EconTalk with Russ Roberts is the best interview podcast I’ve listened to, period. Unlike Tyler Cowen Roberts focuses on an issue or two, not the personality being interviewed. He gives fewer if any passes. The effect is that I feel like I’m actually learning about the thing in question, not just getting acquainted with Cowen’s personality du jour. Whether any learning actually takes place at my advanced age is another matter.

My top 5 episodes:

• Keith Smith on free market health care
• Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding
• Adam Cifu on the case for being a medical conservative
• Patrick Collison on innovation and scientific progress
• Andrew McAfee on more from less

Honorable mentions: Cowen, Holiday, Hossenfelder, Bertaud

Conversations with Tyler are as good as ever. This year’s favorites:

• Mark Zuckerberg and Patrick Collison
• Margaret Atwood
• Masha Gessen
• Emily Wilson
• Ezekiel Emanuel

(Note that the majority are episodes with women - Cowen has Roberts easily beaten here)

Breaking Smart with Venkatesh Rao I would recommend to anyone who’s enjoyed the above-linked interview Russ Roberts did with Rao on one of the better Breaking Smart essays. It’s 15-20 minutes of Rao performing mental stretching excercises, solo.

Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad is another podcast that shines with the solo performances, but the interviews aren’t half-bad either. That isn’t a surprise, since this year Prasad has talked to David Steensma, Frank Harrell, Adam Cifu, H. Gilbert Welch, and Clifford Hudis, among others. Sadly, the podcast still doesn’t have a proper website, so I can’t link to any of these episodes directly.

• A brief overview of the past, present, and future of capitalism by a Serbian-born and formerly World Bank-employed CUNY professor Branko Milanović, who specializes in income inequality.
• Some parts hit closer to home than others, most of all the idea that you can have a welfare state, and you can have open borders, but that mixing the two is ill-advised. I am also well-acquainted with America’s indirect and informal immigrant tax, a version of which Milanović proposes as one of the solutions to the welfare/immigration dilemma. I am not a fan.
• His big insight before this book was the elephant chart. Capitalism, Alone’s big idea is that communism may not have been the pinnacle of society that Marx and Engels had predicted, but rather a good way of transforming feudal agrarian societies into modern economies. Centralized planning and broad-stroke changes work well up to a point, but the production chains soon get too complex for communism, at which point the invisible hand steps in.
• Second big insight: corruption is hard-wired into how a particular type of capitalism (which he calls “political”, in contrast to the Western “liberal meritocratic”) operates. This is supported by many a “liberal meritocratic capitalism” city and state, their financial services and real estate markets being dependent on the “political capitalism’s” dark money.
• It was an easy read for this non-economist. Recommended.

Written by Branko Milanović, 2019

• The only reason I bought and read this book was the excerpt published in the Atlantic which noted some parallels between 1990s' Balkans and 2010s', well, the world, which I was already mulling in my head. Turns out that's the best part of the book.
• The rest is uneven. Holbrooke was a slime ball of a human and his accomplishments were nil, yet Packer still manages to make the book into a hagiography. Which I guess is an accomplishment.
• Did Holbrooke truly think that his memos would change the world? In the Gervais Principle hierarchy, he was a clueless posing as a sociopath.
• Packer’s account of the Dayton negotiations confirms that the only reason a deal was made was that Milošević wanted it at any cost. The agreement was for Holbrooke to mess up, and he almost did, multiple times.
• There is mention of HBO buying rights to make a show out of Holbrooke's account of the Bosnian was. I haven't read "To End a War", but I like the idea of the Dayton negotiations being the centerpiece of a mini-series, with flash backs to each individual warlord's (and Dick's) messy history. Someone please give the idea to Damon Lindelof after he's done with Watchmen.

Written by George Packer, 2019

I started the decade childless and am ending it with three, so I have missed most of the 2010s’ pop culture. This includes the entire Transformers franchise and most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so, not much missed then?)

