Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera has two drinks with the man making San Francisco great again. The show that made former Marine Elliot Ackerman believe in heroes. Suzy Weiss on the end of Meghan Markle’s Montecito era. And much more!
But first: the founder who wants to make a literal unicorn . . .
In the middle of Texas, not far from Austin, you’ll find a scientist who wants to make you a fluorescent cat. She was planning on glowing rabbits, for a time, before the backlash got too intense. But her dreams won’t be dampened: One day soon, she wants to start experimenting to bioengineer some mythical creatures into reality. Imagine dragons flapping over Hill Country.
If these projects sound whimsical, they’re not the only ones Josie Zayner, CEO of The Embryo Corporation, has been cooking up. She’s also working on making a more robust kind of cow, which will be good for ranchers’ bottom lines. She’s sequencing—and making money from—some exceptionally speedy racehorses. And those fluorescent cats? They’ll also be hypoallergenic.
But cool as all this may sound, is it safe? After all, this is a company that was offering members of the public a “frog genetic engineering kit”—“you could inject in the frogs, and they would grow bigger,” explained Zayner. And, perhaps an even bigger question: Is what she’s doing ethical?
Reporter Jessica Lucas traveled to Texas to investigate. “Can the crazy bitch from the rural-poverty farm actually run a company with millions of dollars of investment?” asked Zayner, referring to none other than herself. “I guess we’ll find out!”
Don’t miss this glimpse into a new frontier of science—which isn’t getting as much attention as artificial intelligence, but could alter our reality just as significantly. Because although Zayner said she’s not interested in editing humans right now—because it would require too much bureaucracy—she’s playing with some kind of Promethean fire. Not that she sees it that way.
“I think the whole playing God thing is bullshit,” said Zayner. “Being a god is just being 100 years in the future.”
Read the full story here:
Second Thought
Is it okay for a 40-year-old to still be on her dad’s phone bill? For a 35-year-old to go on a mom-funded vacation? Millennials are infamous for relying on their parents’ credit cards—and some, like comedian Jared Freid, couldn’t be happier about it. “They can pay until the day they die,” Freid says in his new Netflix special, The Family Plan.
Freid joined Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot, on this week’s episode of Second Thought, to discuss his favorite generational beefs, plus the stories that have obsessed the internet this week: the deaths at Burning Man, Al Roker eating dog food on television, and Harry and Meghan’s sad return to England. “If you can’t make it in Montecito,” Suzy says, “you can’t make it anywhere.”
Click below to watch the video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. (And you can watch Jared’s special here.)
This week, we ran an excerpt from Lindsay Crouse’s new book on knowing when to quit; an essay by Nick Clairmont about why he rereads the newspapers from September 12, 2001, every year; and a review by Kat Rosenfield of a book containing a story so bizarre, its author was terrified someone else might tell it first . . .
Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!
A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a schoolteacher in Boston aspiring to drink more; a Rollerblading Christian in North Carolina; or a man in Virginia with a bichon frise named Cosmo. 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, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.
How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked Joe Nocera for his recommendations . . .
📚Read . . . If you’re still hungering for some tennis after the U.S. Open ends this weekend, pick up a copy of Matthew Futterman’s new book, The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis. For more than a decade, Futterman has been writing about the sport for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and now The Athletic. He knows all the players and their coaches, and they all know him, so they tell him things. Novak Djokovic on what it felt like to go from villain to hero. Madison Keys on making her husband her coach. Naomi Osaka’s fears about playing again after having a child. I gulped it down in two sittings. You will too.
🍷 Drink . . . Zinfandel is surely the most underrated of American wines, but I’ve always been a fan, especially once I discovered the Ridge Vineyards years ago. Its Lytton Springs red zinfandel ($56) was ranked third in Wine Spectator’s list of the top 100 wines of 2025. But the one I gravitate to is its Three Valleys zin, which you can get for as little as $25. It’s the perfect red wine, neither as subtle as a French Bordeaux or as insanely bold as some American cabernets. Also: Its vineyards are atop the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Silicon Valley. Many years ago, so it is said, Steve Jobs looked down from that spot and said, “I made this.”
📧Subscribe . . . There are thousands of people writing Substacks, but to my mind, there is one Substacker who stands above the rest: Ted Gioia. He describes his Substack, The Honest Broker, as “a trustworthy guide to music, books, arts, media & culture,” and in my experience, that’s exactly what it is. Gioia regularly posts lists of new music he has discovered, or new YouTube videos worth watching—and they’re always a revelation. He is also a fierce critic of Amazon, Spotify, and any other technology that diminishes the ability to lead a purely human life. He writes in plain, unadorned English and isn’t trying to show off, unlike certain other Substackers. To put it another way, Gioia is as authentic as they come.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
“In the middle of Texas, not far from Austin, you’ll find a scientist who wants to make you a fluorescent cat.”
I have a PhD BioGenetics cousin in Austin, Texas. I have been asking him for twenty years to make me a bunny that glowed under a black light. He decided to go to law school instead. I’ve struggled to forgive him.
I need this Ms. Zayner’s email address!!
A city without families and children can't be easily "fixed".
SF for years has had more pets than children. Last year they recorded 7,000 human babies and registered 7,100 dogs.
With a 23% gay voting population, the city has regularly enacted anti-family legislation.
In 2014, SF stopped offering Algebra 1 in eighth grade for everyone, because of high failure rates among black and latino students. Unfortunately, dumbing down the curriculum didn't improve the math aptitude of those underperforming minorities, though it probably did drive high performing whites and Asians out of the district or to private schools.
In 2020, the city changed the elite Lowell school's selective entrance exams to a lottery, to bring in more diversity. After two years of high failure and dropout rates among under qualified students, a court fight restored the selective system.
In March, 2026, the voters repealed the ban on algebra, beginning in the 2026-27 school year. Yay, I guess.
The recent D.A. appears to care about locking up violent offenders. That's a start.
So maybe the city is taking baby steps to at least slightly correct course. It remains a highly liberal, overly costly, uni-party area in an overly costly, uni-party state. I don't see SF or California returning to its glory years of the 1950s any time soon.