Good morning,

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

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni wondered whether the Ellisons would ever relinquish CNN to facilitate their WarnerMount deal; Kim Masters traced Big Tech’s tightening grip on Hollywood; Eriq Gardner previewed the next A.I. legal nightmare descending on the town; Dylan Byers perused The Daily Wire’s audacious investor pitch deck; Julia Alexander offered the definitive CliffsNotes on the Substack economy; Ian Krietzberg followed the dark money that sank Alex Bores; John Ourand appraised the sports-doc recession; Bill Cohan weighed Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin reckoning; Lauren Sherman cooled the Dario Vitale-to-Armani speculation; Rachel Strugatz diagnosed the Fenty unraveling; Malique Morris investigated Drake’s OVO debt headache; Molly Rooyakkers charted Instagram’s luxury malaise; and Marion Maneker contemplated the mystique of Anselm Kiefer.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Julia Ioffe unpacked J.D. Vance’s stunning turn against Israel; Peter Hamby gauged the Democratic panic after Mamdani’s primary sweep; and Leigh Ann Caldwell pressed Jamie Raskin on Trump impeachment math.

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

Lauren Sherman pours cold water on the Dario Vitale–Armani rumor mill.
and…
Rachel Strugatz reveals why LVMH wants out of Rihanna’s Fenty.
and…
Malique Morris digs into Drake’s OVO debt problem.
meanwhile…
Molly Rooyakkers identifies the one play cutting through luxury’s Instagram fatigue.

Marion Maneker ponders the enduring pull of Anselm Kiefer.
and…
Ingrid Abramovitch previews NOMAD’s Hamptons debut.
meanwhile…
Glenn Adamson profiles furniture designer Minjae Kim.

Matt Belloni investigates the Ellisons’ potential remedies list.
and…
Kim Masters analyzes Big Tech’s tightening grip on the industry.
meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner unpacks the NO FAKES Act’s likeness stakes.

Ian Krietzberg grills Nadia Carlsten on Allbirds’ shoes-to-A.I. pivot and chronicles the super PAC war that toppled Alex Bores.

Howard Blum documents the next chapter in the search for Nancy Guthrie.
and…
Ashley Baker picks apart the socialite ambitions of Jen Rubio.

Dylan Byers dissects The Daily Wire’s $750 million pitch and gets the readout on CNN’s rising exec Alex MacCallum.
and…
Julia Alexander offers a detailed report on the newsletter-industrial complex.

John Ourand surveys the deflating sports-doc economy and sits down with FanDuel president Christian Genetski.
and…
Eriq Gardner assesses a Jim Dolan scandal.

Bill Cohan scrutinizes Michael Saylor’s $17 billion Bitcoin hole and relays Ruth Porat’s $4 trillion A.I. bull case.

Julia Ioffe details J.D. Vance’s startling pivot on Israel.
and…
Peter Hamby parses the Democratic panic after Mamdani’s NYC primary sweep.
meanwhile…
Leigh Ann Caldwell presses Rep. Jamie Raskin on his impeachment calculations.

Dylan and P.R. wizard Lulu Cheng Meservey philosophize about the death of traditional media on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and NBC’s Nicole Auerbach get into the latest college sports plotlines on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and i-D’s Steff Yotka review the Milan men’s shows on Fashion People.
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Matt and the Journal’s Keach Hagey eulogize Luca Guadagnino’s shelved OpenAI film on The Town.
and…
Peter and Dylan chew over the Times–Athletic feud over the Dianna Russini investigation on The Powers That Be.

On Wednesday afternoon, I shared an Uber uptown from Puck’s airy South Tribeca headquarters with my great pal and colleague Tammy Haddad. We were headed to my old stomping grounds at The New York Times Company building on Eighth Avenue—right across from the Port Authority albatross, in an otherwise derelict part of Midtown that’s remained the province of dollar slice shops and dispensaries.

As we exited the Uber you could hear roars from the crowds watching the World Cup at Beer Authority, an open-air, college-days rooftop bar and grill that I frequented regularly during the early years of the past decade. A smile crossed my face as I recalled fond memories of those days—working with Adam Davidson, Sam Sifton, Amy Chozick, Brian Stelter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Mark Leibovich, and Michael Barbaro before they were all world-famous. Anyway, Tammy and I were there for a book party honoring Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new tome, Regime Change. (Fun fact: My mom and Maggie’s mom grew up together. We had Thanksgiving at their apartment a couple times when I was a teenager.)

Regime Change is one of the rare supernova-style events in the publishing industry. The title sold a staggering 150,000 copies on its pub date. Amazon had run out of copies, UTA superagent Pilar Queen told me at the party. As Swan’s rep, she was filled with evident pride.

As you can imagine, the joint was jumping with influential people. Tammy and I could hardly get through security without bumping into leading political consultant Lis Smith and CNN’s Kasie Hunt. (Lis had just done a hit on her air.) At that point, Jeff Zucker and Allison Gollust walked in. I held the door for Gayle King. You get the picture.

While I drifted through the 14th floor cafeteria with Risa Heller, my ride-or-die homie and colleague, I was confronted by a veritable montage of Puck storylines. There was former Times executive editor Dean Baquet making small talk with his successor, Joe Kahn, while his likely successor, Carolyn Ryan, who walked around passing out pins of Jonathan and Maggie. Elsewhere, CNN’s conquering heroes milled about, all while their network is being integrated into David Ellison’s WarnerMount. (By the way, I couldn’t more forcefully recommend my partner Matt Belloni’s latest masterpiece, Will the Ellisons Give Up CNN to Get WarnerMount Done?, which focuses on California A.G. Rob Bonta’s jihad against the deal.) Al Roker and Lawrence O’Donnell made cameos, too.

At some point, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger got up to toast his colleagues. I’ve known A.G. for years—we went to high school together, believe it or not, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more genuine and earnest guy for the role. There’s a line in our industry, often and likely apocryphally credited to Baquet, that the Times’s current fortune—from its renewed stock price and subscriber peaks to its journalism—owes itself to the Sulzberger family’s decision to be multimillionaires rather than billionaires. Whoever said it, it’s true.

A.G.’s remarks, followed by Maggie and Jonathan’s own, ruminated on the unique challenges pertaining to Trump, his various eras, and the people who dot his inner circle. It was a theme explored beautifully the following day by my partner Julia Ioffe in her piece on J.D. Vance’s latest political transformation. On one level, Vance’s New Promised Land focused on the vice president’s surprising and calculated pivot away from Israel. “This is not how he was in the Senate,” someone who worked with Vance in the chamber told Julia. “He was super pro-Israel. I don’t ever remember him being even somewhat slightly critical.”

After Israel helped seduce Trump into the war in Iran, however, public opinion has cooled on our historic ally. And Vance, who leads the unofficial ’28 pack on the right, has been known to prioritize his own political future above all. Vance’s barely concealed ambition is one of the great stories of our time, and I behoove you to carve out space this weekend to read Julia’s piece. Who knows, the guy may have all the makings of a future Maggie-Jonathan subject. “He doesn’t believe in anything,” one Senate G.O.P. leadership aide told Julia. “He will do whatever it takes to ascend the greasy pole.”

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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