The Press Box - Oscar Takes. Plus, Noreen Malone on 'Slow Burn.'

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker share their takes from the 2021 Oscars and discuss the speeches, production value, and all the think pieces that came after (2:55). Then, host of Slate’s ‘Slow Burn’ podcast, Noreen Malone, joins to talk through Episode 1 of the new season and shares what we can expect from Season 5 (29:37). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Noreen Malone Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On TV concierge, the ringer staff delivers a guide to the vast streaming landscape by discussing one show or movie per day, including premieres, the latest surprise Netflix hits, periodic check-ins on favorite TV shows, new movies available for streaming, and the host's favorite shows to watch right away. Check out TV concierge exclusively on Spotify. David, CNN pundit Rick Santorum is in trouble for remarks he made in a speech to the Young America's Foundation. What I want to know is who could CNN bring in to replace Rick Santorum? Oh, man. This seems easy, right? Because Rick Santorum is totally a replacement level cable news pundit. But...

Yes, but the fact that Rick Santorum was the best that they could do might suggest that the criteria is a little bit trickier than we give it credit for. I'm not saying it should be. I think you or I could pick a better person, but, you know, it's not, it's not the simplest thing in the world. No, I mean, CNN's been trying to replace Jeffrey Lord for like four years. We all made fun of Jeffrey Lord when he was the like kind of original pro-Trump pundit and then they couldn't, they've still been trying to replace him.

Yeah. It's hard, it turns out. I don't think people are saying no to it, right? I mean, if you went to anybody, any conservative talking head who does Fox News hits, are they going to say no to CNN out of principle? No, absolutely not. CNN would say no to them, right? I mean, the problem is they don't want to bring in people from the Trump White House.

Right. So you have to kind of find a Santorum-esque third party who's kind of sympathetic to elements of Trumpism, but isn't actually a Trumpite? And that turns out to be a really hard thing to locate. It's true. It's true. Maybe they should just bring in an actor playing. This is Oscars Week.

Anyway, we should bring in an actor playing a Trump supporter. Of course, that person would end up getting like $10 million to host a Fox News prime time show. We would try to be searching for the way, try to remember whether or not this was supposed to be ironic from the start. anyway. Two book deal from regular. I'm available to play that role, CNN, if you want me.

Coming up on today's show, art takes on last night's Oscars, Oscar predictions and Oscar think pieces. Plus, Narene Malone stops by to talk about the new season of the podcast, Slow Burn. All that more in the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network. Hello, media consumers.

Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, I think we can squeeze an Oscar segment onto our media podcast. And I guess I'll start here. Last night, a lot of people had Chadwick Bowesman winning Best Actor.

But the old guy still got it. Or at least the 8 by 10 static headshot of the old guy, Anthony Hopkins, which somehow closed the Oscar ceremony after he won Best Actor.

Yeah. I mean, this is an all-time, well, this is an all-time old guy, so, God, it's probably an all-time low for the form, too. I can't. Usually the old guy still got it as met with like, you know, polite applause or sort of, you know, just general head nod of acknowledgement. But this is an old guy still guided and everyone was sort of let down by the fact. I don't know. The old guy was buoyed by a, I think a very specific set of voters.

Don't surprises feel so weird now in this media world we live in? Because we're so wised up, right? Or at least we think we are. we know who's going to win the Oscar we know who's going to win the political election we know who's going to be the third pick in this week's NFL draft

you know you just remember this like right before 2016 I'm sorry Donald Trump's not going to win any Midwestern states I read Nate Silver I know what's going on here so when something like this happens it just feels like it's like whoa I don't know I've been

listening to these Oscar podcast and reading all this stuff and and yet there is still this potential for surprise. I think that the big thing is that our expectations are, like there's a whole, there's like a journalistic subculture of like tempering expectations, right? Or like, think of all the articles you read about how like, how you were supposed to read Nate Silver and the lead up to the election, right?

Don't, this is not the way you think. You're supposed to, if you, but if you read them this way, then you might get the right impression. Same thing with everybody else with all these other, you know, draft predictions and everything else. That's why, you know, we're having conversation. How many, you had a conversation on the Ringer NFL show recently about the sort of deliberate temperament, temper mentality, I guess, of mock drafts, right? I mean, this is, the inexactitude is the art form.

It's not very common in this day and age when you get the big, you get set up. Yeah, you get, you get an event gets teed up like the best actor award did. And then the bottom just falls out, right? I think it's sort of, despite the fact that like the Oscars have rules, have very specific rules, but who can know who wins the awards ahead of time, et cetera. I think it just sort of defies belief that you would set up a show that way if there was any doubt in your mind, right? That's where the crazy.

I mean, that's where the real shot comes from. Yes. TV-wise, the Oscars had the same challenge as the Golden Globes and the Grammys. And maybe you could even throw in last year's NFL. draft. Show relies normally on spectacle. And then because of the circumstances of the coronavirus and the pandemic, it loses the spectacle.

