Latest news with #Sundberg
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Finland finds its first giant virus
Many viruses measure just tens of nanometers (nm) in size, but that's not always the case. In some rare instances , so-called 'giant viruses' can grow to as much as 1,000 times larger than their relatives. But despite the terrifying name, giant viruses aren't necessarily any more dangerous than a standard-sized species. And in Finland, researchers recently discovered the nation's first known example. Meet Jyvaskylavirus, a 200 nm diameter giant that's roughly two times bigger than influenza or coronavirus. Jyvaskylavirus is detailed in a study recently published in eLife, and named for Jyväskylä, the Finnish city where it was to researchers, the new species was discovered after mixing environmental samples with a culture of amoeba called Acanthamoeba castellanii. 'We elucidated the genome and structure of the Jyvaskylavirus, which was found to be related to Marseilleviruses previously isolated from France,' Lotta-Riina Sundberg, study co-author and University of Jyväskylä professor Lotta-Riina Sundberg, said in a statement on April 16. What makes Jyvaskylavirus particularly interesting to researchers is where it was found. So far, the majority of most known giant viruses so far have only been identified in Europe and South America. Finding a strain so far north leads the study's authors to theorize that giant viruses may be more widespread in soil and water than previously believed. Giant virus life cycles and spread are still not very well understood. That said, certain Arctic species have been shown to infect specific kinds of algae that are currently exacerbating the melting of Earth's polar ice caps. Because of their size, giant viruses also have exponentially larger genomes than their standard-sized counterparts—as many as 2.5 million base DNA pairs compared to the usual 7,000–20,000. While large, Jyvaskylavirus is still dwarfed by the biggest known example, Pandoravirus salinas (500 nm) Researchers hope further study of examples like Jyvaskylavirus will lead to a better understanding of the unique microscopic organisms. But while Jyvaskylavirus is Finland's first catalogued giant virus, Sundberg made clear it certainly isn't the last. 'Other new giant viruses were also detected in [our] environmental samples,' they teased.
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A No-Frills Irish Pub Draws a Martini Crowd
Misty Gonzales has been tending bar at T.J. Byrnes, an Irish pub in the Financial District of Manhattan, for 13 years. For most of that time, she has served office workers, college students and city employees. Two years ago, she noticed some unfamiliar faces. This new crowd was younger and usually stopped in for poetry readings, book-club gatherings and parties. Aside from their age, their drink orders set them apart. 'Martinis are the biggest thing — I couldn't even get over how many people are drinking martinis,' Ms. Gonzales said. 'Lots of Negronis, too.' In the past year, the pub has hosted talks led by the art critic Dean Kissick, a holiday party for the leftist publication Dissent, a monthly reading series called Patio, a performance-art karaoke competition and a pre-Valentine's Day party for single readers of Emily Sundberg's Substack newsletter Feed Me. Some of Ms. Sundberg's 180 guests were initially confused by the choice of location. 'This was the first time people have texted me before being like, 'What is this place?'' said Ms. Sundberg, 30, who first went to the bar for a friend's birthday a couple years ago. 'I wouldn't go as far as to call it the new Clandestino,' she added, referring to the downtown bar that is often bursting at the seams along Canal Street. 'But if you have brand events — magazine parties, readings — it's become a venue.' At first glance, T.J. Byrnes might seem like an unlikely draw for writers, artists and fashion types. The bar is nestled in an austere plaza behind a Key Foods grocery store, at the base of a 27-story residential building. The facade looks onto a courtyard it shares with a preschool and a diner. The interior is unassuming, with a dark wooden bar in the front and white tablecloths and red leather booths in the back. The bar's eponymous owner, Thomas Byrne, 70, can be found most evenings at a cluttered desk just inside the dining room or perched at a hightop near the entrance, keeping an eye on the scene. In a pinch, he pulls pints behind the bar. 'I am very hands-on,' said Mr. Byrne, who has a neat mustache and typically wears a button-down shirt tucked into black trousers. He commutes into the city daily from Yonkers, where he has lived for the last 32 years. 'I'm not saying I never take a day off, but I'm here a lot of the time, and I like that.' The youngest of three, Mr. Byrne immigrated from County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1972 to join his brothers in New York, where they made their livings working in bars. With his brother Seamus, he ran a pub on Fordham Road in the Bronx from 1975 to 1991. After they closed that spot, his brother Denis came across a vacant Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street. It needed some serious remodeling, but its sheer size and proximity to some of Manhattan's busiest office buildings made it too good to pass up. After months of construction, T.J. Byrnes opened its doors in October 1995. With the exception of a brief window during the city's Covid lockdowns, the pub has been open nearly every day for the last 30 years. 