NYT tech reporter. tell me stuff at Mike.Isaac@nytimes.com or mjisaac@protonmail.com / Text my signal username with tips: MikeIsaac.38
Oakland
- Tweets 48,132
- Following 7,784
- Followers 193,673
- Likes 494,988
Pinned Tweet
some news:
after 12 years and a lot of bylines, im leaving The Times
it is bittersweet. i will miss my colleagues and am proud of the work we did together.
im joining The Atlantic in December to cover Silicon Valley for the magazine! could not be more thrilled to get started
416
104
4,589
427,637
if netflix was the sole distributor of “Chopped” and “House Hunters id be a subscriber for life
the platonic ideal of hotel room viewing
Netflix has spent the last few years telling investors that it was excited about its foray into video games. Today's earnings update has zero reference to that business.
3
1
50
5,803
“I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured…will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved…”
🤌
This past Valentine’s Day, 71-year-old Brad Reese, proud grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H. B. Reese, posted a scathing open letter to the manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, accusing the company of unforgivably altering many Reese’s products by replacing real chocolate with compound chocolate — basically using vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter to lower costs and replacing real peanut butter with “peanut-butter-style crèmes.”
“And Reese wasn’t alone in feeling like everything was getting worse,” writes Rachel Handler. “Everyone in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s — and commercial chocolate in general — didn’t taste the way it used to.”
Handler would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for.
“I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow.”
For our cover story, Handler takes a deep dive into the molten belly of the chocolate world. Read it in full: nymag.visitlink.me/vKKky_
8
70
746
21,617
wow, joel kaplan leaving meta per internal memo
not a household name but about as significant as could be in meta politics land
not lost on me that a midterms wipeout is expected and kaplan was the conservative whisperer at the top
28
112
1,206
105,309
ah looks like mike allen got it early
axios.com/2026/10/20/joel-ka…
2
6
80
13,324
wonder if there’s a world netflix — which appears to have a taste problem — after its failed bid for WBD, makes a huge acquisition offer for A24
a24 has strategic PE and VC money which ostensibly requires returns inside a decade. valued at 3.5 billion, could go for much more
it has long been understood that, qualitatively, a “netflix movie” exists in the liminal space between theatrical release and Lifetime production
with some notable exceptions, even the biggest budget productions feel cheap, strange and worst of all, unmemorable
20
4
205
16,891
it has long been understood that, qualitatively, a “netflix movie” exists in the liminal space between theatrical release and Lifetime production
with some notable exceptions, even the biggest budget productions feel cheap, strange and worst of all, unmemorable
Dan Lin is out as film boss at Netflix.
Lin’s firing comes in the wake of Netflix making 1,000 pink-slips given their recent slow growth, and minimal overall viewership spike.
More details here: deadline.com/2026/10/netflix…
64
142
3,644
132,175
