| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Inside Grindr’s boardroom feud |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “A Biography of a Mountain” and “Materialists” |
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| A bit of housekeeping: The Information’s Weekend section is looking for a reporter for a beat we’re calling “tech wealth and culture.” This person will cover how Silicon Valley’s moguls live large—their pursuits, their pastimes—and how they spend their money. Here’s a link to the job description. |
| Interested candidates should drop me a line at abe@theinformation.com.—Abram Brown, Weekend editor |
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| Innovations from Apple used to change the course of the world. Not so much anymore. |
| Consider the waifish iPhone Air, which I’d consider the coolest new product from Cupertino in years. But its sales have disappointed, and Apple plans to delay releasing next year’s version, my colleagues Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu revealed a couple days ago. |
| Their report came around the same time Apple tried to make much hay from the debut of another product: the iPhone Pocket, a slingy thing made in partnership with Issey Miyake, the esteemable Japanese fashion house, that nonetheless possesses all the glamour and grace of Borat’s onesie. |
| In a press release, Apple described the item as “beautiful” and includes a quote from Molly Anderson, the company’s vice president of industrial design,” praising the object’s “craftsmanship, simplicity, and design.” That’s quite a lot of misty-eyed solemnity for a product that’s a cross between a slingshot and a jockstrap. |
| By teaming with Miyake, Apple is trying to tell us Steve Jobs would’ve dug an iPhone Pocket: Miyake, after all, is the company that made Jobs’ trademark black turtleneck. Somehow, though, I doubt Jobs would’ve been a big iPhone Pocket guy—at least not as modern-day Apple unveiled it. |
| Sure, Jobs did in 2004 release the iPod Sock, a woven cloth case for the MP3 player, but he did so with tongue pressed firmly into cheek—as you can see in his initial presentation of it. He knew it was ridiculous and didn’t try to insist otherwise. And since Jobs had recently recemented his reputation as a product genius, he had the credibility to do a jokey product—without Apple’s design sensibility getting turned into a punchline by elbow biters such as myself. Apple in 2025 isn’t in the same position. |
| Look, there’s a real reason why Apple shares have only managed to slightly outpace the Nasdaq’s 19% gain this year—and why the company is struggling to get any growth out of the iPhone, its flagship product. Lately, it just hasn’t displayed the ability to develop any new good ideas. As Apple makes plainly apparent on a regular basis, it instead continues to subsist on the ample amount of brand power it amassed in the Jobs era. |
| To be clear, though, Jobs assembled such a stockpile by knowing full well that most people don’t think their gadgets need knitted condoms, which are, obviously, a poor idea in any circumstance. |
| What else from this week… |
| • To whom it may concern, which is to say maybe all of us: AI cover letters are making the job market terrible for everyone. |
| • I do feel a little bad for Ev Randle, the new Benchmark general partner: He’s getting treated like a journo! All he did was express a straightforward criticism of venture capital, and some of the industry’s thinnest-skinned denizens dogpiled him. |
| • With Gabe Newell’s Valve releasing three new pieces of hardware, the console wars seem like they’re getting steamier. |
| • The second season of Amazon’s Bible series, “House of David,” included 350 shots made using AI. Surely the pope’s aghast. |
| • Apparently you can hire a judge. No one tell President Trump! |
| • Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old AI czar at Meta Platforms, insists young people should be vibe coding around the clock if they want any hope of getting ahead. Sure, programming skills are important. But c’mon, what ever happened to teaching the next generation how to enjoy a good thing—like, say, sex or single-malt scotch—in blissful moderation? |
| • The New Yorker has discovered the advice Scott Galloway has been dispensing to the youths—and also declared Rian Johnson, the director behind the “Knives Out” franchise, the “Agatha Christie for the Netflix age.”—Abram Brown |
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| Odd things often happen on Grindr—and within the company’s boardroom. |
| Once again, a saga around who’ll own the gay hookup-and-dating app is unfolding, and our Cory Weinberg pulls back the curtain on the drama in this week’s Big Read. The unrest involves an increasingly bitter grudge match between Grindr’s controlling shareholders—a pair of straight financiers—and the company’s board. They’ve disagreed on plenty—from basic strategy to more intricate financial and governance issues. Oh, and I haven’t even gotten into who snubbed whom at Grindr’s annual Halloween fete in Manhattan: the, um, Pleasure Ball. |
| Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at abe@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
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| Listening: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (Audible) |
| Surely the corporate treasuries at Amazon could fill several floors of Gringotts vaults—a judgment I make after seeing the Hollywood cast assembled by the company’s Audible division for new audiobook versions of the Harry Potter franchise. Audible began releasing the spared-no-expense adaptations earlier this month with the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” and will dole out the rest in monthly installments through May. And that cast I mentioned really does include more British treasures than most London museums: Keira Knightley, Hugh Laurie, Matthew Macfadyen, James McAvoy, Kit Harington and Riz Ahmed, among many others.—Abram Brown |
| Reading: “A Biography of a Mountain” by Matthew Davis |
| For the better part of a century, Mount Rushmore has been a fixture within the American consciousness—one originally envisioned as a 5,700-foot moment to a sense of noble exceptionalism. As with many icons, of course, the reality is much more complex. In sorting through the complications, Matthew Davis, who has previously written for publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, offers a sketch of how the West was tamed—often through great violence—and the land turned into a memorial to a past that’s a wellspring of both pride and pain. |
| Rushmore is a towering illustration of those dynamics. “It was the first graffiti that ever became a national monument,” said Gerard Baker, a former National Park Service official who was Rushmore’s first Indigenous superintendent. “It was marvelous graffiti but still graffiti.”—A.B. |
| Watching: “Materialists” (HBO Max) |
| As our Jemima McEvoy told you recently, matchmakers are in hot demand these days—and in “Materialists,” Lucy (Dakota Fanning) is an especially talented yenta, even if her need to treat matters of the heart as a supply-and-demand problem has given her a frosty view on love. This A24 picture is comedic and romantic at different points, but it’s not a romantic comedy, and as Lucy struggles to make a choice between Harry (Pedro Pascal), an excellent-on-paper financier, and John (Chris Evans), a ne’er-do-well actor, the movie holds up a mirror to how we look at ourselves and who we see ourselves with. What it reflects back is a startling modern image that’s discomforting in what it says about our desires and priorities.—A.B. |
