Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your Saturday review of the best new work at Puck.

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni traced the unlikely provenance of Backrooms and tried to guess David Ellison’s breaking point at CBS News; Eriq Gardner cross-examined Jeffrey Kessler over the Paramount–WBD deal; Scott Mendelson tempered Hollywood’s YouTube gold rush fantasies; Dylan Byers reconstructed the four-hour deliberation that ended Scott Pelley’s 60 Minutes run; Julia Alexander unearthed Elon’s media master plan in the SpaceX prospectus; John Ourand diagnosed the UFC’s star-power problem ahead of its White House fight night; Ian Krietzberg monitored the A.I. lobby’s strategic retreat; Bill Cohan consulted Wall Street’s A.I. bears; Lauren Sherman weighed the cost of Pharrell Williams’s side hustles; Rachel Strugatz sifted through the ashes of an Estée Lauder fire sale; Malique Morris studied the secrets of Quince’s unsentimental rise; and Marion Maneker broke down the May auctions’ $2.5 billion haul, while George Nelson spotlighted Sotheby’s prospecting for cycle bro V.I.P.s.

Down in D.C., Julia Ioffe revealed Foggy Bottom’s revolt against Trump’s antifa crusade; Leigh Ann Caldwell captured the Senate G.O.P.’s simmering mutiny; Peter Hamby called the California primaries for the normie libs; and John Heilemann heard Sen. Chris Murphy’s case against the Iran war.

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

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Lauren Sherman appraises the sprawling portfolio of Pharrell Williams Inc.
and…
Rachel Strugatz rummages through Estée Lauder’s brand clearance rack.
meanwhile…
Malique Morris deconstructs Quince’s unsentimental ascent.

Marion Maneker makes sense of the art market’s $2.5 billion comeback and puzzles over Pace’s surprising spring mix.
and…
George Nelson rides along with Sotheby’s bet that cycling is the new golf.

Matt Belloni surfaces the talent crisis threatening Bari Weiss’s CBS News and tracks down the 27-year-old assistant who discovered Backrooms.
and…
Eriq Gardner grills Jeffrey Kessler about the Paramount–WBD wars.

Ian Krietzberg maps the A.I. lobby’s Illinois retreat and quizzes HBS’s Marc Zao-Sanders about how people actually use the technology.

Elena Clavarino chronicles the rise and tragic fall of “Jerry Gogosian.”
and…
Andrew Zucker reports from the Hamptons on the second-homes-of-second-homes epidemic.

Dylan Byers replays the four-hour deliberation that sealed Scott Pelley’s fate and explains why Lesley Stahl stayed put at 60 Minutes.
and…
Julia Alexander decodes the Musk media empire lurking in the SpaceX S-1.

John Ourand probes the UFC’s superstar soft patch.
and…
Eriq Gardner peruses a congressional plan to pry marquee games out from behind the paywall.

Bill Cohan consults Wall Street’s A.I. bears and fact-checks Jeff Immelt’s Substack legacy-rehab campaign.

Leigh Ann Caldwell sits down for a conversation with Rep. French Hill for our latest Puck Power Breakfast, presented by Solana Policy Institute.
and…
Julia Ioffe gathers reactions to the State Department’s antifa-as-Al Qaeda sales pitch.
and…
Peter Hamby ponders why California’s normie libs ran the table in the primaries.
and…
John Heilemann presses Sen. Chris Murphy on Trump’s parade of terrible Iran options.

Dylan and Julia demystify the A.I. wearables boom with veteran tech reporter Joanna Stern on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and U.S. Soccer C.O.O. Dan Helfrich size up the Americans’ World Cup readiness on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and handbag apologist Becky Malinsky litigate the fine line between a dupe and a knockoff on Fashion People.
and…
John and Politico’s Jonathan Martin handicap the Ken Paxton–James Talarico Texas showdown on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old wunderkind behind Backrooms, discuss his leap from YouTube to the top of the box office on The Town.
and…
Peter and Abby Livingston mull Graham Platner’s mounting baggage—and the Democrats’ Maine math—on The Powers That Be.

