The Founder Building an Actual Unicorn. Plus . . .

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:

Jessica Lucas • Tech and Business The Founder Building an Actual Unicorn

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Joe Nocera • Two Drinks

Two Drinks with . . . San Francisco’s Knight in Shining Armor

Michael Moritz isn’t your typical San Francisco billionaire venture capitalist. “There are a lot of these people in financial services who think that because they’re wealthy, they’re smarter than other people,” he told Joe Nocera, while drinking tea. “I’ve never felt like that at all.” That’s why, this summer, he launched a competition that’ll give up to $50 million each to a few organizations with good ideas about improving his city; San Francisco, Moritz said, has been “hijacked by a small group of political extremists, who understood how to manipulate power to further their agenda.” He also explains why his new book, “Ausländer,” has people calling their elderly relatives to ask them, Can you tell me your life story? Read story ›

Elliot Ackerman • Things Worth Remembering

Heroes Still Walk Among Us

Two days before the 9/11 attacks, Elliot Ackerman was at college, sitting on the sofa in his apartment, watching HBO’s hit series “Band of Brothers,” in awe of the heroes it depicted. “I couldn’t imagine knowing a Winters or a Speirs—they seemed otherworldly,” he writes. But then he joined the U.S. Marines, spent eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and made friends with countless men like this. In today’s Things Worth Remembering, Elliot reflects on why “Band of Brothers” made him want to serve his country—”there wasn’t a hint of cynicism in the series or of equivocation about America’s role in the world”—which proved that “heroes still walk among us.” Read story ›

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.

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