Meet Feed Me's new additions.
Plus a report from Acela's new train, and a top-grossing newsletter leaves Substack.
Good morning everyone.
Today’s newsletter includes: Feed Me’s new team members, Anonymous Transit Expert’s review of the new Acela train, protein drinks launching at Starbucks, and Substack’s highest-grossing real estate newsletter is leaving the platform.
As Feed Me continues to expand both in media formats and coverage, I’m thrilled to announce two new team members: Anna Silman as Managing Editor, and Cami Fateh as an associate editor.
I met Anna in 2016 on my second day of work at New York Magazine. Since then, I’ve watched in wonder as she reported on Brooklyn hospitals during COVID, Scooter Braun’s addiction to fame, and somehow got thousands of English PhD students to sign up for Business Insider subscriptions with her viral profile of Merve Emre. She lived above Clandestino from 2013 to 2023 which gave her a view of New York City that most people only dream about.
Anna is a freelance writer and while she will be continuing to write features for a range of outlets, she’ll also be serving as Feed Me’s managing editor, editing the daily newsletter as well as columnists and contributors. I’m thrilled to have her rigor, thoroughness, and endless curiosity.
Cami Fateh has been a Feed Me reader since 2023 which means she’s one of the few people who is grandfathered into a $30/year annual subscription. She graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism this year, and has contributed reporting for Feed Me on media parties, outdoor seating in Dimes Square, and SSENSE’s unclear future. She’ll also be writing “Political Parties,” a column covering the intersection of politics, nightlife, and New York City culture. Her knack for knocking on doors, picking up the phone, and Getting The Story makes me excited for her to be a part of the Feed Me team.
Our next Guest Lecture is with Andrea Hernández, the founder of . Paid readers can ask her anything about the state of CPG, marketing strategies that intrigue her, and protein mania.
Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert is helping me build a modern Metro Section. In his last column, he wrote about how parking garages are the hottest real estate in New York. The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office, but you’ll be seeing more of him around here in his column, ‘Stand Clear.’
When Amtrak announced in early August that after nearly five years of delays, five CEOs and almost $3 billion, the new Acela Avelia Liberty trains would whisk passengers between Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. beginning August 28th, I knew immediately where I had to be. Until last week, Amtrak’s flagship high-speed service fleet was four years past its planned retirement date. Breakdown frequencies were up, spare parts were out of production, and the interiors, refreshed in 2018 after a round of delays, were dated and worn. The new fleet, manufactured by French conglomerate Alstom in upstate New York, promises to finally provide a modern experience for travelers within the Northeastern Megalopolis at the same cost (~$150-500). Running on fumes from the long worknight before, I lumbered through the belly of Penn Station (which, if you’ve moved through the new subway mezzanine, you know also serves as a dance studio) to try and catch one of the first rides. If I had to work on a long weekend and nobody was going to show up to the office, I was going to our nation’s capital to see what all that Obama-era, election-year loan money bought the commuters of the Northeast Corridor.
“Doing ‘high-speed’ service in America today is still like trying to build a skyscraper on pilings made of play-doh and getting upset when it tips over.”
I surfaced inside Moynihan Train Hall, the still-shining, still-chairless $1.5 billion expansion of Penn Station, and promptly got in line at Track 12. There, a gang of television cameras, along with a welcome party of sign-waving, smiling Amtrak employees and press were set up to cheer on the maiden voyage of the new Acelas to Washington and Boston. Settling into my seat in business class (the cheapest fare offered on Acela service), I was tipped off by a friend that there was a sizable contingent of travel content creators traveling ahead of me, with whom I was glad I did not share a trip. As we pulled out of Penn an Amtrak-standard ten minutes late, a woman called Pam announced that she and her colleague, also Pam, would be through shortly to collect trash. You could hear the Pams smiling through the PA system. Another employee then materialized to present me and my seatmates, a young boy and his aunt, with certificates commemorating the occasion (plus 1,000 Amtrak miles), a cookie, and a pin which I’ve since stuck into my girlfriend’s corkboard. This was the first time I’d received any sort of recognition for taking a day trip, and I’ve decided it’s something we should do more often.
Looking out the window at the new Portal Bridge, I realized the windows were larger and now curtainless. The seats, while firm and not yet broken in, were comfortable and reclined from the bottom rather than the back, eliminating the risk of crushing the knees of the tall gentleman behind me. The baggage racks, formerly bulbous gray plastic protruding into the aisles, were slimmed and lifted. Even the reading light (moved into the headrest from the old luggage stowage) and the “restroom occupied” sign (now a bright green pictograph) felt thoughtfully designed. If you long for the worn leather of the old seats, you can buy a bag made of them (and even they had more legroom than the regional jet you’d be stuck on between New York and Washington).
The boy sitting across from me, Simon, told me he had convinced his aunt to bring him from Brooklyn to New Haven at the “dang crack of dawn” to catch this inaugural service and ride it back to New Jersey before returning home. Simon then spent the next ten minutes regaling me with all the trips he’d convinced his mother to take with him — Chicago (by sleeper train), California (again, sleeper train), and countless midtown skyscrapers to sample their elevator and escalator models. He insisted that he “really just liked getting around,” and that he’d like more than anything to fly the upper deck of a Boeing 747. He was impressed to learn that I’d flown in one from New York to Paris, and knew that ThyssenKrupp makes elevators, artillery systems, and medical devices. Talking to Simon reminded me of my own New England day trips with my dad. For him, this trip was not the realization of a decade-old investment but an opportunity to accessibly explore a fascination.
