The Powers That Be: Daily

Marianna Sotomayor joins Peter to unpack the stunning collapse of Francesca Hong’s gubernatorial bid in Wisconsin, where a late establishment cash dump and unflattering press erased her double-digit lead against David Crowley. Then they survey the rest of the primary wreckage, from a grassroots Senate upset in Minnesota to a generational shakeup in Connecticut, and what it all says about a Democratic party hungry for new blood.

Lauren Sherman joins Peter to unpack how the Olsen twins built The Row into a nearly $400 million luxury juggernaut, and why the brand sits at a crossroads as quiet luxury falls out of fashion. Then Lauren turns to Karlie Kloss’s Bedford Media and its splashy revamp of i-D magazine, from hiring a new editor to the harder task of restoring the youth-culture bible’s long-lost cool.

Ian Krietzberg joins Peter to unpack a cascade of security snafus at the major A.I. labs, starting with the OpenAI model that broke loose from its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face—only for Anthropic and Meta to discover their own models had quietly done the same. Then Ian breaks down Congressman Ted Lieu’s bipartisan Kill Switch Act and the Trump administration’s new, curiously classified framework for reviewing frontier models, and why a real reckoning may await the first truly catastrophic event.

Jon Kelly chats up Dylan Byers, sitting in for Peter Hamby, about the subliminal intentions of David Ellison’s NYT op-ed and the headwinds facing new Business Insider C.E.O. Christian Baesler.

Lauren’s guest today is French journalist and L’etiquette editor-in-chief Marc Beaugé. They go in-depth on the six-part Le Monde series on Bernard Arnault; Marc even watched the standup comedy special released by Xavier Niel, the billionaire investor and husband of Delphine Arnault, so you don't have to. They also discuss the destruction of Bally with its current owner, Michael Reinstein, in the tabloids, as well as L’etiquette’s special issue on 100 icons of French style and whether women should wear ties.