Free brand trip idea: the library.
Hinge should add an "I'm a reader" option.
It’s possible to be tired of hearing something, and also understand that it’s a net-good thing. Today that net-good thing is the marketed movement for beautiful, interesting, smart women to read.
Last year, I wrote about Miu Miu’s book club, Kaia Gerber’s book club, Alaia’s book store, and Sofia Coppola’s imprint.
’ Substack welcome page reads, “I write gift guides for people who read books.” Zara’s newest collection has a t-shirt that reads READING IS SEXY. I’ve been reading ’s newsletter about books and people who read them since she launched. New York Magazine launched a newsletter called Book Gossip that I was a skeptic of, but it’s quite great. and have a new series called “2 Girls 1 Book.” Part of the viral 75 Hard TikTok trend that took over my newsfeed in January was reading. One of the longer stories in this week’s issue of New York magazine is about McNally Jackson’s literary empire (“McNally has a high-school popular-girl aura.. ‘She’s very beautiful, and she’s very stylish, and, you know, she comes from a background that not all of us come from.’) And just this morning, CULTURED magazine announced a new books editor: Emmeline Clein. The girls are making it clear that they’re reading, and obviously there are worse habits.Last night, model/photographer/artist Orion Carloto launched a book club called Bible Study. The direction of this one is Ethel Cainian, with dark religious imagery of nuns and language like “praiseworthy” and “deliver me.” I DM’d Carloto to find out more about what she’s building – it’s not on Substack, it has a log-in, and there is an analog reading log which she encourages members to print out and tape into their notebooks. She responded quickly:
“This isn’t run like a typical book club where I read a new and unfamiliar title along with the readers…. I always found that to be intimidating and I want to show grace to those who read at a slower pace. This is a world I built where I’ve already done all the research, so by the time it reaches you, you won’t have to guess whether or not I would vouch for it. I think it’s because I have always been precious about my moments alone, so I can only hope that this gives people the chance to do the same, especially in an environment where things are moving so fast…. One could call it a book club, or simply assigned reading. I suggest the book and I leave you alone in your little corner to spend time with it. You find more in those moments than anywhere else. Sometimes that’s enough.”
Meanwhile, J.Crew planned an IRL book club during NYFW with Buffys, that sold out in minutes. Lizzy Hadfield, the founder of book club Buffy’s, visited 11 NYC bookshops to collect 40 different titles, also featuring hand-written notes from the staff members who chose them. The comments on the post now mostly read, “NOOOOOOO would have loved to be there.” Great signaler for other brands trying to figure out what their next event should be besides a dinner — just go to the library!
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Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert is helping me build a modern Metro Section. Last month, he wrote about New York’s transient spaces, and today he’s debating whether offices are So Back. The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office, but you’ll be seeing more of him around here in his series, Stand Clear.
The Commute Not Taken
New York, at long last, has declared victory over its office crisis. Stumbling into 2024 hungover from rate-hike shocks, sentiment about American commercial real estate had never been gloomier. Save for certain subsections of industrials (data centers, warehousing), owners and operators were unprecedentedly blue when surveyed, and walked the walk to back it up. Nowhere was this pessimism more on display than the office sector, where lenders engaged in high-stakes games of hot potato attempting to minimize, or at least punt, the realized losses on their sagging loan portfolios. These games continue today, and are revealing that the fundamentals of the office market tell a tale of two east coast cities.
“If you’re in New York and work for someone other than yourself, it’s more likely than not that the office has crept back into your work-life equation.”
In New York, services giant Colliers reports leasing velocity, the measure of how long space is vacant between occupants, again reached record post-COVID strength in Q4 2024. Net absorption, the measure of leased space less vacated space over a period of time, clocked in at ten times stronger than a year prior. In a town of high-dollar headquarters, trophy assets flush with swanky amenities, prime locations, and gleaming new fixtures shone. That trophy strength now seems to have permeated through to the rest of the market, with the dregs being converted when feasible at accelerating rates, and the middle being leased up by companies which continue to unwind lax work-from-home policies. Blackstone, cold to the Manhattan office market for years, is reported as being deep in talks to make its first buy since 2021. If you’re in New York and work for someone other than yourself, it’s more likely than not that the office has crept back into your work-life equation.
