Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The skinny on Kim Kardashian’s Skims—and how it dodged retail armageddon.

• Beyoncé water and fake Pilsner: Our top 5 favorite New Age canned beverages that thirsty VCs love, too.

• Plus: The perils of inheritance; a man who could save us from our sinking world; and how a football star, a preacher and an actor shaped modern America.

On Thursday, billionaire Josh Kushner and his wife, Karlie Kloss, declared their intention to ascend to media moguldom by resurrecting Life magazine. 

Having purchasing the publication rights to Life from their friend Barry Diller’s Dotdash Meredith, Kushner and Kloss intend to revive the photo-laden chronicle of the previous century with print and online editions, events and “collaborations with brands and major studios,” presumably the ones with Hollywood backlots, DealBook reported.

As my colleague Kate Clark and I told you last year, Kushner has a great deal of quiet ambition that occasionally spills out into public sight and plenty of Diller-type connections to achieve such steady empire building. Yet it’s hard to picture where Life fits in—at least in any meaningful manner. I can easily foresee Kushner finding Life a rather vexing task (at least when it comes to managing the magazine). Just look at what’s happened lately with Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, and Marc Benioff, owner of Time magazine. Each publication enjoyed years of shiny expansion, but both The Post and Time have recently needed to do layoffs. As their growth prospects dim, Silicon Valley cannot stop gossiping about whether Bezos or Benioff will give up and sell. 

You could fill several magazines with stories of rich moguls who thought it’d be fun—and easy enough—to own and run a major publication. (For a brief time, I worked for just such a person.) For a cautionary tale, Kushner could just look across the family dinner table at his brother, Jared. In 2006, Jared paid $10 million for the New York Observer, then a writerly tabloid of culture, politics and business. Under Jared, it went kaput fast, and it exists today as the faintest online specter of its former self.

What could Kushner envision as a best-case scenario? We got a glimpse of that this week when The Atlantic, owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, celebrated intertwined milestones: It has gotten to 1 million print and digital subscribers, and, nearly seven years after Powell Jobs initially invested in the publication and 167 years since its start, it is once again turning a profit.

Every dog has his day, and Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, sees himself someday resurrecting a different deceased publication. Meantime, you can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

How the CEO of Kim Kardashian’s Skims Dodged Retail Armageddon

Like most of America, the Kardashian-Jenner clan has been part of my consciousness for a long time, though I’d wager dollars to lip kits that my experience with them may be a little different from yours. They first showed up in my life when I was a Forbes editor assembling the magazine’s hallmark billionaire list, and Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner were debuting on it. Jenner beat Kardashian to a spot on the roll—arriving there in 2019, two years ahead of her sister—and I remember thinking her beauty products would likely outlast anything from Kardashian, who mostly seemed interested in licensing deals.

Not at all! As my colleagues Ann Gehan and Annie Goldsmith show through their extensive reporting, Kardashian’s Skims clothing brand is a retail juggernaut, practically the only brand left living amid a dark period for the industry’s web-focused startups. Ann and Annie interviewed both Kardashian and her co-founder, Jens Grede, Skims’ CEO, as they detailed Skims’ inner workings: the obsessively long meetings, the new physical retail strategy, the tangled production supply chain that could really hinder further expansion, the methodical product development.

I’d say what got Skims here—and finally pushed Kardashian’s personal fortune into 10 figures—is her decision to stop doing licensing deals and instead exert full creative control over a brand. “I no longer do deals where I lend my name and allow it to be put behind things that I don’t truly believe in or that I am not allowed to be hands-on with,” Kardashian told Ann and Annie. And what about Kardashian’s sister Kylie Jenner? She’s no longer a billionaire, and apparently she’s eager to take a page from Kardashian’s book and buy back control of the cosmetics firm she sold off in 2020.

The Top 5

Our Favorite New Age Canned Beverages—That Thirsty VCs Love, Too

Here’s a confession: Over the years, I’ve drunk a few bad beers. And I’m willing to admit that the fake beer from Athletic Brewing is better than many of the real ones I’ve had, especially the Upside Dawn golden lager and the Free Wave IPA. 

“I’ve done beer tastings with real craft beer writers—who are supposedly professional tasters—and they’ve not been able to pick out our beers from the lineup,” Athletic Brewing co-founder Bill Shufelt told me. Shufelt has raised almost $500 million off the strength of his suds, and his near-beer lands high up on this list—which examines the best drinks to come from the surprise boom of canned beverages that hope to replace traditional adult refreshments, like bad beer. 

Listening: An Unsettling Wayback Machine 

I could give a preamble that tries to sell you on “Landslide,” but host Ben Bradford, a public radio veteran, does a very effective job within seconds of the podcast’s premiere episode. “In the early 1970s, a series of crises cascaded that look eerily similar to today’s: gas prices, inflation and a challenge to American democracy,” he intones. “Those troubled days in the 1970s marked a turning point in American politics.” Braford takes off from there with clarity and agility, eventually heading into the 1980s. He focuses his attention on the era’s three leading political figures—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan—and on showing how their policies and actions shaped America into the country we know (for better and worse) today. With skill and not a hint of partisan bias, Bradford documents the GOP’s shift toward socially conservative causes, as well as the country’s broader rethinking about what it expects—and wants—from its government.—A.B.

Reading: A Modernist’s Water World 

One of my favorite subgenres within The New Yorker magazine is “Eccentric Innovator Comes Up With New Climate Change Hack.” And the latest entry in this category arrived a few days ago: a profile of Koen Olthuis, quirky founder of Waterstudio. The Netherlands-based architectural firm builds geometric floating homes that gently rise and fall with the tide. For now, Olthuis is mostly focusing on sleek luxury units in his home country, a place defined in large part by its relationship with water—existing as it does at the intersection of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt rivers, with more than a quarter of The Netherlands below sea level.

But Olthius is also developing templates that could mitigate the effects of a rapidly flooding world across the planet, ranging from a seaworthy city in the Maldives to a low-cost houseboat made of bamboo and cow manure in India.

Sure, some of Olthius’ and Waterstudio’s ideas may seem a little far-fetched, like a plan for cities that float partly on helium balloons. Then again, his avant-garde firm has come up with concepts others have overlooked, like repurposing worn-out wind turbine blades as material for floating walkways. Since mobilizing the world to stop global warming looks increasingly unlikely, it might be time to refocus on how human ingenuity can help us live differently.—Julia Black

Watching: Gunfire and Great Expectations 

More often than not, inheritance carries the weight of expectations, and sometimes those expectations dwarf any monetary sum involved. Such is the complicated situation that befalls young British aristocrat Eddie Halstead (Theo James—charming as ever) in Netflix’s “The Gentlemen.” Setting aside a military career, Eddie returns to England from abroad to receive his father’s estate and lucrative, if complicated, side business: a flourishing marijuana operation. It’s a bit of a shock to Eddie, who expected Haldstead Sr. to leave the estate to his older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings from “Lovesick” and “The Crown”). But Freddy has gotten himself in Dutch with some usurious—and murderous—Liverpudlians, and Eddie must come up with some much-needed cash before they scratch out Freddy. The show is as richly, delightfully fizzy as it sounds, pulled off with admirable aplomb by film director Guy Ritchie, who did a previous version of the story in a 2019 film by the same name.—A.B.  

Final Thought

Same! My time has never felt more optimized.