Hard to say what’s better here, the article or the illustrations that accompany it. Good job, FT Magazine.
A town that has more art deco than brutalism — the largest piece of concrete in sight was a modestly sized skate park — is my kind of town. It is at once frozen in time (picture unsupervised tweens riding bicycles and scooters down a quiet tree-lined street) and progressive (in the American sense of having more crystal shops than chain stores and more rainbows than stars’n’stripes posted on storefronts). The same cannot be said about another picture-perfect town, Frederick, which is distinctly unlike its home state of Maryland. Note, however, that only one of these two states had segregation of some kind in this century. It is also, for someone who has spent the last 12 years in the Baltimore-DC area, noticeably white, but note more so than would be expected from any place in North Carolina.[^one]
Biltmore is as impressive as you would expect a 250-room house to be, but also shows how much better our lives are compared to the richest of the early 20th century rich. Yes, your 23,000-book library with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases is beautiful, but even a person living on the street has access to more books than that from a device in their pocket. Never mind the demands of heating, cleaning, and maintaining the beast. No wonder then that the owners turned it into an amusement park instead of continuing to live there.
A few more observations:
More art deco than brutalism? Yes, please.
“This contains a combination of various life-extension medicines (metformin, ashwagandha, and some vitamins), and covid defense gear: a CO2 meter… masks, antigen tests and fluvoxamine.”
The reddest of crypto world’s red flags is their belief in longer life through chemistry.
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.”
“The speed of review times and increasing number of FDA-approved cancer medicines has long been used as a metric for successful regulatory processes and improvements in patient outcomes.”
Here are three good reasons why that isn’t so, to which I would add Goodhart’s law.
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.
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.
“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.