This is the big one.

Last year, I set out to read at least 22 books, and gave my self a list. Things went better than planned: in addition to 19 of the 22 books from the list, I found time ⊕ I attribute this to one thing and one thing only: waking up one hour before anyone else in the house. After all, who needs sleep? for 13 more.

In no particular order:

1. The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef) ⊕ The links mostly go to my reviews, as brief as they may be. If I haven’t written about some of these — and I am only now finding out I have skipped quite a few — the link is to the book’s Amazon page. So it goes…
2. How to Live (Derek Sivers)
3. Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics (Daniel Kaplan and Leon Glass)
4. Light (M. John Harrison), which I haven’t written about, maybe because it was a re-read of a book that fascinated me way back when I was in medical school, or maybe because Harrison’s dense prose made me so numb I couldn’t write anything for days. Regardless, it is a masterpiece of science fiction.
5. Safe Haven (Mark Spitznagel)
6. Pieces of the Action (Vannevar Bush)
7. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
8. Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
9. Calculated Risks (Gerd Gigerenzer)
10. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World (Yaneer Bar-Yam), which is another one without a quick review, though again I can’t remember why. Bar-Yam is now more known for his zero Covid activism, which is unfortunate because it may turn away people from his general work on complex systems and the importance of scale.
11. The Morning Star (Karl Ove Knausgaard), but I know full well why I didn’t write about it — it was because I didn’t like it and, even worse, I recommended it to a friend before reading the whole thing on the strength of the setup. Turns out setup is all it was. Shame.
12. Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
13. The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
14. Checkpoint Charlie (Ian MacGregor)
15. Checkmate in Berlin (Giles Milton) which I ended up liking more than the unfocused Checkpoint Charlie, though what the message is other than be careful of temporary solutions because they may last longer than you think, or want I am not quite sure.
16. The Complacent Class (Tyler Cowen)
17. Craft Coffee: A Manual (Jessica Easto)
18. Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (Donald W. Braben) is another one that didn’t sit with me as well as I thought it would, mainly because it turned into the author’s explanation and justification for what the research institue he was running did. Old man explains himself can be a good genre — see Pieces of the Action, above — but this one didn’t quite cut it.
19. Adventures of a Computational Explorer (Stephen Wolfram) confirmed that Wolfram is a lovable blowhard.
20. A World Without Email (Cal Newport)
21. Twilight of Democracy (Anne Applebaum)
22. Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)
23. Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter) was the best book I read this year. I didn’t write about it because I wanted to keep it for myself but I guess that now the secret is out.
24. Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) had the opposite effect of the intended: I realized that the PKM genre is mostly BS and that people with the best “systems” — if you can call them that — don’t write about their workflows but rather about the things around and because of which those workflows were created in the first place. Ryan Holiday comes to mind, but really it is better to find the people in your field whose work you admire and see what they are doing, not what some PKM guru is saying you should do.
25. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom (Katherine Eban)
26. Fooled by Randomness (Nassim N. Taleb)
27. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness (Russel D. Roberts) Denser than the title and the cover would suggest, and with some good messages.
28. Nova Swing (M. John Harrison) because I am a gluton for punishment (but seriously: this is the lighter and more readable sequel to Harrison’s Light)
29. Wild Problems (Russel D. Roberts)
30. The Courage to Be (Paul Tillich) which left enough of an impression that I dedicated a whole podcast episode about it, though in Serbian. What I really thought about non-Serbian speakers shall never know.
31. Coddling of the American Mind (Greg Lukianoff and Jonatha Haidt) was merele OK, as it considered the general decay of intellectual life as phenomenon isolated to American universities. Haidt, one of the authors, recently wrote a brilliant essay correcting this mistake.
32. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis), which I didn’t understand. I should probably read it again and with more care. A project for another year…

Dishonorable mention goes to Ministry for the Future, the only book I started this year without finishing because it read as an underbaked piece of propaganda. The only other book in recent memory which suffered the same fate was the loud, the insufferable, the too smart for its own good Catch 22, to give you an idea of my literary proclivities. They just weren’t for me.

• Fractional use of vials/pills to decrease per-patient cost, because the main driver of high cost of drugs is not manufacturing (i.e. a ten times more efficient manufacturing process would not result in 10 times, or even 2 times lower prices). If you don’t believe me just look at what Sanofi did with alemtuzumab.
• Using real-world data instead of randomized controlled trials, because while retrospective, non-randomized, uncontrolled studies Now rebranded as “real-world data”. are good for generating hypotheses and maybe, maybe, detecting enormous effect sizes Think: smoking causing cancer, but not: who-knows-what new material causing lymphoma. we have learned through much trial and error that RCTs are critical for evaluating whether a medical intervention works or not. Back when personal computers were too big and expensive for mass use, the answer wasn’t to invent a story of why calculators were better — it was to make PCs so cheap and small that not having one in your pocket was a matter of personal choice, not cost. Same for RCTs.
• The Choosing Wisely initiative, which was all the rage back when I was a resident and still seems to have legs. ⊕ Not to mention that the program unintentionally promoted a dangerous frame of mind in which some doctors thought extensive testing was never indicated, thus missing some rare but life-theratening diagnoses. Money spent on producing more content for doctors to read, listen, and watch — thus taking up their time — and encouraging patients to talk to their doctors at length about questionable data behind many of the procedures — thus, again, taking up their time — may have been better spent designing and running pragmatic RCTs that would answer these questions and save both the doctors' and patients' time by reducing ambiguity. Oh well.
• Yet another health care delivery reform — this may be just my healthcare policy naiveté, but these all had the whiff of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. ⊕ See also: the Homer Simpson car Mandating the desired outcome instead of thinking about the right incentives is bound to increase cost through second-order effects.

