Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Teens confront a new age of facial tech 

• Media: The young, male digital stars using YouTube to take over podcasts

• The Top 5: Best AI books of 2024

• Plus: Free Adnan! Free Keiko!; revisiting Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk tome; and a TV triumph about the Troubles.

A few times a year, the big auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s hold megasales, and these events offer a gauge on the art market: what’s hot and what’s not. In general, the market has been in a slump, but Christie’s on Tuesday managed to move a Magritte for $121.2 million, a reflection of the desire for that particular artist and for surrealism more broadly.  

A day later, something even more interesting happened at Sotheby’s. Justin Sun, founder of Tron Foundation, a blockchain company, spent $6.2 million on a ripening banana duct-taped to a wall, a piece by prankster artist Maurizio Cattelan. 

I found it bemusing to see Sun reenter my radar. Aside from a brush with the SEC, he’d fallen out of view during the crypto winter, which, obviously is experiencing a rapid spring thaw, with bitcoin, the benchmark asset, once again at an all-time high. When I was following Sun more closely, it was the heyday of the last crypto boom, and he was one of the major enthusiasts of the explosion in digital art and NFTs. 

Sun positioning himself in the spotlight of a splash sale of physical art should tell us about both digital art and crypto more generally. For now, the fringiest parts of crypto aren’t zooming off quite like they did before—a noticeable difference between today and a few years ago. 

If 2024 more closely resembled 2021 or 2022 in crypto, the auction houses would’ve spent the past week touting digital wares. Yet not a single attention-grabbing Crypto Punk, Bored Ape or Pudgy Penguin traded hands. That’s not a tragedy. It suggests the entire crypto industry might be at a more mature stage of existence (though I won’t go as far as to suggest this will bring all that much more stability in asset prices).

In 2021, Sun very narrowly missed getting his hands on “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” the record-shattering NFT project by the artist known as Beeple, which sold for nearly $70 million. The price made Beeple one of the best-selling living artists alongside names such as Jeff Koons and David Hockney. (For more perspective, it’s more than anyone has ever spent on a Dali.) 

It’s hard to picture any part of that scenario happening again these days. 

“It’s an odd time in the market because I think NFTs, broadly, are still trying to find their audience—there is an audience, but it’s obviously much smaller than a lot of people assumed,” Beeple said when I called him this week to catch up. He too has slipped out of my view in the last couple years. “A lot of people were just in it for the speculation of it. Like, ‘OK, can I make some money off this? No? Then actually I don’t give a shit about this.’” 

Beeple, a pleasant Midwesterner named Mike Winkelmann, is still at work on his core project: daily illustrations of subversive, often perverse art that lampoons the absurdities of the powerful and the rich. His major new effort has been to open a 50,000-square-foot Charleston, S.C., studio to display his digital art, including an enormous print of “Everydays.” It also showcases his growing interest in sculptures: a series of astronaut figures encased in glass boxes laden with LED lights.

The sculptures “are a mix between the physical and digital realm, and I think those lines are again going to continue to get more and more blurry,” Beeple said. Even if they don’t blur exactly as before.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

A Complex New Age of Face Tech

A rare bipartisan push for greater rules around children and teens on social media has got plenty of Silicon Valley companies in a tizzy. And they have something of a conundrum on their hands: They’re trying to limit their sites and content to people of a certain age, but the anonymized nature of the internet makes that a challenge. 

The check-a-box approach—where anyone can click a tab and pinky-promise they meet the age rules—doesn’t work. And no one sees any mass-scale practicality in the strategy Louisiana forces companies to adopt: People there need to upload driver’s licenses to visit sites like Pornhub. 

For this week’s Big Read, our Paris Martineau has an intriguing profile of a company operating in a more comfortable middle ground: Yoti, which makes facial-recognition software that’s pretty accurate, hasn’t been plagued by widespread privacy concerns and is used by companies like Instagram. 

“When we first launched, lots of people said, ‘I don’t believe it, like, how could this work?’” Yoti co-founder Robin Tombs recalled in a conversation with Paris. Turns out it does.

