The Weekend
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Nov 22, 2025
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| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Zach Dell’s Texas-size dream |
| • The Arena: Figure skating launches a comeback—with AI |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: “Allison After NXIVM,” “The Finest Hotel in Kabul” and “Bugonia” |
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| A horrifying thought has lately been immovable from my mind: Am I gonna have to dump ChatGPT for Gemini? |
| Well, Gemini 3 is out, and it’s pretty darn slick: Google has improved the chatbot’s ability to code, search and create images, among other features. AI researcher Ethan Mollick is a fan, and so is Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. Our Stephanie Palazzolo deemed it “well worth the wait and the hype.” |
| What a difference a year or so makes. As recently as spring 2024, Gemini looked like a disaster, attracting widespread jeers for an aesthetic sensibility that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Wesleyan art class. Around that same time, OpenAI seemed to take great pleasure in tweaking Google’s tail, releasing competing products at almost exactly the same moment, many of which got plenty of applause. So people like me threw our lot in with OpenAI and befriended Chat, a buddy I’ve taught to understand my tastes as much as possible—from my morning coffee ritual (a Moka, though sadly not this Moka) to my preferred travel (like this delightful Slovenian hiking-biking expedition). |
| Having already invested some time and effort in personalizing the chatbot, I’m reluctant to use another, especially if everything I’ve told it becomes a part of a gee-whiz AI device. This speaks to a truism in tech that’s familiar to anyone who’s worked on, say, consumer apps: It’s hard to simply get people to download an app and build the habits that lead to steady use, and convincing someone to switch to a different app is tough, too. Just consider how Twitter has survived more assassination attempts than a third-world dictator. |
| For now, ChatGPT has many more users than Gemini: 800 million weekly users, while Gemini reports just 650 million monthly users, a wide gulf that reflects OpenAI’s first-mover advantage. OpenAI will hang on to many of them—many of us—simply by that law of inertia I just mentioned. |
| But there’s no getting around it: OpenAI seems to have fallen behind. We didn’t see it gleefully yanking on Google’s rear this past week, and the recent decision to reach for engagement bait like adult content suggests it has concerns about continued growth—at least in the short term. And while Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of apps, appears eager to publicly insist the startup’s world domination can continue apace, CEO Sam Altman acknowledged behind closed doors last month that Google’s recent resurgence in AI would mean “rough” vibes for the time being, according to a scoop from our Stephanie and Erin Woo. |
| Plus, it’s not like OpenAI has been picking up cool points, which might mitigate an innovation slowdown. |
| Take Sora, for example—the startup’s last big thing. While the video app’s debut made for an undeniable moment, it has also made OpenAI into the de facto enemy of Hollywood and the creative class. Minus 100 cool points! |
| Relatedly, go talk to someone outside the coastal bubbles—another horrifying thought, I know—and I expect you’ll find that ChatGPT is increasingly the stand-in for AI as an evil, labor-market menace in people’s minds. Simply, ChatGPT is the most resonant brand in AI—and in this case, I guess that counts as a first-mover disadvantage. I used to think Gemini’s lack of powerful branding would really hurt it, but if sentiment around AI does really shift at some point, Google could be in a much better position. Maybe the name “Gemini” dissolves—wouldn’t be much of a loss brandingwise, would it?—and all that high-quality underlying technology gets quietly folded into Chrome and Google Search. |
| That scenario reminds me of that scene from “Mad Men”—coming to HBOMax in 4K in two weeks!—when Don Draper’s Sterling Cooper colleagues try to talk him into joining them in a pitch for American Airlines, which has just suffered a crash. |
| “We already have an airline,” Don says. |
| “We don’t have American,” says his boss, Roger Sterling. “Well, that’s right,” Don replies. “We have the one whose planes didn’t just fall out of the sky.” |
| Or, in the context of Google’s public image, the company would have the technology that didn’t just vaporize millions of jobs. Just boring ol’ Google Search. |
| What else from this week… |
| • The Economist gloomily points out that in the next crypto crash—yes, because there’s always a next crypto crash—the pain “will be felt more widely than in the past.” |
| • Singapore-based Folo Toy has pulled its AI-powered teddy bear from shelves after researchers found the bear would discuss topics like, um, BDSM sex. Gee, I didn’t think “Ted” was a documentary. |
| • Over in Britain, Larry Ellison’s more than $10 billion donation to Oxford has caused a lot of drama. |
| • Sotheby’s sold an 18-karat gold toilet owned by hedge funder Steve Cohen for $12.1 million. (It’s an art piece by Maurizio Cattelan, the same guy who did the duct-tape banana, which crypto lord Justin Sun bought for $6.2 million last year, then ate.) For now, the identity of the new throne master is a mystery. But, hey, I’ve got a guess!—Abram Brown |
