Meet artists Randi Renate and Beatriz Chachamovits
Eliot and I met them a few years ago through Fountainhead Arts and have been friendly ever since. They are environmental artists who are helping to clean up our ocean and save coral reefs.
They both scuba dive all over the world on a frequent basis to keep up-to-date on all environmental conditions. They are highly educated and avid readers.
Beatriz and Randi are quite remarkable. They are constantly on the go visiting artist residencies worldwide in order to network and create paintings and sculpture in many different environments. They also teach art and environmental studies at museums, galleries, cultural centers, and makeshift locations.
I’m always amazed at what they do because I just don’t meet many women like them. They just completed a residency at the Orient Point Lighthouse on Long Island. They stayed with Eliot and I in PTown before this one-of-a kind adventure.
For one week, they were living alone on a small island, a mile in circumference, in a lighthouse. A fishing boat took them from the mainland of Long Island to the island. If they needed help they had to call the coast guard—that’s if the cells and internet were working. It was spotty at best.
They cooked on a camp stove and bathed in the water. I won’t describe the toilet conditions but just let’s say they were challenging. I could never do it.
Randi and Beatriz are not me. They thrive on conditions like this so they can be close to nature and create art that reflects their findings. Eliot and I admire them.. They partner on a lot of projects but they also have many other artists that they collaborate with.
Beatriz and Randi live a life of adventure trying to save our planet. They are totally dedicated to their work and dare to live in a non-traditional world. It’s very exciting to be around them.
“I’m going to trip!” Ken Fulk yelled as he barreled down the stairs of the Flemish Revival building in Lower Manhattan where his design company has a New York office. Mr. Fulk, who was rushing to catch a helicopter, had a Louis Vuitton monogram duffle bag in one hand and an Away suitcase in the other. He stuffed them into a car idling outside before climbing in and being whisked away to a helipad on the Hudson River.
From there, Mr. Fulk, 60, flew to the Hamptons to meet with the owner of a home he is decorating there. Later that Wednesday in early April, he had another flight to catch — this one to Verbier, in the Swiss Alps, where he had a meeting about another project.
Mr. Fulk, who lives primarily in San Francisco, started his interior design business there in the 1990s. In recent years, he has been exporting his taste to places across the country and the world. Along with decorating the homes of fashion designers, technology executives and diplomats, he has given his touch to private clubs like the ‘Quin House in Boston and restaurants like Carbone. After designing its locations in Las Vegas and Miami, he is now working on its outpost in London, which is expected to open this summer.
The globe-trotting and creativity his career has demanded is “what I was built to do,” said Mr. Fulk, who recently opened namesake stores selling Ken Fulk-branded home goods in San Francisco and in West Hollywood, Calif. He is planning to open a third in New York later this year.
The West Hollywood store is not far from the site of another project, the Beverly Hills Hotel. Inside, Mr. Fulk is designing a spate of new spaces, including what he described as a “palm-lined, Copacabana supper club” and a lobby bar.
“We are not touching the Polo Lounge,” Mr. Fulk said of the hotel’s marquee establishment, a famously clubby hangout for Hollywood titans. “There would be rioting out front.”
He was joking. But Mr. Fulk’s aesthetic, which can evoke descriptors like “maximalist” or “more-is-more,” is somewhat the opposite of quiet luxury. Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York Magazine, characterized it as “unabashedly unapologetic luxury.”
“It isn’t for everybody,” Ms. Goodman said. “But on the other hand, in design, you see a lot of things that are very safe because people don’t know how to express themselves. Ken knows what he wants. He’s all about the comfort of luxury, which is very seductive. He has a sense of how people want to sit and talk together.”
His client list includes various San Francisco elites. Mr. Fulk has worked with former Vice President Kamala Harris, a former district attorney there, and with Trevor and Alexis Traina, a wealthy and well-connected couple who live in the city. They had him redecorate the U.S. Ambassador to Austria’s residence in Vienna after Mr. Traina was appointed to the position during the first Trump administration. In one room of the home, Mr. Fulk mixed disparate pieces from the Trainas’ art collection, including an abstract Rudolf Bauer painting and a large Tina Barney photograph, with Josef Hoffmann furniture upholstered in powdery pink velvet.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Fulk was the go-to decorator for Silicon Valley figures like Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, and Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and the first president of Facebook. Mr. Fulk also orchestrated Mr. Parker’s 2013 wedding, a medieval fantasia set among the redwoods of the Big Sur region in California, at which custom outfits by a “Lord of The Rings” costume designer were provided to each guest.
“Ken is an imagineer,” said the fashion designer Zac Posen, another client. Mr. Fulk decorated his rental home in San Francisco after Mr. Posen moved to the city last year to take the creative reins at Gap Inc. The residence was built in the 1850s by a ship captain, a history Mr. Fulk nodded to with furnishings like old boat lights and anchor chains.
“It has the feeling of being in a ship, very aquatic,” said Mr. Posen, who has known Mr. Fulk since the early 2000s, and who tapped him to collaborate on a recent campaign for Banana Republic, a brand under Mr. Posen’s umbrella. “Ken understands the theater and fantasy of life.”
