The Press Box - Trump and Fox News, Plus: New York Times Critic Dwight Garner

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker attempt to break down the dynamic between Fox News and Donald Trump (3:30), before answering, Listener Mail, where they guess “Who will be Time’s person of the year?” (31:40) Then New York Times critic Dwight Garner stops by to discuss his new book and his career as a critic (53:40). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, Fox News's Laura Ingram had an alleged informant on her show this week, who was presented in shadow with a distorted voice. What I want to know is, what are your favorite things about this time-honored TV news practice that you might not have seen since your local TV station did a sting on an insurance company? This is seriously, it became more of a gag of this going awry. Right now there's like the insurance commercials where like the voice did or the, you know, the person in this situation gets, it's exposed, and it was a naked gun moment about it.

I'm just excited, I'm glad that you went to local news because my mind immediately went to Magic's biggest secrets finally revealed. Like, this is, it was, there's got to be some point where, even if this is a real person who's willing to come on, which I'm skeptical of, you have to look at this as a producer or whoever and say, it's going to seem, it's going to look fake.

do we really want to have this person on and make everybody think that we put fake things on our show? I salute any real anonymous source, underline real anonymous source that comes forward with some news. It is hard for me to put myself in the brain of the anonymous source that says, I am willing to sit in front of a TV camera with the trust that you are going to obscure my face and voice to such a degree that nobody will recognize me. That's pretty incredible. Do you get sign off on that? Do you get signed? Do you think you must, right? Yeah, well, that's the agreement.

Surely that's the agreement. No, no, but do you see it before it goes on the air that they've like sufficiently disordered your board? I don't think you probably do, right? So you're betting that they're going to obscure you in such a way that nobody will recognize you. That's just amazing to me. Like, I'm sitting in front of the camera and you're going to do some post-production on this.

Okay. Again, if somebody is coming forward with the real information doing that at any point in history, that's awesome. I salute your bravery. But wow, I'm not sure I would be willing to partake of that. I wish they would do this thing more often. I think this should be, I think every show should have an honor. How great would it be of like every night you could just turn on ESPN?

And it was just like, we have one of LeBron James' teammates who doesn't want to be named. So their voice and figure obscured and they just come on just like just talking shit about LeBron James nonsense. The best would be if you have somebody willing to appear on. camera, but you just put them in that just to juice up the segment a little bit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Relatively controversial information, but it's just done in shadow, so it looks really cool. I got to tell you something. I have no idea what this person on the Laura Ingraham show said. I just, I just saw like two seconds of it and I was like, wow, Laura Ingraham had an imaginary person on her show. I assume she said something really

damning about the election recount or whatever, how the votes were tallied. But I, but you're, she could have said nothing. So maybe this was a huge win for Laura Ingraham. I don't know. Coming up on today's show, Fox News versus Donald Trump or Fox News still writing with Donald Trump? We'll talk about Jeffrey Tubin and John Meacham. Answer your listener mail plus New York Times critic Dwight Garner. All that and more on a power-packed press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Schumaker here. David, it's pretty clear the Fox News-Donald Trump relationship has entered a new phase.

But it's not exactly a divorce. It's more complicated than that, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's like you're out on a date with your significant other and you split up, but you both stay in the bar. And so you're sort of like hitting on other people, making eyes, like glaring at each other from 50 feet away. And, you know, getting increasingly drunk too. Yeah, I was thinking it's like we're getting a divorce, but we need to stay friends for QAnon. Okay, that's better.

You win. Trump, as everyone knows, treated Fox over the years like he treated the people who worked for him. Fox could be incredibly loyal, incredibly obsequious, and yet it was never quite enough for Donald Trump. Here's Trump on Fox and Friends early on Election Day, bagging on Fox. And somebody said, what's the biggest difference between this and four years ago? And I say Fox, it's much different. You still have great people. But you're three of them.

But you know, Mr. President, can I just say one thing? What they try to do, what they try to do with Fox? But we just want to show both, unlike the other networks, they were trying to show both sides. So, hey, here's President Trump Live. Here's Joe Biden live. Because we feel to responsible to sell. We report.

Yeah. So I don't think it's an endorsement of anybody. You like Brian Kilmead at this late date trying to explain Fox News News. his approach to journalism to Donald Trump. Yeah, and I like to do that, who is the woman on the show? I'm sorry, I don't even know. Well, anyway, that she had to jump in.

Yeah, was that Ainslie Earhart? Yeah, it was that Ainslie Earhart that had to jump in and say, and just, just distill it down until we report, you decide, you know? Like, this has been the catchphrase. This has been the catchphrase of the network since its inception, I believe. Yeah, it's, uh, what, it's, it's amazing. It's amazing what, how, how much a network can seem to change if you're a, you know, thin-skinned one of the autocrat who went from, I'm sure, just your entire impression of Fox before was

the way that they treated him during interviews, which is like obsequiously. So he would come back. And then now he's watching the network 24 hours a day. And hey, there's parts where people aren't just giving him a, you know, massage. What he was specifically complaining about there was that they were showing snippets of Obama and Biden rallies before the election. Trump was effectively arguing for de-platforming Barack Obama and Joe Biden on Fox. He didn't like that. He's like,

you can show my rallies, but you shouldn't even show their rallies, even just just passionately putting it on television, even if your host come on and bag on those guys. Well, I mean, I know that he didn't actually use the term, but I don't think anybody uses the term de-platforming without actually having entertained the notion of de-platforming others at some point in their life.

But yeah, I think Donald Trump is, I mean, listen, I mean, it's like, if anything's more clear now than ever, it's that, you know, he is the parody of a person that we were sometimes reticent to, to acknowledge out loud that, you know, we always thought he was. And he's, he's just being just, he's being a child, you know, I don't know, there's no other way to put it. So that was election morning. The big break came on election night when Fox News's decision desk, it's D desk, if you will, called the state of Arizona for Biden before anyone else. Now, according to reporting from the Washington Post,

Trump and company just exploded when they saw that call. Jared Kushner was sent to call Rupert Murdoch, Kelly Ann Conway called Brett Baer, Mark Meadows called the decision desk, and Fox News said, sorry about that. We're going to keep the Arizona call. And since Trump really couldn't win the president, without winning Arizona. Fox was effectively saying it's game over on Tuesday night, if not in so many words.

What we've seen since in David is this really weird sort of diorama. On the one hand, I think if you and I sat down and watched 24 hours of Fox News, it would be overwhelmingly stolen election conspiracy theories or at least kind of both sidesing the stolen election conspiracy. theories? Yeah. Hey, you know, on the one hand, Joe Biden says he won the election. On the other hand, Donald Trump claims that millions of votes

were thrown in the dumpster or something like that. That kind of approach. Yeah. Fox will go to the mat saying that, you know, their primetime shows are for entertainment purposes. They've said it in court, you know, about Tucker.

And I think they used to say it about Hannity, too. In various legal proceedings. You know, this is one of those, this is one of those doctrines, one of those, you know, pieces of faith that, like, you have to sort of believe if you are going to run the Fox network with any sort of clear conscience, right? That, like, this, the prime time is entertainment. And, but, I mean, it certainly does feel problematic, even if you believe that and even if you give that a pass, it feels problematic when something like that Lauren Ingraham thing happens.

There's that, I mean, Tucker for the past week has been, I mean, I mean, listen, Tucker Carlson's MO seems to be, like, he, I, I know for a. fact when they're sitting in production meetings, Tucker Carlson is saying, is this going, does this feel like something that might get me fired, then let's do it because they can't fire me. You know, I mean, like, that's the line for him. And Laura Ingraham, I guess, is sitting a production meeting saying, what can, what lie, what story can we literally fabricate that would look like, you know, that would make Trump look good or make the, the liberals look bad? It's, it's, it's really, I mean, it's, it's, it's impossible to weigh all the damage

that they, they do against whatever honesty, the rest of the, the, the, the schedule tells. like you said, they're not being utterly honest. They're not being completely honest. You're not being honest at all. Even if you say things that are totally true, even if the line is not what you said, but it's Joe Biden, who has, you know, been named the winner of the election is putting together his transition team, and then, which is factually true. And then you say, meanwhile, the Trump administration is in court contesting the results. Like, even if you just juxtapose those two things, it gives them a sense of evenness, right? And that, and that's, that's, that's, ingenuous too. So, you know, all that is to say, yes, the network is, they're doing,

there's times where it seems like they're doing just enough to not piss off Trump. And there's times where it seems like they're doing just enough to save face with everybody else in the world. I think they're much more leaning towards making, trying to, trying to appease Trump than trying to actually be a good news outlet. It's much more door number one than door number two. But when you have one of those door number two moments, it gets, tons of pickup. That's it. That's that's that thing. That's why it seems like that. Yeah, you're right. Because it means, aha, even Fox News cannot take it anymore. This was the big one this week. Neil Cavuto

interrupting Kaylee McEnany's press conference. Listen to how this went down. Every illegal vote. Well, I just think we have to be very clear. She's charging the other side is welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can't in good countenance continue showing you this. I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that's an explosive charge to make that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating. And this, David, was host Sandra Smith listening to someone questioning the call of the race. She's addressing Trace Gallagher, her co-host, and Smith was apparently not unaware her

microphone was on. Whoever whoever is decided to be the president, remember, just because CNN says, or even Fox News says that somebody's president doesn't make them president. So I think everybody wants to know that this was done properly and legally. What is happening? Trace, we've called it. And I think we have to look at it. At some point our network's just going for the meme.

