Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Ben Horowitz, an investor of many contrasts 

• Social Media: The moms at war with social media

• The Top 5: Our favorite protein bars 

• From AI to Chelsea Clinton’s Plea, Inside The Information’s Latest WTF Summit 

• Plus: SF’s nerd mecca; the videogame company obsessed with winning and sex; and another great British reality show.

At this point, we’ve hurtled past the time to argue about whether social media as it exists is safe for kids. It very clearly is not, and each passing week seems to bring another grim reminder of that fact. 

Sometimes it brings several of them, and this past week was no different. On the same day, a dozen attorneys general from a dozen states filed a lawsuit against TikTok for allegedly creating a harmful, addictive product for kids, and a famed short-selling firm, Hindenburg Research, published a lengthy analysis of Roblox, an online game company that’s very popular with children, alleging that the site allows pedophiles to “efficiently target hundreds of children.” My colleague Martin Peers, a father of two, summed up Hindenburg’s report rather well in his daily column: “The term ‘social media’ is beginning to be synonymous with ‘cesspool for children.’”

So we know there’s a problem, and now the question is, who is going to fix it: Lawmakers? The corporate executives creating this problematic technology? Parents? 

I think we can rule out the corporate executives. This has been a gathering storm for years, and we have seen little meaningful change from apps like TikTok. (I am not being a soft-hearted, anti-tech journalist by saying this: Just hours after I initially wrote this column, NPR revealed fresh evidence about TikTok, citing internal documents showing that company executives know the app is addicting and unsafe. For instance, TikTok knows its feature to help parents limit kids’ time on the app is an effort to “improve public trust,” not make the app safer, according to the documents reviewed by NPR.) 

Lawmakers are definitely taking more notice these days, but increasingly parents are realizing they need to take a firmer hand in the matter. Our Paris Martineau has an incredibly timely feature for Weekend this week on this very subject: a look at MAMA, or Mothers Against Media Addiction, an organization of outraged parents that has organized itself like MADD, the anti-alcohol group that helped pushed for a slew of laws against drunk driving in the 1980s. MAMA hopes to accomplish something similar with social media. 

Cajoling lawmakers in the hopes of getting them moving is one thing, but Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who has thought, written and studied much about kids and technology, has some stark words for parents. 

“The way that I talk to parents about this is, it is your job to set boundaries and pay attention. There’s no substitute for that oversight,” Oster said. “We can talk all day about restrictions that social media companies should put on—who can use their things, what kind of verification they have—but it’s very difficult to imagine that that would be sufficient, because kids are resourceful and smart.”

Oster, a mother of two, continued: “We shouldn’t pretend that rules are going to be a substitute for knowing what’s going on with your kid, particularly because the impacts on kids are going to vary tremendously.” (Oster talks about this sort of thing at great length in her new podcast, "Raising Parents," which I have previously recommended.)  

If parents do nothing else, Oster said, limiting screen time around bedtime is perhaps most essential. “Sleep is really important, and most kids are not getting enough,” she said. Of course, the same advice could apply to the parents themselves. “Do you ever lie in bed and think, ‘I’m gonna go to sleep,’ and then Instagram is, like, kinda there with you?”—Abram Brown 

The Palmer Drama Goes On

Last week, I wrote about a couple of Silicon Valley grudge matches that were playing out publicly: One was festering (Musk versus Altman), one was concluding (Palmer Luckey versus Mark Zuckerberg).

My column struck Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner who co-founded Anduril with Luckey, as unfair. “Having a hard time coming up with a cope more lame than this one,” Stephens wrote on X while sharing my column. “Forgiveness and Reconciliation is one of the bedrocks of progressive society.”

I didn’t bring up Luckey and Zuckerberg to criticize the fact that they had reconciled. I just find their desire to make their reconciliation so public bemusing. 

In general, I find the technorati’s tendency toward public theatrics a mix of funny and grating. And I was treated to another reminder of that when Stephens’ X post turned into a war of words between Luckey and Jason Calacanis, the “All In” podcast host who has been needling Luckey over what happened with Zuckerberg. By the time their battle finished, Luckey had concluded that Calacanis was a “lying snake.”

