• Ruxandra Teslo: What will it take for AI to change drug discovery?. Producing boatloads of hypotheses won’t be enough, and would even set the field back. Good stuff. Again, China is eating America’s lunch here so something better change, and soon, but it is unlikely LLMs will be of immediate help.
• Chris Arnade: Asian style materialism. And if you think, well, maybe it is time for one civilization to sunset so that another one will rise, observations like Arnade’s should make you pause. The culture there seems rather bleak. And I consider him a rather impartial observer.
• Sarah Kliff for the NYT: The ‘Worst Test in Medicine’ is Driving America’s High C-Section Rate. It is about fetal HR monitoring, a particularly salient topic right now. It seems to be the Swan-Ganz catheter of obstetrics, thankfully much less invasive.
• Anish Koka on X: In the wake of the hubbub on novel promising gene therapy approval for Huntington’s disease, this video on the Sarepta debacle is a must watch. Can’t be… I am sure that everything was on the up-and-up.

• June 25, 2024: Inside the controversy over FDA’s recent gene therapy approval
• July 18, 2025: Analysts demand transparency after Sarepta’s roundabout disclosure of 3rd patient death
• July 18, 2025: FDA Requests Sarepta Therapeutics Suspend Distribution of Elevidys and Places Clinical Trials on Hold for Multiple Gene Therapy Products Following 3 Deaths
• July 30, 2025: Prasad Resigns From Top FDA Post Amid Fallout Over Sarepta Dispute.
• August 7, 2025: The Sarepta Scandal: Laura Loomer, Vinay Prasad, and the history of pharma’s latest attempt to reassert control at Trump’s FDA
• November 3, 2025: Sarepta’s Duchenne confirmatory trial fails, but biotech will ask FDA for full approval anyway

All this for drugs that cost millions of dollars per dose from a company with $2B in revenue. Neutral people in the know have their opinions too. Know me by my enemies indeed.

• Rusty Guinn: Conjuring Consent. Is ignorance, malice or cynicism behind ICE’s attempts to co-opt Lord of the Rings into their anti-immigration narrative? I would say it’s their propensity to bullshit, which matches Guinn’s cynicism take. See also: Guinn on the “woke right”.
• Neil Armstrong for the BBC: Slow Horses: The anti-James Bond that gets to the heart of Britishness. Written last year just after Season 4 started, but seeing as Season 5 was even better it is truer than ever.
• Tanner Garity: Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice for Making the Most of Your Day. Read this only for the exceptionally relevant story from Vonnegut’s 1995 interview with Inc., which isn’t the primary link because it lies behind a paywall. A Vonnegut quote from that interview: “The information superhighway will be two lanes loaded with tollgates, and it’s going to tell you what to look for.”
• Oliver Burkeman: You have to do the living yourself. In which Burkeman answers the question of “Isn’t there something I could do, some rule I could follow, such that if I obediently followed the rule, I wouldn’t have to show up for life, in all its uncertainty and riskiness and intensity, in quite such a full-on way? So I could sort of hang back, hide out, and take things a bit easier instead?” and of course the answer is no.

• Nassim Taleb breaks with Russ Roberts. I learned about EconTalk from Taleb, after he wrote it was the only podcast worth participating in as a guest. The two haven’t had any public exchanges in two years so this was not much of a surprise. I continued listening to EconTalk, though with mixed feelings.
• A podcast on AI and medical progress. It is four hours long and I have no time to listen but I may run the transcript through an LLM to get a summary and a false sense of knowledge and understanding.
• Where are the Mozarts of our time? On one hand I agree that too much of the “top talent” is “wasted on writing algorithms to move trades a quarter of a thousandth of a millisecond faster.” On the other hand, isn’t Lin Manuel Miranda the Mozart of our time?
• Why are doctors less respected? Because “optimizing performance” and “curing disease” are two different things entirely, and you can’t do both while also acting as the nanny nagging about car seats, guns in the household and other matters which have much to do with well-being but nothing with disease.
• What happened to Harvard? This is so confirmatory of everyone’s worst fears about the Ivy League schools that I remain skeptical.

• Kyla Scanlon for the NYT: It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose. Left unsaid is what fuels it: the self-reinforcing duo of greed and envy.
• Lily Lynch: The Curtain Falls on Aleksandar Vučić’s Foreign Policy “Balancing Act” I wish I could consider this good news. Alas, “king” Aleksandar’s reign was full of pathos and drama tinged with blood, so it is hard to see its end being any different.
• The anonymous person behind “Applied Divinity Studies”: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist. A brief defense of Peter Thiel including zingers like “Since technology can progress, it may eventually become powerful enough to kill everyone. But a force capable of regulating this technology would be at least as powerful, and stagnation comes with its own dangers”. What dangers, the essay doesn’t say. I suspect the biggest one is to Mr. Thiel’s pocketbook.
• Ernie Smith: The Sky Is Falling, The Web Is Dead. A deep dive into one analyst’s history of making false claims. Motivated reasoning is a powerful force, particularly when the motive is money.
• Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s Magazine: The Goon Squad. A scary story about a particular corner of the Internet. Warning: there are some graphic depictions of despair that may be distressing for people who have children and now have to worry about protecting them from the bottomless pits of porn. Make no mistake that this, too, is fueled by greed.

• Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic: A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida. Dream of the next generation of railway turns into a bloodbath because Americans forgot that train tracks at grade level with other traffic is bad bad bad. So bad that Robert Moses tore down half of New York to fix it. But that was almost a century ago and we are a forgetfull species. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Tim Urban: Tales from Toddlerhood. An accurate account, and a particularly salient one for me right now. If you think the second baby gets ignored relative to the firstborn, wait until number three comes along. The main character syndrome of the oldest siblings is real (at least to those of us who are not).
• Lisa Woodley: The Year I Left Design. What happens when you let your career drift, and how to get it back on track. Applicable to more than design. (ᔥGina Trapani)
• James L. Olds: “What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)”. He recommends storyboarding your grant proposals. I would trust his advice, but I also — and please don’t interpret this politically — get the urge to burn that system to the ground because it is a narrative fallacy-producing machine.
• Derek Lowe: mRNA Vaccines and Immuno-oncology: Good News. It seems that LNP-encased mRNA by itself, regardless of what it encodes, may imrove efficacy of immunotherapy for cancer as it “stirs up” the immune systen. Big (and indeed good!) if true. But Lowe ends the post, as he did many of the prior ones, with a tirade against the current HHS, NIH and FDA leadership for spreading doubts and fears about mRNA research, forgetting that (1) much of those doubts and fears were about “overstimulation” of the immune system and the related side effects, such as myositis, which the above (positive!) findings further stoke, and (2) the original mRNA research famously never received NIH funding and was indeed “fringe” science. There is raising of legitimate concerns and then there is performative posturing and Lowe’s writing has shifted firmly to the latter.
• Nick Maggiulli: All the Money, None of the Satisfaction. On people continuing to be stingy even after being firmly in the top 1% of income and wealth. I have recently heard a billionaire-several-times-over unironically start a sentence with “If I had money…” so I can confirm that this is a real phenomenon and some may indeed say that the reason they are billionaires is such a mindset, while the hoi polloi drink their $12 frapuccinos. And if those who can afford such beverages are the hoi polloi, what are the people who can not?

• From Ruxandra Teslo, a story of early retirees having to come out of retirement. I am not shedding tears.
• From an anonymous friend, a very good podcast with Dan Wang.
• From a West coast scientist, a commercial genetic test that can predict an embryo’s IQ. To be clear, I do think this is a test of intelligence but not in the way the company intended: their idea is moronic.
• From geneticist Sasha Gusev, an agreement about the above.
• From Brian Potter of the Institute For Progress, an excerpt from his book “The Origins of Efficiency” which clarifies why it costs more to repair things than to buy new ones. Surprisingly, he thinks this is good and wants to efficientize even more things!

• Adam Cifu: Goodharts Law and Medical School Admissions. A significant contributor to scientific slop is “research output” as requirement for fellowship, residency, and even medical school admissions. And yes, I am also a fan of the law.
• Paul Teirstein for WSJ: The Gatekeeper Driving Doctors From Medicine. On board certification, which now seems to have some powerful enemies so consider me conflicted.
• Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman for NYT: Gambling. Investing. Gaming. There’s No Difference Anymore. “There should be a line of separation,” Alexander Hamilton [wrote] in 1792, “between respectable stockholders … and mere unprincipled Gamblers.” As a side note, it is incredible how much sports betting has exploded in the 15 years I’ve been in the US. One of many ways America is looking more and more like Serbia, where seedy gambling outposts are now more common than grocery stores.
• Brian Potter: More on US Pedestrian Deaths. An update of a previously linked-to post, which raises more questions than answers. Allow me to be somewhat conspiratorial: could worse hospital care combined with increasing organ donation contribute to this increase? There have been 3,200 more pedestrian deaths in 2023 compared to 2009 and 8,393 more deceased donor donations according to OPTN. And then there is this.

• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Reading Like It’s 1937. The experiment was to choose only books published in a single year and read these in a short period of time. As expected, there were more duds than classics, and with not that many books coming out in 1937 it amount to very few good books indeed. This kind of experimentation does support the claim that we live in a literary golden age, and I’d say it’s because of a combination of high absolute numbers and us being better at detecting edge cases, not necessarily that the relative percentage of classics per year has increased. If anything, it is probably much lower because of all the AI-generated slop.
• Mike Taylor: If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact? The AI tools described are indeed stupid, but remember that the marginal cost for advertising them is 0, and if you find them stupid you were never the intended audience. In that way they very much resemble phone scams and emails from a Nigerian prince.
• David Shaywitz: The Startling History Behind Merck’s New Cancer Blockbuster. A story from 8 years ago, but it was news to me that pembrolizumab had a very roundabout way of reaching patients. GLP-1 inhibitors had a slightly less circuitous route, but still took too long to get to where they are. Is this truly the best way to develop drugs? (↬Derek Lowe)
• Cal Newport: Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? Probably not, and this is not really an edge case, but as someone who has trouble concluding blog posts (which is why you’re reading a list) I just wanted to pause and admire that last sentence.

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?