Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Nvidia’s quiet rising stars? The CEO’s kids 

• The Top 5: The best at-home longevity tests

• Plus, our Recommendations: “StanLand,” “King of Kings” and “Pee-wee as Himself”

In Piedmont, Calif., a group of parents have been encouraging their friends to do the unthinkable: Take their kids to the park on Friday afternoon—and leave them there.

“There’s this mindset that hypervigilance equals good parenting, said Melissa Partovi, a co-founder of Piedmont Unplugged. “But that’s not true.” Her group advocates that parents restrict their kid’s use of technology and allow them totally unsupervised playtime, like the kind the organization has arranged on Fridays from 3 to 5 p.m. at Piedmont and Crocker parks.

Piedmont Unplugged has existed for about a year, and so far, “nothing bad has happened,” said Liza Nebel, a co-founder of Piedmont Unplugged and founder of BlueOcean AI, a San Francisco startup. The group largely came together through their mutual fascination with Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” a bestseller that argues for limits on young kids’ use of technology. (“Within a month of it being published, every person I know knew about the book,” Nebel said. “It’s been this incredible wildfire.”) 

The group caught my attention when it received a small commendation in an essay in The Atlantic co-authored by Haidt that cites new eyebrow-raising research by Harris Poll researchers: When the pollsters asked children to choose in-person play or online play, they overwhelmingly chose in-person. Only a third wanted to visit the web. Meaning, kids don’t even particularly want the technology that we increasingly suspect is toxic to them.

Unplugged Piedmont generally has about a dozen kids a week at its event, Free Play Friday, which generally attracts about a dozen participants of elementary school age. And, no, it’s not more complicated than it sounds: The parents drop their kids at the park. They leave. The kids play. The parents come back and pick them up. The experience aims to not only add happiness to the children’s lives but also bolster their sense of independence. 

I asked Partovi whether less affluent communities could replicate a model like the one she and her husband, tech investor Ali Partovi, have promoted with Piedmont Unplugged. She insisted they could. “It doesn’t have to be in this idyllic suburb,” Partovi said. I’m not sure I totally share her confidence, but I do very much hope she’s correct.

Sam and the Silicon

On Thursday, the day Chat-GPT 5 launched, Sam Altman made a vivid observation. “Melting silicon has a very distinct smell,” he tweeted. 

Where in the heavens was he when posted the message? I pondered the answer for a bit. The molten heart of the Matrix, I decided. 

And I do mean molten. It takes an enormous amount of energy to melt silicon: close to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Stanford University professor Srabanti Chowdhury, an expert on thermodynamics and semiconductors. So what exactly does it smell like? “It doesn’t have much of a signature smell, but whatever’s inside it can make things interesting,” Chowdhury said. “Phosphorus impurities can give it an acidic edge, and oxygen can make it smell a bit like burning sand.”

Hurry! Someone go get Altman a bottle of SPF 5,000. 

Putin the Techie 

After years of sanctions have cut off Russia from most American goods, the Russians sure do seem desperate to get their hands on anything American. Even our bad ideas.

Last month, Vladimir Putin announced that VK, a Kremlin-controlled social media company, would create a government social media app. Well, it did, and now Putin has unveiled a name for it: Max. Yes, Max. Just what approximately 57 different apps over here call themselves, which is a dumb amount of duplication. Nothing can promise the maximum of anything in a market full of other Maxes. 

It’s disappointing to see Putin display such obvious unoriginality. Oh! I have an alternative suggestion: Putin Plus.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

Nvidia’s Quiet Rising Stars? CEO Jensen Huang’s Kids 

Corporate dynasties have been a defining part of capitalism since its invention. But they haven’t been much of a hallmark of Silicon Valley, largely because the tech industry hasn’t gotten old enough to see moguls grooming their children to succeed them. 

That makes what’s happening now at Nvidia fascinating, as our Anissa Gardizy explains in Weekend’s latest Big Read. After spending their early careers away from the company, the children of billionaire CEO Jensen Huang are now steadily climbing the ranks at Nvidia—particularly daughter Madison, 34. She has become part of a small group of executives nicknamed “The Band” who travel with Jensen to his much-watched public appearances. Madison has arrived at Nvidia along with her brother, Spencer, 35, at a high-stakes moment for the publicly traded business, which Jensen has turned into the world’s most valuable company through its stranglehold on the chips that power artificial intelligence.

