Finished reading: Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman 📚

It is assigned reading for a course I’m helping prepare, so I thought I’d better read the book we’ll ask our students to use. Like many textbooks, it suffers from MANE — many authors no editors — and like many academic texts, it can get way too pedantic. Still, it is hard to argue with its overarching themes: that randomized controlled trials are the pinnacle of medical evidence generation, and that much of the trial paperwork done in the name of quality is unnecessary. I have more comments on that last point, but that is for another time.

At the very start of the textbook Fundamentals of Clinical Trials the authors make a distinction between clinical trials — comparing two or more different interventions — and clinical studies, which merely describe an intervention without comparing it to anything. So, there can be no such thing as a “Phase 1 trial”, since they typically involve a single drug at different doses and schedules. The only true trials, according to the authors, would fall under Phase 3, or Phase 2b at the earliest.

This is stupid, misleading, and not at all how the words “trial” and “study” are used by anyone else, including the biggest and most important drug regulatory agency in the world. There are many such pointless exercises of professorial power in medicine, including my favorite: whether the correct pronunciation of “+” in “7+3” is “plus” or “and”. They amount to nothing more than purity tests that award the wielders of the right language a false sense of precision. As Nassim Taleb wrote, nitpicking is the enemy of thought.

The rest of the book is good enough, but more on that later.

Finished reading: 1177 B.C. by Eric H. Cline 📚

Come for the meticulously documented story of the Bronze Age collapse, stay for what preceded it: alliances, feuds and intrigue to rival anything you’d find in the Game of Thrones.

📚 An unpopular opinion: nonfiction audiobooks are an oxymoron. Those which are better heard than read (see: Gladwell) are entertainment disguised as education, giving only an illusion of understanding.

The very best works of fiction, however, work equally well as either.

Finished reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚

“Finished” as in read every word on the page, yes. But to actually finish this one will take a few years’ worth of listening, as you can imagine. At least I won’t be listening blindly.

Finished reading: Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper 📚🗃️

There are two and a half books here for the price of one in this note-keeping samizdat:

• one: a brief practical guide on how to make an analogue note system;
• two: an exhaustive list of more or less science-based reasons for why you would pick analogue over digital;
• and a half: the author’s self-conscious and slightly over the top running commentary about it all.

The first one was spot on and valuable. The second needed an editor: repeated paragraphs were peppered throughout the chapters a few too many times for me to find it just charming. But an editor may also have cut the commentary, which ended up adding some sparkle — lacking in most other non-fiction books.

Better than expected, even after accounting for low initial expectations. See number 24 here

Currently reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚

Always wonderful to read experts in their craft writing about it. Two dozen pages in and I am already picking up on concepts beyond jazz, efortless teamwork versus dysfunctional prima donnas being broadly relevant.

Finished reading: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt 📚

A timeless masterpiece that takes less than an hour to read, much longer to digest. What reminded me of Frankfurt’s essay was an article about the age of the bullshitter which, alas, ended up being its own kind of bullshit.

Finished reading: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison 📚

A story of damp decay. I didn’t know enough about English geography to fully appreciate the intricacies, but Harrison is the master of the uneasy atmosphere and he got that one just right.

Posting yearly reading lists has become risky as of late, but that won’t stop me. As with last year’s this is more of a guide than a mandate: I may — but probably won’t — read all of them. Odds are, my favorite book of the year won’t even be one on the list.

1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (M. John Harrison)
2. Hitler (Joachim C. Fest)
3. NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible (C. S. Lewis et al.)
4. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric H. Cline)
5. Rules of Civility (Amor Towles)
6. The Odyssey (Homer, Emily Wilson translation)
7. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Plutarch, Dryden translation)
8. Station Eternity (Mur Lafferty)
9. Talent (Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross)
10. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (Luke Burgis)
11. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success (Albert-László Barabási)
12. An Immense World (Ed Young)
13. From Baghdad to Boardrooms: My Family’s Odyssey (Ezra K. Zikha and Ken Emerson)
14. Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection (Sam Apple)
15. How to Listen to Jazz (Ted Gioia)
16. Whole Earth Discipline (Stewart Brand)
17. The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset)
18. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (David Graeber)
19. Against Method (Paul Feyerabend)
20. I Am a Strange Loop (Douglas R. Hofstadter)
21. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
22. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
23. Empty Space: A Haunting (M. John Harrison)