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.

“When people stopped smoking, toxic clouds disappeared from indoor spaces like bars, restaurants, and offices. I think something similar would happen if people stopped reading the news, except the detoxified indoor spaces would be our own heads.”

Brilliant.

PSA: don’t dig holes in the sand. A few years ago my wife and I finished a Thanksgiving beach outing by helping dig out a kid (not ours!) completely buried after a hole he was in collapsed. He made it out alive, but it was traumatic for everyone involved.

The NYT dostarlimab article is reverberating through international media with predictable consequences: being hailed as a miracle cure for cancer. I wrote about it in Serbian, and Google’s translation of it is readable, in an AI-generated spam sort of way.

“It is in the nature of jesters to speak their minds when the mood takes them, regardless of the consequences. They are neither calculating nor circumspect, and this may account for the “foolishness” often ascribed to them.”

Fools were everywhere. Not so much anymore.