Welcome, Weekenders!

Quickly, a programming note: The Briefing, the newsletter written by my colleague Martin Peers, is shifting to an altered schedule, and starting tomorrow, it’ll appear Sunday through Thursday. Martin on a Sunday evening—what a treat! Among other topics, he’ll be applying his inimitable powers of explanation to previewing tech’s week ahead.

Now, in this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Inside the Meta-fication of OpenAI

• The Arena: Sports’ gambling habit will be hard to break  

• Plus, our Recommendations—spooky-vibes edition: “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Interview With the Vampire,” “Suspiria,” “Toy Story of Terror!” and “Weapons”

Only infrequently do I get a chance to brag about how a part of my life was unquestionably better than the experiences of the wealthy and powerful. 

But, hey, I won’t lie: On a bed made by one of the innumerable Casper knockoffs, I slept like a baby last Sunday night into Monday—a beautiful, crisp fall night, the kind where you throw open the window and nestle into the sheets, ahhhhh—while plenty of you apparently did not, the consequence of having previously plunked down as much as $5,000 for a Wi-Fi–connected mattress from Eight Sleep. 

I’m talking about the Great Nightmare of 2025, the moment when an Amazon Web Services outage took down much of the internet for a good spell, which meant that Eight Sleep’s smart beds malfunctioned.

The beds have become a status symbol purchase, beloved for their temperature-control features and ability to compile data on sleep habits. But when AWS shit the bed—so to speak—Eight Sleep owners reported that their beds overheated, sounded a wake-up alarm and got stuck in various positions. 

Two days later, the 10-year-old startup, which has raised about $260 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Founders Fund, pushed out a software update to its beds that it says has fixed the problem and will prevent it from happening again. 

The bedroom farce is a cringe-inducing reflection of the present, and I haven’t stopped thinking of what it likely says about the near-distant future. Our world isn’t very likely to stop trying to digitize itself—and the AI boom is only likely to hasten and magnify such transformation—and I suspect we’ll reach a point when a problem like a broken smart bed will seem as common a household ache as a plugged-up bathroom drain does today. Just imagine the home of tomorrow: It’s a place where Laundr.ai, the clothes-folding robot, dies with a shuddering gasp, an expensive shirt still clutched in his flipper-fingered hands, and the couch swallows you whole when the Nvidia data center accidentally collides with the West Elm satellite. 

I’m always convinced such a future is inevitable during conversations like the one I had with venture capitalist Nick Davidov, who just can’t imagine getting rid of his Eight Sleep despite suffering through the misery of a few days ago. “Well, technology fails sometimes,” he said simply. Part of his nonchalantness probably comes from the fact that he has already shrugged off another problematic situation with his Eight Sleep: A couple years ago, the power went out in his Bay Area home just when he had set the bed into a particular shape to rest an injured lower back. He was trapped. “I was stuck in that funny position for quite a while,” Davidov recalled. “I was very sad. I had to call my wife to help me get on my feet.” 

What else happened this week…

• President Donald Trump pardoned CZ, the co-founder of Binance, a move that raised complaints about undue influence at the White House. Around the same time, Trump said Jensen Huang and Marc Benioff had convinced him not to send troops to San Francisco, a bit of influencing that was more warmly received. Look, Trump is gonna Trump—sometimes it pays off in your favor, sometimes it produces a get-out-of-jail-free card for a person formerly convicted of turning a blind eye to terrorist money laundering. 

• The Meta Ray-Ban Display smartglasses seem pretty meh. And let’s face it, so does OpenAI’s new browser. 

• Wired magazine sent out a reporter to listen to a bunch of Cybertruck owners grouse about how they’ve been mistreated by Elon  haters. 

• Rapid improvements in seed genetics and pollenization science have led giant pumpkins to grow ever more giant: A 2,000-pound pumpkin was impressive a decade ago—a world record—and now a pumpkin can top out at nearly 3,000 pounds. Relatedly, I like this thinking from Ben Podgursky, head of engineering at Orchid, a fertility tech startup: “The main reason I want to colonize Mars is the lower gravity will allow us to grow pumpkins to grotesque and unthinkable dimensions,” he wrote on X. “10,000 lb (earth weight) jack-o-lanterns are within reach.” Thanks, Ben! I finally get why we’d want to go to Mars. 

• Reddit set up an elaborate trap to allege that Perplexity was illegally scraping up content from its site. How shocking—not the honest folks at Perplexity! 

• China and Russia have dispatched beautiful women to conduct clandestine operations—uh, “sex warfare,” as the Times of London termed it—and steal U.S. technology secrets. I wonder if they’re baffled when they walk away empty-handed from a Founders Fund party.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

OpenAI Readies Itself for Its Facebook Era

Lately, we’ve been obsessing about the talent Meta Platforms is hoovering up in its effort to reshape itself to more closely resemble star AI firms like OpenAI. 

But as our Kalley Huang, Erin Woo and Stephanie Palazzolo point out in this week’s Big Read, OpenAI is plenty interested in reshaping itself to look more like Meta. It has gone on a hiring binge and accumulated hundreds of ex-Meta staff, and it has turned its attention to pursuing the type of strategies that allowed Meta to become a corporate juggernaut. 

The Arena

Despite NBA Scandal, Sports’ Gambling Habit Will Be Hard to Break

The stink from indictments against a current NBA coach and player this week is bad, but unringing the bell on legal sports betting will be tough for leagues and media partners to do, our Sara Germano writes in The Arena, Weekend’s franchise devoted to the business of sports.

Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Watching: “The Haunting of Hill House” (Netflix)

I first saw “The Haunting of Hill House,” Netflix’s remake of the Shirley Jackson classic, while curled up on my beat-up college apartment couch when the movie came out in 2018. I’ve rewatched it around Halloween every year since, and I especially appreciate how its jump scares and hidden ghosts still get me.

The show follows the Crain family as they move into a run-down mansion with a morbid past, hoping to flip and sell the house. It goes about as well as for the Crains as you can imagine, with their precocious children continually talking quite casually about the “bent-neck lady” they keep seeing around the place. Creepy! If I were those parents, I’d be running out the door.

“Hill House” glides through several timelines, showing how the family’s paranormal experiences from the past continue to affect their present-day lives and relationships. As a result, the series spends a lot of time thinking about family and forgiveness—themes often revisited by series creator Mike Flanagan—and how trauma can impact people in different ways. If you’re looking for a viewing experience this Halloween that will have you screaming and sobbing in equal amounts, I’d suggest a visit to Hill House.—Stephanie Palazzolo

Watching: “Interview With the Vampire” (AMC, Netflix) 

In the original “Interview With the Vampire,” novelist Anne Rice presented the depth of the relationship between her undead protagonists only suggestively, and the Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt film from the don’t ask, don’t tell 1990s chose to do the same.

The latest version from AMC pulls that subtext into the sunshine: Louis and Lestat are lovers, and the pair playing them, Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm from “Game of Thrones”) and Sam Reid (an Aussie newcomer), share a great amount of chemistry. That’s not the only tweak. As portrayed by Anderson, Louis is Black, with his race a further complication in his feelings for the domineering Lestat. (Both are white in Rice’s book.) And rather than take up residence in San Francisco—truly a fate worse than death—Louis roosts in a tomb-like Dubai townhouse, the setting for the titular conversation with journalist Daniel Molloy (a very droll Eric Bogosian).

Often the scares in “Interview With the Vampire” come with a smirk: The show has an excellent sense of humor. In one scene from season 2, which aired earlier this year and is newly available on Netflix, Louis joins a raid on a countryside manor, and as his fellow Nosferatus escalate the attack, he saunters through a flirtation in the driveway, never succumbing to distraction. Not even when a body comes through an upper-story window.—Abram Brown

Watching: “Suspiria” (Prime)

A year after Luca Guadagnino achieved world fame with “Call Me By Your Name,” the Italian director received a much different response to “Suspiria,” his remake of a 1977 arthouse horror flick. The film flopped. In fact, the reception was so poor that Guadagnino, who had spent a decade trying to bring his “Suspiria” interpretation to life, scrapped plans for a sequel.

My personal opinion is that this constitutes a travesty. “Suspiria,” a movie with a soundtrack from Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and Tilda Swinton playing no fewer than three roles, is an underloved gem. 

Set in Cold War–era Berlin, the film centers around a modern dance academy and a new arrival to the troop, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), an American. As Susie finds out, all is not what it seems. Amid a swirl of hidden hallways and cursed dances, she discovers that a coven of witches controls the place. Without revealing too much, I’ll say there’s the mother of all twist endings.—Jemima McEvoy

Watching: “Toy Story of Terror!” (Disney+) 

My current viewing habits are, I’ll admit, entirely dictated by the tiny tyrants of my household. While this means I’m often forced to skip the prestige dramas, it has led to a delightful seasonal opener for Halloween: “Toy Story of Terror!” a 22-minute short from Pixar that came a couple years after “Toy Story 3” and reunites Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and several more of their playbox pals. 

I know I’m suggesting something that’s a decade old—hardly a timely recommendation—but it’s become my family’s go-to. And what elevates the short beyond simple animated fluff is its cleverness. It’s a perfect example of meta horror and comes complete with a great self-referential vibe. One character, a stuffed-toy hedgehog named Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), is brilliantly genre aware, pointing out the classic B-movie clichés as they happen—almost as if he knows they’re stuck in the plot of a low-budget slasher film (or an animated spoof of one). That knowing wink is what makes it so much fun.—Clark Miller

Watching: “Weapons” (HBO Max)

One of the most exhilarating new movies I’ve seen in recent years was “Barbarian,” the 2022 horror film that announced writer-director Zach Cregger as a major creative talent. His follow-up directing effort, “Weapons,” became another blockbuster when it came out this summer. Still, I’ve talked to a number of people who felt it was a bit of a letdown compared to “Barbarian.” Don’t listen to them—see it (it landed on HBO Max this week in time for Halloween).

The no-spoiler basics of “Weapons” are widely known from the movie’s trailer: Almost an entire classroom of children in a small town goes missing, and the community demands answers from the school and the teacher about what happened. I won’t reveal more about the plot other than the following: The movie uses its “Pulp Fiction”–style, nonlinear narrative structure to great effect; it has a climax that manages to be gory, hilarious and deeply satisfying all at once; and it has an outstanding needle -drop featuring one of my favorite George Harrison songs.

There’s a lot of online discourse about the meaning of “Weapons,” not all of it positive. I, for one, appreciated the movie’s resistance to simple interpretation. Its mysteriousness is one of the reasons I’ve thought about it so often since seeing it in theaters. “Weapons” will stick with you.—Nick Wingfield