Mr. Fulk said that, in a word, his aesthetic could be called optimistic. “There is a theatrical nature to it, but nothing is there just by happenstance,” he added, explaining that he has fashioned himself less after the decorators Dorothy Draperand Tony Duquette, whose exuberant interiors are detectable in Mr. Fulk’s work, and more after Busby Berkeley, the director known for his fantastical and elaborate film sequences. (“Ken Fulk: The Movie in My Mind” was the title of a hefty coffee table book about Mr. Fulk released by Assouline in 2022.)
At his company, Ken Fulk Inc., which now has about 100 employees, design projects often begin in the same way that films do. “We write a script,” Mr. Fulk said. For the Carbone restaurant he designed in Miami, he described the narrative as “Maria Callas waking up next to Frank Sinatra in the Gritti Palace.”
“I think it’s because I was never trained,” Mr. Fulk added about his approach. “I can’t draw a circle.”
He studied history and English at Mary Washington College, now the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Va., and moved to San Francisco after briefly living in Washington, D.C., and Boston. After working in restaurants and starting some unsuccessful businesses — a company that sold shower curtains and pajamas, another that sold and licensed children’s books — Mr. Fulk got his first decorating gig when a friend in San Francisco asked him to put together his apartment. After that, he worked as a house stager and landed more interior design jobs by word of mouth.
“I was always the friend with taste,” said Mr. Fulk, a fastidious dresser whose exuberance is reflected by his preferences for bow ties, boyish Thom Browne suits and wearing his hair in a tidy “Leave It To Beaver” coif. “I’ve done all my own shopping since I was 6,” he added.
Mr. Fulk and his older sister grew up in Harrisonburg, Va., a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. Their parents owned bars and restaurants in the area. He described his life back then as comfortable, if not as grand as his aspirations. “When I was 4 years old, I said I wanted to live in a penthouse in Manhattan, even though I had never left my hometown,” he said.
He has yet to get that penthouse — lately, when in New York, he has been staying at a hotel near his office. In San Francisco, he and his husband, Kurt Wootton, 59, have a home in the Clarendon Heights neighborhood. The couple, who met in Boston in 1991, have three golden retrievers (Duncan, Ciro and Sal), a wire‐haired dachshund (Wiggy), and also own a ranch in Napa Valley, along with a waterfront house in Provincetown, Mass.
Mr. Wootton, who formerly worked in retail at companies like Neiman Marcus and Williams Sonoma, said that Mr. Fulk “is very much the conductor of this thing called life.” He added that, when his husband isn’t working, they are often cooking together (they like Indian and Italian cuisine) or relaxing with their dogs.
Mr. Fulk also owns the Mary Heaton Vorse house in Provincetown, an 18th-century home across the street from his residence, which he runs as an arts center that hosts events, offers temporary residencies to working artists and occasionally serves as a guesthouse for friends like the actress Jennifer Coolidge, who crashed there last summer when Mr. Fulk’s home was full. (He established a similar operation in San Francisco, called Saint Joseph Arts Society.) Mr. Fulk bought the Vorse house in 2018 for $1.17 million — a price with as many digits as his fee for decorating homes, which he said now starts “in the low seven figures.”
He travels between his residences as he and his staff work on dozens of projects at once. “My superpower is saying yes to stuff,” Mr. Fulk said, explaining that his voracious appetite for new opportunities partly resulted from living through the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He came away from that time with a mentality of “do everything right now,” he said.
Jobs Mr. Fulk is currently devoted to include a new boutique hotel in Barcelona and his namesake retail business, where people can buy Ken Fulk candles ($125) and caviar sets ($365) along with décor and jewelry and from other makers. He opened the stores with the help of Dave DeMattei, a former chief financial officer at Gap Inc., whom Mr. Fulk hired in the same capacity at Ken Fulk Inc. in 2023.
The thinking behind the retail expansion, Mr. DeMattei said, was that “not everyone can afford the houses Ken does, but they can go in now and buy a little piece of it.” Mr. Fulk, he added, “is 24-hours-a-day, workaholic, never says no.”
Another thing that Mr. DeMattei has encouraged Mr. Fulk to do: television. Last year, he signed with Creative Artists Agency. But Mr. Fulk isn’t sure if the small screen is for him.
“TV is great, and I know it’s popular, but it isn’t me,” he said. Instead, he hopes his work could be the subject of, yes, a film (specifically a documentary).
“I would like to preserve some pieces of it that way,” he said. “It’s all so terribly cinematic.”
Welcome to Art Lovers Forum. Today we spotlight the bold, electrifying work of Cuban-American artist Alex Núñez, whose newest installation at the Faena Art Project Room in Miami Beach is a must-see this summer.
Titled “There’s a Gator in the Pool,” this site-specific immersive experience isn’t just art—it’s a full-body encounter. Núñez transforms the gallery into a surreal aquatic landscape, using glitter, gold leaf, neon paint, and mutant coral forms to reflect the fragile beauty and quiet chaos of our environment.
Known for her layered, high-energy works that pull from pop culture, memory, and ecological tension, Núñez invites viewers to step into a shimmering, disorienting world where danger and delight coexist. This is art you don’t just view—you feel it under your feet, around your body, and in your gut.
Whether you’re an art collector, a curious local, or a visitor looking for something unforgettable, this is one of the most talked-about installations of the season. Stick around—we’re diving deep with Alex on the inspirations behind her work, how Miami, Cuba, and New Orleans shaped her visual language, and why she believes beauty can be both seductive and unsettling.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE Kyoto Has Zero Zen A great exchange rate, ChatGPT, and kimono-wearing bros have turned Kyoto into the loveliest tourist trap on earth.
