Culp Fiction, The Johnson Piñata, Tucker’s Putinphilia

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your pocket guide to Puck’s latest reporting.

Today, we lead with Rachel Strugatz’s pitch-perfect dispatch on the existential crisis consuming Estée Lauder Companies, America’s oldest and most prestigious beauty conglomerate: After multiple disappointing quarters, can it learn to get younger?

Plus, below the fold: Dylan Byers observes CNN’s strategic retreat from morning television. Tina Nguyen annotates Mike Johnson’s truly hellish week on the Hill. Bill Cohan presents the gripping backstory of the GE split-up and the end of its 132-year reign. On The Town, Matt Belloni and John Ourand consider the odds that the new all-in-one sports app will finally kill cable. And on The Powers That Be, Peter Hamby and Julia Ioffe offer a close reading of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin, before turning their attention to Brett McGurk, the most controversial policy hand in all of Washington.

RACHEL STRUGATZ

After a series of disappointing quarters, how can America’s oldest and most prestigious beauty conglomerate get younger—and fast?

DYLAN BYERS

The readout from the CNN bunker as Mark Thompson reshapes CNN’s morning schedule, signals diminished interest in linear, and leaves his company of TV stalwarts wondering about the next shoe to drop.

TINA NGUYEN

The embattled House Speaker is enduring the lion’s share of Republican finger-pointing for yesterday’s humiliating, double-barreled legislative defeat. But as usual, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

In two months, GE, which Jack Welch once steered to a $650 billion market value, will officially be split into three public companies—the final act of its last C.E.O., Larry Culp. It didn’t have to be this way for America’s formerly most iconic company. This is how we got here.