'People say, 'Oh, you're still here,'' Mr. Byrne said. 'We went through Sept. 11, we went through Sandy, the big storm and all that, and tough times. But you just hang in there, and it works out.' Mr. Byrne recalled finally getting through police barricades the day after the attacks on the twin towers to find the bar, helmed by his brother, teeming with people from the neighborhood. 'So many people came in here just to be together,' he said. 'People were in distress, and this was a meeting place to sit down and talk.' T.J. Byrnes has always had an eclectic clientele, he said. City workers from 100 Gold St. mingled with musical theater students from Pace University. Office employees, retirees from St. Margaret's House apartment community and residents of Southbridge Towers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. But it seemed to take a specific confluence of events to get a more artsy crowd in the door. It might have started in 2022, when the writer Ezra Marcus sang the bar's praises in the Perfectly Imperfect recommendation newsletter. 'Byrnes is a holdout against the mass extinction of normal places for normal people to get a drink in the city,' Mr. Marcus, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, wrote. A couple months later, Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online subcultures, called T.J. Byrnes the 'new Forlini's' in an article for Artnet, likening it to the red-sauce restaurant that had unexpectedly become a downtown cool-kid haunt in the years before it shuttered. At the same time, the micro-neighborhood a few blocks from Forlini's known as Dimes Square was becoming overexposed and — with the arrival of an opulent boutique hotel and fine dining establishments — a bit too upscale for some. 'It just has a better vibe,' Mr. Citarella said on a recent evening at T.J. Byrnes, where he was hosting a reading group with the author Mike Pepi. 'With the transformation of downtown New York, everything has turned into condos; it doesn't feel like anything is authentic or is here to stay.' The South Street Seaport area that surrounds T.J. Byrnes has undergone its own changes. Once a gritty neighborhood celebrated by the writer Joseph Mitchell for its fish markets, the district has been transformed over the decades, most recently by large real estate investments, new shopping destinations and independent art galleries like Dunkunsthalle, located in an old Dunkin' Donuts on Fulton Street. When McNally Jackson Books opened its Seaport location in 2019, making it a hub for literary events, T.J. Byrnes became a favorite post-reading spot. Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was introduced to the bar after one of those McNally Jackson events. He took to it right away. Although T.J. Byrnes is unusually spacious for the city — another point in its favor — he described it as 'beautifully cozy.' When his debut novel, 'See Friendship,' was published this month, he decided to throw a book party there. With a lineup of readers and an open bar, Mr. Gordon invited around 60 of his friends to fete his book. The crowd sipped vodka sodas and hung out in the 'many little pockets' of the space, which includes a large dining room and a side area that's more tucked away. 'It is the type of place that I hope continues to exist for as long as I live in the city,' he said. For some, it is a necessary counterbalance to fussy bars and restaurants that cater to the TikTok crowd or to those seeking experiences behind red ropes. 'I don't want a concept,' said Alex Hartman, who runs the satirical meme account 'Nolita Dirtbag,' railing against what he sees as a trend of bars spending exorbitantly on interior design that panders to the downtown creative class. People are 'protesting this sort of aesthetic lifestyle,' he added. With reasonably priced bars in short supply and a surge of private clubs taking over nightlife, T.J. Byrnes, with its lack of pretense, is an antidote. 'It's the anti-members club,' Ms. Sundberg said. 'There's this huge cohort of New York City who wants to get into this locked, password protected, paywall door — and then T.J. Byrnes is right there.' Mr. Byrne keeps track of his bar's events and parties by hand, in a hardcover planner. Many people looking to entertain there simply text him to reserve the space — no fee or bar minimum required. 'I like the people that come here for the artist group,' Mr. Byrne said. 'They're really nice to deal with and enjoy the place, and we enjoy having them here.' During readings, he often listens from a spot toward the back. On a recent Friday night, the furniture designer Mike Ruiz Serra celebrated his 28th birthday at T.J. Byrnes with about 100 friends. His guests downed pints of Guinness, sipped martinis and Negronis, and ordered classic bar fare like mozzarella sticks. Away from the party, Andy Velez was closing his tab. Mr. Velez, who works for the City of New York in data communications, has been coming to T.J. Byrnes after work for 17 years, usually a few times a week. 'This is my 'Cheers,'' he said. Even when the crowd started to swell, as it was then, Mr. Velez said that the bar was almost never too loud to have a conversation. 'This is a very special place, a staple of the community,' he said. 'Only people in the neighborhood really know about this.'
