Good morning,

It was another great week at Puck: Matt Belloni broke the news on Bryan Lourd’s latest conquest and Steven Spielberg’s missed opportunity; Eriq Gardner untangled an extraordinary Netflix lawsuit; Julia Alexander surmised YouTube’s long-term Vulcan chess; Dylan Byers uncovered the Bari Weiss deal terms; Lauren Sherman revealed the Chloe Malle ascension; Rachel Strugatz previewed the next phase of Estée Lauder’s cleanup plan; Sarah Shapiro explained Leset’s success; Bill Cohan offered the readout from a billionaire conclave; John Ourand envisioned the NFL’s next media strategy; Marion Maneker analyzed the Lichtenstein market; Julie Davich profiled the young women mastering the Old Masters; and Ian Krietzberg corrected the record on the A.I. jobs apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell examined John Thune’s dilemma; Abby Livingston ran the latest redistricting forecasts; and John Heilemann and Peter Hamby debated the repercussions of Trump’s federal policing fantasies.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman offered a Massenet micro-update, a thesis on the Michele situation, and a preview of the Chloe Malle era at Vogue.
and…
Rachel Strugatz reentered the Estée Lauder crying rooms.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro detailed Leset’s Row-lite playbook.

Marion Maneker scanned the Lichtenstein market and penned the final word on Sotheby’s side dealing.
and…
Julie Davich introduced the new wave of young women taking on the Old Masters.

Matt Belloni chronicled the Rotten Tomatoes tragedy and broke a bunch of news: Spielberg’s failed Call of Duty play; Bryan Lourd’s latest poach; and a Michael B. Jordan–adjacent scandalette.
and…
Eriq Gardner got to the bottom of an extraordinary Netflix legal saga.

Ian Krietzberg further revised the scholarship about A.I.’s impact on the workforce and chatted with a chatbot shrink.

Dylan Byers imagined CBS News under Bari Weiss.
and…
John Ourand and Julia Alexander each advanced the latest YouTube theology.

Bill Cohan got a Chatham House Rule exemption from a secretive billionaire conclave in Wyoming.

Leigh Ann Caldwell psychoanalyzed John Thune’s multipronged political minefield.
and…
Abby Livingston recalculated the Democrats’ 2026 House predictions.
and…
John Heilemann and Peter Hamby played out Trump’s crime hysteria endgame.
meanwhile…
Abby and House Agriculture chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson broke down some curious nuances of the Farm Bill, in a conversation presented by Modern Ag Alliance.

Andrew Rosen, the founder of Parqor, offers a controversial ESPN D.T.C. argument to Dylan on The Grill Room.
and…
NBC’s Mike Tirico reveals some Jerry Jones kremlinology to Ourand on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren talks about the Barneys of old with merchandising and retail scion Gene Pressman on Fashion People.
and…
Heilemann and the Times’s Jon Mahler discuss the origins of Mamdani-mania on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and AMC C.E.O. Adam Aron imagined the future of the theatrical on The Town.
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Marion tells Peter all about the latest Sotheby’s drama on The Powers That Be.

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My favorite metric for a technology cycle or platform shift is the interval of time between its introduction and rampant visions of dystopia. But an ellipsis that once took centuries—from, say, Gutenberg to Larry Flynt—has narrowed significantly. It took decades before worrywarts started obsessing about the unfounded medical ramifications of cellphones, and merely years between the moment when op-ed savants applauded Twitter for catalyzing the Arab Spring, and then blamed it for the rise of Donald Trump. That time frame collapsed even further between the advent of TikTok as a cultural force and its reframing as a C.C.P. Trojan horse.

Of course, in the case of A.I., the window was compressed to almost nothing. Nearly from the moment Sam Altman introduced ChatGPT to the public, the culture responded by prompting the bot to reveal the severity of the economic calamity that was presumed to befall us all.

As I’ve noted aplenty, artificial intelligence has already become the definitive technology of our age—the catalyst of trillions in investment in private innovation and extraordinary infrastructure development. And yet, in so many ways, our understanding of its multitudes remains as primitive as when Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel first talked about the internet on Today in 1994. (Bryant: “What is internet, anyway?”… Katie: “A lot of people use it…”) We’re in the early innings, to deploy some overused investor jargon, but we’ve certainly hit the moment in the hype cycle when the questions outweigh the answers and it becomes clear that no one is infallible. 

As is customary in my job, I’ve learned so much about the industry through my partners—via Matt Belloni’s reportage on the technology’s impact on Hollywood, say, or Dylan Byers’s work on how media companies are adjusting. (Leigh Ann Caldwell will have an excellent piece on the current legislative thicket surrounding A.I. on Sunday.) But I’ve been influenced the most by Ian Krietzberg, Puck’s newest partner, who has brought a clear-eyed, data-informed, no-bullshit lens to the space. In a pair of excellent pieces this week, Ian revealed the latest nuances about how this technology will inform our lives in the days and years to come.

In The A.I. Jobpocalypse, Revisited, Ian leveraged a recent study to upend a series of apocryphal and apocalyptic media narratives about A.I.’s impact on the job market. You might be heartened to know that the technology is actually enhancing the value of mid-career workers, and that reports of disrupting early-stage employees are inconclusive—and we haven’t even yet seen the extraordinary job creation that will unfold as the industry matures. And in Id, Ego & A.I., Ian got his hands on “Ash,” a new a16z-backed therapy chatbot, which serves as a reminder that so many humans are entirely irreplicable. It’s a hoot of a read, and a case study in what can happen when science fiction meets capitalism—especially the Wild West of venture-based tulipmania. It’s one of the great stories of our time, and especially what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,

Jon

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