The art world is in the midst of change. I know of three galleries that closed in the last month. Is it reeling from the lack of creativity at the galleries? Have the galleries expanded too fast and raised prices too high? Is it a new generation buying art differently? Have the endless events like Basel and Frieze changed the consumer? Is it the ability for the artist to connect directly to a collector through social media? More than likely it is a combination of all these questions.
I have met artists who have been hurt by gallerists pushing their prices into places they shouldn’t be. Many of those artists didn’t sell for years or watched their prices peak before tumbling back down to reality, although it had nothing to do with the work, just the price.
There are the gatekeepers just like all industries where we have seen more monopolies. The newest wave in the art world is a group of people helping the uber-wealthy collect pieces that are of museum value as another asset class for their families. There are also new agencies and individuals who help the artists get into museums, or specific collections or help with their PR, where this has been something that gallery has done in the past. Is the gallery becoming only a vessel for selling artists work?
I do believe that there will be some major shifts happening in the art space in the years to come. Art reflects the times, and perhaps what is happening now is an indication of the cultural shifts that are happening, including younger generations that are looking at art very differently than the generations before them.
Since its founding in 1857, The Atlantic has excelled in covering matters of war, peace, and national defense. Nathaniel Hawthorne served as the magazine’s Civil War correspondent (Abraham Lincoln himself said that a favorable article in The Atlantic could save him “half a dozen battles”). The strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan advanced the idea of America as a global naval power in the pages of The Atlantic. We published the letters of General George S. Patton; the Cold War analysis of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the CIA; and Frances FitzGerald’s historic reporting on Vietnam.
Today, as the post–World War II international order constructed and maintained by the United States is under unprecedented pressure (from within and without), issues of national defense and America’s role in the world are among the most urgent we face. Which is why The Atlantic is committed to rapidly and dramatically expanding the scope and scale of our coverage. Imagine an intersection at which American national security, defense spending, the rise of China, technological innovation, regional conflict, and the future of liberal democracy all meet; this is where you will find The Atlantic and our stellar team of reporters.
The expansion of our national-security coverage is built on superb talent: Journalists joining our team include such brilliant reporters as Vivian Salama and Nancy Youssef, who, until recently, covered the Pentagon and national security forThe Wall Street Journal; and Shane Harris, Missy Ryan, and Isaac Stanley-Becker, who covered defense and intelligence for The Washington Post. They will be working alongside Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, and Tom Nichols, who taught at the Naval War College until joining us as a staff writer in 2022, among other great reporters. Our team is growing each month, and you should expect to find in The Atlantic the very best coverage of national security anywhere in journalism.
In our forthcoming print issue, devoted to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you will find Tom’s examination of why the power to launch nuclear weapons came to rest with a single American—and the dangerous consequences for national security; Ross Andersen on how nuclear ambitions in east Asia are accelerating as American power recedes; retired Special Forces officer Mike Nelson on the myth that soldiers need to choose between lethality and professionalism; Andrew Aoyama’s essay about the Japanese American activist Joseph Kurihara, who was interned during WWII, after fighting for the U.S. during WWI; and Noah Hawley on Kurt Vonnegut and the bomb.
To read all of these stories—and everything else in The Atlantic—you’ll need a subscription. In my opinion, it’s worth it. A subscription not only gives you unlimited access to our journalism; it also supports our journalists in dangerous times.
Four years ago, an unconscious Kentucky man began to awaken as he was about to be removed from life support so his organs could be donated. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, officials still tried to move forward.
Now, a federal investigation has found that officials at the nonprofit in charge of coordinating organ donations in Kentucky ignored signs of growing alertness not only in that patient but also in dozens of other potential donors.
The investigation examined about 350 cases in Kentucky over the past four years in which plans to remove organs were ultimately canceled. It found that in 73 instances, officials should have considered stopping sooner because the patients had high or improving levels of consciousness.
Although the surgeries didn’t happen, the investigation said multiple patients showed signs of pain or distress while being readied for the procedure.
Most of the patients eventually died, hours or days later. But some recovered enough to leave the hospital, according to an investigation by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, whose findings were shared with The New York Times.
The investigation centered on an increasingly common practice called “donation after circulatory death.” Unlike most organ donors, who are brain-dead, patients in these cases have some brain function but are on life support and not expected to recover. Often, they are in a coma.
If family members agree to donation, employees of a nonprofit called an organ procurement organization begin testing the patient’s organs and lining up transplant surgeons and recipients. Every state has at least one procurement organization, and they often station staff in hospitals to help manage donations.
Typically, the patient is taken to an operating room where hospital workers withdraw life support and wait. The organs are considered viable for donation only if the patient dies within an hour or two. If that happens, the procurement organization’s team waits five more minutes and then begins removing organs. Strict rules are supposed to ensure that no retrieval begins before death or causes it.
The investigation criticized Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which was coordinating donations in the state. Now called Network for Hope after a merger, it has said it always follows the rules and never removes organs until a hospital has declared a patient dead.
But the investigation found that the organization’s employees repeatedly pressured families to authorize donation, improperly took over cases from doctors and tried to push hospital staff to remove life support and allow for surgery even if there were indications of growing awareness in patients.
