Good morning,

It was a great week at Puck: John Heilemann presaged the post-Biden landscape; Dylan Byers captured the media bounce; Peter Hamby assessed the Kamala reassessment; and Tara Palmeri inspected the Vance buyer’s remorse rumors. Meanwhile, John Ourand got behind the scenes of David Zaslav’s NBA battle; Matt Belloni examined the size of his Paris footprint; and Bill Cohan conveyed his remaining M&A and partnership options. Then Lauren Sherman documented the latest round of designer musical chairs; Rachel Strugatz uncovered a new wave of Estée Lauder drama; Eriq Gardner examined some fresh Michael Rubin mishegas; and Marion Maneker explained the art world’s dirty little financial secret.

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

ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker uncovers a financial antecedent of the market’s current woes.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni explores Kamala Harris’s relationship with Dana Walden and Zaz’s latest French adventure.
and…
Scott Mendelson unpacks Twisters’ surprise windfall.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan examines WBD’s empire-building options and Bill Ackman’s retail gambit.
and…
Eriq Gardner reveals the lawsuits keeping Michael Rubin up at night.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers runs the numbers on the Biden legacy media bounce.
and…
John Ourand offers the definitive tick tock on the NBA auction.

WASHINGTON:
Julia Ioffe unearths the foreign policy community’s hopes and expectations for Harris while Peter Hamby envisions her post-honeymoon candidacy.
and…
John Heilemann inspects the Pelosi fingerprints on the transition.
and…
Tara Palmeri gets the internal monologue from Mar-a-Lago.

PODCASTS:
Peter and Eriq wade into the latest Paramount intrigue on The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt and NBCU’s media group chairman Mark Lazarus discuss Olympics monetization models on The Town.
and…
Heilemann invites historian Michael Beschloss and CBS’s Robert Costa to discuss the Harris pivot on Impolitic.
and…
Tara and The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo anticipate Trump’s new strategy on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren and Ourand discuss how LVMH took over the Olympics on Fashion People.

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As I moved through my punch list, I started making preparations to tape the weekly Media Monday episode of The Power That Be, my partner Peter Hamby’s excellent daily podcast that serves as the inner sanctum of the Puck cinematic universe. It seemed like a good idea for me to make some notes on discussion topics so that we wouldn’t have to talk, yet again, about Joe Biden’s battle with the media and his party over the fate of his presidency.

And then—as you can well imagine, dear reader—you know what happened next. I heard my wife audibly gasp from down below and I picked up my phone to find out that Biden had exited the race. I’m not a news junkie, per se, but I am an information addict—there’s an essential difference—and so I pinged Peter, who remains umbilically connected to Bidenworld, to find out what he was hearing and outline the show. Then I hopped on the horn with John Heilemann, whose information on the unfolding Biden saga has been two or three steps ahead of anyone else’s reporting. Before Peter and I started taping, there was a more urgent matter to sort out: Heilemann and I needed to figure out a plan for what he was going to publish that night for his Sunday evening column.

As I’ve noted in this space before, editing is the art of elimination—and in many ways, that’s also one of our founding principles at Puck. There’s too much content in the culture, and the vast majority is garbage. Our business, on the contrary, is predicated on extraordinary and thoughtful and stylish work, filled with news and insights you simply cannot find anywhere else, from authors you adore. And John, in many ways, is the culture’s foremost expert on presidential politics, the heir to Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Ben Cramer. As we chatted, I was interested not only in what he was hearing, but how he was processing it. We spoke for about 45 minutes. I wished I’d taped the conversation and simply transcribed it.

Later that evening, John pulled his thoughts together in the form of the excellent After Biden: Pelosi’s Power, Kamala’s Positioning & What’s Next. It ushered in an extraordinary week from our incredible political team. After we taped The Powers That Be, Peter and I talked through the beats of his brilliant story, Reintroducing Kamala. Julia Ioffe captured the internationalist dimension in The Treaty of Harris, and Tara Palmeri surfaced the collective soliloquy from Palm Beach with The Harris Reset & Hillbilly Blues.

And then, there was the apparent denouement of the NBA’s endless media rights auction, which has been well covered in Puck’s digital pages. For its part, the NBA signaled from the outset of its negotiations that the league wanted to move beyond purely linear partners and offer one package to a streamer. And yet in a world where the broadcast and cable business increasingly hinge on live sports rights, the stakes seemed existential. Disney needed the NBA to launch its two forthcoming streaming services. Amazon had been champing at the bit to get in on the action. And then there was WBD, whose TNT had carried league games since the ’80s.

In How Zaz Lost the NBA, my partner John Ourand offers the incredibly unvarnished tale of how WBD flubbed the auction, and precisely when and why Comcast’s NBCU came in to steal its rights. The story, which presaged WBD’s lawsuit against the league (and its bizarre P.R. offensive, as excellently portrayed by Dylan Byers), is about so much more than sports and media, of course. It’s a metaphor for the profound, even staggering, changes afoot in our industry and economy and the powerlessness of even the most mighty executive to overcome them. It is, in some many ways, the story of our time—and, as you well know by now, precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon