The good: How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough by Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins for The New York Times. The breakthrough discussed is the real deal, and they manage to do it in a measured tone which correctly identifies daraxonrasib as a stepping stone and not a miracle cure. It has this important note up top and not buried down at the end:

The pills, three taken daily, are not a cure — eventually, daraxonrasib stops working. Many patients do not respond. And it has side effects that can be harsh, including rash, diarrhea, fatigue, nausea and raw, split fingertips.

How refreshing — I hope Derek Thompson takes note.

The bad: The Human Body’s Hidden Pathways by Dr. Avraham Z. Cooper, who is a pulmonary/critical care physician at the Ohio State University, for The New York Times Magazine. For the life of me I can not figure out the point of this post-modern journalistic exercise.

Nominally it is about a peer-reviewed research article which came out in 2021 under the title “Evidence for continuity of interstitial spaces across tissue and organ boundaries in humans”. The NYT Magazine staff did not deem it worthy of being linked to, but here it is in its entirety. In it, the authors showed small fragments of tattoo pigment migrating into tissues — skin and colon — deeper than they expected. We are not talking about ink being injected into a bicep and showing up in someone’s rectum here, but rather a series of biopsies of tattooed skin or the lining of the colon where there is a lot of pigment up top, and much less and in smaller pieces down at the bottom of the slide, deeper in the tissue.

Let me pull out my rarely used master’s degree in histology and note that this is hardly surprising. Connections between cells are not exactly air-tight — other than maybe in the brain and the testes — so of course there is some gel-like fluid circulating in the space. Or did the original article’s authors not realize why people tend to rub their feet when they get swollen?

But that is only the introduction. The meat of the article is Dr. Cooper’s theoretizing that this has something to do with — drumroll, please — acupuncture. With no evidence, mind you, but a tingling sensation in the back of his neck or somesuch. By the time the 30th single-sentence screen scrolls by we are firmly in bullshit territory, in the formal sense of the word. Caveat lector.

The ugly: Longevity Medicine - An evidence based guide by Dr. Vinay Prasad who is out of the FDA and back making YouTube videos. And oh my, the contrast between the most recent thumbnail and the one posted just before he joined the FDA is striking. Has it only been a year? No wonder that his first topic back as an influencer is about longevity.

A sidenote here which I will put at the end: the increased interest of Silicon Valley types with longevity, and I am not thinking only about Bryan Johnson’s delusions here, reminds me of the recently quoted speech Charlie Chaplin gave at the end of The Great Dictator, the relevant quote being that “so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” Good for us that snake oil salesmen are still the longevity field’s most prevalent phenotype.

JTR gave me a kick in the rear I needed to update my Blogroll page. There has been way too much cruft accumulated, with some recommendations not having posted in years. It is still a work in progress — only the first two lists are done — but better than nothing! For a (nearly) up-to-date list of every feed I follow, check out Feedland.

• Ed Zitron: Am I Meant To Be Impressed?. A detailed account of why you cannot trust anything tech companies say about the business side of AI, even in official SEC-sanctioned documents (because, of course you can’t). Note in particular how the unsuspecting public buys their narrative about big AI spending leading to increased profits hook, line, and sinker (the “profits” coming from bloated valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic). I am no fan of Apple, but it appears that they have made the right choice by staying out.
• Richard Dawkins: Is AI the next phase of evolution? ⊕ [Note: ᔥJason Kottke ] A eulogy to New Atheism.
• Lada Nuzhna: What the hell is happening in China? This is with regards to their push in biotech. All good things, I’d say.
• Isaac Greene: The Gift of Music. A delightful reframing of gift-giving.
• Derek Sivers: Geography is four-dimensional. About knowing places only at a certain time. The short essay matches my own experience of being asked what Serbia is like now. Having last truly lived there more than 15 years ago, the only correct answer is that I haven’t a clue.
• Charlie Chaplin: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, with transcript. It gave me chills.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Amen.

• Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys to fail and you may need dialysis until they heal, but unless you had bad kidneys to begin with there should be no permanent damage. The (wild) west hantavirus you can get from mice and humans alike, goes for your lungs instead of the kidneys, and kills 4 out of 10 humans who get it. And now there is a cruise ship full of people who were exposed. As if I needed another reason to avoid cruises like the plague.
• Kristen French: What Your Dream Life Says About You. It tells me I wake up too early because I only remember them once every few weeks!
• Kristen French interviews Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat? It is about Barrett’s Nature review which is behind the paywall but at least gives out the punchline in the title: “Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain.” Barrett’s own article in Nautilus, about emotional intelligence, is also worth a read.
• Jake Currie: The Best of NASA’s Newly Released Photos From the Artemis II Mission. An excellent source of desktop and smartphone backgrounds.
• Bob Grant, again: AI Music vs. My Parents. A sad state of affairs. Thankfully, personal experience tells me the younger generations are better at identifying saccharine “content” as slop and filtering it out.

