Special Edition: The Race to City Hall 🚕
A Guest Lecture with New York's future mayor, and what Hell Gate is doing right.
Good morning everyone. Today is a very exciting day on Feed Me for those of you who live in New York City because you get to ask the front-runners in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary… anything.
Today’s letter also includes: what a YouTube superstar leaving the platform says about the price of fame, Lauren Sanchez’s bachelorette party in Paris,
’s thoughts on Chobani’s acquisition of The Daily Harvest, and I want to talk to 2025 grads entering the job market!Guest Lecture: New York’s next mayor
Guest Lecture is a Feed Me series that captures the spirit of that (sometimes unhinged) guest lecturer who would come into your class, drop more knowledge than you’ve heard all year, and then leave forever.
Today, paid readers can submit questions for the front-runners in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The only rule is that the questions can’t be directed towards a single candidate, the entire group will be asked the same set of questions.
The below is another local politics report from Cami Fateh (last month, she wrote about the fate of Le Dive), who is graduating Columbia Journalism School this week. Last week, Cami came to a Feed Me happy hour. She pulled me aside to say she had to leave early to attend a Hell Gate event, where several New York City mayoral candidates would be present, and asked if I wanted to run a story about the event afterwards. I said, depends how the party is. Here’s her report on what Hell Gate is getting right.
Hell Gate is a rare modern media company that a) is not boring, and b) can throw a great party. Last year, their Christmas party was at the Sugar Hill Restaurant & Supper Club in Bed-Stuy. It felt like the closest I’d get to infamous legacy media parties of bygone days: 200 vodka soda-fueled millennials carrying tote bags and wearing Salomons. We were there until three in the morning.
Hell Gate’s Eric Adams Table of Success, which fired shots at every personal and political connection in our socially active mayor’s orbit (Adams’ contacts generally fall at the intersection of the two), became a City Hall item. Max Rivlin-Nader, one of Hell Gate’s five co-founders and reporter-editors, told me that local politicians were reportedly dismayed to be left off the list of Adams’ accomplices.
When Hell Gate announced that they were hosting a forum for the Democratic mayoral candidates at the Public Theater (in collaboration with a new independent media company called New York Focus), I knew the evening would probably be more about who showed up than platform nuance. Most of the attendees were “bike-riding millennials” (Hell Gate co-founder Chris Robbins once joked that this is their target audience) who attended because they were fans of Hell Gate – the candidates (Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, and former comptroller Scott Stringer) were really just a backdrop for conversation about the state of New York City and the publications that cover it.