Like they just want, like, oh, they know the best way to drum up ratings is to just like let them like a fake mistake go viral like that. I don't even know what to say about this. I mean, it's, yeah, you're letting people on. It's like the network has decided that the official party line is. is Lindsey Graham's bullshit, right? It's like, as long as you do, as long as you, you can allude, please allude as much as you want to the Democrats ceiling of the election.

Just don't say the words out loud. Don't state it outright, right? Like, we're a network. Or maybe do. I mean, I don't know, you know. I'm, I just, I just think that, I mean, if they're gonna, like they, they, they would like to think

they're drawing a line, but they're drawing the line at, at, you know, it's okay to incite. Just don't, you know, actively leave the army. me. Well, it goes back to the point you made a second ago about they always said there was this difference between the daytime programming that was more news oriented and then the nighttime programming that was opinion slash quote unquote entertainment oriented. The problem comes in when the nighttime people are alleging facts. Then the whole thing falls apart. It's not that they have wild opinions about the stuff. They are also getting into this happened and this didn't happen.

and that kind of stuff. I mean, the idea would be like if New York Times columnists were saying, you know, Cal Cunningham actually won the North Carolina Senate race. But the election was stolen from, even though the news pages said something else, well, then any reader of the Times would be naturally completely confused and might believe the other person because they were writing it with a lot more verve than the deathless prose of the news story. Yeah.

That just never made any sense. And I know a lot of, a lot of like smart people tried to defend that, including people who worked at Fox that, look, I'm doing my best here and holding the voice. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't work. It just, it just never worked. That brings us, David, to this idea of what's going to happen now between Trump and Fox News.

There is all this talk that Donald Trump wants to start a media company. It's been around for a long time. And Axios's Mike Allen put some details with that today. he said that Trump wants to start a digital media company that will quote, clobber Fox. Trump plans to use the lists of email and phone contacts his campaign amassed to shoot offerings to his followers in hopes of getting them to replace the $6 a month Fox Nation subscription with his feed.

And then what Trump would do is attack Fox when he's out doing rallies or whatever he's going to do now after the election has been decided. I guess that makes a little more sense than Donald Trump trying to start a cable news channel. feels really late in the day to start a cable channel of any kind but well I mean that wouldn't be entirely out of place in his

corporate empire I mean every like it you know it fits right in with like the 24 karat gold faucets and whatever else but go ahead well and I just wonder though like if this digital news network were wildly successful you would hurt Fox's

Fox Nation subscription service So would that really be like the death blow to Fox News that you take away all those digital subscriptions that shows that you and I barely know exist? I mean, I'm not going to let you say anything negative about Cyrus, aka Brodus Clay the Funkasaurus, former W.W.E. Star, who now I believe is on that platform. I wouldn't dream of such a thing. Yeah, it's, no, it's, I don't know that that would, I mean, I don't think that would hurt them at all.

I mean, I just think it's, uh, it's an interesting play by Trump for sure. I mean, that market is there, though. I don't know how many subscribers they have, but I think it's easier to get, you know, some rooms to shell out five bucks a month than, then to, you know, try to actually make inroads into an existing media world. Isn't the way to read all of this that Trump and Rupert Murdoch are having a business negotiation? Mm-hmm. and that both sides want maximum leverage here.

Like, if you're Donald Trump, whether you're going to start a media company or not, it is in your best interest to talk about starting a media company. It's true. It's true. I mean, and everybody's kind of playing an angle here. I saw one of the, was the Newsmax guy, was on Stelter show this weekend and was, and kind of took semi-ironic exception to the way he was introduced and said, like, shouldn't you call me Trump's business partner, L-O-L, you know, or something like that? And I think that's what I think that's what the joke was.

But yeah, I mean, everybody's just sort of milking it, right? I mean, and I mean, frankly, all the people that are semi-seriously, all the late-night comics and the daily shows and whatever else, all the people who are going to quote unquote miss Trump because of all the material he provided, I'm sure would love to have an over-the-top network of material that they can keep making fun of. Yeah. So, like everybody's got an interest in this. Yeah, it feels like it would. be just specifically existing to give the Daily Show, like and John Oliver,

little bits of sound that they could play and then make fun of. Yeah, they could, the MSNBC should bring back Oberman just to make fun of whatever this network is. And the Rupert Murdoch part of this is that Jack Schaefer wrote recently in Politico, that Murdoch's political unions, and I'm quoting here, have always been expedient, transactional, temporary things. Like, he needs to understand which way the wind is blowing here. It made a ton of sense for the last four years to be the Trump network. but, you know, when he had newspapers in England,

it often made sense to do one thing and then to do something else. Tony Blair's going to get elected. Oh, well, let's tack a little bit that way. Even if we ultimately abandoned it and changed ship, you know, change direction at some other point. There is this term I want to introduce you to if you don't know it already called the reverse ferret. Are you familiar with this? I'm not going to try to guess.

I'm sure I'll just be get offensive very quickly. I'll just read the Wikipedia entry. The term originates from Kelvin McKenzie's time at the sun. that's the British paper. His preferred description of the role of journalists when it came to public figures was to stick a ferret up their trousers. This meant making their lives uncomfortable and was based on the supposed northern stunt of ferret legging.

However, when it became clear that the tide of public opinion had turned against the paper's line, McKenzie would burst from his office shouting, reverse ferret. So there is a little bit of a reverse ferret in the Fox sense, right? Donald Trump is defeated. Donald Trump is going to be this huge power player in Republican politics, but not the singular power player in exactly the same way. So maybe we need to figure out what the future of Fox News looks like. Yeah, but I mean, in the meantime, I think a lot of the tension, I'm sure there's internal

tension that comes from the fact that, you know, you're functionally hanging Sean Hannity out to dry when your news desk is saying a thing that doesn't jive with like his, but his platform, right? and what he's like mortgaged his career on. Obviously, he's going to bounce back. And I don't think, you know, you can see how it applies less to Tucker, who is soulless and, you know, Laura Ingraham, who is probably more in the Sackford Trump, but like more Craven sort of in her way. And, and, you know, Hannity is just sort of the purest distillation of Trumpism. And that's why I kind of single him out. But, you know, it does feel like they're pushing in such a way because Fox hasn't made up its mind yet, right?

I mean, the primetime shows are acting out because there's an audience for it, sure, but also because the ferret hasn't been reversed yet. It hasn't been fully reversed. I also see the, I think the idea that, like, Trump is either going to go do his own company or he's going to, he's going to completely stay in the Fox universe. Isn't there a happy medium here? Couldn't Trump do the streaming service or website, bright Barty-style website, whatever he wants to do?

And Rupert Murdoch, like, signs him to a contributor's contract. so he'll call Fox and Friends every Monday morning, and he gets a nice book deal at Harper Collins to write his memoirs, which everyone's talking about. Isn't there kind of a happy medium where you sort of keep him inside the house, essentially stop him from bashing Fox, and then he can also do whatever else he wants to do? Why doesn't Fox just subsidize the entire thing?

I mean, it's obviously there's no, they don't need to cancel an over-the-top network to start another, but if they were traditional networks, wouldn't you just say, okay, well, get rid of Fox Nation, you can have that. Now that's the Trump network. You know, I mean, it seems like there's, there's a way that this could kind of work for everybody.

But, I mean, I think I'm, I've been sort of surprised to the degree to which Newsmax and OAN have like sort of gotten a footing in the Trump years, because it just, it does seem like so much of Trump's base would kind of be past the point of evolving in a technological sense or even a new channel on my television sense. But it's worked. And I don't think that there's any, I don't think that there's any reason to think there's a limit to what Trump could accomplish. I honestly, the negotiation, if this is a, if this dance is a negotiation, I think it's a smart time to be having it because the only way that this Trump, that Trump, whatever Trump does next doesn't work to some degree is if he just drags his feet and doesn't get it out there quickly enough. But, you know, if it's happening now, maybe it could work. Do you see the item in the New York Post about what Trump could get for his memoirs money-wise?

No, but let me guess. Because honestly, I haven't seen it. So now I'm really interested. So you're guessing what he could actually get, plus what the New York Post, a Murdoch paper, parenthetically, would say he would get it for his memoirs. I'll also tell you this appeared on page six. So you mean it would be elevated.

