The Press Box - Watching the Olympics and Slate’s Josh Levin

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker start by going through all their media notes about the Olympics (4:48). Then Slate's Josh Levin joins to talk about his new podcast, 'One Year,' (20:04) and Levin helps David guess this week's Strained-Pun Headline (45:10). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Josh Levin Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Josh Levin Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twice a week, Van Lathen and Rachel Lindsay dissect the biggest topics in black culture, politics, and sports on their show, Higher Learning. They discuss the most important and timely conversations while also frequently inviting guests on the podcast and occasionally debating each other. Check out Higher Learning on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? As you know, I'm on the East Coast for one more week. And I told you about I have been reading The New York Post. Yeah. Had complicated feelings about the New York.

Post. Well, I've got another publication I've been reading up here that I don't have complicated feelings about. In fact, I have nothing but warm feelings about. It is the Lakeville Journal from up here in Northwest Connecticut. Oh, wow. Okay. Weekly newspaper started in

1897. An issue cost you two bucks. There's a front page and then an entertainment section that's called Compass. Let me tell you something. Remember the old phrase news you can use? Yes. You're staying in Northwest Connecticut, the Lakeville Journal is truly news you can use.

Because sometimes I go to small towns, I'm like, I want to buy the newspaper. This would be so cool. And then you get this paper and it's full of wire copy and like one local story. And I'm immediately just, I read it in 10 seconds, the door in the trash. It is funny how the weekly service paper has been the paper that is impervious to the changes of the new news media. Exactly, right? because for the dailies, all that stuff that they would have on the cover,

you know, Biden does this, that's gotten picked off, taken away from them. But the weekly service paper is pretty much unbreakable. For instance, there have been a ton of maws up here in northwest Connecticut.

Moths? Maws. Yes. What cicadas are to Princeton, New Jersey, maws are to northwest Connecticut. So we get the Lakeville Journal, and sure not,

there's a huge article about these maws and how you're supposed to get them off your tree, what you can do about them right there on the front page of the paper. Unbelievable. A restaurant we wanted to go to, David, that had been closed for Dine-in since COVID started, had reopened for Dine in. We found that news right there in the paper.

Story today are the most recent issue on rail service, potentially returning to this part of the world. The weekly papers love the potential for rail service. Yeah, the railroad is back. And by the way, included a quote within it from Simon Winchurch. The best-selling author who apparently lives in this part of the world and was making the case for rail service. Surely Simon Winchester has written like three books about railroads from the 1800s that you and I have seen in the bookstore, but not exactly read.

Anyway, Simon Winchester in the newspaper. Also some parts of the local paper that I just absolutely love, the police blotter. Oh, yeah. There was one about a Nissan, I believe it was, going off the, road and striking a rock because you need to know what happened in the neighborhood. The obligatory funny op-ed headline, which this one was no matter where you are, it's too darned hot. That was the headline.

It turned out to be a very nice piece by Matt Gordon about climate change. The funny thing about this, David, is that it's a thing on Twitter to say, support your local paper. Support your local paper. And when people say that, I want to say, which local paper are you talking about? Because some of them I look at, and it's just been absolutely taken apart by the forces of history. And the local paper stinks or the local paper is owned by a company that stinks. So I don't want to do that because that's bad.

And it's that the local paper of our youth is not coming back no matter how many of us subscribe to it. But I will say, support the. Lakeville Journal when in Northwest Connecticut because it is truly, truly a fantastic

local paper. See, now I feel terrible for not already not pitching a bit on this myself. The Princeton

packet and more importantly, the town topics just continue to shape our weeks over here. Why don't we do this? When you next time,

we'll do the, we'll do the Princeton local papers. Let's do it. And I want them to write you up, by the way. Local,

local podcaster mentions us. Local podcasters making waves. Oh, no, no, local podcasters making air, for in waves. Coming up on today's show, David and I have notes on the opening weekend of Olympics watching plus Slate's Josh Levine is here to talk about his new podcast one year. All that more on the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here.

Erica Servantes is on assignment. So we are produced today by Isaiah Blakely and Donnie Beecham Jr. I thought, David, before we bring Josh on, we do some Olympics watching notes. Let's do it. How much Olympics have you watched over? Not a ton. I watched the opening ceremony. We've been traveling a bunch.

