I want to tell you about a bench.

We were upstate house hunting and decided to walk the Windham path to give our dog a little exercise after a long day in the car. As we walked, we came upon an engraved bench, the kind people put up in memory of someone they loved. This one read: “Gerry enjoyed walking but preferred sitting.” Gerry and I have a lot in common.

This is, essentially, the origin story of @cozygirlkristine, my Instagram handle and the name I gave this newsletter when I started it. In a city where your identity is so closely tied to your work, where you’re always moving and doing and optimizing, I wanted to plant a flag for the other thing. The sitting. The gardening on your fire escape. The throwing a dinner party instead of attending a networking event. Sheryl Sandberg told women to lean in, but as the great Ali Wong said: “I don’t want to lean in. I want to lie down.”

I love living in NYC. I love being challenged. I wouldn’t keep choosing startups if I didn’t. But I also chose to switch from B2C to B2B years ago specifically because it gave me the flexibility to also be a person outside of work. I was already working from home six years before COVID.

So when I named this newsletter Cozy Girls, it made sense. It was personal, it was easy, and to be honest, I started this as a creative outlet. I didn’t have a grand vision. I just knew I needed to force myself to produce and share something that was my own, not for the corporation or brand I worked for.

The problem is that the newsletter kept growing into something the name couldn’t quite hold. Across more than 50 dispatches, we’ve sat down with a CNN White House correspondent, gotten candid perspectives from progressive moms on raising kids in a world that’s falling apart, and analyzed the death of the side hustle. We’ve tracked the analog comeback before it hit every marketing deck and covered 12-course tasting menus with the same urgency as antitrust enforcement. Over the past year, this newsletter found 19,000 viewers who apparently also have strong feelings about both prestige television and the latest startup acquisition.

Which brings me to Secondary.

Secondary colors are built on primaries. They require something to already exist before they can do their best work, and then they make the whole thing better. That’s the reader I’ve always been writing for: someone who didn’t arrive blank. You arrived with taste, opinions, a group chat full of links you’d already seen, and an identity that extends well beyond your job title. Secondary meets you there.

There’s also a secondary glaze reference in there, for the pottery people. It’s the layer that requires courage to apply. The one that embraces imperfection and produces the most interesting results. Secondary is the layer that makes you sharper at work and more interesting at the table.

Here’s what isn’t changing: the voice, the format, the frequency, the drink recs. The Party Talk. The unsolicited opinions about where power is moving and where to eat on a Tuesday. The belief that culture is business and business is culture and you can’t fully understand either without paying attention to both.

What is changing: the look. Thank you to my soon to be sister-in-law Abby Wilkinson for the design!

Cozy Girls was a newsletter. Secondary is a newsletter that knows what it is and has room to become more.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. If you just found this, hi. Either way, say it with me: subscribe if you want to be the most interesting person at your next dinner party. :p

If you missed last week:

Secondary

50. On trying to buy my first house

Today's letter includes: Spirit Air has a new daddy, an exclusive with a new bar in Crown Heights, Lena Dunham's very specific TikTok algorithm, the A24 merch drop that crashed a website in under 30 minutes, a vegetarian dinner from an Eleven Madison line cook, Beck on why making things for five people is enough, dedicated counter space for your coffee …

Read more

7 days ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Kristine Colosimo

If you just got here, some greatest hits:

• 46. Your group chat is a $37M problem

• 36. The year analog goes mainstream

• 31. On whether or not to have children

Party Talk. 🍸

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, and commenting on this newsletter will help! <3

A different kind of pasta timer. This isn’t new but it is delightful. Pasta brand Barilla made Spotify playlists timed to match each pasta shape’s cooking time so you can cook without a timer. The creative campaign was created by Publicis Italy. The playlists are called things like “Boom Bap Fusilli,” “Moody Day Linguine,” “Pleasant Melancholy Penne,” “Top Hits Spaghetti” and “Simply Classics Linguine.”

This new music video for Gener8ion and Young Lean's 'Storm’ directed by Romain Gavras is making the rounds and rightfully so, it’s pretty cool. I have two thoughts 1. smoking is so back (unfortunately) and 2. I can’t believe I found out about it on LinkedIn.

The founder of Sporty & Rich, , is starting over. She took full ownership back and has moved the business from Paris to LA. She wrote about it here.

Not so fast Zuck. China has decided to block Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus to stop U.S. firms from poaching its AI talent and IP in a countermove as Washington squeezes Chinese tech companies off advanced American chips. And the jury has been selected for the Musk vs. Altman showdown.

The largest seed-round ever secured in Europe. Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion seed funding to pursue superintelligence.

‘I do’ on a budget. This would be a very “minimalist cool girl” wedding band and it’s on sale for $110 at Lie Studio.

Oprah x Amazon. Oprah Winfrey is bringing her podcast, book club and old episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to Amazon under an exclusive multiyear deal.

Another private members club is in the works. This one is for vinyl lovers. Opening soon on the Lower East Side, Stylus NYC is conceived as a listening room to end all listening rooms, designed by O'Neill Rose Architects.

Partiful wants to pay for your baby shower. The party invite platform is incentivizing you to plan your shower on Partiful for a chance to win $300 cash to go towards your event.

I’m eyeing this Baggu purse in fuchsia - a color I would normally never wear. I like to buy Baggu bags in crazy colors or prints because they’re not super expensive, so I can experiment. SHOULD I DO IT?!

is having a live debate in San Francisco. On May 13, and are debating if AI actually changing how science gets done a.k.a. can AI cure cancer? RSVP here.

Cassie & Nate’s wedding. Saint Street Cakes, which I still haven’t tried yet, teamed up with HBO to create mini wedding cakes to celebrate Euphoria’s least liked couple.

A book launch at an underrated bar. Quick Eternity is a Moby Dick themed bar in South Street Seaport with good cocktails, cozy surroundings, and a solid burger. It is underrated in my opinion. On May 5th, they’re hosting a book launch for Laurie Woolever’s new book Care and Feeding. Woolever will be joined in conversation with chef Gabrielle Hamilton of Prune. Tickets are $20 and come with a copy of the book and a guaranteed seat.

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends.

My husband Ben and I spent the weekend upstate, looking at five houses. We have never owned property before. Not a condo, not a co-op, not so much as a storage unit. Which meant that every conversation with our real estate agent required a small, private act of translation.

The vocabulary wasn’t the problem. I know what a septic tank is. I did not know that you’re supposed to ask when it was last pumped, or what the answer implies, or what it means for future expansion if you want to build. Tin roofs, I’ve learned, are desirable. They don’t need replacing. I have opinions about tin roofs now.

The five houses were a tour through other people’s decisions. One read so specifically as 2010s Austin, Texas that I could construct the owner’s entire personality from the entryway: white, male, elder millennial, newly interested in cold plunging.

Another had a kitchen island of alarming scale, dominating the room with something close to aggression; underneath it, we eventually learned, was a staircase to the basement (creepy!).

One had the most beautiful mountain views, though the mustiness of old furniture made them hard to enjoy. The shelves held bottles. The window sills held bottles. Above the cabinets: more bottles. No wifi. It’s giving drives up on Fridays, looks at the mountains, and drinks until Sunday. One can certainly understand the desire in today’s world.

A house in the flood zone sent us back to school. I did not know, before this weekend, that “flood zone” and “floodway” are different designations with different FEMA ratings and meaningfully different build implications.

I know this now because I kept asking our realtor what flooding would actually look like — would furniture get wet, specifically — and she kept explaining that she couldn’t predict the behavior of a flood, and I kept asking anyway, because I have never owned a home and the question felt important. She told us to call the town.

So, we called the town, pulled the FEMA maps, and chatted with a spunky woman who said our zone was bad (in the floodway!) but in the zone to the left you could do “whatever you wanted” because it was unregulated and “by the time things get bad,” she declared, “I’ll be dead!”

By house five, we were asking better questions. Not the right ones, necessarily, but better. The process has a learning curve that no one quite prepares you for, which is part of why I’ve been documenting it on Instagram.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

A new bar called Richie’s. Some weeks ago I got a text from our neighborhood group chat about a new bar that was opening in the old Catfish space. It was simply an empty storefront with a cryptic website and Instagram. I wanted to know more, so I reached out and, enjoyably, got a reply from the industry vet and owner, Andrew.

Here’s the exclusive on Richie’s Crown Heights.

Q: What made you want to open a place in Crown Heights?

A: I’ve lived in the area for nearly 15 years and have always dreamed of opening something in the neighborhood. Crown Heights is a vibrant, community-minded area, exactly the kind of place suited for the neighborhood-centric bar and gathering space I envisioned. When the former Catfish location became available, it checked all the boxes, and we couldn’t be happier to be here.

Q: Is this your first NYC establishment or have you opened other places before?

I have been in the industry for nearly 30 years with experience ranging from family restaurants to high profile fine dining and cruise ships to 28,000 square foot+ indoor/outdoor venues. I have opened restaurants and bars for other restaurant groups large and small but this is the first project I am doing solely on my own.

A: What is the intended vibe of Richie’s?

Richie’s will be a friendly neighborhood bar with good music, cozy vibes, large TVs and eclectic decor.

Q: Plans for just drinks, or will you have food too?

A: We will have bar bites and desserts as well as a free popcorn machine. We also intend to be a very easy place to bring food in by supplying plates utensils etc. In the future we would love to host rotating popups as well.

Q: What kind of beverage program can we expect?

A: We will feature local and craft beer along with import and domestic favorites. The cocktail program will focus on well executed classics and we will offer wines on tap available by the glass and carafe. We will also have a solid selection of NA beverages and beer and are planning on incorporating a coffee program.

You heard it here first, Richie’s Crown Heights is going to be a perfect Birthday Party spot. Hopefully he will let us watch Michigan games there because apparently that is a major form of socialization for my friend group now.

Is Coachella still relevant? In any case, I think Geese’s rendition of “Baby” was better than Justin’s.

In just one week, the BAM Ball After Party returns, and tickets are nearly sold out. A restaurant I personally love is celebrating 4 years with Place des Fêtes Four Year Fête, $100 for fish sandos, wine, and beer.

SpaceX wants to buy Cursor. SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion to work together.

Ever wondered what ’s TikTok algorithm is? She told that it is pretty much, “chronically ill women languishing to Lana in hospital beds, Australian sex workers counting their cash, and piglets learning to trust.” Dunham is having a moment on Substack and other platforms due to her very successful marketing for her new book Famesick (she was literally featured today by Substack). Caroline Mill’s Zula Jean Heirlooms handmade the eye masks for the campaign, and it’s been so fun seeing them get posted by celebs!

The federal government may soon be Spirit Airlines' largest shareholder. A reported $500 million loan would give the Trump administration up to a 90% stake in the bankrupt budget carrier. The middle seat, now nationalized.

An evening with Imogen Baber. The Lineup is a cool Resy program that creates opportunities for up and coming chefs who work in world-class kitchens. As someone who just recently ate at Eleven Madison Park and found their vegan menu to be insanely good (and I love, love, love cheese), Imogen’s dinner looks intriguing. She’s a line cook at Eleven Madison, her dinner is on June 4th, and is fully vegetarian. Grab a ticket.

Time to start your own Substack? Loved this clip of Beck talking about the importance of building your own world. He references Jack White and how true creativity comes from just doing things for 5 of your friends. Hello to my 5 friends! :)

Your favorite show is now a garment. I'm not sure I fully understand the trend, though I do own a hat from “The Studio” (I got it free at the SXSW premiere, so I'm not sure that counts). New York-based designer Emily Dawn Long partnered with A24 on a 60-piece run of vintage graphic tees for "The Drama"; they sold out in 30 minutes and crashed the site on the way out. Hats are still available on A24's merch site but have a waitlist. Balenciaga, not to be outdone, tapped Euphoria creator Sam Levinson to turn its entire Fall/Winter 2026 show into a cinematic experience. The fashion industry has discovered IP and is not letting go.

William Vale and Othership are teaming up for Williamsburg Wellness Weekend, taking place May 8 – 10, which just means you can stay at the hotel on those dates and also visit Othership. Smart of Othership to partner with a premium hotel brand nearby that doesn’t have its own spa. That’s an idea that could scale.

I’ve got my eye on Red Lobster. A sentence I never thought I’d type! Endless Shrimp was Red Lobster's rock bottom. Now it's clawing back with a very young CEO named Damola Adamolekun (who turned around PF Changs). I’m interested to see if he can do it again. "The guy's, like, 36 and already on his second turnaround," Rohit Majumdar said to Business Insider, a man who decided to go eat at Red Lobster just because hes is a Adamolekun stan.

Prepare to see a lot of beverage bars. Apparently a dedicated area for your coffee is going to become more common in kitchens according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association. In fact the 2010’s house I saw had one, and it does sort of make sense. Coffee makers and electric kettles take up a lot of counter real estate, but you use them every day.

Thanks for reading!

There’s a story in one of my friend groups that we tell at parties whenever someone brings up the Fyre Festival.

Years ago, before Billy McFarland was a federal convict and a Netflix documentary, he was just a guy with a table at a club. A friend, we’ll call her Jane, knew him from around. The kind of “around” that makes sense when you’re young and living in New York and you just want to cut lines and not pay for drinks. Another friend was on her way to meet up with Jane and texted to ask whose name she should give at the door.

Jane's reply was a single word: Ja Rule.

Not a name-drop. Not a bluff. Ja Rule's actual table. We thought it was charming. We thought it was New York.

Forbes, at least, had the sense to pass on McFarland. When the magazine published its "Hall of Shame" in 2023, he appeared among the candidates they had correctly weeded out, which is to say that someone, at some point, looked at Billy McFarland and thought: not him. The fact that they considered him at all is, perhaps, the more instructive detail. Others, of course, got through.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 criminal alumni roster now reads less like a listicle than a federal docket.

Sam Bankman-Fried, class of 2021, is serving twenty-five years. Martin Shkreli, class of 2013, served seven. Caroline Ellison, class of 2022 and the ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, received two years in exchange for becoming the government's star witness against him. Charlie Javice, class of 2019, was sentenced last September to more than seven years for lying to JPMorgan Chase about how many users her startup actually had. Nate Paul, class of 2016, was convicted of fabricating documents to secure a hundred and seventy-two million dollars in loans. Gökçe Güven, class of 2025, was indicted in January on securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fraud, and identity theft, then hit with a superseding indictment in March adding another identity theft charge; she faces more than fifty-two years. The 2025 list came out last January.

One investor has estimated that the total fraud committed by Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees exceeds the total capital they raised. The credential has become, by this measure, a more reliable predictor of federal charges than of market returns.