The same cannot be said of the nation’s capital. A non-inauguration walk down K Street will yield still-empty sidewalks, with lobbying groups, NGO’s, and federal employees returning to work at a slower pace than the rest of the country. Interestingly, recent measurement suggests the metro area’s traffic congestion is finally exceeding pre-pandemic levels, which I am told by dozens of Twitter accounts called things like “Wall Street Alpha Gains 420” should mean that the city’s urban core is healthy and thriving. The reality is that while not in a Gary, Indiana tailspin, it’s stuck in molasses. According to Cushman & Wakefield’s most recent MarketBeat report on DC Office, vacancy sits high at over 20%, the region’s net absorption is still trending the wrong direction, and foreclosed assets can be had for 30-60% discounts. This prolonged fog over Foggy Bottom may not relent anytime soon, as the newly-formed DOGE, whose genesis has our top brains innovating unsolicited novel ways to “cut $4bn in government spending per day”, suggests it will quickly dispose of government-owned properties and cut leases procured through the GSA. Trepp’s Thomas Taylor took a stab at projecting the potential impact of GSA lease terminations, and their relative footprint by market value and geographic area. In this tale of two cities, the teams are set: New York and Miami are pretty much back to normal. Washington, D.C. and Atlanta are the “best of the rest”, and everywhere else is stuck in varying degrees of low gear. San Francisco, we need not think about.
In both of these cities, and in the swim-or-be-foreclosed office markets across the country, the constraints that had held Class-A office up as safer than sovereign debt have shifted. Below the surface-level noisemaking about distressed assets and pension funds holding enormous bags of dusty, empty offices, landlords have to compete again. On price, on amenities, and on location (good luck, Reagan-era suburban office parks). Losers get exposed, the well-capitalized and cautious weather the changing winds, and a well-timed switch in capital stack position or costume might be the difference between being made whole and getting rinsed. I remain optimistic that employees will continue to return to their offices on negotiated terms, and I daresay that we might learn something interesting about ourselves when we’re tasked with operating inside shifted constraints. You might learn that you enjoy dressing up like a vacationing, bonus-flush associate, or the office siren, or that you detest constraint so violently that you’d prefer to sell all your possessions and live inside a Chevrolet express van than ever set foot in an office again. Whenever I talk with rooms full of undergrads or new hires, they express they’re ready to get to work and go to work. My experience consistently vaporizing hours of time on Teams calls that could have been shoulder taps makes me inclined to agree with them. See you at the front of the E train.
The Anonymous Transit Expert also thinks you should read:
This Plane gets Five Big Booms on the Boom Meter - Boom Technology Inc., the startup that promises to return supersonic air travel to anyone who can afford a business class ticket, achieved the first supersonic civil flight in 20+years last Tuesday afternoon over California when their XB-1 prototype hit mach 1.12. The company has secured 100+ orders for their planned Overture jet with a type certification timeline of +/- 5 years. Pencil me in for a 2030 day trip to London.
Infrastructure Week is Back - A last-minute stay by a D.C. judge unfroze already-partially-specifically-frozen federal funds earmarked for a smorgasbord of rail safety and equipment procurement projects. Separately, memo geniuses at the OMB unfroze freshly frozen highway grants provisioned in the Inflation Reduction Act/Infrastructure and Jobs Act (colloquially either “Green New Deal” or “Green New Scam”).Clarifying guidance was later issued noting that while the OMB freeze on the funds was unfrozen, the funds were still all conceptually frozen, because of reasons discernible to only our most annoying constitutional law experts. Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on and many are calling it the “smoothest rollout of all time”. Perhaps the six boy wonders with completely unmonitored access to the biggest family computer ever can use the power of ctrl+f to add some zeroes to the program budgets.
