• Kyla Scanlon: How to Get Rich in America. A tragedy in five parts. Part four in particular reminded me of my own travails.
• Protesilaos: About desire, authenticity, and moderation. No notes.
• Dorothy Bishop: Acceleration of the arms race between fraudsters and honest researchers. An authentic scientist against the world.
• Cory Doctorow: The actual epistemic crisis. Pairs nicely with the above.
• Ryan Cross for Endpoints News: Exclusive: Third death in China’s popular but opaque trials revealed, this time in CAR-T. Behind a paywall, but the title is comprehensive enough. It was for an in vivo CAR-T trial using circular RNA. Unsurprising.
• Adam Mastroianni: **I like ’em thick. No notes, again.
• Aidan Walker: shift, slop, chud: operating a vibe. Contains the sentence of the week:

The media class continued to read X like a thermometer offering data about the climate of opinion when it was actually a probe taking the rectal temperature of the internet’s loneliest men.

• Bruno Dias: The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier’s Pirates!. This brought me back, particularly since they used the 1993 Pirates! Gold for most (all?) of the screenshots.
• This brought me back as well: Drop Dead Fred, anyone?

OK, some of it is Apple’s agressive post-processing. But this was quite the double rainbow.

Part deux of the rainbow bonanza in Cherry Creek North this weekend. Our kids were making fun of my wife and me. “Dad, it’s just a rainbow, geez.”

Four and some decades and I don’t remember ever seeing something like this in Europe. Or the East coast for that matter.

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.

• 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; beating ourselves up over our imperfections in eliminating them is the road to madness.
• Hugh Rienhoff for the FT: Biotech VCs have become like bankers and we might all pay the price. With the above in mind, I think we can agree that financialization of drug development has brought asymmetric returns to the parties involved, and the closer you are to the actual science the further you are from the rewards. The bankers always win.
• Rahul Parikh and Jonathan Mates for Nautilus: The Trouble with Cancer Screening. There is a school of thought which views information as the ultimate good: the more you have the better. Here is a nice example of when that may not be the case. A pox on every doctor who sends out a screening PSA without first discussing it with their patient.

“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 social media. I hope this article is a sign his new book is coming along.
• Hollywood Gadfly (pseud.): “Can We Make the Villain a White Guy?” As much as I agree with the praise this pseudonymous gadfly heaps on The Wire and other Golden Age shows, I kind of disagree with the premise. There are in fact too few modern movies where there are clear-cut and unambiguous heroes and villains. Everyone has a dark side, and/or conflicting motives, and/or skeletons, etc. Even Saturday morning cartoons — or their 2020s equivalent on YouTube — have become too complex. Won’t somebody think of the children?
• Oliver Burkeman: Let’s stop talking about A.I. Oh how I wish we did. Burkeman too, but there he is, writing about it. D’oh.
• Ernie Smith: Vibe-Coded Flattery. About sloppy spam and some recent developments. Ted Gioia has also been getting email. I keep getting slop-ridden offers to host various academics with low to mid-tier publications on my Serbian-only podcast. What a time to be alive.

• 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 Dick? Oh yes it does, and now my impression got some confirmation bias from a professor at Johns Hopkins and … Dan Wang? This Dan Wang? My impression of him has declined even in the months after reading Breakneck — more on that some other time — but can’t argue with him here.
• Janan Ganesh for the FT: The exciting boring decade. On one hand yes, things are not as bad as we think. On the other, our physical senses are more calibrated to the rate of change than change itself so why not our internal senses too?
• J.R. Duren for the Independent: A terminal cancer drug was priced at $13,000 — but he found the same medication for $40 on Mark Cuban’s website. You mean to say that drug companies are, for the most part, pulling these prices out of thin air? I tend to agree.
• Dan Kagan Kans for New York magazine: He Was Right About AI. What About the Fate of Mankind? What the article says one Hans Moravec was right about back in 1988 was “the arrival on earth of human-level artificial intelligence in 40 years.” So I would clarify the headline to read that he may be right about AI in a couple of years, but LLMs are still closer to chess-playing algorithms than humans.