It would be inflated by appearing on page six. And theoretically. You just need to keep that in mind. I think the real answer, I think the real money answer is, is two and a half to five million. I think they would say $10 or maybe $20 million. They said $100 million. Oh, maybe.

I mean, it's totally possible. I'm trying to think of them. I would love to know what the highest grossing sort of conservative political targeted book would be. Like in the heyday of Bill O'Reilly, how much money would one of those books make? I would find it, I would be shocked to find out that one of the, those books. Well, netted the company more than $10 million, but who knows? I mean, if you think of Donald Trump writing a book and saying like, this is my, this is the story of what actually

happened in the White House, unlike what the liberal media is telling you. And I'm going to go out and promote it myself. I'm going to tweet about it all the time. I'm going to go on all the shows I need to go on. I'll give, you know, 60 minutes or one or two mainstream interviews and then I'll go on Fox all the time and promote it. I mean, it could, it could be a big selling book. Let's put it that way. I don't know how much you would make. No, maybe you're right. Maybe you're right. I just don't, I mean, I don't even know. I mean, honestly, I've been away from publishing for a while. I have no idea what like the highest of high dollar contracts would even look like. But don't we know what Obama? I mean, I thought, I thought Obama's

contract was like $8 million or something. I mean, it was him and his wife together, right? Him and Michelle books together. Wasn't Hillary's like four? I mean, I just, maybe I'm totally wrong, but I feel like, I feel like these epic books, or when Bill Clinton wrote that book, wasn't that like several million dollars i don't know a hundred just seems like a lot but listen i mean i know that he made a killing off of his campaign is whatever anomaly is what was his campaign book and we've forgotten i don't even remember the title i don't know what that book looked like but like that was a huge huge deal you know so um yeah i mean i guess anything's possible it would be really i guess everybody would buy you know all of all the grandparents everybody that voted for trump

might just buy it who knows but but it does feel like i mean i would think that trump books just feel a little bit more disposable than maybe another president's book, even if even if Trump says this is the one that matters, right? I mean, doesn't it just, doesn't the genre just feel a little bit more disposable? Yeah, and he's written so many. That's what I mean. He's written so many books. Won't he write another one as soon as he needs a cash a check? I mean, I don't know. One one sign we might treat this with a grain of salt is the New York Post report was sourced to, I'm not making this up, quote, one source familiar with the president. You know, isn't everyone on planet Earth just about familiar with Donald Trump?

Right now, yeah. You're in a very kind of stilted way, like we are familiar with each other. We are, we know each other, but familiar with Donald Trump. I am familiar with Donald. Literally people all over the earth. Yeah, you're right. I've been getting emails. I don't even talk to people in other countries barely at all, but they've all,

but everyone that's in my Rolodex has like found time to text me over the past week, just a touch base. Yeah. By the way, this is a, I mean, this whole Trump administration has been, you know, leak central, which it's even in, even looking back now, it's, it's sort of wild how many leaks the Trump administrations had sent because, I mean, even if you kind of like, like, like, cordon off, you know, Jared trying to make himself look good leaks and, you know, Bannon at his peak trying to make himself look like, you know, the guy who's really.

really in charge, like, whatever. But most of the people in the White House just, like, seem so desperately to want to be in the White House. Like, they want the success that comes with it. I guess maybe they get disenchanted. But anyway, it seemed like there's a lot of leaks through this whole four years. But right now, these leaks are absolutely bonkers, right? I mean, it's like the number of people who are leaking contradictory things about

Trump's state of mind and whether or not he's just joking with us all about this whole recount thing or setting up his future. and Dave Weigel, you know, who was on the show, was it this week? When was it? Yeah, this on Monday, tweeted, I was just sort of like, kind of was surprised to hear it coming from Weigel. But he said, it's haughty for me to say this, which I'm glad he qualified it. But at what point do we stop handing anonymity to these sources?

They're indulging dangerous conspiracies and giving false hope to people to undermine an election, print their names. I do think that's an interesting thought experiment, but here's a really specific question for you. Like, there is a, there is a, okay, is it possible that an anonymous source, that an article would print an anonymous source from the White House and then because of public outcry be forced to reveal the source. That's not possible, right? I guess there's a scenario where what they were saying was, you know. So problematic.

I mean, problematic, probably not. But I guess, I guess that you could entertain a scenario where you were outing. them would be the moral course of action based on what they said or if they lied or something like that maybe like the editor the publisher comes in over the top of whoever the editor was and says listen then that's not the way we run like that person gets outed or whatever he here's here's the way i can imagine it if they just lied about a factual matter and the paper you know by printing it sort of put some stock behind it and then that was revealed to be untrue then yeah i could see a scenario where someone's like all right that person lied to me i'm going to tell i'm going to say who

who who did yeah maybe I do think we're entering a kind of interesting time because it's not, I mean, there is a whole, there is still a lot of give Trump space out there from both sides, right? And there, and, and, and, and, you know, that even people who are inclined to let Trump sort of fizzle out, I mean, obviously there's times where like, hey, when Trump is like repopulating all of these defense department and intelligence jobs with just like lackeys and cronies, right? Like, where you're just like, maybe we shouldn't be just be giving him. the leash to, you know, to find his emotional space to move on or whatever right now, right?

I mean, it's going to go back and forth. But, and there was also a really compelling piece, which I totally don't have, don't have pulled up right now that somebody said that he should just, we should just let all these lawsuits go, let him fight till the bitter end because it will delegitimize, it'll show how ridiculous it is. And we don't want, no one wants to be seen as like delegitimizing court battles, right? I mean, that's a real thing. All of that is to say that it's we are entering in a really interesting time where there's a lot of argument to just kind of be said just like let it go let it fizzle out and and i think people are starting to take the whole thing less seriously but it's also like this stuff really really matters and this sort of

anonymity this sort of lying is really actually very manageable right it's very easy for like newspapers to say the thing that is true and to not let anybody say anything that's false anonymously or not letting anybody say anything i mean this is this is not going to come back to bite anybody it's not going to come back to, I mean, all it can do at this point is, like, harm the country. And so it makes it more of, I think, an interesting thought experiment than some of the, like the op-ed from Anonymous that, you know, that we talked about forever ago. Yeah, that's the downside of fizzle out is that you're just going to hear this noise for days and days and days. And, you know, and you're just like, you know, it is correct that Donald Trump has the right to file a lawsuit

in court. Okay, so does everybody on earth? But that doesn't mean, you know, but the idea that you would just sort of do nothing. And by the way, I think if we looked at the newspapers, especially New York Times, places like that, they've done a fantastic job of pushing back, you know, and being very,

very clear about what happened in the election. They are not giving Trump space in any sense. No, no, no, fairly, but they are saying that Joe Biden won the election and that there's no, there is no massive fraud that happened in this election. And not even mainstream journalists.

Like, a lot of this is happening on Twitter. And a lot of it's not even coming from, I mean, you know, these, originates. There's obviously an incredible marketplace right now for like made up anonymous stories. See, Maggie Haberman is like adjudicating some of these in real time on her Twitter account. Just like, well, whoever said this is clearly is clearly trying to get themselves a new job or like whatever, you know, just trying to, but it's sort of, I mean, that part of it is even more unsettling

in a certain way that you'd be messing with the truth, messing with the reality, messing with kind of national, the national interest and safety to sort of gimmick your next job. You know, I don't, it's a, there's just too many motivations here. And that's why it's really like a huge problem to have like a television network and whoever else like pretending that what's real isn't because there is a whole lot of stake. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag. It was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

David on Monday, Joe Biden unveiled the 13 members of his COVID response. team. It was an upward Twitter joke to write, but wait, many of these people are actually infectious disease experts. Thanks to John Getz for that one. On Wednesday, David, the AP called the state of Alaska for Donald Trump, causing Ivanka Trump to declare victory on Twitter. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, so we're allowing the media to call races now? Thanks to corporate mark. Maybe not so much a joke as a very trenchant observation about the Trump campaign's interest in media calls. And finally, David, an item from CNN.

You know the doorbell company Ring? Yeah, yeah. Well, Ring is recalling hundreds of thousands of video doorbells. CNN writes after receiving reports of them catching fire. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. Well, Johnny Cash warned us about this. Thanks to stereo sifter, Patrick A. Bernard, Derek Ashworth, and Aaron McDade. If you made fun of people who have ring, congrats.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. David, time for a little listener mail. And a few weeks ago, you might remember us talking about the New Yorkers Jeffrey Tubin. Ooh. Accidentally allowed coworkers to see him exposing himself on a Zoom call. Well, the New Yorker fired Tubman. been Wednesday after 27 years at the magazine. I am been thinking about this.