And it has to kind of do something different. What did you make of the way the Oscars handled that problem or challenge last night? Well, I mean, I think my overall takeaway was that it felt different in the way that, like, I have to say this. I sort of wish it was this different every year. I don't have a lot of like top edits of how I think the Oscars could do a better job. But I do think it would be much more interesting if there was this big of a, I mean, it's really not that different. But if there was this different, if it felt this different every year, I think there, that would, that would solve a lot of the, that would answer a lot of the, the, the critiques.

So we had like Steven Soderberg as a producer this year. but then next year we would have Michael Bay or we would have just some other director who would take it in a completely different direction. Yeah. Hey, listen, we could do the old guy still got it of like Oscars directing too.

Just bring back some like classic, some old timey, some guy who was like DP on the old, like some old odor films or something and just like, you know, give him a crack at it. I think, I mean, but yeah,

I think just having completely different, listen, you could have someone who's basically never watched the Oscars before and let them do whatever they wanted, it would probably end up looking 75% like the Oscars, right? I mean, it's just so baked in to our just consciousness. But, you know, I think I enjoyed watching it just because it was sort of a, it just was different enough to keep me interested. It felt to me very earnest. Like there was very, very little sarcasm in the broadcast last night.

almost very little humor at all, minus a couple of speeches, which we can play in a second if you want to. It was all very straightforward. And some of that is the pandemic. Some of that is the serious subject matter addressed by the movies nominated. But you know what?

The Oscars is always pretty good at doing that for 10 minutes. And then Jimmy Kimmel comes out and gives a big joke, makes a joke. So, it was a little weird for me to see them kind of completely in that. I mean, I guess it started when Laura Dern was out of the beginning of the show and she was giving those very earnest compliments to all the actors in the category. As many people have pointed out in lieu of showing clips of those people acting. Yeah. That to me set us on this this sort of path of earnestness that finally Joaquin Phoenix got out of at the end because he just couldn't even bring himself.

to bother describing the performances of the actress he was giving it to. But that pretty much lasted all the way of the end of the show. Can I say that I really appreciate the earnestness? Really? You? I understand the pull towards deconstruction. I understand that like why you would, if someone came to Brian and David and said you guys are producing the 2022 Oscars,

I know that our impulse would be, let's take everything we remember about the Oscars and sort of turn it on its head. Or like, we'll wink to the audience. So we're all on this together, whatever. The Oscars are a, it is an annual award show or a bunch of rich folks put on tuxitos and ball gowns and celebrate the craft that they've committed their lives to.

There is nothing like a hotel ballroom. There is nothing more old fashioned about this than this. And the earnestness is just sort of part. Once you start winking at the audience, I think once we got past Billy Crystal's opening song and tried to like wink a little bit harder than that, then it sort of diminishes the whole thing. I understand the impulse. And listen, there are definitely years where like Jimmy Kennedy, like you need a comic of a certain caliber to take on certain things like, well, like me too. Like I mean, like there's a bunch of there's the need for comedy in these in these award shows.

but the idea that we need to be like that the Oscars need to be self-aware. The idea of the Oscars can be self-aware is like the least self-aware thing you could possibly pause it. Right? Like Anne Hathaway and James Franco was it that 10 years ago, it seems like just yesterday, it was a debacle for a lot of reasons. But it was like they, it was this idea that like you could be cooler, that you could be like, it's more self-aware than the people watching at home.

and it's just, it's just impossible. So earnestness is, earnestness is at least like, like an affirmative move in one direction, right? You can be over the top. You could, you could just love your fellow actors and directors or whatever else so much. And that's, at least that's honest and believable,

or believable even if it's not honest. But there got to be levels of earnestness. There is, as you say, kind of getting away from the whole self where, hey, it's crazy, we're doing the Oscars here. Look at us. actors just very seriously talking to other actors about how much they love them and doing it five times instead of just showing a clip of somebody doing it. The clip thing, dude, I got to say it was really weird.

It was really weird. It was weird one because it did happen for a few awards like best animated feature. Somehow we needed to see clips of soul and wolf walkers but not best supporting actress. And I don't understand why that happened. But the other thing. thing is, is it made to me feel like the show was really about Hollywood. It was about acting. It was about what's going on in the world right now. I thought all those themes were very addressed during the three plus hours. But it wasn't exactly about movies at every minute. Like, here is the movie. Here is what the movie looks like and sounds like. And especially when you got to things like Trayvon Free winning

Live Action Short, Best Live Action Short for Two Distant Strangers, something that a ton of people I'm sure would really be really curious to see if they have not seen. Why wouldn't you show 15 seconds of that? Yeah. I just don't like, surely of all things or even,

are the best, you know, short form documentary, why wouldn't you just show us a little of that so we have an idea of what that looks like? Yeah. That was a very, very strange choice to me. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean,

it's, what we come back to every year, it's a really hard show to put on, right? I mean, it's just,

there's too much stuff to, to bake into this one cake, even no matter how long you give it to run. And I think that just by the very nature of it, in any, any decision you make to cut time

is going to be leaving something out. And I mean, it's just too unwieldy of a project, right? I mean, it's like, well, I don't even know how you do it. I'm surprised.

