Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: A videogame that fuels fake wars

• HBO’s surprise Sunday night wager—and what else we’re watching this fall

Plus: A deepfake music video; Apple’s little-loved masterpiece; and the moment when Silicon Valley saved the military. 

Oh! Look who’s back in our lives: Nate Silver, the iconoclastic statistician and media mogul founder of FiveThirtyEight. 

Quick, Nate, give us the odds on Harris-Trump. “Right now, the race is 50-50,” he told me earlier this week. “If you had to play someone’s hand, you’d rather have Harris’ than Trump’s but just slightly.”  

Depending on your preexisting beliefs, Silver’s comment may infuriate you. Inevitably, it seems like we’re always angry with him, annoyed whenever his numbers don’t reinforce what we’re already sure is true. And we’re never more interested in hearing from Silver—and yelling at him—than in presidential election years like this one. 

I find this predictable back-and-forth amusing, a reflection of how closed-minded we can get even when confronted with cold, hard numbers. And one of the things I enjoy about Silver is his general willingness to play along with his detractors (to poke them back, really). In fact, he’s been working to give us even more data through his position advising Polymarket, the offshore predictions market that went viral when “Will Biden drop out?” was America’s favorite backyard guessing game this summer. 

Polymarket essentially turbocharges the Silver bit, and he knows that therein lies its appeal. While his traditional prediction work takes some time to come together and refresh, Polymarket “is offering instant answers,” he said. 

Another project Silver has been working on lately is a new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” which came out earlier this month. It explores risk and our relationship to it—and how some people enjoy quantifying not only risk but as much about their lives as they can. 

While writing “On the Edge,” Silver spent time with people like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. “The weird nerds,” Silver said with a laugh. (As a nerd himself, Silver can apply such labels without prejudice.) “There’s a certain analytic type of person that I’ve kept seeing over and over again, and they have the same vocabulary: ‘expected value,’ ‘game theory,’ ‘Bayesian reasoning,’ things like that.” 

As Silver discovered, sometimes these data-minded nerds put their focus on numbers to good use. “It’s a personality type that a lot of billionaires have,” Silver said. “I met more billionaires writing this book than I ever have before.” 

Silver was speaking from his home in Manhattan while packing for a trip to London later in the week. Surely he must have the trip planned to the nth degree in some Google Sheet, right? “No, I’m not a big planner in that respect,” Silver said. “I think there are some things that are worth quantifying and some things that you know better to be spontaneous about.”

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, encourages you to reach him on Telegra—errr, wait maybe not. For real, though, hit him up at [email protected] or find him on X.

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The Big Read 

The Aging Videogame That Fuels Fake Wars

The next time you see war-zone footage on social media, I suggest you squint harder at it. There’s a fair chance it may not be real—and may instead be a clip from Arma 3, an 11-year-old videogame from a Prague-based company that has become an inextricable part of the conflict news cycle. “It doesn’t matter where in the world: Whenever there is any sort of crisis event, Arma 3 footage will follow,” said misinformation researcher Seana Davis. 

That’s a helluva thing to say about a videogame made by some far-flung studio, so I dispatched Simon Parkin, a New Yorker contributor and host of the excellent “My Perfect Console” podcast on videogames, to Prague to find out more about Arma 3 and the game’s creators. 

He returned with an eyebrow-raising story for our latest Big Read, which marks Simon’s debut in Weekend. While Bohemia Interactive executives fully know how much misinformation comes from Arma 3, they aren’t overly worried about it. “That’s not our responsibility,” said Bohemia Interactive co-founder Marek Španěl. “Our role is to make the game as good as possible.”

Media and Entertainment

HBO’s Surprise Sunday Night Wager

Much of the past year in the media world could’ve made for very amusing plotlines within another “Succession” season—most obviously the costly bickering between the studios and the Hollywood unions. Indeed, last year’s labor disputes have thrown the production slate for studios like Warner Bros. Discovery into tumult, and with things gone haywire, Warner’s HBO recently made a somewhat unexpected decision: Elevate a relatively unheralded show, “Industry,” from its place on Monday nights to the channel’s signature 9 p.m. Sunday slot. 