The wife has been watching it pretty religiously when I'm out of the room. But I think it's probably, as I walked in to record this, I saw synchronized diving going on. But I have not personally watched a ton beyond the opening ceremonies. It's like a movie that's a little too violent for your kids. You know, you hit the pause as soon as they walk in the room. It's like when people talk about the people who can't watch horror movies, so they just read the Wikipedia pages. That's this big phenomenon right now.

I just don't watch the Olympics. I just read the news and pretend I watch it. Or listen to the segment, as it turned out. Let me tell you one thing about the Olympics. I feel we're in a time, especially as it pertains to network television where all the stuff we've been watching since we were kids is having an identity crisis. the Oscars every year has an identity crisis. Do people care about us?

What are we doing? What are we here? Who's going to host? The Olympics to me seems absolutely the same broadcast in almost every way as it was when you and I were watching in 1988 or 1992. Yeah. I think I totally agree with this and it was trying to formulate an opinion. You found it for me. Okay, keep going.

There's Peacock, right? The streaming service, which has taken, some of the sports have been shuffled over there. There's premium. There's new camera technology. There's Mike Tariko this year instead of Bob Costas. But the sound of it, the look of it, the theme song of it, the way the announcers talk about the Olympics,

to me feels, and I say this happily, like what you and I watched from Calgary and Barcelona and Atlanta and Athens and everything else. You mentioned Mike Tariko. You didn't mention Maria Taylor, who somehow went from, is she going to re-signed with the ESPN to hosting the Olympics in like the blink of an eye

and somehow hasn't missed it. Like, I was watching her, and I was like, whoever this is looks and reminds me a lot of Maria Taylor because I knew that she, I had read articles about her signing with NBC for the Olympics, and yet there was such a cognitive dissonance

with her being on. screen and that like prepared so quickly that I couldn't I couldn't it didn't make sense but maybe that kind of goes to what you're talking about like the Olympics exist just sort of in the collective consciousness like it's it's in the ether to the extent that it just makes it perfect sense for Maria Taylor just roll in and be and sort of like like inherit the the the breath and soul of everyone who's ever hosted the Olympics before. It's crazy. It's a language.

It is. And she probably knows the language better than even we do because she's watching on television. I know how to host the Olympics. I know what announcers are supposed to say. I was watching the opening ceremonies on Friday. Mike Tariko and Savannah Guthrie from the Today Show are doing the opening ceremonies. And you know they have the parade of nations come in and you have to give like three facts about every nation.

Of course. Of course. The geopolitical facts. And then also like who are their athletes? It's what sports are they competing in? When is the last time they won a medal? There's a lot of box checking going on. Not only was that happening,

but Mike Tariko was doing the thing where it's like being self-conscious about doing that. You know, like, what are we in? Carmen San Diego here? You know, what are we? I bet you, how do you have all these facts about all these countries? That's exactly what Bob Costas and Katie Couric

used to do when they did it. Not only doing the thing, but being sort of meta about doing the thing at the opening ceremonies. It was like slipping into a warm bath. You know, it was like watching a new hope with my son. It was like,

I know this. I don't know the, you know, the fact that they're going to give me about, I don't know, Belgium, but I understand the way they're going to talk about Belgium. Mm-hmm. It's wild.

Yeah, you're right. The self-consciousness is pretty incredible. Like, I don't know how I got here. But again, maybe that's part of the thing. I don't know how we got here and how we started doing this. I'm just constantly impressed with the, not just the spectacle of it, but the spectacle of what we are doing right now. Like this, it's just all like you said,

same as a spring from some eternal well. So it's sort of nonstop amazement, even at what oneself is doing, is sort of perfect. Sue Bird, the basketball star, was one of the flag bearers for the U.S. when the U.S. team came into the stadium. Big Twitter moment when they showed Sue Bird's mom watching from home and her mom's boyfriend who had the

Chiron identification at the bottom of the screen was named Harry Dank. That was kind of an amazing moment for Twitter. They also had a lot of pop-ins. It was like people who were on there. First of all, we could talk to Sue Bird from while she was walking around the stadium. she was talking to the announcers.

