Good morning,

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

It was another incredible week. Matt Belloni broke the news of Amazon dumping its Sam Altman biopic; Julia Alexander decoded the Fox–Roku surprise; Eriq Gardner tried to tabulate Jeffrey Kessler’s Live Nation payday; Scott Mendelson handicapped the Toy Story 5–Minions box office battle; Dylan Byers revisited the Bari Weiss deputy search; John Ourand dissected Neal Mohan’s live sports vulcan chess; Bill Cohan weighed Sam Bankman-Fried’s remaining options; Ian Krietzberg entertained the case for nationalizing the A.I. labs; Malique Morris charted Hillary Super’s Victoria’s Secret revival; Rachel Strugatz appraised Colin Walsh’s Glossier rescue; Lauren Sherman dished on the Moschino conundrum; and Marion Maneker analyzed de Kooning’s $75 million May.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Julia Ioffe assessed Washington’s fury over Trump’s Iran deal; Peter Hamby charted how Netanyahu lost the room in the U.S.; and Leigh Ann Caldwell explored the Graham Platner insurgency splitting the Democrats.

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 OUR SPONSOR

Become a more intelligent enterprise

Imagine your entire company working in perfect sync. Strategy, operations, tech, and AI – all connected. At PwC, we design the solutions that can help you get there.

Lauren Sherman evaluates the Sunnei founders’ Moschino gambit.
and…
Malique Morris unpacks Hillary Super’s Victoria’s Secret turnaround.
and…
Rachel Strugatz checks in on Colin Walsh’s Glossier rehab project.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro pores over the latest ShopMy data to discern who’s still splurging on luxury.

Marion Maneker detects a subtle shift in the market’s middle tier and outlines James Murdoch’s Art Basel squeeze.
and…
Dan Duray communes with Arthur Jafa on his Venice pairing with Richard Prince.

Matt Belloni empties his mailbag and scoops Amazon’s defenestration of its Luca Guadagnino–directed Sam Altman movie.
and…
Julia Alexander makes the case for Lachlan Murdoch’s $22 billion Roku grab.
meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner exposes Jeffrey Kessler’s Live Nation jackpot.

Ian Krietzberg interrogates the push to nationalize the A.I. labs, and talks to the woman behind Google DeepMind’s A.I.-assisted animated short at Tribeca.

Linda Wells charts the rise of the “Vagilangelo.”
and…
Jonathan Butler reports on some Hudson Valley hotel NIMBYism.

Dylan Byers joins the hunt for Bari Weiss’s elusive number two and chronicles a newsroom revolt at the Times.
and…
Julia Alexander scrutinizes Mark Thompson’s wellness chase at CNN.

John Ourand fields the industry gripes about Neal Mohan’s live sports strategy.
and…
Eriq Gardner demystifies the NFL’s 1961 antitrust exemption.

Bill Cohan takes stock of Sam Bankman-Fried’s dwindling options and extracts Lloyd Blankfein’s crisis forecast.

Leigh Ann Caldwell probes the hard feelings splitting Democrats over Graham Platner.
and…
Julia Ioffe gauges Washington’s bipartisan apoplexy over Trump’s Iran capitulation.
meanwhile…
Peter Hamby reveals how Bibi lost America.

Dylan hears out the bull case for cable from Versant C.E.O. Mark Lazarus on The Grill Room.
and…
Lauren sits down with photographers Inez and Vinoodh to discuss their 40-year retrospective on Fashion People.
and…
Matt and Content Partners president John Mass chew over the value of distribution in modern Hollywood on The Town.
and…
Ian Krietzberg and Peter parse Trump’s move against Anthropic’s Fable model on The Powers That Be.

On Thursday morning, I hopped off the train near Puck’s airy South Tribeca headquarters and, for once, headed northeast rather than south. I had promised my 12-year-old son, Jack, that I’d take him to the Knicks’ championship parade down the so-called Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan. Dressed in head-to-toe Knicks swag—or, as the kids say these days, drip—he blended in with pretty much everyone else south of Chambers Street.

I grew up in New York, and came of age during the Ewing-era almost-dynasty of the early ’90s, back when the Knicks’ championship dreams would be thwarted each spring by Jordan or Olajuwon. So there was zero chance that I was going to miss the opportunity to celebrate the team’s first Larry O’Brien Trophy in 53 years alongside other long-suffering fans who remembered all those John Starks bricks in Game 6 of the ’94 Finals. And yet I’d somewhat underestimated just how many other long-suffering fans would be similarly motivated. By the time we crossed Church, I was beginning to comprehend the totality of the situation. We were in a veritable blue and orange war zone—fans were hanging from traffic lights, perched on the hoods and roofs of trucks, and swinging back and forth on the city’s ubiquitous scaffolding, which, for one glorious afternoon, actually became useful.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Become a more intelligent enterprise

Imagine your entire company working in perfect sync. Strategy, operations, tech, and AI – all connected. At PwC, we design the solutions that can help you get there.

My great friend and colleague Risa Heller had invited us to watch from her office right on Broadway. But by 9 a.m., it was clear that there was no chance we’d be able to navigate the roiling sea of humanity before us. So I made the wise parenting decision to pull a U-turn and head back to our office to take in the views from our 23rd floor conference room.

From there, Jack and I were able to fully countenance the size of the crowd. There was no need for any sort of Sean Spicer–style magical thinking: Church and Broadway were chockablock with people up through Tribeca; the side streets were teeming with them, too; ditto the rooftops. It was later estimated that some 2 million people took part in the parade. As Jack watched Brunson and KAT ride down Broadway on their floats, I was again struck by the sheer power of the Knicks’ fandom. In an increasingly balkanized society, few and far between are the moments when you really feel like you’re in the vibrating center of the monoculture.

As I relocated from the conference room to my office, I opened my computer to a draft of my partner John Ourand’s latest masterpiece, which ruminated on the same topic, albeit from a different angle. Ostensibly, John’s piece was about the latest agita in the sports media ecosystem regarding YouTube C.E.O. Neal Mohan’s live sports strategy. For years, Mohan had been gesturing to both league commissioners and the markets that his growing fiefdom was increasingly interested in live sports rights. Mohan, a great guy and sports nut in his own right, also backed up the talk with Google’s unprecedented balance sheet. He picked up the NFL’s Sunday Ticket product and paid nine figures to broadcast a single regular-season football game last year. On the other hand, YouTube recently slunk away from a larger NFL package, which caught the industry off guard. Was this guy finally all in, or still waiting on the sidelines?

One of my favorite parts of this job is the proximity it affords me to all the different markets that Puck covers and operates within. And though you might suspect that the sports media business is overly corporatized and full of polite stiffs, it’s actually more gossipy than most other industries. And so John had been working the phones and hearing from countless executives, all of whom were wondering aloud about YouTube’s long-term objectives—whether they would become an eventual rival to the broadcasters and Amazon, or instead prefer to double-down on their strategy of platforming the engagement around sports. After all, who needs the games when you’re capturing all the eyeballs outside the lines?

In YouTube’s Skinny Sports Rights Diet, John deftly works through this complex talmudic question. We tend to think of leagues like the NBA and NFL as the last true remnants of the monoculture, and that remains true. But YouTube has beaten its peer set to become the locus of the polyculture—the one place everyone eventually finds themselves in a society that my pal Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Axios, has described as a “shards of glass” culture. The interplay of these worlds—our own personal affinities and broadly compelling events—defines the media world that we live in, and helps explain why we often feel as though we inhabit more than one world at once. It’s the story of our time, and precisely what you can expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006