Good morning, It was yet another incredible week: Matt Belloni revealed a fresh Michael Jackson fiasco; Julia Alexander analyzed a Disney streaming gamble; Eriq Gardner got to the bottom of an A.I. suit; Dylan Byers inspected a Zaz loyalist’s fade-out; Lauren Sherman and Bill Cohan crunched the Saks numbers; Rachel Strugatz broke the news on Hailey Bieber’s $1 billion deal; Sarah Shapiro explored the Foster sisters’ burgeoning empire; Marion Maneker caught up with Dasha Zhukova; Julie Davich surveyed the Manhattan gallery scene; and John Ourand offered a talmudic reading of NASCAR’s streaming economics. Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell presaged the Big Beautiful Bill’s journey through the Senate; Julia Ioffe documented the birth of the State Department’s new in-crowd; and Abby Livingston chronicled the Democrats’ gerontocracy crisis. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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Lauren Sherman examines Chanel’s transition and Saks’ debt time bomb. and… Rachel Strugatz scoops Hailey Bieber’s historic Rhode deal. meanwhile… Sarah Shapiro explains Favorite Daughter’s formula.

Marion Maneker chats with Nicholas Acquavella, Jean-Paul Engelen, and Dasha Zhukova. and… Julie Brener Davich gallery hops in Chelsea.

Matt Belloni reveals the latest headache for the Michael Jackson estate. and… Scott Mendelson breaks down the Town’s boffo Memorial Day weekend. meanwhile… Eriq Gardner presages some A.I. cliffhangers while Julia Alexander reveals a Disney streaming gamble.

Dylan Byers details a WBD departure and Axel Springer bloodletting. and… Julia Alexander wades into YouTube’s Disney war. meanwhile… John Ourand illuminates NASCAR’s Amazon gamble.

Bill Cohan reveals a Trump tax glitch.

Julia Ioffe unearths a State Department finishing school. and… Leigh Ann Caldwell ranks Trump’s G.O.P. nemeses in the Senate. meanwhile… Abby Livingston gets into the Democrats’ age crisis.

Julia Alexander and Dylan chew over YouTube’s talent war on The Grill Room. and… John Ourand and ESPN’s Seth Wickersham consider Belichick’s Jordonitis on The Varsity. and… Lauren and Parker Posey discuss her White Lotus wardrobe on Fashion People. and… John Heilemann and embattled D.N.C. vice chair David Hogg survey his plans to elect younger Democrats on Impolitic. and… Matt and John Mulaney discuss SNL and his Netflix late-night show on The Town. and… Matt and Julia discuss the Memorial Day box office bonanza on The Powers That Be.

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I tried to take it easy on Memorial Day, or at least as easy as you can at a fast-growing company like Puck. Instead of sitting at my cluttered desk in my home office, I went out to the backyard to respond to emails, jealously admire my neighbors’ landscaping, and watch my sons play wiffle ball with friends from the neighborhood. I enjoy these quiet moments of early middle-aged tranquility, even if they render me a poor caricature of a figure from the John Updike and Richard Ford novels I read as a young man. I suppose, on some level, that we’re all prisoners of our imaginations. Sifting through documents and spreadsheets, the morning hours got away from me. By the time I finally looked up, the neighbors were already stoking their grills and the boys had decamped somewhere inside—the province of air-conditioning and television, among other preteen delights. I was agitating for a swim, so I wandered inside to try and ferret them out. After all, it’s a crime to spend such a beautiful day indoors.

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When I found the kids in their playroom—a warren of suburban excesses from signed NBA jerseys to Harry Potter Legos—I was aghast at what I’d walked in on. There they were, sprawled out on the coach, watching a continuous scroll of short-burst, mind-closing videos on the YouTube app on our television. The screen, itself, was configured like a vertical video. The media and entertainment industries, as all Puck readers well know, are undergoing a profound technological and financial transformation. Less appreciated, on some level, is the format evolution that undergirds it. Like so many members of my generation, I grew up accustomed to morning television, evening news programs, and late-night TV—all tried and true paradigms that no longer make sense. Cornerstones of our culture, like CNN and MSNBC, are increasingly competing with the YouTube channels of Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman. ESPN is trying to have it both ways by platforming Pat McAfee while simultaneously hoping that his YouTube following drives top-of-funnel awareness for the network. That, of course, is an astonishing fact in and of itself; the most historic brand in sports (and one owned by the munificent Walt Disney Company) truly needs a sleeveless former kicker to maintain relevance in a new era. Go figure. And yet something even more profound is afoot. Just as Facebook upended the news media by harnessing the primacy of shorter, user-generated information, YouTube has become a Trojan horse inside the entertainment business. My kids and their pals had the opportunity to delve into any of the endless streamers available on our smart TV—Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV+, Fubo, even Paramount+ and Peacock. And yet they opted to watch the short-form, lo-fi content they normally consume on phone and laptop screens. The entertainment industry has been late to fully calibrate the threat of YouTube. But in a threesome of characteristically excellent pieces this week, Julia Alexander frames the size of challenge. Julia, as you know, is the quintessence of what we aim to deliver at Puck. She’s a classically trained journalist who segued over to become an operator in the domain she covers—first as an executive at Parrot Analytics, the streaming insights firm, and then at Disney. And now, she’s presaging the future of the industry for Puck subscribers. In Can Twitch Become YouTube Before YouTube Becomes Twitch?, Julia lays out the argument for the advertising video-on-demand business, and how the opportunity has been deeply underappreciated. In YouTube’s Disney War, available exclusively to Inner Circle members, she outlines the emergent platform’s manifest destiny in the sports business. And in Disney’s Cocomelon Gamble, she elegantly delineates between the various focuses of individual streamers. After all, the industry tends to assume that all streaming players have similar objectives. But the reality, naturally, is much more nuanced. I’ve learned so much from Julia’s work, and I know you will, too. Streaming is a decade-plus-old industry that seems like it’s been with us forever. And, in so many ways, it’s still defined by Netflix co-C.E.O. Ted Sarandos’s biblical comment about his desire to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix. In reality, though, Netflix and others need to become YouTube. It’s one of the great dynamics of our age, playing out in real time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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