The Press Box - The Joe Biden Semi-Boomlet, the Jerry Jones Photo, and a New Book by Anthony Bourdain

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Bryan and David kick things off discussing Anthony Bourdain’s biography, ‘Down and Out in Paradise’ (0:33), before weighing in on Joe Biden’s bid for re-election in 2024 against former president Donald Trump (13:44). Then, they address the Washington Post story about Dallas Cowboys owner and GM Jerry Jones and discuss his impact, or lack thereof, in diversifying hiring practices throughout the league (28:21). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. David?

Yes. I want to start a new feature here at the press box called I read something. Oh, I already like the sound of it. Please explain. Because we don't read stuff very often. Yes. Often you kind of wake up and go, I read nothing. I didn't read the new book I wanted to read, didn't read my friend's new book,

my friend's long form article that was tweeted out. What I did was I skimmed. enough so I could send the proper congratulations or put out the tweet I needed to put out, but I didn't read it. My wife and I just listened to The Devil in Sherlock Holmes on audiobook, the great David Grant collection, and I had a sort of wistful feeling throughout the entire thing of just remembering having read things like a decade ago. Like, oh, sitting down and just the rapturous feeling of reading a 10-page New Yorker piece.

my God. It was a great time. Yeah. Well, I got back on the horse over Thanksgiving, and I read the new biography of Anthony Bourdain called Down and Out in Paradise. Oh, yeah. By Charles Learson, who's a veteran of many magazines. Bordane died in 2018, and Learson's book, David, is like a classic unauthorized biography.

Except Learson has Bordane's text messages, including the last. ones he ever sent before his death. He has lots of stuff from his laptop computer, including web searches he was performing in the final days of his life. Bourdain's wife, Atavia Busia Bordane, who Bordane never actually divorced but was living apart from and was in other relationships with other women when he died, is quoted in the book a lot.

usually in kind of an interesting, indirect way of she told a friend. But as the New York Times has noted, Busia Bourdain has not pushed back at all on the publication of this book or anything that's in this book. So we might guess that this book is kind of an authorized, unauthorized biography. Yeah. Which makes it a pretty interesting product. It is. I mean, usually having the authorized tag on there.

one would think would boost sales, although if you were a really like nimble, effective marketing department, you'd think in most other lines of work you could make a lot of hay out of the unauthorized label, especially if you have the goods. The one they don't want you to read.

Something very 90s about down and out in paradise, and I mean that in the best way. First of all, it's written in magazine voice. Remember magazine voice? Explain. By which I mean men's magazine voice. Uh-huh.

You'd read features that were written in that very wise-up, kind of funny, but not especially funny way, a kind of voice that would often bring in a quote from a great writer now and again to kind of set the mood a little bit. Yeah. This book is written in that voice. Yeah. I hadn't realized how much that voice had disappeared. from my life until I was reading this and I'm like, oh my God.

Yeah. It's like you and I are picking up issues of Esquire and GQ back in the day when we had time to read magazines. The other thing that's very 90s about it is it is a muckraking biography of a famous person. And I don't know about you, but when I first started reading adult nonfiction books back in the 90s, many of the books I picked up were books of that genre.

Often about sports or athletes, but they were the untold story of the warts and all story of a person or a team or a season. There's not as much of that around anymore. I mean, books, I don't even know which came first. It's not exactly a chicken or the egg situation,

but certainly books have fallen under the same condition that documentary film is under now that we talk about all the time, right? At a bare minimum, athletes, celebrities, whoever are sort of self-aware or just generally, like, media-savvy enough to know that if they get their version out there, then there's not going to be a market for the CDER version, the unauthorized version. a lot of participating and reaping the financial rewards. And I would add to that, there's the participating part of it that sort of rules out books like this. And there's also just the general, will you come on my podcast aesthetic?

That leads people to conduct an interview or to talk about a person in a particular way rather than in this way. Yeah. But what's interesting about reading one of these, again, after so many years or reading anything, is that it's not disrespectful of Anthony Bourdain. It's just not reverent about Anthony Bourdain.

And that was always such an interesting sweet spot to me. We're not going in like, oh, I hate this person. I'm going to expose them. It's just like, I'm just going to tell a story that has not been told. I'm going to fill in parts of their life that they never told you about or left out as part of the official record. Well, I mean, who knows why? I mean aside from like I said, just the kind of celebrity self-awareness,

or savviness, but I'm sure a part of it too is that, you know, in the 80s, even into the 90s, if you had a best-selling celebrity biography, you could be financially set for life, right? Like you sell one more on the heels of it or something, but like it's like having like whistleblower status. It's like, well, I'm rich now. I don't care if you know one wants to work with me.

I don't care if I don't get any more scoops or People magazine or whatever, you know? It's a little bit harder. it's a harder road to ho now. A couple of things. Road to hoe. Road to hoe. Road to hoe.

