Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Why women in tech are sounding an alarm

• Power and Influence: The tangled web behind the VC who wants to be mayor

• Plus: Terrors from a storm; Netflix escapism; and a podcast with Tom Hanks and chimpanzee butts.

Silicon Valley grudgery really can devolve into such absurd performativity. 

Take, for example, the very public reconciliation efforts lately undertaken by  Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder and Anduril co-founder, and Mark Zuckerberg. 

The two had shared bad blood ever since Facebook fired Luckey in 2016—a point in time when Luckey’s support for Donald Trump was vexing much of Silicon Valley. 

The recent kiss-and-make-up campaign began a few months ago when Zuckerberg supplied a cozy quote through a spokesperson to a Tablet Magazine profile of Luckey: “I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security.…I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.” Talk about revisionist history.

Then this week, Luckey and Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms, were eagerly posting on X about Luckey’s recent visit to see Meta’s new augmented reality glasses. Bosworth topped it up with his own public apology to Luckey, who made sure to repost Bosworth’s apology as well as Zuckerberg’s earlier mea culpa.

Everyone involved here could’ve settled their differences out of sight in someone’s backyard in Tahoe. But that’s not what happened, and I’ve been trying to puzzle out their respective motivations.  

I suppose Luckey has redemption on his mind, though you might think he could let Anduril’s expanding valuation do that for him. The fact is that he can’t seem to admit how much his expulsion from Facebook stung—or how image conscious he is. 

What about Zuckerberg and crew? Maybe Zuckerberg genuinely feels regretful about pushing out Luckey. Or maybe this is part of Zuckerberg’s awkward embrace of Silicon Valley’s right wing, which, of course, previously involved him praising Trump after the former president narrowly survived an assassination attempt. (I honestly cannot believe I put all those words into one sentence—such is the reality of 2024.) 

While Luckey and Zuckerberg have been making amends, Elon Musk has recently been amping up his own long-standing grudge against OpenAI, which he helped co-found but left amid a dispute with CEO Sam Altman. 

Recently, Musk moved xAI—his new AI startup and would-be OpenAI competitor—into OpenAI’s former Mission District offices. And then Musk threw a recruiting party at the offices on the same day of this week that OpenAI held its annual developer’s conference. 

Imagine that! It’s as if someone with a serious hang-up on an ex purchased the ex’s former home and then threw a party for their mutual friends just as the ex was hosting a shindig.

No, I’m going to resist searching for a deeper meaning from Musk’s actions. The man lives to troll.

Instead, I’m left returning to a thought that often pops up into my mind when one of these Silicon Valley grudges comes into view: Surely the rich and powerful have enough money to buy themselves a thicker skin.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

Why Women in Tech Are Sounding an Alarm

There’s no easy way to introduce this very important Big Read from our Julia Black, which examines how the push for greater equality among men and women in tech has been backsliding.

A few years ago, it looked like the industry had successfully jettisoned much of its bro-tastic past. Yet a variety of factors have fueled its return, including an AI boom that once again encourages tech’s worst make-things-fast-and-offend-everyone tendencies. Deena Shakir, a Lux Capital general partner, was one of two dozen women Julia spoke to during her reporting. “Some of these biases are so deeply endemic and unconscious that they’re really hard to break,” Shakir said.

Power and Influence

The Tangled Web Behind the VC Who Wants to Be Mayor

The race for San Francisco mayor is tight: It’s a three-way contest between incumbent London Breed, Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist who previously served a stint as interim mayor back in 2017. 

Farrell has proven to be something of a dark horse candidate since entering the race last winter—enjoying more support than I might’ve imagined a little-known tech investor could garner. 

He has positioned himself as a robust business titan who can help steer San Francisco toward an enduring economic recovery. But as our Josh Koehn details, that’s an oversimplistic image of Farrell, who has  a complicated record as an investor.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, figures New York City Hall will soon be vacant enough for his own mayoral run. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: Wait, Wait, Tell Us Everything

How do you clean a tutu? Use vodka. How do chimpanzees recognize each other? By looking at each other’s butts. 

These are the type of primal, primordial questions being asked and answered on a funny new NPR podcast, “How to Do Everything,” a spinoff of NPR’s longstanding funny news-quiz radio show, “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” Like “Wait Wait,” “How to Do Everything” operates in bite-size segments. Each episode typically contains three segments: One answers a question posed by hosts Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag; a second contends with a listener-submitted query; and a third question gets tossed to a celebrity guest star. Tom Hanks, for instance, stopped to talk about how to handle adoration, a topic prompted by the ever-lengthening standing ovations at film festivals. The proper footwear is essential, Hanks said: “I know there are women who make sure to wear long enough flowing gowns so that they do not have to have crippling shoes on their feet.”—A.B. 

Reading: A Hurricane’s Horrors 

Early in “House of Bone and Rain,” author Gabino Iglesias makes a direct comparison between his latest novel and an existing oeuvre that obviously inspired it: His five main characters are bonded together in San Juan, Puerto Rico, by childhood tragedy and trauma, “like the tight-knit group of kids in a Stephen King novel, except with three brown dudes and two Black ones running around and getting in trouble.”

That’s something of an understatement. From the first page, the guys set out for lethal revenge: A gang lord has murdered one of their mothers. The bodies pile up and the devastation mounts, with much of the horror-noir unfolding during and after Hurricane Maria. As several abuelas recount in “House of Bone and Rain,” the hurricane not only destroyed their physical surroundings but also broke down the barriers between the living and the dead. This makes the storm both a useful plot device and a gale-force indictment of the real-life horrors Puerto Rico has faced as an impoverished U.S. territory. Iglesias, a Puerto Rico native, writes with assertiveness on the subject, describing his torn-apart homeland as a “playground for death.”

As for the supernatural terrors, Iglesias draws them from Caribbean and Latino myth: Baron Samedi, for example, voodoo lord of the dead. Since such superstitions are less familiar than the typical vampires and werewolves, Iglesias’ scares are all the more memorable—strange nightmares concocted from lore substantial enough to give them real staying power. (I recommend his earlier “The Devil Takes You Home” for the same reason.)

Another reason to read: “House of Bone and Rain” functions like a series of Duolingo lessons, with Iglesias weaving in lines of Spanish dialogue. He includes a very funny idiom about defecating chickens, which functions as a tidy metaphor for what happens to the desperate in San Juan no matter what monsters they battle.—A.B. 

Watching: Rom-Com Escapism

Over the last week, I’ve seen the vice presidential debate, the hypomanic “Industry” season finale and the news coming out of the Middle East: It has felt like all my screens are conspiring to give me a heart attack.

For refuge, I’ve turned to “Nobody Wants This,” Netflix’s cozy, charming, totally innocuous new rom-com series. 

Adam Brody, who has been criminally undercast since his role as Seth Cohen on “The O.C.,” plays a Los Angeles rabbi who can’t help falling for Kristen Bell’s blond, blue-eyed sex podcaster shiksa. (Actually, the real star of the show is Timothy Simons, who plays Brody’s brother with all the haplessness and none of the malevolence of his “Veep” character, Jonah Ryan.) I haven’t felt these kinds of butterflies over a rom-com since I rewatched “Four Weddings and a Funeral” a couple of years ago.

I’m still only midway through the 10 episodes, but I’ve heard there may be a season two on the way, and I’ve already decided: I definitely want as much of this as possible.—Julia Black

Final Thought

Who says romance is dead?