• Film: “Get Out”
• Blockbuster/action film: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
• Album: “Hamilton”
• Single: “Rolling in the Deep”
• TV Show: “Veep”
• Single Season: “The Leftovers” season 2
• Book Fiction: “The Dark Forest” (or “Death’s End” if you count the publication of the first Chinese edition, but TDF is superior)
• Book Non Fiction: “Antifragile”
• Athlete of the Decade: The Đoković-Federer-Nadal trio, but if I had to pick one then obviously Đoković.

Movies and music were better in the 2000s, but oh what time to watch TV and follow tennis. It’s too early to judge the books (though it’s telling that my favorite was originally written in 2008).

1. Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the death of Sandra Bland by the way of the Hitler-Chamberlain meetings, Cuban double-agents, college student alcohol culture, an episode of Friends, and Sylvia Plath’s suicide by gas oven. Huh?
2. The pieces actually fit, and — a few abrupt interludes aside — the story flows nicely. His previous books were also stories and not scientific review articles, which people tend to forget, but this one more so than others. Which is good, since people tend to misunderstood him for a Pinkeresque academic with pop culture pretensions rather than a journalist having fun.
3. A single point of disagreement: his portrayal of Ferguson, MO police as misapplies of hot spot policing rather than racketeers rang false to my layman ears.
4. Gladwell has become a podcaster, and it shows in how the book is structured: it reads like a podcast script. I haven’t listened to the audio version, but this may be the one case of a non-fiction book that is better listened than read.
5. But if you don’t have the actual book, you won’t get to read the extensive notes, on of which directly refutes a whole chapter of Blink. Another is an excellent parallel between indiscriminate police searches and cancer screening tests. Too bad he didn’t use actual footnotes (but then people would also complain, see no.2).

Written by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019

Things I found to be scarier than this movie:

• “Cabin in the Woods”
• “Coraline”
• “Toy Story 3”
• My father upgrading his Windows PC
• My 2-year-old’s diaper
• The thought that I have spent almost two hours watching this drek

That this was co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by the same person who did The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly mind-boggling, but certainly disappointing. I wonder what went wrong.

Directed by André Øvredal, 2019

A collection of essays from the man who wrote Infinite Jest, also known as the 20th century’s best 21st century book. Each one is near-to-completely brilliant and worthy of more thought than a one-line in an inconsequential blog post, but that won’t stop me:

• Big red son is the one where he attends the AVN awards as a magazine correspondent. The more absurd things become, the more encyclopedic he gets. Yes it’s funny, but also existentialist and sad as only pornography can be.
• Certainly the end of something or other, one would have to thing is long title to a short-ish review of a supposedly science fiction book by John Updike. He didn’t like it.

• Some remarks on Kafka’s funnies from which probably not enough has been removed is exactly what it says it is. Having only high-school literature class-level acquaintance with Kafka, I can’t comment.

• Authority and American usage is a review of a dictionary but also the 20th century’s (written in 1999) best 21st century essay, covering issues of political correctness, identity politics, race, alienation, and a brief history of the battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism for the hearts and minds of I don’t know who exactly, but what an exciting battle it is.

• The view from Mrs. Thompson’s is about where he was on 9/11 (spoiler alert: he was at Mrs. Thompson’s).

• How Tracey Austin broke my heart is the reason I’m even sadder than I should be about DFW not still being around, because an essay about the Federer-Đoković-Nadal tennis trio in general and the mental gymnastics going on in Novak Đoković’s head in particular would have been spectacular to read (although there has been a fairly successful attempt). Oh, and it’s also a review of a reasonably bad autobiography of the titular Ms. Austin, who is also a tennis player.
• Up, Simba is DFW following McCaine’s failed 2000 attempt in the Republican primaries, wherein he shows just how walled away from the “real” world candidates were back then, how big of a gatekeeper the media world, and just why Twitter could have made all the difference.
• Consider the lobster is where a travel essay for a cooking magazine from a food festival in Maine turns into an existential crisis and a call for veganism. It’s good
• Host is so messed up by its formatting of footnotes (fortunately there is now a web version which more than makes up for it, and the original article published in The Atlantic was also easier to read, apparently, say people who were able to find it, and yes this should also have been a footnote) that it’s hard at first to appreciate how good of a story interspersed with thoughts on infotainment and talk radio it really is, and even though it was written more than a decade ago you can sort of see what it’s protagonist will eventually become in these troubling times.

