It was a bit overcast for a while here yesterday, so I listened to parts one and two of Amy Odell’s podcast about the Olsen twins and how The Row turned into a billion-dollar business. It was worth paying to get behind the paywall.

I drove by Pierre’s in Bridgehampton the other night and wondered what the glowing lights above the overpriced white tablecloth restaurant were. Does someone live above Pierre’s? Do they get a discount on the $22 yogurt parfait served in a martini glass? Can they eavesdrop on all of the gossiping groups of women who I wish Andy Cohen would give a show? The answer to all of these questions is no, because the answer to the glowing lights is Pierre’s Upstairs, a private-event space with the most not-written-with-AI website I’ve seen all summer. The description (best read in a French accent) just lists concepts: “Intimate - Business - Comfortable - Classy- Reunion - Privacy - Exclusive - Elegant - Media Room - Discrete - Seminar - Dress Code - Rehearsal Dinner - Happy Valentine - Anniversary - Family Affairs - Halloween - Private Party - Real Friends.” Incredible.

Today’s newsletter includes: my journey to find the best electrolytes on the market, an exclusive on ’s new business, some positive news for GQ after that rough Semafor newsletter last night, nobody on Wall Street wants to be bald, bad merch of the day, Ring’s latest influencer-filled campaign, a dramatic weekend for food media startup Caper, Chobani is 14 years late to the frozen yogurt game, and the Galliano exhibit at The Met is canceled.

Niche hydration news. I was in the Mercury office last week, where I discovered a new electrolyte brand that I didn’t remember the name of. It led to a lot of wrong guesses by X users and Mercury employees, but one of their engineers saved the day: the brand is ION.

Parking spots in Park Slope are going for $250k—and listing on Compass and Zillow. “THIS IS A PARKING SPOT FOR SALE, NOT A STUDIO APARTMENT” the listing forewarns. No, you can’t live in it. (Unless you want to illegally park your Unimog Build and camp in Park Slope.) Yes, you have to pay $400 a month in common charges. The pitch is that if you own a primo townhouse in the neighborhood, you’re upping the value of your resale by being able to throw in an indoor parking spot nearby. This and the Stickers of Shame are making me think we have an NYC parking crisis coming to a head.

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Today’s newsletter includes: LA residents aren’t happy about Ballerina Farm ice cream coming to town, shares more about her new West Coast store, a 15-year-old is running for governor, nightclubs are banning Meta Glasses and those who wear them, Granola (the AI company) made granola (the crunchy yogurt topping), and on The Grill.

“There is a misconception that The Grill is absurdly expensive.” By .

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name, which is back next month! This week, he wrote about The Grill, and while the headline might sound like rage bait, he’s formed a solid case.

No one talks about The Grill. No one writes about The Grill. The Grill does not get the respect it deserves. It rarely makes a list. Somehow The Grill has become underrated, underappreciated, underrepresented. I won’t say that The Grill is the best restaurant in New York City (but it’s certainly up there), the coolest restaurant in New York City, or even the most glamorous restaurant in New York City, but in my opinion The Grill is the most fabulous restaurant in New York City. It’s a restaurant that feels as if it’s made of air, and sterling silver. It’s shiny and it’s essential.

The Four Seasons is the bygone New York restaurant I most wish I could have eaten at. It opened on East 52nd Street in 1959, with a space designed as a collaboration between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Watch The Throne for lovers of midcentury modern architecture. The space lives up to any and all expectations. Time magazine reported that when it opened, it employed “5 chefs and bakers and a battalion of 125 cummerbunded captains, waiters, wine stewards, barmen and busboys.” New York had never known glamour like this. It was said that the “power lunch” was invented at the Four Seasons restaurant. Powerful people eating, networking, closing deals, and drinking multiple martinis in the middle of the work day. For years it was the peak of design, luxury, and fine dining, in a city full of design, luxury, and fine dining. If Don Draper were real, I’m sure he’d have found himself at The Four Seasons regularly. I’m sure he’d have blacked out there on occasion. But times change, the world changed. Money, power, and the power lunch moved downtown. After years of struggling, and a few changes-of-hand, The Four Seasons closed for good in 2016. Then in came Major Food Group, and hot off their success opening Carbone, they took on the iconic space, as a challenge, and their biggest project to date. They restored the space to its former glory, tweaking things just enough, giving it their patented Major Food Group flair, and $30 million later, they opened The Grill in 2017, with a revamped menu inspired by the classic American chophouse, with a little bit of Southern and Creole flair. Pete Wells gave The Grill three stars, and called it “Confident, Theatrical, Sharp and New Yorky.” (The Pool, a twin restaurant they opened simultaneously, in the Pool Room, did not fare as well; MFG now uses The Pool exclusively for private events, almost every day of the week.) It’s been nine years now, and you can get an early or late reservation at The Grill almost any night of the week.

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Today’s newsletter includes: A New York Times podcast scoop, Kylie Jenner wants to start a newsletter on Substack, Coney Island bachelor parties, Puck’s $250 million valuation, on strange theatrical marketing, and $5 chicken biscuits.

A walk down Super Size Me memory lane. By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

Strange things are happening in theatrical marketing. Chris Hansen reportedly bought pre-show advertising for his streaming network TruBlue to run ahead of every screening of the upcoming Lance Oppenheim/Robert Pattinson film, Primetime, which is based on Hansen and his old show To Catch a Predator. Although he was apparently not able to put in an explicit disclaimer about the movie itself, I have to imagine the effect might be similarly deflating: a reminder of the “real” figure just before you see the movie version of the man and the story.

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I probably won’t be the only person re-listening to Dolly Parton’s America this week. All of the posts I read about her last night painted such an angelic, political, strong image of her life and work. And she arrived at her convictions through such a Golden Rule type of kindness.

And RIP Tim Curry. I’m due for a Muppet Treasure Island re-watch.

Today’s letter includes: I spoke to Lauren Kassan (co-founder of The Wing) about her new business school for kids, WSA’s fitness instructor exodus, a Glossier alum’s new fragrance brand, discounted tickets to the US Open (courtesy of the USTA and our sports-loving mayor), and another print journalist pivots to a video podcast.

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NYT culture reporter (actors, directors, movies, festivals, awards) Kyle Buchanan is leaving the Times to start a new video podcast series. I always enjoyed his Oscars coverage. It feels like we’re going to be seeing lots of this - print journalists moving into exclusively audio-video spaces. It’s interesting that one of the things Buchanan mentions in his comments is that subjects want to have longer conversations - a thing that can obviously happen in audio/video and even some magazines still, but just can’t happen in a newspaper profile. I wonder if Buchanan expressed a desire to do this show at the Times, à la Popcast, and was turned down or if it was always a project that needed to be outside the Times.

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I am laser-focused on getting a Honey Deuce Slushy at Gem Home this week. 🍈

Today’s newsletter includes: Emmanuel Macron wants French people to make babies, an Indian restaurant with 12,000 Google Reviews (almost five stars!) comes to New York, I found a great Hamptons facialist, The RealReal’s 2026 resale report, a Palestinian food pop-up in Brooklyn this weekend, SKIMS’s new hire would dress “literally any woman except Kellyanne Conway,” and Taylor Swift shops at DOEN.

I have never for one minute doubted the intellect and speed of the Feed Me readership. turned William’s guide to the best yogurt into an interactive map, so you know where to buy them in New York City. Brilliant.

Amagansett is heralding the arrival of John Mayer. Mayer is performing at Stephen Talkhouse tomorrow, and the town is abuzz with themed cocktails and smoothies. I went to Doubles last night for dinner, and the woman working there said that the concert is outside in the parking lot, so even if you don’t have tickets, you might be able to hear the concert from Amagansett Green. The copy on the Doubles smoothies is pretty funny. The whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite onion headlines, BREAKING: Imperial Inspector To Arrive By Railcar This Very Afternoon.

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This weekend, I figured out the best way to spend a rainy Friday night at a summer house by the beach: invite 12 friends over, set up a long table filled with chilly bottles of white wine, text Mo Scariano to come sleepover and cook a clambake for 12 said friends, say a rosary that the rain will end by the time the lobster goes in the pot, and let it rock. You can see the results here.

Today’s newsletter includes: I don’t like J.Crew’s new campaign, Sarabeth’s only has two locations left, I’m here for bringing more wellness practitioners to Substack, Olivia Nuzzi’s short film, a16z unfollowed TBPN on X, William Mullan’s Ultimate Guide to Yogurt and Late Summer Fruit, and Austin’s Matthew McConaughey Cinema.

For our next Guest Lecture, we’re talking to Chloe Malle, the Head of Editorial Content at Vogue. Paid readers can ask her anything about working in fashion media in 2026, her almost 16 years at Condé Nast, or her most memorable New York Fashion Week stories.

William Mullan’s Ultimate Guide to Yogurt and Late Summer Fruit

I can’t pinpoint when I met William Mullan, but I know my life is better because he’s in it for the past few years. I have a photo he took of a lamb, framed and hung on my office wall. It makes me smile every morning.

William is a man who is really guided by his passions — he works at Raaka Chocolate as their brand manager, but also knows more about New York City’s fruit trees and local dairy and home-fermenting than anyone I know. Last week, he posted on his Instagram Story that he was making a guide to late-summer fruit and yogurts to pair it with. I told him I wanted to publish it in Feed Me, and the below is what he put together.

In the 2003 François Ozon film, Swimming Pool, our protagonist, Sarah, played by the elegant and steely Charlotte Rampling, arrives in Lacoste, France, and proceeds to head to the village market, where she buys a massive tub of Taillefine, a Danone brand yogurt. She journeys back to the villa where she is writing her next novel, and proceeds to spoon the yogurt into a large glass bowl. After a couple of spoonfuls, she dumps the entire tub in the bowl. She sits on the couch, pops on the television, and eats the entire bowl. I have never resonated with a movie scene more than this one.

Sarah is an ascetic individual. Taillefine translates to “slender waist” in English, a hilariously specific name for a zero-fat, zero-sugar yogurt brand (identifying the body part is just so much more potent and direct than, say, SkinnyGirl Vodka). Her copious yogurt consumption is meant to portray her self-imposed repression. While I understood this, I saw no suffering in her meal. I saw only a big, beautiful bowl of globby white elixir, full of bacterial life and delicious tangy lactic acid. It was meant to make me sad; it made me hungry.

I tell you this so you understand that I know two things in this life: good yogurt and good fruit. I have eaten unholy amounts of both, and written books on the latter.

So, as we head into these final weeks of summer, it gives me great pleasure to pass on the wisdom of the best yogurt and summer fruit combinations to FeedMe readers. Like many millennial New Yorkers, I make my most ill-advised financial decisions in the summertime. But I’m not jet-setting to Marseille, I’m committing entire paychecks to small-batch yogurt, tubs of Maldon, and fresh fruit from the farmer’s market. I tell you this so you know that I have done the research, and you should trust me, and not The New York Times, which I will explain later*.

Let’s begin with what makes a good yogurt. The yogurt is our base, our body of Christ. It is the very foundation that we will build our own big, beautiful bowls on and therefore, like a painter, we must be specific about our canvas.

Good yogurt is about body and tang. Both are the result of time, temperature, straining, and to some extent, good milk. Unfortunately, most supermarket brands favor body at the expense of tang. Much of this is driven by our cultural obsession with macronutrients and their ability to allow us to achieve that taillefine. But yogurt is not a supplement, it is a 2,500-year-old food passed on from genius Mesopotamian herders, who stored milk in animal pouches. While I think those herders would be astonished at the sorcery we’ve achieved with their invention, I think we should respect their work and not reduce their gifts to a set of numbers to be tallied like petty accountants. Energy in, energy out, yes, yes. But the body is more than a balance sheet.

This is all to say that my approach to yogurt is flavor first, and there is a crucial balance between body and tang that is to be respected, even across different styles: Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, Armenian, French, Indian, etc, etc. No tang, no game.

So let’s start with tang, which for me, takes precedence over body. Tang is everything. Tang is life. In the case of yogurt, this is literal: the presence of tang is the direct result of bacteria and yeast turning sweet lactose into tart lactic acid. It means our spoon is full of beautiful bacterias that live in harmony with us and share our love of another species’ milk. Real freak shit. That’s how you know we’re homies. Generally speaking, it takes about 24 hours at the right temperature for our yogurt cultures, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, and Streptococcus thermophilus among others, to eat up all that lactose. This is our primary fermentation step.

A yogurt’s body depends on its fat content and how it’s been strained. If you eat yogurt, especially Greek, you’re probably already familiar with straining. The whey and liquid are strained out, creating a thick, creamy globby goo. What we’re left with is mostly casein, which has just far less flavor than whey. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of drinking fresh whey, you know it is briney and tangy and goddamn delicious.

A good yogurt should be thick and creamy, with a sharp bite that makes your lips pucker and your jawline tingle. It should be cloud-like in the mouth, and clear the clouds in your head. Gentle but bright sunrays coming in through the window. You take a spoonful and you are awake now.

The two major issues with most commercially available yogurts is that the primary fermentation time is cut short, and in the case of Greek-style yogurts, too much whey is strained out. This is an effort to please the masses. The masses want protein. They want thick, dense yogurt that feels decadent. Sometimes the masses are correct, like when radio listeners made Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks. But sometimes, we are wrong, together. Such is the case with current yogurt tastes. No shade to Fage and Siggis, which I enjoy, but it’s time to grow up and accept that yogurt is sour milk and it should be SOUR.

This is not to say that I am a Fage hater. I eat it sometimes! As an Irish person, bland food is like a warm blanket to me, an old friend. I have lived off of microwaved potatoes when necessary, and always found Cormac McCarthy’s sentences about the plain, unseasoned beans eaten by his starving cowboys, outlaws, and their cadre, to be mouthwatering. We have established my penchant for finding the hedonic in the ascetic, the Dionysian in the Apollonian. But we don’t always have to live like this, and in the summer, we can live like kings and queens. I believe whatever or whoever is in control, if there is anyone or any force out there, intended this. Feast and famine, I suppose. So Fage can be okay, it can be good, even. There are simply much better options out there, and everything is expensive now anyway. But if you love Fage, these fruit combinations will work with Fage. Not Chobani, however. Chobani tastes like metal.

Before I tell you my favorite yogurts, the most flavorful and highest quality across various locations, I must tell you that all yogurt should be salted. A generous sprinkle of Maldon, whipped into the yogurt before garnishments and accompaniments are added, makes everything sing. Do not skip this step. If I accomplish anything here, it is turning you into a salted yogurt convert. The kind of person who sips Ayran between messy bites of watermelon slices.

Without further ado…

My Favorite Yogurts (in no particular order):

S-Tier National:

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In today’s letter: Chanel has started advertising on Substack, New York Times Cooking hired a familiar face as its new recipe editor, Honey Deuce price index 🍈, Kallmeyer’s new collection could be a book club catalyst, September 10th will be the busiest day in New York City calendars, on the local Italian restaurant (LIR), and an A24 vet exits after 14 years.

