📺 The Great British Baking Show Series 16 had fewer anxiety attacks and temper tantrums, and was more enjoyable to watch than last year’s. Still, the sheen is beginning to wear off, the artifice of it is becoming more and more apparent, and am I being a horrible person just for liking that a contestant doesn’t get all teary-eyed when kicked out?

Want to introduce some drama? Have people make madelains — a desert that needs at least four hours for the batter to chill to achieve its characteristic “hump” — in 2 hours 15 minutes total and then stress about not doing it correctly. Or, come judging time, be a bit more circumspect about the clear favorite and heap praise on the also-rans so that you can hem and haw about your very difficult choice. Also, is it just my middle age performing mind tricks or are the contestants getting ever-younger? Will there be a point in a decade’s time when Junior Bakeoff and the main attraction meld?

It is still by far the best “reality TV” one would come across, and following it from beginning does make one more interested in baking. As its cultural relevance grows, however, so does the amount of pressure it puts on the bakers, to the point of unpleasantness. Luckily, the finalists this year were wise beyond their years, but how many more people are left in Britain with that kind of mental fortitude?

🏀 Cursed, yet again (and again).

The only team who managed to lose to the Wizards so far this season just booted their GM.

• David Li: lots of discourse on here recently on how to get FIH clinical data in US cheaper, faster, and more competitively with China. “One thing I have not seen folks talk about, which to me is the most obvious, is - wait for it - the intense competition that breeds insane levels of hard work in China.” From a clinical trial perspective, let’s not forget how receptive the audience is to clinical trials, and how deferential to the doctor/investigator’s opinion. (ᔥRuxandra Teslo)
• John Collison: Dave Ricks has been at @EliLillyandCo for 20% of its 150-year history. He came to the pub, poured his own Guinness, and gave us a 2-hour state of the pharma union. Fear not, there is also a YouTube video of the conversation.
• Michael Eisen: Needed a word, so I coined one. The word is chrysotactic — being drawn to gold, wealth, luxury, etc. — which is derived from Greek but I have to say that the Latin aurotaxis has a better ring to it. You will never guess to whom it relates.
• David Weigel: How Elon Musk’s Changes to X Made Our Discourse Far Stupider. This is not on X but rather an article in Talking Points Memo and I completely agree. And yet, people worth listening to continue using it and as long as that X is the only place where they write I will continue to follow. Perhaps.

• Cal Newport: Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. Yes, Cal, if you are a maths professor working on a proof. I love putting my fountain pen to paper as much as anyone but they are not sufficient for any of the hats I wear.
• Eric Topol: Multilingualism and Extending Healthspan. Another thing I should nominally be for as it is positive reinforcement of my own (two languages) and my children’s education (3+ and counting), but no matter how many potential confounders these researchers adjusted for I am absolutely convinced that there are residual confounders behind these results. Learn languages for their own sake, not to “prolong healthspan” or to — what this study actually checks for — make some proteins in your blood go one way instead of another.
• Ezekiel Emanuel at al for the NYT: Make Medical School Three Years. Here is a statement I could get behind provided there is adequate rationale — that undergrad premed is sufficient for basic science knowledge, that it is essential to attain practical skills during postgraduate education as early as possible, that the fourth year of medical school is pure formality of one low-stakes elective after another since most students will have already matched. But no, the rationale here is financial, and that is purely idiotic. The high tuition is taken as a given and all steps stem from there. The authors should check their premises.

• Ruxandra Teslo: What will it take for AI to change drug discovery?. Producing boatloads of hypotheses won’t be enough, and would even set the field back. Good stuff. Again, China is eating America’s lunch here so something better change, and soon, but it is unlikely LLMs will be of immediate help.
• Chris Arnade: Asian style materialism. And if you think, well, maybe it is time for one civilization to sunset so that another one will rise, observations like Arnade’s should make you pause. The culture there seems rather bleak. And I consider him a rather impartial observer.
• Sarah Kliff for the NYT: The ‘Worst Test in Medicine’ is Driving America’s High C-Section Rate. It is about fetal HR monitoring, a particularly salient topic right now. It seems to be the Swan-Ganz catheter of obstetrics, thankfully much less invasive.
• Anish Koka on X: In the wake of the hubbub on novel promising gene therapy approval for Huntington’s disease, this video on the Sarepta debacle is a must watch. Can’t be… I am sure that everything was on the up-and-up.

🍿 Watched: The Twits (2025), an attempt to draw out Roald Dahl’s slender book about an insufferable couple into a 100-minute feature film. In the process, they made a truly classical piece of Netflix polished excrement.

What they should have done was a series of short vignettes, Tom & Jerry style, that could have all been physical comedy with hardly a spoken word. Booba and Gudetama — both streaming on the same service — are good examples. But no, the movie that is nominally about the Twits instead revolves around 10-year-old orphans who behave like adults and magical creatures that belong to Dr Seuss more than to anything Dahl wrote. Even the eponymous couple behaves altogether differently than in the books: the Twits I know would never have cooperated long enough to build a fully (if barely) functioning theme park.

My own children — two of whom have read the book — quickly saw past the gimmick and lost interest despite the beautiful animation and a million things happing all at once for the sake of keeping their attention. In contrast, they have seen — of their own volition — The Mitchels versus the Machines, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and more or less the entire Studio Ghibli repertoire countless times. With all of those still available, what exactly was the point of The Twits?

And then there were six (parents inclusive). Pardon any potential interruptions to our scheduled programing.

🎮 Our 6-year-old has completed both Astro Bot and Astro’s Playroom, mostly by himself, with minimal help from older sisters, and when I say “complete” I mean digging into every nook and cranny and getting all of the trophies. Quite the soundtrack, too (Crash Site is the favorite).