I’m spending this weekend and the foreseeable future at the beach on Long Island. In the city tonight and have no plans? Head to Secret Ballot’s Secret Agent reading (featuring and ) at , wake up early tomorrow for Radio Bakery’s corn and pecorino focaccia, and then head to Rockaway Beach. By the way, can anyone get me a copy of Life of M?

Today’s newsletter includes: Thoughts on Cat Marnell’s novel about a downtown writer in 2012, a guide to New York’s best tomato season BLT’s, a prediction that LA’s Eastside creative class in going to start moving to the Westside, buy a nine-bedroom nine-bathroom Upstate New York inn for under $600k, finally reviews Michael’s, and Justin Smith is hiring an assistant.

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A review of Michael’s, 37 years in the making. By .

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today he goes back to his roots, reviewing a Business Guy Restaurant — the type of place that is best rationalized with the involvement of a corporate card. I’d like to know how much cocaine (if any) has been snorted in the Michael’s bathroom.

They serve your Voss water in a wine glass. There’s a marble floor in the men’s room, Dennis Hopper photographs, and neatseat disposable toilet seat covers. They’re playing smooth jazz. The dining room is big and carpeted, and there’s a fiber board drop ceiling that makes the whole place feel like a Marriott conference room. The walls are covered in ‘80s art by the likes of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and David Hockney. The martinis are gigantic. The burger is $38 and totally fine. It’s Monday night at Michael’s on West 55th Street, and this is what Expense Account is all about.

Michael’s in Midtown opened in 1989, 10 years after its older brother, Michael’s in Santa Monica (former home to Nancy Silverton, Jonathan Waxman, and a number of other prominent California chefs), and helped introduce “California cuisine” to New York City diners. I’m not sure that I’d describe what Michael’s has as aura. I think it’s better described as swagger. Swagger is confidence plus charisma. The swagger to never change. The swagger to open in 1989, and stay stuck in 1989. If you want to know what the world was like the year Taylor Swift was born, then visit Michael’s. In 1989, it was radical for a white boy to get a little funky with it, JFK Jr. in his backwards Kangol, avocados were an exotic ingredient. It’s nice to be reminded of how far food has come in the last 40 years.

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Has anyone had the steak frites at Bar Oliver? I got a drink there last night with and I was distracted by the two guys next to us happily eating steak at the bar, which according to their menu is served with piquillo jus. Next time. On the way out of the bar, I saw . A very small (China)town night.

In today’s newsletter: A new Polymarket-backed media company, Andrew Carmellini’s new restaurant is a tavern, an L.A. artist embarked on a six-week bender in New York’s downtown art scene, on streamers going vertical, Leopold Aschenbrenner is the most famous person on the internet today, and a fall fast fashion campaign shot at Fanelli.

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Once again we’re reminded that Quibi was ahead of its time. By .

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

Rewatching The Social Network last year, I was struck by how outdated the name “social media” is now. We used to go to the apps and see what our friends were up to. Now, for the most part, what we see on Instagram or X is videos made by people we don’t know. Oftentimes the most social part of it all is just sending Reels to people in the DMs.

Somewhere along the way, there was a business and product decision made to transform “social media” into “algorithmic media” because doing so increased the amount of time people would spend in-app and maximized the number of ads that could be shown, juicing revenue.

I was reminded of this when I saw the news that HBO Max is launching “HBO Max Shorts,” which will feature clips from HBO content in a vertical short-form feed so people can scroll endlessly through scenes from the streamer’s entire catalog. Once again we’re reminded that Quibi was ahead of its time.

As a business decision, it makes complete sense. Netflix already launched a “Fast Laughs” feature in 2021 and then a “Clips” feed earlier this year. Half the clips I see on X videos and YouTube Shorts are TV and movie scenes (with annoying music and AI narration over them). So why wouldn’t the streamers move to do it themselves if their AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) competitors are just going to boost their own engagement stats with clips of scripted content they don’t even own?

This outcome didn’t always feel so inevitable. Not long ago, streamers like Netflix were ideologically opposed to ads, proudly brandishing instead their subscriber numbers and their recurring revenue business models as they invested billions of dollars in cash flow into original content. Most investors were more than willing to fund that cash burn. Media competitors wanted to get into the streaming game and get treated, and valued, like sexy tech companies instead of boring old media companies.

That all changed in April 2022 when Netflix reported its first net subscriber loss in over a decade and its stock dropped 35% in a day. Investors realized ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) was ending, capital was not free, and even companies like Netflix were now expected to turn a profit, especially if growth was now leveling off.

Later that same year, Netflix launched an ad-supported tier to the service, allowing subscribers to pay a lower monthly subscription in exchange for watching ads while streaming. Disney+ followed the next month, in December 2022. HBO Max had launched one the year prior in an effort to juice subscriber numbers and catch up in scale with its competitors.

Looking back, that’s when the Faustian bargain was made. Streamers started to realize that ARPUs (average revenue per user) for subscribers on these ad-tiers could actually be higher than the non-ad ARPUs and started pushing their mix of revenue towards ads to keep growing their overall revenue even as subscriber growth stalled off. Ad-supported subscriptions now account for nearly half of US streaming users.

Netflix has always been notorious for its expansive view of its role in our lives, introducing the concept of binge-watching to the world and, in 2017, famously describing sleep as its top competitor. But back then, the traditional Netflix model didn’t literally rely on maximizing every second you spent on the platform. You just had to value your subscription enough to never churn, something that could be achieved by watching a few movies and a TV show every month. That allowed, too, for a potentially healthier alignment between the interests of the companies and the lives of its users.

But now that more time spent watching directly translates to more revenue, I’m not sure what stops the streamers from continually feeling the pressure to evolve their brands and businesses in order to feed the new financial reality. Forget sleep, their competition is companies like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, platforms where people spend hours watching highly engaging content that other users upload for free. In the attention-maximizing world, does it still make sense financially to spend billions on TV shows and movies? Once you accept you’re in the “content” business, doesn’t any loyalty to those traditional media seem like romantic attachments?

Last April, I wrote about the TikTokification of The White Lotus and how disappointed I was by its rapid cutting and editing, as if it were engineered to keep people from looking away. There’s been a lot written about second-screen content and how streamers are dumbing down shows so that people can have them on in the background. In the case of The White Lotus, the show seemed to have done the opposite, adopting the nature of short-form video to compete with it head-on.

But these stylistic changes, however unpleasant, can only be so effective. That’s why we see Netflix moving decisively to bring in all sorts of content that would have once made little sense on the platform because it risked diluting Netflix’s brand. Live sports, video games, video podcasts, and most recently the kind of short videos, albeit well-produced, that you’d normally find on YouTube.

More ad revenue might not necessarily be bad. After all, some version of this happened before in the past. Network television was a robust business that financially supported the creation and distribution of some great shows, like Breaking Bad, Seinfeld, and Lost. The reintroduction of some of that ad money could go a long way to supporting the artists and artisans that make great stories (that is, assuming we don’t see more industry concentration that enables the corporations to hold onto most of it themselves). But network television also never had to compete with a free product driven by an increasingly powerful programming algorithm that knows just what to play next. When every impression is individually targeted, you no longer need a mass simultaneous audience to command a premium, so the reach advantage of expensive scripted content collapses.

Ad revenue is still a small minority of total streaming revenue, but it all makes me wonder what the end game is here. Do the financial incentives of the ad-based business model put us on an inevitable trajectory of slop carcinization? Will all content providers ultimately look very similar as they converge on short-form video as the optimally engaging/addictive delivery mechanism to maximize ad revenue? Because if the end goal for the streamers is to compete with business models with cheap user-generated content, I think they will have to look and think more and more like those businesses and produce the kind of content they put out. Everything that brainrots must converge.

New releases this weekend: The Samurai and the Prisoner, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first crack at the samurai genre. Kurosawa is best known for his slow psychological thrillers like Cure and Pulse, which were major genre inspirations for Obsession’s director, Curry Barker. I’m excited to see how that sensibility translates to feudal Japan. Kurosawa’s Q&As this weekend at IFC are sold out but he’s also doing one for Throne of Blood on Monday.

Director Gregg Araki returns with I Want Your Sex, his first feature in several years, starring Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, and Charli XCX and co-written by . Araki has always occupied a funny and provocative corner of American independent cinema. I got the chance to see this last night and it’s a punchy send-up of the art world and Gen Z sexual anxieties, The Substance crossed with Babygirl (with some references to Sunset Boulevard).

Finally, we have Spider-Man: Brand New Day. People were quick to call an end to uninspired Marvel and Star Wars IP films and usher in the era of Backrooms and Obsession. With this movie tracking for a massive opening weekend and a potential global box office of $2+ billion, that all seems premature. Side character superhero movies may no longer be guaranteed box office hits, but Spider-Man shows that the A-tier characters can still bring people out to the theaters. A huge year for Tom Holland—and Zendaya, who’ll be in Dune 3 as well.

This concludes Stay Tuned by Teddy Kim.

Some breaking niche Long Island news: Giunta’s Meat Farms is buying King Kullen.

There’s a new prediction market-focused media company called Eventual. Sara Fischer reported that the goal is “to give the world’s top prediction market traders a platform for news and analysis.” has 201 subscribers on Substack, and per Axios, its site is “powered by Substack.” It’s backed by LightShed Ventures, Riverside Ventures, Juniper Ventures and BDG Media founder Bryan Goldberg. Prominent traders like Domer, Caleb Davies, Brian Golden, and Paul Krishnamurty will also contribute to Eventual. Polymarket — Eventual’s launch sponsor and data partner — joins a growing group of tech companies like OpenAI and Notion who are experimenting with their own media strategies (OpenAI acquired TBPN, Notion hired New Yorker contributor Adam Iscoe). Earlier this year, Substack formed a partnership with Polymarket that gave publishers more tools to access and share prediction market data.

Don Lemon signed a three-year hosting and advertising deal with podcast hosting platform Libsyn for his podcast and affiliated shows. That explains why his team just posted three roles on the Feed Me Job Board.

L.A.-based artist Sammy Loren embarked on a six-week partying bender with New York’s downtown art scene for the sake of journalism. Stops on his journey included an art show in an abandoned Brooklyn WeWork, a reading with Dimes Square niche micro-celebrities, Mamdani-fueled positivity, and the back room at Time Again. I don’t think I knew they had a back room…

Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and former CEO of Rent the Runway, has been appointed CEO of Babylist. Hyman, who founded clothing rental company Rent the Runway in 2009, left the company earlier this year. She took the company public in 2021. I wasn’t familiar with Babylist until this week, when I bought three baby registry gifts on there for friends. The experience was very easy.