Oh, all right. Road to hoe. That's what I said. And then I said, why are you hoeing a road? Wouldn't you be hoeing it? Anyway. A couple of things interesting

from the book that I want to run by you. One is Anthony Bourdain was in that really small subgroup of celebrities who were like, that person is authentic. That person is no bullshit. They're not lying to us or trying to massage us like other celebrities are. They're giving us the truth. Yeah. And when you read this book, it's so interesting because you see that Anthony Bourdain

was rehearsing to be this particular character. He was creating the authentic Anthony Bourdain for basically his entire life. Huh. It starts in high school in New Jersey. And he's like he, like you and me, right? Like we hadn't done anything, but we were already kind of like, you know, feeling out practicing whatever character we wanted to be in a. adulthood, even though we couldn't quite tell where that was going to go.

Anthony Bourdain was being recognizably the cool customer, the, I'm going to tell you what I really think guy back then, even before he'd done anything. Uh-huh. It's so funny. I was, as you say that, I'm thinking, there's, when we launched the ringer, we did a, we did a little series of profiles called the Undeniable, which was, I was just thinking about it last week because it was actually inspired by an old issue of Esquire with a George lowest cover called The Unknockables.

And Anthony, and it was just sort of the premise was, these are celebrities, athletes, whoever, that have a 100% approval rating. And Anthony Bordane, I don't think was part of that series, but like almost defines it, right? I mean, there's nobody that's not pro Bordane. Totally. Totally. another interesting thing was the tale of how the article

that would become his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential, got into the New Yorker magazine in April 1999. Bourdain, as we all know, wrote it, or most people know, wrote it for the New York press, the free weekly in New York. The press accepted the article,

but never ran it. There's some rights. And later, Bordane would explain, I said, you know, fuck it. I'm taking the piece back, and I stuffed it in an envelope and sent it to the New Yorker. Well, as Learson reminds us, that isn't exactly what happened. Anthony's mother, Gladys, was an editor at the New York Times. She gave a copy of the article to Esther Fine, a reporter at the New York Times, who also happens to be the wife of David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker.

And that's how Remnick read the article. Now, the ending is the same. David Remnick reading this article by somebody, presumably, he has never heard of and being like, oh, my gosh, this voice just pops out of the page. We need to get this in the magazine. Yeah. But that is slightly different than I put it in an envelope and somebody picked it up out of the slush pile and said, oh my gosh, this voice is amazing.

We must get this into the magazine. Yeah. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's interesting. Kitchen Confidential, the book, put together in large part, Larson Wright, by Bourdain's editors at Bloomsbury. If you remember that book, a lot of memoir, a lot of pronouncements about the food world,

it's very interestingly arranged, and he would sort of write these pieces and little parts of it and send them in, and they'd be like, this is better than that. Yeah. This is repetitive. This works if we put it here

and kind of fashion this into a thing. Yeah. So that book should be seen as a triumph of writing. and again, I'm not trying to to cast aspersions on Bordane's writing. He was a fantastic writer, but also a triumph of editing. Yeah.

Stitching together. That's what a triumph in publishing used to look like. Bordane was friends in life with chef Mario Bataali. Batauli was accused, you'll remember, of sexual abuse and harassment in 2017. And Learson says in the book that Bourdain, quote, leaked additional information about Bataali to the media. Then Batali emails Bordane and says,

are these leaks coming from you, from you, my friend? Learson says Bordane emailed back. And presumably Learson has seen this email since he's seen many messages from the computer and otherwise and sent something that was terse and noncommittal to Batali. I thought that was interesting. There is a whole subplot,

and it's actually bigger than a subplot about Borda, girlfriend, Aziah Argento, at the end of his life, which I will not summarize here. And toward the end of the book, the famous chef Eric Repair, who was friends with Bordane, he and Bordane are shooting in France in the last days of Bordain's life. They're staying in adjoining rooms in this hotel. Repair is very worried about Bordane, worried about my friend, want to make sure he's okay. So at the end of the night, he goes and puts his ear to the wall. to listen.

And the first night he hears Bourdain snoring in the other room. Okay, he's asleep. All right. The next night, or maybe a couple of nights later, this is Learson writing. Repair got up in the middle of the night and again put his ear to the wall,

but he heard nothing. And in the morning, Anthony Bourdain would be dead. I will say down and out in paradise is not for everybody. There will be people who will read this and not like the approach, perhaps. recoil at this kind of book.

But I thought it was really interesting. And I thought it was really interesting when paired with some of the other pieces of writing about Bourdain that came out after he died or that have been produced a sense, that are more productions by his inner circle of people. Sure. Which we would call authorized, authorized books about his life and career. Most of all, David, I'm just proud I read. something. Me too,

right. Good job. Self-congratulatory feature here at the press box. Coming up, there's suddenly a Joe Biden boomlet among Democrats. Yay. The Washington Post found an old photo of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones inside a very, very interesting piece of sports writing. And finally, we're sorry, but Bob Dylan did not autograph your copy of his new book. All that and more on the press box. a part of the ringer podcast network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantis here.

