| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| •The Big Read: How YouTuber Mark Rober got inside the heads of Silicon Valley families. |
| • The Top 5: The best trails to use e-bikes to get out of your cars and smell Mother Nature. |
| • Plus: A new album from electronic artist Jamie xx; a Batman villain spreads his wings; and the origins of reality television. |
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| Just when you thought OpenAI had filled its quota of drama for the week, an executive at the artificial intelligence startup handed his proverbial beer to his teammates. On Friday, Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder, posted a 267-word farewell note on X to three senior OpenAI leaders who had announced their departures earlier in the week: Mira Murati, Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph. |
| As my colleagues wrote on Thursday, those departures were part of an extraordinary exodus of talent from OpenAI over the past year. As that story shows, current and former employees point to a number of factors that have contributed to the turnover, most of which boil down to the simple fact that it seems to be a real slog working at the hottest startup in AI. |
| Zaremba's take on the news of his three departing colleagues, though, showed him in a different frame of mind. "Their departures made me think about the hardships parents faced in the Middle Ages when 6 out of 8 children would die prematurely," he wrote. "Despite the profound loss, the parents had to accept it and find deep joy and satisfaction in the 2 who survived." |
| This was a puzzling metaphor, to put it mildly. For starters, Murati, McGrew and Zoph are not dead. Was Zaremba suggesting that OpenAI has an attrition rate—if not a literal fatality rate—of 75% for its leaders or employees? And should we add tuberculosis, plague and famine to the list of occupational hazards endured by the staff of OpenAI? |
| Zaremba's post got even weirder from there. He referred multiple times to the imperfections of OpenAI and said Sam Altman, its co-founder and CEO, "despite all his shortcomings and mistakes, has created an incredible organization." And then in sharing his favorite memories of his departing colleagues, he mentioned that McGrew once "reprimanded me for doing a Jacuzzi with a co-worker." |
| On one level, it's refreshing to see that OpenAI hasn't totally muzzled its executives with platitudinous, public relations–approved statements. Still, this is a company working on a technology that could one day pose significant safety risks for humanity, as AI worrywarts—including Altman himself—are constantly reminding us. Zaremba's post contributes to the never-ending soap opera at the company, which may be entertaining, but isn't exactly reassuring. |
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| Years ago, my kids and I used to love watching "MythBusters," a Discovery Channel series that ran between 2003 and 2016, in which the show's hosts set out to use scientific methods to validate or refute beliefs, rumors and goofy movie stunts and plot devices. While it was a wildly entertaining show, I'm not sure how educational it was. My children typically seemed most engaged when the show's theme was really gross—or when there were more explosions. |
| This week's Big Read about YouTube Mark Rober brought me back to those MythBuster days. Rober has shot to internet fame by similarly combining sugary forms of entertainment—pranks, pyrotechnics and humor—with somewhat scientific themes. And he's started parlaying his YouTube success into a startup that sells subscriptions to toy-building kits for kids aiming to encourage more fluency in STEM subjects. |
| Perhaps it's not a surprise that Rober has become especially popular among the families in Silicon Valley. That may be partly because he's a former Apple and NASA engineer himself. Still, even some of those parents seem a bit divided over whether their kids are learning about math and science by watching Rober, or just having fun. |
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| The irony of visiting national parks and other natural attractions is that you're very often stuck in your car for long passages of time as you schlep to trailheads and local towns, sometimes in rather nasty traffic jams. Until I read Todd Plummer's story this week, it hadn't really occurred to me that e-bikes could provide a welcome respite from some of that car time. Riding an e-bike obviously won't work for all travel destinations, though. Todd does a nice job of identifying places in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and other locations with e-bike–friendly trails and roads that can help you skip the traffic jams and feel more connected to nature. |
