Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Inside tech’s embrace of devout Christianity

• Media and Entertainment: Silicon Valley’s favorite videogames of 2024

• The Top 5: The best disaster kit supplies 

• Plus: A play that morphs; America’s only universal creed; and a saga’s brilliant end.

Santa won’t show up for weeks yet, but thanks to Sam Altman, some of us already have a fancy new toy to enjoy: Sora, OpenAI’s new generative-video tool. 

Golly, it does look neat, doesn’t it? If YouTuber Marques Brownlee hadn’t explicitly said he had used Sora to make this video clip, I doubt I ever would’ve suspected it wasn’t the genuine thing.

Despite the gee-whiz factor, I suspect Sora will likely bring a series of fresh headaches to OpenAI: specifically, lawsuits over the training data used to develop the program.

So far the startup has offered scant details on what exactly it gave to Sora. A telling moment on this subject came last spring when Mira Murati, then still OpenAI’s chief technology officer, tried to duck a Wall Street Journal reporter’s question about the data used to develop Sora. 

All Murati would say is that Sora had received “publicly accessible and licensed content.” Yet as the Journal reporter rightly pointed out at the time, there are millions of videos publicly accessible on, say, YouTube, and OpenAI may still have violated copyright law if it fed them to Sora willy-nilly.

I suspect the Sora-related lawsuits thrown at OpenAI will make the ones filed over ChatGPT by traditional publishers like The New York Times Co. seem like small potatoes—in terms of their sheer number and the sought-after damages. 

That comment is as much about the media as it is about AI. Video is just so much more lucrative than print—though it pains me to say it so plainly here in words—and those magnified economics could inflame tensions between OpenAI and copyright holders far more than we’ve already seen. Video simply puts more money at stake. 

What could a flood of Sora litigation mean for existing ChatGPT lawsuits? Most likely, I suspect it could divert OpenAI’s attention and priorities well away from the ChatGPT-linked cases. If that happens, it could drag out those cases and leave publishers in a tough position: give up or take even less than they thought they might get.

Ports in a Storm

In tech, the mood around Donald Trump has been exuberant almost since the moment polls closed on election night. The Nasdaq is up 8% since then, and Trump has, of course, picked plenty of techies for roles in his administration. 

So it was intriguing to see a rare moment of disconnect between Trump and Silicon Valley on Thursday when Trump said he didn’t support further automation at the nation’s ports, buoying a dockworkers’ union that is preparing to strike. Such unions were once bastions of Democratic support—but not any longer. By supporting the union, Trump clearly hopes to further cement his support in blue-collar America. 

The union may like Trump's position, but his decision to slow innovation resonated differently among the tech elite and even parts of the GOP’s power base. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, described Trump’s policy as “short-sighted economic illiteracy.” Around the same time, Joe Lonsdale, a major Trump donor and Elon Musk friend who has been advising the transition team, came out very publicly against Trump on this issue. 

“The solution is to be generous with this generation of longshoremen, but to allow ports to operate more efficiently, benefiting US consumers and reducing inflation,” wrote Lonsdale, who has always been more anti-woke than he is pro-Trump. 

Something like port automation isn’t likely to be what creates a fatal rift between Trump and Silicon Valley. But it should be the first real reminder to Silicon Valley that it won’t get absolutely everything it wants from Trump.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

The Antichrist and the New Apostles

“People think church is just for the poor, the marginalized, the visibly in need,” said Michelle Stephens, chief revenue officer of Felt, a healthcare-software startup. “But the highly rich and famous are just as much in need.”

As our Julia Black details in this week’s Big Read, many of the technorati increasingly agree with Stephens. She and her husband, Trae, a Founders Fund partner and Anduril co-founder, have become two of the chief evangelists in the movement to embrace Christianity, once a subject considered at best taboo among the tech elite. 

Yet the shift encompasses much more than the Stephenses and their congregation in downtown San Francisco, Epic Church. It extends across the country and across Christian denominations—beckoning a set of faithful drawn partly by this Christianity’s techno-optimism and firm belief that a slowdown in technological innovation could bring about the apocalypse.

Media and Entertainment

Silicon Valley’s Favorite Videogames of 2024

Box Chief Technology Officer Ben Kus has been a very happy guy ever since he got his hands on Factorio: Space Age, the latest expansion to the series of interstellar construction simulation games. 

“If you told me that there is a game that is all about efficient resources and coordination of development practices, I would probably say that sounds like my job and not a game,” Kus said. “But the new Factorio update is surprisingly addicting, and I have enjoyed it a lot.”

Factorio: Space Age is one of more than a dozen titles in this guide assembled by returning Weekend contributor David Ewalt, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Gizmodo editor in chief who covered the videogame industry while at Forbes magazine. David also highlights the latest title from Jedi land, a surprise Chinese blockbuster and a descent into the underworld. 