Caribbean restaurant Doubles (which has locations in Sag Harbor and Amagansett) is opening a third location in Brooklyn Heights. Per a 2025 New York Magazine story, Doubles owners Daniel and Evan Bennett are also partners in Bar Oliver and own the yet-to-open Springs General Store.

Abercrombie’s fall campaign was shot at Fanelli.

New York-based frozen yogurt purveyor Sour Cherries is hosting a pop-up this weekend with Suzie Kondi and Prounis in Amagansett.

Is the Midcoast Villager the only local newspaper that also owns a cafe that offers catering?

The pinot noir days in California are over. The NYT reports that California winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century: “It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog the shelves of storerooms and wine shops.” Vineyard managers are ripping out pinot noir grapes, burning their vineyards, and selling their land. Nationwide, the Times reports, wine sales are at their lowest level in more than two decades, as people drink less and younger drinkers turn from traditional wines to canned cocktails, seltzers, and nonalcoholic beers and spirits. But pinot noir, in particular, has been hit hardest, now that the boom caused by Sideways (it was wine snob Miles’s favorite) has subsided a generation after the indie film goosed consumer demand for some California varietals and spiked the fortunes (“I am NOT drinking any fucking merlot!”) of others.

Andrew Carmellini (Locanda Verde, Cafe Carmellini, Bar Primi) is opening a new restaurant in The Public Theater called The Astor. It’s billing itself as, “ a downtown tavern for the public, where dining, drinking, and performance come together under one roof.” Serge Becker (who designed Miss Lily’s, The Box, and La Esquina) designed the space.

Let’s talk about Leopold. Great reporting by the FT last night. Leopold Aschenbrenner burst onto the scene as a wunderkind stock investor over the last two years, betting on just one megatrend: AI and demand for compute.

A quick primer on his rise and (maybe) fall: At just 23, he left OpenAI’s “SuperAlignment” team, raised a fund called Situational Awareness, generated eye-watering returns, and grew assets under management to $20 billion as of June. Then this morning, CNBC reported that Leo’s dramatic recent losses have wiped out all his YTD gains, and the fund has liquidated all of its public equity holdings.

People have a lot of feelings about this guy. I’ll try to identify how Leo’s shooters would describe him as an investor, and how his haters would describe him. Recent events have proven his haters correct, but let’s try to understand what investors admired in this guy, and why he was such a big deal over the last year.

To his fans, Leo stood out as someone who not only understood AI megatrends, but also deftly traded them in markets. The word was that this kid could read the tea leaves of AI, and was beating the Wall Street veterans at their own game. Like any iconic trader, Leo has an unforgettable signature look, like a foppish elven prince in a movie where elves are good at thinking, but not fighting. Aesthetically, he was an anti Sam Bankman-Fried - whereas SBF survived on cargo shorts and ramen, Leo looked like he might have deadly allergies to both. He also has lore - his deep personal connections to the early teams at OpenAI and Anthropic (and FTX!) supposedly give him an edge as an investor. He also loves Diet Dr. Pepper.

The Leo legend probably reached its peak in a June 8 Wall Street Journal profile. The profile was full of reverential, almost religious, quotes and praise for a whiz-kid investor with a short track record. Go on x.com and look at people’s tweets from early June praising him as a once-in-a-generation investor (some are now deleted). Graybeards will often tell you this type of glowing profile is a perfect signal of a top in the market.

Now for the haters. As Situational Awareness racked up dizzyingly good returns for the first half of 2026, skeptics muttered that Leo might be using extreme, unsafe amounts of leverage (borrowed money) to generate those returns. Some people even claimed he was basically a figurehead for a group of industry insiders who wanted to put on this levered AI trade. “It’s not alpha, it’s levered beta,” said the haters, but the shooters pointed out that Leo’s returns and specific stock picks beat those of the semiconductor indexes, and also beat their estimate of what a levered index bet might look like (always a squishy estimate). Just wait, said the haters: If he’s taking too much risk, eventually his returns will go down as quickly as they went up.

It seems that time has come. With the unwind of the “bottleneck trade” over the last 8 weeks, Leo’s core market of chipmaker, data center, and AI-exposed stocks has traded down sharply. Some of the hardest-hit groups have been Korean retail investors, and investors in Situational Awareness.

As news of the fund’s struggles broke last night, haters claimed he was down 30% year-to-date (YTD), while others claimed his returns and realized gains before June were too good for that, and he’s still up YTD. The FT article is very good, but they did not share his full returns info, so ultimately a lot of these people were just guessing. This morning, breaking reporting from CNBC suggests that Leo’s recent losses have indeed wiped out all his YTD gains, and the fund has exited its entire public equities book. (WSJ is now reporting that Citadel bought all his positions in a single block trade.)

Meanwhile, as recently as last week, Leo was out raising fresh funds, and calling this downturn an excellent buying opportunity. Some smart people agree, and say that behind the scenes, the AI labs and demand for compute are doing nothing but accelerating. But are the bulls just talking their (hurting) books? Time will tell.

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Rest in peace to one of my favorite French artists, Kavinsky. President Emmanuel Macron posted a tribute to the electronic musician this morning on Instagram. Pour one out and press play on “Nightcall.”

Last night, my friend Kareem took me to the New York premiere of A24’s “Tony.” Based on the trailer, I had my concerns about the Anthony Bourdain movie, which focuses on one pivotal seaside summer of his life. The movie was delightful! The soundtrack rocked (Mandy Mamlet, who also worked on “Challengers,” was the music supervisor). I walked out of the theater (passing by chefs who were in attendance, like Jonah Reider and Eric Ripert and ) wanting a greasy slice of New England beach town pizza. Good job, Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Matt Johnson, and A24.

Today’s newsletter includes: George Bush’s paintings came down at a London Gallery as fast as they went up, Mark Zuckerberg is hiring a social media manager, Ross Douthat is leaving the Times for 60 Minutes, a Glossier OG returns to the business, a popular supplement brand is launching its own show, an AI insurance brand is opening three cafes in New York, and dermatologists claim that New York women are pulling back on Botox.

So there’s an AI-powered insurance company called Corgi that is opening three cafes in New York City this year. Corgi, an insurance company that uses AI to generate estimates and plans for startups, started in Y Combinator in 2024. They made headlines last week when they raised a round of funding for the third time since May, bringing their valuation to $4 billion. In addition to building software, the company opened 24-hour cafes in Atlanta and SF. They occasionally serve sponsored drinks like “Brexspresso.” Sponsored drinks aren’t the worst idea, when you think about how Erewhon turned smoothies into billboards for brands like Hailey Bieber’s Rhode and Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee.

One Corgi Cafe customer posted in the Bay Area subreddit: “I went here on a Friday night at 8pm. Weirdest vibe, completely quiet except for a bunch of (presumably) GenZ kids typing furiously on their laptops with headphones on. The moment a friend and I walked in, they stared at us like we were alien freaks. Not a fun vibe.” Jury’s out on how the vibes will be at the new Tribeca, Chelsea, and NoMad locations.

Corgi’s head of brand, Erika Lee, told the SF Gazetteer, “It’s like the Capital One Café.” I’d like to talk to Erika, and see if we can dig deeper into these ideas. While an insurance company cafe might seem radical, all sorts of businesses – including Capital One, Ralph Lauren, and even Alaïa – have opened cafes over the last few years. But here’s the thing, whenever I see a startup going so hard on brand marketing channels so early in its life (2 years old), it tells me they’ve either exhausted all the more tactical, efficient marketing channels, or they didn’t try. Some people will say “this time is different,” and that AI companies need to jump right to brand marketing to thrust themselves upon the public, and maybe if that thrusting is done with “taste,” they’ll get very big very fast. We’ll see if that works.

What’s that you say? You want to know more about Corgi?

• Two thirds of the first 30 hires have a corgi tattoo.

• Corgi’s founder, Nico Laqua, sleeps 3-4 hours a night.

• Don’t worry, London, you’re getting a Corgi Cafe in Shoreditch.

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation is building a 700,000-square-foot brain research institute in New York – the Ackman Oxman Institute. He spent $260 million on two West Side buildings, which will be developed in partnership with Mount Sinai.

One of my favorite buildings in Boerum Hill was listed this week for $5.7 million. I didn’t realize it was a multi-family – great opportunity for someone who wants a conversion project, or is an aspiring landlord.

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Last night I watched Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob. Alongside the perfect 1988 cast of Michelle Pfeiffer, Alec Baldwin, and Matthew Modine, was a young actor in his debut role: Oliver Platt. In one of my favorite types of twists (sibling excellence), Wikipedia revealed Oliver to be the brother of one of the best food critics of our time, Adam Platt. I thought to myself, Their parents must be so proud.

After poking around Adam’s Instagram, I learned that their father Nicholas Platt lived to the age of 90, and passed away less than a week ago. I read Adam’s essay dedicated to this fascinating man — diplomat, leader of the Asia Society in New York City, Harvard grad, speaker of several languages — and thought about how the old guard of US Foreign service was so damned educated. I don’t want to be too nostalgic for a different kind of elite, but I can’t help but think how things might be different if we still had diplomats like this today. (A few books have been written about this.)

Nicholas Platt, what a great 20th Century life. He and his wife raised incredible kids.

Today’s newsletter includes: Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman answers your questions, an SF entrepreneur is looking to pay a personal assistant $180k, a luxury hotel nightmare, a review of the Nob Hill Spa at the Huntington Hotel, a hot girl book club, Bernard Arnault discovers the power of X, and Stephanie Danler’s new dark novel about wealth and privilege in LA.

Have a story you want me to include in the newsletter? Respond to this email or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

Guest Lecture: Nithya Raman

This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Jeremy O. Harris, Recho Omondi, and Jeff Klein. Today, we’re talking to Nithya Raman.

In early June, Nithya Raman, an urban planner, activist, and Los Angeles City Councilmember finished second in the L.A. mayoral primary (slightly behind sitting L.A. mayor Karen Bass and slightly ahead of non-mayor Spencer Pratt), setting up a runoff with Bass in November. Bass, who is the first incumbent L.A. mayor since 2005 to face a runoff, has a formidable challenger in Raman, who is young (44), unapologetically progressive (she’s been endorsed by the DSA), and attracts natural comparisons to Zohran Mamdani.

