The Press Box - The Times’ Mamdani Story, David Foster Wallace Revisited, and Josh Dawsey on the 2024 Election

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Hello media consumers! Bryan and David discuss the NYT's story on Zohran Mamdani and what the point was of running their "scoop" obtained in a hack of Columbia University records, new info on the Epstein files reports there are in fact no files, and new contenders for "Worst Question Ever Asked at the White House" (7:15), before revisiting David Foster Wallace's 2006 piece on Roger Federer entitled, 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience' (22:25). Next Bryan is joined by WSJ's Josh Dawsey to discuss his new book, '2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America' co-written with Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf (41:25). Finally David and Bryan reconnect in wake of the new 'Superman' film to discuss Clark Kent the journalist, and for David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline (1:09:10)! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Josh Dawsey Producer: Kye Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamer is

on the brink of collapse, and which executive is on the hot seat. Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again? Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. David? Yes. I'm kind of against podcast chit-chat as a rule of thumb. But I want to know, how was your July 4th? Oh, that's a good question to start with.

It was good. We had a good pretty low-key July. I mean, we just came back from the beach. and we're going to head up to New Hampshire before long, so we kept a pretty low key. I will say that we went over some friends' houses that live about an hour away, so we did some driving and then just chilled out.

Our little one played with just like the neighborhood kids over there, like something out of an 80s movie, you know? I mean, just like a mob of kids from ages like 4 to 14, just running around. They played 4Square, which was just amazing to watch. What a flashback. I think it was some adults. No, I think that we like reintroduced them to four square.

We were having a conversation about things that were way more popular when we were kids. But they loved Foursquare. That was great. And then we kind of got in the car. The party got a little bit, you know, a bunch of neighbors came over and we just sort of dipped out. Like at first it was like, let's get home to watch the fireworks. And then it kind of became, let's just go home. And we watched the fireworks from the, you know, moon roof in our car.

while our six-year-old slept in the backseat. It was like a low-key, a low-wadage version of New Year's Eve where, like, you know, the most exciting part of the day gets slept through by the little one. These are my kid-based memories of July 4th, 2025. I took my son Owen to see the new Jurassic Park movie, which is called Jurassic World Rebirth. Kind of lost track of the titles of the Jurassic movies at this point.

We had an amazing time. And part of the reason we had an amazing time is we went to a theater in Hollywood where the seats move. Oh, yeah. Have you done this? I did that once long ago in Union Square, not that long ago, like within the past, like when I was living in New York, so five, six years ago or something like that, I went to go see like a Mission Impossible or something like that. It was, I was very skeptical, but it was used kind of appropriately and sparingly. And all the effects. And I was, yeah, I was very into it.

Yeah, they've gone through and really synced it up. So, like, if you're in a Jeep that's going over rugged ground, you're bouncing up and down in your seat. And when Scarlet Johansen is staring over a chasm in the new Jurassic Park movie, your seat leans forward and up just a tad. Mm-hmm. So you feel the vertigo of staring over said chasm. It's really unbelievable.

And it made the movie like 30% better. Mm-hmm. because it felt like a ride? Yes. Observation number two. You like me have a family of four. You like me get on airplanes. We got onto an airplane to come to the East Coast this week.

How do you handle the seating arrangements? When you're on an airplane? Mm-hmm. Well, we have some difficulty with this. We've had some difficulty recently because I ended up. up going, like sometimes we'll travel for work, right? And like, they'll tag along when I travel for work, go to a WrestleMania or something like that. And we have to buy our tickets sort of separately. You have to buy our tickets through like, you know, through the work travel office and then try to figure out how to like sink it

with the tickets you can get online. You can either plan way in advance and get a wide open plane and hope it works out or you do like me, I do wait to the last minute and try to have like two separate people on the phone at the same time, like Joe Dumas trying to like coordinate what seats you can get. In an ideal, like in a perfect world when we travel normally, it's, well, it changes because the kids grow so much. But recently it would be me with the little one and our teenager with his mom. But it's sort of interchangeable.

Mostly it's just a size thing. Like Etienne now is big enough that like we're shoulder to shoulder and sort of leaning opposite directions and we're next to each other on cramp seats. So we generally split up. This is what I'm asking. So you're talking about four people. Is it three and then one across the aisle or two and two? No, no.

We usually try to do two and two in like adjacent rows, but, you know, sometimes two and then two across the aisle. But we usually, we want to, you know, we usually keep it in pairs. See, we always do three and one. And I always was in the seat across the aisle from the other three. Mm-hmm. And for years, this was looked on as kind of the worst seat. Because, hey, they're all there together. They're, you know, we're with mom.

We're with family. I feel secure here. Dad, he's across the row. He's holding things down. It's the old school dad's seat. It's just like dad's reading the newspaper and smoking a pipe like four feet away from his family. And I felt a little guilty about that, but only a little guilty. Yeah.

But what I believe is happening in my family is the kids have gotten wind of the idea that this is actually quite a good seat. Oh, yep. As they get older, they want their, they want their independence too. Right. easy access to the bathroom, a little can stretch those legs out into the aisle. So I rebranded it this year as the Stranger Danger Seat.

You're over there with people you know. I have no idea who's sitting next to me. Which is a real thing, yeah. Yeah. So we're trying to activate those defense reflexes, the Stranger Danger Seat. Try it if you need it next time you're on an airplane. All right, David.

Coming up on the old press box, What, if anything, did the New York Times do wrong with its Zoron Mamdani story? The Epstein Files turned out not to be files. We revisit David Foster Wallace's great story about Roger Federer. Superman is in theaters this week. David tells us what kind of journalist Clark Kent was. Plus, the Wall Street Journal's Josh Dawsey is coming on to talk about his new book, about the 2024 election.

Donald Trump after Butler, Pennsylvania. Kamala Harris, after her disastrous appearance, on the view and what it's like for Josh to be edited by his mom. All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers and happy summer. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker and producer Kyle Crichton here. David, just as we were lighting up that metaphorical Fourth of July grill with that metaphorical charcoal and lighter fluid.

The New York Times had to go and make everybody mad. Yeah. With its story last Thursday about Zoran Mamdani. Even some of its writers were mad if you saw Jamel Bowie's deleted blue sky posts. Yeah. The story in question was a three byliner, Benjamin Ryan, Nicholas Fondos and Dana Rubinstein. And the paper scoop was that back in 2009, Momdani, who had just won the New York Democratic mayoral primary, was asked on his admission form to Colombian. Columbia University to indicate his race.

Mamdani checked Asian. He's talked a lot about his South Asian heritage during this campaign. But Mom Dani, the paper reported, also checked the box for black or African American. And in a section where the applicant can list more information about their background, Mom Dani wrote the name of the country where he was born, Uganda. He told the paper, most college applications don't have a box for Indian Uganda. so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.

Yeah. I'll let you start. What did you make of this story? Um, I mean, weirdly this just kind of gets to the heart of so many of these journalism controversies in this age,

doesn't it? Uh, it's not, it's not out of bounds. I don't think anyone would, uh, I think it'd be hard to argue that it's real, that it, that it would be except for the fact that there's a sort of like,

you know how they're going to use this element to the whole thing, right? It's like, what is your obligation as a journalist when you know that you're, when you can say with 100% certainty that this will not be used to inform, it will be used to smear, right? Even if you say, well, some people learn something from this and it's only the bad actors and we can't be in charge of how people receive it, Well, I mean, it has to be part of your calculus, right? Is anything off limits?