Breaking down the local Italian restaurant (LIR). By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he wrote about local Italian restaurants (LIRs).

Your local Italian restaurant (LIR) is the most important restaurant in the world. I’m incredibly fortunate to have Il Posto Accanto as my LIR. I went with Emily last week. We caught up and talked business. I ate literally the sweetest tomatoes I’ve ever had and squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta and anchovies. And then went back the next day with my wife and her girlfriends for martinis, gossip, and linguine with clams; I saw the cutest little dog. There are dishes that I love more and dishes that I love less, but my LIR is perfect. Please do not tell me that she is not, I won’t hear it, I can’t. The thing is, everyone’s LIR is perfect, in its own way. You go for a date and drink bubbles and eat parmigiana, “you’ve got a little sauce on your face,” it works every time. You go for some spaghetti and meatballs after a long day at the office, you slurp it up, you feel a little lighter. You go on a snow day, when the city feels silent, and nothing else is open, their lasagna warms you up like nothing else. It’s a place where you know you can always get a seat, they’ll fill your glass full of ice cold pinot (grigio or noir) to the brim, and the food will at least be good enough, and sometimes it’ll even be great.

There are LIRs all over the country, and maybe all over the world, but the LIRs in New York are a special breed. They’re all over the city, they’re everywhere, but you rarely even think about them, or I don’t. If you walked around New York City today, I’m sure you walked by at least one, and didn’t even give it a second thought, but I guarantee you that it is someone’s favorite restaurant. There is someone that goes to this restaurant three times a week, and when they’re hungry they dream about their fritto misto. Ireland has pubs, New York has LIRs. (And also pubs.)

There’s almost nothing more intimate than being invited to someone’s Local Italian Restaurant. This is where they go outside of their home to feel comfortable, or happy, or sad. This is where they go to be fed. I don’t like to use the term “third space,” but their LIR is a safe space. To be invited into someone’s LIR is to know that you are trusted.

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Today’s newsletter includes: Salt Hank got a big payday, , MoMA PS 1’s new café, Carbone’s global expansion plans, Vox’s late-summer layoffs, and an Upper East Side walk-in acne clinic is expanding downtown.

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“It’s solidly an HBO show, not a ‘Max’ show.” By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

Last week, I mentioned the upcoming premiere of Lanterns, which is taking over the 9 p.m. ET prestige slot from House of the Dragon for HBO. Just a couple months ago, everyone seemed ready to put superhero content to rest. And then Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit the box office and racked up $2 billion worldwide in 18 days, second-quickest to hit that milestone in movie history. So maybe the death of the comic book crusader was greatly exaggerated. What does seem over are the days of superhero slop, where you could throw out a B-tier superhero, maybe cast a promising but fairly unknown actor, play it relatively safe, and sniff $1 billion in box office: movies like Aquaman, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel. These films launched names like Jason Momoa, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Brie Larson into the mainstream. In that era, you’d have seen the same for someone like this year’s Supergirl, Milly Alcock. Now, if you’re not a marquee name like Batman or Spider-Man, we’re going to need a little more.

So I was pleasantly surprised that Lanterns seems to be heeding that lesson, drawing less from its IP brethren and instead making references (sometimes a little desperately, I’m not like the other superhero shows) to the best works of its crime thriller, neo-noir genre. The three-timeline structure and the not-quite-buddy cop tension between Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart and Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan aka Green Lantern are clear nods to Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season of True Detective and its hallmark driving conversation scenes, although nothing in Lanterns quite matches the unique quality of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle dialogue so far. There’s also more than a bit of Training Day, as well as other little nods to classics of the genre, like an inspired casting choice in Kelly Macdonald (No Country for Old Men) as the small-town sheriff who’s fed up by the pair of interloping investigators and Garret Dillahunt (also No Country for Old Men, sensing a pattern?) as her father-in-law. And I was happy to see Chris Coy, who turned in a solid performance in Netflix’s Black Rabbit, with an important role in the pilot.

Really what’s refreshing about the pilot is the storytelling confidence to start things off where it does, right in the middle of things, and end with a great cliffhanger. We don’t get a boring episode full of DC exposition about how Jordan and Stewart met and paired up and what they’ve been doing since. The show has a certain self-assured but offbeat tone, not as quirky as co-creator Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (an excellent show), but more personality than something like The Penguin. Which is to say, it’s solidly an HBO show, not a “Max” show.

New releases this weekend:

Alex Ullom’s debut, It Ends, opens limited for Neon in NY and LA before it goes wide on August 28. About four recent grads who get stuck on a road that never stops, it sounds a bit like an outdoors sequel to Backrooms. The film has had an interesting path since it premiered at SXSW last year. It was one of the first films on Letterboxd’s new rental store in December and ran for a month before Neon bought it. Curious if we’ll see more indie films try that route if they don’t immediately find a distributor at a festival. Tony and Camp Miasma both go wide after their limited runs. Tickets for Dune: Part Three (out December 18) dropped this week and site crashes have led to people lining up at theaters to buy tickets at physical kiosks. Reddit has been full of people outraged about scalpers buying dozens of IMAX 70mm tickets at a time. The Odyssey phenomenon was cool, but was it worth it if every big IMAX movie from now on is going to bring out the Sea People?

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There is one man who needs a raise today and that is New York Magazine’s Zach Schiffman. The comment section in his Gowanus Tourism Board video is ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

Today’s newsletter includes: Martha’s Vineyard has a rabid bat problem with 34 days left of summer, George McNally’s downstairs lounge will probably be harder to get into than Faux, a breakdown of where early Substack employees go after Substack, Caper (the food magazine started by former Puck employees) is hiring, J.Crew knows you’ve been searching for vintage pieces on eBay, and Balthazar opens an ice cream shop.

Want to pitch me a story? Have some good neighborhood gossip? Email emily@readfeedme.com or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

I encourage you to support Vanity Fair and Aidan McLaughlin by paying a mere $4/month to read the Lauren Sherman profile. And then we can discuss in the comments.

Sharks. Ticks. Now bats with rabies. Martha’s Vineyard keeps upping the ante.

Mayor Mamdani has started wearing a helmet. After being scolded by New Yorkers about not wearing a helmet. “I’m listening, I’m learning. Safety first, NYC” The avid Citi Biker pulled out his personal phone in an interview in April to show off his stats: 2428 rides, 3092 miles, 444 hours. And that was before the summer of Mamdani-on-bike sightings.

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Today’s newsletter includes: A London literary scene party boy launches a talk show, Anna Weyant’s latest magazine cover, Food52’s new editor used to be Ina Garten’s assistant, Gen Z clothing brands want to be your new college bookstore, Popcast’s new couch, and Alex Cooper’s benevolent ad deal.

FEED ME JOB BOARD

Anna Weyant painted Marc Jacobs for the latest cover of Vanity Fair’s Style Issue. This is the third cover Weyant has painted — she also did Vogue (Kaia Gerber for December 2024) and T Mag (“Flour, Sugar, Butter: A World of Pastries” in November 2025). I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy to read Robin Givhan on the idea of “Radical Chic” and how MAGA has hijacked fashion to “evangelize its own rigid, retro vision of America.” Speaking of American style, have you seen the new cover of Granta?

Gen Z fashion brands like LoveShackFancy and Parke are creating their own lines of college merch. LoveShackFancy collaborated with Michael Rubin’s sports platform, Fanatics, while Parke collaborated with ’47, one of the leaders in licensed sports apparel. If you’re questioning the demand for University of Tennessee merch with a pink bow on it, then you clearly haven’t been reading ’s in-depth research on RushTok over the last few weeks. Back in my day, the only college merch marketed to 18-year-old women was for the University of Pink.

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I was pleased to see many of you on Saturday night at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island. Some readers made a day of it, and drove out to the Hamptons from the city, and got some frosé and Feed Me towels before grabbing the last ferry off the island to drive back to Manhattan. My favorite Gen Z feather-rufflers Ella Devi and Alex Bronzini-Vender made the trip from Long Island, as did . New York Magazine’s Alexis Swerdloff and Sam Hine were already on the island, so they didn’t have much of an odyssey to Sunset Beach’s disco ball. I met two young men from the island who recently paid for a blue checkmark for their clam chowder review Instagram page, Chowder Hour. Expect an interview with them soon. Hope everyone had a good weekend.

Today’s newsletter includes: gives us a baller (gloves off) Guest Lecture interview, Anna Wintour is hiring a new assistant, new money millionaires want to buy second homes in Maine, a Feed Me-exclusive discount to The Holes, and the Mamdani administration runs on Zyn.

This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Klein, and Joe Weisenthal.

Today, , author of the bestselling novel Yesteryear, answers your questions about tradwives, rejection in the publishing industry prior to Yesteryear, and adjusting to public life after selling 1.4 million copies of her book.

“Thank you for writing such an amazing book. I couldn’t put it down. Are there any aspects of the ‘trad-wife’ life that you admire? And if so, which elements would you apply to your own?” - Deanna

Trad-wife hobbies I admire: eating fresh food, making meals at home, and avoiding screen time (tho kind of lol for the ones who claim to avoid screen time yet share their kids’ entire lives online).

“How much empathy did you personally feel for your main character (who seems to divide readers) and did that change over the course of writing the novel?” - Eva

I could’ve spent the rest of my life writing from the perspective of Natalie. I think she’s the most ambitious, hysterical, tragic, and fascinating mind I’ve ever occupied. I love her endlessly. I don’t know if my relationship to her changed over the course of writing the novel, but I certainly relate to her even more in the wake of the novel’s publication.

“What has most surprised you, if anything, about how any part of your book has been interpreted either by fans or by the ‘trad-wife’ community?” - Rachel

How open to the conversation many “traditional women” are. I have met so, so, so many conservative/Christian/Republican women on tour. Some of them love the book, some of them kind of like it, some of them dislike it. Regardless, countless have shown up to my signings eager to have conversations inspired from what they read, and that has been extremely cool to witness.

“There is a split between interpretations on whether your book is feminist or inherently woman-hating. How do you define your book? How does your discussion of postpartum depression and psychosis either help or harm our current treatment of mothers?” - Lily

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Last night, I got dinner with at Il Posto Accanto. The highlight of the specials menu was a savory version of strawberries and cream — sweet-as-candy Campo Rosso tomatoes, stracciatella, and tiny leaves of basil layered like a parfait in a glass. If you have no plans this weekend, that’s a strong option.

If you’re looking for more weekend ideas:

• The Feed Me chat is filled with weekend trips from New York City, like taking the ferry from Long Island to Connecticut for a road trip to Rhode Island, the newly-opened Pocketbook Hotel in Hudson, and a life-changing burger in Mystic.

• If you’re staying in New York, I’d probably check out the jalapeño hot dogs on homemade potato buns at Elbow Bread.

• And if you didn’t get tickets to one of Phoebe Bridgers’s planetarium shows, you can bring your headphones to the Museum of Natural History, go to one of their Encounters in the Milky Way shows, and DIY your own Lost Weekend experiences. 🚀🪐🌕🌑☄️🛸

Today’s newsletter includes: A Keens secret menu reveal from , Rich Man Saves a Movie Theater Story of the Week, the restaurateur building in the former Lucky Strike location wants his restaurants to bring in “generational wealth,” Alex Cooper is a CPG founder no longer, and outdoor dining is here to stay in New York.

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I could never and would never gatekeep a chicken tender. By .

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. This week, he wrote about a dish I’ve long heard him whisper about: the chicken tenders at Keens.

I’ve long heard rumors of juicy golden chicken morsels in a temple somewhere in midtown. Whispers of legendary tenders in a legendary room. There are no photos of them online, there’s not a single written word about them. I’ve used Google, I’ve asked Claude, there’s no evidence anywhere that these tenders actually exist. Maybe they shouldn’t exist. But I am here to tell you that the chicken tenders at Keens do exist, and I ate them, and they are glorious.

This is not our first time breaking news of a secret menu at Keens. We were the first to tell the world about Alison Roman’s deconstructed wedge salad, dressing on the side for dipping, and a slab of thick-cut bacon, but I’d say that’s more of a menu hack than a legitimate secret menu item. Their other famous “secret menu” items are their tavern burger, and the Taste of Mutton, and neither are actually a secret. The tavern burger is delicious, it’s on their Pub Room menu, and if you ask very nicely they might serve it to you in the dining room. The Taste of Mutton is just a smaller portion of their legendary 26-ounce mutton chop (one of the iconic dishes of NYC), served with mint jelly of course. It’s featured on their lunch menu, and you can also order it for dinner. But their chicken tenders are on no menu, their name has never been written, and it’s only been uttered by those in the know. I first learned about these tenders from a famous chef in my DMs. He told me, and now I’m telling you. The secret is out. I’m sorry, but I could never and would never gatekeep a chicken tender.

Keens, as you may have heard, is a New York City institution. They’ve been grilling steaks on West 36th Street since 1885. For nearly 150 years, Keens has been a favorite of presidents, athletes, robber barons, and lowly food writers like me. We all dream of adding a pipe to the collection of nearly 50,000 clay pipes displayed proudly on their ceiling. You can judge a person based on their favorite Keens potato. (Mine’s the hash brown, what does that say about me?) Nearly everything there is to say about Keen’s has already been said, but weirdly nothing has been said about their chicken tenders.

The chicken tenders at Keens are buttermilk brined, dredged in a simple batter of flour with a spattering of finely chopped parsley and chives thrown into the mix, for fun more than for flavor. They are classic, and exemplary, as is everything at Keens. They don’t do barbecue sauce, buffalo, honey mustard, they certainly don’t do sweet and sour. They’re served with a side of tartar sauce, creamy and refreshing, old school, ranch’s grandpa. These are not chicken tenders for fucking around. These are some serious tenders. They’re juicy and fried perfectly. They almost might be healthy (almost), if they weren’t served with Keens’s french fries, which are impossible to stop eating. These are tenders for the tender purist, the tender essentialist, the tender historian, who wants to eat tenders as they’d have been served a century ago, to Theodore Roosevelt and Babe Ruth and Buffalo Bill. (Even if chicken tenders weren’t actually invented until the 1970s.) Which is to say that the tenders are a bit on the bland side, but that’s OK! These are secret chicken tenders after all, and fittingly they are a bit quiet. No one will ever make the mistake of going to Keens and skipping a prime rib, a T-bone, in favor of a basket of chicken tenders. I did that, and I won’t be doing it again! (Apologies to my friend, who because of me ate chicken tenders and a Cobb salad as her first ever meal at Keens.) The tenders should be a fun little add-on to a feast, or a cheeky solo meal at the bar, with just a touch of shame.

