Two middle-aged doctors, two grade schoolers, a teenager, an infant and a very loud cat: say hello to the Miljković family flying circus, coming to Denver this very evening.

• Tristan Manalac for Biospace: Amgen’s Tavneos troubles continue as NEJM retracts pivotal publication. First came FDA questions about data integrity. Now the academic authors are confirming the data tampering, though per the now retracted study they did “vouch for the completeness and accuracy of the data, the complete reporting of adverse events, and the adherence of the trial to the protocol. All the authors participated with the sponsor in the design of the trial, the analysis of the data, and the writing of the manuscript.” I wonder if people who sold this rotten pile of garbage to Amgen will offer a refund. So it goes…
• Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez for The NYT: This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade. “Dr. Adamala named her creation SpudCell, after its potato-like appearance. Rather than patent it, she and Dr. Endy are organizing a community of scientists to focus on making SpudCells more fully alive and adapting them to new kinds of experiments.” Bravo! Maybe science isn’t a complete lost cause.
• M Auerbach, MY Lim, GM Rodgers, and T DeLoughery for Sensible Medicine: When Normal Isn’t Normal: Non-anemic Iron Deficiency. A very academic group of authors makes a very good case for treating low iron levels in the absence of overt anemia. This is in response to an earlier text which poo-pooed the practice as “overmedicalizing normality”. Adam Cifu from Sensible Medicine proposes randomized controlled trials, though if symptoms of low iron are as diverse as restless leg syndrome, “brain fog” and craving for ice it would be a challenging endpoint to establish. Boy, isn’t medicine hard.
• Titotal (pseud): The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman ] Mathematical demonstration of why effective altruists are, at the end of the day, a bunch of bozos. And not just them: America is the land of hyperoptimizers and if Taleb’s Incerto wasn’t a convincing enough case for why that doesn’t end up well in the long run, well, here is a much shorter Substack post that shows one facet of the problem.
• Ed Conway: The Apple-Banana Paradox. On the incredible flattening of banana prices in the last 25 years, and the incoming threat of another fungal infection that could wipe out the current Cavendish banana monoculture. On the other, could this be an opening for a Honeycrisp of bananas? One can hope.

Stress-free moves don’t exist. But for less stress, get professional movers from a reputable company, if you can afford it. Yes, packing too. Especially packing.

Yes, we have started the move today, Day 1 of who knows how many.

• Max Kozlov for Nature: Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants. The plot to murder American science in the style of Rasputin (poisoned, shot, shot again) is well under way, and this is the slow-release poison. Choke off funding, dissuade people from thinking about federal funding, see the number of scientists drop for years to come.
• Vinay Prasad: Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jose Baselga. To be clear, there are many things wrong with American science and Prasad in his review of the book How To Rule the World presents some good examples, but you don’t treat a serious diagnosis by killing the patient.
• Andrew Gelman: Bayesian Workflow exists as a physical book! An example of what’s right in science. I will be ordering a copy.
• Ann Lee for the Guardian: ‘David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history. ⊕ [Note: ᔥBill Harris ] An oral history done the right way, about a genius person in a genius movie.
• Catherine Ruth Pakaluk for The NYT: Life Is Better With Siblings. Sure is — just ask Jennifer Connelly from The Labyrinth! Joking aside, this is a serious case for large families and one with which I largely agree, though the double-digit census of children in some of the families mentioned gave me pause. [Note: The old George Carlin bit about idiots and maniacs applies. ] Regardless, for most people the right number is greater than two, and for almost everyone it is certainly greater than zero.

🍿 The Sheep Detectives (2026) was so-so as a murder mystery but absolutely delightful as a family movie that’s bursting with color and character.

1. I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords.
2. No service to the NIH/Medical Center metro station for two whole months? Yikes! Those poor summer school students.
3. Micro.blog’s AI description correctly read the idiograms — see ALT text.

The last Wizards home game our family attended back in April was a disaster. We forgot to bring noise canceling earmuffs for the baby and spent most of the night in the dreary concession stand hallway. Guest Services were only able to provide foam plugs; not good for a five-month-old. This would not have been devastating if what was to be the highlight of the night — and at a Wizards game the highlight is not the game of basketball you can see on the court but rather the overpriced chicken tenders they sell to people who should know better, as the Capital One Arena is the only venue where our kids are permitted to eat junk — if that highlight was any good on our last night at the Arena. Alas, they came out 15 minutes late and still half-frozen, a breaded chicken sashimi. Oh, and after an embarrassing loss to the Miami Heat the Wizards sealed their status as the worst team of the worst conference of a league that has seen better days.

I am not saying that the Washington Wizards were the main reason we are leaving D.C. [Note: A fellow Serbian expat immigrant in DC told me that people back home thought that saying ‘DC’ is taken as being too high-falutin’ since everyone over there calls it Washington. Of course, over here Washington means the Hill and the Swamp and whatever you would call that thing on Pennsylvania Ave and 16th St, so I’ll stick to D.C. ] for Denver, but you know, it is also not not one of the reasons.

So I am happy to report that my last contact with the team was not that ill-fated last home game, but rather their draft party — free popcorn, cash bar — to celebrate the number one pick and choose the next season’s roster of Wizards Dancers.

Watching and voting for the dancers was delightful, particularly a few days after throwing out my back and not being able to even dream of doing one hundredth of the things they did on stage. The Wizards’ audience engagement is so much better than the actual game of basketball that it’s really not fair to these professionals that they earn a few orders of magnitude less money per year than the likes of Alex Sarr, the 2024 number 2 pick who gets north of $12M to get bullied under his own basket.

And then there was the pick. It was fine, I think, not being particularly invested in the outcome any more. I thought the front office made a very good move by trading for two injured low A-tier players (Trae Young, Anthony Davis) for next to nothing and expected the said office to trade them away once they recovered. Alas, no, they in fact intend to keep Trae Young and in that light the number 1 pick does not seem like the right choice as another suffering Wizards fan noted earlier today.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. There will always be a built-in audience for NBA games in DC, fair weather or no, making the Arena stands green when Celtics are in town and purple-gold when the Lakers are in. The dancers will be consistently good as the city seems to attract an unlimited supply of talent. Heck, the senior dancers — delightfully named Wizdom — go above and beyond and are wonderful to watch. Them I will miss. Those overpaid court clowns, not so much.

• Aidan Walker: Kilroy Was Here. About one of the oldest of memes, perhaps the first? Although wasn’t the first true meme — a captioned photo — Hang in there, Baby as noted in the Omnibus podcast some time ago.
• Dynomight (pseud): The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly exaggerated. From the same person who wrote persuasively about the relative benefits of acetaminophen over ibuprofen. For what its worth, I take around 5,000 units of vitamin D3 daily and barely get to the midrange of normal so the outlines studies were massively underdosing it.
• Ben Frumin for The Wirecutter: The $17 Duck Lamp That Won Over Wirecutter. Hey, this duck has won over our family as well — we’ve given it away as presents and have a few scattered around the house. The potato also looks good!
• xkcd: Sports Commentary. Sprts commentators haven’t just discovered p-hacking, they invented it!