Yes, real life is messy, yes, there is more stupidity than evil in the world, and no, there are no billionaire/vampire/reptile cabals running the show behind the curtains (if only). Yet individual humans do have needs, and some of those needs are secret, and when meeting a secret need involves more than one person, when each of those persons is tasked with keeping their role a secret, and when that role is exacting revenge, well then, you have a genuine conspiracy.

There have been many conspiracies in my lifetime, most of them having to do with Serbian politics: the conspiracy by the heads of Serbia and Croatia to break up Yugoslavia; the conspiracy by parts of the Serbian surveillance apparatus to overthrow Slobodan Milošević; the conspiracy by the Serbian mafia-political complex to assasinate the prime minister; the conspiracy by parties yet unknown to hide the numbers of Serbian Covid-19 victims… You cannot fault the average Serb for seeing conspiracies everywhere, and you can empathise at least a tiny bit for being sceptical of masks, vaccines, the existence of the virus itself.

The last time the average American was exposed to a big conspiracy that was named as such was in 1974, and it was so bungled and comically inept that you cannot fault them for thinking conspiracies are relegated to history books. This is what Ryan Holiday suggests in his book, while unravelling the conspiracy by Peter Thiel to secretly bankroll civil lawsuits against Gawker Media until they are bankrupt. But is this true? After all, weren’t Purdue Pharma, Ferguson PD, the 25th amendment gang, and the Capitol insurrectionists, to name a few, all involved in more or less successful conspiracies?

“The idea of a conspiracy,” Thiel is quoted saying in the book, “is linked with intentionality, with planning, working towards longer-term goals. In a world where you don’t have conspiracies maybe also those things disappear.” Holiday adds: “The truth is that Gawker already believed we lived in that world. And so do far too many people.”

I object to that evaluation of my fellow humans, because most people are well aware of the fact that we do indeed live in a world full of conspiracies. If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that people over-read them. But they are conspiracies perpetrated by multinational corporations, rouge state officials, the actual states, and, Holiday’s book now tells us, condescending billionaires.

At a hundred pages, a fifth of which is the preface, this is a slender book that compares the 1950s state of the art computer and neuroscience, but more importantly gives the answer to the burning question in oncology: how much are a few months of overall survival benefit worth? Well, if you are John von Neumann and you have boney metastasis from a cancer of unknown origin eating away first your energy and then your mental capacities while your are writing a series of lectures on how similar and different brains are from “modern-day”¹ computers, and you are way ahead of your time in thinking about both, well, the answer to that question is quite a lot. It is in fact an unthinkable loss that he died before he could even finish his writing, let alone hold the lectures.

It was also somewhat eerie to read about the comparison between humans and machines shortly after Apple announced its quite literally game-changing M1 processor. There is fierce competition among the big tech companies to build the Skynet of our universe, and as of last week Apple is winning.

These 250 pages on the many ways that cancer care in America is broken should be read by everyone with even a passing interest in oncology, and must be read by every heme/onc fellow or fellow-to-be. Malignant reminded me of the best days of my own fellowship, when the then-program director Tito Fojo would eviscerate an article — these tended to be poorly thought out phase 3 trials of one TKI or another that somehow made it to the New England Journal — with a few slides made at the last minute.¹ But this is not just a rehash of those lectures, nor is it the best of Prasad’s prolific Twitter feed, nor an overview of his billion meta-science articles and editorials. It is instead a series of lectures — enough to fill a semester — that takes bits and pieces of the above and adds quite a bit of new to make something better.

It is not the easiest of narratives to follow. This is understandable: cancer research, policy, and outcomes are as intertwined as the molecular pathways Prasad valiantly tried to avoid, and mapping their connections will inevitably result in a crazy wall. There are nominally four parts to the book with four chapters each, because you had to put it together somehow, and the parts make sense. Even so, more than once I was wondering what exactly a particular vignette had to do with where it was in the book, and wanted to put it somewhere else. But the feeling goes away quickly — Prasad’s style is entertaining, the puns are clever², and there isn’t a superfluous paragraph in site.

