Saloni Dattani: Every disease is a policy failure . A good overview of how far we’ve come in treating many diseases, but also a thoroughly depressing perspective and one that I can’t endorse. It’s like saying “poverty is a policy failure.” No. Poverty and disease are the default state of the human condition. We should celebrate and cherish each step away from them;…
This chart is a close relative to “you are not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.” Marginal Revolution comments, as usual, have it right; the actual chart title doesn’t.
“How can you not like Ted Lasso?” I asked my 9-year old daughter. “Because we’re not middle-aged people.” Fair.
Tom Peteet: Do You Speak Creatinine or Cystatin C? Some good advice for internists from an internist here. Peteet used to have a blog , but now of course there is a Substack page which is slowly transforming into a social media platform . I hate it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Book is a Book, not Disembodied Information . Here is another person who abandoned writing blog posts (and books!) for…
John Gruber: Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was, in Fact, a Correct Rejection . Count me among those unsurprised that a purveyor of slop — fine artisanal slop, but slop nevertheless — was not an upstanding citizen. I am surprised that Gruber’s bullshit detector wasn’t better calibrated. Henry Farrel and Dan Wang for the FT: Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K…
🍿 22 Jump Street (2014) was even better than its predecessor , with the best credit sequence in recent memory. I do hope they don’t skip medical school .
PSA: there is a word for “the day after tomorrow”. It’s overmorrow , and it’s almost 500 years old . Let’s bring it back! And “the day before yesterday” is ereyesterday , in case you were wondering.
Apple rejected an astronomy app from the iOS App Store because “it was astrology”. When the author appealed, Apple doubled down because “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Ridiculous, right? Well. The author in question is Terry Godier, and while I understand that he has gained quite the following in recent months, I am not a fan . He is unabashedly pro…
📺 Only Murders in the Building, Season 5 declined in quality by quite a bit near the middle, enough to have me stop watching . Good thing we are a family of completionistis, because the show picked up steam and pulled off one of the best endings of the run. I for one cannot wait to see the crew in London, schmoozing with all the British guest stars.
Adam Mastroianni: Incentives are for losers . With a reference to Dagon , a short story in which a man goes insane after seeing a weird fish. Mastroianni equates the fish to our unchecked and unquestioned assumptions which would fall apart after a bit of scrutiny but few of us are aware that it exists and even fewer dare examine it. I haven’t seen the fish as much as felt its slimy yet at…
🎙️ For all the complaints I had about ASCO’s oncology podcasts, I must admit not all professional societies are as bad. Hemetalks from ASH has much more fluid dialogue and more interesting topics. They even had a patient come in to talk about their experience going through a workup. Recommended!
Gita Jackson: I Am Here To Defend The Noble Action Movie From The Classicist Emily Wilson . Wilson being the most recent translator of the Odyssey and also the author of this takedown of Nolan’s movie, confusingly titled The Odyssey ⊕ [Note: One of these days I should ask a native speaker of English to explain to me, if they may, like I were a five-year-old, what rhyme or reason if any these…
If you have followed this blog long enough you will know that I am an unabashed fan of the life and work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pugilistic social media presence and all. There is no simple way to summarize why — this post from the economist Branko Milanović is as good of an attempt as any — and reducing his Incerto series of books to a collection of One-Neat-Tricks (Ergodicity! Lindy! Skin in…
🍿 Backrooms (2026) was the horror movie Wes Anderson would have made if he made horror movies and forgot everything he knew about plot. Fortunately, the plot was not the point — the physicality of the set and special effects more than make up for it.
I am shocked — shocked! — to find a zoomer “AI investor” caught swimming naked at the first turn of the tide: Aschenbrenner, who had no previous trading experience before starting the fund, worked for the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire before it collapsed in late 2022. He later joined OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before being fired over an…
🍿 The Dink (2026) was a goofy blast. I knew absolutely nothing about pickleball beforehand and know marginally more having seen the movie. It still seems kind of dumb — why don’t they just take up badminton? — and therefore the perfect centerpiece for a Dodgeball/Blades of Glory-style farce.
PSA: when making tiramisu from scratch, do not — I repeat, do not — use mascarpone from Whole Foods unless you are really into tiramisoup.
Venkatesh Rao: Cognitive Farmsteading . From the man who came up with premium mediocre (2017), the cozyweb (2019), and the Internet of beefs (2020) here is another tone-setting phrase. He spent the better part of this decade working on sloptraptions (guess who his co-author is there) so I lost interest, but this article is fully Rao in every sense, even if his preferences in AI use — discussed in…
Noelle Phillips for The Denver Post, my new weekend paper now that we are out of the Financial Times’ distribution zone: Colorado’s oil and gas regulators studied health problems tied to drilling. Critics ask: Why will nothing change? The headline does not scream riveting reading, so before you click here is a short story about our family’s recent journey that may put it in context. We…
Gillian Tett for the FT: Welcome to the era of financial candyfloss . ⊕ [Note: Gift link, if you click on time. ] It is the perfect metaphor for American finance: spinning thin and devalued real properties into mounds of tooth-decaying fluff. You know things are bad when it comes not from the Guardian but from a seasoned Financial Times columnist. Brett Murphy for USA Today: Rigged . ⊕ [Note: ᔥ…
Now that I am back in clinic full-time I have tried and failed to pick up on the more clinical podcasts. Both ASCO and ASH have their podcast series, but they are all so formal and scripted you can see the teleprompter scrolling in front of the speakers’ eyes. One potentially bright note could have been Cancer Stories , which are spoken versions of Journal of Clinical Oncology’s Art of…
Derek Lowe is scandalized by the fact that 9 out of 10 drugs that get to a first-in-human trial don’t get approval or, to use some jargon, a clinical failure rate (CFR) of 91% per year. He quotes a recent paper which followed CFR over the last six decades ⊕ [Note: Just to make things confusing, the paper itself calls this percentage “clinical attrition” but Lowe rebrands it to a…
Vinay Prasad asks whether health care is a human right and, using some convoluted mental gymnastics, answers no with a disturbingly LLM-like turn of phrase: Health care, as it is practiced in 2026 America, is not a human right. It’s a tax penalty on our ignorance and wishful thinking. This is bullshit, in the classical sense . Not to psychoanalyze Vinay ⊕ [Note: The house style over here at…
As described here : Use browsers not apps. Use Firefox or, if you are concerned about their recent turn , at least a Mozilla and not Chromium-based browser. Hit ctrl-alt-r for Reader mode (Cmd-alt-R on MacOS). ⊕ [Note: Per Doctorow: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You…
Craig Coben for the FT: SpaceX and the myth of independent Wall St research . On my first encounter with Wall Street analysts I also wondered what they were for. Here is Coben’s take: It is possible some retail investors may follow the research ratings, but in my experience the audience that matters most is the company itself. Management teams appreciate reports seeing their narrative…