| Welcome, Weekenders! |
| This edition of Weekend is especially exciting: It marks the debut of a new coverage area for us and the arrival to The Information of a talented reporter. |
| Sara Germano, a veteran of the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, has joined Weekend to helm The Arena, Weekend’s new franchise devoted to covering the business and future of sports—particularly women’s sports, a source of major growth and interest for the industry. |
| Great change is happening across sports, as you’ll see in Sara’s debut piece: She writes about the dramatic shift in how companies like Nike think about WNBA stars such as the New York Liberty’s Sabrina Ionescu. Her sneakers, the Sabrinas, are a megahit. “People aren’t wearing them just because they’re my shoes: People are wearing them because it’s a great basketball shoe,” Ionescu told Sara. |
| Many of the forces powering the tumult within sports are plenty recognizable. More and more, we’re seeing the worlds long covered by The Information intertwine with sports, and it’s increasingly clear that the tech and media elite will be the ones funding sports startups and buying teams in the years ahead. Those high-stakes games have only just begun, and Sara will be here to chronicle all the twists, turns and action to come.—Abram Brown, Weekend editor |
| Also in this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: A madcap frenzy of AI meets crypto |
| • Plus, our holiday viewing plans: Fate, actually; boardroom barbarians and a lovable fool; grievances and guffaws; and a visit by a droll troll. |
| |
| Away from all the commotion caused by Elon Musk on Capitol Hill this week was a much less noticed occurrence in Congress that I suspect is a real harbinger of things to come. |
| The NCAA president, Charlie Baker, was there to pressure legislators to create new rules around sports gambling. He’d like them to outlaw “prop bets” on college sports—micro-focused wagers on what happens in a game, like how many points a player will score. Baker thinks prop bets encourage fans to harass players, and he hopes a ban would help eliminate the league’s harassment problem. In fact, many college players have received death threats from bettors, he told Congress on Tuesday. |
| Sports betting is now legal in 38 states. Next year, Missouri will become the 39th state to legalize it. The industry has absolutely exploded in recent years, with mobile-based gaming companies like DraftKings helping to make it a $10 billion market. Sports gambling has become a cultural cornerstone; it can seem as ordinary to see a friend placing a DraftKings bet midgame as it would be to watch that person tweet about the match. |
| As this expansion has unfolded, the industry has enjoyed very little attention from Congress. The hearing with Baker was the first in the Senate about possible national regulations. |
| This situation has some parallels to what’s happened with cryptocurrency in the last several years—another market that gleefully kept growing with little government oversight until it couldn’t avoid regulators any longer. |
| When that happened, the crypto machers decided they wanted to take matters into their own hands. So they made a concerted push in the last election to install pro-crypto politicians in Washington and oust any anti-crypto ones. It’s perfectly plausible to see a future ahead where the sports betting industry and its rich, influential stakeholders try the same maneuver, and given sports gambling’s popularity, I can see how voters might respond to such a campaign. With both crypto and gambling, regulators would pose a threat to something that’s more than just another boring old industry: Both have become part of culture. |
| Would a Republican-led White House and a Republican-led Congress really introduce regulations to sports betting? Granted, the GOP is usually not very big on regulations. Then again, people like Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, are talking openly about new gambling laws after Tuesday’s hearing. “Maybe we need to start thinking about rules of the road,” he said, according to the New York Times. Otherwise, “it’s going to get worse.” Which is exactly what sports-gambling companies don’t want to hear.—A.B. |
| |
|
 |
|
| A few weeks ago, I sent Burt Helm, a BusinessWeek and Fast Company veteran, on a mission to the furthest reaches of the tech-verse—the frontier of the frontier, where AI and crypto are coming together. It’s a realm of mischievous bots, mecha-chickens and eager investors, including Marc Andreessen. |
| Not everyone is convinced this realm is full of promise. “Whenever you have two hypey areas, you’re going to have people who claim to be working at the intersection of both,” Ilya Kirnos, a general partner at SignalFire ventures, told Burt. “I just don’t believe any of this shit.” |
|
 |
|
| The debate within the apparel and sports industries about whether female basketball stars could front major products has died off. Now companies like Nike are concerned with just how many major players like Sabrina Ionescu they can quickly bring in to revive their sales, which underscores a broader change in the economic power of such stars, our Sara Germano reports. |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is ready for a nog-induced shutdown. You can reach him at abe@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
| |
 |
