Did you see the new Bon Appetit cover?
Did you see the new Bon Appetit cover?
+ a hot (unconfirmed) New York restaurant tip, where to get lip filler.
Good morning everyone. Hope you had a good weekend and didn’t get too sunburnt.
It is just about as hot as it could be in New York this week. Last week I was laying in bed watching The Comfort of Strangers, while tapping through Instagram and half-paying attention to Christopher Walken when I saw Brynn Wallner promote the Windmill Air fan. I looked up, felt how hot my apartment was, and ordered one.
Last night, I got home to Brooklyn after a long wine and peach-soaked weekend on Long Island and saw the Windmill box in my doorway and I was never more grateful. This isn’t sponsored (and I don’t believe Brynn’s post was either), it was just a funny, rare successful case of me being influenced. Later in the night, I fainted not because of the heat but because of the lobotomy scene in Six Schizophrenic Brothers on Max.
Today’s letter includes my semi-annual “What the fuck is going on at Bon Appetit?,” a very hot unconfirmed New York restaurant tip, an interview with a duo who left a viral Instagram bakery to start their own, and an observation of eating disorder culture that seems to be percolating this summer.
NEWS:
This week’s New York Magazine cover. I haven’t seen their social team or homepage promote it this morning, for obvious reasons we can assume.
Google may be acquiring cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23B. Wiz, founded in 2020, had been eyeing an IPO as recently as May, when it achieved a valuation of $12B. Its security offering gives companies insight into their full cloud presence, which is a growing sector as more startups are moving their apps and data to the cloud. If completed, the deal will be Google's largest acquisition in history.
Mickey Drexler joined Instagram. Patiently awaiting controversial industry lessons and tough love.
I won’t say the hot topic, but one hot topic of the summer is eating disorders. We have:
Two songs on Charli XCX’s Brat discussing eating disorders (“'Cause for the last couple years, I've been at war with my body, I tried to starve myself thinner, And then I gained all the weight back.” on girl, so confusing with Lorde and “Honestly, I’m always thinking ’bout my weight,” on “Rewind and "You said she's anorexic and you heard she likes when people say it" on Mean Girls)
Then there’s the “speck of dust” meme on TikTok, where people compare themselves to a tiny teeny speck of dust when they make a healthy decision. Like ordering water at dinner or sharing fruit instead of getting dessert or getting a spinach tortilla instead of a regular one on a quesadilla.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserVogue’s culture writer Emma Specter published More, Please, a memoir about her binge-eating disorder and changing relationship to weight, this week.
And Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight, which I read earlier this week, was all about her eating disorder. It was a beautiful essay collection.
WSJ wrote about women who are relying on energy drinks to stay thin. At Cleveland Clinic Children’s, about a third of the hospital’s eating-disorder patients consume energy drinks, estimates Ellen Rome, head of adolescent medicine. Teen and young-adult patients frequently arrive for appointments with Celsius cans in hand, she says.
A recent episode of Kardashian’s said that Lemme Curb, Kourtney Kardashian’s metabolism-boosting gummies, sold out at Target.
This week, Air Mail published a story about how this conversation is happening while Ozempic usage is soaring. “With the overwhelming rise in weight-loss drugs and celebrities squeezing into ever shrinking shapewear, there’s a sense of fatigue regarding keeping up the whole charade—a re-assessment of expending energy on achieving thinness over everything, a collective eyebrow raise at the inundation of diet-culture messaging being leveled at us from every angle, even after decades of feminist advancement.”
