• Read: Cell Biology by the Numbers online, My Name is Red and A Pattern Language offline. But American Registry of Pathology Expert Opinions: Recommendations for the diagnostic workup of mature T cell neoplasms is the only thing I’ll finish (and you can tell from the title it’s a page-turner)
• Watch: Season 1 of The Americans and also this YouTube channel in the background, as one of the children is quite the car enthusiast.
• Play: Elder Sign which is the perfect game to play on a rainy day, and what better way to welcome in the New Year than by fighting the Ancient Ones.
• Eat: Leftovers from The Federalist Pig (or The Capitalist Pig, as a friend tends to mispronounce it constantly in what is quite the Freudian slip).
• Think: How long can I keep this up? I give myself until the end of next week.

If there is a theme to this year’s list it is the intentional omission of all things biomedical, which I hope is self-explanatory considering (waves around) all this.

1. Omnibus, wherein two nerds, one professional the other amateur discuss topics of great interest, including bad architecture, bad cinema, a bad sister, and a very bad husband. It is at once entertaining, educational, and en…titilating?

2. Lex Fridman Podcast, wherein the said Lex Fridman, an AI researcher from MIT, discusses history with Dan Carlin, programming with Chris Lattner, cryptocurrency with Vitalik Buterin, Joe Rogan with Joe Rogan, et cetera, et cetera. File under “good for exploring the back catalogue, not so much for regular weekly listending”, like so many others.

3. 20 Macs for 2020, which is a weekly-ish countdown of notable Apple computers, with comments from notable Apple aficionados. Listen and appreciate how enthusiastic some people can be about some things.

4. Dithering, which is a — shock, horror — paid podcast, but one well worth your money and time if you know the two men responsible, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.

5. People I (mostly) admire, wherein an economist of some fame and with a good sense of humor talks to, well, people he (mostly) admires, including Ken Jennings of the first podcast on this list, and what a nice way to end it.

Previous editions: 2020

• 2019
• 2018
• The one where I took a break from podcasts
• The very first one

EconTalk with Russ Roberts is the best interview podcast I’ve listened to, period. Unlike Tyler Cowen Roberts focuses on an issue or two, not the personality being interviewed. He gives fewer if any passes. The effect is that I feel like I’m actually learning about the thing in question, not just getting acquainted with Cowen’s personality du jour. Whether any learning actually takes place at my advanced age is another matter.

My top 5 episodes:

• Keith Smith on free market health care
• Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding
• Adam Cifu on the case for being a medical conservative
• Patrick Collison on innovation and scientific progress
• Andrew McAfee on more from less

Honorable mentions: Cowen, Holiday, Hossenfelder, Bertaud

Conversations with Tyler are as good as ever. This year’s favorites:

• Mark Zuckerberg and Patrick Collison
• Margaret Atwood
• Masha Gessen
• Emily Wilson
• Ezekiel Emanuel

(Note that the majority are episodes with women - Cowen has Roberts easily beaten here)

Breaking Smart with Venkatesh Rao I would recommend to anyone who’s enjoyed the above-linked interview Russ Roberts did with Rao on one of the better Breaking Smart essays. It’s 15-20 minutes of Rao performing mental stretching excercises, solo.

Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad is another podcast that shines with the solo performances, but the interviews aren’t half-bad either. That isn’t a surprise, since this year Prasad has talked to David Steensma, Frank Harrell, Adam Cifu, H. Gilbert Welch, and Clifford Hudis, among others. Sadly, the podcast still doesn’t have a proper website, so I can’t link to any of these episodes directly.

I started the decade childless and am ending it with three, so I have missed most of the 2010s’ pop culture. This includes the entire Transformers franchise and most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so, not much missed then?)

• Film: “Get Out”
• Blockbuster/action film: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
• Album: “Hamilton”
• Single: “Rolling in the Deep”
• TV Show: “Veep”
• Single Season: “The Leftovers” season 2
• Book Fiction: “The Dark Forest” (or “Death’s End” if you count the publication of the first Chinese edition, but TDF is superior)
• Book Non Fiction: “Antifragile”
• Athlete of the Decade: The Đoković-Federer-Nadal trio, but if I had to pick one then obviously Đoković.

