It is infrastructure day on the blog today, with two updates:

1. The Blogroll is now a fresh export from my feed reader and an accurate representation of what I am actually reading. I still need to figure out how to make the very detailed “About” field for each entry actually show up, so stay tuned for that one.
2. The Now page had its biannual refresh. I will at some point make it a more frequent ritual but best not to expect real-time reading/watching/listening lists.

You may have noticed more linked lists on this blog, starting this summer and ever-increasing. This is the direct result of moving my RSS reading from (mostly) NetNewsWire on the phone to (mostly) Feedly on the Daylight tablet. Whatever the cons I thought it had in the beginning, they melted away as the proof is in the output. Interestingly, I hardly ever use the pen, but did pair it with an old (pre-Touch ID) Magic keyboard encased in this handy case/tablet stand and this light-weight pair of devices is all I need on most short trips.

Now, it is not a cheap device! There is currently a 48 hour pre-Black Friday flash sale, and it is still $649 pre-tax. It is also much less versatile than an iPad (no camera and therefore no video calls, and certainly not a good media player although being an Android tablet it does have an official YouTube app, unlike some other better-screened devices. But if you already have a large phone and a laptop, does that middle screen truly need to be a full laptop replacement?

I was also pleasantly surprised by the (heavily customized) Android tablet interface. Things have evolved quite a bit since I briefly owned a Fire tablet, which appropriate to the name I wanted to burn in an effigy. I haven’t owned a Remarkable or a similar e-ink device, but from the refresh rate alone I would guess my reaction would be the same. The plain old LCD technology that Daylight uses ⊕ Even though, yes, they’ve rebranded it to “e-paper” and say it’s their invention. I don’t know enough about screen technology to comment on whether this is valid, but to me it smells like mostly marketing. was the perfect compromise for my uses, and one I hope more companies would emulate.

• Niko McCarty: Here are 30 great essays about biology. They are indeed great, and it even includes one where I gave a modest and unattributed contribution (you will be able to guess which one). To this I would add William Kaelin’s Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw, cited many times on this blog (most recently just last month).
• Jason Locasale: My latest article in The National Review on what 60 Minutes got wrong about Harvard and the biomedical research industrial complex, and why the deeper issues in science can’t be fixed by throwing more money at broken institutions. Here is the article, which I agreed with directionally but had so many “I know this person and let me tell you what they are truly like” moments that I thought there had to be a backstory to this insider-ish scoop. And indeed there was, as noted in responses to Michael Eisen’s tweet. So much drama, and all it does is make it easier for people to shrug their shoulders, say that it’s complicated, and defer to higher authorities (i.e., Harvard).
• Nassim Taleb: I believe this paper addresses, even solves, the most relevant statistical problem of the century, including the replication crisis & the fake results in publication. No false modesty here. Papers like this make me think that frequentist statistics are fine for the lab where you can truly do the same experiment over and over, but when it comes to clinical trials you can never cross the same river twice and we should all be Bayesians.
• Christopher Hooks: I sincerely believe that anyone pushing this should be shot. I agree in spirit. Whoever made this AI abomination should study Hayao Miyazaki and his work.

• Doc Searls: Smart is as Smart Does. On the deficiencies of IQ as a metric, and I wholeheartedly agree.
• Damon Linker: The Most Moving TV Show I’ve Ever Seen. Which is The Leftovers, of course, and I agree. Bonus article: last year’s NYT interview with the showrunners. (ᔥTipsy Teetotaler)
• Andrew Gelman: Conflicting statistical evidence on the long-term effects of children on being whacked by their parents. How one feels about spanking depends greatly in their own experience of it as a child, as the comments to this blog post show.
• Joseph Heath: Populism Fast and Slow. An aside from this article did more to dissuade me from spanking (sorry, “whacking”) as a teaching method than anything Gelman cited. Its main point is also important, and I will quote it here:

People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world.

As a card-carrying member of the cognitive elite, I fully support the rebellion.

• Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.: No, Conscientiousness Hasn’t Collapsed Among Young People in Recent Years. A while back, when I wrote about “journalist science”, I highlighted FT’s John Burn-Murdoch as someone who’s on thin ice with regards to methodology. Well, according to this article — which I have no reason to doubt — he punched a whole straight through and is now in some icy waters. Unlimited degrees of freedom combined with an incentive towards sensationalism do not make for rigorous research. (↬Adam Mastroianni)
• Erik Hoel: John von Neumann Shot Lightning From His Arse. A delightful myth-busting of some of the more out-there stories about von Neumann. These have recently been spread by, erm, “pop-hereditarianists”, which I suppose are to eugenicists what alt-right is to national socialism. I further suppose these people would also marvel at Winston Churchill’s wit, hearing all the stories about him — it takes a certain dose of credulity to buy into ideologies that have long ago been debunked.
• Kyla Scanlon: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?. “What became clear almost immediately is that the prosperity is real, it’s just not showing up in the places people actually live. It exists in balance sheets, in stock portfolios, in data centers behind chain-link fences. But in daily life like in commutes, in childcare costs, in housing, in safety, in community, people are feeling decay.” Maybe it’s the non-economist in me but what Scanlon is describing here does not sound prosperous at all. The balance sheets and stock portfolios are a jobs report away from melting into nothing. That is not prosperity, it is a house of cards.
• Chris Arnade on X: My take on the Rod piece is that sadly little of it is surprising, although it’s depressing to see the “burn it all down” attitude has reached the political elite, who by all metrics – career, economic, community – are doing well, especially compared to the rest of the country. And here is the Rod (Dreher) piece, on Substack, about his recent encounter with the Vice President et al. I suspect the attitude of people who are “doing well” comes in part from their being well aware of how precarious their position is (see above).

• David Li: lots of discourse on here recently on how to get FIH clinical data in US cheaper, faster, and more competitively with China. “One thing I have not seen folks talk about, which to me is the most obvious, is - wait for it - the intense competition that breeds insane levels of hard work in China.” From a clinical trial perspective, let’s not forget how receptive the audience is to clinical trials, and how deferential to the doctor/investigator’s opinion. (ᔥRuxandra Teslo)
• John Collison: Dave Ricks has been at @EliLillyandCo for 20% of its 150-year history. He came to the pub, poured his own Guinness, and gave us a 2-hour state of the pharma union. Fear not, there is also a YouTube video of the conversation.
• Michael Eisen: Needed a word, so I coined one. The word is chrysotactic — being drawn to gold, wealth, luxury, etc. — which is derived from Greek but I have to say that the Latin aurotaxis has a better ring to it. You will never guess to whom it relates.
• David Weigel: How Elon Musk’s Changes to X Made Our Discourse Far Stupider. This is not on X but rather an article in Talking Points Memo and I completely agree. And yet, people worth listening to continue using it and as long as that X is the only place where they write I will continue to follow. Perhaps.

• Cal Newport: Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. Yes, Cal, if you are a maths professor working on a proof. I love putting my fountain pen to paper as much as anyone but they are not sufficient for any of the hats I wear.
• Eric Topol: Multilingualism and Extending Healthspan. Another thing I should nominally be for as it is positive reinforcement of my own (two languages) and my children’s education (3+ and counting), but no matter how many potential confounders these researchers adjusted for I am absolutely convinced that there are residual confounders behind these results. Learn languages for their own sake, not to “prolong healthspan” or to — what this study actually checks for — make some proteins in your blood go one way instead of another.
• Ezekiel Emanuel at al for the NYT: Make Medical School Three Years. Here is a statement I could get behind provided there is adequate rationale — that undergrad premed is sufficient for basic science knowledge, that it is essential to attain practical skills during postgraduate education as early as possible, that the fourth year of medical school is pure formality of one low-stakes elective after another since most students will have already matched. But no, the rationale here is financial, and that is purely idiotic. The high tuition is taken as a given and all steps stem from there. The authors should check their premises.

• 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.