The chicken tenders at Keens (along with a simple pasta) are their unofficial kids menu, but they’ll serve them to anyone who asks. A five-year-old might enjoy a porterhouse cooked rare, just the same as a 55-year-old might enjoy an order of tenders. Keens is not there to judge your pleasure, they’re there to facilitate it, and that’s what makes Keens such a fantastic and enduring restaurant. Their chicken tenders might not be the most exciting or flavorful chicken tenders in New York City, but when you’re eating them in a restaurant that’s been perfect for nearly a century and a half, they just might be the best chicken tenders in New York City. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

This concludes Expense Account by .

Outdoor dining sheds are back for good in NYC. The City Council voted on Thursday to revive year-round outdoor dining, replacing the build-up-tear-down seasonal policy that was instituted three years ago, in the wake of the ad hoc approach to outdoor dining during Covid. You may not have been able to hear them, but these guys stayed up late celebrating.

Rich Man Buys a Movie Theater Story of the Week: Film producer Jack Heller bought one of Long Island’s oldest theater’s, Manhasset Cinemas in Plandome, for $3 million. He’s planning a gut renovation of the Art Deco theater, which opened in 1936. Most of my memories of Plandome, where my college boyfriend was from, are fond. I like that diner, Louie’s. Heller is also chairman of the board of directors for Southampton Playhouse, which was redeveloped by billionaire Aby Rosen last year.

Fodder for your group chat this weekend: Harvard junior Alex Bronzini-Vender says there’s “a hot new left-wing publication” whose stories are almost all AI slop.

Days after Alex Cooper’s Unwell announced a $500 million valuation, Bloomberg reported that the media company’s beverage business is closing down. Feels like just yesterday I was sitting in the audience of Deal Book, and Cooper brought a bottle of Unwell Hydration on stage to announce that she was launching the beverage in partnership with Nestlé. This news doesn’t surprise me, but I was a skeptic from day one (the creative was bad, it should’ve been a powder) and haven’t thought about the brand much since its 2024 launch.

Last night, I reached out to CPG expert Andrea Hernández () to see if she had any late-night thoughts in the wake of the news. Unsurprisingly, she had several:

“I saw the writing on the wall haha, beverage category is insanely competitive. Launching a celebrity slop hydration drink alongside a controversial BigFood brand like Nestlé felt inauthentic to her. You could tell from the emerging comments when she finally announced it, her fans were underwhelmed that she only launched a beverage brand after teasing a project that felt much bigger. Though Prime is also on its last legs at this point, it’s crazy to think they’ve still outlived Unwell, I think Logan Paul’s “Youth-tube” audience at least fueled the hype in the early years of the brand because Gen Alpha saw it as an extension of being close to someone they are consuming content from, like how you stood in line for autographs for famous celebrities and bands in the older days — celebrity packaged goods, like I like to call it, are just that. However, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, your product needs to build for scale and mainstream, so you cannot fake the product market fit, VC subsidized growth will only take you so far. Beyond taste, if you search on Reddit, a lot of people buying Unwell reported it tasting so bad, even comparing it to having a vitamin-like taste. If your product doesn’t even taste good enough for the mainstream palate, that’s another uphill battle.

At this point, it was easier to cut losses 2 years in than to let it lag any longer. Not long after their launch I had spotted them already being pushed in discounts to move off shelf, Nestlé was probably shelling money to make it move out and get some traction, at that point you’re forcing it and not really having true PMF. Changing consumer behavior away from established, trusted brands is a big endeavor. It takes more than a scandalous podcast to make the mainstream consumer connect with your product enough to incorporate it into their daily lives and make a switch from their go-to brands.

I will add, people want to make a point of it being called Unwell as a turnoff, but I don’t subscribe to that considering Liquid Death is still kicking around (even though they’ve gotten incredibly cringe).”

If you’ve wandered down Grand Street recently, you’ve probably seen the soon-to-be-open New York location of Straker’s in the former Lucky Strike address. The Telegraph spoke to London’s bad boy chef Thomas Straker about how he’s preparing (runs, saunas, monk-like abstention) for the New York location of Straker’s. Straker, who said he wants to make “generational wealth” from his restaurants, said that his London location cost him about half a million pounds, whereas the New York location has cost him “close to three and a half million dollars. I just had to raise another million to get it over the line.” On the bright side, he has Keith McNally’s blessing.

I will spend my LIRR journey this afternoon going down a Cami Clark rabbit hole. Married to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, dated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and pitched a “revolutionary porn company” to Jeffrey Epstein.

A fire on Thursday morning has shuttered Ambassadors Clubhouse (below the A24 offices) indefinitely. It happened when the buzzy new Indian restaurant was closed, and sounds like everyone is all right. But I hope they re-open soon—I like this place.

Nigel Farage won his by-election in Clacton by defeating Count Binface. Close watchers of Industry will recognize Count Binface as having also run in the Parliamentary election that Kit Harington’s character lost in the beginning of Season 4.

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Last night, I started watching Monsters of God on HBO (made by Eric Goode of The Bowery Hotel and Chimp Crazy — man has range). Curious if any of you started the series and what you think. I’ll have to compare it to Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt. Lots of snake on screen this summer.

Today’s newsletter includes: Nat Geo’s New York hiring spree, David Remnick is hiring an assistant, How Long Gone’s new awards show, on Willem Dafoe’s Late Fame, good news for the Elizabeth Street Garden (what a rollercoaster), and Alex Cooper dodges ’s questions.

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“If anyone is casting the Leopold Aschenbrenner biopic, this is your man.” By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

Quick thoughts on two movies I saw and enjoyed this week: Kent Jones’s Late Fame, which stars Willem Dafoe as a long-retired downtown New York poet, Ed Saxberger, who gets “rediscovered” by a circle of young writers and drawn back into the artistic life of the city, only to find its character much changed. Saxberger published one book decades ago and his new friends decide he’s a lost master who’ll lend a serious artistic and historical weight to their own ambitions. The first half hour is a delight, a really funny send-up of the downtown intellectual arts scene. Edmund Donovan plays the ringleader of the group; if anyone is casting the Leopold Aschenbrenner biopic, this is your man. My one complaint was that the film almost suffers from servicing too much plot. I would happily have spent more time just sinking into the vibes of Saxberger’s own life and seeing him hang out with his two sets of friends. If you liked Paterson or Perfect Days or The Great Beauty, this is in that neighborhood, with a little bit of Finding Forrester in there, too.

And Olmo, Fernando Eimbcke’s first feature in ten years, in which a young teen in 1979 New Mexico spends one very hot day trying to get out of looking after his sick dad so he and his friend can make it to a party. It’s not fully Superbad or a John Hughes film, but it carries the charm and innocent fun of those kinds of movies while at the same time staying true to its more quiet and reflective tone. The period detail is also impressively rendered for such a small budget. And it doesn’t hurt that it was produced for Plan B by my friend Yuri.

New releases this weekend: Adam Meek’s Sundance debut, Union County, is opening in limited release. Will Poulter and Noah Centineo play brothers going through a court-mandated recovery program in a stretch of rural Ohio that the opioid years hollowed out. The feature originally started as a short film Meeks made after sitting in on an actual adult recovery court in Union County. A good part of the supporting cast are real patients and family members playing versions of themselves. Also opening this weekend is The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell’s first feature since Under the Silver Lake. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor star in this sci-fi movie about a suburban street that gets transported through time and space. Tonally, it’s not what I would’ve expected from Mitchell but it looks like it might scratch that Spielberg itch for everyone left disappointed by Disclosure Day. Finally: It’s not a theatrical release but the first episode of Lanterns, as in the Green Lanterns of DC Comics, is premiering on HBO this Sunday. Despite my superhero fatigue, I have to admit I’m a little intrigued by the trailer for the show, which is going for a more serious, grounded tone, with explicit references to True Detective, Fargo, and No Country for Old Men. Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen) is a co-creator, which contributes to my optimism. As long as we’re going to get more IP-driven content, I wouldn’t mind if we got something like True Detective in every world.

Posting and browsing the Feed Me Job Board is free. This week’s roles were posted from teams at The Strand Bookstore, Getty Images, and a family-owned gourmet food company.

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Ari Emmanuel’s live-events company, MARI, reached a deal to acquire ATG Entertainment—including 7 Broadway theaters and 10 West End theaters. Reports the NYT: “ATG is the smallest of the big three Broadway landlords, controlling seven of the district’s 41 theaters. … The company is a bigger player in London, where it operates 10 theaters in the West End. It has a global footprint, operating 70 venues in Britain, the United States, Germany and Spain.”

Mayor Mamdani will abandon plans to replace the Elizabeth Street Garden with affordable housing.

How Long Gone is launching an awards show: The Goneies Awards. This is such a smart move and I wish more creators or small media brands were taking swings like this, but I can imagine organizing an event like this was a fuck ton of work. It looks like most of the heavy lifting is complete on HLG’s end – sponsor secured (Meta’s Threads), venue secured (Racket NYC). Now they just need all of their nominees and winners (artists, journalists, cultural figures, previous guests) to show up. Here’s the thing: Chris and Jason aren’t new to this, they’re true to this. Over the last few years, they’ve given hosting sparkly awards shows a trial run as red carpet interviewers for GQ’s Creativity Awards and Men Of the Year events. I’m curious what they’ll wear. Tickets start at $65.

There is a common thread among some of my favorite scoops from the last few years. Lauren Sherman breaking that The Row was taking over the former Issey Miyake store in Tribeca, Curbed reporting on Emily Weiss’s home buying spree… and of course Feed Me breaking that Erewhon was coming to New York City — they’re all real estate stories. This week, New York Magazine listed a role for a Real Estate Reporter. Whoever takes this job will end up breaking stories about restaurant openings, retail leases, and the outrageous personalities that make up the fabric of New York’s real estate and development circles. Really smart move on whoever pitched this expansion at Curbed.

National Geographic is about to go on a New York City hiring spree. In 2026, most magazines are exceptionally lean operations, perpetually trimming editor and writer positions where they can. Not so at National Geographic, which, despite being among the oldest magazines out there (it was founded in 1888), has been steadily expanding its operation and listing interesting old-school-sounding roles. They just listed five more, including a couple of features editor jobs and a travel editor. Most important to note: These are not just jobs in Washington, D.C., where most of the operation is based. These are New York roles, as the magazine aims to build a new editorial beachhead in NYC. (And I hear there are more New York job listings coming soon.) Maybe you’re looking to get back into print; maybe you’re just looking to make your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents proud.

• Senior features editor

• Features editor

• Travel editor

• Senior-level photo editor

• Senior producer on video team

Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger buy the Lakers for $12.5 billion. Joshua Kushner pivoted from his involvement in trying to purchase a stake of the World Cup (a plan that blew up spectacularly two weeks ago and has FIFA head Gianni Infantino fighting for his job) to buying the Los Angeles Lakers with former Disney CEO Bob Iger for the most amount of money ever paid for a professional sports franchise. This deal comes just days after Jeff Bezos acquired a minority stake of Liverpool FC. Billionaire boys and their toys.

Lucia Pizza is opening on the Upper West Side.

Alex Cooper tried to dodge Andrew Ross Sorkin’s questions about Dave Portnoy (his book alleges that she tried to get out of her Barstool deal by accusing him of sexual harassment), on the account that she’s pregnant. The top comment on this TikTok clip reads, “As someone who has carried a child, I can confirm you can answer questions while carrying them!” Earlier this week, Cooper’s Unwell Network received an undisclosed investment from WTSL, the Silver Lake-backed firm led by Patrick Whitesell, which valued Unwell at $500 million. If you’re taking big girl checks, you should be able to answer big girl questions.

Even though the business of sandwiches seems to be booming (you try getting a table at S&P on a Wednesday afternoon), I hear very little about Subway. However I do see a lot of people talking about Jimmy John’s, a chain I’ve never been to. Restaurant Business published an interesting article about how Subway (under its owner Roark Capital) has been squeezing the franchisees who operate its locations to make uneconomic decisions, like keeping unprofitable stores open and extending hours to be open later. Subway has closed 8,000 stores since it peaked at more than 27,000 locations in 2015. A very funny tidbit in this story: 30% of the chain’s restaurants didn’t participate in a recent deal in partnership with the Disney movie Moana. Their customers missed out on a $1 collectible cup.

I wonder what kind of ideas the Grindr team is trying to come up with at these investor-type business dinners.

A J.Crew executive told the FT that post-Kevin Ulrich leadership, “morale is bad.” Despite rollneck sweater collabs with Collina Strada and Eckhaus Latta, a photoshoot with Patrick Radden Keefe, and a viral influencer trip in Italy, J.Crew’s 2025 full-year EBITDA fell 30% to $180 million. Ulrich’s Anchorage Capital became the majority owner of J.Crew in 2020, and one executive told FT that: “There is a lack of strategic direction of where Anchorage wants to go with this. We want to do cool things, but it’s mismanaged and there is no room for error.” Lisa Greenwald, who spent eight years at the brand as Chief Merchandising Officer, left in 2025. And Brendon Babenzien, who was hired as men’s creative director in 2021 to overhaul J.Crew’s menswear, left earlier this year to focus on his brand, Noah. The amount of executives willing to talk to a newspaper for this story is concerning for the company.

David Remnick is hiring an assistant. Applicants should know how to secure a good table at Han Dynasty (Upper West Side, not East Village, obviously).

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In today’s London Edition of Feed Me (made possible by a heavy assist from Montague Ashley-Craig): London’s growing AI mafia, RIP to the Chiltern Street Air Mail newsstand, Dua Lipa is curating this year’s London Literature Festival, the restaurants going mostly raw in the August heatwave, the BBC’s Gen Z whisperer, and the tech companies who want to pay you to rave.

In 2020, Shreeji Newsagents (a magazine and newspaper store that had been open since 1982) went through a renovation in partnership with Gabriel Chipperfield and Air Mail. The newsstand was wrapped with Air Mail branding, served coffee in Air Mail cups, distributed printed issues of Air Mail, and hosted events for Graydon Carter’s news startup.

It recently came to my attention that as of May, the Air Mail newsstand — across from Chiltern Firehouse on Chiltern Street in Marylebone — is Air Mail no longer.

Unlike Air Mail’s Hudson Street shop (which Air Mail fully owns and operates), Air Mail treated Shreeji Newsagents like a billboard, paying the newsstand to have its branding on the awning and inside the store. My guess is that in the 2025 sale of Air Mail to Puck, that advertising line item was slashed from the budget.

Anjali Lewis, Air Mail’s former head of commerce and brand partnerships who ran the West Village store (and prior to that, worked for Graydon Carter for a decade at Vanity Fair), left Air Mail in June. She is back in the Carter orbit at Gravity Strategic Partners.

Today’s Water Cooler was assembled by Montague Ashley-Craig, who I met in London at a Feed Me party.

