• Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett for The NYT: A $5 Million Donation From Big Tobacco Preceded F.D.A. Vape Decision. ⊕ [Note: Gift link ]

There is no definitive evidence linking the new F.D.A. guidance to the lunch, the donation or specific lobbying. But the episode represented a victory for an industry that mostly had been on the defensive for years.

The now former FDA Commissioner Mary Makary quit in protest, and this isn’t the first time lobbying has led to FDA turnover. Yes, lobbying is great again! Say what you will about Makary or his recent subordinate (and, full disclosure, my co-fellow, co-author and friend) Vinay Prasad — as I have — at least they had principles. Those who pay for a STAT+ subscription can get the opposite take from Matthew Herper, who called Makary the worst FDA commissioner in 25 years. ⊕ [Note: And before you ask what poor Jane E. Henney (FDA commiss 1999–2001) did to him, 25 years is how long Herper has been covering biotech. The headline could have used an “at least” for accuracy. ]

• Nick Bowlin and Katie Campbell for ProPublica and The Frontier: Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help.

The basement of a brand new house being filled with oil-smelling, oil-appearing sludge and the government agencies are calling it “water”; a personal and bureaucratic nightmare. This is the wider context:

The Frontier and ProPublica’s reporting on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma over the last year has shown how old oil wells abandoned by the industry pose severe public and environmental health risks. Officially, the state lists 19,000 orphan wells that state regulators are responsible for cleaning up, but the true figure is likely over 300,000, according to federal researchers.

Drill, baby, drill! Preferably through an LLC, so that you can forget about the holes you left behind once the boom busts. This is why I am surprised by otherwise sensible people like Casey Hendmer being so frustrated with lack of drilling [Note: X-post ] in oil-rich California. Could it be that even the smart Californians who would prefer not to live above an abandoned well? I mean, even the ones with just water in them can be scary. Or is it the case of Eden for the rich and stinky sludge for the poors? Let them have oil!

• Chance Townsend for Mashable: Google overhauls its AI subscription tiers, makes them cheaper.

This is one of many reports from Google I/O which focuses on the new prices without mentioning the severely restricted token limits for all tiers. Here is an example of what lower limits mean in practice. I would like to commend Google’s marketing team for this PR sleight of hand: does it count as shrinkflation is the prices have also gone down? And how on Earth would those lower prices help the already abysmally low revenue? Maybe the relative cost of tokens will have increased, but who knows? It’s not like Alphabet is a publicly traded company that should report that kind of information. Good thing AI is its own thing and isn’t affecting anything else around it. Asbestos indeed.

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla for Nature: Researchers who use hallucinated references to face arXiv ban.

There is now a one-year ban from posting on arXiv for all (co-)authors whose preprint have references that LLMs conjured out of thin air, or other signs of passing on LLM-generated content without human review (such as paragraphs starting with “Here is a 200-word summary of…”). ⊕ [Note: A question to readers more style-minded than me: is stringing these four — an ellipsis, quotation mark, right parenthesis, period — one after another a typographical faux pas? ] Note that this is for physical sciences only, life sciences-minded bioRxiv and medRxiv have not (yet) instituted such rules. Which didn’t stop some life scientists from defending [Note: X-post ] the practice of not checking one’s own references: who has the time? Apparently not people with current or former NIH funding. Having once spent a full day finding the correct reference to back up a non-essential introductory claim in one of my least-cited papers (7 as of today) I empathise with the suggestion that references should be more of a guide than firm fact, but empathy is one thing and truth another and in matters of science I will stand behind the truth because if not then what on Earth are we even doing? Unsurprisingly, Andrew Gelman has a good take on the matter.

• Richard Shiffrin et al: Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences.

