The Press Box - Trump at CPAC and Coronavirus Celebrity Books

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down Trump’s first post-presidency speech at CPAC this past weekend (3:25). Later they weigh in on the new stage of the pandemic that features celebrity-authored coronavirus books (25:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Watch is the latest and the greatest in pop culture from best friends Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. Join them as they discuss TV, movies, music, and much more. Check out The Watch on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This weekend, I read James Crumley's private eye novel The Last Good Kiss. And I loved it. What I want to know is, why didn't you tell me about this book sooner? I can't believe I never told me. told you about this book. They're literally only, like the only books that I ever, well, I say the only, like,

mystery novels vaguely defined that I ever, like, hand to people and physical copies are the last good kiss and Daniel Woodrow's, uh, well, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, like, the, the, like, the biot trilogy collection is freaking amazing. Um, there, you didn't hand it to me, though. I know, I know, I know. I think, I think, I don't know when he appeared in my life this, right, Crumley, but he is just absolutely the best. And that trilogy, I think loosely, it's a loose trilogy is, uh, is, just fantastic. He's, I mean, Crumly is sentence for sentence, just one of the great writers of all time.

He's, he, it's so good. You know, they tried to make a TV show of that with Paul Giamati. I think before, right before billions or something, it's, it's, it's so good. But yes, I know we talk about this all the time, but for the record, I, I mean, most of the people that I'm reading are, I feel like you're so sort of like baked into the fabric of, well, every used bookstore you go into that it's sort of beside the point for me to mention them. But there's all the oldies, right? Like, everybody reads his read like James M. Kane and Jim Thompson is sort of unavoidable.

I love Jim Thompson to death, but he's sort of unavoidable. And everybody, I think a lot of people have like a, you know, like Chris and, Andy love Ross McDonald. I'm like a John D. McDonald's guy, although Ross McDonald is good. Those two are like in mass market paperbacks competing for space. But if you don't read,

I mean, if you want to read some good stuff, most of these are people who you've heard of, but Horace McCoy has a very special place in my heart. David Goodes, Corniel Woolrich, Chester Heimbs, but he's really famous. Charles Williford, I'm going down the list here. And there's like the modern ones, you know, George Pelacanos and Elmore Leonard is sort of beside the point.

But those first names, just read all of that and then come back to me and we'll we'll see if I forgot anything. That's kind of a lot. David, by the way, will be roaming the aisles at the mystery bookstore this weekend if you need any further recommendations. Those, yeah, those are those are the... Those dozen weren't enough. I'm going to send you a stack of books.

So you'll never be able to ask me again how I, why I didn't tell you about somebody. Coming up on today's show, Donald Trump is back. at CPAC. We discuss. Plus, here come these celebrity author coronavirus books. All that more on the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, I regret to inform you that Donald Trump is back. You're waiting for a big response there because I don't know if I have one left. It's kind of waiting for a sigh or a...

I thought we were beyond this. I thought we as a country had moved. beyond. No, no, no. We as a country may sort of be beyond this, but CPAC. CPAC is definitely not beyond Donald Trump. And they invited him to speak on Sunday afternoon. A few amazing details before we get into the meat of Donald Trump speech. And by the way, I don't want to say I've missed these because I have not missed Donald Trump being president. but remember when the news was just amazing details about things Donald Trump did? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that very well. Yes, not the policies, not the, not the ruinous policies, but just things that happen in the Oval Office between like 205 in the afternoon.

Yeah, or on the golf course or in route between the Oval Office and the golf course, yeah. We got some of those on Sunday. First of all, Trump was an hour late to his speech. Now, that's not unusual for politicians, but conservative guy Matt Schlapp went on stage and pretended that Donald Trump wasn't late. Everything is going according to schedule, he said. Because if Donald Trump did something bad and everyone pretended he wasn't doing something bad, what's the worst that could happen?

