Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!
🍿 The Family Plan 2 (2025) was, much like its predecessor, a tame mid-budget family action comedy of the kind they don’t show in theaters any more (and for good reason): perfect for post-prandial viewing in this holiday week.
The case for faster bench-to-bedside-and-back type of research, with which I agree. It is remarkable, however, how each generation interested in biomedical research reinvents the wheel without checking prior art. I would also argue strongly that the (correct) thesis of the essay is not a refutation of the biotech-as-casino hypothesis but rather its confirmation, unless you enlarge “biotech” to include academia and government research but then what are we even doing. Investors have no patience for nuance and view clinical trials as dichotomous regardless of how companies try to present them, and interpreting translational research results requires even more patience and tolerance of ambiguity.
Ginexi has been a program at the NIH for more than two decades, so caveat lector, but many POs are indeed mini-Moseses in their scientific domains. On one hand they perform important and valuable work, on the other the importance of a single human being to the careers of investigators young and old tend to favor those with soft skills of communication more than those of scientific and intellectual rigor. No judgements on my end because I genuinely can’t tell if the alternative would be any better.
Some genuinely good advice on how to write grants in a way to increase the odds of them being funded, with emphasis on accepting the reviewers' comments and suggestions and approaching the grant resubmission as one would an offer to revise and resubmit a scientific manuscript, with much thanking and back-bending. Do keep that in mind when you read the next item.
This is true for most, as there are far too many academic right now for all of them to have soul in the game. However, academia continues to ask for more than it gives back out of too many people, while at the same time putting a negative selection pressure against people who are stubborn, single-minded and thus predisposed to a soul-in-the-game phenotype (see above). The only reason why the system survives at all is that the churn has been too low to fully reveal the tension, but it continues to creep towards the breaking point providing yet another case study of things that happen gradually and then suddenly.
Key assumptions that underly this and many similar essays is that people involved have (at least) a laptop computer, know how to use it beyond Zoom and the Office suite, and want to spend time on it over and above what they need to spend on their day job. There will never be a flourishing bazaar of personal websites made by people who are not at the very list interested in web design and/or programming, if not card-carrying members of various IT professions.
I consider myself a dabbler and you are reading this via a product of said dabbling, but if the likes of Nassim Taleb or Frank Harrel or Vincent Rajkumar or whatever other luminary of your field of interest decides it’s too complicated or time-consuming to have personal websites that interact through a muddle of comments, web mentions and whatever other new standard some whiz kid comes up with. So they just keep using X or Bluesky or Mastodon, because that is also where their readers and followers and friends and family members are, so I will also have those accounts despite my best efforts, and so the wheel will keep turning and churning and spitting in and out anyone who is not IT-adjacent and many of those who are, which is to say most of the world.
This is why I am excited about what Dave Winer et al. are doing with 2-way RSS. Winer’s one-man projects have ben technically terrific but ultimately too challenging to use, so here is hoping that broader involvement will add some spit-and-polish. With social media more splintered than at any time since the late 2000s the time to strike is now.
Happy New Year, dear reader! Will 2026 be the year humanity makes it across the ravine without falling down? Let’s hope so.
📺 I will have more to write about each season of Stranger Things after the holidays. But how refreshing was it for a show to clearly distinguish between good and evil, for that evil to be cosmic not personal, and for the ending to be unambiguously happy and satisfying? Bravo, brothers Duffer.
Another great year of reading, and with a back log the length of human history why would every year not be as great?
And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 though of course the book reviews go way back.
Enjoy!
Behold the survivors of my November podcast purge:
The Talk Show With John Gruber is, I think, the first podcast I ever downloaded, at a time when a white 1st generation iPod Nano was the only Apple product I owned. I haven’t missed a single episode since, though I am still waiting for one that matches its November 2016 peak.
Accidental Tech Podcast is one that I have listened to since the very beginning, when it was the after show of the host trio’s short-lived car podcast Neutral. I did drop it at some point but am now back to being a supporter, if for nothing else then to continue listening to John Siracusa kvetch about various topics. Though that, too, is yet to reach levels of his first and now retired podcast Hypercritical
Dithering is the only one I actually pay for. Like the two above it is about mostly about (Apple) technology, this one with a tinge of sports and geopolitics that Ben Thompson brings to the table.
New Creative Era got me interested because of its second season, which is about the Internet as a dark forest. The whole Metalabel enterprise is worth checking out, though it’s too late to browse it for Christmas presents. Unless, of course, your church’s December 25th falls on January 7, in which case I am willing to bet your “Christmas” gifts are exchanged on New Year’s Day and you may still have some time.
Old School with Shilo Brooks brings a new celebrity each episode to talk about a book that changed their lives. Although a part of The Free Press, it has no politics and much nostalgia. I don’t care much for the host, but where else would I be able to hear Nick Cave talk about Pinocchio?
Cortex has lost my favorite YouTuber as a co-host, but in its stead has a series of Internet personalities talk about their daily routines and productivity. Yes, please.
Hard Drugs started off great, with the first two episodes being under 20 minutes and about topics that are essential for drug development (proteins and the development of insulin). The streak didn’t last: episodes 4, 5 and 6 are 54, 60 and 274 (yes, really) minutes long respectively. The young people who made it clearly had time on their hands; sadly, I don’t.
Statecraft, a podcast about American domestic and foreign policy, I will take a moment here to note that Serbian and the adjacent langages — “naš” or “our” language in modern parlance — use the same word for both policy and politics, which is politika. Much evil has come from this confusion in terms. goes out of its way not to be about politics, focusing on the successes and lessons learned from the recent history. This is why I am on the fence about listening to any of it: maybe a podcast about the domestic policy of the late 1800s would be more applicable to the present day.
In Our Time is, on the other hand, a timeless podcast which I plan on listening well into my retirement. Not having retired yet, this year I only had time for Italo Calvino and Slime Moulds
And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — 2017 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one
Our favorite Smithsonian museum(s) continue to surprise and delight. Tucked away on the third and fourth floors of SAAM is the storage center you can actually visit, featuring one impressive sculpture. The parallel space in the National Portrait Gallery is as impressive, though currently empty.