Regional food is getting hyper-regional. Bara, a neighbourhood café in Peckham championing Welsh produce, has launched a monthly evening service. I went to the first dinner last week and was impressed by how sensitively it was done: Welsh ingredients, Welsh wine, but none of it felt like pastiche or a “bit.” Meanwhile, a new restaurant “shaped by the spirit of Appalachia” has just opened in Shoreditch. Maybe hyper-regionalisation is the natural next stage of the British-coded/American-coded food swap I wrote about last month in Feed Me.

Perfume brands are going hyper-local. Perfume brands have developed a thing for collaborating with cult London neighbourhood spots. Jouissance has created an actual La Camionera perfume inspired by the Hackney lesbian bar; Mugler brought its Starlicious fragrance to Spitalfields dessert shop Humble Crumble; and Loewe Perfumes celebrated its new pistachio-scented candle with an ice cream bar at The Dreamery in De Beauvoir.

London is developing its own AI mafia. Google DeepMind, founded here in 2010, has lost 74 researchers so far this year — but plenty aren’t going far. Former DeepMinders are spinning out startups across the city, including Ineffable Intelligence, Recursive Superintelligence, and CuspAI. Companies founded by DeepMind alumni have now raised more than $14 billion between them.

King’s Cross is fast becoming the centre of the London AI scene. Google and Meta are already there, OpenAI and Scale AI have taken space nearby, Anthropic is just down the road, and Prometheus is reportedly eyeing the area too.

Speaking of DeepMind: Its new home is London’s ultimate “landscraper.” DeepMind is based inside Google’s enormous new £1 billion King’s Cross HQ, a super-long, low-rise building—essentially a skyscraper turned on its side. Less glamorously, the building reportedly spent more than a year during construction battling urban foxes living on its vast new living roof. Very London.

AI firms are coming for London’s rare bookshops. London’s antiquarian booksellers are reportedly being targeted with mysterious bulk orders for old and obscure titles as AI companies hunt for new sources of human-written training data that aren’t already on the internet. The fear is that some could ultimately be dismantled and scanned for model training.

Peter Thiel’s Palantir is suing the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime after Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million deal to supply AI software to London’s Metropolitan Police force. Palantir says the decision was unlawful; City Hall says the procurement process was flawed. The fight now heads to the High Court.

Meanwhile, the Mayor’s £1.75 Weekend Hopper has already saved Londoners £4 million. Sadiq Khan’s summer Weekend Hopper — unlimited bus and tram travel all day on Saturdays and Sundays for the price of a single £1.75 fare — has reportedly saved Londoners more than £4 million in its first two weekends. Now to get A/C on those buses…

And Khan does not rule out running for a fourth term as Mayor of London. Sadiq Khan is dropping increasingly unsubtle hints that he’ll run again in 2028, recently saying he’s “already worked out” his strategy for the next election. There’s no term limit for the Mayor of London, and Khan — who assumed the office in May 2016 and is currently in his record-breaking third term — is already the longest-serving mayor the city has had.

Dua Lipa is curating this year’s London Literature Festival. Dua Lipa is taking over the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival this October with her Service95 Book Club. Her newly announced programme includes Zadie Smith, Patti Smith, Mustafa, and Kae Tempest, with Dua herself interviewing both Smiths over the opening weekend.

Nothing will give you $10,000 to throw a rave. London-based tech unicorn Nothing has launched the Club Nothing Fund, giving four independent music collectives or creatives $10K each to put on their biggest party yet. The company is also rumoured to be launching a smartwatch next month.

Skrillex played a surprise set in Peckham. Skrillex turned up for a surprise set at a free party at Jumbi in Peckham on Thursday night. Videos of him dropping UK garage classic “Flowers” by Sweet Female Attitude to the crowd are now doing the rounds online.

Everyone wants to be a mudlarker now. The New Yorker has a great piece on London’s increasingly competitive mudlarking scene, the very London pastime of combing the Thames foreshore at low tide for centuries-old treasure. You can find insane stuff: Roman pottery, Tudor jewellery, Georgian coins, Victorian dentures—essentially 2,000 years of London’s detritus is just sitting in the mud down there, waiting for the tide to go out. It used to be a fairly niche hobby, then absolutely exploded during the pandemic; permits are now strictly limited.

Smithfield—London’s closest approximation of the Meatpacking District—is in the middle of a major transformation. The new London Museum opens in the old General Market this November, and its newly announced food lineup has some serious heavy hitters. Meanwhile, a crop of new restaurants is opening in the surrounding streets. Until now, the area has mostly been known for Smithfield Market, fabric, and the original St John. The meat market, which still supplies much of London’s restaurant trade, is due to leave its historic home in the coming years. With the museum moving in and a load of new restaurants following, Farringdon is going to look very different pretty soon.

London is officially an Ice Cream City. This summer, more than ever, tiny ice cream outfits serving increasingly wild flavours seem to be popping up everywhere. Appropriately, Ice Cream City—Ruby Tandoh’s pocket guide to London ice cream for Vittles—is already close to selling out its second print run. This does not surprise me: London loves a pocket-sized printed guide. Modernist Estates’ Perambulations—walking guides to the modernist architecture of individual London neighbourhoods—are another favourite.

London’s bartenders are swotting up on the snakebite. Food Instagrammer James Dimitri has been making his way around London ordering the very ’80s combination of half lager, half cider and blackcurrant cordial everywhere from pubs to fancy bars. There’s a pleasingly trollish quality to asking a serious bartender for a snakebite, but the bit has become enough of a thing that bars are now apparently revising the recipe in anticipation of his arrival.

London’s pizza scene needs a Five Families sit-down. Williamsburg institution Best Pizza is popping up at The Standard this month, and seemingly every member of London’s pizza cognoscenti turned up to the launch last week. Best Pizza founder Frank Pinello spent the evening slaving over a Gozney oven, slinging out his cult ricotta, mozzarella, caramelised onion, and parsley white pies.

Meanwhile, Max Lewis of Lenny’s Apizza—London’s most vocal New Haven-style pizza evangelist, who partly made his name by beefing with food influencers—has found backing for a permanent site on Henrietta Street in Covent Garden. Better still, it’s around the corner from a slice shop owned by some of those very same former influencer adversaries. London’s pizza wars continue.

The BBC has hired a “Gen Z whisperer.” The BBC hired 26-year-old entrepreneur Brandon Relph to help overhaul how the broadcaster connects with younger audiences, as under-25s increasingly abandon traditional TV for YouTube and TikTok. Relph—who founded his first company at 13 and has jokingly described himself as “the go-to guy who knows the youth”—has joined the BBC’s strategy team.

A dispatch from the A24 Tony preview: At last week’s London industry screening of the Anthony Bourdain documentary, a grande dame of the British food world was overheard whispering, “Tony would have HATED this.”

The Groucho Club is entering its next era. The Groucho—arguably the blueprint for London’s modern members’ club—has unveiled a new identity by my friends at All Purpose. The 40-year-old Soho institution has also been broadening its events programme in an effort to attract a younger crowd.

Even Tramp is getting into wellness. London’s members’ clubs increasingly want to optimise you as well as entertain you. The Arts Club has Lanserhof, 180 House has Soho Health Club, and now even Tramp is getting in on longevity. The famously louche celebrity nightclub has launched Tramp Health, a 16,000-square-foot fitness and longevity club catering to a new generation who apparently see no contradiction between a late night at Tramp and an early-morning workout at Tramp Health.

Has wellness become too much work? In response to British Vogue’s viral “My £1,000-A-Month Wellness Obsession Was Making Me Sick” story, London’s coolest nutritionist, Kat Chan, has written a useful follow-up on the increasingly blurry line between wellness and the wellness industry.

London’s full-body scan obsession is heading stateside. Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health, which started in Stockholm, is launching in New York after expanding rapidly in London. When it arrived here, it reportedly amassed a 100,000-person waitlist; it now has four London clinics. The company just raised $700 million in Series C funding ahead of its US launch.

The Savoy just sold off 2,000 pieces of furniture. As part of its ongoing £45 million refurbishment, The Savoy auctioned off around 2,000 pieces of furniture and fittings to the public two weeks ago. According to one TikToker who went along, wardrobes that originally cost £50,000 sold for £80, while £1,500 lamps went for £90 (!).

Nick Jones is selling Loch Lomond’s “Wallaby Island.” Soho House founder Nick Jones and his broadcaster wife, Kirsty Young, have put Inchconnachan, their 103-acre private island, on the market. Anyone from the west of Scotland will know it better as “Wallaby Island”: red-necked wallabies were introduced there in the 1940s and have been roaming wild ever since. The island is on the market for £2.5 million with planning permission for a lodge, boathouse, and jetty. Which seems…cheap? But maybe I’ve just lived in London for too long. As a former Soho House employee, I’m still processing the fact that my old boss owns Wallaby Island.

It’s officially too hot to cook. As we brace for the fifth heatwave of the summer in the capital, Rita’s in Soho is going (mostly) raw for August, with a menu of “raw, cured, lightly cooked, fresh as all hell” seafood and vegetables. Honestly, fair enough.

And lastly… Harry Potter fans successfully rerouted a £430 million power cable to save Dobby’s grave. The Greenlink interconnector between Wales and Ireland was originally due to pass through Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire, where fans have created a memorial to Dobby the House Elf at the spot where his death scene was filmed. After hundreds of objections, developers agreed to reroute the cable to avoid disturbing the fictional grave. The new route instead passes close to actual Bronze Age burial remains.

Nearly 20 years after the final book came out, Britain’s Harry Potter economy is still booming. London is littered with unofficial wizard shops—some of which have attracted scrutiny over their tax arrangements—and Potter walking tours, while filming locations have become tourist attractions in their own right. In June, the FT’s Jo Ellison declared that “Harry Potter has ruined Britain,” taking particular issue with the way the franchise has co-opted the country’s historic places into its wizarding universe. A fictional grave taking precedence over actual Bronze Age burial remains rather helps her case.

The Feed Me merch store now ships to London.

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Does anyone know anything about this $7,000 whipped cream machine I used last night? It was very fun, and I’m fascinated by the resale prices…

Today’s newsletter includes: I’m throwing a party, a Wi-Fi-free retreat in New York, Westville expands its empire, men can now send the first message on Bumble, goes Spielberg-mode, and local news is thriving on and off Substack.

☀️ Are you out east this weekend? I’m throwing a party for Feed Me readers with my friends at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island on Saturday night at 8:30. If you’re around, RSVP here.

Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics, who joined the company less than a year ago, left OpenAI this week. Prior to OpenAI, Bakalar spent over six years at Meta as an ethicist. Earlier this year, she told a group of students at Swarthmore that her path to this career started with an interest in “how the ways that we communicate and the different kinds of tools or mediums through which we communicate make us better or worse people.” Regarding Bakalar’s exit, an OpenAI comms person told the FT, “AI ethics doesn’t live with one owner or team at OpenAI, and ethical considerations are deeply embedded into the model-building process driven by a number of teams across research.” Johannes Heidecke, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s chief futurist and former head of mission alignment, also left the company in the last few weeks.

Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for features in the e-commerce startup’s software that took credit for sales the app didn’t drive. The Slack messages in this Bloomberg story are insane, and I will use the term cookie-stuffing as often as possible in the wake of this scandal.

Westville is opening its 12th location. None of which are any longer in the West Ville. (The original flagship was on West 10th, between West 4th and Bleecker, but closed in 2016.) The new location will be in Murray Hill, at the Third Avenue turnoff to enter the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Someone has to do the hard work of keeping turkey burgers on a menu in New York City.

Bumble’s main differentiator in the dating app category – the fact that women have to send the first message – is gone. Bloomberg reported that starting today, men will now have the ability to send the first message. Also: Bumble’s response window is now 72 hours, up from 24 hours, after it said users “reported feeling pressure to reply quickly.” Whitney Wolfe added that women often felt like when they had to send the first message, the app experience resulted in low-effort, empty interactions from men. To any Bumble users reading this: You need to toughen up and lock in. You’re missing out on one of the greatest gamified dating app experiences of our century, which bonded tens of thousands of New York City roommates scrolling on the couch together over the last decade. Shares of Bumble are down 57% from a year ago.

For some of you, a one-week stay with strangers in a house upstate without Wi-Fi sounds like a horror movie script that Blumhouse rejected. For others, it might sound like utopia. The Center for Archaic Networks, founded by August Lamm, is an organization focused on studying and cultivating unmonetized human connection and community structures that predated modern social media. This winter, it’s launching a series of one-week stays at an upstate New York home, in Owego, for those looking to experiment with a low-tech living environment. There will be no Wi-Fi available, and all digital devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets) will be locked safely away for the duration of the stay. Computers will be accessible at a nearby public library. Related to the heaven/hell Rorschach test: on-site amenities include a piano, guitar, and bass.

I reached out to , the founder of The Center for Archaic Networks, to learn more about the residency.

ES: This house looks pretty cool. How did you find it?

AL: I was driving back from a concert upstate when I decided to stop for lunch in a small town. The Main Street was lined with beautiful, historic homes, and when I saw a “For Sale” sign in front of one, I stopped in my tracks. While the house was far too big for one person, it was the perfect size for a small residency. It already looked like an academic building, with its white columns and red siding. I got in touch with the realtor and just a few weeks later made an offer. As an unmarried freelance writer, I wasn’t planning on investing in real estate, but when I reviewed my finances I found that my book advance was enough to cover a down payment in a relatively affordable part of upstate. The seller accepted my offer and I got to work developing the residency program.

ES: How are you hoping accepted applicants spend their days in the house?

AL: People seek out low-tech refuges for a variety of reasons, and my hope is that the residency will accommodate all of them. There will be optional activities throughout the day but no expectations of productivity. If residents want to work on specific projects, they’ll have access to a typewriter, an art studio, a piano, and other tools. If they just want to relax, they are welcome to do that. Down the line, I’m planning to host more structured sessions, e.g. writing workshops and music camps, but for now I’ll just let the residents decide how to spend their offline week.

Local-news Substacks may be having a moment. But so, apparently, are local-news newspapers. The Times writes about The Chronicle of Glens Falls, N.Y. and illuminates the broader category of gritty print newsgathering weeklies: “Though nearly 3,500 newspapers have ceased publication since the mid-2000s, about 2,250 publications like The Chronicle — independent, sometimes family-owned weeklies — have been ‘relatively resilient,’ said Zach Metzger, director of the state of local news project at Northwestern University.”

🍿 Emily Dawn Long is taking us to the movies for NYFW this year. She’s been teasing video content made with Meta Glasses over the last few days.