It was a very, very weird situation, right? I mean, and I know that there was so much that we saw that was, sort of evocative of, well, the era we just got out of. But I feel like that in itself was just that little obfuscation about where Trump was was just a perfect little, little version of the previous four years where somehow the lie seems way more suspicious than the truth, right? I mean, like everybody was like on Twitter theorizing that he would, who, I think Jonathan, John, or sorry, John Marshall suggested that he might have been like, he might have saw like a process server on the way in so they were ducking him by the door. I don't know how

facetious he was being, but these sorts of rumors are popping up all over the place. And in fact, it was just he hadn't left his hotel until like, well after the speech was supposed to begin. When Donald Trump finally did arrive at CPAC, the New York Times as Aaron Shaft took this amazing picture. Did you see this? Donald Trump looking at himself backstage in a full-length mirror? It's, wow. Yeah. Kind of a flattering photo as Donald Trump photos go, I must say. It's hard to tell.

Is that one of those, like, it's impossible to buy a mirror for your house, but there is that just one variety of like door height, skinny mirror that for some reason you can always get for 20 bucks. Is that what that is? I think so, that every apartment in New York had in the 2000s? Isn't that one of the most shocking things about adulthood that mirrors cost like $100 something dollars to get? Who knew?

Last detail before we get to the speech. Washington Post found a CPAC attendee carrying a sign that said give Trump back the nuclear codes. Wow. Now I know there are a lot of people that still want Donald Trump to be president that wish he had actually won the

2020 election, but do they really want Trump to have the nuclear codes? There's a lot of people out there that still believe Donald Trump is president and that he won, but those are, you know, the Q&ON supporters for you out there. But yeah, the nuclear codes thing sort of goes against, well, what, I know, we in our, in our liberal bubble thought we were informed over

the past four years, is it all the, even the most ardent Trump supporters were like, well, I wish he'd stop flying off the handle on Twitter all the time, right? But, you know, I guess power's power. Is there an offshoot of Q&N where Donald Trump is secretly still present but just doesn't have the nuclear briefcase? Well, yeah. Okay, I'm not sure about the actual like locale, the nuclear briefcase. I believe that the people who still believe that he is president will reveal himself on March 4th or March 20th, whatever it is, probably believe that he is still in control of the nuclear football. Okay. I got you. I got you. Now, David, what did we learn from Trump's speech and CPAC generally? Well, we saw the beginning of what the Washington Post-Philipump called Trump's

attempted post-insurrection marketing pitch. So we know what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6th, Joe Biden became president on January 20th, and now here we are on March 2nd. And this is Trump trying to reintroduce himself post-insurrection. Part of this was the big lie that you mentioned that Donald Trump won the election, that he's still claiming he won. As he spoke on Sunday, members of the crowd chanted, you won. Who knows, Trump said from the stage, I might even decide to beat them, meaning the Democrats, for a third time.

Dave Weigel of the Washington Post called CPAC cope chella because everyone was coping with the fact that Donald Trump is not actually the president of the United States. I mean, it's a weird way to cope, right? I mean, coping might be giving him too much the benefit of the doubt because it did sort of seem like nobody there was under the impression that he had lost, or at least no one was willing to say it out And I think either way, that's pretty frightening, right?

I mean, listen, we're gonna, we're not gonna, I will cut somebody at the tiniest bit of theoretical slack if you, for not like booing Donald Trump while he's on stage and, and fallaciously proclaiming that he won the, the last election. But every speaker, I mean, the entire CPAC seemed to be dedicated to perpetuating, like you said, the big lie. I mean, for, for like, continuing. on this ridiculous, just totally, well, treasonous line of argument that Trump was the rightful winner of the election when, you know, I think that, well, I don't think we necessarily all

believe that that would be over by now, but I think that we were all hoping that that would be, you know, those charged things would be left behind in an era of, well, I mean, now that the real president, President Biden had taken over. Bump did point out a few things to that line of thought. One is that Trump is kind of trying to nuance his way out of the riot. This was a quote from Sunday. The Democrats use the dot, dot, dot, dot virus as an excuse to change all the election rules without the approval of their state legislatures, making it therefore illegal. It had a massive impact on the election.

Now, you see what he's doing there. One, let's just say that's not true. Some of the many of the election laws were passed by Republican legislature. which many of them were passed long before the coronavirus started. But what he's saying there is he's moving a little bit away from, aha, voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud. He's saying, no, no, no, it was these election laws that were changed. That's what made it illegal.

