| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Secretive startup Klay enters the fray over AI music |
| • Lists: Our 2025 gift guide—38 items we absolutely recommend |
| • Robotics: Meet Matic, the most wonderful little robot in the world |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: “Adrift,” “Venetian Vespers” and “One Battle After Another” |
| |
| Since the invention of cryptocurrency, the digital coins have always been about more than their basic monetary value. That’s because for many investors, owning crypto is a signifier of personal taste—a way to express support for the anti-mainstream, pro-technology belief system held by the people who created and popularized the asset class. |
| Indeed, for these folks, buying crypto has always been about wanting to belong to a particular social set, though the composition of that clique has changed. These days, the neckbearded anarchists who initially adopted the technology represent just a small minority of its supporters. And while crypto hasn’t completely lost its roguish air, the asset class’s immense rise in value has made it a marker of wealth, with many of the world’s richest people touting it and Wall Street lately throwing a big bear hug around it. |
| That perception is proving to be a real hazard for some of those wealthy people, and 2025 has brought two especially dramatic examples of crypto theft that involved the thieves physically assaulting the owners. (There’s actually a grimly cutesy name for these crimes: wrench attacks—a colloquialism that began as an online joke about how a crook with a cheap weapon, like a wrench, could beat someone until they turned over the passwords for their high-tech holdings.) One of those attacks happened in New York, and another took place in San Francisco earlier this week. |
| A good general rule of thumb for better crypto security is to store funds in a multi-signature wallet, which uses what amounts to multiple passwords. But such a precaution only prevents half of a wrench attack’s harm: A robber would leave empty-handed, but they still would’ve physically assaulted the crypto’s owner. |
| There’s a still better safeguard, which would go a long way toward mitigating both parts of the scenario I just described. I’m not sure how appealing it will seem to many crypto enthusiasts, though: To really stay safe, they’d have to never tell anyone they have any crypto. But then they’d lose out on the other half of crypto’s appeal, getting to belong to that club. |
| Actually, I’m not sure crypto could even exist if everyone got quiet about it—or at least not to the extent it does today, totaling some $3 trillion. Aside from stablecoins, cryptocurrencies have no underlying value. They’re just lines of computer code that millions of people have decided have value—and generally, the more people talk about that value, the more it increases. |
| So for the same reason no one walks around going, “I’m a big ruby guy, and I’ve just really gotten into antique blood mine diamonds, too,” I expect we’ll hear a little less openly expressed crypto bullishness, especially if crypto prices keep falling as they have been. And gosh, come to think of it, if crypto is worth a lot less, it’d be a good deal less tempting to steal. |
| What else from this week… |
| • “The Will Stencil Show” is an animated political satire made entirely from Sora. And it’s racist as all hell. |
| • When Substack raises its next glob of fundraising at a valuation that won’t really make much sense, Ryan Lizza deserves, like, a 5% cut of the equity, gratis. His serialized reveals of his relationship with fellow journalist Olivia Nuzzi—and her relationship with RFK, Jr.—have done more to lift the company’s cultural and political relevance than anything else in recent memory. Of course, there’s the question of how long he can keep readers engaged, which is the same fundamental problem most Substackers have. But dammit, the man does seem to have an amount of D.C. dirt that would make J. Edgar Hoover envious. |
| • Apple needed to quietly pull a French-language show from its streaming service over a plagiarism scandal. |
| • Another AI-related super PAC has emerged, which plans to oppose the one that emerged a few months ago. |
| • HBO’s “Industry,” which I strongly recommend to anyone still suffering from “Succession” withdrawal, is coming back in January. It’s the best surprise out of Warner Bros. Discovery in months! |
| • Yeah, the Nvidia-Cisco chart going around Twitter from Michael Burry, one of the guys from “The Big Short,” is definitely disconcerting. Though, we all have a tendency to see what we want from such things. Just ask the oblivious elderly relative who each Thanksgiving offers to help me get a girlfriend.—Abram Brown |
| |
|
|
 |
|
| Last week, some startling news came out of the strange nexus where AI and entertainment are colliding: A little-known startup called Klay inked licensing deals with each of the three major record labels, the first startup of its kind to do so. |
| Klay is run by 30-year-old Ary Attie, who deliberately waited to launch any public products until after signing those deals. The two biggest AI music startups—Suno and Udio—didn’t wait, and they’ve run into legal disputes with the labels, some of which they’ve settled. Attie hopes his decision to play nicely with the labels from the start allows him to establish himself as the music world’s go-to partner in the AI age as he prepares to launch a new streaming-music app. |