The leaves are almost starting to change. The aisles of Staples are getting more crowded. Vogue’s September issue just dropped. Which means one thing: It’s almost back-to-school season. With the welcoming of this special time of year, we have a strong contender for craziest headline of the season: “Students Skinned a Bear in a Dorm. Cornell Realized It Should Ban That.” It gets boring up there in Ithaca, can you blame the guys? Reports the NYT: After hunting a bear and carving up its carcass on a table in a communal dorm kitchen (the students said they planned to make “black-bear pastrami”), a complaint was made, a police report was filed, and the two young men were cleared of wrongdoing (they both had hunting licenses, the bear was killed legally, and there was no existing rule at school forbidding black-bear pastrami-making.) The new policy is meant “to provide clarity regarding what is or is not appropriate to do in a communal kitchen space,” says a Cornell spokesperson. Meateater founder Steven Rinella, who previously spoke to one of the bear-skinners on his podcast, re-posted the New York Times headline, commenting, “it’s a clear sign that Cornell University needs to be boycotted by all serious Americans who love freedom.”

A Staten Island judge paused the rollout of Mayor Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax in response to a lawsuit. Politico reports that the plaintiffs “took specific issue with the publication of more than 900,000 properties” that could be subject to the tax. “The tax applies only to people who own second homes in New York City worth more than $5 million. But some homeowners say they’ve received notices from the city despite being full-time New Yorkers.” Having seen some of the communication between management companies and co-ops regarding the new tax, I am not surprised there is confusion. Mamdani said Monday that he would “vigorously defend” the rollout of the new tax.

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Today’s newsletter includes: AOC is sharing her egg-freezing journey on Instagram, on why everyone is wearing French manicures, Blank Street hired the Steve Jobs of ice cream, WSJ is hiring a Tesla reporter, a former Bloomberg reporter joins Substack, and OpenAI launched integrations with Yelp and Resy.

Interested in working with Feed Me? Need to tell me something? Email emily@readfeedme.com or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

Guest Lecture is a Feed Me series that captures the spirit of that (sometimes unhinged) guest lecturer who comes into your class on a Friday, drops more knowledge than you’ve heard all year, and then leaves forever.

For our next Guest Lecture, we’re talking to , whose bestselling novel Yesteryear has sold 1.4 million copies in the first four months of publication. Paid readers can ask her anything about writing one of the most popular books of the year, online performance, and writing a novel while writing a newsletter while hosting a podcast.

Some truly groundbreaking news from the WSJ this week: Hot women like dating finance guys. Andrew Zucker has spent the past few years fine-tuning his beat – observing and breaking down trends among America’s wealthiest. His latest story is about how superstars like Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all choosing to date…private equity guys. The highlight of the story is from TBPN co-host Jordi Hays, who rage baits readers with the following: “Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk-takers. I can’t think of any archetype of man that fits that description more today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets.”

ChatGPT launched integrations with OpenTable, Resy, and Yelp. At lunch this weekend, a friend described one of many new reservation apps that allows users to pay an exorbitant amount of money in order to get a table at one of New York’s hard-to-land tables (Dorsia, Appointment Trader, Artemis). Someone else at lunch said that their coworker built a tool in ChatGPT to do this for free, by crawling reservation sites. Earlier this year, built a reservation app with Claude that did something similar. OpenAI’s new feature lets users ask ChatGPT for a specific restaurant and day, or more general questions like neighborhood or cuisine. I asked their comms team if this was a feature that users were asking for.

💅💅💅 Three’s a trend. Earlier this year, for a brief moment, we were all being sold bare nails. First, as a status signal, then as a recession indicator. But over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a rapid uptick in French manicure content. Instead of this being a boring, almost-naked look, women who post their French manicures are acting like they’re equipped with a secret weapon. , Substack’s beauty queen, recently wrote a newsletter that described the process of bringing a reference from Pinterest to her nail tech, Miss Thi. Kelly Chapman has been posting photos of her manicure and the good things it has “manifested” for her. And just last night, posted a photo of her French manicure, warning viewers that she would start “acting some type of way” this week.

So what is it about this nail trend that impacts a woman’s mood and way of moving through the world? I reached out to all three trend participants/leaders last night to find out.

For Dia, the style represents release: “The French manicure is a sedative. We’re pacified by the y2k nostalgia, its aesthetic simplicity, feelings of camaraderie—of being one of the girls. For an overstimulated person who’s looking at their fingers a lot, this can be a powerful psychic release. I started exclusively getting red pedicures to force myself into neutral manicures, like the French, for exactly this reason. Beauty Xanax.”

Meg’s inspiration was more patriotic: “Two legendary female icons inspired my French mani pedi: Elle Woods and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I recently wrote about America’s Sweethearts and the way the cheerleaders obsess over their appearance. There’s something aspirational about these women that reminds me of growing up in Dallas, where the French manicure is a beauty staple. I also recently rewatched Legally Blonde. Elle Woods literally said, ‘Never underestimate a woman with a French manicure.’ Tea. The French manicure energy is exactly that—feminine, cutting, put-together, slightly intimidating, and even a bit archaic in a glamorous way. I have a big work week ahead, and I swear I feel more equipped for it thanks to this manicure.”

And for Kelly, the feminine manicure is an adult response to “girlhood”: “The French manicure is the first kind of manicure I got at 13 years old, and revisiting it at 32 feels like coming home. Back then I got it to feel like a real lady, and today I got it for the same reason. It’s peak femininity. It sets the tone. It gives me permission to inhabit a glamorous womanhood, and invites others to treat me that way too. Every time I look at my hands I’m reminded that I’m a gorgeous sophisticate. It’s also versatile - I just moved from a maximalist va-va-voom, long almond French to a more conservative, short square manicure, but it’s no less beautiful. People keep reaching out to me telling me that I’ve influenced them to get one too, which makes me wonder if we’re all hungry for a feeling of womanliness…after years of ‘girlhood’ discourse.”

The hottest new “bureaucratic fad” in business is hiring a chief of staff. (Why don’t you have a chief of staff?) Says the NYT: “Unlike executive assistants, the chief of staff is often a senior level role…because they serve as a second brain for the busy boss.” The story details many examples of these vital right-hands, who could seemingly go by other names: chief organizer; lead helper; reliably all-hours all-platforms texter; assistant with authority; consigliere; gatekeeper; sycophant. “The common thread,” writes the Times, “is that the chief of staff has a single constituent: the boss.” In other words: The chief of staff comes in many different shapes and sizes but they all probably annoy the staff over whom they chief. This reminds me of how Matt Levine recently wrote about “prestige laundering,” the genius of tech and MBA types to periodically rebrand old, boring jobs as new, sexy jobs that talented young should covet. See also this legendary blog post from Karl Yang (aka ChiefofStuffs), “The Job Status Cycle.” He was onto the shell game 6 years ago

New York Times Cooking’s new social editor, Zoe Becker, came from Eater.

WSJ posted a job listing for a Tesla reporter. The right person is based in SF, and is someone who can: “Consistently deliver impactful scoops on Tesla, Rivian, Waymo, and rising EV/AV startups, detailing their strategic pivots, production triumphs, bottlenecks, and executive-level thinking.” Which will happen first, WSJ hiring a SpaceX reporter, or Elon merging all his companies together, so one reporter covers all of them?

The apocalyptic billionaire bunker du jour is in Argentina wine country. The Financial Times reports on tech founders preparing for a third world war outside of Mendoza: “A handful of small prefab homes, geodesic domes and an airstrip have sprung up in the past two years on the remote Wamani ranch, an hour via dirt roads from the nearest village in far-west Argentina. Far from the world’s nuclear superpowers and close to Patagonia’s abundant oil reserves and the fertile plains of Argentine wine capital Mendoza, Wamani is Argentine-Spanish tech founder Martín Varsavsky’s best guess at a place that would survive armageddon.”

AOC has been posting her egg-freezing process on Instagram.

Blank Street is launching ice cream. The coffee chain, which was valued at $500 million last year, is rumored to be raising again this year, per WWD. In addition to Blank Street’s plans for L.A. expansion, the WWD story also mentioned an ice cream launch. I reached out to Blank Street co-founder Issam Freiha this morning to get more information. “We started working on this about a year ago as our stores were getting busier and busier past 4 p.m., and our signature matchas were getting more popular,” he told me. The business is viewing ice cream as a new vessel for late afternoon/early evening customers. “The concept is super simple: five clean ingredients with no refined sugar (sweetened only with honey) for our unique proprietary base, four flavors (vanilla, using Indonesian whole vanilla beans; matcha using Blank Street matcha; coffee using our espresso; and strawberry using Sicilian whole strawberries) that are built from that base, which you can pair with a chocolate shell poured over the top to order (coconut oil, white chocolate base). It’s a cleaner, more natural, and funner affogato. We developed it with Zen Ong, creator of Awan in LA & now Beku in the UK. He’s the Steve Jobs of frozen desserts.”

Conor Sen, who spent a decade writing about housing and the economy for Bloomberg, launched a newsletter called Housing Frame on Substack. On X he wrote: “Seeing friends with thriving Substacks made me wonder what my angle would be if I did one, and I realized housing was the beat that excited me and where I felt there was a relative lack of coverage.”

Jeff Bezos is nearing a deal to become a minority owner of Liverpool FC. The consortium, which includes Bezos, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and British-Indian businessman Amit Bhatia, would acquire a 30% stake of the club for £1.3 billion from Fenway Sports Group, which bought Liverpool in 2010. The sale would value Liverpool at £4.4 billion or $5.9 billion, which would maintain its position among the top 5 most valuable soccer clubs in the world.

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Hypothetically, if I were going to throw a party next weekend, would you prefer it to be in Montauk or on Shelter Island? Respond in comments or by replying to this email. Of course, there would be merch and drinks for anyone who makes the journey.

Today’s newsletter includes: on the performance that is eating at Mr Chow, SF’s tech set gets their own paparazzi treatment, the Department of Sanitation has brought back the BRAT-green stickers, steps down, New York’s best Thai restaurant returns, and Brooklyn is getting…another wellness club.

But first: I made this playlist of songs that mention Mr Chow to go along with J Lee’s review. Hit play, enjoy the weekend. It might be the most sung about restaurant ever.

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“The crispy duck is crispy and it’s duck, therefore it’s delightful.” reviews Mr Chow.

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. The annual August exodus is upon us. The vibe shift is palpable. While J.Lee is stuck in the city preparing for the relaunch of the Expense Account podcast, he figured it was a good time to (re)visit some classics. The Expense Account hall of fame. Last week, he wrote about Michael’s. This week, he’s writing about another midtown legend, Mr Chow.

Mr Chow is not a man. Mr Chow is not a restaurant. Mr Chow is an artist. Mr Chow is a showman. Mr Chow is an experimental theater where as a diner you’re the audience and the performer all at once.

That said, Mr. Chow is also a man. Michael Chow, who turned 87 this year, is the son of an opera singer. His father was a grandmaster of the Peking Opera House, and starred in hundreds of productions before the Cultural Revolution. Michael was born in Shanghai and moved to London at the age of 13. As he got older, he became quite the man about town. A painter, an actor, a burgeoning businessman, a party boy. On Valentine’s Day 1968, he opened Mr Chow in London, combining all of his interests. A Chinese restaurant with Italian waiters and no chopsticks. It was an immediate hit. In 1974, he opened Mr Chow in Beverly Hills, and the Hollywood crowd ate it up. And in 1979, he opened Mr Chow in New York City on East 57th Street, just in time for the 1980s art-world boom: Warhol, Schnabel, Basquiat, a young Larry Gagosian, Madonna, the rise of the finance bro, and cocaine. Michael Chow has always been good at being in the right place at the right time. From there, he opened locations in Las Vegas, Miami, Dubai, of course. He opened a second New York location in Tribeca in 2006. Every location is legendary in its own right (maybe not Dubai), but for me at least, Mr Chow peaked on 57th Street.

As you enter the arena that is Midtown Mr Chow, everything is already happening, the stage is set, they started without you. Chatter fills the air, flowers are in bloom, the silver is polished, Richard Smith’s mobile sculpture feels as if it’s in flight. The room verges on minimalism in shades of black and white, everything is shiny, and there’s a large mirrored wall on the far side of the room, to reflect and amplify the energy. The effect is that it feels like a self-contained energetic ecosystem, a microcosm, a feedback loop that feels alive, and endless.

Every table at Mr Chow has a little beam of light, a spotlight, illuminating a glass vase with an orchid. Restaurants don’t do romance, they don’t do drama, like this anymore. The beam of light lets you know that this is where the action happens, but there are no visible spotlights. I’ll blame my first lycheetini for the fact that it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that the light was coming from inside the table. They’re custom tables with a cutout in the middle, and a light installed beneath. The white tablecloth really sells the illusion. I love this loaded little sleight of hand. The call is coming from inside the house. The light comes from within. The Warholian idea that everyone is a star, you certainly feel like one when you’re eating at Mr Chow.

The servers at Mr Chow feel like used-car salesmen from another era, from a movie. They’re incredibly charming and slippery, and you know they’re trying to fleece you somehow, but maybe that’s half the fun. When you eat at a restaurant like Mr Chow, you want to suspend your disbelief, you want to be fooled a bit. You want someone to tell you with a straight face that it’s completely reasonable to pay $12.50 per skewer of chicken satay (an order of four is $50). They’re a speciality of the house. Mr Chow’s chicken satay is one of the most unphotogenic dishes of all time, they look like a GI disorder, and they’re a little dry, but they’re served to you on a heavy silver platter, they feel consequential. Their signature squid ink noodles are a black mess in the way that squid ink noodles tend to be, and they don’t taste like much, but they’re garnished with a little pink orchid. Their Cy Twombly monogrammed plates are the chicest plates in New York City (can anyone help me get my hands on one? I’ll pay top dollar). The menus are watermarked. I love these little details. I love the bells and the whistles. I love the song and the dance. I’m at Mr Chow for the show, and I know that at the end of the day the food is just a prop, it’s the price of admission.

But don’t get me wrong, the food is not bad, necessarily. The crispy duck is crispy and it’s duck, therefore it’s delightful, and it’s served with little pancake wraps, which I think are homemade, a rarity in this day and age. The crispy beef tastes like candy, and is also crispy. It’s as if the panda from Panda Express shopped at Chanel, and was addicted to energy drinks. And shrimp toast is always good. The food at Mr Chow is high drama, and high pleasure, even when it’s bland. Sometimes it’s of questionable quality, but that’s Broadway baby. You know what time it is when you’re on your third lycheetini. As Michael Chow himself would tell you, they wouldn’t be going on 50 years if the food weren’t good. You can’t argue with that.

I constantly find myself asking what it is that we want from restaurants. Restaurants function in so many different ways, and serve so many different purposes for so many different people. Sometimes we want to eat food. Sometimes we want a home away from home. Sometimes we want to be taken somewhere exotic. Sometimes we want to see and be seen. And sometimes we want to be SOMEWHERE and to be SOMEONE. For nearly 50 years Mr Chow has been a place that you can go to be SOMEWHERE and to be SOMEONE. Food maybe never tastes as good as glamour feels. (Maybe.) And the glamour of Mr Chow is a glamour that has proven to be incredibly hard to cultivate. It’s not a glamour created for tech guys, and pilates influencers, by a team of consultants and investors. Its glamour created by an artist FOR artists. It’s a singular vision by a singular man. First and foremost Michael Chow is not a chef, he’s not a businessman, he’s an artist, and that’s what makes Mr Chow so great.