So my friends had a chance to prove fraud. They couldn't prove anything. Chances to put up before courtrooms dozens of times. They couldn't do it. So I'm now sort of changing the argument. It's not about voter fraud. It's about these election laws, which we therefore must change.

Well, and that is, the entire conservative movement obviously mirrored Trump in his sort of, well, apoplexy, idiocy, whatever. I mean, as long as he was insisting that the election was stolen, so did so much of the conservative right-wing machine. But now what you see is really Trump reflecting them back, right? I mean, he sort of adopted the arguments that the last stragglers, the intellectual last stragglers are making, right? Oh, we were never saying that the election.

was stolen. We were just saying that, look, there are all these, like, major grievances that one could raise. And, you know, again, one would think that a single judge somewhere might have agreed with them if there were any shred of truth to it. There's no shred of truth to it. But, you know, it's sort of a, it's weirdly concrete and abstract at the same time, right? If you, it's like, it's like when, you know, gun rights activists try to catch you in a, catch you in a, in a corner bite, for not knowing something about like the magazine of a certain gun or something and therefore you don't know what you're talking about in the whole issue. It's it's sort of a disprovable bit of legal ease. But anyway, yeah, Trump has definitely has adopted some of those arguments from,

you know, the people who are still making the argument out there publicly. The other thing he did was try to separate the speech he gave on January 6th from the actual capital riot. Like these were two very, very distinct events. This is a quote from Sunday. He gave this to Fox. The press doesn't like to talk about it, but the real number was much, much bigger in terms of people that were at the location. And went all the way back, practically, to the Washington Monument.

It was tremendous numbers of people, not the Capitol. I'm talking about the rally itself. And it was a love fest, he continued. It was a beautiful thing. So you see what he's doing there. Rally and my speech, Love Fest. Thing that happened at the Capitol is some very separate event. that was not the thing

and notice there David he is also once again trying to insist that he had lots and lots of people lined up to hear him around the Capitol that goes back to the old Sean Spicer days when it was how many people attended Donald Trump's 2017

inauguration a little callback there from Trump see that's what they do in quality television shows you reference things in the expanded universe that's really Donald Trump telling people it's like Wanda vision right that's Donald Trump say hey look, remember that? I had many, many more people at this than you might think, too. It's sort of like the dilution theory of the assault on the Capitol, right? If you can just

sort of inflate the crowd size to a certain point, it becomes a really effective tool, right? I mean, it's like in two years when every congressional race is going to be decided on the fact that all these Republicans voted to acquit Trump of the charges of, in charge of impeachment and also overlooked the fact that he that he instigated this riot, they can just be like, well, yeah, all of the Republicans in Congress did vote in favor of Trump, but there are millions and millions of Republicans in the world and in the country, and not all of them voted that way, so you can't really blame us. We also got a little bit of a glimpse of the post-presidency Trump.

He confirmed that he's going to be a Republican, not a third-party guy. We already knew that, but that was interesting to hear from his mouth. he decided to go ahead and do this kind of fantasy booking scenario where he's the president. We would have had a deal with Iran in the first week, Trump said of his second term. See, Biden is engaged in this thing with Iran. We would have already had that deal done, he said. Of President Biden on energy, he wants to put you all out of business. He's not okay with energy.

He wants windmills, windmills, the windmills that don't work when you need them. repreasing a line of argument or a line of bullshit from the snowstorms in Texas. He also took claim for the vaccines, right? Like there's anything that drives Donald Trump nuts right now. It is that he will not get credit for the vaccine, which of course he was not in a laboratory making. But now that people are being vaccinated in this country at Dodger Stadium and everywhere else, uh-oh, somebody else is getting the credit for that. and he can't stand it. Remember when Geraldo suggested that we just call the shot to Trump?

Not the vaccine, but the like the act of getting the shot. Like, did you get your Trump? I don't even have a joke. I just remember that. That was great. That was the ultimate act of giving in. That's like saying Trump's not late. You know, we're just, okay, okay.