Raman is running on a platform of, among other things, reducing street homelessness in L.A., increasing and speeding up housing production, tackling affordability, and helping revive the film and TV production industry in L.A. She lives in Silver Lake and won overwhelmingly in the East Side neighborhoods we cover regularly in the letter. It felt like a good time to get your questions to her.

“How do you and some of the intellectual heavyweights you have in your corner aim to combat the persistent narrative that ‘urban disorder’ is a byproduct of progressive governance and something excessively tolerated/not addressed by progressives in power?” — Edward

I could give you a more ideological answer, but the truth is that the only convincing response is to demonstrate results.

I am a proud progressive. I believe in the power of government to do good, and I believe in the power of government intervention to solve problems and make our lives better. But that means that progressives actually need to do more than other politicians to deliver results for people. This cannot be a political project of asking people to accept less.

People want clean and safe streets. They want 911 to answer. They want garbage picked up and street lights fixed and city services to work. Those aren’t conservative demands. They are basic expectations of government.

And in Los Angeles, people want homelessness addressed. Angelenos have proven over and over again that they believe in a progressive vision of how to address homelessness: This is a city where people have voted three times in the last few years to tax themselves to provide housing and shelter and services for people on the streets. We owe it to every person on this city’s streets and to every voter and to every taxpayer to really build a response that works to end this humanitarian crisis and keep our streets safe, healthy, and clean for all.

This is why I have worked so hard to bring down homelessness in my district every single year that I have been in office. This is why I worked to ensure that shelter beds and permanent supportive housing units are full every night.

That is what progressive governance should look like. Treating people with dignity. Changing the political norms so that we don’t hide data that voters won’t like, but that we are honest and transparent about what we are doing well and where we are falling short so we can actually fix things. And doing all of this to actually deliver a safer, cleaner, healthier city for all.

“Burglaries and break-ins in the neighborhood are daily and nightly. Last year, three masked men broke into my home while a getaway driver waited out front and LAPD never showed up. What’s your strategy to prevent this sort of crime citywide and keep those who commit these crimes from returning to our neighborhoods?” — Spencer

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I went to City Island – a small beach town in the Bronx – for the first time on Saturday for a friend’s birthday. After several Hennessy Coladas and hand-sized Cherrystone clams at Johnny’s Reef, and in search of a sunset view, we walked down a residential road that dead-ended with a big seawall and a view of the water. Beyond the seawall was at Eastchester Bay, where the Long Island Sound meets the East River. A man in a Tesla drove down the street to his waterfront house, which had a few chairs set up on a green lawn, and a small private beach that looked out at the New York City skyline. We passed the City Island library, which had porthole-shaped windows. City Island Aquarium, which was actually a store with fish for home tanks, was open late on a Saturday night. I found a video on YouTube that showcases their colorful beta fish. A woman on a jet ski wearing jeans pulled up to one of the waterfront restaurants to go to dinner. It was probably a faster commute than sitting in traffic with the cars full of couples going out to dinner for date night.

The next day, a friend of mine who lives on City Island DM’d me to inform me that Seafood City, another waterfront seafood restaurant on the 1.5 mile-long island, has a two Henny Colada limit. “For good reason.”

Today’s newsletter includes: Air Mail’s new travel newsletter, Patreon’s mass layoffs, news organizations are using Reddit to drive traffic to their stories, another reason to be upset by the department store landscape in New York City, Park Slope bookstore news, and sleepaway camps are trying to manage their on-site pharmacies.

For our next Guest Lecture, paid readers can ask Brenda Hashtag anything they want. See you in the Feed Me chat.

WSJ Magazine is launching a wellness newsletter. Sara O’Brien (who has been covering the peptide industry) will now be writing the Journal’s weekly Wellness newsletter. My longtime favorite wellness/beauty newsletter is Linda Wells’s Air Mail newsletter, LOOK. And Substack has been quickly catching up: Laura Reilly’s new wellness and aesthetics newsletter, High Touch, scratches so many voyeuristic itches. Health Gossip and Self Involved open the proverbial medicine cabinets of beautiful, unusual women (and sometimes men). I’m new to the world below ’s Snake Super Health paywall. Puck’s Lauren Sherman asks her podcast guests about what they eat for breakfast, and addresses peptides almost weekly. And the New York Times has a new series called I ______ it (the blank is filled with trending wellness verbs like froze or absorbed). Wellness content is great for traffic, which is why I’m a little surprised there aren’t more smart, non-Dear Media podcasts about wellness from a New York Magazine or The Times.

Patreon laid off 30% of its staff (93 employees). In a note shared on Patreon last week, CEO Jack Conte wrote, “Patreon’s core business is healthy and strong, and we’re going to be a rock for creators for decades to come.” He also said that AI is not responsible for the layoffs. In addition to the headcount reduction, Patreon will be reorganizing internally.

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I’ll be spending most of August on Long Island. If you’ll be in the Hamptons next month, fill out this form so I can keep you updated on Feed Me events. If you have any stories you think would be interesting to Feed Me readers or you want to kick it, shoot me an email.

Today’s newsletter includes: The Carbone team is building a “giant campus of indulgence and fun” in Miami, someone made a Clandestino video game, L Catterton invested in the Gen Z jam boom, on a New-England-seafood-shack-slash-izakaya, the parent company behind several influencer clothing brands, and Vogue is hiring someone to take care of their ultra-high-net-worth Vogue100 members.

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Smithereens is a New-England-seafood-shack-slash-izakaya. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about a lobster roll with a little pirate flag sticking out the top.

It’s taken me a while to get to Smithereens. It’s one of those things. Sometimes you miss the moment (or you feel like you’ve missed the moment), and then it’s hard to go back. Smithereens opened on 9th between 1st and A all the way back in 2024. By now, the reviews have been written, they’re all glowing, it’s #18 on the Times list for godsake, what more could I add to this discourse? Well, I finally made it to Smithereens. I went there as a civilian, I didn’t take notes, my photos are bad, I had no plans to write about it. Yet here we are. Sometimes you eat a meal that makes you want to write.

Smithereens is an American seafood restaurant. It’s lovely to go to Smithereens with that as your mindset, in the same way that it’s lovely to watch The Sixth Sense knowing only that it’s about a boy who sees ghosts and he has a therapist who is not a ghost, and is Bruce Willis. It’s nice to be surprised, and it’s rare these days. At least for me. A new restaurant opens every day in New York City, but I rarely eat food that feels new. Smithereens is making food that feels new, but never too new, there is always a whiff of familiarity. New can be scary. It’s hot outside, but Smithereens is wearing a jacket; they’ve got tricks up their sleeves.

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Today’s newsletter includes: on the flaws of The Odyssey, catching up with C.O. Bigelow’s pharmacist on the dangers of peptides, an update on the operator of The 21 Club, Rockefeller Center gets a luxury hotel, a media merch trend, Travis Kalanick’s new company, and The Cut has a new fashion editor.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️⚠️⚠️

The Prestige of The Odyssey. By .

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

In 2026 A.D., going to the movies is no simple trip.

In this day and era, it’s an intentional choice, a rejection of scrolling the endless sea of short-form videos that waylay our lives at every turn, threatening to eat up hours, and days, adding years before we finally arrive at the place we first set out for.

Technology is changing, and the times and customs are changing with it. The streaming war has been raging on for over a decade. There are fearful rumors of raiders from far-off lands, pillaging studios as they go, under the name of consolidation, in brazen defiance of antitrust law: Treat every company as if they could be a monopoly in disguise.

So we find solace together in the darkness of the palatial theater, feasting on buttery popcorn with our seatmates, spellbound by the light of the IMAX screen. For almost three hours, we can experience “a time of apparent magic.”

Given the precarious cultural and economic health of cinema, there is an impulse to treat every movie we watch not just as an opportunity to entertain ourselves but as a way to support an industry and art form at risk. Going to watch The Odyssey, then, is just as much about celebrating and shoring up The Movies™ as seeing the film itself. And in this moment, Nolan himself, maybe along with Denis Villeneuve and Tom Cruise, has become one of the most important avatars of The Movies™ that we can all rally around as a cultural movement, an identity.

Just think about how much of the marketing for this movie has been based on a behind-the-scenes appreciation for its craft and technology. It’s the first movie to be filmed entirely on IMAX 70mm and tickets to see it in that native format have been notoriously hard to buy. New screenings at the big screen at AMC Lincoln Square are sold out deep into August and tickets are reselling for hundreds of dollars. There’s always been a premium to seeing the year’s big movies there but never in my life have I seen a movie open like a Supreme drop.

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All New Yorkers should be grateful to Helios, or whatever sun god you pray to, for the next five days of sunny weather. I hope you all take advantage of it in the form an outdoor screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or a Miller High Life under the stars.

Today’s newsletter includes: You can buy a movie theater for $700k, is expanding their editorial coverage, one of the art-world’s most coveted positions has been filled, The New York Times and How Long Gone reported on the same hybrid fruit today, and a New York Magazine writer is hosting a seaside writer’s retreat in Maine.

Catch up on Feed Me:

Have a story you want me to include in the newsletter? Respond to this email or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

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Good afternoon, everyone.

I am closely monitoring the Blowin’ In the Wind jokes on X ahead of the Bob Dylan concert at Forest Hills tonight. If I weren’t going to Queens tonight, I would try to make this Rachel Alice Roddy spaghetti recipe and finish London Falling.

Today’s newsletter includes: Fall internships that you should send to an ambitious college student in your life, Meta has a whole page dedicated to chefs who use Meta Glasses, restaurants creating secret menus for burgers, Substack is pitching itself as a place to “make a living,” and a $250k party planning job at a16z.

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Catching up with Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray on summer hunger, Thai Diner, and partnering with Instacart.

Every summer, over 20 million kids across the country lose access to the free school meals they depend on. In New York neighborhoods like the South Bronx (one of the most food-insecure neighborhoods in New York City), that loss is a problem for an entire community.

Instacart is teaming up with Ghetto Gastro, the Bronx-born culinary collective co-founded by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, as part of their largest-ever Summer Hunger campaign, in partnership with Feeding America. The collaboration centers on three things: developing accessible, nutritious recipes; showing up in communities through a live cooking event (like the City Harvest Mobile Market event on July 11); and rallying people to donate through Community Carts at instacart.com/donate.

Last week, I caught up with Jon Gray (who I first met almost ten years ago when I worked at Great Jones) to learn about how he decided to work with Instacart, the easiest way for New Yorkers to give back, and where he’s been eating in the city (he sends an Uber to bring Thai Diner all the way to the Bronx).

EMILY: You grew up in the Bronx and live close to where this City Harvest event is happening. What does summer hunger actually look like on the ground there?