The New York Times once described Mr Chow as a “glittery, elegant, non-Chinese looking Chinese restaurant.” It’s certainly glittery, it’s certainly elegant, and who am I to judge what a Chinese restaurant should or shouldn’t look like? But I think of what it meant to open a restaurant like Mr Chow in 1979. To build a space like this, an undeniable, highly activated, dynamic space. A space with the power to convince celebrities, artists, and random rich people that they’re in the most important place in the world and that Chinese food can be glittery and elegant, sexy and fun, and also incredibly expensive. A Chinese restaurant with the balls to not set their tables with chopsticks. It’s no small feat. He built it, and they came, and they continue to come. They continue to go all the way up to East 57th Street, to be part of the show and to wash their greasy fingers in sterling silver tea bowls. They continue to come because no one is doing it like Mr Chow. No one will ever do it like Mr Chow. There’s no lack of glossy rooms and overpriced mediocre food and ice cold martinis in Midtown Manhattan, but none feel as compelling and alive as Mr Chow. Mr Chow has an elegance, and an energy, that I fear we can’t recreate in 2026. We may have lost the recipes. Even after all these years, Mr Chow feels like magic.

This concludes Expense Account by .

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Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith, the restaurateurs behind Mermaid Inn, are opening a new restaurant on the Upper West Side. “The upcoming restaurant at 61 West 74th Street remains unnamed and its concept undecided.”

The Sticker of Shame! After a 14-year-hiatus, the Department of Sanitation has brought back the BRAT-green stickers for cars that don’t move for street cleaning. Alternate-side city parking is a pain in the ass, but eating $65 tickets once or twice a week is still often less than the monthly fee at most parking garages in New York. Perhaps too obvious a trade-off for NYC car owners has led to the city reintroducing this radical intervention after banning the practice in 2012. The sticker reads: “THIS VEHICLE VIOLATED NYC STREET CLEANING RULES. AS A RESULT, THIS STREET COULD NOT BE PROPERLY CLEANED.” No, the sticker of shame can not be peeled off (warm water and a scraper are required) and, no, receiving one does not keep you from getting a $65 ticket, too.

Ugly Baby, the Carroll Gardens Thai restaurant that Pete Wells once called “extraordinary,” is returning after closing in 2024. My mouth is watering just scrolling the restaurant’s Instagram. The new location will be in Williamsburg. I am always on a search for the best Thai Food in New York (Thai Diner goes hard, Bangkok Degree in Park Slope is extremely satisfying), but I’m curious where else you go. What is the New York equivalent of Luv2Eat? (Will venture to any borough.)

From the Feed Me Tip Line: Brooklyn is getting a new wellness club this winter called Saunter. A reader sent me a job description for the mysterious new concept’s Marketing Director. Based on the emphasis of the word “warm” all over the site, I’m guessing this is a sauna-slash-coworking space. Per the job description, “We’re building a lifestyle brand that is highly differentiated — one that touches wellness, hospitality, culture, and much more — and this role owns how that brand takes shape and reaches people.”

From the Feed Me Tip Line: Affiliate site ShopMy is now using their chat feature (historically used for promoting discounts) as a job board. A reader sent me this screenshot from footwear brand, M.Gemi. Maybe they think superfans of the brand would be good hires, or be more likely to recommend a good hire for the sake of the brand.

New York State lawmakers want to lift the ban on gay bathhouses.

Multi-amenity office buildings are playing catch up with the amenities of tech offices. Marx Realty (the company behind midtown buildings like 10 Grand Central and 545 Madison Avenue) is pouring $68 million into 430 Park Avenue to develop a “hospitality-infused” 19-story office building. When you look at office buildings like WSA (which has its own private restaurant and state-of-the-art gym) or JP Morgan’s new 270 Park Avenue (which has a private pub and yoga studios for employees), it makes sense why developers would feel the need to court hedge funds and family offices with splashy building features. Marx’s Herald Building in D.C. even has a members club called The Bouvier. As for 430 Park, there will be a library, a lounge, and a parlor (sounds redundant), as well as fireplaces and showers.

Thom Bettridge is stepping down from his role as editor of i-D Magazine to focus on his creative studio, Content World. I called this months ago, after seeing how much effort Thom was putting into his personal newsletter on Substack (which is doing quite well), all while i-D was trying to grow its own presence on the platform. Steff Yotka, who seems very cool, will succeed Thom, and as said this morning, Steff “has been circling the top of the masthead for far too long.”

🕷️ 🕷️ 🕷️ Martha’s Vineyard is getting ticked off 🕷️ 🕷️ 🕷️. There are concerns about the tick-related drop in tourism to Martha’s Vineyard. Ferries are carrying 5% fewer passengers this year, and short-term bookings are falling. Per Bloomberg, “There were almost 750 positive tests for alpha-gal at the Vineyard’s only hospital in 2025, a twenty-fold jump from four years earlier. Hundreds more have tested positive this year.” As I covered earlier this summer, many restaurants are altering their menus to accommodate diners with alpha-gal, removing red meat from dishes.

’s new social media bit is cosplaying as TMZ for the tech set. This week, they’ve posted paparazzi shots (assumably staged) of Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, and Figma CEO Dylan Field.

Interested in working with Feed Me? Need to tell me something? Email emily@readfeedme.com or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

Yesterday, Brex published a list of the top 15 newsletters that startups expense on their Brex corporate cards. was #1, was #5, and Feed Me was #6. The report said, “Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me is up 38%. Feed Me is a read about taste and consumer culture, and it sits four spots below Stratechery on the same corporate cards.” Thank you to all the finance teams approving this $80 expense.

Feed Me is working on another Black Book, this time for the East End of Long Island including the North Fork, Shelter Island, and The Hamptons. If you know a guy, know a spot, or feel like letting the Feed Me readership on a recommendation you’d normally gatekeep, please submit a response here. 🏖️

Today’s newsletter includes: The bank spending $250 million a year on Ozempic for employees, the future of skincare is getting another human’s fat injected into your face, Puck is hiring a party planner, Vogue heads to San Francisco, on New York Film Festival, and a millennial divorce marks the end of an era.

We’re 50 days out from the New York Film Festival. By .

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

The 64th New York Film Festival (9/25-10/12) just announced its Main Slate of 32 films this year. Whereas Sundance opens the festival calendar and therefore has the charm of surprise and discovery, NYFF, arriving in the fall, always delivers a strong curation of the year’s festival bests. The cast and crew are often there to present the films they’ve worked on, and it’s hard to not bump into someone just walking in and around Alice Tully Hall. You might see New Yorker critic Richard Brody on the sidewalk, run into Mikey Madison on the way to the bathroom, and find yourself sitting in a screening next to Ari Aster. It’s also often the last time to catch these films before they release theatrically, sometimes months and months later.

Last year’s crop was particularly strong: It Was Just an Accident, Sentimental Value, and my favorite movie from last year, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. This year’s slate looks promising, as well. Chris Rock is back as a director, after 12 years, with his new film, Misty Green. From the prolific director Hong Sang-soo, we have two new films, something you can count on seeing every year, considering that NYFF director Dennis Lim literally wrote the book on Hong. Many of the top films from Cannes are there: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which is opening the festival.

The two films I’m most excited for: An exclamation in the title doesn’t always bode well, but in the case of Behemoth!, it’s a fitting punctuation to welcome back Tony Gilroy, fresh off his success on Andor, with his first feature film in 14 years. Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is also back, after eight years, with Possible Love. Lee works at a novelist’s pace, but arguably every one of the six films he’s directed is a masterpiece. His work is known for its social realism and the deep and complex human emotion of his characters. Lee’s Burning is one of the best films since 2018, and I’m a firm believer that it should have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. Sadly it didn’t even get nominated, just missing the Korean zeitgeist that Parasite ushered in the following year. I’m counting down the days until we get to see his newest, and if it’s as good as his past work, I certainly hope it gets more love.

If you’re around the city for the festival, I highly recommend checking it out. You can get early passes or individual tickets later, although be warned that in-demand screenings sell out quickly. If you want to brush up on some filmography leading up to NYFF64, here’s where to start:

Lee Chang-dong: Burning; Oasis; Secret Sunshine; Poetry

Pedro Almodóvar: Talk to Her; All About My Mother; Volver; Pain and Glory

Mike Leigh: Secrets & Lies; Naked; Vera Drake

Paweł Pawlikowski: Ida; Cold War; My Summer of Love

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi: Drive My Car; Happy Hour; Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Andrew Haigh: 45 Years; Weekend; Lean on Pete

Hong Sang-soo: The Day He Arrives; Tale of Cinema; Right Now, Wrong Then

Tony Gilroy: Michael Clayton; Andor

James Gray: The Immigrant; Two Lovers; We Own the Night

New releases this weekend:

A24’s teenage Anthony Bourdain biopic, Tony, is opening in limited release in NY and LA. Early reviews from this one are great, with good buzz coming from “Industry Night” screenings on Monday that were hosted by local chefs in 25 cities. Tony goes wide on August 21. One Night Only, starring man of the hour Callum Turner and an ascendant Monica Barbaro. Anyone who’s been to the movies recently has seen the trailer, which pitches the high-concept and annoyingly compelling premise: What if single people were only allowed to have sex one night a year? Yes, many people have commented: The Purge, but fornication. This is director Will Gluck’s follow-up to Anyone but You, which I didn’t love. But it did make $220 million on a $25 million budget and vaulted Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney to a new level of stardom, so I appreciate Gluck trying to single-handedly revive the theatrical rom-com. Reviews for One Night Only are mixed, but if you liked Anyone But You, you’ll probably enjoy this one. I’m intrigued by what amusing world-building the movie will do to sell the premise—how exactly does the government outlaw single people from from having sex every other night?—and whether Turner and Barbaro have the chemistry to make us care about little else. In any case, I bet entire planes will be watching this on Delta flights this fall. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens limited in NY and LA, starring Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) and Gillian Anderson (The X-Files). Director Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Camp Miasma premiered at Cannes this year and won the Queer Palm. A psychedelic slasher inspired by Friday the 13th, it’s the second notable queer horror movie of the summer, after Leviticus.

It’s the end of a DTC era: AWAY Luggage co-founder Jennifer Rubio and billionaire Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield are getting divorced. I’m not sure why, but this couple gave many millennials an immense amount of hope. Earlier this year, the pair donated $23 million to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and less than a year ago, Derek Blasberg wrote about their Southampton estate for Architectural Digest. I will always consider Stewart a romantic after the proposal tweet that he posted after AWAY’s $1.6 billion valuation.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product for the last 400 days, is stepping down. On Wednesday he wrote, “Serving the X community has been the privilege of a lifetime. X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history. But running this app is a 24/7 job and it’s now time for me to take a breather.”

Puck is hiring a party planner. This week, they posted an open role for a contract event coordinator who has “experience with event planning and project management.” It’s based in New York, but applicants must have willingness to travel (and willingness to not receive staff benefits). Rate is $55-$70/hour.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent insulted WSJ chief economics correspondent Nick Timiraos on X — and people across media and finance quickly jumped to Nick’s defense. Timiraos fits into a tradition of the WSJ Fed reporter enjoying a close relationship with the Fed, and putting out thoughtful reporting that’s a must-read across Wall Street. Finance blog ZeroHedge calls him “Nikileaks,” for his accurate scoops. New goal unlocked for an economics reporter: get nicknamed by ZeroHedge and insulted by the Treasury Secretary.

Uber’s lawyers question victims of sexual assault at the hands of drivers by drilling down on what they were wearing, among other things. The New York Times reports: “The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.”

A reader pointed out that after I wrote about Aman’s treatment of journalist Ryan Walker, the luxury hotel group wiped their awful Google reviews.

Sweetgreen is launching a Niçoise salad with tinned fish brand Fishwife. The catch is that you have to assemble it yourself — the salad comes with a tin of tuna that you need to open, and somehow then get onto the salad without getting oil all over your hands and desk. Godspeed!

Would you get another human’s fat injected into your face to restore facial volume? Sounds like a horror story I wrote a few years ago. Bloomberg reported that L&C Bio, the Korean biotech company behind Re2O (which uses cadaver-donated skin to improve skin quality and wrinkles), is developing an injectable made from donated human fat to correct “Ozempic face,” or the the hollow cheeks and weak jawline from rapid weight loss caused by GLP-1 use. It’s actually a fascinating business story because, until this year, South Korea classified donated fat as medical waste, so nobody could recycle it. Morgan Stanley analyst Mi Hyun Kim told Bloomberg that the legal change could drive profit because donated fat, once a disposal cost, will become a nearly-free raw material. The global dermal fillers market – which is currently dominated by traditional filler giants like Juvéderm and Restylane – is expected to more than double to $17 billion by 2035, according to Precedence Research.

Speaking of which, Bank of America’s CEO said that the company is spending more than $250 million a year on GLP-1 weight loss medications for its employees.

Bertazzoni oven ($3k) + Liebherr refrigerator ($4k) + Bosch microwave ($1.6k) + Beko dishwasher ($700) = almost $10k just in appliances. This sub-$700k West Village apartment has all of those plus it’s located directly above The Spaniard. The dream for an incoming NYU student with rich parents or a sugar daddy.

Dylan Byers said that the rise in video stars at The New York Times is creating an internal “caste system.”

Ken Griffin is reportedly keeping his residence in New York City, after rumors swirled of him moving his business and personal residency to Miami after Mamdani’s viral Tax Day video. In April, Mayor Mamdani posted a video in which he stands in front of Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse apartment, and says “this pied-à-terre tax is designed for the richest of the rich.” In response to Griffin’s pivot, some people on X have pointed out that rich people do much more talking about leaving due to taxes than ACTUALLY leaving.

Punchbowl News is interviewing Donald Trump tomorrow for the season finale of their podcast, Fly Out Day. This morning, I asked Jake Sherman how he’s feeling about the conversation. “I’m looking forward to talking to him about Congress and legislating, which are the issues our core audience cares about.”

Isabelle Conner (formerly of La Mer, ILIA, and Bobbi Brown) started her own marketing consultancy called Swirl Projects. I spoke to her this morning to learn more about the decision to go out on her own:

“I’ve always been entrepreneurial-curious, but had no desire to start a brand. Instead, I like helping founders shape and tell their stories, and sharing them with the world. After working across an incredible array of brands in very different life stages, I realized I wanted to help yet-to-be-launched and emerging beauty brands, as well as those looking to reinvent themselves, find their place in a wildly competitive and dense landscape.

I’ve learned such a great deal from my teammates, bosses, and founders over the years -- at Supergoop!, I learned how to scale a clear mission and message, at ILIA Beauty, I learned about marketing cross-generationally and globally, and at Skinfix, I learned how paring a brand back to its most essential strengths and qualities can help amplify it.”