We talked about the whole Joe Biden age thing forever. There are certainly things that are that are off limits in a newsroom for various decorum-based reasons. And I'm not sure what the upshot was here. I mean, it kind of felt like half of a piece, to be honest with you. Like there was something like I was reading along waiting for a sort of. of broader justification, which never really came. I completely agree with the half a piece assessment. Mom Dani is 17 years old, 18 years old when he's sending in this admissions form.

We're talking about something that happens when he's in high school, but it's not a crime or even the allegation of a crime. You could say, well, perhaps he misrepresented his background on this form. But what's interesting about that is, Mom Dani did not, in fact, gained admission to Columbia. Yeah. Despite the fact that his dad is and was a professor there. Mm-hmm. He went to Bowdoin and majored in Africana Studies in case you were wondering.

Moreover, the Times didn't find any evidence that Mom Donnie had identified as black or African-American ever again. Yeah. So what you've got is this one 17-year-old data point. Mm-hmm. What is that? What does that mean? and what you're saying by half a story is they never really told us what it means. Yeah.

They just kind of released it out into the universe. Which is sort of the obligation, right? I think so to a point. I mean, I always come down whenever we have stories about elected officials, I want to know more, not less. Yep. You mentioned Biden in his age. How about the one about Tim Scott and his girlfriend, his mystery girlfriend, four plus years ago? You know, I look at that story and I'm like, I really.

don't care. I really don't know that this should be in a newspaper. But if we're electing this guy president of the United States, potentially, then I want to know everything there is to know now rather than after the election. But I look at this and I'm just like, okay. I mean, even if you're not worried about it being used to smear him, even if you're not worried about like the electoral outcomes or, you know, that that little data point could bring. along. What is it? Yeah. I mean, there's certainly an interesting story about how he thinks about his own background. Mm-hmm. That potentially that could be a data point in. He did talk to the times of public about more, I mean, to varying degrees, but he hasn't, he hasn't exactly kept that a secret.

Yeah. And then so I'm sitting there looking at this story on Thursday, and I'm like, why would they publish this so quickly without that story attached to it, a larger story about Mom Donnie? And then I read Max Taney's semaphore newsletter this morning. And he notes that Christopher Rufo, yes, that Christopher Rufo, was also working on this story. So the New York Times is like a wide receiver that's hearing footsteps. But the DB turned out to be Christopher Rufo in this case. Yeah. That's an interesting thing to know when you're like, wait, why just go with this one little?

Oh, okay. Yeah. there was competition. Sure. They tried to explain this a little bit. Again, this is a quote to Tannian semaphore. The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting one senior reporter told semaphore.

No one seriously believes that. We printed something in the paper and everyone got mad, therefore it must be a legitimate story. Yeah. Come on. Nobody really thinks that's a good reason to do it. No. Patrick Healy, the assistant managing editor-times, had a big Twitter thread. His response is more or less, hey, we cover major candidates and tell you just about everything we find out about them.

Yep. So there's that. I love this tweet from Zishan Aleem, who is a columnist and editor for NBC, for MSNBC, excuse me. He writes, these things can coexist, that Mom Donnie was aware that what he was doing was exploiting a technicality slash pushing or violating the limits of the kind of truth the form was seeking to ascertain, but that he also saw it as an opportunity to telegraph very real things about him that would help him stand out as an applicant in a way that isn't purely cynical and is encouraged by the entire process of competitive college applications.

It seems like a very, very sensible way to put that to me. The other part of the story was, where do the information come from? we learn high up in the time story. It came from internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with a paper. It takes us 12 paragraphs to find out more about that hack. And here the paper continues, the data was shared with the times by an intermediary

who goes by the name Kremu, when I'm saying that correctly, on substack and X dot, dot, dot. he is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about IQ and race. So now we arrive back at another instance of journalistic hand-wringing that you and I've talked about before, which is what do you do with hacked material? We saw this in 2016, the Russian hack. We saw this in 2024 with an Iranian hack. The first case, the press mostly indulged.

And the second case, they mostly declined to indulge. Yeah. And I think now we can say that the only rule about using hacked material is that there is no rule at all. Mm-hmm. And honestly, maybe there shouldn't be a rule. Because if you ask me to think about, should you use hacked material in the story, my first and overriding question is, what is the material? What are we talking about here? How important.

It goes back to knowing more about our candidates, right? Is it really that important? Yeah. Do we need to know about it? But then the second question, of course, is by publishing this, am I being manipulated by the hackers? Yes. Or by the intermediaries that would pass along this kind of information. Ideally, I'd like to avoid being manipulated.

But if I am, if I feel it's important enough to get this information out, I want to disclose and explain as much as I can. And here, the Times had a sentence after noting the, noting, noting, cremew, it says he provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. Now think about that sentence for a second. The Times is saying, we entered into this deal to keep his identity private, but if you would like to know more, just Google. Please leave our website.

Yeah. All the news that's fit to print about cremew can be found elsewhere. which is not an ideal setup. No. If you're the New York Times and you're trying to provide information about where this came from. Mm-hmm.

So it certainly feels like half a scoop. We have the latest Epstein files bust, David. Oh, Lord. Alex Eisenstadt had a scoop in Politico last night. President Trump's Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence The convicted sex offender and disgraced, only in journalism, financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a quote-unquote client list or was murdered, according to a memo detailing the findings obtained by Axios. Eisenstadt notes that as MAGA influencers, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino had been among the loudest voices touting Epstein conspiracy theories.

Yep. And then we have this amazing sound clip from Attorney General Pam Bondi. This is back in February when she was on with Fox News's John Roberts. The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients. Will that really happen? It's sitting on my desk right now to review. Sitting on my desk right now, oh wait, it doesn't actually exist. Okay.

It's a little bit hard. Another entry, David, and our worst question ever. Asked at the White House feature. Oh, yeah. Some people have accused us of overstatement. Is this really the worst question ever asked at the White House? Well, I will assure you that Kyle Crichton is still going through all the questions ever asked. Every day.

Every day. He's just reached the Ford administration and all the questions asked to Gerald Ford's press secretary, Ronald Nesson. That's our latest update. But until he finishes his work, we can almost definitively declare these two questions the worst ever asked at the White House. In fact, they were asked in the Florida Ever, Florida Everglades. Trump was at the migrant detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz. I cannot believe that's a real thing.

I want you to listen to the way this question was asked, and especially the way it ends. President, in 2018, you suggested putting alligators in the Rio Grande to prevent crossings in Texas. Is this a dream come true for you, sir? Well, I was thinking about that, I must say. It was a bit more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it if you want to know the truth. Do you typically end questions when you're asking a famous people with Sir? Oh, yeah, that's not a great look. You've ever asked Triple H, you know.

Is this a dream come true for you? Anything that is. Is this a dream come true for you? Yeah, not typically. Are you on cloud nine now, sir? That should be any great interview. You should include those words. Have you realized all your goals and are you contemplating retirement now?

Sir. We got one more, David, for you. Also from Florida. Another worst question? Another worst question. Leave it to you, which one of these is worse? Just listen to the wording on this one. Your beloved New York City may well be led by a communist soon, Zohan Mandami,

who in his nomination speech said, He will defy ICE and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City. Your message to communist Zohan Mundani. Your message is another amazing bit of verbiage. Just want to give you a platform here, yeah. Yeah, you're the president of the United States. You don't often get to address the country. Please feel free to do it right now.