I step carefully here. Because I feel one of the things about this very, very strange episode in American journalism is that we just don't really have an obvious analogy for this or a way to think about it. Uh-huh. There are all other kinds of inappropriate newsroom behavior where we could be like,

Oh, it's like that thing. This does not seem to be like that thing. So can I very carefully attempt an analogy here that maybe helped me at least process this a little bit more? Please, please do. I'm slightly terrified. Let's go. All right. Folks, you may or may not be hearing this when we actually publish the podcast.

Here goes. The staff of a magazine goes on an editorial retreat. Ha, ha, there are no more editorial retreats. Nobody has any money. But roll with me here. They go on an editorial retreat. They rent a house that has lots of bedrooms. Okay?

Everybody has their own room. They meet in the morning and then do their editorial trust falls or whatever they're doing. And then somebody says, okay, we're going to take a 30 minute break. You can all go do whatever you want. Now, if somebody were to go back to their room during that 30 minute break, would we think that they have the right inside the privacy of their own room to do whatever it is they want to. do pretty much. Yeah, I guess within reason. But we would also have this enormous expectation that they would close the door if that was something that would potentially bother other people.

And we might also have the expectation that they really, really, really make sure the door is closed, perhaps even lock the door so that nobody walks by the door. None of their colleagues walk by the door and are incredibly put in this incredibly awful and uncomfortable position of seeing something they did not plan on seeing. Now, technology is more complicated than just going and locking a door. I grant you that. But isn't essentially that if we take Tubinette's word that he did not mean to do this, isn't that essentially what happened in this case?

And what I think the New Yorker is saying is, whatever you do in your personal time, you have a certain responsibility to you. your coworkers to make sure that door is closed. There's, yes, there's, I, you think that's an interest, that's probably a good analogy, actually. I,

two minor quibbles. One, um, the door lock, I mean, yes, there's the expectation that he will close the door and lock the door, but there's also,

I don't know if this is particular to our society or our current year or whatever. I don't think so. I think that there's also, when it comes to, matters of sex and particularly sexual indiscretion, it's not just the expectation that you won't close the door. There is an expectation that you won't get caught, right? That you're not allowed to let anyone else find out you're doing this full stop, even if it's not your fault. Like it's just, it's a secret. You do this thing like in a whatever, the back of whatever metaphorical,

unlit closet, whatever. I mean, it's just not, it's never to come to light. And that's not manageable, but it's, you know, that's, that is sort of the unwritten expectation. The flip side of that is what matters for everybody else, which is, it doesn't really matter if you lock the door. I mean, it doesn't matter what the, what the expectations are and whether or not they're violated. What matter, if someone is kind of

caught on the other side of that, then they didn't have a choice in the matter at all, right? So it's, it's sort of, it's, it would be like, I don't know, I mean, what would be the analogy? It would be like if somebody, it would be like a like a like a like a like a wacky movie from the 80s or 90s or something where like a two way mirror is involved that nobody knew existed right i mean it's like if if if you've gone back to room and locked the door and then everybody else is suddenly forced to watch on security camera or something what you're doing because of some mishap with technology i mean there's it does it becomes just like unthinkable in like a kooky or just unthinkable way i don't know i mean this whole thing is it's really hard to wrap one's mind around i will say this the new yorker has a i think more I mean, a pretty vested interest in, I mean, has an interest, I mean, has a, you know, best interest in Jeffrey Tubin.

He's an important writer, an important employee. He's a good writer. He does everything. They're invested in his success. Sure. This is so much as we know, in so much as we know what happened, well, I don't even know. I guess I'll just say this. I feel very comfortable saying that of all of these crazy situations and there will certainly

be more of them, I feel comfortable that this was like a. adjudicated correctly because they had an interest in not damaging his reputation and they had to know that of all of the possible inpoints to this thing publicly firing him was only going to reopen the conversation so it seems like for what because of whatever else they know this was the only this was the best possible solution and this was the most extreme solution so i'm frankly feel comfortable that they made the right choice based on little or nothing i think i think you can say that it can on the one hand be a completely horrible accident. And on the other hand, it is his responsibility to make sure that accident doesn't happen. Yeah. Yeah. When you put it that way,

that makes a lot of things. Both of those things can be true. But, you know, when you think about the coworkers who went up seeing that, who do not want to see that, who were not absolutely not expecting to see that, it's kind of your responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. And Yeah, I mean, that's where I go. That's where I'm at, right? Like, both of those things can be true. And the second part becomes the operative thing here. Well, I didn't mean for this to happen, but guess what?

It happened. And it's a really big deal. And my colleagues, you know, bear the brunt of it, as it were. Can we talk about someone else who often appears on cable television or did? John Meacham, historian and contributor to MSNBC. So John Meacham has been all over television because he's the guy who comes on and says what it all means with the every time there's something vaguely historical, he is kind of Mr. History. I was watching him while the count was going on, I believe it was last Wednesday. He came on and started talking about, you know, using phrases like vital pamphlet and ambient pandemic.

And this is my favorite. You don't want to get too Dickensian about it when he was talking. about the vote count. Yeah. Oh, my God. Anyway, this Monday, Annie Carney, the New York Times reports that Meacham was actually helping Joe Biden write speeches, including helping him write his acceptance speech that he gave Saturday night after

he was declared the winner of the election. Now, we know where John Meacham's sympathies lie in this election. He actually spoke at the Democratic Convention that it was more of like a soul of the country kind of thing. obviously he wants Biden to be president, does not want Trump to be president. But if you are writing speeches for a candidate, you should not be interviewed as the official historian of MSNBC. You should be interviewed as a campaign operative. That seems like a pretty obvious line between two very, very different jobs.

What do you think? I mean, I'm always a little bit perplexed. I think we've had conversations about this sort of in the sports world, right? I mean, I've always sort of been, I remember when Magic Johnson was an owner of the Lakers and was still on like NBA halftime shows and stuff. It's just like an objective journalist. You know, I mean, that was confusing to me. Everything on cable news is slightly perplexing, right? That it's just like you have a job and then you have like a bonus job, like taped over the top of it where you just do a different thing.

You go on TV and talk about your job, you know, and like I'm sure that there are lots of rules and regulations because this is a fairly commonplace now. but it does seem to, it does feel like it's going to open up, it would open up problems on a daily basis, you know, when you're doing the sort of thing. Um, if nothing else, just like your availability, availability issues, uh, yeah, I'm busy writing Biden's speech. I can't come on right now, Brian Williams. Or the inverse, right? It's just like, oh, you're, yeah, like, Brian Williams, like, is calling you and you're, and you're having MSNBC contract to show up and you're also, like, on deadline with the Washington Post. Like, what do you see? I mean, I'm sure these things are, they figure this out. I'm sure they know, you know, there's things take, there's,

priorities, but still, it does seem like, oddly, it is always confused me. I will say this in the specific case of Meacham. Right. You're also just, when you're appearing on there and you're not telling your employers what you're doing, Brian Williams is actually asking you the wrong questions. Like, his questions to you should be about what Joe Biden wants to say with these various speeches. Like, you've got information that is actually very, very germane to the kinds of things MSNBC is

reporting about and you're talking about Alexander Hamilton. If they knew that, I suspect they did not know that, but if they knew that, they would be asking him a different set of questions. You're putting them in a terrible position. Yeah. Well, you're putting everybody in terrible. And I guess that's the bigger question, right? It's like who knew what, when? Because frankly, I don't think that it's that big of a deal. I mean, I guess you would, maybe you just didn't want to have the conversation. I don't know. It doesn't seem like any, it seems like you're right. They would find a way to ask the right question because certainly MSNBC doesn't want to get saddled with this stuff, you know, John Meacham, it would be hard to imagine that it would make much of a

difference to him. Certainly the Biden, doesn't think the Biden campaign would ever want to get involved with is a speech writing, I know a speech writing situation. You know, I mean, it's like, I just don't, it just, I don't know. I just don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you're right that nobody, nobody's surprised about the ideology of, of, of John Meacham. I mean, I, he's been on MSNBC for months now, basically like, giving anti-Trump political speeches lovely ones and I can see why you would reach out to him

to do some top editing and whatever whatever you were writing I could see how a unofficial can you take a look at this sort of email correspondence could grow into something more problematic but all that said that's not the issue the issue is like how do you like you know you got to tell the people that are paying you

when you do something outside of the outside of what they're paying you for the issue involves what they're paying you for the issue also we bring this up all the time is people not wanting to make choices like in this case john meecham like you can you can be mr history on tv or you can be a speechwriter for one of the candidates but you have to pick you should just go ahead and pick one of those things right he doesn't want to give up the idea that he's the official historian who is called on to make sense of these confusing times on msnbc so he doesn't make a choice he does both you you have to make choices we say that's when somebody writes a member

memoir of someone who's on their beat, ghost writes a memoir and takes the money, a journalist. You just should, you just have to pick one or the other sometimes. Yeah. You can't pick both. And to me, it's just,

and again, it's less a scandal than it's just so dumb. Like, it's like, come on, man, you know this. You know, George Will did this,

right, when he was participating in Reagan debate prep back in the, you know, it's like, no, you can't go on TV and grade Ronald Reagan's debate and then also participate in the debate prep without telling anybody. That doesn't work. Anyway.