I mean, yeah, I don't even know how to do it. Yeah, even the in-memorium segment they had just speeding through the names, if you notice this, and you couldn't even read the names of the people who had died in the previous year. And Powell Ogeddy of the Ringer was like, does Steven Sutterberg listen to podcasts on two-time speed? Is that what we got going on here? They could have, they should have just taken like the coronavirus. The lesson from like the menus of the past year and just put a QR code on the screen.

If you'd like to see a memoriam, flash your phone. Here's some down the middle Oscar moments. Daniel Kaluya, after winning for Judas and the Black Messiah. Like, it's incredible. My mom, my dad, they had sex. It's amazing. Like, you know what I'm saying? I'm here.

You know what I'm in? So I'm so happy to be alive. So I'm going to celebrate that tonight. You know what I'm saying? Yes, that was the chain of events. that led him to appear on the stage of the Academy Awards. This was Yajong Yun, winning Best Supporting Actress. Listen to her riff on her name.

Actually, my name is Yajong Yun, and most of European people call me Yoyang, and some of them call me Yuzhong. But tonight, you are all forgiven. I love that. Here's my thought experiment for the Oscar Day Afterpieces, David. Okay. I wanted to have two groups.

One group knew that Steven Soderberg in particular, a guy who has very high approval rating among movie writers, was the producer of the Oscars. And I wanted to have a second group that watched the same show but didn't know Stephen Soderberg was the producer of the Oscars. I am guessing that group number two's reviews of the show would have been way worse than group number one. Sure. there was an autour bonus

given to Stephen Soderberg for that show you'll never convince me otherwise yeah yeah you're undeniably that's right and I think the part of it's just you pay attention harder when you're like

when you're trying to figure out what the Soderbergisms the whole thing are you know and you anything that makes you pay it to pay more attention I think is kind of anything that engages you more probably leaves you with overall a more positive feeling about the show unless it's just an absolute catastrophe.

But you hit on what it is is you're looking at the show for flourishes of Steven Soderberg instead of asking yourself, is this show any good? Which is this is kind of like autourism that happens all the time in movie writing and movie podcasting?

Yeah. People forget, this goes back to like Pauline Kale's original complaint about the autour theory way back when is you just start looking for signatures rather than thinking is the thing any good? Yeah. But some of the, I mean, some of these day after reviews where people are like, well, see, the best picture was before best actor, best actress.

And that is Steven Soderberg playing with time as he often does in his movies. I mean, come on now. So changing the order was like like moving Christopher Nolan is Dunkirk or something like that is playing with time. Come on, man. That's not what that was. that is changing around the order that is that is not an autour flourish

I'll give I'll give you the Regina King walk down the red carpet at the beginning which is a very sort of burgy shot but a lot of this is just trying to turn this and this is not a movie this is an award show yeah I mean but you just said

you're not paying attention without the show is any good I mean I feel like that's the big mistake of how we look at how we watch these shows I think that the Oscars is so far beyond being good or even particularly bad. I just think it's just a statue to, you know, I mean, it's like it's a giant,

it's just a giant tribute to things we have all watched on TV. That's it. Well, some of us. Award shows or history or whatever else. Yeah, but did we all watch these movies? No, no. That's a thing, right? That's another reason, by the way,

they could have, I thought, done clips this year is just to introduce people who didn't watch all these movies, including yours truly. Yeah. And just give you a sense of what some of them look like, because I certainly didn't see them all and would have loved a little bit of that. I was going to ask you if this was the think piece Oscars this year. But then I think every Oscars is kind of the think piece Oscars. There's always some larger point to be drawn out from the actual ceremony.

And the think pieces this year were actually really bad, I think. And the ones I'm talking about, there was a Maring Dowd one on Sunday that was sort of, jumping off a Bill Maher riff about how the movies all made you feel bad and whatever happened to old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment. This is also something you saw from on the kind of right-wing takes on the Oscars. Here she's quoting, this is Maureen Dowd quoting Leon Weaselteer, who I guess is back. Leon Weaselterre agrees that Hollywood, quote, has traded playfulness and complexity and surprise and depth for virtue.

Now, do you think if we went to Leon Weaselter in any time in the last 25 years, he would have saluted Hollywood's playfulness and complexity, et cetera, et cetera. Come on now. Come on. You don't believe that. There is just, I just, this whole idea that if you like entertainment for adults and you can't get that from now in this day and age, if you have subscription to HBO and Netflix and maybe Amazon Prime, I don't believe you.