Some employees failed to recognize that hospital sedatives or illegal drugs could mask patients’ neurological condition, meaning they might be in better shape than they seemed.
In December 2022, a 50-year-old overdose victim began stirring less than an hour after being taken off life support and started looking around. The retrieval attempt was not immediately ended, nor was the patient given any explanation.
“The patient had no idea what was going on but was becoming more aware by the minute,” records noted.
After 40 more minutes — when the patient’s organs would no longer qualify for donation — the attempt was called off, and he was moved to an intensive care unit. He later sat up and spoke with his family before dying three days later, the investigation found.
Overall, the investigation flagged 103 cases as having “concerning features” and said problems were more likely to occur at rural hospitals. It noted more than half of transplants arranged by the Kentucky organization were from circulatory-death patients, above the national average.
Nationwide, officials recovered about 20,000 organs from this type of donor last year, nearly double the total in 2021, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which oversees the transplant system.
Federal regulators told the network last week that the Kentucky organization must increase training for staff and conduct neurological assessments on potential organ donors every 12 hours, among other changes.
On Thursday, the organization said it had received a report about the government investigation. “We will fully comply with all of their suggested recommendations,” it said in a statement.
The federal inquiry began last fall after a congressional committee heard testimony about the Kentucky man, Anthony Thomas Hoover II, who had an overdose in 2021. He was unresponsive for two days before his family agreed to donate his organs.
Over the next two days, the procurement organization moved toward surgery even as his neurological condition improved, the investigation found. During one exam, records show, he was “thrashing on the bed.” He was sedated to prevent further motion.
The hospital staff “was extremely uncomfortable with the amount of reflexes patient is exhibiting,” case notes read. “Hospital staff kept stating that this was euthanasia.” A procurement organization coordinator assured them it was not.
When Mr. Hoover was taken for the retrieval, records show, he cried, pulled his knees to his chest and shook his head. A hospital doctor refused to withdraw life support. Mr. Hoover eventually recovered. Now 36, he has lingering neurological injuries.
In interviews with The Times, two former employees of the procurement organization said higher-ups tried to pressure the doctor to continue the retrieval attempt. “If it had not been for that physician, we absolutely 1,000 percent would have moved forward,” said one of them, Natasha Miller, who was in the room. Three other former Kentucky employees said they had seen similar cases.
The investigation did not say if there was pressure on doctors who treated Mr. Hoover. Network for Hope did not respond to a request for comment on that case.
The Kentucky attorney general’s office also launched an investigation into Mr. Hoover’s case. On Thursday, the office said the review was ongoing.
You’ll read about Bob Dylan’s father, Abe Zimmerman, in a book I am writing about being a trade reporter, then editor, during the first 10 years of CES. Abe ran an appliance store in Hibbing, Minnesota and spoke to me several times a month about the appliance business. He talked a little about his son but no one knew he would become such an icon.
In 1966, my job at HFD was to cold-call appliance retailers around the country in hopes of uncovering industry gossip that could turn into a front-page “scoop.” My editors, Manning Greenberg and Aaron Neretin, asked me not to talk directly to manufacturers—they were our advertisers, and one dumb comment from me could risk a contract.
Instead, I was assigned to call what we jokingly called the “sweaty armpits crowd”—the floor guys. These were the hardworking men stocking shelves and advising customers in appliance stores from coast to coast. Abe was the one who gave me the scoop about the birth of Best Buy. That story made me one of the most famous business writers in the country for years.
The big bonus was that Publisher Richard Ekstract hired me away from HFD and taught me and my future husband, Eliot Hess, all we needed to know about running a successful business. The book is mostly about working for Richard and the shenanigans that took place behind the scenes at CES.
Thank you Abe for the scoop. It made my dreams come true. You left us too early.
Today’s guest is someone who quite literally lives between worlds—both geographically and creatively.
Leslie Moody Castro is an independent art curator and writer who splits her time between Austin, Texas, and Mexico City, a rhythm she’s kept for over twenty years. Her practice is deeply rooted in movement, collaboration, and conversation—whether across borders, between disciplines, or within communities.
For nearly two decades, Leslie has produced and curated projects across Mexico and the United States, always with an eye toward creating spaces for dialogue and exchange. She’s the co-founder of Unlisted Projects Residency and Co-Lab Projects, a unique, artist-run nonprofit in Austin dedicated to experimental and collaborative art. (Fun fact: Co-Lab is housed inside five massive concrete culverts)—those structures that usually carry water underground—gifted by a neighboring concrete factory. Leslie, and partner Sean Gaulager, along with their team transformed the concrete culverts into an imaginative and unconventional exhibition space on an acre of Texas land).
In 2022, she was both the inaugural curatorial fellow at New Mexico State University and curator-in-residence at Casa Otro in Mexico. Her work has earned two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a State Department fellowship for her research on borders.
Leslie’s global perspective is also shaped by residencies from Estonia to Tepoztlán, from Miami to Mexico City. She’s curated several major biennials, including the 2018 Texas Biennial, the 2021 Amarillo Museum Biennial, and most recently, the 2024 Aurora Biennial. From 2021 to 2024, she was also the guest editor of Glasstire, Texas’s leading online arts magazine.
She’s the founder of AtravesArte, a platform dedicated to transborder art practices—and she’ll be the first to tell you: Mariachi makes everything better.