Also, people who were like going to other sporting events could kind of pop in. That was, I thought, really cool. We also got something amazing, David, which was, I'm talking a lot about Peyton Manning on here. Michael Phelps as a color commentator at the Olympics. Michael Phelps, who won approximately one billion medals in swimming, he comes out. He has big, styled hair. He has a beard on Saturday night. one of those shirts, you know, when you go to REI and you see all the camping gear and then you

see like, hey, it's REI, but we have shirts you can just wear around on a daily basis. He had one of those kind of shirts, kind of a button down. I put a picture in here. He's standing next to Rowdy Gaines, who was wearing the NBC polo. That made for kind of an amazing picture. And he was pretty good. He was funny because, you know, he's kind of a mentor to the U.S. swim team. So when he was doing like, hey, you know, so I talked to so-and-so. yesterday. It wasn't just like the Phil Sims, you know, hey, I talked to so and so yesterday because we had the obligatory meeting.

Yeah. It was like, I talked to him because I'm his friend and hero, and we talked about how he's going to swim this race. That was kind of awesome. Yeah, and it does. They had a conversation with, um, on the

during the opening ceremony with Megan Rapino, who was both giving a readout of the last, uh, US women's national team game, but also talking. about Sue Byrd and how she found out that she would be marching in the over carrying the flag, which is maybe Michael Phelps is probably a better example, but there would be a moment where you'd be like, maybe this should be couched a little bit differently. I mean, and maybe in another world, you'd be like, I'm not quite sure what the journalistic

ethics are of what we're doing right now, but the Olympics, it doesn't matter, right? This is, it's just, it is a, like we've said, thing of wonder and it just feels, it does. for some reason the level of access that they're getting even just on like Zoom calls and iPhones or whatever else just seems so cool and so novel that it's

I don't know it's been it's been really fun to watch it reminded me a little of when Bobby Heenan Bobby the Brain Heenan was the color commentator in the wrestling match and was also the manager or advisor to the wrestler who was in the ring you didn't expect him to be you called down the middle right you expected him to be

Bobby the Brain that's what we're doing here at the Olympics. Exactly. Glad you brought up journalistic ethics because we did have a pretty wild story in that department. Karen Krause is a longtime New York Times sports writer. I'm going to quote from Eric Wimple's piece over the Washington Post here. In mid-June, Karen Krause's byline appeared on a story about how Phelps, that is Michael Phelps, winner of 23 Olympic gold medals relates to his successors in the U.S. swimming program.

Though he retired from the sports, sport five years ago, he quote, exchanged isolation for outreach, sprinkling instruction and advice like the Pope, blessing his flock with holy water as a mentor he has found a way to pull this U.S. team along in his wake without getting wet. Then came the editor's note to that Karen Krause piece about Michael Phelps in the New York Times. Quote, after this article was published, editors learned that the reporter had entered an agreement to co-write a book with Michael Phelps.

if editors had been aware of the conflict, the reporter would not have been given the assignment. So she publishes a story about Michael Phelps and then at some later date informs her editors that, oh yeah, I am writing a book with Michael Phelps. I have entered into a financial deal with Michael Phelps. I don't even know.

know what to do with this. I don't either. Daily Beast says editors were quote unquote livid. Yeah. I mean, as bad an idea as this is anywhere, how bad an idea is this at the New York Times putting those editors and those people with those journalistic values in that position? Yeah. I mean, the interesting part here, you and I've talked about this a little bit on various forms. I am just, I am flabbergasted when people agree to write a book of someone who is active on their beat. Yeah. And again, I'm not talking about a book about that person, but I'm talking about you are signing a book contract saying, you get paid and I get paid and together we produce your memoirs. I find, I find that incredible. And it still happens a lot in sports. It's interesting

with Phelps because he is retired. So I guess the question is, could you write the Michael Phelps story for the New York Times reporter? And you obviously cannot write this piece. You especially can't write this piece about him. Could you write the Michael Phelps story given he's kind of done even as you cover swimming

and cover swimmers that he is the mentor to? Like, is there enough of? a line between those two things to do them? I don't know. It's tough because, you know, there's not like, I don't know, it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to, like, theorize the parallel. It seems like the answer's no, right? I mean, but at the same time, it's like, do you not co-write, you know, a former NBA

coach's memoir if he's retired because he might be coming back at some point in the future? you know, do you know, it's, it's, it's, it's tough. I mean, that's a, that's a pretty, I think that's a good example. So, okay, so you're an in, or let's, let's even say NBA player, because this is Michael Phelps are talking about. Mm-hmm. Like, if you're an NBA writer, you're obviously not going to write the memoirs of, of, you know, who, who, who can we pick, any, LeBron right now.

