Hope you’re having a happy weekend. Inspired by the Sunday Long Read, here are some of the week’s best profiles, essays and provocations relating to the media beat…

Let’s begin with three pieces about making media in 2026.

Chris Almeida’s Washingtonian profile of the influencer Anthony Polcari is one of the best I’ve ever read. Polcari’s seemingly mundane posts about yuppie life made him Instagram-famous — with many snarky commenters treating him as the butt of a joke. So the profile is titled, “Guess What? Tony P Hates You, Too.”

Polcari opened up to Almeida about those cruel commenters, and admitted, “My business is directly tied to those haters… I have to give them credit for, potentially, helping to grow my reach.” There’s so much more to the story, including Polcari’s strategy for making the leap to TV, so check it out here.

For WSJ Magazine, Anna Silman profiled Whitney Frick of Dial Press, who “found her niche with feelings-forward novels and girlbossy nonfiction tailor-made to be cracked open at book clubs.” Frick is the publisher behind “Untamed,” “The Tell” and “Strangers.”

Frick told Silman she gravitates toward books about people “who thought their life was going to follow a certain script, and then something shifts and the script changes. We read to find better ways of being ourselves, and that arc really exemplifies it.” Here’s a gift link.

John McDermott penned one of those stories for The Guardian. He profiled the hard-charging, hard-drinking former Gawker editor AJ Daulerio, who has reemerged as “the gentle, deeply pensive and contrite author of The Small Bow, the newsletter he created in 2018 to chronicle his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and his attempts to reclaim his life as a changed man.”

Daulerio is now expanding The Small Bow into a full-blown media company — while following a very structured life to keep his ego in check, a concept familiar to anyone who’s been to an AA meeting. “There’s a concept in recovery of a living amends,” Daulerio said. “The Small Bow is a living amends for whatever version of me came before on the internet.” Here’s the full story.

Ross Douthat’s final NYT column is in today’s paper. “I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times,” he says. “I hope that I make that kind of contribution at 60 Minutes.”

>> Gabe Rottman writes about this summer’s subpoenas: “Sending armed agents to reporters’ homes is a threat to free press and whistle-blowers.” (LA Times)

>> Brett LoGiurato says the Michigan primary results highlighted how “increasingly flimsy polling data” is flowing into prediction markets and distorting perceptions. (Status)

>> Jeremy W. Peters writes about young socialist leaders “taking their budding insurgency inside hostile territory” by appearing on Fox News and talking with conservative commentators. (NYT)

>> Judd Legum says the Senate GOP’s “primary dark money group” has launched a network of websites that sound like news outlets (Peach State Post, New Hampshire Daily) but apparently exist to promote candidates. (Popular Information)

>> Will Sommer says Tucker Carlson’s latest monologue “sure sounded like the launch of a shadow run for president.” (The Bulwark)

>> Charles C. W. Cooke says it’s “indefensible” and “impeachable” that President Trump “is charging Americans a fee for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.” (National Review)

>> Jon Lemire says “Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support. But that power appears to be fading.” (The Atlantic)

MS NOW’s Brandy Zadrozny has a fascinating deep dive into how MAGA media has been torn apart by Charlie Kirk conspiracies for the past year. Zadrozny explores “what happens when a political movement built on conspiracy theories becomes the target of its own creation” in this 46-minute documentary on YouTube.

Writing for Inc., Rob Walker says The Bulwark has become a profitable business “by breaking the old media rules.” Among the lessons: Passion, authenticity (“I’m actually mad,” Tim Miller says) and experimentation.

“I think that one of our projects has been to rebuild the bundle,” Jonathan V. Last says. “I think we are much more than the sum of our parts. We bring together a bigger audience, build a bigger community because we’re all together than any of us would on our own. And I think there’s a lot of value in that for the people who read us and listen to us and talk with us and a lot of value for us as people who are on a mission and not just trying to make money.”

This NYT story gets at all the layers of the Reflecting Pool trouble. The reporters call it a “striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”

Maxine Joselow, David A. Fahrenthold, Tyler Pager and Clarence Williams have tons of new reporting too — here’s a gift link.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has become “social media’s hottest topic” and a “late-summer courtroom sensation,” Renée Graham writes for the Boston Globe. On podcasts and streams, people are sharing “daily dissections of testimony, commentary about the demeanor and credibility of witnesses, and a lot of sketchy theories…”

Technology writer Jasmine Sun recently traveled the AI data center landscape in the upper Midwest and heard “reflexive skepticism of every claim” made by AI companies.

Back in SF, she writes, “it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity — the reasons that people resist.”

Max Read’s reaction to Sun’s reporting: “Oh, there’s no faith in institutions? An all-encompassing skepticism and paranoia? No local institutional news sources? I wonder how that came about. Replacing and diminishing trusted mediating institutions with advertising-surveillance platforms has been extraordinarily lucrative to Silicon Valley executives and investors over the past two decades.”

Tech giants cultivated a “low-trust environment,” Read argues, but now that “has now created real obstacles to its ambitions.”

>> Emily Hoeven travels to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where the population has tripled, and rents have doubled, for this story about “how Silicon Valley data centers are reshaping rural America.” (SF Chronicle)

>> Alex Reisner looks at whether AI companies are to blame amid a mysterious used-book buying bonanza. (The Atlantic)

>> John Herrman asks, “Can Reddit survive the AI boom?” He says “the platform is making AI better while AI is making it worse.” (Intelligencer)