📚️ Absolutely flabbergasted — in a good way! — that The End of Everything has won the Booker Prize. I take particular delight in reading the mostly negative comments from the confused NYT readers.

Their actual review, however, was quite good. Maybe that’s why the announcement didn’t link to it?

“Wall Street sheds $3.2tn as Democratic midterm sweep triggers brutal AI rout”:

The Democrats’ win in Congress was “a horrible day for America”, said a US portfolio manager with large positions in tech companies including Anthropic.

A: Gobsmackingly idiotic.

Q: Which two words best describe 2020s finance?

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Mission accomplished.

FT has a good writeup.

NYT’s is an embarrassment. Their word games are the only thing keeping me a subscriber.

Congratulations to my fellow citizens! Now the real work begins.

Flying for the first time since July, to Chicago.

To vote. In the Serbian parliamentary elections. Lily Lynch has a good writeup of why these are really really really really important.

There are no absentee ballots in Serbia: if you are away from home you either have to haul your behind back, or register to vote abroad. The number of Serbs in Denver being too small to open a polling place there — not that there would be one even if there were more of us, as the soon-to-be former Serbian kakistocracy has been doing its best to suppress the diaspora vote — we did a nick-of-time registration to the one place they had to open up. ⊕ [Note: But no, it was in fact more complicated than that. We first naively registered to vote in Denver, well ahead of the registration deadline, thinking that the powers that be would, in case there wasn’t a polling place there, re-route us to the closes city automatically like we heard they did in years past. Then we learned that there was no law requiring them to do so. Fearing shenanigans, my wife and I sent a second registration, for Chicago, skipping Denver altogether. And a good thing we did, because my father-in-law, visiting from Serbia, never submitted the re-registration my wife dutifully prepared for him, and learned that his request to vote in Denver was denied, end of story. This all happened a few weeks ago. For those whose jobs, finances and/or child care responsibilities don’t allow for last-minute plane tickets: tough luck. Draw your own conclusions about what the implications are for Serbian democracy. ]

Another cute way to take away people’s right to vote was to have the polling places open at the same time as they are in Serbia. Which is to say, they opened at midnight central, and will close at 1pm. Or maybe 2pm, since today was the end of daylight savings torture in most of the world. I am guessing here, because the official certificate of registration to the Chicago consulate my wife and I received never specified the time. In prior elections, this was 8am to 8pm local time, so those used to voting that way are in for a surprise if they show up in the late afternoon.

Only, this obvious ploy to rig the vote was publicized so heavily that it made people who otherwise may not have voted so pissed off that they registered and started queuing well before midnight. I keep getting videos of long lines in DC, Chicago, etc.

Anyway, it was a 6am flight in — the one I am on now — and a 9pm flight back, with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in between. First class for both of us, thanks to the free upgrade from status I earned at my previous job and hope never to have again. The night before, we were privileged to a) witness a Nuggets nail-biter (against the Pelicans, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the season but oh well), and b) participate in the 4th quarter timeout show, wherein the Nuggets mascot Rocky threw a half-court shot behind his back and right into the net, earning us $200 (!?) most of which we will donate. ⊕ [Note: I would like to think that this was the turning point in the match. The Nuggets were 19 points behind at the start of the quarter. Some of the home crowd was booing. Then Rocky made the shot, the energy changed, and they came back to win in overtime. If you have access to the video via the NBA app you can see for yourself and check if my intuition is correct. ] Which is a long-winded way to say: helluva weekend.

Clayton Davis for Variety:

The smartest defense is baked into the movie’s DNA. This is not a redemption tour. It is a study of the impossibility of ever knowing what is real, which is either the perfect subject for a branch that fetishizes authenticity or a provocation aimed straight at it.

Max Fisher for Newpress:

China quietly saved the world last month.

Max Kozlov for Nature:

The NIH is quietly restricting funding for research that evaluates how public policy impacts human health.

Ba-dump.

Frequent Infinite Regress linkee Ruxandra Tesslo wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about why we can’t get new cancer cures. Unsurprising for those who have read her past work, she places the bulk of the blame on the glacial speed by which clinical trials are designed, set up and run, at least in the US. Biotechs are looking at other countries — yes, including China — for their next first-in-human trial. All the cures we need are right there in the lab, you see, it is these darn trials that are too slow, keeping patients away from life-saving medicines. There is a nice n-of-one story about a patient with KRAS-mutated lung cancer who received a RAS inhibitor in a phase 1 trial to set the tone.