Thanks to Carl Mazdom for alerting us there. I didn't want to say a quick word, David, about the floods in central Texas. Yeah. Just the worst story ever. I'm sure you were reading it over the weekend like I was. More than 80 people now have been confirmed dead at Camp Mystic that girls summer camp we've been reading about. There are now 27 campers and counselors that have been confirmed dead there alone. I don't know about you, but on Saturday when I'm flying and I'm just kind of checking,

in and trying to figure out what the story is all about and how awful it is, I saw social media posts from parents who had kids at Camp Mystic. And, of course, there's pictures of these beautiful kids. And then the parents had posted their phone number on those pictures. Oh, man. Because they couldn't make contact with the camp. There was so much chaos going on there. And they were just reaching out for information.

and just looking at those and thinking about not only those kids, but those parents and the helplessness, the confusion, that brings you to the point where you're posting your phone number online and just saying, please, if you have any information, reach out to me. Oh, my gosh. All we can do is say that our hearts go out to all those families in Texas this week. All right, David, you and I talked about revisiting a piece of sports. writing. A classic piece of sports writing, some would say it's called Roger Federer as religious

experience. And it ran in Play Magazine, which used to be back when the New York Times of Sports Magazine. And it ran in September 2006. The occasion for this piece is that Roger Federer was 25 years old. This piece was reported partly. at the 2006 Wimbledon men's final. We're in the midst of Wimbledon. This will be 19 years ago this Wednesday. And it was written by one David Foster Wallace. Yeah.

Who was at the back end of his magazine writing career. The famous piece about the crews that ran in Harper's, that was 1996. Consider the lobster. That was 2004. This is 2006 in Play Magazine. Yeah. Before we revisit this story, can I give you a fact

that will absolutely blow your mind? Yeah, please. So as you know, I was writing for play at this point in point of time. And I called Josh Dean, who was an editor there who worked on this story,

to give me some fun behind the scenes stuff and some fun trivia. What if I told you that David Foster Wallace was not the first writer play reached out to about writing this story?

Well, that's sort of shocking just because it's so, it's so this piece doesn't make sense without David Foster Wallace but I could imagine them going to somebody

before him just kind of in general way who was the first person I'm trying to think play magazine in those days dude I don't know gods of magazine journalism

gods of literary magazine journalism the answer my friend get a retugment here sameish I don't know who is it John Jeremiah Sullivan

oh wow Yeah. Wow. Who was busy with GQ stuff. Oh my God. It's funny because you think of Wallace with tennis, right? He has lots of collected pieces about tennis. Mm-hmm.

But Sullivan was the first call and could not do it. Was it one of those like just, you know, serendipitous situations where Sullivan was just like, you know, I can't do it, but you should give my friend Dave a call. We need to send a note to Sullivan. but I'd ask if that is exactly what happened. I know this guy from Harper's really good. Might have heard of him. A couple other notes for you in terms of trivia.

David Foster Wallace did not have a credit card back in 2006. Yeah, plausible. This piece was assigned. So Play Magazine had to prepay for hotels. And I'm 95% sure this is true, may have had to even give Wallace a cash advance so that he could fly to London and report this story from Wimbledon. Wallace also did not have a cell phone.

So a cell phone was given to him to use during this reporting trip. It's just fantastic. He called the editor Josh Dean early in the morning on the East Coast to ask him about how to get on a press bus, other questions like that. Dean, who is, of course,

very, very happy to have worked on this story and I was very, very proud of the way it turned out said it was a little bit just like talking to a child who was navigating the world as a reporter. The story itself, I'll let you begin because I've got some thoughts on this. What did you make of Federer as religious experience?

I mean, I was, I'm trying to, I should have put my thoughts down. It's always interesting to go back to Foster Wallace as nonfiction and try to remember the headspace of reading it the first time. As with every writer, both influential writers

and just because the passage of time, it seems less revolutionary than it did at the time you first read it. But I also think with Foster Wallace in particular, there's a way in which you forget how good of a writer he was, as opposed to just being an interesting writer. I mean, clearly his engagement with Federer the player,

I mean, there was, you listen, there are periods of time where this piece would have been considered a failure. You know, I mean, just the way, like the, like the, the way that it is not a conventional magazine piece, the way that it's not a conventional sports piece. And those are the ways in which it just truly succeeds, I think, now, you know? Like, we can all imagine, I think, you know, it's not a right around.

He had so much access, but it has that feeling of someone who doesn't quite have, have the grasp of what they want to write about, you know, and just trying to reconstruct it post-mortem a little bit, you know? But I think that's the kind of the brilliance of it. And I don't know, there's a level of, it's not naive because he's a tennis expert, obviously, but almost like a sports writing naivete that, that, you know, really shines through. Just, and it's a sort like in another writer's hand, this, Dave Eggers or something,

it would be more of a devil-may-care feel to it. With him, it's just a sort of purity and brilliance that I don't know. I just, it's just a fantastic piece. Should we count off the ways it doesn't feel like conventional sports writing, or perhaps he fails at being conventional sports writing? Yeah. So he did get an interview with Roger Federer at Wimbledon. The quotes from this interview are only used in footnotes.

Well, the footnotes itself, right? Where this is pre-Grantland, this is, it was, Was play using footnotes in any other context? Or is pretty specific to a certain set of writers, I would assume. I believe this is one and done for footnotes at play. Yeah. But I could be wrong. And what made me smile so big is that the footnotes in two different cases had footnotes?

Mm-hmm. Like you would read one and then that would lead you to like sub-basement 1B. Yes. Because he wasn't quite done with a footnote. Mm-hmm. That made me incredible. happy. The piece does not have any kind of conventional sports through line. We're like leading up to this. We're leading up to that. Ah, here's, here's an exciting ending. And in fact, he has this big point

between that he describes between Federer and Raphael Nadal at Wimbled in 2006 in the final. But it's actually the penultimate section of the piece. And then the last section is just like more analysis about what makes Roger Federer great. Yeah. Analysis that, as you say, is very, very specific. Mm-hmm. You are absolutely correct when you say that, like, reading this piece now 19 years later, it does not quite have the jolt that it did back when because you expect a little bit of the Foster Wallace technique.

Mm-hmm. But I will say reading this, I'm like, I can't believe stuff of this depth and complexity appeared in the New York Times at all. I mean, this is really stretching the bounds of general interest material for sports fans. What he's trying to do is explain what makes Roger Federer great. Yeah. Basically, I think there are two types of magazine profiles. Who are they profile and the why are they great profile?

This is certainly the latter. It blows off all the biographical material and just goes for it. And he has this explanation that is all about like the power game of tennis in the early 2000s and how Federer manages to be great in that even with finesse and other qualities that were thought to have leached out of the game. Then Foster Walls has this metaphysical explanation for Federer's greatness. I'll just read you a paragraph here. Maybe I caught into this paragraph more because it had the names of other athletes I was more familiar with. The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.

Good analogs here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high, but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could float across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock time required for one. There are probably a half a dozen other example since 1960, and Federer is of this type, a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar. He has never hurried or off balance. The approaching ball hangs for him, a split second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali,

Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces, particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring. He looks like what he may well, I think, be, a creature whose body is both flesh and somehow light. Yeah. There is a David Foster Wallace paragraph, sir. That's fantastic. Yeah. Other things that jumped out of me,

Foster Wallace gets really interested in the child cancer survivor who tossed the coin for who would get to serve first. Yeah. In the Wimbledon men's final, that's a very DFW touch. He compared Roger Federer's girlfriend, who's now his wife, to Alice B. Toaklis, who was Gertrude Stein's lover and in charge of her affairs.

And it's not just a flip metaphor. That is exactly what the girlfriend, now wife, was doing for Roger Federer. A couple of other behind the scenes notes for you. David Foster Wallace did have email, but Josh Dean told me that he had trouble attaching documents. We've all been there. So, and I believe again, this is. with 95% accuracy

with all of our collective memories. Foster Wallace sent in the initial draft for this piece by mailing a computer disc to the New York Times. Amazing. And he did the edits, and this piece ran, as you can imagine, about 98% at what it was turned in at.