Questions from listeners, David, from Tom Gunjami. Which current Trump official do you think will unfortunately get a cushy media gig first and where? Oh, man. Isn't the answer here Kelly Ann Conway? Oh, is it that easy? I mean, she has a lot of like mainstream pundit experience. Isn't she the one who's going to wind up on someplace like CNN replacing Rickson? Santorum. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely could see that happen. It's just like, it's amazing that she sort of

persevered to the point of being a plausible candidate for this, because I don't think that's where she, that's certainly not where she began her journey. It sort of depends on where everybody wants to, I think there's some people that will not be interested in media gigs, right? Like, you can imagine, well, Hope Hicks had her turn at Fox in the office, I guess. And, but I can imagine she wouldn't be that interested in that. Mark Meadows obviously, I mean, has a, has political aspirations. So does Pompeo. Jared and Ivanka will presumably, you know, find another calling in life. Who else? I mean, I was talking to my wife about this the other day, based on absolutely nothing. Here's a prediction. Mike Pence for the next president of Liberty University.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. What a better throne. for the new head of religious conservatism. Yeah. And it doesn't rule anything out for 2024. Exactly. And the great thing about universities is it's always an, it's an appropriate job to take, never seems like a demotion. And they can come up with whatever.

It's how you can be the, you know, the freaking, you know, just advanced, you know, the ombudsman of Liberty University. Just give me, just make up some, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, presidency there, you know, it can be anything. It can be the chancellor, the whatever. But yeah, I mean, Kelly and Conway, okay, so Stephen Miller is an interesting one. Is Stephen Miller going to take another policy job? Is he going to run for Senate from wherever the hell?

Is he from North Carolina? Is he going to be a college there? Oh, California. Is he going to become a congressman? Is he going to start advising somebody else? Or does he get, you know, put through the washing machine at Fox News? I could totally see him on Fox. I see.

See, that's the thing I think here. A lot of these people you could imagine on Fox. There's a tinier number that could work at some place that's not Fox, like CNN or maybe one of the networks as the conservative person. I think that's kind of the interesting class, right? If Mark Meadows and Mike Pompeo become Fox pundits while they get ready for their next political race, okay, that's not terribly interesting to me. But which one of these people would CNN consider hiring given the massive amount of

blowback they're going to get? That's kind of interesting. And I sort of wonder who's in that group besides Conway. I find it hard to imagine that CNN would hire Stephen Miller. But it's, I mean. No chance. No chance. No, no.

I mean, but like. I think CNN people would revolt. I think the argument of some of the architect of family separation. I just don't think that's going to do. Brian, I don't disagree with you, but I, but I, but I, I mean, Rick Santorum is one of the most problematic politicians of our lifetime. I know. It's just time, right, has gone by.

No, the way, the timing worked out differently. And he certainly wasn't, you know, and that's not an excuse. It's just that people kind of forgot, you know, and like he's, and it's Trump, right? So he's suddenly next to Trump seems more acceptable. But yes, I don't completely agree.

And I don't know. Good question from Rick Delaney, David. Who will be Times person of the year? Do you take Joe Biden versus the field? Delaney also lists the other options. Is it the for better or worse choice, Trump, the underdog, Anthony Fauci, the nebulous choice?

choice, the virus, or the nerds choice, the pollsters. It was going to be Times Person of the Year. When does it come out? At the end of the year. It's like December. It's not like the Oscars where it's like months later. No, no. I think it's like in the next month.

So it's going to be, I would say Fauci, except for the fact that the virus is going to be raging out of control. And so it would kind of be hard to put a, put the stamp on like a, you know, someone is fighting against it at that moment. A few months later might be a different story. The virus might be it or what would be the sort of you or the personal computer of the of the coronavirus era? The mask? Yeah.

I mean, maybe it's the mask. Is there some sort of like, is it family? You know, like what is like what is the togetherness sort of? Yeah. Social distancing is the person of the year. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it has to be coronavirus, but they have to sort of take a cautious, not too rosy glass take on it.

I don't know what it would be. I think the virus, Fauci and Biden all have pretty good odds. But I think, I mean, I think it's also just kind of like a magazine editor thing. Do you want to just do a cover that is the virus? Or do you want the inspiring story of how Anthony Fauci fought the virus and negotiated all the perils of the Trump administration? If I'm assigning one of those two stories, you're right, virus may be it given the hell we are currently experiencing. But Fauci is kind of the easier thing to write. Oh, for sure.

The easier thing to sell. So I just wonder, and especially since he's apparently going to stay on during the Biden administration and continue to lead this fight, he feels like it to me. Just from a programming point. What if Trump fires him before it begins, though? Does that, I guess he can just get rehired in a hurry? Yeah, he can't really fire him, right, because of the civil service stuff. If you get fired and then rehired, do you have to wait for two months to your health insurance to kick in again? How does that?

Same thing. Fouchi, going to be on Cobra in the meantime. This is a good question from Dan Chamberlain. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman signed a book deal. Yeah, I was going to mention this earlier. Negotiated by the DC-based javelin agency, of course, since they negotiate everything now, to write a Trump book that's going to come out in 2020. And Chamberlain asks us, is that too late? Will we still care?

How much goods could she have held back and saved for the book? Is 2022 too late? I mean, it's less than ideal. You know, delivery dates on books and book contracts are sometimes not really realistic in either. I mean, it can be in either direction. But it does feel like this is one where they would have a pretty good handle on it, right? I don't know. I mean, I think that there are diminishing returns for any book that's going to come out after February, frankly, January, probably.

And at some point, you've got to be betting on getting the book right, you know, having the best name, having the best, you know, the best angle, the best, the most comprehensive look, whatever. And 2022 is not that far away. I think we all have pretty, you know, visceral memories of what four years ago felt like. So I'm not sure that 18 months is going to make a lot of difference. She might be the exception just because she's such a big name and you could sell it right as this is the definitive book about Donald Trump in the White House. Yeah. Covering Donald Trump in the White House, especially if she includes parts about herself. And I say that as a journalism person, media person.

Like that's kind of what I want to read within this is what it was like to cover Donald Trump. I don't know if she would be interested in sharing that, but that part of it is fascinating to me. Yeah. It does bring up the bigger question, doesn't it, of how much Donald Trump content, especially in the form of like big dollar books, is there going to be an appetite for after January?

What do you think about that? Well, I mean, if he stays in the media eye, you know, to whatever degree, depends on if he's still running for office, you know, if he's teasing another run for office, you know, he'll still be around. I then I think the appetite will always be there. even if he becomes more less serious, I think the appetite in some ways sort of grows, right?

That like the jokes get a little bit easier. But, I mean, specific to the Haberman thing, one could, I mean, it's going to be the book, right? It'll be the, the, it probably is going to be helpful to wait for it to die, wait for the rest of the books to die down a little bit. And then, you know, there's every reason to imagine that there would be like an accompanying documentary or whatever. I mean, there could be any sort of other,

major thing that was kind of coming along with it. Sure. And that this would sort of be the, you know, like you said, this is, this is the official telling. This is what really matters. This is the only, this is the only thing you ever need to read again. But what will be the, I mean, I think there's people that are going to still be, I mean, we're still going to be getting Trump White House memoirs for the next year, you know, whether

or not they, they, people buy them or they make a lot of, I don't know what the appetite's going to be, but the publisher's appetite, I'm sure we'll just, we'll keep turning them out. If nothing else, I mean, listen, like Jason Miller writing about how awesome the Trump years were is probably going to sell more copies than like a reporter's book about the first year of the Biden administration. So, I mean, the appetite comparatively is still going to be reasonably strong. I'd love to know what the appetite for Biden books are right now. That'd be funny. Speaking of books, David, Dwight Garner, New York Times book critic, has written his own book. He joined us to talk about what that's like and about the art of book reviewing.

Dwight Garner realizes he has done something fraught this week. He is a New York Times book critic who has brought his own book into the world. The book is Garner's quotations, a modern miscellany. It's a collection of sentences drawn from sources ranging from Emily Gould to Robert Lewis Stevenson. At which point, Dwight, I think you've covered the waterfront. Dwight is here to talk about his book and his career. Thank you so much for coming on the press box. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

So as a book critic, you of all people see how many books are put into the universe. Yeah. Did that make you overthink writing one of your own? It does. You know, I remember I was an editor, you know, before I became a critic, I worked at the Times Book Review as an editor for a long time. And, you know, we would just get 100 books every day. And in the mail, you'd open them and say, well, like, here's a really necessary book. I mean, what is a necessary book? But sometimes you see it and you know that's not it. And the last thing I want to do as someone who reviews other people's books is bring a book that I just don't think people need into the world.