Vogue World will go to San Francisco in 2027. “Vogue believes in celebrating cities, and San Francisco is a city like none other,” Anna Wintour said in a statement. Get the boys on a runway! If any of you can explain what Vogue World is, please send a detailed email.

“Rhode’s latest summer product launch drove $27 million of DTC sales in a single day.” Glossy reported that Rhode’s summer launch (Highlight Milk Multipurpose Luminizer, Pocket Bronzer, and Peptide Lip Shape in three new shades) brought in 90,000 new consumers with over 70% of sales coming from existing consumers.

NEED A NEW HAT?

Today’s newsletter includes: a movie screening tonight with Zohran Mamdani’s mom, I think about 2012 Vice as a snow globe (but the snow is cocaine), Ven. Space expands in Brooklyn, Aman needs to hire some varsity-status crisis comms, and checking in with New York City’s summer interns.

Yesterday, I posted on X that I haven’t been seeing a lot of posts about summer interns in the city. During prior summers, we saw viral tweets about fake IDs at The Spaniard or horrible sartorial decisions being made by clueless 21-year-olds. But this summer? You could hear a pin drop at Phebe’s. One person on X called it “AI’s silent summer.” Another blamed it on everyone wanting to be solo founders now. Maybe they aren’t drinking, so they blend into Equinox classes and and loops around Central Park. Perhaps it’s just a glitch in the timeline, and we’ll all be back to reporting on our young visiting neighbors next summer.

(Sincere plea to all interns — cut the vent stitches on your suits! they’re not meant to stay there.)

I got in touch with a few summer interns, and spoke to them about their experience in the Big Apple, as well as their general feelings about the job market (spoiler: bleak). Here were some of our conversations:

Anonymous intern at luxury brand, graduated NYU in 2026:

“I go to college here, so I feel a bit of a superiority complex to the interns who all flock here for the summer. I really hate going out when Intern Season starts because every bar or subway is riddled with 19-year-old boys, but it kinda inspires me to branch out of my usual area to find where the interns are not.

I was in this weird in-between where I was still interning while some of my friends were starting their full-time jobs. My company doesn’t do official return offers so it felt kind of pointless and not super productive. I also think that for someone thinking about pursuing a corporate fashion job it’s surprisingly hard to compete with FIT, LIM, and other art/fashion school kids because they all dedicate every semester to internships. On the other hand, it feels like my friends pursuing more unique, creative jobs found them through social settings / people they’ve met out or through past creative projects like helping out on shoots and film sets (might be more of an NYU niche). So it feels like in order to pursue a job in a more creative field you need to be fully immersed in the social scene of those same people, or have a nepo connection. I know a lot of people who are just kinda cool and that’s enough to get them a cool job if that makes sense. I don’t think that the majority of the creative jobs I would want to pursue are even advertised or available anywhere online or on LinkedIn.”

Hattie Bridell, intern at Lubov Gallery and On The Rag:

“Because New York attracts creatives of all backgrounds, I got to know people I would’ve never crossed paths with otherwise. I met professionals specializing in a range of mediums, including painting, photography, and fiber arts. Interactions with people are spontaneous and candid. They will share intimate details of their life with you one minute and disappear the next. Coming from rural New Mexico, this dynamic was foreign to me but I have quickly grown used to it.

The majority of people I have worked with are also Gen Z and in a similar stage in life, but I have had the privilege of learning from those older than me. Their experience and knowledge of the field helped me grow and work more confidently. Many of my peers are also interns. I feel lucky to have secured these positions, as in the city these opportunities go as quickly as they come.”

Torrey Lin, intern at The Daily Show and Morning Brew, rising junior at UNC-Chapel Hill:

“I really loved living in the city for the summer. My working and unoriginal theory on the city is that nobody lives here because it’s easy. And on a bad day, it can be way too sticky and overstimulating and it can smell really bad. But then you go to sleep and you’re really able to start over the next day. People really do seem to live here because they’re chasing something. Somehow there’s enough room for these huge dreams and goals and I loved feeling the ambition.

I have no idea how much of my anxiety about the job market is just being 20 years old and not knowing what I want to do with my life and how much of it is unprecedented paralysis and a deeply rooted fear across all careers.

I really hope that people continue to seek out real connection, and if that’s the case, I think and hope that there will be a need for human creativity. All of my friends are going into the corporate world and I am trying to resist the urge as much as I can. I really don’t want to work to be rich and that’s it. That can’t be the point. I felt really hopeful being around a lot of young and creative people. There seems to be a sense of wry acceptance about the current state of the job market. Everybody knows it’s bad but nobody wants to talk about it but it still comes up in every conversation. I think job permanence is something I’m thinking about and nervous for. You have your job until you don’t, and then what? I’m really scared of my skills and passions just being rendered not profitable and then tossed aside. But overall, it was really great to see what it’s like out there right now. I’m nervous but also extremely hopeful and excited.”

Kiran Mathew, intern at Orchestra, rising senior at NYU.

“A lot of my friends stayed in the city for the summer but couldn’t get internships (so have started with summer retail gigs or are coasting by on their parents’ money). Interestingly, a lot of the interns at my firm are postgrad or masters students. I don’t have anything insightful to say about Gen Z’s thoughts on the job market other than “so bleak.” People are applying to like hundreds of jobs and hearing nothing, even unpaid internships are a prized commodity. Some of my friends even say they go out, get flirted with by some older guy in their target industry, and their career flashes before their eyes. Many have tried but no one has turned that into an internship yet.”

The White House UFC fight cost $60 million and led to $30 million in losses. On a Q2 earnings call Monday, TKO Group executive chairman and CEO, Ari Emanuel, called the UFC Freedom 250 event “a roaring success” before the company’s CFO reminded analysts and investors that they “incurred significantly higher-than-normal costs” and did not sell tickets, resulting in meaningfully-impacted margins.

“Vice was a cult. It was also one of the best business schools in modern history.” Mitchell Jackson is a publicist whose stacked comms client roster includes Candace Owens, Adam Friedland, Caroline Calloway, and Clavicular (I wonder what his client Christmas party is like.) He wrote about what it was like to be the youngest employee at Vice in 2012. Whenever I read about the Vice empire that was already peaking when I moved to New York in 2012 (when I was 18), I picture Williamsburg as a snow globe. Something Jackson does well in this essay is capture the unknowable price of putting your byline on viral stories, and how even in 2026, peoples 2010’s media reputations follow them around like shadows in New York City. “It was traumatic. I didn’t realize the price of writing online — my editors did, but they let me hang myself. Hanging myself meant traffic.”

Ven. Space, the menswear mecca of New York, is opening a second location. Ven Archive is a few blocks north on President Street, and will be open from Thursday to Sunday from noon-6. Ven Archive will have past collections and one-off samples, and based on their Instagram, perhaps some cool furniture.

The New York Times added 280,000 net digital subscribers in the second quarter of 2026. The paper’s revenue is up 11%.

Brooklyn-based bakery Winner is opening another location in Downtown Brooklyn. The 2,726-square-foot cafe will be in the new 100 Flatbush Avenue development. Winner’s baked goods and sandwiches are some of the best in the game — I would love if this one has more indoor seating/hangout space than my beloved Park Slope location, although eating your sandwich in the standing crowd on the corner has become its own charming ritual.

Travel journalist Ryan Walker (135k subscribers on YouTube) was supposed to review the new Amanvari in Mexico, but instead the hotel called the police on him upon arrival. Over the course of this 11-minute vlog, we see Ryan pull up to the ultra-luxury Aman hotel (which costs over $6k/night) after a two-hour drive, get recognized by a guard outside, and stopped at a gate outside of the hotel, before being told that his reservation was canceled. The team calls the police on him. After scrolling through his inbox, Ryan realizes that hours prior to arrival, he received an email telling him that the property was still being worked on and they had to cancel some reservations. Ryan, a highly regarded hotel reviewer, historically pays for his own hotels (safe to say he paid for this one), and reviews honestly based on: Room, Ambiance, Dining, Service, and “It-Factor”. Based on responses from Aman’s team, we can assume Amanvari wasn’t going to deliver on one or all of those categories. During the video, Ryan speaks to the camera: “If you silence independent reviews and cancel the reservation before they check in, the narrative is controlled by the corporation.” Comments on Aman’s recent post of Amanvari are turned off, and Amanvari’s Google reviews are a mess.

Compass real estate opened its first office on Shelter Island. Island’s heating up!

Matthieu Blazy is going to pop a bottle tonight: Chanel’s sales rose by 16% in the first half of the year.

Today’s newsletter includes: The latest from Untitled Food Magazine (formerly Gourmet), fintech companies are making bagels, why doesn’t identify as a journalist, the Hailey Bieber x Gap resale market, a writer who has held jobs at two separate Substack bestselling newsletters, American college grads are still living at home, and Meta’s C-Suite press tour continues.

FEED ME JOB BOARD

Guest Lecture: Brenda Hashtag

This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Mark Guiducci, Jake Sherman, and Clare de Boer.

Today, answers your questions about publishing on multiple platforms, developing a personal moral code as a creator, and why all fashion brands have bad social media presences.

“How do you see the trajectory of your career as a creator? Is this still something you plan to be doing in 5,10,15 years time? Or do you have a game plan for tapping out?” - Phoebe

The job “influencer” has thankfully now existed long enough for us to have thousands of real-life X to Z evolutions to take examples from, so we are not just shooting in the dark: the influencer to burnout, to founder, to pyramid scheme promoter, to pop star, to deleting all social media and flipping houses, to designer, to actor, to creative director, to influencer - manager, to author, pipelines. I have always tried to be realistic about the demand for @brendahashtag, about ageing out of it, in terms of wanting to show myself, wanting to share my life, in terms of having something to say (I cannot fathom not being opinionated at some point though), in terms of zeitgeist (something only very few can hold on to forever), in terms of looks, as a woman I am painfully aware of the beauty standards in the media industry that I will, at some point in the near future, no longer serve. So far I have been able to shapeshift and re-invent myself every few years, changing platforms, changing clothes, changing topics, switching to video, starting a podcast, becoming an editor - but the expansion options, influence-wise, actually seem endless to me. I would like to write a book, I would like to appear on TV, I would like to make my podcast bigger, I still have so much to say. Influencers constantly promote someone else’s product when they don’t have their own brand, which is less risky than sitting on stock yourself, but also doesn’t earn you as much. I have dabbled in promoting my own things, a necklace collaboration with a friend, a small batch of my own Adidas shoe, and my book “brended”, but have yet to commit to doing something bigger, because getting a client some traction and likes (I am underselling myself here but you know what I mean) versus being responsible for sales, is a lot more pressure.

I believe you get into dangerous territory as an influencer when you’re only known for one thing, one format (unless you have found an evergreen like “what is your take”, “what is the best”), one brand, one product, and most importantly when you rely on one platform only. I mainly monetize instagram (where I have two accounts, brendahashtag and brendawareness) but I am also on tiktok, youtube, tumblr, substack, spotify and apple podcasts, because you never know where a platform is headed (I deactivated X after the last US election, that is 40,000 accounts missing from my portfolio of people I can reach). On a positive note, there are now more ways than ever for passive income as a creator, such as affiliate links and subscription based models, and I make sure I get paid for things that aren’t content, such as appearances (attendance fee), writing for other publications (that one doesn’t pay a lot), panel talks, lectures (again, doesn’t pay a lot), and most importantly consulting (I consult individuals and brands on all things I claim to know things about and charge a day rate for it). Without falling into fear in your day to day life, you have to consider becoming uncool, canceled, or both. I do hope to continue this journey that I am on, being someone with a platform that people pay attention to, forever. I look at Suzy Menkes backstage with her iPad filming Raf Simons upside down and think, “goals”. So there is no exit strategy in place; I try to not rely on one thing only and set myself up for the future in the most sensible way I know. I have investments in stocks, am a home owner, and not yet a birkin owner.

And maybe one thing to add, while I am sure your question for me came from a curious place, people tend to ask content creators this “what’s your exit strategy” question but wouldn’t ask graphic designers, copywriters, editors, and other freelancers the same thing. I hope I don’t sound defensive, I do see this question come up even in small talk and it might not always land well with everybody, pointing at the finish line. A lot of creatives are capable of adapting and pivoting, and so are influencers with an entrepreneurial mindset.

“Do you think authenticity is possible online?” - Anki

There are levels to this shit, but overall, no. Social life has always been about performance, way before the introduction of social media. Most of us behave differently with our parents, friends, strangers, some of us are performing alone in the house. The moment you are being watched, your behavior changes. Every one of my posts, even when I think it’s coming from the depths of my soul, is made with the awareness that an audience will see it, read it, interact with it, judge it.

Obviously there is a distinction between authenticity, expressing what is yours, and performance, how you choose to express it, so they aren’t necessarily opposites. I am seeing this great screenshot of some Charli xcx interview go around: “I’m very self aware, which hasn’t solved anything.” So I am not fighting my urge to perform, and maybe that has actually brought me a bit closer to an authentic online self? This is gibberish, you are at the afters in someone’s kitchen at 6 a.m. listening to me talk about authenticity while your friend is hooking up with someone on the couch and you just want to go home.

“How do you navigate the tension between maintaining editorial credibility as a journalist and doing brand partnerships as a creator, especially while working for a magazine?” - Nathalia

There is no tension because I am not a journalist! It is a word that is used to describe me sometimes but I do not use it myself. We are talking about fashion here, I am doing (mostly) fun interviews with successful people, my work is not digging into brand’s supply chains to uncover something. Much respect to those who do that! In fashion, I can count on one hand the publications who don’t let their writers accept flights, gifts, free dinners, free stays from brands, and many other things that a journalist wouldn’t do from an ethics code standpoint. They all have advertisers, and they sure as hell aren’t speaking negatively about them. The entire thing is a conflict of interest, so when I get shade from “professional” fashion journalists about my brand business flights, who are currently walking around with their new Prada bag, please be so for real!!!!! So yeah, I see no tension here. I love my different jobs, influencing, writing, consulting, and I do them to the best abilities of my personal moral code, and that’s that on that.

“I really admire the confidence you have in your vision, and the belief to always speak your truth. How much do you rely on your partner / close friends / colleagues to discuss your ideas and observations before sharing them publicly? How much do you sense check yourself?” - Panayiota

Thank you so much for saying that! To everyone’s detriment, myself included, I don’t think before I post, let alone discuss anything with anyone. Everyone works in different ways, some people need to formulate the text message to their situationship with three friends, some people view their AI as their soundboard, I can remember being 15 and hanging out in stores with my girlfriends and trying things on and just thinking to myself, why are they giving each other so much feedback? I know which T-Shirt I want and I don’t need to discuss my choice with them, I either have enough pocket money to get what I want or I don’t, but I never enjoyed this time of contemplating together, which, I came to realize, is the fun part for most people. I am also an only child and was raised in a way where I was able to make a lot of decisions on my own, what I wanted to wear to school, I was never forced into playdates with my parents friends’ kids, and maybe no parent or guardian ever really second guessed my choices. So I guess I didn’t grow up around contemplating. I am a pretty impatient person with everyone around me (and myself), so when I notice patterns such as someone calling or texting six different people for their decision making, I think that is more of an attention issue. I know you asked about something completely different but I feel it’s all intertwined right? I admire people with a strong sense of self, people who trust their gut feelings, and that is how I try to operate! So when it comes to sense checking myself, I hope to constantly learn and grow. And while I take my work pretty seriously, I don’t give the internet as a whole that much weight; I can post and change my mind. Not in the eyes of cancel culture maybe, but I find that admitting something is beyond your control…that acceptance isn’t surrender. It’s reclaiming control.

