What happens if you go through the Surf Lodge portal?
The Montauk bar is now a billboard for nicotine pouches.
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Notion, and it’s free to all readers.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I’m driving to Cape Cod this weekend, and reading Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House in the passenger seat.
If you’ve been scrolling Substack Notes over the last 24 hours, then you’ve likely seen the venue for Substack’s Media Summit yesterday, including the indoor pool. The Asfour Guzy-designed townhouse on Lafayette Street is available to rent for $80k/month if you’re interested. Guzy also designed Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Blue Ribbon Sushi, and Misi in Brooklyn. Substack’s events team has champagne taste.
Today’s newsletter includes: a mysterious nicotine-sponsored portal has appeared at The Surf Lodge, Sarah Shapiro’s new newsletter, and Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert on the most recent Penn Station plans.
Taste mass hysteria.
On Wednesday, I hosted a conversation with my friend Emmett Shine, founder of Little Plains, at the Notion office in New York. (The last party Notion and I threw together resulted in multiple hangovers, so we dialed it down this time.) Ahead of the event, we asked attendees to submit questions for us, and then tried to weave our responses into the conversation. In addition to dozens of questions about using Notion, working for yourself, and how we think about using AI in the creative process (I’m not interested in watching AI-generated docs, or any AI-generated movies for that matter), we received a surprising amount of questions about taste. Here are some of them:
If someone is early in their career and feels like they ‘don’t have taste yet,’ what would you have them do for 30 minutes a day for a year?
How do you know if you have good taste?
What’s the best way you’ve helped someone find their taste?
How do you know when to trust your own taste versus listening to feedback from clients, coworkers, or the internet?
As founders and creatives, how do you tell the difference between building for genuine long-term taste versus just responding to what feels culturally loud in the moment?
As your businesses have grown, how have you balanced building systems and processes that scale without losing the originality and personal taste that made the work compelling in the first place?
How do you keep building ambitious things without losing your sense of taste and self?
The people behind these questions worked at companies like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, AWS, Mubi, Spotify, and Stripe. Not all of them work in creative-adjacent roles. Toward the end of the conversation, someone in the front row raised their hand and called what we were discussing a mass hysteria of taste.
Emmett defined taste as “experience with knowledge, which is vocabulary.” He referenced a recent clip of Diplo, where he says the best DJs in the world are in their 40s and 50s. Diplo talks about digging through record libraries and doing deep research in order to develop a sound (i.e., taste). “Our repertoire, our knowledge of music is what makes us good.” Emmett compared middle-aged DJs to London cab drivers, whose ability to navigate complicated city streets pre-GPS made them some of the most instinctual, knowledgeable drivers in the world. He encouraged the room to “find your favorite influencer’s favorite influencer’s favorite influencer,” emphasizing the importance of deep research and deep cuts and studying the greats when trying to develop this thing we call “taste.” I think another pattern here is studying artists who didn’t have the shortcuts we have today (Google Maps, Spotify-generated playlists, etc.)
I went to sleep that night thinking less about taste development, and more about why this question feels so top of mind for people. One conclusion I came to is that taste (discernment, judgement, whatever we want to call it) is an obvious edge that people have over AI. But tools like Notion, ChatGPT, and Claude are useless if you don’t have gut instinct. (Related reading: ANU on HumanWashing.) Reading through these questions made me think that people across industries (from investors to creative directors) are catching on to that.
That said, I find Notion to be a helpful tool for the operational tasks that exist apart from my writing, like inbox management (I have it scan my emails every morning to check for inbound emails I haven’t responded to yet), organizing links, and keeping track of my calendar. When we asked the room who was already using Notion, over half of attendees raised their hands. Curious if (and how) any of you are using Notion. If you are thinking about it, start with their Think Together video to get a sense for their approach to integrating AI into their products.
And as far as the Taste Mass Hysteria goes… I think we’ll need another Feed Me event to keep unpacking this.
I went through the VELO portal at The Surf Lodge and turned into a 32-year-old wearing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual who is still on my parents’ phone plan. Last week, I wrote that Montauk’s buzziest bar, The Surf Lodge, signed Popeyes as their exclusive chicken tender for the summer. Whatever the hell that means. Last night, I learned that the nicotine pouch brand VELO is not only now served behind the bar, but also has some physical advertisements around the bar, including a portal-like structure that I guess you’re supposed to…. take pictures of your friends inside of? Walk through and turn into a whole new man? Surf Lodge vet Ruby Saracino was shocked enough to share the photos with me. I find the billboard-ification of bars and restaurants gross, but the VELO signs have turned this place into a 7-Eleven. Because of how crowded and photographed Hamptons businesses are, brands have seen everything from hotel mirrors at Gurney’s to frozen yogurt flavors at BuddhaBerry as opportunities to advertise themselves. Earlier this year, I wrote about a new diner in Sag Harbor called Babe’s that said, “In addition to our normal service, Babe’s will be hosting restaurants and creators from New York City and around the country for tasting menu style dinners during peak summer weekends.” Expect to see more brands showing up on your pancake menu.