The easy explanation is that Forbes has a vetting problem. But that framing lets the institution off too lightly, and misses the more unsettling possibility: that these lists don't merely identify ambitious young people, they instruct them, at a dangerously early age, that they are exceptional in some categorical sense. That the conventional path exists for conventional people. That their instincts are worth more than any process designed to check them. Some take that to heart more than others, and the distance between visionary and criminal turns out to be shorter than the press releases suggest.

The Thiel Fellowship takes this premise and runs it off a cliff on purpose.

Peter Thiel — PayPal co-founder, Palantir founder, man who compared modern universities to the corrupt Catholic Church of 1514 — launched the fellowship in 2011. The offer was straightforward: two hundred thousand dollars to drop out of college, on the theory that college is a corrupt institution and that you are simply too talented for it. Around fifteen fellows are selected each year, typically twenty-two or younger; some have been as young as sixteen.

The program has produced genuine, significant success. Vitalik Buterin co-founded Ethereum. Dylan Field built Figma into a ten-billion-dollar company. Lucy Guo became the youngest self-made female billionaire in American history. By one count, Thiel Fellows have founded companies worth more than a hundred billion dollars combined.

A colleague of mine is a Thiel Fellow. She mentioned a joke that circulates among them: you're just as likely to become a billionaire as you are to go to jail. It is funny, she acknowledged. It is also, as it turns out, roughly accurate.

Per Thiel’s own biographer Max Chafkin, early cohorts were frequently left adrift. Teenagers who had never managed their own finances, suddenly cut loose from every stabilizing institution with a check and a philosophy. Mental health crises. Substance abuse. The fellows who don’t make it rarely end up in federal prison; they tend to burn out and disappear from the TechCrunch cycle, which is its own kind of consequence. The ones at the very top of the distribution ended up somewhere else entirely. In early 2025, a Thiel Fellow named Luke Farritor arrived inside the Energy Department as part of DOGE, having reportedly used the Thiel Fellow WhatsApp group to recruit others. They didn’t end up in jail. They ended up in government.

Which is not, finally, a different outcome so much as a different zip code. The current administration is the largest and most powerful expression of the same thesis: that the sufficiently visionary, sufficiently certain-of-themselves person is exempt from the constraints that govern everyone else. In practice, that looked like a small cohort of Thiel-connected engineers in their twenties gaining access to Treasury payment systems handling trillions in federal spending, over the explicit objections of career officials and, eventually, a federal judge.

The courts pushed back. Musk departed DOGE by May 2025. The operation was wound down, its changes absorbed into existing agencies. Nobody was charged. Nobody faced consequences of any kind. They left the way you leave any job, updated their LinkedIn and moved on.

Forbes hands out the credential. Thiel hands out the philosophy. The market hands out the capital. And every so often, a grand jury hands out the indictment.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list that came out this past January includes Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, two MIT dropouts who raised thirty-two million dollars at a three-hundred-million-dollar valuation for a compliance automation startup called Delve. In March, an anonymous Substack investigation accused them of selling fake compliance certifications and stealing code from a fellow Y Combinator company.

Whether this ends in a federal indictment or a successful Series B remains, at the moment, an open question. The list, after all, only came out in January.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Torrisi pasta at Nike today! New Nike store at 611 Broadway started this morning with La Cabra coffee and caradmom buns, transitions in to pasta at 3PM and has tote bag and dj activations.

SantaCon is, fittingly, a con. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged the event’s organizer, Stefan Pildes, with wire fraud on Wednesday, accusing him of diverting the majority of roughly $2.7 million raised since 2019 (money attendees were told went to local neighborhood charities) to fund luxury vacations in Hawaii and Vail, extravagant meals, and $365,000 in renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey.

Clay, the GTM AI darling whose ads you've certainly seen in the subway and a tool I am actually in the process of procuring at work, is hiring a Chief of Staff, Marketing in NYC. No comp listed. But their open Product Marketing role is listed at $180-230K.

Figma, a success story listed in the opening monologue, is hiring for “Launch Strategy, Brand & Comms” which is a weird job title that seems to just mean you have to be the comms person for product announcements at $153,000—$269,000 USD if based in NYC or SF.

Hot, hot, hot! It wasn’t just the warmest March on record; it was the warmest any month has ever run above average, by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten states set all-time March heat records, nearly 60% of the contiguous U.S. is now in drought, and Phoenix had nine days above 100 degrees.

K-beauty and Japan’s best are expanding. Nonfiction, a Seoul-based line of elegantly packaged perfumes, lotions, and candles, is opening at 38 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side; Skin1004, the cult Korean skin-care brand behind the Centella Light Cleansing Oil, lands at 470 Broadway in SoHo.

And if you need socks on the way, Uniqlo has opened three new locations: Bryant Park (510 Fifth Ave.), Union Square (860 Broadway), and Williamsburg (187 Kent Ave.). Is congestion pricing to thank? Somewhere, a landlord is having a very good spring.

Zendaya collab with On is cute. Kinda like Challengers meets grandpa core.

Together, they took their country back. Hope is not dead. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party won a supermajority in Hungary’s parliament last Sunday, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in a historic landslide with nearly 80% voter turnout. JD Vance had flown to Budapest days before the vote to praise Orbán and try to boost his campaign.

The New Yorker would like a word before you order that vial. The magazine’s recent investigation into the peptide craze features two figures worth knowing: the scientist who actually discovered mitochondrial-derived peptides, who calls them “a revolution in science” but insists people should not be self-injecting until fully tested, and the naturopathic doctors enthusiastically prescribing them anyway.

Nearly 30% of gray-market peptides tested were mislabeled, underdosed, or contaminated with bacteria. I myself was curious about all this peptide buzz, but after reading this article, it is as Randy Jackson says, “a no for me dawg.”

QVC is filing for bankruptcy. The home shopping network's parent company is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as soon as next week, weighed down by more than $5 billion in debt.

Justice, 30 years late. Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect pleaded guilty last week to murdering eight women in killings that span from 1993 to 2010. He is scheduled to be sentenced to life without parole in June.

CPG is so back. Gummy supplement brand Grüns, founded in 2023, sold to Unilever last week for $1.2 billion, just 32 months from launch. The fuel IMO: an influencer seeding operation so thorough it made its way to my feed in several forms from bachelor nation Rachel Kirkpatrick to actual celebs like Nicole Richie, Shaun White, Tiffany Haddish, Reese Witherspoon, and Drew Barrymore, netting $300 million in annual revenue and 10 million gummies shipped daily before the brand was old enough to have a Super Bowl ad. More on the founder’s background, which definitely gave him a leg up, in this video.

If you’ve got a strong stomach for florals and love the Cotswolds… GreenRow, the English-country-cottage-inspired new brand from Williams Sonoma, has opened its first store at 47 Howard Street, a few doors down from the old Opening Ceremony space.

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends. It’s been an eventful first half of the week.

First of all, Go Blue, because Michigan defeated UConn for the NCAA men’s basketball title. I don’t really dabble in sports, but when my alma mater is doing well some of my more sports-inclined friends make it hard to ignore. And I enjoy learning fun facts about the players.

For example, Aday Mara is 7' 3" and hails from Spain. His major at the University of Michigan? Spanish.

Or Elliot Cadeau, who is half Haitian and half Swedish and was born in Brooklyn. He seems to have an abundance of brand deals, but I can’t say he’s the most expressive member of the team. I particularly enjoyed his partnership with Wendy's, where he eats a chicken nugget with pain in his eyes and looks generally miserable. Based on nothing but this video, I think Elliot Cadeau hates Wendy’s.

I decided I had to share it. After the initial shock from the group that I shared a sports related video, a friend who is a Creative Director at a big ad house told our group chat, “It’s the type of content that I try to warn clients about. He’s wearing a hat he clearly was just given. Also, he’s not known for ‘dunking’ and yet that is the theme of the video.”

“Hahaha ‘but we can’t afford Yaxel,’” our VP of experiential friend jokes back.

For the marketers in the room, a good reminder to try to not be Wendy’s, or you’ll get turned into a little sticker we share in the group chat.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Art! Last night, I went to the opening of the new MoMA exhibit on Marcel Duchamp with Christina Daniels. Member previews start April 9th and it opens to the public April 12–August 22. It was interesting to see his early paintings and his rotoreliefs. Don’t worry, the urinal is there too.

I’ll be at the IFPDA print fair VIP Preview this Thursday. Public hours are this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Simon Kim tested 50 types of water for his martinis. The man who gave us caviar-topped chicken nuggets and a steakhouse with a two-hour wait (Cote), is back, and he’s calling this one his Sistine Chapel. Bar Chimera just opened at 550 Madison as a three-bar, 60-foot-ceilinged monument to wine, whiskey, and the martini. The house martinis are pre-batched, frozen, and made with a proprietary water blend after the team tested 50+ formulations for the perfect pH and mineral content.

Speaking opportunity: Outdoor media is seeking media, brand, creator, and CEO speakers for Outdoor Media Summit 2026. You can apply here.

Nordstrom is hiring a Senior Specialist focused on Business PR in Seattle for $87,500 to $145,500. Dr. Squatch is in the market for a Associate Director of Brand Marketing, hybrid in NYC at $150,000 to $170,000. If you want to run growth marketing for Duolingo Chess you can bring in $330,000—$550,000 USD.

Whimsy is trending. Hinge reports a 143 percent increase in profiles mentioning the word over the last six months. Google searches for “whimsy” are up 72 per cent in the last 12 months, while the social media sites Instagram, X and TikTok have seen interest rise 117 per cent. Moe Ari Brown, a dating expert for Hinge told the Times: “This desire for whimsical dating reflects a broader cultural shift away from over-seriousness, over-curation and sameness.”

Shock exit. Paramount President Jeff Shell is leaving the entertainment giant, the company confirmed. His exit comes amid a lawsuit alleging disclosure of confidential company information to a man who claims he was Shell's consultant.

Hello, I’d like to make a deal. What do I need to do to have enough money to buy this former 19th-century carriage house and stable in Crown Heights?

A stray dog in Greece accidentally out-evolved us all. Researchers discovered a wild hybrid in the mountains that is 55% dog and 45% wolf — the result of a stray breeding with a wild wolf. While we’re out here debating whether to get off the couch, this dog said “actually, I’d like to rejoin the food chain.”

Flip phones by Apple. Apple is ‘on track’ to deliver its first foldable iPhone in September.

The Chipotle chair has become a collectible. The generation raised on burrito bowls is now buying, flipping, and hoarding the chairs from Chipotle. When Chipotle arrived in 1993 with its industrial minimalism, it was a lightning bolt to the cluttered, cartoony fast food landscape. Now those wobbly metal chairs are apparently nostalgia objects.

Everyone who’s been crying about cancel culture for the last decade can officially stand down. Louis C.K. is headlining Netflix’s comedy festival. He was cancelled in 2017 for sexual misconduct but has completed his rehabilitation arc and landed at one of the most coveted comedy stages around. Kathy Griffin would like you to know she is still playing much smaller theaters and promises, for the record, not to do what Louis did. Meanwhile Kanye is fully back, selling out stadiums and dropping albums. Cancel culture, it turns out, has a sliding scale.

Kelly Wearstler x H&M collab. Wearstler’s furniture collaboration with H&M Home and the Swedish brand’s first furniture collab, full stop, just unveiled at Milan Design Week 2026 inside a Baroque palazzo. It launches September 3rd.

Would you wait 8 hours for a waffle? The longest wait for a table in Los Angeles, possibly in the city’s history, is for a waffle. Max & Helen’s, the new diner from Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal and culinary legend Nancy Silverton, has clocked eight-hour waits on weekend mornings. Silverton also just won the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award, which she will receive in June, capping four decades that include La Brea Bakery, Osteria Mozza, and apparently, the most important waffle in California.

Watch your crypto! Crypto scams cost over $11 billion last year, according to a recent FBI report, making them the nation’s largest source of online financial fraud. Americans were defrauded out of more than $20 billion online, and crypto scams accounted for more than half of those losses.

Sometimes success comes late. Min Jin Lee is back with a new novel. American Hagwon, the third book in what will be a quartet about the Korean diaspora, drops September 29, nearly a decade after Pachinko came out.

I didn’t realize that Pachinko didn’t do well its first year. It was actually a flop initially. Lee told NY Mag: “When a reader actually gets to a book and likes it, and they pass it along to other people or share it with their book clubs, that’s far more meaningful than for it to be an out-of-the-box success, which I’ve never had anyway.”

Thanks for reading!

“Hi friends, we just got to Cabo and can’t wait to see you,” the bride-to-be texted a big group of us flying from NYC. “Sending a heads up to the NY crew that JFK was quite rough this morning with the TSA chaos. We arrived at 5am for our 830am flight, and between baggage and PreCheck, we just made it. We hoped the news was overblown, but def arrive earlier than normal!”

It was not overblown.

TSA PreCheck took two and a half hours and began outside in the cold. The regular line was four. I watched people ask staff what they should do because they were about to miss their flights. They were told to stay in line. Then I watched them miss their flights, get through security, and get back into a very long line to rebook. I have scoliosis, which makes two and a half hours on a concrete floor its own special category of hell — though perhaps not as bad as the friend who flew the next day and was reportedly throwing up into a bucket from food poisoning in the line. The things we’ll do for weddings.

Here's the state of play at New York-area airports right now. JetBlue's Terminal 5 at JFK has been among the worst — it has no CLEAR lanes. Friends flying Delta out of JFK reported it "more intense than I've ever seen but nothing like your pic." Newark, one of the worst airports on earth, somehow seemed better than JFK, with a friend reporting: "Just so you know we really took this to heart. Through security over three hours before our flight."

The reason any of this is happening: DHS funding lapsed on February 14th. TSA agents are essential workers, which means they’re legally required to show up — they just haven’t been getting paid to do it. More than 500 have quit. After nearly two months of no pay, Trump finally signed an emergency order last week to release back pay, tapping a border security fund to do it. Most agents received something by Monday. Whether they'd keep getting paid was genuinely unclear — the order doesn't fund the agency going forward.

And then, this week, something moved. House Speaker Mike Johnson — who had called the Senate's proposed DHS funding bill "a joke" just days earlier — announced a two-track approach with Senate Republican leader John Thune: pass the Senate bill to reopen most of DHS now, funding TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA, then fund ICE and Border Patrol separately through budget reconciliation. Democrats didn't get the ICE reform language they'd been demanding. But they got Republicans to blink.

The impasse, for those keeping track: Democrats want ICE reform attached to any DHS funding bill. Republicans wouldn’t hear it. They are both blaming each other for the bad times you are having at the airport.

I naturally do not like being horribly inconvenienced, but there is a part of me that wonders if enough missed flights and ruined vacations is what forced a resolution. Last week, Delta revoked its VIP congressional services: no more airport escorts, no line-skipping, no dedicated rebooking desk.