I don't believe there's not enough for you to watch no matter what your taste in anything is. if anything, you could argue that blockbusters were underserved in 2020. For sure they were. None of them came out. Yeah, that the people who want Marvel movies and big giant, you know, spectacles that run from like April to July that they had a shitty year. But if you liked like a, you know, like I said, sophisticated entertainments,

whether that's in the form of a TV show or a movie, if you like things that address current events, if you like movies that are made not for kids, but for actual adults, how are you not finding tons of things to watch right now? I don't get that critique at all. No, I mean, you're right. This was a year that was absolutely made for movies that were made to get an Oscar. I mean, this was a perfect year for that sort of thing. And I don't know that there's any think piece that needs to go any deeper than what a weird year for movies this was.

You know, I'm not sure that it does feel a little bit. beside the point, right? I mean, it's to kind of pay tribute to everything that, like, movie making and the film world and everybody else had to, went through this past year as something that's somehow separate from what the entire world has gone through. And maybe that's part of the disconnect that you can't really say, woe is us without looking like an idiot.

But it was a weird year for movies. It's just that there are a lot of them, most of them didn't come out, you know? and then the ones that did out on your TV, and much like the way the Oscars are presented every year, we think we know what we want, but we don't always know, right? And it turns out that as much as we have seen the, you know, indie phenoms and theaters in years past,

or seen the nominees and just said, please, why can't you just watch that at home? It turns out we don't really want to watch it at home either. It loses a lot when you're not, it loses a lot when it's on the big screen. It probably loses a lot to the imagination when it's so easily accessible. That's another thing that struck me about this year's Oscars is every time we say we want something out of the Oscars, we may not actually want that. Because remember the other years, why can't they just let the acceptance speeches run? This is these people's moment in the sun.

They may never be back up there. Why don't they just give them the chance to talk? Last night, everybody's like, man, these acceptance speeches are going on kind of a long time. Where's the band? Can't the band come in at the 45 second market? We can just move on to the next thing. and I think it's actually what you're talking about too with the movies. One thing piece I did like was from Derek Robertson and Politico magazine.

He IDed a genre, David, he calls Wikipedia Theater. He's talking about the Chicago 7 movie from Aaron Sorkin. Wikipedia Theater, shoebox history lessons, frequently peppered with archival footage that makes their rip from yesterday's headlines, narratives, all the more immersive. I love that phrase, Wikipedia Theater. Yeah.

That felt like what that movie Vice about Dick Cheney was a couple of years ago. Where the filmmakers are really trying to do, and again, Ernest is probably another word that should come up here, really trying to do something, but they're just like going down this very, very, you know, visible historical outline of something that happened. Yeah. It's also kind of a podcast genre, too, Wikipedia theater. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's certainly a new, it must have changed the way that people make films. Jones, right? Because like Judas and the Black Messiah is a great example of a movie that obviously there was some historical liberties taken in the screenwriting process, but or the movie making process, I guess, more broadly. But I'm not sure if that would have even been a point of discussion 10 years ago. You know, that might have been when we were growing up or when, you know, we were adults. You would, you would, you might hear that one thing about the movie. Oh, you know, that conversation never actually took place. Do you know that? Well, it's still a really good, really good movie. You know, whatever. But like now we fact check in real. time on Wikipedia and wherever else.

And so we're left thinking, you can either, like being precise, being, you know, getting everything right, according to Wikipedia is sort of a virtue in and of itself, right? And then you get a movie like Judas and the Black Messiah, which is fantastic. But which you do, it's sort of like put in a separate category. It's almost like historical fiction because it's, it's not sufficiently, you know, know, Wikipedia. But yeah, it is a very weird sort of genre or mutation to genre or whatever you want to say. Two more funny things from the Oscars before we move on. One was during the pre-show. I don't know how much you watched to that, but Lil Rel Howrie, comedian, one of the hosts the pre-show,

was talking to her, the musician who was nominated for Best Original Song and in fact won the award later. And Howrie says, okay, we're going to go right now to your live. live performance. And then they cut to a performance that was clearly pre-taped. And you knew it was pre-taped because it was happening not there on the red carpet, but somewhere else. And also at a different time of day. But the screen, the whole time, still said live in the corner.

And I was like, am I misunderstanding what live means in this context? My 12-year-old will sometimes ask if he'll walk into a room and just watch, see, see, we're watching for like, you know, 15 seconds, sort of perplexed, and he'll just be like, is this live? And I think to him, all that it means is it's not available on demand. Like, it is just the thing besides the way that he streams an entire season of Arrow in two days or whatever. Like it's, and so at first I said no.

I said no to that question a lot, right? It's like, no, this is not a professional basketball game. This is not an inaugural address. No, this is not live, you know? But like, all he's asking is, is this on. what this thing that you guys call television. And I guess in that sense, the Oscars were correct.

What a time to be alive. The other thing was... No pun intended. Yeah, exactly. The other thing was, David, was the generic beginning to any Oscar Awards presentation. Mm-hmm.

Which is, let's say you're giving out the best directing award. You say, you start your spiel with, what is directing? What is cinematography? Webster's define cinematography. There's the other one. We had one of those last night, and there were some that got so close.

