Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera reviews the new Steve Jobs biography, 40 years after profiling him. Jill Kargman, who skewers the Upper East Side for a living, says: “I don’t need Bellinis to be uncensored.” Kat Rosenfield was wrong about The Sheep Detectives. Kara Kennedy defends the self-professed “slut,” and now mom-to-be, Alex Cooper. And much more!
But first: The builders of the Bay Area are finding God.
If you go to a party in the Bay Area, there’s a good chance you hear AI researchers making their favorite joke: that they’re “building God.”
Very few mean it literally. They just mean that this technology could become more powerful than anything we’ve ever known. But Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at the AI firm Anthropic, sees the joke as a reminder that, even as it works to transcend humanity, Silicon Valley has a God-shaped hole in its heart.
A lot of the people making this joke are about to become very rich—both Anthropic and OpenAI are set to go public at eye-watering valuations in the very near future—and have seen machines do things that seem miraculous. Materially, these tech workers could not be more satisfied. But spiritually, there’s an emptiness. And that’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us.
“You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied,” writes Avital. Having lived in San Francisco for four years, she found herself yearning for a religious practice. In her essay today, she explains why. Don’t miss it.
When Steve Jobs Grew Up |
|
|
|
 |
|
When Joe Nocera spent a week with Steve Jobs in 1986, the man he met was rude, abrasive, and arrogant—so sure he was always right he wouldn’t listen to even his closest aides. His leadership style nearly wrecked the company he was trying to build after being pushed out of Apple the year before. When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, he was a completely different boss, who had learned to trust the people around him, and to offer leadership without bullying. Joe reviews a new book that explains what brought about the change. | | |
|
Two Drinks with . . . the ‘Odd Mom Out’ |
|
|
|
 |
|
Jill Kargman is the quintessential New York City society girl—her father was the CEO of Chanel; her brother was married to Drew Barrymore; and she went to high school with Gwyneth Paltrow—but she built her career on skewering the rarefied world she grew up in. In her new film, “Influenced,” she plays a momfluencer whose son asks: “Mom, how come we don’t have any poor friends?” Jill met our features editor Dana Schuster to dish on the time she says the mayor’s wife blocked her on Instagram, the mah-jongg mafia, and why she thinks over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs are “what I would call BFTJ: bad for the Jews.”
| | |
|
Wait, Are Kids’ Movies Good Again? |
|
|
|
 |
|
When our critic Kat Rosenfield saw the trailer for “The Sheep Detectives,” she wondered if there’d been “a successful plot to blackmail some of the greatest actors in Hollywood into making the world’s most ridiculous movie.” It’s a murder mystery about barnyard animals that somehow stars Emma Thompson, Hugh Jackman, and Nicholas Braun! But when she went to see it, the truth shocked her: “The Sheep Detectives” is proof that, after a decade of films about Minions and kung fu pandas, Hollywood can still make something adults love as much as their kids.
| | |
|
When Sluts Settle Down |
|
|
|
 |
|
Alex Cooper has built a multimillion-dollar podcast empire on telling young women to spend their 20s sleeping around instead of settling down, so when the “Call Her Daddy” host announced this week that she and her husband are expecting a baby, a lot of people called her a hypocrite. But Kara Kennedy argues in her latest essay that a girl who’s boy-crazy in her 20s is actually more likely to have a happily-ever-after. “When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him,” writes Kara. “Her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming.”
| | |
|
