You can view an essay as you would an organism. There is the skeleton — a through-line going from paragraph to paragraph that forms a coherent message. Then there is the meat — mostly facts, one would hope, and at least one original opinion. And of course the connective tissue — turns of phrase and flourishes of style that bring it all together.

LLMs are good — occasionally brilliant — at this last component and serviceable if a bit pedestrian at the first, but the meat is all on you. (ᔥThis day’s portion)

We finally got tho see The Great Zucchini of The Peekaboo Paradox fame (first mentioned here) in action. He was indeed as marvelous as they say. If toddlers were automatons he’d be the Master Engineer, knowing exactly what button to push to get the desired reaction — be it wonder, awe or delight.

From McSweeney’s SELECTIONS FROM H.P. LOVECRAFT’S BRIEF TENURE AS A WHITMAN’S SAMPLER COPYWRITER:

Chocolate Cherry Cordial: You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question, “What is toffee, exactly?” All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane.

There are others as well and they are all outstanding. (ᔥAlex Wiltshire in a footnote of a rather excellent blog post which I don’t want to spoil here but is also to do with Lovecraft)

I’ve never heard of “Movers and Shakers” before and I am unlikely to give it a try, but its producer just gave the best description of the value of podcasting I’ve read in a while. (ᔥDave Winer, who also knows a few things about podcasting)

From the Antidotes to cynicism creep in academia:

Let me reiterate what I said before: when someone sends me a paper or a newspaper article about a paper, my view today is that the conclusions may or may not be valid. I don’t expect things to hold up just because this is a scientific paper (compared to a blog post), or because it is peer-reviewed (compared to a preprint), or because it is published in Nature or Science, or because it is published by a famous scientist. I think my view is reasonable and supported by evidence, at least in the fields I work in.

This is also my view, and applies equally to The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and JAMA as it does to Nature or Science. They are for-profit businesses who will do things for profit, not for elevation of science. The article goes on to list the titular antidotes from the position of a tenured professor of psychology working in Europe. My own antidote to cynicism creep in academia was slightly different.

(↬Marginal Revolution)

I forgot to mark the 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, a childhood-defining event if there ever was one (I was 15 at the time and a high school freshman). Well, today marks 25 years since the modest Yugoslav Army missile defense shot down the F-117 stealth bomber. The story is as good as a wartime story can get: there were no fatalities, the two main characters became friends, and the wreckage is now in a Belgrade museum, ignored by schoolchildren for whom these events are ancient history.

🏀 Remember these two nitwits shaking hands on a deal? Well, the deal is dead and the Caps and Wizards' owner suddenly has some nice things to say about DC. Quoth Wikipedia:

Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.

Janan Ganesh’s FT column today ends with an excellent quote which can also serve as the motto of American politics:

“We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”

He doesn’t cite the source because the FT readership would of course know who it was (I didn’t): Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission. I thought re-election wouldn’t be a problem in Luxembourg since there were so few politicians around you were bound to circle back to the top spot, but there you go.