🍿 Grizzly Man (2005) is peak Werner Herzog. What other filmmaker would voice over images of bears frolicking in a national park with:

“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.”

Roger Ebert had a very good review to which I have nothing to add.

First things first: The Pitt (2025) is miles better than two other era-defining medical shows, ER and House MD. The conceit — one hour per episode, one shift per season — makes for a more realistic pace. The case selection is good, if on the extreme end of any possible presentation. The medical staff personality types are spot on, ⊕ They are all good, but I would like to highlight the charge nurse and the neuro-atypical first-year resident as commonly encountered phenotypes that TV shows never seem to get right.if not quite representative of the variety of English accents one would hear during rounds. And the battle between administrators and clinicians hit all the right notes, even if having the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer hover over ER staff at all hours of the day would be considered atypical for the role.

Kudos are also due for the use of prosthetics, sometimes quite grizzly, with an abundance of open wounds and mangled extremities. With so much exposed tissue I wondered why no one was wearing a mask during procedures even while, in a mid-season episode, admonishing an anti-mask patient about their beliefs. But that is, of course, another conceit, otherwise we would never be able to tell who was saying what. A more believable move was to have one of the medical students ⊕ More kudos for making the two students smart, competent and lovable all at once.present for most of the cases, requiring everyone to explain what they were doing at an 8th grade level (our own 8th grader who was watching with us also appreciated this). Granted, the historical reminiscences and calling out different healthcare-related statistics were much less plausible: they reminded me of the most self-important parts of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that its then-arch rival 30 Rock so successfully parodied.

Admittedly, it is an unusual hospital. More than 20 ORs and so much house staff with only one attending physician during a day shift sounds… implausible. It does make for great tension-building, and it was no wonder that Noah Wiley’s character — spoiler alert — by the end of the season gets burnt out to a crisp. Another oddity is how competent and unflappable all of the staff were during — another spoiler — a major traumatic event that no one wanted to experience but everyone was prepared for. Color me skeptical that operations would have been that smooth.

Still. As fanciful as they were, ER and the less-remembered Chicago Hope were, to me at least and I suspect to many others of similar age, ⊕ The less I say about House MD the better. a large part of the draw of medicine. It is good to know that there is a half-decent show out there that may keep the flame going.

A rare day-job update: we have not one but two papers out in the journal Nature Medicine this morning. The first is clinical and the other biomarker data from the same randomized trial, both open access. The last big paper was more than two years ago, and the post-publication feeling hasn’t changed.

David Bowie was born January 8 and died on January 10, so today is a fine day to remember his genius:

Bowie: I think the Internet… I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cups of something exhilarating and terrifying.

Paxman: It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?

Bowie: No it’s not. No, it’s an alien life form.

That was in 1999, long before widespread broadband, Web 2.0, YouTube or the iPhone. Do watch the whole thing if you haven’t yet.

• Steven Johnson: Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians. A serialized account of the earliest, pre-historic civilizations, which will also come with its very own LLM chatbot? Sign me up! Johnson has been a subject matter expert for Google’s NotebookLM project since back when it was called Project Tailwind, so it is not a surprise that he is also its promoter. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• Joseph Epstein for The Free Press: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands. Although only mentioned in passing, any essay that highlights the idiocy of transcendetalists gets my recommendation. See also, and in much greater detail, Venkatesh Rao’s description of waldenponding.
• Joan Westenberg: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation. A well-made dig at Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk is also much appreciated, as is this exquisite critique of Joe Rogan and the entire marathon-length podcasting enterprise:

A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can’t fact-check something as easily when it’s buried in hour two of a podcast. You can’t easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

• Molly White: The year of technoligarchy. An account of the last five years in tech with a looks towards 2026, in which “[w]e’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.” Kyla Scanlon hit similar notes last month.
• John Nerst: 2025: The Final Final Year. Always good to see signs of life from a blog I thought was defunct. Nerst is close to publishing a book, “Competitive Sensemaking”, which is a topic he has covered in the blog since 2016 (!?) and one that has gotten ever-more relevant since then (see Westenberg, White and Scanlon above). So, I will gladly add Nerst’s book to the pile once it is out, and would happily preorder it, if only there were a way to do so.
• Nikita Prokopov: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. A beautifully illustrated case against the new MacOS visuals. Like I needed another reason to ditch Apple.

Apple in China was a difficult book to read. Not because of the prose — the words flow beautifully and the chronology is easy to follow — but because after each chapter I was questioning my relationship with Apple products and second-guessing my decision from 2012 ⊕ An interesting year, that one, as I had also decided to detach from Google; facebook account deletion came the following year. Two for three ain’t bad.to go all-in on their ecosystem.

The first issue is what they did: supporting, even enabling, of an autocratic regime that has no respect for personal freedom, privacy, or culture other than Xi’s. Whether they sleepwalked into it at first makes little difference. That Xi Jinping was a dictator-in-waiting was clear to some soon after he came to power in 2013, become even clearer in 2016 when he designated himself core leader and obvious even to the willfully blind in 2018 when he abolished term limits. That last step was seven years ago, and each year from 2013 to 2018 Apple was investing tens of billions of dollars into the economy.

The second is why they did it: to increase shareholder value. This is as far away from the 1984 athletes and the 1997 crazy ones as you can get. There was no reason why Apple products could not have been made around the world — per the book, Samsung has only a token presence in China, and manufactures its chips in Korea in the US. But at what cost? And with what margins? Profits seduced the company right into a quicksand trap. McGee and his interviewees have a difficult time imagining it escape.

The third, and most painful to read, was the how: by being ruthless in negotiating and relentless in what they demanded of their employees. It is a company of sharks that destroy their partners and chew up their employees in pursuit of engineering excellence higher margins. You do net get to a trillion dollar valuation by being a minnow.

I first heard of the book in May 2025, on The Talk Show. I would like to think that John Gruber was under its influence back in March when he wrote that something was rotten in the state of Cupertino. That article was about the false advertising of Apple “Intelligence”, but the rot started much earlier and is infinitely deeper. Warren Buffet was smart to have been selling, and I should get smart about detaching.

🏒 A high-scoring game from the Caps last night, yet again! Alex Ovechkin added two to his record, Justin Sourdif had a hat trick. Plus two penalty shots and more than a few brawls to make it the prototypical (if not typical) game of hockey.

With today’s Alphaville, I have never been more proud of paying for a (not cheap!) subscription. (ᔥJohn Gruber, who also provided some non-gift-link-requiring context)