Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• A lone shining light in food tech’s dark age

• The best summer camps for grownups

• Plus: A tremendous trek through the Grand Canyon; “Succession” in breeches and gowns; and a gamified interview show.

Venture capitalists excel at many things. For starters, they’re quite good at losing other people’s money. They’re also quite good at taking deep bows and patting themselves on the back when they actually manage to make money and can publicly tout those accomplishments.

Case in point: The release of Forbes’ latest Midas List of the best VCs this past week prompted a great amount of back-slapping on Sand Hill Road; frankly, I’m surprised the vibrations didn’t register on someone’s seismograph as a small earthquake. And it’s not as if the list was especially shocking. It’s mostly the same names each year—especially at the top, which this time included Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital, Micky Malka from Ribbit Capital and Neil Shen from HongShan, which, of course, used to be Sequoia China.

Amid all the good cheer, John Coogan, the Soylent co-founder who’s now an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, came forward with an idea for a new list: The Icarus List. He was kidding, but I love his proposal. As the name suggests, an Icarus List would head in the other direction from Forbes’ roll and examine the worst-performing VCs, the ones with returns melting faster than wax in sunlight.

In some ways, an Icarus List would actually be a greater journalistic service: It would compile a tally of who you absolutely shouldn’t give any money to—rather than manufacture a cause for celebration. How exactly to construct such a list? I haven’t gotten that far. A simple version might be just to highlight the investors involved in the biggest startup blowups of the past year. Ideally, though, you’d want to go more in depth, and look at the investors with funds underperforming over the long term. It’d be difficult but rewarding reporting.

In public, many among the technorati would attest to absolutely despising the Icarus List’s existence—while being completely captivated by it behind closed doors. (Oh, you don’t believe me? How enticing was the email subject line to this newsletter?) Undoubtedly, it would reopen the ages-old debate between tech and the media over whether it’s appropriate and fair to cover mishaps and failures. (It is—as well as tremendously necessary.) At the same time, it would allow for an enormous amount of schadenfreude, a more powerful intoxicant for many in Silicon Valley than any drug at a Musk party.

I called Coogan and asked him what he thought would happen if we did an Icarus List. He laughed. “The amount of effort that firms spend to get on the Midas List would be dwarfed by the amount of effort that they spend to stay off the Icarus List,” Coogan said. “You would have divisions—armies—of Stanford-educated associates working round the clock to get the firm off of the list. And then in every group chat, every tech person would be like, ‘Oh my god, this is hilarious and extremely accurate.’”

Icarus, Midas? Eh. Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is more hoping for a summer of bacchanals. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

The Three Young Founders Looking at Food Tech’s Dark Age in a New Light

Larissa Zimberoff, a returning Weekend contributor, is a bit of an expert when it comes to lab-grown food: Wagyu, lamb, Australian elk, steak, chicken, caviar and tuna—she’s seen and tasted it all. That made her the ideal person to write this week’s Big Read on the mad scientist co-founders of Prolific Machines, which is the only startup in food tech with much of a pulse at the moment.

As Larissa explains, Prolific doesn’t intend to sell lab-grown meat. Instead, it hopes to sell the software and hardware for producing such meat through optogenetics, where light stimulates cellular growth. Optogenetics, theoretically, is cheaper than the traditional manufacturing process for lab-grown meat; moreover, it would allow manufacturers to ditch the chemicals and proteins used in that process, which have been criticized as possibly unsafe. Prolific’s ambitions extend beyond serving the food industry. The startup hopes to license the technology to any company interested in commercializing cellular growth.

The Top 5

The Best Summer Camps for Grownups

You’ve probably already figured out where the kids are going to camp this summer. Can we make a polite suggestion? Find something like that for yourself, too—and take the time to disconnect at length and play. (As it happens, there’s plenty of science to say it’ll help your mind stay more pliable when you return to the everyday.) Brigid Mander, another returning Weekend contributor, has assembled a varied collection of options for whether you want a contemporary dude ranch, a week with the Classics or a chance to build a space rocket.

