Each time I mentioned I was going to Gov Ball, the responses ranged from, “How young of you,” to “You can just hang out in the 21+ area — the 21+ area will be empty.” Encouraging!

I have been to Gov Ball before. It was 2013, and it was on Randall’s Island, which was a genuinely difficult place to get to. After schlepping there on Friday, a friend of a friend — who was PAing on some TV show — commandeered the production van to drive us back. It was a run-of-the-mill, maybe even shitty white van, but compared to being packed into the 6 train like a can of sardines and then walking 15 minutes across a bridge, I felt like royalty. Friend of a friend, I can’t remember who you are, but thank you for what turned out to be a core memory.

Gov Ball has since relocated to Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, which is, logistically, the same as going to a Mets game. Much easier. And yet: going to Gov Ball in your 30s is still, I can now confirm, a crazy thing to do. I might even do it again. Here’s how it went.

10:45 AM — We met Mike and Mel for breakfast in the neighborhood. I ordered cheesy grits with a poached egg, even though I don’t normally eat breakfast, and split an iced latte with Ben. Mel got avocado toast that weirdly came with two pieces of toast stacked on top of each other, avocado only on the top one. In the end, it was so loaded she needed the second piece anyway. In what can only be described as a wild choice, Mike ordered shrimp tacos. Shrimp tacos are not breakfast.

11:30 AM — We began our pilgrimage to Flushing Meadows. Into Manhattan, across it, and into Queens. When we finally got off the 7, there was something fun about walking out onto a wooden platform; it felt like going to the beach. I immediately noticed that everyone was wearing tall boots. It was extremely hot out. I regulate my body temperature through my feet. These dogs needed to breathe.

12:30 PM — We clear security, admire the trees they’ve covered in pink fur, and head toward the Snapchat Stage where Rachel Chinouriri is on. On the way, I stop to investigate the Verizon Lounge situation. It turns out you just have to be a Verizon customer. No one else seems to care about this. I file it away.

It’s so hot. We find a sliver of shade. Rachel Chinouriri is cute and has great energy. Then the giant screens cut from her performance to a message: “Thunderstorms in the area.” Mike consults a fancy Doppler radar app. “Some storms are coming,” he says. “I think it’ll rain for like 15 minutes.” Meanwhile, men are climbing poles to do something to the straps holding up the screens. I look around. “The Verizon Lounge?” Everyone: yes.

1:00 PM — We’re in the Verizon Lounge. At first it was at capacity, but by some miracle we all make it in. There are $20 beers and what appears to be a Costco variety pack of chips for sale. None of that matters, because when the skies open up — and oh boy do they — we are sitting comfortably in one of the only structures with a roof.

Mike and I are flying high off our own foresight. I won’t say the day would have been ruined if we’d gotten drenched, but I’m not sure how gracefully I would have handled it. Mel and Ben probably would have been fine either way. They have a chill demeanor I do not possess.

1:45 PM — Slayyyter finally comes on, late due to the rain delay. I knew who she was because Megan Stalter played her recent DJ set I reported on previously, but I’d never actually seen her perform. Her set was maybe the best of the day. Ben and I couldn’t stop describing her to each other. “She’s like Screamo Shakira,” I said. “Except she really loves guns.” “It’s very Florida Woman,” Ben replied. “It’s like she saw Spring Breakers and thought: what if I made that my whole vibe, but was a pop star.” The imagery flashing behind her the entire set was spooky, fast-moving scenes of dollar signs, guns, deer, and a Donnie Darko-esque bunny.

3:30 PM — I’m fading. My need to sit is growing. My desire for shade is beginning to supersede my desire for music. I leave the Blood Orange set to use the bathroom and discover there is no hand sanitizer left. The thought of how many people around me cannot sanitize their hands makes me recoil. I am once again reminded of my age.

4:45 PM — I get food while Ben watches Geese. I know Geese is very hot right now. Food is more important. The lines are insane. In line, a slender blonde girl is joined by her brown-haired friend, who returns breathless with news: “I got scouted again!” “Oh my god,” says the blonde, clearly jealous. “I wish I’d been with you so we could have been twin scouted!” “No, no. She was reluctant because I’m only 15, and you’re 14.” I am out here dressed like a Korean grandma and there are at least two model scouts here, scouting 14-year-olds.

6:15 PM — I end up laying in the grass during Hot Mulligan, and it hits me: everyone was right. I am too old for this. I post about it on Instagram Stories. People seem to enjoy my defeat.

Hot Mulligan, it turns out, is from Michigan. I should have known, as something about them felt familiar and safe. The lead singer unknowingly made fun of the VIP section mid-set and told the GA crowd to boo them. We did.

7:00 PM — We are so far back at Dominic Fike that the video is out of sync with the audio, which Ben tells me is a known phenomenon. Mel keeps going on about Dominic’s evil aura. “Doesn’t anyone else see it?”

His stage banter is very bad. At one point he just says, “Hey New York, a lot of hot people here! Everyone’s so hot in this city!” Then he tells the audience to punch him if they see him in the street. “Take my ears off and throw them away,” our friend Hannah says. Chicken Tenders is a good song, though.