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
A Canadian professor warned that illegal immigration and drug smuggling could surge in Canada thanks to the Trump administration's strict border enforcement. Kelly Sundberg from Mount Royal University spoke on "60 Minutes Overtime" Sunday night about a "tsunami" of illegal immigrants that can be expected to cross through the United States into Canada out of fear of being arrested or deported. "I hope I'm wrong, but it would appear that we're going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country, and they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them," Sundberg said. Tom Homan Delivers Bold Message To Sanctuary Cities 'Slowing Down' Ice, Warns They're 'Going To Keep Coming' Sundberg cited President Donald Trump's move to send thousands of "criminal illegal aliens" to Guantánamo Bay as a huge factor in encouraging migration to Canada, exacerbating concerns about fentanyl trafficking. Elsewhere during the segment, an anonymous Mexican cartel member revealed he has seen more migrants hoping to be smuggled through the U.S. rather than into the U.S. compared to before the Trump administration. Read On The Fox News App "Most of them are Venezuelans," the cartel member said. "Those people are afraid of being deported to their countries. Normally before, we didn't see that much, maybe out of every 30 people we crossed, three or four would come up. Now, maybe out of every 10 we cross, five go up to Canada." The Canadian border got more attention last month after a report uncovered Canadian traffickers allegedly advertising what looked like a human-smuggling operation to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S. through the northern border. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Trump has also been critical of Canada's border, accusing the country of failing to properly secure its border to prevent an influx of fentanyl into the U.S. In response, he enacted 25% tariffs on Canada's steel and aluminum and has threatened additional tariffs on all Canadian products on April 2. In February, Trump's first full month of his second term, illegal border crossings dropped to a record-setting low number of 8,326 apprehensions of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). This marked a 96% drop from the highest numbers reported by the Biden administration in Dec. 2023 with 301,981 encounters at the southern article source: Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
Fox News
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
A Canadian professor warned that illegal immigration and drug smuggling could surge in Canada thanks to the Trump administration's strict border enforcement. Kelly Sundberg from Mount Royal University spoke on "60 Minutes Overtime" Sunday night about a "tsunami" of illegal immigrants that can be expected to cross through the United States into Canada out of fear of being arrested or deported. "I hope I'm wrong, but it would appear that we're going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country, and they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them," Sundberg said. Sundberg cited President Donald Trump's move to send thousands of "criminal illegal aliens" to Guantánamo Bay as a huge factor in encouraging migration to Canada, exacerbating concerns about fentanyl trafficking. Elsewhere during the segment, an anonymous Mexican cartel member revealed he has seen more migrants hoping to be smuggled through the U.S. rather than into the U.S. compared to before the Trump administration. "Most of them are Venezuelans," the cartel member said. "Those people are afraid of being deported to their countries. Normally before, we didn't see that much, maybe out of every 30 people we crossed, three or four would come up. Now, maybe out of every 10 we cross, five go up to Canada." The Canadian border got more attention last month after a report uncovered Canadian traffickers allegedly advertising what looked like a human-smuggling operation to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S. through the northern border. Trump has also been critical of Canada's border, accusing the country of failing to properly secure its border to prevent an influx of fentanyl into the U.S. In response, he enacted 25% tariffs on Canada's steel and aluminum and has threatened additional tariffs on all Canadian products on April 2. In February, Trump's first full month of his second term, illegal border crossings dropped to a record-setting low number of 8,326 apprehensions of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). This marked a 96% drop from the highest numbers reported by the Biden administration in Dec. 2023 with 301,981 encounters at the southern border.