David, in terms of the 2024 presidential race, we're in positioning season. And we know we're in positioning season because Mike Pompeo is sub-tweeting his old boss, Donald Trump. You saw the story where Donald Trump had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, who is both a white supremacist and Holocaust denoucels. and Mike Pompeo tweeted,

anti-Semitism is a cancer. We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world's oldest bigotry. Not mentioning explicitly who he's talking about when he sends that tweet. Also positioning himself for a likely 2024 presidential run is President Joe Biden. Front page story in today's New York Times

it talks about how Biden is enjoying, I don't know if boomlet is the right word. Does boomlet ever describe the feeling about Joe Biden even within the Democratic Party? I don't want to split hairs. It feels more like, what, if we see another piece or two like this, it's a boomlet of Biden's back. If old guys all got it, think pieces or whatever. But yeah, okay, it's a Biden boomlet. We can call it that. New York Times writes that in recent days, officials ranging from Representative Henry Quayar,

one of the most conservative House Democrats, to Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have said they would support another Biden bid. So one interesting question is, how do we get here? Well, there was the better than expected Democratic showing in the midterms. Yeah. which serves not only as a reason Joe Biden should run for another term, but I guess a vindication, at least partially of his political instincts. Is that fair? That's certainly how it's being read. I'm, for one, am skeptical. That it had a direct correlate, correlate relationship.

But sure, I mean, if Biden had, if Biden's last, you know, five public appearances prior to the election were him just like dancing the jitterbug. And, the exact same election outcome occurred, there would be many people, there'd be New York Times you're writing pieces about, you know, jitterbug politics and how the jitterbug is going to say it's a Democratic Party. You know, that's inevitable. We need lots more Biden dancing in campaign ads in 2024. I for one would like that, especially the, I'm Joe Biden and I approve this message part at the end. We saw him cutting a rug. The other part, of the Joe Biden boomlet, if that's the right word for it,

is that Trump got into the election. And does Joe Biden have any more effective branding than I'm the guy who is not Trump and can beat Trump? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it feels like, it feels like, you know, with the would be the sports metaphor. It feels like, you know, like a NBA playoff series where they bring in like the 34-year-old semi-retired sinner to defend somebody because he has a good track record of being that guy, right? But if we're just talking, but if we're going to torture an NBA defensive metaphor,

it's like, you know, it's a good personal business to be the Kobe stopper, but every Kobe stopper became a laughing stock at some point, right? Like, you get to be the Kobe stopper for about like three months and then Kobe just scores 60 on you. So I don't know if that's, but yeah, it's, again, it's inevitable that Trump getting back in their race will will cause people, will bring people to this kind of very straightforward calculus. It's like, well, Trump is such a wild card. All we know for sure is that there's one person who's beaten him. And that person is our president, Joe Biden. So yeah, that, I mean, that makes sense. I find it a little bit, the logic goes a little bit off the rails for me

on the next step, which is, if it's anybody else, somebody else might have a better shot. But because Joe Biden has beaten Trump, Joe Biden is the best option against Trump. Well, maybe. But it kind of follows for me that whoever is able to beat Trump is probably just the best candidate. And vice versa, the best candidate is the most capable of beating Trump. It doesn't necessarily mean it's Joe Biden, but the idea that like, whatever unnamed potentially, like Gavin Newsom is a better candidate against Ron DeSantis than Joe Biden would be, doesn't really make a lot of sense. I mean, maybe there's other reasons. Maybe age matters, maybe like, whatever. Maybe you want a fresh face. There's a million things, but why you would only think of Biden because he's

beaten Trump, but not in any other instance, it's kind of odd. Yeah, especially since we had that big conversation, both with Trump and with all of his predecessors, about the power of incumbency with presidents in recent years. Like, Trump almost won re-election. He came really close. Yeah. And partly was leveraging the incumbent. incumbent power of being president to win reelection despite having dismal approval ratings. I would like Cousin Sal to visit this show over the next couple of weeks and just set some odds for will a political pundit use the phrase Kobe Stopper when describing Joe Biden, excuse me, at any time over the next two years?

It'll happen. I'm going to have a special show for you if the phrase Kobe Stopper is used. yeah well we'll see can i ask you a little bit of a pedantic whatever irritating question about the shape of this piece in the new york times about the biden boomlet it said they talked to 24 or over two dozen current uh whatever democratic office holders or operatives or um you know just various democrats in some significance uh of some significance and um it made me wonder like you should usually, usually, you know, 24, 30, however many it is, it's a significant number, right? I mean, there's no doubt about it. But if you're writing a piece that's sort of in search of,

like, you're kind of going with your lead, right? You go in with your, with your, with the, with the argument in mind, and you're kind of looking for validation. Certainly, they found it. What is the right number? I think for me, what tripping up is the, the variety of people really helps the piece, but it also just makes the net so necessarily wide. that who knows if you're getting a representative sample, right? It's like, like, you know, I talked to, I talked to over two dozen New Yorkers about the state of the subway system. And here's what we came out.