Simon and his aunt got off in New Jersey. I dialed into work for the rest of the trip to Washington, trusting Teams calls to the fast new 5G wifi, ordering a hot dog (with mustard) from the cafe car, and taking in the smoother ride made possible by modernized tilt systems that made higher-speed curves almost imperceptible. The newer equipment is nicer by every measure, from the comforts of the modern cabin to the completely redesigned operator’s cockpit and redesigned articulated bogies (wheels shared by cars) designed to reduce repair frequency. If you’re a corporate traveler between New York and Boston or Washington you’d be a fool not to take one in lieu of flying. Importantly for Amtrak, the new fleet, when fully in service in 2027, will mark a 77% increase in the number of seats for sale on its most (and one of its only) profitable routes. It is, whether you love Amtrak as a public utility or pray for its privatization, a sound investment.
Doing “high-speed” service in America today is still like trying to build a skyscraper on pilings made of play-doh and getting upset when it tips over. I’ve already lamented about the ball of yarn that is the electrification of the NEC, the Connecticut NIMBYs that perpetually hold up a plan that would shave a half hour off the Acela’s seven-hour Boston-Washington run, and the underfunding of equipment maintenance on profitable routes. What the New Acela is, at its core, is something better than what we had. One day maybe we can copy France (1,800 miles of high-speed track) or China’s (28,000 miles) homework and provide the average American access to fast regional transport. For today, just better than what we had might have to be enough.
This concludes Stand Clear by Anonymous Transit Expert.
📱 Have a story you think I should look into? Text the anonymous Feed Me Hotline: (646) 494-3916 📱
Prescriptions of beta blockers – a medication that prevents the physical symptoms of anxiety – are up 28% from 2020. When I read stats like this, I question everyone around me because I don’t know anyone who has told me they’re on beta blockers. One interesting anecdote in this story is that brides are taking the medication so they have a calmer wedding day, to which I ask, what kind of world are we living in if we’re controlling all aspects of our nervous system with the swallow of a pill?
, Substack’s highest-grossing real estate newsletter, is leaving the platform.
Manhattan office leasing increased more than 20% in August compared with July.
Funny Bar is now giving customers free beer if they order a steak before 6:30.
Tracks Raw Bar and Grill, a Penn Station classic, opened in the LIRR section of Grand Central Station this week. “Tracks is iconic, Tracks is what people talk about when they talk about 30 years of commuting,” MTA Chair Janno Lieber said on Monday. Gothamist reported that the restaurant’s annual rent is $216k.
I woke up and couldn’t stop reading the New York Magazine story about Wondermind, Selena Gomez’s mental-health startup. Angelina Chapin peered into the chaotic business, where Gomez’s mother Mandy Teefey was the CEO. It coincided with another story from earlier this summer about Daniella Pierson, a newsletter founder (and cofounder of Wondermind) who was accused of fabricating numbers. Feed Me spoke to Chapin today about the reporting process, including the ethics around a story like this:
What made you want to report this story?
“In the spring, Forbes came out with a piece about some of the financial dysfunction happening at Wondermind, like employees not getting their paychecks. And it made me wonder what the hell was going on. It seemed on the surface like a mental health company that was ruining its employees' mental health, but I didn't really know why. Was this all because Selena Gomez's mom didn't know how to be CEO? What was going on? Then there were all these layoffs after the Forbes piece came out, and so that really gave me an opportunity to get in touch with people who were mad and really wanted to talk.”What were the biggest challenges of putting it together?
“I say people wanted to talk, but they were also scared shitless. Selena Gomez, who co-founded the company with her mom, she's almost a billionaire, if not a billionaire. So it was very daunting for people to tell their stories to me of what happened there because of the potential retaliation. I would joke with friends as I was reporting this that this felt like Watergate-level complication, even though it was ultimately a story about a celebrity's mom running a company into the ground. It was really tricky and it took months. It took a lot of sensitivity with sources, making sure that they were not identifiable to Mandy [Selena’s mom] and the company. I will also say it was a journalistic first for me to have to call a celebrity's mother in the morning and ask, do you snort Ritalin?”
What are the main things you took away from it, or things you’re thinking about differently in the aftermath?
“This started out being a story, a business story about a CEO who was unfit to run a company and ran it into the ground, and the irony that this startup was supposed to help people's mental health and instead made employees have panic attacks, consider suicide, have to go on drugs. But as I kept reporting, it really turned into more of a Gypsy Rose-style psychodrama about mother-daughter relationships, which was very fitting, considering I'm recently back from mat leave. And it ended up being this thing of you're a teen mom, then you’re a stage mom, your daughter shoots to unimaginable fame and then rejects you. And so what do you do with your identity? Throughout the piece, we see Mandy really struggling with wanting to be seen in her own right, having an identity separate from Selena. But that's sort of impossible. And in the process of doing that she left all this devastation in her wake. As much as this is sort of a juicy piece about celebrities and this insane startup culture that will just give famous people and their families money to do these really half-baked ideas, I think it's also a story about human relationships and thorny family dynamics.”
Did you have any ethical qualms reporting on someone clearly struggling with mental health issues?
“I don’t think this would be a story if Mandy was just any startup CEO. Then it might have felt more like punching down. But because she and her extremely famous daughter have made mental health such a key part of their money-making brands — and because Wondermind, a company that is supposed to help people’s mental health, caused employees to have panic attacks and left them without health insurance — it was fair game to report on her instability.”
Thanks Emily! For those who don't know my work, I've been writing about the cultural convergences that lead to what we find in the grocery aisle. My work has allowed me to work with the biggest food and beverage companies in the world as well as being able to be a resource to emerging brands looking to break into CPG. I've seen it all from palo santo brewed waters being marketed to uplift your vibes to creatine croissants and protein hard seltzers. Looking forward to answering your questions!
So thrilled to be here!