Welcome to your Weekend!

Let me introduce—well, reintroduce—myself. I’m Abram Brown, the new editor of Weekend, the magazine you’ve got in front of you. This issue marks my return to The Information after earlier tenures as a Weekend staff editor and senior reporter. In coming weekends, you’ll notice some changes to Weekend, but its raison d’être remains the same: to present you with the foremost chronicle of tech, media and finance—and all the characters, cultural forces and companies within those worlds. 

Enough about me, though, because I want to talk about a man who seems to have no interest in returning to his former company: Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. Our Julia Black trekked out to Utah to see the mogul at the mountain he purchased last year and plans to transform into a skier’s paradise. “They say there are two acres of terrain for every skier,” Julia said. In prep for her trip, she consulted with Hastings about what to pack: “Big boots,” he suggested at one point.

“I’m a warm-weather gal,” Julia admitted, “so I wasn’t all that eager to fly straight from my Caribbean vacation to 12-degree Utah. But the truth is, I was quite taken with the jaw-dropping scale of the place.”  

Reshaping Powder Mountain is only half of Hastings’ post-Netflix plans. He also intends to spend down his billion-dollar fortune on world-altering philanthropy, hoping to become a “baby Bill Gates,” as he himself terms it. In the past, Hastings has been best known as a major Democratic party donor, but his attention now is more on broad education reform in America and economic development in Africa. When Julia spoke to Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s current co-CEO, he told her that “Reed often says he wants the stock price to go higher, so that he has more money to give away.”—Abram Brown

The Big Read

The Power and the Powder: Inside Reed Hasting's Life After Netflix

Julia Black gives us an exclusive look at what Reed Hastings has planned for his next acts. He calls it “retirement,” but it involves taming a seemingly untameable mountain and ambitious, Bill Gates-style philanthropy.

“He seems genuinely committed to the idea that high-performance cultures at do-gooder organizations can create the best outcomes for the people they set out to serve,” Julia said once she thawed out from her trip to Powder Mountain.

The Top 5

The Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2024

How does Bill Gates wield his influence? Will artificial intelligence kill us all? Why doesn’t the creator economy function better? The answers to all these questions and more fill the pages of the books we’re most excited about this year. As much as they have a common theme, several express a sense of “ennui with technology,” as Kyle Chayka, the author of one pick, understatedly put it. 

Following: Percy Jackson’s Papa

As a fan of the Percy Jackson books, I’m used to disappointment when it comes to how they’re presented onscreen. When Hollywood made a movie out of the story of Percy, the teenage son of Greek god Poseidon, in 2010, it was such a rotten olive that series author Rick Riordan succinctly deemed the flick “terrible.” I agreed with him then, and we both seem to agree now that Disney+’s new adaptation of Percy’s adventures is excellent. (It concludes its debut season this weekend.) Riordan has sworn off social media in the past, but he’s been on Threads—Threads!—offering an inside view of how modern Hollywood works and his own creative process, talking about his modern Medusa (she’s been sexually abused in the past) and Chiron the centaur’s leg brace (a nod to his fabled arrow injury). As we finally get all the Percy Jackson content we’ve long deserved, Riordan is proving that a good Threads follow isn’t a myth.—Margaux Maccoll  

Reading: Trusts From the Crypt

If there’s something the ultrarich are more eager to preserve than their wealth, it’s themselves. Now some are pursuing the two simultaneously with “cryonic suspension trusts,” as Mother Jones reported. It’s all pretty sci-fi–ish: Moguls plan to have their bodies frozen after death, hoping for a later resurrection. They hope the trusts they set up—essentially naming themselves as their own heirs—will steer their fortunes to their future selves. Since no one has yet staged such a revival, a number of questions abound, including whether a reanimated mogul would face hefty IRS penalties connected to generation-skipping inheritances. The risk is worth it, said Mark House, the Scottsdale, Ariz., lawyer pioneering these financial instruments: “You don’t wanna come back poor.”—A.B. 

Playing: Pokémon’s Parallel World

What’s over there in the tall grass? It’s round and furry—and oh, my gosh, it’s coming toward me! Ah, phewww, it’s only a Lamball. The lamb-like, ball-shaped critter is one of the 100 or so Pals that fill the world within the new viral game Palworld—quite like Pokémon’s titular creatures (down to their unsubtle names). You can breed ‘em, eat ‘em, weaponize ‘em; it’s all a bit more adult than Pokémon. Right now, Japanese developer Pocket Pair only offers a work-in-progress version of Palworld on Steam and Xbox ($29.99), but it has become a bona fide hit since its release last week, selling 5 million copies in three days. Controversy has followed closely behind, which makes playing the survival game all the more interesting. Pocket Pair faces stiff criticism over the Pals’ resemblance to Pokémon characters and speculation that it used generative artificial intelligence to create the game.—A.B.

Makes You Think

Yeah, but aren't we all a work in progress?