Well, you know, that's fine for like a style section piece or something. But if you really want to get to the nuts and bolts, you might need to talk to like 200, you know, or even more. I don't know. What's the right number? I can't decide if two dozen is too small or too big. Right. Yeah.

It's kind of in the middle where it feels like it kind of, of waters down like a real concise argument that somebody one or two people might have but it's but it's and it certainly doesn't it certainly doesn't get the whole range of of argument though if i ever by the way brag in the form of a book or piece about how many people i talk to for this i understand this is a convention of newspaper writing we're trying to give readers a sense that this is a representative opinion. But if I ever do that, I talk to 284 people for this, just come get me. It's over. Journalism, we're going to put O'Brien out to pasture. When you write a book, sometimes your publisher does that for you, right? That just somehow makes it way into the jacket copy,

like Obama's Kenyan birthplace or whatever, and it just never leaves. And that's fine, but if you ever hear that out of my mouth, you come get old Brian, we're going to send him out to pasture. It's all over. A couple more Biden notes for you. I was, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade with my kids? Same. Same. This was my, my, the day before Thanksgiving, my three and a half year old preschool teacher, play school teacher told him about the Thanksgiving Day parade. So he just suddenly came home and he was like, what's this parade? Tell me, listen, can we watch this parade? Many people are talking. Yeah. We had a Thanksgiving Day parade. Did you see the awkward Biden call

in to the parade? Oh, no, I missed it. NBC's correspond. First of all, there's brand name Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is on NBC. I realize this year, and then there's off-brand Thanksgiving Day parade on CBS, which doesn't use the word Macy's. Oh my God, I had no idea. But it's the same parade, and they are showing different floats at different times. Anyway, on the on-brand Macy's parade, one of NBC's correspondents was standing on the parade route and had a cell phone up to her ear to talk to Joe Biden and the first lady Jill Biden. Now, I assume the sound, I hope the sound was not actually coming over the cell phone,

but her attempted interactions with the Bidens definitely felt like you were calling your grandparents on a cell phone and nobody could really hear or figure out what was going on. And they were kind of deferring to each other and finishing each other's sentences. like, oh, you know, I know that Thanksgiving time I'm thinking about the troops overseas and would just like to thank the troops. Like, okay, you know, and then went back to Jill for being thankful for something else. Truly, truly, truly strange moment. And you realize with Biden, his awkwardness is such that sometimes even the layups of

being president, like my Thanksgiving message during the parade is going to be kind of an adventure, not quite producing the smooth soundbite that maybe it would have in other presidencies. Yeah. Also, we had the Biden Thanksgiving photo bomb. Do you see this? The Biden's were in Nantucket for Thanksgiving, and they're walking down the street. And I have a picture there in the Google Doc, if you want to glance at it, but some young

girls are in a, I guess it's a house. maybe it's another store and they see Biden and his secret service detail coming down the streets and get really excited and Biden comes up to the window. Oh my gosh.

And some people compared it to a horror movie. To me it reminds me of a horror movie poster. Like everything's a little bit too convenient. Well, yeah, but also you just see this kind of face and it's not totally in focus but there is somebody waiting outside the window. Kind of an amazing moment.

But it'd be great. if you're those kids. President of the United States stopped by to say hi. By the way, I think it was confirmed in the comments that this is a restaurant on Main Street of Nantucket. He's not just peeking into somebody's win.

Coming up in 30 seconds, you need to hear about this new photo or old photo of 14-year-old Jerry Jones. Plus, our much awaited discussion about the Bob Dylan autograph scandal. But first, David, Let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I don't know if our correspondence were eating Thanksgiving dinner, but I did not see too many fantastic overworked Twitter jokes, David. Kind of a tie here. One was we lost Irene Cara. she is the voice of the song from the movie fame. Oh, wow. Famous song, later TV show fame. Uh-huh.

A lot of kind of so-so Twitter jokes about how Irene Kara did not, in fact, live forever. I don't know if we really, you know, if we really, you know, celebrate that too much. You also didn't learn how to fly if you want to follow up on the lyrics there. But today's winner, I guess, Friday, there was a big showdown of the World Cup. And I know you and the family were glued to the TV for this between. the US of A and England. Yeah. It ended zero zero.