But he did all the edits by facts. With old-fashioned writing in the margins. Yeah. Speaking of those edits, Do you think David Foster Wallace had any thoughts about how the piece should be punctuated? Oh my God. Tell me. So the New York Times does not use serial commas or did not use serial commas in that age?

Yeah, a real oversight on their part, go ahead. He's very into the serial comma and somehow persuaded the Times style desk, which I can tell you by personal experience, was very hard to persuade about anything. Sure. That that rule should be set aside for his piece. I got some of his emails here, which I'll quote from. But one thing Dean told me, he said, he told him, this is Foster Wallace talking to Josh Dean, how much it matters to him to obsess over getting things right down to the hyphen. He said that his students were allowed one misspelling in their papers.

And if there were more than that, they had to redo the paper, reproof it, and resubmit it. The idea is teaching them it's public is how he explained. Wow. He also referred to both Josh and his fact checker as Mr. So-and-So for the entirety of the editing experience. That's good. It's safe, you know? I mean, if you, you're not going to accidentally insult somebody by getting that wrong. The other funny part about this is there is a corrective out there from Jeremy Gordon. He wrote it for the outline.

He went back and read this piece and read David Foster Wallace's opening, which is about this very exciting moment between Roger Federer and Andre Agassi at the previous years U.S. Open. This would be the 2005 U.S. Open. Gordon went back and watched the match on YouTube and tried to find the point that David Foster Wallace was describing and came to the conclusion that he had misdescribed it. And he goes on to write about journalists of yore and, you know, veracity and all those things. I will just add here, the New York Times Play Magazine did have fact checkers. And they were fact checkers who, I know this from personal experience, would call the people you quoted and read them the quotes and say, did you say this?

Yeah. But you're talking about 2006 here. YouTube, as we know it, was a little over a year old. Mm-hmm. So being able to go back and review a point from the 2005 U.S. Open was probably pretty difficult. And I found the sentence in this email that Josh Dean sent me. This is from Foster Wallace. I'll just read you here too.

We'll call the fact checker in question David Shoemaker because I don't want to out the fact checker here. But this is Foster Wallace writing to a fact checker about a different point, a different point of tennis. Quoting, David Shoemaker is unusually cool for a fact checker and appears ready to believe that I'm not Jason Blair. I managed to verify via eBay that Yvonne Lindle's Adidas racket was an early graphite-based form of composite and left David a long, breathless voicemail to this effect.

If you would exempt him from making me send him my tape of the Wimbledon final, which my dad made and sent me, it would save me a long drive and much hassle. Each point described as 100% accurate, and the description is based on scores of reviewings of the exchange. I can tell that David is torn between his justifiable impulse to trust me, and his conscientious. about his job. If he'd tell him that Dave can be trusted, all caps. It's his reputation, too. If there's errors of fact, then I don't have to spend two hours and three long forms at UPS overnight. He closed that email to Josh Dean. Notice that I'm not calling you at 4.30 a.m. About any of this. Mr. Foster Wallace is just the most relatable writer. He's just like this

outsized reputation and personality, but I get everything. It's just we're too, too, like, nervous to say these things out loud. Yes, he was not too nervous. Do we want to do some only in David Foster Wallace Journalism words before we get out of here? Please, yes, yes, yes. Tell me, I had to look a lot of these up. Anealed.

Oh, yeah, no, no idea. Heating metal or glass to let it cool smoothly. Mm-hmm. Regicide. Yeah, it's a great one. Everted, which means to turn something inside out. He's talking about an umbrella that was averted in a windstorm. Mm-hmm.

specular. I mentioned lithe, he used that twice. I mentioned preternatural. He also used that twice. He used rasp

in its carpentry form. That is a file used for shaping wood or metal. And he several times used the word kinesthetic.

Yeah. Which I know has appeared in several of your wrestling profiles. Yeah, well. It's a good word. The kinesthetic

pleasures of psycho sin. All right. Coming up in 30 seconds, David. everything you didn't know about the 2024 election. But first, let's do the Overwork 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 at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I have some wah-wah news from your part of the world, David. Yeah, what is it? L.L. Cool J. Said that he will not perform at Wawa Welcome America in Philadelphia on July 4th because of a union strike.

Oh, yeah. Quote, there is absolutely no way I can perform across a picket line. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write Labor loves cool James.

Thank you to Pete Crowato. If you were tempted to write, Mama said, listen to your shop steward. Congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right,

in the notebook dump, we got two fun things for you. First off, David, here is a writer who shaped our understanding of the Trump era. He is the Wall Street Journal's Josh Dossi. He's got a new book written with Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf called 2024 that's going to be out within hours of you downloading this podcast. I cannot tell you how many things I learned from this book about the 2024 elections,

stories that were filled in, background details that were added to the record of what we already know. There's one moment where Stephen Spielberg was brought in to advise Joe Biden about public speaking and debating. Yeah. We generally knew that. I didn't know until I read 2024 that Spielberg had advised Biden during his one disastrous debate with Donald Trump, that he should make some kind of face when Donald Trump was talking to let people know he was registering. his disgust for what Trump was saying. That was a Spielbergism, huh?

Remember that Biden face? Yeah. That might have been the worst shot that Steven Spielberg ever directed. Also, you and I had Ashley Parker on the podcast fairly recently talking about how she and her colleague Michael Scherer had written a profile of Trump that Sherer had actually cold-called Donald Trump

on his cell phone. Well, I want you to know that 2024 includes Tyler Pageer cold-calling Joe Biden on his cell phone. Oh, God. After the election, and Joe Biden actually answering. How's that for a tease?

Here's Josh Dossie. All right, Josh, so many things I want to ask you about in this book, but let's begin with your overarching premise, which is that Donald Trump winning the 2024 election and Kamala Harris losing may seem preordained now, but it really wasn't.

What moments would you point to that really swung the election? Well, there were many of them. I think that played out even earlier than people think, right? When you go back, I sort of take my story back to 2022, where Trump is still at a lot of circles of pariah, not among the most fervent Republicans, but he does not have anyone near the power he has now. He's at Mara Lago.

He's fighting the feds to give classified documents back. And then they raid his home, right? And they come in and they give the classified documents. documents that have tried repeatedly to get them to give him back. He doesn't give him back. It escalates. It escalates. It escalates is a raid on Marlaca, right?

And then you see him really angry. And in that moment, as he told me in the interview, it made me more resolute to run. And people contemporaneously told us that he suddenly saw there all been these investigations swirling into him, the New York investigation, where he was ultimately convicted in Georgia, Jack Smith and the J6 case and the documents. And he saw them increasingly becoming existential threat to him. He told one of his advisors that we quoted the book, I'm running for my freedom, so to speak, right?