JON: The thing with hunger, it’s almost like Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. You can’t necessarily see that a person is hungry or know what they’re going through from the eye test. When I was growing up in this neighborhood and also when I lived in Spanish Harlem when I was six years old, I remember a lot of my friends in New York City public schools—so many people, that’s where they ate.

That school lunch, no matter how terrible it might’ve looked, we had friends that partook in that because that’s where they ate. Another meal wasn’t always going to happen at home. They might not have had breakfast.

I remember when I was living in public housing, when my mom was getting on her feet, they used to have the summer breakfast program at a school on 3rd Avenue between 96th and 95th Street, and I used to go get the carrot cakes and the banana breads. I was always a picky eater, but that was my go-to. I didn’t mess with the milk, but I’d definitely get the banana bread.

A lot of people don’t know that the Bronx is home to the largest food distribution network in the United States, second largest in the world. When you think about fish markets, the only fish market that’s larger than the one here in Hunts Point is the one in Toyosu in Japan. But we deal with a lot of the adverse effects of having this food distribution from the fossil fuel emissions from the diesel trucks, so you have high asthma rates, but then you have lack of nutritious and delicious food access, even though all of this food is leaving the neighborhood. So you have high diabetes, hypertension, all of these things because it’s not easy to get nutritious and delicious food. This is one of the most food insecure parts of New York City, which is crazy when you think about the wealth and it’s like a tale of two cities for real.

EMILY: Brands must constantly come to Ghetto Gastro wanting to work with you. What part of Instacart’s pitch made you actually want to work with them?

JON: It was a few things. The fact that we actually use Instacart—when we’re in the lab and we need something on the fly, when we’re working on recipes or filming something, it’s like, All right, we’re going to hit Instacart to get what we need. That’s usually the first step: Do we use this? Because we always want to be authentic in our storytelling and our partnerships.

The second part was the impact bit. It’s like, Oh wait, this is not just about capitalism. This is making an impact in the area that’s near and dear to our heart, which is trying to work on food insecurity and work on the hunger crisis, because it’s a real thing and right now it’s not getting better with the different cuts in SNAP. It’s a lot of cuts in this type of funding. So being able to have that double bottom line where these are for‑profit entities but doing business in a radical way that impacts humans in a good way—I think that has to be the future of how business works. It can’t just be “give me, give me, give me, give me.”

And then also the team. My whole thing is I like working with people that I wouldn’t mind having dinner with or a drink with outside of whatever the project is.

EMILY: For New Yorkers who have the ability to give, what are some easy and effective ways they can help their neighbors beyond this Instacart program?

JON: I think it’s always best to get involved in things that you’re truly interested in. Food for me is my life, so I can’t take my privilege for granted, especially knowing intimately folks that are hungry and folks that are still using SNAP benefits and food stamps that are close friends and family. That’s why this is near and dear to me. With Instacart’s Community Carts, it’s just so easy. A big barrier is that everybody has good intentions, but actually executing on the intention has too many barriers to entry—people don’t know how to do it.

So being able to spread the word about Instacart and Community Carts is important. Each one teach one. We often look outside of ourselves to make a big gesture, but it could be a small gesture. It could be peanut butter, rice, and a certain ingredient that a food pantry in your neighborhood needs. You can spend 15, 20 bucks and that gets sent right there through Community Carts.

I also work with Rethink Food—I’m on the board. They’re doing community meals where they’re giving grants to small restaurants in local neighborhoods that then feed folks. And Sky High Farm upstate of Hudson—I’m on the board of that organization too. They’re growing food and giving it to local food banks, but beautiful food, beautiful produce, beautiful protein. So I think people should do what feels good and what they care about or have some type of knowledge or interest in.

EMILY: You created three recipes for this Instacart program. Can you walk us through them, starting with your “fire ants on a log”?

JON: My recipe is Fire Ants on a Log. I made this in my food stamp era, when I was living in Spanish Harlem. I was going through it, but I had a tale of two cities life, too, because my mother, even though she was on the come up and figuring it out, was like, “I’m putting you in afterschool and summer camp at 92nd Street Y.” As part of the afterschool program, we published a book. My mother sent me a picture of the cookbook I made when I was a kid.

My recipe was ants on a log, but this is the OG style: celery, peanut butter, raisins. It’s a way to get kids to eat veggies and get some fiber and some roughage, but still have a sweetness and a protein. It’s a really well‑balanced snack.

I took some of my new knowledge and new flavors. Cherry pistachio was always my favorite ice cream growing up. We’d go to the Japanese hibachi spot close to my neighborhood in the Bronx called Edo, in Westchester and Pelham Manor, and I’d get the cherry pistachio ice cream. I was like, All right, let’s do a cherry pistachio ants on a log. So we do the pistachio cream, pistachio butter kind of vibe with dried cranberries that were soaked in cherry juice.

I’m the non‑chef in the gang, so it was about kids and summer hunger. I wanted to make something where you don’t have to have a kitchen—thinking about folks that might be in shelters or on the move. You can do something nutritious, delicious, and introduce people to new ingredients.

I know tasting some “crazy” things when I was five or six years old really opened my aperture. I view the plate as a portal. Even if you don’t have a passport and you can’t travel, you can travel on your plate and learn things about different cultures and ways of being.

EMILY: What are your top three favorite restaurants in New York right now—your summer spots?

JON: Do you remember the show Making the Band? Do you remember Dylan, Dylan, Dylan? I’m going to just say Gourmega, Gourmega, Gourmega. In all seriousness, we just opened Gourmega, so that’s my favorite spot—I’ve got to plug that.

I love what Paul Carmichael is doing at Kabawa, just really taking those crazy Caribbean flavors and reinventing…not even reinventing, but doing some crazy things like dry‑aging fish in a beautiful way and doing these beautiful patties in the bar that they have.

I love La Morada—I’ll always pick that spot in the Bronx. It’s Oaxacan cuisine on Willis. We partnered with them years ago during the pandemic to feed over 100,000 families at the height of the pandemic. And I’m such a creature of habit—I have to just say Thai Diner. I probably eat there once or twice a week. I’ll send an Uber to pick up my order and bring it to the Bronx just to bust down that short rib while I watch House of the Dragon. It’s a true luxury—my luxuries are eating good and getting really good food.

➡️ Donate through Community Carts: Go to instacart.com/donate and send exactly what a local food bank needs, delivered straight to them with no fees.

There is a growing community of millennials who are buying their second home first, while continuing to rent their primary residence. And many of them seem to have the same hat. One has a newsletter to help others who are interested in doing the same. It is called, yes, Second Home First.

Meta Glasses posted a collaboration with French pastry chef Cedric Grolet. Last year, the New York Times called Grolet “the internet’s most famous pastry chef.” Last time I passed his chocolate shop in Paris, there were velvet ropes organizing dozens of hungry customers. One of the patterns I’ve noticed with Meta Glasses is that they like to partner with chefs — Laila Gohar made the desserts for their most recent New York launch party, but they’ve been working with chefs for years. Even chefs like Four Horsemen’s Nick Curtola have been making content with Meta Glasses, unofficially. After doing some digging around, I learned Meta has a whole page dedicated to cooking with Meta Glasses. The use case the tech company makes for chefs is that you can order groceries and ask recipe questions while wearing the glasses. But I think the likelier reason the Meta glasses have proven popular with chefs and food/cooking content is just that people like to watch POV cooking videos, and surveilling vegetables is less concerning than surveilling people.

Substack launched a new feature with Pangram that scans newsletters for AI-generated content.

The NYT launched a local newsletter covering only the Twin Cities. This is like a Times-scale version of neighborhood Substacks proliferating. Feels extremely interesting, both as a content experiment and strategically. The Times has done this before with daily letters like “California Today,” but that transitioned from a full-blown newsletter to a links/stories roundup in 2024 after undoubtedly proving challenging for one writer to cover the entire state in that manner. Picking one city (or a pair of cities, in this case)— comprising the country’s 16th largest metro area—feels like the perfect size to try this again. The Local: Twin Cities will launch in August.

Nili Lotan is launching footwear. The designer is also opening two stores in South Korea this year, and one “concept store” in New York.

a16z New Media is hiring an events planner for $250k. “The Events Partner for New Media is a senior operator responsible for designing and executing a portfolio of high-impact experiences - from intimate community dinners to multi-day summits and leadership retreats.”

Rubirosa’s, a Parisian boutique that I’ve never been to but could navigate with my eyes closed because of how many times I’ve seen it on my Instagram feed, is expanding. Lynette Nylander got an early look at the new location (right next door to the original), which will focus on more luxurious items like cashmere sweaters and shirting.

This $10 million apartment basically has its own members club inside. The Gramercy Park penthouse apartment features a custom turquoise Miele fridge, four fireplaces, a key to Gramercy Park, and a private saloon-like bar. If I was to buy that apartment, I’d turn the bar into the Feed Me Club, and we could all be members and hold shareholder meetings there. Cara Delevingne bought the apartment from Jimmy Fallon for $10.8 million in 2022. It’s now listed at $8.5 million.

London restaurants are experimenting with limited burger menus. The Infatuation reported that restaurants like Dove (which has 10 burgers available per service) and Vesper (which serves an off-menu gorgonzola burger) are part of this trend of secret menus. I think it’s fun.

Substack’s latest campaign highlights the writers who “make a living” on the platform. I’m not asking for an IRS audit of these writers’ finances, but it would be nice to know if “living” is defined by paid subscriptions, advertisements, events, outside gigs, or a combination of all of those. This framing by Substack was surprising to me, because in reality I’d guess maybe ~1000 publishers actually make a living salary from Substack subscribers. Unlike OnlyFans – where the explicit point of creating on the platform is to exchange content for money – Substack has long positioned itself as a place to connect people in interesting ways, foster creativity, and…write. 

Substack has long gamified financial success on the platform through leaderboards and infantilizing colored checkmarks. The problem I see with selling Substack as a place where anyone can make a living, is that I’m just not sure there’s enough “market depth” of paid subscribers. Whereas there seems to be enough (almost endless) market depth for paid subs on OnlyFans, or for ad-monetized users on other platforms (YouTube). Substack’s product offering is this more earthbound combo of niche writing (limited market depth) + subscription-only monetization (cuts off the low end of the market that would would read with ads). This is perfectly fine for readers and writers who accept the limitations, but it might not be enough to drive the GMV of the platform to $100 billion.