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Where the Dealmakers and Strivers Get Their Gossip
It took about three minutes for Emily Sundberg to secure an invitation to her first inauguration party in Washington this January. She had asked for invites on X, adding, as a selling point: 'I am so funny.' Bari Weiss answered the call. The founder of The Free Press, Ms. Weiss was co-hosting a party at a five-star hotel with Uber and Elon Musk's social media network. Her guest list included the former British prime minister Liz Truss, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Ms. Weiss and Ms. Sundberg, 30, are both stars of Substack, their shared publishing platform, though on considerably different scales. The Free Press, a center-right publication, recently reached one million subscribers. Feed Me, Ms. Sundberg's daily business newsletter combining zeitgeist analysis with link aggregation, has only about 60,000 readers. But over the last two years, Ms. Sundberg has become an object of fascination in media and finance circles. Though many readers are young (or youngish) worker bees, Feed Me's subscribers include high-profile venture capitalists like Kirsten Green, well-connected rising editors like Willa Bennett, and Bloomberg personalities like Matt Levine and Joe Weisenthal. In November, Ms. Sundberg was a co-host of an off-the-record dinner along with Paul Needham, chief executive of The Infatuation, a restaurant recommendation website owned by Chase and favored among upwardly mobile city-dwellers hunting for spots for a first date. It was attended by a mix of scene-y creators and power brokers: Kareem Rahma of the web series 'Subway Takes,' Chris Black of the podcast 'How Long Gone,' Peter Lattman of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times's DealBook. While that gathering was invitation-only, an upcoming party for Feed Me readers around Valentine's Day ('a really chic, cool singles party,' as Ms. Sundberg wrote on X) currently has a waiting list of 500. Feed Me bills itself as being about the 'spirit of enterprise,' but its true subject is consumption: How do people make their money and spend it? In her writing, Ms. Sundberg has assumed the identity of an insider — sometimes with the bite and braggadocio of a 'Succession' character. Her bio reads: 'I write the hottest daily business newsletter.' Her newsletter reads: 'Dior's golf collection will be a flop.' 'It was first described to me as a finance newsletter,' said Janice Min, the former longtime editor of Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter who now runs Ankler Media. 'It is definitely not a finance newsletter.' Until recently, almost every edition included a pouting selfie of Ms. Sundberg, even if the headline was about Goldman Sachs interns. ('There's a lot of guys,' she said of her subscriber base.) Feed Me is preoccupied with a certain slice of millennial culture in New York City. The restaurants they patronize, the media they consume, their picturesque vacations, their online shopping habits, their obsession with Gen Z. 'She's almost like a Carrie Bradshaw of her generation,' said Ms. Min, whose company also publishes its flagship newsletter, The Ankler, on Substack. On the platform's leaderboard of popular business publications, Feed Me is now at No. 4, one spot below The Ankler. Like the divisive heroine of 'Sex and the City,' Ms. Sundberg writes in the first person, usually to place herself in a scene ('I went to dinner at The Odeon last night …') or to emphasize her connections to one ('I texted a few friends who work on Wall Street this morning …'). She is not, however, a confessional sex columnist. But that was not the point of Ms. Min's comparison: 'If 'Sex and the City' was about the search for romantic fulfillment, Emily's voyeurism is about money — and that same sense of it being possibly unattainable, frustrating and, for some, something that comes easy,' Ms. Min said. Because of its gossipy core, Feed Me also sometimes reminds people of Gawker — written by young people in New York, self-assured in its own taste and authority. Max Read, a former editor of Gawker, said that he might not understand or occupy the 'parallel New York City' that Ms. Sundberg had built, but that he still loved to read about it. 'The exercise of creating a 'scene' like that is way more difficult than people credit,' he said, adding, 'I suspect if it were 20 years ago she could equally have been a Gawker writer or a Gawker character.' On the Colostrum Beat Ms. Sundberg began publishing Feed Me on a dailyish basis in November 2022, around the time she was laid off from Meta. Until then, her career was in 9-to-5 digital marketing. She worked at The Cut, Condé Nast and Great Jones — a cookware company where she saw venture capital and consumer goods collide close up for the first time. Now, for Feed Me, she trawls job board openings to speculate about the direction of companies. She tracks trends with CNBC vernacular; in 2023, she was 'bullish' on both Ozempic and vaping. Real estate tycoons and Instagram chefs interest Ms. Sundberg equally, especially if she can reveal which spas they frequent. No observation or rumor is too minute to itemize, like a prebiotic soda brand flooding Manhattan bodegas, or Jeff Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dining at a private club, or 'I can't open Instagram without hearing about colostrum.' She often includes a bulleted list of external links. Recent subjects include protein bars; return to office; plastic surgery; and Rhode, the skin care company founded by the model Hailey Bieber. David Ulevitch, general partner at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, said the newsletter enriched his professional understanding of cultural shifts. 