Mm-hmm. It was an overworked Twitter joke and later a pun headline to write, U.S. beat England nil-nil. Because they're better at soccer than we are. Yeah. By the way, the two USA matches in the World Cup so far, nill nil and 1-1 against wales two matches a total of two goals for all the four participating teams

don't you miss the old american soccer troll at times like this you'd be like why aren't you scoring more yeah it's just like soccer is boring yeah there's no scoring in it this is terrible i miss i miss that person in our lives we're too nuanced in our point we're too nuanced in our Points of view right now at this point. We just, we just, we accept, we accept these, these scoreless soccer games as, as, as, as a true American, we should be railing against them. We all got scared out of it by big soccer. Big soccer. We were surrounded by soccer fans who were telling us how amazing this is and nobody had the guts to write, you know what, maybe soccer is really boring. That's okay.

If you like it, that's okay, but maybe it is. I really wanted the F-4. one troll to appear this year. And maybe I'll bring that into being next year, but it's like somebody to be like, these F1 races people talking about, there's like one lead change? Do I have to like this? Is big auto racing

going to bully me into liking F1? Anyway, thanks to radio free Billy D and Nick Sheiko. If you have ambitions to be a soccer troll in 2022, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump,

we've got to talk about this Jerry Jones story. Came out the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in the Washington Post. Double byline par excellence, David Marinus and Sally Jenkins produced a story that included a photo of 14-year-old Jerry Jones. Now, for context, the Post has been publishing a series on black NFL coaches and specifically the lack of opportunity for black NFL head coaches.

The paper sent a request to all 32 NFL owners and said, we want to talk to you about this. Talk to you about this issue. One guy agreed to talk, at least to talk a lot about this issue. And that was Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. So Marinus and Jenkins go into Jerry's own history with race and they find this photo.

taken in 1957. Jerry was 14 years old. He was a sophomore at North Little Rock High School in Arkansas. This is three years after the Supreme Court decided that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Six black students on this day were trying to integrate North Little Rock High School. They were met by white students that the post notes were hurling snarling racial slurs. The black students were turned away. Jerry's explanation to the paper was that he was an onlooker. He was not a participant. What did you make of this photo?

The first time I saw the photo, it was on Twitter, detached from the story, and I just assumed it was that it was not actually, like it was someone making someone's idea of a joke, or, I mean, because it does sort of feel like a Reddit investigation, right? It's like we found this old photo, and we're going to just try to figure out

who each of these people are. but it was a really interesting story I'll say at the top and I believe that they actually like goes as far as to kind of say this indirectly or maybe directly in the piece but like kudos to Jerry Jones for being willing to talk

but even more so kudos for him for just kind of like opening up the Rolodex about all these issues right they kind of they did say specifically that nobody seemed to have any fear of repercussion for talking very openly about Jerry Jones's past and it's a it's not just a congratulations to him, but it's like a, it's like a,

you know, Hayesport good game to him because this is how you should do it, right? I mean, it's just there's so much like, I feel like you, you just gain so much by just by being open and by letting everyone else be open about you too, right? There was the literal implication throughout the piece that Jerry Jones is a more open-minded

and potentially progressive thinking person, because he was willing to do this, right? I mean, it was, and you get that, you would get that from reading it regardless. But it was like, like, it was a, it was a really interesting piece because it, it dealt with an incredibly important issue. And, and it linked, you know,

it talked about some investigations that time, I mean, the Post has done in the past. Tyler Times wrote some great pieces for the ringer on the same, on the subject of black coaches. is not getting an opportunity, not getting the opportunity is commiserate with their experience, etc. It's a really important subject. And, and, but, but the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the,

and the, and the, and the, the leader of the, the, leader of the sport was really interesting. Um, I'm not sure I would change anything about the piece, but there was, but the connective tissue between those sort of two poles, sometimes I felt a little bit wanting to right and I don't know what else they could have done it is the it is the journey of one man that this story is about but the idea that he has the power to change the way that that you know hiring along racial lines or or race blind hiring is you know works in the NFL I think is undoubtedly true but it but the piece itself doesn't really nudge that concept forward that much right it sort of states

it and then 10,000 words later, we kind of get back to it. I don't know, but I don't know if that's a criticism. It was a really compelling and interesting piece and certainly thought provoking. And maybe that's part of what really makes it work is that it kind of forces the reader or allows the reader to spend time meditating on it. To me, the connective tissue that you mentioned is this, is someone who came from this time and this place, as shown on the photo. going to fix the NFL's awful record of hiring black coach.

Yeah, is it, should it even be a conversation? Should he even be the person we're talking about? Yeah, that's a good question. Because that's what we're, that's what this whole series is about, right? How did we get here? Yeah. What are the elements that are happening, uh, that got us to this place? And, and, you know, I think it starts out being like, here is this photo from this truly

ugly and horrible moment in American history. Here is this guy who is arguably the most powerful. person in sports who was present at this moment. Amazingly, shockingly, when you look at this picture, but then connecting it around and saying, now, what we're asking here is that this person is going to be one of the 32 NFL owners who is going to fix this problem. And not 32. I mean, it's one of one, right?