It was like, special effects add a lot to a movie. Oh, you don't say, that's interesting. Tell me more about special effects. I don't think you need to define. I mean, cinematography, there are probably lots of people watching the Oscars and just don't know what that means at all. But I think with directing and acting, I think we got it. Well, and let me say this, I'm making a pull a really, really incredibly ancient point. of reference out of my bag here.

You remember, if anyone's ever watched Wheel of Fortune, I know Jeopardy's the cool show that comes on before prime time now, but Wheel of Fortune's there too. And then if you get to the last, if you get to the bonus game or whatever, if you're the winner, you get to, you have to solve a puzzle with just a few letters. And it used to be that you would get to pick some letters and then see what came up. And then based on those, you'd pick a couple more. but at some point it became clear that every single person was picking RSTL and a knee. And so they just made that official, right?

You codify that as the ones you get automatically. Maybe if the Oscars, maybe if it's so important to define all these things, let's just, and it's uneven and the process gets kind of confused. Let's just take it out of the presenter's hands. Let's just have the definition of these things put on the screen before each award is given out. So we know the criteria. We know what we're looking for here. That's what we need are more explainers during the Oscars.

I think things explain to me. Yeah, I know. What is cinematography? I don't know. I'm not sure. Can you tell me? I just thought that was very funny. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. We're going to focus on the Oscars for this overwork Twitter joke segment. And we're particularly going to focus on my octopus teacher. the somewhat controversial winner of the Best Documentary Feature Award. Some great ones. A lot of talk about octopus teachers and not enough about octopus class size. Shout out to all the octopus teachers who had to rely on Zoom all year. And I particularly like this one.

My Octopus Adjunct is a similar movie but without health care. Thanks to shy J.D. Doug, Aaron Schaefer, Michael Mason, Victor Flores, an E. Spender kite. E. Spencer Kite, excuse me, for that one. David, about halfway through the show, we were treated to a trailer for Stephen Spielberg's reboot of West Side Story.

Kind of a weird moment in the Oscars. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write excited for Spielberg's take on West Side Story in which you don't see the sharks for the first hour. That's good. Thanks to Ben Wagner for that one. And finally, as mentioned, the Oscars ended on a bizarre note.

Anthony Hopkins, not actually present for the ceremony. present only with a somewhat dated 8 by 10 headshot wins the best acting Oscar. A couple of really good jokes about that. Anthony Hopkins is going to be so excited tomorrow morning when he wakes up, makes some coffee, and finds out he won best actor.

I think that might have actually happened. Anthony Hopkins about to fire off a lip-sink TikTok instead of an acceptance speech. The award goes to Anthony Hopkins as the new Irish exit. And finally, Stephen Soderberg with a twist ending so good, even he didn't see it coming. Thanks to Ryan Scott for those. If you were funnier than anything in the Oscar ceremony,

congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And when there's a new season of the podcast Slow Burn, that's kind of an occasion, is it not? Definitely. Season 5 began last week. It's about the run-up to the Iraq War.

And this time it's hosted by Narene Malone, longtime New York Magazine Denison, terrific writer. I was interested in where she's going to go this season and also how writing a serialized podcast is different from writing a big feature. Here's Noreen Malo. All right, Noreen, when I see a podcast about a subject as big as the Iraq War,

my mind goes right to the dumb question, which is where do you start a project like this? Well, I don't know if we started in the right place or not, but we started actually sort of during the beginning days of the pandemic. I left New York Magazine where I was an editor and came to late to work on this season of Slowburn and I had actually pitched them the Iraq War as a subject.

They'd asked me to do a different topic that I was less interested in and I thought this one seemed big and meaty and something that I'd lived through but didn't know all the ins and outs of. And so I started by reading a ton. Just sort of giving myself a crash course,

like almost a semester's worth of reading on the Iraq War, books and, you know, watching clips and going down different rabbit holes. So you read all this stuff, and then how do you decide how you're going to shrink it down into something that can fit to a podcast? Yeah, I had actually done some of that work in the pitching stage. I had sort of gone to them and said, you know, Here are eight things that I think could be episodes, and some of those are turning into episodes. Actually, our media episode, which will be episode seven, and maybe of special interest to listeners of this podcast is something that I'd originally pitched.

But some of it was just, as I was reading, it was something that stuck out to me as either just a character on whom I could hang a theme or something crazy that I hadn't either known about or hadn't remembered or hadn't totally under. stood the significance of. So, for instance, I didn't necessarily go into this thinking that I would do an episode about the anthrax attacks of 2001, because I hadn't quite remembered how significant, or maybe I just hadn't known how significant those were in sort of the drum beats to war. So it was really about picking out things that could illuminate these themes, but also, I think, importantly for Slow Burn, have a sort of narrative thrust to them or have a theme inherent in their existence.

