Happy Labor Day Weekend. I thought this was the perfect thing to head into our weekend with: our monthly round-up of what everyone could not stop flapping their traps about throughout August. Here are some of the stories people kept sending around:
Bezos now owns three houses on Indian Creek, worth roughly $234 million combined, but The Wall Street Journal reported that he still hadn’t been admitted to the island’s famously private country club. In the Hamptons, John Mayer played a tiny SiriusXM show at the 250-person Stephen Talkhouse. The tickets weren’t sold publicly and became so hard to get that people were asking as much as $4,000 for them, RPS was told. Speaking of the Hamptons, Gwyneth Paltrow was also supposed to host an off-the-record dinner for Sam Altman at her home in Amagansett. The dinner attracted plenty of attention, then was indefinitely postponed. Emma Cline’s Switzy was definitely the galley brag of the month. (And if you haven’t been lucky enough to snag a copy yourself, the Booker-longlisted novel follows a wealthy former executive whose memory is failing as he travels by private plane to Zurich, where he plans to end his life while he can still make the decision himself.)
Then there was the Met’s John Galliano mess. The museum announced a major retrospective of the designer, only to face immediate criticism over Galliano’s 2011 antisemitic tirade. By the end of the month, Galliano had withdrawn and the exhibition was canceled.
There’s more, from helicopter parents bringing actual helicopters to sleepaway-camp these days, and Saint-Tropez on the brink of being declared persona non grata by those who have been going nowhere else for decades. What else do you think was big news in the RPS ecosystem in August?
Today, RPS also has an extra-special opportunity for ten of our New York-based paid subscribers who have read (or are currently reading) the book The Plunge, by friend of the letter Lila Raicek.
Also in today’s letter: a very special US Open section on private aviation costs, the great influencer debate, and private bathrooms; plus Stan Kroenke buys the Angels and now owns 2.7 million acres, L.A. County hits Jeff Bezos, Rihanna and other private-jet owners with unpaid tax bills, Libbie Mugrabi posts a “set the record straight” video, Sotheby’s starts building an events business, women are now driving most of golf’s growth, and New York City moves to restrict AI in public schools.
