Christmas in New York.

A Gothic Yule, Target in SoHo, financial cocktails.

Dec 11, 2025

Today’s letter is free because it’s sponsored by Target.

Good morning everyone. I can’t wait to see some of you tonight at Feed Me’s party with Link in Bio.

Today’s letter includes: The redesigned Target in SoHo, The New York Times is doubling down on podcast clips, finance-themed cocktail menus, and The New York Review of Books joins Substack.

Last night I bounced between three holiday parties: Meta’s at People’s, my friends at Centre Street Partners at The Clocktower, and then one thrown by Harrison Vail and Laurence Milstein in Laurence’s family apartment at The Dakota. To repeatedly overhear people exclaim: “We’re at The Dakota!” was both funny and completely deserved. It’s The Dakota, after all.

The theme of the party was A Gothic Yule, and the invitation was appropriately an Edward Gorey illustration of two lizards drinking martinis. The mood was bright across the board — smiles about low-stakes rumors and a collective effort to avoid checking the time.

I was eating a slice of meringue cake in the dining room with a Palantir employee who told me that the room reminded her of the mansions she grew up around in Newport, Rhode Island. I got up close to the wallpaper in one of the rooms and realized it wasn’t wallpaper at all — every line and flourish was hand-painted. I looked at the bowl of mustard beside the hotdogs baked in puff pastry and wondered if this would be the only night where Joe Kahn, Meredith Marks and I would share a mustard bowl.

After a third drink, my vision was becoming Lynchian. The tablescape of layer cakes baked by Lauren Schofield looked like Christmas dinner at Hogwarts. And the butler was straight out of central casting. His job for the night was to part a crowd of writers and make way for a bagpiper (also out of central casting) to march around the room, while guests clamored around him to get the best angle for their Instagram videos.

At the end of the performance, the butler and bagpiper rushed into a room behind the dining room. You don’t see a bi-swing door in a home very often. I want to write more about this party, but that’s not what you’re all here for…

J Lee and I are doing an end-of-year AMA podcast on Friday and we want your questions. Leave a voicemail on the Feed Me hotline (keep it funny, keep it brief) and we’ll answer them on Friday’s show!!!!!!!! ‪(646) 494-3916‬

I find myself walking up the stairs of the Broadway/Lafayette subway station no less than three times a week. Last month, I noticed some changes in the windows of the Target store in SoHo, and on Monday night I learned why – it’s been transformed into a one-of-a-kind concept store, or as I kept remarking at the opening party, “Not my Long Island suburban Target!” (I love that one too). The space feels much more like a downtown New York concept store than a big-box store. Celebrity makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes helped to curate their Beauty Bar (I want to know what products Paloma Elsesser took home from the party) and it’s smart that they included at least a dozen selfie opportunities for shoppers, including a photo booth. The holiday season reopening is obviously intentional: the place is stuffed with giftable things like matching pajamas, furry coats, small home décor objects, and instant cameras. The kinds of items you tell yourself you’re buying “for other people.” The entry to Target SoHo is a long, newly built red hallway meant to feel like walking through the Bullseye logo, with rotating collections that change by season. Phase two of the redesign rolls out in 2026, with plans for a café, event programming, and more seasonal installations.
CAT MARNELL wrote about being sober for three years. I liked reading about how tidy her apartment has become.
Rama Duwaji (Zohran Mamdani’s wife) is the reason I know what a “bixie” haircut is. Part bob, part pixie. Her Brooklyn-based hair stylist, Lauren Sottile, posted a photo of her last week, and I’m sure it led to a boost in appointment inquiries.
The New York Times is doubling down on video podcast promotion. They posted a job listing yesterday for a post-production editor to work on a range of shows including Popcast and The Interview. Applicants should have “a digital-first mindset to editing on-platform and for social media” and they’ll also assist in “defining style and techniques that give our videos a voice and make them stand out from the pack.” Roles like this are part of a broader trend: audio teams being rebuilt as video teams, hosts being treated like talent, and video clips being treated as a key product vs. an afterthought. If you’re interested in learning more about the increasing importance of social video in newsrooms, I consider Rachel Karten’s interview with Arjun Ram Srivatsa required reading.
I’m a Salt & Stone skeptic, but they’re on track to do $140mm in revenue by the end of 2025.
Hinge’s founder Justin McLeod is stepping down as CEO to build Overtone, an AI-powered dating app, which he’s launching with Match Group’s support. Jackie Jantos, president and CMO of Hinge, will succeed McLeod as the dating app’s CEO. You might not know Jantos’s name, but you know her work – she was responsible for the “No Ordinary Love” campaign that was all over the subway and Substack earlier this year.
I want to talk to whoever is coming up with the names for these finance-themed specialty cocktails I’ve been served the past two nights.
Menu on the left is from the Odd Lots 10-year party, menu on the right is from the Centre Street Partners holiday party.
Scoop: The New York Review of Books is joining Substack on Friday. Editor Emily Greenhouse told Feed Me about the move:
The New York Review is sixty-odd years old, so writers and friends who come by the office are often frankly alarmed at how young much of the staff is (hell I’ve been in this job almost seven years, and I’m still holding on to my thirties). It’s a huge point of pride that we publish writers from their twenties to their nineties — any age, really, so long as the thinking is electric and the approach to ideas curious and rigorous.
All to say we’ve got a lot of overlap with the folks on Substack, where quite a few of our regular contributors write already. We’re jazzed to be here.
We’ll of course be featuring archive hits (Didion, Baldwin, Sontag), but even more of our vibrant new stuff, too, starting with our barn-burner of a holiday issue, which covers everything from unregulated crypto to Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel to Italian fascism to shipwrecked love affairs to tuberculosis to Thomas Jefferson’s inner turmoil, and then a swooning carnation of a crescendo with Andrew O’Hagan on Oasis.
Can I interest you in Ben Lerner on his open-heart surgery, Namwali Serpell on the whore figure onscreen, or Sally Rooney on snooker?
SC103’s first store opens tomorrow on Henry Street! Founders Claire McKinney and Sophie Andes-Gascon joked to Vogue that they should have an HGTV show after the amount of work that went into the store.
And Maryam Nassir Zadeh is shutting down. End of an era!!! MNZ girls were the coolest.
The new Sweetgreen store reminds me of the Khaite store in Soho. The salad chain’s CEO, Jonathan Neman, told me Khaite wasn’t on the mood board. I wonder what they’re going to play on those custom speakers (from House Under Magic) for all the Flatiron tech employees waiting for salad.
Sweetgreen, Khaite