Movies and music were better in the 2000s, but oh what time to watch TV and follow tennis. It’s too early to judge the books (though it’s telling that my favorite was originally written in 2008).

1. Plenary Session. Many friends and coworkers are amazed that anyone would voluntarily subject themself to Vinay Prasad‘s tirades, but his podcast is well-behaved and a pleasure to listen. The monologues are better than the interviews, which is to be expected: he’s been monologuing his whole life and interviewing for less than a year. And yes, some of his guests/collaborators need too much coaxing, but sock puppets only reinforce the national meeting atmosphere that the name evokes.
2. Conversations with Tyler. Still great. You can start at the beginning, or with the one with Daniel Kahneman, but start somewhere. Most are excellent and all are good, even the ones you wouldn’t guess from the interviewee’s name and bio.
3. The Knowledge Project. Farnham Street/F.S. has gotten some good press, and for good reason. It’s self-improvement for people allergic to the self-improvement label.
4. Revisionist History. Yet to listen to the latest season, but I can’t see it going badly. Malcolm Gladwell is a pro.
5. The Glass Canon Podcast. In the absence of a regular gaming night (never schedule a campaign around three doctors’ schedules), I listen to other people playing tabletop RPGs. No better entertainment, I say.

For better or worse, the American system of government is strong. Those who say otherwise have a financial interest in people thinking the opposite.

Culturally, US has more similarities with Iran than with Saudi Arabia, even if you count religion and religiosity as part of culture. The Christian right is working hard to make them even more similar.

Though still quite hard, it’s easier for a high-skilled immigrant to come to America than to any other country in the world. Comparison is even more favorable for low-skilled and unskilled immigrants. For all of them, quality of life, acceptance, and protection they get are better than anywhere else.

The randomness of the Green Card lottery process is a feature not a bug.

Reading the non-fiction sections of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and whatever their conservative equivalents are, is good for generating fake insight but ultimately pointless. The Economist is useful for a tiny segment of the population but lets be real: if you’re reading this you are not it.

The only useful section in the daily newspapers is Local. Maybe Sports, if you are into that sort of thing, but professional and college sports are a scam so stick with the amateur leagues.

TSA agents and airline personnel are nice people but some passengers check out their brains at the curb and make everyone’s lives less pleasant.

Apple hardware products are underpriced for what you get but do you actually need what they offer? This doesn’t include the AirPods, which are the best thing Apple has made in the last 20 years and still underpriced; though they unfortunately resemble in both name and appearance a mind control method from Doctor Who S2 and paired with a smart phone are not far from it.

The world doesn’t need another IPA. America needs more tripels.

This is all coming from a non-immigrant resident alien with no expertise in politics, international law, transportation, or technology. I do know beer though.

• Conversations with Tyler: I much prefer this over his mostly spartan, often cryptic, and always clueless about things medical blog Marginal revolution. Cowen‘s interview style brings out the best from people; it is also a good and rare example of clear thinking. Compare and contrast his chat with Malcolm Gladwell and Patrick Collison’s chat with Cowen: when answering, Gladwell uhms and ahhs and changes direction mid-sentence; Cowen pauses for a half-second, then produces paragraphs of prose that could have been lifted right out of an encyclopedia. Not to belittle Gladwell — for one, I’d be even worse (as anyone who had to finish my sentences for me can confirm); and two, he is responsible for
• Revisionist history: He had me at Food Fight. Gladwell embraces and owns his Well, actually kind of story-telling — even the show’s name is a big Well, actually to the Gladwell-haters. And good for him, because the stories are marvelous in both topic and style, and make me want to read his books again.
• Sources and methods: Two ex-spies talk about learning and cognition. They are still in intelligence-gathering mode, interviewing guests you‘re unlikely to hear anywhere else. It’s how I learned about Tinderbox (and you can too).
• America the bilingual: One part pep-talk to encourage the pre-1990s waves of immigrants to America to take up a second language, one part advice to parents raising multilingual children. The latter validated my plan to save money strengthen the offspring’s Serbian by shipping them across the Atlantic to spend some quality time with the grandparents.
• Novel targets: Finishing of the list of men talking to each other is the best oncology podcast I’ve come across. It may be heavily slanted towards immunotherapy, and not zealous enough in dampening the hype, but it tries.