| “Music has always been exposed to technological change in a very intense—almost aggressive—way. There’s just been these shock waves again and again,” Attie told me. “Artists are keenly aware of this.” |
|
 |
|
| In my humble opinion, knowing how to gift well is nearly as complicated as assembling all the nifty AI that’s pouring out of Silicon Valley. Let this guide simplify matters—and rest assured, we here at The Information take enormous pride in putting it together, selecting only items we know and love. After all, a scoop is valuable—but so is delighting someone else. |
|
 |
|
| “We’ve had this goal of creating this magical product,” explained Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic, which makes a very popular, very cute little robot. |
| Ask around Silicon Valley—or look around someone home’s—and you’ll likely get the sense that plenty of people think Nariyawala and his co-founder, Navneet Dalal, have accomplished their goal: The Matic, a sleek, cutesy, three-wheeled robot that vacuums and mops, is a breakout consumer tech hit of the year. The company is selling 2,000 robots a month, an annual run rate of around $30 million; a year ago, it did $1 million in revenue. Floorboards aside, the device’s popularity is an intriguing data point within the debate among roboticists over whether to build simpler, less expensive robots, like a Matic, or to focus on more complex, more expensive ones, like humanoids. |
| “We realized that there are products that seem futuristic and there are products that become future,” Nariyawala told me. “Products that actually become cool because they are just so incredibly useful.” |
| Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at abe@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
| |
 |
| Listening: “Adrift” |
| Sure, plenty of us have had family gatherings that feel like an abrupt shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean next to a trio of menacing orcas. So pity the poor Robertson family of Staffordshire, England—parents Dougal and Lynn, with their children Douglas, Sandy and Neil—who actually did find themselves in that nightmare in 1971 when their around-the-world boating expedition ran into trouble. (“How could it have come to this? How could a farmer’s son from the middle of England be eaten by a bloody killer whale in the Pacific Ocean?” one Robertson recalls thinking.) |
| “Adrift,” which chronicles the Robertsons’ nautical journey and efforts to make it back to dry land, offers a blessed break from the podcast industry’s overwhelming fondness for stories about scamsters and murderers. The family’s tale of survival has top-notch production quality—as befits an Apple-produced pod—and even manages to pull off the generally impossible: audio reenactments that don’t feel totally waterlogged.—Abram Brown |
| Reading: “Venetian Vespers” by John Banville |
| A couple months ago, Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder, had a funny tweet about that famous lagoon city in northern Italy. “In Venice you don’t go to see the thing,” he wrote. “You’re in the thing.” |
| It made me chuckle because Graham’s absolutely right: Most touristy destinations have their fair share of sights and attractions. But the entirety of Venice is a sight and an attraction, giving the place a sense of all-encompassingness. Sometimes, though, it’s more like moody enshroudment—as Evelyn Dolman, a hapless Englishman honeymooning there with his American bride in fin de siècle Italy, learns for himself in “Venetian Vespers.” Nothing and no one is what it appears to be, Dolman finds, as Banville, a Booker Prize winner, unspools the mystery with his trademark languidness. (Some of the man’s sentences are, I grant you, windier than the average Venice canal.) Soon Dolman very much finds himself lost in the thing, to paraphrase that tweet I mentioned, caught up in schemes and subschemes and menace and a possible menage-a-four. It’s horny Edgar Allen Poe, plumped up on cicchetti.—A.B. |
| Watching: “One Battle After Another” |
| Revolutionaries are inherently rather cinematic. But few have been depicted quite like Bob Ferguson, aka Ghetto Pat (Leonardo di Caprio), the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film. More technically, Bob’s a retired revolutionary, and he’s content living off the grid, smoking too much weed and doing his best to raise his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s been working hard to leave behind a past in which he and Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), ran around blowing up buildings, breaking people out of detention camps and falling in love as members of the French 75, a fictional militant group. Unfortunately for Bob and Willa, their mundane existence gets very interrupted. |
| The film is filled with colorful supporting characters, including the captivating yet entirely dislikable Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a sensei named Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) and a group of white supremacists who call themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club. As you might’ve gathered by the names, Anderson’s film tows a line between darkness and comedy—without ever tripping over the usual narrative land mines involved in such an endeavor. (It’s based on “Vineland,” one of Thomas Pynchon’s more unloved works.) Put together, it makes a thought-provoking argument about the difficulty of escaping fate, something each of the main characters reckons with.—Jemima McEvoy |