I mean, it was kind of, the piece came back around several times to like, if Jerry Jones does something, then the league changes, right? Yeah. Well, so Jerry Jones is certainly happy to, uh, to, to co-sign that idea, right? That I have the power to change it. Uh, the piece says when asked whether he believed he had the singular ability to change

things, he responded, I do. What I'm saying is I understand that. Even though we should know, Jerry Jones has hired eight Dallas Cowboys head coaches since he bought the team in 1989. All eight of them were white, including several that the post calls. often unremarkable white men.

And by the way, it mentions the Dennis Green near hiring in the piece, which somehow felt much more problematic in real time. Usually when you look back on those things, it feels more problematic in retrospect. But I seem to remember the entire discourse of the time being that he had a staged phone call with Dennis Smith when he was fishing on his fishing boat as cover because he already knew he was going to hire Bill Parcells.

And he wanted to comply with NFL rules. I want to come back to the Jerry Jones part of the story that you touched on, which to me is part of what's fascinating here. The interview lasted two and a half hours that he had at the Cowboys headquarters there with Jenkins and Meredith. If you were on Twitter after the Cowboys beat the Giants on Thanksgiving Day, you notice that Jerry Jones was standing outside the locker room talking to reporters even more about this story. providing them with essential material. And that to me has always been something that has just blown my mind about Jerry Jones is he does not have conventional, this is good press, this is bad press decision making. Like most NFL owners or powerful people inside and outside of sports. Yeah.

There is some part of him that just craves attention. no matter what the story is, even a very, very tough, difficult, tricky story like this. And again, like when you see it in there, you see this part of this being about his vanity. And, you know, Jenkins and Marinus are able to bring that out, him saying like, oh, I can do this. I can change this.

Yes, almost like he's talking himself into the idea. Mm-hmm. While they're sitting there talking. I mean, and you realize, like, that's about, that's about Jerry at some level of his being being flattered or flattering himself. Sure. I can be this agent of change. I have agreed to this interview because I'm going to be the one guy who sits here and goes over all these things and digs into my past.

I mean, that's just like this part of Jerry Jones that is just, again, it reminds me of an era of sports ownership that you and I were not alive during, like when the NFL was being run out of Canton, Ohio. Right. or, you know, I wasn't around for Bill Vec or something like that, where you're just like, hi, I would like to come into your office and interview you, including about an issue like the NFL's crappy track record of hiring blackhead coaches. Yep. And here's Jerry dispensing material. Mm-hmm.

It is, it is really, really striking. And it's always worked out for him, too, right? Just to kind of be very available and just sort of be, you know, he sort of becomes almost like a named background source for so many of these giant NFL issues, right? You get Jerry Jones on the record because it's available. You get him first.

You get him at some length and then the angle of the story sort of pivots from there. It doesn't even pivot, but sort of that's baked in a little bit. And being baked in to the NFL, being baked into this story is, it's suit, it works out well for him.

That's not like a knock. It's not like he's being underhanded. I don't think he's being particularly deliberaged, like you said. but it has worked out well for him so I can see why he would keep doing it. It's worked out well in his mind because he wants to be at the center of everything.

And he wants to be getting attention about everything, whether it's good or bad. Yeah. So again, you have this great shame, this great problem of the NFL, and he's like, I want my name to be part of that story. Again, no matter what people come away with thinking of the story,

a lot of very, very negative Twitter attention we should note to the story. You know, like that that's what I want. Or that is my goal with everything. So on that level, it's really, really fascinating. There was a note in Peter King's column today that there's this conspiracy theory out in the world that the Jerry Jones photo and the story that resulted from it came from soon to be former commander's owner, Dan Snyder. remember that Don Van Nata story at ESPN where

of course, yeah. Snyder was telling friends that, those owners are going to try to remove me. Better watch out. Yeah. And I guess the conspiracy theory is that this was part of the compromise that Dan Snyder had on Jerry Jones, to which Jenkins told Peter King,

all I could tell you is that Dan Snyder wants me personally face down in a ditch. I don't think Dan Snyder is going to be giving out his goodies to the Washington Post, the newspaper that has investigated and investigated and investigated him again. Maybe this is 4D Chess. Maybe he did it and nobody would think it was them. Have I told the story on this podcast about my last interview experience with Jerry Jones?

No, I'm not sure. I don't think so. Similar is similar-ish, I guess, to this one. This is 2018. We're all at the ringer. I'm writing about Fox getting the NFL rights. which at that point was 25 years, it was 1993, so it was the 25th anniversary of that happening.

And I've been trying to get Jerry Jones for an interview because he was a big driver among NFL owners. And of course, I'm figuring in my mind, like a sports writer, Jerry Jones will talk to me about being a big driver in getting the NFL rights for Fox. And so for a period of months, I went back and forth with the Cowboys. I love to talk to you about this.