What puts you over the threshold, finally? I don't know. I thought I had some good stuff, you know, and I liked it that it was just stuff that I had put together. I liked it that it was a book that directed people to other books, you know, which is what I do really for a living. Anyone who reads your book reviews in The Times recognizes that you are a collector of good sentences. And you write in the preface that you've been collecting them since you were in high school.

What made you start doing that? You know, I don't know. I, at some point I realized that, you know, I loved, books and some lines just stuck with me. Of course, when you're young and pretentious, like I'm sure I was, the stuff you write down is sort of shitty. You know, you're not writing down lines that are equivalent of Pat Benatar's love is a battlefield. You know, you're write down the worst lines from books because you're just, you're young and you're thinking about, you know, just dumb things. And it reminds me if anyone ever reads books on Kindle, which I do a lot.

Kindle lets you see what the most underlined passages are. And I realize that America is still a 14-year-old kid in heart because the stuff that people underline in books is the worst. I just think, oh, I just want to kill myself. I'll read a book that has 97 brilliant observations in it. And the one thing that's underlined is something like, you know, the rain was lonely, my friend, as we walk down the, you know, give me something better. So as you collected these, you put them in a commonplace book. Will you remind people what a commonplace book is? Yeah, it's just a personal book of collections. You know, there were many great reference books out there, Bartlett's and the Yale Book of Quotations and the,

The Penguin Book of Quotations are three that I really like. But, you know, necessarily, they have to cover the waterfront and cover things historically. And there was a lot of sort of wasted space in those books to my mind. And you end up looking through things like, you know, a penny saved as a penny earned, which has to be in there. But commonplace books were originally kept because books were scarce. And you might only have access to a book for a bit of time. And so you would write down things you wanted to remember. increasingly they've become ways

artists and writers will keep them and Virginia Woolf kept one W.H. Auden kept one. The poet J.D. McClatchie kept one. Ian Forrester's was published after his death. There have been a lot of them and some of my favorites are sort of by nobody's, just people who had a good ear for the sentence and just published their own and they're kind of cult items

now. I always think of Sherlock Holmes taking his commonplace book down off the shelf to read about the great families of Europe. Refresh his memory, right? Exactly. You write that you would occasionally include your own bit of prose in your commonplace book, was the idea there to see if you could box with heavyweights? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the answer is no, you know, I absolutely not. You know, I hope that, you know, one or two of my sentences over a long career might be worthy of somebody

remembering, maybe my mother, but no, my stuff is not as good as this stuff. So you have these quotations at hand when you're doing your day job. When you are writing a book review, what is the key to deploying a quotation well? Well, you know, the first thing is it's got to be subtle. You know, you can't, you can't sort of gong people over the head with it. If the quote sounds like you're trying to wedge it in there, it's just the worst. And so it's got to sound like the quote has to be sort of part of part of your style, your voice, your way of being on the page. I really admire writers who quote well, you know, and it bugs me when writers don't. Nothing turns me off more quickly into read a book and let's say a nonfiction book or

book of essays. And the quotes are just terrible. They're quoting the same old stuff from Tocqueville or the same old stuff from Einstein or Lincoln or Twain that we've all read 100 times. And if I find a writer who quotes something really different, something unique, and on point, I'm just thinking, yeah, that's how it's done. Who quotes well? I think of William F. Buckley and Christopher Buckley both have a good to have a talent with that. Do there are other people who come to mind? You know, Hitchens, Hitchins was amazing at it. I just, I happen to be listening now to his memoir, H-22, which I read when it came out a decade ago. And I'm shocked by the fact that it's basically one quote after another sort of stitched together, but he does it so effortlessly. It is so learned that it all just, just, just sort of blends in with his own voice. And you don't feel like someone's just throwing these canned things at you.

You know, Orwell was pretty great at it. The novel is Sigrid Nunes, whose books I really like, has this way of just sort of dropping it in and about four words. She doesn't belabor it. There's no quote marks. She'll just remark that, you know, Elliot thought we should all think this way about whatever. And she'll just have it in there and bounce off it. And it's quick and it's painless.

And it feels like part of her natural thought process. when I'm tempted to include an outside quotation in an article, sometimes it's because I have the line at hand that's just perfect. But I would say more of the time, it's because I'm scared of writing a B minus sentence. So let's see what Dennis Johnson had to say about this subject. Does that afflict you as well? It does. But, you know, the reason I started, well, the reason I've really kept this book up in recent years is that if I'm using those quotes at the start of the piece, I want them to be like, you know, hot shit. I want them to be great, you know.

And so I keep my own stash. You know, I don't, if you go online to try to look for things, you're going to find garbage because it's, the quote sites are in general not good at all. They're not reliable. And so I just wanted to have some from fresh herbs, you know. I love the word stash. And that is true, right? Because you want something that even the fellow journalist reading this will have never heard before. Yeah, ideally.

And, you know, there's a line in my book, something like, you know, I think Chris Knauss, the novelist said it. You know, they dug each other's references and felt smarter in each other's company. And I sort of liked that. Someone quotes something. I'm like, yes, that is just right on. And thank you for showing me that. And I'm going to write it down now on my own book. We'll read a few from your collection here in a second.

But in terms of gathering these, you seem to have gone out of your way to avoid any rousing super famous quotations. As you said from Ben Franklin, from Winston Churchill, people like that. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm really proud that. I mean, there is one from Lincoln. I believe there's one or two from Twain. I believe Fran Lee Bowitt is in there. There's no Woody Allen.

I'm talking about the people who are always, always cited. I mean, I just, you know, let's ban those for 10 years, then come back to them. And as you read the book, you find your quotations will be about the same subject, and they'll often appear next to each other. So on page 9 here, there are quotations about hotels, page 76 bidet, page 92 suicide. But you don't helpfully label these little mini sections. What was your thinking there? You know, I kind of wanted it to read like a poem. You know, I'm not sure it does.

I think in places it might. And I like the idea of making connections over generations. I mean, you'll have, I don't know, Robert Lewis Stevenson on cheese. Then you'll have Arvin Dadiga on cheese and Michael Sheabon on cheese and Lori Moore on cheese and T.S. Eliot on cheese. And let them all bounce off each other and kind of disagree about cheese, which was sort of the idea, you know, to sort of let them have at each other. More poem and less how-to guide for writers, searching for cheese. And I'm glad you mentioned like the badees and the other weird stuff because one thing that I, you know, when I keep my own commonplace book, I have categories that people just don't put in quotation books. And by that, I mean, vomiting.

I mean, masturbation. I mean, you know, revenge. Just, I mean, I don't like comments. I don't like books of quotes because they're so skewed to sort of happiness and success and good feeling and family. No, let's flip that over for a while. Let's have some quotes that are about hating yourself and about things like that. Yes, this is not an overly smiley collection of quotations. You know, this isn't going to make you go run through a wall to use the football cliche.

It's more introspective, I think. I want to hit you with a few of these. react however you want. Philip K. Dick in Martian Time Slipp, a novel I really like. I'm not much, but I'm all I have. Yeah, there are a lot of quotes like that in this book. I mean, there's Dennis Johnson talking to my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

I would say that there's any slice of quotes that has the largest place in this book. They're quotes like that. I mean, because, you know, like everyone, I, you know, I'd like to think a mildly healthy ego. But at the same time, I spend most of my time limping around thinking I'm the worst person in the world. And I think, you know, most people who do any kind of creative work, and most people in general feel that way. I love this similar one from the British critic, Cyril Connolly. I have always disliked myself at any given moment. The total of such moments is my life. There you go. That should have been the title of the book. How about Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. What are we to take from that? I've always loved that line. And in fact, I like even more. Okay, here's an example of the kind of connections I tried to make. So would you read the next quote to your listeners after that? Because the, because the quotes, a scream is better than a thesis sometimes. And then the one directly after that is sort of, let me find it. Here we go. Here we go. When you know you're going to scream, lay your head back, which spreads your vocal cords real wide. And when the scream comes out, it barely nicks your vocal cords. Advice from blues man Floyd Miles and Greg Allman's Mike Cross to bear. Yeah, the idea of linking, you know, Thoreau with Greg Allman, I, you know, I'm proud of that one.

I just got back from a road trip. So this one from Diane Johnson spoke to me. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people? She's the best. Her book, I'll just plug it quickly called Natural Opium. It's from her book of travel writing, which is one of my favorite books. Also from the British painter Walter Sickert, you must come again when you have less time. There's a lot of quotes like that.

You know, there's one in that section from Louise Glick, who is our new Nobel laureate, the poet. And, you know, her poems are what I like about them is they're pretty, me, they're, you know, she's, I compare her poems the best of them to, like, Dylan's blood on the tracks. You know, they're, they're angry poems, and she's sort of getting back at various lovers. And she's quoted in that section as well. But her poems are like, are like that, you know, go away from my window, leave at your own chosen speed, as Dylan said. How about this one from the novelist, Otessa Mosheg?

