56. A Grindr t-shirt I'm not giving back
On weddings, line cooks, and Madonna's leg.
Hi friends.
“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:
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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!