Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Meet Sequoia Capital’s Musk whisperer 

• Our favorite new power-dining spots 

• Plus: A funny-as-hell boss from hell; the mojo-less media; and a galactic bug hunt.

As a small, dumb boy at heart, I saw the flying paint and smashed smithereens in Apple’s new iPad ad and honestly thought nothing more profound than: Neat!

Obviously I was in the minority. Nearly everyone else hated it and viewed the 68-second advertisement as a dual metaphor for technology’s destructive effects on creative industries and for how $2.8 trillion Apple itself operates. (My colleague Martin Peers likened the visuals to images of book burning.) The criticism produced a swift reaction from Cupertino: Two days after releasing “Crush!” online, Apple issued an apology and canceled plans to use it in further marketing efforts. 

As it turns out, I’m not quite the only person who liked “Crush!” Other ad executives loved it, including Rob Siltanen, who co-created Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign for ad agency Chiat\Day. 

“Apple used to be David. It is now Goliath. But how you remain a giant is you continue to act like David. You continue to do work that is engaging, provocative and entertaining. You don’t do boring, Goliath-like communication. That’s how Goliath gets slayed,” he said. “It’s beautifully done and very smart. It makes me want a new iPad. In my opinion, they crushed it.”

I think this partly explains how “Crush!” got made in the first place and, ultimately, one of its major flaws. It’s an adman’s ad. And it ran into the same trouble that often befalls a director’s cut and those newspaper and magazine stories clearly authored by journalists writing for other journalists: A broader consumer audience may have a different opinion than industry peers.

I am surprised to see Apple capitulate so quickly and publicly, and the decision to scrap “Crush!” is a dramatic, manifold marker of the times. Clearly, Apple feels it can’t take any chance of offending customers at a moment when it is already struggling to rekindle interest in its aging products and has no surefire new blockbuster on the horizon. At the same time, the “Crush!” commotion spotlights the enormous fear around technology’s potential to warp creative development, partly the result of new generative artificial intelligence tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT. (Notice I mentioned two non-Apple products there? That goes back to the matter I was just talking about: Apple is short on fresh hits.)

I do wonder what might’ve happened if Apple had chosen to tune out the feedback—whether the reaction to “Crush!” might’ve mellowed over time. 

If you read that and think malfunctioning AirPods have fried my brain, consider what Craig Tanimoto, another “Think Different” co-creator, told me. By Tanimoto’s recollection, “Think Different” was no beloved instant classic. He remembers criticism over several perceived blunders: The ad didn’t show a product. The slogan, which he wrote, was grammatically incorrect. 

When Tanimoto finally met Steve Jobs at the “Think Different” launch party, the Apple CEO actually teased him about the situation: “I’ve been defending your line for days.”

Quickly, though, sentiment and critical assessment of “Think Different” shifted. “Then everyone was talking about it as the best thing since sliced bread,” Tanimoto said. Partly that’s because the campaign ushered in a wave of hit Apple products. I almost wish we’d get a chance to see whether this new ultrathin iPad was cool enough to cast “Crush!” in a different light. Then again, perhaps Apple’s move to hastily discard the ad tells us it already knows the new iPad couldn’t possibly manage such a feat.

 Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is an absolute lemon. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

The Musk Whisperer

When Elon Musk needed help getting approval for his private jet’s arrival in Israel in November, who did he call? Shaun Maguire, a rising star at Sequoia Capital, who was already in the country staying at a family member’s house. Maguire leapt into action, only narrowly securing the go-ahead for Musk a few minutes before the plane needed to land. Musk then spent the week touring Israel and meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

That anecdote within our Margaux MacColl’s Big Read profile of Maguire neatly illustrates two of Maguire’s chief preoccupations: Musk and Israel. His relationship with the former has helped make him a crucial part of Sequoia, while his ardent support for the latter has made him a lightning rod within Silicon Valley—earning him the deep enmity of Arabs and pro-Palestinian voices within tech who think Maguire is enflaming dangerous, anti-Muslim sentiment in the industry.

