Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting. Here’s what you need to know… and stick around for more on James Murdoch’s takeover of Vox Media’s prime assets.

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Meanwhile, on the pods…

And now, a little more on the “new” Vox Media…

MEDIA

On Wednesday morning, James Murdoch announced that he had landed his long-anticipated, $300 million-plus deal to acquire New York, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and Vox.com. The new Vox Media, as it will be called, will be a subsidiary of James’s investment vehicle, Lupa Systems, and will be run by current C.E.O. Jim Bankoff—whose decision to stick around must have made the deal far more palatable.

As Dylan reports, James’s primary motivation seems to be getting back into the media game, with a strategy that seems to revolve around a Laurene Powell Jobs–style idealism. The announcement also came with some intriguing personnel news: Vox vice chair and New York scion Pam Wasserstein will make the transition and continue reporting to Bankoff, and Vox president Ryan Pauley will take over a new stand-alone company containing the remaining digital assets. Meanwhile, well-informed sources told Dylan they anticipate those remaining assets could one day pass to Jay Penske’s PMC…

Click here to read Dylan’s full story.

FASHION

After the Baldonigate fallout, Blake Lively’s briefly hot Target haircare line, Blake Brown, is circling the drain—and its Italian partners want out. Finding a new operator may not be easy.

ART

Beyond the billion-dollar single-night bonanzas and the movie-star promo spots, smaller sales are revealing a less sexy dynamic in the market: Collectors are exercising the freedom to sell without taking too big a loss—and their willingness to move on is creating liquidity that will fuel future growth.

WALL STREET

Once a predictable cashflow business, Lipton has become a test case for how private equity leverage is holding up these days amid a less forgiving economic environment. The company’s new management team is confident they can turn things around.

WASHINGTON

After a tense phone call with Majority Leader John Thune, Trump did what many felt he’d wanted to all along.

HOLLYWOOD

From Grogu to Spidey, here’s what each of this summer’s top 10 tentpoles actually needs to earn—and why success means something different for everyone.

WASHINGTON

Julia Ioffe joins Peter to break down Trump’s pressure campaign against Cuba, where the administration seems to be deploying parts of the Maduro playbook: a D.O.J. indictment of Raúl Castro, Marco Rubio targeting Cuba’s GAESA conglomerate, and a humanitarian collapse amid negotiations between Havana and the C.I.A. But if Trump isn’t after the country’s oil, what’s the actual goal here?

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