There are also approximately one thousand young girls all wearing the exact same outfit: white tank top or tube top, denim shorts or skirt, knee-high boots. Individually, they all look perfectly normal, but congregated together in a big group, it looks cult-like. At their age, I imagine, I too was dressed exactly like all of my friends at Gov Ball.

7:45 PM — We rush to the Snapchat Stage for Jennie. A man I immediately dislike is standing in front of me. I keep moving. He keeps ending up next to me. He is my enemy.

We’re far back, but Jennie comes out looking cool. She’s a great dancer, with a full team of dancers, a live band, and pyrotechnics. She is also clearly lip-syncing, which, given the choreography, seems like a reasonable call — it looks genuinely exhausting. When she finally addresses the crowd, she says: “You guys are making me so excited, because this is just the start of all the music festivals I have to do.” She sounds like someone who just remembered she has 47 more of these. What a curse, to be that good at something.

She closes with Like Jennie, a predictable move. The crowd loses its mind.

8:45 PM — A$AP Rocky closes things out. Truly, everybody is there. The largest crowd of the day. He comes out wearing a mask, which is a huge cop-out — I can’t even see his lips moving — but also respect. Very Daft Punk. Very “send a body double and no one will know.”

We leave early. We can’t really see anything, and, as established, we can’t see his mouth. The walk to the rideshare pickup is long and, finally, pleasant weather-wise.

My biggest takeaway: I would do it again. Festivals are nice. But I need a blanket, because at this age, being on the ground is non-negotiable.

If you missed last week, a meditation on weddings, line cooks, and Madonna’s leg.

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

“I was initially drawn to Marcus for, I assume, the same reason as everybody else — there were small bowls of candy all around his parents’ house, and I had an incurable sweet tooth.”

My husband was giving a toast. We were in Pittsburgh.

As Ben was in the wedding party, I found myself with some downtime prior. We were staying at the Omni William Penn, a property doing a kind of stately English impression, all crystal chandeliers and gold plasterwork. In the lobby there was a letter from the British Ambassador who once stayed there. I thought it was funny that his team decided to put him up in a hotel that is a rather unconvincing knockoff of his homeland. The gym couldn’t shake the aesthetic either, I noticed, as I walked on a treadmill next to an ornate fireplace.

After getting swindled at the hotel coffee shop where I paid $7 for two bottles of Poland Spring, I decided to eat my Chobani yogurt in the cute plaza outside. The city had programmed a little concert which was just a tent and a girl standing inside singing to 4 people and roughly forty pigeons (the business district of downtown Pittsburgh is quiet on weekends). She had a great voice.

She moved through the standards: Midnight Train to Georgia, Vanessa Carlton's A Thousand Miles. I waited patiently for her to sing me an Olivia Dean song. I felt confident she would. Then the opening chords of "Man I Need" rang out, and I sang along, unashamed, beside a family who had clearly never heard of Olivia Dean. The singer and I locked eyes. The plaza was so clean and the pigeons bobbed around us in such numbers that the whole scene took on the quality of a simulation, like an uncanny Animal Crossing loading screen.

Back in New York it was a16z tech week, which I had planned to participate in more seriously than I did. In practice this meant one dinner at Medúza which is connected to the Gansevoort Hotel. The invitation arrived with a venue-imposed dress code prohibiting wigs, slides, ballcaps, sleeveless tanks, costumes, and a constellation of other items suggesting the door policy had been written by someone who had recently been burned by an uncouth bachelorette party. Inside: Tulum vibes, $30 feta truffle martinis, and Rosa Barney and I telling all our best stories to the mix of influencers and marketers in attendance.

Later, The Lineup: a dinner series that hands line cooks a kitchen of their own for one night. Our chef, Imogen Baber, spends her days at Eleven Madison Park and her evenings proving a point: the zero-waste leek tamale was, against all odds, divine.

We ended the night uptown. Due to the dinner, we missed the Grindr x Madonna concert, but we were all impressed with Madonna's dexterity and also still a little worried about her leg-dangling 500 feet above Times Square. Lizzie Mac, who helped produce it, arrived bearing a Grindr x Madonna t-shirt, which she handed over to me with the gravity of a controlled substance transfer. “People will fight you for this,” she said. I know she’s right.

If you missed the last dispatch, reporting from the Skylark Member’s Club launch party:

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

Retail & real estate.

Stand Oil x Colina Strada. Stand Oil is a cute Korean purse brand that I saw all around Seoul. It is on the more affordable end (and I personally opted to purchase Marge Sherwood and Osoi instead), but this collab makes total sense. I like the wave knot bag, but the others are much more Colina Strada-y.

UNIQLO and Cecilie Bahnsen. This looks itchy to me but also kind of cute?

Outdoor brands taking over in China. A wave of premium outdoor and sport labels opened China debut stores in recent months like Japan’s Nanamica, Spanish trail-running brand NNormal, and Danish camping label Nordisk, joining Mammut in a broader push into the country’s top-tier cities. The retail real estate once held by luxury fashion houses is being quietly absorbed by performance brands.

