Good morning, Thanks for reading The Backstory, your weekend capsule of the best new work at Puck. It was another memorable week: Matt Belloni presaged Brian Roberts’s looming Peacock decision; Eriq Gardner chronicled a nightmare Hollywood breakup; Lauren Sherman identified the premier challenge for LVMH in ’25; Rachel Strugatz got her hands on Rhode’s Q4 numbers; Sarah Shapiro explored a Larroudé awakening; Dylan Byers surveyed the D.C. media circus after a full week of Trump 2.0; Bill Cohan interrogated the Nvidia market pseudo-panic; John Ourand assessed ESPN’s latest sports rights deal; Marion Maneker combed through Sotheby’s finances; and Julie Davich chatted up a top art entrepreneur. Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell ran the numbers on the O.M.B. freeze while Peter Hamby captured the silence of the Dems; Tara Palmeri measured the panic level on K Street; and John Heilemann canvassed Jen Palmieri for her assessment of Trump’s first days back in the Oval. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman portrays LVMH at a crossroads, and reports from New York’s picket lines. and… Rachel Strugatz previews the Sephora wars between Hailey Bieber and Selena Gomez. meanwhile… Sarah Shapiro chats with the Larroudés, and covers the week in shopping.

Marion Maneker inspects Sotheby’s real estate play and conveys the nuances of the Morandi market. and… Julie Davich explains the Nevelson momentum, offers a gallery tour, and goes deep on a $12 million Stradivarius.

Matt Belloni crunches the latest Netflix numbers and warns of Peacock’s potential outcomes. and… Eriq Gardner has the skinny on one of the entertainment industry’s most notorious lawsuits.

Bill Cohan envisions banking in the age of A.I. and details the Nvidia stock hiccup.

Dylan Byers uncovers the latest problems at Politico. and… John Ourand investigates ESPN’s sweetheart ACC deal.

Leigh Ann Caldwell reveals what Democrats and Republicans are really whispering about the president on the Hill. and… Tara Palmeri recounts how the O.M.B. mess played out on K Street. and… Peter Hamby hunts for profiles in courage on the left.

🎧 Dylan welcomes MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to The Grill Room. and… Fox and NFL Network analyst Peter Schrager joins Ourand on The Varsity. and… John Heilemann and former White House comms director Jen Palmieri swap Trump II notes on Impolitic. and… Irving Azoff, the music industry legend, discusses his FireAid concert with Matt on The Town. and… Tara evaluates the viability of the $TRUMP memecoin on Somebody’s Gotta Win. and… Lauren and the Times’s Jacob Gallagher reunite on Fashion People. and… Eriq and Peter wade into the administration’s new flood of legal developments on The Powers That Be.

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Years ago, a mentor of mine took the time to extemporize about the theory of punctuated equilibrium, the concept in evolutionary biology (and since applied to politics and economics) that progress rarely occurs gradually, as we expect, or hope, but rather in cacophonous fits and starts. Indeed, industries don’t really evolve in a piecemeal manner. Instead, there’s an awakening or disruptive technology—the printing press, the Renaissance, the cotton gin, Ford’s assembly line, the iPhone, Obama, Trump, ChatGPT—that catapults the culture forward, inevitably causing a series of reverberations. As Shakespeare knew well, there’s almost always an inciting event that provokes the drama—or the markets—into action. That’s a truth we hold to be self-evident, and one of the many reasons we’ve derived our name from the bard. (For those just tuning in, Puck is named after the mirthful narrating fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Anyway, without getting unnecessarily philosophical, the conversation crossed my mind amid a week replete with so many gyrations, oscillations, and conflagrations, from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C. In her extraordinary debut at Puck, my newest partner, Leigh Ann Caldwell, delivered a pair of showstopping dispatches from Trump’s Washington that captured the nonstop whiplash of, well, so many aspects of his dervish—the reversed O.M.B. freeze, the elongated nomination battle royales, and the attendant anxieties and animosities of both his supplicants and foes on Capitol Hill. If you really want a flavor of what’s going on in the nation’s capital, I’d suggest devouring Leigh Ann’s two masterstrokes, The Week & The Damned and Endless Executive Time. For his part, Dylan Byers elegantly captured the new and utterly bizarre machinations and jolts inside the Brady Briefing Room and D.C. media scene in his latest joint, Boiler Room. Obviously, it’s not just politics that’s on the fritz. In Sex, Lies & Nvidia, Bill Cohan dispassionately examined the chipmaker’s massive sell-off, the most potent expression of a panic that swept Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike. As Bill put it, “One faithful Wall Street eminence, a lusty contrarian, wrote to me on Monday that his ‘decades’ of market experience had led him to the conclusion that ‘stocks have their sharpest drops from their highest peaks when all see only upside.’ I’d say we experienced a healthy dose of reality on Monday. I think we have a few more doses to take before we’re done here, even if in the longer run, owning stocks—at least over the past 45 years or so—has proved to be a major wealth generator.” Punctuated equilibrium, indeed. The peerless Matt Belloni captured the same phenomenon in his fabulous story Kabletown at a Krossroads, which juxtaposed Netflix’s boffo earnings and seemingly irreversible ascent with Peacock’s latest losses and continued uncertainty. As we move into an era when so many streamers have pivoted toward profitability, Peacock is stuck deep in the red—a $372 million loss in the last quarter, to be precise—and approaching decision time. “So that leads to the inevitable M&A discussion that has consumed Hollywood for the past few years,” Matt noted. “We all know that Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav wants a transformational deal.” But do Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanagh? “That’s been the open question, and the triple-whammy of broadband weakness, the cable TV spinoff, and the issues at Peacock suggest the right time may be approaching.” But if you have time to read only one piece this weekend, and perhaps you’re pining for some distance from the domestic landscape, I’d turn your attention to Lauren Sherman’s newest release from her ever-satisfying oeuvre on Europe’s largest conglomerate, We Need to Talk About LVMH, which is exclusive to our Inner Circle members. (Upgrade your subscription here, if you haven’t already.) LVMH, after all, is a company steeped in history and yet also ruthlessly attempting to maintain its moat by shuffling its portfolio—divesting smaller entities while focusing on its largest brands, and rearranging creative executives and operators in the process, all while sorting through the real-time management of succession planning. Its maneuvers, complex and often vague, are the latest evidence that progress rarely happens gradually but rather, as Hemingway said about bankruptcy, slowly and then seemingly all at once. It’s a leitmotif of our culture, and something you’ll always see reflected in Puck.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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