The Velo portal. From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Hi hi! Not sure if this is Feed Me worthy but I live on Madison and 96th and BOTH Eli Zabars locations on Madison have been broken into in the last 30 days.” Per The Upper East Side, burglars stole $12K in cash this last time.
Should we be crossing state lines for facials? Julia Fox called Club Aesthetics, a spa in New Jersey, her “happy place” on her Instagram Story yesterday. I will take a bus ride there next week and check it out.
From Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert: “Renderings of the plans by Penn Transformation Partners (a joint venture of developer Vornado and civil construction firms Halmar and Skanska) for a renewed New York Penn Station were released this week, and they look a lot like some past plans hit with a Trumpification beam. (My favorite idea for a Penn Station do-over remains Grand Penn, a modest proposal that would have required MSG to move across 7th Avenue.) Most importantly, the now-federally-led plan promises through-running of the NJT and LIRR trains that travel through the Western Hemisphere’s busiest station, reducing congestion, and the widening of some congested platforms via removal of some of MSG’s support columns. All of this is contingent on MSG still standing at the end of June, which seems unlikely if the Knicks win their first title since 1973—and New York’s first big-four sports championship since 2012.”
Sarah Shapiro launched a new newsletter on Substack called Private Label. Sarah Shapiro started writing a newsletter called Retail Diary on Substack in 2019. Retail Diary was acquired by Puck in 2024, where Sarah then wrote for Line Sheet (Lauren Sherman’s daily fashion newsletter). Last night, Sarah announced that she’d be returning to writing on Substack, this time with a new newsletter called Private Label, “the newsletter for everyone who loves to read and discuss retail, consumerism, fashion, beauty, shopping, and more.” I learned that Sarah is no longer working at Puck full-time. “I spent about a year and a half at Puck as a retail correspondent after they acquired Retail Diary, but ultimately, really missed directly interacting with my Substack audience,” Sarah told me last night. “So I’m back with Private Label. I’m getting granular on the brands hitting it big, the trends to look out for, store visits, and business decisions behind what merchandise ends up on the floor. I’m staying on as a Puck contributor, so you can still expect to see my byline on Line Sheet occasionally.”
Of course you can buy dairy-, gluten-, and dye-free dot cakes in the Hamptons this weekend.
Thanks so much for the mention!! <3 I've been writing about this taste discourse for over a year now, so I have many thoughts and reading reccs for anyone interested in exploring further:
-The taste hysteria is actually about humanness. After the first round of tech bro taste tweets in early 2025, I broke it down into Discernment, Intuition, & Narrative - the specific components that I think people are trying to gesture towards with "taste." These elements introduce human idiosyncrasy. (https://whatsanu.substack.com/i/162999784/strategy-and-merchandising-restraint-intuition-and-narrative)
-Douglas Brundage wrote my favorite essay defining "taste" and why AI can never actually recreate it: taste is weird, illogical, anti-average (https://anenfantterrible.substack.com/p/taste-test-encrusting-the-tortoise)
-"Good taste" is a trap because: if you can define taste, then AI can emulate it, which defeats the purpose of why people are obsessed with "taste as the new core skill." That's also why I personally think "charisma" is a more differentiated skill in an AI era. (https://whatsanu.substack.com/p/charisma)
-Emily Segal's piece on Tasteslop explores why the soulless emulation of "good taste" reads as slop. (https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/tasteslop)
-Tasteslop is an example of what I'd previously called "Humanwashing," or the synthetic performance of humanness, which results in a hierarchy of humanness. Real humanness is a luxury, tasteslop is 'premium mediocre,' and synthetic slop is mass market.(https://whatsanu.substack.com/p/2510-humanwashing)
-An earlier pre-AI iteration of 'humanwashing' was algorithmic flattening. I will always reference Kyle Chayka's 2016 article on Airspace. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification)
I think good taste is most vitally expressed as taste in people. In the sense of people who bring out the best in you, not in a Hannibal Lector sense.