She Wrote About Hidden Patterns. Then She Died at Camp Hero.

Everything we know about Lauren Balik's death at 35 on a Montauk hiking trail. Plus: An East Hampton garden institution's plight; the U.S. Open invades Shinnecock Hills.

Monday morning’s THC “office hours” meetup at Sag Harbor’s The American Hotel was a movie. Maybe a lesser-known, plotless Noah Baumbach indie—but one you want to watch over and over again. Regulars blinked into the dappled sunshine on the porch; a European family argued over eggs; I bogarted the newspapers in the back room. Bartender Vinny Rom, who’s worked there since 1991, was buzzing about the turnout at Amagansett Square’s Saturday Knicks watch party as he lined up bottles of S. Pellegrino and cut limes for the day. Although the hotel’s happy hours, martinis, and lobster BLT sandwiches are famous, its year-round morning hours still have a hidden-gem feeling (if you stay at the hotel upstairs a Continental breakfast is included).

Today, we start with some darker news—everything we know about the death last week of a 35-year-old Substack writer in Montauk.

A Niche Internet Writer Dies on a Montauk Trail

On June 11, a body later identified as Lauren Balik, 35, was found near the Montauk Point East Overlook at Camp Hero State Park.

The state police said that the investigation is ongoing. No further details have been released.

Balik was a financial writer and data engineer in niche Internet circles who wrote about obscure connections between finance, tech, geopolitical intrigue, and Kabbalah symbolism for her Substack, and on her Twitter account with over 33,000 followers. On June 9, she posted what appears to be biographical details to X: “Steven Charles Balik, Born October 13 1990, Reston Virginia.”

Balik’s brother Brian posted a tribute to social media saying, “We sadly have lost one of my siblings this week after a long battle with mental health challenges.” Brian nodded to the family’s love of hiking and the outdoors in the post.

Camp Hero, now a state park, was a WWII-era coastal defense site disguised as a fishing village, later used as an Air Force radar station until 1982. The 754-acre park surrounding Montauk Point Lighthouse looms large in speculative conspiracy theory corners of the internet. It served as an inspiration for the supernatural TV show “Stranger Things,” which was originally called “Montauk.” There’s no immediate indication from Balik’s writing that she had any connection to the east end. A resident of Brooklyn, she often hiked in the tri-state area.

Balik’s Substack, “Lauren Balik’s Almanac & Revue,” was a sporadically updated chronicle about the hidden patterns behind finance and tech. The last post to her 2,200 subscribers, in April, was a pitch of herself for “wholesome projects.” In a description of her skillset, she wrote, “I run large parts of the digital space.” She also spoke about “Banksy-style digital projects which had the power to create real world outcomes with real humans here on Earth firing up output back into the digital cloud in feedback loops.” A few of Balik’s subscribers pointed me to a lengthy post she wrote in November 2025 about “esoteric assassinations.” The post describes people who went down online rabbit holes which ended badly.

Balik had many followers around the Internet, including establishment figures like Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, who called her a “true original.” One of Balik’s Substack subscribers told me, “Lauren was a detective of sorts who clearly understood some secret things about the world and was willing to share them in her own odd way. They spoke in code often and also translated code that was spoken out in the world and taught us how to translate it.”

This is a developing story and it will be updated as we learn more.

The beloved East Hampton Gardens center is in peril. Fashion-world alum Michael Giannelli, who’s run the Gingerbread Lane shop for ten years as well as doing garden design, says his landlords have sent an abrupt notice that he must vacate the premises by October 31, or December 31 with an extension. Giannelli wrote a letter to the EH Star explaining, “There was no first right of refusal, no meaningful discussion about our future at the property, and no opportunity to negotiate.” In an Instagram video titled “Devastated,” he said, “If anyone knows of anything adorable and fabulous out in the Hamptons that we could possibly reinvent keep us posted.”

“It’s so heartbreaking,” says Giannelli’s client Gwen Whiting, the founder of The Laundress and The Fill and a resident of Bridgehampton. “Michael is the kind of quintessential Hampton person that we love and need more of…he’s preserving the type of beautiful business that we love that are dropping like flies.”

“All the cool, fabulous, charming things are disappearing at a rapid pace,” adds Whiting, who also cited Estia’s restaurant.

No sandals, no cell phone, no problem.

The U.S. Open begins this week at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, bringing a transportation quagmire, football fields’ worth of merch, and thousands of men with alcohol-induced rosacea. The first round of championship play is June 18, but the site is already mobbed (one man in the Sag Harbor White’s was complaining today that the traffic made it hard to get to his other golf club). A few notes:

• Architecture: The Open is a wonderful occasion to check out the 1892 club house designed by Stanford White, one of the great east end architects (he also designed Montauk’s Seven Sisters). Normally, cell phones are not permitted—outside of one’s car or the telephone room—at the club house.

• Merch: The USGA pulled in a record $333 million in 2025, much of that attributed to the U.S. Open. While that doesn’t break out merchandise, men in polos are already lining up this year to buy more polos. North Carolina brand Peter Millar is the official outfitter. Something tells me that no one from the nearby Shinnecock Reservation will be buying one of the official Smathers & Branson needlepoint belts embroidered with Native American chief heads.

• Transportation: The tournament recommends LIRR, which has added a temporary “Shinnecock Hills Station” on the Montauk line (my spies say the trains are already standing-room-only). If you drive, you’ll need to park in a distant lot that requires a shuttle. There are just a few spots left for Thursday’s Blade helicopter rides from the city, which take less than an hour, cost around $1,480, and deliver you steps from the links. The entrepreneurial Captain Chip Cheek is offering scenic boat rides from the North Fork. Inevitably, jokesters are saying that they’ll just swim to the event.

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