To that last point — if anything, the book is too short. My pet cancer peeve, the disconnect between bioplausability and reality, and the many misuses of animal models to inform clinical trials, was barely mentioned when it could’ve easily made a whole chapter. Same for grant mechanisms, which did get a page and a half — that one half is a figure — but left too many things unexplained and uncovered, particularly for the lay audience. And as to Prasad’s big advice that the federal government should take over running clinical trials from private companies, well, it’s nice to put some pie-in-the-sky proposals out there, but something that is so against the grain should be more fleshed out.³ Or maybe mention some more feasible proposals, in the line of Vincent Rajkumar’s plea to cut down the number of people with veto power over a randomized controlled trial. I could go on, but I’d rather not spend too much time on what can be refuted by a single sentence: “Write your own damn book”.

Written by Vinay Prasad, 2020

• A brief overview of the past, present, and future of capitalism by a Serbian-born and formerly World Bank-employed CUNY professor Branko Milanović, who specializes in income inequality.
• Some parts hit closer to home than others, most of all the idea that you can have a welfare state, and you can have open borders, but that mixing the two is ill-advised. I am also well-acquainted with America’s indirect and informal immigrant tax, a version of which Milanović proposes as one of the solutions to the welfare/immigration dilemma. I am not a fan.
• His big insight before this book was the elephant chart. Capitalism, Alone’s big idea is that communism may not have been the pinnacle of society that Marx and Engels had predicted, but rather a good way of transforming feudal agrarian societies into modern economies. Centralized planning and broad-stroke changes work well up to a point, but the production chains soon get too complex for communism, at which point the invisible hand steps in.
• Second big insight: corruption is hard-wired into how a particular type of capitalism (which he calls “political”, in contrast to the Western “liberal meritocratic”) operates. This is supported by many a “liberal meritocratic capitalism” city and state, their financial services and real estate markets being dependent on the “political capitalism’s” dark money.
• It was an easy read for this non-economist. Recommended.

Written by Branko Milanović, 2019

• The only reason I bought and read this book was the excerpt published in the Atlantic which noted some parallels between 1990s' Balkans and 2010s', well, the world, which I was already mulling in my head. Turns out that's the best part of the book.
• The rest is uneven. Holbrooke was a slime ball of a human and his accomplishments were nil, yet Packer still manages to make the book into a hagiography. Which I guess is an accomplishment.
• Did Holbrooke truly think that his memos would change the world? In the Gervais Principle hierarchy, he was a clueless posing as a sociopath.
• Packer’s account of the Dayton negotiations confirms that the only reason a deal was made was that Milošević wanted it at any cost. The agreement was for Holbrooke to mess up, and he almost did, multiple times.
• There is mention of HBO buying rights to make a show out of Holbrooke's account of the Bosnian was. I haven't read "To End a War", but I like the idea of the Dayton negotiations being the centerpiece of a mini-series, with flash backs to each individual warlord's (and Dick's) messy history. Someone please give the idea to Damon Lindelof after he's done with Watchmen.

Written by George Packer, 2019

1. Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the death of Sandra Bland by the way of the Hitler-Chamberlain meetings, Cuban double-agents, college student alcohol culture, an episode of Friends, and Sylvia Plath’s suicide by gas oven. Huh?
2. The pieces actually fit, and — a few abrupt interludes aside — the story flows nicely. His previous books were also stories and not scientific review articles, which people tend to forget, but this one more so than others. Which is good, since people tend to misunderstood him for a Pinkeresque academic with pop culture pretensions rather than a journalist having fun.
3. A single point of disagreement: his portrayal of Ferguson, MO police as misapplies of hot spot policing rather than racketeers rang false to my layman ears.
4. Gladwell has become a podcaster, and it shows in how the book is structured: it reads like a podcast script. I haven’t listened to the audio version, but this may be the one case of a non-fiction book that is better listened than read.
5. But if you don’t have the actual book, you won’t get to read the extensive notes, on of which directly refutes a whole chapter of Blink. Another is an excellent parallel between indiscriminate police searches and cancer screening tests. Too bad he didn’t use actual footnotes (but then people would also complain, see no.2).

Written by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019

A collection of essays from the man who wrote Infinite Jest, also known as the 20th century’s best 21st century book. Each one is near-to-completely brilliant and worthy of more thought than a one-line in an inconsequential blog post, but that won’t stop me:

• Big red son is the one where he attends the AVN awards as a magazine correspondent. The more absurd things become, the more encyclopedic he gets. Yes it’s funny, but also existentialist and sad as only pornography can be.
• Certainly the end of something or other, one would have to thing is long title to a short-ish review of a supposedly science fiction book by John Updike. He didn’t like it.