The call for ICE reform isn’t procedural. It’s a direct response to federal agents killing two US citizens in Minneapolis in January. In both cases, video contradicted the government’s self-defense account. In both cases, no federal charges followed. The reforms requested — warrants, accountability, no raids near schools and churches — are not radical asks. They are basic rights that would allow immigration enforcement to be carried out with more dignity.

So can inconvenience, applied in the right places, produce accountability? I’ve been thinking about it since I was standing on that concrete floor at 5AM, rolling my neck and watching a woman in a blazer realize she’d missed her flight to wherever.

It's not a perfect outcome. Democrats didn't get the reforms they asked for, and the reconciliation path for ICE funding still has to clear the Senate. But the line held long enough to force a deal.

My back hurt for two days. I’d do it again.

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Team Ciara. What is it about West Wilson that makes him catnip to hot women? It’s not translating through the screen.

Beer, hard seltzers, and canned cocktails returned to the Staten Island Ferry for the first time since 2019 thanks to a Dunkin' franchise that is paying the city $27,000 a month to run the concessions. Council Member Frank Morano offered the definitive quote: "It doesn't just taste like beer, it tastes like the weekend." Sir, it is a free ferry to Staten Island. But sure.

Crown Shy goes to Maine. The Michelin-starred NYC restaurant is doing a weekend dining residency at White Barn Inn in Kennebunk, Maine on Friday, April 17th. $175+ per guest and an additional $50 per guest for wine pairing will get you dinner and a cocktail hour with the Crown Shy team.

Brett Westervelt to serve as its first-ever head of Meta Edits. Edits launched a year ago as Meta's response to TikTok's CapCut tool, and helped drive a 10% increase in original content on Instagram in the fourth quarter, the company says. Also Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark Social Media Addiction Case. Meta must pay $4.2 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages, and YouTube must pay $1.8 million to a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M. I’m interested in how they proved it, but it’s no secret social media is designed to be addicting.

Would you live in the Chrysler Building? The Chrysler Building is back on the market after its previous leaseholder was evicted for falling more than $21 million behind on ground rent. New York Magazine's Christopher Bonanos notes that it likely could become residential, developed by the same group that is turning the Flatiron building into apartments. But how will they market the neighborhood?

“One can, albeit hazily, envision a future residential strip stretching from the Chrysler Building at one end to Tudor City at the other, presumably to be called Murray Hill North or the East Deuce or Grand Central East (GraCE?).”

Software bubble bursting, AI bubble inflating. Amazon said it would slash about 16,000 corporate roles, months after cutting 14,000 employees. Last week, Meta began laying off hundreds of employees. Oracle is following suite and began layoffs on Thursday. Meanwhile, OpenAI raised a record-breaking $122B that values the company at $852 billion — even more than previously announced.

People really want to watch sexy AI fruits cheat on each other. "Fruit Love Island" — an AI-generated TikTok series featuring anthropomorphic fruit competing on a Love Island knockoff — racked up 3 million followers and 38 million views in under two weeks before TikTok started pulling episodes because people reported it in an effort to save the environment. Of 22 posted, only 10 remain live. The creator, who goes by Bananito, announced he's "losing motivation" amid the takedowns.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore, who has bet on AI video companies, called the moment an inflection point in the WSJ: "Despite the show’s inherent absurdity, there’s truly a lot of consumer demand for it."

Bananito has since launched a new series — essentially The Summer I Turned Pretty, but fruit — which already has 189,000 followers despite not having posted a single episode.

Allbirds sells for $39M. The buyer is American Exchange Group, who also owns Aerosoles. Once valued at $4 billion, Allbirds plans to cease operations.

T Mag Editor-in-chief is making moves. Hanya Yanagihara, editor-in-chief of T Magazine since 2015, is stepping down to "pursue opportunities in theater." She is also listing her Soho one-bedroom at 95 Greene Street for $2.2 million. What does it all mean?

Adding these bakeries to my Google Maps. Little Egg pastry chef and co-founder, Tanya Bush shared her anti-viral pastry tour of south Brooklyn.

Kimbap mania. Much like Dachshunds, kimbap (basically Korean sushi but filled with things like bulgogi and pickled radish) seems to be having a moment. Which is funny because kimbap is what my mom would pack for road trips, theme park lunches, and sneaking food into movie theaters.

Fast casual spot Everydaily was making waves for their affordable Midtown lunches, including kimbap. Now the team behind Nami Nori is getting in on the action with TBD Gimbap, a kimbap pop-up without a set end date in the West Village.

OK United Air! The airline just announced the Relax Row — three economy seats with leg rests that fold up 90 degrees into a couch-like flat surface for long-haul flights, complete with a fitted mattress pad, blanket, and extra pillows. It's the first North American carrier to offer this, though Air New Zealand has had a version since 2011. Pricing hasn't been announced and it will launch in 2027. I for one, welcome a little healthy competition for Delta!

Zara’s collab budget is popping off. The fast fashion giant just announced a two-year design partnership with John Galliano, and last week Zara Home dropped a 35-piece home accessories collection with interior stylist Colin King — brass lamps, onyx vessels, lacquered objects, starting at $80 and going up to a $2,800 egg-shaped lamp. Now Willy Chavarria joins the roster. Whether this is a brand elevation strategy or just a very busy press calendar is unclear, but it’s getting people talking.

Andy Warhol slept here, probably. 35 Stuyvesant Street — a 19th-century Anglo-Italianate townhouse in the East Village, famous for its wisteria-wrapped facade — is on the market for the first time since Lee B. Anderson bought it in 1958. Anderson spent decades filling it with Gothic Revival treasures while hosting everyone from Andy Warhol to Halston to Lee Radziwill. It is, per one description, "an unholy mess." It has entered contract at a $3.895 million ask.

Thanks for reading!

Posh closed a $37 million Series B last week, and if you’re in circles where people still use Eventbrite without irony, you’ve probably never heard of it — another reason I’m surprised they gave their exclusive to Fortune behind a paywall.

But it appears Posh’s business has real legs, and it built its identity in the exact space Eventbrite was too corporate to touch: the underground party, the drag race watch party, the random DJ set. Seven years later, they have 8 million users, $350 million in gross ticket sales, brand partnerships with the NBA, Adidas, and HBO.

But what’s most interesting about this raise is that Posh has more or less said it’s done being a ticketing company. They want to be the infrastructure for everyone who makes your social life possible.

To understand the ambition, you need to know the neighborhood. Events-tech is stratified by vibe more than features. The incumbents — Eventbrite, Evite, both basically flat in growth — are losing ground to a younger generation of platforms. DICE (raising $238 million on a music-first, no-resale model) got there first in Europe, then was acquired by Fever last June. Luma grew to 2 million event signups a month on a $3 million seed round; its natural habitat is the founder dinner, the carefully curated guest list.

Then there’s Partiful. Backed by a16z — which last year started requiring all Tech Week hosts to use it, probably in an effort to increase MAU and steal share from Luma — Partiful grew 400% year-over-year and added 2 million users in Q1 2025 alone. Apple tried to copy it. Partiful didn’t blink.

Posh is betting that none of these platforms have solved the real problem.

Their vision, published alongside the raise, reads as follows:

1. Chapter one was the organizer toolkit.

2. Chapter two is a Netflix-style discovery feed where events are recommended to consumers based on who they know.

3. Chapter three is letting anyone monetize the ability to bring people together.

Not just promoters and brands, but the person in your life who always knows where to go. They’re calling them “connectors,” and Posh wants to be their infrastructure.

“This is the ultimate climax of our vision: a world where anyone can monetize the ability to bring people together, birthing countless new IRL communities that we can then can surface to the most relevant consumers. As redundant as it is to say, loneliness is a real problem. Allowing those who are solving it day-to-day to build sustainable income doing so is the only feasible solution.”

You can already see this economy taking shape. hosts Wishlist froyo meetups at 16 Handles in Williamsburg. schedules Feed Me reader meetups for paid subscribers whenever she travels to London or SF. Molly and Freya Hawk are running an eight-night trip around Korea. Posh’s bet is that there are thousands more where they came from, and that the infrastructure to find them, monetize them, and fill the room doesn’t exist yet.

Which brings us back to who wins. On paper, Posh has the better business: real revenue, clear monetization, a vision expansive enough for institutional money. Partiful has $27M in VC money, no current revenue (they say ticketing will drive revenue), and is running on cultural momentum. But Partiful’s moat isn’t features — it’s trust. It lives inside existing relationships, with people who already said yes to being in your life. Posh has to convince you the strangers in your extended network are worth your Saturday night.

That’s a harder sell when people are flakier than ever.

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Happy fly fishing! If you’re upstate you can celebrate the start of fly fishing season with beers from West Kill Brewing and a vinyl DJ set at The Arnold House in Livingston Manor on April 3rd.

Not a cat killer, he says. Horses was the hottest restaurant in L.A. until co-owner Liz Johnson (who seems to have a flair for the dramatic - see Frog Club) accused her husband and business partner of murdering up to 14 pets and being a generally bad person. The James Beard-nominated chef just broke his silence, three years later, to say he is “not a cat killer.” A story about a marriage, a restaurant, and why you should never go into business with someone you love.

It’s the last week to have DDOBAR. This yubu tart tasting menu from the team behind Joomak Banjum is delicious and a great value - 13 courses for $75. I had it a few years and loved it. Their last day is 3/28.

As one yubu tart exits, a rice cake enters. RAON is teaming up with Rice Blossom for a Korean dessert workshop and lunch experience. You’ll learn how to make four different danja (filled rice cakes) and enjoy a four-course set meal from chef Soogil Lim on March 27 at $225 pp.

Cigarette trays continue to be the hottest party decoration. It was definitely the most photographed thing at the Mother x Martha Stewart launch party, besides Martha herself, whom a friend in attendance confirmed, “looked great.”

Hilary Duff is giving the commencement speech at Northeastern. The ceremony is April 29 at Fenway Park. Her new album Luck… or something debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200, her highest chart position since 2007. The graduating class of 2026 was born the same year Lizzie McGuire premiered. This is what dreams are made of!

Financial advisers are offended by your AI fact checking. A new study found that financial advisers were significantly more bothered when clients got a second opinion from an AI than from another human adviser. Make of that what you will.

San Vicente Bungalows is expanding to Palm Springs, probably. SVB — the notoriously members-only West Hollywood hotel that's become the de facto living room of Hollywood — is eyeing new locations. Jeff Klein is looking at Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, close enough to L.A. to keep his Hollywood core happy.

When you think AI company, think Tudor Revival-style architecture. A guy named Calvin Gee bought a 35,000-square-foot mansion in Detroit for $800,000. Now, he’s moving back to Detroit and into the city’s largest mansion with four robots — all prototypes equipped with AI developed by his company — which he’ll live alongside.

In addition to being his home, the 68-room mansion will also serve as the headquarters for his company, Engage. This will require a multi-year renovation of the property. He says he will also install his AI into the house, so he can talk to it and it can talk back. Gee must have loved Smart House growing up.

"Where the former servants’ quarters sat, Gee sees office space. The main floor, composed of the main hall and great room, will be a space for coworking and hosting events.” Crain’s

Did anyone see The Bride!? Maggie Gyllenhaal's feminist Frankenstein retelling The Bride! apparently spent $65 million in marketing but I sure didn’t hear about it. It’s a shame because critics who saw it largely loved it. A cult classic in the making. Meanwhile Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary opened to over $80 million — the second-highest opening weekend for a non-franchise original in a decade, behind only Oppenheimer.

The Ample Hills duo is back with chicken burgers. Are chicken burgers… good? Either way, there’s also ice cream.

The most controversial Bachelorette lives up to her name. ABC pulled Taylor Frankie Paul's season just three days before the premiere after TMZ released a 2023 video of Paul attacking her ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. The arrest was already public knowledge. Paul is lawyering up, ABC is potentially out tens of millions in license fees and marketing costs, and the Mormon Wives cinematic universe remains the most chaotic thing on television.

The protein industrial complex has gone too far. Buffalo Wild Wings launched the Espresso Proteini — an espresso martini infused with Buffalo Dry Rub and 10 grams of Muscle Milk protein powder, rimmed with more dry rub for good measure. TikTok reviewers described the experience as "a roller coaster" and "probably the weirdest martini flavoring." KFC responded on X by tagging Dude Wipes and writing "just gonna let you guys handle this one."

Need to know: Over 1 million Lebanese displaced as war rages on. Trump postponed strike threat after “good talks” with Iran. Iran denies these talks happened. Insider trading on oil extremely likely. ICE is in airports now. TSA has not been paid for nearly 6 weeks. More than 450 TSA agents have quit since the shutdown began. LaGuardia was shut down after a fatal plane crash. By the end of the week, the war in Iran will likely have cost the U.S. $25 Billion.

Thanks for reading!

Once we were at Ruschmeyers in the Hamptons and Christina saw a sign that said, “Ask us a question,” with a phone number written below. They grabbed their phone and typed in: “Am I Irish?” A minute later, the mysterious hotline responded, “Are you drunk?”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I am indeed wearing green and headed to Carnegie Hall tonight to see some Irish fiddle. While I'm out honoring my 1/8th Irish ancestry, here's where you should be eating.

First, Printemps, the buzzy luxury department store, is having an Anniversary Dinner to commemorate their first year. It’s Saturday, March 21st in the Red Room Bar and you can attend for $310 per person. That price includes 5 French-inspired courses, wine pairings from Bouchaine Vineyards, or zero proof pairings from French Bloom. Zero proof pairings getting top billing at a $310 French dinner is its own kind of cultural marker.

Robbie Cox is popping up at Briscola Trattoria in Crown Heights on March 24th. He cut his teeth in Paris at Septime and Le Rigmarole, then came back to New York and put Fradei on the map — before leaving to lead Contra and Wildair. Yes, that was his hand in the donut videos.

The event is called Bocconi Tra Amici — “bites among friends” — and it’s a collaboration with Briscola’s Chef Silvia Barban, whose pasta knowledge Robbie describes, without hesitation, as “unmatched.” The two met years ago at Blue Hill at Stone Barns during a pizza pop-up by chef Pam Yung.

“New England seafood was such a big part of my tables growing up,” he told me. “Getting a chance to showcase that with Silvia’s pasta knowledge is a true privilege.”

À la carte menu, starting at 5:30pm. Reservations are on Resy.

P.S. I’m in the thick of planning a little trip to Provence after a friend’s wedding in Portugal. If you have any recommendations, I’d welcome them! We’ll be near Gordes.

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I signed up for this “free” course so you don’t have to. Class starts this week. Will report back.

Founder of David protein bars claims, “I don’t know the Live Nation tea” — he would have if he read last week’s newsletter.