We'll call the shot the Trump. That was how low we were at the time. that point in history. This miraculous life-safing vaccine. If we just call it the Trump, maybe people will go get it. Ben Jacobs notes, as always, Trump read his text as if large sections were entirely new to him,

offering occasional commentary and going off on obscure meandering riffs, including at one point the statement, quote, the world is actually a small piece of the universe. Donald Trump going a little Carl Sagan on us there, billions and billions of stars. Oh, my God. We are but small people living in a vast universe.

Oh, and let's not forget that Trump claims that he requested 10,000 National Guard troops at the Capitol on the day of his speech or the day of the riot, to be clear. But it was rejected by Nancy Pelosi. Presumably, this is an easily provable thing that we will find out is not true very soon. But I love the implication, though, that just like, he was like, hey, let's. Listen, I wanted to control that treasonous riot that I instigated as much as the next guy. I just, the Democrats stopped me from having the guards there to keep my supporters from charging the capital as I always wanted. That's just, it's just, it's fantastic. It's like, it's like a hold me back argument.

It's fantastic. There was a straw poll at CPAC, as there always is, David, because everybody wants to know who is going to be the 2024 GOP candidate for president. And they did it two ways. If you include Trump in the poll, he runs away with. 55% of attendees want Donald Trump to be the nominee one more time and bring it all back. If you don't include Donald Trump in the straw poll, things get more interesting. Did you see that the runaway winner with 43% of the vote is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Oh, my God.

Was that surprising to you, Ron DeSanis? Can we make, is there an argument that because of coronavirus, that this was a less national travel sort of CPAC, that there was just more of a more of a Florida crowd that would be pro DeSantis? Is that feasible? Yeah. I mean, regardless, it's a home turf sort of vote. I don't know. I mean, at a conference where people seemed more than anything else interested in perpetuating the myth that Trump won the election. and lauding Trump in any number of other ways.

It's not shocking that DeSantis would be amongst the frontrunners because he's sort of the most Trump-Light or Trump Jr. Or Trump, whatever you want to say, of the field, right? I mean, the fact that he beat out some of these more establishment candidates, that doesn't shock me. I mean, the degree to which he won is sort of shocking. Yeah. I just think if we had gone into these cousin Sal casino six months ago and said,

which one of these governors political fortunes will be brightest at the end of the pandemic? Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, or Ron DeSantis, the odds that it would be Ron DeSanis would be pretty high. And yet here he is, 43% in this. Admittedly, unscientific straw poll. Ron Paul won the straw poll before. So entertainment purposes only. Let me give you some of the other results, David. Number two on the poll, Christy Noem of South Dakota, 11%.

I had no idea Christy Noem was interested in becoming president. Don Jr. at 8%. Mike Pompeo, 7%. Really? Mike Pompeo? Come on. Ted Cruz, 7% Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley and Nikki Haley and Ivanka, all 3%. Ran Paul, 2%.

And finally, last and certainly least, at least in this, Paul, Mike Pence at 1%. Was that a courtesy one? Was that? You think one person just like looked at the, looked at a tote board and didn't see this sound they didn't have a vote? Yeah. It's like that NBA All-Star voting we heard about where, you know, you want to make

sure all your teammates get a vote. Oh man, that 1%. Now, as long as we're extrapolating wildly, you wonder if like a really bad showing by some of the. like Pence or maybe some of the other, like I said, more more mainstream candidates might show them that hewing to the Trump line is not necessarily the best path forward for them. Certainly, obviously, they will not actually take that as the lesson, but maybe that should be the lesson, right? That, like, the only way you're going to effectively rally Trump's base is to either be a Trump or be a

Trump clone and, you know, that's not a viable path for just about anybody. Yeah. I, I, you know, again, it's, I just, the whole, it's almost less, the question of is Donald Trump in charge of the GOP is settled law. There's no question he's obviously running the Republican Party. The question is just what do the Republicans do with that? Like how in the world do you navigate that and how, how could you possibly come out of that and be the GOP nominee, not tie yourself and knots like Nikki Haley's done over the last couple of months? How do you figure out away from. here to the 2024 nomination. And I don't know, right? Anybody knows. But Ron DeSantis, that was wild. Speaking of Donald Trump being back, David, this weekend also brought back one amazing tradition of the Trump years.

