| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Sports league startups bet on selfies and shape-shifting putting greens |
| * Power and Influence: The tech industrial complex gets ready to party over Trump |
| • Media and Entertainment: Apple’s most intriguing TV show |
| • Plus, our Recommendations—for deep-winter binges: A buffed-up Baldur’s Gate 3; the merry in Derry; a surreal swamp; and Baden-Baden–style bumps in the night |
| |
| The complete extent of the devastation wrought by the fires still encircling Los Angeles will take years to fully tally. Hopefully, though, local and federal authorities can move fast to develop new strategies for fighting such disasters, as well as ones to prevent fires from igniting. |
| One obvious move would be to throw some substantial government dollars at the increasing number of startups developing anti-wildfire technology. Clearly the infrastructure we have right now isn’t working—or isn’t enough—and these startups are underpinned by the type of disruptive thinking that might really make a difference. |
| There’s Pano AI, which makes wildfire detection software that relies on a network of high-definition cameras. “We launched in 2020—a few months before the sky turned blood red over San Francisco,” thanks to fires north of the city, Pano AI founder Sonia Kastner recalled this week. Pano aims to halt a fire before it surpasses 10 acres. “Every fire you contain at 10 acres is one you don’t have to deal with at 1,000 acres,” she said. (Pano’s tech can also monitor prescribed burns—a practice utilities and governments use to incinerate highly flammable shrubs and trees that could fuel unplanned fires.) |
| Pano is one of the biggest wildfire startups but far from the only one. Sonora, Calif.–based Kodama Systems has figured out how to rig together cameras, radar and lidar to create a semiautonomous vehicle that helps clear parts of forests that would fuel a fire. When Kodama founder Merritt Jenkins initially described his idea to forestry crews, he worried they would balk. “Instead, the reaction was, ‘You better hurry up,’” he said. |
| Yes, the future could be one with Kodama machines on the ground—while semiautonomous aircraft outfitted by Maxwell Brodie’s Alameda, Calif.–based startup, Rain Industries, fly overhead, dropping fire suppressant on more remote locations than fire crews can reach. Rain’s technology has already been put to work in helicopters; it wouldn’t work as well in drones because the smaller craft aren’t big enough to carry a meaningful amount of suppressant. “Drones are what you buy at Best Buy,” Brodie said. |
| Most wildfire startups launched less than five years ago. They’ve collectively raised over $100 million in venture capital, a figure that may seem small given that wildfires increasingly endanger more and more of the country. Fires have also been a problem for a long time in the literal backyard of the venture capital community. So why hasn’t more money flowed to these startups? “Their typical customers are customers that VCs shy away from: utilities, insurers and governments—customers that are often considered slow moving and hard to sell to,” explained Jay Ribakove, a partner at Convective Capital, a climate-focused VC shop that has backed many of these startups. |
| For now, they are looking for what amounts to a SpaceX moment, Ribakove said. They’re waiting for the government to wise up and then shake up how it has done things in the past—just as it has done by embracing private space companies like SpaceX. When that happens, more venture capital will flow. |
| In November, Convective got together a group of these startups to do what every industry should when it wants to cajole Uncle Sam: They formed an official lobbying group, the Association of FireTech Innovation. “I hope Elon Musk is reading this,” said Kastner, the Pano AI founder. “Because now there are members of the new administration who know the power of technology.”—Abram Brown |
| Cybertrucks Ho! |
| Whether Elon Musk helps get more government funding to startups like Kastner’s obviously remains to be seen. But the world’s richest person has already had at least a small role in fighting the LA fires. |
| Earlier in the week, a convoy of Cybertruck-owning startup founders in Los Angeles got together on Twitter—with Musk lending a modicum of support through retweets and likes of their organizing—and set out the next day to deliver supplies they picked up at Costco to relief efforts. They brought along their Starlink terminals, too, so stranded Californians could access high-speed internet. |