And in that moment, he begins running. And he's not the preordained nominee. But what happens is as a cases play out, as he's charged, the Republican Party comes back to him in a way that sort of, you know, was not. Not expected. At the same time in 2022, you have President Biden, who's not popular in a lot of ways. His supporters across the country, the polls show the Democratic Party, believes he's too old, wants another nominee. The parties continuing to push him through to that process, right? And they do better in the midterms than they expected. The Democrats do. And what we show in the book was a lot of other Democrats were thinking about calling for him publicly to get out of the right. and the Democrats have a better night been expected in the midterms

and that effort loses a lot of steam, right? And why that happened in some ways was because President Trump was continuing to say false things about the election being stolen and he was supporting sort of the election deniers in various states. They weren't picking winning candidates. So you have Trump getting in,

you have Biden staying in at that point. And then as 2023 plays out and 24 plays out, there's just lots of choices on both sides of the aisle that both parties made. I think now it sort of seems to us it was preordained that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, but it wasn't always so and nor was a preordained I think that

the Democrats had to lose in the way that they did, but they made deleterious choices to get to that point. So many moments in this book I want to cover with you, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last July, a year ago this week. You have an incredibly vivid account in here of the hours after that attempted assassination.

assassination, what was it like for Trump and his team in the hospital? Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of the books. I'm glad you asked me about it. My colleague, Isaac Garnsdorf, who wrote the book with me, was actually at Butler that night and was sort of thrown to the ground and covered a lot of the fallout that day. But what we did was we tried to piece together what happened to him in those hours after he was shot from multiple people, some of them, they are in the hospital with him, others who were briefed on it. And Trump in that moment, I think, realized he had survived something, you know, sort of crazy, but the bullet if it would have gone one inch the other way, he might not have been there, right?

And his people were in a short of shock, right? They were crying. Family members were calling into Dan Scavino when it was aged, trying to get Trump on the phone. They had him in a room, but I believed he was going to be okay at that point. But one of the things that I think folks sort of are dismissive of is, is the amount of blood that there was. You know, the ear is one of these parts of the body that just has a lot of blood in it.

Like, it looked, the actual, what happened in the shooting and amount of blood was looked way worse than what it actually was, which was that he just kind of got grazed, right? But there's a lot of blood in the ear. And in that moment, you know, Trump starts taking phone calls from, you know, Sylvester Stallone, from Mark Zuckerberg, from Jeff Bezos, all of these people calling to congratulate him

or say how hard it was, but congratulate him on surviving a crazy attack like that and wishing him well. So many people congratulating him on his response, how he sort of triumphantly put his fist into the air, you know, in that moment that sort of became the iconic image of the campaign that's on the cover of our books, saying, you know, that showed a lot of resolve, that showed a lot of toughness. It's one of the things Bezos said on the call with Trump that night. And you didn't see RFK calls him that night. That begins the discussions on RFK's endorsement. But really in that moment, when I was interviewing Trump at Mara Wago earlier this year, he said to me, you know, I thought about a lot. Do I think that helped me when?

It probably did help me a little bit. What do you think, right? But he sort of, the Democratic Party was in such convulsions that day. Biden was furiously trying to, you know, survive and keep his candidacy alive and was facing all of these calls from Schumer and all sorts of Democrats who were flooding him to say you've got to step down. Meanwhile, Trump has this, you know, insanely a scary thing happened to him. He survives. And the race feels like it takes a dramatic turn even further that day. One detail you have in here is that Trump decided in the hospital that

night that he wanted to get a CAT scan. He did. Yes. The doctor said, well, you don't need a CAT scan. He said, no, no, no, I want a CAT scan. So he gets taken off and he gets a CAT scan. And then he sent one of his aides to go get the film because he wanted to have the film for his own possessions. And he said that getting a CAT scan, quote unquote, he may have been semi-joking here, was like an IQ test that he wanted to see what the scan looked like, and make sure it was perfect. So we know about that incident. And then the other assassination attempt a couple months later in Florida on one of his golf courses. But you had a passage in this book that really popped out to me given the recent events in the Middle East. because Trump's team became worried at some point that the regime in Iran might want to try to get to him.

What form did those fears take? And that good reason to be worried, right? I mean, the FBI and law enforcement told them that the Iranians had killtings in the country. A couple years before, Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, had a near miss where the Iranians had figured out where he was in Paris. and he had to be sort of rescued away from the intelligence folks there. They had all sorts of plots going on in the United States that the Iranians wanted to come, obviously, and thankfully they were not able to do that. But they were pretty serious about this.

And Trump's team had all sorts of fears. There were moments in the book where they were driving down a highway in Pennsylvania, and this drone is following the Mimotokai for a long time. time. They can't shake the drone, right? There are times for the Secret Service wanted them to take decoy planes because they didn't think Trump's plane was safe to fly that day for whatever threats I had. And I think what happened in that moment, Brian, is it was a sense of real paranoia. Some of it, I think, founded, right? I mean, they were real intelligence that was coming into them. You'd had one guy who'd shot him, hit him in the ear, another guy who'd lined up in the golf course,

you know, were standing over with a gun. in the Bush's waiting from the come, and then all sorts of weird things were happening, right? And when weird things start happening, I think you sort of can understand what I'm saying here, that every little thing that happens, you read something into it, right? And so some of that probably wasn't freaking out a little bit too much, but they also had reason to be freaked out. One week after Butler, Joe Biden drops out of the race. What was the feeling in Trump land when they realized they're going to have to face Kamala Harris instead?

Trump's team in the middle of the first debate, Biden is doing so poorly. He's unable to sort of put sentences together, you know, rambling word salad. And Trump's folks are talking to their surrogates and they're saying, make sure when you go out there, you say to the public, you know, but this is their nominee and they have to keep this guy, right? We don't want to call for him to drop out. We want him to stay in. and they wanted him to stay in throughout the month of July. And in fact, we're sort of trying to figure out behind the scenes. Could they do anything to make it more likely for him to stay in?

Because they believed he was an eminently beatable candidate after that disastrous performance. They thought once a public had seen that, there was nothing they could do to unsee it, right? And that the election was basically baked in their mind. So when Kamala Harris got in, the person who was angry about it was Donald Trump. He thought he'd already beaten Joe Biden and now had to start with a new candidate. We quote him in the book saying, you know, how unfair this is. And Trump seemed to sit around at their headquarters in West Palm Beach and watch as her numbers sort of skyrocket. I mean, if you really look at what happened in that situation, the Democratic Party support for Biden was so depressed for so long because they didn't want him as a nominee.

and then that performance happens. And then they get a new candidate. And they're like, this person actually has a chance, right? Because they'd sort of resign themselves to the fact that Biden had no chance. And so her numbers turn around drastically. She's ahead in some of these states.

Her favorable school up. And Tony Fabrizio, who's Trump's pollster, and frankly got a lot right about this election. His numbers proved pretty accurate time and time again, said, you know, she's going to come back down to Earth. This is a sugar high. And basically what we've got to do is ride this out for a few.

few weeks, let her go to the convention, and then we're going to start, you know, carpet bombing her, so to speak, putting out all of these things she said, all of these ads, all this money, all these attacks. But those first few weeks, they were quite displeased about the fact that they had a new candidate who was doing a lot better than Biden was. And you write that then she goes on the view and she can't separate herself or refuses to separate herself from Biden. And all of a sudden there's this great relief in Trump world because they've been struggling to define her. Now we have something that she essentially is the unpopular candidate we were running against a few weeks ago. Right. So they practice this answer with her backstage. Her team does. What happens if you get this

question? And when she goes on stage and she obviously does not say what she's practiced and she says, there's nothing I would do differently than Biden. And one of her top aides, Rob Farrity, who's staffing this and is backstage, you know, puts his hands over his head and is like, you know, this is going to be a problem. Then her team goes out, as we report in the book, and tries to get the view to ask her the question again so she can clean up her answer because the first answer was just so bad. I Trump's people immediately, the way it was described to me was they watch his answer happen, and they're like, how quick can we get this in ads and blanket this on swing states? Can we do it by the weekend? If we get millions on air right now, like how fast can we get this up,

right? And what that was really about? our reporting shows. There was so many efforts by Kamala Harris' team to get her to draw some distance from Biden, whether on Gaza and Israel, whether on electric vehicles, whether on immigration, all these places where they wanted her to say gently, you know, maybe Biden missed a mark on this, because the numbers were so bad. But she wouldn't do it. And one of the reasons she wouldn't do it is we report in the book is Biden called her

and told her, I don't want you to break any distance from me. The other reason, and I think this is a genuine reason, is she didn't think people would think it was often. She was the vice president. She had been the administration for four years. Suddenly, you're a nominee and you say, oh, by the way, I don't agree with all the things our administration's been doing for the last four years. Like, it's also hard to sort of pull that off in a genuine way.