A marvelous overview of various pitfalls in thinking which I will have to read again and with great care to fully understand. As is often the case, the concluding paragraph gives one a good idea of the flavor of the whole text:

At the least, the difficulties of understanding should make all scientists both skeptical and humble, knowing that ‘truth’ is an ever receding goal. We must realize the full range of possible illusions and appreciate that they occur in all approaches. We can reduce false insights and achieve better understanding by embracing diverse theoretical perspectives, research methods, and modes of analysis. This requires constant intellectual humility towards our own theories, models and methods. This recommendation unfortunately competes with forces in scientific societies that foster overstated claims and conclusions: Faced with millions of publications each year, scientists must fight for attention, readers and citations in the research marketplace, and journal editors must seek impact factors, submissions, and readers. In addition, scientists’ beliefs in overstated claims are subject to biases that occur more broadly. Thus, scientists can exhibit trust that increases beyond what is justified for mentors, friends, colleagues, same institutions and affiliations, famous scientists at leading universities and research centers, and decreases for women and minority authors. Do scientists realize the extent to which such factors operate and are they adapting to their existence?

• Jeffrey S. Flier: Drug Development Failure. ⊕ [Note: ᔥMax Marchione on X. ]

The subtitle is “How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990”, and it attests to a 30-year delay in bringing these revolutionary drugs to patients, because someone at Pfizer thought they understood what was going on. So the pipeline is even more broken than I thought.

• Greg Wilson: Sex & Drugs & Guns & Code.

A series of well-referenced historical vignettes whose purpose is to bring tech-adjacent people closer to worldviews other than “the toxic strain of neoliberal capitalism favored by venture capitalists and their gushing fans in the tech media.” But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy his notes on selfishness, corporate psychopathy or people being human in a crisis, to pick a few recent ones.

• John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times: Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. This is a gift link but has only 3 uses, so I will reveal the punchline of this beautifully illustrated exploration of data here: “In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.” Note that my thoughts on journalist science still apply: caveat lector. But since the article matches my own bias I link to it without hesitation.
• Harry Law for Works in Progress: Why Spain has the world’s greatest cities. Having recently been to Spain, I agree with their assessment that it does indeed have the best cities. Though with 65% of people living in apartments, and not of the luxury kind, I imagine it can get claustrophobic for introverts.
• Scott Lincicome for The Dispatch: GDP Is Good, Actually. Sure is, as long as you remember Goodhart’s law. Otherwise you get into all sorts of moral conundrums, such as whether it is OK to produce and sell stuff that causes cancer because hey, cancer drug research, manufacture and sale will also make GDP go up, amiright?
• Melissa Naschek for Jacobin: Socialism Has a Future. Central Planning Doesn’t. This is an interview with Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at NYU. I will emphasize the same part Alex Tabarrok did, and for the same reason: “If we’re actually serious about changing the world, people on the Left … should be the most remorseless and the most merciless when it comes to facts.” Being merciless about facts used to be the defining characteristic of the scientific way of thinking, until people started using phrases like “settled science” and such as a linguistic bludgeon.

• Kristen French for Nautilus: New Fathers Are Dying, and We Don’t Know Why.

Oh but we do, at least superficially: “of 130,000 men who became new fathers between 2017 and 2022, almost 800 died during that same 5-year period, and 60 percent of those deaths were from potentially preventable causes like homicide, accidental injury, and suicide” which is about what you would expect for a group of men that skews younger. The authors of the paper make a comparison between fathers who died and those that survived but a more interesting one would have been a demographically matched of childless men. Alas, all we have is all the men in Georgia and lo, for each age range the new fathers have a lower mortality and the discussion appropriately leads with “Fatherhood appeared to be associated with reduced mortality.“ ⊕ [Note: Another reason to have more children. Though, if you are going to do it solely because of a misguided belief that you yourself would live longer, then perhaps don’t? ] Methinks French — or her headline writer — were fooled by randomness.

• Derek Lowe: What Success Can Look Like, Darn It.