'Plus, I'm a sucker for news that is just a degree above gossip,' he said. Sophia Amoruso, a venture capitalist whose best-selling book, 'Girlboss,' made her a target of journalists, said that 'Emily's voice feels insidery without the overwhelming, self-important snark that so many 'in-the-know' journalists have.' High-profile readers sometimes join what Ms. Sundberg has called her 'really fat Rolodex.' She notices when a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter begins following her on Instagram. She notices when Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News emails to say Feed Me introduced him to Ghia, a stylish nonalcoholic aperitif. When the fashion writer Derek Blasberg upgraded from a free to a paid subscription, Ms. Sundberg offered to take him out for a martini. 'Listen, I'm basically a middle-aged uptown gay dad at this point,' said Mr. Blasberg, a celebrity 'partner in crime' who attended Ms. Sundberg's dinner in November. 'I can't be in the East Village bumming Zyns from out-of-work actors at Lucien anymore.' Outsider to Insider Ms. Sundberg was an observer of money from a young age. She grew up in Huntington, a town on Long Island, where her parents, an artist and a public school administrator, had also been raised. 'I had neighbors who were lobster fishermen, and I had neighbors who were cleaning up on Wall Street in the '90s,' said Ms. Sundberg, who later studied advertising and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She also liked to write. In 2021, Ms. Sundberg used her newsletter to occasionally publish short fiction, including a horror story about a female founder whose employees toiled in the basement of her brownstone. (Ms. Sundberg has, incidentally, consulted for various female founders, such as The Wing's Audrey Gelman and Outdoor Voices' Ty Haney.) After seeing 'The Nutcracker' while high on mushrooms, she wrote of the well-dressed audience, 'I wanted to suck the pearls off of all these women's ears and roll them around in my mouth like gum balls.' In New York, her social circle had the same mix of well-off and less so that she'd grown up with in Huntington. And yet the money managers and bartenders in her group texts were equally enthusiastic about one thing, Ms. Sundberg said: business news. Not the minutiae of the market, but information about apps they used routinely, like the restaurant reservation app Resy. That sensibility formed the core of Feed Me. 'A menu change at Balthazar would get as much traction as a credit-restructuring deal at Rent the Runway,' she said. 'People wanted really fun, juicy takes.' Feed Me's early dispatches read more as Ms. Sundberg pressing her face against the glass of an unmapped world — this moneyed junction of tech, culture and hospitality — than as her being ensconced in it. Just because you're at the party doesn't mean you're at the party. Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, described her voice as an outsider 'looking in, with one foot but not wanting to totally be in, not wanting to take it too seriously.' Soon her writing began appearing in major outlets. A Grub Street article about 'shoppy shops' drove a surge of new subscribers to Feed Me; an article for GQ about members-only clubs landed her talent representation from WME. But as the newsletter grew, Ms. Sundberg lost her anonymity. She did not enjoy being recognized in public or the speculation on Reddit forums about matters like the size of her lips, which are not cosmetically enhanced, she said. She cut back on selfies, which she said earned her the nickname 'thot Jim Cramer.' ('Being hot on LinkedIn and saying 'slut' on LinkedIn has been a funny experiment,' she explained to the hosts of the shock-jock fashion podcast 'Throwing Fits.') She now works from both her apartment in Brooklyn's South Slope neighborhood and the affluent private club Casa Cipriani. While Ms. Sundberg declined to disclose her finances, she is most likely earning a minimum of $400,000 in annualized subscription revenue. (In 2024, she charged $50 for paid yearly subscriptions, of which there are nearly 10,000. Ten percent of these earnings go to Substack, along with payment processing fees to Stripe.) That estimate does not include revenue from Feed Me's advertising, sponsored posts or merchandise. She made 10 advertising deals last year, she said, which represented 'maybe a quarter' of her subscriber revenue. Those deals included various sponsored newsletters, as well as a dinner co-hosted with the wealth management app Titan and a book-club discussion of Miranda July's novel 'All Fours' at a Warby Parker glasses store. Ms. Sundberg has since raised the price for new annual subscribers to $80. This falls somewhere between a New York magazine digital subscription ($60) and access to Puck's industry newsletters ($150). She currently has no paid employees, although Feed Me has three paid columnists who write monthly about transit, restaurants and entertainment. The downtown publicist Kaitlin Phillips also assists Ms. Sundberg, though she works for free. 