So she was sort of boxed in. You mentioned the view moment. The other moment that the Trump people sort of couldn't believe their good luck was when they find this close. or the survey at 2019 to the ACLU where she says, you know, she believes that, you know, immigrants, illegal undocumented immigrants and prisoners should have rights to, you know, funded transgender surgeries, right? And they can't believe she said this. In fact, like what Trump folks read, there's no way she actually said this. And then they're like, yeah, she got. And

because it was in 2019, they were all trying to run to the left in the primary. And that sort of became just a crazy ad for the Trump folks. They tested that ad and watched how it sort of boomeranged across, you know, the sphere. You had Charlemagne the God. You had others, you know, who were not necessarily even their allies in bringing it up. And we're just shocked at how well that ad did for them. We've had about a dozen discussions on this podcast about Trump's use of podcast during the election. Would you tell people who you report in this book, help Trump choose which.

podcast to go on? His son, Baron Trump. The strategy for podcasts for Trump was that his team decided in early 2024 that, and we have the memos that show how they came to his decision, that instead of trying to get more suburban women and more independent voters who had gone away from him, the strategy to winning was to run up the score with men. And they did an analysis of the 2016 of a 2020 election and determined that his biggest slippage in their words was that with men. And then they had to get men back. So so much of a strategy was trying to reach men, young men, black men, Latino men, and white men, but also a large part black and Latino men who they believed were not tuning in to traditional news,

who were not watching the news every night, who were not seeing necessarily all of the ads, but we're watching, you know, WWE and football games, and we're tuning into podcasts, right? And so they come up with a strategy to do a series of influential podcasts described internally as a manosphere on the campaign. And Trump at first doesn't know if he wants to do it or not.

He's like, what are these ratings? Do they get any ratings? This is a waste of my time. And Trump's team, one of his time staffers, Daniel Alvarez, shows him you know, how many people listen to these podcasts on the YouTube? And he's like, wow, that's a lot of numbers. And then he says to them, if Barron approves of these hosts, then I'll do it. So his A, it's call Barron Trump, who's now a freshman at NYU and says, do you know these guys? And it's like,

oh, yeah, I listen to that. When I listen to that one, I listen to that one, we should do those. And then Trump agrees to do the podcast. We know how this all turned out. Trump won every single swing state. What was Trump's team worried about on election day? What were they worried about on election day? I'm like a question. I mean, the real truth, they were pretty confident on election day.

I mean, I was down in Palm Beach, and I went out to lunch with a number of his advisors, and they were all basically measuring with drapes. I mean, they were looking at the numbers and saying that if their models were right, that they were going to win convincingly. I mean, you always have fears that your voters don't show up that, you know, you've gotten the numbers wrong, but the other side, you know, comes out way more than you think. But they were pretty confident. And a couple of them who were pretty confident are people that I've had longstanding relationships with. And I really didn't think they were just screwing with me. Like I thought if they thought the election was really going off the rails, they would be, you know, oh, I don't know, it's going to be a tough one. We'll see. We've got a chance. But they were.

pretty supremely confident on election day. I mean, the person he was the most nervous on Election Day was Trump himself. I mean, Trump was jittery, calling Susie Wiles every few minutes, you know, hearing from friends and allies who were saying, you know, sure a lot of people in line in Pennsylvania waiting, you know, to vote. And it looks like Kamala Harris is doing well in Philadelphia and this, that and the other. But Trump's people weren't that concerned. I mentioned your two co-authors. in my intro, Tyler Pedro and Isaac Arnsdorf.

What's the like for three people to write a book together? So I think for us, it was a pretty productive experience, actually. We all started this process when it was going to be Biden versus Trump in 2023. And then the story obviously took so many crazy changes over the last year and a half. And then when we realized what a dramatic election it was going to be, we really wanted to get it out quickly. And, you know, Tyler, my co-author, who now is a White House reporter at the New York Times, covered the Biden and then the Harris campaign for the Washington Post. The book was born out of the Washington Post, but we all were working at the time that we started the book. And we sort of each had our lanes, right?

Tyler was responsible for a lot of the Biden and Harris reporting. I did some of it, but he did the overwhelming majority of it. I was responsible for a lot of a Trump reporting. Isaac did some of it and Biden, I mean, Tyler did some of it, but I did most of it. And I think Isaac, who is a beautiful writer, incredibly well organized, very good at putting together lots of information and cohesive and comprehensive ways in a way that I'm frankly not in some ways. He just writes faster and probably better than I do. I think we were able, if this turns out well, I hope it does. I hope people like the book. We were able to sort of do a lot of reporting and kind of crash land the plane in a short period of time because all three of us were working on different things simultaneously. And, you know, I think we all emerge as like friends, right? I mean, none of us like hate each other, which is what you're worried about at the end of one of these projects. Like, you know, we all sort of, we had differing opinions at different times

on what chapters should say or what should we focus or what should we not focus. But I think we handled those like professionally and just like disagreements on the material, you know. You mentioned interviewing Donald Trump, which happened in January for this book. What was his reaction to the fact that you were writing a book about the election? And he had known about it for a while and I had been trying to sort of get on his schedule and then he finally agreed to do an interview. The day that I was there, he was just surrounded by these tech tycoons who were suddenly sycophantic and trying to get his good graces. So I'm sort of sitting in the lobby of Mar-Ira Lago, and Trump is in a other room, sort of in one of a side rooms. He comes out, he sees me,

and he comes over and says, hi, Judge. How are you? We talk for a few minutes. I mean, he goes, Mark Zuckerberg's in there. And I'm like, I can't hear you. What are you saying? He's like, Zuckerberg. He's in there. And I'm like, Zuckerberg here. And then he's like, oh, he's mediating a suit where they're going to write a big check. And sure enough, like Zuckerberg walks out. And then we go in another room to do the interview and sort of this dining room that sort of has beautiful views, panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean. And in the middle of the interview, we're sort of as we're wrapping up, like, Elon Musk walks in the room and wants to talk to him about something. And I sort of was talking to Trump. I was like, you know, your life changed in a pretty drastic way.

I was like, all these guys are down here, you know, basically begging you for things, asking you for things. asking you for things, sort of you're kind of, you know, the king of the world in this moment. He was like, yeah, and he goes, you know, if I had lost, none of them would have be here. And I wouldn't have been here either if I was. Like, he sort of realized, like, what his power was in that moment. And that it wasn't that they were really his friends, but they wanted something from him and he wanted things from them. And he said to me, he said, you know, I had a lot of friends who called me and said, you have to win.

Because if you don't win, the rest of your life is going to be a living hell. And he was like, you know, it sort of would have been a living hell. And I think he knew that. I mean, I look at some of the shrewd and someone might say cynical choices that he made in the book to win, partially borne out of, this was an existential moment in his life. It wasn't just, oh, I'm not going to redeem myself politically. And when I saw him in January, you know, he's floating around the club. He's dipping shrimp in tartar sauce. You have all sorts of members coming over to like, you know, ask him for things, take pictures with him.

congratulate him. And it struck me. He was just sort of like taking it all in. That like for years after losing in 2020, he had tried to convince everyone that like, you know, I was actually the winner and all of this was unfair and done to me. And sort of through sheer will, he had put himself like right back in the center of it again.

