Good morning,

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

Okay, so I say this every week, but only because it is true—it was another fabulous week at Puck. Matt Belloni presaged the Hollywood peace treaty; Dylan Byers scooped Jeff Bezos’s WaPo C.E.O. succession search; Julia Alexander explained David Zaslav’s sports strategy; Julia Ioffe imagined a terrifying geopolitical hypothetical; Lauren Sherman investigated a fashion mystery; Eriq Gardner probed a major Netflix-Ava DuVernay lawsuit; and Teddy Schleifer revealed some more fresh dish about S.B.F.’s political buddies.

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

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan has the wild story of two Manhattan D.A.s and an eight figure art restitution.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers previews the final round of Jeff Bezos’s WaPo C.E.O. search.
and…
Julia Alexander deciphers Zaz’s sports strategy.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni breaks down the historic WGA deal
and…
Jonathan Handel reads the fine print on the 94-page contract.
and…
Eriq Gardner explains the drama behind a startling Netflix lawsuit.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer unearths more of S.B.F.’s clandestine political operation.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri reports on the 2028 G.O.P. hopefuls.
and…
Peter Hamby unveils the political scandal befitting our times.
and…
Tina Nguyen unfurls the DeSantis delusion.
and…
Julia Ioffe, as only she can, infiltrates Foggy Bottom for a Ukraine hypothetical.

PODCASTS:
Tara Palmeri gets the read on the dilapidated G.O.P. field from operative Mark McKinnon on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Matt Belloni chats about the strike aftermath with WGA negotiation member Adam Conover on The Town.
and…
Peter Hamby and Julia Ioffe explain how the crisis in Ukraine became the central issue in U.S. politics on The Powers That Be.

For the next hour, Bank of America’s extraordinary media analyst, Jessica Reif Ehrlich, briefed Puck’s subscribers on the patterns that she is seeing in the streaming industry; Penta’s senior partner Kevin Madden offered guidance and around-the-corner analysis regarding how Fortune 500 companies are getting ahead on Capitol Hill; and Meredith Whitney, the incredible and inimitable Wall Street analyst, provided proprietary learnings and insights into housing trends and wealth migration across the country. We presented their findings not entirely unlike what you’d expect from a public company’s earnings report. My partners Matt Belloni and Abby Livingston asked follow-up questions and probed their presentations, just like Wall Street analysts. As the hour-long, subscriber-only event ended, my inbox was flooded with questions about when we’d be staging the next one.

We have obsessions here at Puck—I know you know that (Chris Licht, Jeff Roe, I could go on…). But preeminent among them is that our journalists aren’t simply expert storytellers, they are also domain experts. At the same time, we know that our community has a rapacious appetite for insiderly information. If you’re like me, you view newspaper articles, magazine stories, or TV segments as the true first draft of events, or about 80 percent of the real story. The true essence of what’s really going on—the plot that only the insiders know, that’s where Puck comes in.

Our Quarterly Call concept is an attempt to bring audiences closer than ever to our elite journalists and the professional analyst class whose data helps power their insights. If nothing else, I hope that our first call, sponsored by Global X ETFs, brought subscribers into the room with Jessica, Kevin, and Meredith, to absorb their culture-shifting perspectives. The future of journalism, after all, relies on new formats and expressions. It was heady stuff and a ton of fun, if I’m being honest. We’re already working on another for Q4.

As the quarter comes to a close, it’s hard to ignore a mild sensation that our culture appears to be turning the corner in numerous ways, and that was the leitmotif here at Puck this week. As Matt noted in Hollywood’s Post-Writers Strike Reality, the town is coming to terms with its new detente as it enters the A.I.-addled, everything-on-the-table era. In S.B.F.’s McConnell Tickle, Part 2, Teddy Schleifer provided some of the fresh context for the trial of the era, which starts next week. And in DeSantis Fatigue & G.O.P. Grief Therapy, Tara Palmeri reveals that the Republican cognoscenti is moving on to ’28.

But if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d suggest turning your attention to The Phoebe Diaries, Lauren Sherman’s excellent dissertation on the fashion industry’s insatiable interest in Phoebe Philo’s mystery-shrouded forthcoming line. It’s one of the great stories of our time—a confection of ego, Arnaults, and enigma—and precisely the sort of tale you can only find at Puck.