Flâneur:

A French noun referring to a person, literally meaning “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer”, but with some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into English). Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations… Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.

Flânerie has been anglicized into flaneuring, a term I first saw when Nassim Taleb described his strolls through Belgrade but which is popular enough to have had its segment on the Today Show, plugging a book that looks like something that I would never in my life touch, but hey, the concept is sound! Take a leisurely walk through the city without a destination or a particular plan. Don’t wear headphones. Do have a partner or two to share your observations.

It is exactly what we have been doing in Honolulu for the last few days and I mentioned off-handedly to my wife the Taleb post and the term. It clicked instantly, like “premium mediocre” did back in the day. What was once premium mediocre has become an unbridled luxury ⊕ To keep the Talebian theme going, this is as clear of an example of the Lindy effect as any. — thank you, inflation — so we don’t mention the phrase much, but as long as there are cities there will be flaneuring.

The non-touristy parts of DC — which is most of them, actually — would probably be in the US Top 5, which is damning with faint praise because the competition is so bad. It is a shame that it wouldn’t be the clear number 2 — with New York being the obvious number 1 — but DC is fairly small, and Chicago is even better for flaneuring than NYC for 3 months of the year. Of course, if we started taking weather into account Honolulu would soon rise to the top and overtake all; but as we are not effective altruists, let’s not.

Accompanying the spouse to a conference is always good, but doubly so when the conference is in Honolulu! There will be a more detailed report after we are back; in the mean time, here are a few murals, from delightful to bizarre.

The last time I attended a large annual meeting of a professional society was in 2019, and either things have taken a strange turn in the last 4 years, or hematology and oncology are so different that attending any other society’s opening session feels uncanny.

I say this because I attended one yesterday — see the other post from today — and if my eyes could have rolled all the way back into my skull, they would have. This is what I am used to: speakers standing behind the podium — usually elevated, sometimes not — looking straight ahead, reading off the teleprompter more or less skillfully — since after all they are doctors and PhDs, not professional salespeople — occasionally averting their gaze in an attempt to connect with the crowd, which is of course impossible because of the glaring stage lights, but all is forgiven because, after all, we are there to learn, not to be entertained.

Well, someone must have come in and told the medicine men they were doing it all wrong, because this session looked like an Apple keynote — the boring parts, where Tim Cook talks about how many stores they opened — crossed with a TED Talk from a dubious but super-enthusiastic liberal arts professor. There is no podium to anchor yourself, so you and your hands are all over the place gesticulating wildly — power-posing, perhaps? — while you gaze into the teleprompter positioned at 45° above the horizon to give you that contemplative look.

This style of presentation is cringy even when most tech companies do it: Apple is Apple; the other big ones don’t even try to compete, and it’s not until you come to the mid to lower-tier This is a link to the Procreate Dreams reveal video. It is an excellent product which I will definitely get for my kidds to play with, and the creators seem rightfully proud of what they accomplished, but copying Apple did it a disservice. that the “person emoting in front of a large professionally-made slide” style re-emerges.

I wish that was all there was to it. Alas, there was a keynote speaker for this openning session of a professional medical society, and the keynote speaker was — it was at this point that I realized the universe was making me pay for coming to Hawaii — a YouTuber! Which is fine, only they decided to set their talk to background music and flashy videos, and pepper it with excerpts from their own content, letting a good personal story of their family and education get drowned in dumb glitz.

Therefore, to be possess’d with double pompe,
To guard a Title, that was rich before;
To gilde refined Gold, to paint the Lilly;
To throw a perfume on the Violet,
To smooth the yce, or adde another hew
Vnto the Raine-bow; or with Taper-light
To seeke the beauteous eye of heauen to garnish,
Is wastefull, and ridiculous excesse.

Four centuries later, we are in full-on gild mode.

Finished reading: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard 📚. It was one of those delightful surprises — much like G.E.B. was last year — that had me double-check my dates: it came out in 1999 but could have been written yesterday. Only, of course, with not nearly as evocative of a title.

It has been sitting on my wish list for a while, as on its surface it resembled too much Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: hunt for similarities between disparate legends, epics, and myths; generalize. I did not much care for that. But after a glowing overview of Girard’s work in Wanting, off the list it went and onto the shelf.

That was a good decision. The comparison to Campbell was unfair: Girard is narrower in focus and more precise in style. The message is not buried under a mountain of anecdote, it’s right there in the introduction: myths are lies people told themselves, blinded by their own viciousness manifest in the process of scapegoating — i.e. mimetic contagion, i.e. the titular Satan — various stories of the Bible shone a light, the light, onto the process, and the world was never the same. Two thousand and some years later people are again eating their own tale, but I am now mixing my myths and becoming an unreliable re-teller — you should read the book for yourself, it is short but punchy.

Last week I went to Bethesda for the NIH hematology/oncology fellowship’s “career panel”. They didn’t have those back in my day so I can’t attest to their value for the heme/onc fellows, but I learned a lot! One interesting tidbit noted by a panelist: academia emphasizes owning the idea, industry emphasizes owning the execution.

📚 I Am a Strange Loop was quite a bit more personal than G.E.B. (about which I wrote a one-sentence blurb here; it is due for a proper review, after a re-read), and it’s easy to pile on Hofstadter since he’s made himself so vulnerable, but there are moments when he is way off base. Yes, there is a something to the analogy between the sense of selfhood and a self-referential (“strange”) loop, and yes different animals have different levels of self-perception, but no, I would not hail Mother Theresa as the pinnacle of humanity, nor Martin Luther King, Jr. for that matter: sorting people’s souls by a single metric is a slippery slope.

The second issue is with his idea of our own loops containing those of others, and people’s identity persisting in others' minds. That is true only to the extent that other people 1) know themselves, and 2) let others learn what they know about themselves, and not many would pass through both filters.

Dave Winer (@dave) is right, except for one thing: X should have enabled inline links to go alongside the walls of text. I never did care for Twitter cards, but how can you have an interNET without links? Mastodon and Threads, inexplicably, have the same problem.

📺 Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building was their best one yet; I wrote as much last week. Meryl Streep deserves all the awards, Martin Short was at his best, even Paul Rudd was tolerable. The mystery itself was better set up than last year’s, which had too many last-minute revelations for my taste.

If there is one nit to pick it is this: ever since Game of Thrones started going all-out in the second to last episode, actual season finales of many shows have become anti-climactic. The Afterparty is a much bigger offender there, but Murders… do suffer from the same ailment, especially since the last few episodes before the finale itself were so over-the-top good.