If you’re in New York right after Labor Day, I’m chatting with Tony Tulathimutte for the paperback release of his batshit (major compliment) novel, REJECTION at Yu & Me Books. Come hang out!

Of course everyone in media should read The Cut’s story on the Food52 content studio director Shannon Muldoon who stole at least $270,000 from the company by charging her corporate card for flights, clothes, etc., which first of all, who knew Food52 had it like that, even back in 2020? (“Plus brand partnerships was a big business, and the division was still hitting its margins and goals enough of the time despite the money Muldoon was spending on herself” — okay, so she wasn’t terrible at her job…). Also, a fun tidbit for our purposes: “In February 2024, she was hired at Substack as its podcast and video acquisition-and-development lead. She was employed for fewer than 90 days.”

It is, of course, unfortunate for the colleagues who eventually got laid off at Food52 once the media headwinds changed, but you can’t really bring up Muldoon’s story in a decent industry group chat without someone verbalizing what we’re all thinking: goals. JK JK, sure, except as Emilia Petrarca astutely pointed out in her read of the Michael Grynbaum book, The Condé Empire Was One Big Beautiful Grift, back when having editors and writers approximate the appearance of a luxurious life was the whole point.

Muldoon’s real mistake, you could argue, was simply being born in the wrong era and working somewhere not under S.I. Newhouse Jr.’s particular largesse. But to be a purveyor of lifestyle media, lest we forget, has been and always will be a kind of scam in some form; the real skill issue is simply figuring out which corporate funds to siphon off for your Net-a-Porter purposes, and how explicit the permission to do so is.

Meanwhile, what’s Brian Lam, OG founder of Wirecutter, doing with his life now? Apparently moving to Japan with his ex and daughter to be a carpentry apprentice. Aspirational, as always. I find it quite novelistic that the guy who made his fortune on rigorous product reviews continues to strive for an actually interesting life (recall the doing ocean stuff in Hawaii life stage, for example) beyond making like, more media. Good for him.

Rather impressive to me is how Celine Song has unwittingly kept herself and The Materialists at the center of internet discourse; in a recent viral Letterboxd video interview, she delivers a solemn rebuke to the, well, Letterboxd-level comment that her movies was “broke boy propaganda” with some 101 stuff about feminism and classicism, and Twitter/X went nuts for it, which is probably just representative of how utterly devoid of calmly articulated argument the platform is, even though in my brain, I was like, why is no one challenging her on the fact that she seems to be confusing ‘broke’ and ‘poor?’ This would never stand muster on 2017 Twitter! Not if the entire staff of Jezebel had a say!

My pretty snooty theory is that ever since most of the media / sane members of the “internet intellectual class” who used to hang out on Twitter have left, there has remained a vacuum that has now been filled by a kind of endless amateur critic hour (consider the Sydney Sweeney discourse, how people dissect your average YA show like The Summer I Turned Pretty as if it is god’s gift to cinema) to the discourse. (I’m told that most of the know-it-alls have decamped to Bluesky, where they’ve proliferated unchecked by the quotient of shitposters and jokesters necessary to keep the nerds from getting too annoying; after all, a truly healthy discourse ecosystem requires both!) This is obviously a real “Twitter used to be a SMART and INFORMATIVE place to hang out, now please help grandma take her meds!” take, but it is quite sad that even X has become such a credulous place now.

Count me fascinated with the next iteration of Taylor Swift’s sprawling yet self-contained universe, wherein Travis Kelce has clearly assumed Chosen One status in terms of being the first boyfriend (so interesting that GQ called TS his “partner”) willingly—nay, enthusiastically—up to the task of playing emissary of her great big brand. A soulmate is great; a brand-safe adjoining platform and audience is even better.

I watched Weapons on Monday afternoon and honestly kept forgetting it was a horror film (if you, like me, are particular about your scary movies, I’m happy to report that it’s predominantly jump scares and very manageable gore). ****Light spoilers from here on out…

For premise-related reasons, the film reminded me the most of HBO’s The Leftovers, where we observe regular degular small town folks grappling with a mass disappearance—in Weapons’ case, of nearly an entire class of fifth-graders. But it’s much more action-packed than The Leftovers, less broody or big-headed. The storytelling was objectively great in deploying various POVs of different characters who intersect at specific moments, then pulling back and filling in what happened on the other end of things was done perfectly.

But I found a lot of the fear factor a bit contrived: Julia Garner’s character as the scapegoated teacher seemed too personally reckless to register significant dread, Josh Brolin playing the angry, grieving father was not quite ragey or obsessive enough. But as soon as we landed in the highly anticipated perspective of “Alex,” the lone classmate who didn’t disappear that fateful night, and get a glimpse of his domestic life, the terror becomes visceral and consuming. It made me think about the specific fears of a child: the arcane rules handed down to you by your care-givers that you must obey, the isolation of the family unit, how surreal and threatening your own house can feel especially in the dark. Director Zach Creggar’s previous film, Barbarian, was similarly fixated on the domestic sphere (or its approximation via Airbnb rentals): the not-quite home. Obviously not the first to do it (the call coming from inside the house, etc.) but a refreshing indictment nonetheless of the suburban American equivalence of “inside” with “safety.”