The FT and NYT both have stories about the dollar’s poor start to the year, which sounds alarming. But then NYT shows this graph to back up the claim and you know what, it really doesn’t seem to be all that dramatic. In fact, the very beginning of the year has been quite average, as have the last two months. It is only the period from March until mid-April that saw two unusual slumps, but does that count as “dollar having its worst start to a year since 1973”, as the NYT put it? It might, depending on your definition of “worst” and “start”, but hardly a foregone conclusion. I know that newspapers need to prepare for the slow news week with the holiday coming up, but come on. “Worst start to a year in more than 50 years” is a bit too dramatic for what the chart shows us.

What kind of data would deserve some drama? Well, again the NYT provides the perfect example with their front page news on April 2020 US unemployment data. The headline, in much deserved all-caps, says “U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT IS WORST SINCE DEPRESSION” and has the unemployed bard dip so far below anything in the past 50 years that it falls all the way down to the bottom of the front page. A true extreme value.

As an aside, if you thought you could call either “an outlier”, think again. Here is a 12-minute explainer on the difference from Pasquale Cirillo’s Log of Risk podcast but in short: outliers are impossible values, extreme values are, well, extreme but still in the realm of the possible. The dollar’s decline this year is neither but you wouldn’t know it if you just read the headlines.

Microsoft claims their new medical tool is “four times more successful than human doctors at diagnosing complex ailments”. Unsurprisingly, what they meant by “diagnosing a disease” was the thinking-hard part, not the inputs part:

To test its capabilities, “MAI-DxO” was fed 304 studies from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that describe how some of the most complicated cases were solved by doctors. 

This allowed researchers to test if the programme could figure out the correct diagnosis and relay its decision-making process, using a new technique called “chain of debate”, which makes AI reasoning models give a step-by-step account of how they solve problems.

If and when deployed, how likely is it that these algorithms will get a query comparable to a New England Journal of Medicine case study? Most doctors don’t reach those levels of perception and synthesis, let alone the general public.

Fact of the day from FT’s Edward Luce:

America has 120 guns per 100 people against 4.6 in England and Wales. The next highest democracy to America is Montenegro with 39 guns per 100 people — still a third of its level.

Super-excited about our family’s Montenegro vacation in August.

Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:

René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.

These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.

FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?

“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.

Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:

• alive (or at least active) now, and
• capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.

A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.

That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:

• “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”

Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.

Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.

But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?

It takes a special kind of negligence to accumulate $200,000 in traffic tickets over 7 years. To post about it on Reddit while whining about your car being impounded is the chef’s kiss. Many thanks to the ANC Commissioner who immortalized the now-deleted posts and to DC Councilmember Charles Allan for making it happen.

The Department of Justice is just asking questions:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

The Clinton administration bombed Yugoslavia under the thinnest of pretenses; his successor one-upped him. The Obama campaign used “Big Data” to target individual voters; his successor one-upped him. The Biden administration cloaked their attempts at censoring social media under the guise of “misinformation”; and, well, see above.

For every hair-raising breakdown of values and norms there is a precedent, and time and again the precedent has been set by the same side, with remarkable shortsightedness.

If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.

Big news: DEVONthink 4 is almost out as a public beta. A Reddit user got an early look at the announcement and a few things stick out:

• As expected (and hoped for), AI features prominently, with options to integrate your preferred online model
• There now seems to be built-in version control
• Purchase (or upgrade from v3) gets you updates for a year, after that you pay for continuous updates

I wish AI integration was on-device only as online integration will limit the types of data I can use it on, but still, sign me up! (↬r/devonthink)

What to call this momentous moment in history? “Liberation Day” doesn’t quite capture the sentiment. I propose FAFO Day.

Waiting with bated breath for the “Make America Wise Again” campaign.