Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend compendium of the best new work at Puck.

It was another fabulous week at Puck: Matt Belloni grilled Gerry Cardinale about his synergy plans at WBD; Bill Cohan uncovered the financial engineering behind Paramount’s L.B.O.; Eriq Gardner examined CAA’s blacklist; Julia Alexander articulated Formula One’s major streaming gamble; Ian Krietzberg reevaluated an A.I. market correction theory; Lauren Sherman documented Kering’s date with destiny; Rachel Strugatz unveiled a beauty shadow broker; Sarah Shapiro unfurled the latest resort trends; Malique Morris surveyed the shots fired in Quince’s dupe wars; Dylan Byers covered Bari Weiss’s wartime administration; John Ourand previewed Roger Goodell’s forthcoming media negotiations in breathtaking detail; and the peerless Marion Maneker ran the numbers on the contemporary art market’s $60 million week.

In Washington, Peter Hamby chatted up Gavin Newsom, Leigh Ann Caldwell acknowledged J.D. Vance’s private war, Abby Livingston dissected Texas’s complex Senate primaries, and the inimitable Julia Ioffe chronicled Noem-ghazi.

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

A MESSAGE FROM ANTHROPIC

Claude, the AI for finding the patients lost in the data

Fragmented data makes it hard to find critical interventions. Qualified Health used Claude, built by Anthropic, to screen over 1 million heart failure patients in the University of Texas Health System. Read the customer story

Lauren Sherman envisions the next phase of Luca de Meo’s Kering journey.
and…
Rachel Strugatz introduces the most important beauty executive you’ve never heard of.
meanwhile…
Malique Morris reveals how Quince hit the mattresses in the dupe wars, while Sarah Shapiro charts the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy trickle-down effect.

Marion Maneker runs the numbers from the Big Three’s midseason sales.

Matt Belloni probes RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale for WBD’s integration plan.
and…
Eriq Gardner unpacks a thorny CAA lawsuit.

Ian Krietzberg inspects Nvidia’s fortress balance sheet.

Belle Burden explains how she got her groove back.
and…
Linda Wells proposes a modern plastic surgery manifesto.

Dylan Byers details a potential Bari Weiss turnaround.

John Ourand foreshadows Roger Goodell’s NFL rights renegotiation playbook.
and…
Julia Alexander anticipates a hiccup in the Apple–F1 marriage.

Bill Cohan processes David Ellison’s debt-reduction theory.

Leigh Ann Caldwell previews J.D. Vance’s ’28 turmoil.
and…
Julia Ioffe articulates the Hegseth–Cruz war of attrition.
and…
Abby Livingston picks apart the Republicans’ mess in Texas.
and and and…
Peter Hamby goes deep with Gavin Newsom.

Dylan and Julia break down the Bari Weiss–CNN anxieties on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and Guggenheim Securities analyst Mike Morris unveil the NFL’s unit economics on The Varsity.
and…
Designer Daniella Kallmeyer joins Lauren on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and Scott Galloway dissect Sam Altman’s evolution on Impolitic.
and…
LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield predicts various WBD–PSKY synergies with Matt on The Town.
and…
Ian digs into the Anthropic–OpenAI–Pentagon war games with Peter on The Powers That Be.

All Photos: Getty Images for Puck

On Wednesday evening, just as the sun was starting to set, I met my colleagues and partners in the lobby of The Riggs, Puck’s home base in Washington, and shuffled into an armada of Ubers en route to the French Ambassador’s Residence in Kalorama. We’d gathered for Puck’s fourth annual First Amendment Gala, held in partnership with Ambassador Laurent Bili, unquestionably my favorite evening of the year.