I want to talk to Jerry about this. I want to talk to Jerry about this. It kind of dragged on and on. And then I think I got an email sometime late in the process when I was like really getting desperate. And somebody over there said, oh, Jerry actually did the interview. And I looked it up and he had given quotes

about the anniversary of Fox News, which was also having some kind of anniversary. And I'm like, no, no, no. That's not the Fox story that I'm working on. Jerry's celebrating a Fox News anniversary is not it. At this point, I'm just like, just getting almost angry. And then the word came down and said, why don't you just come down to Dallas on Wednesday? And I went down.

I was escorted into Jerry Jones's office. PR guy says, oh, Jerry, you and Brian know each other. We do not know each other or certainly know each other on that level. PR guy left. I was seated in Jerry Jones's office alone. And he was like, Brian, I got a bathroom back here. If you need to go use bathroom anytime, just my private bathroom, just go make yourself home.

And I talked to him for an hour and a half until I just completely ran out of questions. At which point. At that point, at which point Jerry himself escorted me back to the elevator. That was what, and this is 2018. This is what a media interrupt. action was like. And, you know, a fascinating story

that probably requires more discussion. Jerry Jones in the Washington Post, a story by David Marinus and Sally Jenkins. One more item for us today, David. Sure. Listeners, Duck Bear and John brought the Bob Dylan

autograph scandal to our attention. I love this story. I'm interested in autographs, as you know. Bob Dylan in kind of a funny note, has a new book out called The History of Modern Song. It's basically Bob Dylan writing the book of basketball,

but about music. Yeah. Going to put Chuck Barry in the Pantheon? Got to read to find out. According to the New York Times, Simon & Schuster, who is Dylan's publisher, advertised limited edition,

hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each. Yeah. The book is, what, $40? bucks. For $600, you get a signed copy of Bob Dylan's book. They included a letter of authenticity signed by Jonathan Carp. The publisher's chief executive, huge figure in the publishing world. Yeah, a legend. Now tell me this, the autographed limited edition run, is that something that the big authors get when you have a book come out? Sure. I mean, it would only be the biggest a big author that people would even be interested in. I mean, up to the level of, I mean,

there's New York Times bestsellers that would eagerly sign a book so that you would buy it. That cover price, not at $600, right? I mean, it's, can I sign you? We see all this, remember at Christmas time on Twitter? Would you like me to sign a copy of my book and send it to you? Your publisher will tell you, you know, if you're traveling, if you're anywhere, you know, anywhere in usual, go to the local books store and offer to sign the copies of your book that are in stock, you know, it's, and if they have them, they'll be, they'll be happy to let you. Yeah, so, I mean, it would only be very specific. I don't know how they do. I mean, I presume that it's, it's a separate skew. I mean, you know, they would have like a unique ISBN number.

It's a completely different category for these books. And, yeah, you would want, it's not unusual for there to be like a limited edition run of a book, you know, this is the, We've all seen those books on various shelves, right? This one has a fancier cover. It's like comic books when we were kids, you know? It's the gold embossed version or the hologram version. Yeah. But, I mean, for someone like Dylan especially, to whom there is a huge memorabilia market already attached.

Yeah. I was just at a charity event. And they have all these, you know, things you can bid a silent auction items all the way, like, lining the room. And some were just, like, gift baskets. We made it off of the couple of gift baskets. But some of them were these, like, framed photos. And I quickly realized, I had never even thought about this before. But there was, like, 50 of these in the room would be, like, a photo of Bruce Bringsingson playing a concert, signed by, with a little placard signed by Bruce.

and also like a set list from one of the shows. And I'm like, I'm not sure to what degree all of this is absolutely above board. It's certainly like, they're, it's certainly like officially endorsed or I would guess officially endorsed by the Springsteen camp, but like to what degree, I don't know if it's a unique signature, it's whatever. But this is an industry, right? This is just one company came and dropped off like 50 of these things. And they're like, if you sell them, you know, for the minimum, they're all yours.

And if not, we'll come get the rest tomorrow or whatever, you know. But I was staring at these, at these signatures wondering, is that actually, or, okay, I buy the Springsteen signature, but it's sitting right next to an Einstein, you know, it's like an Einstein photo with a quote and a weird little gold sign placard. Like, that's not Einstein's signature. So what am I really do? What are we doing here? Anyway, all that's to say, there was a, there was a Bob Dylan photo with some sort of scribbled notes as well.

people love Bob Dylan people love having pieces of Bob Dylan they always have and as particularly as he gets older this is a great thing for him so of course you want to you're going to get the book anyway for 40 bucks but you pay 600 for a very limited signed version it's it's compelling right but that's a very long answer your question the story doesn't end there well you're wondering how you can tell if Albert Einstein's signature is real well in 2022 let me assure you this david but I know those from personal experience, there is a vast autograph collecting community out there online.

