Good afternoon, everyone. Writing this newsletter from a bench on Lexington, using a WiFi network called 599 Lexington Lobby.
My first movie, THE END, premiered four years ago (yesterday) at the Hamptons International Film Festival. It’s a short doc about Gardiner’s Island, America’s oldest privately-owned island that’s located off the coast of East Hampton. I made it with my own money, which started with a $2,500 creative grant from Adobe that I applied for when I was bored during COVID. I used that money to rent an Airbnb in Montauk during lockdowns, and I invited some of my friends who worked in film to come to Long Island for a few days, visit the libraries and historical centers, turn on our cameras, and see what would happen. We cooked spaghetti and drank wine while looking through our footage every night, and drove around the quiet off-season Hamptons neighborhoods, speaking to local historians during the day.
The whole project was extremely low budget, and we used our savings. I think making this doc cost $15k altogether — I did all the artwork (drew the poster with pen and paper) and credits, we did our own promotion, didn’t apply to many festivals, and our friends took paycuts to play around and make something during the depression of a pandemic. I finished it up while I was working at Meta, and my Meta colleague Maple edited the movie.
THE END did pretty well. It premiered at HIFF, and also made it into one of my favorite film festivals, DOC NYC. I haven’t made any movies since 2022 because I started Feed Me two weeks later, but I’m very proud of the whole experience and I encourage anyone who wants to make a movie to make one.
I share this because I didn’t start writing on Substack in hopes of making it my full-time job — I was running several experiments at once. My day job at Meta, making movies with my friends, writing short stories on Substack for an audience of a few hundred, and I wasn’t sure which one would take off. I’m glad Feed Me did, but sometimes I miss when I had more free time to play and make things with my friends.
Last night’s first Monday Scaries screening at Cobble Hill Cinemas was a blast. Teddy Kim chose our first movie, The Vanishing, and the theater was 90% full on a Monday night. Teddy and our friends grabbed drinks across the street at Congress Bar afterwards. If you come to the next Monday Scaries, hang out with us afterwards.
Today’s newsletter includes: The CEO of a shuttered fashion brand started a powdered gelatin company, an interview with Chanel’s President of Arts, Culture & Heritage, Nina Park’s new beauty line, New York City grandmas on Ozempic are causing friction with their daughters, Hillary Clinton joins the Vox family, DealBook’s 2026 lineup, and Louis Cheslaw’s conversation with Christoffer Lundman.
Have a story you think should be in Feed Me? Want to get in touch? Reply to this email, or text the Feed Me Tip Line: (646) 494-3916
Beauty Independent reported that Nina Park, the celebrity makeup artist who launched thousands of tutorials on TikTok, is creating her own beauty line. Excellent news for those of us who have been trying to recreate Zoë Kravitz’s blurred lip for the last two years. “Competition is steep, and Park’s brand could enter a beauty market where makeup sales have been relatively soft,” Beauty Independent reported. “In the first half of 2026, prestige makeup registered the slowest dollar sales growth of any prestige beauty category, at 3%, compared to 11% for haircare, 9% for skincare and 6% for fragrance, according to Circana.” The advantage Park has on competition – similar to Fara Homidi and Gucci Westman and Bobbi Brown – is that she’s a makeup artist with a strong personal aesthetic, as opposed to a pop star or fashion house creating a beauty brand. The trademarks that Park has filed include cosmetics, makeup brushes, and bags for carrying makeup and toiletries.
GIRLS IS RETURNING. Lena Dunham you’re going to have no problem getting through the gates of heaven.
New York City grandmas are on GLP-1s and can’t stop talking about it. Izzy Grinspan wrote about the complicated dynamics arising between mothers and daughters because of GLP-1 usage. One New York therapist said that parents are offering to pay their children to get on the drugs, and some women don’t even want their mothers to know when they go on the meds because it feels like giving in to the pressure. “It feels like something that will please their moms,” Zoë Bisbing, founder of Body Positivity Therapy, said, “and they don’t want to please their moms.” I was sad reading about one woman who said her mom doesn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner or make the same desserts with her anymore.
The Upper West Side is getting spoiled with new openings. First Lucia, then Wu’s Dynasty, now “Eataly Caffe.”