Click below to hear all about Co-Lab, the art gallery housed inside five massive concrete culverts, structures that usually carry water underground—gifted by a neighboring concrete factory. Leslie, and partner Sean Gaulager, along with their team, transformed the concrete culverts into an imaginative and unconventional exhibition space on an acre of Texas land).
Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh’s Newly Uncovered Will Highlights an Important Lesson for Entrepreneurs
The recently discovered document has ignited more in-fighting among Hsieh’s family, friends, and former colleagues. The episode serves as a reminder for founders.
MAY 19, 2025
The sudden emergence of Tony Hsieh’s will last month, years after his death in a house fire, has all the tension and intrigue of an HBO drama.
The Zappos founder’s final years were spent in a spiral of drug use and collapsing mental health. During the pandemic, he relocated from Las Vegas and holed up in a mansion in Park City, Utah, growing increasingly manic, claiming that he was working on world peace and eradicating Covid-19, as Forbes reporters documented in a book on Hsieh’s life. He died in 2020 at the age of 46 after succumbing to injuries sustained in the fire, which took place in New London, Connecticut.
The will, included in a court filing in Las Vegas, was found in the possession of a mystery man named Pir Muhammad who died after suffering from Alzheimer’s, The Wall Street Journal reported in April. The will’s emergence added fuel to an already fractious dispute over Hsieh’s estate, which is worth around $500 million. The proceedings are now consumed by in-fighting among Hsieh’s family, close confidants, and former colleagues, some of whom have been described as “sycophants” by Forbes.
Written in 2015, the will includes atypical provisions, like transferring $50 million and a series of Las Vegas properties to trusts tied to unnamed beneficiaries. It gives $3 million to Hsieh’s alma mater Harvard University, and $250,000 to the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic organizations. There is also a no-contest clause in the will, meaning that if any of Hsieh’s family members dispute the contract, they will receive nothing.
For founders who’ve achieved even a fraction of Hsieh’s wealth, estate planning is often an afterthought. “For most clients I deal with, that’s not something that they’re thinking about early on,” says Shavon J. Smith, principal at the Washington D.C.-based SJS Law Firm and the author of small business advice book Tell Me About the Hard Part. “When you’re starting a business, you’re just trying to get it going, you’re just trying to make sure you generate income, make sure you can make payroll, make sure you’re bringing in contracts.
Of course, there are ways to ensure that your business doesn’t become the center of a protracted legal dispute, and that starts with a long-term plan, Smith advises.
If you own a single LLC, your company’s operating agreement should include a clause about whom you’d trust to step in and make decisions about its assets, and how they are willed to certain people, in the event of your death.
When your company is a trust or partnership, there will often be a “death clause” in its operating agreement, Smith says. This clause treats “death, or even disability [as] an automatic trigger to sell your shares to your co-owners as well.”
There are other basic considerations that can very well slip a founder’s mind—like who has access to a software program. “I had a client pass away this summer recently, and it was like, ‘OK, so how are we going to run payroll? Because he was the only person on the account,’” Smith says. The example highlights the necessity of a succession plan that outlines who will control what aspects of the remaining business
Hsieh made a fortune peddling shoes on the internet, eventually selling Zappos to Amazon in an all-stock deal worth around $1 billion in 2009. He was a charismatic and colorful figure who emphasized customer obsession and company culture, publishing a book called Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose in 2010.
Hsieh’s will emphasized instilling his beneficiaries lives’ with a “wow factor.” The WSJ reports that Hsieh wrote in the document: “I want my beneficiaries to ‘live in the wow’ and to enjoy [their gifts] as a memorable and meaningful experience.”
Hsieh wasn’t particularly organized with his personal affairs, however. “You’ve got this very wealthy guy who gave his original will to one person, and it appears that that person was incapacitated and then died. In terms of best practices, that’s not the way to go,” says Marc M. Stern, a partner at Greenberg Glusker, a full-service law firm in Los Angeles
It’s important to trust your estate with professionals who can recall important documents at a moment’s notice. “Many clients want their originals, so we send it [when requested], but we retain copies. If something were to happen to somebody, we know that it exists,” Stern says.
Crucially, the most prepared founders understand that in the event of their death, the business is still a living, breathing asset. Understanding debt obligations is paramount, so you aren’t saddling beneficiaries with a bill. Smith recommends life insurance as a way to leverage potential debt.
“When someone comes to me and they have a succession plan, they have thought about what’s going to happen next in the business, and their personal estate planning is done, those people tend to have well-run businesses in general,” Smith explains.
Legal proceedings surrounding Hsieh’s estate will resume later this month.
Taylor Jenkins Reid is leaning against a railing in the sun outside Los Angeles’ famed Griffith Observatory. We’ve picked this place to talk about her ninth book, Atmosphere, a space thriller and love story set at NASA in the 1980s, but as the iconic Hollywood sign shines in the hills behind her, the scene feels almost too on the nose.
Reid, despite her ability to blend in with the tourists milling about, is not just any author. She is one of the most successful novelists working today, her books not only beloved by readers but also hot commodities in the film and TV industry. Atmosphere, out June 3, is poised to be one of the biggest books of the summer, if not the year, with a movie adaptation already planned. So it feels a bit inevitable when a man in a backpack taps her on the shoulder, his phone camera open.