On Wednesday afternoon, I was cutting through traffic en route to Penn Station for a quickie jaunt down to Washington. My great friend Tammy Haddad, who not infrequently cameos in this email, was hosting her annual A.I. Honors Dinner, the tentpole event of her Washington A.I. Network. I was excited to kibbitz in a room with administration officials, Washington swells, senators, and political people on each side of the revolving door. No one puts together a room quite like Tammy, and this would be no different: my buddies Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason and Sen. Mike Rounds would be there; Sen. Mark Warner, Dr. Oz, Mr. Wonderful, and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, too. I was excited to break bread alongside tablemates Mayor Bowser and former CFPB director Rohit Chopra.

As I was stepping out of my Uber, however, I saw a message from my partner Eriq Garder, who reported that he’d just landed an interview with superlawyer Jeffrey Kessler, the co-chairman of Winston Taylor. Kessler has had one of the more exalted careers in the history of the modern bar. As a young attorney at Weil Gotshal & Manges, he successfully defended the Japanese conglomerate Matsushita before the Supreme Court. Years later, he effectively created the modern free agency system in the NFL while defending Freeman McNeil against the Shield.

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From there, he built lasting relationships with players’ associations across various leagues and became one of the most important figures in the last quarter century of sports that you’ve probably never heard of—and eventually, one of the biggest players in media whose name you might not recognize at first blush. As Eriq has fastidiously chronicled, Kessler recently became the legal hero of the Live Nation monopolization trial; now, he was representing Paramount–WBD in a case against many of the state A.G.s that had been his clients. Eriq was excited to ask him why he had gone from the plaintiff side of antitrust to defending a megamerger that he might once have fought. This update prompted me to break out in an ear-to-ear smile.

I know firsthand how persuasively Kessler can argue his point. More than 25 years ago, I got to know Jeff when I was an undersized and not particularly fast linebacker and running back on a ~.500 Fieldston football team helmed by a dynamic quarterback named Andrew Kessler. This was a decade after the McNeil case, and we all vaguely knew that Kess’s father was involved in pro sports in a legally adjacent capacity, but we were too young and naive to fully grasp the sort of influence he was establishing. Instead, he was familiar to us as the dad who attended unbearably hot preseason practices and brought the sandwiches that we’d eat in the locker room after the games. After long road trips to schools in Connecticut or out on Long Island, we’d see him already set up in the parking lot, often reading the Times sports section hours before kickoff.

All I really knew about Jeff was that he’d gone to Columbia, a school I had fancied for myself even though my grades weren’t quite there, and I was sure that they rejected kids who’d scored 1600 on their boards. But I was a hustler, even as a teenager, and so I asked Kess one night if his dad might write me a letter of recommendation. Shortly afterward, he gave me the green light to reach out and make the ask myself.

I remember picking up the landline at our apartment and dialing their home number. Regina, his wife and one of those great moms who always seemed to have a stuffed pantry when we’d swing by their house after practice, picked up the phone and detected the anxiety in my voice. She then passed me along with a tone of reassurance.

In a brief conversation, Jeff asked me about my grades and SAT scores, extracurriculars outside of sports, etcetera. I suggested that my grades were good, outside of a rogue C- in a math class that had proved over my head—but, yes, I might need a little help selling my candidacy to a bare-knuckled admissions committee. He got it, promised nothing, and made a quick, polite joke about how it was the least he could do for someone who had blocked for his son. (I was a terrible blocking back… Kess got sacked aplenty in those years. He knew this as well as I did, but I appreciated the gesture.) Anyway, I was grateful for his time, but I also worried that I’d enlisted a busy person on a fool’s errand. It was only months later, when my father presented me with a girthy white envelope that enclosed my acceptance letter, that I realized the truth: no one, not even Columbia, could argue with Jeffrey Kessler.

If you have a moment this weekend, I encourage you to sit down and read Eriq’s brilliant piece, Ellison’s Legal Gladiator Is Ready For War. Indeed, Kessler articulates in surgical detail how the combination of Warners and Paramount is a necessity for the future of the entertainment and streaming landscape, not a detriment. The conversation diverges into a number of fascinating and newsy areas, including many that are all the rage nowadays at Puck—particularly the CBS News and CNN of it all. (And, by the way, if this is your current obsession, allow me to also turn your attention to Dylan Byers’s latest heartstopper, Lesley Stahl & The ‘60 Minutes’ Guys are Staying. Also, stay tuned for our partner Bill Cohan’s spicy interview with Lesley tomorrow.)

In many ways, Kessler is near the nerve center of many of the great stories of our time. I expect you’ll see a lot more of him in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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