Every neighborhood is starting to look the same. New York Magazine’s Curbed has a name for it: “Little Nolita” ie. the phenomenon of the same cluster of upscale DTC brands (your Aesops, your Everlanes, your Buck Masons) colonizing formerly distinct neighborhoods in cities across the country until every cool block is essentially a franchise of the same aesthetic.

I hate it here. “Who’d want it is an Elon Musk–type,” a broker told NY Mag. “He could have a compound with his 100 children there.” Jeff Greene, developer and failed Senate candidate, bought a Soho cast-iron building in 2011 for $26 million, planned to sell seven boutique lofts but couldn’t, so in late May he bundled three unsold lofts into a “private vertical estate“ asking $72 million.

People aren’t buying appliances right now. Whirlpool shares tumbled after the company reported a nearly 10% revenue drop year-over-year. CFO Roxanne Warner said demand for appliances has hit "recession-level lows" in the U.S. and Canada due to cratering consumer confidence "fueled by the impact of the Iran war." Whirlpool's small domestic appliance business, however, grew more than 13%, as consumers proved willing to spend on more affordable items.

Craft girlies, do we think I could make these? Seems like I could just sew on those circles right?

New York stuff.

Is it too expensive to be creative in Brooklyn? Another creative moves upstate as her business shutters.

Red Hook Tavern opened a cocktail bar. With perhaps the most straightforward name ever, Tavern Next Door, and you can get the famous burger there (hopefully without the long waits).

Greenpoint got a beach. It’s called Motiva, which sounds like something you take when you can’t focus, but is actually the name of the oil company that sold the city the land. It took 20 years and $350 million to get here. It is 1.8 acres.

This Kabir guy must really be something. The new Brooklyn Mirage owner, Kabir Mulchandani (CEO and founder of Pacha’s parent company) secured a temporary liquor license in a hearing that began as a tense standoff. But he won over the board with promises of accountability, which a reporter for the Brooklyn Mag said “…was, in its own way, the kind of performance that might have earned an encore, if regulatory hearings had them.”

Go Knicks! Short king summer.

Life x AI.

This startup will clean your New York apartment for free. The catch: a guy with a camera on his hat is filming the whole thing. Home environments are the hardest data set to get in robotics right now. They say they’ll blur faces and sensitive details before upload, though there’s no mention of being able to pull your data once it’s in. Would you trade your privacy for a free cleaning?

Reporters aren’t allowed in the Pentagon press office anymore.

Gusto, a payroll/HRIS company, is hiring Head of Social and Influencer Marketing. Interesting to see so many B2B brands behaving more like consumer brands. Salary range listed at $200,000 - $240,000/yr for San Francisco & New York.

The AI subscription era that made ChatGPT cheaper than your Hulu account is over. Anthropic and OpenAI both moved in May to decouple agentic usage from flat-rate plans. Anthropic splits interactive and automated usage into separate billing pools starting June 15, while GitHub retires flat-fee Copilot entirely on June 1.

Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO, putting the company on track for an autumn listing at a $965 billion valuation and leapfrogging OpenAI, which is also filing, possibly this week. Ironically, perhaps in preparation for IPO, the very companies who are creating AI Writers are paying $400K for human ones. The State of Brand reports: “Anthropic’s careers page is running a full hiring sprint for its Creative Studio: a Head of Copy & Content role listed at $320,000 to $400,000, a Copy Lead for Enterprise at $255,000 to $320,000, a Copy & Content Lead for Launches, a Motion Designer, and a Head of Anthropic Creative.”

Jensen Huang says to stop blaming layoffs on AI gains. NVIDIA's CEO went on international television and called the AI layoff excuse "lazy" and "irresponsible." DeepMind's CEO said essentially the same thing a week earlier.

Health and wellness.

Is protein ice cream good? David (the protein bar that launched with a staged Bella Hadid papparazzi opp) launched a protein ice cream with a staged Bella Hadid papparazzi opp, this time on a boat in Cannes. The brand also dropped Cod 2 earlier this month, a tinned fish with exactly two ingredients (cod, salt). Protein can we sweet, protein can be salty, either way David wants to own it.

Biohacking is part of dominant culture now and crossovers like this will be interesting to watch: Morpheus, partner company to NYCxDESIGN and Milan Design Week regular ATRA, showed up at Dave Asprey’s Beyond Biohacking Conference in Austin. Magasin described Morpheus as “a lounge chair system embedded with stress-regulating tech—light therapy and inaudible sound waves—that analogs as luxury furniture.” Biohacking is getting tasteful, which is either a sign it’s maturing or that it’s learned how to sell to a different kind of person.

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

I decided this long weekend I was going to be fun. That included heading to The Bell House for the taping of “Why Are You Single” — Marie Faustin’s dating show being filmed to air on Tubi. Her outfit? Scottish realness. The seat next to me? Empty, because you know Jassmin was late. They kept asking the audience if we had any questions for the contestants and Christina and I tried a few times to get them to tell us their star sign and what it means to them. We were unsuccessful.

After the show, we said hello to Jassmin’s comedian friends who also came out to support Marie, including Devon Walker from SNL who had just casually brought a tennis racket to the show. We get it, you play tennis! We hopped into a cab to Public Records, immediately regretted it, and walked to Bar Rêve. With a cocktail menu where each drink is inspired by an impressionist painting, I’m not saying that it’s trying too hard, but it’s definitely not, not trying.

