Let the year-in-review season begin. First up is flying, courtesy of Flighty. Here’s hoping for fewer miles travelled in 2026!

• Gina Kolata for the NYT: Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated. Is the rise in cancer rates due to overdiagnosing tumors that would have been harmless or a true “epidemic” of deadly malignancies? The answer is “Yes”.
• Alex Telford: Going direct: notes on Eli Lilly at a trillion. Why has the valuation (if not true value) of Eli Lilly skyrocketed while the other big GLP-1 company, Novo Nordisk, is in turmoil? The answer is “tech company mimesis”. Girardian.
• Caasey Handmer: Energy Predictions 2025. What is the future of world energy production? The answer is — and this should not be a surprise — “soral”, but good luck to cloudy countries with a NIMBY attitude towards wind power.
• Ben Werdmuller: Why RSS matters? Because you would not be able to read this without it!

📺 It breaks my heart that Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building immediately descended into toilet humor and pointless self-parody. Five episodes in and we are out — life is too short to spend it on drivel.

• Vincent Rajkumar on X: I’ve been on this platform for 16 years. Here are some tips on how to be productive, and gain influence and credibility on X. Great advice for those attending the 2015 ASH Annual Meeting, but I am not so sure about their utility a decade later. Where is the hematology dark forest?
• Edward Zitron: The Era Of The Business Idiot. The more sociopathic of Taleb’s IYIs become executives; hilarity ensues.
• Cory Doctorow: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. An introduction to Doctorow’s new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Astute as ever.
• Chris Arnade: [Why are Americans Unhappy]. Arnade dismantles the $140,000 poverty line idiocy with a side jab at the abundance movement by repeating the insight he has each time he visits a seemingly poorer but more communal part of Europe:

So yes, Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do. When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard work will lead to success, and then your policy design ensures it doesn’t, people will end up both economically frustrated, as well as spiritually empty, sitting in their living room streaming the latest movie wondering what exactly is the point of life. Or, they will feel they have failed at the material, while also having little else to give them meaning.

It’s Caturday Night Fever (or lack thereof).

❄️ DC had its first snowfall today, which was so much earlier than usual that it surprised even some public school systems, which only had enough time to declare a 2-hour delay at most. DC Public Schools are operating on their regular schedule, because DC DOT can read the weather forecast and knows how to put salt on roads.

But it really wasn’t that early. We had November snow as recently as 2018 (November 15, 1.4 inches), so December 5 doesn’t even crack the the top 20. The earliest? October 10 1979, 0.3".

• Lily Lynch: How the US Stunted Europe. Short and to the point, no notes. Sufficient to make me re-subscribe to Lynch’s newsletter. She links to her review of Sanna Marin’s biography, which is also no-notes wonderful.
• Chris Person for Aftermath: Horses is Tame. I have never heard of the game Horses before or the controversy surrounding it, so I must assume that Valve, Epic and others who banned it for not sure what exactly have never heard of the Streisand effect. Well done, folks.
• Jim Olds: How Will You Know You’ve Succeeded?. I have panned this career research administrator’s first blog post, but this one was in fact enlightening. You have to keep the funders happy, even if they are an amorphous blob called “the American taxpayer”.
• Dr. Christine Corbett Moran: Scaling Career and Family: Systems Thinking, Public School, Home Enrichment. Advice on raising kids from a couple of scientists/engineers turned entrepreneurs. Useful, if a bit on the spectrum, and I even more thankful we had extensive family support when raising our kids, particularly early on.
• Nick Maggiulli: There is No Substitute for Thinking. What are students who use ChatGPT thinking, if they are thinking at all? Will they be writing texts like the ones above or post AI slop in their middle age? Time will tell.

Readers from Philadelphia or Philly-adjacent, please help me make sense of the place. From my limited time there, it seems to have fallen into the uncanny valley of American cities: has some history but it’s no Boston, some finance-looking people walking down the streets but it ain’t Manhattan, some tall buildings but not Chicago. Is the best thing about it that it’s a short and pleasant train ride away from both DC and NYC? Surely there’s more, but what is it?