Good morning,

It was another incredible week: Matt Belloni measured the Kimmel blast radius; Kim Masters reassessed Iger’s legacy; Eriq Gardner offered a contrarian take on Brendan Carr’s power; Julia Alexander crunched the numbers on the ESPN app’s first 30 days; Bill Cohan pondered a Zaz stalking horse; Dylan Byers broke the news of Bari Weiss’s brand-new $150 million bag; John Ourand presaged Roger Goodell’s next big negotiation; Lauren Sherman examined Amy Griffin’s V.C. fund, post-Times exposé; Rachel Strugatz dissected a Sephora-Ulta recruiting war; Sarah Shapiro documented a British fashion invasion; Ian Krietzberg considered the bull case for Sam Altman’s cash incinerator; Marion Maneker sat down with Gagosian; and Julie Davich reevaluated the Chinese ceramics market.

Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell shared a talmudic reading of Ted Cruz’s ‘28 posturing; Peter Hamby profiled a different Texas Dem wunderkind; Julia Ioffe spotlighted the latest indignity in Foggy Bottom; and Abby Livingston heard from the Hakeem Jeffries haters on the Hill.

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 weighs in on the Amy Griffin discourse and the Demna debut.
and…
Rachel Strugatz investigates a Sephora-Ulta recruiting war.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro chats with Me+Em C.E.O. Clare Hornby.

Marion Maneker discusses the art market recession with Larry Gagosian.
and…
Julie Davich analyzes the latest tranches of auction house data.

Matt Belloni sorts the winners and losers of Kimmelgate.
meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner chronicles the Brendan Carr reality-distortion complex.
and…
Kim Masters revisits the Iger-Eisner relationship.

Ian Krietzberg evaluates Sam Altman’s staggering unit economics.

Dylan Byers reveals Bari Weiss’s windfall and grades Dana Walden’s performance in the Kimmel clash.
and…
Julia Alexander assesses ESPN’s first month in the streaming wars.
meanwhile…
John Ourand proffers some NFL media rights kremlinology.

Bill Cohan details a new potential Zaz suitor and relays Mark Carney’s Trump fears.

Leigh Ann Caldwell previews Ted Cruz’s burgeoning ’28 campaign.
and…
Abby Livingston gathers the frustrations with Hakeem Jeffries.
and…
Peter Hamby chats up a great new hope on the left.
meanwhile…
Julia Ioffe looks into yet another Foggy Bottom beef.

Dylan and Julia Alexander forecast the next steps in the Kimmel crisis on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and UFL co-owner Dany Garcia discuss the league’s burn rate on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren goes deep with The RealReal chief brand officer Kristen Naiman on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and Rahm Emanuel chew over Trump’s First Amendment wars on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and KPMG media leader Scott Purdy break down the new Hollywood economics on The Town.
and…
Leigh Ann and Peter gauge the lingering Charlie Kirk aftershocks on The Best & The Brightest.

As a reminder, you can update your profile at any time to get more stories like these directly in your inbox. Click here to customize your email settings.

The duration of a media scandal often has little correlation with its political or societal import. In fact, if one were to draw a graph, they might discover an inverse relationship between consequence and staying power—a grim reality that the ballad of Lorena Bobbitt, the poop cruise, the Jayson Blair saga, and even O.J. and Nicole aptly demonstrated. Unfortunately, it’s human nature to drown out significant crises for all the obvious reasons: They are often too bleak and painful and unpleasant to countenance on a quotidian basis. That’s at least one reason why media coverage of our double-barreled Bush-era wars in Afghanistan and Iraq faded out so many years before our troops came home.

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The Jimmy Kimmel affair existed somewhere on the midpoint of this graph. The subject of scrutiny was a globally famous comedian, and yet the intricacies of the matter were profound and sprawling. As I noted to my partner Peter Hamby on a recent episode of The Powers That Be, the whole misadventure reminded me of Magnolia, the vintage Paul Thomas Anderson ensemble that charts the dramas of separate but interconnected lives. All politics aside, beyond Kimmel’s remark lay a murdered man who left behind a wife and children, slain long before he could comb grey hairs.

And yet, Kimmel and his employer were being pressured by government forces in a decidedly unconstitutional manner, something that has become an astonishingly disturbing yet unsurprising trend. Further in the background, the scandal was being managed by Dana Walden, the co-chairman of Disney Entertainment and quite possibly the successor to Bob Iger. These lives and so many more were impacted by a snippet of a monologue that lasted no more than a few seconds. In the small and transforming world of media, it seemed like a true Franz Ferdinand moment.

Naturally, my partners have been obsessed with this storyline—and we’re really only just beginning to grasp its reverberations. In Iger, Eisner, and Why Disney Finally Stood Up to Trump, my brilliant partner Kim Masters predicted the scandal’s impact on Iger’s legacy. In The Miseducation of Brendan Carr, Eriq Gardner offered a gimlet-eyed assessment of the F.C.C. chair’s actual juice. And in a typical masterstroke, Matt Belloni surveyed the damage for all the key players in The Jimmy Kimmel Blast Radius. Finally, Dylan Byers delved into the Disney C-suite politics of it all in Walden, Revisited.

The Kimmel saga, after all, touches virtually every power corridor in which Puck operates. More importantly, it touches the bedrock foundation upon which our industry operates: the First Amendment. It’s one of the most important stories of our time, and exactly what you should expect to consume at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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