It's time to make an East End Black Book. 🦞
There are still 47 days left of summer.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Yesterday, Brex published a list of the top 15 newsletters that startups expense on their Brex corporate cards. Lenny Rachitsky was #1, Rachel Karten was #5, and Feed Me was #6. The report said, “Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me is up 38%. Feed Me is a read about taste and consumer culture, and it sits four spots below Stratechery on the same corporate cards.” Thank you to all the finance teams approving this $80 expense.
Feed Me is working on another Black Book, this time for the East End of Long Island including the North Fork, Shelter Island, and The Hamptons. If you know a guy, know a spot, or feel like letting the Feed Me readership on a recommendation you’d normally gatekeep, please submit a response here. 🏖️
Today’s newsletter includes: The bank spending $250 million a year on Ozempic for employees, the future of skincare is getting another human’s fat injected into your face, Puck is hiring a party planner, Vogue heads to San Francisco, Teddy Kim on New York Film Festival, and a millennial divorce marks the end of an era.
Posting and browsing on the Feed Me Job Board is free. New roles this week include:
🍦 Store manager at Sworl, a new protein-based soft serve store opening in the West Village.
🎤 Coordinator, Podcast Revenue Partnerships at Audacy (the podcast platform behind shows like Search Engine and The Powers That Be).
📱 Social Media Manager at Dan Harris’s media company, 10% Media.
We’re 50 days out from the New York Film Festival. By Teddy Kim.
Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.
The 64th New York Film Festival (9/25-10/12) just announced its Main Slate of 32 films this year. Whereas Sundance opens the festival calendar and therefore has the charm of surprise and discovery, NYFF, arriving in the fall, always delivers a strong curation of the year’s festival bests. The cast and crew are often there to present the films they’ve worked on, and it’s hard to not bump into someone just walking in and around Alice Tully Hall. You might see New Yorker critic Richard Brody on the sidewalk, run into Mikey Madison on the way to the bathroom, and find yourself sitting in a screening next to Ari Aster. It’s also often the last time to catch these films before they release theatrically, sometimes months and months later.
Last year’s crop was particularly strong: It Was Just an Accident, Sentimental Value, and my favorite movie from last year, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. This year’s slate looks promising, as well. Chris Rock is back as a director, after 12 years, with his new film, Misty Green. From the prolific director Hong Sang-soo, we have two new films, something you can count on seeing every year, considering that NYFF director Dennis Lim literally wrote the book on Hong. Many of the top films from Cannes are there: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which is opening the festival.
The two films I’m most excited for: An exclamation in the title doesn’t always bode well, but in the case of Behemoth!, it’s a fitting punctuation to welcome back Tony Gilroy, fresh off his success on Andor, with his first feature film in 14 years. Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is also back, after eight years, with Possible Love. Lee works at a novelist’s pace, but arguably every one of the six films he’s directed is a masterpiece. His work is known for its social realism and the deep and complex human emotion of his characters. Lee’s Burning is one of the best films since 2018, and I’m a firm believer that it should have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. Sadly it didn’t even get nominated, just missing the Korean zeitgeist that Parasite ushered in the following year. I’m counting down the days until we get to see his newest, and if it’s as good as his past work, I certainly hope it gets more love.