So in the end, as one grudge match dies away, another comes to life.—A.B. 

The Big Read 

The Ben Horowitz Paradox 

A while ago, I wrote a profile of Marc Andreessen, one-half of the fabled venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. This was back when Marc versus the media was a major storyline, and I focused mostly on his past and current relationship with the industry. (He loved it, then hated it—but failed when he tried to beat it at its own game.) As I worked on the piece, I learned Andreessen is a tough fellow to report on: His firm and friends are a close-knit crew, with few eager to talk to journalists.

These days, the other half of Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, is more on people’s minds after the longtime Democratic donor announced support for Donald Trump in July.

Like Andreessen, Horowitz is hard to report on. Still, our Julia Black has an incisive profile of the investor, which shines a light on his many incongruities. His friend Ali Ghodsi, the DataBricks CEO, described Horowitz to Julia as someone who has “always advocated for doing the right thing long term and not getting swayed by the current hysteria.”

Social Media

Mad Moms Stigmatized Drunk Driving. Their Next Target: Social Media

In a short amount of time, Mothers Against Media Addiction has achieved fast-growing popularity. “The demand for MAMA exceeds our capacity to meet it,” said the group’s founder, Julie Scelfo, who has fielded requests for 19 chapters in 12 states.

As I mentioned above, MAMA hopes to push through new laws on social media and its harmful effects. Barron Lerner, a historian who studies the evolution of medicine, thinks America may be at the same tipping point that the country found itself at in the 1980s, when MADD helped get new laws passed against drinking and driving.  

“We’ve been through a couple decades of this sort of rampant uptake of kids with phones, and there are pros, but…maybe it’s time that the pendulum goes back in the other direction,” he told our Paris Martineau.

The Top 5

There's a Growing Arms Race for the Next Million-Dollar Protein Bar

The protein market is, well, seeing a ton of gains lately. It’s already hit $4 billion, and that’s prompted a wave of startups to muscle into the industry. In fact, Peter Rahal, who founded Rxbar and sold it to Kellogg in 2017 for $600 million, has made his return with the launch of his new David protein bars. 

“We’re competing [against] the banana,” Rahal told Ashwin Rodrigues, a returning Weekend contributor. “The 50-year-old woman who had a coffee and a banana at breakfast—we’re a way better substitute. I want to take that share, because it would provide so much value to her.” 

Rodrigues has not only this industry snapshot but also a definitive ranking of the best protein bars, a list formed after he practically lived on the dense rectangles for a week or so.

WTF Summit

From AI to Chelsea Clinton’s Plea, Inside The Information’s Latest WTF Summit 

What happens when you fill a beautiful space in Napa Valley with some of Silicon Valley’s most influential and powerful women? You get conversations with the likes of Marissa Mayer, Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, Chelsea Clinton and The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles—just some of the illustrious names that turned up for our annual WTF Summit, which marks the success and disruption of women in tech, media and finance. 

Never one to skip the tough question, our Jessica Lessin pressed Vox Media President Pam Wasserstein for an update on Olivia Nuzzi, the star political reporter from Vox-owned New York magazine. She’s been put on leave after a secret intimate relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Wasserstein largely dodged the question, reiterating that an independent investigation would examine Nuzzi’s conduct. She conceded one thing to Jessica. “It probably won’t surprise you that in the last couple weeks, you’re not the first person in my life who’s asked about this,” she said.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, may also report to the federal pen just for the LinkedIn likes. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Attending: Ink’s Enduring Might

At a recent dinner with my editors, a discussion on whether it’s more worthwhile to own physical books or records grew contentious. One editor sided with the printed word. The other argued that vinyl has more utility: Someone might listen to a record 50 times in a year, while no one really rereads a novel very often. Knives were out, salad forks were raised, and we hadn’t even received the bread.