All of this also explains Substack’s strategy to win “whale” writers and established celebrities who can attract larger groups of paid subs. While Feed Me has benefitted from Substack highlighting my work, I also recognize the first-mover advantage I had by being an early user. It’s far too simple to tell writers that if they join today, they can make a living here. Although I want people to get paid for their writing, I find the bar is really high for me to pay for new subscriptions.

I am curious what you all think: Do you see Substack as a place to build a business? A place to write and share your thoughts with friends? A social media platform? A side hustle? Or simply the technology that delivers your favorite newsletters to your inbox?

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Today’s letter includes: Feed Me’s California beauty and wellness Black Book, an Ojai dispatch, the SF billionaires buying houses in Nevada, a group art exhibit honoring recently-demolished Taix, a Ringer podcast host joins Substack, and the Anduril marketing team is apparently made up of Studio Ghibli fans.

Have a story you want me to include in the newsletter? Need to tell me something? Respond to this email or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

I’m writing to you today from my apartment in New York, where I have bowls of avocados, passion fruit, and tangerines I smuggled home from the Ojai Farmer’s Market last night. I spent the weekend in Ojai because I wanted to finally stay at Hotel El Roblar, the oldest hotel in Ojai, which was recently renovated and restored by Eric Goode (the man behind The Bowery Hotel and the producer of Tiger King), Jeremy McBride, Ramin Shamshiri, and Warner Ebbink. I had to be in LA for a few days for work, but instead of flying home on Friday, I drove 90 minutes to sunny Ojai for a few days.

The lobby of Hotel El Roblar is dark and leathery, with paintings of the Ojai Valley by Stefano Castronovo. There were parallels to The Bowery, like the yellow light coming from the hidden bar, and the memorable room key, and the patio furniture with red and cream upholstery. I paid for my room, but they upgraded us upon checking in to a room in their Sycamore House – a California Craftsman 8-room house on the back of the property. As the front desk agent walked us down a hallway, through a garden, and past the property’s giant tortoises, she told us that the pool closes at 8 p.m. “If you night swim, we won’t tell.”

Our room was spacious and smelled like wood and incense. On the desk was a printed guide to the property, a stuffed animal condor, and a handsome set of stationery. The sunlit bathroom was a sanctuary – wood paneling, aquamarine tiles, Autumn Sonata robes, and a massive crystal staring down into the soaking tub. My only note on the room was that the towels could’ve been thicker.

But we spent most of the day by the pool. On Saturday afternoon, a woman walked up to me and noticed my copy of London Calling. She told me her husband was mentioned in the book, a friend of one of the central characters, Akbar. Dubious association. Easily 5 carats on her finger.

What else to do in Ojai:

The world’s largest outdoor bookstore, Bart’s Books. This winding bookstore, which took up about half of a suburban block, felt like a place out of a California fairytale. Shelves upon shelves of vaguely organized books, in the great outdoors. I got a copy of UFO...Contact from the Pleiades Volume I, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, and Golden Guide to Stars. A man behind me in line asked why I was buying all these books if we already “know what’s going on,” in reference to the Pentagon Papers released earlier this year. I also grabbed a few packets of seeds from Ojai-based Plant Good Seed (good logo).

If you still can’t get tickets to The Odyssey in New York, there were plenty of tickets at Ojai Playhouse. This 110-year-old theater (which was renovated in 2020) is located right across the street from Hotel El Roblar. I would say about one third of the audience was drinking their boozy slushies in the theater. I opted for a tequila soda with lime.

Rainbow Bridge Natural Market. You’d be surprised at the way I can work the beauty section of a health food store. Rainbow Bridge is my ideal natural foods market – glass jars of local yogurt, a buzzing juice machine behind a deli bar, attentive staff helping shoppers decide between medjool and deglet dates. But it also had an impressive apothecary, with crocheted headbands and very ‘90s iridescent pink headbands. I bought a few hair accessories, as well as a scented oil called “Aura” from local apothecary From the Heart of Ojai.

Mark my words, by the end of August I will have reverse-engineered the watermelon-infused white negroni at Rory’s Place (which is also across the street from El Roblar). My introduction to Tomato Season 2026 happened in the form of a tuna crudo with tiny golden tomatoes and tarragon. I also loved the blistered Japanese sweet potatoes with miso butter, scallion, bonito, and finger lime. Round of applause for the lighting in the restaurant, which made everyone look like they were in Black Mirror S3E4, “San Junipero.”

The Turtle Conservation Center. In addition to co-owning Hotel El Roblar and The Bowery Hotel, and producing movies about the wild animal trade, Eric Goode runs a conservancy for turtles and tortoises. At the start of the tour, he came over and introduced himself. Somehow, in the first several minutes of our conversation, the Aspinall family came up. Of course I brought up their zoo, which also appears in London Falling, which he had plenty to say about. Visitors of the conservancy are able to meet and feed giant tortoises, as well as learn about the rescue and breeding work that the center does. Our guide, Manci, told us that a few years ago, a new paper was published that turtles actually speak to each other, which I thought about as we walked through the orange trees and cacti on the property. When the tour ended, we washed our hands in one of the houses on the property that Goode built himself, and were given a copy of the conservancy’s publication, The Tortoise. I fell in love with an oyster shell chandelier in the otherwise bare California bungalow, which I later found on Chairish.

If you enjoyed this dispatch, let me know. I’d be happy to write more about the hotels and cities I visit in the future.

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The California Beauty and Wellness Black Book, According to West Coast Feed Me Readers.

Over the weekend, I emailed a group of California-based Feed Me readers to help me assemble a comprehensive guide to the best healers, injectors, masseuses, colorists, and facialists. The reason I wanted names of people and not just names of practices or spas is because I was looking for clients who actually know the names of the people taking care of them.

One reader replied to my email, “*Something I’ve noticed about California wellness culture is that you have to be a bit more vigilant about protecting yourself from energy vampires. There are people that want to perform as healers but are more interested in their own brand than they are in meeting you where you are, where your body is - which can be dangerous. It’s really important to me to find people that understand how to care for a nervous system as much as they are skilled in their craft.”

The final list includes: a Silver Lake colorist who delivers “the perfect Amanda Seyfried blonde,” a West Hollywood herbalist, a San Francisco eyebrow threader worth flying across the country for, a Thai masseuse who can cure hangovers and depressive streaks, and a Marin County acupuncturist who helped one woman get a handle on her migraines.

LOS ANGELES

Hair

Kiley Fitzgerald, Hairstylist at Mare, West Hollywood. “A true artist with an exceptional eye — she consistently nails the look you’re after, especially if you come in with reference photos. A former assistant to Mara Roszak, and her skill and attention to detail show it. Well worth the wait.” (~$300, waitlist) - Jayme Cyk, founder of And Repeat and author of the Substack I’m On An Antidepressant

Molly and Josh, Haircuts at Goo, Fairfax. “Obviously I heard this rec originally from Poog years ago, but they will give you the best haircut of your life and you’ll have an amazing hour hanging out with them. I drove there across town the morning of my wedding, there’s no one else I trust as much. Txt Molly for an appointment, it’s around $125.” - Tori Schachne

Toyomi, colorist at Kim Vo Salon, West Hollywood. “While you’re in the chair, ask her about her favorite Japanese spots around town, she knows all the greats. Starts at $175, email/DM her or call the salon.” - Sheila Yasmin Marikar, author and journalist

Mark Anawalt, hairstylist/colorist. “One of LA’s best-kept secrets. Previously, only took appointments in his private home salons in West Hollywood or Palm Springs. Now taking limited appointments at Canale-Martinez in the Palisades. Good, fast (a perfectly blended, full set of highlights AND a cut in record time), not cheap. Call the salon at (310) 454-3444 or DM him @styledbymarkanawalt.” - Anonymous

Sayaka at Blow Me Away, Beverly Grove. “I’ve been going to Sayaka for years, long before head spas started popping up all over SoCal. She doesn’t use all the bells & whistles that successors have but I still haven’t found anyone better at scalp massage.” - Jean Ortiz-Luis, marketer & writer

Aaron King at Crane on Robertson Blvd in West Hollywood. “Aaron came up through red carpet grooming, so he really understands what cut/style will make you look the hottest, objectively. Yes, it’s tough to get on his schedule, and yes, it costs $200+, but…beauty is pain. You can text his assistant Mimi for scheduling: +1 (310) 780-1926” - Anonymous

Ryan at Unison Men’s Salon in Mid-City. “I drive across town for this, which is crazy, but Ryan went out on his own and started Unison a few years ago and has built out a great community and crew around it, they’re all so nice and the cuts are great. And it’s next door to Republique, so perfect for a snack after.” - Harry White

Kelsey at Studio33 on Miracle Mile in LA. “When I lived in LA, I got my hair cut at the incredibly cool (and equally hard-to-book) Unison. Luckily, two of their best barbers have since opened their own shops, where you can get a Unison-quality haircut without waiting months for an appointment (though if you can plan ahead, Ryan at Unison is still amazing). Kelsey recently opened Studio33, her solo salon inside Sola Salons on Miracle Mile in LA. Whenever I’m in town for TBPN and need a haircut or beard trim, I see Kelsey. She does an incredible job, and men’’‘s haircuts are $100. When I’’‘m home in the Bay, I see Tala, who also recently moved up from LA. She owns Bookwithtala in Burlingame, and short haircuts start at $75. I have incredibly curly hair, and both Kelsey and Tala are exceptionally good at cutting and styling curls, a skill that’’‘s been much harder to find on the West Coast than it was in NYC.” - Dylan Abruscato, President, TBPN

Kat Cali or Allison DeMoss at Freija Collective in Highland Park. “Almost every cool girl who lives east of the 101 gets their haircut at Freija. Both Kat and Allison are incredibly gifted at giving that cool, tousled haircut that works just as well for rolling out of bed as it does styled. My husband and I both see Allison now that Kat splits her time in Nashville, but both are amazing.” - Sarah Freedman, writer

Ryann Bossetti. “My hairdresser in LA is Ryann Bosetti, who I found in a Feed Me thread (I believe rec’d by Grace Doherty). To put it the most Californian way I can, she has the best, most calming energy. She cuts hair to be manageable and air dry gracefully.” - Julia Woods

Gel Lyle for color at Summer Hours Salon in Silver Lake. “Gel always delivers the perfect Amanda Seyfried blonde.” - Leonora Epstein, writer/Schmatta

Ashley Flores at Gold on Grand Salon in DTLA. “Hair is so important, changing anything is nerve-wracking, you want to feel like you’re in good hands... this is the spot. I send all my friends here. Ashley is the owner of the salon and can do anything, I go every time I need a boost and want to feel pretty! Best cut and color (and blow out) in town.” - Lisa Hanawalt

SKIN

Sora Connor, Esthetician. “Sora just gets skin. Her treatments leave you looking lifted, sculpted, and refreshed. She has an incredible touch, and her facial massage is pure magic. You walk out of her studio feeling both energized and deeply relaxed.” (From $350, referral only) - Jayme Cyk, founder of And Repeat and author of the Substack I’m On An Antidepressant

Amy Velten, facials at Blush Spa, Pasadena. “She’s the absolute sweetest! Prices vary depending on treatment. $175 for standard facial.” - Tori Schachne

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Earlier this summer, I bought a copy of Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham. I started it yesterday and it’s a pleasure to devour. I can’t stop thinking about Robin Birley, the owner of members’ club Annabel’s, getting mauled by a tiger in a private zoo when he was 12.