| Nick Wingfield, The Information's features editor, thinks you really ought to wear a helmet on your e-bike. You can reach him at nick@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
| thinks you should wear a helmet on your e-bike |
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| Listening: Soundtracks for Lonely Hedonists |
| I never used to be a fan of electronic music, which I always associated with the neon, Instagram-friendly aesthetics of a Coachella EDM set. Then the credits rolled on the 2022 social satire "Triangle of Sadness" with an absolutely iconic usage of Fred Again's "Marea (We've Lost Dancing)" and I stepped into a whole new world of interesting, melancholic London house and breakbeat music. My interest grew when the electronica-heavy soundtrack of HBO's "Industry," featuring artists like Jamie xx, helped bolster the show's glittery, depraved atmosphere. |
| Now Jamie xx has a new album, "In Waves," packed with songs that feature the artists Robyn, The Avalanches and Panda Bear. (If you don't know Jamie xx, you might remember him as one-third of the 2010s indie rock band The xx.) The LP is an upbeat ode to dance-floor abandon but maintains enough of a minor-key edge to keep it interesting. Bangers like "Baddy on the Floor" and the "Life" will keep the party going, while those looking for a headier trip will get lost in the existential spoken word of "Falling Together" or the xx reunion song "Waited All Night." |
| If you move fast, you can still catch Jamie xx at the Portola Music Festival in San Francisco tonight.—Julia Black |
| Watching: Best of the Bat |
| My appetite for all things Batman has never really been in question, but it's become a real time suck in recent weeks. In the last month, I've watched everything from a new animated series on Amazon and the 2022 film starring Robert Pattinson as flawed hero Bruce Wayne to "The Penguin," a new spinoff series on HBO Max. |
| "The Penguin" was the most enjoyable of those offerings by far. Colin Farrell dons an ungodly range of prosthetics to star as Oswald "Oz" Cobb (aka The Penguin), a hobbled, sneering mobster who decides it's finally his time to make a play at running Gotham's underground. The show, which airs every Thursday, picks up right where the last Batman reboot left off, but it drops some of the brooding emo vibes of the Pattinson flick—something always just felt a bit off with the latter's sweaty, "Matrix"-trilogy aesthetic. |
| I love the gritty crime-noir vibe of "The Penguin," and also its top-tier character development. Farrell absolutely crushes the titular role as he oscillates between moments of scheming and impetuous rage to showing a sensitive side as a physically and emotionally damaged mama's boy. Oz would rather be a mentor than a murderer to Victor Aguilar, an orphaned teen who tried to steal his plum-colored Maserati, but that doesn't stop him from repeatedly threatening to shoot the boy if he makes a single mistake. |
| There's also delicious tension—sexual and murderous—between Farrell's Oz and Cristin Milioti, who plays the recently deceased mob boss's daughter, Sofia Falcone. She just got out of Arkham Asylum after her own killing spree, and she seems keen on taking over the family biz. |
| The crime noir genre is becoming a bit of a specialty for Farrell after his turn in the Marlowesque Apple series "Sugar," and it wouldn't surprise me if this show's focused character study nets the cast some hardware during award season.—Josh Koehn |
| Reading: The Reality of reality |
| For much of my life, I scoffed at reality tv. I thought it was a trashy, vapid waste of time. Then one day, deep in the throes of the pandemic, I became fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes of some of the biggest unscripted shows on television. Behind every glossy episode of "The Bachelor" or "Love Is Blind" there is a team of Machiavellian producers, showrunners and story editors vying for power—and to shape the final edit—as they manage the cast of characters viewers eventually see onscreen. |
| Though these movers and shakers are arguably more influential than a show's cast, they're rarely mentioned in mainstream discussions of reality TV, which I've always thought was a shame. |
| That's why I was thrilled to read the latest book from New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum, "Cue the Sun!" (Penguin Random House) The hefty nonfiction work takes readers on a rollicking journey through the history of reality television—from the 1940s-era game show "Queen for a Day" to "The Apprentice"—told by the people who made it. (For the book, Nussbaum interviewed over 300 people who worked in the reality genre over seven decades, and it shows.) |
| It's a fast-paced, funny and fascinating read for reality TV junkies and skeptics alike.—Paris Martineau |
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| Not him too. |
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