• Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic: A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida. Dream of the next generation of railway turns into a bloodbath because Americans forgot that train tracks at grade level with other traffic is bad bad bad. So bad that Robert Moses tore down half of New York to fix it. But that was almost a century ago and we are a forgetfull species. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Tim Urban: Tales from Toddlerhood. An accurate account, and a particularly salient one for me right now. If you think the second baby gets ignored relative to the firstborn, wait until number three comes along. The main character syndrome of the oldest siblings is real (at least to those of us who are not).
• Lisa Woodley: The Year I Left Design. What happens when you let your career drift, and how to get it back on track. Applicable to more than design. (ᔥGina Trapani)
• James L. Olds: “What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)”. He recommends storyboarding your grant proposals. I would trust his advice, but I also — and please don’t interpret this politically — get the urge to burn that system to the ground because it is a narrative fallacy-producing machine.
• Derek Lowe: mRNA Vaccines and Immuno-oncology: Good News. It seems that LNP-encased mRNA by itself, regardless of what it encodes, may imrove efficacy of immunotherapy for cancer as it “stirs up” the immune systen. Big (and indeed good!) if true. But Lowe ends the post, as he did many of the prior ones, with a tirade against the current HHS, NIH and FDA leadership for spreading doubts and fears about mRNA research, forgetting that (1) much of those doubts and fears were about “overstimulation” of the immune system and the related side effects, such as myositis, which the above (positive!) findings further stoke, and (2) the original mRNA research famously never received NIH funding and was indeed “fringe” science. There is raising of legitimate concerns and then there is performative posturing and Lowe’s writing has shifted firmly to the latter.
• Nick Maggiulli: All the Money, None of the Satisfaction. On people continuing to be stingy even after being firmly in the top 1% of income and wealth. I have recently heard a billionaire-several-times-over unironically start a sentence with “If I had money…” so I can confirm that this is a real phenomenon and some may indeed say that the reason they are billionaires is such a mindset, while the hoi polloi drink their $12 frapuccinos. And if those who can afford such beverages are the hoi polloi, what are the people who can not?

It’s a gorgeous day for picking apples.

I mean, just look at these clouds.

And, of course, the star of the show. It’s apple pie time tomorrow.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

• From Ruxandra Teslo, a story of early retirees having to come out of retirement. I am not shedding tears.
• From an anonymous friend, a very good podcast with Dan Wang.
• From a West coast scientist, a commercial genetic test that can predict an embryo’s IQ. To be clear, I do think this is a test of intelligence but not in the way the company intended: their idea is moronic.
• From geneticist Sasha Gusev, an agreement about the above.
• From Brian Potter of the Institute For Progress, an excerpt from his book “The Origins of Efficiency” which clarifies why it costs more to repair things than to buy new ones. Surprisingly, he thinks this is good and wants to efficientize even more things!

• Adam Cifu: Goodharts Law and Medical School Admissions. A significant contributor to scientific slop is “research output” as requirement for fellowship, residency, and even medical school admissions. And yes, I am also a fan of the law.
• Paul Teirstein for WSJ: The Gatekeeper Driving Doctors From Medicine. On board certification, which now seems to have some powerful enemies so consider me conflicted.
• Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman for NYT: Gambling. Investing. Gaming. There’s No Difference Anymore. “There should be a line of separation,” Alexander Hamilton [wrote] in 1792, “between respectable stockholders … and mere unprincipled Gamblers.” As a side note, it is incredible how much sports betting has exploded in the 15 years I’ve been in the US. One of many ways America is looking more and more like Serbia, where seedy gambling outposts are now more common than grocery stores.
• Brian Potter: More on US Pedestrian Deaths. An update of a previously linked-to post, which raises more questions than answers. Allow me to be somewhat conspiratorial: could worse hospital care combined with increasing organ donation contribute to this increase? There have been 3,200 more pedestrian deaths in 2023 compared to 2009 and 8,393 more deceased donor donations according to OPTN. And then there is this.

• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Reading Like It’s 1937. The experiment was to choose only books published in a single year and read these in a short period of time. As expected, there were more duds than classics, and with not that many books coming out in 1937 it amount to very few good books indeed. This kind of experimentation does support the claim that we live in a literary golden age, and I’d say it’s because of a combination of high absolute numbers and us being better at detecting edge cases, not necessarily that the relative percentage of classics per year has increased. If anything, it is probably much lower because of all the AI-generated slop.
• Mike Taylor: If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact? The AI tools described are indeed stupid, but remember that the marginal cost for advertising them is 0, and if you find them stupid you were never the intended audience. In that way they very much resemble phone scams and emails from a Nigerian prince.
• David Shaywitz: The Startling History Behind Merck’s New Cancer Blockbuster. A story from 8 years ago, but it was news to me that pembrolizumab had a very roundabout way of reaching patients. GLP-1 inhibitors had a slightly less circuitous route, but still took too long to get to where they are. Is this truly the best way to develop drugs? (↬Derek Lowe)
• Cal Newport: Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? Probably not, and this is not really an edge case, but as someone who has trouble concluding blog posts (which is why you’re reading a list) I just wanted to pause and admire that last sentence.