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| Zach Dell, son of billionaire Michael Dell, the PC legend, wants to sell people a giant battery for their houses. Homeowners get an extra supply of reliable, cheap energy, with Dell’s Austin, Texas–based startup, Base, refilling them from the grid when energy prices are cheap. And when the batteries aren’t in use, Base can sell the stored power, helping meet the increasing demand on America’s energy grid. With $1 billion in fresh funding, Dell is wasting no time, he explains to our Steve LeVine. Dell describes his modus operandi as simply, “Go, go, go.” |
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| Hard as it is to believe, figure skating was the second most popular sport on TV in the 1990s. Now—not so much: It’s mostly an afterthought except for a few days during the Winter Olympics. The sport would like to recapture some of its former glory, Sara Germano reports, and it hopes to do so by changing up the music used in the athletes’ performances: “Swan Lake” is out. Songs from more recent eras—like “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)”—are in. And skaters are turning to AI-generated remixes to cut down on music licensing’s high costs. |
| 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: “Allison After NXIVM” |
| Allison Mack, the former “Smallville” actress, accumulated fame in the worst possible manner: For a brief moment, she had a bit of bright stardom, but it rapidly dissipated—then many years later it curdled into dark infamy, which, ironically, made her more widely known than ever before. That notoriety came from her supporting role in Keith Raniere’s NXIVM sex cult, for which she helped Raniere recruit women and maintain control over them. She and Raniere were arrested in 2018, and Mack served several years in prison before her early release in 2023. Throughout her descent into notoriety, Mack’s been absolutely mum—until she agreed to sit down for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s “Allison After NXIVM.” |
| The pod mostly wants to question whether someone like Mack can be both victim and victimizer. That’s a fairly standard line of pursuit in a case like hers. Yet I wonder if the show got duped a bit, and I think it’s all the more fascinating for it. While “Allison After NXIVM” may seem like just another all-access, behind-the-scenes look at a true crime, I wonder if it’s actually an eerie close-up of a manipulative performer trying out her next staged routine: remorse.—Abram Brown |
| Reading: “The Finest Hotel in Kabul” by Lyse Doucet |
| For the moment, Afghanistan seems to have faded from U.S. view. Yet if you stop to think about it, it feels grimly inevitable that the country will capture our attention again, sitting as it does at a grim, unstable nexus point of global tensions. For several decades, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, has watched those geopolitical forces ebb and flow within Afghanistan—often from a perch at the Inter-Continental Hotel, a 200-room brutalist landmark on a hill above Kabul that opened in 1969, a few years before the nation’s unraveling commenced. |
| Through foreign invasions and civil war, the Inter-Con, as the hotel is known to all in the city, has managed to achieve a remarkable longevity, which makes for a useful narrative framework. Centering the story within the place’s four walls, Doucet constructs an intimate picture of the country’s decadeslong tumult by making the Inter-Con’s staff into an ensemble of main characters—confining the mullahs, mujahedeen, generals and other VIPs of history to the background. That’s not how many authors would approach such a book, and ultimately, Doucet’s subversion demonstrates an interest that lies less in the lives and whims of the powerful and power hungry than in the everyday chaos they leave behind.—A.B. |
| Watching: “Bugonia” |
| In “Bugonia,” Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a high-powered pharmaceutical CEO, lives a life that wouldn’t be out of place in Silicon Valley. She starts each morning at 4:30 with yoga, followed by a private boxing lesson at her mansion and time with a red-light therapy mask. But her hypercontrolled life implodes when she’s ambushed after work and dragged to the basement of a dilapidated farmhouse by two masked men who believe she’s an alien. During the ensuing interrogation, the chief abductor, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), points to Fuller’s youthful appearance as evidence that she isn’t human. She dismisses his point: It’s just the result of her “very expensive” anti-aging regimen, she says. |
| “Bugonia” marks Stone’s third collaboration in three years with director Yorgos Lanthimos, following “Poor Things” (2023) and “Kinds of Kindness” (2024)—and in my view, it’s the best of the three. The premise is just as outlandish and grotesque as that of any other Lanthimos flick, but it’s also deeply rooted in some dark realities of our time. Through Gatz, we’re plunged into the mind of a man consumed by conspiracy theories, isolation and the tragedies of his past. There’s another important lesson: Spend too much time under a red-light mask, and someone might mistake you for an alien!—Jemima McEvoy |
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