I don't want to hide these clothing tags. 🏷️
Plus: Patreon layoffs, Air Mail expands its coverage, and more.
Good afternoon, everyone.
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 Sami Reiss’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.