53. We need to talk about Megan (Stalter)
We seem to be in a sort of cringe queen rehabilitation, culturally.
Hi friends.
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. Following the Yuan 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!
Okay, I'm intrigued by what I have been missing. Also, really liked the new and notable section- love to see what is catching your attention.
I began reading "Care and Feeding" about a week or so ago... and read about 1/3 and then jumped to the last two chapters. It is too much "excessive confessional", too much self-destructive behavior and names, (oh, the names you know). How different is"Famesick"? And would Megan (Statler) still hurt even if she were hungry and poor? Probably. Perhaps some advocacy and positive action for mental health would be prettier.