| “Tesla weirdos like us have everything from Tesla: We all had Starlinks, and we all had Cybertrucks,” said Farbood Nivi, founder of Coinmine, a crypto-mining startup. (Yes, strictly speaking Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, not Tesla, but they’re certainly all Musk companies.) “So we just put the Starlinks in the back of the trucks and plugged it in.” |
| What was striking to me about this expedition wasn’t its size or the dollar value of the relief supplies it toted around. It’s that it coalesced together simply out of a mutual interest—shared adoration, really—for Musk, who has tweeted frequently about the fire, and for his products. It’s such a clear reflection of his unprecedented reach beyond American business into the American psyche.—A.B. |
| |
|
 |
|
| The sports world has some unwritten rules. Quarterbacks are de facto MVP favorites. The eleventh hole at Augusta, Ga., is a toughie. The New York Yankees still win more than they deserve to. The Buffalo Bills lose more than they should. |
| Here’s another: It’s damn difficult to do a sports league startup. But we’re in the middle of a boom period, and a pair of them has sprung to life within days of each other: Unrivaled, a new professional women’s basketball league, and Tmrw’s Golf League, created by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. |
| Both Unrivaled and TGL have set themselves up as entertainment spectacles that can capture an audience in the social media age, our Sara Germano describes in the latest installment of The Arena, Weekend’s new franchise covering the business and future of sports. |
| The new leagues have a major difference, though. TGL has a chummy relationship with the golf establishment, while Unrivaled represents a painful point of disruption for basketball’s powers that be. |
|
 |
|
| “I’ve never in my entire life worn a tux on more than one night, so now I’m gonna have four nights of tuxes,” said JP Richardson, CEO of the crypto firm Exodus, who has plans to attend a dinner with President-elect Donald Trump at the National Building Museum on Sunday along with a slew of other events. |
| CEOs like Richardson have spent the past two months making steady pilgrimages to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, and now they’re headed to D.C. for a series of parties and events celebrating Trump’s inauguration on Monday. They’re using the opportunity to network and to further press their case for light regulation and increased government spending for industries like crypto, defense tech and nuclear energy. |
|
 |
|
| Yes, like many of you, I’m excited “Severance” is newly returned to Apple+. But I’d like to direct your attention to another Apple+ series: “Silo.” More so than “Severance,” I’d argue, “Silo” is a perfect illustration of Apple+’s streaming strategy: elevated genre fare that enjoys a devoted, niche fan base and receives regular renewals. (Also in this category are “For All Mankind,” “Foundation” and “Bad Monkey.”) That kind of thing was a basic tenet in Hollywood a decade ago, but post-strike budgets are tighter, and almost every other streaming service has far less patience than it used to. Not Apple, though! |
| “Silo” creator Graham Yost couldn’t have been happier when Weekend contributor Josh Duboff, a former Vanity Fair veteran, spoke to him practically hours after Apple publicly said “Silo” would get two more seasons. “We just want to do more,” said Yost. “The reality is, it’s a big show. It’s very complicated to do. We don’t have all the stage space in the world, and the cast is huge.” |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, would also like to find a weekend to go completely dark: Go on, Mitch McConnell, ban him, too! Reach him at abe@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
| |
 |
| Playing: Baldur’s Revolving Door |
| Ever since Baldur’s Gate 3 came out in mid-2023, the role-playing game based on Dungeons and Dragons has been beloved. I’d argue that’s even more true today. |
| Over the last year and a half, the game’s makers have rolled out a slew of updates and patches that further elevate what was already a top-tier storyline about a group of disparate adventurers forced to work together to rid themselves of a dangerous parasite. Each character has an intricate—and often deeply moving—backstory, complex motivations and a distinct sense of humor. |
