Good morning,

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

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni charted Jimmy Kimmel’s late night windfall; Kim Masters surfaced the origins of Scorsese’s A.I. endorsement; Eriq Gardner weighed Ken Paxton’s “dark patterns” suit against Netflix; Dylan Byers revisited David Ellison’s search for a Bari Weiss co-pilot; Bill Cohan sat down with Lesley Stahl and David Solomon (separately); Julia Alexander decoded Fox’s contrarian creator economy bet; Ian Krietzberg examined the Allen Institute’s $400 million A.I. moonshot; John Ourand revealed the NFL’s Murdochian grudge; Lauren Sherman scooped Frédéric Arnault’s Loro Piana ambitions; Rachel Strugatz evaluated Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Beauty challenge; Malique Morris appraised Net-a-Porter’s overhaul; Marion Maneker got the skinny on Sotheby’s design objects sale; and Jamie Lincoln Kitman unveiled the Millennial centimillionaires’ new favorite toy.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Julia Ioffe profiled Axios star reporter and West Wing denizen Barak Ravid; former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann called John Heilemann’s attention to the real prize in Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” D.O.J. settlement; and Peter Hamby got his hands on fresh swing voter data about America at 250.

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

Lauren Sherman breaks the news on Frédéric Arnault’s Loro Piana power play.
and…
Rachel Strugatz considers whether Matthieu Blazy can revive Chanel’s $6 billion beauty division.
and…
Malique Morris inspects Michael Kliger’s Net-a-Porter rescue.

Marion Maneker strolls through the season’s design sales, and talks with the Aldrich Museum’s director about its first decennial.
meanwhile…
Jamie Lincoln Kitman ponders the Nintendo generation’s nascent, and unique, car-collecting fixation.

Matt Belloni tallies Jimmy Kimmel’s Colbert bump.
and…
Julia Alexander makes sense of Fox’s platform-agnostic creator economy wager.
meanwhile…
Kim Masters reads the tea leaves on Weiss’s CBS makeover and the Ovitz-brokered Scorsese A.I. endorsement, while Eriq Gardner dissects Ken Paxton’s “dark patterns” case against Netflix.

Ian Krietzberg probes the Allen Institute’s $400 million wager to fight neurodegenerative disease.
and…
John Heilemann trades notes with A.I. for Good author Josh Tyrangiel on the optimist’s case on the technology.

Ashley Baker details Ellen and Portia’s Cotswolds crisis.
And…
Jay McInerney goes heavy on the Chardonnay.

Dylan Byers has an update on David Ellison’s plan to install a counterpart for Bari.
and…
Julia Alexander grills Verbatim Media’s Peter Rothpletz on building a Red Seat Ventures for the left.
and…
Bill Cohan sits down with Lesley Stahl to discuss the hardest chapter of her long 60 Minutes tenure.

John Ourand scrutinizes the NFL’s Rupert Murdoch blame game and chews over the league’s media-rights leverage with LightShed’s Rich Greenfield.
and…
Eriq Gardner critiques Cincinnati’s $1 million Brendan Sorsby N.I.L. lawsuit.

Bill Cohan interrogates David Solomon about Goldman Sachs’ golden year.

Julia Ioffe unpacks the Trump–Barak Ravid bond.
and…
John Heilemann presses former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on the buried prize in Trump’s D.O.J. settlement.
and…
Peter Hamby gauges how regular Americans feel about the country at 250.

Dylan gets Fox One’s Pete Distad on The Grill Room to litigate the World Cup’s streaming stakes.
and…
Ourand and Eriq cut it up on how Capitol Hill is trying to overhaul college sports on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and Zegna artistic director Alessandro Sartori chew over modular dressing on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann welcomes City on the Edge author Jonathan Weber to puzzle over San Francisco’s doom loops on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Lucas Shaw trade Nick Bilton notes on The Town.
and…
Peter and Abby Livingston handicap the competitive Senate races on The Powers That Be.

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On Tuesday evening, I raced from Puck’s airy lower Tribeca headquarters to the Whitby, the unusually chic Midtown hotel, where Puck was hosting the second event in our new Fine Print series—a beautiful gala-ette built around a candid chat between one of our partners and the august author of a new book, all in partnership with our pals at Mayer Brown. This evening’s conclave was perhaps the most coveted invite of the season: My peerless colleague Bill Cohan was interviewing Lloyd Blankfein, the former C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs and the author of Streetwise, the Horatio Alger tale of his own ascent from the New York City housing projects to the pinnacle of Wall Street.

Photos: Daphne Youree

As I entered the Whitby, I said a quick hello to Louise Johnson, our phenomenally talented head of experiential marketing, who whisked me off to a back room where Bill and Lloyd were getting loose. Indeed, Bill isn’t merely the most ferocious author on the finance beat, he’s one of its Mount Rushmore heroes. As you no doubt know by now, he spent decades as an M&A banker at Lazard, among other storied institutions, before turning the telescope around and reporting on the industry with unique sophistication and aplomb. Among his many seminal bestsellers is Money & Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World. I was anticipating a good and candid conversation between veritable peers. Lloyd, who was discussing topics ranging from politics to the sitch at 60 Minutes in the greenroom, seemed eager and game to dig in.