All right. So speaking of characters, episode one is called the exile. Remind us, who was Ahmed Chalabi? Ahmed Chalabi was this aristocratic Iraqi exile who had grown up in this incredibly wealthy family in Iraq. His family was kicked out in 1958 when there was a military coup. This was in advance of the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraq had an unstable few years.

And he spent his whole. life trying to get back to a rock and sort of trying to get back to his birthright, really. And so he, you know, was this incredibly smart, charming man who was educated at MIT and the University of Chicago and, you know, could just sort of, could connect with sort of the most intellectual people in the world, was very westernized, but not, you know, did not turn his back on Arab culture. and he made it his mission to, he decided a certain point that the best way to get rid of Saddam Hussein that he thought was ruining his home country was to get the U.S. involved in taking out Saddam. And he went around Washington and found a sort of varied set of power brokers who were all supportive of this idea,

whether it was because they had come in thinking already that this was a good idea or because it sort of dovetailed with things that they wanted to do in the region. So he was this person who was very good at, you know, manipulating people, but he also, you know, knew exactly who had these aligning interests and then who was already wanting to do these things. And when you say aristocrats, you have this great detail in the first episode at the beginning. He's in Kurdistan. I think this is 1995.

And, you know, the conditions there are not fantastic, but he somehow has a generator. And this allows him to watch. the Jeremy Irons version of Bride's Head Revisited. Yes. As he's plotting to overthrow Saddam. Thank you for picking up on that detail because I had a lot of fights with my editors about keeping that detail in, which is completely extraneous to the story.

But I happen to think it's incredibly revelatory personally to who Ahmed Chalibi is. So I'm very gratified that you picked up on that. And Chalabi just doesn't want to just overthrow Saddam. He actually wants to replace Saddam as well. he does and he has a good idea about who could do who could be the replacement and he thinks it could be a prime minister akman chalibi um so chalibi uh one of the things that he does in the 1990s is he creates this group called the iraqi national congress the i nc it's a group of exiles um many of them like him sort of secular educated but from all sort of walks of Iraqi life he himself was sheate but there were you know there were communists there were there were some sunis it was It was a diverse group, but the idea of it was sort of a government in waiting, and he was the de facto leader. He sort of modeled it explicitly off of groups started by Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, so he was not exactly ego-free here.

Now, the CIA is underwriting him to the tune of millions of dollars, but as you point out on the podcast, he is not actually providing them with intelligence. In fact, he's refusing, in some cases, provide them with intelligence. How is he pulling that off? Well, he's he's pulling it off because he's sort of just doing it, right? He's he is taking whatever latitude they give him and just going with it. He's not someone who's afraid of the CIA and he also, you know, knows the area a lot better than they do. But they're also sort of, they're sort of letting him do it, right? The CIA thought he, he, he was useful to them, even in that capacity, just having a presence there was useful to them. So once again, it's sort of this thing where both sides were mutually using each other and sort of aware

of that relationship. One of the striking things in the first episode, we hear Chalaby's voice on these tapes that he was making when he was giving interviews to his biographer. How did you get a hold of those and what was it like to put those into the podcast? Yeah, that was actually such, that was such a process. So one of the, after I got interested in Akma Chalabi, sort of just reading around generally, I read a biography of him by Rich Bonin, who is a producer for 60 minutes. And it's an excellent biography. It's called Arrows of the Night, if anyone is interested in knowing more about Chalabi. There's tons more we couldn't fit into this podcast. But we contacted Rich for an interview. He shows up in the episode as well as sort of a talking head,

you know, narrating the biography. And Rich is one of these, like, really generous journalists who was like, okay, who have you talked to? What have you learned?

And so we were just chatting about the reporting of the story and, you know, his reporting. And I forget how it came out that he had this cache of tapes from the biography

that he'd written sort of 10 years ago or more. And it was, you know, we had to secure the rights and we'd talk to him about how it'd be used. But he gave us, I think it was something like 60 hours of tape that I will shout out my producers, Jason DeLeon and Sophie Somagrad and Margaret Kelly. Another producer, it's like came on and helped. And we mostly them sorted through all of this tape to find what we ended up using.

But we felt like it was worth it because Chalaby's not alive. We couldn't interview him. And you really, I think, get, it just makes the episode richer to know how he talked when he wasn't on. you know, on a major news show trying to convince you of this one specific point. This was how he really talked. And he was really funny. I mean, there's tons of tape that we couldn't use that was just funny and like braggadocious. And, you know, you got a sense of how exactly he was able to win people over and also how, frankly, he was able to fuck people over. This solves like five problems for your narrative podcast, finding these tapes. Yes, yes. It was when the sort of deal came through with Rich to make sure that we were allowed to use it, we were very happy.

