RPS Turned Six Months. Here's Where We Stand.

Plus: a protest on Martha's Vineyard, the latest UES feud, and an investigation at Yale

^{Free letter today. Don’t get used to it.}

A lot of you already know the story of this newsletter. I have trickled it out here and there, usually while cringing at the details: I was sick with the flu, only a couple of weeks out from the abysmal end of a relationship with a love-bombing PE partner, left with more questions than answers, and lying in bed feeling sorry for myself on a Saturday morning. So I did what I have always done when I can’t fix something: I started writing.

This time, though, it was a newsletter. One that had been percolating in the back of my mind for nearly a year. Named after my self-proclaimed journalism beat—“rich people shit”—it would give me a place to publish the short-form stories I couldn’t place in the large national publications I already wrote for. It would let me put the absurdly wide network of friends, sources, and contacts I had accumulated over the course of my career to good use. And it would give me somewhere to shadily hold people who didn’t behave properly accountable from time to time. (Only when they deserved it, obviously. Mostly.)

So I wrote the first issue of Rich People Shit, and I pressed send.

A collage of images from RPS stories from the past few months.

Two weeks, I told myself. Give it two weeks. If you look dumb, or hate it, you can always quit. But then something happened: you showed up for me. You subscribed and shared and commented. Then you kept doing it. By the end of those two weeks, I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t go anywhere. I had paid subscribers. I was a real newsletter.

And now RPS has reached the six-month mark, a milestone that once seemed impossibly far away. It feels like the right moment to look at what we have accomplished so far, and what I plan to make you all endure next.

First, I still can’t figure out what came first, the press or the subscribers. In my first month alone, RPS attracted more than 3,000 subscribers, while I appeared in the New York Post twice, New York Magazine’s newsletter, and AOL.com. This little newsletter was starting to feel very real, very quickly.

Over a month ago, our subscriber count crossed into five figures. RPS now has more subscribers than twice the combined population of Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. We could fill nearly seven sold-out Broadway theaters, more than half of Arthur Ashe Stadium, 65 fully loaded coach buses, or 75 Boeing 737s. And I am well on my way to reaching my goal of 25,000 subscribers in the first year. That is a lot of people reading this every time I press send. But even more meaningful than how many of you are reading is who you are.

RPS is read by founders and financiers, designers and dealers, actors and authors, publicists and politicians, hoteliers and restaurateurs. There are billionaires, editors, chief executives, socialites, society fixtures, professional troublemakers, and the people paid very well to clean up after all of the above. Some of your names appear regularly in newspapers. Some of you own those newspapers. Some of you decide whose names appear there. And some of you would be horrified to appear in one at all.

The breadth of this readership continually amazes me. So does the fact that people who are this busy, accomplished, influential, and, in many cases, impossible to impress want to know what I have to say multiple times a week. I do not take that lightly, even when the subject at hand is not always on the heaviest side.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the power this newsletter has developed. RPS increasingly feels like a living, breathing thing separate from me, capable of producing benefits and consequences all on its own. That continues to boggle my mind.

One person I interviewed made six figures from a business deal that came directly from appearing in RPS. Others have told me they gained subscribers, followers, customers, reservations, sales, introductions, and opportunities after being featured here. Stories that began in this newsletter have traveled through the media, into boardrooms, around dinner tables, between bedsheets, and, I am told, through a considerable number of group chats. All from being in RPS.

This newsletter is powerful. But it is powerful because of you: your taste, your curiosity, the people you choose to support, and the community that has formed here. An audience like this one does not simply read something. It can change what happens next.

In June, I threw a party to celebrate it. I won’t lie: it took an enormous amount of planning. This was not a “drinks at a bar” situation. It was an invitation-only evening of caviar and cocktails, with a guest list edited more ruthlessly than my copy. The goal was to take RPS off the screen and put it into a room. It needed to feel glamorous but not corporate, exclusive but not joyless, and full of people who were actually interesting, not just professionally photographed. I didn’t want a party that was strictly media. We all go to enough of those right? I wanted a mix. (And we got a mix!) In other words, it needed to feel like this newsletter. It was a certain kind of party for a certain kind of person, and I was completely comfortable with that. RPS is not for everyone. It was never supposed to be. But I wanted to celebrate the people it is for: the readers, subjects, sources, friends, and early believers who understood what this could become, sometimes before I did. Looking around the room and seeing the world of RPS made tangible was one of the strangest and most gratifying moments of these first six months. (It was also proof that all of you look very good in cocktail attire.)

