Good morning,

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

It was another fabulous week: Matt Belloni dished out his annual Awards Season Awards; Kim Masters rifled through David Ellison’s H.R. files; Eriq Gardner previewed an NFL legal barnburner; Julia Alexander identified Adam Silver’s next multibillion-dollar windfall; John Ourand measured the Michael Jordan effect on NASCAR; Bill Cohan picked Dan Yergin’s brain regarding the Iran war’s shock to the oil markets; Ian Krietzberg pressaged Sam Altman’s next headache; Lauren Sherman filed her dispatch from Paris Fashion Week; Sarah Shapiro ran the numbers on the new Forever 21; Malique Morris reported on Matches’ life after death; Rachael Strugatz detailed Glossier’s latest pivot; and Marion Maneker analyzed the $551 million in sales at the London auctions.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Julia Ioffe profiled the Trump administration’s unlikeliest Iran hawk; Leigh Ann Caldwell pondered Katie Miller’s newfound love of solar; Peter Hamby conveyed Gen Z’s Iran fears; and Sen. Mark Kelly lamented the Hegseth of it all to John Heilemann.

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 ranks Fashion Month’s top 10 shows and deciphers the foibles ailing the industry.
and…
Rachel Strugatz gets a whiff of Glossier’s new scent.
and…
Malique Morris explains whether Matches 2.0 has a chance, while Sarah Shapiro evaluates Edikted’s business model.

Marion Maneker reads the tea leaves from the London sales.

Matt Belloni hosts his annual Awards Season Awards show.
and…
Eriq Gardner uncovers a Murdoch media rights crisis and previews the NFL’s next legal thicket.
meanwhile…
Kim Masters scrutinizes David Ellison’s hiring history.

Ian Krietzberg envisions the next roadblock for the hyperscalers.

Elaine Sciolino recalls her chat with Ayatollah Khamenei.
and…
Kevin Maher chronicles the hard times for Fergie and Andrew’s kids.

Dylan Byers considers the Ellisons’ plans for CNN.

John Ourand reports on NASCAR’s Jordan bounce.
and…
Julia Alexander reveals the NBA’s next billion-dollar idea.

Bill Cohan contemplates whether Trump’s Iran misadventure will prompt a recession.

Leigh Ann Caldwell explores Katie Miller’s latest preoccupation.
and…
Julia Ioffe spotlights the Pentagon’s conflicted new Iran ideologue.
and…
John Heilemann downloads Sen. Mark Kelly’s war report.
and…
Peter Hamby examines how the White House has alienated the Rogan bros.

Dylan and C-SPAN C.E.O. Sam Feist discuss the finer points of a CNN–CBS News tie-up on The Grill Room.
and…
John Ourand and former Turner Broadcasting president David Levy trade notes on the future of the media rights business on The Varsity.
and…
How Long Gone co-host Jason Stewart shares his Paris Fashion Week observations with Lauren Sherman on Fashion People.
and…
Former national security advisor Jake Sullivan talks Iran strategy with John Heilemann on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and manager Michael Lasker make their Oscar predictions on The Town.
and…
Abby Livingston breaks down the Texas Senate mishegas for Peter Hamby on The Powers that Be.

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At first blush, Elbridge “Bridge” Colby seems like a character out of pre-Trump Republican fantasyland, a shaman of the Before Times. The well-coiffed undersecretary of defense policy is the grandson of William Colby, the director of the C.I.A. during the Nixon and Ford years, and the product of Groton, Harvard, and Yale Law School. He is also the author of scholarly pieces that few outside the Gang of 500 would ever read and a deep thinker about the U.S. and its place in the world. And, in a town consumed by optics, the guy looks the part. (I’ve lived long enough to know that no one is simply born with a mane like that one…) Frankly, you could see Colby playing himself in a movie about traditional moderate Republicans suffering the slings and arrows of the MAGA era.

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

Unlike the Republicans of his grandfather’s and father’s generation, however, Colby spent much of his professional life broadly eschewing the challenges posed by Russia and the Middle East and instead trying to sound the alarm on China’s exponentially growing ambitions. This leitmotif would animate Obama’s foreign policy and eventually land Colby in hot water with various Republican factions. He was dropped from consideration for a job on Jeb Bush’s ill-fated presidential campaign partly on account of an op-ed he wrote in The National Review advocating to forgo military action in Iran in favor of a more pragmatic form of containment.

And yet Washington has a way of making even the most doctrinaire true believers discover some flexibility within their personal operating plans. Colby, for his part, has metamorphosed into one of the most strident champions of our current military excursion in Iran, at least this side of Pete Hegseth. During a March 2025 hearing, cognizant of the administration’s growing appetite for regime change in Tehran and elsewhere, Colby found his religion on the topic—the Middle East dove became an Iran hawk, just like the boss. During a recent cameo on Capitol Hill, Colby’s volte face hardly went unnoticed.

Anyway, it’s all a familiar story about what the proximity to power can do to a striver in D.C. “There’s a question that people in Washington have been asking themselves but, after a decade of getting the same answer, have grown tired of repeating: What happened to this otherwise reasonable Republican?,” my partner Julia Ioffe wrote in her latest masterpiece, Elbridge Over Troubled Waters. “The answer is always Trump, and the power that joining his movement confers. Colby isn’t the first to strike this kind of Faustian—or simply Washingtonian—bargain over the past decade.”

Julia continued: “But for him, as for everyone else, the MAGAfication cuts both ways. On one hand, he has political power and the kind of job that NatSec types dream of. On the other, that power is entirely subject to Trump’s whims. ‘He’s an ideological actor in an administration that has no ideology,’ a Democratic member of Congress told me. ‘The president does whatever the fuck he wants one day to the next, and Bridge is trying to rationalize it—and his credibility is being severely damaged in the process.’ Or as a second Senate aide put it, ‘It’s very emasculating.’”

In many ways, Elbridge Over Troubled Waters is a Trollopian tale of modern Washington, a place where getting ahead has never been easier nor come at a higher cost. Indeed, as Julia notes, Colby seems likely to try to hitch his wagon to J.D. Vance’s putative ’28 campaign, possibly as a contender for national security advisor. But by that point, I suppose, he won’t be the only person in town trying to figure out how to pivot back to the center. This political shapeshifting has become one of the most fascinating themes in our culture, and certainly one of our central preoccupations here at Puck.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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