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.

“If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.”

Cowen is right, though we can debate whether early closure is a defect or a feature.

Hard to say what’s better here, the article or the illustrations that accompany it. Good job, FT Magazine.

“The convergence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor directly or the blood (known as liquid biopsy)—matched with the appropriate therapy is leading to outcomes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncologists.”

So writes one Eric Topol, who seems to have made a career out of telling high-status people what they want to hear. For reasons why most of what he wrote is wrong, take a few minutes to watch Vinay Prasad’s reviews of the articles in question.

The trend disrupting medicine back when Dr. Topol was writing about its Creative Destruction turned out to be not technology but rather the opioid epidemic. As a non-expert oncologist I would wager something other than liquid biopsies is leaving its hallmark on the field right now.