Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend capsule of the best new work at Puck.

It was another incredible week: Matt Belloni broke the news of an enormous Netflix payday; Julia Alexander previewed the next great Hollywood M&A target; Eriq Gardner got to the bottom of the Jeff Shell defenestration discourse; Dylan Byers probed a very D.C. media imbroglio; John Ourand uncovered an MLB feel-good story; Ian Krietzberg explained Sam Altman’s agent headache; Bill Cohan investigated a $40 trillion Wall Street crisis; Lauren Sherman confronted the Everlane brain drain; Malique Morris examined Lululemon’s crisis of confidence; Rachel Strugatz dabbled in the Barbara Sturm pseudoscience wars; Marion Maneker peeked around Glenn Fuhrman’s collection; and Glenn Adamson presented the new new thing in the art world: 36-year-old Rio Kobayashi.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Leigh Ann Caldwell gathered all the Capitol Hill tea on the ascent of Markwayne Mullin; Julia Ioffe chatted up Rep. Jason Crow about Iran; Peter Hamby got his hands on exclusive data about Trump’s foreign policy diehards; and Abby Livingston documented the latest travails of Sen. John Cornyn.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

A MESSAGE FROM ANTHROPIC

Claude, the AI for finding the patients lost in the data 

Fragmented data makes it hard to find critical interventions. Qualified Health used Claude, built  by Anthropic, to screen over 1 million heart failure patients in the University of Texas Health  System. Read the customer story

Lauren Sherman circles a Lanvin Group mystery and pours one out for Everlane.
and…
Rachel Strugatz investigates the Dr. Barbara Sturm controversy.
and…
Malique Morris presages the Lululemon endgame, while Sarah Shapiro traces Alo Yoga’s flight path.

Marion Maneker previews the New Museum’s new build-out.

Matt Belloni has the inside story on Netflix’s latest major talent negotiation.
and…
Eriq Gardner offers the latest Jeff Shell legal kremlinology.
meanwhile…
Julia Alexander runs the numbers on potential Roku M&A.

Ian Krietzberg looks into Sam Altman’s anti-bot army.

Ashley Baker unspools a real estate scandal in the Hamptons.
and…
Jacob Furedi interviews the guy really responsible for Prince Andrew’s arrest.

Dylan Byers chronicles Robert Allbritton’s revenge tour.

John Ourand details MLB’s new gold mine.
and…
Julia Alexander uncovers YouTube’s March Madness competition killer.

Bill Cohan finds the cockroaches in the $40 trillion private-credit market.

Leigh Ann Caldwell profiles the ascendant Markwayne Mullin.
and…
Julia Ioffe chats up Rep. Jason Crow about Trump’s new Middle East war games.
and…
Abby Livingston checks in on the Texas Senate food fight.
and…
Peter Hamby parses exclusive crosstabs for a readout on Trump’s loyal warriors.

Dylan and Beehiiv C.E.O. Tyler Denk re-evaluate the newsletter economy on The Grill Room.
and…
John Ourand and Mike Foss, ESPN’s “McAfee whisperer,” cut it up on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren interviews Oscar-nominated costume designer Miyako Bellizzi on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and erstwhile neocon Bill Kristol discuss the ways out of Iran on Impolitic.
and…
Matt discusses the secrets to commercial filmmaking with director Paul Feig on The Town.
and…
Matt tells Peter all about Amazon’s $200M anti-Netflix playbook on The Powers That Be.

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On Thursday night, during a brief cameo in Los Angeles, I convened a number of my partners for an impromptu family dinner of sorts at San Vicente Bungalows—the industry hideout owned by my old friend and ride-or-die Jeff Klein and run by so-called directrice Gabé Doppelt. L.A. was wilting under its ongoing heat wave, so we dined outside on an unseasonably warm spring evening, sharing stories and gossip and finishing each other’s sentences.

I’ll admit I had a light song in my heart. Five years ago to the day, Puck’s Series A investment had closed, and the dream of this media company—run and owned by journalists, all equitably taking control of their economic and industrial future—suddenly became reality. Staring across the table over the pigs in a blanket (obviously) and caviar potato chips (I can’t help myself), I couldn’t have been more grateful about what we had achieved together and more excited about the achievements awaiting in the foreground.

A MESSAGE FROM ANTHROPIC

Claude, the AI for finding the patients lost in the data 

Fragmented data makes it hard to find critical interventions. Qualified Health used Claude, built  by Anthropic, to screen over 1 million heart failure patients in the University of Texas Health  System. Read the customer story

There was Peter Hamby, perhaps my oldest friend among the crew, and one of our founding partners; beside him was Dylan Byers, a fellow founding partner, whose arrival conferred instant credibility on our business back in September 2021. Then there was Julia Alexander, our streaming and new-media guru, who’s among the most brilliant visionaries I’ve ever worked with. To my left was Kim Masters, the legendary Hollywood journalist, whose arrival at Puck a couple years ago heralded the end of our startup age and advancement into the scale-up era. We were sorry to miss the inimitable Matt Belloni, who was in his home office restlessly completing the latest issue of What I’m Hearing; Pete Keeley, who was peerlessly editing it in real time; and our killer sales ace Bellinda Alvarez. First-ballot hall of famers, all of them.

As you can imagine, the dinner table conversation veered on the topics of the day, all of them familiar leitmotifs of the Puck oeuvre. We traded notes on the lingering fate of Jeff Shell, whose contentious lawsuit was just forensically detailed by our partner Eriq Gardner in the artfully titled The Jeff Shell Legal Saga Takes a Startling Turn. (Kim also recently offered her own close reading in David Ellison’s Troubling H.R. File.) We also swapped observations regarding the recent media kerfuffle in Washington, D.C., where former Politico financier Robert Allbritton was rumbling about supersizing his recent-ish vanity media project, NOTUS, into a Washington Post replacement play. Dylan’s recent barnburner, Little Allbritton, had taken the industry by storm.

But at some point, the table conversation naturally turned to the latest machinations at CNN, an obvious staple of the Puck diet and a perennially beleaguered institution. Yes, CNN finds itself in the middle of the $111 billion ParaBros. deal, and it may also soon become ensconced in the Bari Weiss psychodrama. Heavy cake, I know. But the topic emerged at dinner for neither of these reasons. Instead, a couple of us had caught a recent Anderson Cooper segment in which the host was decidedly dressed down in a loosened tie and rolled sleeves, speaking into a mic, YouTube-podcast style, overlooking a map of the Middle East.

Yes, we’re living in an age when declining audiences and winnowing programming budgets are forcing network executives to do more with less—a financial reality that has led to licensing podcasts and YouTube segments on air. But Anderson Cooper? Putting CNN’s highest-paid anchor in this format seemed less like innovation than desperation. And Dylan had the texts from inside the building to suggest that others concurred. Amid the chatter, the next issue of In the Room was born.

The resulting story, CNN’s Open Mic Night, delicately balances a number of discordant yet undeniable realities. Authenticity matters more than ever in this era of media, and yet a previous generation of stars may be systemically unable to disrobe their years of makeup and cue cards to meet the moment. At the same time, it remains an open question how this dynamic will play out at CNN, an institutional brand built beyond the scaffolding of personalities.

It’s notable, though, that this sort of experimentation follows the sale of its parent company. It almost makes you wonder whether network C.E.O. Mark Thompson is finally feeling relaxed enough to use this interregnum to loosen his own tie. Indeed, this will be one of the great stories of our moment, and precisely what you can expect to read about in Puck.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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