ERIKA AYERS BADAN kicked off her heels and sank into the quiet of her Connecticut home. It was the run-up to the spring sprint for Barstool Sports, the company she’s run for seven years. There was the Super Bowl, March Madness. And then there was the deal with Penn Entertainment, a casino and racetrack company, to fully acquire Barstool, after buying a third of the business years earlier, with plans to take on the whole thing in 2023. She knew it was coming, but these last few weeks were filled with the minutiae of it. She paid visits to all of the cable business channels to field questions about what this would mean for the company, which, since its founding, revolutionized the way media companies build community and make actual money and step in shit by being unapologetically themselves. (Barstool being itself meant being relentlessly chaotic and behaviorally tricky.) She led town halls with hundreds of employees. She recorded episodes 260 and 261 of her podcast, Token CEO (on Barstool, of course). She bought David Portnoy a bottle of wine from 2003—the year he founded Barstool as a free hometown subway newspaper in Boston, backed by $25,000 from his parents, for other Red Sox bros commuting. “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who, like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing,” he wrote in his first issue, “and chasing short skirts.”
Denne historien er fra September 2023-utgaven av Vanity Fair US.
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Denne historien er fra September 2023-utgaven av Vanity Fair US.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Party Planning - Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
I don’t know which moment in US history former president Donald Trump imagines when he says, “Make America great again.” He has never given a definitive answer in any speech or interview. But I know exactly which moment Vladimir Putin imagines in his own vision for Russian greatness. It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill divided the world in Crimea.
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
THE BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET
THE GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE, BORN IN 1937, IS ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, WITH MORE MONEY THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR FRANÇOIS PINAULT. WHERE DID HIS FAMILY FORTUNE COME FROM? THE NAZIS KNOW
GIVE AND LET GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