Written by David Foster Wallace, 2007

Residency application season has just started. Many of the applicants, a few of whom I know in person, will be foreign medical graduates, or FMGs, meaning that they are doctors who want to work in the US but are not US citizens. Most FMGs, but not all, will also be international medical graduates — IMGs — meaning that they have graduated from a non-US medical schools. Something called the Education Commision for Foreign Medical Graduates, or ECFMG, acts as their medical school when interacting with most of the sprawling US bureaucracy. These are our personae dramatis, if you will.

Disclosure: I am both an FMG and an IMG, and first began working in the US on an ECFMG-sponsored J1 visa.

America is a net importer of physicians, that much should obvious to anyone who’s ever been in an American hospital. The country depends on FMGs to keep the system running, get the less lucrative specialties, work in underserved areas, etc. Not so obvious is that most FMGs get to America by lying; ICE-approved, foreign-government sponsored lying for sure, but lying nonetheless.

Here are the lies FMGs tell when they come in: that their country has a need for doctors of such-and-such specialty, and/or that their government is sending them to the US for training in the said specialty, and/or that at the end of training they will go back to their country of origin to work in the (sub)specialty they came in to obtain. Those are the three postulates of the J1 physician exchange visa, the very name of which is also a lie as there is no exchange taking place: foreign doctors do come in, but no American doctors come out.

The postulates are incompatible with reality, and imply foreign government competence that just isn’t there in second and third-world countries. ⊕ [Note: The transitioning and developing world, if you will. ] Because over there, no one is keeping statistics on specialist needs, and if they are there is actually a surplus, and if there isn’t they wouldn’t be able to afford the (sub)specialists once they come back, and if they could then they would be chosen by party or family lines, and you wouldn’t want them in your hospitals anyway.

So to get a J1 visa FMGs need to obtain a letter from their Ministry of Health or equivalent stating the above (the postulates, not the actual truth; I’m sure that in some of those countries people have gone to prison for saying the truth). But is there a functioning Ministry of Health? Does anyone there know that the letter they are supposed to provide about lending a medical graduate and wanting them back is a piece of kabuki theater, and not a commitment to employ that person if and when they come back? And because this letter is supposed to come in a sealed envelope directly from the Ministry to ECFMG: does anyone there speak English? So here are all those FMGs whose main reason to emigrate to America may have been to escape their kleptocratic governments, being dragged into a game of Whom do I bribe next? and Which newspaper do I threaten them with? ⊕ [Note: In 2019 the correct answer is, for most countries of this sort, None. ] by the rules of the country they were hoping was less crooked than their own.

Which is fine for America, because it doesn’t care as long as it gets its steady stream of MDs one way or another. Only it should care because 1) the amount of person-hours wasted is on par with if not greater than the amount spent writing grants, and that one’s a whopper, 2) it relinquishes control over a part of its healthcare to foreign governments, and 3) it introduces an air of subterfuge and deceit at the very beginning of the FMG-USA relationship. I would like to think this is an aberration to be fixed, and not a preview of things to come in other areas of governance.

The process was probably fine 50 years ago, when both demands of the medical system and the influx of foreign doctors were but a fraction of the current monstrosity, when USMLE was taken on paper if you had to take it at all, when it wasn’t so obvious to a non-aligned physician whether they should go to the US or USSR (or Yugoslavia, for that matter) to get more training. But healthcare has changed and so has the world: it’s time do drop the pretense of an exchange, America, and be honest about what’s going on here.