Media

Rise of the Bro-Casters

One of my favorite online pastimes of the last several years has been to watch Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, dive down the internet’s many, many rabbit holes and emerge with a great story. 

Luckily for Weekend, she has just such a piece for us this time, a clear-headed explanation of how the economics function around the “manosphere,” the set of male digital celebrities whose shows proved to be vital campaign stops for Donald Trump before the presidential election. 

This isn’t so much a politics story as much as it is an astute examination of the podcast industry and how YouTube has eaten away at the traditional players, like Spotify. As these new stars have fashioned themselves after Joe Rogan and comedian Theo Von, they’ve thrown themselves into creating video just as much as audio content. And they’ve interwoven their efforts together in a lucrative fashion. 

In Trump’s America, their audience seems set to widen further. “This younger generation of men—they want to learn, they want to be educated, and they don’t trust the [traditional] media,” John Shahidi, a manager of YouTube stars, told Taylor. “So they are getting their news and information from podcasts. They’re learning from the Rogans, the Theo Vons.”

The Top Five

Best AI Books of 2024: How to Use and Understand the Tech

No one can stop talking about AI these days. And everyone seems to be publishing a book in the subject. Our Rocket Drew surveyed dozens of industry insiders for their reading-list picks and spent his own time considering the choices out there. 

There are some options offering practical ways to approach AI tools, like Ethan Mollick’s “Co-Intelligence,” and just enough of the ones that eagerly look into the future and imagine what will come, like Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Nearer.”

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, must be the only person who can’t get a call with Elon Musk. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: Wail of the Whales 

Goodness, the folks at Serial Productions love a wrongful-imprisonment story, don’t they? The company, of course, draws its name from its landmark podcast, “Serial,” which earned fame from its debut season in 2014 about Adnan Syed, a Maryland man convicted of rape and later freed in a complex saga. Serial Productions, which is now part of The New York Times Co., focuses its latest effort, “The Good Whale,” on a different inmate: Keiko, the Orca whale who starred in 1997’s “Free Willy,” a film shot at the animal’s rundown Mexico City aquarium. 

Keiko had spent nearly his entire life there, and after the movie turned into a megahit, the film’s creators decided they needed to, well, free Keiko. The pod recounts their effort and reiterates a cry from that era, one increasingly hushed in recent years: It’s not just Keiko that needs saving. The whole planet does.—A.B.

Reading: When Walter Met Elon

Earlier this week, Donald Trump joined Elon Musk at the southern tip of Texas to watch the sixth launch of Starship, the gargantuan new rocket from Musk’s SpaceX. The mission was a success, though not quite as successful as the rocket’s last launch, when SpaceX was able to gracefully grab the rocket’s first stage with mechanical arms as it glided back to earth (the company scrubbed the booster catch this time). When Trump arrived for the event, Musk greeted him with a bro-hug, the latest reminder of how Musk, through his enormous financial contributions to Trump’s campaign, has taken his power and influence to another level.

I happened to be belatedly finishing Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk around this same time and realized this wasn’t Trump’s first time dropping in on a SpaceX launch. During his first presidential term, in 2020, Trump and vice president Mike Pence watched a Falcon 9 rocket with two NASA astronauts blast off from Cape Canaveral. How different that scene was from this week’s.

At the 2020 launch, Isaacson describes Musk being somewhat baffled by Trump’s cryptic comments and attempting to keep his distance from the president: “When Trump walked over to Musk and his team and asked, ‘Are you guys ready to do four more years?’ Musk zoned out and turned away.” Although Isaacson’s book came out over a year ago, it’s worth revisiting as Trump prepares to take power again, if only as a vivid reminder of how different the relationship between the two men once was.—Nick Wingfield

Watching: The Troubles on TV

I’ll say a little about “Say Nothing,” the FX series set in the Troubles. It’s quite good. It’s a spy story, a family drama, a lady-led caper. It’s television adaptation at its finest form—buttressed by very fine source material, “Say Nothing,” a nonfiction thriller by Patrick Radden Keefe, a New Yorker staffer. Need I say more?—A.B.

Final Thought

*Margaret Thatcher voice* Ohhh, your majesties.