Oh, and Khosla Ventures partner Jun Jeon describes Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred as “a standout…very recommended for any RPG fans.”

The Top Five

How Techies Stock Their Disaster Kits 

We all got a real scare last week when the tsunami warning hit everyone’s phones. Then many of us had another frightening realization: Our disaster supplies are woefully lacking. So I sent out frequent Weekend contributor Todd Plummer to figure out what everyone should keep in their emergency stockpiles—a list that just begins with Starlinks, top-of-the-line generators, water-filtering tech, thousand-dollar satellite phones and goes on from there.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, hopes to earn a spot in the next Murdoch irrevocable trust. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Attending: Speedrun Dramas

For nearly a decade, I’ve routinely attended performances of “The Infinite Wrench,” a delightfully chaotic theatrical gauntlet in which cast members attempt to perform 30 original plays in 60 minutes. There’s an “Infinite Wrench” troupe in New York and another in San Francisco; they perform nearly every weekend. 

The lineup at an “Infinite Wrench” show is varied and ever changing. Past performances have included a gut-wrenching monologue about a cast member’s struggles caring for a disabled sibling; a bar-themed sequence where two performers took shots of tequila, snorted lines of salt and squirted lime into each other’s eyes; and a dramatic segment where the cast polled the audience to determine which Muppet is the most physically attractive. (The Swedish Chef took home that honor in the 2019 performance I attended.)

At the end of every performance, a dice gets tossed into the audience to determine how many plays will get cut and replaced with new works the following week. After a few weeks, it’s an entirely different show.

This weekend, the group’s New York and San Francisco outposts are putting on special performances highlighting the best plays of 2024. Tickets are $30.—Paris Martineau

Reading: Tales of Too Much

America may seem to have very little binding it together anymore, but I think we still share one universal credo: consume, shop, acquire. And Emily Mester has long recognized how her family would rank among the country’s most ardent followers of this philosophy.

In Mester's debut work, “American Bulk: Essays on Excess," she examines the American consumerist complex with a tone both darkly funny and unblushingly confessional—her shop-happy father and grandmother, for instance, get likened to the greedy souls damned to Dante’s fourth circle of hell. (“My dad is just as obsessed with acquiring stuff as his mother; the only difference is that she is very cheap, and he is very spendy.”)

Mester examines several temples of consumerism with a keener sense for business than I might have expected from a graduate of the University of Iowa’s master’s program in nonfiction writing. Costco, obviously, is one, along with Olive Garden, which leads Mester to a tidy discourse on what constitutes “middlebrow” and how activist investors might find such an idea lucrative, as well as Ulta, the beauty chain that employed her as a sales clerk after she completed undergrad. 

A very funny bit encompasses Mester’s longtime obsession with leaving online reviews. It feeds into an illuminating history of how the reviews industry has flourished to accommodate startups such as Empathiq, a service for physicians that studies reviews left for their practices across the internet and suggests how the doctors can boost their scores. 

Mester’s review mania leads to a breakdown in a Target aisle as she considers body washes while she questions the value of the reviews she can’t stop reading: “Even if the reviews were true, what fate were they delivering me from? In my attempts to reduce the friction between me and certain objects, I’d multiplied the frictions that inevitably remained. If I believed there was a best body wash, I had to fear the worst. If I had a god, I needed a devil.” Eesh!—A.B. 

Watching: Arrivederci, Friends

If you, like me, are headed home this holiday season to a large Italian-American family, there may be no better December binge than the recently released final season of “My Brilliant Friend,” a prestige TV adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels. 

The series chronicles a group of childhood friends as they grow up in post–World War II Italy, and the latest installment arrives at an emotional apex: how the group navigates going from middle aged to aged. As such, the characters have been recast with adults—Alba Rohrwacher as narrator and protagonist Lenù, and a sublime Irene Maiorino as the titular brilliant friend, Lila.

The Neapolitan novels are renowned for their nuanced portrait of a female friendship, set against the backdrop of dynamic postwar Italy. This screen adaptation succeeds in translating these details and in many ways amplifying them: For instance, Lila’s brother-in-law, Alfonso (an arresting Renato De Simone), goes from a secondary character in the novels to a scene-stealer on screen. Also stellar: the characters’ classic (and still relevant!) 1980s fashions. 

Ultimately, I thought this season did a tremendous job of exploring how these characters rebelled against—and submitted to—the stultifying force of their Mafia-controlled rione, or neighborhood. It is a raw, brutal examination of whether you can ever go home again.—Sara Germano

Final Thought

At least it’s not an OOO response?