“If you had to return to wearing color, which one would you choose and why?” - Samara

Nope! And while I am at it, abolish theoretical questions!!! They tell us absolutely nothing about a person, only reality and actions do! I will not love you as a worm!!!!!!!!!!

“What percentage of your brand deals are inbound, vs you or your team seeking them out?” - ALB

It’s 100% inbound, which I don’t recommend to anybody, especially not when you’re starting out. I work in a super niche sector of the fashion industry, so there aren’t many gigs out there. When I was just starting out, I got some great advice from a friend who worked at Nike at the time, doing global brand communications. This is not one size fits all advice because he knew me and where I was going, so take that with a grain of salt: The best thing you can get is tailored jobs. Where you make yourself so unignorable that they want you on their team. Instead of “we are doing this bag activation, here are the deliverables,” you want “we are dying to work with you, how can we make it work?” This sounds delusional, but that is what I am after. I do believe in a thing called “brand fit,” but posting for free a hundred times will not make you a brand ambassador, in my opinion. I focus on myself, on my followers, and trust that brands will want to be a part of my world. I had no prior contact with Adidas, not one gifted item or showroom invite, before they offered me to do a superstar with them. I had never driven an Audi before I started working with them. You build your world, you work in your personal branding, on recognizability, and on not being interchangeable. They will come! If you do what everyone else is doing, they won’t. Unless you work the “cost leadership” strategy, Michael Porter’s classic, competing on price. I do not, lol. That doesn’t mean we don’t follow up, or ask clients for calls every few months to see what they’re working on, some outreach should always be done! Relationships have to be nurtured. But honestly if you come with a community, that is the absolute greatest commodity online. That is not to say there aren’t many great examples of people who love a product or brand, and reach out and pitch themselves, it just never worked for me. Because you kind of start at the short end of the stick, asking for something. But again, I am in a very niche sector of my industry, working with exclusivity as one of my sellers.

Wow, I could talk about this forever because I feel it’s also important to mention that every market is entirely different. My French agents sometimes won’t reply until the follow-up email, to signal the first offer wasn’t so interesting to us. In an American market, that often means you already missed the window of the deal, because a contract is signed within one day of the initial email and the deliverables are due yesterday.

“How do you take care of yourself when you travel so much for work?” - Maria

So, I am on a plane every week, which is insanely disruptive on the system, I do not want to glamorize that. I struggle with anxiety, mostly one that I make up in my head that then manifests into real, physical distress. Some days I am more coping than living. I don’t drink any alcohol, I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke. I have done all of the things in the past, and am so insanely grateful that these things are not a part of my life anymore. So that honestly is my main self-care. I would like to say that I work out consistently but sadly have not yet managed to keep a rhythm of anything while changing locations every week. I would really like to start running, because you can do it anywhere, but so far have only had some failed attempts every few months. If anyone has some motivational tips for me, please!!!!!! Besides that, my biggest enemy of self-care is negative self-talk, I am trying to do less of that.

“What is your best stain remover for white clothes?” - Julia

My things are all dirty! I think the dirtier the white vintage Levi’s, the better. I think clothes are meant to be worn, and they will get dirty in the process. If you are struggling with deodorant stains in armpits, I use a deodorant from the brand Susanne Kaufmann, it’s clear! I am not sure if you can get it in many countries though.

“Is there a fashion brand that she thinks is really good at social media?” - Rachel

I can only talk about high fashion brands here and you know what, no. I think everyone is bad, and not in a camp way. Most luxury brands are kind of stuck in their brand guidelines that they paid some agency soo/too much money for to abandon their made-up rulebook. The logo can only be used with this much distance from the subject, everything has an insanely long chain of commands and ends up at the desk of the CMO when a moment has already passed. Campaigns need to be tailored to each (social) media, they have enough money for that but don’t see the need.

“Who was the last person to inspire you?” - Benedicte

I am inspired by my friends who know about their hierarchy of needs. I have a friend that will go on a run on a group vacation, no matter what, because he knows he’ll be grumpy otherwise. And I look at that and think, damn, the discipline! But it’s honestly more an honoring of yourself, knowing what you need out of your day to have a good day. I am my worst version of myself when I feel like I am on other people’s time and have abandoned my deadlines, my own to do’s, my need for healthy food, for sleep, my sacred alone time, whatever it is that keeps me sane. I get irritated and frustrated and take it out on my environment with passive aggressiveness, blaming whoever “kept me” from what I was supposed to do. Feeling like I am spineless. Failing to record a podcast when I am with my partner, who would happily leave me alone for a few hours if I would just say so. I don’t want to get that mixed up with the concept of community, I do not want to alienate myself from what is best for everyone! I just would love to be a bit more regimented. So people that do what they need to do in order to feel happy, no matter the circumstances, they really inspire me.

“What keeps you grounded during turbulent times, both at work and in life?” - Joaney

Picking up dog poop first thing in the morning really helps.

“As someone consistently on deadline, what does your time-management strategy look like? Is there room for mess in the brendaverse?” - Kat

So, I have sadly never fallen flat on my face, hence will not learn. Starting at grade 6, I have almost failed the school year, every single year, and was the loser at home having to take extra classes and or tests during summer break, just so that I could attend the next school year. Currently I am answering the feedme questions instead of writing a text for a Phaidon book that is due in two days, I haven’t even started the layout or anything, just because I know I will probably pull myself together 2 hours before the deadline and write it. At what cost? Extreme anxiety but also extreme “I am a god” feeling while sending the email and submitting the text. There is no time management whatsoever, only a knowledge of myself and my creative process. I think this is something extremely important for anyone working for themselves to figure out. When do you work the best? At what times of the day? In what state of mind do you need to be? Some of my friends need to be angry, heartbroken to create (“A computer can never be spiteful or horny and therefore shouldn’t make art” or however that sentence goes), some need to be happy, some need to be prepared. I need alone time, I need 4 hours of staring at the wall for 1 hour of writing. I go into interviews completely unprepared because I trust myself to come up with interesting questions on the spot (you might see that as offensive, if you are being offered the same gigs you can just do it better than me!), I go into university lectures unprepared because I have always found it to be more valuable to just let students ask me questions than to read them my script. When it comes to paid content of course that is entirely different, a well-paying client wants to see what you will be posting and saying. For those kinds of deadlines, my management is on top of me putting reminders in my calendar and I have never turned in work late. But most of my content is organic, I don’t have a posting schedule and just wait for an idea. Sometimes that means 10 posts a day in four platforms and sometimes it’s crickets.

“Do you think there are any white spaces in fashion media that you think someone should fill?” - Emily

I honestly do not believe in market saturation in the age of branding (lol I hope nobody quotes this because this sounds like “let’s stop selling podcast equipment” territory), you can fill any space you want or make up a new room and sit at your own table and invite people over. It is a lot harder to join platforms that have matured, obviously, but I believe that if you have something interesting to say, a new point of view, useful knowledge, people will find you. And stop pitching your ideas to dying media when you can be self-published. I think monetization methods are endless at the moment, that’s not to say you can just start a Substack and make a living from it, unless you have secret informants at LVMH and Kering and can paywall information that affects the stock market. I think a huge white space in fashion media is streaming, the consumer demand is endless and I feel people would actually tune into a 16-hour-a-day livestream of fashionTV. If someone wants to start it, I want some airtime! Our commodity in high fashion, attending shows that are limited to 400 seats and being in “the rooms,” in general, has so much demand, I think it would do so well. Also from a brand’s perspective, all of their livestreams are so incredibly lame, most of them don’t have a moderator, there is a huge need to make those better. Brands with 10M instagram followers have 2k livestream watchers on their shows because it’s not enjoyable to watch unless you’re a superfan, that’s embarrassing and needs to change. Go pitch!

“How has your experience on Substack been so far?” - Emily

Omg, it’s like X without the haters and trolls! It feels so wholesome! Maybe because I have not had a viral moment on here yet. It is my first experience, besides my consulting work, being able to monetize my thoughts, and feeling like they are worth paying for, to some people. Not having to have a brand involved. That feels incredibly rewarding and validating. I don’t think I have exactly found my people on here or built a strong community, and the 50 percent email opening rate is pretty humbling sometimes.

In another question on here I talk about not wanting feedback - I don’t think that applies to writing. I think we all need editing, and not AI editing that hypes you up and switches out sentences for more lame versions. At 032c, I have a real person trying to make sense of my rambles, telling me my sentence makes no sense, asking me to refine, asking me to cut (hate!!!! cutting), asking me to elaborate. So while I grew on here, my writing didn’t get any better. I don’t check myself, and editing is my least favorite part of the process. I finish a text and send it out immediately. And sure, some of it is part of the charm, but it will never make me sharp. We are all a little too close to our own product and a second set of eyes does help make our messages clearer. So yeah, a lot of the articles I read on here, even from people with 100k followers, is absolute garbage writing. Takes one to know one :)

“What’s a piece of professional advice you wish you got a year ago?” - Emily

Nothing I wish I got a year ago - but I believe that in business, the person willing to walk away holds the power!

SHOP THE FEED ME STORE!!!

Clothing and goods for in and out of the office. Designed at the Feed Me HQ.

FEED ME STORE

The Gap x Hailey Bieber jeans, which retail for $90, are unsurprisingly almost sold out. They’re going for $220 on eBay.

Is Jonas Du the first person to hold jobs at two separate Substack bestselling newsletters? Du, who graduated Columbia last year, spent the last two years at The Free Press as a fellow. He’ll now be covering Washington, D.C. for Pirate Wires.

More than one quarter of recent college grads are living with their parents—a return to the high mark during Covid. The Times puts numbers to what anyone with a recent college grad in their life anecdotally knows to be the case: “Data from the economists Stefania Albanesi, Rania Gihleb and Ning Zhang show that the portion of college graduates ages 23 to 27 living with their parents has returned to the high it reached during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than one-quarter did so as of last year, from a low of about 18 percent in 2001, according to updates to the paper that are not yet online.”

Gourmet, the worker-owned food magazine that launched earlier this year after noticing that Condé Nast failed to renew the Gourmet Magazine trademark, is going back to the drawing board. Last night, they sent out an email that said, “Starting tomorrow, we’re going to begin the process of rebranding. You’ll still get your regular Tuesday and Thursday newsletters, but they’ll be coming from [Untitled Food Magazine] until we unveil our new moniker.” Many food publications have launched over the last year, but Gourmet has by far been my favorite. The writing is sharp and magazine-y, and the product has a high concentration of surprise and personality. Even though there is not one person behind the personality (smart). I wasn’t looking for a cooking newsletter, but it fell into my inbox and now I love this one.

I texted Amiel Stanek, one of the owners of the magazine, to find out how things are going over there in the wake of this [Untitled Food Magazine] news. Re: the assumed Condé intervention, “Goulash Unlimited LLC has agreed to rebrand and cease use of the GOURMET trademark as part of a confidential settlement agreement with Condé Nast.” Moments ago, the in-limbo email sent an email that said, “The long and short (and legal) of it is that we have agreed to rebrand and cease use of the Gourmet trademark as part of a confidential settlement agreement with Condé Nast.” Here’s the rest of my conversation with Amiel from last night:

ES: You don’t sound as stressed as some other media operators I talk to. What’s the secret to running a media startup in 2026 without losing your mind?

AS: “Speaking only for myself: a mortgage with a 3.25% interest rate. The fact that we’ve all been around long enough to know that if we wanted to get rich we would’ve done something else—and, despite that, still wanting to spend a great deal of time writing and editing and cooking and goofing off. Being a coöp helps, too. It probably isn’t “easier” per se than a more traditional hierarchical media model, but there is a satisfaction that comes with collective decision making, a deep comradeliness that makes even the hard things feel worth doing. As a cohort we have a pretty strong sense of joie de vivre, which keeps things in perspective. We get to make a fun thing with our friends, drink wine together, pay ourselves, pay contributors more than most other outlets do, and people want to read it??”

ES: Can we look forward to any events or other surprises this fall?

AS: “We’ve got at least one Capital P Party in the works, but also looking forward to hosting some more intimate happenings for subscribers on both coasts. The party we hosted at International Bar, where we cooked a giant pot of soup in the backyard and broke down an entire wheel of Parm and drank pint glass-sized margaritas was such a blast, and we want more opportunities to just hang out with the weirdos (complimentary) who are into this thing we’re doing. Merch, for sure. A lot of our collective bandwidth has been tied up with other things for the last few months, and we’re ready to spread our wings a bit.

ES: What are your biggest pet peeves about food media, that might’ve become more evident since launching Gourmet?

AS: “I don’t know that this has necessarily become more evident, but I think that people often fail to keep in mind how boring food is on a fundamental level. That is what makes it compelling to write about—your job is to take the most mundane of things and inject it with enough style and point of view that it doesn’t put someone to sleep. That’s a challenge! I’m not saying we’re batting a thousand, but I’m pretty allergic to food media that is too self-regarding, or operates under the assumption that the topic at hand is interesting on its face. Oh, and ‘shatteringly crisp.’ No more of that.”

Banking services company Mercury, which is valued at $5.2 billion and backed by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, is now making bagels. Kind of. Instead of opening their own cafe like fintech peers Capital One and Corgi, Mercury has been partnering with restaurants and cafes like Leon’s Bagels in New York and Breadbelly in SF. You know who makes a good bagel? Leon’s. You know who probably wouldn’t make a good bagel? Mercury. I think Mercury has strong marketing – it never comes off desperate or like it’s trying to be something cooler than a startup for banking services. (I should say that Mercury advertised with Feed Me earlier this year).

Prediction Market Insider Trading Corner: George Santos was ordered to pay $35k for placing bets on Kalshi about whether he himself would attend the State of the Union address in February. According to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Santos deceived bettors into believing he would attend via posts on social media (e.g., “I’m going to be there for the State of the Union in the gallery, guys”), and then bet against his own attendance once the market moved, making around $17,500.

This October, David Zwirner will present the first solo exhibition by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara.

Meta’s C-Suite press tour continues. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, went on Throwing Fits this week. He discussed Instagram’s rules around nipples and how Instagram Story views are ordered.