• Some remarks on Kafka’s funnies from which probably not enough has been removed is exactly what it says it is. Having only high-school literature class-level acquaintance with Kafka, I can’t comment.

• Authority and American usage is a review of a dictionary but also the 20th century’s (written in 1999) best 21st century essay, covering issues of political correctness, identity politics, race, alienation, and a brief history of the battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism for the hearts and minds of I don’t know who exactly, but what an exciting battle it is.

• The view from Mrs. Thompson’s is about where he was on 9/11 (spoiler alert: he was at Mrs. Thompson’s).

• How Tracey Austin broke my heart is the reason I’m even sadder than I should be about DFW not still being around, because an essay about the Federer-Đoković-Nadal tennis trio in general and the mental gymnastics going on in Novak Đoković’s head in particular would have been spectacular to read (although there has been a fairly successful attempt). Oh, and it’s also a review of a reasonably bad autobiography of the titular Ms. Austin, who is also a tennis player.
• Up, Simba is DFW following McCaine’s failed 2000 attempt in the Republican primaries, wherein he shows just how walled away from the “real” world candidates were back then, how big of a gatekeeper the media world, and just why Twitter could have made all the difference.
• Consider the lobster is where a travel essay for a cooking magazine from a food festival in Maine turns into an existential crisis and a call for veganism. It’s good
• Host is so messed up by its formatting of footnotes (fortunately there is now a web version which more than makes up for it, and the original article published in The Atlantic was also easier to read, apparently, say people who were able to find it, and yes this should also have been a footnote) that it’s hard at first to appreciate how good of a story interspersed with thoughts on infotainment and talk radio it really is, and even though it was written more than a decade ago you can sort of see what it’s protagonist will eventually become in these troubling times.

Written by David Foster Wallace, 2007

I’ve always assumed that much of the western scientific tradition is a series of That’ll-Do measures made by imperfect humans in imperfect circumstances. This monograph showed me just how imperfect were both the circumstances (the English civil war) and the humans (naive, vain, incestuous, sometimes all at once). And just how much like the present times was the whole scientific endeavor: even back then, with so much yet to be discovered, most published papers were trivialities, most scientists (and “scientists”) cared for status more than truth, and most research (and “research”) was left unheard and unread.

It’s not a mystery then why we have such a hard time changing the ways of the ancients when those ways were built out of sheep’s blood and luminescent meat. But then I realized: we don’t get the science we need, we get one that we deserve, and we’ve been deserving the same kind of science for centuries now.

Written by Adrian Tinniswood, 2019

• Francis Collins is a physician scientist who after a particularly tough patient interaction went from being atheist to agnostic to evangelical Christian. He is also kind of my boss, and while I hope that fact is not influencing my opinion of his book, it probably is.
• The books has two audiences: scientists prejudiced against (organized) religion, and Christians prejudiced against science, evolution in particular.
• The message to the scientists is: read C.S. Lewis to find out more.
• The message to the faithful: don't be narrow in your reading of the Bible, it'll come back to bite you. And also read C.S. Lewis.
• The first few chapters read like Dr. Collins' personal statement. Residency and fellowship applicants, take note.
• The scientific parts are accurate and an easy read for me and probably for the target audience as well.
• The parts on religion are vague, subjective, and rely too much on "trust me".
• The part where he turns a story of a sexual assault against his daughter into a story about his faith deserves a cringe, a face-slap, and a letter of apology in future editions.

Written by Francis S. Collins, 2007

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book with a brilliant idea, adequately presented. Collapse is also presented adequately, for an undergrad ecology course textbook. The ideas aren’t lacking, but are dull, undefined, hard to follow, and boil down to this: it is hard for a society to survive in a harsh, isolated environment, and some places tend to become harsh and isolated once humans start overexploiting resources, so better be careful. He presents several past societies that thus failed (Easter Island, Anasazi, the Greenland Norse, etc.), several that survived, and gives some not entirely plausible accounts of current societies which may be on the brink of collapse (Montana, China, Rwanda).

Diamond likes to enumerate: there is a Five-point Framework for Societies’ Collapse, but also Ten (?) Reasons Why The Vikings Failed, Seven Ways the Hard Mining Industry is Ruining the Environment, and Fifteen Things to Do in Iceland. I made-up those last three numbers, because I couldn’t remember the actual ones — he likes to enumerate, but doesn’t like lists, so it doesn’t make for a very good textbook either.

Written by Jared Diamond, 2011