The French manicure is the Xanax of beauty.
"For an overstimulated person who’s looking at their fingers a lot, this can be a powerful psychic release."
Good afternoon, everyone.
Today’s newsletter includes: AOC is sharing her egg-freezing journey on Instagram, Dia Lupo on why everyone is wearing French manicures, Blank Street hired the Steve Jobs of ice cream, WSJ is hiring a Tesla reporter, a former Bloomberg reporter joins Substack, and OpenAI launched integrations with Yelp and Resy.
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Some truly groundbreaking news from the WSJ this week: Hot women like dating finance guys. Andrew Zucker has spent the past few years fine-tuning his beat – observing and breaking down trends among America’s wealthiest. His latest story is about how superstars like Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all choosing to date…private equity guys. The highlight of the story is from TBPN co-host Jordi Hays, who rage baits readers with the following: “Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk-takers. I can’t think of any archetype of man that fits that description more today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets.”
ChatGPT launched integrations with OpenTable, Resy, and Yelp. At lunch this weekend, a friend described one of many new reservation apps that allows users to pay an exorbitant amount of money in order to get a table at one of New York’s hard-to-land tables (Dorsia, Appointment Trader, Artemis). Someone else at lunch said that their coworker built a tool in ChatGPT to do this for free, by crawling reservation sites. Earlier this year, Austin Tedesco built a reservation app with Claude that did something similar. OpenAI’s new feature lets users ask ChatGPT for a specific restaurant and day, or more general questions like neighborhood or cuisine. I asked their comms team if this was a feature that users were asking for.
💅💅💅 Three’s a trend. Earlier this year, for a brief moment, we were all being sold bare nails. First, as a status signal, then as a recession indicator. But over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a rapid uptick in French manicure content. Instead of this being a boring, almost-naked look, women who post their French manicures are acting like they’re equipped with a secret weapon. Dia Lupo, Substack’s beauty queen, recently wrote a newsletter that described the process of bringing a reference from Pinterest to her nail tech, Miss Thi. Kelly Chapman has been posting photos of her manicure and the good things it has “manifested” for her. And just last night, Megan O'Sullivan posted a photo of her French manicure, warning viewers that she would start “acting some type of way” this week.
So what is it about this nail trend that impacts a woman’s mood and way of moving through the world? I reached out to all three trend participants/leaders last night to find out.
For Dia, the style represents release: “The French manicure is a sedative. We’re pacified by the y2k nostalgia, its aesthetic simplicity, feelings of camaraderie—of being one of the girls. For an overstimulated person who’s looking at their fingers a lot, this can be a powerful psychic release. I started exclusively getting red pedicures to force myself into neutral manicures, like the French, for exactly this reason. Beauty Xanax.”
Meg’s inspiration was more patriotic: “Two legendary female icons inspired my French mani pedi: Elle Woods and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I recently wrote about America’s Sweethearts and the way the cheerleaders obsess over their appearance. There’s something aspirational about these women that reminds me of growing up in Dallas, where the French manicure is a beauty staple. I also recently rewatched Legally Blonde. Elle Woods literally said, ‘Never underestimate a woman with a French manicure.’ Tea. The French manicure energy is exactly that—feminine, cutting, put-together, slightly intimidating, and even a bit archaic in a glamorous way. I have a big work week ahead, and I swear I feel more equipped for it thanks to this manicure.”
And for Kelly, the feminine manicure is an adult response to “girlhood”: “The French manicure is the first kind of manicure I got at 13 years old, and revisiting it at 32 feels like coming home. Back then I got it to feel like a real lady, and today I got it for the same reason. It’s peak femininity. It sets the tone. It gives me permission to inhabit a glamorous womanhood, and invites others to treat me that way too. Every time I look at my hands I’m reminded that I’m a gorgeous sophisticate. It’s also versatile - I just moved from a maximalist va-va-voom, long almond French to a more conservative, short square manicure, but it’s no less beautiful. People keep reaching out to me telling me that I’ve influenced them to get one too, which makes me wonder if we’re all hungry for a feeling of womanliness…after years of ‘girlhood’ discourse.”
