Crypto News: Weekend Edition: ‘You should be more powerful’

Welcome to the weekend!

If you were hanging by a Wall Street water cooler yesterday, you might have heard rumblings of the "Mar-a-Lago Accord," a grand bargain in which Donald Trump could ease US debt by forcing foreign creditors to swap their Treasuries into long-term bonds. Will it happen? Probably not. But the speculation is gaining steam.

If you missed the water-cooler talk because you worked from home yesterday, well, Jamie Dimon has Thoughts. "Don't give me this s**t that work-from-home-Friday works," the JPMorgan CEO said during an internal town hall this week. "I call a lot of people on Fridays and there's not a go**amn person you can get a hold of."

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Cultural Consumption

Silicon Valley has never had a reputation for being particularly bookish — the pursuit of power tends to trump the pursuit of idle erudition. But today's tech luminaries seem to want to talk about nothing but books, as they debate different flavors of rationalism, economic policy, democracy and corporate rule. This fervor has yielded a recognizable "Silicon Valley canon," writes Henry Farrell, one that contextualizes DOGE's quest to cut the federal government down to size.

Weekend Essay

'You Should Be More Powerful'

Silicon Valley's reading list reveals its political ambitions.

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While US techies are celebrating The Sovereign Individual, Japan is pushing Jujutsu Kaisen. The manga series is just one example of the type of entertainment the country is doubling down on as part of its rebooted 'Cool Japan' initiative. Threatened by growing cultural cache in Korea and China — and by the rise of AI — Japan set a 2033 goal of quadrupling the content it sells in overseas markets annually. Now, writes Gearoid Reidy, it just needs policies to match.

Weekend Essay

Japan's Next Big Export: Its 'Cool'

The country is using anime and manga to boost its soft power.

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If a nation's global influence comes down to more than its currency, governance or military might, so too does a nation's sense of self. In war-torn Syria, writes Anissa Helou, culture is rooted in cuisine — as ancient as the country's history and as diverse as its ethnic and religious heterogeneity. That makes the food scene a useful barometer of how Syrians feel about themselves, and its recovery an important milestone in the journey to restoration.

Dispatch

Harvesting Hope in Postwar Syria

To gauge the country's recovery, look to its fabled food scene.

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Dispatches

Dubai
When cricket teams from India and Pakistan face off on Sunday, millions of people will tune in on TV. Not Navjot Sharma. The 41-year-old consultant from New Jersey flew across the world to watch the game in Dubai, which stepped in to host after India refused to send its team to Pakistan. It was a demonstration of the UAE's clout in a sport played by few Emiratis, and of the country's quest to become a global cricket hub.

Illustration: Isabella Cotier for Bloomberg

Bangalore
An indoor mini golf course. Relaxation zones with hammocks. A tunnel slide between floors. For Silicon Valley tech workers, such perks are routine. But this isn't a complex in Mountain View — it's Google's biggest campus yet in Bangalore, and a sign of the growing competition to lure tech talent amid a global AI boom. Perhaps in a nod to the company's ambitions in India, the new office is called Ananta, which is Sanskrit for infinite.

Illustration: Lee Kyutae for Bloomberg

Call to Arms

"Our geopolitical adversaries are ruled by individuals who are often closer to founders, in the sense Silicon Valley uses the term."

Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska

The Technological Republic

Karp and Zamiska hail from the C-suite of Palantir Technologies, which explains why their new book reads like an ad for the company. The Technological Republic contends that Silicon Valley should stop building consumer products and start applying its "ruthlessly pragmatic" engineering mindset to national issues — an argument that reviewer John Ganz describes as "deeply undemocratic and elitist."

What We're Reading

German Politics Are at a Breaking Point

Ukraine's Women Power Its Economy

BP's CEO Faces His Toughest Test Yet

Weekend Plans

What we're reading: Stuck. Atlantic writer Yoni Appelbaum argues that the US's golden age of mobility is over. But the book also ends up driving home the point that America has never made moving easy.

What we're reading next: World Eaters. Catherine Bracy writes that venture capital's "move fast and break things" ethos is a bug, not a feature, and lets VCs ignore societal problems.

What we're wearing: a wrap dress, just like a half-century of women before us. Four years after handing operations to a Chinese company, designer Diane von Furstenberg is reclaiming her brand.

What we're saving: gold. India's households own about 25,000 tons of the metal. In a country with little formal retirement support, gold serves as health insurance, social security and inheritance.

What we're buying: a "climate passport." To help meet the cost of moving 10,000 residents from low-lying homes, the remote Pacific Ocean nation of Nauru is selling citizenships for $140,500 and up.