It was really quite a scene. And so I think it didn't explain sort of what it's like to be down there with him. he's just like the center of the world. I mean, you know, he walks in a room. Everyone's like, stands up and cheers. And he pays, like all these people are paying large sums of money to be there and flatter him. And if you're down there as a reporter, you're sort of like the object of attention. He's to go, you know, we've got the Wall Street Journal over here.

Like, does everyone want to meet the Wall Street Journal? And you're just sitting there in the middle of the club with him. I mean, it's a pretty surreal experience, actually, to talk to him there. You're now back at the journal after seven and a half years at the Washington Post. I am, yes. I started back in February on the Investigations and Enterprise team in the Washington Bureau. How is writing for the journal different than writing for the Post? Question. I think the main thing I would say, I mean, both papers really like good stories. I think if you read the journal in the post, you would see the journal often has shorter stories than the Post.

I think the journal is particularly interested in the Post is interested in this too, but the journal is really interested in you know, power and business and the intersection of sort of the government and the titans of the universe and what they're doing and what they're getting. And I think that's a fascinating storyline in this moment, just sort of the grab bag of money and the bonanza of cash that's in Washington and how that's playing out. So that's sort of what I'm focused on probably more than I was at the Post. At the Post, I covered the White House basically or Trump for seven years. Yeah, you read a Billy.

piece about Elon and Trump's falling out the other day that touched on all those themes you're talking about. One more question about the journal. You've talked in the past about how in 2016 when you got laid off from the journal, that was a huge moment in your career and in your life. What was it like to come back to a publication years after that? It was something I must say in 2016. I probably never thought I would do. I always like enjoyed writing for the Wall Street Journal in my, by even my first stint. And then I obviously got laid off, which turned out to be sort of in a weird way, a good thing in my life had forced me to move to Washington and cover the White House and cover Trump and had a lot of opportunities

due to good bosses and mentors, and I'm thankful. But I wasn't happy about that, obviously, in that moment. But coming back in some ways, you know, there's still the parts of the Wall Street Journal, but I have a lot of respect for, which are, you know, fastidious sort of attention to, like, sourcing and ethics and details and like trying to be sort of above reproach in the writing and reporting of stories. And in a lot of ways, there was also a totally different management, totally different colleagues. I mean, I'm working in some ways for the same newspaper, but it's a totally different city. I mean, it's just a different situation in almost every way. You read about this in the acknowledgement. And I'll end here, Josh. Your mom edited this book.

What does it like to get a line edit from your mom? He did. So my mother, who is a She was a retired teacher in South Carolina, always edits my stories. And she always has for more than a decade will send me typos, grammar fixes. If a quote doesn't make sense to her. And she's usually right. I mean, the Washington Post copy, a couple of the copy editors joke that we should hire her when I work there as a copy editor because she caught things all the time. And I wanted someone, my parents who live in South Carolina, both are our Trump supporters.

I don't think they would mind me saying that, our big Trump supporters. Very, you know, smart people. I love them dearly. They adopted me. I'm adopted. So that's kind of a cool story. And I'm like, who can I trust to read this book to give me a gut check on like, is the tone right? Is it a pacing right?

Like, is it makes sense? is a grammar writing, and I sort of thought of my mother because she's been reading my stories for years. So she would send back entire chapters to me, marked up in red pin, where we would have like, you know, a word spelled wrong or a semicolon instead of a comma. And my co-authors, like, after a few of the chapters, they were like, can you send a couple more chapters to your mom? Like, we need to get moving because she was just such a great read for all of us. And I judged at her judgment on sort of the content of the book in a way. Like my mother, I think, um, appreciates news that in her mind, like, isn't snarky and like just kind of gives like the facts, like even if

they're positive or negative about Trump or whatever. I think she wants a fact. And like one of the, one of the suggestions she gave me, I mean, I'll stop here. She was like, you know, Josh, I really like the book, but there sure is a lot of swearing in there. Like, you really have to keep the F word in the book that many times. She's like, I know people. People talk that way, but like, I don't like that kind of talk. And I was, I actually told my co-authors. I was like, maybe we could like call a little bit of a swearing. Because like if my mom in South Carolina thinks it's too much, like maybe the average reader will think it's too much too.

She was very helpful. I love her and I'm very grateful for her work on this book. Josh Dossi's expertly edited PG-13 rated book, which is also Tyler Pager and Isaac Arndar's book is 2024, how Trump retook the White House and how the Democrats lost America. It's great. It's available right now. Josh, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks so much. All right, David. Superman comes out Thursday. It does indeed. Something people might not know about our friendship is that we were different kinds of nerds in high school. You were comic book nerd. I was a different nerd. So I come to you and say, you're a pure nerd. You're journalism nerd. Well, I come to you and I ask, what should we know about Superman, that is Clark Kent's career as a journalist?

Well, there's a lot to know. I mean, I think that the conventional wisdom of Clark Kent, the reporter, people remember the sort of clumsy, like deliberately clumsy bumbling persona that Superman put on to be Clark Kent to distance himself from Superman. You know, it was a little hunched shoulder and even trip and drop things. She always wanted to throw people off the potential scent. And everybody knows about Lois Lane, his co-worker and love interest in comic book, Laura or wife, as the big time reporter. And it's true, Lois Lane is the super duper star of, you know, D.C. universe and Metropolis, in particular, journalism. She's a sort of Maggie Haberman of comic book lore. But if that's true, then Clark can't, but Clark is no,

Clark is nothing to sneeze at. Clark is the, you know, if she's the Haberman, he's the Jonathan Swan. If Swan was like moonlighting as Stephen Miller or something. I only say that because there's a, there is a through line of lack of objectivity here that must be addressed. We'll kind of loop back to that at the end. Okay. But I think it's, it is either because.

It sometimes it feels like because the the comic book world is so small and insular in terms of the stories that they're telling. And then sometimes it's really fleshed out into the storyline. But Clark is is like regarded as the best reporter in the world second to lowest lane. Like that's just the sort of that's that is that is sort of undeniable. He won a Pulitzer and has been a New York Times bestseller. We'll get it in the details there. Interesting note is that way, way, way back when, like in the 40s and 50s when there was a Superman radio show, most of those adventures started with journalism. Like most of the Superman's adventures were like he's on a journalistic mission.

I mean, he's writing a story. And then there's something that Superman needs to come help to save the day. You know, like that's, that was the way into a lot of those stories, which makes sense from a sort of, you know, like radio drama sort of point of view. but, you know, there was obviously a lot less of like the superpowered villainry in those days. It was just Superman punching out, you know, near-do-wells or whatever. But in terms of his actual journalistic accolades, actually found a very wonderful layout of the awards and accolades that he's received on Quora of all places. The poster users named A-A-R-I-O-O-N, pronounced that as you will. And Superman Red and Blue number three,

it is noted that he was at the top of his journalism school. He's won more lifetime journalism awards than just about any reporter alive outside of Lois Lane. And this is a little bit, you know, personal. But meeting a tough deadline is when he feels the most human. We can all sympathize with that. Sounds like Johnson Swan to me. Yeah, exactly.

Superman 64 by Alvin Schwartz, Wayne Boring and Stephen K. Lewis and Clark separately, but each win the, quote, trophy prize for reporting at the, quote, Newspaperman's banquet in Metropolis Hall. They also become honorary journalism professors at Quinn College School of Journalism as part of that award. Then in Action Comics 250 by Bill Finger, Wayne Boring, and Stephen Kay, Clark wins Reporter of the Year. They send him on the TV show I have Metropolis, where he's referred to as a famed reporter. Superman number 171 by Siegel Swan and Klein.