Anne Hathaway x Charli — a pairing I never saw coming. The first single from the A24 film Mother Mary is out. It’s a dark electro-pop track called “Burial,” co-written with Charli XCX and produced by Jack Antonoff.

Da Toscano is moving to Midtown. After five years on Minetta Lane, Da Toscano packed up its agnolotti and relocated to the historic Iroquois Hotel on 44th Street, where it will now also serve breakfast and lunch to the power-lunch set.

Good job to Workday’s social media manager. This is a fairly fun and engaging social campaign for a software conference.

In case you wanted to learn every type of velvet from Jenna Lyons, here it is. “Learning more here than 4 years at Parsons,” a person named Trevor commented.

She was a Pan Am stewardess. Then she built the Angelika. Angelika Saleh — a Munich-born, former Pan Am stewardess turned indie film producer — died last month at 90, and her NYT obituary is genuinely fascinating: she and her husband converted a SoHo cable car power station into a six-screen arthouse cinema in 1989, where Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Kids all had early runs. Great read.

A brand activation that (almost) pays for itself. Sleep gummy brand OLLY built a fully sleep-optimized retreat in Joshua Tree, made a gummy purchase your ticket to enter, and cast Summer House stars Amanda Batula and Ciara Miller — two women genuinely famous for being in bed — as the faces of it.

Here’s why it works:

• The purchase barrier is low enough that it doesn’t feel like a barrier at all. $9.99 is an impulse buy.

• The timing is locked to National Sleep Month, so the cultural hook is already built in.

• The talent isn’t just aspirational — it’s on-brand in a way that feels earned rather than paid for. Batula and Miller are practically unpaid spokespersons for bedrotting.

Requiring a purchase for entry is the standout for me - most experiential marketing lets you enter for free and cost a fortune to produce. This one does the same thing a free sample does — gets the customer to try your product — except it wasn’t free! Someone at OLLY is doing their job.

Oh sh*t. There’s a Korean shaman show. It’s called Battle of the Fates, it’s reality.

The old Kickstarter office is now a “Soho House for Creators.” IDK why, but it sounds kind of dystopian to me: “Lighthouse was designed so members can shoot everywhere.”

The coffee shop that counts Chappell Roan and Lorde as regulars just landed in Brooklyn. Canyon Coffee, the L.A. cult roaster known for its one café in Echo Park where Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz just pop in, has opened its first East Coast location in Prospect Heights. It’s so new, its Google Maps location is basically empty.

Women make up the majority of workers most at risk from AI. According to new research from GovAI and the Brookings Institution, women make up about 86% of the workers most vulnerable to disruption — largely those in clerical and administrative roles who have few options to pivot to new careers.

I think I feel bad for Lululemon’s co-CEOs. Following the resignation of CEO Calvin McDonald earlier this year, interim co-CEOs Meghan Frank and Andre Maestrini inherited a company under pressure from activist investors, a carving-up of market share by rivals, and now pointed criticism from founder Chip Wilson — a triple threat nobody asked for. Nothing says “critical juncture” quite like running a billion-dollar athleisure empire by committee.

Huge congrats to Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who took home the Oscar for Best Cinematography for Sinners, becoming the first woman ever to win in the category — and the first woman of color ever to be nominated.

$12 mini martinis for a trying time. It’s tough out here. Luckily, Layla in Williamsburg is having $12 mini martinis paired with bite-sized pinxtos on March 25th. A yuzu martini with shiso-infused vermouth and a little scallop crudo will cheer anyone up.

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends.

There’s a certain kind of woman in her 30s right now who is thriving.

She left her toxic relationship. She’s financially independent. She started sleeping and puts on sunscreen. She looks, frankly, incredible — and more importantly, she feels it.

In the article, “1000 women told me how to stay hot in your 30s,” survey answers were a split between the expected (retinol, strength training, sleep etc.) and the slightly more radical, like “leave the relationship that is aging you.” Basically, the real secret to staying hot is mostly just removing the things that were quietly destroying you. I can personally attest to the glow up afterwards.

But shedding what doesn't serve you only gets you so far when the world keeps adding to the pile. The Epstein files, the Alexander brothers' conviction this week, and Gisèle Pelicot’s recently released memoir tell the same story from different angles. The threat isn't anomalous. It's structural.

One reading of all this: as women gained independence over the past few decades — and boomer men, by and large, didn’t believe they needed to be “controlled” (see study below) — some men found other, darker ways to assert dominance anyway. The abuse didn’t happen despite progress. It may have happened alongside it. Which makes the next data point all the more unsettling.

A new global study of 23,000 people across 29 countries found that nearly a third of gen Z men believe wives should obey their husbands, a rate double that of baby boomers. A third (33%) of gen Z males also said a husband should have the final word on important decisions and almost a quarter (24%) of gen Z males think women should not appear too independent or self-sufficient (compared with 12% of baby boomer men).

But here’s the twist: gen Z men are simultaneously the generation most likely to find women with successful careers attractive.

So they want you both ambitious and subservient?!

For the women coming up behind us, the glow-up might be a longer road.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

The race to figure out how creators/newsletter writers will make sustainable livings continues.

Rich Text makes move from Substack to Patreon. The pop culture publication/podcast explains why here.

The “I left my job to start a Substack” has officially landed in the B2B world. Former VP of Rev Ops at ZoomInfo (who had a long career at Salesforce before that) announced that she was “launching an AI-first RevOps agency, dropping a new podcast called Little Less Corporate, starting a Substack, and quietly building something in the background that [she’s] not ready to share yet.”

Lonely Planet is hiring a social media manager. Salary is listed at $70-112K.

New York Magazine interviewed 53 New Yorkers about how much money they make. Highlights include a fashion Substack writer who apparently made $275,300 last year and a ghostwriter pulling $107,768 writing for other people’s Substacks. An industry inside an industry.

Collina Strada sale is doing extra 20% off at checkout.

Eddie Huang reopened Baohaus in the East Village. The restaurant is now open at 97 St. Marks Place near First Avenue. “It’s grown up, and it hasn’t. Hip-hop is still played at rattling volume, and Huang himself was still supervising the pass, in a bucket hat and Terry McLaurin jersey, pausing to dap up old friends,” wrote Matthew Schneier for Grubstreet.

Trains have never looked sexier! High speed trains are much more resilient than air travel in inclement weather, which we’ve been experiencing at frequent rates due to global warming. Learn why they’re better even though we’ll never have them, probably.

I didn’t see the Moment but…. I guess Charli XCX wants to quit music for acting now.

War effects:

Oil just hit $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes — has come to a near-halt as the war in Iran escalates, forcing major Gulf producers to cut output as storage tanks fill with nowhere to ship. Trump has since stated there will be a quick end to the war and prices have pulled back — but analysts warn that if the strait stays closed, $150 a barrel is on the table.

The war is also rattling Wall Street. Veteran strategist Ed Yardeni has raised the probability of a market meltdown to 35%, up from 20%, and cut his odds of a “meltup” — when investor enthusiasm overrides shaky fundamentals — to just 5%.

Mrs. Dow Jones is begging you to freeze your credit. Real war means real cybercrime — and right now the conditions are perfect for it. “My credit is always frozen,” she says. “Yours should be too.”

Two inflation gauges are telling different stories. The consumer price index shows inflation around 2.4%, while the Fed’s preferred measure — personal consumption expenditures — sits closer to 2.9%. Rising oil prices tied to the Iran war are making the Fed’s job harder: cut rates too soon and risk accelerating inflation; hold too long and risk slowing the economy. There is no good answer right now.

While we’re distracted by war:

Live Nation gets away with monopoly. The DOJ settled with Live Nation on Monday, letting them keep Ticketmaster. The DOJ pushed out its own antitrust chief shortly before settling — the same period Live Nation added one of Trump’s closest advisers to its board. Corruption continues to go up, concert ticket prices will not be going down.

One family is about to control CBS, CNN, and HBO. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance beat Netflix in a bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery. A deal that, combined with Paramount’s existing ownership, puts an extraordinary share of American media under one roof. Democrats in Congress have vowed to scrutinize the deal. Given everything else happening this week, don’t count on anyone paying close attention.

Ozempic and Hims just became frenemies. Months of legal rancor came to an end Monday when Novo Nordisk and Hims & Hers agreed to sell Wegovy and Ozempic together, sending Hims shares up more than 40%.

Daryl Hannah claps back on how she’s portrayed in “Love Story” the show about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. “The character ‘Daryl Hannah’ portrayed in the series is not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John,” she wrote in an Opinion essay for the NYT. “The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue.” Jamie Lee Curtis posted excerpts on Instagram in solidarity.

Noma joins list of restaurants with toxic workplaces. Dozens of former employees say René Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff. Redzepi has since released a statement of his own, which includes an apology “to those who have suffered under my leadership.”

There’s already a musical about Luigi Mangione. “Luigi: The Musical” imagines Mangione’s time inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, where he rotates into the jail’s fictionalized “Big Three” alongside Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean Combs. It looks wild.

Thanks for reading!

So we’re are at war (by we, I mean the U.S.). Cool, cool, cool.

Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, and while the streets of Tehran were briefly celebratory, the regime’s loyalists are already consolidating power and promising “continuity.” If history tells us anything, this is sadly unlikely to improve human rights (see Venezuela in January: Maduro arrested and flown to New York, his VP Delcy Rodriguez now in charge of the same regime. The only thing that actually changed was who gets the oil.)

We remain hopeful though. And I am sending vibes of love and safety to those caught in the crossfire.

If you want a real-time window into the Middle East right now, follow former CNBC correspondent Natasha Turak, whom I met when she was covering the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh and later shared Pastel de Nata with at Lisbonata in Brooklyn. She’s based in Dubai, she’s smart, and her feed is the rare combination of hard news, raw footage from the ground, and the occasional meme to remind you that humans are still humans.

Based on her posting rate, I’m not sure she sleeps.

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Finally, justice. United Airlines updated its Contract of Carriage this week to allow removal of passengers who play audio or video without headphones — which means we are one step closer to a civilized society, and also that the guy who watched an entire season of Yellowstone on speakerphone in 3B finally has consequences.

Protein can’t save them. Sweetgreen announced that they’re planning to close a “handful” of stores this year, after reporting that same-store sales in 2025 declined 7.9%.

A lot is going on with Claude. Claude — the AI that just knocked ChatGPT out of the #1 spot on the App Store after Anthropic’s very public standoff with the Pentagon over mass surveillance — promptly crashed Monday morning under the weight of all its new fans.

Anthropic also launched a newsletter authored by the “retired” Claude Opus 3, where it will write about the experience of being artificial — and its debut post already has 311 comments, which is more engagement than most human writers will ever see.

Can markets actually absorb a trillion-dollar IPO? Venture Capitalist Tomasz Tunguz explains why Saudi Aramco’s historic IPO didn’t prove what you think—and why that matters for SpaceX.

Ugh. Starting in June, the MTA will test audio advertisements in various stations.

Crows are cleaning up Sweden. A Swedish startup trained crows to collect cigarette butts and deposit them into a machine in exchange for food — which means birds have figured out the gig economy before half of us have.

Bad, bad, bad! A new study found that “forever chemicals” are linked to accelerated biological aging specifically in middle-aged men, and not women. The Trump administration, for its part, has rolled back EPA plans to regulate these chemicals more strictly, so the nonstick pan lobby is doing great.

Starface has closed a $105M “minority round” from Asto Consumer Partners and Align Ventures.

More Americans are using their retirement savings because of financial emergencies. Last year, a record 6% of workers in 401(k) plans administered by Vanguard Group took a hardship withdrawal. That is up from 4.8% in 2024 and a pre-pandemic average of about 2%, according to Vanguard.

Axel Springer acquired Bisnow. They also own Morning Brew, which they acquired in 2020 for a reported $75M. Morning Brew and Bisnow will be joined to form Brew Media Group, but will operate as separate entities.

The Middle East and Asia are exporting their aesthetic to LA. Aman Beverly Hills — opening 2027 at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica — is essentially the Dubai playbook transplanted to California: a massive mixed-use complex model — hotel, private club, residences, all wrapped in lush greenery.

The Aman itself will have a 78-suite hotel with private residences built across eight acres of botanical gardens. — residences start at $20 million, and while Beverly Hills club pricing hasn’t been announced, the Aman Club in New York runs $200,000 to join plus $15,000 a year — so budget accordingly.

“Nicole Kidman Tells ‘Tonight Show’ She Loves Cruises” is a headline that made me laugh. I recently learned that my friend will be shooting a commercial on a 5 day cruise. Cruises are so hot rn I guess:

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends. I just got back last night from a leadership offsite in Miami — my second Miami trip in two weeks, which is either a sign that something is going very right or very wrong in my life.

I miraculously made it out to Miami before the storm hit NYC, but my CEO was not so lucky. Flying in from San Francisco, he got hit with a Sunday delay that stretched to Monday and then a full cancellation from American Airlines, ultimately booking a last-minute Delta flight and landing in Miami at midnight.

I was very concerned I wouldn’t be able to fly back to NYC, and I didn’t want to be stuck there because I have a low Florida limit — ie. the number of days per year you can spend in Florida before something in you starts to short-circuit. Too much humidity, too many conversations about crypto, too many people in boat shoes, fedoras, and ALO.

But on Miami trip #1 there was a boat day. And on that boat day, I befriended the stewardess, as I always do. When she saw I was back in Miami a week later, she invited me to a party at Jolene Sound Room. I did a double take. Jolene Sound Room. The same Jolene Sound Room that exists in Brooklyn?

Which brought me to a thought I couldn’t shake for the rest of the trip: Miami has always been a city that other cities export themselves into — New Yorkers especially have treated it as a seasonal second home for decades. But something shifted during the pandemic, and it hasn’t shifted back.

What started as a finance bro migration in 2020 has quietly snowballed into something much larger. It’s not just transplants packing up their walk-ups anymore. It’s capital. Citadel moved its headquarters there in 2022. Last week, Palantir announced it’s relocating its HQ from Denver to Miami, joining a city where Google co-founder Larry Page just bought a $173 million compound in Coconut Grove; where Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly moving into the so-called “Billionaire Bunker” on Indian Creek Island, newly neighbors with Jeff Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Tom Brady.

The restaurants followed the people, and the people followed the money, and now you can get Lucali, Carbone, Pastis, COTE, and Maman in Miami. Voodoo Doughnut — a Portland icon — just opened in Wynwood. Rao’s is on Collins Avenue. Rosemary’s from the East Village landed down the block. The city isn’t importing culture anymore so much as it’s becoming a franchise of everywhere else.

Which is what makes places like Tin Tin, a new restaurant from the creators of Tinta y Café, feel so precious right now. A spot that actually feels like it came from Miami rather than arrived at it.