“Securities” Firm Alleged to Have Pumped, Dumped - Speaking of efficient, decentralized mediums of exchange and stores of value, crypto exchange “pump dot fun”, the trading platform of choice for all manner of memecoin “investors”, was named as the defendant in a “class action lawsuit” filed where else but New York. The suit alleges that the tokens traded on the website can be constructively defined as securities, and therefore the exchange’s $500mm of trading fee income can be viewed as made from the facilitation of unregistered securities trading. Something tells me this is not going to be a top priority item for the SEC, but I really need exit liquidity for my $SIGMA, $Fartcoin, and $FWOG.
Gothamist’s Khalifeh & Nessen are on a heater - The combined byline have released only hits this month, covering exploding century-old electrical equipment, the real costs of deferred maintenance, and the delicate condition of the steel that holds the whole thing together. I look forward to their coverage when Congestion Pricing is taken out behind the woodshed.
This concludes Stand Clear by Anonymous Transit Expert.
Step Aside, Incognito Mode: Europeans Can Now Get Their Porn Right in an iOS App The really important phrase here is “App store review” which is basically Apple being like, “We’re protecting our ecosystem.” As a company, they’ve historically had G-rated taste and tight rules around apps, sometimes enforcing rules tighter than what’s permitted by law. (If you think about Amazon selling supplements that say “This will make you 10x smarter,” Apple might not allow the same teaser for a brain training or meditation app). Thanks to a pro-competition EU law called the Digital Markets Act, an alternative app store called AltStore has just launched the first porn app that you can natively download for iPhone. (Interestingly, AltStore is backed by Epic Games, which has its own motivations for taking on Apple.) The app is called Hot Tub, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Would you guys feel comfortable having this on your phone’s home screen?
Alex Cooper should really hire Adam Faze for these videos…. On a related note, I joined the waitlist for Unwell’s Spring Break party. Stay tuned 🍹
Nicolaia Rips wins the New Job Announcement of the Week award. Excited to see her join Thom Bettridge and Steff Yotka.
Catch Hospitality potentially has a new location: Italy. Last week, Feed Me broke the news that the group was buying The Frog Club’s space. One of its partners, Tilman Fertitta recently bought the emblematic Keens Steakhouse which brought a wave of concern to how the restaurant’s business would be conducted, especially given the announcement of a Dallas expansion. The group and it’s partners have been making waves on the scene, but Tilman might be removed from it soon, as he’s just been announced for the role of US ambassador to Italy. I doubt Rainforest Cafe (Fertita is also CEO of Landry’s, the group that owns the restaurant franchise) will be a smash hit in Rome.
In New York’s restaurants, nearly 60% of the workforce is foreign-born. “But that hardly tells the real story. The fact that the industry relies on undocumented labor is not so much an ‘open secret’ as an indisputable truth.” It’s rare that restaurant owners are so adamant about speaking off the record, especially when Chris Crowley calls. Chris (who wrote the story) said he’d be down to hop in the Feed Me chat later to discuss it.
What do we think Biden needs an agent at CAA for? I think he should let a sleep or meditation app use his voice.
wrote about facial balancing, a term I’ve heard many time from friends, doctors, and podcasters. One doctor asked if I slept on my right side (I do) because that side of my face was flatter. She accompanied the post with a fun fact: “This article was originally supposed to run in a major national publication, which requested I remove the bulk of my research tracing the “facial harmony” trend back to eugenics and Nazi ideology :) i declined & decided to run the piece here in my newsletter instead. if you’re so inclined after reading, please share!!”
“Pizza and beer. My goodness, I think it’s going to be very popular. The type of person that’s going to be there is me.” The Hamptons is getting a new brewery in Springs. Rare that proposals like this are received so well, but it sounds like locals want a place to drink beer year-round without having to get onto Montauk Highway.
As a lifelong obsessive reader I have mixed feelings about “books r hot” ! My generous take is: it’s good to read! And libraries are underrated safe places of hope
Bible Study is such a good name. And the branding!!!