Thanks for coming to the party last night.
A TBPN x Feed Me night to remember.
Hello everyone. I’m at a wedding on Shelter Island this weekend. There are all these wild turkeys walking around the island, and sometimes you see them sitting in a strange way, but when they stand up, all their chicks run out from under them and scatter. It’s very sweet.
Today’s letter includes: why beauty brands keep selling you makeup bags, a correction to yesterday’s newsletter re: Alex Jones, more brands should be making stickers and paper dolls, and a promising new East Village bar.
I threw a party last night with John and Jordi from
— the only media business I’m jealous of — at San Vicente (thank you Jeff) in the West Village. They were in town for the Figma IPO (they went live with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field from the floor of the NYSE), and I decided to take advantage of their rare time in New York and throw a party.We planned this in four days, so thank you to everyone who braved the rain, re-arranged their dinners, took Blades from the Hamptons, and risked Friday morning hangovers to come hang. And thank you to the TBPN interns who seemed to be multiplying over the course of the night.
I woke up to one text about a romantic success story and two about professional success stories. Good job.
Did you know that the survivors of the Titanic stayed at The Jane Hotel (where San Vicente is now) when they got to New York? Powerful room…
Correction: I reported yesterday on the Alex Jones livestream viewership and compared it to CNN’s primetime viewership, writing that “Alex Jones got more views last night than CNN did last month.” CNN emailed me yesterday asking for a correction, noting that CNN’s traditional TV broadcast is also viewed by many more people on places like HBO Max, YouTube and CNN.com. They also noted that views on X and television audience, as measured by Nielsen, are two different metrics.
A Nielsen spokesperson told Feed Me, “‘Views’ are not comparable to Average Audience Projection. To provide some context, the closest statistic we have to that (it's not exact but it's in the same ballpark) is what we call Qualified Average Audience Reach GRP Projection. If we look at CNN during prime time for July 30th, 2025, that number is over 2.8 million.”
Fair enough. But the overall point — that cable news channels like CNN continue to lose their relevance — is still worth talking about. These days, it doesn’t take a midtown production studio, research team, and a highly polished news product to attract viewership – and I’m not saying that’s a good thing.
Many of the primetime hosts from Fox have gone independent; there’s also a smaller but similar set of personalities on the left. Livestreams on the different digital platforms offer better connections to a wider audience. Cable news has historically struggled to try and attract a younger demographic. According to a 2024 WSJ story, “The median age for TNT and Bravo viewers is 56, for HGTV it is 66, and even the once-youthful MTV’s median-age viewer is 51… The cable news audience is even older, with MSNBC’s median age at 70, Fox News’s at 69 and CNN’s, 67. Among broadcasters, CBS’s median age is 64 and ABC’s is 66."” One could expect consumers engaging with news content on X, Substack or YouTube to skew younger.
“You put together a motley crew of impressive and strange individuals who collectively have a low douche factor.” - Text from someone who came to the TBPN x Feed Me party last night
Feeling really good about Lucinda Williams’ new honky tonk bar in the East Village. When will Joe Weisenthal’s band perform?
Rains used stickers to promote their Autumn/Winter 2025 collection. They don’t appear to be selling the stickers (although commenters are saying they want to buy them), but it’s an inventive way to hold people’s attention by changing the way customers think about a lookbook.
If you didn’t post a photo of a lobster roll on your Instagram story, did you ever eat it? Pete Wells wrote a summer story for The New York Times today about the lobster roll boom in Maine, and how locals didn’t grow up with the buttery sandwiches being such a thing like they are today. One of the lobster shacks he features used to sell about 40 lobster rolls a day, and now they sell closer to 500. I think about Bon Appetit’s obsession with Portland in 2018 a lot.
The New York Times hired a new film manager. Zach Caldwell spent almost six years as Vice’s Senior Director of Photography, where he shot and oversaw the cinematography for their shows on Showtime, HBO and Hulu. His work has also won multiple Emmy awards.
If given the choice between the $40 plastic pencil case from Glossier or the $28 plush cloud makeup case from Rhode, you know what I’m choosing. It has been fun to watch all these beauty brands move into the object and accessory space. Necessaire recently announced a collaboration with New Tendency, a Berlin-based design studio that applies “modernist design principles onto contemporary objects of the everyday.” Orebella sells scentable bracelets and necklaces. Rare Beauty sells headbands that are designed to wear while applying makeup and cosmetics travel cases (this is kind of cute). They’re kind of the new tote bag for a lot of these brands — they’re cheap to manufacture, but still boost AOV by $20-$40 (or $300 in the case of Fara Homidi). In addition, it becomes an additional item that can serve as a status symbol. I have a lot of memories of my grandma getting makeup bags like this as a gift with purchase from department store beauty counters.
Makeup bags from Fara Homidi, Glossier, and Rhode.
Me thinks the CNN doth protest too much
Bring back the classic Bendel's brown and white striped makeup bags. So many great shapes and sizes and sooo NYC.