Hi, welcome to your Weekend!

E.B. Boyd has been covering tech for most of this century, but back during the first dot-com boom, Liza (as her friends call her) worked on product teams at Intuit and a now-defunct startup. She remembers feeling excited about the amazing innovation taking place, but also like a stranger in a strange land.

In reporting this week’s cover story for The Information Weekend, Liza found that her experiences were common among rising women in tech. To get ahead, women were expected to become “one of the guys,” and the gestalt of Web 1.0-era books like “Good to Great” (2001), “Built to Last” (1994), and “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (1997) reflected that ethos.

By writing a new kind of management memoir, the female executives who Liza interviews for her story uniformly decided to throw off the shackles of expectation and simply write as themselves. “It was amazing how energized everyone feels to be able to talk this way,” she says. “To be able to say, ‘I have something to say. And I’m going to say it in my own voice.’”

Liza’s story, and theirs, is worth a read.

Tech’s Most Powerful Stories Are Being Written By Women

In 2008, Julie Zhou, a 25-year-old battlefield-appointed manager at Facebook, scoured bookshelves for information that might help her at her new job. She quickly found that all the titles were written by male executives whose experiences bore little resemblance to her own. So, she wrote her own. Zhou is just one of the managers-turned-authors who are replacing the chest-thumping memoir with personal accounts centered around candor, vulnerability, uncertainty and compassion.

‘Tesla Is Not As Cool As It Used to Be’

It used to be that, if a discerning tech worker wanted to buy an electric car, there was only one choice: Tesla. Now, however, new competition—plus changing impressions about the company’s controversial CEO—is turning Silicon Valley away from the company. Says Carter Gibson, a San Francisco–based project manager at Google, on why he's not buying a Tesla: “The number one reason is that I don’t like Elon as a person,” And Gibson’s far from alone.

How to Gift Someone a Last-Second NFT in Six (Somewhat) Simple Steps

It’s one week until Christmas, and time to face the music: The non-fungible token is the gift of the season. It’s endlessly customizable, doesn’t require shipping, and is completely unaffected by the supply chain. Here, a step-by-step guide to picking, purchasing and gifting an NFT, suitable for crypto novices and old hands, alike.

Can I Let One Kid Play Violent Video Games and Not the Other?

In this week’s Parentverse advice column, Emily Dreyfuss tackles the age-old question of raising differently aged siblings, well, differently. Dreyfuss advises reader Caroline Day that she can and must set different rules for her sons according to their needs, no matter how much the younger boy really wants to play Grand Theft Auto.

The Endorsement

Reporter Annie Goldsmith on Leggings with Crystals:
At the onset of the pandemic, many an influencer began looking to crystals for their “healing” powers—so much so that The Washington Post felt obligated to run a story entitled, “Crystals and covid: Science says popular rocks don’t heal.” I, a skeptic of all things woo-woo, never participated in the trend. So, when I came across Geyed, an activewear brand that markets both leggings and crystals, my first thought was, “What in the Goop is this?” But curiosity prevailed. A few days later, the “Protect Leggings” arrived at my apartment. The pants come in two blue shades, Third Eye and Throat, and one black. (I chose the latter). Each pair comes with a Red Jasper crystal that offers “renewed stability and empowerment” and “serves as a reminder to maintain perspective and value your worth.” Purchasers are advised to “place red jasper inside the [pants’] crystal pocket to create stimulation and connection between the crystal’s energy and the root chakra.” I’m not sure where my root chakra is, but I placed the small red stone in the pocket just below my belly button. Then, I went about my day. I worked, ran errands, and asked my editor to send me a stressful Slack (he obliged with, “Annie, we need to talk”). I will admit, they weren't a panacea. But, there is something about having a little crystal in your pants that reminds you to remain calm, breathe a little deeper and be a little more present. Perhaps it was a placebo, but, little by little, I felt a bit more grounded. And, it doesn’t hurt that—crystal or not—the leggings are pretty cute.

Listening: An exhaustive look at the year in TikTok music.
So, what are the kids listening to these days? Sea shanties, yes, but also experimental hip-hop, the singing synthesis software Vocaloid, and CupcakKe’s explicit song, “Vagina.” Pitchfork’s “The Year in Music on TikTok 2021” is a must-read for any youth culture connoisseur, capturing the full spectrum of viral sounds that originated on the app and migrated into the mainstream.

Noticing: Greylock Partners’ holiday gift boxes.
Two weeks ago, we explored the absurdist, lavish ecosystem of the Silicon Valley holiday gifting arms race. Now, there’s another elite gift box to add to the list. VC firm Greylock Partners just sent out about a dozen of their “favorite things” to a lucky group of portfolio companies. These included a Greylock-branded pickleball set (the trendiest sport right now—court not included), a Grosche espresso maker, and Ecuadorian writer-mediator Yung Pueblo’s book of poetry. The complexity of the basket, though, is perhaps not everyone’s cup of… espresso. As reads one tweet, “in my day, investors just wrote checks.”

Reading: You can now be underdressed on the internet
At Meta’s Connect 2021 conference, the world watched (in horror?) as Mark Zuckerberg flipped through whimsical outfits for his immortal digital clone. One day, he mused, everyone will have a closet packed with “virtual clothes for different occasions.” While that sounded a bit like a threat coming from Mr. Grey Hoodie, CNN’s Jacqui Palumbo describes how fashion brands are out to prove that metaverse couture is a good thing. Proponents argue the virtual self expression will actually carry over into the physical world. It also promises to be very lucrative for brands, who won’t have to spend money on pesky things like fabrics or manufacturing.

Makes You Think

Have we reached Peak NFT yet? Because you can’t spell “Melania” without “Mania.”

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading!

—Jon

Weekend Editor, The Information