| Watching: A Fool and a Fortune |
| Ostensibly, “The Hudsucker Proxy” is about securities fraud, but because much of this early Coen brothers film takes place around New Year’s Eve, it has always felt like a holiday movie to me. |
| It begins with Hudsucker Industries, a large manufacturing corporation, reporting record profits as a year ends. (“We’re loaded,” gloats an executive in a board meeting full of cigar-chomping men.) In response, Hudsucker’s founder climbs onto the boardroom table, then wordlessly leaps through a window: He has nothing more in life to achieve. |
| Immediately, the board springs into action, led by ruthless executive Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman). Mussburger quickly reasons that the founder’s death means his Hudsucker shares will be made available to the public starting Jan. 1. Quelle horreur! Thanks to those record profits, the stock price is just too high for the board members to buy all the shares themselves. So Mussburger hatches a plan to tank the stock by temporarily installing the dumbest person he can find as president, allowing the board to gobble up their old boss’s stake. |
| For the plot, he finds a perfect patsy in the company mailroom: Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a new business school graduate from rural Indiana. (Barnes seals his fate when he shows Mussburger his big business idea: a simple drawing of a circle. “You know, for kids!” Barnes says to a bewildered Mussburger.) Once Barnes takes over, a fast-talking Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) comes knocking to investigate what’s going on.—Paris Martineau |
| Watching: Auld Lang Seinfield |
| I just can’t get into schmaltzy Christmas fare. But what I can celebrate is a Christmas tradition with a funny, sardonic edge: Yes, that’s why there is “a Festivus for the rest of us!” |
| In 1997, “Seinfeld” aired its now-immortal holiday episode, “The Strike,” commemorating the Costanza family’s made-up tradition: Festivus, which encourages celebrants to list all their disappointments from the year. |
| On the surface, Festivus is a dramatic pivot away from most aspects of modern Christmas: It rejects sentimentality and abhors consumerism. Peace and joy? Bah, humbug! Festivus revolves around pain and strife, with adherents participating in the “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength,” with an adult George Costanza wrestling his elderly father, Frank. |
| What makes the holiday (and the episode) work is that Festivus, like Christmas, is about emotional honesty and vulnerability—in this case, honesty about the annoying stuff in life. It’s not a realistic scenario for all of us every December, but neither is falling in love with the handsome tree farm owner on a snowy trip home for the holidays.—Sara Germano |
| Watching: A Different Rom-Com to Love |
| Sister-in-law suggesting “Love, Actually” for the 15th time this month? Make her a counteroffer for “About Time,” a far superior film by the same writer-director, Richard Curtis. |
| At a New Year’s Eve party, our delightful protagonist Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel back in time. At first, Tim uses his newfound superpower to iterate and optimize every moment—but eventually he realizes some things are better left to fate. |
| Despite the sci-fi premise, the film is deeply human—and perfectly captures the heartwrenching period of adulthood when people realize they must let go of the past in order to greet the future. Unless you’re a total Scrooge, I guarantee it will have you misty-eyed by the third act, swearing to appreciate every fleeting moment in life, even—no, especially—the time spent with annoying family, a welcome reminder at a time of year that leaves us all to put up with each other again.—Julia Black |
| Watching: Well-Aged Wisecracks |
| If someone remade 1942’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner” today, Sheridan Whiteside would almost certainly get updated as a very wonderful Twitter troll–cum-podcaster. |
| In the original, though, Whiteside (Monty Woolley) is an acid-tongued culture critic and radio host, a thinly veiled spoof of Alexander Woollcott, the caustic New Yorker writer. On a speaking tour across America, Whiteside stops to address a women’s society in a small Ohio town and slips on a patch of ice just as he reluctantly accepts an invite to supper with an upper-class family of “Midwestern barbarians” (Whiteside’s words, not mine). This delays his trip, forcing him and his doting secretary (Bette Davis at her most charming) to stay put there for the Christmas season. |
| Then as now, Christmas films in the ’40s really tended toward good cheer and sentimentality as sticky as figgy pudding. All of that hokum gets shoved into a roaring fire in this picture, and the wisecracks fly at a furious rate. |
| At one point, a handsome newspaper man (Richard Travis) talks his way into the parlor where Whiteside is convalescing and convinces the old boy to do an interview. |
| “How do you think Ohio women stack up?” asks the newspaper man. |
| “I’ve never gone for stacking up women,” replies Whiteside, “so I really can’t say.” |
| Woolley clearly had a grand time as Whiteside, and he must’ve particularly enjoyed such a line: Even in that era’s Hollywood, he had a reputation as an unrepentant homosexual.—A.B. |
| |
|
| Who needs sports gambling when we could have… |
 |