Listening: Where the Wild Things Happen 

NPR’s Rachel Martin has enjoyed a wonderfully varied career at the public broadcaster: founding host of the organization’s flagship “Up First” podcast, national security reporter and religion correspondent, among many roles. Martin has another new gig as the host of “Wild Card,” an interview pod that bills itself as an “existential gameshow,” and it makes excellent use of Martin's many interests—particularly her curiosity in spirituality and life’s deeper meanings, which propelled her religion reporting. 

 “Wild Card” asks the talented and the famous to draw from a stack of, yes, cards with a probing question for them to answer printed on each. The game progresses through three sections of questions: Memories, Insights and Beliefs. That’s it. The guests aren’t there to talk up a project, and Martin has no interest in sitting around for that sort of thing. She doesn’t want her guests to do what many celebrities do in interviews, where they just “put a cassette tape into their brain,” she said. “And they’re like, ‘Oh, this question: I’m just going to deploy this cassette tape answer that I’ve said a million times.’” (Some recent guests: actor Chris Pine, comedian Bowen Yang and poet laureate Ada Limón.)

By relying on the cards to generate serendipity, her “Wild Card” interviews become “these beautiful, ephemeral things,” she said. “I’ve learned to surrender to that.” 

Reading: Some Grand Misadventures

The next time a friend coughs up a terrible idea that costs you significant time and aggravation, take solace in the fact that the situation can’t possibly be as bad as what happened to Kevin Fedarko when he listened to his pal Pete McBride in 2015.

Fedarko and McBride, a pair of journalists, were at that moment rather bored after long careers contributing to publications like National Geographic. They were looking for a grand adventure. McBride’s suggestion: Why not hike the entirety of the Grand Canyon? A 750-mile, year-long journey of discoveries and misadventures followed, which Fedarko has compiled with considerable skill into his new book, “A Walk in the Park.” (Fun title. That’s also how McBride originally pitched the expedition to Grand Canyon National Park to Fedarko.)

As Fedarko makes clear, the canyon is a magnificent, wondrous place but not one to trifle with. More than 800 people have died there in the last 150 years; it is home to an terrifying array of fauna, including 47 types of reptiles, 22 species of bat and more than 100 separate forms of stink beetle. In October, a cool day in the bottom of the Grand Canyon can top out around 105 degrees, and throughout the duo’s time in the canyon, the cruel heat punished them often. At one point, McBride and Fedarko, dehydrated and nearly delirious, mistook a series of excruciating muscle cramps convulsing beneath McBride’s skin for something else: They initially feared a desert wood rat had somehow managed to get inside McBride. “It probably stands as a testament to just how poorly I was dealing with the whole situation,” Fedarko writes, “that for several long seconds I found myself wondering exactly how an actual rat—a live rodent—had burrowed beneath Pete’s skin.”

Watching: The Logan Roy of Carnivals

What’s HBO’s “Ren Faire,” a documentary series on a Texas Renaissance festival, really about?” Well, to paraphrase Shakespeare: Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown—or covets it.

In “Ren Faire,” the crown belongs to elderly George Coulam, who owns the largest Renaissance festival in the States and actually prefers to be called King George. (Meanwhile, he has a separate name for his penis: Leonard.) As the three-episode show starts, George is considering who might succeed him: Louie, the schemer, or Jeff, the lickspittle? They vie for his attention and affection. Louie offers to buy the festival and make George even wealthier—George likes to date as a sugar daddy—while Jeff offers George unconditional devotion.

Director Lance Oppenheim, 28, directs a relentless gaze at the festival’s oddball characters—both the ones in costume and the ones running the fair in real life. With cinematic elan, Oppenheim instills a real sense of crazy carnival dread that, honestly, made me think of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”

Final Thought

😬 … or should we say, “Final Thot?”