I fell on the side of books because they’re just plain beautiful when grouped together. Seeing a title on a book’s spine has a unique power to transport you to the point in life when you first read them—and perhaps even inspire some reflection on lessons learned since reading it.

With all that in mind: It’s Litquake, baby!

This year marks the 25th anniversary of San Francisco’s preeminent literary festival, and the upcoming election and growing threats to free speech will feature prominently. (PEN America, a group that tracks book bans, counted more than 10,000 books that have been removed—at least temporarily—from public schools in just the 2023–24 academic calendar.)

Litquake kicked off Thursday and will take place at venues across the San Francisco Bay Area until Oct. 27. A couple of can’t-miss events include Booker Prize-winner Paul Lynch talking about his award-winning novel “Prophet Song,” a story of Ireland descending into a totalitarian state and civil war—no obvious parallels here!—and an all-day block party at KQED’s headquarters. On top of the festivities at the radio station’s fancy digs, news anchor Brian Watt will host a forum on the banning of books and the threat this poses in particular to LGBTQ+ Americans—since conservatives so often seem out to ban books that include characters from that community. 

Prefer something on the lighter side? Stand-up comedian, actor and author Jenny Slate will close out Litquake at the Palace of Fine Arts with a reading of “Lifeform,” her new book of essays, followed by an audience Q&A.—Josh Koehn

Reading: A Raging Blizzard

Over several decades, Blizzard Entertainment established itself as a top shop in videogames—the maker of titles like Diablo, Hearthstone, Starcraft and the World of Warcraft series.

Outwardly, the company projected an image as a thriving creative wonder. The truth is much more complicated, as Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier ably chronicles in “Play Nice,” a history of the company that isn’t shy about unearthing the dirt. Some Blizzard executives, for instance, received nicknames based on “Mad Men” characters because, like the Mad Men, they drank a great deal in the office. At the company’s annual conference, BlizzCon, attendees treated Blizzard executives like rock stars, and in turn, executives had no qualms about handing out their autographs—no matter where a fan wanted their signature inscribed. “If a girl puts boobs in your face and says sign them, you sign them,” Joeyray Hall, a former top Blizzard exec, told Schreier.  

In whole, the Blizzard tale is one of “men getting rich very fast, a hostile corporate takeover, and a culture that left many of its employees with complicated and contradictory feelings. It’s also a story about money, power, and the hunt for never-ending growth.” Huh. How familiar sounding.—A.B.

Watching: Orders and Disarray  

I recently have fallen in love with “Taskmaster,” an absurd, long-running British game show that pits five comedians against each other in a battle of wits and weirdness. Each season follows the quintet as the group completes a slew of unique and ridiculous challenges. Some of the tasks are straightforward, such as eating as much watermelon as possible in a minute. Some are more artistic, including one that asked the contestants to do “the most beautiful thing with bubbles.” Still, my absolute favorites are open-ended prompts like “create tension” and “make the biggest mess and completely clear it up.” 

Honestly, I can’t stop thinking about the messes that got created. Most of the contestants took a literal approach, throwing objects around the set, then picking them up. But Canadian Katherine Ryan created disasters of a different type. She called her sister and (falsely) said her brother-in-law had been cheating on the sister; she next called her father and told him her sister was pregnant (also not true). At the end of the task, she called them both back and fessed up to the ruses. Ryan ended up scoring top marks for that task. (Those points get handed out by the titular Taskmaster—comedian Greg Davies, the school teacher-esque host of the show—who awards the marks based on performance.)

A great newbie introduction to the show is “Taskmaster Series 17,” which aired six months ago. It’s an absolute riot and is totally bingeable, with every episode now available on YouTube. If you want to dive into the current season, which is only a few episodes in but so far is off to a great start, new episodes are released on the Taskmaster YouTube channel every Friday (or if you’re in the U.K., on Channel 4 Thursday evenings). Keep an eye out for chaos contestant Rosie Jones, a whip-smart and boundary-pushing comedian with cerebral palsy.—Paris Martineau 

Final Thought

This week in personal news…