Today’s newsletter includes: Tommy Paul’s new canned cocktail brand, on an East Village “pizza studio,” an interview with the designer behind influencer Halley Kate’s pink wedding dress, Substack appears to be launching a slate of platform-exclusive shows, and the magazine launching social media-only columns.

Have a story you want me to include in the newsletter? Need to tell me something? Respond to this email or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

The Feed Me store is back!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on bringing back the Feed Me store. The collection includes reader-favorite merch, like American-made heavy crewnecks, and every version of the ouroboros hat, plus some new goods like a Nalgene with the Feed Me manifesto (which I keep getting asked about on the subway) and thick, colorful towels.

I love making things for all of you. Thank you Dano, Shannon, and Justin for helping to bring this all to life.

SHOP FEED ME

Touching the face of god at Pizza Studio Tamaki. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about a Japanese pizza “studio” in the East Village.

New York is hot, it’s full of smoke, and it’s about that time of year when it’s beginning to clear out. Those of us who are still here have our pick of reservations, but we still can’t get a seat to see The Odyssey in IMAX. I think it’s more than fair to say that all of us who are here are wishing we were somewhere else. Almost every day I have a moment when I consider blocking someone, simply because they are somewhere fabulous, and I am not. The world feels so much bigger in the summertime. There are so many beaches, so many coves, so much water in so many shades of blue, and so many plates of fried seafood. The thing about New York, though, is that even when you can’t make it out to see the world, the world will always come to you. Recently, Pizza Studio Tamaki, the legendary Japanese pizza “studio,” known for their expertly charred Neapolitan pies, opened up shop on St. Mark’s Place, steps from Tompkins Square Park. Maybe one of their pies could transport me to Tokyo. Maybe to Naples.

Pizza Studio Tamaki, or PST, is in the East Village, but it feels like it’s in Madison, Wisconsin. (That’s no knock on Madison, I love Madison.) It feels like a fancy brewpub in a Midwestern college town, the place where you go for drinks with your “cohort.” The room is deceptively large and centered around a terrazzo bar where people drink beer out of wine glasses. Every surface is shiny, the lighting is very bright and very white. This is a pizza “studio” after all. Feel free to leave your flash at home, the room is bright enough. This isn’t a place where you come to have a romantic evening or a drink with friends, this place is designed for one thing and one thing only: taking photos of pizzas. Whether or not you eat the pizzas is up to you. This is the moment that we’re living in. My phone eats first, every time.

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Today’s newsletter includes: A Brooklyn restaurateur opening in a Williamsburg luxury development, there are at least four New York media summits this fall, on Ross McElwee’s Remake, my favorite bakery is hosting a sourdough workshop in Maine, and the owner of C.O. Bigelow explains why the West Village pharmacy is unusually busy this summer.

Before we begin, pop quiz: which half-zip is from OpenAI’s new merch store?

Ross McElwee’s Remake might make you look at your own camera roll and ask “What really happened there?” By

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

Last week I wrote a little about Remake, the new documentary from Ross McElwee. On Saturday, I saw the movie at Film Forum, and it was one of the most difficult and beautiful movies I’ve seen this year. I gave myself a headache crying through most of it. Remake picks up decades after McElwee’s 1986 film, Sherman’s March, and follows his attempts to see that documentary turned into a fiction feature. As those efforts stall, the focus shifts to the death of his son, Adrian, and becomes a meditation on their relationship in life and across Adrian’s past appearances in McElwee’s films.

Remake is a heart-breaking self-portrait of grief. But it’s also a self-portrait of an artist as an old man, at a moment when his faith in his life’s work is shaken to its core. McElwee has pointed a camera at the people he loves for fifty years and the film forces him to consider what that habit, taken this far, may have cost him. The film doesn’t quite make it explicit, but there’s a suggestion that McElwee’s compulsion mirrors the addictions that haunt Adrian.

Early on in McElwee’s narration, he introduces this idea that the “reels” of his life have become disorganized, out of order, that what’s left are segments you could rearrange into any number of stories. Later in the film, there’s a note from Adrian in which he writes about the disorienting effect of seeing alternate versions of his own life.

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Today’s newsletter includes: Jony Ive’s hardware plans for OpenAI, media parties are alive and well in Gowanus, a $100 million Manhattan members’ club, new Montauk tennis courts, the artist who painted Phoebe Bridgers’s new guitar has pieces for sale, Semafor is developing five new shows, everyone is creating an advice column, and a case for buying Chanel flats in the airport.

Have a story you want me to include in the newsletter? Need to tell me something? Respond to this email or text the Feed Me Tip Line: 1 (646) 494-3916

takes the crown for best party-host-slash-newsletter-writer. Last night, she invited her readers out for a “media mixer” that really just felt like a successful night at Public Records. Instead of the bar’s usual crowd of product managers wearing oversized Bode shirts and quirked-up rings, it was mostly-employed writers and politely ambitious recent grads.

Attendees included: , fresh off the plane , Brock Colyar, ’s Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush, , , Sam Hine, , Max Tani, Kiara Barrow, , and former Feed Me assistant Zack Hauptman—and I brought after our dinner at Lonnie’s (smashburger was messy but fantastic). I heard that a few attendees found the event just by browsing Eventbrite for things to go to. Honestly, cool.

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About 1/3 of the people dining at Balthazar last night had goblets of Balthazar Frose on the table. It was a little early in the week for me, but the woman across from me eating French onion soup and sipping on frosty blended wine and strawberries looked awfully happy.

Today in Feed Me: How an ice cream brand’s homemade Instagram feed captured my attention, Anthropic is looking for a New Yorker-level editor, Hailey Bieber’s new job at Gap, and X wants hot girls to post photos on their platform.

While scrolling on Instagram the other night, my thumb stopped on a felt flyer for an ice cream company called PomPom. Unlike other New York ice cream brands that have caught my attention through brand and chef collabs, PomPom hooked me in on their approach to marketing.

I got in touch with Shirah, the founder of PomPom, to learn more about her path from Ralph Lauren to health coach to ice cream maker. Right now, the ice cream — organic, natural plant-based whole food ingredients, without refined sugar, gluten, soy, nuts (mostly), gums, emulsifiers, stabilizers, or artificial colors/flavors — is made in small batches, and scooped out of a roving cart around Brooklyn.

Shirah told me about her former career in fashion, plans for pop-ups (Spiral Books!) and her daughter, Olivia, who is a RISD grad who makes all kinds of fantastic objects with felt.

How did you learn to make ice cream and why did you start PomPom?

Like with so many other stories, Pom Pom (the very early seeds of it) was something I began working on during the pandemic, when I had an unprecedented amount of time on my hands. I’d been put on furlough from my job at Ralph Lauren, where I’d worked for 13 years, and took the opportunity to do an online program to become a holistic health coach. I have an autoimmune disease, and am passionate about helping other people learn how to manage illness through diet and lifestyle. My other passion has always been baking, I did it professionally for a bit. These two interests sort of melded and flourished in the void that was left by my joblessness, and transformed into a purpose to bring something into the world that didn’t exist — something that makes people happy, and that also shows people that eating healthy and being happy are not mutually exclusive. I have a long list of dietary restrictions due to health issues, and could never find any vegan ice cream that wasn’t full of so much junk and sugar, so I became obsessed with making it. I got an ice cream machine and started experimenting, learning by trial and error. I also did a lot of reading about the science of ice cream making (it’s very scientific!)

What’s the most challenging part of hosting pop-ups? Where can people find your ice cream this summer?

Ice cream, specifically, is challenging in a pop-up situation because it melts. Figuring out how to keep it from melting while outside for hours in 85°+ weather is an ongoing pursuit. This summer, we’re popping up at our favorite cafe in Bed-Stuy, Rita & Maria. We’ll also be at Pilgrim Surf + Supply in Williamsburg at the end of August, and at the best children’s bookstore, Spiral Books, in September. There are a few other TBD dates, as well. We’ll post the details on IG!

I first discovered you from one of the flyers you posted on Instagram. The felt design was so lovely, and I figured someone with a strong sense of taste was behind the business. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to design and marketing the business?

Thank you :) I think beauty and art and design are very important, and that they should be integrated in everything, even an ice cream business. My approach to marketing is just authenticity, I guess. I don’t have any real strategy other than doing what resonates. I love natural materials and handmade crafts, so the design choices usually go in that direction. I’m very lucky because my older daughter, Olivia, is an amazing fiber artist. She has a felting business called For Play Lighting, but finds time to help me with making the felt flyers. I think they’re so beautiful. We have a great collaborative process where I tell her my vision and inspiration, and she interprets them in her own way. The fact that they’re made by my daughter makes the pieces so special to me. It also means I can be much more annoying and particular than I would ever be with any other designer.

What’s the long-term dream?

The dream is to open a little ice cream shop here in my area of Bed-Stuy, because we really need it. Gelateria-style, where the ice cream is made fresh every day, and the whole neighborhood — kids in their pajamas, dogs, everyone — gathers on summer evenings to hang out and chat and have a little treat before bed.

Anthropic is hiring a Standards Editor. The ideal person has strong opinions about how many times in one piece a colon should introduce an appositive. “Spiritually, this role is New York, not San Francisco.” Jake Eaton, an editor at Anthropic, posted on X that they’re looking for a comma queen. When I DM’d him asking what that meant, he replied with this story by Mary Norris (who worked at The New Yorker from 1978 to 2017). Anthropic’s editor salary is $265,000 - $295,000, which can pay for a very good editor. Maybe they can even get the Comma Queen herself out of retirement. Earlier this year, Notion, another AI company, hired New Yorker writer Adam Iscoe.