Onstage, Bill and Lloyd dazzled the crowd with a vivid and acerbic back-and-forth that spanned the current quandary in the credit markets to the kremlinology of the partnership at Goldman Sachs. It was the sort of insiderly dialogue, in a beautiful setting surrounded by Wall Street dealmakers and M&A lawyers, that only Puck can deliver. We’ll be publishing Lloyd Management tomorrow in Bill’s excellent private email, Dry Powder. (Sign up here, if you are not already a subscriber.)

Goldman has been everywhere these days. The bank was the lead underwriter in yesterday’s historic I.P.O. of SpaceX, and is working on Anthropic’s public offering, too. The firm also helped Google with its astonishing recent $85 million equity raise. The next afternoon, I found myself having lunch at the University Club with my buds Tammy Haddad, Stephanie Ruhle, Caryn Seidman Becker, and Kevin Sheekey as former Goldman partner Dina Powell McCormick, now the president and vice chairman of Meta, discussed the A.I. revolution at an event convened by the Economic Club of New York. Hours later, Puck proudly published Bill’s latest masterstroke: Free Solomon, a deep and engaging on-the-record chat with Goldman Sachs C.E.O. David Solomon.

Like Blankfein the previous night, Solomon was forthright about the issues of our day. In particular, he was profoundly articulate about the impact of geopolitics on our economy. “My base case is, while the markets are running, we’re going to see some softness in the economy, potentially in the second half of the year, because this has to have a real effect,” he told Bill, referring to how the war in Iran might impact economic growth. “It doesn’t mean a recession. But my growth expectation was—with all the stimulus, the benefits of the bill from last summer coming into play, the continued deregulatory trend, the A.I. investment super-cycle—like, you know what? This can break to the high side in terms of nominal growth, and now I think we’ve got a headwind.”

And yet Solomon was sanguine about the longer-term economic trend lines. Like Powell, he refuted the narrative of A.I. doomerism as facile and incomplete. “When I hear people talk about structural unemployment, universal basic income, and that no one will have a job, I just don’t think that’s grounded in reality,” Solomon told Bill. “Technology has been disrupting jobs, changing work patterns for my whole career. People are incredibly resilient when they’re forced to change. They don’t like to change, but when they’re forced to, they adapt. I don’t think it’s different this time.” If you have some time this weekend, I behoove you to read Free Solomon after you’ve applied your sunscreen.

On Wednesday evening, rounding out an already busy week, I had the privilege of heading to Temple Bar, my pal Maneesh Goyal’s haunt in NoHo, to celebrate my newest partner, Rickie de Sole, who recently joined Air Mail as editor of our fashion and style brand, Dress Code. I first met Rickie when we were both toiling as assistants at Vanity Fair back in the pre-iPhone stone ages. In the intervening years, she’s easily become one of the most singularly important and beloved voices in the fashion industry, with extraordinary taste and a natural aptitude for capturing the zeitgeist.

Photos: Daniel Paik

Boy, does Rickie turn people out. Hours before New York went into a collective trauma-and-euphoria bond with the Knicks, the leading lights of the fashion industry showed up to shower their love and affection on Rickie. There was Julia Vitale, Linda Wells, Chloe Malle, Sylvana Ward Durrett, Eva Chen, Rebecca Kelly, Derek Blasberg, Christopher John Rogers, Aurora James, Emily Dawn Long, Daniella Kallmeyer, Hillary Taymour, Sam Hine, Emily Sundberg, Lynn Yaeger, Batsheva Hay, Brandon Maxwell, Peter Malachi, Garine Zerounian, Joseph Altuzarra, and Rachel Scott.

And, of course, there was: Trecia Laird, Preia Narendra, Risa Heller, Stuart Vevers, Sarah Personette, Liz Gough, Elizabeth von der Goltz, Alicia Parker, Wes Gordon, Rory Satran, Thessaly La Force, Michael Carl, Gillian Tozer, Jodie Chan, Servane Fournier, Nancy Walsh Hawthorne, Stefano Tonchi, Aladin Hardy, Kate Young, Jodi Gottlieb, Sally Singer, John Demsey, Selby Drummond, Amy Fine Collins, and Virginia Smith. It was a beautiful room, overflowing with praise and support. I encourage everyone to upgrade their Puck subscription here in order to read Rickie’s incredible work.

We’re living through complex times, there’s no doubt. And perhaps that’s why I’ll freely admit that my favorite piece of the entire week was Michael Hainey’s new menswear column for Dress Code. And so I want to leave you with one bon mot about the now ubiquitous French chore jacket from Of Advice and Men that I found particularly true in this uncertain age. “Lately, when I see one I’m reminded of Calvin Trillin’s concise rules for wearing a Greek fisherman’s hat: 1) You are Greek; 2) You are a fisherman. The same must now be declared for the French chore jacket: If you’re not 1) French or 2) Doing chores, then leave it in the cellar, mon frère.” Now that’s one of the great truths of our time, and something you should always expect to read about in Dress Code.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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