Anything else?

Not much time for TV this year — which is a good thing! — but here is what we ⊕ Yes, “we”. Watching TV is for me a communal thing and the last time I watched any show by myself was finishing up Veep in mid-2014 during my last few night shifts as a fellow. watched, in no particular order:

1. Station Eleven (HBO)
2. Magpie Murders (PBS, Britbox)
3. Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
4. The Mysterious Benedict Society (Disney+)
5. Wednesday (Netflix)
6. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu), which I didn’t write about but Season 2 was even better than the first and I have every reason to believe Season 3 will be even better. There is nothing with Steve Martin and Martin Short in it that I haven’t loved, and Selena Gomez was a wonderful surprise, Only Murders… being the only live action thing of hers I saw.
7. The Afterparty (Apple TV+), which between the murder mystery plot, the cast, the jokes, and the production values should really take the number one spot as my favorite show of the year overall.
8. Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount+), which is, let’s all agree, the best Star Trek show since the original series.
9. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+), which is the second best Star Trek since TOS.
10. The Great British Baking Show (Netflix), which continues being the perennial favorite, despite the humor, the baking, and the charm all slipping away year by year ever since the pandemic.

And yes, looking back at the list I have to wonder what it would have looked like if we did have time for TV. Geez.

I’ve been listing podcasts since 2014 and 5 years ago to the day it became a yearly ritual. Here is to another year of quality podcasts.

1. The Joy of Why by the mathematician Steven Strogatz is the best science podcast from the best science website, Quanta Magazine. He doesn’t pander to the listener and focuses more on the practicality of science than the gee-whiz isn’t science so gosh darn great ethos that plagues other popular science podcasts. The downside is that it is sometimes just at the edge of my understanding ⊕ Or, if the talk is about mathematics, way way off. but is that really such a bad thing?

2. The Jim Rutt Show is a strange beast. The topics are more about the philosophy of science than science itself — with rare but brilliant exceptions — and Jim has a no-nonsense, tells it like it is personality that I find endearing but some might say is a bit grating. He also has unusual ideas about the future of humanity — “Game B” is the preferred name — which I am yet to digest, but that only comes up rarely.

3. FT Weekend by Lilah Raptopoulos is probably the heart of “Game A”: nominally it is for and about the ultra-rich readers of the Financial Times — think the abominable passengers of the yacht in Triangle of Sadness — catering to their tastes and interests, but really it is there to satisfy the podcast-listening upper middle class’s interest in that world. Funnily enough, I watched Triangle of Sadness based on Lilah’s interview with the director.

4. Conversations with Tyler by Tyler Cowen haven’t made an appearance in a while, but I continue listening and this year has been one of the better ones. His interview with Jeremy Grantham, the investor turned philanthropist, is hands down the best one hour I’ve spent listening in 2022.

5. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is my guilty pleasure which at one point I listened daily but then realized it was unsustainable and saved it only for special moments like the day after the American midterm elections or Keith’s twitter ban. Snark is like candy — pleasurable in tiny bursts, but too much will rot your brain. Caveat audiens.

These are only the new or semi-new regulars. Others continue being in rotation: ⊕ With rare exceptions, but so it goes. 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one

Apple Music has started making year-in-review playlists and, well, 2022 was the year my kids officially took over the account. Behold the Top 10 in the Miljković household:

1. Enemy (Imagine Dragons): 228 plays
2. Quietly Yours (Birdy): 145 plays
3. Natural (Imagine Dragons): 120 plays
4. Spring Waltz a.k.a. Mariage d’Amour (Toms Mucenieks): 87 plays
5. We Are Monster Trucks (Kids Channel): 86 plays
6. Surface Pressure (Jessica Darrow): 81 plays
7. We Don’t Talk About Bruno (Carolina Gaitán et al.): 71 plays
8. Wait For It (Leslie Odom Jr. et al.): 70 plays
9. Le Carnaval des Animaux: Aquarium (Charles Dutoit et al): 66 plays
10. Radioactive (Imagine Dragons): 50 plays

Figuring out who in the family was listening to what is left as an exercise for the reader.

