This FT lunch interview with Piers Morgan was written for someone more clued in to British media than I am, but he seems to be an insufferable oaf, and proud of it! Even if just a facade — though one that pays off handsomely — is that how you want people to see you?

Charlie Warzel puts out a brilliant newsletter every week, and today’s is no different. “Business dude lorem ipsum” indeed.

An old one but good one from Scott Aaronson:

A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions.

Dealing with some government bureaucracy today and boy does this word fit for some — not all! — of the people involved.

Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair:

Though Fenton is a FEMA superstar with ample experience responding to tornadoes and hurricanes, it would have been more logical for the top person to come from within the HHS family of agencies, though a division director from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was assigned as Fenton’s deputy. The choice “reflects the fact that CDC can’t operate its way out of a paper bag,” said the former HHS official.

Third year into the covid-19 pandemic and I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that the CDC is moribund. Institutional decay comes for all during the fat and lazy times.

Katherine Eban also wrote this brilliant account of the lab-leak hypothesis and a hair-raising book about the FDA that made the agency’s fumbles, unlike the CDC’s, not at all surprising.

Associated Press:

Next year, the country is set to allow people to be killed exclusively for mental health reasons. It is also considering extending euthanasia to “mature” minors — children under 18 who meet the same requirements as adults.

That country is Canada. Yikes!

Andrew Bosworth (a.k.a. Boz):

Sarcasm “works” because it alludes to a critique without ever actually making it. It shifts the burden of substantiating the criticism as an exercise for the audience and further suggests that if they don’t already understand it then they are deficient. Making a critique implicit is an unassailable rhetorical position. The most socially acceptable response for the group is to go along with it, as you have given them nothing specific to challenge. And if someone does challenge it you can simply demur and say it was “just a joke.”

Last year I tried to explain why I didn’t care much for sarcasm. Boz makes a more cogent (and infinitely more readable!) argument.

Lily Lynch compares Serbia and the USA in a (paywalled) Patreon post:

“I’m stunned by how comparatively apolitical Americans seem, even, strangely, those who pay attention to politics. There’s still something of an extracurricular quality to them. In Serbia, politics feel much heavier and closer to everyday life. There’s something tense and suffocating about it. And with that pressure lifted here, I feel that a lot of space has been freed up for me to think about other things.”

There are many reasons why I myself left Serbia a decade ago, but this was the main one: unless you move to the countryside to keep bees and heard goats, you have no choice but be infused with (highly toxic) national politics.

But if and when I do pivot to making chèvre, going back to Serbia would not be out of the question.

Donald McNeil, formerly of the New York Times, wrote a primer on the monkeypox outbreak which is well worth the 10 minutes' reading time. The bottom line: not great, not terrible. For now.

“Lazy columnists rest a sweeping argument about political ideology on a tossed-off missive they heard one random person (not a public figure) utter online.”

Lazy journalism is a dominant negative mutant, destroying any benefit good journalism (like Warzel’s column!) brings.

“A lot of people simply won’t read a 15-page whitepaper, but will be impressed by flowcharts. By making the language of Web3 meandering and impenetrable and by building a culture that is very self-referential, investors make criticism harder to come by.”

Today’s Galaxy Brain newsletter is about Web3, but replace “whitepaper” with “manuscript” and “investors” with “researchers” and you get bad science in a nutshell.