You're not going to be, you're probably not going to want to ghost write LeBron's memoir. But could you write, the memoirs of somebody who's of Scotty Pippin. He's even maybe a bad example because he feels a little remote, right? Could you write like the memoirs of Jerry West who's kind of still around as an advisor

and working in the NBA? If Jerry West was a GM, I think the answer would obviously be no. But if Jerry West was kind of tangentially still around, I mean, it's the answer, I think, I think your answer is right. The answer is probably no in all these cases. And it's especially no at the New York Times.

I cannot emphasize that enough. All right, David, let's do the Overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they were always gratefully received. In other Olympics news, Team USA, basketball, lost to France

to France. It ended a win streak which dated all the way back to 2004. That is now over. It was an upward Twitter joke to write. Kevin Durant has decided to join France to win a gold medal in Tokyo. God, that's terrible.

By the way, we did that when USA team lost those preliminary games, too, just FYI. Thanks to Dukas the Lucas for that. Cleveland's baseball team, David has a new nickname, finally. Oh, I saw this. They will be the Cleveland Guardians. Cleveland Guardians,

a lot of Marvel Expanded Universe jokes about that one, including it was an overwork Twitter joke to write. Does this mean we get to Groot, Groot for the home team? Thanks to Paul Middukoff. And finally, David, I regret to report that Marjorie Taylor Green,

the Republican representative from Georgia, is at it again, asked if she had received the COVID vaccine, Marjorie Taylor Green said this. Aaron DeVarro, CBS News. Whip Scalese said that he got vaccinated, siding this delta variant that's going around and said he's confident. Have you yourself gotten vaccinated?

Well, your first question is a violation of my HIPAA rights. You see, with HIPAA rights, we don't have to reveal our medical records and that also involves our vaccine records. So it is not, in fact, a HIPAA violation to ask a U.S. representative if they they've had the COVID vaccine, but David, would you like to hear some other proposed HIPAA violations that Twitter came up with this week? Yes, please. Calling me about my car's extended warranty is a HIPAA violation. Asking, what are we?

Is a HIPAA violation? Asking me about the meaning of my tattoos is a HIPAA violation. Spelling it, HIPPA, not HIPAA, is a HIPA violation. asking me to select the squares with traffic lights in them is a HIPAA violation. And tweeting about HIPAA violations is a HIPAA violation. Thanks to Cade Stone Sugar Lemon and ASG, if you think not listening to the press box is a HIPAA violation, congrats. You made the Overword Twitter joke of the week.

All right, Josh Levine is here. Don't call him Levin because that means you don't know him. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Queen Longtime. writer and editor at slate.com. How many years now, Josh, at slate.com? Coming up on 18, Mr. Curtis. My mentor, Brian Curtis, has long since moved on to many different publications, but I'm still in the same place.

It wasn't totally voluntary. How many issues of the print edition of Slate do you have filed away in a drawer somewhere? That's a question for both of you. That was actually more in Brian's day than my day. I'm a young man by comparison. I'm not that old either, I'd like to say. Josh Levine is the creator of an excellent new podcast, one year, which he is here to talk about today. Josh Levine, welcome to the press box.

It's an honor and a privilege, sir. Thank you. So when last we heard from you in long form audio style, you were doing a really awesome slow burn series about David Duke. You're hunting around for your next idea, and how do you come up with one year? So coming off of the David Duke series, I had been living in that story for a very long time, which is kind of an unpleasant place to be, being inside David Duke's brain for any amount of time, much less many months. And so I was interested in doing a historical narrative series, but one that wasn't entirely focused on one person or one story, which can be. extremely rewarding. I was grateful that I had the opportunity to tell that story at the kind of length and with the

amount of reporting and interviews that felt like it was necessary to do that, but also I wanted to tell a bunch of different kinds of stories and with the one-year format, you know, the way that history works, it's not like

one thing happens and the entire world stops. Like different people and events and culture and politics to sort of bounce off each other in really interesting ways. And so it just felt more true to the world we live in to look at those kind of connections and synchroniscities and try to do something that I hadn't really done before, which is that kind of like long-form narrative reporting on a bunch of different things, you know, happening simultaneously.