• Brian VanHooker for Polygon: An oral history of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Netflix’s quirky sci-fi masterpiece. I don’t know how long an article needs to be or how many people need to be involved for it to qualify as an oral history, but this ain’t it. Still, it is about one of our family’s favorite movies so I felt obligated to link. For sampling of a true “oral history”, check out The Ringer.
• Nick Schaden: Discs versus digital: A buyer’s guide. Discs, of course, which are no less digital than streaming and are impervious to flaky internet connections.
• Gabby at woolgathering: one ticket for two movies, please!. Some interesting movie pairings, with the very first one proposed spanning the longest time period: Bringing Up Baby from (1938) + What’s Up, Doc? (1972).
• Scott Sumner: Films of 2026: Q1. Many of them are behind the Substack paywall (why, Scott, why?) but the reviews of new-ish movies I never would have heard of otherwise is above the fold. His brief re-re-review of Mulholland Drive is spot on.

As promised, today’s update to Microbe — a micro.blog client for Emacs now at version 2.0 — includes draft syncing. There were also some minor updates to Inkling. Both are available on GitHub though I think I’ll just drop that and just host them here. Something to think about for next week…

• Virginia Postrel for Works in Progress: Engineering the disposable diaper. I, for one, am grateful that there is no more need for “the knife method” of diaper washing — one guess as to what the knife was used for. The article doesn’t mention that the technology which made baby diapers ever so thinner and easier to transport has also helped microscopy. Knowledge begets knowledge.
• Dynomight (pseud): You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller. On the benefits of acetaminophen, the blind alley of pain medicines.
• Brennan Kenneth Brown: Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics. Just a few week ago my wife and I were talking about the mind-bending difference in magnitude between a googol and a googolplex, and the notations described in this article would have come in handy. More to the point, even farming games not mentioned here like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing do wonders to teach children math.
• Ted Gioia: Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalists. Look, when FT’s Janan Ganesh praised the unexamined life I don’t think he meant going about it like an amoeba. Est modus in rebus.
• Jake Currie for Nautilus: Birds Are More Afraid of Women Than of Men. Submitted without further comment.

The essay is five years old yet I have discovered it just now because the author is also the person behind Denote, a marvelous note-taking tool for Emacs. The tone is not as dry as a scholastic text ⊕ [Note: For a Substack version of a similar message I encourage you to check out Experimental History. The most recent post, for example, is a case study of one particular aspect of scientism — zombie ideas. ] but not as entertaining as something one would find on Substack. The message is unambiguous, and rather than rehash it let me quote one paragraph out of many:

Science as a career choice rather than a disposition towards learning, and an attitude of living in accordance with the principles than (sic!) enable such learning, contributes to the distancing from philosophy and to the degradation of the moral character of those involved. The practitioner who has not been in the least exposed to the rigours of a virtuous modus vivendi is likely to prioritise superficialities that obscure their own intellectual insecurities, such as social status, a growing collection of titles and certificates that are supposed to support one’s appeal to intellectuality, or the emptiness of being celebrated as a force for so-called “progress” and “rationality” among those who are believed to be unfortunate enough not to be scientists. The latter is one of those non-scientific beliefs amplified by the oligopoly of mass media that helps the philosophically deprived science stake its claim as the tutelary figure of the contemporary world, while blithely disregarding its instrumentalisation as both the apologist and militant activist of the power apparatus that enables it.

The author, who chose to drop his surname and go just by Protesilaos thereby making me break the house rule of using last names only when referring to folks, lives in a hut he built himself ⊕ [Note: A hut which brought to mind this recent essay from Joan Westenberg about people retreating from their true calling for years in order to recharge. ] in the mountains of Cyprus. Fascinating stuff, all with a large back catalogue I will be perusing in the months to come.

The last few years have been particularly tricky to tread for people who recognize the difference between science and scientism. If the entire board of the National Science Foundation is fired in one day, is it an attack on science or an attempt to curb scientism? [Note: ¿Por qué no los dos? ] When one of the “Abundance” guys — yes, that book is still on the pile — proposes an unbaked not-even-embryonic scheme for reform, is the rebuke from a seasoned scientist legitimate or just circling the wagons? [Note: Vide supra ] So yes, a retreat to the mountains does sound appealing.

• Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
• Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
• Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. ] This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
• Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.

Another weekend, another free hour to improve Inkling, the 95% Gemini-generated Emacs client for Inkwell. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs — and how great is it that every RSS feed is its own unique snowflake? — I’ve added a bookmark manager for micro.blog’s bookmarks, complete with tagging. Next up: adding drafts to Microbe.