns how one kills tens of thousands of turkeys at the same time if one needs to. Did you watch that happen? No, I didn't.

I, you know, I interviewed veterinary epidemiologists, and one of them was just a genius. She should be a reporter. She was able to describe, you know, there were two of them that were very helpful. But, you know, the whole process of, you know, I just ask her, you know, how do you not talk to the farmers and, you know, what's your equipment like? What's the procedure like? What does the turkey look like? But, you know, just all of those things, they were extremely helpful. And then they read all or portions of the book to make sure it was accurate.

So you handed it back to them and said, does this sound like what would happen, that passage in the book? Does this sound like what would happen if you had to do it? I honestly, you know, there's some, especially with the science, I just was not going to trust my own understanding. At the end, I wanted the experts to proofread it and make sure that I hadn't screwed it up. Is that something you do with nonfiction or is that just in the case of a novel like this? Well, yeah, in nonfiction, like if it's a New Yorker story, the checkers will go over it.

But oftentimes, I'll send passages to a source and say, you know, what do you think? It's just better to find out before you publish my experience. So even though you might get this, what are you saying? That's not the way, you know, at least you hear it before and you have a chance to remedy. I always like, I mean, just getting things right is sort of the basic responsibility of the journalists. Another detail from the end of October, the somewhat dysfunctional U.S. government flees to Mount Weather, which is a real place. And the vice president is placed inside a large plastic ball, you write, used in embassies to protect against biological attacks. That is a real thing. There are large plastic balls we could put our head of state in.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are, there are, you know, there is so many fascinating things I got to learn. I mean, the thing I guess most people don't understand about writing and journalism in particular is how much fun it is to research and, and to dive into these worlds. And, you know, there's a submarine scene in the novel. And I went to a sub-base in Kings Bay, Georgia. And they took me on a tour of this nuclear submarine. It's immense, but while I was there, they were doing a test and of their, you know, their missile test. And, you know, I went into the targeting room, it's called. And there were these guys who I hope are really sane, but it wasn't evident because one of them said, would you like to push the button? hands me something, it looks like a pistol grip, and it's got this kind of spiral black cord and, you know, there's a red button on top and I said, are you sure? I'm not going to destroy Russia or something. Anyway, Russia's still there. Yeah, so you pushed it, but no. Yeah, I did,

but I mean, but my heart kind of skipped, but the privilege that you have as a writer to go into places like that is, you know, it's just something that just, you know, it still fills me with a lot of joy. When you're preparing a piece of nonfiction, you go looking for a person that you call the donkey, one of my favorite writer terms. Can you tell people what a donkey is? Well, a donkey, which it sounds like a disparaging term, but it is a useful beast of burden. A donkey carries a lot of information on his back. A donkey can carry the reader into a that he's never been in before. And a donkey is not the same thing as a profile.

You know, if you're writing a profile, you, you know, it could be somebody famous or glamorous. A donkey is just a partisan of a world. And he's, but, you know, it helps if he's in trouble. It gives you something to write about. And, you know, in the looming tower, you know, the first donkey that I enlisted was John O'Neill, was John O'Neill, who had been the head of counterterrorism in New York and died in 9-11. But he was the person who had the warrant on bin Laden.

And I thought, you know, I don't know if he's, you know, he got fired from the FBI. I thought maybe he's a goat, not a donkey, but he turned out to be fascinating character. And I didn't know that at the time, but I just knew that he would be a useful donkey. donkey. Yeah, and Paul Haggis in Scientology, someone who's going to take us into this world and

see contradictions and flaws and then ultimately want to escape, right? He was a very courageous donkey. It strikes me with the end of October, a similar thing, right? Uneven terrain, difficult terrain for a normal reader to understand, if not a normal writer, to understand. How do you create a fictional donkey like Dr. Henry Parsons in this book? Parsons, you know, he embodies the world of public health that I so admire. You know, he is brilliant and courageous. He had the elements of a hero to start with. And then in terms of

concocting his character, first of all, the name Henry Parsons, I borrowed from a real person. He was an epidemiologist. He was actually a country doctor in England at the end of the 19th century and he had been made head of a deputy head of a public health board in London when they had an influenza outbreak in the 1890s. And at that time, they thought that influenza was caused by miasmas, you know, environmental gases. And Henry Parsons was the first to conclusively demonstrate that it spread by contagion. There's a historic moment in the history of epidemiologists, and he's little remembered now. So I decided to give him a little more notoriety. My Henry Parsons has been touched by disease.

