Supported By The Northern Trust Institute

Below, you'll find a note from our editors about The Information Weekend, a brand new section exclusively for subscribers. To celebrate today's launch, you can save 50% on an annual subscription to The Information, which gives you unlimited access to our reporting and analysis, org charts, events, newsletters and more. Subscribe here to get $200 off.

How does Silicon Valley relax on the weekend?

It is a simple question—and, upon a little introspection, a perplexing one. How does the most casual culture on the planet unwind? How do you dress down when you never dress up?

What distinguishes life outside the office when your office is your living room, you take meetings from your Peloton and you try to teach your kids how to use Roblox while you’re on a Zoom?

For many of us, it often feels like the weekend doesn’t even exist.

Yet the weekend still serves a purpose. It is a time to think about how we spend our time. To exhale out the stress of our weekday jobs. To concentrate on things that are not mission critical. To stretch our muscles. To stoke our creativity. To absorb culture.

The truth is, we’re all living the tech lifestyle whether we realize it or not. And that lifestyle is changing fast.

At The Information, we know tech. For almost eight years, we have driven the agenda in business coverage of the technology industry. We’ve been the first to tell our subscribers about major new trends—from the rise of ride sharing to the arrival of the metaverse. And we’ve been the first to hold leaders accountable when they have failed to recognize the growing power and responsibility they hold over our businesses—and our lives.

And so, as tech’s impact becomes more pervasive by the day, we are expanding our lens, in our biggest editorial expansion since we launched.

With exclusive profiles and interviews, The Information Weekend will bring you inside the lives and minds of the new arbiters of culture and technology. We’ll shine a light on trends that are changing the way we live. We’ll recommend new products and services. We’ll be insanely practical. (We listen to our audiobooks at 2X, after all.) If there’s a book, movie, solar-heated coffee mug, or connected rowing machine you must know about, we’ll tell you first.

We’ve assembled an all-star team hailing from Vanity Fair, New York magazine, Town & Country, Wired and beyond to serve up this new section, which we are offering at no additional cost to subscribers. These award-winning journalists will be your navigators, with stylish and authoritative writing that will keep you reading from your first oat-milk latte of the day to that happy-hour cabernet from your boss’s Napa winery. It’s the quality of journalism you have come to expect from The Information, with a little more flair.

We also hope our new section—delivered via email, online and in The Information app every Friday—helps you find a little flow in your week. The pandemic has left us drained and exhausted from navigating work, life and the too-porous boundary between them.

We all need a place to log off.

Jessica Lessin, founder, The Information
Jon Steinberg, editor, The Information Weekend

The Big Read

Silicon Valley’s most optimistic man just bet $375 million on a nuclear energy moonshot. And launched a controversial cryptocurrency company called Worldcoin. And shipped a next-gen artificial intelligence tool for Microsoft. It's all in a day’s work for Altman, the former head of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI, who’s as excited about the future of technology as anyone you’ll meet—in spite of some major questions about how we’ll actually get there.

Social Studies

All Sam Williams wanted was to post some funny videos on the Internet co-starring his grandmother, Dame Judi Dench. But as his TikTok audience grew, so did the toxicity. Williams and other celebrity offspring are finding that TikTok isn’t the promised land of free expression they (briefly) thought it was—and some of them are beginning to back away from the app.

Market Research

Before he was TikTok-famous as Your Korean Dad, Nick Cho was specialty-coffee-famous as the founder of San Francisco’s Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. Which is why we asked him to assess tech’s newest caffeine obsession: highbrow instant coffees, including Jot, Juno, Swift Club, and the coolest java on the market (literally—its cryogenically frozen), Cometeer.

Decamped

Hitlist founder Gillian Morris had one too many brushes with street crime during her time in San Francisco. So she gave up the Bay Area startup life for a fresh start in Puerto Rico. Now her morning commute includes a dip in the Caribbean. And no, you won’t find her riding ATVs on the beach with Logan Paul.

A Message from The Northern Trust Institute

Balancing Private & Public Investments

With new private investment opportunities emerging across a range of asset classes, is now the time to reevaluate the role of private investments in your portfolio? A new report offers research-backed insights to weigh your options. Learn more here.

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