Damian Pickett · No. 31
Sunday 4 October 2026
F1’s Bahrain Grand Prix, raced in Malaysia, and the Patriots’ away game at Buffalo both kick off later today.
Apple says a small number of iPhone 18 Pro Max units on AT&T’s network lose cellular service and must be physically replaced, not fixed by a software update.
Max Verstappen out-qualified Lewis Hamilton at Sepang for Red Bull’s first pole of the season, a rare bright spot in a difficult year. The Bahrain Grand Prix, held in Malaysia, starts tonight.
Simon Willison argues that AI and other usage-billed products need hard spending caps by default, not just alerts, after seeing people rack up surprise bills with no warning.
Read · Lenny's Newsletter
Lessons from Pinterest, Netflix, Tinder, Dropbox, DoorDash, Robinhood, Amazon, WhatsApp, and dozens of today’s most successful consumer businesses
A craft-your-pitch guide drawn from Pinterest, Dropbox and DoorDash, useful for a product marketer who finds the story inside a launch.
Listen · Founders
Brad Jacobs has built multiple billion-dollar companies from scratch, the kind of operator study Damian studies alongside Jobs and Disney.
Listen · David Senra
A builder’s account of AppLovin, useful listening for someone who ships his own software products on the side.
Listen · Acquired
A deep dive on building a sports league into a business, relevant on a Sunday with F1 and the Patriots both live.
Amazon Web Services pushed back on criticism of its data centre practices, saying it has dropped non-disclosure agreements that limited what nearby communities could say about facilities.
David Robinson left OpenAI’s safety team warning that its culture undermines its own safety commitments, the latest in a run of departures from AI labs’ safety teams this year.
A widget called Dynamic Lyrics brings synced song lyrics to Apple CarPlay, turning any drive into an impromptu karaoke session.
New Zealand’s Vessev has built an electric hydrofoil ferry designed to lift above the water, cutting fuel use and noise on short sea crossings.
Neko Health, the full-body scanning startup backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, has launched in the US, betting that preventative health screening can go mainstream.
A long-time Apple Watch holdout explains why the Series 12’s upgrades were enough to retire a Series 10 bought only in January.
HEVCut is a small iPhone app that shrinks photo library size by re-encoding video clips, without deleting a single memory.
Apple TV is streaming the Bahrain Grand Prix, raced in Malaysia, free and without a subscription for US viewers this weekend.
Tom McCarthy’s NYFF premiere, starring Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan and John Turturro, dramatises a 1980 conference on the climate crisis; critics say the cast elevates otherwise talky material.
Tony Gilroy’s New York Film Festival premiere ‘Behemoth!’ used nine different composers for its score, a rare approach Variety breaks down track by track.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ‘Digger’, starring Tom Cruise, opened to less than $10 million, on course for one of Cruise’s weakest openings in nearly two decades.
Denver Film Festival will open with Peter Farrelly’s ‘I Play Rocky’ and close with James Gray’s ‘Paper Tiger’, while honouring Carrie Coon and John Cho among others.
The French drama, which premiered in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, won the Golden Eye, the top prize at the 22nd Zurich Film Festival.
The Celtics’ reputation for developing shooters continues, with one player singled out as the programme’s standout example this off-season.
New England has elevated safety Mike Brown and cornerback Kindle Vildor from the practice squad, adding depth to a thin secondary for Sunday’s game at Buffalo.
Rookie cornerback Channing Canada has been ruled out for Sunday’s game against the Bills, the third active-roster Patriot to miss the trip to Orchard Park.
New England’s defence is bracing for Josh Allen’s improvisation after the snap, not just his arm, ahead of Sunday’s AFC East clash at Buffalo.
Hamilton says his front-row qualifying lap at Sepang, alongside pole-sitter Verstappen, was the best of his season so far for Ferrari.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admits a new aerodynamic package meant to add pace instead left the car slower and draggier through Malaysia’s low-speed corners.
Formula1.com’s race-day preview flags Verstappen and Hamilton’s front row, Mercedes’ troubled upgrade, and the first wet-weather threat of the regulation era.
Mickey Gasper had surgery to repair a torn distal biceps tendon shortly after Boston’s elimination from the playoffs.
Boston’s bats went quiet when the Yankees eliminated them, and fixing the lineup will mean hard decisions about last winter’s signings, not just new additions.
Architecture studio INC designed every room at New York’s 529-key Kimpton Era hotel, overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, to feel like a stateroom on a classic ocean liner.
