Books -- 'The Enlightened Bracketologist'

For Richard Sandomir and Mark Reiter, the editors of "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything," pairing candidates into NCAA Tournament-style brackets is the best way to determine the best movie death, sports book, political hot-button issue, and more.

Reiter and Sandomir were online Thursday, March 22 at noon ET to take your questions about the book.

A transcript follows.

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Alexandria, Va.: Do you guys have a Web site? This seems like a natural.

Mark Reiter: Yes, it's dailybracket.com. Still under development, working out some kinks, but definitely worth visiting.

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Washington, D.C.: I work in D.C. and I joked about Final Four brackets today and none of my coworkers knew the term or understood it. I certainly don't watch sports on TV, but I know it can be popular in certain circles. Do you have to spend a lot of time explaining what brackets and college basketball are?

Mark Reiter: People who are not into sports have about a 10-second delay in "getting" the concept of bracketology. But that's about it. Once they see the bracket format, they understand that it's a knockout tournament, or a pyramid turned on its side, and they understand the concept pretty quickly after. Sports fans get it immediately of course -- and they tend to slap their forehead and say, "Why didn't I think of that?"

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Washington, D.C.: Wow, I just bought your book 10 mins ago, then checked out today's discussion lists and here you are! I thought your book would be a great discussion-starter in between commercials during the Final Four games, should a game become a blowout or we just get tired of hearing Billy Packer's yadda yadda yadda...

As a huge March Madness fan, I'm thinking this is a dynamic that's here to stay, and that gets revved up every March.

Some of my favorite bracketology e-mails have included:

- Best Comedy movies of all time

- Best movies of all time

- Best SI swimsuit models of (2002, 2004, 2005)

And, I just heard of a personals site launching a similar bracket format for selected profiles periodically (every week?). Looking forward to your book!

Richard Sandomir: Well, we're happy that you bought the book, and I think you'll find a lot of brackets that will interest you. We feel that some of the discussions might take you past the commercial breaks. The humorist Dave Barry kindly said that our book is the one book to have in your bathroom if you could only have one book at all. We do have three movie brackets: Film deaths, great sports movies, and classic comedies (done by the comic actor Robert Wuhl). Enjoy!

Mark Reiter: If you go on dailybracket.com, you'll see a Supermodels bracket that I wrote -- with Christy Turlington beating Cindy Crawford in the finals. Of course, a successful model named Crystal Renn "critiqued" my choices online. She thought I was showing my age by ignoring Kate Moss. She's probably right. Check it out.

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washingtonpost.com: DailyBracket.com

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Arlington, Va.: How long did it take you to put together your experts for the book, and how did you decide you to ask to judge each bracket?

Richard Sandomir: I'd say it took close to four months to go through the basic process: deciding which brackets to assign; who we solicited to write the brackets, and getting the brackets back from our contributors. We tried hard to assign brackets to people who had great expertise in the bracket areas. For instance, Ken Jennings, the all-time "Jeopardy!" champion, bracketizes Great Game Show Catchphrases. We have two former White House speechwriters, Curt Smith and Jeff Shesol, bracketizing great presidential speeches and great speech lines, respectively. The executive editor of Business Week, John Byrne, who also wrote Jack Welch's autobiography, bracketizes the greatest CEO's -- doesn't name Welch the best one. And the great New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast, did great animated characters.

One of the other duties the bracketologists had, beyond playing out their brackets until a winner emerged, is to provide analyses of key matchups throughout their tournaments.

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Houston: There's a ton of discussions on the WaPo Web site every day. If I were to put them all into your bracket, where would THIS chat fit?

Mark Reiter: Honestly, I think we'd have a tough time making it out of the first round -- probably thrashed by the Attorney General scandal or the Iraq War or the "Waltergate" VA scandal or.... but I digress. In another town, maybe we'd find our way into the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight. Say Chapel Hill, N.C.?

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Rockville, Md.: How did you get the idea for the book? Was it hard to explain to publishers?

Richard Sandomir: About a year ago, in my New York Times sports column, I used the word "bracketelogy," which my co-editor, Mark, who is also my agent, was not familiar with. He called me up and he gave me his pitch: that the brackets formula could be used in lots of different areas like sports, culture, politics, business, food, wine, personal relationships. We could be serious, we could be fun, and we could show that one's decision-making could be improved by the act of pitting one choice against the other in one-on-one matchups.

Mark explained the concept at a lunchtime meeting with one of the top people at Bloomsbury USA, our publisher, started writing brackets on the back of napkins, and they made a deal right there.

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Washington, D.C.: Were there any subjects you wanted to try and "bracket" but weren't able to, for whatever reason?

Mark Reiter: We originally approached the all-time Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings to do a bracket on Trivia Questions. Sounded like a good idea at the time. But Ken pointed out (wisely) that it was really a dumb idea, impossible to do. For example, what constitutes a great trivia question? Cleverness? Difficulty? What's the criterion? So we yielded (wisely) and let Ken do what he wanted to do: Game Show Catchphrases. ("Survey said..." beats "Come on down" in the finals.)

