Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Meet Curtis Yarvis, far-right guru and friend to tech conservatives like Peter Thiel

• The Top 5: Our favorite board games 

• The techies who went for gold in Paris 

Plus: A nifty, nasty weather app; Stephen King strikes again; and laughter in the slammer.

For almost a century and a half, the San Francisco Bohemian Club, an elite gentlemen’s club in Lower Nob Hill that has 2,600 members, has organized an all-male conclave, the Bohemian Grove, at a wooded Sonoma County retreat. Attendees go to strike deals and listen to lectures from various titans of industry while enjoying al fresco breakfasts and dinners lit by gas lamps. Past special guests include Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

One strict rule: Guests must abandon the use of all digital and recording devices. Still, that didn’t stop me from learning some details about the latest Bohemian Grove last month. Speakers included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

Risking banishment from the Bohemian Grove, a source who attended last month’s retreat showed me the program for events and recounted how Altman spoke bullishly about artificial intelligence in a July 21 talk titled “Superintelligence and Society.” Altman indicated that superintelligence is much closer than many imagine, my source said. 

(An OpenAI spokesperson declined to offer specifics on Altman’s remarks, citing the retreat’s confidential nature; the Bohemian Club declined to comment and so did a Schmidt spokesperson.)

During Altman’s talk at a standing-room-only outdoor amphitheater, he gave a video presentation and, in a moment of levity, apparently had trouble getting it to work. “The irony of a guy who was predicting superintelligence not being able to get his video to work was amazing,” my source said. “I don’t think it was lost on anybody.”

Schmidt and Milley focused much of their own Bohemian Grove talks on the use of drones and AI in modern warfare. The two men each discussed how such tools are being used to devastating effect in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and will soon be instrumental in homeland security.—Josh Koehn 

Meanwhile, in Paris… 

In the last few weeks, so many venture capitalists have gone to Paris to see the Olympic games—and network with each other—that one who went likened the atmosphere to Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley conference. “VC firms are hosting nightly watch parties and soirées,” said the investor. “In the last two weeks, I’ve just been pinged by so many people that I thought, ‘I have to go.’”  

Venky Ganesan, a Menlo Ventures partner, said he’s run into a number of investors and found himself choosing between any number of ticketed, invite-only events. Said Ganesan: “It may be partisan in politics, but in Paris, everyone is Team USA.”—Natasha Mascarenhas

The Big Read 

The Far-Right Guru Who Has Befriended Silicon Valley’s Extreme Factions

Curtis Yarvin’s dream for America is startling: Dispense with democracy as we know it and replace it with a dictatorship in which the free press is gone and so is much of the federal government. 

He has spent much of the last two decades working to push his ideas into the mainstream and, as our Julia Black explains in this week’s Big Read, he has found a receptive audience in some of the most right-wing in tech, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Dismissing him as fringe and inconsequential seems like a mistake: Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has also sat down with him.

The Top 5

The Very Best Board Games

I’m back visiting my parents this weekend in upstate New York, and it’s day four of rain here. We’re stuck in the house—along with two rambunctious dogs—and we could really use a diversion: I wish I had picked up one of the suggestions from this list compiled by Weekend newcomer David Ewalt, a former Forbes editor who is also an expert on the world of board games. (I recommend his very funny, very personal book on Dungeons & Dragons, “Of Dice and Men.”)

From upstate, a tabletop takeover of western Europe with a mind flayer sure sounds more enjoyable than another fight about what’s for dinner (or unburying the Buffalo, N.Y.–themed Monopoly—Buffalo-Opoly!—from the closet floor).

The Techies Who Went Out of Office to Chase Olympic Glory

I’ve long suspected I didn’t have what it takes to become an Olympian. I’m absolutely sure I don’t after editing our Akash Pasricha’s piece on the Olympians who’ve juggled the demands of training for the quadrennial completion with the more everyday demands of working in tech, media and finance. 

Rower Peter Chatain, a 24-year-old machine-learning engineer, has spent the past several years in a grueling daily routine that included a 5,500-calorie diet. He won bronze in Paris but walked away unsatisfied with himself. “I’m happy with bronze. I feel like there’s more, though,” he said, already with an eye on the Los Angeles games in 2028. If nothing else, those will make for an easier commute for him.

