Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon medley of Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Eriq Gardner considers how the government shutdown is reshaping the landscape for major media deals. With antitrust employees on furlough, can Bob Iger and Disney evade D.O.J. scrutiny on their pending Fubo acquisition? And are the various suitors for Warner Bros. Discovery beyond the Ellisons—like Brian Roberts at Comcast—suddenly in a position to test their strategic leverage and Trump’s perceived veto power?

Plus, below the fold: Peter Hamby offers a data-driven look at the most pressing lessons from the Dems’ 2024 electoral collapse. Ian Krietzberg gets a look at Miami’s new self-driving, A.I.-loaded police cruiser. Marion Maneker previews the Ruth Asawa retrospective opening at MoMA. Sarah Shapiro spotlights the quiet success of Gigi Hadid’s cashmere-focused retail play, Guest in Residence. And exclusively for Inner Circle members, Julia Alexander and analyst Peter Supino assess the true value of WBD’s sports rights.

Meanwhile, on the pods: John Ourand is joined by Amazon sports boss Jay Marine on The Varsity to discuss Prime Video’s evolution as a media rights heavyweight. On Impolitic, John Heilemann and writer-director Cameron Crowe discuss his new memoir chronicling the years that inspired his Oscar-winning film, Almost Famous. And on The Powers That Be, Peter and Leigh Ann Caldwell enumerate the political pressure points that could resolve the grueling government stalemate.

HOLLYWOOD

News and notes on how the government shutdown might disproportionately benefit Disney’s ability to close its Fubo deal, and why Comcast co-C.E.O. Brian Roberts still has options to circumnavigate Trump’s perceived veto power on the WBD deal.

WASHINGTON

A new 2024 postmortem, released on the eve of the D.N.C.’s own self-autopsy, makes the case for Democrats cutting the cord with left-wing party activists and winning back normie voters with a return to big-tent, multiracial, middle-class messaging—while learning a little from A.O.C. and Zohran Mamdani, too.

A.I.

Nobody seems to know what the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office’s new all-seeing, self-driving, A.I.-infused police van will actually do, or how much it cost. What’s the worst that could happen?

ART

A sweeping MoMA retrospective shows the full scope and ambition of Ruth Asawa, a titanic talent who studied with luminaries like Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, yet wasn’t fully discovered until her death in 2013. As the art world approaches her centennial, the appreciation is still growing.

FASHION

The supermodel’s cashmere label, Guest in Residence, has quietly become a $30 million business—profitable, well-liked, and largely unrecognized as hers.

SPORTS

A wide-ranging chat with renowned analyst Peter Supino about the auction for Warner Bros. Discovery, including the true value of WBD’s sports rights, the potential buyers most likely to bid on the motherlode, a few strange and overlooked aspects of the deal, and much more.

SPORTS

Live from New York, Amazon sports chief Jay Marine joins John to discuss Prime Video’s evolution from live-sports skeptic to major NFL bidder, why Amazon is pouring money into tier-one rights, and how that $20 billion NBA deal came together.

HOLLYWOOD

John sits down for an epic conversation with Oscar-winning writer-director Cameron Crowe about his new memoir, The Uncool, which covers his years as a teenaged rock music writer for Rolling Stone in the 1970s—years that served as the inspiration for his classic movie, Almost Famous. In the first installment of this special two-part episode, Crowe details his seminal experiences on the road with The Eagles, The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, and other defining bands of the era, which shaped his unusual adolescence and turned him into a magazine journalism wunderkind, as well as the unique relationship he forged with Bob Dylan, which ultimately paid dividends for another of his hit films, Jerry Maguire.

WASHINGTON

Leigh Ann Caldwell joins Peter to discuss two upcoming off-ramps for the government shutdown, and the pressure points that could bring an end to this grueling political stalemate. Then they consider how House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have ceded congressional power to Trump, and what this portends for both parties going forward.

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