Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend folio of the best new work from Puck.

It was another remarkably busy week: Matt Belloni and Julia Alexander debated Netflix’s YouTube-envy pivot; Kim Masters chronicled Armie Hammer’s desperate comeback gambit; Eriq Gardner clocked the U.K. threat to the WarnerMount merger; Dylan Byers roamed the quaking aspens of Sun Valley; Ian Krietzberg weighed Meta’s emerging compute glut; John Ourand sized up the 2030 World Cup rights race; Bill Cohan dug into Blackstone’s latest entrant in this year’s I.P.O. canon; Lauren Sherman scrutinized Luca de Meo’s Kering turnaround progress; Malique Morris assessed Spanx’s Skims-sized problem; and Marion Maneker made sense of London’s booming Old Masters sales.

Down in D.C., Julia Ioffe captured Nina Khrushcheva’s portrait of a wartime Moscow; Peter Hamby examined the Democratic blind spots behind Graham Platner’s implosion; and Leigh Ann Caldwell surfaced the buyer’s remorse spreading through Trump’s voter base while Marianna Sotomayor delved into Mitch McConnell’s health scandalette.

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

Lauren Sherman interrogates Luca de Meo’s Kering turnaround and grades Jonathan Anderson’s clarifying Dior era.
and…
Malique Morris diagnoses Spanx’s Skims-induced identity crisis.

Marion Maneker tallies London’s $153 million Old Masters haul and checks in on the Willem de Kooning revival.

Matt Belloni and Julia Alexander dissect Netflix’s cheap-content pivot.
and…
Eriq Gardner untangles the U.K. review now casting a shadow over the Paramount–WBD merger.
meanwhile…
Kim Masters tracks Armie Hammer’s desperate, Elon-boosted comeback gambit.

Ian Krietzberg probes whether Meta is sitting on an A.I. compute glut and grills Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed on his plan to nationalize the real final frontier.

Josh Karp chronicles the making of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on its 40th anniversary.
and…
Nathan King offers a Carvel bildungsroman.

Dylan Byers surveys the Sun Valley scene and deciphers Comcast’s post-spinoff survival blueprint.
and…
Julia Alexander evaluates the Times’s real pivot to video.

John Ourand handicaps the coming FIFA rights bonanza and consults analyst Steven Cahall on the NFL, Fox–Roku, and the NBCU spinoff.
and…
Eriq Gardner spotlights the ghost-ticket suit haunting StubHub and FIFA.

Bill Cohan profiles the latest entrants in the “Year of the I.P.O.”

Julia Ioffe rings up Nina Khrushcheva as Putin’s war curdles the mood in Moscow.
and…
Peter Hamby autopsies Graham Platner’s campaign implosion and the blind spots that enabled the mess in the first place.
meanwhile…
Leigh Ann Caldwell canvasses the buyer’s remorse percolating through Trump’s base.

The Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan discuss their hyper-bestseller, Regime Change, with Dylan on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim serve up the state of tennis on The Varsity.
and…
Fundamentalco’s Jenna Lyons (the designer and former Housewife) and Jonny Bauer philosophize with Lauren about brand-building on Fashion People.
and…
Matt and producer Scott Glassgold chew over Hollywood’s internet-I.P. gold rush on The Town.
meanwhile…
Peter and Ourand get into the World Cup bonanza and MLB’s labor storm clouds on The Powers That Be.

Rarely do political scandals result only from the misdeeds of the candidates themselves, and such was the case with Graham Platner—the too-good-to-be-true Mainer oyster farmer and Marine vet, who turned out to be a scam. Platner emerged out of nowhere, with almost Mamdani-esque verve and velocity, to capture the imagination of the Berniecrats and others who quixotically viewed him as a new candidate ideal on the left. Superficially, Platner appeared to represent the Democrats’ answer to the manosphere and a MAGA left—a bearded tough guy who spoke the lingua franca of affordability and vulnerability, and had a viable shot at a U.S. Senate seat in Maine that might tip the upper chamber for the Democrats this November. What wasn’t to love?

Well, in retrospect, everything from his Nazi tattoo to all the allegations of sexual misconduct that have emerged in recent weeks and led the candidate to finally drop out on Wednesday. (Platner has denied the accusations against him.) The Platner discourse has understandably seized Washington and the broader political zeitgeist. Naturally, it was also the subject of some extraordinary work this week at Puck.

In the Graham Platner Hostage Crisis, published at nearly the moment that he suspended his candidacy, Peter Hamby argued that the main culprit in this fiasco was the Democrats’ own blind spots. “Maine’s population is almost 94 percent white, with a voting base that’s older and more educated than other states, making it an ideal launchpad for a candidate in the mold of Sanders, who struggled in two presidential campaigns to appeal to voters of color,” Peter wrote. “Bakari Sellers, the CNN analyst and former South Carolina state legislator, rolled his eyes at the notion of Platner winning a race anywhere outside of New England. ‘There is some level of irony in the purity politics of the Bernie left, or the far left, when it comes to policy points but not necessarily character,’ Sellers said. ‘In Platner’s case, there is this push to appeal to this fetished version of a white male voter above all else. Can you imagine if Raphael Warnock or Wes Moore were facing the same kind of issues? I guarantee you they would not get the benefit of the doubt from that corner of the party.’” No doubt.

And given the size of this political nightmare, there was still ample blame to distribute. As my partner Marianna Sotomayor noted this week, heaping recriminations landed upon Platner’s youthful advisor Morris Katz, who made his name as a consiglieri to Mamdani. Katz, a viral video artist and esteemed online provocateur, not only helped recruit Platner, he also goaded the media—Gary Hart–style—to deliver the sort of journalistic knockout punch that could defenestrate his grassroots campaign.

In June, after the Journal and Times published detailed creepy stories of Platner’s intimate life, Katz reposted a Bulwark piece arguing that “the knives are out” for him. “Best not miss,” Katz posted on X, essentially sealing his own fate as reportage from Politico and CNN followed with chilling new allegations. “Sure, Katz possesses genuine talent as a video storyteller, but that can only take a campaign so far,” Marianna wrote in Post-Platner Blame Games. “As Tré Easton, the vice president for public affairs at Searchlight Institute, told me, ‘If you just want to be right and you don’t want to actually win elections, you’re going to get into trouble, like we’re seeing with Platner.’”

She continued: “In his first post since Platner dropped out, Katz wrote on X: ‘Like so many of his supporters, I’m deeply disappointed.’ But that isn’t cutting it for some: An online petition has garnered more than 120 signatures from democratic socialists calling on ‘D.S.A. candidates and elected officials to no longer contract or work with Morris Katz or Fight Agency, his political consulting firm.’”

Alas, the cyclical and interminable and deeply cynical nature of politics suggests that we haven’t heard the last of either Platner or Katz. But the lesson from this whole quagmire is both lucid and unmistakable. Voters may be frustrated with their representatives in Washington, but government matters and we need to remember that picking a candidate can’t just be an exercise in vibes—it’s about more than a deep scroll or a like. And as much as the Democrats want to blame the D.S.A. or Katz, this one is also on the party, its oppo research henchmen, and those voters in Maine who never bothered to stress-test a story that seemed too good to be true—which, as it turned out, it was. Indeed, even Platner’s tale about how he bought his house was baloney: His dad paid the $200,000 mortgage, not the V.A.

If you have any time this weekend, I’d behoove you to curl up to these pieces. A week after we celebrated all that is great about America, it’s worth remembering that we all get a say in fixing its imperfections, too.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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