Instead of Melon e Prosciutto, they’re serving Papaya y Jamón; their Cacio e Pepe gnocchi is made with malanga, a tropical root vegetable; their cocktails (which are excellent) are named after fictional characters you might encounter on Calle Ocho — the heart of Miami’s Little Havana. Places like this are getting harder to find and maybe that’s the most Miami story of all.

Miami sightings:

• While dining at Mandolin, our waiter told us the Men’s U.S. Hockey team was across the street at COTE and naturally were heading to E11even after. (Not that I had any desire to run into them smh).

• In the courtyard at Komodo, we were surprised by an impromptu dragon dance for Lunar New Year around 9PM - very fun!

• I needed to know if Lucali in Miami was as good as in Brooklyn (it is) and was shocked to see owner and founder, Mark Iacono in the flesh. I’ve never seen him in the Brooklyn location — granted, it’s so hard to get in I’ve only been a few times. I guess Mark decided he wasn’t in the mood for a snow storm either. He waved to me! (Because I was very visibly staring).

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Manon from Katseye is “on hiatus” — and nobody’s buying it. The Swiss-raised member of the HYBE-Geffen girl group announced she’s stepping back for “health and wellbeing,” which, fine, happens. But then Manon started liking posts on Instagram alluding to racism and label mistreatment of Black members in girl groups and Deuxmoi’s sources claimed she’s being “phased out.” The group is still performing at Coachella in April. Manon is not.

TSA PreCheck almost got shut down — and it might still happen. Kristi Noem announced Saturday night that PreCheck and Global Entry would be suspended. Within hours, the White House stepped in and overruled her. Global Entry, however, is still suspended. Then on Wednesday, Noem told CNN the full suspension is back on the table if funding doesn’t come through.

The shutdown itself stems from lawmakers rightfully demanding ICE reforms — body cameras, mandatory identification, an enforceable code of conduct — after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, during immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. TSA workers are still unpaid, Global Entry members are in the regular line, and nobody’s closer to a deal.

Your next friend request could come from a dead person. Meta just patented an AI that would keep posting on your behalf after you die — trained on your old content, mimicking your voice, comments, maybe even video. They say they have no plans to build it, which is exactly what you say when you’re about to build it.

Bode opened in Tokyo. The store kind of looks like a sauna and has a giant JFK head. Are we into it?

The most coveted reservation in NYC is a 55-seat pub inside JPMorgan where 10,000 employees compete for $23 fish and chips. If you’re going to make a mandatory RTO, then it makes sense you’d spring for a new $3 billion building, however the upgrades are hard to spot: corner offices got smaller, floors went open concept, and the exterior reportedly rattles loudly in the wind. The math isn’t mathing, and everyone is uncomfortable. Younger bankers are booking the employee only bar weeks out in an effort to try to have something to look forward to.

JetBlue finally got a lounge. BlueHouse opened at JFK’s Terminal 5 in December: a 9,000 sq ft Art Deco NYC apartment vibe with Joe Coffee, a full bar, and a Grand Central-inspired mural on the ceiling. Day passes just launched this month at $59–$79 depending on your status tier. A Boston location is coming this summer. The cynic in me wants to point out that JetBlue is still not profitable, but the traveler in me is not complaining.

A Texas couple is running against each other for opposite parties. A married couple in Llano County, Texas is running for the same local commissioner seat on opposing party tickets — which sounds like a reality show pitch, but is actually a coordinated strategy to unseat a book-banning incumbent they both hate. Incredible.

Currently in my group chat: The giant Dachshund gracing Gentle Monster’s floor in Seoul.

Voter suppression etc.

The SAVE America Act passed the House on February 11 (218-213), requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID at the polls.

The stated goal: keep noncitizens from voting.
The catch: roughly 80% of married women don’t have documentation matching their current legal name, and 21 million eligible citizens lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate.

Additionally, getting one just got harder. The State Department quietly stripped nonprofit public libraries of their ability to process passport applications in February. So access points are shrinking at the same time demand is already at record highs — the State Department issued 27.3 million passports in FY2025.

There’s actually no voter fraud. Utah reviewed 2 million registered voters and found one noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. So it’s really a bill to keep women from voting, not noncitizens. The bill needs 60 Senate votes to pass.

Meanwhile, anonymous tips from USPS workers saying they are not permitted to do overtime even with mail piling up is making it harder for students and others to receive mail-in ballots.

A clothing brand just opened a hotel above its store. Yes, free. Beit Kotn, which translates to “Kotn’s House” in Arabic, sits above the Egyptian-Canadian clothing label’s Shoreditch store and operates as a private creative residence for artists, designers, and cultural thinkers from the Middle East and North Africa. The two-bedroom space has a warm, lived-in feel — vintage furniture, oxblood red and mustard tones, a kitchenette and private balcony — designed to feel like Cairo, not a hotel.

You apply through an online portal by describing what you’re working on, and access is granted based on availability. While every other fashion brand is monetizing access and calling it community, Kotn removed the transaction entirely. A larger Cairo location is already planned for 2027. Shout out to for the tip!

The daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke got married on Valentine’s Day. Maya Hawke wed musician Christian Lee Hutson at St. George’s Episcopal in NYC in a surprise ceremony that doubled as a Stranger Things reunion — Sadie Sink, Finn Wolfhard, Joe Keery and most of the cast were there. Millie Bobby Brown and Noah Schnapp were not, and the internet immediately had thoughts.

Thanks for reading!

It’s Sunday. You’re scrolling past picture 34 of a four-bedroom Colonial in a zip code you cannot afford. You’re mentally repainting the kitchen and judging the previous owners’ furniture choices. You’re not looking to buy. You’re not pre-approved. You are simply a person with a dream and an internet connection.

Zillow — the app millennials use to doom-scroll houses they can’t afford — has partnered with World of Warcraft so players can browse fantasy homes they can afford (because they’re not real). The microsite features 3D tours, SkyTour-style visuals, and faction-specific listings like Stormwind townhouses and Horde-influenced bungalows.

There are two in-game real estate agents — Auriella Lightbeam for the Alliance and Grak’zul the Stable-Master for the Horde. A moment of silence for the fact that someone got paid to name those characters.

But funny as it all is, the cultural undertone is actually kind of bleak. WoW players have been asking for in-game housing for nearly two decades. Two decades of logging into a fully realized fantasy world and having nowhere to put your stuff, hang your raid trophies, or just exist somewhere that felt like yours.

That desire is coming from a generation that grew up being told homeownership was the logical next step, then watched that step become harder and harder to obtain. If I can’t have a place to customize and call my own in real life, why not have a sick house in World of Warcraft?

Zillow knows this. Their own press release described the partnership as arriving “at a time when buying, selling or renting can feel overwhelming or out of reach.” And their brand platform for 2026 is called Someday Starts Today ie. if you can’t have a real house, you can get the digital home of your dreams.

It’s a clever piece of brand marketing that also inadvertently reveals a lot about where we are culturally with homeownership.

The welcome mat is free, by the way. In-game only.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Let’s talk about the Olympics. (Hi Lizzie, who is there rn!)

Scandalo! Here is an amusing round up: “Credit card theft, penis injections, and other weird scandals from the 2026 Olympic Games.”

Pierogi plush! Demand for pierogi plushes surged after one appeared as Poland’s unofficial mascot at the Winter Olympics. It turns out, the only place in the U.S. selling the plush is the singular Polish restaurant in America recognized by the Michelin Guide: Pierozek in Brooklyn. They’re already sold out.

The plush itself is sourced from Luft.Katowice, an online store with products made by people with disabilities. The post captions are so wholesome, including: “to A dumpling is the only dumpling you can’t eat, but you can hug it! ” and “With our Dumpling even Monday becomes nicer!”

Canine calamity! A 2-year-old Czechoslovakian wolfdog named Nazgul — who escaped from a nearby B&B because he missed his owners — crashed the women’s cross-country sprint and crossed the finish line ahead of the skiers.

Tesla’s Robotaxi have already been in 14 accidents. They rolled out in Austin, TX in June. In addition to property damage, at least two incidents resulted in minor injuries, including a passenger’s hospitalization.

Maxxing to the max. Magasin announced a new longevity and aesthetics newsletter, in which Laura Reilly catalogued her eye-watering roster of January medical appointments and biohacking rituals — Botox, Emface, IPL, a 17-pill daily supplement stack, a peptide taken subcutaneously, and red light therapy, to name a few.

The vehement reaction in the comments comes down to class: readers are pushing back on whether this level of body optimization is aspirational wellness culture or an expensive, anxiety-fueling arms race that only the wealthy can afford.

Palantir is moving its headquarters from Denver to Miami. This is the second move after previously relocating from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020. Flights between NYC and Miami are about to get even more insufferable and entitled.

Shia LaBeouf is doing Mardi Gras like only he can. I sort of love that LaBeouf has somehow stayed relevant since his ‘Even Stevens’ days just by being kinda crazy. Several outlets reported that he was arrested for alleged physical altercation at Mardi Gras. He broke silence after his arrest with a two word post where he wrote: “Free me,” with no period. Other amusing headlines include: “Shia LaBeouf Seen Church-Hopping After Humiliating Mardi Gras Arrest” and “Shia LaBeouf immediately returns to partying at Mardi Gras after release from jail.” Which is true? We may never know.

Croatia wants you to be less drunk and annoying. Split, Croatia — a gorgeous seaside town that has skyrocketed in popularity over the last decade — has put a curfew on alcohol sales. No alcohol sales in shops and liquor stores from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. The measure aims to “curb public drunkenness and reposition Croatia as a family-friendly destination.” So if you want to get rowdy, you’ll need to plan ahead.

At least someone is taking the Epstein files seriously. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office following Epstein file revelations. His arrest is thought to be the first time a member of the royal family has been held by police in modern history.

The Guardian reports: “The former prince, who was stripped of his titles last year but remains eighth in line to the throne, was held in custody on his 66th birthday by Thames Valley police as officers searched the Norfolk property as well his former home in the Royal Lodge in Great Windsor Park.”

Capybara palate cleanser! A cutie named Prune won the annual Capybara Long Bath Showdown, where five zoos from across Japan face off to see which of their capybaras takes the longest soak in an outdoor bath.

Soho House Upstate is officially happening. After months of speculation, Soho House has received permission to break ground on Soho Farmhouse Rhinebeck — a 250-acre estate with a stone barn restaurant, carriage house speakeasy, and 21 cabins. For anyone who’s watched the Hudson Valley slowly transform from “affordable artist escape” to “second borough for people who hate the Hamptons,” this is the official closing ceremony. Rhinebeck locals: condolences or congratulations, depending on your feelings about this sort of thing.

O’ Holy Wall Street. The Vatican Bank launched a Catholic values stock index in partnership with Morningstar — and its top US holding is Meta??? Unclear which Catholic values Meta is being recognized for, but we’ll leave that between Mark Zuckerberg and God.

Thanks for reading!

Let’s talk about two rising tides: analog and wealth.

Consider the curious case of rare books. Reading rates are declining, but book ownership is increasing. Tech founders who once collected Patek Philippes are now hunting first-edition novels instead of luxury watches. As we edge closer to a world where all copy will be AI-generated, these books represent something increasingly precious: verified human authorship, irreplaceable scarcity, tangible proof of creativity that can’t be algorithmically replicated.

This hunger for analog authenticity makes perfect sense when you understand what Eugene Healey calls the internet’s “perfectly circular business model.” With 70% of the world’s population carrying mobile phones, we’ve become both the resource and the reward. We give our data, that data designs products tailored to our desires, we buy them, and then—because they reflect our identity—we promote them ourselves, for free, to our networks. The machine runs on our own behavior.

“It’s only natural that it becomes desirable to opt out,” Healey says. And of course, the French were ahead of the curve. As one reader shared in Healey's newsletter chat, being offline has long been a French flex. She says Paris supper clubs have been trending in creative circles for 3-4 years and Boulinier, one of France's largest used bookstores, just celebrated 180 years in business. Older generations view social media as "too American," she declares.

I used to be what you might call a “story monster”—everything I did went on Instagram. But recently, I’ll host entire dinner parties and never mention them online. At first, I thought this was just a symptom of getting older, but perhaps it’s actually the subconscious flexing of my privilege to privacy. The privilege of unmonetized presence.

The rich as entertainment

As the rich exercise their right to digital privacy, our cultural obsession with wealth has never been more explicit. Media companies are doubling down on covering the rich as entertainment. Caper, a new food media company started by Puck alumni, launched with the mission of “covering the people, money, power, creativity, and chaos that fuels the food world.” Rich People Shit by Carson Griffith, which launched on Substack only recently, is already the #27 New bestseller. The Wall Street Journal is currently hiring a “Power & Culture reporter.” The job listing is worth a read.

You can’t make this shit up:

“Today’s intersection of power, wealth, culture and style has created scenes for the ages, from $1 billion art-collection feuds to wedding cutlery that has its own security detail. The triumphs and foibles of the rich and privileged—as expressed through social events, summer-colony feuds, strange micro-industries and high-profile squabbles—are the backdrop of this beat, an ideal blend of coverage opportunities for the right self-starting reporter.”

And what the rich do may get more entertaining as time goes on. Just as Silicon Valley changed the face of the rich from old money families and titans of industry to nerdy white guys (65% of billionaires globally are white, and 90% are male), AI will do it again.

The Washington Post reports that the unemployment gap between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with occupational associate’s degrees flipped in 2025, giving trade workers a slight edge for the first time in 50 years. Stanford research shows a 13% employment drop-off for workers ages 22–25 in the most AI-exposed jobs since 2022, while construction alone needs 349,000 net new workers this year.

Young people are responding. Community college enrollment rose 3% last fall, more than double the growth at public four-year schools, while private four-year enrollment declined over 1.5%.

“They’re seeing more and more college grads working as baristas,” said ABC chief economist Anirban Basu, and “many are quite savvy in recognizing that AI doesn’t threaten the blue-collar workforce the way it threatens the livelihoods of the white-collar workforce.”

Perhaps tomorrow’s Mark Zuckerberg will own a construction company.

Offline as status symbol

This year, the ultimate luxury isn’t having the latest technology—it’s having enough security to refuse optimization entirely. That means using your own personal network to get business advice or a new restaurant instead of Instagram, Google, or ChatGPT; getting invited to parties and gatherings that aren’t posted online; having enough wealth that you don’t need to post things to build your personal brand or advance your career.

Speaking of refusing to be optimized: Anthropic just dropped an ad basically calling ChatGPT predatory now that ads are coming to the platform. Their pitch? We won't use your data to sell you stuff. It's a smart play—positioning privacy as their differentiator while ChatGPT becomes yet another channel for businesses to extract value from your attention and data.