Ted Cruz was asked to comment on Donald Trump's speech at CPAC. And Ted Cruz said, I didn't see them. he did not see the speech remember when all those Republican senators didn't see the tweet he didn't see the speech that's unbelievable why were there I mean it wasn't I mean I know

he went on late but come on I can't imagine you were too busy handing out water and parking lots to do that by the way did you see Ted Cruz's speech I did I'm gonna be honest it was really like just really bad comedy about coronavirus regulations. I did see the

Cancun joke that he made at the beginning. Yeah. It was supposed to be self-deprecating. He went on to make to have a very odd riff.

It was like a joke without a punchline. It was an odd riff about how silly it was that you had to wear your mask when you walked into the restaurant and then you could take it off when you sat down.

I mean, it was, it was, yeah, it was just bad. It was that it was, it was somebody who doesn't get out much who like watches,

you know, stand-up comedy specials on Netflix and thinks they could do that. It was really, really embarrassing. I could totally see Ted Cruz watching the blue-collar comedy special and being like, I could do that. I could be one of those guys. Just with a little practice, I decided to go into politics, a little practice, I could be that good. He's not even blue collar. He's 100% watching like George Carlin

and just being like, see, the woke police would never let this happen today. And just like, tossing popcorn. Warren down his go with. Yeah, that's Ted Cruz. When I say I didn't see Ted Cruz's speech at CPAC, I'm not like being like one of those centers. I really did not want to watch that. I willfully was not going to watch that. And by the way, we got a pretty good overwork

Twitter joke going when Cruz said he didn't see Trump speech. If only Nira Tandon had live tweeted Trump speech, then maybe Ted Cruz would have seen it. Speaking of which, David, time of 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 to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. One final scene from CPAC, David, according to journalist William Turton, attendees lined up to

get their pictures taken with Representative Marjorie Taylor Green. Marjorie Taylor Green. It was an overworked Twitter joke or maybe just a good joke to write. Why on God's Green Earth would you say they're lining up instead of saying they're in the queue? in the queue. Thanks to Tim Moran for that one. Last night was the Zoom call version of the Golden Globes, David, you might have seen some content here on the ringer.

Daniel Kaluya won a Best Supporting Actor Award for Judas and the Black Messiah. One problem. Due to an audio glitch, we could not hear the first part of his acceptance speech. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write,

Daniel, you're on mute. Thanks to Jordan A. Chaffiat for that one. And finally, a tweet that's good news for people like me and David. Quoting here, glasses wearers less likely to get COVID study says. Glasses wears less likely to get COVID. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write nerd immunity.

Thanks to Scott Clayton, Benjamin Scott, and Corbyn, Dubois, or Dubois. Do you remember when we used to live together mid-2000s and like you'd peek into my room on a Sunday afternoon, I'd be just reading a book. And you'd be like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'll just read a book. And you just go, nerd. I always love that. Yeah, well, I'm allowed to make fun of nerds because I'm also a nerd.

That's the way that comedy works. If you stole David's bit, congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Time for you old notebook dump. And David, we have entered a new stage of the coronavirus pandemic. the celebrity author coronavirus book stage. Two announcements over the last few weeks caught our eye. Michael Lewis is writing a coronavirus book called The Premonition, a pandemic story, which is out May 4th.

And Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker has a book called The Plague Year, which is out one month later, June 8th. So you're our publishing guy here. Let's back up before we even get to the celebrity nonfiction author portion of this. when something like the coronavirus is happening, obviously a huge story, obviously an occasion for books, what is going on inside a book publishing house? Are they immediately thinking, we need to have books about this and we need to get them out? Are they waiting for pitches which are going to be inevitable?

How does that work? I mean, both, all of the above, I guess. There's certainly, I mean, Lawrence Wright, Michael Lewis, writers of that level have a little bit more latitude to write on a certain schedule or to let their creative juices flow however they may flow. But their agents, presumably, are leaping into action the moment there is even the inkling that a book might exist at some point in the future to sort of gauge the writer's interest to see if they'd want to do it. And they can, I mean, you could sell, well, both of them are probably under an option contract with a publisher.