He wins the National Publishers Prize for, quote, his big expose of the hot car racket. I don't think he actually wins it in that issue, but they refer to it in that issue. And then in Action Comics 367 by Binder, Swan, and Klein, he wins the Superman Award at the annual policeman's banquet for the person who has helped Superman the most, not strictly a journalism award, but bears mentioning.

Secret votes were cast by everybody. and the police department to decide who won this award. But then Superman, Superman who showed up to present the award, had to give the award to Clark. There was a very, you know, some very awkward hijinks ensued. Also, Sam Stone wrote on thepopverse.com,

there was a, there's a graphic novel called Superman under a yellow sun that was presented as a novel written by Clark Kent. And in the DC lore, that novel won Clark a Pulitzer Prize. outside of mainstream D.C. continuity in Kingdom Come. He's described as winning two Pulitzer Prizes during his time with the Daily Planet. There's a lot of references to his Pulitzer win

throughout the lore. What you're saying? One of those was for fiction. Yes. Apparently he had a number of novels. He had best-selling novels in the 90s, very talented writer. So there's a lot of big...

It was like the rest of us. He wanted to eventually get out journalism and makes him real money. Exactly, exactly. But there's a lot of references to him being, you know, requested by subjects for interviews because of his notoriety,

because of his reputation. He's very, very well regarded. And just there's incidental stuff. There's talk about, you know, he broke stories on not just the hot car racket, but the lead pipes in Metropolis's water infrastructure. X-ray vision probably had something to do with that. Mob trafficking drugs over,

Manhattan airspace. Again, the dude can fly. He's very well-situated report this. He once figured out Bruce Wayne was Batman just through investigation. That's a pretty good one. He was briefly a TV broadcaster in the 70s, too, although that was probably kind of disappeared. But I think the most widely recognized accolade given to Clark Kent was from the original Superman movie, 1978, when Perry White, his editor says, to Lois. Lane. Clark Kent may seem like just a mild-mannered reporter, but listen, not only does he know how to treat his editor-in-chief with proper respect, not only does he have a snappy, punchy, pro style, but he is, in my 40 years in this business, the fastest typist I've ever seen, right? There's some,

obviously, Superman powers in there, too. Sounds like a kiss has, too. Yeah, Perry White. Perry White needs, we all know reporters like that. Yeah, he needs a lot of attention. I should say, because I haven't said it elsewhere, that in the Snyder verse, does that I Zach Snyder paints Clark Kent as a pretty crappy reporter. That's an outlier, I would say. But going back to the beginning, the superpowers, the super madness of the whole thing, and how do they apply here? Lois Lane has multiple Pulitzer Prizes.

They get frequently mentioned throughout the Lord. Does anybody else win a Pulitzer Prize in? Well, we don't know. There's not that many newspapers. Yeah. Is it a one newspaper town like the road? of America. Daily Planet.

According to the film Superman returns, one of her Pulitzer's was for an article titled Why the World Doesn't Need Superman, which sounds a little bit more like an op-ed than an article. Yeah. Appalienating.

Yeah, so a lot of people are wearing a lot of hats in the Daily Planet, or sorry, yeah, the Daily Planet Newsroom. Daily Planet, by the way, initially known as the Daily Star, although that did not last long. Lois also has the advantage over Clark. when it comes to access.

She has the advantage of being repeatedly saved by Superman and getting to write about it. Clark Kent in the distance, trying to distance himself from the character, does report on Superman-y things, but doesn't get to actually, you know, engage in that firsthand reportage, which all leads us to a great piece by Madeline Leow

in the review of journalism that takes to task Superman or Clark Kent's journalistic ethics. She referenced in an article in The Atlantic by Daniel D. Snyder. she says, Kent, along with fabricating quotes, is guilty of giving insider information to his wife, Lois Lane, while she may have the true spirit

of an investigative reporter, her relationship with Superman affects her journalistic integrity. And then later, in the graphic novel, Superman Earth One, there's an excerpt from a story Kent wrote about Superman.

He declines a polite request for his real name and the part of the country where he grew up. This is from another piece. and we almost believe he was speaking to someone else. Conflicts of interests aren't unheard of in the industry. But interviewing yourself for a front page story goes a little too far.

He's able to construct a narrative that he wants to portray Superman because he's asking questions and shaping the responses. I think Norman Maylor did that one time. Yeah, not unheard of in the 70s for sure. Anyway, Clark Kent, very, very good reporter, obviously conflicted as hell. you know, I don't know what we do here. It's sort of like his reporting style was basically like the sports star documentary style

of the modern age, right? He's just like, I'm going to do the best I can, but I'm going to be an EP on this project. We're going to get as close to me can to the truth with me sitting here in the editing room. Still great access. Incredible access, yeah. Now, am I a bad person if I get Perry White

confused with Jay Jonah Jameson, who was the angry editor in Spree? Spider-Man? No. They're basically the same character. Why was Angry Editor an archetype in early comics? Well, in a lot of cases, these archetypes just, I mean, just very straightforwardly borrowed from other archetypes, right?

I mean, you would see it in another comic book and you'd be like, I want to do that here. And I don't think there was quite the same IP, you know, guidelines or potential treachery as you would see today. I don't think people were, you know, no one was on Twitter complaining about the swipe. They're also stock characters, and I think that was probably, I mean, what? Was there, wasn't there? I mean, there were angry editors on, uh, what was the TV show? Uh, Mary Tyler Moore show, you know, there's like, there's always like angry.

That's, that's the role, you know, I mean, that's a authority figure for, for drama. Yeah, exactly. So we have Wendell Pierce's Perry White in the new movie. I'm reading from Wikipedia here. Other staff at the Daily Planet include Skyler Gazondo as Jimmy Olson. the boyish young photographer Beck Bennett as the reporter Steve Lombard, Michaela Hoover's columnist Kat Grant and Christopher McDonald's reporter Ron Troop. We got a lot of journalists in this movie.

God, this is like the Murphy Brown of the big screen. This is fantastic. Let's not doom it before it starts. Anyway, that was fantastic, David. Thank you for a rundown from David Shoemaker, the good, the bad, the ugly of Clark Kent, journalist. All right, it's time for a feature that is only good, not bad or ugly. It's time for David's Shoemaker guesses, the strain pun headline.

Yeah. Last Monday's headline about Jane Austen's strangest book was Keep Austin Weird. Today's headline comes to us from listener Michael Soto. David, I know you've been away. Did you happen to see the ringer's headline on the piece about Cooper Flag that we ran? I think I must have. What was it? By Kurt Goldsbury.

Did you see that piece? No, what was it? Oh, let's just relive it together in case you did. Cooper Flag is from Maine. Uh-huh. And Kirk asked, according to the subhead here, how did a rural town in an isolated corner of the country produce the consensus number one pick in the NBA draft? So we're looking for the legend of Cooper Flag via the place of his birth.

What was the ringer's strain pun headline? Is it the main character? Mm-mm. The main man? The main event. The main, the main, the main, the main, the myth, the legend of Cooper Fly. That is some damn good stuff. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Pinnacs and Magic by Kyle Crichton. David, we got some stuff coming up here on the press box. Joel's back on Thursday. And then we've got a couple of new additions of our 25 for 25 series coming up. can I interest you in the future of physical media? Books, blue rays, magazines, newspapers, the kind of things you and I collect. That may have already been recorded.

Can I interest you in the future of the celebrity profile? Yes. Which may or may not involve the word kinesthetic. That is also recorded coming very soon here on the press box. David, I will see you soon with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.