The Top 5

The Best New Power-Dining Spots Specialize in Fishy Bliss

The French Laundry? How passé. The Four Seasons? So last season. No, the finest new power-dining spots are the high-end omakase bars that have proliferated across San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles over the last few years. And I trust the man who picked these places for us to know top-notch nigiri when he tastes it: Weekend newcomer Ryan Sutton is a James Beard Award–winning food critic and writer, who previously worked at Eater and Bloomberg Pursuits and continues to author a top-shelf Substack about what and where we should eat.  

“It’s been relatively easy to find a fancy sushi meal for quite some time now in Los Angeles, New York or San Francisco,” Ryan said. “But what’s changed in the past five or six years is the sheer number of ultrahigh-end omakase spots—places where you can easily spend $800 or more for two.” Of the many great dishes Ryan describes in the piece, he admits he can’t stop thinking about one in particular: the fermented sea urchin at Noz 17 in Manhattan. “Uni by itself packs a strong flavor, but this version is doubly powerful,” he said. “It’s not for everyone, and that’s the thing. High-end sushi isn’t necessarily about ‘good’ versus ‘better’ versus ‘best.’ It’s about finding what’s right for you.”

Playing: Extraterrestrial Extermination

Helldivers 2 offers a sci-fi pastiche so unexpected and demented, it has rocketed the game to a surprise standing as one of the year’s best titles. In the third-person shooter, you play as a ground soldier fighting on behalf of Super Earth’s “managed democracy,” hopscotching across a galaxy infested by villainous space bugs; zap ’em, and they explode in a pleasing, cartoonish cloud of goo and guts. It’s all manic action, with the game giving you the ability to call in orbital airstrikes, fire from a machine-gun turret and even mow down an annoying squad mate should you choose. It gives a lovingly knowing nod to “Starship Troopers,” the jokey Casper Van Dien flick from the ’90s, and in several shootouts, I had to resist yelling aloud: “Everyone fights, no one quits!”—A.B. 

Reading: How the Media Lost Its Mojo

Media critic Jack Shafer’s thought piece on the state of journalism in Politico this week is a much-needed insight into the ills of modern-day journalism (or at least one of the ills). His focus is on what he calls a loss of “swagger” among reporters—a concept that might turn off average people and even journalists!—but Shafer is getting at something more fundamental and important. The rise of wokeness among younger journalists, along with a greater willingness among public figures to use the legal system to challenge news outlets, has turned the news media into a shadow of its former self. 

It’s not just, as Shafer says, that outlets shy away from tough stories in an effort not to get sued. It used to be that writing clearly to convey what was going on to the reader was of paramount importance, which means calling a spade a spade. Nowadays, many reporters appear to believe not upsetting certain groups is their main job. As a result, Shafer says, articles are also written with a “guarded, couched and equivocating copy” and “editors recoil from publishing anything that might cause anyone offense.” 

What Shafer doesn’t directly touch on is the reality that much of the news media is marketing. The need for a constant feed of articles and traffic means many news outlets write up press releases masquerading as exclusives or news “developments” that actually mean nothing (such as covering every utterance of Elon Musk). The idea of diving deep on a subject to show what is really going on is out of favor, partly because so few people have the attention span required. But if news outlets don’t keep telling people actual news, they’ll become ever more irrelevant.—Martin Peers 

Watching: A Pair of Funny Frenemies

I’ve had quite a few bosses whom I could describe as creative geniuses as well as unrepentant jerks. Many of us have. I think that’s part of the universal appeal behind “Hacks,” the Max comedy freshly returned for its third season. Jean Smart stars as Deborah Vance, an aging, acid-tongued comedian, while Hannah Einbinder plays Ava, Debra’s dorkish former writer and former bestie. The two separated as last season ended, and they miss each other terribly, though each has too much pride to admit it. I’m sure they’ll reunite, while hilarity continues to ensue until they do. 

“Hacks” is meme bait in the best possible way. In one scene, Debra seeks an eighth opinion on a possible awards-gala outfit and calls down to a hotel’s front desk. “Would you please send up a bellhop?” she asks. “A gay one.” The show is quite funny. In another moment, Debra snatches a votive candle bearing her likeness from a fan and demands to know where he got the unlicensed merch. Etsy, he says. She stares back, bewildered: “Who the fuck is Betsy?”—A.B.

Final Thought

Jeff and company, with real news this weird, you’ve got your work cut out for you.