'I just believe in the cause,' said Ms. Phillips, who was recently persuaded by Ms. Sundberg to start her own newsletter on Substack. She now earns around $99,000 in annualized revenue from it. Scoops as Currency Why did Ms. Sundberg go to Washington? Feed Me does not cover politics. She is, however, interested in vibe shifts. After she received The Free Press's invitation to the inauguration party, Ms. Sundberg booked a room at the Riggs, the luxury hotel where it was held. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to score an invite to Mark Zuckerberg's black-tie reception.) 'I had a prediction that nobody else was going to cover the party in the same way, and I was right,' Ms. Sundberg said. Her report included details like 'a lot of incredible tans going on,' and a video showing Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, singing to Dierks Bentley. The coverage earned her new subscribers, she said, but also new scrutiny. Days after the inauguration, Ms. Sundberg wrote in Feed Me about having a 'phone call with Tucker Carlson.' She was promoting her new feature for GQ about Zyn. The article included interviews with Feed Me readers, as well as Mr. Carlson, who owns a rival nicotine pouch company. (Ms. Sundberg, a social smoker, said she was 'trying to use Zyn less.') On Substack, Caro Claire Burke, a writer and co-host of the podcast Diabolical Lies, called it a 'little puff piece push for Tucker Carlson and big nicotine.' In an email, Ms. Burke said she thought Feed Me reflected a worldview of 'how a certain group' had 'become empowered to stop caring about politics altogether.' There is a centrist desire 'to enjoy wealth aspiration and conspicuous consumption again.' To her, Feed Me was 'much less a newsletter about building and maintaining businesses, and much more about the business of sounding rich, which is probably why it's found such success,' Ms. Burke said. 'It's hard to start a company. It's much easier to learn how to speak like someone who has.' In D.C., back at her hotel, Ms. Sundberg semi-clarified her personal politics: 'I wouldn't say I'm like a social-justice-warrior super progressive, but definitely care about people,' she said. 'There's still a Bernie poster in my apartment.' She knew her readers were more politically mixed: 'People on the right are inherently pro-business.' Sometimes Ms. Sundberg said, she longs for the camaraderie and resources of a newsroom. She gets lonely. Yet she has decided not to work for a media company or let one acquire Feed Me. 'I don't know if any traditional media company would be able to afford it, and it's growing too fast for me to even consider,' said Ms. Sundberg, who also prefers to sell her own ads. She ended her business relationship with WME, the talent agency, last month. Her team there had recently asked if she wanted to pursue sponsorship around her wedding, and she declined. (Ms. Sundberg is engaged to a man who works in tech.) When she first moved to this city, Ms. Sundberg learned that money bought access to the world she wanted to inhabit. But when she started building Feed Me, she learned that scoops were currency, too. 'The networks that I've developed definitely give me an edge,' Ms. Sundberg said. She referred to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who also financed lawsuits against Gawker: 'He really believes that secrets give people edge.' In January, Ms. Sundberg had been the first to report on a West Village resident's application to install a tourist-deterring stoop gate; the landmark building had been used for exterior shots of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment. The story, which came from a reader tip, was picked up by dozens of news outlets, many of which credited Feed Me. 'If I don't get something, then Puck will,' she said, referring to the power-obsessed digital media site. 'And if Puck doesn't get it, Semafor does. And if Semafor doesn't, The New York Times will — eventually.' Though she often writes about unsourced gossip in her newsletter, she said she had not yet encountered any legal challenges. Ms. Sundberg has been trying to raise her standards as the newsletter grows, such as reaching out for comment when she publishes a rumor about a company. 'A habit that I've been getting better at: Act like you might be working at real place,' she said.