Hillary Clinton is launching a podcast with Vox. Her co-host? Kara Swisher. Clinton and Swisher will kick off their special midterms-focused limited series, “High Stakes,” on October 14, which will run as a third weekly episode of Swisher’s show, On With Kara Swisher. “Think of this series as Pivot [the twice-weekly podcast she does with Scott Galloway], but with an actual expert as my co-host,” Swisher said in the press release. On With Kara Swisher is currently hiring a Video Producer.
For someone who makes his own beer, and seemingly likes beer, Mark Zuckerberg sure kept that Guinness in his mouth for a lonnnngg time on a recent episode of Cheeky Pint.
Over the summer, I noticed an uptick in – brace yourselves – bovine gelatin content on my TikTok feed. The recipes, which involved fruit, powdered gelatin, and seeds, seemed to scratch a similar itch for viewers as 2020’s viral slime videos. Squishy colorful JELL-O, filled with fruits and seeds, popping out of different shaped molds. On top of that, women often bite into the gelatin shapes, resulting in the ASMR effect of mukbang videos. This morning, I became aware of a new CPG brand called Wobble – a modern gelatin mix. The $18 boxes of powdered bovine gelatin are made without artificial dyes or sugars, and join brands like Oddball and Gelée in the modern (luxuriously marketed) gelatin trend.
Now, some of you may remember that before Hailey Bieber’s rhode there was a clothing brand called Rhode, which was carried in stores like Net-a-Porter and Bergdorf Goodman. It closed down in 2024, after a two-year-long legal battle with rhode skin-care line over its shared name, which the designers claimed was “hurting our company, our employees, our customers and our partners.” After a bit of clicking around LinkedIn this morning, I learned that Wobble was started by Purna Khatau, the co-founder and former CEO of Rhode Clothing. David Kitz (who has also worked with Ghia and Unwell Beverages) shot the photos.
J.Crew and American Girl launched a collection of winter clothes for girls and dolls. Tiny sequin barn jacket!
Andrew Ross Sorkin announced the official lineup for the 25th DealBook conference this morning. It includes Hailey Bieber, Sam Altman, David Ellison, and Elon Musk. Stacked.
Auralee’s Ryota Iwai and Salon C. Lundman’s Christoffer Lundman are collaborating on a collection. Louis Cheslaw, one of my favorite menswear writers, published a great conversation with Lundman about the collection’s origin story, and how he approaches clothes. “Of course I care about how I dress, but it’s not the most important part of my morning. It isn’t for most people. So the essence of what I want to do is create clothes that make you feel comfortable. And the only image I want to portray is one of tenderness, and observation.”
Volume 02 of Chanel’s Arts & Culture magazine is out next week. I first learned about this publication over lox and toast with Yana Peel, Chanel’s President of Arts, Culture & Heritage, a few months ago at Chez Nous. This was last spring, and I’ve found myself flipping through Volume 01 since she sent me home with a copy. The magazine is a beast, both in size (300 pages) and editorial lift. Volume 02 includes new artwork by Cindy Sherman, an exploration of the formative work of Linder Sterling, and a conversation mediated by Merve Emre. To better understand why Chanel has made such an investment in this project, I spoke with Yana this week.
Emily Sundberg: Why does a luxury fashion house publish an art magazine?
Yana Peel: “The magazine grew out of our own love of magazines—and their wonderful ability to bring unexpected voices and ideas together in the same pages. We wanted to create a space for discovery and conversations that cross disciplines and generations. The magazine is an ode to the artists, leaders, and innovators we encounter in our work at CHANEL Culture Fund. It’s also an invitation to those who share our curiosity. We work with artists and cultural institutions around the world, and the magazine is a way to share some of those extraordinary ideas with a wider audience and advance our mission—to be the best partner in the arts. It is a platform for what artists are thinking about, questioning, and imagining next. And it’s free. Great ideas should travel!”
ES: The newest issue includes everyone from Cindy Sherman (on the cover), to Patti Smith, to Merve Emre (so excited about this one). Can you talk a little bit about how you assemble these features and conversations, and who made sense for this issue?
YP: “I’m a great believer in creative collisions—bringing together people who might never otherwise find themselves in the same room, let alone the same magazine. These junctions are where possibilities arise.