Weekend Welcomes Two New Reporters: Josh Koehn and Paris Martineau

And, finally, a very welcome housekeeping note: We’ve got a pair of fresh faces joining Weekend, Josh Koehn and Paris Martineau. 

Josh, who comes to The Information from The San Francisco Standard, will cover politics, power and influence in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And you may well recognize Paris’ name: She’s been with The Information since 2020 and transitions to Weekend to cover the technology that defines the lives of children, teens and young adults—often with perilous consequences. 

Both Josh and Paris have an eye for an exposé and the ambition for the deep reporting these stories demand. Huzzah! 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, would like to spend a weekend on the couch—and that’s not meant to be, you know, weird! You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Downloading: Weather and Wisecracks

The other week, our New York newsroom was abuzz with gripes and grumbles about an all too common bugbear: the weather. It had been oppressively hot and sticky for weeks—par for the course for New York City, which in 2020 was reclassified as part of the humid subtropical climate zone—and one morning rain showers had surprised many of my co-workers on their morning commutes.

Apple’s weather app never seems to function well, even though it purportedly integrated features from Dark Sky, a third-party weather app it purchased, in 2020. So I proposed an alternative to my damp colleagues, and I’ll share it with you, too: Carrot Weather, an app I’ve loved for years. It’s beautifully designed and superaccurate; the free version takes its weather data from Forcea, a company that provided some of the most accurate forecasts for New York and San Francisco last year. And it even offers a layout, Inline, that mimics DarkSky’s beloved design. 

Part of the app’s appeal lies in the quirky personality of its humorous, text-based forecasts, which you can customize to be friendly, snarky, or “homicidal.” There’s a “professional” setting, if you prefer your weather sans quips, but I’ve grown fond of Carrot’s bizarre insults.

It’s not necessary, but I pay $20 per year for Carrot premium. It lets me access extra features like hourly forecast widgets for my home screen and customize my weather data sources. I’ve actually connected my Carrot to data streams from amateur meteorologists in my neighborhood, who operate their own sets of weather-measuring instruments and publicly share hyperlocal weather information.—Paris Martineau

Reading: Let Stephen King Under Your Skin 

Ahhh, the long days of summer have arrived, and in this part of the season, I like to balance out the abundant sunshine with some darkness. And abundant darkness can be found in Stephen King’s new collection of short stories, “You Like It Darker.” (Yes, I do, Stephen!) The horror maestro has compiled 12 stories of varying sizes—some less than 20 pages, some longer than 100. One of them, “Rattlesnakes,” continues “Cujo,” his devil dog novel from 1981. The finest from “You Like It Darker” is also the book’s first, “Two Talented Bastids.” It concludes on a very Rod Serling-esque note, offering a moralism for those among you obsessed with self-optimization.

They’re all wonderfully classic King, the type of stories that make you look out a window and wonderful if the cornfield outside has always been quite so close.—A.B. 

Watching: Jest From a Jailhouse

Mark it down: A24’s “Sing Sing” is one of the year’s first great dramas. The film, which is based on real events, stars Oscar nominee Colman Domingo as Divine G, a wrongly imprisoned man preparing for a clemency hearing. To pass the time at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Divine G and his friends have formed a theater troupe to stage their own original comedy, a musical complete with time traveling and Hamlet!

“Sing Sing” offers a raw, authentic look at the lives of the men at the prison, strengthened by a cast largely featuring former inmates who actually participated in the prison theater program that inspired the film. 

One of the film’s best performances comes from Clarence Maclin (a real-life former Sing Sing inmate) as Divine Eye, a newcomer to the theater program who tests the group’s patience. And the film will give its leading man a second shot at a best actor Oscar: Last year, Domingo’s performance in another biopic, “Rustin,” which followed the life of American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, lost out to Cillian Murphy’s turn as the titular “Oppenheimer.” 

Perhaps most interesting to a film nerd like me: Everyone in “Sing Sing”—from Domingo to the production assistants—received equal pay and equity in the film. The parity imbued “Sing Sing” with “a sense of purpose,” Domingo told Deadline. “That’s the sort of art you make time for. There’s an understanding that, at the heart of it, everyone involved is in it for the right reasons.”—Kate Clark

Final Thought

Quick, the de minimis charm for defense!