Vepdegestrant for breast cancer seems to be another entry in the annals of approved drugs being considered failures by Mr. Market. Let it be noted that a chemist (Lowe) writing for a prestigious peer-reviewed journal (Science) dunks on a drug while citing millions and billions of dollars exchanged or promised to various stakeholders while barely mentioning, and wrongly at that, the actual trial results. “It did not really demonstrate any advantage versus the comparison in the trial, fulvestrant” is factually incorrect: median progression free survival was 5 versus 2.1 months, which, fine, is tiny and may have been the result of statistical shenanigans; but it may also be a true and meaningful incremental improvement and if we are going to dismiss it out of hand then what are we even doing here? The rot runs deep.

• Deena Mousa: We don’t know why Malawi is poor.

It is a genuine mystery of why a mostly agrarian functional democracy with no separatist movements, demographic catastrophes, curses of resource wealth and the other usual suspects of stalled growth should completely flatline their GDP. Mousa shows compelling data and many hypotheses, though I wonder whether there is something that isn’t and can’t be measured which is keeping the country where it is. And if you are thinking that oh, GDP can’t measure happiness, I bet that at least they are happy, think again: it was the 4th least happy country last year. But then the “Happiness Report” methodology takes GDP into account (!?) so it is almost impossible for a GDP-poor country to break through in the rankings.

• Dynomight: What’s with all the slide decks?

This is about slides shared via email, never meant to be presented, but rather serving as a landscape-oriented picture book for adults. I don’t know what is behind communication-by-slide, and as a seminar-attending Tufte acolyte I abhor it. Management consultants spreading them around like a viral respiratory disease — which is the thesis of the blog post — certainly has something to do with it, but the syndrome is now bottom-up as well. My third-grader asked me just this morning why they were forced to watch and make (!?) slides at school.

The good: How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough by Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins for The New York Times. The breakthrough discussed is the real deal, and they manage to do it in a measured tone which correctly identifies daraxonrasib as a stepping stone and not a miracle cure. It has this important note up top and not buried down at the end:

The pills, three taken daily, are not a cure — eventually, daraxonrasib stops working. Many patients do not respond. And it has side effects that can be harsh, including rash, diarrhea, fatigue, nausea and raw, split fingertips.

How refreshing — I hope Derek Thompson takes note.

The bad: The Human Body’s Hidden Pathways by Dr. Avraham Z. Cooper, who is a pulmonary/critical care physician at the Ohio State University, for The New York Times Magazine. For the life of me I can not figure out the point of this post-modern journalistic exercise.

Nominally it is about a peer-reviewed research article which came out in 2021 under the title “Evidence for continuity of interstitial spaces across tissue and organ boundaries in humans”. The NYT Magazine staff did not deem it worthy of being linked to, but here it is in its entirety. In it, the authors showed small fragments of tattoo pigment migrating into tissues — skin and colon — deeper than they expected. We are not talking about ink being injected into a bicep and showing up in someone’s rectum here, but rather a series of biopsies of tattooed skin or the lining of the colon where there is a lot of pigment up top, and much less and in smaller pieces down at the bottom of the slide, deeper in the tissue.

Let me pull out my rarely used master’s degree in histology and note that this is hardly surprising. Connections between cells are not exactly air-tight — other than maybe in the brain and the testes — so of course there is some gel-like fluid circulating in the space. Or did the original article’s authors not realize why people tend to rub their feet when they get swollen?

But that is only the introduction. The meat of the article is Dr. Cooper’s theoretizing that this has something to do with — drumroll, please — acupuncture. With no evidence, mind you, but a tingling sensation in the back of his neck or somesuch. By the time the 30th single-sentence screen scrolls by we are firmly in bullshit territory, in the formal sense of the word. Caveat lector.

The ugly: Longevity Medicine - An evidence based guide by Dr. Vinay Prasad who is out of the FDA and back making YouTube videos. And oh my, the contrast between the most recent thumbnail and the one posted just before he joined the FDA is striking. Has it only been a year? No wonder that his first topic back as an influencer is about longevity.