I mean, maybe, maybe not. But there's, you know, Michael Lewis, Michael Lewis's pre-last publisher probably has an option on whatever he does next but regardless you could sell a Michael Lewis book or a right book

with a sentence you know just Michael Lewis on the pandemic we will give you five million dollars for that tomorrow you know I mean that that part's pretty easy and that's but I mean there's I'm sure

there are literally tens if not a hundred other related books that are in the pipeline from authors you've never heard of or just kind of mid-list authors or other big name authors. But those sort of, you know, a name as big as, well, Michael Lewis or Lawrence Wright, I mean, Michael Lewis in particular will succeed kind of regardless of genre, but will also

at the same time eclipse a lot of other books in the genre. So a little bit of a division killer, that one. Now, the coronavirus. This is something that's obviously a huge news story. Do book publishers regard that as like, this is something people. will definitely want to read about, will not be able to get enough books about, or is this something that's so

sort of depressing and has affected our lives so much that there may be less of an appetite to read a book about that? I'm tempted to say it's too depressing, although I think the logic will eventually push against that, because the publishing logic,

because, well, I mean, this is a totally different example. But, like, if you have the book, that a if you have the you know the book that that if you're the publisher of the da Vinci code when the DaVinci Code comes out you're going to sell a trillion extra copies of the DaVinci Code even you know obviously it's a huge it's a blockbuster or whatever but also if you're the publisher of like an art flick that may be get nominated for like one Oscar but doesn't win it and like even you or I might not see this movie um you're still going to make a of money off of that book because the scale of like movie viewership versus book viewership is so

different. The point I'm trying to make is, yeah, you or I or everybody might say, I'm, you know, it's too depressing to read about the coronavirus, but there's going to be just so much abstract interest in the coronavirus compared to another popular science book that the coronavirus is probably a safer, like, area to publish into. and could certainly, you know, take off. Now, you would think that there would be, there's different sorts of books, right?

If we weren't talking about Michael Lewis anyway, I would be sitting here saying, there's a lot more upside in a Michael Lewis-style book about the coronavirus than, you know, a dry sort of journalistic recounting of something, right? If you can find the inn, if you can find a way to tell a story that's regarding, I mean, that's exciting,

almost regardless of whether or not it's about the coronavirus, then sure. Tell me, I mean, publish those all day. And there are some that are going to break news and they're going to be important, you know, pieces of history. But it is a depressing area to publish into. And I, and I, it's, I will be intrigued to see how many COVID books there are on the on the front table of the bookstore, you know, in six months or a year. So you mentioned, David, Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright can basically sell a book based on a sentence. what other kind of things are afforded to big nonfiction authors like that, mega selling nonfiction authors, it wouldn't be afforded to normal authors? I mean, there's many.

I mean, all the way down to like, you know, royalty percentages and stuff like that. But, although less than, you know, once was the case.

But, I mean, we talk about, we talk about, you know, how many books are going to be published in the subject and everything. I mean, the specter of a book by Michael Lewis or Lawrence Wright is going to,

is not just like theoretically push out push other books aside but literally i mean they're you know the buyer of barns and noble is going to say oh we have a michael lewis book on the subject coming out that month so we want zero copy or one copy of your book as opposed to a thousand if it had come out a month earlier you know i mean so there's they don't you know they they don't need to make room for anybody everybody else has got to make room for them um And, you know, they'll get the full more, more, it is more likely than with, you know, another writer that they'll get the, the full strength of the publishing machine behind them. You know, obviously PR and marketing also, I mean, but, but even as on the pre-pub side, I mean, if people always talk about how books don't have fact checkers. I mean, presumably of Michael Lewis said I want a fact checker that someone would provide one, right? I mean, you have a lot of power you can throw around. So, you know, I mean, it's, it's, I don't think. anything too shocking. It's a, it's a, they've, they've earned their spots, you know, and these books will probably be great. Well, we've already read the, I mean, have we read all of Lawrence