It's a lot more work. I mean, it must be, right? I mean, because I should have told me before I started, David. Unfortunately, I've discovered that, yes. Well, yeah, I mean, every episode could, I mean, could conceivably be four episodes, right? I mean, without much difference in terms of the research side. I mean, but it's, but it has it been, has it been more rewarding because of that, you think? Yeah, I mean, I hope when people listen, they're like, this could be a four episode, not this feels like four episodes.

But the thing that I think you realize, or that I realize sort of in retrospect doing this series, is that for something like a slow burn, like the David Duke series that I did, you interview a journalist or you interview a politician. And you can use snippets from those interviews throughout the series, whereas the research for one episode of this, like if I can't use the research for the Mary Shane episode, which I think we'll talk about

in the episode about marijuana or the episode about Anita Bryant. It just like lives in that one place. And so, yeah, there's no kind of efficiencies to be had here. But I don't know. I don't know how you guys work. But sometimes if you're kind of work obsessive, you sort of can take a break by working on a separate project as opposed to the one you're working on. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to tell myself.

Yeah. That next piece that I'm supposed to be doing suddenly looks really interesting, as opposed to this thing I have to finish. It's right in front of me. You know, I know that I know that feeling. David and I joke on this podcast all the time about how a lot of long-form podcasting at its core is, here's a thing that happened that you didn't know about. And then the person goes off from there. So the question is, how do you find those kinds of things within one year like 1977? Well, 77, I think, is a really good sweet spot for this because I'm just interested in the 70s in general as a period that feels kind of relatively under explored compared to the 60s and the 80s. But it's also a moment when you have both things that no one remembers and you have things. And you have

things that people think they remember, but actually don't. There's not really anything that happened that year. That's like baseline level of interesting. That it feels like if you did like a long kind of exploration excavating a bunch of stuff, people would be like, I knew all of that already. Or like, yeah, like tell me something I, you know, I haven't heard a million times before. So it's kind of finding the story mix, it's looking for things that will grab people immediately. Like, oh, yeah, I've heard of that. I'm interested in that and things. Like, I mean, for me, even though, like, as a sportsperson, the Mary Shane story about the first woman baseball announcer had, like, a legitimate shot at that job. Like, I had never heard of her. I don't think

the vast, vast majority of people listening to this will have heard of her. And so I'm not doing much to kind of disabuse you of your stereotype about what long-form podcasting is. But I feel like this format is kind of suited to it or makes it feel maybe slightly more original. I don't know. Maybe it's not original, but hopefully it's good anyway. It is. It's really good.

I was saying before I got on the air, this is, this is, it was a, it was, I was sort of overwhelmed by how much I enjoyed it. Maybe this is a little bit too inside baseball, but was this podcast hard to pitch? Because in some ways it's obvious for the format, right? It's like a weekly radio show, but in some ways it's, it is unusual. You know, I mean, it seems like everything is six episodes now

or eight episodes or, you know, it's, it's, it's all these different things that are happening at one time. And, you know, the elevator pitch, I guess, is easy on the one hand and a little bit expansive on the other hand. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually curious to see, how people respond to it because on the one hand, there's so many different entry points for people that might want to skip a series on David Duke. There's going to be something that I think everyone will be interested in.

And yet, if you get hooked on an individual story, maybe there's not something to keep you there. I don't know. I mean, I'm curious to find that out. But for me, and I hope for listeners, The thing that I find really interesting about this conceit is that it's one that has like a pretty strict constraint, but that constraint actually doesn't prevent you from doing anything. Like you can still tell every kind of story.

You can find any kind of story in any year. Honestly, like I think 1977 is a good year for a bunch of different reasons. Like it's this weird kind of interstitial like period between Nixon and Reagan. Like a bunch of stuff was changing, but that there was like. a lot of people fighting against that change. So I think it's an interesting moment to look at. But honestly, like, you know, hopefully, you know, in future seasons, like any year is interesting if you look at it really closely. And so there were other, back to your original question, David, like there were other things that I was thinking about pitching that are similarly like historical

narrative, but they had more like kind of, the constraints in those pitches were like, they did actually limit the kinds of stories you could tell. And I was finding that I would like come across interesting ideas and be like, oh, that doesn't fit in the conceit because of like it's not exactly this kind of thing. And there's just not really anything you can come across if you're doing like a one year kind of concept that you couldn't do. Like as long as it even like plausibly fits into a year, into the year, then you can just, you know, go ahead and report it out and do it.