If you’re around the city for the festival, I highly recommend checking it out. You can get early passes or individual tickets later, although be warned that in-demand screenings sell out quickly. If you want to brush up on some filmography leading up to NYFF64, here’s where to start:
Lee Chang-dong: Burning; Oasis; Secret Sunshine; Poetry
Pedro Almodóvar: Talk to Her; All About My Mother; Volver; Pain and Glory
Mike Leigh: Secrets & Lies; Naked; Vera Drake
Paweł Pawlikowski: Ida; Cold War; My Summer of Love
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi: Drive My Car; Happy Hour; Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Andrew Haigh: 45 Years; Weekend; Lean on Pete
Hong Sang-soo: The Day He Arrives; Tale of Cinema; Right Now, Wrong Then
Tony Gilroy: Michael Clayton; Andor
James Gray: The Immigrant; Two Lovers; We Own the Night
New releases this weekend:
A24’s teenage Anthony Bourdain biopic, Tony, is opening in limited release in NY and LA. Early reviews from this one are great, with good buzz coming from “Industry Night” screenings on Monday that were hosted by local chefs in 25 cities. Tony goes wide on August 21. One Night Only, starring man of the hour Callum Turner and an ascendant Monica Barbaro. Anyone who’s been to the movies recently has seen the trailer, which pitches the high-concept and annoyingly compelling premise: What if single people were only allowed to have sex one night a year? Yes, many people have commented: The Purge, but fornication. This is director Will Gluck’s follow-up to Anyone but You, which I didn’t love. But it did make $220 million on a $25 million budget and vaulted Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney to a new level of stardom, so I appreciate Gluck trying to single-handedly revive the theatrical rom-com. Reviews for One Night Only are mixed, but if you liked Anyone But You, you’ll probably enjoy this one. I’m intrigued by what amusing world-building the movie will do to sell the premise—how exactly does the government outlaw single people from from having sex every other night?—and whether Turner and Barbaro have the chemistry to make us care about little else. In any case, I bet entire planes will be watching this on Delta flights this fall. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens limited in NY and LA, starring Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) and Gillian Anderson (The X-Files). Director Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Camp Miasma premiered at Cannes this year and won the Queer Palm. A psychedelic slasher inspired by Friday the 13th, it’s the second notable queer horror movie of the summer, after Leviticus.
Here are some other screenings I’d encourage you to check out in the coming week:
📮 Friday 8/7 onwards, @ Film at Lincoln Center & Film Forum — Late Fame (2026) — Willem Dafoe stars as a downtown poet from the ’70s who gets adopted in his late age by a circle of young artists. Director Kent Jones, a former critic, headed the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019. The tickets for Q&A screenings with Jones and Dafoe, one moderated by Martin Scorsese, are sold out at Film at Lincoln Center, but they’re still available at Film Forum.
🚬 Saturday 8/8 @ Metrograph — In the Mood for Love (2000) — Part of Metrograph’s retrospective series on the work of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a frequent collaborator of director Wong Kar-wai. A mainstay of repertory cinemas, In the Mood for Love is arguably Wong’s magnum opus, filled with humid shadows, a haunting score, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung exchanging smoldering looks.
🔪 Saturday 8/8 & Sunday 8/9 @ Metrograph — The Chaser (2008) — Korean director Na Hong-jin’s debut thriller that chases a serial killer through Seoul across one night. Na’s film at Cannes this year, Hope, had a polarizing reception but apparently has been improved with edits and reworked VFX.
It’s the end of a DTC era: AWAY Luggage co-founder Jennifer Rubio and billionaire Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield are getting divorced. I’m not sure why, but this couple gave many millennials an immense amount of hope. Earlier this year, the pair donated $23 million to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and less than a year ago, Derek Blasberg wrote about their Southampton estate for Architectural Digest. I will always consider Stewart a romantic after the proposal tweet that he posted after AWAY’s $1.6 billion valuation.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product for the last 400 days, is stepping down. On Wednesday he wrote, “Serving the X community has been the privilege of a lifetime. X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history. But running this app is a 24/7 job and it’s now time for me to take a breather.”
Puck is hiring a party planner. This week, they posted an open role for a contract event coordinator who has “experience with event planning and project management.” It’s based in New York, but applicants must have willingness to travel (and willingness to not receive staff benefits). Rate is $55-$70/hour.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent insulted WSJ chief economics correspondent Nick Timiraos on X — and people across media and finance quickly jumped to Nick’s defense. Timiraos fits into a tradition of the WSJ Fed reporter enjoying a close relationship with the Fed, and putting out thoughtful reporting that’s a must-read across Wall Street. Finance blog ZeroHedge calls him “Nikileaks,” for his accurate scoops. New goal unlocked for an economics reporter: get nicknamed by ZeroHedge and insulted by the Treasury Secretary.
