Bryan Vartabedian: Three Bottlenecks in Healthcare Delivery. Ah, we have come to the AI section of the link list. This one is about creating abundance in health care and all I could think of while reading the article was the Isaac Asimov quote from 1953: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.”
Adam Mastroianni: Infinite midwit. The titular midwit is your friendly neighborhood LLM, because Mastroianni shares my observations about the ChatGPT style of writing. As a semi-professional writer, he is more relieved that he won’t be out of work any time soon than frustrated that he keeps encountering dreck. Oh well.
Ruxandra Teslo: The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure. Teslo asks for more abundance. The Asimov quote a few bullet points up still stands, though it is only a matter of degree that is unknown: we know full well what kind of shenanigans releasing the brakes on early-stage trials would unleash. Again, letting China do it would be a sign of maturity.
Kyla Scanlon: The Ozempicization of the Economy. I don’t know which part of this hot-take smorgasbord I liked more: Scanlon’s digs at the “prediction” “markets”, her overview of “The Manosphere” (I watched the first 10 minutes of Theroux’s documentary and promptly turned it off as it was little different from watching the actual TikTok videos), or her observations on the most recent war. So, I will only re-quote one MG Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who per Scanlon tweeted (confusing em-dash spacing included):
We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let’s see if they can turn that into “actual fuel” at the pump —or maybe even print gas molecules!
Tee hee.
March 31, 2026
🍿 The Thin Man (1934) was fun to watch, even with the wooden acting from everyone but the lead characters. Nick and Nora inspired so many other murder mysteries and action comedies that a reboot is only a matter of time, and indeed Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt’s production companies were considering it. I imagine their functional alcoholism will play differently these days.
Ernie Smith for Tedium: Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?. For some this will be a costly read — and yet still worth it.
Chris Arnade: Japan: America’s Best Ally? Yelling “Takaichi!” while holding up both thumbs will be my go-to way for getting out of uncomfortable conversations.
🍿 21 Jump Street (2012) was fun, but its main effect was to make me want to rewatch Hot Fuzz.
March 28, 2026
🍿 The End of the Tour (2015) made David Foster Wallace less handsome — with apologies to Jason Segel — but also less neurotic and more comfortable to watch. For comparison, here is an interview with the real DFW done around the same time the movie portrays, which I dare you to watch without cringing. DFW was an introspection machine, to our benefit and his own detriment, the self-destructed proof that the unexamined life is more viable.
Jamie Dimon has long been a leader in the financial services industry, where his skill in assessing and managing risk has proven to be a defining feature of his career. As chairman of the board and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Dimon has employed a “fortress balance sheet” strategy in which financial strength and resilience are achieved through high liquidity, deep capital reserves, and low debt. The stability gained from this approach enabled Dimon’s firm to successfully weather the 2008 global financial crisis.
Whether JPMorgan Chase’s success in 2008 was due to Dimon’s “fortress balance sheet” strategy or a $25 billion bailout is for someone with more financial sophistication to say.
Dimon at the Gallery.
The quoted text is from the bottom right plaque.
Look, I don’t mind that Dimon is there. There is also a bust of John D. Rockefeller a floor above and by all accounts he was an infinitely more sinister character. Not to mention the parade of narcissists — honorable exceptions like 1 and 16 notwithstanding — at the American Presidents exhibit. But note the brazenness of portraying a champion of financialization in a positive light in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Is it a they-know-that-we-know-that-they-know situation or are people writing the text truly that clueless?
Which now makes me doubt every each and every one of those captions. Next thing you know they’ll commission Steven Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw to do his NPG portrait without mentioning in the text that they have been married for 30-plus years!
Scott Sumner: Paid subscriptions. His blog, “The Pursuit of Happiness”, will be mostly behind a paywall moving forward. Unfortunate but completely expected: the Monetize button on all these platforms is a Chekhov gun waiting to go off. Remember, that is why friends don’t let friends write on substack.
Harry Crane: Prediction Markets: Real Financial Assets or just Sports Betting? Clearly the latter, although Crane makes a valiant effort to portray them in a more positive light. Of course, the sole purpose of these markets is for various figures on the periphery of America’s current, shameful administration to convert some of that shame into more fungible assets.
Just shy of 100 small-format pages, On Skibidi was a pamphlet more than a book, and a worthwhile read for this geriatric millennial who somehow managed to raise a handful of generation alpha children without once resorting to Skibidi Toilet.
Walker built his meme-explainer career on Skibidi so of course he would read all sorts of things into it: any time he mentioned dialectics or some other high-falutin’ sociology term my eyes rolled so far back into my head I would catch a glimpse of my own retinas. But there is an undeniable attraction to the screen-within-a-screen format; I remember being confounded, as a six-year-old, by the movie theater scene from Annie. How on Earth did they film actors watching other actors, and was anybody filming us watching those actors who watch the actors… which I guess was my first introduction to mise en abyme even though I only found out about the term from Walker. Coupled with quick cuts and catchy music, it seemed infinitely more appealing than the umpteenth ASMR unboxing video.
But of course now it is me overexplaining things. As with Joe Rogan, and Taylor Swift, and any other winner in the winner-takes-all extremistan world of content creation and consumption, the most likely reason why Skibidi Toilet became so popular was simply because it was popular. And to learn more about that, Fooled by Randomness would be a better bet than On Skibidi.