You mentioned Mary Shane, Josh. She gets hired by the Chicago White Sox as a baseball announcer, as a play-by-play announcer, 1977. What attracted you to the Mary Shane story? First of all, that I didn't know it. She's the kind of person that comes up in these like, calendars that you guys probably had that I had when I was a kid of like amazing sports feeds 365 days in the year. She's like a trivia question and a trivia answer. And as it's the stories of pioneers

are always incredibly interesting. And some pioneers just get, you know, like everybody knows the Jackie Robinson story, right? But there's like the Larry Dobie story and there's like a million different stories, all of which have similarities, but all of which are also different. And so she's someone who has her own kind of unique path into sports, into baseball, and into announcing. But also this is a moment where like women all over America are getting opportunities in white-collar professions. Like, this is the year when it seems like the Equal Rights Amendment is going to get passed. And so another, like, kind of major thing I was hoping to accomplish with this series is, like, tell you about the big things that were happening in that year, but not

tell you the story of, like, the National Women's Conference in Houston, or not tell you the story about the Equal Rights Amendment, tell you the story about Mary Shane, which gets at those stories in maybe like a sideways and unexpected way. I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, but there's a kind of a, you know, a lot of the tension when you're telling stories that you know, one's heard before is why haven't I heard this before?

And there's some like the Mary Shane thing, or why am I not more aware or blah, blah, you know, whatever happened to? Are you saying, are you saying that I'm making people feel stupid? Like, he is absolutely saying that. I have to stop listening because I've not heard of this before

and I just can't, I can't deal with that. No, I mean, listen, I was listening to the Mary Shane story on the edge of my seat, but the question in the back of my mind was like, why am I not more familiar with Mary Shane? Of course, like, you know, the last sort of act of the story explains that. I mean, to give, and I guess do you look for stories that have that sort of narrative bent? Or is it more about just sort of totemizing the year? I mean, like you said, getting into the bigger ideas through these smaller pieces.

there is this cultural forgetting thing that happens in all kind of realms of anything. And one thing that I found when doing research on Mary Shane is that people would say she was the first woman to ever call a baseball game, which wasn't true. There were actually a couple of women who had kind of smaller scale opportunities. But then afterwards, people would say that the next person was the first woman to ever call a baseball game. and just forgetting about Mary Shane because she was only there for a certain period of time

and didn't turn out to be celebrated by that team or by Major League Baseball. But like when I was doing my book on Linda Taylor, the like, you know, start of the welfare queen archetype, she got totally forgotten. Like with the next wave of people who were given that label, they were considered the first or the biggest. And so that's just an interesting thing

that I found in doing these kinds of stories. is how people just get overwritten in the kind of like quest to like celebrate or demonize in some cases the next person and finding those people that have been overwritten or who were at one point celebrated and figuring out why they're not remembered has been like a pretty fruitful area to focus on all right so you've decided you're going to do a pot episode on mary Shane what are the raw ingredients audio and otherwise you need to do that episode Well, you need audio of her calling a baseball game, which we found just one game, actually, from July of 1977, which is the high point.

The White Sox have this really kind of surprise. They're really bad in this period, but they have a surprisingly good season that year. And this game was like the high point of their season and was the kind of high point of Mary Shane's announcing career. So that if we hadn't been able to find that, you can't do the story. You can't just say like, you know, the Chicago Sunday. times said she sounded like this, but we don't have a clip of that. So you also have to find people that, you know, worked with her. We had to get participation of her family because there's a thing

that that happens, I think, particularly with people, you know, not to like generalize overly broadly, but when you have, for instance, a woman who gets in a high profile, job like this and is a pioneer. She's going to, quote, unquote, say all the right things to the press. She's going to say, oh, what a great opportunity. Everybody's been so great to me. You know, everyone's so nice. But you need to find people who she was talking to when there wasn't a microphone in front of her face,

the people who she was saying how she really felt and really thought. And so you need a set of those people. And then her son, who, you know, participate. and was great through this whole process, had her unpublished memoir, which now you're like in the realm of, okay, it's not just like people remembering a few conversations they had with her.