A sidenote here which I will put at the end: the increased interest of Silicon Valley types with longevity, and I am not thinking only about Bryan Johnson’s delusions here, reminds me of the recently quoted speech Charlie Chaplin gave at the end of The Great Dictator, the relevant quote being that “so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” Good for us that snake oil salesmen are still the longevity field’s most prevalent phenotype.

JTR gave me a kick in the rear I needed to update my Blogroll page. There has been way too much cruft accumulated, with some recommendations not having posted in years. It is still a work in progress — only the first two lists are done — but better than nothing! For a (nearly) up-to-date list of every feed I follow, check out Feedland.

• Ed Zitron: Am I Meant To Be Impressed?. A detailed account of why you cannot trust anything tech companies say about the business side of AI, even in official SEC-sanctioned documents (because, of course you can’t). Note in particular how the unsuspecting public buys their narrative about big AI spending leading to increased profits hook, line, and sinker (the “profits” coming from bloated valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic). I am no fan of Apple, but it appears that they have made the right choice by staying out.
• Richard Dawkins: Is AI the next phase of evolution? ⊕ [Note: ᔥJason Kottke ] A eulogy to New Atheism.
• Lada Nuzhna: What the hell is happening in China? This is with regards to their push in biotech. All good things, I’d say.
• Isaac Greene: The Gift of Music. A delightful reframing of gift-giving.
• Derek Sivers: Geography is four-dimensional. About knowing places only at a certain time. The short essay matches my own experience of being asked what Serbia is like now. Having last truly lived there more than 15 years ago, the only correct answer is that I haven’t a clue.
• Charlie Chaplin: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, with transcript. It gave me chills.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Amen.

• Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys to fail and you may need dialysis until they heal, but unless you had bad kidneys to begin with there should be no permanent damage. The (wild) west hantavirus you can get from mice and humans alike, goes for your lungs instead of the kidneys, and kills 4 out of 10 humans who get it. And now there is a cruise ship full of people who were exposed. As if I needed another reason to avoid cruises like the plague.
• Kristen French: What Your Dream Life Says About You. It tells me I wake up too early because I only remember them once every few weeks!
• Kristen French interviews Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat? It is about Barrett’s Nature review which is behind the paywall but at least gives out the punchline in the title: “Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain.” Barrett’s own article in Nautilus, about emotional intelligence, is also worth a read.
• Jake Currie: The Best of NASA’s Newly Released Photos From the Artemis II Mission. An excellent source of desktop and smartphone backgrounds.
• Bob Grant, again: AI Music vs. My Parents. A sad state of affairs. Thankfully, personal experience tells me the younger generations are better at identifying saccharine “content” as slop and filtering it out.

• Brian VanHooker for Polygon: An oral history of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Netflix’s quirky sci-fi masterpiece. I don’t know how long an article needs to be or how many people need to be involved for it to qualify as an oral history, but this ain’t it. Still, it is about one of our family’s favorite movies so I felt obligated to link. For sampling of a true “oral history”, check out The Ringer.
• Nick Schaden: Discs versus digital: A buyer’s guide. Discs, of course, which are no less digital than streaming and are impervious to flaky internet connections.
• Gabby at woolgathering: one ticket for two movies, please!. Some interesting movie pairings, with the very first one proposed spanning the longest time period: Bringing Up Baby from (1938) + What’s Up, Doc? (1972).
• Scott Sumner: Films of 2026: Q1. Many of them are behind the Substack paywall (why, Scott, why?) but the reviews of new-ish movies I never would have heard of otherwise is above the fold. His brief re-re-review of Mulholland Drive is spot on.

As promised, today’s update to Microbe — a micro.blog client for Emacs now at version 2.0 — includes draft syncing. There were also some minor updates to Inkling. Both are available on GitHub though I think I’ll just drop that and just host them here. Something to think about for next week…