You know, he's partially crippled and by rickets. And I had a friend who was a professor at SMU who suffered from that. And I always admired his courage and the nobility that he had and bearing up under that kind of disfiguring disease. And then, you know, there are bits and pieces of experiences that I've had. You know, for instance, I had written a lot about cults. you know, I had been in Saudi Arabia after 9-11, and I was working at a newspaper there supervising the coverage of the Hage. And so, you know, all that sort of stuff I took from my own experience and put it into Henry Parsons. Let me ask you one more question before we let you go.

You came up in an age of magazines. Worked in Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, and then on to the New Yorker. We live in an interesting time now where a lot of those magazines are still alive, but I think If I ask someone under 30, what is the New Yorker? They'd be as likely to cite those daily columns and reactions and things as much as a conventional, long-form piece of magazine writing. What role do you think a magazine article can play in our journalistic universe now here in 2020? It's an interesting question. I worried that the magazine world would simply collapse.

And for a long time, I wondered if there were any young people that would go into what they call long-form journalism. The term, I don't know exactly when it came around, but it was just journalism until. And, you know, but the surviving magazines, the ones that are still with us, I think, are pretty healthy. And there's still a market for it. But all that said, you know, they've diversified. They found other sources of revenue, you know, events, radio, you know, just so many different ways of expressing videos. And I, but at the same time, you know, the New Yorker is an interesting example because it actually sustains itself on subscriptions. You know, the New Yorker doesn't have very many ads.

I used to really sweat bullets when, you know, Christmas season would come around. around and the New York would be so thin. And I thought, how is this possible? And they decided, let's just see if people will pay for it. And their subscribers are very loyal. And so that gives me a lot of hope that the New Yorker, as a magazine, will endure, as it will, as a brand in other areas. Book is the end of October.

Larry Wright, thanks for joining us. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Wright told me after the interview, David, that he is now working. This is not a joke. He is working on a musical. So, nonfiction books, fiction books, screenplay, plays,

and now a musical. Lawrence Wright has hit for the literary cycle at this point. All right, time for David Shoemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Woo! Thursday's headline about the decline in the car rental industry was everybody hurts. We also got to vote for

hardship enterprise. hardship enterprise, which is really great. Today's strain pun comes from Daniel Cherney. It's from the Harold Sun newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, one of the greatest cities in the world. Let me give you some help here, David. Dan Andrews is the premier of the Australian state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located.

Like the governors in the United States, Dan Andrews has started lifting restrictions. You can hike and fish. Ozzie Rules football practice can begin, but the Harold's son being a right wing paper, they are dinging Dan Andrews for not opening up fast enough, right? They're saying these are minor measures.

So Dan Andrews, minor measures, what was the Harold's son's strained pun headline? I'm going to take from your repetition of the first name that there's some of Dan ban, is it like a lifted Dan? start a situation going on here. Ban, what's a ban phrase?

Remember, these are baby steps, baby steps. Baby steps. Baby steps. Band. Um, baby steps. Smalls bad. Small's good. Little band.

One small. One small step for band kind. Dan kind. One small step for Dan. All right. That's good. And the rest of the headline is, but no giant leap on work, playgrounds and cafes, et cetera, et cetera.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeid and production magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Thursday with listener mail. We've been working on an Obamagate explainer. Mostly so we can explain these quote-unquote scandal to ourselves. Yeah, so maybe we'll do that. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you, Brian.