I’m feeling super bullish on brands like J.Crew and Merit, which are integrating illustration and collages into their marketing. In a sea of templatized graphics on Instagram and ChatGPT-generated images, there is such a satisfying element of surprise to handmade posts.

“I love being alive.” My friend Suze posted this over the weekend on X, along with photos from Sunset Beach on Shelter Island. What followed was a debate over whether women should be able to treat X like Instagram, with commentary from X’s head of product, Nikita Bier. An anon account Signull replied (now deleted) to Suze’s post saying “This is not Instagram.” Nikita then replied to Signull saying, “For the love of god, can we get a single woman on this app without an anon account attacking them?” My X feed is now full of beautiful women posting carousels of photos on X, also loving being alive. If you read between the lines, Nikita’s recent statements and algorithm changes suggest he wants to make X a safer and more fun place to post for your friends, mutuals, and like-minded accounts, without your comments getting hijacked by antagonistic accounts who found you through the algo… almost like how Twitter used to be before Musk bought it. You can read Nikita’s comments here in the context of this “friendlier algo” push, but like any of his experiments, we’ll see if it sticks

Brandon Tan has been named the Global Fashion Director of GQ. Tan, who spent the last two years at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, after working as a fashion editor at GQ from 2022 to 2024, has also been a personal stylist for Sombr. Per BoF, “Tan succeeds Miles Pope, who left the position last month to join activewear maker Vuori as vice president of style, talent and activations creative.”

Charli XCX, have you considered posting on LinkedIn? The musician, who has been organizing smaller, more intimate conversations and shows over the last year, said, “truly believe anti marketing will become a thing soon… still marketing but it’s just a different approach, more intimate, personal, private, one on one. less about the projection of scale.” All of which is to say: the intimate strategy is still a strategy.

Alix Earle is wearing Emily Dawn Long on the cover of Time Magazine.

A magazine launch I care deeply about: The New England Review of Boats.

Hailey Bieber has added denim designer to her resume. There have been so many signs that the Gap team is on fire: bringing Byline co-founder Meg O’Sullivan onto their creative team, setting up a hoodie station at Coachella, and choosing novelist Madeline Cash as a model for a recent campaign. But it was really solidified when I met a man in Cannes last month who said his shirt was by “Richard Dickson.”

Today in Feed Me: Newspapers know you want to click on stories about how rich people live, Brooklyn is getting another bathhouse-slash-members-club, a D.C. hotel offering pool passes during this week’s heat wave, a waterfront Brooklyn mansion hits the market, the marketing agency plagiarizing one of Substack’s bestselling business newsletters, and Legionnaires’ Disease is coming for New York museums.

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The Transatlantic Restaurant Exchange. By Montague Ashley-Craig.

Last week, wrote a London Edition of Feed Me for our readers across the pond (or those curious about Petrossian caviar soft-serve at Selfridges). Today, she has an essay for all of you about the other side of the London restaurants coming to New York conversation.

American readers will probably be aware that New York City is in the midst of a British restaurant boom.

There’s Dame in Greenwich Village, which since opening in 2020 has helped redefine British food for a New York audience with its fish and chips, sticky toffee pudding, and pints of Guinness. The restaurant recently announced plans to open a standalone chippy in the East Village. Three blocks away, Lord’s has New Yorkers queueing for sausage rolls and Scotch eggs. Dean’s, a seafood-centric pub in Hudson Square, serves pork scratchings, bubble and squeak, stargazy pie, and Old Speckled Hen on draught. Then there are the British imports: Ambassador’s Clubhouse is bringing British-Indian food to Manhattan (with Dishoom to follow next year), Hawksmoor is doing a roaring trade in steak and Sunday roasts, and the internet’s favorite Notting Hill chef badboy, Tom Straker, is opening his first American restaurant this summer.

But what you might not be aware of is that, at almost exactly the same moment, the culinary special relationship has been running in reverse, as well. Since the dawn of the pandemic, London has been speedrunning the American food canon, one hyper-regional specialty at a time.

It all started with subs. During the first lockdown, as restaurants scrambled to pivot to takeaway, sandwiches suddenly made sense. But instead of doubling down on Britain’s own sandwich traditions, a new generation of shops—Dom’s Subs (full disclosure: my husband opened it), Bodega Rita’s, Mondo Sando, Fat Pat’s—looked west and embraced a distinctly Italian-American idea of the sandwich.

Travel was off the table. If you wanted the kind of Italian-American hoagie you’d normally seek out in New York, someone in London had to make it. Thanks to social media, London’s chefs could obsess over heros from Brooklyn, bagels from Manhattan, and brisket from Austin—and go about recreating it here.

For years, Britain’s idea of the American sandwich had begun and ended with Subway. The pandemic changed that. Chefs started treating subs with the seriousness they’d once reserved for tasting menus. Suddenly there were freshly baked sesame-crusted rolls, shaved lettuce, vinaigrette, mortadella and capicola. The sandwich became an object of obsession.

Looking back, the sandwich was just the gateway drug.

Next came the bagel wave. London already had bagels. What it didn’t have was New York bagels. A new generation of shops – It’s Bagels, Papo’s, Paulie’s, and Banook – weren’t trying to continue the city’s longstanding Jewish beigel tradition. They were chasing something altogether different: the glossy, blistered, chewy bagels of New York City.

As lockdown restrictions eased and sit-down dining returned, attention shifted from food that traveled well to food that demanded time, space, and intention. Barbecue was the next wave.

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I am battling a hangover today after having a late night (martini at Maxime’s, wine at Bemelmans, Pete’s Tavern with varsity Substack Notes user ) so thank you for bearing with me and thank you Terrace Bagels for saving my life.

Today in Feed Me: D.C. tailors are dressing customers up like Chase bank tellers in Brickell, a new Bed-Stuy bakery from a former Vogue contributor, on Austin’s newest steakhouse, Chase Bank joined Substack, Bloomberg investigates Phoebe Gates’s startup, and frozen yogurt on Canal Street.

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First Look: The Driskill Grill, in Austin, TX. By

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about a new steakhouse in Austin that the MML Hospitality team invited him to check out.

The Driskill Grill is the real deal. The historic restaurant, in Austin’s historic Driskill hotel, was taken over by the MML hospitality group this year. It’s been overhauled, revamped, retooled, and polished to a mirror sheen. At its helm is April Bloomfield, the sometimes embattled and always brilliant chef behind The Spotted Pig, and more recently Sailor. April can tell you what is a pub, and what is not a pub. The Driskill Grill is not a pub. It’s a steakhouse, and it’s a proper one.

Before tech, Teslas, Outdoor Voices, Rogan, and “comedy,” the biggest business in this town was oil, and the second biggest was cows. The founder of The Driskill was a cattleman, who made his fortune selling beef during the Civil War, so appropriately there is a deep reverence for cows, and for cowboys here. While the Driskill Grill is a properly buttoned up restaurant, with top-notch service, monogrammed butter, salad forks, white table cloths, and beautiful leather banquettes, they’ll never ask you to take off your hat, cowboy or otherwise. This is fine dining for VC-funded roughnecks, if John Wayne drove a Cybertruck. You might come to the Driskill to close a deal, but the real business of the evening is having a good time; smashing ice cold martinis and ice cold seafood towers with abandon. The oysters here are immaculate, and the wedge salad is a real treat. It’s served somewhat deconstructed with a generous serving of tomatoes, a big slice of blue cheese, and a slab of thick cut charred bacon. It’s decadent, refreshing, and perfect. Elegance without austerity.

But there’s more to the Driskill than classic steakhouse fare. The menu is full of little exuberant and slightly experimental moments that are rare at this type of establishment, but never feel out of place. An avocado salad with crispy kale and puffed rice sounds like a weird hippie monstrosity, but it’s texturally vivacious, it tastes familiar and new all at once, and the chili dressing keeps you on your toes; I can’t stop thinking about it. A thai-style crab fried rice might seem out of place on the menu of a Texas steakhouse, but when it’s on your plate next to some chargrilled tomatoes and creamed sweet corn, it almost reads as Southern. Those green thai chilis are great at cutting through fat, and noise, they open up your salivary glands, they prep your mouth for some steak. As if your mouth needed prepping. The dry-aging room holds a prominent spot in the dining room, it’s radiant, and it reminds you that this is a house built BY beef and FOR beef. And this beef is some of the best I’ve had anywhere. I’m no beef expert, and I’ve said before that writing about meat is vulgar (no one needs to read about the bloody flesh of a beast), but there’s just so much depth in each bite of this dry-aged steak. I often feel that I could be a pescetarian, I don’t cook much meat at home, but steaks like these are a reminder of why meat is just so compelling, and why I won’t be quitting it any time soon.

Remember when I said that this is not a pub? Well it’s not, but there is some pub influence, of course. After all, this is an April Bloomfield restaurant. The prime rib is cut tableside and served Sunday roast style with horseradish cream, and the eggiest richest Yorkshire pudding, perfect for sopping up all of those delicious meat juices. I’m not embarrassed to say that I made myself a little sandwich.

By the time the dessert cart rolled around, I was entering a meat coma, but the thing about dessert is that there is always room for dessert. The desserts at the Driskill are delightful. You should order a baked alaska, if not to eat, at least for the pyrotechnics, which are always impressive. It might have been that impending meat coma, or maybe the multiple martinis and all the wine I drank, but the ice cream sundae at the Driskill had me feeling like a giddy overtired delirious little child, so happy and ready for bed. It felt like my birthday.

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My official drink of summer is cheap white wine: riesling, sav blanc, pinot gris, it can come out of a bottle, a can, a box, whatever, on ice, with a heavy splash of cherry Spindrift. Any flavor of Spindrift will work (or even a cheeky little Something & Nothing), but the cherry flavor is new and rare, and absolutely delicious if you’re a cherry head like I am. It also gives you that fomo-inducing color of the perfect summer petnat/co-ferment/rosato, that makes people on Instagram go wild. It looks like an ice cold sunset in a glass, and it tastes like candy made by angels (not too sweet). It’s refreshing, and lets people know that you’re not a snob, you’re here for some fun and you’re thirsty. We’re calling it the Shmandy, and we’ve got till September 7th. Clock starts now. Drink up!