This is her actually writing down in the moment how she felt and what people said and what people did. And so for me, that was just, okay, we're not like maybe going to do this. We're definitely going to do this story. And it's just like a rare and valuable document of somebody

you know, living through this experience. And David, kind of back to your previous question, you know, when her son sent me this document, the first few pages of it are rejection letters from a publisher and from an agent who said that this is not, this is in the early 80s by this point, this is not commercially viable. Like, this is like a story of a very minor and local interest. And so, you know, it's possible that Brian would be finding this book at a used bookstore somewhere if it had been published and it would be remembered as a lost classic or either be, or maybe it would not be a lost class. Maybe it would just be a classic or maybe it would at least be findable. But she was told, like, nobody cares about your, literally nobody cares about your story.

This is not interesting. Again, maybe at the risk of being to Insight Baseball, how do you as a writer, you've written a billion articles, you've written an incredible book? book, how do you, how do you see this sort of podcasting fitting into like your body of work? Like is this long form writing just, it's just spoken out loud to you? Or is it, is it, is it its own thing? Well, thank you, David. And I think as a writer, I approach it as long form writing, often to my detriment, I would say. And I think as I do this more, you sort of learn a little bit to think in audio. But like with the slow burn series, which I kind of came out of, those podcasts, I think, are and feel more written than a lot of other ones, you know, in that category,

which I think is a good thing. But, you know, people that come out of audio, they'll look at the tape that they have. They'll look at the interview tape or the archive tape. And they'll like, they'll maybe put that into a document and like script around it. Whereas for all that I've done this and all I've kind of tried to get into my brain that the tape is the most important thing, you know, I'll often just be writing and then be like, all right, now time to go find some tape. All right, let's put that tape in. Now have time to get back to writing.

So I really do think, and you guys can tell me, if, if you're, if you're, agree that the tape is the stuff that people remember, really? Just if you have like a strong interview or like a really emotional interview or an amazing piece of archive, that is probably the thing that sticks in people's heads. And so got to try to remember that and write to that to the extent that I can for it, like, retrain my my brain to to to have that in mind as I'm like sitting in front of my blank page. I think it's a combination of things. I mean, I think it's in a way, it's a lot like a like a magazine article or a book. It's new material, right? So that new interview that you're doing

with somebody who was around then or knows, you know, the time talking about that really pops. It's the archival audio, which is obviously has its own, you know, version in an in a written and then it's the ability of a storyteller to actually just clearly tell me what the stakes are. Yeah. I mean, part of when we go, when we're all three of us are here talking about the fact that Mary Shane has forgotten, there's a certain narrative tension to this story because we don't know how this is going to turn out. Right. We don't, we don't understand it. So you're, you know, I think it's setting the stakes at the top of the podcast and then we kind of slip into the story.

One thing I want to ask you about Josh is so interesting to me is you've written stuff and you've had that at a boy, job. I've done it. I have finished this piece of writing. Now you've done long form podcast. Is there a different pleasure at the end of one than there is at the other? The pleasure in podcasting for me is that it's a team sport. Do we have an athlete on the podcast? I'm sorry. I said, I want to owe this to all my teammates. This is fantastic. Please continue. So, Thank you for putting me in my place. I deserve that. But, you know, because people on the, the listen to this are going to be aware of sports.

Some people know that there are team, they're individual sports and there are team sports. I'm just trying to make a reference to familiarize the unfamiliar. But there are so many things that go into making this thing that I have no ability to do. And it's just so collaborative. I mean, when I, you know, go away and. and write a piece, it's incredibly isolating. And there are these moments when doing this as well. But I do kind of enjoy the collaboration.

It makes me feel less alone in doing this thing, not to make this about me and my sad personality. But, you know, it's something that it feels rewarding to have done. as a project. And it just, it feels more rewarding, I feel like, because there's a certain kind of magic to it.