Then the plot twist: “Will you take a picture … of us?” he asks, gesturing to his wife and son. Reid gamely starts snapping, bending down to get the right angle.
“I’m chasing a feeling. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I’m fancy. Maybe I’m just fun.”
-Taylor Jenkins Reid
Julia Johnson for TIME
While this family clearly has no idea who Reid is, there are many, many people for whom this encounter would be huge. Despite grumbles that no one reads anymore, Circana BookScan data shows book sales are up—there were more than 797,000,000 print books sold in the U.S. last year, up 2% from 2023 and 14% from 2019. And the contemporary women’s fiction category, where Reid is often listed, ended 2024 with a nearly 30% increase in sales over 2019 numbers, according to analyst Kristen McLean. But in recent years, as celebrity-led book clubs have proliferated and TikTok has driven demand, a select group of authors—Reid, Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry, Kristin Hannah, and romantasy favorites Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros among them—have become the North Stars of the industry. They’re not just popular writers; they’re brands, known entities with whom fans feel a deep connection.
Reid’s novels—which center and largely appeal to women, who have long bought more fiction than men—create conversations on social media, have been selected by heavy hitters like Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager for their book clubs, and virtually all are being or already have been adapted; Daisy Jones & the Six became an Emmy-winning series. Reid’s eight novels before Atmosphere, five of which are New York Times best sellers, have sold more than 21 million print, e-book, and audiobook copies in 42 languages, per her agent. And, according to two industry sources, the scuttlebutt is that she recently signed a five-book deal for an eye-popping $8 million—per book. (Her agent declined to confirm.)
Given all this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Reid, 41, might be a little miffed by the lack of recognition at Griffith. But where she grew up in Acton, Mass., vanity was a strict no-no: “You would never want to be caught thinking you were something.” So she’s still trying to reconcile her “uncool life in the Valley,” where she lives with her husband and daughter, with how the world responds to her work. When people ask how she feels about having another best seller or the fact that Serena Williams wants to work with her, she isn’t quite sure how to react. “Well, what do you want me to feel?” she thinks. “Like I’m hot sh-t?” None other than Stevie Nicks expressed interest in collaborating on Daisy Jones, but, for Reid, it still feels like this can’t be real life. “That happened to somebody else, I think,” she jokes. “It happened to Taylor Jenkins Reid, right? God bless her. Good for you, babe.”
If you spent any time on BookTok in 2021, you probably saw young women, faces streaked with tears, sharing their love for Reid’s fifth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which had been published four years earlier. This followed Witherspoon’s 2019 selection of Daisy Jones for her book club—and her announcement that she would produce an adaptation.
Publishing, like so many industries, changed with the pandemic. “Both because people suddenly had time to read, and also with the arrival of BookTok in late 2020, genre fiction like romance and authors like Hoover and Reid took off,” says McLean. After Evelyn Hugo went viral, suddenly readers were looking for other books by Reid—many of them, according to Barnes & Noble senior director of books Shannon DeVito, arriving in stores to film content and find backlist titles. Word of mouth has always been key to an author’s success. “It can’t be reverse engineered,” Reid says. “It just happens when it happens.”
That it would happen for Reid, though, was hardly expected, especially considering she didn’t originally set out to write books. The woman who now regularly fields offers to put her work onscreen initially wanted to be in the movie business.
She got her start as a casting assistant, but began writing on the side, even finishing a manuscript that was never published. In 2012, she asked her husband how he’d feel about her taking time off to focus on fiction. Within a month, she had a draft for what became her first novel, Forever, Interrupted. That book, published in 2013, sold poorly. Her second, After I Do, didn’t do much better.
But once readers found Reid’s books, the appeal was clear. Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones,2021’s Malibu Rising, and 2022’s Carrie Soto Is Back, a loosely connected quartet, tell the stories of women navigating the pressures of fame in male-dominated spaces. Reid’s storytelling feels immersive—she takes you deep inside the worlds she builds, and delivers the gossipy details you want to hear. Her protagonists are specific, bold, and unapologetic. They have a way of lingering with you after the story ends. “You feel like they’re just sort of out there, living in the world somewhere,” says Ballantine publisher Jennifer Hershey, Reid’s editor on her four latest books, including Atmosphere.
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The romance novelist Emily Henry, a close friend of Reid’s, finds something “healing” in her work. “So many of us do have fears about being too much or too little, or not performing our womanhood correctly, not being friendly enough or pretty enough or passive enough or sparkly enough,” says Henry, whose latest novel Great Big Beautiful Life is a No. 1 New York Times best seller. “I love that she writes these women who are very aware of how the world sees them and how they may fall short in the eyes of others, and their arc is never about trying to change that thing or trying to justify their existence.”
Reid’s books are also, as more literary readers might say, “easy to read,” often looked down upon by highbrow critics. She says her aim was always to write the kind of novels you could binge in a weekend, but the more she published,the more reviews came in, and she found herself chafing at the criticism: “Oh, this person said they liked my book, but they didn’t find it to be high art. How can my sentences be better? How can my work be more literary? I fell into that trap quite a bit, looking for approval.” When Malibu Rising came out, Reid was proud—she thought this multigenerational family drama, of all her books, would be the one embraced by the literati. The reviews “leveled” her. One person called it “Candy Land Franzen.” She remembers how she talked herself out of the sting. “Because I know you’re trying to insult me, it hurts,” she says. “But I am not writing as complex stories as Jonathan Franzen—that wasn’t the point. So it probably is Candy Land Franzen. And maybe I lovebeing Candy Land Franzen.”