The hottest new “bureaucratic fad” in business is hiring a chief of staff. (Why don’t you have a chief of staff?) Says the NYT: “Unlike executive assistants, the chief of staff is often a senior level role…because they serve as a second brain for the busy boss.” The story details many examples of these vital right-hands, who could seemingly go by other names: chief organizer; lead helper; reliably all-hours all-platforms texter; assistant with authority; consigliere; gatekeeper; sycophant. “The common thread,” writes the Times, “is that the chief of staff has a single constituent: the boss.” In other words: The chief of staff comes in many different shapes and sizes but they all probably annoy the staff over whom they chief. This reminds me of how Matt Levine recently wrote about “prestige laundering,” the genius of tech and MBA types to periodically rebrand old, boring jobs as new, sexy jobs that talented young should covet. See also this legendary blog post from Karl Yang (aka ChiefofStuffs), “The Job Status Cycle.” He was onto the shell game 6 years ago
New York Times Cooking’s new social editor, Zoe Becker, came from Eater.
WSJ posted a job listing for a Tesla reporter. The right person is based in SF, and is someone who can: “Consistently deliver impactful scoops on Tesla, Rivian, Waymo, and rising EV/AV startups, detailing their strategic pivots, production triumphs, bottlenecks, and executive-level thinking.” Which will happen first, WSJ hiring a SpaceX reporter, or Elon merging all his companies together, so one reporter covers all of them?
The apocalyptic billionaire bunker du jour is in Argentina wine country. The Financial Times reports on tech founders preparing for a third world war outside of Mendoza: “A handful of small prefab homes, geodesic domes and an airstrip have sprung up in the past two years on the remote Wamani ranch, an hour via dirt roads from the nearest village in far-west Argentina. Far from the world’s nuclear superpowers and close to Patagonia’s abundant oil reserves and the fertile plains of Argentine wine capital Mendoza, Wamani is Argentine-Spanish tech founder Martín Varsavsky’s best guess at a place that would survive armageddon.”
AOC has been posting her egg-freezing process on Instagram.
Blank Street is launching ice cream. The coffee chain, which was valued at $500 million last year, is rumored to be raising again this year, per WWD. In addition to Blank Street’s plans for L.A. expansion, the WWD story also mentioned an ice cream launch. I reached out to Blank Street co-founder Issam Freiha this morning to get more information. “We started working on this about a year ago as our stores were getting busier and busier past 4 p.m., and our signature matchas were getting more popular,” he told me. The business is viewing ice cream as a new vessel for late afternoon/early evening customers. “The concept is super simple: five clean ingredients with no refined sugar (sweetened only with honey) for our unique proprietary base, four flavors (vanilla, using Indonesian whole vanilla beans; matcha using Blank Street matcha; coffee using our espresso; and strawberry using Sicilian whole strawberries) that are built from that base, which you can pair with a chocolate shell poured over the top to order (coconut oil, white chocolate base). It’s a cleaner, more natural, and funner affogato. We developed it with Zen Ong, creator of Awan in LA & now Beku in the UK. He’s the Steve Jobs of frozen desserts.”
Conor Sen, who spent a decade writing about housing and the economy for Bloomberg, launched a newsletter called Housing Frame on Substack. On X he wrote: “Seeing friends with thriving Substacks made me wonder what my angle would be if I did one, and I realized housing was the beat that excited me and where I felt there was a relative lack of coverage.”
Jeff Bezos is nearing a deal to become a minority owner of Liverpool FC. The consortium, which includes Bezos, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and British-Indian businessman Amit Bhatia, would acquire a 30% stake of the club for £1.3 billion from Fenway Sports Group, which bought Liverpool in 2010. The sale would value Liverpool at £4.4 billion or $5.9 billion, which would maintain its position among the top 5 most valuable soccer clubs in the world.
As someone who spent part of my youth and a chunk of my adult life in Dallas, I always think of the Big D when I see a French manicure. It’s the go-to neutral mani there.
Literally just got a French manicure to pull my life together. It worked.