D.C. men, particularly “founders and executives in the defense technology space,” have an increased interest in fitted suits. Just when you were about to pull the trigger on that oversized vintage Armani suit on your Grailed watchlist, WSJ has published a story on the rise in popularity of tighter-fitting suits. This is an important conversation, and a timely one considering Wednesday’s Subway Take was that men get in shape for other men, not for women. In the same way, these suits have gotta be for other men because they sure aren’t for me. They remind me a little of the DJs from Long Island bat mitzvahs, and a little like someone who is trying to be part of Andrew Tate’s entourage. A casual Friday Lululemon ABC wearer. A man who posts gym selfies in the poorly-lit hotel gym while traveling for work. It’s also worth noting that D.C. is a terribly dressed city so the correct conclusion is that none of us should listen to what they’re doing.

A former Vogue contributor named Samantha Rees opened a bakery called Saison at 434 Hancock Street in Bed-Stuy. Neighborhood newsletter reported that after Saison entered the neighborhood, “someone pointedly printed off a list of Black-owned bakeries and posted it outside the store.”

From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Have you seen/tried LeLick? An electrolyte lollipop sounds enticing, would love your opinion! My first thought is it be the only ‘wellness’ product that bridges the gap between Pilates girlies and vapers who are maybe trying to quit with its ‘oral sensation.’” I’m guessing the person who sent this works at LeLick. I have two thoughts: I don’t like this site’s A.I.-generated imagery, and I don’t see how a lollipop could hydrate you unless there was a drop of water in the center.

From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Word on the street is that Frenchette is taking over Casa (Brazilian Restaurant) on Duane Street. Those are the only details I have.” I reached out to the Frenchette team for a comment.

These Sun Valley photos from this 1994 issue of Vanity Fair are sick. How far we’ve fallen, sartorially.

Your stupid Hamptons parties are killing piping plover chicks.

Tracy Anderson told the FT about how she banned phones from her workout classes. “The studio is not a content set; it is a practice space. When people enter our rooms, they are stepping into an environment designed to support focus, regulation and creativity. Phones interrupt that relationship.”

Bloomberg reported that Phia, the shopping tool co-founded by Phoebe Gates (daughter of Bill) and Sophia Kianni, claimed credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive. I don’t know anyone who has ever used Phia, so I was surprised when they raised $35 million earlier this year. Per Bloomberg, “Phia registered fake clicks on retailers’ websites, allowing it to replace another referrer’s unique code with its own… This allows Phia to claim a commission for sales it did not meaningfully influence.” Embarrassing. Sophia and Phoebe also hosted a podcast about running a startup called The Burnouts on Alex Cooper’s Unwell network. In Vanity Fair’s recent investigation of Unwell, I learned that they left the network. “The Burnouts are now actively exploring new partners for season two.”

Chase launched a new youth-focused newsletter on Substack called Stacking Paper. It’s not so bad. They roped in popular writers on the platform like and , as well as an anonymous author named “the paper stacker” who walks readers through grocery budgets and what to do if you lose your debit card.

Food, the artist-run restaurant on Canal Street, is starting to serve frozen yogurt. They even started a new Instagram account (fro_yooooooo) to show the brands they’re working with. The first flavor is with Sourmilk Yogurt and Psycho olive oil, but I’m curious if they’re going to loop in other brands in the future, a la Erewhon. Fun.

Gracie Abrams said she wrote part of her new album in the Elizabeth Street Garden.

Today in Feed Me: A historic midtown bar is looking for a new operator, on movies to see this weekend (including one I’m introducing), women are getting facelifts on their hands, the fate of Anna Delvey’s members club, which A.I. millionaire is going to the T-Rex auction at Sotheby’s next week, a new Hamptons cooking show is coming to Netflix, and SF’s tech companies are setting up shop in New York City.

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I was a little surprised by the reactions to the events roundup I included in yesterday’s newsletter. Substack’s CMS launched a new callout block feature a few weeks ago, and I’ve been playing around with it to try to figure out the best way to integrate it into Feed Me. Substack is notoriously limited on the design front, but I think I’ve done a good job at working around it with designing elements and manually adding them to here, plus using the Substack-provided customization tools like line breaks, colored text, and fonts.

I will use this as a moment to advise any person trying to find success in media at large, or specifically on Substack, to think more about design. If you like how a brand looks, develop the language so you can articulate why you like it. The reasoning behind my investment in Feed Me’s design is twofold: I respect my readers too much to put something ugly in their inboxes, and I identify as an artist before anything else.

I frequently work with illustrator (and fellow FIT grad) Sara Rabin on physical and digital Feed Me projects. When I worked with my designer Justin on Feed Me’s design system in 2024, I brought a variety of references to the table — Japanese car ads, old Apple Computer guides, worn out embroidered gym bags that you see bankers carrying on the A train.

Feed Me’s ouroboros symbol brings together two heavyweights of internet history: It’s a reconfiguration of Susan Kare’s command symbol for the keyboard of the original Macintosh computer, with an 8bit snake head that is evocative of Taneli Armanto’s Snake game preloaded on many of our first Nokia phones. The ouroboros also illustrates the theme of consumption, and the fact that Feed Me’s tone has a bit of a bite to it.

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Last night, I attended my friend Jack Klein’s talk about subway temperatures in the back room at PubKey (sick website). Jack invited me to introduce him ahead of his presentation, which was easy for me to do. I’ve been a fan of his work since I interviewed him for Feed Me last summer.

I said this last night, but Jack really cares about small interventions that can make a difference in the quality of life and comfort of New Yorkers. Zohran Mamdani had that bump at the entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge smoothed out in January; Jack took it upon himself to hand out water in the subways during the heat wave last week. One thing Jack said that stuck with me was that with natural disasters like fires or floods, there is physical residue of the issue in question. Where with heat, once the city cools down, we all forget how hot it is. If any of you look into Jack’s work and research, and would like to get involved or offer some ideas, let me know and I’ll connect you.

Today in Feed Me: Hotel Chelsea’s owner expands into midtown, burnout is surging among tech workers, a new members’ club in Battery City (random), a dream editor-in-chief executive assistant job, reading 1984 in the time of Meta Glasses, Tory Burch’s sparkly new hire, and celebrities are buying merch.

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What will happen to this now-beleaguered building? By Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert.

The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office.

Through June, New York is having something of a banner year for housing, announcing that nearly 40,000 units were added to the City’s perpetually-short housing stock in 2025 and that the City is poised to bring as much housing on-market every month through the end of the decade as San Francisco builds in an entire year. Better still, the coming influx of monied datanauts at Anthropic or Citadel or OpenAI will have plenty of ultra-expensive, strangely-shaped, full-amenity apartments to lease as the City doubles its already sizable lead in transforming Manhattan’s dumpy Reagan-era office space into residences. The pipeline today, stoked further by Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes” zoning reform and Mayor Mamdani’s YIMBYish tendencies (and despite the rent freeze), leaves New York with a real outside chance of meaningfully cutting its housing supply shortage, which drives so many out of the City and State seeking more comfortable (economic, physical) conditions to form families.

With all of this good news, and while still riding the highs of a new apartment and quitting my job, I wrote off the pair of enormous fire trucks (in their own PE-driven shortage) ripping past me down Broadway at 8 a.m. yesterday as an oddity. After settling in at my desk, I learned they were in fact responding to the sagging, shifting former Pfizer headquarters, where five floors started blowing out under added stress from new construction grafted onto the existing structure. While Uncles everywhere made the same joke about the perceived irony of the Pfizer building collapsing, the building itself, one of the largest (~1,500 units) and most expensive (~$700 million of loans) office-to-residential gambles to date, just sort of…sat there doing nothing.

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If you were traveling during Father’s Day last month like I was, you can make up for it with tickets to Bob Dylan at Forest Hills on July 21st.

Today in Feed Me: A new midtown newsstand selling Iraqi Cokes and old magazines, Recho Omondi on the biggest open secret about New York’s fashion world, Downtown Brooklyn is getting a five-story mall, the latest hobby of Upstate New York teenage boys, and Matthieu Blazy replaced the Chanel bride with a revenge dress.

Browsing and posting on the Feed Me Job Board is free. Roles this week include:

☎️ Communications Manager at The Cutting Room Floor

👖 Creative Marketing Manager at Eckhaus Latta

🎨 Design Director at Day Job

FEED ME JOB BOARD

This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Alison Roman, Rachel Karten, and Jake Sherman.

Recho Omondi is the host of The Cutting Room Floor, a podcast about the fashion industry and the people who occupy it. I started listening during COVID and have been a devout listener since. Today, Recho answers your questions about paywalls, New York’s fashion world secrets, and fandom.

“If you were starting a show again today, what would your strategy be with free vs paywalled content?” - Macy

If I were starting from scratch today, I’d probably go all in on TikTok first. Just to test the market and find out whether people genuinely care about your POV. If you build a loyal audience that consistently shows up for you, then maybe I’d experiment with a paid offering that gives them a compelling reason to come along.

You have to be thoughtful about the relationship between your free and paid content, though. If you’re giving everything away for free, the audience will wonder what’s different about the paywalled experience. The paid offering has to feel meaningfully distinct. There has to be a real value proposition. What is someone getting in exchange for their money? That’s something every creator has to answer for themselves.

“Where do you see the most benefits from paywalling your full conversations as opposed to others who share on YouTube? How and where do those benefits show up and how do you approach growth with that in mind? (thinking a lot about paywalling conversations that often happen behind closed doors as a way to mitigate some of the pain of sharing publicly for *everyone in the world* to weigh back in on)” - Cait

For me, one of the biggest benefits of the paywall is that I’m no longer a slave to the algorithm, which has become more and more tyrannical over the years. I like knowing that my audience knows where to find me. I don’t have to constantly chase trends or make content that feels inauthentic just to stay visible.

The other major benefit is the good-faith conversation. When people are paying to be there, it’s an intentional choice, which creates a positive environment. The comments and discussions happen in much better faith because there are fewer drive-by content consumers and fewer people showing up just to argue for sport. This makes it easier to have nuanced conversations, without every subject getting flattened into a debate.

You and Emily seem to have different ways of publishing content. Recho does episodes every other week vs. Emily does a newsletter essentially every day. I’m curious if there’s anything Recho thinks she’s missing out on by having more intermittent content in a time when people are posting at such high frequencies. - Angela

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Today in Feed Me: Substack is hiring a creator consigliere, Hamptons weekend gossip from victims of the Shelter Island Ferry’s new schedule, The Gramercy Park Hotel’s members club kerfuffle, Into the Gloss hires a new editor, and a new influencer reporter whose job it is to investigate deleted comments and “telling crops.”

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During a thunderstorm on Saturday night, there was a fight at Sunset Beach. One reader told me his friend found a Patek on the ground afterwards.

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