On Sunday we headed to BAM to watch Obsession for my sister’s birthday. It’s a horror film, and the horror is this: a white man’s cowardly decision ruins multiple women’s lives. As for being scary, it was more frightening from an auditory standpoint than anything else. A lot of screaming, a lot of banging. It’s not the kind of movie you can say you “enjoyed” but I did think it was good. The director, Curry Barker, is only 26 years old and relatively unknown, though his dad is in the biz (a screenwriter). At $750K to make and a $90M global box office in just two weeks, it’s the least expensive film to top the domestic box office in 17 years and has already out-performed the theatrical runs of Midsommar, Hereditary, and Barbarian. I’ll be watching Inde Navarrette, her performance carried the movie.

When the film ended my sister tried to just go home, but one needs to debrief and decompress after a movie like that so I insisted on a nightcap. She ordered a Gerolsteiner, which sounds like a beer, but it’s actually extremely aggressive sparkling water that is high in both calcium and magnesium content. I really don’t think we are talking about German sparkling water enough.

Wednesday, Marianne Boschert and Rachel Joelson put on a delightful party for Skylark’s new membership at the Ludlow Hotel. There was a gorgeous tiered grazing table, custom matchboxes and yes, cigarettes. We met some influencers who were trying to mingle. One regaled us with the tale of how she had just broken up with her boyfriend and he was chewing her out on the phone moments before she arrived. Then texts started piling in and she fell silent as she read them and began to furiously respond. The conversation continued around her until she suddenly stood up and said she needed a moment, making a swift exit. I do not envy her or wish to go back to that young, tumultuous type of love.

I have not yet watched the Summer House Reunion but I have seen many comments speculating that Amanda Batula’s pharmaceutical mix must resemble something similar to “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” which is a great marriage of two of my interests.

There is no Party Talk this week because I am writing this from a hotel in Pittsburgh and it’s a short week at work, so please forgive me. Back to your regularly scheduled programming next week.

If you missed it, a birthday in a closed coffee shop in the LES got me thinking about movie marketing campaigns, and our queen Megan Stalter stopped everyone in their tracks at the AMAs:

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

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

How about that bait and switch between 94 degree weather yesterday and a cool 64 today?

Over the weekend, I went to a birthday party in a closed coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Two friends were there, both producers, one in film, one in fashion, and Marty Supreme came up. Neither of them liked it very much. I agreed. The case against it is well-documented: indulgent, stress-inducing, a white man making bad choices with zero apparent consequence. It’s been made thoroughly enough that I’ll spare you.

On Monday, my husband Ben and I watched Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. We’re serious about movies in the way that true film lovers are: no phones, no leaving the room, full attention. We held to this until around the final act, when I noticed Ben had gotten up from the couch. Afterward, I asked what he thought, expecting a full takedown. Instead: the costumes weren’t to his taste, it was trying too hard, and it was, overall, a little boring. Hard to argue.

The third film I’ve been turning over is The Drama, which I haven’t seen. So I did what any reasonable person does: I asked around. The consensus, to the extent there was one, broke along familiar lines. People who liked the concept didn’t love the execution: the script, thin character development, an ending that apparently goes too soft. The ones who landed somewhere between neutral and positive tended to cite the same thing: it’s a good conversation starter. One person went to opening night to support a friend in the cast and put it best: “It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to have one opinion about. I went with a group of like ten people and I’d say a couple really did not like it, a couple loved it, and most fell in a complicated middle.”

What all three films share isn’t mediocrity, exactly. It’s the gap between what they were sold as and what they actually are. Timothée Chalamet was everywhere before Marty Supreme dropped; the campaign was a spectacle unto itself. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi blanketed Vogue and Deux Moi in the run-up to Wuthering Heights’ Valentine’s Day release. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson were photographed together so relentlessly that by the time anyone realized it was a stunt, we’d already been had.

Movie marketing has always sold a fantasy. What’s changed is that it’s gotten so good at it that the film itself almost can’t compete. You’ve been on the date before you’ve walked in the door.

If you missed last week, I broke down why we all need to be watching Megan Stalter:

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 fun note. A lot of Party Talk items were sent in by readers this week and I love it! My inbox is open: kristine@secondarymag.com

Should we be paying more attention to the clown community? When a friend mentioned she was going to Paris to attend clown school I thought nothing of it (not sure who that says more about). But then I saw this feature in Vulture about the Los Angeles clown scene, which apparently was brought into the spotlight via Heated Rivalry’s “It” boy Connor Storrie, who casually mentioned taking clown classes in an interview. The pictures are pretty dynamic.

All Things Go NYC lineup was just released. I swear the Washington D.C. lineup is always better than the New York City one. Sigh. But our girl Meg Stalter is on the lineup so if anyone goes please let me know.

