FASHION:
Lauren Sherman captures Alessandro-mania in Paris.
WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan decodes Elon & Linda’s debt bomb at X and chats with Bill Ackman about his interest in the business.
MEDIA:
Dylan Byers has the inside story at CNN and The Washington Post.
HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni explains a new Harvey Weinstein saga and foretells a TV purge.
and…
Julia Alexander details the great streamer transparency fallacy.
and…
Jonathan Handel offers more lessons from the writers’ strike.
SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer reveals S.B.F.’s pre-trial calculation.
WASHINGTON:
Eriq Gardner previews Hunter Biden’s legal revenge fantasy.
and…
Tara Palmeri gathers The 500’s hottest Biden parlor game.
and…
Peter Hamby cures the Youngkin Mind Flu.
and…
Julia Ioffe, as only she can, explains how the defund Ukraine movement is overstated—at least for now. Meanwhile, Tina Nguyen and Abby Livingston stylishly remember Kevin McCarthy.
PODCASTS:
🚨 Listen to Julia Ioffe’s brilliant new narrative audio series, About A Boy, which is already one of the top shows in the country!
and…
Tara Palmeri and Abby Livingston preview the next wave of House mayhem on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Matt Belloni chats with J.B. Perrette, WBD’s C.E.O. of global streaming, to discuss the company’s live sports simulcasting strategy on The Town.
and…
Peter Hamby and Teddy Schleifer get into S.B.F.’s legal strategy on The Powers That Be. |
| On Wednesday evening, I was kibitzing with Amy Klobuchar in the elegantly festooned Silver Lyan, a beautiful old fashioned cocktail bar in the basement of The Riggs—that handsome boutique hotel on 9th and F, a short walk from Pennsylvania Avenue—whose tasteful marble and gold features remind you of Washington’s timeless charm. It was, admittedly, a kooky week in town: Kevin McCarthy had been defenestrated, his loyal deputies were already working the phones to whip votes for their own leadership campaigns, and Democrats were gossiping about Biden’s age, as usual.
And yet, life can’t be all doom and gloom. Indeed, we had much to celebrate. We were hosting a small event to honor my partners and their various recent accomplishments—Capitol Hill veteran Abby Livingston’s arrival at Puck; Tara Palmeri’s new podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, a partnership with Bill Simmons’ The Ringer; and Julia Ioffe’s hot-off-the-audio-presses new narrative podcast, About a Boy: The Story of Vladimir Putin, which had debuted that day at number 40 on the iTunes charts.
Around us at the Silver Lyan, friends and well-wishers soaked in the good cheer. Senator Klobuchar came to toast Tara and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz shared her appreciation for Abby while a room of swells—Kevin Madden, Scott Mulhauser, Meredith Whitney, etcetera—mingled about. At Puck, after all, my partners aren’t simply generationally talented journalists; they’re also accomplished multiplatform creators, whose storytelling prowess and domain expertise aren’t thresholded by any particular medium.
As the night started to wind down, I clinked my glass a few times to offer a few words about my assembled colleagues. As I was just beginning to extemporize, however, I saw out of the corner of my eye a handsome gentleman of a certain age—a younger Saul Bellow type with an enviable frame and distinguished features. It was Michael Ioffe, Julia’s dad.
Ever since I first reconnected with Julia about building Puck, now years ago amid our pre-history, she would always talk about her father. She ran key personal and professional decisions by him; she was grateful for his advice, and I proved to be, too. For one thing, Michael had encouraged Julia to pass up an opportunity at The Washington Post in order to help us build the media company of our dreams.
Michael’s presence loomed large in her latest creative endeavor, too. About a Boy is a critical examination of Vladimir Putin’s early childhood, the truly unexplored period of his life, where he was formed by the codes of the dvor—the mean streets, so to speak—into a street urchin who would one day rise through the K.G.B. and the Kremlin. Julia had perspicaciously recognized this quality in Putin, in part, because Michael had instilled it in her. He, too, had endured those mean streets before choosing a decidedly different path—moving his family from the Soviet Union to suburban Maryland, where he worked in the federal government and, along with Olga, Julia’s mom, built a beautiful life and raised their daughters.
Michael’s perspective on Putin’s early life—in particular, the way that the dvor shaped his ruthless thuggery—is as unique and inimitable as Julia’s coverage of the warlord who now runs Russia. And their conversations are memorialized in About a Boy. No spoilers here, but if you have an hour this weekend, you’ll do yourself a service by downloading the first episode. It’s the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