People feel so special, so wise when somebody they know drops dead. Isn't that true? I mean, I love some things because I've read no one who ever said it that way before. If someone dies, suddenly you feel like, I don't know, you feel like you're in an airplane looking over the world and, you know, you just feel the sense of awe and as well as, I hope, depression. But I've never read that thought quite that way. And I link it up with some other quotes about death, including one from Jim Harrison. But anyway, yeah. I want to make that a pin tweet whenever we do obituary Twitter, you know, because people do feel so special and so wise publicly when somebody they know drops dead.

So yes, let us do that. No, Etessa Mastrake, she's very good on death. I have another quote from her in this book that you're going to have to bleep out, but it's a bit of dialogue from one of her novels. I forget which one now, but it says something like, quote, die young and leave a pretty corpse. Who said that? And the response in her novel is someone who likes fucking corpses. So, you know, Otesse, Otessa is brilliant.

This one seems relevant to the events of last week from H.L. Mencken. Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is. justice. Isn't that true? Yeah, Mankin's friends. A lot of Mankin in this book. Mankin is slightly overdone in books of quotations, but I grew up reading Mankin and he's a hero of mine, so there are probably five or six Mankanisms in here. So I was going to ask you about that. Mankin's in here a couple of times, Christopher Hitchens, you mentioned, Brett Easton Ellis, Albert Murray, Tina Brown shows up again and again, happily for me. Did anybody threaten to sort of take over the book because they turned out so many quotable sentences? Yeah, I had to pull out a few from

Stanley Elkin, who, if anything that I hope this book does is promote a new run on Stanley Elkins' fiction. His novel, The Dick Gibson Show, has probably quoted eight or nine times in this book. Eve Babbitts, the L.A. writer who wrote in the 70s and 80s. She's still around, but she hasn't done anything for a long time. Her two books are quoted an awful lot in here. Kevin Young, the poet, who was the portrait of the New Yorker. I think he still is, but he's gone to take a new job in D.C., I think, at the Smithsonian. He's in there a lot.

Yeah, but these are just some of my favorite writers. Mosheveg's in there a lot. Samuel Johnson said, people seldom read a book which is given to them. Man, is that not the truth? Wait, you don't think that's true? No, it is the truth. I think it's absolutely true.

I have a stack of things people have pressed it at my hands, and I gave a big smile and said, oh, it sounds great and never open it. No, you know, it's funny. I grew up in a house that didn't really have books in it. I don't want to make my, I don't want to pour mouth myself, because I grew up solidly middle class, and I had tennis lessons in orthodontia. But we weren't a bookish family.

Maybe there were some readers digest condensed books. But looking back on it, I'm sort of glad, and this relates to that quote, because it's good to have to go find your own stuff and sort of make your own, put your own mind together and discover this stuff on your own. So I have a lot of friends who grew up with very literary parents,

and I do envy them. But in some ways, it's good to sort of, you know, find this stuff on your own. Here's one from William S. Burroughs. I don't care if people hate my guts. I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. I told you I've got a fair number of revenge quotes.

I'm not sure there are a ton in here, but Burroughs is always pretty quotable. It was similar to when someone told the sports writer Dan Jenkins, he had a problem. And Jenkins replied, no, you've got the problem. I've got the typewriter. I've thought those two could have been joined, right? Dan Jenkins is in here. He's good. He is.

He is. And he's another one that could have taken over any book. finally this one from novelist Ocean Vuong, a quotation that really speaks to sports in 2020. The one good thing about national anthems is that we're already on our feet and therefore ready to run. It's so good.

I think that's in a long section of quotes that sort of relate to Trump. Some of them are right on definitely about Trump and others could be applied to Trump. So there's sort of a riff, an extended riff, of which that's one of the best quotes. Now you mentioned all these themes that you like or let's say do not shy away from coming up again and again in this book.

Should we read this as your memoir in absentia or your memoir done in other terms? Not really. I think this book speaks to the side of myself that sort of likes, you know, gin and spare ribs and late nights and too many books and hating myself and loving myself. And, you know, it speaks to sort of the side of myself that wants the way we talk about books to be reflected in what it feels like to read most books. And I feel like critics get, and I'm just as guilty as anyone else. They make these generalizations, you know, this is a lovely book about the father, daughter,

bond, or whatever. And, you know, you can say that about an episode of like a sitcom, you know, and maybe that's true of the novel as well. But I, there's something about novels that, I care about ideas and novels very much, and I care about a lot of other things. And often, by the way, the best novels are not quotable at all. So I don't mean to say that you have to be quotable to be a good writer. But I like novels that dig into the human stuff. about being alive. And I think this is a collection of that kind of human stuff taken from novels.

If I detected any themes here was a very special interest in reading and book reviewing, no surprise there. Little resistance, shall we say, to sexual or scatological writing and an ambivalence about children and prizes. Did I get any of those? I think that's about right. I don't think I would reject a prize, depending on the prize. But yeah, no, it's good to be suspicious. I mean, you know, Jack Schaefer is the great guy who's always, pissing on every journalism prize, every prize no demand. So I think that was in there for Jack Schaefer, dedicated to him. Let me ask you a little bit about your career.

When did you first decide you wanted to be a book critic? You know, actually kind of pathetically young. I mean, who wants to be a critic, right? And no one, there's no, if someone said, when you go to the high school or the college job fair, there's no critics table there, you know, to come and get an interview. But, you know, I haven't grown up without a lot of books around, and I was a big reader, a really big reader, I sort of had no one to talk to about them. And so when I started finding reviewers and critics, I really sort of, I felt like, wow,

finally, in my mind, I can talk to these people. Weirdly, the first critics I loved were sports writers, specifically sports columnists, because, you know, anyone I thought could write a report of what happened in the game. But give me this guy the next day, he kind of pulls the game apart and writes really smart things about what happened. In my case, it was this guy named Edwin Pope, who was the longtime sports columnist from the Miami Herald, whom I just loved when I was a kid when I was a kid. And I don't really follow sports much anymore, but Edwin Pope was a major influence on me. But I went to college, and I was kind of a journalism geek.

I was one of those kids who edited my high school paper, edited my college paper. I was a stringer for The New York Times. I was in college. I wrote for a newsweek in college. I was reviewing books and plays for a local weekly in college. You know, I was just kind of this go-getter, you know, Jimmy Deadline, Johnny Deadline kind of kid. But I found that I loved books, one than anything. I could sell pieces to national outlets, book reviews, like the village voice were buying

their pieces. And my friends who wanted to be journalists couldn't sell their stuff from Vermont. I mean, no one wants a piece about, you know, cows. And so I was writing book reviews really early on for some fairly big places. Where do you stand on the title book critic versus literary critic? I hate the word literary, you know, so definitely not that. How about just critic, I guess? But I would take book over literary.

I think I understand the best parts of being a book critic. What's the worst part of being a book critic? Oh, God, the worst part about being a book critic is that writers are my favorite people. And I've got a lot of friends who are writers, but I can't make any more writer friends, really, because it doesn't do them any good to know me. I mean, if I like them, I can't write about them. And if I hate them, I can't write about them. And, you know, so I just, I often want to call a writer up.

If I'm in town and I know this great writer, let's say, you know, I try, no one travels anymore. Well, let's just say, I'd be in Seattle, and I wanted to call this guy up that I loved, I know we'd have a great time having a drink together or a woman writer. And I can't do it anymore because I just, I can't compromise my position. And also it hurts them, you know, to meet me because I can't write about them anymore. As long as, there used to be a rule at the Times Book Review. If I would call you up, Brian, and say, hey, do you want to review the new book by X? And you would say, I can't.

I know X. And we would say, well, do you know the names of their children? And if you didn't, we would say, how close can you be? And that was sort of the line. So there were a few writers who had a dream. with but don't really know. There are books that the New York Times Daily Critics are absolutely going to review major novels, Obama's book next week.

I think that's actually already up on the site right now. How do you decide what other books you're going to review if you only have so much time in your day? Well, we picked the books pretty far in advance. We just picked, for example, there were three of us daily critics, myself, Paril, Segal, and Jennifer Zalai. And we just did our February picks, for example. And, you know, I get my book by advanced copies of the books.

and I put them in order by date. And I just looked at February. And if you look at a month's worth of books, there's always two that you know you're going to do. Maybe it's a new Margaret Atwood or, I don't know, you know, the new Franz and novel or, you know, anyway, Tony Morrison's diaries. You know, you know you have to do that.

And then the fun job is looking for that second and third book, you know, and you really, I try to give everything a read, you know, a couple pages. I'll read the front page. Then maybe I'll jump to page 79 and read a page. and see if something sparks. Just sampling it like that to see if this is going to be something that will hold your interest. I hate to miss something, man.