Wright's book or is he fleshing out the New Yorker piece? I would assume that's not the whole thing, right? I mean, it's very, very long. I would assume so too, but it's, it's, it's, um, we kind of know what that one's going to be. Michael Lewis, I'm looking right now on Barnes & Noble.com. This is, it's apparently a taught and brilliant nonfiction thriller that pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration of the outbreak of COVID-19. So yes, we found our way in now. And they find their way out. And even just from the press materials, like you can already tell it to Michael Lewis, that a 13-year-old girl's science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into

a very grown-up model of disease control. A local health public health officer uses her worms-eye view dot, dot, dot, right? We can see the kind of heroes you didn't know. about that Michael Lewis found that will tell us the story of this very complex, overwhelming thing in very human terms. Right? That's his gift. That's what he does. You mentioned the stuff like the Barnes & Noble order the orders the book. I love just being somebody who's on the mailing lists of these from these publishers who gets a like separate email to announce a book.

Like if you have a certain status in the book world, the publisher just sends me, it doesn't send me the cattle. with the book in it. They say, Lawrence Wright is writing a book. You should know about that. And sometimes even they get like Michael Lewis, the fact that Michael Lewis is writing a book about the coronavirus got an article in the New York Times. Just to tell us, doesn't even tell us what's in the book. It just says Michael Lewis is writing a book about the coronavirus. That's like the level you have attained at that point where it's like it's news that you're writing something in the New York Times. and not a blurb either, like a full-blown news article.

And I'm not criticizing because when I got the paper that day, that was like the first thing I read. I was like, oh, cool. Michael Lewis is writing. Can we get him on the press box? So you think there's going to be, you think if we walk into the bookstore in six months or a year, we'll see more than a dozen books about the coronavirus?

Two dozen? We'll see. Major question, right? If you're looking for them, yeah, you'll find, you'll find many, many books about it. I mean, and there'll be scholarly books, you know, there'll be, like I said, journalistic books. There's so many different varieties of books. I mean, I mean, of ways that you could publish that. But I do think that there's, I mean, every publisher, almost every single publisher,

serious publisher, will have a book on the subject, whether or not they have the biggest name. on and it'll be to some extent you know like like Trump books you know like how many more could the market possibly hold well I mean they keep coming out right so I think that we will see a lot of them yeah

the story's so big too there's all kinds of books you can write about it I mean these are books that sort of take on the pandemic and and sort of how do we fix it how do we solve this problem how do we how do we rescue human society but there's also books like I saw a book about the NBA bubble that was a sign that was sold last year. It's such a vast story that you can write

books about all kinds of parts of it and have them be totally self-contained and different from the other ones. It's true. I mean, in good bookstores are already, I mean, it's not like we're waiting for this wave to come. The good bookstores are already selling, I'm sure, huge numbers of copies of like the Hot Zone and of the Defoe Book, the Journal of the Plague Year. And I mean, all these books about the bubonic plague that have sort of popular histories that have been published over the past decade have been, you know, those are books that people are very interested in right now. So that's sort of the tip of the, you know, the tip of the wave, I guess, and there'll be many more to come. All right, David and I will be reading these, and you will

be hearing these celebrity authors with any luck here on the Press Box podcast. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker, guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about a troop of homebound pandemic family singers was von Trapped. I've been sitting on today's headline for a while. It comes from Simon Pollock. It's from Celtics blog. The article published before Boston's recent swoon, David, is about the Celtics trying a lineup with both Daniel Tice and Robert Williams on the floor at the same

time. We're both bad men. Your hint here is Shakespeare. Shakespeare. What was Celtics blog's strained pun headline? Shakespeare Um This could have run on the ringer

by the way So this is so Two towers to Two To wrestling That's two wrestling That's the twin towers To

Is two ships passing in the night Shakespeare To To to To You got the wrong guy As Angus King once said I was gonna say

go with. I thought it was going to be like two stiffs passing in the night. Is that what would be no offense to Daniel Tyson, Robert William. Here, now this is elemental Shakespeare. What is the, what is one Shakespeare quote that everyone knows? To be to be to to be to be too big, two bigs or not too big? Yeah, too big, too big or not too big. Oh, T-O-O-O-O-2 big? No, no, two, two, because there's two of them on the floor at the same time. too big. Yeah. I thought that was pretty good.

He is David Chewbaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus. We are back Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.