We don’t begin with a rigid theme, though our contributions intentionally connect back to the Culture Fund’s work. After an encounter at 12 Chairs on MacDougal Street in New York, Patti agreed to be our guest at the Venice Biennale dinner celebrating our Next Prize winners (ten artists redefining their field who each receive 100,000 euros). Her tribute to the artists on the night was an awe-inspiring bonus, and sharing her handwritten lyrics in the magazine was a natural extension. Similarly, we invited Merve to write for the magazine after she chaired our writers’ retreat at Gabrielle Chanel’s Riviera home, La Pausa, last year.
When someone becomes involved in our world, we weave these experiences back into the fabric of our work through the magazine. We love finding artists and thinkers who are challenging conventions. Cindy is a perfect example. We approached her to create a series of photographs using items from CHANEL’s archive, giving her complete freedom on the outcome. I love that she shares the pages with Patti Smith and Merve Emre—three fiercely original minds who see the world quite differently.”
ES: It’s been really exciting to see the resurgence of printed material in the fashion world. There were Ralph Lauren newspapers at the US Open, and Kallmeyer had magazines at their NYFW show. What do you hope people feel when flipping through this issue?
YP: “Curiosity! Surprise! The urge to put down their phones for an hour. In a world of increasingly fleeting images and shrinking attention spans, print offers something wonderfully countercultural: the invitation to slow down, look closely, and spend time with an idea. The print magazine is a place where we can give an artist 10 pages instead of 10 seconds. Time spent reading is such a gift—time to inhabit someone else’s mind, and time to expand or change your own.
I love the physicality of a magazine, too. The weight of the paper, images from different photographers, the act of flipping through the pages to discover something you didn’t know you were interested in. There’s a special thrill in boarding an airplane and pulling out my stack of magazines. When Hans Ulrich Obrist and I were partners at the Serpentine, we would have a mad ritual of tearing and exchanging articles that came from the magazines we packed into our overflowing carry-ons—on art, architecture, tech, philosophy, geopolitics, music, and more. To this day, our exchange continues. I’ll be on a flight to Seoul or a Eurostar to Paris and drop him a picture of my outrageous stack.
What do I hope? I hope people pick it up for Cindy Sherman and find themselves completely absorbed by someone they’ve never heard of. “What do you wish you knew more about?” is a prompt we ask throughout the issue. And I hope readers find discovery and delight.”
ES: How have your past jobs made you a better editor?
YP: “I’ve spent my career moving between worlds—finance, media, contemporary art, and now culture and heritage both—and, again, I’ve learned that some of the most interesting ideas emerge when worlds collide.
My time in finance taught me how to turn ambitious ideas into reality (on deadline), and my time leading arts institutions taught me when to create space for imagination to flourish. Success across industries (IMHO) is based on the people you invite into the room—creatives, thinkers, and colleagues. I work with the greatest team with the best instincts and the best taste!”
ES: I’m curious what magazines or books are currently on your nightstand.My nightstand is heaving! Magazines: Neptune Papers, 032C, W Youth (giving me Sassy flashbacks in the best way), Alphabet (Donatien Grau is The Don!) Next up on my reading list are Stay True by Hua Hsu and Ari Emanuel’s Roll the Calls...it feels like those should balance one another!
ES: Favorite bookstore in New York and London? And can you give one more rec in an unexpected city?
YP: In London, I love Hatchards for books (the bookstore that Gabrielle Chanel returned to over and over to assemble her own library), and all of Gabe Chipperfield’s newsstands—especially my local, Foreign Exchange News in Bayswater. In New York, my neighborhood bookstore is McNally Jackson (where Vol. 2 of ARTS & CULTURE will be available for free starting October 23, along with the iconic Guggenheim Museum bookstore).
On the West Coast, Arcana in Culver City is a favourite for its out-of-print and rare titles. If you’re in Shanghai, you must stop by Bananafish, and of course, Espace Gabrielle Chanel at Power Station of Art—the first public contemporary art library in China.
I feel like the reason why sales might be “soft” for these beauty brands is because they are sprouting like weed/vape shops — there are just simply too many of them. It’s too much. I can’t tell the difference between any of them anymore so I’m still sticking to my old Mac eyeliner from 11th grade.
Also have to add I saw a “feedme sounding” response today from the guy on Atlantic ave who runs the toy store that was attacked by Kelly Clarkson — he called it “asymmetrical social warfare” in an interview w NY mag. Love that response. It does sound a bit asymmetrical to me. Why does a celebrity need to take down a local toy shop??
Monday Scaries was spooktacular 🫡 Teddy