Welcome to The Weekend Press! Today, the woman who planned JFK Jr.’s wedding on how Taylor Swift could get married in secret. Two Drinks with the Republican senator who says Iran is running rings round our president. Sitcom star Mayim Bialik gets real about her “personal neuroses.” And more!
But first, Suzy Weiss introduces the origin story of a media empire. . . .
The beginnings of media empires are seldom smooth. The Free Press began on Substack, when Bari and Nellie created an account using crappy airplane Wi-Fi. But after that, it was like we were News Corp. Just kidding: There was endless confusion about everything from incorporating (hello, Delaware!) to office kitchen-cleaning politics (ceramic coffee cups are a privilege, people!) to office leases on both coasts. (Thank you, Craigslist!)
Dave Portnoy knows what I’m talking about. He started Barstool Sports—the bro-tainment juggernaut that pumps out sports articles, gambling picks, podcasts about getting girls, and fodder for internet drama at an industrial scale—with a loan from his dad that he used to buy 100 newsstands, which his mom helped him set up all over Boston.
He was just a recent Michigan grad (Go Blue!) with a deadening sales job and a hunch about what guys really wanted to read, and the gambling companies that might take an interest on the ad side. But he eventually sold a stake of his company for millions upon millions of dollars. These days, the brash-talking Boston kid is, somehow, the Rupert Murdoch of people who spend weekends shotgunning beer.
In today’s lead essay, Portnoy lays out exactly what the beginning of Barstool Sports looked like: broken-down vans, drunk contractors, Hooters ads, and all. The first edition of the paper introduced it as a publication by normal dudes, for normal dudes: “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing, and chasing short skirts.”
And that, says Portnoy, is the secret to his success. Long live the bro. —Suzy Weiss
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I Planned JFK Jr.’s Secret Wedding. Here’s How Taylor and Travis Could Pull It Off. |
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The marriage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is perhaps the closest thing America will have to a royal wedding—and everyone’s convinced it’s happening on Friday, at Madison Square Garden. Permits have been filed, Travis’s teammates are booked at a Times Square hotel, and Amtrak officers have been told to expect it. RoseMarie Terenzio has seen celebrity mania like this before—and knows a thing or two about secret weddings. The former chief of staff to JFK Jr. helped plan his and Carolyn Bessette’s undercover nuptials—spiriting them off to a remote Georgia island. Afterward, members of the press chased a fake honeymoon in Ireland. Her read on the rumors: “If this information is out there,” she writes, “it’s because she put it there.” | |
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Two Drinks with . . . the Senator Warning Trump That Iran ‘Cannot Be Trusted’ |
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The young GOP senator from Montana Tim Sheehy wears several silver bracelets, one for each friend he lost while serving as a Navy SEAL in Iraq. They were killed by radical Shiite forces funded by the Iranian regime—a regime that Sheehy understands “through the barrel of a gun and through the receiving end of IEDs and bombs.” So when he went viral this week for warning that it is not to be trusted, he knew what he was talking about. On Wednesday, with the Trump administration locked in negotiations with Tehran, Audrey Fahlberg visited him in his office, and Sheehy—while sipping his drink of choice, Coors Banquet—discussed death threats, Tucker Carlson, and why America must hold the Iranian regime “by the throat.” | |
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How One Forgotten Novel Helped Me Return to Judaism |
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Once upon a time, Columbia Journalism School professor Nicholas Lemann couldn’t understand why his parents, born in 1926, had to hide their Judaism in New Orleans: “Having come to maturity at the dawn of what was supposed to be an era of multicultural tolerance and ethnic pride, shouldn’t they have felt free to embrace being Jewish?” In this week’s Things Worth Remembering, he explains how Myron S. Kaufmann’s little-known novel “Remember Me to God” helped him understand their religious dilemma—and recognize how our culture continues to shame young Jews out of their identity today. | |
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She’s an anti-diaper mom of two, an award-winning sitcom star, a neuroscience PhD, a former Jeopardy! host, and a certified lactation educator. Meet Mayim Bialik, who sat down with Suzy Weiss for the latest episode of Second Thought, to talk about it all. “I wouldn’t consider myself normal by a lot of [Hollywood] standards,” she said. But she does thin
