Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly capsule of the best new work at Puck.

It was a terrific week here at Puck: Teddy Schleifer broke the news of Jeff Bezos’s NFL backtrack; Julia Ioffe talked TikTok with Senator Mark Warner; Tara Palmeri explained how uber-consultant Jeff Roe is redefining DeSantis; Matt Belloni went beyond the hype of the new Affleck-Damon-RedBird Hollywood financing machine; Dylan Byers explained the inside theories about why Murdoch won’t settle; Lauren Sherman dug into the celebrity styling scandal for the ages; Eriq Gardner unveiled the possibility of a bananas Hulk-for-Hulu M&A swap; and Bill Cohan offered an insider reading of the latest damning S.B.F. allegations.

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

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer scoops Bezos’s Commanders headfake and previews the ‘24 tech money spigot.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers gets into the Murdoch settlement game theory.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni has the definitive multi-part analysis on whether this new Affleck-Damon-RedBird Capital venture is really a game changer.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri reports on the Jeff Roe-inflected DeSantis semi-reset.
and…
Tina Nguyen gets the Taliban 20 to open up about their plans for McCarthy.
and…
Julia Ioffe chats with Mark Warner about TikTok, Putin, and Musk.

FASHION:
Puck’s newest partner, Lauren Sherman, digs into the industry’s sordid saga of the moment: what happened to Law Roach? And is the stylist a victim of the business or his own ego?

PODCASTS:
Matt and Lucas talk about Zaz’s year of magical thinking on The Town.
and…
Matt also joins Peter Hamby on The Powers That Be to explain the transition to Max.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

First and foremost, we’d come to the obvious conclusion that as you scaled the heights of various businesses and fields—finance, media, tech, politics, entertainment, and so forth—it was all one small world, populated by a relatively narrow cast of characters, who had outsize power, and yet their motivations and maneuvers were largely undercovered and misunderstood. We also recognized that the media, itself, was changing drastically. Journalists, with their access to proprietary information and spheres of influence across platforms, were true domain experts and underpriced influencers. We tried to marry these realities, along with a novel business model that treated authors as equity holders, in the form of Puck.

On a fundamental level, Puck believes in scarcity. I lived through the spray-and-pray days of digital media, and I don’t want to recreate it: newsrooms turned into ant farms, “eyeballs” took primacy over readers, and investors got taken to the cleaners. We deliberately only publish a few articles a day, often directly to our community’s inbox, because our model is aligned with quality: we believe in expertly reported, elegantly told stories by generationally talented domain experts. (And, sure, slap my wrist if there’s a little dish and intrigue baked into the cake.) Bill Cohan isn’t just the Wall Street chronicler of our time, after all, he’s a former banker with 20 years of M&A experience. This authenticity and credentialism is true across our ranks at Puck.

From nearly the moment we got started, I’d been curious about moving Puck into fashion. The high end schmatta trade, after all, is a multi-trillion dollar industry run by some of the most fascinating egos in the world. It’s also a business that’s built on historic brands, enfant terribles, and an intrinsic anxiety about remaining relevant. And it’s also a world that runs on relationships, which is a polite way of saying that the media often bites its tongue, and the real story behind the story rarely ever gets out there. But what if it did?

For months, I’d been quietly asking advisors and confidantes who might be the perfect person to bring Puck into fashion and vice versa. And, I can say without exaggeration, I received the same answer every time: Lauren Sherman, the extraordinary talent from The Business of Fashion.

My partners know that I’m not precisely what you would call a fashion person. On most days, I look like I got mugged by a J. Press catalog. But every since my formative years at Vanity Fair, I’ve been addicted to the dark arts of the trade and the lure of its practitioners. Funnily enough, as I was charting a backchannel to Lauren, she brokered an introduction through Puck founding partner Teddy Schleifer, an old pal of her husband.

After a few weeks of previews, we launched Lauren’s Line Sheet this week to rave reviews. The email breaks the news of Tom Ford’s forthcoming exit from his namesake brand, digs into the ways that the bean counters at Vogue monetize the Met Gala, explains why Bottega is about to soar and then weighs into the industry’s obsession of the moment: what in the world is going on with star stylist and Zendaya courtier Law Roach. If you have a moment this weekend, please spend some time with Law Roach and the Red Carpet Pilling of the Styling Industry. It’s precisely the sort of story you can now, blessedly, expect from Puck. Sign up for Line Sheet here.

Have a great weekend,
Jon