The Top Five

The Best At-Home Longevity Tests

After a long workweek, I sometimes feel like I’m 36 going on 76. I wonder what the tests in this helpful guide would tell me: As frequent Weekend contributor Todd Plummer points out, it has never been easier to accumulate data about our bodies’ aging—thanks to the longevity gospel spread by many in Silicon Valley, including Bryan Johnson, whose startup, Blueprint, makes one of the tests Todd highlights. 

Abram Brown is the editor of The Information’s Weekend magazine section. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “StanLand” (The Sonar Network)

I keep waiting for actress Rhea Seehorn, who co-starred alongside Bob Odenkirk on “Better Call Saul,” the “Breaking Bad” spinoff, to achieve mega, mainstream popularity. I suppose that won’t happen from “StanLand,” an amusing, if twee, fictional satire of stan culture and fantasy lands—co-produced by Odenkirk’s production company—but it offers another display of her underappreciated comedic abilities. In the five-episode series, Seehorn voices Melanie Hughes, an investigative podcaster who disappears through a magic wardrobe (sound familiar?) into a strange realm called Zyngia. She’s not the only visitor there: Simple-minded Stan Little (comedian Bobby Moynihan) has already stumbled through the wardrobe, inadvertently introducing the place’s gullible fairies and nymphs to destructive ideas from our world, like vapes and fast food. Soon they’re in a race to save the place before it turns itself into one giant Domino’s. 

Reading: “King of Kings” by Scott Anderson

The fate of Iranian ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—known variously to his subjects as the light of the Aryans, the shadow of God on earth and the king of kings—was nearly inconceivable to his closest ally: the United States. Pahlavi seemed immovable, enjoying total control over a country that flourished to some degree under his rule. Per capita income rose 20-fold as the average lifespan nearly doubled. Women enjoyed greater freedom and opportunities. The literacy rate quintupled. 

But the shah fell, much to America’s surprise: Simply, the U.S. “couldn’t conceive of life without him—and so it did not,” writes journalist Scott Anderson in this vivid account of the shah’s rise, reign and exile. The 1979 putsch against Pahlavi upended global politics, reordering a high-stakes chessboard that still demands much of America’s attention. Anderson’s detailed examination of what we missed serves as an unsettling warning of how easy it is to misread what’s happening in the Middle East.

Watching: “Pee-wee as Himself” (HBO Max)

In another era, I suspect Paul Reubens, the comedian known better as his bow-tied, shrill-voiced alter ego, Pee-wee Herman, might’ve outrun the consequences of the very public humiliation that ended his career: a 1991 arrest in a pornographic theater. Afterward, CBS took his Saturday morning kids’ show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” off the air, and Reubens vanished from sight, allowing the traditional media—cable news, newspapers, late-night hosts—to control the narrative around the scandal.

The media no longer enjoys the same stranglehold over information, and I can picture how Reubens today might easily navigate such a crisis with little more than a Notes app apology. The thought played constantly in the background of my mind throughout “Pee-wee as Himself,” a two-episode documentary about Reubens that’s up for an Emmy this fall. For the film, Reubens, who died in 2023, spent more than 40 hours with director Matt Wolf, sharing a trove of photos and videos. The result is an intimate portrait of stardom, one immensely compelling even for people like me who have no special nostalgia for Pee-wee. 

Reubens spent his life hiding behind his character, mostly appearing in public as Pee-wee Herman, not Paul Reubens. He clearly never lost his keen interest in media manipulation, and he spends much of the documentary jostling with Wolf, dodging some efforts to push him toward candid reflection. In a final act of puckish deception, Reubens withheld a major secret from Wolf: a yearslong cancer battle, which made Reubens’ death a total surprise for the director. “Pee-wee as Himself” was, in fact, Reubens’ last chance to reclaim his public image, an opportunity he obviously relished.—Abram Brown