Writing a book that’s easy to read, Reid contends, is extremely difficult. She has to think about the reader’s experience on every page. “I’m chasing a feeling,” she says. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if I’m fancy. Maybe I’m just fun.”
An estimated 16 million unsolicited manuscripts are submitted to agents’ “slush piles” each year, according to Laura McGrath, a professor at Temple University who uses data to study literature and literary culture. To get published at all, even if you sell poorly, is a feat. “It’s just sad to me, when I talk to aspiring writers and they’ll talk about Taylor Jenkins Reid as though anyone could do this,” McGrath says.
Libby McGuire, publisher of Atria—which published Evelyn Hugo and reportedly won Reid back from Ballantine with that massive deal—emphasizes that there’s a path to success as an author without ascending to the level of a phenomenon. If you rely solely on the New York Times best-seller list, she says, you might miss books that are still selling well over time. “When I talk to my friends at other houses, everyone has these books that are quietly succeeding,” McGuire says. “It’s just that they’re selling 2,000 to 3,000 a week.” But the lack of transparency around advances and sales, combined with sensational stories like Reid’s, leads to a skewed perception of what success looks like for a typical author, McGrath says. “We lose sight of the fact that there is a workaday writer churning out a book a year or a book every couple of years, who is making a reasonable living or still has a day job.”
In the Penguin Random House antitrust trial three years ago, the publishing giant revealed that only 35% of its books are profitable and of those, 4% bring in the majority of profits, suggesting that the company runs on the success of just a tiny handful of authors. To some in the industry, the gap between what authors like Reid are offered—face time with internal sales reps, booksellers, and media, marketing and publicity support, the opportunity to tour—and what the majority receives is unfair.
Reid reportedly got less than $100,000 when she sold Evelyn Hugo—somewhere between $50,000 and $99,000, per Publishers Marketplace—which seems laughable now that it’s sold more than 10 million copies.But she feels fortunate to have started small. “You could say, well, publishers should put all of the energy equally behind all the books. But if they do that, they can’t publish as many,” she says. “The only way they were going to publish Forever, Interrupted was to take a chance on me, give me a low advance, not put a ton of energy behind it, and see what happened.” For companies that take a volume approach, the real boon is when one of the smaller bets, like Evelyn Hugo, becomes a runaway hit.
“I always describe it as like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos,” says Reid’s agent Celeste Fine, who specializes in representing big-name writers like Nicholas Sparks and Jennifer Weiner. “Authors to these corporations are just like marbles, like nom nom nom.” Over the years, Fine has observed a “mission creep,” where publishers expect not only exceptional books, but also marketing and sales acumen, engagement on social media, and the ability to entertain a crowd on tour. It’s as if they’re saying, “Not only are we paying for the book—now we own a piece of you, the human, and you should be grateful,” Fine says. She believes an author like Reid deserves to be treated like a business partner: “She has earned the right to be as certain about what she’s getting out of the next 10 years of her career as any CEO with their benefit packages.”
There are no guarantees in publishing, but Atmosphere is a solid bet. The novel follows Joan Goodwin, an astrophysicist who joins NASA’s space-shuttle program in the early ’80s. There she meets Vanessa Ford, a woman who challenges her understanding of who she is. In Reid’s first thriller, she pumps up the stakes with a disaster on the shuttle in the first few pages.
She studied the works of Andy Weir, read about Apollo 13, and pored over NASA documents. Paul Dye, a retired NASA flight director, helped her untangle the technical details. But for all of Reid’s research, the idea for the book really started with a desire to tell a particular type of story. “It just felt like time for me to write a very high-stakes, dramatic love story,” she says. She asked herself: “What is my Titanic?”
Reid knew she wanted to explore how intimate a connection could be between one character in space and one on the ground, and that those characters would both be women. She also knew this choice would lead her into another debate about identity. Who is allowed to write what type of characters has long been a fraught subject in publishing, with some arguing that authors should write only from perspectives they inhabit and can therefore be trusted to represent truthfully, and others encouraging the ideas of allyship and creative freedom. Though Reid is white, some of her characters are not, and the way she wrote Carrie Soto, a Latina, in particular yielded some criticism she took to heart. “What I was being told was I don’t have the range necessary to pull off what I’m trying to pull off,” she says. So when it comes to race, for now she’ll stick to what she knows.
Her response was not the same when it came to writing about sexuality, but then neither was her experience. The publication of Evelyn Hugo,ultimately a love story about two women, led to questions about why Reid, who is married to a man, writes queer characters. “I am very private,” she says. “So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.” But now, as she prepares for the topic to resurface around Atmosphere’s release, Reid wants to be very clear about something those close to her have always known: she is bisexual. “It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story,” she says.
When Reid was a teenager, she began expressing herself through her appearance. “I got hit pretty quickly with, Why can’t you dress more like a girl? Why don’t you do your nails? Why do you talk that way? Can’t you be a little bit quieter?” she says. “I started to get people who would say, ‘Oh, I get why you dress like a boy—you’re gay.’” But that label didn’t feel right to her—her first love was a boy, and still people told her to just wait and she’d see. Then, when she fell for a woman in her early 20s, her friends also doubted her for that. “This was the late ’90s, so nobody was talking about bisexuality. And if they were, it was to make fun of people,” Reid says. “The messages about bisexuality were you just want attention or it was a stop on the way to gayville. I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn’t know myself, but I did.”
