• Steven Johnson: Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians. A serialized account of the earliest, pre-historic civilizations, which will also come with its very own LLM chatbot? Sign me up! Johnson has been a subject matter expert for Google’s NotebookLM project since back when it was called Project Tailwind, so it is not a surprise that he is also its promoter. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• Joseph Epstein for The Free Press: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands. Although only mentioned in passing, any essay that highlights the idiocy of transcendetalists gets my recommendation. See also, and in much greater detail, Venkatesh Rao’s description of waldenponding.
• Joan Westenberg: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation. A well-made dig at Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk is also much appreciated, as is this exquisite critique of Joe Rogan and the entire marathon-length podcasting enterprise:

A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can’t fact-check something as easily when it’s buried in hour two of a podcast. You can’t easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

• Molly White: The year of technoligarchy. An account of the last five years in tech with a looks towards 2026, in which “[w]e’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.” Kyla Scanlon hit similar notes last month.
• John Nerst: 2025: The Final Final Year. Always good to see signs of life from a blog I thought was defunct. Nerst is close to publishing a book, “Competitive Sensemaking”, which is a topic he has covered in the blog since 2016 (!?) and one that has gotten ever-more relevant since then (see Westenberg, White and Scanlon above). So, I will gladly add Nerst’s book to the pile once it is out, and would happily preorder it, if only there were a way to do so.
• Nikita Prokopov: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. A beautifully illustrated case against the new MacOS visuals. Like I needed another reason to ditch Apple.

• Jason Kelly on X: The crisis in biotech startups is not just “biotech being cyclical” - you can see clearly that the rise in Chinese startups is not cyclical over the last 25 years - it’s spiking up in the last 10 years (see chart below from @AsimovPress). This is in response to a post from Bruce Booth arguing that the rise in Chinese biotech is not just a threat for the US but also an opportunity, and one that should be a cause for optimism. Booth responded in turn. I am close to finishing Apple in China and based on that alone I tend to side with Kelly. Riding dragons is a dangerous business, as both Apple and Tesla have found out in their respective industries. There are, of course, a few ways in which biotech is significantly different from cars and phones that requires some more thinking, but that is for a different post.
• Cory Doctorow on Mastodon: On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Not just post-American but post-Chinese Internet as well, so this is a talk about robustness and dare I say antifragility through decentralization, not anti-imperialist rambling (although this being Doctorow there is some of that sprinkled in too). A video version is also available.
• Matthew Dowd on X: Pickle Expose: Sliced and Diced. Engrossing article in the form of a full-blown X post, with links, in-line images and half-decent typography. (ᔥJohn Gruber))
• Katyayani Shukla on X: Warren Buffett literally gave a free 1-hour masterclass on business. I saw the video and thought that Mr. Buffet was looking unusually spry for a 95-year-old! Well, the speech is from July 18, 2001 and is available in both YouTube video and transcript form, so there was no need for contextless X posts with worse quality video and audio. This particular one got 7.5 thousand likes and 2 thousand reposts in less than two days. I guess not everyone appreciates context and citation as much as I do. (ᔥJohn Mandrola, also on X)

Note: Despite three of the four links being from X, I have to admit that I am finding Mastodon more and more enjoyable and the superior of the four post-Twitter offerings, at least for me and my tastes. I am still vacillating on whether I should just use my micro.blog account to follow all non-X users, but then Ivory is too good of an app not to use. Advice appreciated.

• John Plender: How the bubble bursts, with some informative graphs. Remember Melania coin?
• Melissa Heikkilä: Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’. LeCunn is leaving Facebook/Meta soon to chair a more Euro-centric startup. From how he describes the workings of Meta in this Lunch with FT, it seems to be a wise move.
• Jo Ellison: Please don’t talk about my generation, which in her case is Generation X. Our children apparently include generations Z, alpha and beta which is all you need to know about the usefulness of the model.
• Sam Anderson: Inside the Choreographed Chaos of ‘The Pitt’. We are in the middle of Season 1 and I can see the appeal, including the wonderful performance of Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse. Glad to learn she received an Emmy for it!

• Trowaway_whistleblow on r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ‘Priority Fee’ and ‘Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. Big if true, and of course it’s true. Our family has stopped using DoorDash last year and we have never used Uber Eats so I will allow myself a moral victory lap, but the reasons for not using them were more prosaic (too slow and too many missed orders).
• Dan Wang: 2025. Wang’s yearly letter starts off with thoughts on Silicon Valley and its similarities to China. It is hard to square his generally positive disposition and stories about charming San Francisco billionaires who don’t have time to set up a bed for their mattress in a nearly-empty flat with the above product of Silicon Valley culture. In this I will agree with Wang: SV bros and the Chinese Communist Party are equally abhorrent, and for similar reasons.
• Doug Belshaw: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us. A fairly short blog post that added many new-to-me rabbit holes to a well-trodden topic that has seen many other metaphors. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Hun will likely join the pile though as a slight 72-page essay I hope it won’t stay there for too long.
• Henry Desroches: A website to destroy all websites. Another familiar topic with some clear call-to-action advice, including “Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)”, while of course being beautifully typeset and designed. So, let me get on my soapbox and state the obvious:

Key assumptions that underly this and many similar essays is that people involved have (at least) a laptop computer, know how to use it beyond Zoom and the Office suite, and want to spend time on it over and above what they need to spend on their day job. There will never be a flourishing bazaar of personal websites made by people who are not at the very list interested in web design and/or programming, if not card-carrying members of various IT professions.