Uber’s lawyers question victims of sexual assault at the hands of drivers by drilling down on what they were wearing, among other things. The New York Times reports: “The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.”
Sweetgreen is launching a Niçoise salad with tinned fish brand Fishwife. The catch is that you have to assemble it yourself — the salad comes with a tin of tuna that you need to open, and somehow then get onto the salad without getting oil all over your hands and desk. Godspeed!
Would you get another human’s fat injected into your face to restore facial volume? Sounds like a horror story I wrote a few years ago. Bloomberg reported that L&C Bio, the Korean biotech company behind Re2O (which uses cadaver-donated skin to improve skin quality and wrinkles), is developing an injectable made from donated human fat to correct “Ozempic face,” or the the hollow cheeks and weak jawline from rapid weight loss caused by GLP-1 use. It’s actually a fascinating business story because, until this year, South Korea classified donated fat as medical waste, so nobody could recycle it. Morgan Stanley analyst Mi Hyun Kim told Bloomberg that the legal change could drive profit because donated fat, once a disposal cost, will become a nearly-free raw material. The global dermal fillers market – which is currently dominated by traditional filler giants like Juvéderm and Restylane – is expected to more than double to $17 billion by 2035, according to Precedence Research.
Bertazzoni oven ($3k) + Liebherr refrigerator ($4k) + Bosch microwave ($1.6k) + Beko dishwasher ($700) = almost $10k just in appliances. This sub-$700k West Village apartment has all of those plus it’s located directly above The Spaniard. The dream for an incoming NYU student with rich parents or a sugar daddy.
Ken Griffin is reportedly keeping his residence in New York City, after rumors swirled of him moving his business and personal residency to Miami after Mamdani’s viral Tax Day video. In April, Mayor Mamdani posted a video in which he stands in front of Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse apartment, and says “this pied-à-terre tax is designed for the richest of the rich.” In response to Griffin’s pivot, some people on X have pointed out that rich people do much more talking about leaving due to taxes than ACTUALLY leaving.
Punchbowl News is interviewing Donald Trump tomorrow for the season finale of their podcast, Fly Out Day. This morning, I asked Jake Sherman how he’s feeling about the conversation. “I’m looking forward to talking to him about Congress and legislating, which are the issues our core audience cares about.”
Isabelle Conner (formerly of La Mer, ILIA, and Bobbi Brown) started her own marketing consultancy called Swirl Projects. I spoke to her this morning to learn more about the decision to go out on her own:
“I’ve always been entrepreneurial-curious, but had no desire to start a brand. Instead, I like helping founders shape and tell their stories, and sharing them with the world. After working across an incredible array of brands in very different life stages, I realized I wanted to help yet-to-be-launched and emerging beauty brands, as well as those looking to reinvent themselves, find their place in a wildly competitive and dense landscape.
I’ve learned such a great deal from my teammates, bosses, and founders over the years -- at Supergoop!, I learned how to scale a clear mission and message, at ILIA Beauty, I learned about marketing cross-generationally and globally, and at Skinfix, I learned how paring a brand back to its most essential strengths and qualities can help amplify it.”
Vogue World will go to San Francisco in 2027. “Vogue believes in celebrating cities, and San Francisco is a city like none other,” Anna Wintour said in a statement. Get the TBPN boys on a runway! If any of you can explain what Vogue World is, please send a detailed email.
“Rhode’s latest summer product launch drove $27 million of DTC sales in a single day.” Glossy reported that Rhode’s summer launch (Highlight Milk Multipurpose Luminizer, Pocket Bronzer, and Peptide Lip Shape in three new shades) brought in 90,000 new consumers with over 70% of sales coming from existing consumers.
 | A guest post by
|
Teddy Kim’s film syllabus… all bangers 😮💨
Sweetgreen is gonna be hearing from the EPA with the amount of oil spills they’ll be enabling