Meaningful innovation in men’s shoes doesn’t come around often, but what Sketchers has done with their hands-free Swift Fit is a miracle — and one you can get for $35 at Costco. Dads everywhere salute you.

• Derek Sivers meets 30 people in Istanbul. One of them is a dear friend of mine.
• After a long break, Kyla Scanlon has a new book-length post out, about the American economy. There is a bone-chilling graph tucked in the middle of Part 4. It ends on a hopeful note. It’s good.
• Ted Gioia recommends seven Philip K. Dick novels.
• A ridiculously detailed history of Lemmings, the game.
• Surgeons behaving badly.
• Ada Palmer has a podcast.
• I miss The Elder Scrolls. Apparently, the new one is in production but not out until 2028 at the earliest. I predict the bubble bursting before release, and the odds of the game ever being available pretty much a coin flip. Get bought by Microsoft, die by Microsoft.

📚 Finished reading: The End of Everything: A Novel by M. John Harrison. An anti-narrative which resembles the best parts of Harrison’s short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. Similar themes to Sunken Land…, only more comedic than Lovecraftian. And, to my amazement, on the Booker Prize shortlist for this year. Read it if you can.

Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, ⊕ [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is a testatemnt to how good it was that I finished it. More than that: I am eager to read it again.

Re-reading is necessary to make more sense of the whirlwind of names, dates and events that are just too darn similar, even with Palmer’s attempts to give them cute and memorable nicknames. I know there was a Battle Pope, and a Battle Pope 2, and a very very very (…) bad Pope, but would I be able to tell you their actual names and origin stories?

Fortunately, the thickest, middle part of the book — a bit of a slog, going through biographies of 15 people, some of whom I was already familiar with, most of them new — was there mostly to make the ending more understandable, even if you weren’t on a first-name basis with the protagonists. And the ending is a breezy 200 pages that could have been a book of its own, about virtue, politics, virtue politics, great forces, great people, progress, “progress”, and plagues ancient and modern.

Less fortunately for me, this is the kind of book that makes you want to read many more. The recommended reading list looks absolutely delicious, never mind that I am now watching out for a good translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. Ars longa…

A return to form from Vinay Prasad with two short and sweet articles on AI in oncology:

• Terrence Tao does not understand cancer medicine
• Can AI ‘hack’ a cancer clinical trial

If mathematicians want to complain that computers are replacing them, they should seek the comfort of chess Masters complaining that they have been bested. But they should not look for comfort from doctors. We would do anything to help our patients. We would do anything to extend survival. We already do things on a wish and a prayer and a mechanism of action and a hint of bioplausibility.

True.

As heard at the NIH IRB retreat, which I sadly had to miss:

“For the incredible gift of looking at the most chaotic study designs and effortlessly deciphering their hidden meaning, this goes to Milos Miljkovic!”

Not into sharing accolades here, but I’m super-proud of this one.

🍿 The Running Man (2025) was:

1. Better than the 1987 Schwarzenegger version. Not a high bar.
2. More enjoyable than Edgar Wright’s other post-Cornetto trilogy movie, which was still quite good.
3. A satire as likely to be misunderstood by the average American movie critic as Verhoven’s Starship Troopers, and glancing at some of the reviews about the implausibility of its dystopian world, yep, they did not disappoint.
4. Easily dismissed as yet another eat-the-rich movie, but as Wright has a gift of peering into the near future — his Brexit-coded “The World’s End” came out in 2013 — if I were rich I would be a tad more worried about this one than something like Triangle of Sadness.
5. The kids loved it: “If it weren’t a matter of life and death it would be great to see a show like that on TV!” Yikes.

A few days ago I wrote about a decade-old medical experience with parallels to modern tech. Today I have a recent story from home with parallels to medicine.

We have an indor fountain in our fancy new home, ⊕ [Note: The story of how we ended up in a house some two levels of fancifullness above our needs and wants deserves a separate post, maybe a whole series of posts. ] a thin slab of rock over which water runs in a smooth sheeth.

Problem one: when the water tank is full the fountain is nearly silent. In the dry Colorado air, it is full for a day or two at most, after which it becomes an increasingly annoying drip-drip-dripapalooza.

Problem two: you can’t fill a fountain with plain tap water, unless you want to clog the pipes with sediment. No, you need it to be deionized, at least aquarium-grade, preferably distilled.

Problem three: the only place that will refill a 3 gallon bottle of deinozed water near us is Whole Foods, which during my time in the US went from the third great Wonder of Capitalism (Costco being number one, TJ’s number two) to a soul-sucking dump. I was not about to make twice-weekly trips to Whole Foods a family ritual.

So, we got ourselves a home deionizer that hooked up to our laundy room’s faucet and produced 3 gallons of fountain-ready water — along with around 4 gallons of waist water; it is not a terribly efficient system — in about 45 minutes and at fractions of a penny per gallon. Waste tube goes into the sink, output tube goes into the 3 gallon bottle. What could go wrong?

Well you could leave it unattended for too long is what could go wrong, and it did, I did, within a few weeks of my installing it. One moment you are turning on the laundry room faucet before dinner thinking the length of an evening family meal is just enough for the bottle to fill up, the next you are sitting at your computer finishing up slides for next day’s lecture when you are startled by your wife’s loud, anxious, not really panicked but certainly urgent question from two stories down of why there was water drip-drip-dripping from the recessed light fixture onto the glass cooktop.

Not 10 seconds had passed from the downstairs yelp to my running to the laundry room and turning off the faucet. There wasn’t that much water on the floor, and none at all under the washer and dryer which were mercifully elevated with the tiles underneath clearly visible. However much water went over, and from the timing of everything it could have been up to 4 gallons, must have quickly found its way down under the floor, which was also the kitchen ceiling. But whatever damage there was, it had already happened. There was nothing to do but survey it, right?

Wrong. The process of surveying included climbing onto the kitchen island, as the recessed lights were right above it an inaccesible by ladder. On the island was also a stove. With a glass cooktop. Which I was very careful not to put pressure on getting onto the island, because of course the glass was fragile and not meant to be stomped on. But for one of the two lights, which ended up not being a conduit for the drips, I had to — oh so very gently — lay my knee onto the stove so that I could have a better grasp of the trim. Relieved that there was no water underneath, I quickly turned to the other one, behind me, bending my knee ever so slightly in the process, hearing a gentle click down below.

So that is the story of how our attempt to boycott MacKenzie Scott’s husband led to an $850 cooktop repair bill but — mercifully — no substantial water damage. Squint hard enough and you will also see a story of medical misadventures, chasing one fix with another for a problem of your own making until you make a critical mistake.

Like the time someone had a thyroid ultrasound to screen for cancer — please, don’t ever do this — and found a few thyroid nodules, benign under a microscope, but also a plump lymph node in the neck. That one was also biopsied, the result being some scar tissue and a piece of muscle so it may not have been as plump as the sonographer had thought, which should have provided reassurance but instead only prompted some to ask how we could tell that the person — let’s not call them a patient as there was never anything wrong with them — didn’t truly have lymphoma? I would argue that their probability of having it would be the same as anyone else’s, the suspicious lymph node being a nothingburger, but in the great game of Cover Your Ass someone else decided to scan the patients whole body, leading to a bonanza of incidental findings of the kind you would suspect to see in a 60-year-old smoker, with so many radiographic ghosts in which to stick a needle, maybe miss, maybe cause bleeding or infection.

But hey, at least we did something.