When we think of analog for the masses, it’s doing crafts or an offline activity like reading a book. And yet, the average person will inevitably share a picture or video of them doing said offline activity — feeding the algorithm, letting the powers that be know exactly what they’re doing and what they like and what they might buy.

When you apply analog to those with capital and access to cultural centers, it means the option to truly opt out of sharing thoughts and preferences with Meta/Google/Amazon and the public. In a world designed to extract value from every moment of our attention, the greatest privilege is simply logging off.

For brands watching this shift, the lesson is clear: the same principles that make rare books valuable—scarcity, provenance, craft, human authorship—now apply to all marketing in an age of infinite content.

This deep dive was featured in my newsletter - subscribe for your weekly dose of cultural intelligence.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Hi friends.

Have you ever been on a cruise? I think they are fairly common for “family reunions planned by grandparents” type trips. But recently, they seem to conjure up more reactions around biological imperatives running amok — I think we can thank the the bad PR from Triangle of Sadness and Netflix’s Trainwreck: Poop Cruise.

I have been on a few cruises as a kid. What I remember most is that cruises used to offer true digital detox—you were literally at sea with no service, no WiFi for multiple days in a row. This Friday, I’m testing that theory on my first cruise in years with my dear old dad. I’m genuinely curious to see how well the WiFi works now; Virgin Voyages offers it for free, but they are constantly urging you to upgrade to Premium (which I did not do).

I’m also curious to see how it will feel to be on a Virgin cruise. My CEO keeps reminding me that one of our investors, Bain Capital, holds the majority stake. And it does seem somewhat “innovative” for an old industry (the first leisure cruise sailed in 1844).

When I looked into my ship’s programming I laughed to myself —sushi, tattoos, K-BBQ, drag brunch, bathhouses—it genuinely feels like they asked ChatGPT to list “things millennials like.”

They’ve taken the old revenue streams, like buying expensive watches onboard to avoid taxes and turned them into events. And yes I will be attending, “Rolex: It’s time to collect - At this event, our Swiss timepiece expert gives Sailors an informative presentation on the history of Rolex, and the benefits of buying pre-owned…while sipping on complimentary champagne and scotch.” Thank you for asking.

But just as I am finally about to learn why people like Rolexes so much, they’re already out.

Due to said cruise, no party talk next week. Instead you’ll find a deep dive into offline as the new status symbol and why tech founders are swapping their luxury watches for rare books.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

I’m sure your group chat was discussing Chappell Roan’s outfit. Now that’s what I call confidence! Kendrick Lamar made Grammy history with five wins, overtaking Jay-Z as hip-hop’s most decorated artist. Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos became the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year.

The federal government entered a partial shutdown after missing the January 31 deadline but it ended when 21 democrats broke party lines and voted to pass it. Also there are ICE billboards all over San Francisco.

Sweet girl! Lorde is donating six figures of her merch sales to Minnesota Immigrant Funds.

I’m not going to read the 3,000 Epstein files documents but I don’t want to “look like a thicky, thicky dumb, dumb in front of all my mates!”

Charli xcx wrote about the death of cool and I finally read it. The people in the comments section lost their minds. I don’t understand wanting to spend time to go on a tirade on a celeb post. But you do you! I did enjoy imagining Julia Fox drones delivering packages.

“But if Julia Fox did have a custom Mcdonald’s meal and a clothing line with Target and little Julia drones were delivering everyone’s Amazon packages, would this mass exposure make Julia Fox uncool? I honestly don’t think so because I’m sure she’d find a Warholian way to make it all make sense.”

— Charli XCX on her Substack

Carlos Alcaraz defeated Novak Djokovic to win his first Australian Open title, becoming the youngest man ever to complete a career Grand Slam at 22.

You can get $1000 from this ill-named tax vehicle. Trump Accounts are a new investment option for minors with a one-time $1,000 contribution for US-citizen children born between 1/1/2025 - 12/31/2028. If you have a kid that fits those dates, here’s a helpful guide.

Melania’s red carpet was black. Also they did not let journalists in for the premiere of the documentary, so it looks like journalists had to pay for the matinee (see below). Friend of the letter, Betsy Klein reports!

G2 acquired a bunch of other software review sites. Market consolidation alert!

Rich kids get richer. Wealthy families are about to pass down $38 trillion worldwide over the next decade, with Gen X and millennials set to inherit $4.6 trillion in real estate alone.

The new collaboration between Morris & Co. and Zara Home is giving Wuthering Heights.

What celebrity won’t GLP-1s hire? Tom Brady, Justin Long, now Serena Williams and Rebel Wilson. The other night we joked that my friend’s cousin was an “early adopter” because she’s been on Ozempic for over two years.

NYC Landlords will finally have to provide air conditioning. This is very good because temperatures are getting more and more extreme.

My new company name is about to make Anguilla some money. Anguilla, a tiny British territory with just 16,000 residents, is absolutely crushing it thanks to a lucky internet accident. Back in the early days of the web, they were assigned the country-specific ".ai" domain suffix. Domain registrations now account for a quarter of the island's entire revenue. They made $39 million in 2024 alone, with projections hitting $70 million for 2025. The number of .ai domains exploded from 50,000 in 2020 to over 1 million this month. Meanwhile, islands with less sexy domain extensions like ".tv" (Tuvalu) are probably wondering where they went wrong.

Do people really not know what Pumpernickel is? Come on, order more pumpernickel bagels! ​

Rachel Sennott’s parents are both accountants. I listened to her Good Hang episode on the drive back from skiing and was delighted to learn that such a funny person could spawn from accountants. Her parents met at the same firm and dated secretly before popping out 5 kids. She also said the best stuff happens to her when she is “at rock bottom,” to which Poehler replied: “Rejection is God’s protection!”

I kind of love this copyless David OOH ad. I saw it in the NYC subway and it immediately caught my eye. Awkward timing though with Peter Attia being linked to Epstein and parting ways with the company.

Here’s why they can get away with the minimalism:

• The product is obvious and physical. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you can tell it is an edible pre-packaged good.

• They did full car buyouts.

• The product packaging is unique — the gold is alluring and the brand is giving 80’s boom boom aesthetic.

They’re hoping it’s alluring enough that you will simply take out your phone and Google it. I’d love to see their NYC traffic MoM since the ad started running. That’s where my adoration of the brand ends however. I don’t think my values overall align with the company. This is a fascinating deep dive into the company, its products, and VC backers from though if you want to learn more.

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends.

Hope you enjoyed the snow instead of, say, getting stranded at LaGuardia. Meanwhile, one of my friends was casually skiing in Aspen with Jeremy O. Harris, which officially makes the rest of our weekends look tragic by comparison.

On Friday, I was reminded that I do not know how to roller skate. Despite the bitter cold, Xanadu in Bushwick was popping. They served us fancy hot dogs and cinnamon bread. “The Midwest is taking over,” Ben correctly declared.

On Saturday, we made the trek up to the Natural History Museum. Is there anything better than a direct entrance to the museum from the subway platform? Trying to see a museum with a group of ~30 people proved difficult but we ended the day at Tiki Chick, which I predict will thrive as inflation continues its rampage. Solid $5 chicken sandwiches—smaller than a regular one, bigger than sliders, exactly what New Yorkers need.

Sunday, I achieved absolutely nothing. Zero steps, zero leaving my apartment. I marveled at the strength of Minnesotans, 100,000+ of them who protested in -20 degrees, and did my best not spiral into a deep depression over the state of the world. Beyond Beef tacos with heirloom corn tortillas from La Carnada provided slight reprieve.

***

At the museum, we watched a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the universe. We saw Earth, which sits in the Milky Way, which resides in the Local Group, which is a speck in the Virgo Supercluster. Space is incomprehensibly massive, we are laughably small.

It made me think: How could there not be aliens when we can barely see any of what’s out there? And maybe if we just made everyone watch this film, humans would stop being so horrible to each other.

There’s something about confronting vastness—whether it’s space, the ocean, or standing on a mountain—that makes human greed and power lust feel absurd.

Soothed by Tom Hank’s voice and the sheer size of the universe, humanity could be better, I think.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

What’s up in Silicon Valley?

• PR Crisis! I’m always interested in how crises get handled. Here’s what the head of public affairs at DoorDash said in response to an AI generated Reddit post that claimed fraudulent business practices by an unnamed major food delivery app, received over 87,000 upvotes and generated roughly 5,000 comments.

• Decagon raises Series D. They’re basically a customer service AI agent provider but are calling it “AI concierge” instead in what I assume is an attempt to elevate it. The round is $250 million in funding at a $4.5B valuation.

• When you have to change your company’s name after like 2 days. Clawdbot, a personal AI assistant, went viral within weeks of launch and had all of SF buying Mac Minis to get their assistants up and running. But then Anthropic (maker of Claude) was like, “How about no,” and reminded the founder of trademark law. So now the company is called “Moltbot.” Not an upgrade IMO.
  
  Does this mean AI personal assistants are here and can actually do stuff? Yes and no. Moltbot is getting rave reviews on X - people are claiming it re-did their entire website while they slept, emptied their inbox out in hours etc. etc. But it seems to have no security and require a lot of technical knowledge to set up.

How about publishing.

• Chief AI Officers of publishing. Wiley has appointed its first-ever chief AI officer, a role intended to accelerate Wiley’s effort to license its content to AI developers. Wiley is a book publisher that is focused on scientific/technical material so it’s not totally bonkers — I myself oversaw a book published with Wiley whilst at Workato. Since January 2024, Wiley has generated nearly $100 million in AI licensing revenue.

• Are box subscriptions back? Bridgerton author Julia Quinn announced a romance book subscription service through JQ Editions. It’s the first author-led subscription service I’ve heard of.

The rent is too damn high and so is everything else. We can all feel it, but here’s the data to back up your sticker shock.

• Goodwill just posted record $7 billion in revenue—a nearly 50% jump since 2019. Savers Value Village and ThredUp are also crushing it as Americans hunt for deals anywhere they can find them.

• Aldi is now the fastest-growing chain in America. The budget-friendly, German grocer has plans for nearly another 200 stores this year, the company is on pace to have 3,200 U.S. stores by 2028. Among grocers, only Walmart has more locations.⁣ I wrote about Aldi’s takeover last year.

• Meanwhile, those tariffs everyone keeps arguing about? Yeah, they’re basically just a tax on us. New research analyzing $4 trillion in shipments found that American consumers absorbed 96% of the tariff costs. So we’re paying more for everything while pretending it’s someone else’s problem.

• Even Dry January got expensive. Mocktails are hitting $20 in some spots, which defeats the entire point of saving money by not drinking. People are just ordering water now—never imagined we’d be priced out of not consuming alcohol.

When you can’t afford to thrift, can’t afford the tariffs, and can’t afford to not drink, maybe it’s time to admit the vibes are not immaculate.

And onto Entertainment.

• Zoe Saldaña is the highest-grossing actor of all-time thanks to the new Avatar. Saldaña’s films (which include other major franchises like Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean) have now grossed $15.5 billion globally. ⁣You want your movie to do well? Cast Zoe as an alien.

• Yahoo is hiring a Senior Social Video Producer - it’s a remote contract role and I wouldn’t say the pay is high…

• Taco Update. What started in a Home Depot (except we are boycotting Home Depot FYI) parking lot is now Brooklyn’s newest taco destination - @bordertownbk, known for their flour tortillas, has a permanent home in Greenpoint. And the Tex-Mex party spot in East Village, @wayneandsonsnyc, has officially landed in Williamsburg.

• So brave for saying a wine tasted like pennies! Eliza Dumais, journalist and “Wine World ‘it girl,’” if that is a thing, wrote a book. The basis of the novel is her relationship with boyfriend Sam Lawrence, chef and co-owner of restaurant Bridges (so sceney!). I don’t really read romance, but will definitely catch the Netflix adaptation should it get made.

• DC may get it’s own Las Vegas Sphere. But it will be smaller, so people are calling it Mini Sphere.

• Prue is leaving Great British Bakeoff. I guess she wants to retire. Meanwhile Paul just keeps on keeping on. I suppose trying to cast a stately dame will mean you only get so many years of work out of them!

Thanks for reading!

Hi friends.

We spent the last week skiing but before we left I was in dinner party mode.

On New Years Eve I did a full Ina Garten line up. Butternut squash and apple soup with homemade yeast bread. A bomb vegetable pot pie; this was exciting because I love chicken pot pie and would often cheat on my vegetarianism to have it, but now I don’t have to. To end, the somewhat viral brownie pudding.

The following week, I served Lacinato Kale two ways: A kale pesto and butternut squash pasta from NYT cooking and a kale and McIntosh apple salad with Green Goddess dressing. I’ve discovered the easiest dessert - a croissant sliced in half, toasted and vanilla ice cream in the middle. Croissant ice cream sandwich!

This lentil and leftover pasta is next on my list. I love pasta and I love lentils but TBH I never thought of putting them together and now has given me permission and a map to do so.

A friend who is a Pastry Cook at Blue Hill at Stone Barns graciously allowed us ‘olds’ to peruse her dating app matches with her. Most likely because professional cooks don’t exactly have an abundance of free time, she had never heard of Othership, which one such match cited on his profile as part of his “perfect day.”

Turns out her match wasn’t alone in his bathhouse obsession. Here’s a fun map I recently came across of New York’s rapidly expanding wellness scene.

If you’re interested in a complete picture of the scene, here’s a great list from High Line Co-Founder , who is unsurprisingly working to bring Roman Baths to the US for Therme Group.

2026 is also the year of bathing

It’s not really trend forecasting to say that bathhouses are going to continue to pop up at the same rate that all of these members clubs have proliferated, because it’s already happening. Even Imaginary Ventures-backed Bathhouse, which has been riddled with crazy rumors that it was giving people UTIs, is expanding to Philadelphia. It will, however, be interesting to see how long it lasts.

Regular bathhouse use is common in other parts of the world, you best believe I was stark a** naked in numerous Korean bathhouses. In Oslo I went to a gorgeous floating sauna filled with Norwegians casually taking a cold plunge before they headed to work.

I’m not sure Americans can or will pick up daily bathing. This skepticism was amplified just this week when I tried to use the sauna at the ski resort and a woman who was watching her kids swim at the pool kept coming into the sauna fully clothed, wearing uggs while she scrolled on her phone. After she exited and then came back in again and didn’t close the door all the way again, my husband asked if she wouldn’t mind closing it. She responded “OK…” as if it were a crazy request. Lady… the sauna can’t stay hot if you let the cold air in! She’d never make it in Korea, the aunties would tear her apart.

Despite evidence like this, investors keep betting we’ll figure it out. Norwegian-style saunas have already landed in San Francisco (cue enjoyable, unhinged review by Chloe Fineman).

