Hello, and welcome back. Reporting to you from Sun Valley, where I am diving under shrubs to avoid Dylan Byers but then finding him there in the shrubs saying, “Hi, it’s Dylan Byers, got a minute?” Honestly, I love it here. When we first came several years ago, Bar was like, “Can you believe our lives led us here?” and all I could say was, actually, yeah. As the smartest person I know (me, not Bar), this is exactly how I expected things to unfold for me. The market is efficient. I was made for Sun Valley.
In announcements: Our July Supper Club is next Wednesday, July 15, in 38 cities across four countries, because apparently “meeting strangers from the internet for dinner” is now one of our most successful ventures. Last month, thousands of you did it and the overwhelming feedback was, “Can we do this again immediately?” Make your reservations today! And this, from some of the supper club organizers, looks cool: a two-day frontier tech conference in New Hampshire, known to me as the thinking man’s Vermont.
→ The oyster of my eye: Graham Platner—the king of the Dirtbag Left, the boarding-school kid who talked all gruff so everyone could pretend he was working class—has suspended his hugely viral and popular campaign for Senate in Maine after being accused of rape. I have to spend a little time on this since it really tells you a lot about where our politics are at. First, the accusation, reported by Politico in an explosive new piece: Platner’s ex-girlfriend says he broke into her house and raped her. Or, as the media is phrasing it, “he entered her rural Maine home uninvited” and “forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.” Hmm. There’s a word for that!
Now, here’s the odd thing. That very same accuser, Jenny Racicot, had earlier spoken to The New York Times. Weeks ago they published their own Platner sex scandal story. But it was soft. It didn’t include the rape. What NYT supporters say is that she didn’t want to go on the record with it. The other way to see it—my way, the bad way—is that it looks like that the story was a sort of catch-and-kill, in which they got the facts and downplayed them to protect Platner. Because they did know everything. They had been told about that sexual assault.
