Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Nuclear power could help tech solve its AI-driven electricity problem, if new reactors can actually get built.

• Venture Bets: There’s a vibe shift in nuclear startup investing.

• Clean Energy: Fusion, geothermal, solar. It’s not all about nuclear fission.

• Plus, our Recommendations, messed-up love edition: A Lynch affair; Kafka for the ChatGPT generation and romance with a Scottish brogue.

“This weekend feels like San Francisco’s coming-out party,” a staffer at one of the Bay Area’s pro sports teams told me over coffee Thursday morning, shortly after I arrived for the NBA’s All-Star festivities. 

Yes, there’s going to be a game featuring the likes of LeBron James, Nikola Jokić and Kevin Durant here on Sunday night, but the basketball is almost besides the point. San Francisco has a new mayor at City Hall, a new local WNBA franchise kicking off this spring, and the 2026 Super Bowl and World Cup both scheduled to take place in the Bay Area. The region is gearing up to take the sports spotlight. 

Not that Silicon Valley hasn’t already left its fingerprints, holograms and digital signatures on the sports world already. One sign of that is the annual NBA Tech Summit, an event that took place Friday at a Hilton hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square. Virtually every contact in my Rolodex described it as one of the hottest tickets in sports, especially this year since it was held on the tech industry’s home turf.

Started in 2000—the last time the league’s All-Star Weekend was hosted in the Bay Area—it’s an invite-only, off-the-record gathering of A-listers in tech, sports, finance and media. Among Friday’s panelists were Eddy Cue of Apple, Kevin Weil of OpenAI, Ruth Porat of Alphabet and Neal Mohan of YouTube. 

The techies got to rub shoulders—or at least torsos—at the event with 7-foot-3 San Antonio Spurs phenom Victor Wembanyama, along with New York Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson, who is a mere 6-foot-2. Principals at some of the top banks and venture capital funds munched on steak skewers alongside powerful Hollywood agents and star athletes like Sabrina Ionescu. 

The NBA prides itself on being the most technologically progressive major sports league, and it has used the summit to debut new features such as last year’s NB-AI, a voice-activated assistant the league is developing to augment and enhance live broadcasts. On Friday, members of the Golden State Warriors showed off robots engineered to help with shooting drills and equipment maintenance. 

The melding of tech and sports wasn’t limited to the summit, of course. On Thursday night, talent agency Excel Sports Management hosted a private party at Executive Order, a bar and lounge in the South of Market neighborhood. Between the pool tables and the DJ booth, I spotted Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, wearing a black WNBA hoodie, as well as TikTok creator and rookie 76er Jared McCain. Missing from the action was Caitlin Clark, arguably Excel’s hottest client, who declined an invitation to participate in the three-point contest Saturday night. Instead, her representatives said, she wanted her first three-point contest to be at the WNBA’s own All-Star festivities on her home court in Indianapolis this summer. Now that’s a power move.

P.S. I’ll be in town all weekend, so if you’re attending any of the mixers, games or product launches and want to connect, drop me a line at [email protected].

The Big Read

Can Tech Get Nuclear Power to Move at AI Speeds?

Weekend went all in on a single subject this week: nuclear power. No, we weren’t inspired by rewatching HBO’s “Chernobyl” or “The Days,” the miniseries about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster on Netflix. 

Instead, our Nuclear Issue, as we’re calling it, was prompted by the simple fact that all three of the top-tier cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have begun striking partnerships over the last 12 months with both nuclear reactor startups and existing nuclear power plants. They and other tech companies are seeing huge increases in their electricity needs because of AI. If they’re going to meet that demand without emitting crazy amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, nuclear power has got to be a part of their energy mix, they believe.

In the Big Read, we tried to go beyond the mere fact of these partnerships to figure out how realistic their plans are to boost the nuclear power available to them. Some of their efforts, like restarting mothballed reactors, are fairly straightforward. The real promise is in the building of new reactors based on innovative designs. But completing those will take years, and they will have to run a gauntlet of regulators.—Nick Wingfield 

Venture Bets

Nuclear Investing, No Longer Radioactive

One of the side effects of the AI-inspired nuclear power renaissance is that venture capitalists are getting much more interested in investing in startups in the category. You would think they’d be scared off by the staggering amounts of capital such startups require, the long time horizons needed to get reactor designs approved by regulators and the recent history of nuclear projects in the U.S. that have gone off the rails. But more and more inventors seem to be confident they’ll see a payoff from the category because nuclear power is one of the best options for around-the-clock, carbon-free power.—N.W.