Reid’s husband, the screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid, recently came across the idea that a person’s identity is like a house with many rooms. “My attraction to women is a room in the house that is my identity—Alex understood this book was about me spending time in that room,” Reid says. “He was so excited for me, like, ‘What a great way for you to express this side of you.’ And he helped me get the book to be as romantic and beautiful as it could be.”
Reid knows being married to a man gives her “straight-passing” privileges that others in the LGBTQ community do not have, so she wants to speak thoughtfully about what it means for her to share this part of her life. “How do I talk about who I really am with full deference to the life experiences of other people?” she asks. “Basically where I came down is I can talk about who I am, and then people can think about that whatever they want.”
As our conversation shifts back to Atmosphere and its other themes, she leads me to the basement level of Griffith Observatory and stops in front of her favorite exhibit, a representation of time since the creation of the universe made with more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry in celestial shapes.
“This is 400 million years after the Big Bang, and we’re only right here,” she says, gesturing to the long wall as we walk. We pass the billion-year mark, the 10-billion-year mark, and still we have yet to reach the moment when human life began. “You start to realize the amount of time a human is alive is so short, and yet all of our problems seem immense,” Reid says. To her, it’s reassuring. No matter what any one of us does, the universe will keep expanding.
Still from TV series Daisy Jones & The Six. Josh Whitehouse (Eddie Roundtree), Sebastian Chacon (Warren Rojas), Sam Claflin (Billy Dunne), Riley Keough (Daisy Jones), Will Harrison (Graham Dunne), Suki Waterhouse (Karen Sirko) Lacey Terrell—Prime Video/Amazon Studios
The next day, at an open-air café in West Hollywood, we sit down for lunch beside a 20-something actor describing his recent Nickelodeon gig. This seems as good a place as any to talk about the many projects Reid has in development.
There are the previously announced adaptations of Carrie Soto, executive produced by Serena Williams, for Netflix; Malibu Rising, which was with Hulu but, Reid’s producing partner Brad Mendelsohn tells me, now needs a new distributor; and Forever, Interrupted, executive produced by and starring Laura Dern and Margaret Qualley, in development with A24 for Netflix.
But there’s also news: Reid and Mendelsohn envision a global theatrical release for Atmosphere,and just brought on Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the duo behind Half Nelson, Mississippi Grind, and Captain Marvel, to write and direct. And, independent of her adaptations, Reid and her childhood friend Ashley Rodger wrote a jukebox Chicks musical, Goodbye, Earl, about two friends who team up to kill one’s abusive husband, with the Chicks signed on as executive producers. “It’s got Thelma and Louise vibes,” says Mendelsohn, a partner at Circle Management + Production. “It’s a story about what you would do to protect your friend,” Reid says. “I’m writing it from how I feel about Ashley, and she’s writing it from how she feels about me. There were a lot of tears, and a lot of making each other laugh.”
Meanwhile, fans can’t stop talking about even the projects for which there is no news. Stevie Nicks herself has expressed her eagerness for a second installment of Daisy Jones. And, though the show was released more than two years ago, star Riley Keough still sees posts from people pleading for more. “Being able to play—or watch or read—a woman who’s beating her own drum is inspiring. It speaks to something within all of us, the desire for that freedom of self,” Keough says. That said, she doesn’t have high hopes for a return: “The way the show was made very much wrapped it up.”
And for years, fans have speculated about casting for a promised Netflix Evelyn Hugo movie. So many have clamored for Jessica Chastain to play the redheaded actor Celia St. James that she’s had to clarify multiple times that it’s not happening. Ana de Armas and Eiza González, meanwhile, have both expressed interest in playing Evelyn. (Emily Henry’s vote is for de Armas: “I know that she already played Marilyn Monroe, but she’s an even more perfect Evelyn Hugo.”) “We’re not casting until we have a script that’s ready,” Mendelsohn says. “There’s so much attention on it because of the fan base that there is a pressure to get it right.”
Reid, the former casting assistant, says she has strong opinions but is keeping them to herself. One thing she will share is her desire to update the story. Evelyn Hugo came out just months before #MeToo went viral. “There was no Harvey Weinstein conversation when I finished that book,” she says. “We have a real opportunity here to further that conversation, and to make the movie better than the book.”
For all the glamour that Hollywood projects bring, Reid is clear on the real benefit of adaptations. She thought the money she’d get from selling screen rights would be what changed her life. “But actually you need the movie, the TV show, whatever it is, to come out and be a hit,” she says. That’s what gets your books back on display and readers back in stores, which shows your publisher they should invest more in you. “If you can get that snowball going once, you can ride that goodwill for a while.”
And, ultimately, that’s the point: longevity. Reid wants to be the kind of author who can experiment with genre, write whatever she wants to write, and still be embraced—like Stephen King, whose brand is so much bigger than any given book. “It’s a lot of pressure,” Reid says. “But the thing I try to keep in mind, and that my agents certainly help me keep in mind, is that you have to keep your eye on what the actual goal is: I hope I produce work that makes people happy often enough that they’ll give my next one a chance.”
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