Another one we REALLY wanted to try was Punchlines from the World's Dirtiest Jokes. The punchlines tend to be harmless and rated PG. The jokes themselves are... well, unsuitable for family entertainment. For example, "You're not hunting for bear, are you?" And then we'd publish the actual joke (which would be inappropriate for a book sold in Wal-Mart) online. A clever idea, but too unwieldy and risky.

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Arlington, Va.: Will the "build your own" brackets be linkable? I think a lot of bloggers would enjoy putting these on their sites.

Richard Sandomir: We're still in the early stages of dailybracket.com, and while there is no linkability now, there will be in a few weeks.

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Washington, D.C.: Mark, you are way off on Best Elvis Costello songs.

Where's "I Want You"? "Alison"?

Mark Reiter: You're not the first person to say that -- and I have taken my lumps for that bracket. Even my kids say I'm off target. We were going to publish an alternative female bracket of Elvis Costello Songs, by Mikki Halpin (who wrote the Mondegreens bracket in the book). When she handed it in, she had 32 different songs compared to mine. So, Elvis C. has a lot of good songs to choose from -- and wise men and women can disagree but still remain... fans. By the way, Alison made it into my tournament but had an unfortunate matchup against eventual finalist "Brilliant Mistake." As for "I Want You," it's a great tune too, but sooo depressing.

I will also add that my assistant Emily agrees with my winner. (She may be the only one. So I'm keeping her.)

What would your Final Four be?

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Holmdel, N.J.: What was your criteria for seeding and who wins each round? I love the book, but I wonder how you can have "A League of Their Own" lose to "Field of Dreams"? In a first-round matchup no less?

Richard Sandomir: My friend Vince asked me the same question, believe it or not, about "A League of Their Own."

Mark and I didn't seed any brackets, and didn't encourage our experts to do it, either. We felt that in our brackets (nearly all of them 32, not the 64 of March Madness) there were so many great choices, and there was so much quality, that we did not feel seeding would make a difference. That said, we didn't have an NCAA committee meeting in secret in a hotel room demanding rigorous adherence to any type of rules in creating the matchups. Sometimes it was simply a matchup I wanted to see, or one that was simply begging to be created. "League" and "Field of Dreams" are two baseball films from about the same time period. I felt they created a great first-round matchup. At some point, fairly early on, "League" would have been knocked off; it's a very moving film, but not a great one, and "Field" is simply better in my mind.

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Anonymous: What, George W. Bush doesn't make the Best Presidents bracket?

Richard Sandomir: He didn't make Best Presidents, because such a bracket didn't exist. But he plays himself in the final round matchup of the greatest political blunders of the last 50 years. To backtrack, the final four in that bracket pits, in one matchup, Bush ignoring warnings about 9/11 against Nixon installing the White House taping system, and in the second, LBJ escalates the Vietnam War plays Bush ignoring warnings against invading Iraq. This bracket was done by the political satirist and writer Paul Slansky.

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Anonymous: Have you gotten much response from people who were the subjects of the brackets -- directors, authors, whatever, complaining that they should have won their bracket?

Richard Sandomir: Nobody has yet to complain. But whenever we do interviews with the media or talk to friends, we're asked questioned and challenged on the bracketologists' picks, which is precisely the type of response we hoped for. Bracketology equals debate, whether it's in the NCAA tournament or in the book. In the Jock Films bracket, a close friend said, "How could 'A League of their Own' not make out of the first round?" An interviewer wondered how I, who did the Bald Guys bracket, could pit Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas against each other in a first-round matchup. One thing we told our bracketologists is that we would not change their picks; we hired them for their expertise, and regardless of whether we disagreed with their selections, we wouldn't change them. Bob Costas railed about the exclusion of Woody Woodpecker from the animated characters bracket.

Mark Reiter: Elmore Leonard, I heard, saw my bracket on his novels -- and did not agree with my winner: "Killshot" beats "Swag" in the finals. I heard through a third party that he's partial to "Freaky Deaky," which I'm relieved to say did at least make it to the Elite Eight.

But, hey, that's the hard life of an Enlightened Bracketologist. You're always gonna get people disagreeing. And that's exactly the response we want. Now that the book's out, people basically react to it in three quick stages. First, they smile. Then they laugh. Then they start arguing, "I can't believe you picked..."

Frankly, disagreement is music to our ears. It gets people talking, debating, thinking out loud. And it turns them on to new things. That can't be all bad.

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Washington, D.C.: So, Final Four for best bathroom books?

- "Bracketology"

- "How things work"

- "The Far Side Anthology" (wait, they have a box set now?)

- Anything by Gene Weingarten (you might ask "who?" but we D.C. readers know...)

Richard Sandomir: Dave Barry's blurb for our book also included a bracket....our books against all other books, and our book won in a walkaway.

There are no doubt some lovers of dirty joke books that would voice great outrage against being excluded from your Final Four. That is, unless Gene Weingarten writes dirty jokes.

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