| Baldur’s Gate 3 ostensibly concludes a trilogy, but it works brilliantly as a stand-alone narrative. I still have no idea what happened in Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2, and I’ve sunk well over 300 hours into this installment, partly because I appreciate its enormity. Characters you save—or slight—within the first few hours of the game will remember and act accordingly 50 hours of gameplay later. |
| Baldur’s Gate 3 will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It may even make you throw your controller at the wall when a Natural 1 gets rolled during a key moment!—Paris Martineau |
| Reading: Return to the Swamp |
| For a winter escape, I’m going someplace warm—someplace lush and muggy: Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” series. In October, VanderMeer released “Absolution,” the surprise prequel to a trilogy that fans assumed had reached its conclusion years ago. |
| The series’ first installment, “Annihilation,” which was adapted into a woefully inadequate Natalie Portman film from 2018, follows a biologist who signs up for an expedition to a swampy, region called Area X, hoping to learn why her husband returned from the unearthly place with no memories and a rare, terminal cancer. I loved the first book’s surreal intrigue, but frankly, the rest of the trilogy— “Authority” and “Acceptance”—left me with more questions than answers, an itch left unscratched. |
| That’s why I was thrilled to learn that VanderMeer’s new installment promised more insight into the origins of the Southern Reach, the shadowy government organization created to explore Area X. Better yet, the prequel gives me the perfect excuse to reread the whole series in chronological order.—Julia Black |
| Watching: Irish Eyes Are Crying-Laughing |
| “Derry Girls,” a laugh-a-minute British comedy about teens in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has some of TV’s sharpest lines. When a 98-year-old nun dies, a parishioner laments her passing: “Struck down in her prime,” he sighs. In another episode, neurotic Clare (Nicola Coughlan from “Bridgerton”) comes out to her bestie Erin (a superb Saoirse-Monica Jackson). Clare really just wants her friend’s acceptance, but Erica sees it as a romantic advance and rebuffs Clare. Clare laughs—as if she’d be interested in Erica! “Look at the state of yeh,” she says, giving Erin a derisive once-over. |
| The two-season show mostly depicts the girls navigating everyday life: school talent shows, family weddings, job hunts—all with a civil war in the background. The series steers through it all with commendable alacrity: Episodes run about 25 minutes each, making “Derry Girls” the type of lightning-fast binge and easily digestible diversion that’s perfect for freezing, gray afternoons when I’m between other programs. |
| “Derry Girls” is transportative in the best ways comfort television can be. It takes me off not only to Europe but also to my own days as a ’90s kid thanks to its lovely period-specific soundtrack that includes The Cranberries, Fatboy Slim and The Corrs. (Remember “Breathless”? You’re welcome.)—Sara Germano |
| Watching: Guten Morgen, Ghouls |
| More than any other season, winter confounds the senses, evaporating the boundaries of time: What’s really the difference between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. when they’re both equally dark? |
| “Dark” on Netflix has a similar destabilizing effect on a person’s equilibrium, though I promise it’s entirely worth it. The German-language show’s first season came in 2017—just as Netflix was adding a thermonuclear charge to its global expansion plans. The sci-fi show has plenty of creeps and missing kids, so when it initially debuted, it couldn’t escape some obvious parallels to Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” which was much more in the cultural conversation at that point. In retrospect, the similarities aren’t as stark as they first seemed: “Dark” is, well, darker than “Stranger Things”—with more of an A24 artiness to it than the Amblin sheen covering “Stranger Things.” |
| Across three seasons, “Dark” jumps madly through portals and across the narrative arcs of four families (or is it really more like two families?). As this happens, the characters from these clans confront the heaviest element in our universe—fate—and struggle to bend it to their will. Throughout, a very specifically German sense of dread seeps into the series’ rain-soaked foundation, a source of pride for the creators of “Dark.” |
| “I don’t know if it’s German angst, but there is something uniquely creepy about Germans, at least from the outside perspective,” one of the showrunners, Jantje Friese, said in 2017. “We are definitely delivering on that.”—A.B. |
| |
|
| Just out on a casual 26-miler today… |
 |
