The dog days of summer can be a drag on the media beat. After Sun Valley, Hollywood moguls disperse to yachts in the Mediterranean and Aegean, weddings in St. Tropez, or pastoral second, third, or fourth homes in the South of France and the American West. Manhattan media execs and their most well-paid talent retreat, as often as they can, to the Hamptons or Hudson Valley or Martha’s Vineyard. And even the employees tethered to their responsibilities in New York or Washington usually work from home, to beat the heat or avoid Covid exposure. The entire industry seems to have disbanded, time zones misalign, and it becomes hard to pin people down.

And so what if you did? No one is making much news, anyway. After all, there’s nothing really to discuss, other than Netflix’s Q2 earnings, or those photos of Ari Emanuel hosing down Elon Musk in Mykonos—and there’s really not much to say about all that, is there? In a sign of just how dry the media news well has become, the biggest fracas in New York media this week (so far) is The New Yorker’s archive editor, Erin Overbey, publishing a Felicia Sonmez-style tweet thread about gender disparity in which she accuses her boss, Pulitzer winner David Remnick, of inserting factual errors into her writing as part of an effort to get her ousted for insubordination. The New Yorker called this accusation “absurd,” which reflects the sentiment of almost everyone I know there, as well as the news media industry at large.