Is it too early to start with end-of-year lists? Because I would like to share my disappointments of the year. Or, more precisely, disappointment (singular), as there has been only one: LG in general, and their HU810PW laser projector in particular.

It broke just a few months out of warranty (strike 1), they have no local authorized service shops (strike 2), and a week after speaking to someone from their call center I am yet to get instructions on how to send it to them for a $600 $100 shiping and $60 insurance not included. repair (strike 3). I do, however, receive half a dozen spam emails per day from LG now that they have my email address (not a strike, just completely shameless).

To be clear, it is a gorgeous projector with crystal clear picture even in daylight. LG’s WebOS is the best smart TV software out there. Yes, it is a low bar. Still… It has generous horizontal shift that saved me from having to drill holes in the ceiling. The remote control isn’t the sleek piece of aluminium Apple TV has, but unlike Apple TV’s it is comfortable to hold, glows in the dark, and actually works! ⊕ And to be clear from a different perspective — that this is my biggest disappointment of 2022 is a good indicator that the year was pretty decent for the Miljković household, all things considered.

Which makes its breaking just out of warranty and LG’s lack of customer service all the more grating.

• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
• How to Live by Derek Sivers (the only one in the list I may re-read)
• Safe Haven by Mark Spitznagel

So far so good. If the first month is anything to go by, I will have the 2022 reading list licked by September.

This is the bare minimum of non-medical books I should read this year. The last two years were abysmal in that regard, and I look forward to making excuses for why 2022 was no different.

• The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef)
• How to Live (Derek Sivers)
• Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics (Daniel Kaplan and Leon Glass)
• Light (M. John Harrison)
• Safe Haven (Mark Spitznagel)
• Pieces of the Action (Vannevar Bush)
• The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
• Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
• Calculated Risks (Gerd Gigerenzer)
• Making Things Work (Yaneer Bar-Yam)
• The Morning Star (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
• Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
• Where Law Ends (Andrew Weissmann)
• The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
• Checkpoint Charlie (Ian MacGregor)
• Checkmate in Berlin (Giles Milton)
• The Complacent Class (Tyler Cowen)
• Craft Coffee: A Manual (Jessica Easto)
• The Complete Father Brown Stories (G. K. Chesterton)
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Ecco)
• Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (Donald W. Braben)
• Adventures of a Computational Explorer (Stephen Wolfram)

• Adjacent Possible
• Astral Codex Ten
• Breaking the News
• Galaxy Brain
• Insight
• Ribbonfarm Studio
• Ridgeline
• Slow Boring
• Story Club
• Wrath of Gnon

Most of these also make an appearance on my list of blogs. All are recommended, though some of the more prolific ones are best consumed in moderation.

Listen to podcasts long enough and you are bound to develop tastes. After 15-some years, mine are these: conversations over stories, with minimal to no editing, and lasting no longer than a couple of hours per episode. Even within these constraints, the list of podcasts I could listen to is near-infinite. Yet these are the few to which I keep returning:

1. Omnibus, which survived John Roderick’s attempted cancelation to continue providing two poorly-researched topics per week. Highlights of 2021: Mobile Jubilees, The Bottle Conjuror, Officials General, Merkins (yes, those), and The Phantom of New Guinea in which the curious popularity of an obscure Canadian detective show in Serbia makes an appearance.
2. EconTalk, which continues to be the best general-interest interview show for people who’d rather avoid snake oil salesmen. Highlights of 2021: Dana Giola on poetry (which is in fact the best episode of 2021), Julia Galef on her book Scout Mindset (which I am yet to read, but oh well), Anja Shortland on lost art, Bret Devereaux on ancient Greece and Rome, and Johann Hari on lost connections (which reminded me of a particularly sad episode from my tenure as a heme/onc attending).
3. Healthcare Unfiltered is the first new healthcare-related podcast I’ve started listening in years. Chadi Nabhan is a good interviewer with an even better access to relevant guests, particularly when he attempts to bring together both sides of a twitter-heated medical debate. Highlights of 2021: Bishal Gyawali on clinical trial design, Aaron Goodman and Matt Wilson on CNS prophylaxis for DLBCL, Barbara Pro and Mehdi Hamadani on PTCL, Mikkael Sekeres and David Steensma on mid-career transition, and Aaron Goodman versus the world, supposedly about randomized clinical trials.
4. Plenary Session was back on my playlist this year, and mostly Covid-free. Highlights of 2021: Chris Booth, Adam Cifu, Manni Mohyuddin, Bapu Jena, and again Aaron Goodman (who should really start his own podcast instead of squatting in other people’s).
5. The VPZD Show is the one about Covid. Prasad and Damania have their hearts in the right place and fairly sharp minds; they can evaluate evidence on merits and are willing to admit past mistakes. Without mourning days past when these characteristics were more common — because in fact they weren’t — I’ll just note that in times like these, they are essential. Highlights of 2021 include the entirety of the show, which has only just started.

Previous editions: 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one