Josh Duboff, a longtime Vanity Fair veteran, returns to Weekend to tell us how “Industry” rose to the top of HBO as a surprise heir to “Succession”—and how its two very online showrunners have channeled the internet buzz around “Industry” into how they create the series, which has been enjoying enviable ratings since returning for a third season earlier this month. Said co-showrunner Konrad Kay: “I have a very well-curated Twitter feed if I say so myself—that’s where I get all my news.”

Following: A Music Video Starring Biden and Putin…and Trump 

Answer this: Deepfakes are becoming (a) a big problem, (b) fatal to truth or (c) wildly entertaining. How about all of the above? This week brought the latest example of (c), when a couple of internet provocateurs who go by the name the Dor Brothers released a 1-minute, 39-second video called “The Hustle” that they said was composed partially using Grok, the AI tool from Elon Musk’s xAI.

“The Hustle” is essentially a music video, set to a song by Indian rapper Hanumankind, featuring photorealistic fake clips of Mark Zuckerberg, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin and Musk behaving badly—or at least bizarrely. They menace others with guns, forcibly vaccinate people in their homes and pass out drunk on the floor. The video is actually the second chapter of “The Hustle.” The first one features a similar cast: My personal favorite shows Zuckerberg getting arrested with a pet lizard perched on his shoulder.

“The Hustle” reminded me of another similarly entertaining music video from a few years ago for DJ Shadow’s “Nobody Speak,” which shows a U.N.-like meeting of diplomats erupting into fisticuffs. It’s mesmerizing to watch digital fabrications of the world’s most famous political and business leaders running amok, even if deepfakes may one day create actual nightmares for us.—Nick Wingfield

Reading: The Generals Who Needed a Reboot 

In summer 2018, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright received a top-secret briefing on AI—and how America had fallen behind China in it. 

Her assessment? “The U.S. is fucked,” she said. 

The scene is one of many memorable moments recounted in “Unit X” (Scribner), a memoir of sorts. Authors Raj Shah and Chris Kirchhoff can speak with substantial authority on the subject of the titular Unit X: For several years, they ran the Pentagon program established in the 2010s to connect the U.S. military and Silicon Valley. 

Shah, a former fighter-jet pilot, and Kirchhoff, who worked as an aide in the Obama administration, arrived in Mountain View, Calif., determined to solve a profound problem. Since the dot-com era, consumer technology had flourished and in many cases surpassed the tech used by America’s soldiers. (Shah recalls flying an F-16 with a $300 Compaq iPaq on his lap; the consumer map software was better than anything he had in his cockpit.) They labored to get the military upgraded and shared Albright’s fears: Without sweeping technological updates, adversaries like China would surely overtake the U.S. in the latter half of the 21st century. After all, China and many other U.S. foes don’t have any qualms about mixing the public and private sectors. 

“Unit X” never sinks to scaremongering, but it may constantly infuriate you over our federal government’s inherent inertia.—A.B.

Watching: A Strivers’ Saga 

As different as the many generations of the Baek family seem in “Pachinko,” they have more in common than they’d like to admit—or perhaps more than they realize. 

One notable link is a shared sense of unquenchable longing. As the Apple TV+ series resumes with a second season, Sunja (Minha Kim) strives to find enough food for her family in World War II Japan. She never truly does, though that doesn’t stop her from trying. 

The series, which is based on a 2017 best-selling novel of the same name, darts nimbly across time. In the ’80s, an elderly Sunja (Youn Yuh-jung) has guided the Baeks to better days, though they hang on in a precarious, lower-middle-class position—entranced by the Japanese boom times but denied full access because of their Korean roots. No one is angrier about this than Sunja’s grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha). He’s been exiled from a high-powered investment firm after prioritizing a Korean woman’s interests over his company’s and is determined to recapture his place in the world that has cast him out.

The camera in “Pachinko” never shies away from lingering on a mournful Baek—often with admirable subtlety. Early in season 2, for instance, Solomon courts an investor for his new fund at a high-priced sushi restaurant; as Solomon looks on, the camera cuts to what look like edible gold flakes falling onto a plate of sashimi. It’s a meal he’d love to enjoy yet clearly can’t afford. Given how badly he needs the potential investment, though, he can’t afford not to have it.—A.B.

Final Thought

Sorry not sorry!