Harry & Meghan, S.B.F.’s Future, WaPo Fury

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Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the best work of the week at Puck.

It was another sensational week here at Puck: Julia Ioffe revealed the story of “Putin’s Chef,” the man who runs Moscow’s shadow army; Matt Belloni articulated the case for never over-estimating James Cameron; Julia Alexander ran the numbers on the Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary; Dylan Byers reported on the fury inside The Washington Post; Bill Cohan presaged the next steps of the S.B.F. crisis and Teddy Schleifer delivered the news on his latest political scandal.

Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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SILICON VALLEY:
Baratunde Thurston explains when the robots are really going to take over.

Hollywood:
Matt Belloni captures the envy and anxiety around the new Avatar movie.
and…
Julia Alexander crunches the numbers on Netflix’s investment in the Sussexs.

Wall Street:
Eriq Gardner explains Lina Khan’s secret weapon against Microsoft.
and…
Bill Cohan reads between the lines of the S.E.C.’s case against S.B.F.
and and!...
Teddy Schleifer dives into the former crypto prince’s newest political scandal.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers captures the anxiety inside The Washington Post.

WASHINGTON:
Julia Ioffe introduces the culture to “Putin’s Chef”—perhaps the only man inside Russia with leverage.
and…
Tara Palmeri captures the tension on the Democrats’ ’24 sidelines.
and and!...
Tina Nguyen documents the evolution of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

PODCASTS:
Listen to Dylan discuss the civil war inside the Post on Peter Hamby’s The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw enumerate Hollywood’s biggest flexes of the year on The Town.

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.

Happy Holidays from Puck

Back in the earliest days of Puck’s pre-history, my partners and I envisioned a company that treated journalists as influencers—the sort of environment where readers could feel uniquely connected to the author of the work they were imbibing. I’d grown up in a world that treated writers as stars. My parents are authors, and our apartment was festooned with books. When I was learning the magazine trade from Graydon Carter, the first editorial pages of Vanity Fair were dedicated to miniature biographies of the magazine’s top reporters, with small vignettes on the stories behind their articles. As the magazine arts repopulate our direct-to-consumer digital media landscape, I’ve come to believe that readers deserve something akin to a farm-to-table experience. We don’t just want them to enjoy their favorite articles, we want to showcase the ingredients, and do everything we can to take them inside the kitchen to meet the chef.

Indeed, Puck’s authors aren’t simply peerless talents. They are also sophisticated curators of the culture. That’s why we’re so pleased to share our second annual holiday Guide to Mirth & Merriment. It’s our attempt to share what we’re watching, reading, listening to, and buying for ourselves (and others) outside of working hours.

Sure, some of you have already completed your holiday shopping, but I behoove you to spend a little time this morning cuddling up to your Amazon app to reinvest in the American economy, with a little assistance from my partners. Julia Ioffe has some great ideas for the Portuguese wool blanket you always knew that you needed; Bill Cohan has a few book suggestions; and you’ll get to know what Matt Belloni is streaming this holiday season. This, above all, is precisely the sort of information that you can only find at Puck!