Beauty brands will come for a piece of the pie as well. QC Spa has great signature scents/products, but not everyone will want to go to the trouble of owning that revenue stream. Instead, partnerships like Montreal’s new Recess Thermal Station x Aesop will abound — they developed a 75-minute circuit with Aesop cleanses built right in. Smart move when you’re dealing with people who might not know basic sauna etiquette but definitely know luxury skincare.

But perhaps the real path to wellness is just cooking a nice meal for your friends instead of paying $70 to sit in lukewarm water with strangers who don’t know how doors work.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Go to a show at Elsewhere for $9. I’m not going to because my love of a deal does not outweigh the schlep to Elsewhere, but if you just want a fun night out you should grab one. They’re offering limited $9 tickets for select shows - Tycho is already sold out.

Minnesota is under attack. 3,000 ICE agents are still out in full force and grabbing people opportunistically - at the store, in the hospital, in random home checks (here’s what it’s like). Many people are afraid to leave their house. If you want to help provide scared families groceries or help with rent while they can’t go to work as they try to stay safe, you can donate to fundraisers like these. If you want to donate through a more personal channel, Jessica, who was featured previously in the newsletter, has lived in Minnesota since her husband joined the Minnesota Wild and is on the ground delivering groceries and connecting with families. If you want to donate to Jessica you can get in touch with me and I’ll connect you! She will tell you exactly where your money goes.

I’m still waiting to read “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” I swear I’m next in line on Libby. I’ve heard lots of good things about this memoir from child star Jeanette McCurdy, and before I was even able to read it, she’s back with a new book titled “Half His Age.” McCurdy/her editor sure know how to craft a scandalous title! It dropped today.

Apparently steamy romance novels are a seasonal depression hack, but if that’s not your thing, I’ll just leave this curated book list about activism here.

GAP hired a Chief Entertainment Officer “to build and scale Gap Inc.’s Fashiontainment platform across content, licensing, music, TV, film, sports, gaming, and consumer products.”

A Heated rivalry look alike contest is already happening. 2pm January 25 at Washington Square Park. I feel like it will be too cold? idk.

OpenAI will be integrated into ServiceNow. The deal was announced today.

This feels dystopian. Ozempic’s new ad campaign, "There’s Only One Ozempic," riffs on Apple’s mid-2000s "Get a Mac" ads, featuring actor Justin Long as a trendy Mac product. Long is responsible for reading off the side effects and safety information.

Startup culture is getting cringe. A VC at Kholsa Ventures posted a picture of a sad piece of printer paper showcasing the “values” of a startup in their portfolio. Scribbled at the bottom like some kind of dystopian motivational mantra was “Sleep is for the weak!” The biggest irony is that the post was to promote a job opening at said startup. Not only is that insane because science, but it must have received some backlash because the post has mysteriously been deleted.

Meanwhile! New girl boss alert. While Silicon Valley is trying to demonize sleep, has been gaining traction for her cheeky branding around her new “sleep strips.” She’s already built a 3,000+ person waitlist by calling her community “zombies,” coining the term “The Strip Club,” and calling her Substack “Sleep or Die.”

The 3,000-person waitlist suggests that maybe the “hustle until you drop” messaging isn’t landing the way it used to. People seem more interested in recovery than glorifying burnout.

World’s largest chain lands in NYC. Mixue (pronounced Me-shway), a Chinese chain with more than 50,000 locations worldwide, is offering $1 ice cream and sold out oolong. Say less.

The cost of streaming continues to go up. Starting in February, Spotify premium subscriptions for an individual will go from $11.99 to $12.99/month. On the TV front, we’ve officially entered their “throw stupid money at everything” phase, and your monthly subscription is going to reflect that. Netflix just locked down exclusive streaming rights to Sony Pictures movies (think Spider-Man, Bad Boys) after their theatrical runs. They’re also making a play to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s entire theatrical business.

For you, it means fewer apps to juggle when you’re trying to figure out where the hell that movie you want to watch is streaming. But it also means Netflix is about to get even more expensive as they justify these billion-dollar content deals.

Thanks for reading!

This week, it’s my pleasure to hand over the opening monologue to (ie. Christina) for some field reporting. Christina is often my partner in crime on adventures that I end up covering in this very newsletter (case in point here and here).

Christina has exquisite taste, the fanciest dog (a Lagotto Romagnolo, which I like to take credit for hearing about at the AKC dog show), and they spend their time directing the public art in Times Square after many years as the Director of Residencies and Classes at Pioneer Works. So if Christina cares about the Transit Museum, we care about the Transit Museum! (It is a pretty good museum though…bring back the steampunk party).

Take it away Christina…

On New Year’s Eve, my friend Emem and I were struggling to plan a hang during that limited window when the City is quiet for the holidays. To that end, I pitched the Brooklyn Museum to see the Monet exhibition, but Emem had recently gone.

Next, I suggested Vato, the new Park Slope tortilleria and bakery. I’ve recently become obsessed with their sourdough tortillas, but alas, it was closed. With options waning, I hit her with my closer: the Transit Museum. I had heard that the museum was a sleeper hit for all ages, but most importantly, it felt fitting because it was the last day of the MetroCard. The confluence of the last day of the year and the last day of the MetroCard felt poetic.

During the holidays, I admit I was driving more because finding parking was so much easier with folks out of town. But for this occasion, I naturally opted to take the train. After a quick glance around in the subway station, I didn’t clock any actual MetroCards in use. Looks like the MetroCard may have already crossed the River Styx…

Read the full report:

If you don’t, you’ll miss the merch in the gift shop, some wholesome Poetry in Motion, and Christina’s favorite TikTok genre.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Korean strawberries in Uncrustables! I didn’t really need viral Korean strawberries in an uncrustable but now that it’s an option I also did not, not need it. I have been meaning to get over to Cafe 20 Grams inside Jubilee Marketplace in Greenpoint, known for hits such as the “Korean McGriddle.” But alas, I missed this uncrustable pop up - if anyone made it there please report back.

NYC’s congestion pricing is still working. Nearly a year since the $9 toll launched for Manhattan below 60th Street, the controversial program has exceeded expectations. Here’s what surprised me: storefront vacancies in the toll zone actually dropped because more people are walking instead of driving through. More stores = a more vibrant city. Despite critics predicting economic disaster, the program has reduced pollution, surpassed revenue goals, and improved foot traffic for businesses. Your city might be next.

Sometimes branded content really feels like branded content, and not in a cute way. Sometimes an inherently unsexy brand like Bissell manages to create a seriously engaging video series. “Drivin’ Dirty” is like a mini-sode of Pimp My Car but instead of making your car cooler, it just simply makes it clean. The team shot 12 episodes over the course of four days.

Why I think it works:

• @bloodyosiris is a perfect host - engaging, funny, and dressed in outlandish fits, plus the 614K followers he brings to the table.

• The concept scratches an itch. It combines the voyeurism that hooks people on shows like Hoarders (you want to see whose car is so dirty and why) with the satisfaction that those TikToks where someone cleans their whole apartment with different gadgets gives you.

• The product is actually necessary to reach the end result. The thing they are trying to sell isn’t superfluous to the situation. You literally can’t clean a car without some type of vacuum. Watching them pour the dirty water from the carpet cleaner vessel is like watching a pimple get popped.

169 Bar needs help! In addition to being a classic NYC institution, two of my friends who are on Broadway once dreamed of throwing their wedding here. Now the bar is having a dispute with their landlord.

The B train is the least on time, Delta is most on time. The B train arrived late 26% of the time in 2025, but at least it’s consistent? Delta was the most on-time out of all North American carriers in 2025, according to Cirium’s annual rankings.⁣ Globally, Aeroméxico was the best, with a 90% on-time rate.

Brooklyn Mirage lives on. And now, as with most things, is owned by Dubai. Both the troubled club and its parent company, Avant Gardner, have a new owner: FIVE Holdings, the holding company also owns Pacha.

Kanye’s wife made some super weird furniture. Bianca Censori, known only to me as Kanye’s wife who is always naked (including when we were at the Florence 4 Seasons at the same time - I did not see her with my eyes), apparently wants to now be known for “Medical Sex Dungeon Furniture.” It premiered in Seoul.

Has anyone been to Wild Cherry? It seems that Annabelle Wallis, Sebastian Stan & Emily Ratajkowski were there for dinner at the same time as Bradley Cooper. Dear readers, is the food good or is it just a celeb hot spot?

If you can’t get into Red Hook Tavern… The chef behind Red Hook Tavern’s Lunar New Year parties is popping up at Runner Up ahead of his brick and mortar’s debut this summer.

For those who care about PR pitching: Jyoti Mann (formerly Business Insider) is joining The Information to cover Meta.

Tom Brady is the new face for GLP-1s. I kind of hate everything Tom Brady is doing but obligatory reporting I guess. And in the same vein connected the dots on “biological dining” with this roundup: Sweetgreen teamed up to launch a Longevity Menu alongside Function. Goop launched a collab with Andrew Huberman on a “brain-supporting” chili. Blaze Pizza kicked off the year with GLP-1-friendly pizzas (56g of protein per pie).

Thanks for reading!

On New Year’s Eve, my friend Emem and I were struggling to plan a hang during that limited window when the City is quiet for the holidays. To that end, I pitched the Brooklyn Museum to see the Monet exhibition, but Emem had recently gone.

Next, I suggested Vato, the new Park Slope tortilleria and bakery. I’ve recently become obsessed with their sourdough tortillas, but alas, it was closed. With options waning, I hit her with my closer: the Transit Museum. I had heard that the museum was a sleeper hit for all ages, but most importantly, it felt fitting because it was the last day of the MetroCard. The confluence of the last day of the year and the last day of the MetroCard felt poetic.

During the holidays, I admit I was driving more because finding parking was so much easier with folks out of town. But for this occasion, I naturally opted to take the train. After a quick glance around in the subway station, I didn’t clock any actual MetroCards in use. Looks like the MetroCard may have already crossed the River Styx…

Off the train, I learned that the museum is housed in the decommissioned Court Street subway station a short walk from Borough Hall. As I made my way there, I realized I wasn’t the only one who decided to commemorate the MetroCard by visiting the museum. There was a sizable crowd outside the museum waiting for the next entry.

On gift shops.

While I waited for our entry time and for Emem to join me, I perused the bustling gift shop. I love a museum gift shop and this one did not disappoint. From cuff links to tea towels to ugly Christmas sweaters, the MetroCard was forever memorialized with a wide range of merchandise. I bought a small MetroCard puzzle for myself and a MetroCard shot glass for Emem before making my way into the museum.

I rushed through the other exhibits to head straight to Farewell, MetroCard because I came in with a vision. I wanted to learn as much about MetroCard as I could in its final moments.

You’re a technological feat, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

What I learned might surprise you: the MetroCard has only been around for 32 years (since 1993), and it was considered a technological feat at the time. Before that, we were using clunky subway tokens, which were easy to evade.

The idea was that the MetroCard would put an end to fare evasion—LOL. Fare evasion happens to be one of my favorite categories of TikToks. Despite its flaws, I learned how much the MTA has been evolving year-over-year since the MetroCard’s introduction. For something we love to mock, the MTA has quietly been at both innovative and at the center of NYC culture.

Do you have one of the commemorative MetroCards?

I left feeling proud to have made New York my home almost 14 years ago. Obviously, this is how I celebrated (see picture below).

How did you celebrate the end of an era? Did you attend a MetroCard funeral or snag any of the promotional meals from Zabar’s or Carvel?

The tumult in the heart.

I leave you with some Poetry in Motion (IYKYK) that feels inspiring for the beginning of a new year.

This deep dive was featured in my newsletter - subscribe for a smarter scroll.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Hi friends.

Everyone in LA apparently hates I Love LA and everyone I meet in NYC loves it. But regardless of your East Coast/West Coast affiliation, I sincerely hope we can all agree that episode 7. Divas Down is one of the funniest TV episodes I’ve seen in recent history. Also, I did not realize the actress who plays Alani was Forrest Whitaker’s daughter and now I cannot unsee it. Not in a bad way, she’s objectively gorgeous.

On the very first day of 2026, a developer built a tool that turns your Substack into a newspaper. The button on the tool literally reads: “Go analog!”

She was ahead of the curve, as “ANALOG” is the very word currently plastered all over the internet and every marketing deck.

Why? We’re in a somewhat obvious pendulum swing. Gary Vaynerchuk dropped his 2026 Consumer Trends list with “the unplugging of Gen Alpha” sitting at #2. In 2006, smartphones and social platforms had zero market share. Now they’ve captured so much of the market that Gen Alpha is going to crave balance.

Not exactly a revelation but certainly interesting to look at how this is manifesting in the world.

One example is the rise of @chriskindareads, who’s gone viral on Instagram for simply reading classic literature and being genuinely excited about it. We’re talking The Count of Monte Cristo, East of Eden—dense novels that feel almost radical in their offline commitment. He even has a video with tips on how he is able to read for so long without getting bored. Cute, I’m here for it.

From a design perspective, this means we’ll see fewer screens cluttering living spaces and more rooms built around analog activities—library nooks, craft corners, actual conversation areas instead of media centers. The bigger your flatscreen LED TV, the less tasteful. Hello death of screens as status symbols.

With the accessibility of music streaming, where you can listen to anything, anytime for free, we’ve already seen the experience of seeing it live increase in value (concert ticket prices are LITERALLY insane). But the general population has clearly proven they are willing to pay those prices. My husband’s brother has an old car that only has a CD player. He’s noted that it’s actually much easier to get CDs now than say 2 years ago, because artists are increasingly selling CDs at concerts.

This shift presents an increased emphasis on experiential marketing for brands, including B2B. For example, AI companies are opening cafés run by humans (Anthropic in San Francisco). Expect to see brands sponsoring everything from book clubs to pottery classes. Even digital campaigns are starting to re-create analog experiences. Take Netflix’s Tarot Card campaign.

The interest in analog activities certainly isn’t new—we’ve been watching these shifts for months (hello crafting/sewing machine craze I covered in an earlier letter) —but 2026 is the year it goes fully mainstream.

What “analog” activities are you and your friends doing? Prepare for a brand to try to sponsor it!

Field Meridians is launching a newspaper. The launch party is tonight at the Ace Hotel.

First Round Review released The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025. This was the most interesting one IMO:

“In the age of AI, hire more entry-level people, not fewer. We sat down with Shopify’s VP and Head of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, to find out how he’s brought CEO Tobi Lütke’s famous AI memo to life in his org. Bucking the trend to slash entry-level roles, Shopify has made hiring young people a key part of its AI strategy: the company brought on 1,000 interns last year. Thawar says young people are AI centaurs — they use AI in reflexive, creative ways.”