You mentioned Chalaby going to Washington and building this base of support in Washington, which is think tankers and senators and journalists. What is the case he is making about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to these people? Well, he's sort of making a different case to different people. He was a very astute reader of American politics. the overall thing that he was trying to do was that he was trying to make it an American domestic political issue, right? Because at that point, in the 90s, Americans weren't totally interested

in things that were going on in foreign policy. So he was trying to figure out a way to make it something that people are talking about on the news. So he had a few different ways of doing that. He sort of appealed to the liberal ideal deal of civil rights and just sort of dignity of people in Iraq. This is how he sort of got people that we would now call sort of humanitarian interventionists

on board by highlighting the horrors of Saddam regime. And there was another Iraqi exile named Kanam Makia, who was actually also crucial in sort of that push. And then for the neo-conservatives, they saw him as a useful figure for this thing that they had wanted to do, which was sort of to do this combination of, you know, in the post-Cold War era, they felt like they could be the one superpower in the world. They could, they could sort of remake the world for good that you could bring democracy to the Middle East. And it would also somehow, you know, you could solve all the problems of the Middle East if you could just fix Iraq. And then there were people who we appealed to who were hawkish on Iran.

and for them and and and people for whom Israel was important. And for them, he made a case that was more about, okay, you know, a post-Saddam Iraq can be, you know, can be a Shiite alternative in the Middle East to Iran. And this would be friendlier to the U.S. and to Israel. And then he liked to sort of allude to the fact that Iraq had tons of oil, that this very unfriendly dictator was sort of controlling. So he had a lot of different ways that he could go about arguing his case. You talk in the podcast about this one failed attempt that he co-leads or leads maybe

to overthrow Saddam during the Clinton administration. What happened in that episode? Oh, my God. I actually don't know if I can recount it. It took, this is one of the miracles of. podcast editing. Josh Levine and Gabe Roth were the editors on this and it's this very convoluted thing that happened

that we were able to sort of boil down. But basically the sort of boiled down version of this is that Chalabi had decided that he wanted to get Kurdish freedom fighters together with some disaffected Iraqi

generals who he was sure were going to leave. He wanted to get them to overthrow Saddam to start the revolution from within. And And he thought he was going to get backing from Iran and maybe from Turkey and also crucially from the United States because none of these groups would do it unless the United States was willing to do it. So he got this CIA officer Bob Baer on board.

And Bob Baer was literally the basis for George Clooney's character in Syriana. he is he's just sort of like a Hollywood idea of a spy. So Bob Bear comes to Kurdistan and agrees to help Chalaby out with his coup. His bosses at the CIA do not want him to do this. They do not reply to any of his messages. He keeps moving ahead with it. He and Chalaby are going forward with it. The last minute, the CIA bosses say, no, no, no, don't do this.

Bear goes ahead anyway. but, you know, no one shows up for the party. You know, there's one group of Kurdish fighters doesn't show up. The Iranians don't show up because they've gotten wind, and Saddam Hussein has gotten wind of the whole thing. So it was a really sort of doomed effort. And then it was followed the next year

by another sort of failed effort that really kind of torched Cholodey's relationship with the CIA in the end. You've done lots of magazine writing. Was writing a podcast harder or easier than writing a magazine piece? Oh, it is so different. I know everyone says that, but it really is so different because a lot of the tricks that you've learned as a magazine writer don't work. A lot of you have to use the plainest English possible. You have to learn to say everything out loud. You have to sort of work against your own instinct to complicate something while also hopefully throwing in ideas. And the other thing is, This has been the, like, really revelatory. And I knew that intellectually going into this because I had, you know, I'd listen to people

talk about narrative podcasts. I'd listen to a bunch of narrative podcasts. I'd even done some editing on one in New York Magazine. But the thing that you don't really know until you do it is that every time you make a change in a podcast script, you have to retract. And so every change becomes, you really, like, feel that change. So, you know, whereas if you change a word on the, internet or in print, it's much less laborious.

This isn't like being in the Google Doc like late at night. I just got one more thing. Can I just fix this transition real quick? I mean, that happens, but then you have to go into the studio. But it is actually, I think, a really good form of writing to learn because you actually have to learn to boil things down to their clearest, simplest form, which theoretically you should be trying to do in print anyway, but often you don't do. but for a podcast you really have to work to do that.

Like there's one section that now is maybe like two sentences on sort of like the history of Iraq that I spent like a day working on. And it started with two pages and I just shrunk it and shrunk it and shrunk it and shrunk it. And I mean, I hope, I'm sure like some scholar of Iraqi history is like, you know, cringing at the way I ended up boiling it down. But you have to sort of start at the real deep. understanding level in order to get it to be simple and clear. And if you don't understand it at the sort of more complicated level, you can't do the simple and clear, right. So it's a related

art form, but a different art form than writing a piece. Yes. Yes, I think that's true. And that's an extreme form of kill all your darlings to two sentences. Yeah. Well, I mean, come on now. Here's where I admit, I did not kill all my darlings personally. The other thing about podcasting, narrative podcasting in particular, is that it is such a team And that's actually the fun part is that it's even more collaborative than making a magazine, is that everyone is sort of in the Google Doc together. And you and your producer are, you know, as you track it, you're fixing things even in that moment. So take us into the editing suite a little bit.

