Intro for October 2, 2026

Dear Gossips,

It’s been a busy week for Florence Pugh, but now that East of Eden is officially streaming, she can relax. For a minute, before Dunesday kicks off in a couple months. And she did relax, hanging out in New York with some friends and her boyfriend, Finn Cole. This is how I learned Flo is dating Finn Cole, by the way. Most people probably know him best from Peaky Blinders, but I could never get into that show, so I know him best from Animal Kingdom.

Anyway, I hope she’s celebrating, because Flo’s reviews for East of Eden are stellar—I’ll be reviewing it next week—and she did mark the series premiere with a photo dump on Instagram.

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A post shared by Florence Pugh (@florencepugh)

Of course, Florence used her spotlight this week to shine an even brighter light on what is now being called the “Cornell 7” case. The latest development is that New York Governor Kathy Hochul has turned the case over the State Attorney General, Letitia James, removing it from the Tompkins County district attorney’s office. I guess it’s something.

It’s been twelve years since Emma Sulkowicz did her senior thesis in visual arts at Columbia in full view of the public over the 2014-2015 academic year, dragging a mattress everywhere she went, representative of the dorm mattresses used at the university. Sulkowicz alleges she was sexually assaulted in her dorm room in 2012, and her performance art, titled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), was meant to draw attention to the university’s inaction in the wake of her allegations.

These aren’t new problems, they keep happening because not enough changes, ever. It’s just the same story over and over again. The whisper network has never not been active. As Florence said, men have got to get involved, because women can’t carry this burden forever. We’ve already been doing it for a few thousand years, someone else can carry that weight for a while.

Live long and gossip and whisper,

Sarah