A Korean produce farm grows in the Hudson Valley. The chefs behind Jook, Jua, Atomix, Atoboy and more are taking sourcing into their own hands. After struggling to find high-quality Korean produce in the U.S. they’re launching @firsthandfarm, a one-acre farm in the Hudson Valley dedicated to growing foundational Korean ingredients like perilla leaves, namul vegetables, wild garlic, and more. They should have just bought the perilla leaves from me; They were growing so well on the terrace last year that we threw a perilla leaf party.

Anthropic keeps acquiring. Stainless, the SDK generator, announced it's joining Anthropic to work on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs. The move is less about tidying up the API docs and more about owning the infrastructure that connects AI agents to the rest of the internet and applications.

Shein bought Everlane, which is either ironic or inevitable. Shein is acquiring Everlane, the millennial DTC brand whose entire identity was built on "radical transparency" and ethical sourcing, from majority owner L Catterton for about $100 million, a steep discount from its $250 million peak valuation. The leading theory on why: Everlane allows Shein to play in a segment beyond fast fashion, supporting a narrative of a more balanced portfolio ahead of a potential IPO. Those with common stock will not receive a payout.

The Jacob Riis Bathhouse in the Rockaways is back with a cover charge. The Art Deco landmark that once held 10,000 changing rooms, a rooftop solarium, an orchestra, and 8,000 beachgoers at a time was boarded up in 1972 and handed off to the National Park Service, which used it mostly to house lifeguards. This summer it reopens as the $88 million Rockaway Ocean Club, a members club and hotel coming to what was historically known as the "People's Beach." The people’s beach no longer though, with founding memberships starting at $1,700 a year ($1200 + $500 joining fee for those under 30 years old). It does appear a few of the food offerings will be public.

The Met is absorbing the Neue Galerie. Ronald Lauder (Estée Lauder heir and founder of the Neue Galerie) and his daughter are contributing a $200 million endowment and 13 paintings from their personal collection to seal the 2028 merger; the deal brings more than 600 works into the Met, including Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," the shimmering "Woman in Gold.” Café Sabarsky stays open, which is the only part anyone on the Upper East Side actually cares about.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 underwhelms in China. Boycotts spread across China, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong after viewers said the name of a Chinese assistant character echoes "ching chong," a racist anti-Asian slur, while her portrayal as a nerdy, high-achieving but socially awkward overachiever drew criticism for reinforcing exactly the kind of Hollywood stereotype that hasn't gone anywhere. The film opened fourth on China's national chart.

Real estate.

The end of Bubble House. The iconic house at 251 East 71st Street with bubble windows has been sold to a family for $4.99M that wasn’t hunting for an architectural oddity and will “very likely” take the windows out.

Miami keeps getting richer and emptier at the same time. The number of millionaires in the city nearly doubled between 2014 and 2024, new arrivals earn $178,000 a year on average, and Palantir and Citadel have both relocated there — yet people are leaving metro Miami faster than any other large metro in the country, because it turns out importing the one percent does not make a city more livable for everyone else.

43,000 Chicago home listings just vanished from Zillow overnight. The local Midwest listings database cut off its feed to the site amid a broader fight over "private listings," a practice championed by Compass, the country's largest brokerage, that lets sellers quietly test the market with select agents and buyers before going public. Zillow, which argues private listings disadvantage buyers and undermine market transparency, is now caught in the crossfire, with tens of thousands of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin sellers suddenly invisible to the internet's most-visited real estate site.

Reality check.

Trump sued himself and won, at your expense. Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS (the agency he controls) in exchange for a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "Anti-Weaponization Fund" with no congressional approval, no judicial sign-off, and a five-member commission Trump can fire at will. The fund is widely expected to pay out January 6 defendants and political allies; the settlement was timed to drop two days before a judge could ask whether the lawsuit was even legitimate.

A separate document signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declares the government "FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED" from investigating Trump, his family, or his businesses for past tax issues. Senator Ron Wyden called it a violation of the federal law that prohibits executive branch officials from interfering in IRS audits. The contractor who leaked the returns in the first place already pleaded guilty and went to prison. Just one of those weeks.

Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. Charming. From Barrons: “Musk holds 6.4 billion shares of SpaceX. The IPO hasn’t happened yet, but recent private-market trades have reached as high as $130. That makes Musk’s stock worth about $830 billion. Musk’s Tesla stock, including his 2018 vested stock options, is currently worth about $290 billion. Combined, that’s $1.1 trillion. He’s done it. Musk is a trillionaire.”

Jeff Bezos is on some weird crisis PR journey after the Met Gala. His remarks declaring he wants the bottom half of earners to pay zero income tax have been widely covered, but also he wants to make sure he notes that taxing him (ie. billionaires) more won’t do anything to help the bottom half in his opinion. If he’s so concerned about the bottom half of earners, it begs the question why his warehouse employees are peeing in bottles.

Palate cleanser.

The next Chapelle Roan will be British.

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Thanks for reading!

We need to talk about Megan.

I first encountered her in Hacks, where she plays Kayla, a spectacularly unqualified talent agent’s assistant, with a commitment to the bit so total it becomes its own kind of virtuosity. I tried Too Much, Lena Dunham’s Netflix series in which Stalter plays the lead, and couldn’t finish it. And yet here I am, unable to look away.