I can now confidently say that RPS is one of the top news-breaking newsletters on the Substack platform, even if some of you occasionally forget where you read something first when you lift it. Here is just a sampling of the stories RPS has exclusively broken over the past six months: Annabel’s coming to the U.S., with Scott’s opening inside it; Jessica Gillin leaving Jenna Perry to open Franklin’s NYC; London private members’ club Estelle coming to the UES; Estelle Manor scouting locations in the Hudson Valley (I would have appreciated credit for that one, Mark Ellwood, but apparently that’s your M.O.); Mr. Chow closing its Tribeca location; the hedge fund surf club; Queen Camilla’s nephew getting fired; the Ned Club’s email debacle and attempted dues hike; Jes Staley’s issue with an UES church; the Barney Greengrass pop-up at Babe’s Sag Harbor; and so much more that, honestly, I can’t even remember it all. It is a lot for a one-man (girl!) operation, and that doesn’t include all the news I follow, the interviews I bring you or the other fun things that end up going viral. (The full archive of all these things can be found here).

Rich People Shit has also become something of a press staple. That is an extremely strange sentence for me to write because I am the press. But along with our first month of press, RPS and I have now appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Caper, The Hollywood Reporter, AVENUE, Vanity Fair (twice!), The New York Post more times than I count, a litany of other amazing Substacks, and others I am sure I am forgetting.

I will never be entirely comfortable being interviewed. I am much happier asking the questions than answering them. I am happy to offer informed opinions on subjects I know a lot about, but I am not meant to be famous, and I have no desire to become an influencer. I do not want to film myself getting dressed or take you through my morning routine. There are already enough people volunteering for those jobs. RPS has always been about my reporting, my access, and my particular way of looking at the world. It is not a diary, and I am not its main character. There is a reason so many of you spent the first few months assuming it was written by a man. The name does a lot of the lifting. I have proven the work is good enough to speak for itself. I’ll just peek through the curtain every now and then.

I do, however, have enormous ambitions for this newsletter. I don’t know whether every one of them will happen exactly as I imagine, but I am going to do everything I can to find out.

Over the next six months, the RPS merch store will finally open, complete with a discount code for paid subscribers. There will be more events for paid subscribers, followed by even more over the six months after that, including events beyond New York City. The design and structure of RPS will continue to evolve, becoming more polished, organized, and sophisticated. And by Labor Day, I intend to have a publishing schedule so consistent that you will know exactly when RPS is about to land in your inbox.

The famous gift-bags from the first RPS event.

I will also be introducing a new interview series, followed—I hope—by several new regular franchises. There will be more Venn & Now editions, too, since I know how popular they are and how often you ask me when the next one is coming. If that still doesn’t feel like enough, I remain exactly where I have always been: available by email and DM, listening to your ideas, tips, and strongly worded opinions.

Because while I am technically the person who makes this whole operation run, RPS is shaped just as much by what interests you, what you respond to, and what you send me. I have never understood newsletter writers who behave as though they descended from the heavens to deliver content unto the inbox. Without readers, a newsletter is just a person writing very long emails to herself. Your interests, ideas, and occasional corrections are what make this whole thing tick.

If you are a free subscriber, I am thrilled to have you here. If you are a paid subscriber, I am even happier, and I consider it a genuine privilege that you invest any amount of your money, monthly or annually, in my work. And if you are a founding member, please never forget how much your grounded belief in RPS has meant to me (and my ever-growing enterprise).