And the cool thing is, is they have lots of examples at hand of legitimate autographs that they can then compare to autographs that come in, in this case that came in on the Dillon book. And a guy named Justin Steffman, who is the Times calls a professional authenticator who runs a Facebook group for collectors, figured out pretty quickly.

that the Bob Dylan autographs in the books looked like they were done with an auto pin. Yeah. What Simon and Schuster would later call in pinned replica form, meaning Bob Dylan didn't sit down and sign 600 books. These guys in the internet guy, it's like, that looks like a machine signed a bunch of these books. So Simon and Schuster had to apologize.

They are offering refunds for the $600 Bob villain book. But they're still saying this was a auto pin signed. I think to me, I don't, I think auto pin's ridiculous, but I do, but if someone wants to insist upon its legitimacy, that's fine, right? It's like, oh, I'm signing these things, but just remotely or whatever. But the problem here was that there was, there were repeat, repeats, right? There's clearly like some smaller

number of unique signatures that were then duplicated as real signatures by the, it was using auto pin as like a cheat code. So yeah, you have to offer people their money back and whatever else. And then wasn't there a thing in there where it said like there's some hope that they'll have even more value now that everybody's like is going to have to send them back to the publisher? Reader they won't. Let me tell you that. Was it always kind of weird that Bob Dylan was going to sit down and autograph a thousand copies of his book? Does that sound like something Bob Dylan was going to do?

Sounds like something Like Stephen King and Michael Crichton would have done As someone who's worked at a bookstore and been a part of the Autographing process, right? I worked at Politics and Pro's bookstore at D.C. Big bookstore, huge live event venue.

Where every D.C. book event happens. Yeah. Whenever we would have like a big, big, big author in, you could go and listen to him speak and get in line. have him or her like sign your book whatever and have a nice little 20 second chat with them

along the way but you could also order a signed copy of the book. And so after the authors were done signing and for some people it was quite a long line they were done with and the employees like me would have the two or three of those would come with boxes of books and we would open them to the appropriate page and have them sign

and just like make sure there's one constantly from them and this is like a pretty laborious task after a certain point right? by book 100, your signing hand starts to shake a little, you know? And it's a whole ordeal. So yeah, I mean, a thousand, you have to be really committed. It's not just commitment to selling your book. And by the way, if you're Bob Dylan, you don't need to sell books.

You know, you're fine. And you've already been paid your advance and whatever else. Not to mention making lots of money for your music. Yeah, sure. But it's struggling author, Bob Dylan. commitment to the marketing program, right? It's almost like, yeah, you're going to make money off of these books, but 600 bucks a pop and there's a thousand of them,

so you're making $300,000. I guess that's good money. But still, I mean, it's signing books in general is sort of a commitment to the marketing plan, a commitment to your publisher, a reciprocal sort of deal. And it could be a lot of work, man. Did you see a lot of famous Washington journalists coming in and asking about an auto pin?

No, but I believe that was it Barbara Kingsolver? Chris Matthews might have done it. Was it Margaret Atwood that invented the auto pen? Or was at least its first proponent? I remember, yeah, because it was this sort of like futurist sort of push at the beginning, right? Yeah, and it wasn't just an auto pin which just replicate signatures. And it was, she was going to sign on a device remotely. Right.

That would then appear on your book. I mean, it was a very, it was a more, it was slightly more complicated. It was like you could have a book signing. It was basically a book signing via telegraph, right, whereas she's just like signing a thing on a pad in her living room. This is basically she on your book. The audit, she predicted like the era of Zoom books,

book readings. She just didn't have this. She didn't realize the signing part didn't matter that much. Yeah, there was a great New Yorker talk of the town story about this a billion years ago by Ted Friend, which I'll put on our Twitter account if anybody's interested in remote autographs. New York Times, by the way,

had a funny headline on this story, David. Bob Dylan gets tangled up in book, Autograph controversy. Speaking of which, it's time for David Shoemaker, guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Wednesday's headline about potentially rogue purveyors of coffee was coffee cart on Brooklyn Heights Promenade causes a brewhaha.

Today's headline comes to us from TV anchor and valued listener Mitch Carr. It's from MSNBC, David. Actually, more of a strain pun, Chiron. MSNBC was doing a segment about Mike Pompeo, the aforementioned former Trump Secretary of State. Mike Pompeo has been critical of his old boss, which is probably his way of strategically finding an opening to run for president himself.

What was MSNBC's strained pun, Kairon? I have no, I'm just going to assume it's Pompeo in circumstance or something. Wow. Just close it down. All right. That doesn't have, that's not based on the way you described it, just based on the only plan I can think of for Pompeo.

Pompeo and circumstance. He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantis. If you missed our last pod, which you did right before Thanksgiving, it is about the late George Lois, the cover genius of many an issue of Esquire

and the lost art of the magazine cover. That was very fun. David and I did that with Michael Solomon. That's up now. I'll be back later in the week. And David, on Monday, we've got to talk about the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff. Because it is a week from Tuesday, we could be in store for six more years of Senator Raphael Warnock or six years of Senator Herschel Walker. We will discuss Monday plus more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.