📺 It breaks my heart that Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building immediately descended into toilet humor and pointless self-parody. Five episodes in and we are out — life is too short to spend it on drivel.

• Michael DePeau-Wilson for Asimov Press: Why the FDA Is Slow to Remove Drugs. And more importantly, why this is bad. You can’t accelerate drug approvals without also doing more culling on the back end. Symmetry, please.
• James L. Olds: Why Transformational Science Can’t Get Funded: The Einstein Problem. I disagree with most of it, but it is in fact the institutional point of view.
• Anonymous for the Good Science Project: A Top Scientist’s Ideas as to NIH. Did AI write this? Not great, but again, an institutional point of view masquerading as call to reform.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Physician authority and influence. An important distinction, and kudos to Dr. Vartabedian for coping that he has more influence than authority. I, on the other hand, have neither.
• Joe Boudreau: On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads. I have been doing it for at least 15 (13 of those in English) and it is in fact wonderful.
• Todd Vaziri: The “Mad Men” in 4K on HBO Max Debacle. The best and most concise review of this royal screwup of one of my favorite shows.

📺 Notes from re-watching the first two seasons of Stranger Things with my 13-year-old:

• Wow, it really took a while for Steve and Dustin to meet.
• I underrated Season 2 in my memory, I suspect because of the poorly timed and too on-the-nose episode 7.
• Will this be their generation’s Harry Potter?

📺 Common Side Effects (2025) worked for me on at least three levels: as a Mike Judge satire (and I love Mike Judge), as the spiritual successor to Scavengers Reign (ditto), and as a true-in-spirit if not in fact look at the American pharmaceutical industry (and here I could link to half of this blog). With 10 episodes of about 20 minutes each — the runtime of approximately one Irishman — it is well worth seeing at a single go.

📺 The Great British Baking Show Series 16 had fewer anxiety attacks and temper tantrums, and was more enjoyable to watch than last year’s. Still, the sheen is beginning to wear off, the artifice of it is becoming more and more apparent, and am I being a horrible person just for liking that a contestant doesn’t get all teary-eyed when kicked out?

Want to introduce some drama? Have people make madelains — a desert that needs at least four hours for the batter to chill to achieve its characteristic “hump” — in 2 hours 15 minutes total and then stress about not doing it correctly. Or, come judging time, be a bit more circumspect about the clear favorite and heap praise on the also-rans so that you can hem and haw about your very difficult choice. Also, is it just my middle age performing mind tricks or are the contestants getting ever-younger? Will there be a point in a decade’s time when Junior Bakeoff and the main attraction meld?

It is still by far the best “reality TV” one would come across, and following it from beginning does make one more interested in baking. As its cultural relevance grows, however, so does the amount of pressure it puts on the bakers, to the point of unpleasantness. Luckily, the finalists this year were wise beyond their years, but how many more people are left in Britain with that kind of mental fortitude?

🎃 At a friend’s recommendation, our trio of children dressed up as Greg, Wirt and the frog from Over the Garden Wall, a family favorite for over a decade now. To our surprise and delight, they kept being recognized. A group of millennials handing out candy even broke out into song (To Adelaide, then Potatoes and Molasses). “Greg” had some candy in her pockets to throw out each time people guessed, but soon ran out and had to recycle the hard-earned treats from her bag. So, I’d call this Halloween a great success.

📺 Six episodes in, Season 5 of Only Murders In the Building — the only show we were excited about on Hulu — has been a thorough disappointment, and now Disney+ hits us with a whooping 100% increase in the annual subscription for its package deal. Granted, we were grandfathered into the $80/year plan and the new one is still better than the current price of standalone Disney+ Premium, but still — how much is it worth to pay for something you will never use?

By the way, the link above is to the Disney+ pricing website, and it is confusopoly on steroids, a roadmap to the world Philip K. Dick so brilliantly described in Ubik. I regret every bit of schadenfreude I had canceling cable.

📺 Slow Horses, Season 5: even better than the last. Less violence (season opener notwithstanding) and more laugh-out-loud moments in this one, which was fine with me!

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?

📺 Broadchurch, Season 1 got my full attention the moment David Tenant screamed Bloody Twitter. The show deserves an A+ for drama, a B- for the mystery, and an F for its medical chops. Fortunately, medicine didn’t come into play until very late, when drama and mystery were already at full steam.