The next time someone asks me about books to read before residency, I will direct them here. You don’t have to be a medical trainee to benefit from these, but that period of anxious anticipation between match day and orientation is perfect for buffing your attributes.

How to read a book, by Mortimer J. Adler

What better way to start learning about learning than by reading a book about reading books?

The Farnam Street blog has a nice outline of the book’s main ideas. The same establishment is now hocking a $200 course on the same topic. It’s probably good, but at $10 the source material is slightly more affordable.

Getting things done, by David Allen

The first few months you will be neck-deep in scut work no matter what you do. After that, though, you will have to juggle patient care, research, didactics, fellowship/career planning, and piles of administrative drek—and that’s just inside the hospital. At the very least, this book will help you make time for laundry (and maybe some reading).

Thinking, fast and slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Superficially, similar knowledge to what is in these 400+ pages can be found in a few Wikipedia entries. But you would miss out on the how and why cognitive biases and heuristics are so important. Medicine and research are bias-driven endeavors, and not understanding them is not knowing real-world medicine.

Only three? Yes. If anything, the two and a half months between mid-March and July 1st won’t be enough to read them all with the attention they deserve. But you should try.

Another year, another round of podcast recommendations:

• …
• …
• …

No, it’s not your browser. The list is empty.

After 10 years of attaching electric appendages to my head using flimsy earhooks some call ear-phones, I have decided that one voice in my head at a time is quite enough, thank you, and that there are better ways to muffle the sounds of everyday existence than the nasal overtones of middle-aged white men.

Who will be crushed to lose me as a listener, I am sure.

I haven’t suddenly decided that they are all bad, mind you—I have spent cumulative months listening to them, so they must be good. The problem is, I like them too much.

Behold my modified CAGE questionnaire for podcasts:

1. Have you ever felt you needed to Cut down on your time spent listening to podcasts? Doing it right now.
2. Have people Annoyed you by criticizing your listening to podcasts at inappropriate times? Does my wife count as people*? If so, then yes.*
3. Have you ever felt Guilty about listening to a podcast instead of doing something else? You mean like sitting in the car 10 extra minutes after coming back home from work, waiting for an episode of Radiolab to finish? Umm…
4. Have you ever felt you needed to put on your headphones first thing in the morning (Eye-opener) to finish listening to last night’s podcast, or to get a head start on completing the unplayed list. “Felt like?” I do it all the time.

Aced it.

Granted, being mostly free, not too hard on your body, sometimes educational, and often entertaining, podcasts are not the worst thing in the world to be addicted to. But to be alone with your thoughts is exceedingly rare when there is a toddler in the house—rare enough that you do not want to spoil it by introducing external stimuli which make it impossible to string a chain of thought longer than the 30-second commercial break for Squarespace.

Farewell, voices. It was good while it lasted.

• 4 books read: Ocean at the End of the Lane, Tenth of December, The Golem and the Jinn, Ubiq
• 2 books re-read: Getting Things Done, Mindfulness in Plain English
• 1 book half-way through: Embassytown
• 2 computer games completed: To the Moon, Bastion
• 3 tabletop games played: Dixit (3 sessions), Pandemic (2), Eldritch Horror (4)
• 1 used minivan purchased
• 1 article, 1 abstract submitted
• 61 km ran
• 1000+ toddler photos taken
• 0 tedious field trips made

NIH orientation started today. My commute is 90-plus minutes each way, and the first four months are mostly inpatient. I will have to wait until retirement for another run like this.