Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• A Wall Street titan with Sequoia money  

• The very best ghostwriters for conjuring a bestseller

• Plus: When crooks fell in love with an FBI messaging app; the tech that sparked a toe-curling scandal; and a joyous apocalypse.

Melinda French Gates is wasting no time apparently. Less than a month after announcing her departure from the Gates Foundation, which she ran with ex-husband Bill Gates, the billionaire made headlines again this week: She’s directing $1 billion in the next two years to organizations focusing on women’s rights and families. 

Donations to these types of groups have swelled in recent years, following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade in 2022. (When the court initially issued the decision, several prominent abortion rights groups said they saw the greatest influx of donations ever, and ActBlue, a Democratic online fundraising operation, took in $12 million nearly overnight.) French Gates is positioning herself as the banner leader in the movement. It’s an important priority for Democrats in this year’s presidential contest given that the abortion access issue has helped lift Democrats each year since Roe v. Wade fell. Should President Joe Biden lose in November, it’s easy to imagine the money flowing even more freely to these organizations.

Such an influx will produce short-term change at those organizations. But I wonder whether they will eventually encounter many of the same problems faced by the civil rights organizations that received a windfall in donations following the Black Lives Matter protests. That’s a sad reality that billionaire John Arnold, one of America’s largest and most thoughtful philanthropists, highlighted several days ago in a post on X: “My understanding is most racial equity orgs are cutting budgets and shrinking today. The one-time surge of money, while beneficial at the time, created a mess for nonprofits to navigate.” 

Perhaps the same fate won’t befall the groups buoyed by French Gates and her followers. Certainly, French Gates has displayed some considerable long-term thinking while building up the Gates Foundation, which she and Bill Gates started in 2002. Maybe most crucially, she does have plenty of money still to spend—another $10 billion or so earmarked from her split from the Gates Foundation.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, thinks Hush Money would make a top-dollar drag name. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Mega-billionaire Ken Griffin Wants to Own Our World

Back in 2021, Ken Griffin, the wealthy financier, arrived in the public consciousness through the GameStop drama as an unyielding force of nature with very little backstory—some Wall Street specter invading the world of tech. 

That’s a gross oversimplification, as Weekend veteran Michelle Celarier details at great length in this week’s Big Read. He has spent decades working to construct his empire. It hasn’t always gone smoothly, but it has drawn attention and investment dollars from the likes of Sequoia Capital. Given Griffin’s expansive domain and burgeoning influence as a GOP megadonor, anyone interested in the world’s capital markets or America’s politics will find Michelle’s story captivating.

The Top 5

The Very Best Ghostwriters For Conjuring a Bestseller

“People tell me, this feels like therapy—but in a good way,” said Carlye Adler, one of the most popular ghostwriters in Silicon Valley. The former Fortune magazine writer has helped technorati like Marc Benioff channel their thoughts onto the page and has some sage advice for anyone else looking to hire a ghostwriter: “Only work with someone you have chemistry with, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”

To find such a person, you should take a moment and look over this highly curated roll assembled by returning Weekend contributor Diane Harris. One of the other people on Diane’s list, Michelle Burford, who collaborated with basketball star Brittney Griner on current bestseller “Coming Home,” actually dislikes the term ghostwriter and instead prefers a more high-minded label: “story architect.” When Burford speaks to clients, she likes to tell them: “You bring the bricks, I build the mansion.”

Listening: A Stone Cold War 

You may recall Beergate, the brouhaha over drinking in the clubhouse during the Boston Red Sox’s 2011 collapse, and you likely remember Bountygate, the scandal over the New Orleans Saints’ long-standing practice of assigning prizes for hits on opposing players. 

Now, what about Broomgate? Don’t try to sweep away the cobwebs of your memory for it—just go listen to the highly amusing podcast, “Broomgate” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. about the 2015 controversy that forever changed the sport of curling. (That’s the Canadian-beloved pastime involving ice, brooms and 44-pound stones.) The pod’s host: Calgary-based comedian John Cullen, a passionate, semi-professional curler. (“I have seven provincial medals to my name,” he says early in the six-episode run. “None of them gold.") Cullen proves a droll guide to the sport and to the contretemps that enveloped it, a scandal sparked by the introduction of a new high-tech…broom. It led to, as Cullen puts it, a “frosty situation” among the sport’s participants and great soul-searching over its future.—A.B. 

Reading: The FBI’s Spy App

In 2021, Joseph Cox, then a reporter at Vice, watched a group of stone-faced Justice Department officials deliver a press conference in San Diego on a remarkable story: For nearly three years, the FBI had covertly run an encrypted phone service favored by criminals the world over—and used it to watch their every move.

His book, “Dark Wire,” lays out the entire backstory in painstaking, cinematic detail, like the murder plots communicated with smiley-face emojis and the drug raids at sea. In assembling the complex narrative, Cox took cues from “The Wire,” the beloved HBO crime drama. “You follow the cops, and then you follow the criminals, and there's two parallel strains,” said Cox, who’s now co-founder of tech news site 404 Media. HBO missed out on this one: Netflix has already acquired the rights to the “Dark Wire” with Jason Bateman signed on to direct.

More than just a page turner, the book offers an important and even-handed meditation on the balance between privacy and safety that any Signal user will find fascinating. “Is the tradeoff worth it? Are we okay with saving potentially 150 lives if at least one person was killed on the FBI's app as well? Do we want the FBI to run these sorts of backdoors?” asked Cox. “Those are exceptionally open questions, because we've never had the evidence in the public domain to even start to have that conversation.”—Julia Black

Watching: An Amusing Armageddon 

It’s hard to imagine the end of the world ushering in an epoch full of merriment and great fun. One with giant, super-hungry cockroaches—and a disembodied brain on a Roomba? Well, sure, perhaps.

Yeah, the characters within Amazon’s “Fallout” certainly aren’t enjoying themselves, living 200 years after a series of blasts irradiated the planet and eradicated most of humankind. Even so, their trials and tribulations are fun to watch. 

The TV series, which debuted a month or so ago and has gotten too little attention amid a barrage of premieres ahead of Emmy deadlines, falls within the same fictional universe as the venerable video game franchise of the same name. Commendably, it relies on a totally original storyline: After a life spent underground in a society with Jetsons-esque technology, Lucy (Ella Purnell from “Yellowjackets”) must brave the wasteland above. It’s a topsy-turvy journey in which she encounters any number of horrors, including The Ghoul, a centuries-old mutant bounty hunter (played by the delightful-as-always Walton Goggins). To make it through, she teams up with Maximus (Aaron Moten), a young man from the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel. Aside from Lucy, everyone else is a sorta hero, sorta villain; the lines between the two aren’t blurred as much as they’ve been dissolved by thermonuclear goo. 

“Fallout” has much to say about family, loss—and capitalism, presenting a winky boardroom scene that makes Will Ferrell and his suited cretins in “Barbie” seem like able stewards of shareholder value by comparison. At the same time, the series delivers some top-notch action sequences and a streak of dark slapstick-ish comedy. It is the rare “Fallout” character who makes it through the season without losing some bodily appendage. One good thing about this world, though: It’s far easier to reattach—or regrow—a toe than you might imagine.—A.B.

Final Thought

The Titanic continues to attract—and destroy—great ego and wealth with regularity. Really, it’s quite like Warner Media in that regard.