Like I understand, why a piece works or doesn't work. And in this case, just feeling, feeling like there's something out there that's like transcended my abilities. It's pretty cool. Brian,

I try to make fun of that. No, but it's an out. I get what you mean. It's like the producers are putting in this, you know, or helping you arrange it. They're putting in the audio, arranging the audio in such a way that it's different from you sitting down and writing a script. You're like, oh my gosh, this product is much bigger and richer than what I have sat down

on my computer to type out. Yeah, but I also feel like I don't understand the way that structure works, for instance, in audio as deeply as I may be on. understand it and print at this point. And like, I don't come from an audio background. And so, you know, in some cases, doing things the way that they're traditionally done is like not a recipe for success. But it just feels like when things click into place, it just feels more surprising to me and feels really good and satisfying because the answers don't necessarily feel obvious. I said earlier that you were kind of doing a dream podcast of mine and part of that is because

I find if there's one thing that I, if I had to isolate one rabbit hole that I find myself going down or one just needless internet activity. So I just go to like the New York Times archive and just plug random keywords in together and see what I can find. You know, I'm just looking like I was searching for like cowboy and murder and the, you know, whatever. What is it? What I'm not going to read anything on to you into your process. But what is it? I mean, how are you looking, how are you searching for the sort of, you know, the stories that you cover?

Is it, is it, are you, are you, do you do any like just random searches? I can't wait for cowboy murder coming to, uh, cowboy murder is going to be huge. Spotify in the 2020. Original, yeah. You could, you could have it be Dallas Cowboys. It could be any kind of cowboy, honestly. That's, that's the pitch. So we found stories in a bunch of different ways.

You know, I love newspapers.com. I'm a newspapers.com guy. I would enjoy being a paid endorser for newspapers.com. The interface is great. You can search by keyword. You can search by state. You can search by time. It just works perfectly well.

So that is a fun place to kind of root around and has the kind of like, serendipity factor of microfilm without actually having to go and work with microfilm. No offense to microfilm. Looking through old TV news episodes by date is a useful thing. Looking on the inside of major newspapers, like inside the A section of the New York Times is often a good place to find things that made the national news but aren't overly kind of done or well remembered and looking in J-Store and searching for in 1977 because a lot of times it can actually be hard to find things that happen in 1977 by looking in 1977. Often you don't know about them until a year or two later when

you know, they make it to the courts or, you know, there's something that instigates coverage. And so finding, figuring out a way to track down things that are covered in retrospect once they've actually gotten big enough. And if they're in, you know, a journal of cultural history or a journal of whatever history, then you've already, you know, you found something that's like someone has noticed and then you, like, have found an expert who can talk to you about it. So that's a good two for one situation. One year is out now. It is absolutely fabulous. I got episodes on Mary Shane on Anita Bryant. One on the miniseries Roots is coming, which I am excited about.

Do you want to stick around, Josh, and help David guess the strained pun headline? There's nothing that I would rather do. All right. Thank you guys so much. Good. Attentacompo getting lots of fresh media attention was a deer in headlines. Today's headline comes from Luke B. It's from the Chicago Sun Times and appropriately enough about the White Sox.

You might have seen that White Sox rookie catcher, Yermine Mercedes, was demoted to AAA at the beginning of July. He responded by writing an Instagram post saying he was, quote, stepping aside from baseball indefinitely. And the picture on the post was the words, It's Over. All right. So your mean Mercedes has retired via social media.

What was the Chicago Sun Times's strain pun headline? Oh my gosh. Okay. Immediately I want to go to like Mercedes Binns puns, but I'm not, is that, I'm getting in a proving. Mercedes. But how do you, goodbye and social media all have to cram, and white socks, I'll have to cram into something that says bins.

Since the Chicago, sometimes, they didn't have to get everything. I'm thinking, oh, Lord, won't you goodbye me, your mean Mercedes-Benz. So that's, let me just put that, that's better than what the actual pun headline was. Mercedes. We're pretty simple here. We don't even need the social media part. Mercedes bids adieu, Mercedes Bid. Bid.

Mercedes. My career is over. That's it. It. Retires? Mercedes. Mercedes. Tire?

Mercedes bids. Mercedes bids a do. Done. Over. It is not starting, but it is. Enes. Mercedes ends. Mercedes ends.

Question mark. By the way, Jeremy Mercedes did not, in fact, retire. Thanks very much to Josh Levine. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Isaiah Blakely

and Donnie Beecham Jr. On Friday, we've got Bob Costas on talking about his new HBO show. plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you later, David. See you later, Brian.