Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera reviews the new Steve Jobs biography, 40 years after profiling him. Jill Kargman, who skewers the Upper East Side for a living, says: “I don’t need Bellinis to be uncensored.” Kat Rosenfield was wrong about The Sheep Detectives. Kara Kennedy defends the self-professed “slut,” and now mom-to-be, Alex Cooper. And much more!
But first: The builders of the Bay Area are finding God.
If you go to a party in the Bay Area, there’s a good chance you hear AI researchers making their favorite joke: that they’re “building God.”
Very few mean it literally. They just mean that this technology could become more powerful than anything we’ve ever known. But Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at the AI firm Anthropic, sees the joke as a reminder that, even as it works to transcend humanity, Silicon Valley has a God-shaped hole in its heart.
A lot of the people making this joke are about to become very rich—both Anthropic and OpenAI are set to go public at eye-watering valuations in the very near future—and have seen machines do things that seem miraculous. Materially, these tech workers could not be more satisfied. But spiritually, there’s an emptiness. And that’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us.
“You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied,” writes Avital. Having lived in San Francisco for four years, she found herself yearning for a religious practice. In her essay today, she explains why. Don’t miss it.
When Joe Nocera spent a week with Steve Jobs in 1986, the man he met was rude, abrasive, and arrogant—so sure he was always right he wouldn’t listen to even his closest aides. His leadership style nearly wrecked the company he was trying to build after being pushed out of Apple the year before. When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, he was a completely different boss, who had learned to trust the people around him, and to offer leadership without bullying. Joe reviews a new book that explains what brought about the change.
Jill Kargman is the quintessential New York City society girl—her father was the CEO of Chanel; her brother was married to Drew Barrymore; and she went to high school with Gwyneth Paltrow—but she built her career on skewering the rarefied world she grew up in. In her new film, “Influenced,” she plays a momfluencer whose son asks: “Mom, how come we don’t have any poor friends?” Jill met our features editor Dana Schuster to dish on the time she says the mayor’s wife blocked her on Instagram, the mah-jongg mafia, and why she thinks over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs are “what I would call BFTJ: bad for the Jews.”
When our critic Kat Rosenfield saw the trailer for “The Sheep Detectives,” she wondered if there’d been “a successful plot to blackmail some of the greatest actors in Hollywood into making the world’s most ridiculous movie.” It’s a murder mystery about barnyard animals that somehow stars Emma Thompson, Hugh Jackman, and Nicholas Braun! But when she went to see it, the truth shocked her: “The Sheep Detectives” is proof that, after a decade of films about Minions and kung fu pandas, Hollywood can still make something adults love as much as their kids.
Alex Cooper has built a multimillion-dollar podcast empire on telling young women to spend their 20s sleeping around instead of settling down, so when the “Call Her Daddy” host announced this week that she and her husband are expecting a baby, a lot of people called her a hypocrite. But Kara Kennedy argues in her latest essay that a girl who’s boy-crazy in her 20s is actually more likely to have a happily-ever-after. “When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him,” writes Kara. “Her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming.”
Second Thought
Whatever vulnerability a woman has, “there is a rabbit hole she can go down,” says Freya India, one of our new contributing writers and the author of the brand-new book Girls®, which is all about how her generation was robbed of their childhoods. Freya joined Suzy for the latest episode of Second Thought to talk about how Instagram makes girls hate themselves, how “femosphere” podcasts make women hate men, and how slowly but surely we’re all looking and sounding the same. . . .
Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!
Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!
Knock knock, it’s Cupid! A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a former violinist in New York City who’s built an international career from Geneva to Hong Kong; a Shaolin kung fu blue-belt in Connecticut; or a pun-loving Angeleno who works in HR (but is more fun than Toby from The Office, he promises). Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.
Don’t miss Suzy Weiss’s latest investigation—into the weird, wonderful, and surprisingly controversial world of “cottage food”—and Noah Bernstein’s piece on the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-like competition taking place this weekend that allows athletes to dope. Plus: Novi Zhukovsky on whether AI just won a literary prize, and Liel Leibovitz on why the world of American podcasting is like North Korea:
Obviously, you should spend your weekend listening to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a brand new true-crime podcast from The Free Press, about the mysterious kidnapping that has perplexed America for more than 90 years. But we also asked the host, our senior editor Joe Nocera, for some recommendations—for when you’ve finished binging his show:
📺 Watch . . . Do you miss the HBO satire Silicon Valley, which ended in 2019 after six hilarious seasons? I do—or at least I did until The Audacity popped up last month on AMC+. It is also very funny, but where Silicon Valley had a kind of sweetness at its core, The Audacity’s humor is rooted in a deep cynicism about the people who get rich peddling technology that both addicts us and strips us of our privacy. “Where’s our parade?” asks one of the show’s self-pitying billionaires. “All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.” It’s the perfect show for us pitchfork carriers.
🎵Listen . . . The Portuguese word for mandolin is bandolim—and the greatest bandolim player in the world is a 50-year-old Brazilian musician and composer named Hamilton de Holanda. His trio’s latest album, Nova, came out earlier this week and it is a wonder: infectious, joyous, combining Brazilian rhythms with jazz-tinged improvisations. On one track, he plays with Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s sitar-playing daughter. Also: If you live in New York, Holanda will be playing June 12 and 13 with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Not to be missed.
🎾 Sports . . . For the next two weeks, you can roll out of bed, make a cup of coffee, turn on the TV, and watch . . . tennis! The French Open starts Sunday, and I can hardly wait. Because it is played on red clay—the slowest tennis surface—it is easy to follow the ball on TV (unlike Wimbledon). And the rallies are often long and taxing, requiring a well-rounded game (again, unlike Wimbledon). Jannik Sinner, the world’s No. 1, who hasn’t lost a match since mid-February, is the favorite of course. But keep an eye out for Michael Zheng, who just graduated from Columbia University. He won his first-round match at the Australian Open, and he’s looking to better that in Paris.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
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