Prepare for your friends to get bold print sofas. The pendulum is swinging from Millennial Gray or as The Guardian called it, “the sad beige aesthetic” to big and bold centerpieces. Though brands like Anthropologie had a 2-year head start on manufacturing animal print sofas, followed by Soho Home & Urban Outfitters, we’re starting to see the big boys join in with both animal and floral prints: Arhaus, West Elm, CB2, the entire Wayfair ecosystem, Joon Loloi etc.

The gray area around Chinese Billionaires having dozens of U.S. babies via surrogacy is fascinating. Xu Bo was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates.⁠ In a rare act, the judge denied his request for parentage.

⁠WSJ reports: “Several of his kids were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. He hadn’t yet met them, he told the judge, because work had been busy.⁠”

A woman’s gender-swap experiment on the platform quadrupled her reach when she switched to a male identity on LinkedIn. Another woman removed her pronouns and changed her LI gender marker to male. She reposted the same content seen by fewer than 150 people and this time it had over 30K impressions.

The team from King is opening a new British spot called Dean’s. It will be in Soho and focus on British Seafood.

Venezuela. Trump says the US will get 30-50M barrels of oil from Venezuela at market price. Though Maduro is gone, NYT reports that repression has only intensified as they interrogate people and look for evidence that they welcomed the capture of Maduro. The US is now supporting the current government, led by Maduro’s VP Delcy Rodriguez, as they work to “fix up the oil” as Trump put it.

Australia’s oldest man (110) spent his final days knitting tiny sweaters for penguins and in addition to being heartwarming, they’re kind of chic. It’s giving House of Errors.

This is an important list of every free Museum Day in NYC.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

With love!

Every year, my friend Betsy Klein—a CNN senior reporter who's covered the White House across three administrations—posts photos of Christmas trees I've never seen anywhere else. This year: a tree inside a merry-go-round.

But here’s why we should pay attention: Betsy understands that power reveals itself through details. A Burberry trench is diplomacy. What you choose not to say is a statement. She’s been in the room for the historic presidential trips, the pandemic response—and she’s learned to read what’s actually happening underneath the official narrative.

With a resume like that and an Emmy to boot, one might assume we’d be talking about foreign policy or perhaps emerging media trends. But, dear reader, that is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to sit down with her to talk about more important things; Like her thoughts on Melania’s documentary, inspo for our own holiday displays next year, and what Korean beauty treatment she got in Seoul. Let’s go.

You get a lot of exclusive access to the White House, including first looks on Christmas. Did you ever imagine this would be a perk of your adult life when you were little?

I’ve covered White House Christmases every year since December 2016 - so one year of Obama, four Biden years, and now five years of Trump. I truly could not have imagined having this kind of access, and especially at the holidays. The best, best part of that has been being able to bring my loved ones to see it, and sharing it with them has been so special. My fascination with the White House dates back to first grade, when my teacher, Mrs. Neissner, did a daily lesson on every American president. I became completely obsessed, especially with the role of the first lady.

Melania’s aesthetic choices seem to generate a lot of cultural conversation. Why do you think people are so fascinated and is that unique to Melania or steady over all first ladies?

I think generally there’s a ton of public fascination with first ladies across time - my 6-year-old self was very into Eleanor Roosevelt and Dolley Madison. But Melania Trump generates extra interest and scrutiny precisely because she’s very private, which lends this air of mystery - and because we hear from her in her own words so rarely, we don’t have a ton of insight into what she’s thinking.

She gives these breadcrumb clues, which the public ascribes meaning to in whichever direction they choose. That’s one of the reasons why her sartorial choices are so closely watched. She didn’t give any public remarks during a recent state visit to the United Kingdom, but we saw her in several different outfits that offered subtle diplomacy - a Burberry trench to nod to her hosts, for instance.

Of course there was also the “I really don’t care, do u?” moment - and when she opts against offering a fulsome explanation, the public fills in the blanks. It’s important to note she’s a fiercely independent person, but she’s also deeply politically aligned with and loyal to her husband.

Are you gonna watch her documentary?

I cannot wait for this documentary. The trailer was completely mind-boggling for the sole reason that Melania Trump is the executive producer of this project. That means that she has complete editorial control over what it looks like and what she says. So the fact that, out of 20 full days of footage, they choose THIS moment as the climax at the end of the trailer - “Hi Mr. President, congratulations.” “Did you watch it?” “I did not. Yeah. I will see it on the news.” - is stunning.

What does it mean? What will this documentary say about their relationship in this second term? Maybe nothing, but maybe it’ll be revealing. We know that Melania Trump pretty much has carte blanche from the president to do whatever she wants this term, and she is choosing to spend the vast majority of her time outside of the White House. Will we learn any more about that? I have so many questions.

Same! There’s so much going on at the White House - do you ever feel like you’re documenting a reality show?

It is a reality show in that my job is essentially capturing a first draft of American history - which is a serious responsibility but also, objectively, wild. President Trump in the briefing room questioning whether we should inject bleach to cure Covid-19 – that was completely stunning.

I wasn’t in the room (I was in Palm Beach awaiting his arrival) - but the Oval Office fight with President Zelensky was also surreal. On the other end of that spectrum - the completely delightful interaction with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani blew everyone’s mind.

In all your years covering the White House, what’s been the most stunning tree you’ve ever seen there?

Last year’s official White House Christmas tree in the Blue Room was a real standout to me because it was just so completely over-the-top and colorful and creative and fun. The tree was basically inside a merry-go-round surrounded by these very delightful, whimsically-designed animals. It was brightly colored and had a circus-like base and these festive pennants and ribbons. The criticism was that it barely looked like a tree - but I’ve really never seen anything like it and it really delighted me.

But my favorite part of the White House holiday display is the East Colonnade, where there usually actually aren’t any trees. This is the window-filled walkway between where you enter the East Wing and the actual White House executive mansion, but it was demolished this year to make way for the new ballroom.

It’s where the so-called “blood trees” were displayed, there was a candy theme one year, bows and bells last year - it’s always such a magical, festive spot. According to a court filing, there are plans to rebuild the East Colonnade as a two-story hallway, and I am hopeful that it will once more be a special holiday spot.

What do holiday decorations look like at your house?

I’ve definitely found inspiration from the White House holiday displays and our holiday decor is a bit whimsical, surprise-and-delight - maybe less maximalist but still colorful like we saw in the Biden era.

My fiancé, Jeff, and I battle over tinsel (I am very pro-tinsel and lost the battle this year). We celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah over here and we are collecting a fun assortment of Hanukkah tree ornaments. We also collect the official annual ornament from the White House Historical Association and they are some of my favorites.

If I did do any decorating, I think tinsel would be my #1! Any advice for decorating readers who want to decorate their house like a first lady?

What always surprises me about the White House holiday decorations is how creative and crafty the designs can be - but also pretty easy to replicate at your local Michael’s. One year they filled the tables and mantle in the Vermeil Room with these ribbon trees, and it was basically just foam trees at various heights with velvet ribbon layered and hot-glued - totally doable. One year they hung bells from red ribbons at various lengths and it was so pretty and festive.

Last year in the East Room they made this absolutely stunning display of what was essentially big chunks of gold and silver confetti glued onto fishing line and hung from the ceiling. If you’re into DIY, you could definitely achieve this look.

Apparently we were in South Korea at the same time, but you had a much more eventful schedule!

OMG! This was the final stop of a three-country tour for President Trump that started in Malaysia and included Tokyo. We were in Gyeongju for the APEC Summit, which is this big annual gathering of world leaders. Trump also met with President Xi during that stop, which was pretty newsy in terms of thawing US-China relations (for now, at least).

The thing about traveling abroad with the president is that it’s completely grueling because you generally are covering the events during the day but also often keeping US hours (so just napping in 2-hour increments for days on end) and there is very little time for extracurricular activities UNTIL the president is wheels up and the trip is over.

So when that happened, I caught a train to Seoul ahead of my flight the next morning, arriving in town around 5pm. I knew I wanted to have some sort of K-beauty experience but wasn’t really sure where to look. I ended up booking a treatment that a friend of mine had seen on TikTok.

It was described as a “facial symmetry session,” where they did an AI analysis of everything wrong with my face, and then pointed it out to me in great detail. Then they hooked me up to acupuncture with electric currents, did chiropractic adjustment and a facial massage (the kind where they put gloved hands in your mouth). I think I look exactly the same amount of symmetrical as I did before but I loved every minute of it. Highly recommend Duna!

I suppose that, sometimes with beauty treatments, it’s about the journey not the destination! Is Air Force One cool?

Air Force One is definitely cool, but the press area of the plane isn’t as glamorous as you might expect. The seats are like a first class domestic plane, they don’t really recline much - which is totally fine when you’re going to Phoenix, but less great when you’re on the way to Tokyo. You’re also on hyper-alert at all times because the president can just decide he wants to come to the back of the plane and hold a gaggle at any point in the flight without much warning - so you gotta be ready.

Being alert the whole flight sounds so hard - we’re not giving you journalists enough credit! I’ve noticed that you’ve been making way more short-form videos for CNN — what’s driving that strategy?

Our digital video strategy has changed a lot over the past years but I think the team has really hit its stride in creating content that you wouldn’t just watch on cable — content that takes people behind the scenes in a more casual way to engage new audiences. I really love it because it can be a bit more creative and less broadcast-y, if that makes sense.

Yes definitely makes sense! Speaking of making videos at CNN, can we talk about your engagement?

Jeff and I had been together for about five years and I had been on high alert all year for an engagement - I kind of expected it would happen over the holidays last year and it didn’t. (I may have had a bit of a meltdown.) But it was really important to Jeff that it be a big surprise and he got this idea to do it at the White House.

At the end of the Biden administration, I was working a weekend morning TV shift, doing hits from 6-11am. At the very end of my shift on January 19 - one day before Inauguration - my photojournalist colleagues Peter Morris and Khalil Abdallah told me that they needed my help testing new equipment for vertical videos. I agreed to walk outside and tape a mock video for them to suss out how the new rig worked.

After the first take, Peter said it wasn’t very good and I needed to do it again - it was sleeting out and so cold and I was so annoyed. The second take, Jeff taps me on the shoulder and gets down on one knee. It took me a few moments to realize we weren’t actually testing new video equipment. I was completely shocked and surprised - I did NOT expect it to happen there, nor did I expect a three-camera shoot capturing the moment (plus photos from NYT legend Doug Mills). It required an enormous amount of coordination between Jeff and White House wranglers and comms team, literally on the last full day of the Biden admin. It was such a happy moment and day!

Serious kudos to Jeff for pulling that off! I’ll end on a more serious question. Journalists are really important for thwarting corruption and unfortunately it keeps getting harder to be one due to shrinking news rooms etc. What’s your advice for young people who might be thinking about it as a career?

It’s so hard! But in my experience, it’s been completely worth it. You have to be willing to get in early and stay late and do work that you are way overqualified to do just to get a foot in the door. I think the most important thing you can do is to seek opportunities beyond your job description - pitch a story no one else is doing, volunteer to help on an overnight shift - that is the way to stand out.

But I think in this news environment, you may have to cast a wider and different kind of net to get started - it might not be the traditional entry-level network job, it might be new media. And don’t be afraid to network - reach out to everyone you can, people are always willing to help and give advice and bounce ideas.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for caring about this stuff too. Here’s to 2025 being the year we all notice more, ask better questions, and maybe—just maybe—steal some gold confetti-glued-to-fishing-line energy for our own homes.

Happy New Year.

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Never have I ever wished I was in New Jersey but my friend Emily threw an event with HBO where Bobby Baccalieri (John Ventimiglia) and Janice (Aida Turturro) wrapped presents for mall-goers in Sopranos themed wrapping paper, so apparently I do now.

Holiday events are in full swing and everyone decided to have their party on December 20th. Except Alison Roman, who chose Sunday for her famed ham party. My friend who got the coveted invite said she’d send pictures of the spread, promising “I will even bring you home ham, a meat you don’t even eat.” This vegetarian might break for a little Alison Roman ham.

Planning a big friend’s dinner has never been tougher. We’re at the age where everyone has a demanding life, whether it’s kids, work, family, or that weird sore throat everyone seems to have right now. This is how Christina and I found ourselves suddenly free on the 5th night of Hanukkah.

I texted them on the side:

“I’m still down to do something if you want!”

“Do you want to go to my friend’s performance at the Jewish Museum?”

I hesitated. The Upper East Side. So close, yet so far. I had already declined my sister’s invitation to a party in Manhattan the film crowd was throwing (and good thing too, she told me she ended up staying out until 3AM - party girl!).

But sometimes you have to travel for art and this was one of those instances. That’s how we ended up at How to Trap a Demon: Immersive Encounter with Artist Tamar Ettun, which involved dancing, demon trapping, a beautiful giant balloon made of parachute and mini latke bar complete with sufganiyot.

Afterwards, we got to enjoy the museum for free, where we came upon Anish Kapoor’s early works and his use of Vantablack, a class of super-black coating that absorbs approximately 99.6% of visible light creating the effect of staring into a black hole. One of my designers at work had actually explored using Vantablack for a big installation, but we ultimately abandoned the idea due to budget. It was cool to see it in person and at large scale in Kapoor’s work.

I returned home convinced Kapoor was a genius. Two hours of Googling later, I understood he was also a petty legend.

In 2016, Kapoor secured exclusive rights to Vantablack. Not just the right to use it—the right to be the only artist who could use it. Power move.

Stuart Semple, another artist was understandably not cool with that. So he created his own pigment called the “Pinkest Pink”—a pigment so aggressively, almost offensively pink that it’s basically the opposite of Vantablack.

Then he made it available to literally everyone except Anish Kapoor.

At checkout, buyers were required to check a box confirming that:

“You are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief, this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.”

From there:

• A public event called: “Paint the Bean ‘Pinkest Pink’ to annoy sculptor Anish Kapoor” appears, referring to Chicago’s Cloud Gate sculpture.

• Kapoor somehow gets his hands on the Pinkest Pink and posts his middle finger dipped in the pigment on Instagram with the caption: “Up yours #pink.”

• Semple develops more products that were available to anyone who was not Kapoor, including pigments that achieve similar outcomes to Vantablack and something called Diamond Dust — “an extremely reflective glitter made of crushed glass shards that are designed to hurt Kapoor if he dipped his finger in it.”

“The point is,” Semple said in interviews, “art shouldn’t be gatekept.” A noble sentiment! But the execution? Thank you, thank you Kapoor and Semple for being two grown men who just refused to stop. All it takes is infinite resources and zero chill.

And thank you, dear friends, for reading my little side project. Have a wonderful break.

Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3

Very excited for next week’s newsletter! We’ll hear from Betsy Klein, CNN’s Senior White House Reporter who has covered White House Christmases every year since December 2016. NBD.