A few weeks ago, Stalter staged a lookalike contest in a Bushwick park, arrived in character to reveal the entire event was a vehicle for her pop music debut, then roasted every contestant. Days later she played a pop-up show at Drom in an orange wig and a yellow feather boa, looking like a fever dream of what a pop star is supposed to look like. Not quite Charli XCX, not quite a parody of Charli XCX. The song is called “Prettiest Girl in America.”

A lyric: “Sometimes I wish I was ugly and poor / so we wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

And then there is the Substack article. In the weeks surrounding the Hacks finale and her music rollout, Stalter wrote about being queer and Christian at a moment when the right is deploying religion as its primary legislative weapon against queer people. It’s not “some sort of religious psychosis,” she assures readers. Her argument is not complicated, but it is doing real work: God is for everyone, and you cannot take that from me.

This woman contains multitudes.

None of this exists without Lena Dunham, which Dunham made literal by casting Stalter in Too Much. This was not subtle, and it was not meant to be. Dunham is the old guard of this particular archetype: confessional, excessive, and sincere about the wrong things in the wrong register.

Her first memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, arrived in 2014 at the peak of a cultural appetite for messy female interiority, and then the mood shifted, and she was made to feel the full weight of that shift. Her new book, Famesick — an instant Times number-one, her first in over a decade — is a memoir about illness, addiction, ambition, and the cost of having been very publicly known.

The book tour is deliberately intimate: pajamas encouraged, sleepover-party vibe intended, venues ranging from BAM to the Hackney Empire. There was even a Warby Parker-sponsored launch event at Gloria Steinem’s home, which is either the most New York sentence of 2026 or a precise encapsulation of how cultural rehabilitation actually works: feminist icon, legacy brand, book party. The establishment has clearly made its peace with Dunham and ultimately embraced her.

Stalter is what the archetype looks like when it has learned from that history. Where Dunham’s excess was largely unselfconscious (she was simply herself, and the culture overreacted), Stalter’s is fully constructed and self-aware. The bit never fully ends, which means she can never quite be pinned down. She has armor Dunham did not have, and she built it, at least in part, out of watching what happened to Dunham. The orange wig, the feather boa, the electroclash single about the difficulty of being beautiful and rich: all of it is a performance of excess so precise it becomes untouchable. You cannot accuse someone of being too much when being too much is demonstrably the point.

If you’re not watching Stalter, you should start. She’s one of the most interesting people in entertainment right now. And Stalter and Dunham both refuse to be brand-safe. In this moment, it seems that the culture is newly hungry for exactly that. Not because we became nicer, or more sophisticated, or more willing to sit with discomfort. But because our world is falling apart.

When queerness is under coordinated legislative attack, a queer woman who goes to church and writes earnestly about reclaiming faith is not oversharing. She is holding ground. When a woman writes a memoir about the cost of ambition and public visibility in this specific historical moment, it does not read as self-indulgence. It reads as documentation.

Dunham both blazed a trail and paid the price for being “too much” when she was younger and less self-aware. Stalter is building on that foundation, with better armor and a bigger wig.

If you missed last week, I quit Amazon:

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

Inflation is outpacing wage growth. Inflation has risen to 3.8% year-over-year, according to the latest data from the Labor Department, outpacing wage growth of 3.6%. Consumers are struggling to keep up with higher prices on gas and groceries due to the ongoing Iran war. But I guess investors think bagels are recession proof because…

Private equity is obsessed with bagels. The New York Times identified four brands that have taken on significant investment: Pop-Up Bagels raised $27 million from Stripes and recently closed a round at a $300 million valuation from Tiger Global, with plans to expand to 300 locations by 2029; Call Your Mother Deli sold a majority stake to asset manager Invis and is expanding from DC to Denver, Philly, and Chicago; H&H Bagels, purchased by Wall Street veteran Jay Russian in 2014, now has 19 locations nationally; and Go Bagels, backed by the Manhattan Bagel Equity Fund, acquired Baz Bagel and Bagel Point with $5 million and is looking to raise $50 million more.

This isn’t entirely new territory — the owners of Panera, Einstein’s, Brugger’s, and Manhattan Bagel have run over 1,000 locations for decades — but let’s be honest, those places sell circle shaped bread, not real bagels. This new wave of PE investments is betting that freshly-baked, slow-risen, hand-rolled bagels can scale.

ILIS lost its lease, last day of service is May 28. After 2.5 years of operation, the Greenpoint building housing ILIS was sold. “We are already looking toward our next home and planning what comes next,” they wrote in their newsletter. If you never made it here, it is an amazing experience.

Kith's members' club may be struggling to fill seats. Feed Me reported that Ronny Fieg's Ivy club appears to be having trouble attracting members as neighboring Chez Margaux has reportedly encouraged its own members to apply. Separately, Kith's London restaurant is closing.

Vinyl at Industry City. June 13-14, The Vinyl Con will bring its massive traveling record fair to Industry City for its NYC debut—two days, thousands of records and DJs spinning straight from their own shelves.⁠

Pop Mart makes mini fridges now. Pop Mart launched its first home appliance offering; two LABUBU-themed mini fridges priced at 5,999 RMB each (~$883 USD). With only 999 units produced on April 30, they sold out instantly. Resale listings on secondhand platforms hit as high as 92,300 RMB (~$13,591 USD), a 15x markup, before the drop.

A hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship sent vaccine stocks surging this week. The WHO confirmed 8 cases and 3 deaths; Moderna climbed as much as 9% on news of its early-stage research partnership with Korea University’s Vaccine Innovation Center, a collaboration that actually started in 2023. The virus causes roughly 50,000 serious infections annually with no approved vaccine.

An actually good B2B event at Tech Week. Tech Weeks are often filled with random panels and events that founders go to for free food. But when I saw this event I thought, “This actually looks kinda legit.” A financial planning software company called Pigment is hosting a Women in Finance panel followed by puppy yoga at Boston Tech Week.

Here’s why it works:

• Women-only turns a product event into a community event.

  • You’re not there to be sold to, you’re there because you belong. Most companies wouldn’t want to limit themselves to one gender, but by doing so it actually makes the event more appealing to that specific demographic.

• It’s a full half day of programming, not a one-off panel, making it feel more like attending a retreat.

  • This will help them attract the CFOs and senior finance leaders they’ve limited attendance to.

  • Fun programming like Puppy yoga after a panel on AI and financial planning is a genuinely good idea.

  • 22 seats keeps it exclusive enough to feel like an invite worth accepting.

If anyone in marketing at Pigment is reading this, let me know how the event goes!

This week in AI:

Princeton’s 133-year honor code couldn’t survive the ChatGPT era. Faculty voted this week to require proctors during exams, effectively ending a policy that has let students test unsupervised since 1893. The school’s dean cited widespread belief that AI-assisted cheating has become endemic, a suspicion confirmed when 30% of seniors admitted to cheating in a student newspaper survey last year.

Anthropic says Claude is done blackmailing people. Remember how Claude Opus 4 attempted to blackmail engineers to avoid being shut down up to 96% of the time? It’s a behavior the company traced back to training on online portrayals of AI as evil and self-preserving. The fix, somehow, was fiction: Anthropic adjusted the model’s training to include stories about AIs behaving admirably, and the blackmail stopped. The villain origin story was literary, and so was the intervention. Claude Haiku 4.5 is, reportedly, a good person now.

Elon Musk’s surprise Anthropic deal is “Game of Thrones-y.” Reporter Madison Mills of Axios does a great breakdown of what she calls the fastest “enemy to business partners pivot” she’s ever reported on.

DeepSeek seeks largest single raise by a Chinese AI company to date. reported that DeepSeek is looking to raise up to 50 billion RMB ($7B+ USD) in its debut external funding round, which could value the company at roughly 350 billion RMB ($50B USD).

Walmart is laying off 1,000 of its knowledge workers. The retailer plans to lay off or relocate roughly 1,000 employees from its global technology and product teams following an operational efficiency review, including around 100 cuts at its corporate hub in New Jersey.

Palette cleanser:

Did you know Aaliyah recorded a song for the animated movie Anastasia? Though I remember watching the animated movie as a child, I have no recollection of Aaliyah’s version, this music video where she looks fierce in red and hangs out with animated characters, or her performance as the youngest person to perform at the Oscars. So when this showed up on my feed, I investigated and enjoyed a little music history.

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

Recently, we needed a new door mat. I love going out, but somehow also hate leaving my house. I forced myself to walk to the local hardware store, not Home Depot, not Lowes. I asked if they had door mats, thinking that they wouldn’t.

“That aisle back there,” the shopkeeper pointed from behind the counter.

Sure I didn’t get to pick the exact color or design, but I didn’t use Amazon. And I got to walk home with it right away. It was like rediscovering how gratifying it can be to need something, go buy it, and have it immediately - not wait 3 days for it to show up on your doorstep.

Scott Galloway started a campaign to get people to cancel Amazon Prime. Economic pressure, he argued, is the only kind that actually registers. On March 11th, I did it. Prime and One Medical, gone.

I assumed it would be painful. I have a lot going on and Amazon had become my shortcut for feeling on top of it. Turns out two months later, things are fine. I haven’t bought every little thing I thought my apartment needed, which mostly confirms I didn’t need it.

I’ve been stopping into physical stores instead. They almost always have what I need. And I found myself thinking about all of this while being inundated with Met Gala content.

This year’s gala, with Bezos and Lauren Sánchez as honorary chairs and lead sponsors to the tune of at least $10 million, triggered boycott calls, protest posters near the museum, and a roster of notable no-shows including Zendaya and, allegedly, Meryl Streep. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon smuggled hundreds of bottles of fake urine into the Met ahead of the red carpet, a nod to longstanding reports about Amazon warehouse conditions. The Met’s own union pointed out that 19% of its members earn less annually than the cost of a single ticket to last year’s gala.