Because I know if, you know, writing a piece, you know, I can look at it in draft form, be like, man, that reads like crap. And then you go back and ditch it or fix it or whatever. When you hear something that doesn't work, what doesn't, what doesn't, work about it? What's a flaw in it that you would go back and fix? So usually it's stilted, right? It's something that would work in writing and you thought it sounded great on the page and maybe even your editor thought it sounded great on the page. And then you say it aloud and you cringe. It's just whether it's a turn of phrase or

it's just, you know, it's a sentence construction that doesn't work. That's the other big thing is that, you know, you have to do compound sentences or a no, no, simple sentences are the way to go. But yeah, usually, usually at least for me and I think for other people too, it's something that sounds overwritten, you know, and there's nothing worse than a sort of overwritten narrative podcast. Yeah. Sounds like a lot of the press box, too, if we're being honest here, you know, kind of something a little, we thought was pretty arch and funny and then we said it and it sounded terrible. Well, you know, that happens in print too. It's just you don't have to actually hear yourself say it, you know? There's something about the actual act.

of listening back to your voice. And also you get to watch your producer's expression, which is a real tool for understanding how it's landing. Now you teased, you're going to have a media chapter of this. So when I think of media at Rock War, my mind goes to Judith Miller, my mind goes to the New York Times. What kind of things you're going to explore in that episode?

Yeah, we're still reporting that episode. But, you know, I think, I think where your mind is going is not that different from where my mind is going, but one of the things that we're interested in that episode of the podcast and exploring is there are certain people who have been really villainized and correctly in many ways, but there are also a lot of people who got their reporting really wrong and have not really suffered professional consequences. and so we're interested in exploring sort of why that is and, you know, what the institutional forces were at the various places that shaped that.

And then separately, there is an episode that is more on this sort of intellectual game of it. The people, you know, not the, not the reporters, not the cable news people, but the people at the quote unquote little magazines, right? The New Republic Slate places where we have both worked. Yeah, and the weekly standard on the right, and what was going on at those places and how, and in the blogosphere, which was basically brand new at the time. One of my favorite little things I came across was in 2002, I believe, the New York Times ran an article explaining that not all blogs were about the Iraq War and that people blogged about things that were not war, too, which was sort of an amazing thing to read. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when there was a very personal debate happening in the pages of Slate, which I think we still called pages at that point in history about the Iraq War. And it was like, wow, you know, that was, it was a time for journalism.

I'll put it that way. Were you at Slate at that time? Yeah, it was. And I just remember. Did you participate in the, I did not. I did not. And probably best for all involved that I didn't. Tees the Wednesday episode for us a little bit, the anthrax scare of 2001.

What struck you when you revisited that? Yeah, the Antarctic scare of 2001 is something that certainly as soon as I read it, I just flashed back to remembering that happening. But what I had not understood was just how much the Bush administration sort of got out and used that to tie it to Iraq. And that was really when the threat of bioweapons came in. And my favorite sort of little find on that episode was there was a, before, Before 9-11, in the summer of 2001, there was a war game called Operation Dark Winter that imagined what a bioterror attack would look like in the United States. They picked smallpox, and they spent a weekend really gaming it out. And the really striking thing, I was reading about this sort of in the first half of the pandemic, and they predicted coronavirus, basically, which we don't exactly say in the podcast.

But if you listen, you'll be able to hear, you know, you hear about the way the pandemic spread. you hear about, you know, countries closing their borders. You hear about controversy over who gets a good vaccine and who gets a bad vaccine. You talk about, you know, getting schools to close properly. It's just all of these things had been thought about and prepared for in 2001. And then, and then whoops. So, and that comes into it because Dick Cheney was very taken by this, this briefing that he got on Operation Dark Winter. and Dick Cheney became quite obsessed

of the bioterror threat, and he also was one of the leading Iraq Hawks. You can listen to The Exile, the first episode of Season 5 of Slow Burn right now, episode two coming out on Wednesday, follow Noreen at Noreen on Twitter Noreen.

Thank you so much for coming on the press box. Thank you. This was fun. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strain pun headline. See if I can do better than last week. Today's headline comes from the Washington Post. It's from

Immorten Joe Biden. That's a really good Twitter handle. All right, David, this is a baseball gamer about the Orioles beating the A's. And some of the key

players in this game were John Means. John Means, who was the pitcher for the Orioles, and Austin Hayes, who hit two home runs. John means and Austin Hayes.

Okay. Or you maybe even put them the other way. Now remember, this is the Washington Post. Oh, okay. I got it. I got this. You just gave it away. You put it the other way.

Oh, damn it. The Hayes Means Committee? Yes. Oakland can't get past Hayes and Means Committee. That's fun. I let you out. The key is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantus. We are back Thursday with the ringers Danny Hyphen. and an NFL draft coverage glossary, plus more Lukemore takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Ryan.