Clean Energy

From Fusion to Geothermal, Tech’s Clean Energy Bets Are Multiplying

Nuclear fission—the process of splitting atomic nuclei to generate energy—isn’t the only form of clean energy tech companies are banking on to meet their electricity needs. In this sidebar, we show how they’re also making big investments in geothermal, wind and solar. One of the most tantalizing potential sources of energy is nuclear fusion, which involves mimicking the inner workings of stars to meld atomic nuclei together. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others, has poured money into one fusion startup. But that technology still has a ways to go before it’s viable.—N.W.

Nick Wingfield, The Information’s features editor, will not be participating in the NBA Slam Dunk Contest. Reach him at [email protected].

Watching: A Love Story in Hell

David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990) is a surreal exploration of love, violence and, inexplicably, “The Wizard of Oz.” The story follows a pair of star-crossed lovers, “Sailor” Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Fortune (Laura Dern), who end up on the run after Lula’s overbearing mother sics a John Wick–style criminal network on them. Lula’s mother is played by Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd, who chews the scenery in the most delightful way in her depiction of the Wicked Witch–esque character of Marietta Fortune. 

It’s a highly sexual, somewhat gory (Sailor kills a would-be assassin in the first five minutes!), distinctly Lynchian film that’s often overlooked in discussions of the director’s filmography, even though it’s certainly his most romantic work. (Lynch often described the film as a “love story in hell.”) It’s hard to find on streaming services in the U.S., but it’s available in full on the Internet Archive.—Paris Martineau

Reading: Dark Tales of Dating 

Ever since I picked up a copy of Kate Folk’s masterful short-story collection “Out There” (2022), I have been screaming myself hoarse telling friends and strangers about it. The collection is Kafka for the ChatGPT generation: 15 tales of grotesque medical advancements and apocalyptic survival missions, each of which wrestles with the question of preserving one’s humanity in an increasingly post-human world. Her writing marries distinctive imagination about human connection in the digital age with spare, unflinching language (“I saw the world through the eyes of a recently fucked woman”).

“Out There” begins with the story that gives the collection its name:the chronicle of a San Francisco woman’s ambivalent journey on dating apps. It starts as a relatable tale but quickly takes a dark turn: The protagonist has to distinguish between real human men and robotic human look-alikes called Blots, which are being developed in the Bay Area. 

She and her friends commiserate, as gals do, about their sour experiences with “being blotted”—fooled by these handsome pseudo-men who take them to bed and then steal all their data and passwords. As Blot technology advances, our hero’s journey shifts from the standard romantic narrative of whether she will find a partner to whether it is preferable to have your heart shattered by a human or stolen by a facsimile. 

The humanoids return in the book’s final story, “Big Sur,” a detailed account of a relationship between human Meg and Roger, a Blot. They are mutually self-aware about the risks of mixed human-Blot relations and decide to pursue their connection anyway. A humbling read for anyone who’s ever faced the “But you’re too good for him!” talk from their friends, it’s about the ways in which we betray our own values for the promise of companionship—in other words, the ways in which we are human.—S.G.

Reading: A Loveless World

In short order, Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart has developed a specialty as a writer of heart-breaking tales about broken boys set in his native Glasgow. His first book, “Shuggie Bain,” won the Booker Prize in 2020. His second, “Young Mungo,” came out two years later to quieter acclaim—a pity, really, because “Young Mungo” is the finer of the pair, with sharper language and an even more merciless ending. 

The 15-year-old Mungo gets introduced to us as he is sent out of town on a camping trip at the behest of his mother, Maureen, a cruel drunkard. Indeed, the booze makes Maureen into such a ghoul that her children have a nickname for the creature she becomes once she gets in her cups: Tattie-Bogle. Yet Mungo loves her dearly. He also cannot help himself from falling in love with a boy, James; the fact that Mungo is a Protestant and James is a Catholic compounds their already substantial difficulties. And yet he loves James dearly, too. 

On the camping trip, his ne’er-do-well chaperones do their best to show Mungo how loveless the world can be. “‘Listen son, at ma age love is a nuisance of a thing. What ye want is some easy company on a Tuesday night, a bit of help runnin’ the hoose, and if yer lucky a bit of nookie as long as ye can both lie on yer side while ye’re at it,’” one of them tells Mungo. “‘What ye want is an easy life. There’s nothin’ easy about love.’”—A.B.

Final Thought

Crimes against calendars.