An oral history of the final episode of the best show of the 2010s? Yes, please.

Spoiler alert, obviously.


By the way, the article I just wrote about found its way to me via Artifact, which has become great for discovering interesting content — thank you, clickbait-hunters — but subpar for reading it, even on the iPad. Anxiously awaiting a Reader mode there.


"The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified"

Writes Kate Lindsay in The Atlantic: Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?

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At $5 per month for a cozy social network and a static blog hosting service, micro.blog was already quite the bargain. This summer, $4 will get you four full months — an absolute steal.

With $10/month you also get podcast hosting, bookmark archives, and a newsletter, if you are so inclined. So you have to ask what exactly $8 per month give you at that other service. The freedom to see fewer adds, I suppose.


Chores

Adam Mastroianni has published part 2 of his three-part series on negotiation, and it is well worth your time. The problem of dividing household chores fits the theme perfectly while also being easily understandable, practical, and — if you haven’t gotten that part of your life sorted out yet — immediately actionable. In case you were wondering: if we ever had to share chores, my preferrence is for doing the dishes, I am neutral on vacuuming, and you would have to pay me — and pay me a lot — to do laundry and clean the bathrooms.

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Having forgotten my work laptop at home — why oh why is every backpack I have black? — I now have to contend with two bizarro pieces of technology: a Dell laptop running Windows, and, after a long while, the Gmail web interface.

To my surprise, it is Gmail that is indisputably worse! Yikes, what a mess.


Any text about building a better NIH will have my interest, and the Brookings Institute came up with not one such text but eight! To my bemusement, zero of the nine authors responsible have any background in biomedical science. Could that be why some of them were so good?


There is a strong belief among scientists and lay people alike that:

  1. more information is always better (it isnn’t)
  2. hard numbers are the only valid form of information (they aren’t)

Combine the two fallacies and you get to today’s level of misinformation and self-deception.


Back to school

It will be 13 years this June since I have left a job teaching histology at the University of Belgrade to start internal medicine residency in Baltimore. And lo and behold, I am back teaching, sort of. UMBC — University of Maryland Baltimore County to friends — is starting a graduate course on clinical trials. I will be helping out Wilson Bryan, the recently retired Director of FDA’s OTAT (aka “head of cell and gene therapy”), to design and run it.

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Currently reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚 which starts off as self-help dreck, but soon switches gears and reassures me that I haven’t made a horrible mistake buying it. The formula for success is mostly randomness, but it’s worth dwelling on the parts that aren’t pure chance.