I consider myself a dabbler and you are reading this via a product of said dabbling, but if the likes of Nassim Taleb or Frank Harrel or Vincent Rajkumar or whatever other luminary of your field of interest decides it’s too complicated or time-consuming to have personal websites that interact through a muddle of comments, web mentions and whatever other new standard some whiz kid comes up with. So they just keep using X or Bluesky or Mastodon, because that is also where their readers and followers and friends and family members are, so I will also have those accounts despite my best efforts, and so the wheel will keep turning and churning and spitting in and out anyone who is not IT-adjacent and many of those who are, which is to say most of the world.

This is why I am excited about what Dave Winer et al. are doing with 2-way RSS. Winer’s one-man projects have ben technically terrific but ultimately too challenging to use, so here is hoping that broader involvement will add some spit-and-polish. With social media more splintered than at any time since the late 2000s the time to strike is now.

• Ruxandra Tesslo and Asimov Press: Clinic-in-the-Loop

The case for faster bench-to-bedside-and-back type of research, with which I agree. It is remarkable, however, how each generation interested in biomedical research reinvents the wheel without checking prior art. I would also argue strongly that the (correct) thesis of the essay is not a refutation of the biotech-as-casino hypothesis but rather its confirmation, unless you enlarge “biotech” to include academia and government research but then what are we even doing. Investors have no patience for nuance and view clinical trials as dichotomous regardless of how companies try to present them, and interpreting translational research results requires even more patience and tolerance of ambiguity.

• Elizabeth Ginexi: The Quiet Power of Program Officers

Ginexi has been a program at the NIH for more than two decades, so caveat lector, but many POs are indeed mini-Moseses in their scientific domains. On one hand they perform important and valuable work, on the other the importance of a single human being to the careers of investigators young and old tend to favor those with soft skills of communication more than those of scientific and intellectual rigor. No judgements on my end because I genuinely can’t tell if the alternative would be any better.

• James L. Olds: A Grant Reviewer’s New Year Advice to Proposers: What I’d Tell My Younger Self

Some genuinely good advice on how to write grants in a way to increase the odds of them being funded, with emphasis on accepting the reviewers' comments and suggestions and approaching the grant resubmission as one would an offer to revise and resubmit a scientific manuscript, with much thanking and back-bending. Do keep that in mind when you read the next item.

• Laurel Raffington: Academia is just a job

This is true for most, as there are far too many academic right now for all of them to have soul in the game. However, academia continues to ask for more than it gives back out of too many people, while at the same time putting a negative selection pressure against people who are stubborn, single-minded and thus predisposed to a soul-in-the-game phenotype (see above). The only reason why the system survives at all is that the churn has been too low to fully reveal the tension, but it continues to creep towards the breaking point providing yet another case study of things that happen gradually and then suddenly.

• Guru Madhavan: Compulsive tracking doesn’t measure what really counts. And this is not even taking into account Goodhart’s Law
• Diana Mariska and A. Anantha Lakshmi: Move over, Tokyo — the world has a new biggest city. It is Jakarta, which its own citizens call — and I don’t know if they actually do or if it is an FT-ism but I find it delightful — the Big Durian.
• Stephen Bush: Creativity thrives with constraints. I nod my head in agreement even as the whole family is giddy in anticipation of what will inevitably be another polished turd to premiere on Netflix tonight at 8pm EST.
• Jonathan Vincent: How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history. But why the scare quotes, oh FT?
• Janan Ganesh: The case for denial. It all makes sense until you find yourself missing the last train out of Berlin.
• Hannah Shuckburgh: Should you have a library in your loo?. Without getting too personal I would like to point out that my reading history would have been dramatically different — and poorer — had there been smart phones back in the day.
• Chloe Fox: **I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done **. A better way to keep books, though realistically the loo is more in my wheelhouse.
• Aimee Farrell: Green Knowe, the house that inspired a children’s classic. It is about the oldest inhabited house in Britain, which is all well and good with some great-looking photos but then I imagine walking in and hitting a wall of mustiness.
• Mark Ellwood: Instagram is coming for your house move. Good. Lord.
• Oliver Smith: I went in search of spiritual renewal in Japan — and ended up being dangled off a cliff. Good. Lord. Though in a different way.

Enjoy!