A MESSAGE FROM ANTHROPIC

Claude, the AI for finding the patients lost in the data

Fragmented data makes it hard to find critical interventions. Qualified Health used Claude, built by Anthropic, to screen over 1 million heart failure patients in the University of Texas Health System. Read the customer story

We conceived this event shortly after our company launched with the express purpose of promoting comity: In a divided town, and during a particularly divided era, Puck wanted to espouse a theme that would unite us all. For the past four years, we’ve opened the social season in Washington, D.C., by honoring an outstanding patriot or journalist for their personification of the First Amendment, perhaps the most perfect 45 words ever written, and the bedrock of both our society and our business model at Puck—a company where the bylines are proudly memorialized on the cap table, too. Its enduring importance is one thing we can all appreciate and agree on.

That night, I was thrilled to toast my pal Andrew Ross Sorkin. Andrew, in many ways, has had one of the most extraordinary careers in the modern media business. After publishing his first piece in the Times as a high-school student, in 1995, he went on to found DealBook six years later, and then began an astonishing run of market-shaking scoops that would culminate in his historic and prescient coverage of the 2008 financial crisis—the antecedent of Too Big to Fail, his canonical bestseller, and the HBO adaptation by the same name.

Over the intervening years, Andrew would become a co-host of Squawk Box, manifest Bobby Axelrod into the culture, erect the DealBook Summit, and publish a second massive tome, 1929. And yet he’s accomplished some of the best work of his career during the past 12 months—holding powerful government officials to account, judiciously making sense of Trump’s tariffs campaign, and narrating the increased interconnectivity of Wall Street and the White House. “Nowadays, defending the First Amendment doesn’t just mean allowing every voice to be heard, but also guaranteeing the conditions that are essential to any democratic debate,” Ambassador Bili noted in his moving introduction. “That means respecting facts and ensuring pluralism, rigor, authenticity, accountability, and transparency. A sense of humanity is vital, and it should be one of our most deeply held values on both sides of the Atlantic.” I couldn’t agree more.

Andrew also knows how to work a crowd. After I presented him with his award (a beautiful vintage typewriter) and mocked-up Puck magazine cover (coverline: The Art of the DealBook… I can’t help myself sometimes…), he descended into a crowd of friends and well-wishers that included electeds such as Senator Jim Banks, Senator Chris Murphy, Rep. Jason Crow, and Rep. Kevin Kiley; Trump administration insiders like Chris Klomp, Noah Sofio, Seval Oz, Karen Sessions, and Alex Flemister; CNNers Kaitlan Collins, Kasie Hunt, and Pamela Brown; White House Correspondents’ Association executive director Steve Thomma; CBS News White House correspondent and W.H.C.A. president Weijia Jiang; Washington Post legends David Ignatius (a past First Amendment gala honoree) and Sally Quinn; and Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter and director Patty Jenkins.

And then there was NBC News chairman Cesar Conde; Axel Springer supervisory board chairman Jan Bayer (who helped lead the ~$800 million acquisition of The Telegraph, which was announced days later); Uber C.M.O. Jill Hazelbaker; superjournalist Kara Swisher and Amanda Katz; the Journal’s Josh Dawsey; Peter Baker and Shawn McCreesh from the Times; BPI family members Scott Mulhauser, Ivanka Farrell, and Scott Zumwalt; the American Beverage Association’s Franklin Davis, Lindsey Kolb, and Maura Morton; Bayer’s Amber Lyons and Michael Parrish; Delta’s Lisa Hanna; the Consumer Technology Association’s Kinsey Fabrizio, Melissa Harrison, and Michael Petricone; PhRMA’s Cait DeBaun and Chanse Jones; Kekst CNC’s Brian Bartlett; the singular powerbroker Tammy Haddad and crew; my partners at Puck; and so many more.

It was a beautiful night, filled with both hope and plenty of gossip. (I can’t tell you the number of people who wanted to seek out my partner Dylan Byers to ask whether Bari Weiss was going to take over CNN.) And, in that regard, it fulfilled its purpose. In his own touching remarks, Andrew reflected on the 45 words that make up the First Amendment, and wisely noted that four of the freedoms it protects—religion, speech, assembly, and petition—all rely on the fifth: the rights of the press. It was a thoughtful and poetic recapitulation of another tenet held by everyone in that room: The work of journalism is never done nor complete. That’s one of the great truths of any time, and the underlying mission of Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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