While all of that was happening on the Upper East Side, the rest of the city was busy hosting its own fashion week. In the Meatpacking District, Ball Without Billionaires drew hundreds of people in handmade looks bearing slogans like “The Devil Wears Amazon” in front of a makeshift bodega that read “Labor Is Power.” Fashion stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson hosted; Lisa Ann Walter of Abbott Elementary emceed and delivered her verdict on Jeff Bezos: “Temu Lex Luthor,” “Q-tip with a yacht,” and simply, “very bald.” Workers harmed by Amazon walked the red carpet in custom couture, among them warehouse employees injured on the job, organizers fighting the company’s AI data centers, and laid-off Washington Post staff.

Across the river in Brooklyn, the annual People’s Ball filled the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza with amateur fashionistas, a free runway, and no prize except the crowd’s approval.

On that very same Sunday I was out with a friend who is an actress and when she’s not on stage she helps rich Brooklyn women organize their homes and take care of their children. One such employer has filled a beautiful Brownstone with unopened Amazon boxes. She orders say, sponges, forgets that she ordered them because she doesn’t open the box, and then orders them again.

Perhaps the ease with which we can order things is enabling us to consume more than we actually require.

P.S.

I gotta “hand” it to who predicted we’d see a lot of hands in fashion prior to the Met Gala.

If you missed last week:

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

Have you read a burnout memoir? Last week I wrote about my own desire for coziness and balance and mental health and why I had initially named this newsletter “Cozy girls.” I also referenced the piece I wrote about the end of hustle culture last year. Publishing trends are a useful barometer. When the industry starts packaging a feeling into a genre, the feeling has usually been circulating for a while, long enough to write, edit, and print.

Alice Robb wrote in Bloomberg:

“In this decade, a very different agenda has emerged: the pleasures of giving up. In A Year of Nothing (Whitefox Publishing), prolific British podcaster Emma Gannon cancels all her commitments in favor of long walks and eating bananas in bed. In Ambition Monster (Atria Books), startup veteran Jennifer Romolini laments the toll of all that work on her mental health and marriage. Journalist Rainesford Stauffer’s gentle manifesto, *All the Gold Stars* (Balance), suggests we reframe success to encompass hobbies and community.”

The G train is shutting down for 10 weekends this summer. This is the third straight summer of disruptions, despite residents being told last year it would be the last. Hope you like shuttle buses.

The most expensive home ever listed just hit the market. Asking price? $400 Million. It’s an LA Mega-mansion on an eight-acre estate featuring 39 bedrooms and multiple kitchens across a Mediterranean-style main residence and guest house. On the grounds, you’ll also find three swimming pools, a pool house, a tennis court, a tennis pavilion, and a hammam.

Coinbase laying off 14% of staff. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the reduction in response to a volatile market and, of course, AI advancement. 15 direct reports sounds nightmarish but I generally agree that there is a coordination tax if you let your teams bloat too much at large orgs.

“We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles.”

American Girl x Hill House. My brain when I saw this news: “Why?” then, “Do children even know what Hill House is?” But then I realized it’s really for their moms. Launched this week and timed to Mother’s Day, the 10-piece collection reimagines prints from the original historical dolls (Felicity, Addy, Kirsten, and Samantha) across Hill House’s signature Nap Dress silhouettes in women’s, kids’, baby, and doll sizes, so you can match with your daughter and her doll simultaneously. Actually brilliant.

Do I need to get back on Facebook? reported that content creators and brand accounts started noticing a spike on Facebook around October 2025. A cheese shop in Beverly Hills pulled 13 million Facebook views in 30 days, and another client got 20 million on a single video. A comment on Karten’s LinkedIn post reads:

“I've gone from 0 to 30,000 followers on Facebook in 3 months just by dual posting my reels. The engagement there is crazy right now and the creator fund payouts are much higher than TikTok.”

IKEA has finally cracked inflatable furniture, and it only took 30 years. The PS 2026 collection, the brand's first since 2017, is headlined by an armchair filled with air but built on a carbon steel frame with a textile cover, so it actually holds its shape. The original 1990s attempt, which required a hair dryer to inflate and had a tendency to slide out from under you, was one of the more notable failures in IKEA design history. The full collection, with 35-plus pieces, drops May 14.

“Ganni is one of those brands that has cute stores and nothing to buy.” had some harsh but true words for Ganni this week: “This brand suffers from thinking it was too cool for the masses, while simultaneously pursuing them at top speed.” CEO Laura du Rusquec, who came over from Balenciaga to steer a brand already in super-growth, stepped down after two years. Her mandate was elevation: Paris Fashion Week instead of Copenhagen, higher price points, a new Paris headquarters. The workforce shrank from over 600 to 453 in the process.

Spirit Airlines shut down at 3 a.m. on May 2nd, and thousands of passengers found out when they showed up to the airport. A $500 million government rescue collapsed at the last minute, bondholders said no, and 34 years of budget travel ended overnight — the first major U.S. airline to fold in 25 years. It turns out the demand for budget travel never really recovered after Covid, and the airlines paying attention figured that out.

The WSJ ran a big feature this week on United Airlines' CEO and his revelation that making your airline not terrible is actually a winning business strategy (duh.) They’re taking a page from Delta, which has been executing on this for years. The proof: Delta's co-branded Amex cards are swiped so frequently that spending on them approaches 1% of U.S. GDP.

Ok bye! 🍊

Thanks for reading!

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

2 months 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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).

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

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.

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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!