• Ben Sasse (@BenSasse): Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.. I first learned about Sasse from his conversation with Tyler where he presented himself as a down-to-earth, sensible nerd. In that light, his short and turbulent tenure as University of Florida’s President was not a surprise: “Dr. Sasse didn’t have much respect for the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but the university’s politically connected board of trustees very much did.” And now this. So it goes…
• Caleb Watney (@calebwatney): OSTP asked for concrete suggestions to accelerate American science. Here are our thoughts. In a world where people like Ben Sasse were still in politics these kinds of sensible solutions might have had a chance of being implemented. But the recommendation that “the administration should prioritize visa applications for researchers and entrepreneurs…” would have to wait for the likes of Stephen Miller and his nativist friends to leave the premises.
• NonsparseOncologist (@5_utr): Is “Precision Oncology” just marketing? The thread suggests that it is, and I can confirm. The word scores quite well with both doctors and patients so you’d better claim that your drug is precise no matter what it actually means.
• The White Rabbit (@White_Rabbit_OG): When two faces flash rapidly while you fixate, the brain overcorrects for contrast. The illusion is real and unnerving, as is the background music.
• Jack Connor (@Jac5Connor): I’ve watched this at least 30 times. Robot kicks man in the groin. As the post he quotes states, it is a beautiful metaphor for 2025, the year in which humanity got its feet firmly planted in the Ow my Balls! territory.

• Dan Frank: 15 theses on the optimization crisis: or why so many are dissatisfied with society, despite our prosperity. I can but nod along, as I have noted these soul-deadening tendencies myself a few times before. Point number 9 was particularly salient as I read about Robert De Niro’s hotel chains and George Clooney’s old tequila business, perpetuating the cycle of greed and envy.
• David Cain: Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High. An argument for slowing down most things you do, with an emphasis of reading. Pairs nicely with Alan Jacobs' advice on reading, particularly the second paragraph.
• Andrew Gelman: How much of an NBA team’s won-loss record is from skill and how much is luck? Gelman provides a neat step-by-step account of a statistical exploration which you will appreciate even if you are not a basketball fan. Note his advice on slowing down and thinking about what to expect before performing an analysis. After this you will have an idea of how much the practitioners of journalist science leave out in their final write-ups.
• Steve Dylan: How Gemini Gives Me Hope for a Future Internet. No, not Google’s LLM, but a text-based protocol that reimagines how hypertext on the Internet could work. And if it seems cumbersome compared to even “surfing the web” — let alone mindlessly thumbing down a social feed — well, there lies much of the point!
• Charlie Buckland for BBC Wales: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years. Just a feel-good story for the holiday season, to be read slowly and enjoyed.

• Adam Mastroianni: So you wanna de-bog yourself. Mastroianni has a playful way with words that is a joy to read regardless of the topic, but this one in particular fits nicely in the New Year resolution-making season. It is Oliver Burkeman-like advice condensed into shorter snippets, for those who have not yet reached middle age.
• David Allen (or whoever writes his newsletter): The biggest secret about goal setting. Note that there is a big difference between setting your own personal goals and the several steps-removed goals that management gives to their teams. The bit about changing the saliency landscape applies to both.
• Yann LeCun: “the concept (of general intelligence) is compete BS”; the Nobel prize winner Demis Hassabis disagrees. But the fourth paragraph of that rebuttal is precisely what LeCun was talking about (mistaking specific for the general because it has “general” in the name).
• Karl Schroeder: Stop Thinking. ⊕ ᔥJohn Naughton On the difference between “understanding” — which is the analytical method that the people in the rationalist community, LLMs, and Mr. Spock do extremely well — and “reasoning”, which I understand (hah!) to be more akin to Charlie Munger’s mental models, applied intuitively, fluidly, and to the rationalist’s eyes haphazardly. Feel free to apply this distinction to the debate one bullet point above.
• Lily Lynch: Serbia’s Vučić Enters Deeper International Isolation. Could not have happened to a more deserving person! Although of course this means nothing but bad news for my fatherland so I wish El Presidente all the best in the New Year and may what is left of his reign be peaceful if not very long.

• V.H. Belvadi: Working with the end in sight. ⊕ ᔥPhil Bowell, who also noted the beautiful site design. Matches my own experience with Zettelkasten/Slip-box systems, in that none of the very productive people in academia I know actually use anything close to them. Belvadi is sticking to markdown files edited in BBEdit; I am partial to DEVONThink and TinderBox although both of them can also punt text files to BBEdit, which is on my list of should-learn apps.
• Andrej Karpathy: Chemical hygiene. This list of sensible advice for managing our own environment appeared in my RSS reader as part of the Bear blog discovery feed, with small-a “andrej” listed as the author. Since I found myself nodding along to most of it The risk of chemical exposure while handling paper receipts is overblown unless you work at a cash register, in which case you really should wear gloves. I clicked through to check out this andrej’s other work and lo, it was Andrej Karpathy. Unsurprisingly, his 2025 LLM Year in Review was also quite good.
• Brooklyn Gibbs: how to use the internet again: a curriculum. ⊕ ᔥThought Shrapnel, with a much better re-title. Online literacy for adults and children alike. Note in particular that there exist things outside the web: see Project Gemini for an example of a cozy part of the Internet that is very much distinct from the World Wide Web.
• Matthew Haughey: Recent camping and travel discoveries. We will have a fourth-grader in the household next year which means a National Parks pass for the whole family, so this may come in useful!