Vinay Prasad calls out a few big omissions in Tesslo’s article, and the number one point he brings out is the number one point I have issue with as well: the science is, in fact, lacking. There are no miracle cures locked in a drawer somewhere, not reaching patients because of government bureaucracy or a big pharma conspiracy.

But how can that be, with all the money thrown into cancer research ever since Dick Nixon’s War on Cancer? Well. Though I don’t know this for a fact, I have a strong suspicion that the answer to the curious lack of cancer cures is the same as the answer to that other question no one dares ask: if trials being so slow and expensive is a huge bottleneck, why are they so slow and expensive in the first place? It’s also the reason why a discerning reader of this blog may have noticed that my writing has taken a slight but unexpected anti-market turn.

Financialization, once the great enabler of garage-based startups, has turned every field of American endeavor into a casino and given one too many a bullshitter enough money to choke the competition. Biomedicine is particularly susceptible to bullshit large and small. Even if decently financed, the honest players — of which there are quite a few — have to fight for other limited resources in the ecosystem, from PhDs to do the actual research and clinical trial sites to attention. The result is hyperinflation of trial costs and a veritable bullshit bonanza in the biomedical literature, and this is not even taking into account the more personal motives of academics to fill the field with dreck.

My big fear is that no one is talking about the negative impact of financialization because it is water. Kudos to Tesslo for not talking about billion dollar drugs, but that seems to be the default, even among science journalists. Mr. Market will give you cheaper 4K TVs — surveillance comes for free — what it won’t give you is cancer cures.

A note on the title: I have come to detest The NYT’s two-sentence titles that go out of their way to dumb down the subject matter while piquing people’s interest, but thought it would be fun to write one for a quick post that’s a comment on a NYT article. Promise it won’t happen again.

• Dan Luu: Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record. Not great. I have linked to Zitron a few times, to articles that were short enough for me to actually read and understand. Most of them were just too long and/or too angry. Fitting that a critique of Zitron’s writing is just as long, though much more even-keel.
• Lilly Lynch: Sympathy for the Devil? Lindsay Clancy, Mercy and Maternal Filicide in History. The less I know about this case the better, but this was some good context.
• Ernie Smith: Wanted: Some Cheap Computing. Issue No. 1 of Smith’s mini-PC newsletter. I am in the market for both a heavy-duty primary machine and some satellite servers, and thanks to the ramapocalypse the latter — and therefore this newsletter — is much more appealing.
• Derek Sivers: Bangalore India hospital flow. Today I learned Sivers was a fan of “executive health checks”. Yikes! As I wrote in a comment to the article:

The human body is not a car. We don’t know how most of it works. There are a handful of labs you should start getting once you hit 40 (or earlier depending on family history), and a few cancer screenings we know work. Anything else is a needless waste of money at best, and a recipe for an iatrogenic disaster if an incidental finding from a whole-body MRI leads to a wild goose chase, biopsies, surgeries, etc. Not to mention the false sense of security these things can give.

Calling it now: “quietly” is Word of the Year 2026.

What AI sired, mindless zeitgeist reverberators now rear.

• Michael Peel and Antonia Cundy: The cowboy clinics selling unproven longevity treatments. Wherein two FT reportes pose as patients and get to hear some ridiculous promises. How on Earth do these supposed doctors get to keep their licenses?
• Robert Armstrong: The US consumer is showing some strain. Great data analysis work. If only people gave that much scrutiny to biomedcial research.
• Miranda Green: Have you got 10 minutes? No? Neither do I.
• Madhumita Murgia: Anthropic launches AI tool that can conduct scientific experiments. As if science wasn’t slop-ridden already. Says the text:

AI has become increasingly important to drug research at big pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly, maker of popular weight-loss drugs, has partnered with AI chipmaker Nvidia chips and earlier this year invested in Insilico Medicine, a company focused on AI for drug discovery.

Please. I would wait until any of the money poured into drug discovery AI produces a tangible result before calling it “increasingly important”. Never mind that it’s not the discovery that is the real bottleneck.