Six months ago, I gave myself permission to quit after two weeks. Instead, you gave me a reason to keep going. RPS is no longer the thing I started from bed on a particularly self-pitying Saturday morning. It has since become a real publication with a community I could never have imagined when I hit send that first morning. I can’t wait to see what happens in the months ahead. So stick around, if only to see how long it takes for this whole thing to blow up. And if it does, at least we’ll have had a lot of fun along the way.

Now, enough of my rambling. There’s more in today’s letter than me squawking at you about RPS making it through its first half-year without adult supervision.

Martha’s Vineyard, Shopbop, Yale, Medium Cool, Joshua Wagner, Dan Bink, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Star Island, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, Pi Pizzeria, Nantucket, Evan and Maria Marley, Upper East Side, Spence School, Patrick Murphy’s Market, The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, Arlington, Harsch Kumar Sood, Jeremy King Restaurants, Ashley Baker and more….

• Nothing says summer on Martha’s Vineyard quite like a protest outside a designer shopping event. Amazon-owned online retailer Shopbop opened a three-day pop-up at Edgartown’s Sydney Hotel this weekend. On one side of Winter Street: a long line of shoppers and influencers. On the other: a group of furious local boutique owners. Shopbop carries many of the same brands as the independent stores that rely on the Vineyard’s short summer season to stay in business. Have you all noticed a trend in some of the most rarefied summer enclaves? Sag Harbor is pushing back on chain stores coming in (earlier this summer, we discussed a petition created to keep big stores from coming to Main Street); now this with Martha’s Vineyard. Local is important to these areas more than ever.

  

• The Justice Department is investigating whether Yale illegally favored Black and Hispanic applicants over white and Asian applicants after the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions in 2023. The investigation covers Yale College, Yale Law School and Yale School of Medicine; Yale denies considering race in any of their admissions decisions. One of the things I find most interesting about this is the only place reporting on this as of now is the Yale Daily News. Now that’s good journalism.

• Medium Cool, the subterranean Miami Beach bar that made the very convincing case that people still want to drink cocktails and listen to jazz in a room that does not feel designed for TikTok (i.e. the owners never even hired a publicist despite the mile long lines every night), is closing its 17th Street location on August 22.

  The team blamed an unexpected change in direction at the hotel that houses it. But Medium Cool itself is not going away. Co-founders Joshua Wagner and Dan Bink are already looking for a new home.

  

• Speaking of Miami, Sean “Diddy” Combs has reportedly sold his infamous Star Island mansion off-market for $55 million after buying it from Gloria and Emilio Estefan in 2021. Prosecutors cited the property as a setting for his “freak-off” parties, but Combs still owns the house next door.

• Nantucket’s Pi Pizzeria is for sale. And for $12.5 million, you can now buy the whole Pi. Evan and Maria Marley are selling the Nantucket institution after 25 years, along with its West Creek Road property and a staff house. They hope to find a buyer who will keep the beloved restaurant going. Maria, meanwhile, plans to retire, take art classes and make lightship baskets.

  

• The Upper East Side has found its latest battleground: an elite private school versus a beloved neighborhood grocer. Spence wants to expand its lower school into the former Patrick Murphy’s Market, replacing the Madison Avenue storefront with classrooms and a rooftop play area. The local landmarks committee recommended rejecting the plan, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission will have the final say. If you have anymore information on this one, you know where to find me.

• Did you know The Odyssey has its own ticket black market? According to CULTURED, opening-weekend tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX sold out within an hour, with pairs at AMC Lincoln Square reportedly hitting resale sites for as much as $999. Only 25 theaters in the U.S. can show the movie in the format Nolan intended. Has anyone seen it yet? What did you think?

• There is maybe nothing I love more than a long lunch, so it was a hard yes when London’s Arlington asked to interview me for its Long Lunch series earlier this month. I brought my friend Harsch Kumar Sood along for lobster thermidor soufflé and Sancerre while I answered questions about ideal lunch companions, why overdressed is my baseline and how a long lunch can actually be good business. Thank you to Jeremy King Restaurants, Arlington and Ashley Baker for having us. Read it all about it here.

  Not yet following @readrps on Instagram? Now is the day to change that. And per usual, I can be reached at carson@readrps.com.