I really hate it when some book that I didn't give enough time to becomes something everyone's talking about, you know. Well, you quote Delmore Schwartz in here. No class of people are more abundantly provided with time for drinking than readers of books. I wish I could drink and read. I just can't do it. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I just, you know, once the drinking time in my day comes around, books are put away. I was going to ask if you don't allow yourself to have a cocktail as you read a book for review.

You know, I don't. I read all day long. And by cocktail hour, which for me is 7 p.m. I work right until 7 and then my wife and I go have cocktails and we have dinner. And I kind of stop reading. I'm done. My eyes need a break. You quote Dennis Johnson about book reviews. A bad review is like one of those worms in the Amazon that swims up your penis. If you read it, you can't get it out somehow. Now, at this point in your career, do you feel anything when you write a tree? truly bad review? I do. And you know, you try not to, like, I would never review, let's say, a first novel negatively. I mean, unless the novel had a ton of buzz and it's already been sent up into the sky. But, you know, the last thing you want to do is review. Write something a piece that says, well, you know, here's something you've never heard of and it's terrible. You know,

something readers will never even heard of. So you don't want to do that. And, you know, if a writer already has a large reputation, I, you know, I like the give and take of positive and negative reviews. I don't feel bad about writing a negative review of a well-known writer. When a writer is lesser-known, it gets a little harder. There are a couple reviews I regret early on. I think I was trying to sort of, I don't know. Was I showing off? Was I trying to make a name for myself?

Was I trying to prove that I could be negative? But one or two early reviews I actively regret. And if I ever saw these people, I would just say, you know, I overdid it. And I apologize. And it's far too late because my wormers already swam up their penis, as Dennis Johnson said. You know? And we all remember the worst things people have said about us. You know, we do.

I mean, if someone makes some crack about, you know, the way your eyes look or your hair or something. And so I know that the critical jabs, even those critical jabs that are delivered on your Amazon page, you know, can stick around for a while. What's the best reviewed book you ever gave a bad review to? Oh, God, I still get grief. There's this Anna Burns won the Booker Prize for her novel, Milkman. It's a beloved, beloved novel. Everyone loves it. Everyone loves it.

and I'm just the only person who didn't. And you can't make yourself, I mean, you're reading it. I felt like, well, here's a young writer, and this book's won the Booker Prize, and it sounds right in my alley. And yet, you know, maybe you're this way. I just, you can't bullshit. I mean, if you feel some way, you can't just decide that, well, I should like this. You just got to say what you got to say.

How often do you hear from authors after bad reviews? Never. Never. I've met one or two. One man refused. just shake my hand in a public situation, but, you know, it didn't descend into a piece shooting or anything. But I do get a lot of letters from writers who liked my reviews. And tip to young reviewers out there, always try to review a book by an artist because they'll send you, they'll send

you their work. Yeah, I've reviewed, nothing great, but I've reviewed books by, you know, Jules Fifer, the cartoonist, and Ed Corrin, the cartoonist, and Sally Mann, the photographer, and some others. And they always, when they send your note of thanks, they always drop a little something that they've done is the way of thank you. And now on my kitchen wall, I've got these beautiful little, I mean, nothing, nothing fantastic, nothing really worth anything. But, you know, it's just, it's fun. I feel that's always such an awkward encounter when someone writes something nice and then the person reaches out to tell it to thank you. You know, both sides are kind of playing it casually because they want to preserve your journalistic,

you know, integrity, right? And they, but they want to thank you at the same time. Do you have a response you give them when they, when they come to you and thank you for a nice review? No, I'm always baffled. I don't know what to say because they don't thank me. I mean, I liked your work. And if I didn't, you know, the other, I used to always get invited back when pre-COVID in New York City, I'd write a paused review and the publisher would call me up and say, well, we're having a private dinner for ex-writer. We'd love to have you attend. And, you know, there's the worst thing. I never want to feel like I'm just taking some kind of victory lap. You know, I didn't do it as a favor to you. I mean, I did it because I really liked your book.

I don't know. All things being equal, book predictions, stay home and just live in their, live in their bunkers and try to be as honest as they can. As a review, you've written, ever elicited the classic response to a book reviewer that begins, Dear Sir, I hardly recognize the book you reviewed in your issue of November 5th, etc., etc. Well, at the times, you have to fact-check your own stuff. And I find that, well, first of all, getting a correction in New York Times is like getting a traffic ticket. You know, you don't get one for three years. Then it's like, boom, boom, boom.

and you just feel like, you know, you're going down with the ship. But I fact-checked the hell out of my pieces because the last thing you want to do, especially if they're negative, is to give the writer a chance to say, well, you know, if Dwight Goddard didn't know my lead character's hair was red and not some other, you know, her eyes were blue and not green. How could you have even paid attention to my book? So you don't want to give them that little wedge to sort of discredit your opinion by getting a little fact wrong.

I want to end here by asking you about a writer who's all over this book, Clive James, the Australian-turned British critics, who died a year ago this month. What did you learn from reading Clive, James? Oh, just how to be sparkling and effervescent and really, I mean, just devastatingly smart. I mean, Clive was a polymath. He spoke five or six languages. He translated Dante. I mean, he lives in a whole other universe in the universe I live in. But I felt a kinship with him in terms of his notion that that criticism should be light and alive and witty. And if you're not witty, really, why should anyone pay attention to your thinking? I mean,

The natural working of an alive mind is to sort of produce on some level, a certain level of wit and be alert to the human comedy. And I feel that Clives' stuff just always does that for me. And, you know, if there's a writer that I would pick maybe to take to a Desert Island, well, when I want a book of criticism on Desert Island, I don't know. Maybe I would just take a book about how to make fires. But Clive is the writer that I return to, I would say most, just for joy in being alive and joy in sensing what other people have had to say about the world. He would, did he call himself a literary entertainer? Is that right? You know, it's funny.

I don't know that, but it would make sense. Yeah, I remember he had a review, you may have even assigned this about it was a book of movie criticism, a collection through the ages for the times. And there was a Carl Sandberg movie review in there. And he wrote, Carl Sandberg's prose was bad poetry, like his poetry. It's so great. I got to see Clive shortly before he died. We weren't buddies, but I probably saw him five times over the course of 10 years. And even at the very end, he was told.

and a court at his table and just shedding bright bits of angel fluff about everything in the world. So I miss him. I remember reading. I read Anthony Lane first, and then I went back and read Clive James. This is about 15 years ago, whenever it wasn't. And as soon as I read Clive James, I went, oh, oh, now I get it. Exactly. Now I understand Anthony Lane.

Yeah, when I pick up the New Yorker, I definitely, the first thing I go to is Anthony Lane's movie review. I mean, I read the whole issue, but, I mean, Anthony Lane is just reliably, just smart and witty. and I know I'm going to feel better when I'm done reading him. And so give me that. It's a little appetizer of a muse bush, and then I'll go read the New York. I hereby encourage you to buy Dwight Garner's new book. It's Garner's quotations, a modern miscellany,

available for touch-free ordering right now. Dwight, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about the interminable vote count

was Make America Wait. again. God, that was good. Today's headline comes from Sunny, Missoulo and Chloe P. It's from the Guardian, David. Three tourists were charged and sentenced last week for preparing supper at Yellowstone Park, I'm quoting from the Guardian here,

by boiling chickens in one of the park's natural hot springs. Charged in sentence for preparing supper by boiling chickens in one of the Park's natural hot springs. What was the Guardian's, strain pun, line. What happened to them? They were arrested? Charged and sentenced. Sentenced. Okay. I immediately was thinking Yogi Bear, but I can't think of anything that's going to go.

That would really fit. Sorry, that's Jellystone Park. Apologies. Is it a chicken soup? Is that where we're? Is it a boil? Maybe a synonym for chicken? Foul, foul play. Foul, foul, foul, foul, uh, foul line foul oh my gosh a foul a foul a foul a foul a foul running a foul of the law running a foul of the law yes a foul of the law i feel like you could have done better than that that just seems like anything that has to do with chickens that could that could be the headline should have gone the yogi bear route okay maybe not jelly Stealing all those pickinick baskets from all the parkgoers there.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Servantes. We got two very fun shows coming up next week on the press box. We were talking about books. Well, we're going to get a bunch of insidery books about the 2020 campaign next year. But David and I don't want to wait. We want to try to pre-write a campaign book in advance.

We will try to next week. Plus, Reeves Weidman stops about to talk about his new book about Wework. and our very own Claire McNair talks Jeopardy and the legacy of Alex Trebek plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later. Brian, oh, wait, wait, wait, one more thing?

Yeah. This is the headline. Yellowstone, is it police? What are the Yellowstone? Park Rangers? Sure. So just say, Yellowstone police, colon, no spring chicken.

Ooh. Ooh. Take it to the back. Thank you.